[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
Gael wrote:
lifticus wrote:
But truth claims can only be true or false.
All apples are red.
Even within the confines of a logical system, you are wrong.
Statements that presuppose false statements are neither true nor false. (Dan stopped beating his wife.)
Statements that contain contradictory self references are neither true nor false. (H is a member of H, where H is the set of all sets that do not contain themselves.)
When we exit the confines of a logical system and enter the real world, you are even more wrong.
Implicature. Is “Ann Coulter called John Edwards a faggot” a true statement? Google her quote.
Fuzzy sets. How many bites can an apple have removed from it before “This is an apple” becomes a false statement. Don’t tell me it depends how you define apple. Get real. Definitions in the real world are post hoc descriptive approximations of words that people come to understand without their use.
While you’re at it, look up the Gricean maxims, and discover how statements that would be evaluated to be true under classical logic, are not true at all by any sensible interpretation.
If a statement cannot be answered as either true or false it is not a truth claim.
Likewise, logic sets must be unambiguously defined or there is no possibility to judge truth claims as such.
Logic is easier to understand from a computer processors perspective. Everything is explicitly defined to it in terms of low and high voltage units. Linguistically, we can do the same thing, only much more efficiently.[/quote]
Let’s take it one thing at a time, shall we?
Start with this one:
H is a member of H, where H is the set of all sets that do not contain themselves.
True or false? There is no ambiguity here.