FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Tue May 09, 2023 12:52 pm
For two fact claims to be contradictory, at least one must assert by entailment the untruth of the other. This logical relationship places them in need of resolution, and until there is resolution, the fact statements are typically considered tentative, proposed, theoretical or moot (and so on).
I'm not sure that is universal practice or even scientific practice. Often what happens in science is one team considers the other team's fact false. You can have this in paradigm shifts or in situations where something does or seems to go against a preferred model. But there can be situations where contradictory facts are held to be true in a variety of fields and communities.
We already have plenty of logical and linguistic tools to handle conflict and ambiguity because what we cannot accept is the notion that two statements that each entail the other is wrong could be simultaneously both true.
But out here in life, we often have to follow different ideas of truth at different times. Before the particle/wave dualism got resolved (if it did) people likely went on with one set of facts and other people or even the same people in other contexts going with other facts. We can look back and think, well, our concepts were limited and it merely seemed like a contradiction, but it wasn't. But one of my points was that here we are in the middle of processes of unraveling things. The other point is we presume things like natural laws, at least some do. So, we can't have a law as a fact and have things that go against those laws. However in recent decades there has been some scraping away at the idea that there are natural laws period.
The bullshit that VA and Skep are trying to sell us require the internalisation of the liar's paradox, which triggers a vomit reflex in all sane persons.
We don't have to view everything as teams.
You see how they resolve the contradiction though, right?
That's correct, the thing can occupy two different states at once, which is something you cannot do,
We don't know the limits of this phenomenon.
So it isn't contradictory unless you insist that quantum things can only occupy a single state at a given time. "Particle A occupies state X" is not contradicted by "particle A occupies state Y" unless state Y entails not state X.
I think you're missing what their experiment shows or is evidence of. The facts are different to different observers. What happened or what was is different to the different observers. It wasn't in two states for A and two states for B. Different things are observed, because different things happened in their worlds.
The research is something that has only recently been technologically possible to investigate.
Maybe the thing you presented should properly be thought of as actual contradictory facts. There was no way for you to convey that, the contradiction had to be resolved enough that you could actually describe the scenario and thus you end up with a thing being in two states at once or else a better way of looking at things might be that the observation is observer dependent.
And generally, as they discuss in the lay article, observer independence is quality of scientific research and confirmation. Not in the sense of the old qm thing that observers influence or cohere something out of superposition, but that two things can be cohered out of suposition at the same moment.
Makes no odds, you couldn't convey the story with real contradictory facts because we aren't tooled to think about things that way. This is a private language problem.
I'm not sure what you mean here.
I seem to be able to imagine a reality that is shifting laws and patterns and then also is not consistent between individuals. That at the macro level I and someone else could both correctly describe and event and contradict each other. And not because we saw only certain facets, which would always be the case, but because reality isn't a thing that we view in that old subject perception object model. I'm not sure what I can't think of here. But I likely missed your point.
Eventually though, if we find a fact to be both true and impossible by virtue of entailment from some other fact, then that other fact becomes falsified.
1) that's why I mentioned time. We can have two correct facts, until it resolves, if it does.
2) Both facts might get confirmed, however we understand the context is more complex.
3) Both could be disconfirmed or at least seem to be.
Here we are in the middle of time with incomplete knowledge and a lot of working assumptions about reality.
And if we try to give up on just the notion of contradiction, we will fail as we would end up sacrificing the notion of falsification as well, and that would create a single-circuit self resolving paradox.
Or we move ahead, instead of deciding the whole thing has to collapse, with everything even facts as tentative, in some way, and even what we consider obvious ontology also tentative, in some way. Language can contradict itself but reality has is consistant/has laws, rather than say habits, perhaps local ones/events are what they are and not also something else and so on. I think this is what we actually do in practice, with individuals having different awareness of this, committment to tentativeness, openness to radically different ontologies and so on.
You could even look at this as a special case of cognitive dissonance.