Contradictoriness

Abstract

Why does a sentence such as ‘John was killed but didn’t die’ feel contradictory? The standard response to this question is familiar: ‘John was killed but didn’t die’ feels contradictory because it is a necessary falsehood (i.e. it is false in every possible world). This talk is divided into three parts: in the first part of the talk, I show that the condition of being false in every possible world isn’t a predictor of contradictoriness; in the second part, I put forth an account of contradictoriness and discuss its predictions; in the third part, I make the case that redundancy is the other side of the coin of the phenomenon of contradictoriness and suggest a path to theoretical unification.