Yahoo! News - Top Stories Photos - AP. More crushing of dissent.
(Update: Talk about a "climate of fear". Note I thought about that before Reynolds made the same connection. Though, I found that link on his site in the first place.)
As I go through my philosophy education I'm repeatedly surprised at the silly things philosophers have actually believed or argued about. Examples include behaviorism, logical positivism, that human language can and should be conformed to the principles of first order logic, materialism, and the following:
In my philosophy of science class today my professor brought up the "liar paradox"-type paradox of "This sentence is false". I didn't think anyone still got hung up on silly things like that, but my professor said that it's actually still an issue people argue about.
I'll put it this way: it makes as much sense to say "This sentence is true" as it does to say "This sentence is blue". Truth and falsehood simply don't apply to sentences, they apply to statements or propositions. This is a very simple category or type error and I'm astounded people make it. Further, the self-reference isn't a problem. It's perfectly sensible to say "This sentence is in English" or "This sentence has five words".
To elaborate a bit -- to say something is true or false you have to have a proposition. Before you get to the "is true" or "is false" in the sentence all you have at that point is "This sentence". There's no content there. It's like a pointer that points simply to itself. If you try to use it you just go in a circle, and there's no content there for the pointer to point to. In contrast, you can construct a perfectly good self-referential sentence that does contain some proposition, such as "That this sentence has eight words is true". Also note the linguistic structure: it has to contain a full sentence within itself to give you some content to talk about. There may be other self-referential sentences that try to make truth claims about themselves and make sense that don't have this form. I'd be interested if anyone can come up with one.
I've challenged my professor to come back to me with something that causes my view to get me into some paradox. I'll be interested to see if he can come up with anything. Or, if anyone philosophically trained wants to weigh in and tell me why I'm going wrong or elaborate on why people get hung up on a thing such as this I'd appreciate it.
Thursday, September 16, 2004
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