Contradictoriness
Diego Feinmann
November 2023
 

This article provides a new perspective on the phenomenon of contradictoriness, i.e. the observable fact that certain sentences feel contradictory. In the first part (§1-2), I present a series of empirical arguments aimed at showing that standard notions of contradiction—falsehood in every possible world, falsehood under all possible uniform substitutions of non-logical words—are of little use when it comes to characterising contradictoriness. In the second part (§3-5), I offer an account of this phenomenon; this account is stated in the form of a generalisation and has at its core a new theoretical notion—the notion of predicate connection.
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Reference: lingbuzz/006629
(please use that when you cite this article)
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keywords: contradictoriness, contradiction, connection, oddness, semantics
previous versions: v1 [May 2022]
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