No Doubt About It...

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Casting around for ideas for tonight's scribble I came across a YouTube on a subject I've never really given much thought to, despite being aware of it: ternary logic, proposed in the early 20th Century by Jan Łukasiewicz, pictured; the Polish logician and philosopher for whom the term 'Polish Logic Notation' was coined. Ternary logic, as the video explains, is founded on a base three counting system differing from binary logic in that it has a third state, rather than simply ones and zeroes, or logical true or false states. The third state is indeterminate, or 'unknown', and the logical states are given as [-1=>FALSE, 0=>UNKNOWN, 1=>TRUE]: the UNKNOWN being an undefined or NULL condition: a smoking gun, with no hard logical truth or falsity one way or the other.

Weirdly, I've just walked into the sitting room and found Jane watching a documentary about the growing unease over the Lucy Letby conviction(s) for child murder, which was at a point where someone stated that the prosecution knew full well, but ran with the knowledge throughout the trial despite the fact that, the bulk of the evidence against Letby was circumstantial. This echoes the treatment of Christopher Jefferies, accused of the 2010 murder of Joanna Yates, and his subsequent public pillorying by the press in 2010/11.

It strikes me that wholly circumstantial evidence has to fall under the UNKNOWN branch of the logic: there is no TRUE or FALSE, and therefore no concrete determination one way or the other can logically be made. In decades past, Letby would already be dead at the hand of the state executioner, on a case made up of largely UNKNOWN evidence, its circumstantiality and ternary nature squeezed uncomfortably and unfortunately into a binary EITHER/OR logical statement. Life is definitely greyer than that polarisational logic, methinks...

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