We've proposed embracing conflict. In dissecting this proposition we would do well to consider it carefully. There is, after all, a difference between glamorizing hardship and embracing conflict. We can hardly consider ourselves discerning individuals if we accept an unwanted imposition when we are not forced to. We here consider what care we can take, looking at our engagement in coercion.
It is the fundamental problem considered in this series that there seem to be unavoidable necessities. This is often a good circumstance. But it is not always, so we are left to wonder why and where we are truly coerced to anything at all. We've supposed all particularity we come across to be of our own design, and the seeming impositions around us to be implicit in our own choice. So we find freedom in embracing conflict when it is of the sort for which any path out leaves a circumstance in which we wish to stay. At that point our recognition of it affords us a proportion in its experience and a certain virtuosity in handling it. We model our proportionate experience of unwanted conflict on the sort we do want. Many gratifying things are hard. Those struggles in which we willingly choose to engage are the ones we experience with proportion. So it is we look for the contradiction in our undesirable conflicts in hope of finding where it is we who are actively engaging—willfully—in the conflict.
Flat out contradiction can be seen to be embraced every day. In modeling the world on contradiction we may attach excessive importance to that essential feature of models—that they are distinct from the thing modeled. The expectation that the essence of contradiction in everyday life should only be extracted after long and difficult deliberation over counterintuitive propositions, places too much weight on the distinctiveness of the model from reality. Contradiction as distinction does take together two things that are different, but the model is most successful when we find surprise that our seemingly counterintuitive take on things is not always so remote. It is in this spirit that we say, yes a thing having parts makes that thing of count one have in another sense a count of many. This contradiction is so easily written off, that we hardly recognize it as the presence of contradiction in actuality. Surely this isn't a contradiction, we may object. And surely it isn't, in the sense that contradiction as distinction is just a model. But that the phenomenon has this resemblance to the model while not being problematic can just as easily be seen as the most compelling evidence that we have a good model. We will suggest in what follows, further examples of contradiction in everyday life, and those involving coercion in particular.
Commands
Statements, commands and questions are seen with varying degrees of clarity to be modeled by distinction and plain contradiction. A statement, a proposition, makes a compelling example of distinction. It carries this sense of contradiction in that most incredulous way we mentioned in the previous paragraph. The more counterintuitive existence of contradiction can be found in asking the way in which commands and questions are distinctions. We have a resource in statements that allows us to cast commands as statements. To achieve coercion with only a statement we can turn to our ability to assert contradictions. If an individual has one thing on offer, we can coerce from them anything distinct from that offer—in essence commanding them to do something they weren't otherwise going to do. This method is described in Smullyan's The Riddle of Scheherazade. He describes a situation in which a father offers his younger daughter's hand in marriage to his elder daughter's suitor if the suitor makes a true statement, and none of his daughters if he makes a false statement. The suitor answers such that paradox arises in all situations in which the father doesn't give him the elder daughter's hand. This arrangement can be generally characterized: 1) the coerced who holds certain presuppositions offers a particular action and awaits some true statement while 2) the unsuspected coercer's reply conjoins the fact of the coerced's refraining from action with a desired result and conjoins fact of the coerced's carrying out that action with facts contrary to the presuppositions. The conclusion from these two as premises is contradictory if not along the coercer's desire.
This use of contradiction is seen to hold the essentials of coercive command. To further explain questions, we see in them commands to resolve contradictions. If I make the statement, “it will rain tomorrow”, the time, “tomorrow”, is well-placed. If I replace the object of time with something quite out of place—like an object of no time at all such as the word “when”—I am only a coercion away from having my contradiction resolved by an answer such as “tomorrow”. A question is a statement of contradictions, with at least one of those contradictions being itself a statement of another contradiction, all this exemplifying our agility at navigating contradiction.
If this construction carries the essence of the imperative, we've found our freedom from coercion. In these examples of coercion, the coerced subject must be engaged. Not every question is met with an answer. Not every command is followed. In Smullyan's examples, the coerced subject makes an offer of action, which the coercer deftly manipulates into a necessary result. We have an undeniable coercion, but not the undeniable imposition, for the engagement of the coerced is required. If our offer is always present in any imposition, we have our freedom, for it is ours to abstain from it.
Logic
We see contradiction as coercive everywhere. In simple everyday reasoning, the bare existence of paradoxes coerces us away from arguments that lead to them. In logic paradox has shaped our landscape. Paradox forces logicians to avoid the disjunctive syllogism in entailment, to restrict our comprehension in set theory, to introduce types in higher order logic. In mathematics, the fundamentals of real analysis were driven by the paradox of infinitesimals. The fact that it seems unsafe to accept “B” simply because we have “A or B” and “not A”, carries both a coercion of paradox as a possibility in our conclusion and in what imperative there is in being compelled to adopt premises. Do we have freedom to disengage from these premises? We have argued elsewhere that we do.
Knowledge
We find a ready example of an imposed fact from which we are free to abstain in certain knowledge. When we ask, is certain knowledge to be had, we have in a sense fixed our answer in the question. If we wish to be certain about it, we can only answer yes, for a certain no is paradoxical—at once an example of certain knowledge, and at the same time denying the possibility of the same. If we do not wish to be certain, an uncertain yes or no still leaves open the question. We seem only to escape the certainty of some certain knowledge by not answering the question. As we pointed out in our last entry, that knowledge only seems certain in counterfactual situations does not remove the utility of knowledge itself. By recognizing the border of the possible answers to our question about knowledge, perhaps we can find proportion in those situations where such an answer carries import.
In our suspicion that all coercion requires our engagement we have not conclusively excluded the possibility of impositions over which we have no choice. We might say we can defeat our suspicion by fiat, contradicting our own choice and finding all resolutions to be against that choice. But whether or not some impositions are utterly unavoidable, we can only be giving ourselves more freedom by considering in any one circumstance how that imposition may, counterintuitively, not be so imposing after all.