A charitable paraphrase of “The universe is coherent” could be a statement of the universal validity of non-contradiction: For every p, not (p and not p). However, given the existence of paraconsistent logic and philosophers who take dialethism seriously, I cannot assign probability 1 to the claim that no aspect of the universe requires a contradiction in its description.
I would go even further to say that I am quite more certain of many other claims (such as “1+1=2” and “2+2=4″) than of such general and abstract propositions as “the universe is coherent” or even “there are no true contradictions”.
I don’t think he goes quite that far—he assigns no statements probability 0 or 1 within our own logic system, even (P and ¬P), because he believes it to be possible (though not very likely) that some other logic system might supersede our own.
His belief is that it is not possible for ALL systems of logic to be incorrect, i.e. that (it is impossible to reason correctly about the universe) is necessarily false.
A charitable paraphrase of “The universe is coherent” could be a statement of the universal validity of non-contradiction: For every p, not (p and not p). However, given the existence of paraconsistent logic and philosophers who take dialethism seriously, I cannot assign probability 1 to the claim that no aspect of the universe requires a contradiction in its description.
I would go even further to say that I am quite more certain of many other claims (such as “1+1=2” and “2+2=4″) than of such general and abstract propositions as “the universe is coherent” or even “there are no true contradictions”.
I don’t think he goes quite that far—he assigns no statements probability 0 or 1 within our own logic system, even (P and ¬P), because he believes it to be possible (though not very likely) that some other logic system might supersede our own.
His belief is that it is not possible for ALL systems of logic to be incorrect, i.e. that (it is impossible to reason correctly about the universe) is necessarily false.