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Matt and Nick talk Dialetheism

Monday, January 10, 2005 at 09:57PM

Matt Carter and Nick Trakakis are arguing over dialetheism. What’s dialetheism? It’s the view that some contradictory pairs of statements are true.

It’s interesting that Nick is trying the line that contradictions (conjunctions of the form ’p and not-p’) are meaningless. I always find it hard to judge claims of meaninglessness (since I don’t have on hand a general theory of meaningfulness), but I don’t have a great deal of sympathy for that line of argument. I would have thought that it was because we understood the meaning the statement ’p and not-p’ that we could see that it couldn’t be true.

But Nick’s in good company here. His view that contradictions (and tautologies) has proponents like the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus.

About

I’m Greg Restall, and this is my website. I work in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Email: greg at consequently.org; Post: School of of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry, University of Melbourne, Parkville 3010, Australia.

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Thought

G. K. Chesterton once wrote, “The word ‘good’ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his mother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.’ It’ the qualifier “necessarily” that shows Chesterton possessed a truly philosophical mind. – Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, in Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar …