The case against boolean logic
Key takeaways
- Today, I want to discuss another instance of the same problem, in a simpler and more direct way.
- Every time someone asks you a yes/no question, you are being coerced into accepting a pattern of thought that we’ll call boolean thinking.
- “But every statement is either true or false,” some might object.
In my last post about generality, I tried to show how our ambition to discover ideas that are all-encompassing and eternal makes our worldview crumble, leaving us unable to think clearly even about simple issues with obvious solutions. Today, I want to discuss another instance of the same problem, in a simpler and more direct way. You can think of this essay as a prequel to “When Universality Breaks.”
Every time someone asks you a yes/no question, you are being coerced into accepting a pattern of thought that we’ll call boolean thinking. The word “boolean” here is used in the sense of the Boolean logic, and the Boolean datatype in logic and programming — a type that admits only two values: true and false. By “boolean thinking,” I am referring to the precondition that every statement should necessarily be categorized as either true or false. This is a law in Boolean logic, known as the “law of excluded middle”).
“But every statement is either true or false,” some might object. This principle might not be entirely false, but it is also not entirely true (ba-dum-tss).