It makes sense; as he lays out in the first section, it isn’t clear why dialetheism is different from trivialism. If they weren’t different, then a good part of his advisor’s field would become trivial! Taking on a willing grad student to devote time to separating the two is just good politics.
it isn’t clear why dialetheism is different from trivialism.
Imagine all well-formed logical statements, stretching out in an infinite list.
Each of these statements are to be marked “true” or “false.” For each possible marking, there is a shortest set of rules that generates that marking. Those rules are “rules of logic” you’d be following if that was how all the statements were to be marked true or false.
Trivialism is a particularly simple rule: “mark all true.” Dialetheism points to a category of markings, where both A and not-A are true for some A—and thus points to a category of rules that generate such patterns.
Trivialism is a particularly simple rule: “mark all true.”
This is one form of trivialism; the dissertation also uses it to mean something like “whatever marking you place on the list, every item is marked true (but also possibly marked something else).”
It makes sense; as he lays out in the first section, it isn’t clear why dialetheism is different from trivialism. If they weren’t different, then a good part of his advisor’s field would become trivial! Taking on a willing grad student to devote time to separating the two is just good politics.
Imagine all well-formed logical statements, stretching out in an infinite list.
Each of these statements are to be marked “true” or “false.” For each possible marking, there is a shortest set of rules that generates that marking. Those rules are “rules of logic” you’d be following if that was how all the statements were to be marked true or false.
Trivialism is a particularly simple rule: “mark all true.” Dialetheism points to a category of markings, where both A and not-A are true for some A—and thus points to a category of rules that generate such patterns.
This is one form of trivialism; the dissertation also uses it to mean something like “whatever marking you place on the list, every item is marked true (but also possibly marked something else).”