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Which kind of lends credence to the idea that he was against writing, no?
by beatgammit 7y ago
Which kind of lends credence to the idea that he was against writing, no?
- soulofmischief 7y agoNo, not really. A -> B != B -> A. In other words, you can't draw an affirmative conclusion from a negative premise. You can say that if Socrates never wrote then we would not have any surviving texts. This is logical. But you can't turn that around and conclud that the fact that we have no surviving texts attributed to Socrates means he never wrote / was against writing. This logical proposition is not closed, there are unaccounted variables for why we may not have any texts. You can only propose the contrapositive, in that if we did have surviving texts from Socrates, it means he wrote. You could even argue that I shouldn't have said "he never wrote anything", because we just can't definitely know. I was just being brief.