Logic 101

[525252]

I do not mean to revive some corpse of a discussion but for those that are interested and remember my unfinished ramblings on "Margiela is Good", I have recently found some writings which better articulate some thoughts and support the idea.

Firstly, from Badiou's Logiques Des Mondes

Proposition 14: The reverse of the reverse of the minimal degree is equal to this same degree. Thus . And likewise, the reverse of the reverse of the maximal degree is equal to the maximal degree. Thus ¬ ¬ M = M. In these particular cases, the double negation is equivalent to affirmation. The minimum and the maximum conduct each other, as for the double negation, in a classic way

I'm not actually sure if that clarifies anything for anyone but at least there's a reference for further reading.
It is essentially what I described earlier in the thread :

"Margiela is Good" (affirmation) = "Good is Margiela" (double negation, or "A is not not B")

Further reading which is more appropriate, puts the above in context:
DESTRUCTION, NEGATION, SUBTRACTION by Badiou

And lastly, some Zizek to top it off: http://www.lacan.com/zizpassion.htm

p.s. I feel I should mention that I did actually take a rest from this topic and did other things with my life in that time and I'm not really a nut job that constantly philosophises the shit out of everything.

[nqth]

i think the double negation of "margiela is good" shld be "(what is) not good is not margiela"

if i remember right, "a then b" is equivalent to "not b then not a"

[Faust]

Brain explode.

[525252]

Thanks for the replies guys :)

I'm going to go by Badiou's 35 propositions (Gosh I just realised I forgot to link this before!! Propositions 5-17 are relevant to this discussion)

From the Zizek article linked before:

When Badiou emphasizes that double negation is not the same as affirmation, he thereby merely confirms the old Hegelian motto les non-dupes errent. Let us take the affirmation "I believe." Its negation is: "I do not really believe, I just fake to believe." However, its properly Hegelian negation of negation is not the return to direct belief, but the self-relating fake: "I fake to fake to believe," which means: "I really believe without being aware of it." Is, then, irony not the ultimate form of the critique of ideology today - irony in the precise Mozartean sense of taking the statements more seriously than the subjects who utter them themselves?

Rilu's double negation concluded with the affirmation that was started with. While Badiou makes this contention that they are not the same, his 14th Proposition poses a case where they are.

Proposition 14: The reverse of the reverse of the minimal degree is equal to this same degree. Thus . And likewise, the reverse of the reverse of the maximal degree is equal to the maximal degree. Thus ¬ ¬ M = M. In these particular cases, the double negation is equivalent to affirmation. The minimum and the maximum conduct each other, as for the double negation, in a classic way.

Above there is an emphasis on "in a classic way". In propositions 5 to 13, leading up to our 14th, it is indicated throughout that these are specifically classical, transcendental, formal logics. Proposition 15 sums this up:

Proposition 15: Logic, in the usual sense, be it the formal calculation of the propositions and of the predicates, receives, for a given world, its values of truth and the signification of its operators from the sole transcendental of this world. In this way, formal logic is a simple consequence of transcendental logic.

So by formal logic, we conclude that double negation = the affirmation. From here things start to get blurry, I need to study this much more (wanted: philosophy tutor) but here goes:

Proposition 17: The transcendental degree which measures, in a given world, the identity of one appearing to another, measures as well the identity of this other to the first: the function of transcendental indexation is symmetrical.

This is where I think "Good is Margiela" comes in. The idea is that "Margiela" becomes a defining attribute of "Good" as much as the vice versa with the affirmation "Margiela is Good".

This is what I was trying to illustrate with "Good is Margiela". It is also a way of trying to express that the double negation is not the same as the affirmation "Margiela is Good". I'm going to work on this a bit more, but please read this article!! I think the key points are somewhat there.

[trentk]

While speculating about the possibilities advances in virtual reality could open up, Jaron Lanier (the inventor of virtual reality) brings up something called post-symbolic communication: a type of communication that is possible if you have the ability to morph/colorize things/yourself as fast as you can think. I'm not sure that all the examples he gives are actually post-symbolic (some, I think, just use non-linguistic symbols as opposed to non-symbols). However, the following example, I think is post-symbolic:
"In the domain of symbols, you might be able to express a quality like “redness.” In postsymbolic communication, you might come across a red bucket. Pull it over your head, and you discover that it is cavernous on the inside. Floating in there is every red thing: there are umbrellas, apples, rubies, and droplets of blood. The red within the bucket is not Plato‟s eternal red. It is concrete. You can see for yourself what the objects have in common. It's a new kind of concreteness that is as expressive as an abstract category."

Is this what you (525252) mean when you say that x is an attribute of y rather than y is an attribute of x? (ruby is an attribute of red rather than red is an attribute of ruby).

[nqth]

i think a more precise way to formalize this is as:
"there exists X, such that X is M and X is G".
So now, the negation of the above sentence will be:
It is not the case that (there exists X, such that X is M and X is G)
which is equivalent to:
For every x, if x is M, then X is not G.

thx for the formalization and i'll try to analyze it later. but as the starting point, I understood the sentence
"Margiela is Good" in a little bit different way, as
"for every x, if x is M then x is G".

(of course in the context of branding - every m product is a good product)

[eleven crows]

Brain explode.

Margiela...? Well, I...

[525252]

Is this what you (525252) mean when you say that x is an attribute of y rather than y is an attribute of x? (ruby is an attribute of red rather than red is an attribute of ruby).

I'm not familiar with Lanier's ideas of virtual reality but as I understand it from what you've written, it sounds like a reversal of Gertrude Stein's "A rose is a rose is a rose." Instead of describing a rose by its colour such as red, the writer finds that no word can describe so perfectly a rose than the word "rose" itself. The red bucket example says that the colour red is defined by some intuitive correlation between a rose and an apple and other objects we recognise as being red.

I did not mean that x is an attribute of y rather than the vice vera; x is an attribute of y equally as much as the vice versa. I don't think Stein's rose or Lanier's Bucket is more or less correct than the other, I think both ideas are valid and necessary simultaneously.

However I should make a point that I disagree with Lanier when he (I assume it was he) says "It is concrete. You can see for yourself what the objects have in common. It's a new kind of concreteness that is as expressive as an abstract category." Vision, or more broadly, perception deals with abstracts which are stemming from concretes. This is inherent in the nature of perception and experience, I don't think there is anything new or concrete about it.

Moving on, back to the topic of the double negation:

nqth said at some point

"a then b" is equivalent to "not b then not a"

Did you mean that the double negation of "a then b" is equivalent to "not b then not a"
or
did you mean the the affirmation "a then b" is equivalent to the double negation "not b then not a"
or
did you mean both?

[Faust]

Ok, enough of this. This has gone seriously off topic and has turned an important discussion into a parody. I can make you a logic sandbox if you want to go play there.