Apparent Contradictions, True Contradictions, and Meaning

Abstract

In the same spirit as Yarbrough, Brian Caraher, noting that ‘[i]n Aristotelian and later analytic and symbolic logics, contradiction poses a problem for systematic thought,’ argues that it is ‘very difficult for either finely trained intellects or the ordinarily opinionated to get much beyond the view that logical, verbal, and argumentative contradictions seriously disable discourse of any kind’ (1992: 1–2). Caraher suggests, for example, citing propositions 4.462 and 4.464 of the Tractatus (‘Tautologies and contradictions are not pictures of reality. They do not represent any possible situations. For the former admit of all possible situations, and the latter none. A tautology’s truth is certain, a proposition’s possible, a contradiction’s impossible’), that the ‘visual, spatialized, and pictorial qualities of Wittgenstein’s representational or correspondence theory of logical language and truth … promote an intellectually austere regard for the kind of propositions that can speak the truth of things’ (2). Wittgenstein, he notes, asserts that ‘[i]t is impossible to represent in language anything that “contradicts logic” as it is in geometry to represent by its co-ordinates a figure that contradicts the laws of space, or to give the co-ordinates of a point that does not exist’ (2).