21. Re: [marxistphilosophy] Graham Priest vs Erwin Marquit (2)
(Jim Farmelant)
> Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2005 12:24:14 -0400
> From: Jim Farmelant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] [marxistphilosophy] Graham Priest vs
> Erwin Marquit (2)
> On Sat, 17 Sep 2005 18:54:33 -0400 Ralph Dumain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > The upshot, I think, is that even if Priest can prove Marquite wrong
> > in
> > arguing for contradictions in 'the same respect', that one point
> > does not
> > render his analysis of the issues involved any subtler, nor does it
> > lead to
> > interesting arguments and conclusions. The argument is to one point
> >
> > only--the admission of contradictions into formal logic. And so?
>
> That's pretty much my take on Priest. At most what he does
> is show that you can have viable systems of formal logic
> that admit contradictions. He attempts to show that
> Hegel and Marx can be understood as having been
> dialetheists but he leaves unclear what would follow
> if we accept his conclusions. Is our understanding
> of Marxist dialectics in any fundamental way changed
> if we choose to agree with Marquit or opt for Priest?
>
> Certainly other philosophers
> before him have attempted to understand or model
> dialectical reasoning in terms of formal logic. Even
> A.J. Ayer in his *The Central Questions of Philosophy*
> briefly made the argument that perhaps Hegel's
> dialectical logic could be understood in terms
> of a multivalue logic. Lofti Zadeh is noted
> for his fuzzy logic and fuzzy set theory
> (which Priest regards as dialetheic)
> which likewise admits contradictions.
> And some Soviet philosophers like Gorskii
> were interested in fuzzy logic for that very
> reason. But in the end what follows from
> this does not seem very clear.
Fuzzy logic and it's various variants can be easily interpreted as a
dialectical logic as they have very strong connections with multi-valued
logic. There are particular models (shadowed sets) which are more towards
such interpretations. A multi-valued logic admits of more than two truth
values for a statement. More fundamentally FST is connected with semi-set
theory (Vopenka). The primary goal of which was to deal with reasoning in
natural language.
If Priest claims that fuzzy logic and paraconsistent logic have similar kinds
of contradictions then he is wrong. The conclusions from Vakarelov's formal
analysis of negations (and weakenings thereof) in the various types of formal
logics clearly implies that.
<snip>
A. Mani
Member, Cal. Math. Soc
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