This post is a continuation of the line of thought in Emptiness, Self-Reference, and Assertibility, a post from the old blog which in due course will be revised and deposited here. There you will find a brief explanation of anatta. Retortion was explained in recent posts. See the contents of the Retortion category. What happens when we apply retortion to the anatta doctrine? Consider the unrestricted anatta thesis (unrestricted in the sense that it applies to absolutely everything including nibbana)
1. All is empty.
Is the problem with (1) simply one of performative inconsistency? Or does the problem lie deeper, in logical inconsistency? Anyone who affirms (1) is involved in a performative inconsistency: the very act of affirming it presupposes that it has a definite affirmable content. The act of affirming (1) thus 'contradicts' the content of (1). So (1) succumbs to retortion. Retortion seems to show that it cannot be the case that all is empty. Some things must be non-empty, and one might expect that a Buddhist would hold that among these non-empty things are such fundamental truths of Buddhism as the truth of impermanence, the truth of suffering, and the truth of selflessness. After all, impermanence is not impermanent, and neither are suffering nor selflessness. Furthermore, how could the truths of suffering and selflessness be either suffering or selfless? The truth of suffering, or rather its appreciation, is supposed to be ameliorative of suffering, and the truth of 'no self' has a definite nature or content or self, besides also being conducive to release from suffering.
Despite the fact that (1) succumbs to retortion, might the unrestricted anatta thesis be true all the same? Might it be an unaffirmable truth? Are there any unaffirmable truths? One might respond: "Precisely because (1) is true, precisely because all is devoid of self-nature, you cannot affirm it; your inability to affirm it does not show it not to be true."
Now that is certainly a curious move, but not one that can be dismissed out of hand. So we have to think about it. Thinking about it, I find it not very good. For what (1) implies is that everything is empty or devoid of self-nature: every act of assertion, indeed every speech act, every content asserted, and every linguistic and other means used to encode or express propositional contents. The problem, therefore, is not just that the speech act of stating or asserting (1) is self-defeating, but that the propositional content asserted is inconsistent with this content's being true. This takes us beyond retortion to a deeper logical problem.
(1), then, is not merely performatively self-defeating; it is self-defeating in itself. (1) is in this respect different from
2. No statement is negative.
(2) succumbs to the retort that to state it is to falsify it. Nevertheless, there are merely possible worlds in which the proposition expressed by (2) is true, namely, worlds in which there are no statements and worlds in which there are statements but they are all affirmative. There are also times in the actual world, those times at which no being capable of making statements exists, when the proposition expressed by (2) is false. (1), however, expresses a proposition that is false in all possible worlds.
In sum, we don't need retortion to show that the unrestricted anatta thesis is false, and retortion cannot show this in any case since retortion merely delivers a negative result, an ad hominem result. In the case of (2), for example, retortion merely exposes the performative inconsistency into which anyone will fall if he tries to assert it; but it does not show that the negation of (2) — Some statement is affirmative — is true in itself.