Jeff Gibbons wrote: >Ah. > You know, the difficulty of arguing via email is that not only does time >pass between volleys, but that others interject new points, and the tangents >change. We started on the nature of the English language, then to the nature >of an argument, to the definition of a contradiction. If we had reversed the >last two, we would have followed the same progression as a rather famous >Monty Python skit. > >Jeff > > Indeed -- I was reacting to 'contradiction' in the logical sense, a paradox or impossibility, as that had seemed to me to be the sense in which skzb was using it. By that definition, life _cannot_ contradict itself, as contradictions are logical impossibilities and thus do not exist in reality. Where there is apparent contradiction (in this sense), there must be a misunderstanding or misperception of the facts. Thus, I found his use of 'contradiction' in that specific example to be thoroughly baffling. There is, to my understanding, no contradiction in the ongoing transformations of living creatures. Unliving mass is absorbed, integrated by the organism, and formerly living mass is detached from the organism and ejected. Just because the life/unlife pair operates as a continuum rather than as a binary operation is no reason to call it a contradiction -- at least as I understand the word. So I guess we're full circle to use of language again. pe