cthia
notes on polyvalent logic
FOREVER starting again, having to go back to the last place you remember: isn't this the law of flicker-self? Why do you imagine it is ever any different?
Negligence is an army. In this landscape of futile guideposts, language itself is only the pointer, perhaps, to what should have been the in-between places.
And philosophy moves like another such caped crusade, multiplying shadows in its war against the tendency to flicker.
Our picture of how we use words is not only different from how we use them, if it were so, we could not even form that picture. Rather, it is one of our myths--call it the myth of thinginess (Haeccitas). It's why translation seems inherently paradoxical, and true philosophy a goal almost beyond imagining. And, when one abandons this myth, it is so great a leap that it takes only a modest degree of fetishizing to render it the Jewel in the Crown, the experience of experiences, satori--or letting go of words as words. Why should this be so? Is it that who we think we are, is also a grave matter of "words as words"? And where do we go from there?
The Hat model of meaning: every word is a hat, and every meaning is something that wears that hat.
Meaning comes from speech communities interacting. The "language" that exists as dictionaries and grammars is the result of a complex process of analysis, but its relation to the meaning that comes from a speech community interacting, is that of a cut-out traced shadow silhouette to its threedimensional figure source.
We should seek the bones of our language in grief, not grammar.
Dualisms directly proceed from prejudice to absurdity, in a foreordained march that is nonetheless incomprehensible to their footsoldiers.
Dhjksdc (4-value logic).
Fuazole = both-true-and-false [T ∪ F, Metaphor] (noun; adjective= "irreal"), symbol: Q'
Gwedd = neither-true-nor-false [~T ∩ ~F, Nonsense] (adjective; noun= "frop"), symbol: G'
Glaugnea has both logical and observational modifiers: the default is true, apparently & really, for me &/or some others.
apparently apparently despite
and really but not appearances
true --- VR' VL'
false P' PR' PL'
irreal Q' QR' QL'
gwedd G' GR' GL'
Fuazole: also includes collaborative conceptual structures (occult traditions, religious doctrines)--even: bwinmol [conlangs] (usage). The "Rainbow Bridge" of concepts is like a poet's idiolect. ...Legends...Games...
Everything exists, even Nothingness. The Nothingness that exists is As-If [fuazole]. By virtue of As-If, Cosmos is & is not; Mind is and is not. The part of mind that is-not (Language) corresponds both to the part of cosmos that is (things) & the part of cosmos that is-not (the Unmanifest). Thus Language has secular & sacred aspects.
Logic is an attitude toward description. Since it is a subset of descriptive language, fuazole & gwedd belong in the category of nondescriptive language, rather than as forms of logic. Statements-in-context have truth-values, but isolated sentences don't. (They only have shorn meanings.) And all meanings derive from an allusion to shared experience. Thus poetry (as fuazole) is the least transferrable (in time, space, or language) form of communication--it becomes frop too easily--except insofar as it is both simply expressed & universal in scope. ...Poetry survives cosmopolitanism only because of the magical utility of gwedd poetry...
All that we think, dream, or perceive, passes either through the horn gate of As-If, or the ivory gate of Not-As If.
Truth Tables. Not to be construed as adding ~T ∩ ~F and ~T ∪ ~F (redundantly), but rather a profound recognition of the metaphorical nature of language, involving as it does a devalorization ofthe pole "Truth", which is either tautology or insight... [picture of a tetrahedron with vertices T, F, Q', and G'.]
How is it that the Symbolic must be a separate logical modality, not reducible to True or False, say, in a determinate context? Such as: running on a football field, between one blast of a whistle and the next, is only "flight" according to certain rules. Or: fear and sorrow for the audience of a tragedy (yet no one rises to prevent), for that room with its stone's-throw removal and for that hour only. --"Killing the king" on a wooden chessboard, even farther from reality. One then is forced to argue that what is true is the form, and what is false is the meaning. But let a transgressor take the play seriously--crossing from the arena (or temenos) into the audience or vice versa--either by plan or by spontaneous choice--this does not work either as act (which might well get handed over to the authorities) or aesthetic expression (what does it express that the stage itself could not speak?). In fact, it's a taboo. And this taboo shows that we are dealing with a separate realm, one that has to be protected from the encroachment of having to choose either truth or falsity.
(Indeed, insofar as "Reality TV" is not simply acting by non-actors, it signifies precisely the collapse of such boundaries, the absence of a viable society. --At the same time as serious artists are responding with hoaxes, pseudodocumentation, and genre crossing.)
It might be helpful to give a name to two aspects, two movements in the life of the Symbolic. One, for the moment when "play" becomes "real," as Vuelta. The other, for the pressure, under forced modernization, for the symbolic to be threatened with extinction: as Kenosis. Thus, what postmodern neobarbarian masses express, in their violent self-assertions, is not so much the desire to preserve their sense of "having a soul," and sacredness, as it is an exasperated expression of resistance to Kenosis. It is the flattened response of one who has been abjectly deprived of the symbolic realm.
(To call it, as in its twencen manifestations, "fascism," reduces it to mere political terms, as just another team. But what kind of team wants to clear the field of all its opponents? Fascism more closely resembles a disease of the imagination. When fascism triumphs, it's not a political debacle. It's a Zombie Apocalypse.)
Compassion: another person as-if myself.
To listen as-if the other person might be saying something true, that you need to know.
To act & judge as if you could be wrong.
Doublethink, rationalization, denial, NOT-AS-IF...
As-If & Not-As-If are contraries, not opposites. The latter is a restriction (sort of--) of the former... All language is first As-If. Nonsense might be construed as the part of As-If [~ As-If] that is not True. For, one arrives at this latter distinction only through empirical testing. Strictly speaking, False shades into Nonsense only by degree of unfamiliarity. "Pigs fly" is a conventional kind of paradox, not more so than "Colorless Green Ideas." But [computer-generated] "it's the it bathed played" contains within it a tug toward metaphor unlike the others.
Rationalism might be called the fallacy of believing language to be a category of description, rather than that description is a special use of language.
Description is As-If-(some) World, just as Ego is As-If-(some) Self.
...3-logic is [topologically] equivalent to subtractive color theory, more than binary logic with a middle term added. A model: the "Scissors, Paper, Rock" game. Philosophically, 'true' can be considered {as-if (not (as-if))}; as-if is basic. But it is convenient to have a name for the world inferred by the realm of discourse: paratrue. ("False" can be made from T and T + F.) then, considering the two kinds of (Lojban) NOT: Polar opposite & Contrary (or: other than), we have a "scissors, paper, rock" circle: [a circle divided into thirds by the points A, B, C is pictured]. Let S = a proposition. Values: S, As-If S; other-than-S-that's-not As-If (call them A, B, C). A (Not As-if/ paratrue) is the contrary of C (Neither-True-Nor-False/ nonsense) and the polar opposite of B (As-If, or Both-True-and-False), which is the contrary of C.
A ∪ B → B A ∪ C → A B ∪ C → C
Contrariwise:
A ∩ B → A A ∩ C → C B ∩ C → B
Finally, if as-if = T ∪ F :
F = (T ∪ F) ∩ (~T)
A novel which purports to be an exchange of letters between Teddy Roosevelt & Sherlock Holmes. Suggests that any combination of fiction & nonfiction has the truth value of fiction.
Quadrupolar logic: aliens of planet Ummo (Wolf 424).
Truth values: so, not-so, possibly-so. (Truthful, untruthful, chatoyant.)
In Aymara: jisa, jani, ina.
In Lojban: jetnu, jitfa, norje'u.
Though logic per se seldom appears in our regular considerations, there is an implicit logical element in our choosing and in our experiencing new things (perhaps in others as well?). To act as if only two alternatives are possible; to be compelled by imperative feeling to make a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down judgment at every novel stimulus--these are dualistic sorts of blunder. And it would be a not negligible improvement simply to insert a conscious else also (Lojban: ji'a drata) into these automatic processes. --Thus does cthia start to reshape the world.
Another way to make polyvalent logic part ofyour life is to practice finding the "tertium quid" or third alternative, for those reflexive pairs which so bedevil our discourse. There is always one to be found.
Philosophically, if logical "true" is only not-as if (instead of fundamental), this accords well with the idea that while falsification of a theory is always possible, there is no final truth
Compromise as the natural and desired outcome.
With only exclusive-OR, the ego has to reject or identify with the unconscious--both pathological outcomes. On the one hand, denial and the persecution of "enemies"; on the other, a humorless antinomialism whose further limit is crime. But with nonexclusive-OR, the ego can acknowledge and accept the unconscious. --On my car radio just now, "Werewolves of London."
And what is transcendence but "else also" embodied?
Without as-if, language dances in leg irons.