Why would we need to refute either of them? What's *your* worry about them?

But I've had too much coffee, and i'm a little outraged by other things, and thus you're *so* next
Suppose, per impossibile, one of them is true (and if trivialism is true, then dialethism is true too - and 'dialethism is true and false' is true!). There's still all the propositions we once called 'contradictory' and/or 'false'. And don't you know it, but they still act as if they are false or contradictory in the physical world. For example, I still cannot have my cake and eat it, even though in dialethism 'Chris-Kirk has his cake and has eaten it' as a contradiction is now true as well as false. I still am not rich, even though in tirvialism 'Chris-Kirk is rich' is now true since every proposition is true. So now I'll have to come up with some other distinction that does all the work 'true' and 'contradictory' used to do. And once i've done that, and it all works as well as 'true' and 'contradictory' once did - why, then I'll just have something much like the old notion. And if so, there was little reason to go through the whole mess in the first place.

However, dialethism at least is a formal system that we can examine apart from its possible physicalization, just like we can consider a hyper-cube even though there is no physical four-spatial-dimensional space for it to exist.

Chris-Kirk (and not Chris-Kirk)

Last edited by Shade Tree Philosopher (3/28/2016 10:22 pm)

I somehow understand why dialetheism fails.Something is true or false if it is grounded in reality.Since statements like "This statement is false" is not grounded in reality(and so not a sentence at all but just a string of meaningless characters),it cannot be true or false.But how about the statement "Everything is true"(the trivialist position)?

Chris,thanks for correcting me.Indeed,the trivialist position is :"Every proposition is true."Even though I admit this is a complete logical garbage,how can we refute such a position,without appealing to other systems of logic,rather than trivialism,and thus begging the question against the trivialist's position?Of course,if you subscribe to classical logic,the proposition "Every proposition is true" is false.But the trivialist might object that you are begging the question against him,by appealing to classical logic and not to trivialism.So,can we construct a reductio ad absurdum argument,supposing that trivialism is true,and showing that trivialism in the end is an incoherent position?And if yes,how?