realistcat wrote:
in the case of Aflak and his cowardice on certain occasions and courageousness on others, you'll notice that the issue seems to come down to whether these are contraries that exclude each other. It's true that courageousness and cowardice are usually interpreted in some sort of dispositional sense. I don't want to take a position on whether "He is cowardly and he is courageous" is inconsistent. As I say, it depends on whether you think of them as contraries.

But, in that case, notice a very pervasive feature of our world. Properties tend to be organized into contraries that exclude each other. So, this is true of weights, colors, lengths, pitch of a sound, age.

And if we think of simple subject/predicate sentences of the form

F(A) or "A Fs"

the predicate often tracks some property that falls into a range that has contraries. We might even use this idea to hold that "not" can be interpreted as a kind of disjunction:

A is not F iff A is either G or H or I or J...
where we have a list of the contraries that would exclude F.

Thus we might say that the LNC is so entrenched because of this pervasive feature of our world. It's hard for us to think of things being otherwise.

But if this is the real basis of the LNC, then it's not clear that it is some sort of apriori necessity, but more like an extremely well entrenched hypothesis.
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realistcat wrote:
"I mention this because you speak in terms of contraries of properties. Properties are, to my imagination, mere mental constructs that have no relationship to what is actually happening. On a fundamental level (and yes, I'm going atomistic here) we have particles and spatiotemporal relationships."

If predicates don't track properties, what do they do, what is their function? You also mention "spatiotemporal relationships" -- relations are properties.

Language is a biological function of humans. It's likely that it has an evolutionary explanation. What is it about it that makes it adaptive for humans? If we think of hunter-gatherer bands and someone coming back and telling them about an area where there is a food source, or warning of a dangerous large predator, we can see here how description of states of affairs in the world would be highly useful for survival. This means that the facts they conveyed had to be accessible to them...they didn't know about particles and all that.

Why do all human languages have a subject/predicate structure to the descriptive sentences? Again, if we assume that the predidates track properties in the world, then we have an acount of what the function of a sentence is...it is to convey that something A has some property P. So "truth" means it serves its function, "false" means it fails to serve the function of a descriptive sentence, it is defective that way.

Properties can't be "reduced" to particular entities. If there were only particular entities there'd be no facts, no states of affairs that obtain, and nothing for sentences to convey.

realistcat wrote:
quote:
"When we are discussing existence (that is, is it possible for something to both exist and not exist in the same way at the same time?), games of language will not resolve the underlying question. We must directly compare our logic to our world and see if the rules match the reality."

How do you compare "logic" (whatever that is) to "our world" (whatever that is)? What is a "match" with "reality"?

If I say "there are two cats on the sofa," it's clear from the context which sofa i'm referring to. You can observe that sofa and see if you detect two cats on it.

This is not difficult. In this case if I see the cats curled up on the sofa, i'm observing them, their fur, their shape on the sofa and their spatial relationship to the sofa, and the their twoness, that is, that there are two of them.

Now these are all properties I observe in the situation.

Elementary particles are not something we observe directly. What physicists do observe are their apparatuses in various experimental situations and so on...they are thus doing exactly what I'm doing when I observe the cats on the sofa. If I'm not observing facts, then neither are they. But their positing of particles occurs in the context of complex set of hypotheses whose function is to explain countless observations of the sorts I've just described.

If these observations do not observe properties of things, various facts about things, then there is no evidential base for the hypotheses of the physicists, and there would then be no reason to believe them.

YOU:
"In my mind, the idea of motion is precisely this problem. As to any moment, t1, what is the state of a particle? Does it exist at a specifiable location? If there is no moment at which you can specify its location, does it exist at all? If you can specify its location at t1, how can it have momentum/velocity? Cf. Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal and Zeno’s paradox of the arrow."

Motions and other states of particles are properties. There is no reason to believe these properties exist while colors and weights and meows of cats do not. One type of property is not "more real" than the other. Since the evidential force for the hypothesis that there are these particles is entirely based on observation of macro-level properties that humans are capable of observing, if the latter are not real neither are the former.

If you're talking about the collapse of the wave function, this has been one reason some people have questioned LNC. There are also interpretations that can get away from having to deny LNC. But if LNC is just an entrenched hypothesis, then this is consistent with saying that in certain spheres...such as at the very smallest micro level...it doesn't apply.

YOU:
"I realize that our concepts exist as features of language, so it is impossible to talk about existence as if we are free of the constraints of our language, but pretend as if we can. Putting language aside, is it ontically the case that a particle both exists and not exists at the same time?"

I don't think this is a question of our language but of our hypothesis about properties. The LNC may not hold in this case. But th LNC isn't about our language but about properties and things, and thus about obtaining of states of affairs. LNC says that S can't both obtain and not obtain. This is speaking in the ontological mode, that is, about what corresponds to sentences rather than talking about sentences.

YOU
"If ontologically it appears necessary to conceive of something both being and not being, shouldn’t we have a logic that permits us to work with the world as it appears? Shouldn’t we have a logic that permits at least some dialethia, even if it is only a dialethia related to an ontic claim? Don’t the ontic facts call for a logic that does not rigidly apply the LNC?"

I don't know what you mean by "ontic realm." Ontology refers to what there is. A person's ontology is said to be whatever they think there is. When we think that things exist and have properties, they are by that fact part of our ontology.

“Stanford” wrote:

An alternative, dialetheic account of motion, which takes at face value the aforementioned Hegelian idea that “Something moves, not because at one moment it is here and another there, but because at one and the same moment it is here and not here, because in this ‘here’, it at once is and is not”, is exposed in Priest, 1987, Ch. 12.