Truth Dispersion
The Modal Language Model
After reading, Christian Apologetics and Philosophy by Paul Herrick, modal logic stood out as essential for understanding modern political language.
Herrick describes Modal Logic as “the branch concerned with possibility, contingency, and necessity—sometimes called the “modes” of truth and falsity.”
Truth for the modalist exhibits theoretical discreteness, truth being divided into necessary truth, necessary falsehood, contingent truth, and possible truth. Rather than dividing the truth, the complex ideas of truth are parted into sub factions of truth, while maintaining the complex image of truth singularly.
“A being exists contingently, if it exists but would not have existed had circumstances been sufficiently different.” Herrick continues, “Thus, it exists in some possible circumstances and fails to exist in other possible circumstances.”
Later adding the humans are all contingent beings depending on the circumstances of our mother and fathers.
Culturally, theoretical discreteness can be observed through gender based language themes. The necessary truth is that humans are only male and female and the falsehood would be that a male can be a female.
Language and culture changes over time, adapting necessary truths and contingent truths, thus, gender has become dependent on the prescription of language. Modern feminists critique that men created the language thus, oppressing other genders.
Possible truth could be used to justify these premises, but that doesn’t make the truth therefore necessary.
Prescribing gender as a tool to fight the patriarchy. Therefore destroying the value of language prescriptions of that hierarchy: universal prescriptive behavior, desires, needs, possessions.
If having children is a necessity in masculine cultures, then women must prioritize the hatred of child rearing. Hence, the arguments that our society chooses to make may not inherently value based judgements. Rather arguments are made based upon the language game that’s prescribed for us.
Similarly to the relationship between norms and laws, language and values are symbiotically related.
The diction describes the values we hold, and the values we hold prescribe the lexicon of the individual. This would also explain why the educated tend to be politically leaning one way as they share the same vocabulary and are able to play in certain language games.
Religious values can be observed from the prioritization of certain words in discussion. Although Christian Apologetics and Philosophy focuses on the existence of God, the pages on modality inspired this commentary.