Apples are not pipes or oranges

“Sam was chewing an apple thoughtfully. He had a pocket full of them: a parting present from Nob and Bob. ‘Apples for walking, and a pipe for sitting,’ he said. ‘But I reckon I’ll miss them both before long.'” Fellowship of the Ring,

 ‘To give your language an individual flavour, it must have woven into it the threads of an individual mythology. … The converse indeed is true, your language construction will breed a mythology’. JRR Tolkien

Continuing the topic of grammar.

 Both/And can't go against the Principle of Non-Contradiction.   This principle as stated by St Thomas is both metaphysical and logical:

Thomism’s metaphysical first principle of non-contradiction (PNC) reads, “Being cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect.” Its sister first principles are those of identity and excluded middle. Its logical form reads, “The same predicate cannot be affirmed and denied of the same subject.”

Oh, and by the way, the PNC is not made obsolete by quantam mechanics, or so it seems.   Superposition is considered a third state.   I suppose it's something like saying that because there are grey and brown things, or striped things, that doesn't mean that something can both be uniformly black and uniformly white at the same time.  

What follows is going to be me thinking through this issue, and it may well be done in bullet-points.

In computer logic, "and" includes or combines two (or more) possibilities, while "or" selects one and excludes the other.    B/A lends itself to a higher unity:   "apples" AND "oranges" can be combined as "edible things" "roughly circular organic things" "fruits" "things you can fit in a messenger bag" and so on.   E/O implies constraint -- maybe you can only eat one thing, or carry one thing; selecting one excludes the other.

That is logistic constraint, but there are other constraints that are to do with reality.   If I'm gathering fruit, bananas and mangos can exist with the apples and oranges, but lumps of coal and diamonds can't.   Pipes and apples are both things you can carry in your pocket, and miss when you don't have them, but apparently one thing is for walking and the other for sitting.

Humans spend a lot of mental energy synthesizing and distinguishing and categorizing; that is almost the power of thought itself, at least the active kind, along with the initial perceptions and memory, which are more passive but more fundamenta.

In John 6, Jesus has thoroughly confused all those around him.  In the first place, the people pose an either/or:

41 At this the Jews there began to grumble about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” 42 They said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I came down from heaven’?”

To them it is not possible that Jesus can be both from heaven AND the man they have seen grow up in the household of Joseph.     

Their next "either/or" concerns the bread part of Jesus's proposition:

52 Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

They are thinking "human" and "edible thing" are either/or, at least for normal people.  And in a certain respect, you can't blame them for being puzzled.    Peter is still puzzled when later, he proclaims his continued faith in his friend.

In fact, our Christian pondering on the meaning of Jesus's words from Peter's time on to today has shown the faithful how Jesus's words can be "both/and" -- how he can be the son of Mary and yet the Son of God sent from heaven; how we can eat his flesh without being cannibals; how his flesh can be the bread of life.  It's not that it becomes obvious, but it becomes something that though mysterious, does not contradict itself.    You get to the outside boundary of things understood, but what is beyond does not go against reason.  Again the PnC is in effect. 

Obviously, going back to thw Gospel, the great either/or of death and life broke down too in those same three years of history.

At the same time, some either/or sets were declaimed or reinforced pretty sharply during this time:

"You cannot serve both God and mammon."

You can't be both a sheep and a goat.   Or both wheat and tares.   Sure, sheep and goats are both livestock and wheat and tares are both things that grow in fields, but for the purposes of the analogy the distinction between the pairs is what counts.

A couple more things I want to point out before the end of this fragmented post:

"Both/ands" do not break down the identity of the smaller sets they are combining.  Apples and oranges don't get muddled into a generic combo fruit, Jesus remains Son of God, son of a Nazareth household, AND bread of life.  

The combo category has to be consistent beyond itself if it is going to be a true "both/and".  In other words, some animals are not more equal than others.    The fruit category can't exclude bananas or indeed, apparently, tomatoes.

Just saying some is an "either/or" or a "both/and" doesn't make it so.    In other words, we are talking about how things really are, not what the rule of law says (assuming that this doesn't coincide with reality).    I am particularly talking about theology here, because theology is above all things in accordance with Reality.   It's not something we make up as we go along, any more than logic is.   

If I hold that those orange thick-skinned fruits are now to be called apples, my diktat will not convince anyone that the two things are the same.    Even if everyone around me out of love or fear called them apples, there would probably have to be some operative distinctions -- "could I have one of those citrus apples? "