Language and Logic (General)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Sunday, April 06, 2014, 18:38 (3882 days ago) @ dhw

I seem to have come rather late to this discussion, but will attempt to answer the point addressed to me.-> Over the last two or three weeks, the discussions on the Big Bang, free will and emergence have thrown up some interesting examples of how we use language to establish seemingly logical patterns which on closer inspection turn out to be nothing of the sort. Here are three examples of what I see as logic twisted by language. I should preface this by saying I do not believe for one minute that any of them are deliberate.
> 
> George argues that the universe is "everything", the beginning of the universe was the beginning of everything, everything must include time, and therefore there was no "before". Even David has agreed that time began with the universe, but he also believes in a "before", which George understandably claims is illogical. It is illogical if we accept George's starting point. -Thanks for that!-> He thinks his argument is based on the facts we "know", but if we accept the argument that we do not "know" of any effects that don't have a cause (see Romansh on the subject of free will), we can invert George's logic. -The flaw in this argument is that the very concepts of "cause and effect" cannot be defined without use of the concept of time. By definition a cause precedes an effect and an effect follows a cause in time.-> The universe cannot have come into being without a cause, therefore if the universe had a beginning, the universe cannot be "everything". The cause must have existed before, and therefore the beginning of the universe cannot have been the beginning of time. -I would point our that the idea of "coming into being" also requires the existence of time. Can one talk about the "coming into being" of Time itself without implying that there was Time before Time?-> David's dilemma disappears, and instead George is forced to argue that the beginning of the universe had no cause, which David in turn understandably claims is illogical.-I would say that there can be a "beginning" (t = 0) without there being any preceding activity, just as there can be a North Pole without anything further North. This is perfectly logical.

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GPJ