Re: law vs. science

Murphy (gmurphy@imperium.net)
Sat, 22 Mar 1997 08:57:03 -0500

Jan de Koning wrote:
>
> In the first place, the "law of non-contradictions" is not generally valid.
> Some statement may be somewhere in between true and false. My math. prof.
> in a lecture in 1928 said: If you come out of the cold in a room, you may
> say: it is warm here, while someone who is there for over an hour will
> saay: no, it is cold. For many statements there is not an easy division
> between true and false. So, in Poland, Sienckewicz (spelling?) wrote a
> book on Many-valued Logic. In the U.S. Kleene defended that, but I have
> not followed recent literature. The law is also not accepted in the
> Intuitionist school of (math)logic.

There is a legal parallel. In Scots law a verdict need not
be "Guilty" or "Not Guilty" but can also be "Not Proven".
George Murphy