Social Contradictions

Kane B and contadictions. Both name and dont name a more iconic duo

Erwin Schrödinger walked so Graham Priest could walk and not walk

Emma just sent me this video, and I want to thank you for such a thoughful and careful video on this stuff! Your viewers might also enjoy this: we occasionally perform 'Contradiction Club' as a play, featuring a stuffy classical logician and an effortlessly cool dialetheist. I leave you to guess which of myself and Emma plays each role lol.

Like laws, languages are also socially constructed. This, the ability for things to be inconsistent applies everywhere. Imposing a structure of institutional intent will not escape this. One can say that the purpose of laws is to prevent certain actions, but then there are laws that enforce certain actions - like wearing seatbelts. For any statement or definition or problem, there are always new ways of looking at it. People are creative and will find and create new contractions. The important thing is whether we deal with the anomalies in intellectually progressive or intellectually degenerate ways.

In the UK women were only specifically denied the vote in the 1832 Great Reform Act, before that time there were occasional instances where women did meet the qualifications for voting, though apparently qualifications for the franchise varied from borough to borough. Quite often being a landowner was sufficient qualification and there was nothing in law (until 1832) to specify gender.

Kane B - that JC Beall move you mention (the ‘according to’ move) at 25:41 is really fascinating because there is a theory of the nature of laws which see them as claims about morality. So to have a legal obligation etc is for it to be the case that “according to law, you have a moral obligation”. would you be able to tell me where Beall makes this argument? That would be really helpful :)

Interesting topic. Philosophy of Law offers some ways to resolve these kinds of contradictions. They are usually called "apparent" contradictions, since they must be resolved in one way or another. It's said the legal system, as a whole, can provide the parameters for interpreting a particular case and then eliminate the contradiction, thus saving the coherence of the entire system.

The first rule of contradiction club is you DON'T talk about contradiction club. The second rule of contradiction club is you DO talk about contradiction club! ...I'll see myself out. 😂

I understand it isn't the point of the example, but for the right to vote one, I could deny that any government has the ability to give or take away rights. There are plenty of people who only believe in natural (negative) rights, not positive rights that can be granted or taken. I am sure you could construct a similar contradiction where rights aren't involved though

Nice mate cheerio 🥂

I'd love to see you do an in-depth analysis of the implications of dielithism

Given the type of examples here true contradictions seem to be possible under situations where some agents get to make up the rules/give truth value to some propositions and if that holds, we could on that basis argue that god can also create true contradictions because that too would be a similar case where an agent gets to decide what is and is not true because they literally make the laws.

Systems of law and the constitutions of clubs and states seem more akin to the formal systems of mathematical logic than to descriptions of aspects of the world. If they were descriptions they would be aiming at truth and the existence of 'true contradictions' would indeed be problematic. But axiomatic systems merely aim at consistency, and that is what we ask of law and constitutions. Consistency makes them implementable.

my head hurts

Contracts: Having listened to that, I reject the claim that "being obligated not to do" necessarily implies "not being obligated to do". I accept your counterexample. Laws: I'm surprised you didn't entertain the possibility, since Sydney is a landowner, and all landowners are voters, and all voters are women, that Sydney is a woman! (This is a joke.) In English jurisprudence, legal contradictions are almost always resolvable (by the principle of lex posterior, as you cited, for example), but contradictions can occur between the Human Rights Act (1998) and later statutes. In such cases, a judge may make a declaration of incompatibility. The incompatibility may only be resolved legislatively. In the meantime, however, the provisions of the non-HRA statute apply. Clubs: Don't we just wait to see what happens when Graham tries to change the radio station? Perhaps all social facts are fictions.

Sorry but, can I just say that if i was the second contract writer (gona guess a solicitor of some sort) I would simply ask "so before we get started..do you have any contracts that we should know about?"

I think this issue turns on the combination of social ontology & epistemic constraints. It’d be too swift to say “the best this issue is doing is showing agents have contradictory intentional attitudes” because like you say (on constructivism) certain social facts constitutively depend on attitudes, so if an agent with the appropriate authority declares an incoherent attitude then it seems to follow there’re contradictory facts. My initial thoughts were: 1. If we accept classical logic we’re just going to reject there’re incoherent facts of any sort - that’s just an entailment of the logic, so something else needs revision, probably our concept of social facts & their relation to authority/legitimacy 2. Can’t we say by the same token that (given classical logic) it’s a preconditional social fact that all social facts constitutively depend on coherence - so anyone we take to be an authority declaring an incoherent attitude just isn’t an authority (at least with respect to what they’re trying to declare/make a social fact). Coherence is just baked into the notion of a legitimate social fact. So necessarily anyone who attempts to declare an incoherent social fact fails and is at best just expressing an incoherent attitude again. That move seems to preserve classical logic, social facts as attitudes, & agents having incoherent attitudes. 3. A more ballsy move would be to just reject that anyone has incoherent attitudes so the issue becomes unstateable, but I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that revenge-style paradoxes will creep in. 4. What would the conditions of satisfaction look like for an incoherent social fact? Other than the literal act of someone just saying something incoherent in a specific context - how does anyone behave in accordance with an incoherent fact? Especially if you consider normativity as an accordance relation, the whole notion of trying/success/failure becomes unintelligible then the notion of an incoherent social fact becomes unintelligible given social facts in this context determine norms & normativity. 5. Maybe there’s a de dicto/de re issue here I’m too tired and lazy to consider rn. Anyway, those were just some initial thoughts piggybacking off the end of the video. Good stuff as always, interested in if you have any criticisms.

It's at least not immediately obvious that "Op & O~p" is a contradiction, in contrast to "Op & ~Op". Maybe there is some deontic logic inference I am not aware of here.

Say two different people have contradictory beliefs & are operating under different assumptions; Wouldn't it be possible for a third party to engage both individuals & utter a phrase which would be interpreted in two different ways & nevertheless with the intent to express both things simultaneously although they might be in contradiction? (I.E. {B1:"People are fundamentally good & trustworthy", B2:~B1, U:"Child safety ornd parental rights are very important to me."} )

Okay, so the proposed contradiction is the following: "Sydney has the right to vote and Sydney does not have the right to vote." Let's do a semantic analysis on these conjuncts: "Sydney has the right to vote." What is meant by this? I take it to mean "There is a law in place in Society S that allows Sydney to vote". That is true under the scenario. "Sydney does not have the right to vote." If by this we mean the negation of "There is a law in place in Society S that allows Sydney to vote", then we get "There is not a law in place in Society S that allows Sydney to vote". That's false though under the scenario. So, I take this to mean "There is a law in place in Society S that prevents Sydney from voting", which is true under the scenario. Using these interpretations, upon semantic analysis, we get the following conjunction: "There is a law in place in Society S that allows Sydney to vote and there is a law in place in Society S that prevents Sydney from voting." That's true under the scenario, but that's P∧Q, which is not a contradictory statement. Thus, I believe the proposed contradiction "Sydney has the right to vote and Sydney does not have the right to vote" is equivocational where, upon semantic analysis, the left conjunct and the right conjunct are not truly the negations of each other.