All 19 Uses of
contradict
in
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- The problem, the contradiction the scientists are stuck with, is that of mind.†
Part 1 *contradiction = something (typically a statement) that disagrees with itself; or (more rarely) the act of disagreeing
- A fragment of memory is preserved of him sitting in a room at three and four in the morning with Immanuel Kant's famous Critique of Pure Reason, studying it as a chess player studies the openings of the tournament masters, trying to test the line of development against his own judgment and skill, looking for contradictions and incongruities.†
Part 2contradictions = things that disagree with themselves; or (more rarely) acts of disagreeing
- We have in our minds an a priori motorcycle which has continuity in time and space and is capable of changing appearance as one moves one's head and is therefore not contradicted by the sense data one is receiving.†
Part 2contradicted = disagreed
- All his letters show is an enormous confusion of contradictions and incongruities and divergences and exceptions to any rule he formulated about the things he observed.†
Part 2contradictions = things that disagree with themselves; or (more rarely) acts of disagreeing
- I reply, "That's self-contradictory.†
Part 2contradictory = in disagreement
- It seemed as though every rule he honestly tried to discover with them and learn with them was so full of exceptions and contradictions and qualifications and confusions that he wished he'd never come across the rule in the first place.†
Part 2contradictions = things that disagree with themselves; or (more rarely) acts of disagreeing
- That contradicts what I actually believe.†
Part 3contradicts = disagrees
- There was no feeling of contradiction.†
Part 3contradiction = something (typically a statement) that disagrees with itself; or (more rarely) the act of disagreeing
- They did this by reasoning that if there were any way to reduce Euclid's postulate to other, surer axioms, another effect would also be noticeable: a reversal of Euclid's postulate would create logical contradictions in the geometry.†
Part 3contradictions = things that disagree with themselves; or (more rarely) acts of disagreeing
- From these hypotheses he deduces a series of theorems among which it's impossible to find any contradiction, and he constructs a geometry whose faultless logic is inferior in nothing to that of the Euclidian geometry.†
Part 3contradiction = something (typically a statement) that disagrees with itself; or (more rarely) the act of disagreeing
- Thus by his failure to find any contradictions he proves that the fifth postulate is irreducible to simpler axioms.†
Part 3contradictions = things that disagree with themselves; or (more rarely) acts of disagreeing
- We now had two contradictory visions of unshakable scientific truth, true for all men of all ages, regardless of their individual preferences.†
Part 3contradictory = in disagreement
- If there is no basis for distinguishing between them, then you have a total mathematics which admits logical contradictions.†
Part 3contradictions = things that disagree with themselves; or (more rarely) acts of disagreeing
- But a mathematics that admits internal logical contradictions is no mathematics at all.†
Part 3
- And of course once that door was opened one could hardly expect the number of contradictory systems of unshakable scientific truth to be limited to two.†
Part 3contradictory = in disagreement
- Again there is no internal contradiction, only an inconsistency with both Lobachevskian and Euclidian geometries.†
Part 3contradiction = something (typically a statement) that disagrees with itself; or (more rarely) the act of disagreeing
- Poincaré concluded that the axioms of geometry are conventions, our choice among all possible conventions is guided by experimental facts, but it remains free and is limited only by the necessity of avoiding all contradiction.†
Part 3
- Great Universities proceeded in a Hegelian fashion and any school which could not accept a thesis contradicting its fundamental tenets was in a rut.†
Part 4contradicting = disagreeing
- There is no contradiction.†
Part 4contradiction = something (typically a statement) that disagrees with itself; or (more rarely) the act of disagreeing
Definition:
disagree
in various senses, including:
- to say something is not true -- as in "She contradicted his testimony."
- to say something else is true when both can't be true -- as in "I don't believe her. She contradicted herself as she told us what happened."
- to be in conflict with -- as in "Her assertions contradict accepted scientific principles."