Tuesday, August 18, 2015

The Principle of Explosion (Critical Thinking Fallacy)

My new favorite critical thinking fallacy.

"The principle of explosion (Latin: ex falso quodlibet, "from a falsehood, anything follows", or ex contradictione sequitur quodlibet, "from a contradiction, anything follows"), or the principle of Pseudo-Scotus, is the law of classical logic, intuitionistic logic and similar logical systems, according to which any statement can be proven from a contradiction. That is, once a contradiction has been asserted, any proposition (or its negation) can be inferred from it." (Wiki)

Abstract from Ex Contradictione Sequitir Quodlibet by Walter A. Carnielli , João Marcos

"We summarize here the main arguments, basic research lines, and results on the foundations of the logics of formal inconsistency. These involve, in particular, some classes of well-known paraconsistent systems. We also present their semantical interpretations by way of possible-translations semantics and their applications to human reasoning and machine reasoning. 1 1. Do we need to worry about inconsistency? Classical logic, as we all know, cannot survive contradictions. Among the principles that were gradually incorporated into the “properties of correct reasoning ” since Aristotle, the Principle of Pseudo-Scotus (PPS), also known since medieval times as ex contradictione sequitur quodlibet (and also called the Principle of Explosion by some contemporary logicians), states that in any theory exposed to the enzymatic character of a contradiction A and ÏA one can derive any other arbitrary sentence B, so that the theory would turn out to be trivial."

I think we should apply this one to Big-Bloated-Bang.  

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