https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/bg2fpk/how_does_graham_priests_dialetheia_headcount/
created by justanediblefriend on 22/04/2019 at 14:01 UTC
6 upvotes, 1 top-level comments (showing 1)
I'm currently reading all of Priest's *In Contradiction* and in chapter 8, where he tries to give something like the deductive modus ponens and disjunctive syllogism back as a type of inductive reasoning, he says this:
The dialetheist, on the other hand, considers the hypothesis of inconsistency or, better, local inconsistency (i.e. the truth of α&¬α for particular α) to be no different, in principle, from any other hypothesis, and therefore to be evaluated on its merits. There are, however, certain considerations that will, other things being equal, cause her to reject it. The reason is a simple one: the statistical frequency of dialetheias in normal discourse is low. Dialetheias appear to occur in a quite limited number of domains: certain logico-mathematical contexts, certain legal and dialectical contexts (which I will discuss in Part Three), and maybe a few others. Moreover, even in the domains where they do occur, very few contradictions are dialetheias. Hence most contradictions one normally comes across are not dialetheic.
The claim that the frequency of dialetheias is low seems fairly obvious, but, inevitably, it will be asked how one knows this once one has conceded that there are some. The simplest argument fur this is a head-count. The reader is invited to consider a random sample of the assertions he has met in the last few days and see what percentage might reasonably be thought to be dialetheic. If it is more than a handful, this probably means that the reader has been reading a book on paradoxes. (Maybe this one.)
But then, in chapters 11 and 12, he demonstrates that motion and change entail contradictions. We talk about change and motion all the time, so wouldn't the head count yield "more than a handful" in ordinary discourse? If I say "I'm on my way home," I've just contradicted myself, and I say things like this all the time. Is there something I'm missing here?
Comment by iunoionnis at 22/04/2019 at 21:31 UTC*
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
If I say "I'm on my way home," I've just contradicted myself, and I say things like this all the time.
You haven't contradicted yourself, you have stated something that's true, but described a process (a process that is, in terms of its motion, contradictory).
Don't we often say "I'm on my way" to people before we have actually left? (Because the start and end of the motion are included within the motion itself, yet also not included). So if you are "just leaving," it's true that "you're on your way," but also true that "you are not yet on your way."
On this subject, I had a series of miscommunications the other day with my wife who said "I'm starting the clean cycle on the coffee maker." I wanted to know if I still had time to make a cup, so I asked her if she was starting the cleaning cycle now, or had already started it. "Starting" is an example of becoming, and thus can be understood in terms of being or non-being.
As Hegel points out in the *Lesser Logic*, "beginnings" and "endings" are both examples of things that, considered ontologically, both exist and do not exist.
Is there something I'm missing here?
Based on the context, the "head count" strategy doesn't seem like a philosophical position, so much as an explanation for why people don't notice dialetheias unless they've been reading Hegel, Engels, or Priest. Obviously, Priest thinks that these things *are* dialetheias.
Then again, if Priest is committed to the claim that only a few things are dialethic, maybe he's wrong about this. Hegel argues, for instance, that *everything* is contradictory, so this might be worth looking into.