From: amnell@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Marko Amnell)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Re: Excluded Middle
Date: 6 Nov 92 19:38:12 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki

In article <TORKEL.92Nov6191327@bast.sics.se> torkel@sics.se 
(Torkel Franzen) writes:

>In article <1992Nov6.171811.3695@klaava.Helsinki.FI> amnell@klaava.Helsinki.
>FI (Marko Amnell) writes:
>
>   >This is the point where the Law of Excluded Middle comes in.
>   >It says that every possible proposition is true or false.
>
>  That is, that it is true or is not true? As in your earlier formula,
>"the conditions obtain or do not obtain"? But this is just what I am
>asking about. What do you intend to assert here? How is this statement
>different from "if the conditions obtain, then they obtain" or any other
>statement that is usually regarded as a logical truth? 

I see your point.  You must be saying that a tautology is vacous, and
hence it is no use trying to use it as an explanation, since it is
futile to rephrase it.  But, I am wondering where this tautology
comes from, and to ask this is to ask for a psychological explanation
of how we think.

Apparently you
>attach some peculiar significance to this particular tautology, at least
>when it is uttered in certain contexts, but your present remarks don't
>explain what this signficance is.

This is fair.  I'm not sure my own thoughts are very clear about this.
Nevertheless, I remain interested in the apparently crucial role this
tautology plays in Hintikka's and Dummett's work.  I don't think I
understand why it should crop up in all these places.

>   >It follows
>   >that in every instance, it _does_ make sense to ask whether a certain
>   >proposition describes some fact in the real world, or does not.
>
>  How does this follow, and why doesn't it follow from other
>tautologies?  Let's take a concrete example. I say, "this painting is
>beautiful, or it is not beautiful". How do you deduce from this
>statement that the matter of the painting being beautiful is in some
>non-trivial sense a matter of fact?

The picture is of the world as a totality and each proposition has a
place in this collection.  I can see that if this kind of Tractatus-
like ontology is to hold, any tautology would do the trick.  But,
if this is the case, why do we ascribe special significance to the
law of logic?  A trick of history?  It occurs to me that the way we
actually think -- when I think of how I think myself -- is very
much the way Locke described it.  I associate ideas almost randomly,
and when there is order, I don't have an explanation of where this
order comes from.  All I can appeal to is a further idea.  This is
very muddled.

 Or perhaps you don't actually mean
>that anything follows from this statement, but rather that when you
>yourself make such statements you intend to express some metaphysical
>conviction - as people do when they utter a tautology of the form "if
>A then A" in order to express a fatalistic view of events?

The first part is probably true.  The conviction is that there is a fact
of the matter about the things we would call facts, that it is legitimate
to ask if something is a fact or a fiction.  This is so despite the
profusion of languages and alternative possible descriptions of the
same event.  But, does the tautology express this conviction?  How?

But, I don't think I have a fatalistic view of events, if you mean by
this some kind of determinism.  I think that we are more free than
animals, which are more free than plants, but that to ask if we are
_really_ free is to misunderstand what we mean by freedom.  This is a
very Wittgensteinian position about free will.

-- 
Marko Amnell
amnell@klaava.helsinki.fi
Graduate Student in Philosophy