The Logical Equivalence of "And" and "But"

And a question about "studies"

The extremely common Greek conjunction “δὲ” (“de”) can be translated as “and” or “but.” This struck me as weird at first, since we think of those conjunctions as having opposite effects, but between Greek and a Logic course I took in college, I realized that, logically, the two words are equivalent.

You can say “I walk to work, and I drive to church” and the content is equivalent to “I walk to work, but I drive to church.” That’s clear enough: we can tell that the first is mentioning two typical modes of getting about, while the latter is really highlighting that distinction. But that gentle “highlighting” is all the word choice accomplishes semantically. At the end of the day, both sentences communicate the following content:

1. I walk to work

2. I drive to church

The one is a true fact. The other is also a true fact.

Now, having said this, I want to be clear that I am not mechanically denying rhetorical emphasis. I actually spend a lot of my time thinking about stylistic subtleties. The semantic content of “A is true. B is true.” is not the end of the story when you join A and B with one conjunction or another. And it’s actually interesting, reading Greek, if you’re translating in your head, how the one word “de” can feel wrong in one context or another when translated as one of the words, but right as the other. 1 Corinthians 7:4, for example, sees Paul sandwich “de” between a word that means “likewise” and another conjunction that means “and” or “also,” so “but” would feel pretty totally out of place.

But what interested me about this is that the rhetorical emphasis is the clear thing to us. The less-obvious truth is that “and” and “but” logically communicate two true facts. And, in turn, I think that after grasping this does the weight of the framing, the emphasis, the implications that “A is the important fact here” or “B is true, which might surprise you since A is true too” seem to come into more distinct focus after recognizing that the bare semantic equivalence.

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On an altogether different topic: in the New York Times “The Morning” email today, which I cannot stop myself from hate-reading, both for reasons of feeling informed and for reminding myself that there are lots of people in the world who are thinking wrong things, David Leonhardt raised the question of America’s outlier status among rich nations when it came to gun homicide rates. He said, “Why is the U.S. such an outlier? The main reasons, studies suggest, are the sheer number of guns in this country and the loose laws about obtaining and using them.”

But I’ve become increasingly watchful of this word, “studies,” and I followed the link here. I didn’t read the entire study, but I did read the Introduction and Conclusions and skim much of the middle. I could not find, for the life of me, this “the sheer number of guns in this country” culprit that Leonhardt identified. Is it just his inference from the study’s reference to various gun laws that amount to how much easier it is here to obtain guns than in other countries (all while remaining significantly harder than getting your hands on a book)? I’m genuinely at a loss, and growing more skeptical by the day about journalists who cite “studies,” even if they link to them, for some narrative-buttressing point. As ever, I am all to pleased to be corrected, so if any revelatory passage from the study gets quoted in the comments I would be grateful. And I doubt it exists. I mean, “But” I doubt it exists.