Conjunction and Contradiction
Achille C. Varzi · 2004
Abstract There are two ways of understanding the notion of a contradiction: as a conjunction of a statement and its negation, or as a pair of statements, one of which is the negation of the other. Correspondingly, there are two ways of understanding the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC), i.e. the law that says that no contradictions can be true. This chapter offers some arguments to the effect that, on the first (collective) reading, LNC is non-negotiable, but on the second (distributive) reading, it is perfectly plausible to suppose that LNC may, in some rather special and perhaps undesirable circumstances, fail to hold.