Inconsistent Thoughts

I have recently been reading Graham Priest’s Beyond the Limits of Thought which is a neat book on a subject that I find really intriguing.  It sort of inspired the following argument.  The crux of what I will argue is that the Principle of Charity requires us to interpret certain mystics as having rational, inconsistent beliefs.  This puts us in a difficult position unless we revise our logic in favor of a paraconsistent one.

For the reader unfamiliar with mysticism, I recommend the SEP article on the topic. Mysticism is a widespread historical phenomenon which manifests in different ways in different places.  I want to focus on the aspect of mysticism which consists in asserting the existence of some transcendent and ineffable truth.  The revelation of such transcendent truth is often said to be life-changing in some positive way, so that there is an impetus to take the claim of its existence seriously and seek it out for oneself.  My favorite example of this brand of mysticism is that found in the Upanishads, whose central philosophical thesis is that Atman is Brahman.  A rough and ready gloss of what this means is that the indestructible and eternal spiritual core of each existing thing (its Atman) is in fact the same substance as the universal consciousness (Brahman).  The fact that Atman is Brahman is said to be realized only in deep meditation and its realization is supposed to bring about an enlightened and joyous state of mind.  This transcendent truth cannot really be appreciated from the perspective of the unenlightened in part because it is an ineffable truth which cannot really be expressed in words.

On the face of it, such mysticism is contradictory.  A necessary condition for any claim of the form “X is F” to have a determinate truth value is that “X” succeeds in referring to something.  So in particular, a necessary condition for the assertion that there is some transcendent truth T to have a determinate truth value is that “T” succeeds in referring to something.  But if “T” succeeds in referring to some truth, then that truth is expressible since referring is a way of expressing.  Hence, the assertion of the mystic implies that the putative transcendent truth T both is and is not expressible.

One problem with this argument is that it assumes a position on the debate over the effect of empty referring expressions on the sentences in which they occur.  Positive and negative free logicians would object to the premise that a necessary condition for any claim of the form “X is F” to have a determinate truth value is that “X” succeeds in referring to something.  I don’t know what to say here in defense of my ‘neutralist’ leanings, namely the assumption that empty referring expressions render the sentences in which they occur indeterminate in truth value.  This just strikes me as highly intuitive (though if you are looking for a nice argument against negative free logic, I can refer you to this source).

Granting that mysticism has contradictory implications, the reader might be thinking: so what?  Lots of people say things that are contradictory, and we can safely dismiss the beliefs of such people.  The problem with this reaction is that it violates the Principle of Charity in the following guise.  One version of Charity demands that we not interpret other cultural traditions as ascribing to beliefs which are systematically irrational.  So we have an interpretive choice on our hands.  Either the contradictory assertions of the mystic are to be taken as rational or the doctrine which we have taken to be contradictory must be reinterpreted so as to have strictly consistent implications.

Some think that when it comes to such mysticism as that found in the Upanishads, we should go the second route.  One version of this is to take a conventionalist line.  There are “two kinds of truth”, the merely conventional and the ultimately real.  It is conventionally true that the fact that Atman is Brahman can be expressed, but it is ultimately true that it cannot be expressed.  The qualification remedies the apparent contradiction.  Again, I don’t know exactly what to say about about this.  It is a live philosophical option to take such an interpretive stance, it just seems wrong to me.  It seems to get the spirit of the mystical doctrine wrong by rendering a view that is explicitly intended to carry an air of paradox to instead be a ’safe’ and consistent view in disguise.

If I am right about all this, then we are in the following position with respect to mysticism.  The Principle of Charity requires that we not interpret the mystic as ascribing to beliefs which are systematically irrational.  The assertions of the mystic have contradictory implications, so if we do our Charitable duty we must consider it rational to hold such inconsistent beliefs.  But here we run into problems on the logical front, for it is a notorious feature of classical logic that it cannot ‘elegantly’ accommodate inconsistent theories because of the following rule called Explosion.

In slogan form, Explosion has it that a contradiction entails everything.  The rule is valid under classical logic, which means that an inconsistent theory closed under classical logic is trivial (committed to the truth of absolutely everything).  That may stop just short of accusing such a theory of being systematically irrational, but it is close enough as to want avoiding (in fact, elsewhere Priest has argued that such triviality is literally unbelievable and so literally irrational).  We must reject the rule of Explosion in favor of a logic which can accommodate inconsistent theories more elegantly.  A logic in which the rule of Explosion is invalid is called a paraconsistent logic.  A simple example is Priest’s logic LP.

To reiterate the thrust of my argument, consider this prompt: how should we proceed when we encounter a cultural or philosophical tradition which is committed to contradictory beliefs?  We want to engage this tradition on equal footing, but there just seems to be no way to do so if we are stuck with the entrenched classical logic.  The Un-Charitable thing to do would be to dismiss any tradition which contravenes our logic.  The Charitable thing to do is revise our logic in the direction of a paraconsistent alternative that can at least elegantly accommodate what our interlocutors have to say.  Something as radical as the revision of logic can arise from nothing more than the commonplace responsibility to take seriously what other philosophers have to say.