Can you give an example in the Pali canon where the Buddha uses LEM?

[josephzizys]

@yeshe.tenley

I don’t think I have! Can you link it? I’d be interested for sure. I’ll wait to read your thread to try and understand your point, but at the outset I’ll say that I found Priest’s work very illuminating and logically consistent. Where I part with Priest is I don’t think the Buddha was adopting the 4-valued logic himself - or a 4+N valued logic as Priest would have it - but rather only using the 4-valued logical premise to reject his interlocutors arguments.

TO BE OR NOT TO BE, the undeclared points in the 4 principle Nikayas:

TO BE OR NOT TO BE (or both, or neither) The undeclared points in the 4 principle Nikayas. The undeclared points are a number of questions, typically ten, but sometimes as few as two, as at SN44.10, and sometimes as many as 11, as at AN10.95, and often 4, as at SN12.17. This essay focuses on the standard set of ten, and looks at the differing explanations given for the Buddha’s silence in the different suttas. We first see the undeclared points introduced at DN1 and DN2, where they are used to…

I think Priest is interesting, and first degre entailment is interesting, I just think theres no reason to believe that anything other than “common sense logic” was at play in the undeclared points, they seem to be pre-buddhist, in DN2 they are associated with Sañjaya Belaṭṭhiputta and cover a range of different questions, none of which seem to me to require any other truth values than true or flase, at least if the 3rd and 4th options, where they occur, are treated merologically, which seems to me to agin be perfectly commonsensical.