Abstract
So called “shapes of opposition”—like the classical square of opposition and its extensions—can be seen as graphical representations of the ways in which types of statements constrain each other in their possible truth values. As such, they can be used as a novel way of analysing the subject matter of disputes. While there have been great refinements and extensions of this logico-topological tool in the last years, the broad range of shapes of opposition are not widely known outside of a circle of specialists. This ignorance may lead to the presumption that the classical square of opposition fits all disputes. A broader view, which takes expanded shapes of opposition into account, may come to a more nuanced appraisal of possible disputes. Once we take other shapes of opposition into account, some alleged disputes may turn out to be Scheindisputes. In order to do the wide range of linguistic expressions justice and to differentiate Scheindisputes from real ones, a broader view is advised. To illustrate this point, I discuss the notion of “introspective disputes”. These are commonly reconstructed as obeying the square, but are more aptly reconstructed with a more complex octagon. If we reconstruct these disputes based on Buridan’s octagon, it becomes obvious that “introspective disputes” are likely Scheindisputes.
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- 1.
For example, “Laura is rich” and “Laura is poor” are not syntactically or on the surface levels negations of another (because there is no “not” involved at all). Still, both sentences are contrary to another, because both can be simultaneously false: Laura could simply be doing alright.
- 2.
- 3.
Sometimes, the method is broadened: Reports that are deemed to express an introspectively formed opinion or questionnaires about experiences are sometimes seen as introspection as well.
- 4.
Some argue that more than the phenomenal aspects of experiences can be introspected. There might then be introspective disputes concerning attitudes, content, experience onset, and so on. I will focus only on introspective disputes concerning phenomenal aspects of experiences, as this subject matter provides the best examples for introspective disputes.
- 5.
- 6.
Armstrong [2, 300], for example, argues for this, and seems to justify that claim by introspection.
- 7.
See also Zahavi [43, 132]: “Whereas we live through a number of different experiences, the dimension of first-personal experiencing remains the same […] it may be described as an invariant dimension of first-personal givenness throughout the multitude of changing experiences.”
- 8.
See also Hume [14, Sect. VI].
- 9.
One may wonder how one justifies the general opinion by introspective acquaintance. But the method of eidetic or Phenomenological variation builds on one’s direct grasp of phenomenal experiences to justify such general statements. General statements about phenomenality can then be justified by one’s grasp of one’s experiences from the first-person perspective. So there are similar disputes in Phenomenology. For the purpose at hand, we may see such Phenomenological disputes as part of the larger class of introspective disputes.
- 10.
See also Dennett [8, 66]: “It is just astonishing to see how often ‘academic’ discussions of phenomenological controversies degenerate into desk-thumping cacophony, with everybody talking past everybody else. This is all the more surprising, in a way, because according to long-standing philosophical tradition, we all agree on what we find when we “look inside” at our own phenomenology. […] just about every author who has written about consciousness has made what we might call the first-person plural presumption: Whatever mysteries consciousness may hold, we (you, gentle reader, and I) may speak comfortably together about our mutual acquaintances, the things we both find in our streams of consciousness. […] This would be fine if it weren’t for the embarrassing fact that controversy and contradiction bedevil the claims under these conditions of polite mutual agreement. We are fooling ourselves about something.”
- 11.
“The epistemological problem regarding phenomenological, first-person approaches of “data generation” [meant as scare quotes] is that if inconsistencies in two individual “data sets” [scare quotes again] should appear, there is no way to settle the conflict. […] This is a third defining characteristic of the scientific way of approaching reality: there are procedures to settle conflicts resulting from conflicting hypotheses. Epistemic progress continues.” [21, 591].
- 12.
“I aim to persuade you that people in general know very little about what might seem to be obvious features of their stream of conscious experience […] People often differ greatly in their judgments about their stream of experience (across cultures, between individuals within the same culture, or within the same individual over time). Sometimes, in such cases, it seems unlikely that their actual underlying experiences vary correspondingly. Consequently, some of their judgments—we don’t necessarily know which ones—are probably wrong.” [34, ix–x].
- 13.
Kriegel [16, 122f] augurs this: “The above phenomenological disputes, and others like them, are disconcerting inasmuch as the Consciousness Studies community does not have accepted guidelines for adjudicating them. Phenomenological disputes have a way of leading to apparent deadlocks with remarkable immediacy. Disputants reach the foot-stomping stage of the dialectic more or less right after declaring their discordant positions. […] The most violent reaction is to claim that there is no fact of the matter concerning these disputes.”
- 14.
This is in accord with the presumption that a square of opposition is committed to existential import [1, II, 176, 20–21]. That is, if I were to claim that all goblins eat cheese and you claim that no goblin eats cheese, either statement commits us to the existence of goblins if we presume that we two are in a dispute [see also 30]. If we reject the presumption that we are in a dispute, we thereby reject the ontological commitment: If there are no goblins, we do not need to fight over their affinity to cheese. Rejecting the existence claim means that general statements can (under some views) be considered true, but vacuously so. This affects disputes based on contrary opinions.
- 15.
However, see [12] for a conflicting view.
- 16.
Buridan’s example is of a man’s ass running, i.e. omnis asinus hominis currit. “Hominis” is here in the genitive.
- 17.
See especially [28] for a discussion of this form and its variations.
- 18.
In contrast to the reconstruction as an octagon, one might think that there should in principle be sixteen different types of statements and, therefore, a sixteen-sided figure: While I have introduced A…- and I…-statements (universally and particularly affirmative statements), I have ignored the possible forms of E…- or O…-statements (universally and particularly negative statements). Only a sixteen-sided figure would accommodate these additional eight statement-types.
Why are these omitted? Because each is equivalent to some of the forms mentioned. Consider the case of an AA-statement like “For all experiencers, all their thoughts have phenomenal aspects.” This is equivalent to the EO-statement “For all experiencers, none of their thoughts fails to have phenomenal aspects.” And consider an II-statement like “For some experiencer, some thought have phenomenal aspects.” This is equivalent with the OE-statement that “For some experiencers, not all thoughts fail to have phenomenal aspects.” The general rule for such quantifier-involving statements is: To find the equivalent statement to some \(\Gamma \Delta \)-statement, take the contrary or subcontrary type to \(\Gamma \) in the classical square (A transforms to E, I to O, and vice versa) and the contradictory form to \(\Delta \) in the square (A transforms to O, I to E, and vice versa). This leads to a reduction of a hypothetical 16-sided figure to the octagon in the following way: AA ≡ EO; AE ≡ EI; AI ≡ EE; AO ≡ EO; IA ≡ OO; IE ≡ OI; II ≡ OE; IO ≡ OA. Thus, we may continue with the octagon as presented in Fig. 2.
- 19.
Especially the person whose opinion this is.
- 20.
Levin [17] argued that induction plays a major part of Phenomenological or eidetic variation, which is often used to justify such statements.
- 21.
This article is built on work published in my PhD-thesis (2015) at the University of Osnabrück. This work has been supported by a Lichtenberg scholarship. I am grateful to Karsten Engel and one anonymous reviewer for helpful comments, and also to the organisers of Square 2014 at the Vatican for a very enjoyable conference.
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Fink, S.B. (2017). Why Care beyond the Square? Classical and Extended Shapes of Oppositions in Their Application to “Introspective Disputes”. In: Béziau, JY., Basti, G. (eds) The Square of Opposition: A Cornerstone of Thought. Studies in Universal Logic. Birkhäuser, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45062-9_20
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