The story seems meaningful only because we don’t get answer for any of these questions. It is a compartmentalization forced by the author on readers. The problems are not there only because the author refuses to look at them.
So in essence claiming “A and not ~A, therefore B and ~C, the end.” That isn’t a limitation imposed by the author but an avoidance of some facts that can be inferred by the reader.
Imagine that I offer you a story where some statement X is both completely true and completely false, and yet we can talk about it meaningfully.
And the story goes like this:
“Joe saw a statement X written on paper. It was a completely true statement. And yet, it was also a completely false statement. At first, Joe was surprised a lot. Just to make sure, he tried evaluating it using the old-fashioned boolean logic. After a few minutes he received a result 1, meaning the statement was true. But he also received a result 0, meaning the statement was false.”
Quite a let-down, wasn’t it? At least it did not take ten pages of text. Now you can be curious how exactly one can evaluate a statement using a boolean logic and receive 1 and 0 simultaneusly… but that’s exactly the part I don’t explain.
So the “talk about it meaningfully” part simply means that I am able to surround a nonsensical statement with other words, creating an illusion of a context. It’s just that the parts of contexts which are relevant, don’t make sense; and the parts of contexts which make sense are not relevant. (The latter is absent in my short story, but I could add a previous paragraph about Joe getting the piece of paper from a mysterious stranger in a library.)
So in essence claiming “A and not ~A, therefore B and ~C, the end.” That isn’t a limitation imposed by the author but an avoidance of some facts that can be inferred by the reader.
Imagine that I offer you a story where some statement X is both completely true and completely false, and yet we can talk about it meaningfully.
And the story goes like this:
“Joe saw a statement X written on paper. It was a completely true statement. And yet, it was also a completely false statement. At first, Joe was surprised a lot. Just to make sure, he tried evaluating it using the old-fashioned boolean logic. After a few minutes he received a result 1, meaning the statement was true. But he also received a result 0, meaning the statement was false.”
Quite a let-down, wasn’t it? At least it did not take ten pages of text. Now you can be curious how exactly one can evaluate a statement using a boolean logic and receive 1 and 0 simultaneusly… but that’s exactly the part I don’t explain.
So the “talk about it meaningfully” part simply means that I am able to surround a nonsensical statement with other words, creating an illusion of a context. It’s just that the parts of contexts which are relevant, don’t make sense; and the parts of contexts which make sense are not relevant. (The latter is absent in my short story, but I could add a previous paragraph about Joe getting the piece of paper from a mysterious stranger in a library.)