1 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
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.
Comment by justanediblefriend at 23/04/2019 at 02:10 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Thanks. Since Priest is using the Hegelian account of motion, this should be sufficient. Just to confirm one of your suspicions:
if Priest is committed to the claim that only a few things are dialethic
it would seem so. He's trying to give us reason to think we can still use disjunctive syllogism and modus ponens inductively. For that to work, dialtheias have to be rare enough that we can say "this is valid because it's usually valid," the same way we can say "flipping this switch will turn on the lights because it usually turns on the lights." If everything were contradictory, it's unclear how Priest would succeed in giving us back modus ponens and disjunctive syllogism. Similarly, if a light switch *never* turned on the lights, it's unclear how we would conclude that flipping it will turn on the lights. We'd conclude quite the opposite.