Jurriaan Bendien wrote:
> A dialectical contradiction differs from a logical contradiction in that a
> logical contradiction is basically a formal inconsistency of meaning,
> evaluated according to certain inferential rules of propositional logic.
> >From a logically contradictory type of statement anything can follow. A
> dialectical contradiction describes a situation in which a condition
> co-exists meaningfully with another condition, in such a way that although
> the one is the opposite of the other, it also presupposes the other. The
> dialectical contradiction is "held in place" by the fact that it is mediated
> by something, or contained by something else. In formal logic we call this
> either a paradoxical statement, or a nonsensical statement. But in fact in
> practical life we encounter such dialectical contradictions all the time,
> and there is nothing particularly mysterious about it.
>
even at the most elementary level a formula like
a = not a
is understandable in terms of materialist dialectics.
The principle that the negation of the negation is becoming, which
seemed gobledegook to me when I read it in Hegel, is a commonplace to
the electrical engineer. If one wants to build a digital oscillator, one
chains an odd number of not gates together, and you get a result that
periodically changes from true to false.
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Received on Wed Sep 9 04:01:59 2009
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