In distinction there is choice. We see in it alternates or alternatives. The found alternate is external to we who find it and the alternatives are that from which we choose. The self is what we are. What we are not, the rest of it, is the external world. So we see a boundary between ourselves and the external world in choice.
What we establish by convention is our choice. Things chosen are created, adopted, unfixed. They are what we'd have them be, possibly this or possibly that, equally well predicted as contradicted. What is discovered has its nature without our choice. Things discovered are fixed, surprising, unchosen. They are exactly what they are and not anything else—they are noncontradictory.
We will consider here choice and the distinction between the internal and external world from the views of distinction as naming and as contradiction.
In naming is an instance of taking together, something we've taken as distinction itself. It generalizes the A is B form. However, this isn't the only way we take things together. The “is” in “A is B” is a sign of this taking together as truth. Indeed, we see the “is” in the phrase as but one part of the taking together of A and B in language. The “A” and the “is”, the “is” and the “B”, the “A” and the “is B”, and any other constituents we see in the linguistic phrase, are all taken together. In the graphic form of language, even the letters in a word are taken together. But in discussing “A is B” we are really talking about the A and the B being taken together.
We've already looked at taking “not” together with another thing, but in fact any two things, like “featherless” and “biped” might be taken together to form a distinction. “Man is a featherless biped”. “This is exquisitely delicious”. “That biped is not feathered”. “I have gone fishing”. So things described in language with adjectives, adverbs, transitive verbs, compound names all have in them distinct things taken together, laid against each other. And not just linguistic forms are taken together but all the things we experience. The surfaces juxtaposed at the joint in a door. The thing we lay before us and we ourselves. In mathematics, the argument applied to its function, f(x). The detail of contour within any diversity taken together as one thing.
In this is both internal choice and external observation. When taking two things together, we accept the things taken as fixed and our internal choice is the distinction of sense. When we simply take two of these takings together together again, or when we see distinctiveness within each of the particulars of a given taking together, we are taking distinctions themselves together. Such is clearly the case in communication where we can see an interesting interplay of choice and observation. Take the following two similar conversations.
He: The cat is in the box.
She: I'd say the cat is on the box.
He: The cat is on the floor.
She: I'd say the cat is on the box.
In each conversation a different point is highlighted. In the first, she is clarifying that the cat is on the box, in the second that the cat is on the box. In both conversation she utters the same thing, and even communicates partially the same thing, that is, where the cat is. But the sense is different, and is fixed by what is common to the two utterances. If he had held his silence while merely thinking that the cat was in the box, yet she had assumed he believed the cat to be on the floor, her utterance would yield a reply from him that would be occasioned by some surprise on her part.
We sometimes fix such sense within one utterance by distinguishing one word with emphasis, as when italicized. We can imagine our protagonist alone in this search for a cat, wondering at once whether the cat was in the box or on the floor and finding surprise in her own thought that perhaps the cat is on the box.
We find in our distinctions externally existent things yet in our own distinction the source of external things. This elicits a debate as to whether external things are the way they are exactly because it is “we” who found them that way, or whether we are what we are only because we find external things just as they are. Whichever we define in terms of the other, one remains fixed and the other ranges free.
We have in past entries described distinction as arising from contradiction. We say, we can't hold a contradiction, so we resolve it, and that resolution is distinctive, or is our distinction. The task may be put to our theory of life as born from contradiction to defend itself in the face of reason and clarity, which is at times, if not as often as we'd wish, plainly before us. From this point of view, the rational reality toward which we resolve contradiction is noncontradiction. Noncontradiction is rational, fixed external reality. In noncontradiction is the requirement that distinct things are not the same—a thing is not both true and not true. We have the external, that which is not us, as noncontradiction, and us, that choice in resolution which remains, as contradiction.
Noncontradiction in philosophy is a general principle about facts. Facts are independently true things. These facts have been subdivided in many ways, just some of which are a priori-a posteriori, analytic-synthetic, necessary-contingent. In each of these subdivisions, noncontradiction is held and truth or falsity is to be found fixed, absolutely in propositions.
Noncontradiction and contradiction are particularly relevant where we see the most stringent of facts and the most freedom of choice, thought. As much as number may be a convention of our own, once made, we can't choose 2 + 2 into being 5 without breaking our own convention. But we are free to choose to break or modify our convention by resolving those contradictions we don't object to reject, as we say “P and not P” is only true if we recognize instead of the atomic fact P we have a relation P such that “P(4) and not P(5)”. Similarly we say there may be no whole number we can add to 3 to get 2, but we can by fiat introduce negative numbers to say -1 + 3 = 2. Before even mathematics, we resolve contradiction when we see no sameness in two different words in a statement about two names were we not by fiat to take them to name the same thing.
It seems odd to discuss contradiction and noncontradiction as opposites, for it is the role of opposition within these two categories that distinguishes the two categories. Isn't it the role of noncontradiction to define “opposite” or “not”, and therefore contradictory to speak of noncontradiction's opposite? We can throw up our hands, and say, once we start talking of all reason, as we are when we discuss noncontradiction, we are inevitably without recourse to reason. Or we can look again with surprise at the perfect sense in describing “opposition to noncontradiction” as “contradiction”. To “opposite of contradiction” we object, “contradiction!”, but this objection imputes exactly what it was in objection to.
Taking each of these two categories as wholes, say C and N, we can say any two opposites in C are indistinguishable and any two opposites in N are perfectly distinct. Indeed, everything in C is indistinguishable from everything else in C, and within N is a vast sea of distinguished particularity. The shared use of “not” in these two categories reflects our choice of distinction—the essence of “not”—as the essence of the two taken together. We can see distinction as encompassing both N and C if we look at its behavior under this essential complement created by it.
In distinction is that which is distinguished and that which is indiscernible. In indistinction is that which is distinguished and that which is indiscernible. The two appear indiscernible in all ways but name. We might call this latter thing counterdistinction to reflect a role in our discursive account, but being distinguished for the sake of being distinguished is all this new name brings to the discussion. We could say the difference between distinction and counterdistinction is in which side of a distinction, the distintive and indiscernable, is prior, but this is drawing further distinction, hypothesizing the structure of sides. Within a distinction itself, priority is a thing to be distinguished and not present at face value.
To summarize simply, in contradiction we have something to resolve, and this is our choice. In noncontradiction distinctiveness is imposed—a thing and its opposite are different, and we have no choice over this. So we have our internal truth and external truth. Both are valid and viewable as by fiat, as is seen in the multiple senses of fiat—a thing arbitrary and a thing by command.
We might ask, how can the external not be fixed first and foremost rather than purely of our own distinction when we clearly find individuals other than ourselves? Which of us, we might ask, is the creator of reality, and if both, how do we explain conflicts of convention between us in our mutual creations of the external world? The answer is in our distinction of individual. Surely the individuals we distinguish in life, if they are to be distinct from ourselves but individuals like ourselves, will appear to us with all we hold fixed in individuality, such as the experience of all reality from a view in which only they have choice over what we see as fixed to ourselves but intrinsic to them. Just as our distinctions contain fixed facts, so do the conflicting choices of what we distinguish as other individuals appear as impositions to ourselves.
We might ask, if all we can do with the external is discover, does this very observation uncover a truly external fact over which we have no choice? Clearly the answer depends on what we distinguish in the question.