HOW THINGS BEGAN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 552, 20 January 1950, Page 5

HOW THINGS BEGAN

Sir,-My letter of December 23 contained five points of criticism. Mr. Prior has. (wisely) ignoted the first two, attempted a reply to the third and fourth, and left the fifth till later. I asked Mr. Prior to quote instances to prove his charge that my use of the term "selfcontradictory" was indiscriminate. Since "indiscriminate" means "promiscuous" as well as "confused," I think his proof requires several instances. He has furnished one, viz., my statement that Monism is "incompatible with the principle of contradiction." This instance does not serve his purpose, for a statement may be immediately or mediately incompatible with the principle of contradiction, and only in the former case is it self-contradictory. But I did not write "immediately incompatible." Mr.° Prior knows enough logic to realise that in making this distinction I am not quibbling. In fact, the distinction underlies the theory of the syllogism. Mr. Prior says that a proposition may be self-evidently false without contradicting itself, Not so. When we say that a proposition is self-evidently false, we mean that its falsity may be seen from an examination of the proposition itself, an examination which shows that it is self-contradictory, e.g., the proposition, "a part is greater than the whole." Strictly speaking, of course, a proposition cannot contradict itself, for, as anyone who has heard of the Square of Opposition knows, contradiction is betweem two propositions. To say that a proposition is self-contradictory is merely a short way of saying that it contradicts some self-evident truth, e.g., the principle of identity. Thus "A is not A" is said to be self-contradictory, because it contradicts "A is A," which is self-evi-dently true. Similarly forthe proposition "A change may be without a cause" .. . I suspect (a suspicion reinforced by some remarks in Mr. Prior’s original review) that he has not grasped the difference between "evident" and "self-evident." Mr. Prior says that "being caused" is not part of the meaning of "being a change." I hold that it is, ie., it suffices to analyse the meaning of "being. a change" to see that it implies "being caused." Mr. Prior’s mention of "effect" in this context is irrelevant, for we are not discussing "effect," but "change." Similarly irrelevant is his reference to the unlikelihood of the intervention by’ the Creator to transform marble into a statue. The point at issue was whether such a change is possible "without the intervention of any cause." To say that it is is nonsense, i.e. self-contradictory, if you admit that a change must have some cause. Present-day philosophical fashions, good or bad, have nothing to do with the case. Finally, I should be grateful to Mr. Prior for that list of transitional forms.

G. H.

DUGGAN

S.

M.

(Greenmeadows