Is Graham Priest’s Dialetheism a Logic of Quantum Mechanics?

Paul Austin Murphy
7 min readJul 13, 2022

Graham Priest tells us that in certain quantum-mechanical experiments “the law of excluded middle tells us that [an atom, particle, etc.] is one or the other”. He also claims that quantum mechanics (or at least its interpretations) suggests otherwise.

It’s tempting to think that the nature of quantum mechanics is the primary reason why the philosopher and logician Graham Priest (1948-) defends, accepts and uses dialetheic logic (or dialetheism generally).¹ Indeed, he mentions quantum mechanics (QM) a few times in various papers and in interviews.

It can now be asked if his views have any impact on the “classical world” or macro-reality (or, at the least, the world as it’s perceived and/or experienced). Perhaps, if dialetheic logic (DL) is truly dependent on the findings of quantum mechanics, it can also be asked if dialetheism is applicable to the “classical world” at all. Of course I may be barking up the wrong tree here. That is, why assume that this macro-world/micro-world opposition has any relevance to dialetheic logic?²

In any case, what has Priest got to say about what he calls “[u]nobservable realms”? (A term which needn’t only refer to the quantum world; but also to historical events, events beyond our galaxy, numbers/abstract objects, etc.) Take this passage from Priest:

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