Priest, Graham Sylvan’s box: A short story and ten morals. (English) Zbl 0926.03003 Notre Dame J. Formal Logic 38, No. 4, 573-582 (1997). A writer of fiction may include physically impossible events and objects, from faster-than-light travel to fire-breathing vertebrates, and describe them in as much detail as desired. A writer of fiction may include the mathematically impossible, introducing a character who has squared the circle or discovered the greatest prime; but cannot go into detail about these achievements, on pain of incoherence. This, at least, is the received wisdom. Graham Priest, as an exponent of paraconsistent logic, dissents, and to make good his dissent has written a fictional story which tells how he and Nick Griffin, Richard Sylvan’s literary executor, discovered among Richard’s things an impossible object; and describes what they decided to do with it (which is, naturally enough, something impossible). He then draws lessons, mostly contrary to the received wisdom, from the story. Reviewer: J.Mackenzie (Sydney) Cited in 6 Documents MSC: 03A05 Philosophical and critical aspects of logic and foundations 03B53 Paraconsistent logics Keywords:consistency; inconsistency; fiction; impossible object PDF BibTeX XML Cite \textit{G. Priest}, Notre Dame J. Formal Logic 38, No. 4, 573--582 (1997; Zbl 0926.03003) Full Text: DOI OpenURL References: [1] Lewis, D., Philosophical Papers , vol. 1, Oxford University Press, New York, 1983. · Zbl 0914.01028 [2] Mares, E., and A. Fuhrman, “A relevant theory of conditionals,” Journal of Philosophical Logic , vol. 24 (1995), pp. 645–65. · Zbl 0853.03005 [3] Priest, G., In Contradiction , Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1987. · Zbl 0682.03002 [4] Priest, G., R. Routley, and J. Norman, Paraconsistent Logic: Essays on the Inconsistent , Philosophia Verlag, Munich, 1989. · Zbl 0678.00003 [5] Priest, G., “What is a non-normal world?,” Logique et Analyse , vol. 35 (1992), pp. 291–302. · Zbl 0834.03002 [6] Sylvan, R., Meinong’s Jungle and Beyond , Australian National University, Canberra, 1980. [7] Sylvan, R., “On relevant conditionals, and relevant applications thereof,” pp. 191–244, in Logic, Language and Computation , edited by S. Akama, Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1997. · Zbl 0947.03502 [8] Yagisawa, T., “Beyond possible worlds,” Philosophical Studies , vol. 53 (1988), pp. 175–204. This reference list is based on information provided by the publisher or from digital mathematics libraries. Its items are heuristically matched to zbMATH identifiers and may contain data conversion errors. It attempts to reflect the references listed in the original paper as accurately as possible without claiming the completeness or perfect precision of the matching.