GoKawiilIn 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.”
What is boolean thinking
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).
Context is key. By “context”, I mean the set of premises/postulates/axioms, which we presume in order to think. Depending on the context, a statement can be:
Unknown or unknowable (if the context is incomplete)
Senseless (if the question is meaningless)
Both true and false (if the context varies)
You are probably aware of such situations, but you might still not see them as contradicting the Boolean doctrine (boolean thinking, as we shall see, is precisely that—a doctrine). It’s a mode of thought that, although not universally valid, is often useful. For instance, you can’t make plans with someone who says there’s a 40% chance they’ll go out tonight, or that the question doesn’t make sense. Thus, you might be tempted to treat all imperfections of the Boolean model as imperfections of the world — or of thinking agents themselves:
No statement is unknowable — somewhere out there, there must be an answer. No statement is senseless — given enough effort, every statement can be interpreted. A statement is both true and false only because we lack sufficient information.
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