Dictionary:

contradiction

  (kŏn'trə-dĭk'shən)

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1. 1. The act of contradicting.
   2. The state of being contradicted.
2. A denial.
3. Inconsistency; discrepancy.
4. Something that contains contradictory elements.

noun

1. The condition of being in conflict: antagonism, antithesis, contradistinction, contraposition, contrariety, contrariness, opposition, polarity. See support/oppose.
2. A refusal to grant the truth of a statement or charge: denial, disaffirmance, disaffirmation, disclaimer, negation, rejection. Law traversal. See affirm/deny/argue.

Definition: variance to something
Antonyms: acceptance, agreement, approval, concession, confirmation, corroboration, ok, reconcilement, verification

Term adapted from its ordinary meaning by Hegel and Marx to refer to dialectical conflicts in history and society. According to Marxist theory, contradiction is a tenet of dialectical reasoning rather than a logical error. Contradiction is held to be present in all phenomena and to be the principal reason for their motion and development. In Dialectics of Nature, Engels presents examples from both natural science and mathematics intended to defend this proposition. However, the doctrine of contradiction as the main source of development is most easily understood with respect to society. Marx and Engels argued in the Manifesto of the Communist Party that, ‘the history of society is the history of class struggle’. Social classes, particularly bourgeois and proletarians under capitalism, found themselves with contradictory interests, and their interaction produced not only historical but social transformation. Marx and Engels predicted the victory of proletarians and the eventual abolition of class relations. Given the ubiquity of contradictions, Soviet ideologists were faced with initial difficulty in characterizing social relations under socialism. They resolved the problem by developing the notion of antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions; thus, unlike bourgeois and proletarians under capitalism, workers and peasants in the Soviet Union did not have antagonistically contradictory interests, merely non-antagonistically contradictory ones.

— Stephen Whitefield

The conjunction of a proposition and its negation. The law of non-contradiction provides that no such conjunction can be true: not (p & not-p). The standard proof of the inconsistency of a set of propositions or sentences is to show that a contradiction may be derived from them.

In Hegelian and Marxist writing the term is used more widely. A contradiction may be a pair of features that together produce an unstable tension in a political or social system: a ‘contradiction’ of capitalism might be the arousal of expectations in the workers that the system cannot requite. For Hegel the gap between this and genuine contradiction is not as wide as it is for other thinkers, given the equation between systems of thought and their historical embodiments.

In its primary meaning, contradiction is the act of contradicting, of opposing oneself to someone by saying the opposite of whatever he or she says. The term is used in mathematics and philosophy. In mathematical logic, a contradiction is a statement whose truth function has only one value: false. In philosophy it is the relation that exists between the affirmation and the negation of a proposition. A term that embodies incompatible (contrary or contradictory) elements is also called a contradiction.

Contradicting the fears and feelings of a patient under hypnosis was the first therapeutic intervention that Freud described in his early article on "A Case of Successful Treatment by Hypnotism" (1892-93a). He showed that the etiology of the symptom depended on "antithetic ideas" (p. 121) opposed to the individual's intentions. The formal element in the etiology was thus contradiction, which also applied to repression: "For these patients whom I analysed had enjoyed good mental health up to the moment at which an occurrence of incompatibility took place in their ideational life—that is to say, until their ego was faced with an experience, an idea or a feeling which aroused such a distressing affect that the subject decided to forget about it because he had no confidence in his power to resolve the contradiction between that incompatible idea and his ego by means of thought-activity" (Freud 1894a, p. 47).

The Interpretation of Dreams and the "first topography" increased the places in Freud's theory where contradictory oppositions could be found within a single agency, between agencies, or between psychical reality and external reality. As early as 1900, Freud noted that "Thoughts which are mutually contradictory make no attempt to do away with each other, but persist side by side. They often combine to form condensations, just as though there were no contradiction between them, or arrive at compromises such as our conscious thoughts would never tolerate, but such as are often admitted in our actions" (1900a, p. 596). The absence of contradiction, Widerspruchslosigkeit, at first an attribute of the primary process, later became a feature of the unconscious:

The nucleus of the Ucs. consists . . . of wishful impulses. These instinctual impulses are co-ordinate with one another, exist side by side without being influenced by one another, and are exempt from mutual contradiction. When two wishful impulses whose aims must appear to us incompatible become simultaneously active, the two impulses do not diminish each other or cancel each other out, but combine to form an intermediate aim, a compromise. There are in this system no negation, no doubt, no degrees of certainty: all this is only introduced by the work of the censorship between the Ucs. and the Pcs. Negation is a substitute, at a higher level, for repression" (Freud, 1915e, pp.186-187).

Freud used similar language apropos of the id, adding that "The logical laws of thought do not apply to the id, and this is true above all of the law of contradiction" (1933a [1932], p. 73). Ambivalence is the final dynamic factor necessary for understanding the ubiquity of contradiction in the expression of psychic processes.

Thus, all products of the unconscious—dreams, slips, jokes, symptoms—simply disregard "the category of contraries and contradictories. ...Dreams feel themselves at liberty, moreover, to represent any element by its wishful contrary; so that there is no way of deciding, at first glance, whether any element that admits of a contrary is present in the dream-thoughts as a positive or as a negative" (Freud, 1900a, p. 318). Freud compared these psychic creations to the antithetical meanings of primal words (1910e), which he again analyzed in his study of taboos (1912-1913), and then in his essay on "The Uncanny" (1919h). The term "compromise formation," a feature of all defenses, demonstrates the extension of contradiction across the whole of mental life.

Contradiction intersects with negation and with the formal referential binary true/false. But Freud was especially interested in dynamic processes that allow contradictory mental positions to be maintained simultaneously. In addition to those already mentioned, he also referred to negation linked to repression, disavowal, splitting, and repudiation (or foreclosure, in Lacanian terms). Thus the contradiction between wish and reality is systematic in relation to the difference between the sexes.

The notion of contradiction implies the formal expression of an opposition and its relation to truth. Mathematicians such as Kurt Gödel have shown that its domain of relevance is restricted. Structuralist linguists have distinguished oppositions based on contraries from those based on exclusion. Contradiction would appear to be a very rudimentary formal instrument for investigating psychic conflicts. Freud did not rely much on it, preferring the more dynamic terms "opposite" and "contrary."

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. (1892-93a). A case of successful treatment by hypnotism. SE, 1: 115-128.

——. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams; Part I. SE,4: 1-338; Part II. SE, 5: 339-625.

——. (1894a). The neuro-psychoses of defence. SE,3:41-61.

——. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 1-182.

——. (1915e). The unconscious. SE, 14: 159-204.

—MICHÈLE PORTE

Quotes:

"I happen to feel that the degree of a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting attitudes she can bring to bear on the same topic." - Lisa Alther

"I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction." - Georges Bataille

"What an antithetical mind! -- tenderness, roughness -- delicacy, coarseness -- sentiment, sensuality -- soaring and groveling, dirt and deity -- all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!" - Lord Byron

"The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning." - Winston Churchill

"I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste." - Marcel Duchamp

"Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

See more famous quotes about Contradiction

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