We don’t know that all possible worlds are actual. This could be the only one. Also, non-contradiction doesn’t tell you what’s possible, only what’s impossible. How were you first informed of the existence of numbers, colors, space, time, or people? It wasn’t by non-contradiction.
If contradiction tells you what’s impossible, non-contradiction tells you what’s possible..for some value of “possible”...perhaps not the most interesting one.
We don’t know that all possible worlds are actual. This could be the only one.
Indeed. This entire post assumes all possible worlds are actual and reasons from there; I didn’t mean to argue for their existence.
How were you first informed of the existence of numbers, colors, space, time, or people? It wasn’t by non-contradiction.
Correct. But we are quite bad at actually reasoning from the law of non-contradiction; we often tend to act as if we believed contradictory things (as is shown by how frequently we make math errors). I conjecture that that is the reason why we need observation to figure things out (assuming all possible worlds exist), although I am not completely sure.
We don’t know that all possible worlds are actual. This could be the only one. Also, non-contradiction doesn’t tell you what’s possible, only what’s impossible. How were you first informed of the existence of numbers, colors, space, time, or people? It wasn’t by non-contradiction.
If contradiction tells you what’s impossible, non-contradiction tells you what’s possible..for some value of “possible”...perhaps not the most interesting one.
Indeed. This entire post assumes all possible worlds are actual and reasons from there; I didn’t mean to argue for their existence.
Correct. But we are quite bad at actually reasoning from the law of non-contradiction; we often tend to act as if we believed contradictory things (as is shown by how frequently we make math errors). I conjecture that that is the reason why we need observation to figure things out (assuming all possible worlds exist), although I am not completely sure.