cbostrum (08/08/82)
A UofT philosopher once visited our philosophy department here, and gave a paper entitled "can God make a contradiction come true?" His position was that God *could* do so if he wished to, but that he did not wish to. I attempted vainly to "reason" with him, but could seem to get nowhere. He admitted that contradictions could not exist, but that God could make them come true, if he wished to. I argued that if God really wished to then he would be in trouble, but he (apparently) thought it signifigant that God did not wish to, and that this made "God can make a contradiction come true" true. It cant be as simple as interpreting what we would normally interpret as a subjunctive as a simple material conditional, cant it? Im afraid either he is totally crazy or I just could not understand him. We played around for a while trying to express all this in some sort of logic, and I think we made some progress, although I cant remember much about it. Does anybody know anything about this guy, or any other serious (?!) work that has been done on this? The only other things I remember about this guy is that he looked a little like Woody Allen, and was a Marxist. (Slightly on this topic, I might mention paraconsistent logics, which are those developed to model "nontrivial inconsistent theories". That is, you can prove some contradictions in them, but without the traditional logical result that you can prove any statement whatsoever. Does anybody know anything interesting about these logics? (Related are the "non monotonic" AI logic of Doyle and Reiter, eg))