In my opinion, if one ever ignores the LNC, due to the PoE, anything might as well be true.

In my opinion, if one ever ignores the LNC, due to the PoE, anything might as well be true.

Such an opinion can be investigated systematically by formalizing it. Translation is more an art than a science so anyone may quibble on how this could be done, but here's an attempt nonetheless.

Omitting 'In my opinion' as conventionally or pragmatically implied we only have to analyze

if one ever ignores the LNC, due to the PoE, anything might as well be true.

It seems to obviously be of the form if A, (then) B, where

A: one ~~ever~~ ignores the LNC, due to the PoE  
B: anything might as well be true

The 'ever' seems only for emphasis, to be an informal universal generalization (over circumstances when the LNC might apply?). B seems much simpler, any proposition whatsoever, so call it 'Q'. So the guts of your opinion seem to reduce fairly neatly to translating A into a statement of formal logic.

The following is more semantic and intuitive and probably controversial or individual.

So how do you translate 'one ignores X' and 'Y due to Z'? I'll tackle the first, first, though this isn't meant to be definitive. My intuition is just '¬X'. Why? Well if you ignore something, you act or pretend it isn't there or isn't important, or doesn't matter. That seems like saying you'll keep doing whatever you were going to anyway, as though it weren't true. As for 'due to' that just seems synonymous with 'because of', or 'As a condition of' or 'As a consequence of', which suggests a simple implication. So propositionally we seem to have reduced it to

(PoE → ¬LNC) → Q

of filling in the usual expressions for PoE and LNC, we arrive at a proposition like

((P∧¬P) → R) → ¬(P∧¬P)) → Q

(using the convention that a negation logically precedes a conditional to reduce unnecessary parentheses).

We can now ask some standard questions, like is it a theorem or inconsistent. Well it's a fairly easy exercise (you can do a few things to check like a truth table), but it seems to me to be satisfiable and not a theorem. It's fairly plain that whatever truth value you assign to P, whatever it means, the conjunction P∧¬P is always false (by rules of ordinary speech governing ∧ and ¬), and the conditional (P∧¬P) → R is always true by the loosest understanding of ordinary conditionals, whatever Q is. ¬(P∧¬P) will always be true similarly thus the antecedent (P∧¬P) → Q) → ¬(P∧¬P) will always be true. So the status of the truth value of ((P∧¬P) → R) → ¬(P∧¬P)) → Q, seems to depend entirely on whatever the truth value of Q is, that is, what it means. At least at this cursory propositional level, it appears the conclusion

anything might as well be true

i.e. any Q is true, is unwarranted. If that seems doubtful, we seem left with only a few less palatable options, like doubting ordinary rules of speech, or our understanding of how simplest connectives (namely conjunctions, negations and implications) appear to operate, or abandoning truth values entirely perhaps among others.

You might introduce a quantifier since 'one' acts as a variable over ignorers and some judicious predicates because 'due' and 'ignore' seem operative and important, and this would transform it into some more complicated statement of predicate logic. That seems to take it quite different directions maybe something like

   ∀x((Due(PoE) → Ignore(x,LNC)) → A)

This seems vaguely like epistemic logic to me. You might replace PoE, LNC or A with proposition schemas, but that complicates things further. The propositional translation seems relevant and focused, perhaps well suited to further basic inquiry.

/r/logic Thread