Why do logicians say this? Why do all statements have to be either true or false? Why not neither?
The liar paradox would be simple to resolve if you allowed that:
This sentence is false.
Is this statement true or false? It’s not a problem if you allow that it can be neither.
Then there’s statements like this:
I like icecream.
But what if I only sort of, kind of like icecream, but I’m not really sure? What if I don’t like it enough to confidently say “I like icecream”? Can a statement be “sort of” true?
Or what if it depends on the flavor of icecream? I could really, really love chocolate icecream but absolutely hate vanilla. So would the statement “I like icecream” be true or false?
I’m pretty sure they allow for nonsense, ambiguousness, lack of clarity and other factors that would make sentences neither true nor false, and they certainly are aware of paradoxical statements that are neither. Also there would be statements that are partially true.
That said, I Think the topic is interesting because I Think the set of statements that are neither (purely) true nor (purely) false is very large. In fact one could argue that all statements fall short, except perhaps analytical ones. We have incomplete, generally metaphorical terms for things. so there is something approximate and gestural even in the most accurate statements.
I Think so. Let’s say that actually you don’t really like the taste of ice Cream, but eating reminds you of those times at the Zoo with dad…
So it is both true and false. Or perhaps very true if one broadens this idea of liking to include associations. Or perhaps false.
Some logicians say that. And some say things that are similar to that, but that may be more or less fleshed out to better define what they mean.
I think they mean that, “if a certain set of conditions surround proposition x, then proposition x must be true or false relative to those conditions”.
It’s kinda like you might say, “Richard Nixon is the president”. And I might say, “Richard Nixon is not the president”.
Now at some point in time yours was true and now it’s false, and the same with mine. And it’s totally because of the condition of who was occupying the presidency at the time the proposition was uttered. Who’s in that seat is the kind of condition I was referring to above in my shitty definition of what people mean when they talk about things like non contradiction and excluded middle and all that.
Some people say that some kinda of propositions are indexical. As in, they are true at some times and false at others given variances in the world in which they are uttered. Like it the proposition “Richard Nixon is president” might not be true in this world, but if say for instance…we had an index of infinite possible worlds, then we’d rolodex through that bitch trying to find precisely the world in which the proposition does hold, and then we’d try and see if we could deduct stuff from it that contradicts things that are evident in this world and you know the whole scientific process as though we think we just discovered this sentence and we wanna know everything we can about it like what kinda world it lives in because we’ve already checked and Nixon isn’t the prez in this one.
And then there is the special kind of logical proposition like :I love strawberries, but I don’t eat them" , here this can be both true and false. I can love strawberries and not eat them, or eat them, and I can hate strawberries and still eat them or not.
If I say object A exists
and you say object A does not exist
and I show you evidence for object A’s existence
and instead of accepting the evidence,
you cop out by saying,
A must be “true for you” and “not true for me,”
whereas I would say:
something can’t be “true and not true,
it either exists or it doesn’t,”
which is just another way of
reminding you that you have switched from
a discussion about the objective into the
realm of the subjective
not that there’s anything wrong with it,
but when people discuss assertions
it should be established which plane is
being discussed, external, internal, objective, subjective.
people who say “it may not be true for you but it’s true for me”
are simply moving the goalpost or fighting unfair.
they are not asserting that x and not can share the same plane.
what they are instead doing is switching the plane altogether without
warning, and rendering the argument nonsensical.
i love when someone losing tries to talk about something else r
We CAN talk about diff planes if you want, but that’s NOT what we were just discussing.
see how they run like pigs from a gun see how they snide…
It may not be true for you, but it’s true for me.
should be modified to say
It may not be true in reality, but I need it to be true for me subjectively
or
It’s totally NOT true, but I’d like to willingly enter a mental state where I can experience it as true
or its a pile of bullshit, but I want to roll around in it, smear it on my face and make a hat with it and release a scat film.
so next time some little bitchtoast square bag gives you this “true for me true for you” playground trope
just tell them it’s true for them to want to roll around in scat and film, you want to roll around in bullshit.
Some might, but I’ve studied logic enough (or should I say logicians) to know that the assumption that statements are either true or false is a common part of the practice. I believe it comes from the law of excluded middle.
Usually, we would say the entire statement is false in these cases. If you’ve got two simple statement conjoined with and: “I love strawberries” and “I don’t eat them,” and one of them is false, the whole conjunction is false–at least, that’s the rule in the practice of logic.
Okay, Gamer, Okay–calm down. The whole relativistic truth bit is no more self-contradictory than the indexicals that smears pointed out. Saying “It’s true for me but not true for you” is like saying “Nixon was president in 1969 but not in 1979”.
It’s difficult to conceive a state of being where these pairs of opposites do not exist at all. Thought tends to move between these pair of opposites. We’ve accepted it as natural. But is it? Yet, that’s what we are. Since we are not different from this movement of thought, questioning it places our existence at stake. It’s simply mechanical in its nature – machine like – it’s not what you are.
So the astronauts is talking to his wife, both extremely romantic people. He just Went on a trip to the moon, or better Mars, reached some fairly high speeds on the way there and back. She says’ Oh, my love, it was so horrible. We were apart 2 years, 27 Days, 6 hours, ten minutes and 3 seconds.’ He says, ‘We were apart…’ and gives a different, slightly shorter time. naturally both have the highest quality watches.
Well, keep in mind, logic is a tradition that goes back 2300 years (roughly). They believed a lot of odd things back then. Logic doesn’t seem to want to change much–probably because of how closely couple with mathematics it is. This dichotomy of true/false with statements can be seen in the writings of the early Wittgenstein (I think the later Wittgenstein would have agreed with us).
I’ve been muddling the issue and I can see how one can demand clear definitions/scope of the terms as a way to push statement towards this digital nature.
Birds fly.
Does this mean all birds or some birds?
IOW if we are allowed to clarify until satisfied, we can certainly assign truth or falsity to more statements.
I keep thinking of Quantum mechanics, also, where ‘things’ are in more that one Place at the same time.
I also wonder what we do with many statements some of whose terms are dead metaphors? Is a metaphor true?
I Think part of the problem I have with this is that is assumes a container/conduit theory of language, I Think. But the truth of statements has to do with what happens when humans read them. Sentences elicit stuff. And so we can speak of the truth of sentences with dead and other metaphors, even though, literally, they are simply not correct. they present good models, perhaps, or not.
It’s worth noting that not all statements in the linguistic sense are statements in the logical sense. Well-formed propositions are a small fraction of possible meaningful utterances.
Russell did a lot of work in decomposing statements to clarify their logical status - famously for untangling the truth-value of “the king of France is bald”, where there is no referent. While it’s a meaningful statement, it decomposes to “There exists an X such that X is the king of France -and- X is bald” - hence false.
“I like ice-cream” is simply inadequate for analysis. In logical language, you’d have to specify whether there exists an ice-cream X such that you like X, or whether it’s true for all X. It’s an utterance, but not yet a logical proposition.
There’s also the option that propositions that are neither true nor false are meaningless - the liar paradox, for example. Or, according to logical positivists, everything that isn’t either tautologically or empirically verifiable to be true or false.
I’m with Moreno in general, though - logic is a useful check that a formal argument is consistent, but it’s not a path to enlightenment in any form. Most utterances, even in philosophy, are speech acts rather than logical propositions. Even early Wittgenstein, for all his apparent love of logic, advises you to throw away the ladder once you have climbed it.
To real logicians, there are rational statements and irrational statements.
An irrational statement is not necessarily true or false, it merely serves no purpose concerning clarity.
Rational statements are the only ones that are necessarily either true or false (assuming everything to have been define properly).
Which ends up meaning that a rational statement needs a user manual. That statements are never sufficient unto themselves. And then statements in the user manual must also be defined, scope and context explained and so on.
Take two statements:
Practice makes perfect.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
I think there is some truth to both of these. I don’t think either is true or false in a digital pure way. And they can be seen as contradicting each other.