It wouldn’t mean anything for the universe to contain contradictions, really, because this isn’t the kind of thing that might be. If we had square circles or if it were the case that both P and ~P, then we’d have contradictions, but this is the sort of thing that can be said and not imagined.
I don’t we disagree but I think we can make this point more strongly. It isn’t just that the universe never could have contradiction or that we can’t imagine a contradictory universe. Rather, universes just aren’t the sorts of things that are contradictory or not contradictory. Its like saying that most coffee cups hate Nietzsche. A piece of language can be contradictory because the semantic content of one part of the piece doesn’t constrain the semantic content of another part. But the universe doesn’t have any semantic content at all.
So contradictory theories aren’t wrong because the universe is consistent and (therefore) “inconsistency brings with it the guarantee of being wrong in at least one place”. Rather they are bad because a self-contradictory theory can be made to show anything. There is nothing it can’t predict or explain. Thus, we can reject them on purely formal, analytic grounds. Contradictions don’t say anything at all because they say everything.
It wouldn’t mean anything for the universe to contain contradictions, really, because this isn’t the kind of thing that might be. If we had square circles or if it were the case that both P and ~P, then we’d have contradictions, but this is the sort of thing that can be said and not imagined.
I don’t we disagree but I think we can make this point more strongly. It isn’t just that the universe never could have contradiction or that we can’t imagine a contradictory universe. Rather, universes just aren’t the sorts of things that are contradictory or not contradictory. Its like saying that most coffee cups hate Nietzsche. A piece of language can be contradictory because the semantic content of one part of the piece doesn’t constrain the semantic content of another part. But the universe doesn’t have any semantic content at all.
So contradictory theories aren’t wrong because the universe is consistent and (therefore) “inconsistency brings with it the guarantee of being wrong in at least one place”. Rather they are bad because a self-contradictory theory can be made to show anything. There is nothing it can’t predict or explain. Thus, we can reject them on purely formal, analytic grounds. Contradictions don’t say anything at all because they say everything.