Well, it would be fair to say that it wasn't the best Thanksgiving ever.

Between the palm trees and the lizards and the dinner of Ramen Noodles, something of the traditional flavor of the holiday was lost for me. On the plus side, around 10:30 at night I walked down to the Denny's in Coral Gables to get a slice of pumpkin pie and a cup of coffee, so I did perform at least one traditionally Thanksgiving-y activity (eating pumpkin pie), albeit in a somewhat non-Thanksgiving-y ambience.

Next year, I'm just going to have to find a way to make it to Leeds.

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On the plus side (and this ranks way up there in the list of *non*-Thanskgiving-y activities), I did manage to get some work done today. (Philosophy, not skiffy.) I hadn't intended on doing it just yet, but my final paper in Dr. Bueno's "Topics in Logic" class is due soon.

While I was walking to Denny's, it suddenly occurred to me exactly how to phrase the argument that I gave in a much more ham-manded way in my presentation in class on Wednesday. I ended up pounding out the bulk of my paper on my laptop in Denny's. I still have to write the beginning and end parts, summarizing the arguments I'm responding to and applying the stuff I said to it, but I've got the 6 pages presenting my own argument and, rhetorically at least, it's *way* better than what I had before.

Just for the sake of giving anyone who's interested a sample of the bizarre and unreal nature of my day job, the paper has to do with Graham Priest's arguments in his book "In Contradiction" for dialetheism, which is the position that paraconsistent logic (rather than classical logic) models reality, i.e. there are true statements of the form "A and not A." He gives arguments from paradoxes that arise both in natural languages (like English) and in set theory.

I'm hopelessly out of my depth in the set-theoretic stuff (had I but known how much it would come up now, I would have taken more math classes undergrad), so the bits I'm mostly concerned with are the "semantic paradoxes." The classic case (and most widely known...I've seen them make jokes about it on "The Simpsons") is the "Liar Paradox," which is:

"This sentence is false."

Of course, if it's true, it's false. If it's false, it's true. If you want to say that classical logic accurately models reality, this is a serious problem. All you need to get from that to dialetheism is the premise that all propositions are true or false (the law of bivalence.)

And, as people like me try so hard to impress upon our students in Intro to Philosophy in universities everywhere every fall and spring, if you want to rationally dispute the conclusion of a deductive argument, you have to either find a premise to disagree with or find a flaw in one of the argumenative steps. So, since surely almost everyone wants to disagree with this particular conclusion, which premise do we pick a fight with?

The obvious response to it, if you go with the traditional theory that truth is correspondence to reality, is that the sentence has a "truth value gap." Since it doesn't refer to anything in the external world, it's neither false nor true.

As Priest points out, this leads to serious trouble with the Extended Liar Paradox, which is (1):

(1) is not true.

Now, if (1)'s neither true nor false, as posited by the truth-value-gap block, then it's not true, right? From the position that (1) is neither true nor false, you can derive, um:

(1) is not true.

...and the problem raises its ugly head all over again.

So, what can you say about this? Sure, you can construct a formal logical meta-language in which this isn't expressable, and lots of solutions along these lines have been offered, but does that really solve the problem? Aren't you just changing the subject?

And that's where the fun starts. Finding a non-self-refuting way to get around this gets you into all kinds of incredibly intricate and messy sub-issues about the relationship between language and reality, the semantics of the word "truth," etc., etc., etc.

Which is just as well, really. I made a grand whopping total of $40 this year from writing short stories ($20 for the sale to Walking Bones Magazine and $10 each from the DKA and Afterburn SF sales...plus a t-shirt and a bag of books from the Revolution SF contest), so for the moment, I really need to do *something* else to pay the bills. Might as well be something interesting.