No label defined (Q4662885)

The paper offers a careful discussion of the epistemic status of the law of non-contradiction (LNC) understood as the claim that no contradictory statement is ever correctly assertable. The status of LNC is considered from the point of view of foundationalist and coherentist theories of epistemic justification and from the point of view of internalist as well as externalist approaches. The author argues that, in logic and mathematics, coherentist considerations must play a role, and comes to the conclusion that it is difficult to choose between different logical theories that lead to the same consequence relation. The central claim of the paper is based on the observation that a paraconsistent consequence relation may result from a semantics in which contradictions never receive a designated semantic value. Examples are given of paraconsistent consequence relations that preserve wanted properties different from either truth or consistency. (Unfortunately, the statement of the preservationist semantics contains some typos, so that the papers referred to should be consulted.) Since these preservationist semantics result in paraconsistent consequence relations without any commitment to non-trivial models of inconsistent premise sets, there is room for a defence of LNC in paraconsistent logic. The author advocates a form of epistemic realism such that the epistemic status of LNC must be an invariant across all epistemically tenable theories. In the end, the status of LNC is compared with the status of Euclid's parallel postulate: ``a tenable but not indispensable part of some formal theories''. For the entire collection see [Zbl 1054.03003].