False Opposition: five enigmas for the interpreter

Abstract

Interpreting a philosophical text means trying to decipher its meaning, identify its theses and isolate its arguments. Developing a philosophical text, on the other hand, consists in selecting certain fundamental ideas, valuable but in need of refinement, and to obtain its better formulation. Lógica Viva, the most important philosophical work of Vaz Ferreira, has deserved diverse interpretations and developments. In particular, this has happened with his chapter on false opposition. The main objective of this note is to recognize five enigmas in this chapter, relevant to an interpretation and decisive for certain developments. Expressed in the form of questions, these enigmas could be stated as follows: how to understand opposition in this context? What is the role that exemplification plays in the characterization of fallacies? How relevant are the literal and non-literal dimensions to understand them? What is the "bad argument" that is considered “false opposition”? In which ways are they wrong and in which ways are they convincing this paralogism? It also uses a model of argument analysis (called M), inspired by the ideas of Vaz Ferreira, in order to show how its use supports, on one hand, an explicit treatment of these enigmas and, on the other, challenged by these, maybe suggests interesting lines of interpretation and/or development. These pages also intend to illustrate certain relationships between both activities.