Why am I using symbolic logic, you ask?
One of the reasons I’m using symbolic logic is because I hate symbolic logic.
I hate how reductive it is, how presumptuous it is. How dare it try to claim mastery over things by packaging them into a reductive system that could never actually treat with the messiness, the overflowing and contradictory nature, of things in the world, of the world of things, of worldthings. Part of the reason I’m using symbolic logic is to be rude to it: to argue for its inadequacy: to take it and change it for my purposes. I’m doing this without getting permission, without asking any experts if its okay, without doing my due diligence and looking at every different kind of logic ever previously formed, which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tells me is quite a lot. I’m disrespecting it by taking its core tenant, the law of excluded middle, and throwing it out. Unceremoniously. And the only justification I provide for this treatment is my own dislike.
But this project isn’t a revenge quest; I am not fueled entirely by spite. Most of me thinks its funny that I’m doing this, funny that I’m using something I don’t like to talk about things I do like. Because evidently all of it – the liking and the disliking – is more complicated than that. Me not liking symbolic logic, me liking Twilight, are sentiments composed of layers of interlocking overlapping liking and disliking, taking back my word, changing my mind.
The degree to which symbolic logic bothers me forces me to realize that there must be something I like about it. I appreciate how neat it is – like a geometric proof, it instrumentalizes the propositions that can build up and create a complicated argument, which makes the actual workings of the argument much easier to grasp. Symbolic logic can be used to crisply explain why a line of thinking is invalid.
But symbolic logic also threatens some things I deeply believe to the point that it is offensive to me. Symbolic logic scoffs at the complexity of truth and falsehood in a way that is violent and egoistic. It stands in opposition to the unbounded possibility of imaginative thinking. I have a deep horror of The End of possibility, of deterministic claims that assert "X statement is false" unavoidably, in all circumstances. Whenever I’m confronted with a simple statement assigned T or F, no matter how irrelevant, my brain races to refute the truth-claim, churning out possible counterexamples. If you say it is true that ‘all bachelors are unmarried men’ I will tell you 'well hey a man could be a Bachelor on The Bachelor while being married' and I don't know about this whole synthetic a priori judgement thing.
But that doesn’t really matter. The point is that I always try to get around symbolic logic. And here, I’m trying to use symbolic logic to get into something, something that I think is difficult. Maybe I’m comfortable using it in this context because I recognize it as a tool that is supremely limited, with provisional use-value. Perhaps in applying it to the things I’m looking at, and expanding symbolic logic into something that can only exist through the negation of its key proposition, and in so doing I am further underscoring its limitedness.
I think that part of what makes post-ironic relations to objects difficult to square, or think about, is the condensed-ness of the language in which it occurs. The words “I like Twilight!” can represent a sincere, an ironic, OR a post-ironic liking. One would have to try to piece together, through things like content or tone, what I actually mean when I use that sentence. Something about the way that ironic relations are articulated in layers made me interested in how not-not-not could be represented as TFT.
I am articulating goodness and badness in the form of true and false. True and good and bad and false are not identical (though, the good and the true and the bad and the false have a history of coarticulation). But when I use a T in a triple truth value, this T represents one’s understanding of their own belief. If I sincerely like Twilight, I could make the statement, ‘I like Twilight’, and that would be True to me. It is true that I believe that I like Twilight. It is true that I believe that Twilight is a good movie. If I do not like Twilight, I would say the statement, ‘I like Twilight’, is false. It is false that I believe that Twilight is a good movie – I do not think it is a good movie.
If I ironically like Twilight, I would falsely say ‘I like Twilight’. This – the disconnect between actual and expressed sentiment – is where things get a bit harder to keep track of, and why an instrumentalized mode of expressing belief, disbelief, truth, and falsity becomes helpful. So, if I ironically like Twilight, I would make the statement ‘I like Twilight’, or say ‘Twilight is a good movie’. I would believe the statement ‘Twilight is a good movie’ to be false – I would not believe the statement.
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