Happy Unhappiness (and Other Stratified Contradictions)

Philosophia 50 (5):2423-2440 (2022)
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Abstract

Stratified properties such as ‘happy unhappiness’, ‘ungrounded ground’, ‘fortunate misfortune’, and evidently ‘true falsity’ may generate dialetheias (true contradictions). The aim of the article is to show that if this is the case, then we will have a special, conjunctive, kind of dialetheia: a true state description of the form ‘Fa and not Fa’ (for some property F and object a), wherein the two conjuncts, separately taken, are to be held untrue. The particular focus of the article is on happy unhappiness: people suffering from (or enjoying) happy unhappiness (if there is some situation or state of mind of this kind) cannot be truly said ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’, but we can say they are both. In the first section three cases of conjunctive stratification are presented; in the second section the logic of stratified contradictions is explored. The last section focuses on eudemonistic ascriptions: stated that a is happy to be unhappy (or unhappy to be happy), should we say a is happy? unhappy? both? neither?

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Franca d'Agostini
Università degli Studi di Milano

Citations of this work

Hegel’s Interpretation of the Sorites.Franca D’Agostini - 2023 - History and Philosophy of Logic 44 (2):132-150.

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References found in this work

Guide to Ground.Kit Fine - 2012 - In Fabrice Correia & Benjamin Schnieder (eds.), Metaphysical Grounding. Cambridge University Press. pp. 37--80.
In contradiction: a study of the transconsistent.Graham Priest - 1987 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Saving truth from paradox.Hartry H. Field - 2008 - New York: Oxford University Press.

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