[lbo-talk] Contradiction

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Fri Nov 30 11:10:59 PST 2007


ravi wrote:
>
> >
> I am not sure what Woj intended, but I choose to read him as saying
> something like this (which I might say): contradiction is a property
> (or state) of logical systems. Logical systems are tools of the human
> mind.

This is so -- but it is still unacceptable as a comment on language. It is as silly as though someone were to critique the phrase "silly putty" on the grounds that silly was a state of mind. It is a naive concept of words as having a mystical one-and-only meaning, which is linguistically stupid. All words have many meanings, and you don't fight definitions, you just note which sense of the word is relevant to a given context.

Carrol



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