When I first introduced the term "The Pentastring", I used it as a name not an adjective. — TonesInDeepFreeze
("The Pentastring" is a name for the expression "This string has five words".) — TonesInDeepFreeze
"London" is a city. (false - "London" is a word, not a city) — TonesInDeepFreeze
I said that The Pentastring is "This string has five words". — TonesInDeepFreeze
Going back to your 3 possibilities, this is the form of your Possibility 3. So as I read this, you consider "This sentence has five words" to be true under your Possibility 3. Am I getting this right? — EricH
To isolate the key point: — TonesInDeepFreeze
Einstein's famous formula is "E=MC^2". — TonesInDeepFreeze
The expression "The Pentastring" refers to the expression "This string has five words". — TonesInDeepFreeze
The Pentastring is "This string has five words." — TonesInDeepFreeze
"London" is a city. (false - "London" is a word, not a city) — TonesInDeepFreeze
Notice that there you left out that the Pentastring is "This string has five words". — TonesInDeepFreeze
"London" is a city. (false - "London" is a word, not a city) — TonesInDeepFreeze
Possibility two
It could be referring to itself. In this case, the sentence"this sentence is false""this sentence has five words" means that the expression "this sentence"is falsehas five words.But this is meaningless, and is similar to saying "this house" is false.. This is meaningful but false ("this sentence" has two words.).........................So AFAICT the Pentastring is meaningful in all 3 of your possibilities. Yes this is a minor point, but I wanted to clear it up. — EricH
Perhaps you were in a hurry when you responded, but I wasn't talking about the Liar Statement, I was talking about Tones' counter example "The sentence has five words." So in all 3 of your scenarios "This sentence has five words" appears to be meaningful. — EricH
Now if I'm following from your last reply to Tones you seem to be acknowledging this - but you are claiming that because "This sentence has five words" asserts a situation in the real world then it is no longer self referential. Am I following you correctly? — EricH
If you skip my main argument, then we won't get anywhere. — TonesInDeepFreeze
At least at first blush, "The string has five words" seems syntactic. A noun phrase, "This string" followed by a predicate, "has five words". — TonesInDeepFreeze
So you need to demonstrate that it is meaningless. But meanwhile, perhaps see if there is an error in the reasoning I gave for why we may take it to be meaningful. That reasoning could be wrong, but if it is, then I'd be interested to know how. — TonesInDeepFreeze
"This string has five words" asserts that "This string has five words" has five words. That seems meaningful. — TonesInDeepFreeze
So it seems "This string has five words" is a sentence as it fulfills the two requirements: syntactical and meaningful. — TonesInDeepFreeze
And "This string has five words" is true if "This string has five words" has five words, which it does; so "This string has five words" seems to be true. So, "This string has five words" seems to be true sentence. — TonesInDeepFreeze
Suppose we define 'the Pentastring' as the "This string has five words". — TonesInDeepFreeze
So, we have a subject from the world, viz. the Pentastring. — TonesInDeepFreeze
So, "The Pentastring has five words" is meaningful. — TonesInDeepFreeze
To determine whether the Pentastring is true, we determine whether the Pentastring has five words. — TonesInDeepFreeze
In "This string has five words", 'this string' refers to the Pentastring, which is in the world. — TonesInDeepFreeze
And "This string has five words" is equivalent with "The Pentastring has five words", in the sense that each is true if and only if the Pentastring has five words. So, "This string has five words" is meaningful. — TonesInDeepFreeze
To determine whether the Pentastring is true, we determine whether the Pentastring has five words. — TonesInDeepFreeze
which is to determine whether "This string has five words" has five words. — TonesInDeepFreeze
To determine whether "This string has five words" is true, we determine whether "This string has five words" has five words. The determination of the truth value of the Pentastring is exactly the determination of the truth value of "This string has five words". — TonesInDeepFreeze
If I'm following this, you stated that all self referential statements are meaningless. Tones disagrees with that and offers the counter example "This sentence has five words". I could be mistaken (happens on a regular basis) but it seems that this is meaningful under all three of your possibilities. — EricH
"London" has six letters. The word is spoken about. London is populous. The word is used to refer to the city not to the word. It should be easy to see: London is a city. (true).................."London" is a city. (false - "London" is a word, not a city) — TonesInDeepFreeze
The use/mention distinction (as it has come to be called) is of particular relevance in the theory of definitions. For when we give the definition of a term, we mention the term, we do not use it. For example, the term, "pain", is defined, but pain itself is not defined. We define only terms, never their referents.
The video that was mentioned argues erroneously by conflating "refers to" with "equals". — TonesInDeepFreeze
I would say just mention not "mention" — TonesInDeepFreeze
"Big Ben" has two words. "the bell inside the clock tower" has six words. So "Big Ben" is not "the bell inside the clock tower". — TonesInDeepFreeze
"Big Ben" and "the bell inside the clock tower" are not the same expression — TonesInDeepFreeze
The teacher writes on the blackboard, "Caesar was a Roman emperor". A student writes in her notebook, "Caesar was a Roman emperor". The physical inscription on the blackboard is made of chalk. The physical inscription in the notebook is made of pencil lead. There are two inscriptions. But there is only one sentence involved. — TonesInDeepFreeze
That is also not a sentence — Lionino
That is not a sentence though. — Lionino
The use-mention distinction — TonesInDeepFreeze
"This string" and "This string has five words" are interchangeable. (False) — TonesInDeepFreeze
And now I see that you have a serious misunderstanding of how quotation marks work. Just as with the video that is you inspiration, you don't understand use-mention as you flagrantly fail to use quotation marks correctly. — TonesInDeepFreeze
The physical inscription on the blackboard is made of chalk. The physical inscription in the notebook is made of pencil lead. There are two inscriptions. But there is only one sentence involved. — TonesInDeepFreeze
The ball is in your court to support that claim — TonesInDeepFreeze
The glaring sophistry in that video is the claim that "this sentence" equals "this sentence is false." — TonesInDeepFreeze
Wrong. It's referring to the sentence "this sentence has ten words", which is to say that it is referring to "this sentence has ten words". — TonesInDeepFreeze
You skipped my argument, for the second time (as now revised to use 'stirng' instead of 'sentence'): Suppose we define 'the Pentastring' as the "This string has five words". So, we have a subject from the world, viz. the Pentastring. So, "The Pentastring has five words" is meaningful. — TonesInDeepFreeze
'This string has five words' Is that a sentence? — TonesInDeepFreeze
"This string has five words" asserts that "This string has five words" has five words. That seems meaningful. — TonesInDeepFreeze
"This string has five words".................'has five words' corresponds with the property of a string having five words, which is something that I observe some strings to have. — TonesInDeepFreeze
But is it the case that all self-referential sentences are meaningless? — TonesInDeepFreeze
a word, clause, or phrase or a group of clauses or phrases forming a syntactic unit which expresses an assertion, a question, a command, a wish, an exclamation, or the performance of an action, that in writing usually begins with a capital letter and concludes with appropriate end punctuation, and that in speaking is distinguished by characteristic patterns of stress, pitch, and pauses
"This sentence has five words" has five words. The meaning of the sentence is that the predicate (has five words) holds for the subject ("This sentence has five words"); and its truth value is 'true'. — TonesInDeepFreeze
It's not the case that in general self-reference using the pronoun 'this' is meaningless: "This Guy's In Love With You" — TonesInDeepFreeze
It's not the case that a sentence referencing a sentence is meaningless: — TonesInDeepFreeze
So, why would "This sentence has five words" be meaningless? — TonesInDeepFreeze
It would help to have an explanation of what you mean by 'the world'. — TonesInDeepFreeze
it seems your argument should allow that sentences are in "the world". I surmise you would agree — TonesInDeepFreeze
There is quite a lot of stage setting that would occur to understand if such an individual had such a rule. — Richard B
I don't whole hog buy into your general view about language, but for the sake of argument, suppose these matters are observer dependent. May not another observer determine that it is a statement? — TonesInDeepFreeze
So I don't trust that the very brief synopsis does justice to Kripke's view. — TonesInDeepFreeze
Can I make a rule for myself, privately? Here "privately" means "not subject to enforcement by anything else (human or otherwise)". In other words, is it possible for the correct application of my rule to be solely determined by my application of it? In yet other words, if I make my rule and determine what is the correct application of it, is it meaningful to say that I am bound by it? — Ludwig V
In An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume proposed that the origin of our knowledge of necessary connections arises out of observation of the constant conjunction of certain impressions across many instances, so that causation is merely constant conjunction—after observing the constant conjunction between two events A and B for a duration of time, we become convinced that A causes B. However, this position raises problems, as it seems that certain kinds of constant conjunction are merely accidental and cannot be equated with causation.
This sentence has five words. Not true? — TonesInDeepFreeze
I think the word ‘declarative’ is important; a statement declares a fact; it does not in addition instantiate that fact to a given truth value. — Devans99
Kripke proposes a solution in the following manner. If a statement's truth value is ultimately tied up in some evaluable fact about the world, that statement is "grounded". If not, that statement is "ungrounded". Ungrounded statements do not have a truth value. Liar statements and liar-like statements are ungrounded, and therefore have no truth value.
AC Grayling: "One need not take as one's target so radical a form of the thesis to show that cognitive relativism is unacceptable, however."
Hey you got it! — flannel jesus
So, whose door is White? And what medium does the Kenyan use for his art? — flannel jesus
Then I asked yesterday if A was ambiguous or just contradictory. The debate remains. — javi2541997
Is it possible to formulate it using first-order logic? — javi2541997
Who is the liar? — javi2541997
Yes, the oracle may perfectly well know that thwarter will do the opposite of what he predicts, but he has committed to his prediction already. It will be too late already. — Tarskian
In fact, there is no app that can tell minute by minute what even any other app will be doing. — Tarskian
So in a way, negative self reference in my opinion is a very essential building block for logic. — ssu
Witt clearly is offering this up as an example of an atomic proposition, not a proposition. He starts by saying that he believed that one needed to introduce numbers into atomic propositions, and that he would provide an example of what he means, which was the square example with [6-9, 3-8] R as the elementary proposition: — 013zen
He goes on to describe how one might analyze the proposition: "The square is red" into the elementary propsition: " [6-9, 3--8] R " — 013zen
If Witt truly thought that "X is red" was an elementary proposition, why would he attempt to construct an analysis into " [6-9, 3--8] R " in Some Remarks on Logical Form? — 013zen
(the colour exclusion problem)...........I've never heard the position that this supposed problem was one of if not the reason why Witt wrote the PI. — 013zen
Sraffa’s Impact on Wittgenstein - Matthias Unterhuber, Salzburg, Austria
Ramsey’s criticism (1923) of the Tractatus (Wittgenstein 1922/1933) is essential for the change from Wittgenstein’s earlier to his later philosophy (Jacquette 1998). Ramsey’s influence on Wittgenstein is very easily traceable, as Ramsey (1923) published his criticism of the Tractatus and Wittgenstein modified the approach of the Tractatus to account for the criticism and published his response in Some Remarks on Logical Form (Wittgenstein, 1929). He, however, eventually noticed that his modified approach did not solve the problem suggested by Ramsey.
The criticism of Ramsey amounts to the fact that Wittgenstein could not explain a statement he accepted: that a “point in the visual field cannot be both red and blue” (Ramsey 1923, p. 473). According to the Tractatus “the only necessity is that of tautology, the only impossibility that of contradiction” (p. 473). The present contradiction, however, is attributable rather to properties of space, time and matter and is not accounted for by the general form of proposition which according to the Tractatus determines all and only genuine propositions. Wittgenstein eventually gave up the thesis that there is a general form of proposition and resumed a family resemblance approach which does not provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the distinction of meaningful and senseless propositions.
SEP - Frank Ramsey
Ramsey, as we saw in the previous section, was still an undergraduate when, aged 19, he completed a translation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein 1922). Alas, C. K. Ogden got all the credit and it has been known since as the ‘Ogden translation’. Ramsey’s translation is usually considered to be superseded by the Pears-McGuinness translation (1961), but one should not lose sight of the fact that it was carefully scrutinized by Wittgenstein, who gave it his seal of approval. Ramsey then wrote a searching review of the Tractatus (1923) in which he raised many serious objections (Methven 2015, chapter 4) (Sullivan 2005). One such objections is the ‘colour-exclusion problem’ (1923, 473), against Wittgenstein’s claim in 6.3751 that it is “logically impossible” that a point in the visual field be both red and blue. This claim was linked to the requirement that elementary propositions be logically independent (otherwise, the analysis of the proposition would not be completed), a pillar of the Tractatus. Wittgenstein’s recognition in 1929 that he could not sustain his claim (Wittgenstein 1929), probably under pressure at that stage from discussions with Ramsey, was to provoke the downfall of the Tractatus.
Wittgenstein and the colour incompatibility problem - Dale Jacquette
What induced Wittgenstein to repudiate the logical atomism
I want to argue that Wittgenstein's abandonment of logical atomism and the development of his later philosophy was in large part the result of Ramsey's criticism of the Tractatus treatment of the color incompatibility problem, the problem of the apparent nonlogical impossibility of different colors occurring in a single place at the very same time.
Wittgenstein writes in Philosophical Grammar - "The proposition 'this place is now red' (or 'this circle is now red') can be called an elementary proposition if this means that it is neither a truth function of other propositions nor defined as such...But from 'a is now red' there follows 'a is now not green' and so elementary propositions in this sense aren't independent of each other like the elementary propositions in the calculus I once described - a calculus to which, misled as I was by a false notion of reduction, I thought that the whole use of propositions must be reducible".
An elementary proposition is not "The car is red". This is a proposition capable of being true or false and depending on its veracity or falsity we can infer other propositions from it. — 013zen