But why do some of these stories give correct predictions and others don't? — litewave
In other words, contradiction is not something that could even in principle apply - or not - to things in the world; you 'can't imagine that reality would be absurd' because absurdity is a function of thought, not being. To say that reality can or can't be 'contradictory' is to project onto the world a category that applies only to our thinking about the world. — StreetlightX
They give approximately correct predictions, to the limits of our experimental apparatus. — fishfry
Newton wasn't correct, nor is Einstein. They get closer and closer to something that may or may not be there. — fishfry
I think non-contradiction applies to reality very well because only non-contradictory statements can correspond to reality — litewave
Granting that one can make any sense of the murky and loaded idea of 'correspondence' — StreetlightX
you've just made a claim about 'statements' - about what we can say of the world. And this is just where contradiction is applicable. — StreetlightX
But among such correct statements is that every thing is what it is and is not what it is not, and so the thing does not contradict itself or any other thing. In other words, every thing - and therefore reality - is non-contradictory. — litewave
Your 'in other words' does not follow. Again, a lack of argument, and a missing minor premise. — StreetlightX
And why do some stories give more correct predictions than others? — litewave
In the time of the Ancient Greeks, angels were thought to push the planets around, and Ptolemy had no trouble incorporating this belief in his theory... which by the way allowed astronomers to make many correct predictions. — Hachem
The correctness of the predictions of the Ptolemaic geocentric theory followed from the correspondence between the mathematical properties of the theory and the mathematical structure of the universe, not from the assumption of angels. — litewave
Nowadays Physics is still embedded in a view of the universe, and we are still trying to figure out the correct view. There are still people who think that God does not play dice, while others vote for a more probabilistic/random approach. — Hachem
Still, contemporary theories are much more parsimonious than Ptolemy's and they can predict much more than Ptolemy could even imagine.
. — litewave
They correctly describe a much larger portion of reality than Ptolemy's theory did. — litewave
Suppose that for Angie, events A and B occur at the same time; But for Beth, A occurs before B. The transformation formulas in special relativity allow both Angie and Beth to agree with these two statements:
From Angie's frame of reference, events A and B occur at the same time.
From Beth's frame of reference, A occurs before B.
That is, both Angie and Beth, and anyone else that cares to do the calculations, will agree that for Angie, events A and B are simultaneous. — Banno
How is this not a violation of the law of non-contradiction, when what Beth believes is clearly contradictory to what Angie believes? — Metaphysician Undercover
One thing to note here is that contradiction is not inconsistency. Or, as a matter of terminological precision: inconsistency is a function of contradiction within a formal system: a system is said to be inconsistent if it contains contradictions. The claimed inconsistencies between relativity and QM are not of this kind: the entire point is that there are inconsistencies between two systems. — StreetlightX
Note also just how strict the criteria are to meet the standard of contradiction: X and its opposite must be 'true' in order for contradiction to hold: a proposition must say that X AND ¬X is true. — StreetlightX
But of course there is no theory that claims any such thing. As it stands, the operator between the apparently 'contradictory' statements between QM and relativity is - I think assumed to be - a XOR operator (exclusive or): X ⊻ ¬X , not X ∧ ¬X. — StreetlightX
There is no 'contradiction' here, in the logical, intra-systemic sense. Things might be confusing because science writers are not logicians, and they are apt to use terms in ways that are not the technical terms of logic. This is to be expected, but it is also to be watched out for when trying to draw conclusions. — StreetlightX
Wait, that's not right. X believes P, and Y believes not-P. That's not a contradiction. — fishfry
You can do this by contriving your definition of "true", such that truth is relative to the observer, — Metaphysician Undercover
One is a principle of classical logic; and the other is a principle of modern physics. — fishfry
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