the boundaries of language

I'm currently engaged in what I think is a very interesting discussion with Colin Caret and others over at What is it like to be a Blog? The discussion started out concerning what the grounds might be to hold that someone who doesn't practice what they preach lacks moral authority, but we've spilled over into a new thread discussing issues that come up when an agent has inconsistent beliefs, but doesn't recognise that this is so. Does this familiar kind of situation motivate a move to paraconsistent logic, or even full blown rational dialetheism, or can the classicist (or less radical logical revisionist) maintain that such a move is unmotivated here? I'm trying to argue for the latter position.

See Colin's posts 'Hypocrisy and Moral Authority' and 'Paraconsistency and Dialetheism'.

(I get rightly criticised here sometimes for not explaining terminology. So here I'm taking paraconsistent logics to be those that lack the explosion rule, A, ~A |- B, and rational dialetheism to be the view that some contradictions are true and that it can be rational to believe some contradictions. The rational dialetheist will adopt a paraconsistent logic, since it clearly isn't rational to have trivial beliefs, but one can adopt a paraconsistent logic without being a dialetheist.)

Labels: Links, Philosophy of Logic