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Comment by dllthomas | Hacker News Reader

I don't see that every violation of the principle of noncontradiction trivially leaves definitions meaningless. Suggesting that a principle shouldn't be taken to hold in general doesn't mean that you have to violate the principle at every opportunity, just that there is some place it is (in whatever sense) correct to violate the principle. Of course, under traditional logics, accepting a contradiction leaves everything provable - but we're dealing with nontraditional logics that may have other ways of dealing with that.

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As someone not versed in nontraditional logics, can you give an entry-level statement or thought experiment that violates the principle of non-contradiction without leaving everything provable?

I'm also not particularly versed in nontraditional logics. I'm just leery of saying a mathematical structure can't be interesting or has no applications, when mathematicians seem to disagree.

by 'every violation' do you mean 'any violation', 'no violation', 'blue violation'...

by 'every violation' do you mean 'every observance', 'every miss-fire', 'every monkey'...

you see, apart from the law of non-contradiction language is impossible.

You're being needlessly difficult to no good end. I am not dropping the law of non-contradiction in my comments here, where I speak about logics that drop non-contradiction.

And the point you're trying to make here ignores what I said. It is certainly the case that if you permit every violation of non-contradiction, whether or not it violates any other rule, you wind up with nonsense. In no way does that establish that nonsense follows from any violation of non-contradiction even in the face of other rules. I don't have deep enough knowledge to say one way or the other, but some mathematicians seem to think there are things of interest there and your superficial rejection does nothing to prove them wrong.

sorry if I came across as difficult; honestly not my intention.

You were perceived as difficult because rather than actually address the content of what I said, you tried to make the same point in the same way you had earlier - a way which was undermined by what I had said.

That's just being difficult. The real world does work that way. Take poltical labels for example, liberal, conservative, et al have totally different meanings for different people. Contradictions do exist, just externalizing them in a formal system is lazy.

Not trying to be difficult; just pointing out that language cannot work apart from PNC.

I don't think linguistic ambiguity - while clearly something that exists - is the same thing as what is under discussion in this post.

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