Found Sci (2013) 18:625640

DOI 10.1007/s10699-012-9294-7

The Unexpected Applicability of Paraconsistent Logic:

A Chomskyan Route to Dialetheism
Nicholas D. McGinnis

Published online: 6 June 2012

Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Abstract Paraconsistent logics are characterized by rejection of ex falso quodlibet, the

principle of explosion, which states that from a contradiction, anything can be derived.
Strikingly these logics have found a wide range of application, despite the misgivings of
philosophers as prominent as Lewis and Putnam. Such applications, I will argue, are of significant philosophical interest. They suggest ways to employ these logics in philosophical
and scientific theories. To this end I will sketch out a naturalized semantic dialetheism following Priests early suggestion that the principles governing human natural language may
well be inconsistent. There will be a significant deviation from Priests work, namely, the
assumption of a broadly Chomskyan picture of semantics. This allows us to explain natural
language inconsistency tolerance without commitment to contentious views in formal logic.
Keywords

Chomsky dialetheism inconsistency Tolerance language paraconsistent priest

1 Introduction
1.1 Paraconsistency and Dialetheism
Paraconsistent logics are characterized by rejection of ex falso quodlibet, the principle of
explosion: from a contradiction, anything can be derived (e.g. classically, via disjunctive
syllogism). There are various means of avoiding trivializing inconsistency. Relevant logics require that some appropriate connection exist between antecedent and consequent, or
premises and conclusion (Read 1988). Priests Logic of Paradox is a three-valued logic,
where the third value is interpreted as both true and false (Priest 1987, 2001, 1991). Da
Costa has developed logics of formal inconsistency which isolate contradictions in an effort to
preserve as much of classical logic as possible (Da Costa 1974). Adaptive logics distinguish

N. D. McGinnis (B)
Department of Philosophy, University of Western Ontario, Stevenson-Hall 2150,
London N6A 5B8, Canada
e-mail: nmcginni@uwo.ca

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between a full upper-limit and restricted lower-limit logic that retracts unwanted inferences (Batens 2000). There are many more.1
There are some purely philosophical motivations for such logics. We may want a deontic
logic that does not trivialize conflicting obligations, or again an epistemic logic that does
not trivialize inconsistent beliefs (Brown 2002, p. 629). There is, of course, a cost: some very
intuitive inferences are blocked, or we may only regain the inferential strength of classical
logic at the price of non-monoticity (Priest 1991).
Dialetheism is a separate issue. A dialetheist asserts that there is one, or it is possible that
there is one, sentence S such that S and the negation of S is true. To avoid triviality, the dialetheist must adopt a logic that rejects or limits explosion, i.e., a paraconsistent logic (though
one need not be a dialetheist to see the value in paraconsistent logic). The clearest example of
a candidate dialetheia is the liar paradox. Priest argues that the paradoxes of self-reference
are in fact sound arguments whose most natural interpretation is that they are both true and
not true (Priest 1987). Truth-value gap accountsthat such sentences are neither true nor
falsefall prey to extended liar paradoxes.2
1.2 Dialetheism Naturalized
In what follows I will argue that the myriad successful applications of paraconsistent logics
are suggestive of ways to integrate paraconsistency in scientific theories (and not merely
as descriptions of actual scientific reasoning). More specifically, logics where explosion is
curtailed appear to better capture natural language processing in the Chomskyan sense.
They provide an empirically adequate description of non-trivial (appropriate) lexical item
selection and the internalist computations that enter into this process; they explain the creation
and interpretation of inconsistent sentences; and they satisfy the optimality conditions of the
minimalist program in linguistics. While at least part of the motivation for these claims is
the successful and widespread use of paraconsistent logics in analogical engineering contexts
(discussed in Sect. 2), descriptive adequacy is also a major consideration. Moreover separating out natural from formal languages, as per the Chomskyan view, allows us to explain a
great deal of phenomena without committing ourselves to contentious views in logic.
The Chomskyan picture rejects the thesis that a scientific account of natural language
semantics can be externalist, that is, given in terms of reference or truth-conditions. Instead,
as Chomsky summarizes, natural language consists of internalist computations, and performance systems that access them, along with much other information and belief (Chomsky 1995a, p. 27). Naturalized dialetheism would characterize the computational system
as paraconsistent and the candidate inconsistent objects as ineliminable explanandum of
an abstract computational theory that describes and relates internal (mental) states and
processes (McGilvray 1998, p. 230).
Is this really an argument for dialetheism proper? Two obvious problems present themselves. First, inconsistent information is not typically seen as a compelling candidate for
dialetheia. Second, and more worrisome, a non-truth-conditional semantics seems to leave
no room for the notion of a true contradiction for truth and falsity is no longer at issue.
In response to the first problem, we can ask the following question: to the extent that we
are committed to the existence of the objects, properties, laws, and so forth, that our best
theories describe, might we not be led from a successful inconsistent theory of natural language processing to the dialetheic position? We would require two separate presuppositions:
1 An accessible general introduction is Bremer (2005).
2 This sentence is either false or neither true nor false. See Priest (1987, pp. 1931).

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first, that ontological commitment is determined by methodological naturalism; and second,

that our inconsistent theory is not merely a device of convenience, where the true contradictions can be re-described in consistent terms but it is unwieldy to do so. I will argue that an
inconsistent theory of natural language can plausibly satisfy the desiderata for metaphysical
dialetheism:
There is (or at least there might be) no way of accurately and completely describing the
world without committing ourselves to contradictions. If there is some fact such that
both it and its negative correlate obtain, then any consistent description of the world
will miss describing at least one fact. (Mares 2004, p. 270).
What counts as a fact is contentious, of course; here the purported facts include mental
states, events, and properties. I will again follow Chomskys lead: unless offered some new
notion of body or material or physical, we have no concept of naturalism apart from methodological naturalism (Chomsky 1995a, p. 37). In other words, there is no principled reason to
privilege some ill-defined notion of the materially physical when defining a factfacts are
what appear in well-supported theories, even if abstract or higher-order. This naturalized
argument for dialetheism is not meant as an alternative position to the metaphysical view,
but as a scientifically-minded (instead of philosophical) defense of it.3 And it seems clear
that facts about mental states can conflict with one another; all that is left to show is that such
conflicts arise during the regular operations of the language faculty.
The second objection can be answered by considering the important difference between
natural language and scientific languages. While it is not the case that natural language
expressions have truth-conditional semantics, the theoretical description of the processes
that produce expressions is not itself a product of natural language:
I-Languages, as instantiations of natural language, are not scientific symbol systems.
Unlike natural languages, these reach beyond innate endowment; learning a scientific language is notoriously late and laborious, and people differ greatly in their
abilities. Scientific systems are interesting, for unlike natural languages, they actually
come quite close to allowing one to define the meanings of expressions in terms of
theory-internal truth-role or function (McGilvray 1998, p. 242).
Scientific languages have stipulated properties serving specific goals or ends. Among these
properties are robust notions of reference, truth, and predication. As would be expected,
they are difficult to learn and play little role in our day-to-day lives. By separating scientific from natural language we can deny the externalist, truth-conditional approach to natural
language semantics while still affirming that a naturalistic scientific theory of the computational processing that underpins the faculty is inconsistency-tolerant and genuinely refers to
contradictory external entities. Well have occasion to return to this point in Sect. 3.
1.3 Canonical Versus Naturalized Dialetheism
Consider Priests claim, in In Contradiction, that
The inconsistency of our linguistic principles is the very thesis I am affirming the
natural presupposition is that of inconsistency. For language and the principles that
govern it have developed piecemeal and under no central direction. (Priest 1987, p. 5).
3 I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for clarification on this point.

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What I propose is to place this thesis within the context of a broadly Chomskyan theory of
natural language. Certainly the most provocative and controversial version of dialetheism
affirms the possibility of true contradictions in nature, of the kind described in Priests
article Sylvans Boxdirect perceptual acquaintance with an impossible object such as a
box that is both occupied and empty at the same time (Priest 1997). Inconsistent theories are
somehow less alluring than inconsistent things out there, even if we internalize the stricture
that we read off our ontology from science. After all, theories can be mere theories.
So-called weak paraconsistency is the view that paraconsistent models are merely mathematical tools that prove to be useful but, in the end, not representative of real possibility.
(Beall 2004b, p. 6). What real possibility means here can be spelled out in more detail. If the
idea is that we require paraconsistent logics to model inconsistent theories, the weak paraconsistentist nevertheless maintains that such inconsistent theories are artefacts of limited human
capacity; they do not claim that the logic of completed science has to be a paraconsistent
one (Bremer 2005, p. 16). Weak paraconsistency is certainly compatible with the account
presented here, though I will present some considerations against such an interpretation.
This is in contrast to the strong view, that there are provably, unavoidably true contradictions. Here Priests canonical version fares better at first glance. The argument proceeds from
semantic considerations. A rough sketch can be given quickly. Any general account of languagethat is, of any languagemust serve as its own metalanguage (otherwise it wouldnt
be perfectly general). This desiderata, semantic closure, delivers seemingly unavoidable
antinomies such as the liar paradox. Together with Tarskis universally accepted convention-T we arrive at a conclusion just as puzzling as any impossible box: provably true
contradictions and no obvious guilty party to convict.4
Priests canonical account differs from the present proposal in that it relies on truthfunctional semantics, where the Chomskyan picture does not; a dialetheic theory of natural
language processing would not rely on Tarskis convention to generate dialetheia, since
the semantics proposed is not truth-functional. Rather, the dialetheia figure as ineliminable
aspects of a theory of internalist computation requiring non-explosive treatment to be empirically adequate. For Priest, meanwhile, it is taken for granted that
At the heart of a theory of meaning for a language is a theory of truth [which] spells
out in a systematic way the truth conditions for all the sentences of that language.
(Priest 1987, pp. 7172).
The dialetheic proposal about the meaning of antinomies such as the liar paradox then commits us to inconsistent truth-conditions. Priest tries to convince us that such conditions can
obtain, and not only in semantics (though the semantic paradoxes remain the crucial wedge):
there are several areas where very natural considerations push us towards the conclusion that
something may be both true and false, such as the truth-conditions of sentences involving
change and conflicting norms (Priest 1987, p. 85).
The common response to the strong view is to insist that, somehow, the liar paradox
and other related antinomies are unsound; and that, in any event, acceptance of dialetheism
has worse consequences yet, consequences unacceptable even to the dialetheist. Perhaps
explosion cannot be avoided after all; or deleterious irrationality awaits.5
4 The convention understood in the usual fashion: [(T) p is true (in L) if and only if p.]. Substitute This

sentence is false for p into the convention. A basic outline of the argument from provability to truth is given
in Bremer (2005). Priest goes into far more detail in Priest (1987).
5 The collection of papers in section V [For the LNC] of Beall et al. (2004a) capture the important positions
in the literature. They will not be discussed in what follows.

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It is important to notice that Priests above-quoted claim from In Contradiction, of

the inconsistency of our linguistic principles, stands in tension with the canonical argument for strong paraconsistency. Priests observation that language has developed piecemeal and without central direction is likely correct as a matter of evolutionary fact,
but this is an observation about natural language for humans, not about languages in
general.6 Formal languages simply do not develop piecemeal. I am inclined to read the
proposal of natural language inconsistency as an essentially naturalistic proposal concerning the nature of the human language capacity, i.e., language considered as a natural
object.7
The literature on dialetheism, while important in its own right, is largely concerned with
formal languages, on the assumption that natural language is sufficiently akin to the former
a claim explicitly defended in Bremers introductory text (Bremer 2005, p. 2526), and
often implicitly assumed elsewhere.8 This seems incorrect, for reasons that will be given in
Sect. 3.
So I wish to bracket the issue of dialetheism in relation to formal languages and explore
the possibility that natural human languages should be considered separately. To separate natural and formal languages we adopt a broadly Chomskyan understanding of natural language processingas strictly internalist and non-representationalist. This leaves
open the possibility of accepting dialetheism with regards to either natural or formal languages; or with both; or with neither. The argument will be that if we find compelling
reason to adopt a paraconsistent model of human natural language processing, there will be
no reason to believe that any inconsistencies present will be an ideally eliminable part of
that theory, whatever else we may conclude about formal languages. The mental phenomena will not be redescribable in consistent terms because they arent taken to represent
external things, but mental events, states and processes that can be genuinely contradictory.
In the next section I will motivate paraconsistent logics as viable candidates for the
kind of internalist computation Chomskyan linguists take language to be; then I will further outline and defend the Chomskyan view. In the concluding section I will outline some
limitations of the current proposal but note the relative unimportance of a priori scruples
in scientific methodology, a key difference between the investigation of natural and formal
phenomena.

6 This may not be fair to Priest, who claims that formal language should be understood as a model of natural

language. But I am not arguing that the tension is internal to Priests view; it is rather about the rejection
of externalist truth-conditional semantics in mainstream linguistics on similar evolutionary and naturalistic
grounds, too often ignored to the detriment of our philosophical theories. I am again indebted to a careful
anonymous reviewer here.
7 Which is to say that I am merely bringing in Priests suggestion to mainstream linguistics. The methodological point should be uncontroversial: A naturalistic approach to linguistic and mental aspects of the world
seeks to construct intelligible explanatory theories, taking as real what we are led to posit in this quest,
and hoping for eventual unification with the core natural sciences: unification, not necessarily reduction
(Chomsky 1995a, p. 1). The substantive view will, of course, have to be defended.
8 The following observation is entirely correct: It may be the default view in the philosophy of language that
natural languages are, at least in key semantic respects, rather like the formal languages invented by mathematical logicians. (That the logical languages are invented, with the properties being explicitly stipulated,
is meant to be an unimportant difference.) This is the first plank of the view to be rejected (Stainton 2006,
p. 916).

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2 The Case for Paraconsistency

2.1 Two Prominent Critics
The most persistent objection to dialetheism is that there can be no such inconsistent truthconditions: it simply violates our intuitions that there are no true contradictions [ ] there are
no ineliminable contradictory facts, metaphysically or semantically (Mares 2004, p. 271).
Indeed some philosophers, such as Lewis and Putnam, have this intuition quite vociferously:
The reason we should reject this proposal is simple. No truth does have, and no truth
could have, a true negation. Nothing is, and nothing could be, literally both true and
false. This we know for certain, and a priori, and without any exception for especially
perplexing subject matters. The radical case for relevance should be dismissed just
because the hypothesis it requires us to entertain is inconsistent (Lewis 1982, p. 434).
To clarify Lewis remarks here it should be noted that in a later letter he writes that he
is becoming increasingly convinced that we can indeed reason about impossible situations, indicating the remarks above are meant to apply equally to the thesis that there could
be inconsistent facts and the related thesis that the principles of our reasoning might well
be at times paraconsistent (Lewis 2004, p. 176). The latter is an important observation that
must be accommodated by any adequate theory, as Priest notes: in interpreting the story of
Sylvans Box, one does not infer from the description of the box that it was shot off
into space, or infinitely many other possibilities. Not everything happens in the story, and
thats exactly right (Priest 1997).
How is it that we are able to draw correct inferences, including the production of appropriate linguistic output, from plainly inconsistent dataparticularly if we understand the mind
as essentially a sophisticated modular computational system? The beginnings of an answer
can be found in consideration of similar tasks performed by similarly modular computing
architectures. Non-explosive logics have found an important place in software and computer engineering in precisely the place the dialetheist would expect: large-scale information
integration across more or less autonomous modules requiring discriminatory treatment of
multiple conflicting inputs to create safe, appropriate output. This is exactly the problem
Priest singles out in Sylvans Box: how do we handle inconsistent information?
The practical uses of paraconsistency in this context belie Putnams comment on the a
priori nature of the law of non-contradiction. In the same vein as Lewis, Putnam writes
But to convince me that it is possible to imagine the falsity of For all statements
P, (P P) is true, you have to put an alternative logic in the field. I am aware
that some people think such a logicparaconsistent logichas already been put in
the field. The lack of any convincing application of that logic makes them, at least at
present, a mere formal system in my view (Putnam 2000, pp. 220, 230).
Lewis and Putnam offer similar complaints: both argue that true contradictions, however
characterized, are irreconcilable with our intuitive notion of truth. Yet Putnam, by characterizing paraconsistent logics as mere formalisms, appears at least open to the idea that
finding convincing application might change his mind. These applications do exist and lend
credence to the suggestion that the principles of our language might well be paraconsistent.

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2.2 The Applicability of Paraconsistent Logic

Is Putnam right? Are paraconsistent logics empty formalisms without convincing application?
No.
Fascinating practical uses for paraconsistent logics have been developed that reflect the
large-scale integration of computing resources made possible by improvements in networking and multi-core processing, resulting in distributed modular architectures with multiple
interface points. Commenting on the scale of the information-processing problems that result,
MIT computer engineer Carl Hewitt notes that
Because of the scale and concurrency of the information systems involved, inconsistency is the norm there is no practical way to reason about this information without
using paraconsistent logic because no one knows where most of the inconsistencies
are located. At a given time, only a small subset will have been identified and most of
these will be unresolved (Hewitt 2008, p. 98).
Previously stand-alone components are coming together to form modular, non-hierarchical
organizations that offer up heterogeneous and often conflicting information that requires
careful management. The inconsistencies that plague such large-scale information structures
are not trivially removable, either, for obvious reasons of computational tractability.
There may be a normative presumption that ideally issues of inconsistency ought to be
resolved because there are, in fact, no true contradictions. Two considerations should be kept
in mind here. First, inconsistency is, practically speaking, an ineliminable and even desirable feature of sufficiently complex systems. It is expected that inconsistencies arise and
we accommodate it. Epistemologists have long known that consistency-verification for large
sets of beliefs is a computationally intractable task. The practically-minded folk that populate
engineering departments work with inconsistency as a given; so should we. Second, there
is every reason to think that when it comes to human minds, inconsistencies are not even
in principle eliminable. It is a simple fact of psychology that our internal mental states can
conflict in fundamental ways, with each other and with themselves. Any theory of mind that
is committed to the existence of real mental events is ipso facto committed to inconsistency,
as is any theory of language that concerns itself with internal (mental) events as well.
These points are not controversial outside philosophy; this is reflected in the matter-offact approach taken to practical problems of inconsistency processing. Heres a representative
quote from a collection of papers titled Inconsistency Tolerance:
All seem to agree that data of the form q q cannot exist together, and that the conflict
must be resolved somehow. This view is too simplistic for developing robust software
or intelligent systems, and furthermore fails to use the benefits of inconsistent information in intelligent activities, or to acknowledge the fact that living with inconsistency
seems to be unavoidable. Inconsistency in information is the norm in the real world,
and so should be formalized and used, rather than always rejected Inconsistency is
useful in directing reasoning and instigating the natural processes of argumentation,
information seeking, multi-agent interaction, knowledge acquisition and refinement,
adaptation, and learning (Bertossi et al. 2004, p. 2).
The authors add that
The central position is that the collapse of classical logic in cases of inconsistency
should be circumvented. In other words, we need to suspend the principle of absurdity

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(ex falso quodlibet) for many kinds of reasoning. A number of useful proposals have
been made in the field of paraconsistent logics (Bertossi et al. 2004, p. 6).
There are many situations where inconsistency tolerance is critical. Any context where information is incomplete, vague, or needs to be discarded for efficiency; where complex queries
to multiple unverified databases must be answered within reasonable response times; where
rules, norms, demands or prioritization conflict; where tractability precludes consistencychecking; where consistency isnt a desiderata. Database management has pioneered the
paraconsistent approach (e.g. for spatial location databases (Rodriguez 2004), health-case
ontologies (Imam et al. 2007), and logistical planning (Kassoff and Genesereth 2007), currently being extended to logical spreadsheets that output relevant information even when
given inconsistent information.9 )
Da Costa has helpfully summarized a great deal of the practical research done:
Annotated logics have been developed and applied to fields like robot control, air
traffic control, control systems for autonomous machines, defeasible deontic reasoning,
information systems and medicine non-monotonic and defeasible forms of reasoning
have been approached by paraconsistent logics, leading to the development of softwares
that are being used in traffic control; the hardware counterpart was presented as a chip.
(Da Costa et al. 2004)
Artificial intelligence research has also produced a sizeable literature on the uses of paraconsistency, far too voluminous to recount here. A representative example can be found in
the work of Jair Abe and colleagues, who have developed an autonomous robot (Emmy)
running on a paraconsistent logic controller which can be applied to resolve conflicts and
to deal with contradictions and/or paracompleteness, by implementing decision-making in
the presence of uncertainties (Abe et al. 2006, p. 851).
These contexts, and applications, mirror natural language production, where appropriate linguistic output is the result of a weakly modular but highly efficient computational
system. Inconsistency tolerance is an important feature fulfilling the information processing
requirements of computational systems where information cant be discarded, consistency
cannot be verified, and efficiency, understood in terms of response time and appropriateness
of output, is a central concern. We have every reason to believe that an internalist computational system dedicated to language production would have the same requirements. It is to
this system we turn.

3 Naturalization and Language

3.1 Why Natural Language Semantics Cant Be Externalist
Naturalized semantic dialetheism proposes to incorporate Priests suggestion, that the principles of our language are inconsistent, into mainstream Chomskyan linguistics. This has the
considerable advantage of explaining our ability to handle inconsistent sentences without
being further committed to any particular views about formal logic: the semantic antinomies are generated by an internalist computational engine with no regard to external-world
9 Currently being used by Stanford University for classroom assignments. The U.S. military has been funding

further research via DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to investigate the use of
inconsistency-tolerant logical spreadsheets for organizing e.g. troop deployment and training (Young 2007).

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truth-conditions. Nevertheless, this engine, among its computational properties, must be

inconsistency-tolerant.
Separating formal from natural language is controversial, as Ive noted already. Philosophers have generally been committed to a truth-conditional, externalist semantics following
the influential work of Davidson (1967), Putnam (1975) and Burge (1979). As weve seen,
this means accounts of language must then be logically equipped to deal with the semantic
antinomies. Yet this orthodoxy is at odds with the views of most linguists, who think that
A comprehensive science of language cannot (and should not try to) describe relations of semantic reference if there is to be a genuine science of linguistic meaning
(yielding theoretical insight into underlying relativities, aiming for integration with
other natural sciences), then a theory of meaning cannot involve assigning external,
real-world, objects to names, nor sets of external objects to predicates, nor truth-values
(or world-bound thoughts) to sentences. (Stainton 2006, p. 913).
This may strike philosophers as a radical view, but it follows directly from a commitment
to methodological naturalismfor externalism is scientifically intractable. This naturalistic
stance is in contrast to an a priori philosophical project such as rational reconstruction.
The externalist project is beset with unaddressed problems. Inter alia Stainton (2006) notes
the difficulty of rigorously individuating public language words meant to stand in the
right wordworld relation.10 He argues further that even if they could be individuated, common-sense concepts are not amenable to systematization.11 Finally he argues that there is
no evidence that the language faculty does assign truth-conditions to sentences and much
evidence that it doesnt.
This last point is worth expanding. As Stainton notes,
On the one hand, there is no empirical reason for thinking that what the language faculty assigns to a sentence would be capable of being true or false, even given contextual
parameters like time, place, speaker, hearer, etc. (Theres lots of empirical reason for
thinking that people can say, and think, things that are true or false; but that is another
matter.) The only thing which drives one to this expectation is, at bottom, a dubious
analogy between natural objects and artifacts whose properties are stipulated (e.g. the
predicate calculus). For the methodological naturalist, that in itself is damning. On the
other hand, there is lots of empirical evidence that the language faculty alone doesnt
assign thoughts (or propositions, or truth conditions, or what have you). In particular, very many sentences either lack truth conditions altogether, or are assigned truth
conditions only via the rich interaction of different mental faculties (Stainton 2006,
p. 930).
10 An argument echoed by Chomsky: see Chomsky (1995a, pp. 4748). It should be noted Stainton does not
necessarily endorse all the arguments presented in the paper, which are summarized for exegetical purposes;
moreover (Stainton 2011) explicitly defends the notion of public languages.
11 See Chomskys discussion of the name London: We can regard London with or without regard to its
population: from one point of view, it is the same city if its people desert it; from another, we can say that
London came to have a harsher feel to it through the Thatcher years, a comment on how people act and live.
Referring to London, we can be talking about a location, people who sometimes live there, the air above (but
not too high), buildings, institutions, etc., in various combinations. A single occurrence of the term can serve
all these functions simultaneously, as when I say that London is so unhappy, ugly, and polluted that it should
be destroyed and rebuilt 100 miles away no object in the world could have this collection of properties.
Quoted in Stainton (2006, p. 925).

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These interaction effects would quickly swamp a theory of language and turn it into a
what McGilvray calls an intractable theory of everything (McGilvray 1998, p. 237). To
illustrate this Stainton produces a pair of sentences:
1. Poems are written by fools like me.
2. Mountains are climbed by fools like me.
The difficulty is that the first sentence has intuitive truth conditions which implies that all
poems are written by fools, but the second sentence, in order to be true, does not require that
all mountains are climbed by fools. The truth-conditions differ for these otherwise syntactically identical sentences on account of background knowledge and beliefs the linguistically
competent user has about poems and mountains. But this information has nothing to do
with the language faculty: to incorporate these would be to have a theory of everything.
Thus, not being solely an aspect of the language faculty, it follows that the truth conditions
which people assign to sentences do not fall within the domain of the science of language
(Stainton 2006, p. 932).
These interaction effects would rapidly overwhelm any serious scientific theory of language purporting to treat semantics truth-conditionally. Tractability would be lost in the heterogeneity of things and predicates treated. One can re-introduce systematicity in a formal
or scientific language, but this has nothing to do with the natural language faculty. Scientific
terms and languages are austere, stipulative, difficult to master and often deeply-counterintuitive, directly because they aim to construct symbolic systems in which certain expressions
are intended to pick out things in the world (Chomsky 1995a, p. 46). Nevertheless these
endeavours do not inform us about ordinary language or common-sense understanding
(Chomsky 1995a, p. 46). The difficulties in learning scientific languages in fact provide
evidence that natural language processing cant be made responsible for going outside the
head.
This point ties into the observation that the first thing that needs to be explained in regards
to natural language is the so-called poverty of the stimulus. Humans acquire and use language in ways that far outstrip their exposure to it, indicating the presence of a significant
innate endowment. Evidence for poverty of the stimulus is convincing. A typical property of
the lexicon is, for example, that a sentence such as I painted my house brown is automatically taken to mean its outside was painted; the interior dimension of usage can be marked,
but the default is to understand the exterior (Chomsky 1995b, p. 20). Similarly one is not
near a house one is inside of, even though it is treated as an one-dimensional exterior
surface in the unmarked case (Chomsky 1995b, p. 20).12 All this is so quickly understood
by a child acquiring a language that she can only be said to be learning it in the loosest
sense; to explain these abilities it is necessary to assume that knowledge of language [is] in
substantial measure innately determined, hence virtually uniform among languages despite
surface dissimilarities (Chomsky 1995b, p. 20). An extreme case of the poverty of stimulus
is found in creole languages:
That the complexity of a native speakers competence vastly exceeds the complexity of the linguistic environment is transparently shown by the emergence of creoles,
which have all the properties of natural languages but take a drastically impoverished
linguistic environment, a pidgin, for input (Hornstein et al. 2005, p. 4).
12 While the understanding that in precludes near is so intuitive as to almost seem trivial, geometrically
speaking a point is just as near a surface if it is inside or outside it. These are the kinds of anthropocentric features human languages are replete with, creating severe poverty of the stimulus issuesand making
non-anthropocentric, objective (scientific) languages deeply counter-intuitive.

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If a general-purpose learning algorithm without pre-established innate constraints and structures was responsible for language acquisition, children exposed to pidgins would not
develop creole languages with properties not present in the input data (but which are found in
other natural languages). These innate features make learning possible. A rather more formal
characterization of the problem of language learning is given in Gold (1967); the result
shows that the linguistic data available to children radically underdetermines the grammar in
the absence of pre-established constraints, for any finite set of linguistic exemplars is compatible with an indefinite number of potential grammars. Thus the emergence of a normal
language from impoverished input is evidence for the existence of a dedicated language faculty that humans are both with, which has an genetically-determined initial state, matures,
and stabilizes into a steady state, in a similar fashion to other human faculties (e.g. facial
recognition) and organs (Chomsky 1997, pp. 1316).
Under the principles and parameters approach, natural language acquisition is largely a
combination of lexical acquisition and parameter setting (idealized as switches with two or
more settings). The faculty begins in an initial state (the universal grammar) and, as a result
of linguistic exposure, settles into the individuals I-Language, the only form of language
visible to science:13 .
An I-language is a computational system that generates infinitely many internal expressions, each of which can be regarded as an array of instructions to the interface systems,
sensorimotor (SM) and conceptualintentional (CI) (Chomsky 2007, p. 5).
Universal grammar provides a fixed system of principles and a finite array of finitely valued
parameters so that aselection  among these options determines a language (Chomsky
1995b, p. 170). The computational system of the language faculty then selects and arranges
items from the lexicon, interacting with only two external interfaces: an articulatoryperceptual system and a conceptualintentional system (Chomsky 1995b, p. 2, 6). As Chomsky
notes, the combination of fixed principles and parameter settings accounts for the rich surface
variety of human language while acknowledging the deeper similarities between them. The
total space of available communication protocols given our physical capacities is much, much
larger than the space of actually available natural languages; this observation is explained by
the hypothesis of linguistic nativism or universal grammar.
On this view, meanings are syntactically individuated, derive and recombinate from an
innate stock, are generatively infinite, and are strictly internalist. They reflect particularly
human interests and perspectives: meanings, Chomsky writes,
focus attention on selected aspects of the world as it is taken to be by other cognitive systems, and provide intricate and highly specialized perspectives from which to
view them, crucially involving human interests and concerns even in the simplest cases
(Quoted in McGilvray 1998, p. 256).
These perspectives interface with phonetic production systems, of which some details are
known and understood; they are generally of little interest to philosophers. The conceptual
13 As opposed to the social, political, geographical, etc. congeries called English, Chinese, Greek, and
so on. Peter Ludlow contrasts I-Languages to the common view: [I-languages] are data structures in a kind of
internal computational system with which humans are born and which they have co-opted for communication
and other purposes from the [typical philosophical] perspective, on the other hand, a natural language is a
kind of social object the structure of which is purported to be established by convention (however convention
is to be understood) on Chomskys view, such social objects do not exist and would be of little scientific
interest if they did (Ludlow 1999, pp. 17).

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intentional systems running alongside are only beginning to be understood, and it is here that
inconsistency-tolerance becomes a plausible constraint on the faculty.
3.2 Inconsistency Tolerance as Optimality Constraint
Human language is then a combination of parameter settings and fixed principles. The minimalist program adds that investigation into the functioning of the language faculty should be
guided by design optimality considerations; these optimality considerations form part of the
rationale for specific constraints and principles. Anything that can be dispensed with, is. One
significant fixed constraint is efficient computation, which is of particular significance for
generative systems (Chomsky 2007, p. 3). In particular,
Optimality considerations require comparison of computations to determine whether
some object is a valid linguistic expression. Unless sharp constraints are introduced,
the complexity of such computations will explode, and it will be virtually impossible
to know what is an expression of the language (Chomsky 1997, p. 29).
The minimalist programs basic stance is to ask how little can be attributed to universal
grammar (UG) while still retaining descriptive adequacy in regards to language acquisition and usein other words, to limit the complexity of UG by paring it down to the
fewest operations (e.g. Merge) and relying, as far as possible, on general biological and
physical constraints not particular to the language faculty (Chomsky 2007, pp. 3, 4). The
ability to generate usable, that is, interpretable sentences, can be explained in terms of
a simple set of operations and properties (e.g., it seems clear that once interpreted later
operations cannot return to modify that interpretation, as the simplest solution would predict). So it is established that the computational properties of natural language will be
exceedingly well-suited to the task it performs, and not at all reflective of philosophical
desiderata.
At this point the sense that a fundamental category mistake is being made might appear.
If dialetheism means anything at all, it is in the context of an inferential system concerned
with truth-preservation. A language faculty with a proprietary computational system and
internalist semantics cannot, in any relevant sense, be understood as a logic. The language
faculty is not concerned with truth-preservation and the generative computational procedures associated with it do not look anything like those of formal logic.
This criticism is not wrong, exactly. It does ignore the potential separation of logic
from specific computational application. Early integrated circuits, after all, were composed
exclusively of NOR and NAND gates, the only truth-functionally complete operators in the
sentential calculus. Still, the computational operations permitted by such primitive circuits
are not always part of a truth-preserving inferential system: they may be used for any number
of purposes. One response would therefore be to characterize the fundamental or underlying
logic of the language facultys computations to be paraconsistent, for example implemented
as a ternary-valued logic running underneath the system (perhaps at the neural level), similar to the paraconsistent logics implemented in various hardware applications; and that this
would explain the ability of the language faculty to handle inconsistent input.
While this might function as an answer of sorts to the objection, it does not really
recover dialetheism, which is, after all, a claim about interpretation. If the candidate
inconsistent facts are to be mental events involved in the production of language the
inconsistency-tolerance cannot be shoved down to the neural level (after all, presumably
a neuron does not both fire and not fire). In any event, little is understood about this aspect of
the human brain, and the suggestion remains mere speculation. There could be a wider chasm

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than expected between the neurobiological facts and the higher-level semantic phenomena
philosophers wish to explain, and so the prevalent view, which is that formal language are
useful models for explaining natural language, cannot simply be assumed to be true.14
A more principled answer can be found in the idea of inconsistency-tolerance as a consequence of optimality conditions at the interface. As Chomsky notes,
The language faculty is part of the overall architecture of the mind/brain, interacting with other components: the sensorimotor apparatus and the systems that enter
into thought, imagination, and other mental processes, and their expression and interpretation. The language faculty interfaces with other components of the mind/brain
(Chomsky 1997, p. 29).
It is at the interface that inconsistency tolerance is paramount. As Stainton has noted, while
natural language semantics is decidedly not truth-functional, still people can say and think
things that are true and false (Stainton 2006, p. 930); not to mention things that are true
and false. At the least, we can imagine true contradictions, as Sylvans Box has shown. Our
other mental processes also have no presumption of consistency built-in: our beliefs might
conflict; our desires might conflict; our very percepts might conflict; and our judgments about
truth-conditions might take contradictory form. There is no limit to the potentially inconsistent information that could find its way to the interface points the language faculty has with
the components of the mind. Contradictory or conflicting input at the interface (incompatible
features, affirmations and denials of a state of affairs, and so on) must be handled in some
discriminate way. The information need not be explicitly characterized as truth-functional
(e.g. as a conscious judgement about truth-functional properties) in order to be inconsistent
from the language facultys point of view. It is enough that, at the interface points, the
faculty receives conflicting input. For instance, a person could have conflicting desires about
some course of action, such that she both wants and does not want to undertake it, producing
in response the appropriate and grammatically correct sentence I want to and I dont want
to at the same time.
The appropriateness of linguistic output is crucial. As McGilvray notes, language use
is stimulus-free, unbounded, and yet, in use, typically appropriate to any number of tasks
(McGilvray 1998, p. 234). While McGilvray sees this as evidence that intentional meaningindividuation is hopeless, the observation also has a clear positive consequence: whatever
processes underpin appropriateness are non-explosive. The language faculty, in interacting
with the many components of the mind/brain, always outputs appropriate linguistic forms, no
matter the situation. A person can observe an M.C. Escher drawing; contemplate the liar paradox; feel torn about a job offer; imagine an impossible situation; and the appropriateness of
linguistic output is never threatened. All these situations involve components of the brain the
language faculty interacts with in order to produce relevant, appropriate output. Moreover,
they are genuine inconsistencies. Taking mental events as real, any scientific description of
the language faculty must make reference to inconsistent mental events; while natural language is not committed to external truth-conditions, scientific languages, being genuinely
descriptive, are.
14 To see why this might be the case, consider the following analogy: while the set of possible behaviours a
computer can exhibit is certainly fully explainable by, and in a sense reducible to, its logical architecture, the
variety of available behaviour at this higher level is vast enough that a hardware-based theory (descriptions of
logic gates, electron flow, and so on) purporting to be about the software available at your local shop (games,
word processors, and so on) would not only be deeply unsatisfying, but rather ridiculous. There is no properly
definable set of electron activity in logic-gates that corresponds to the perfectly intelligible activity editing
a document.

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This is important when considering the optimality conditions that render humans able to
generate interpretable sentences. On the output side the meanings generated by the semantic
interface of the language faculty have been described as a configuring instruction to conceptualintentional systems, individuated solely by intrinsic, broadly syntactic features
(McGilvray 1998, p. 238, 239). These instructions are not defined in terms of interpretation; instead, they provide specific and essentially human structure and texture to cognitive domains where they are taken up and used (McGilvray 1998, pp. 239240). Chomsky,
discussing this feature of meaning, notes in particular that all the normal lexical features
(such as exterior and interior marking) appear in the interpretation of inconsistent scenarios:
The same is true of impossible objects. If I tell you that I painted a spherical cube
brown, you take its exterior to be brown in the unmarked case, and if I am inside it,
you know I am not near it (Chomsky 1995b, p. 20).
The natural language faculty, in other words, re-packages the inconsistent objecthere, a
spherical cubeinto a interpretable sentence that has all the normal properties wed expect.
At first, this may seem unsurprising, as the sentence is in a very typical form. But the form
(an action being performed to an object) doesnt capture the marked/unmarked usage, which
is a semantic property of the lexical item. Further, even if one focuses on the impossibility
of the object (that it is both a cube and not a cube, if it is a spherical cube), painting it
still carries the presumption of its exterior surface being modified. Any number of questions
about impossible objects can be appropriately answeredas Priest noted in Sylvans Box.
The explanation for inconsistency-tolerance is, of course, very different in the present case.
The Chomskyan line also does explain how we understand paradoxical sentences without
making any claim about which is the correct logic. It certainly cant be that we think we
understand some sentence but realize, upon sober reflection, that it is in fact nonsense. Natural language paradoxes, like the Barbers, cant be nonsense.15 Its in virtue of the words,
and the ways in which the words are arranged that we come to see that the situation described
is paradoxical. Internalist semantics allow us to make a further determination that the truthconditions of a sentence are inconsistent. And when asked whether the storys barber shaves
himself or not, whatever retrieval function is engaged responds in a discriminate fashion to
the query: the system does not crash. Instead a salient configuration is picked out, processed,
and sent back to conceptualintentional systems.
We can conclude that lexical item selection is clearly not trivialized by inconsistency
in either direction: in the input direction, since the language faculty, when interacting with
other components of the mind, manages to choose relevant and appropriate lexical items
to compute over; and in the output direction, since the configuring instructions given to
the conceptualintentional systems as the result of processing are non-explosive to the components they are outputed to. These are the places where inconsistency-tolerance matters;
within the derivational computation it is indeed too quick to characterize the process as paraconsistent system (although there are interesting issues surrounding quantifier raising). At
the interfaces, however, where interaction with other cognitive systems occurs, output, while
free, is never arbitrary. In order for lexical retrieval to do this in an efficient mannerperhaps
in an optimal manner, to maintain computational tractabilitythe underlying process must
be discriminatory with regards to contradictions. That is, choice of which lexical items will
go into the derivation is paraconsistent.
15 A barber shaves only and all in town who do not shave themselves. Do he shave himself?

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4 Conclusion
It is clear by now that paraconsistent logic, as a means of reasoning about inconsistent
information, forms a maturing research program with demonstrated practical application in
precisely the area the naturalistically-inclined dialetheist would expect: in modularized, distributed databases where consistency cant be assumed or verified and where sophisticated
computations must be rendered in an efficient manner. Hypothesizing that the minditself
a modular, naturally evolved computational systemwould require some measure of inconsistency tolerance is not only analogically obvious, but necessary for reasons of descriptive
adequacy. Wed expect the brain/mind to be capable of both the production and handling of
inconsistent information. Dialetheia, or something like them, figure in a theory of inconsistent natural language processing to the extent that they appear as an explanandum. All this is
meant as a series of empirical claims, to be confirmed or refuted. Metaphysical or intuitive
a priori considerations simply do not apply, any more than Kantian intuitions by themselves
could disconfirm general relativity.
The great virtue of this proposal is that it explains natural-language inconsistency tolerance while leaving open questions of formal logic. Even in the absence of a truth-conditional
semantics, inconsistency-tolerance would be required. Any serious scientific theory of natural language must take into account the fact that modularity of mind will lead to ineliminable
informational inconsistencies. What is far less obvious, and a harder problem for future
research, is what exact form this inconsistency-tolerance takes.
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Author Biography
Nicholas D. McGinnis (1979) is a Ph.D. student in philosophy at the University of Western Ontario,
Canada. He completed his M.A. and B.A. (Honours) in philosophy, at Concordia University, Montreal, with
a thesis on the influence of Wittgenstein on the modern revival of virtue ethics. His research interests include
experimental philosophy, metaphysics, semantics and political philosophy. The provisional title of his doctoral dissertation is Reference and Experiment. He has also published on Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology,
Interrogation and Biopower: Merleau-Ponty on Human Resources Exploitation, Review Journal of Political Philosophy 8.1:125137, 2011) and presented his work at conferences in Canada, the United States, and
Europe.

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