Re: Fitch's paradox and OWA
Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2009 01:18:18 -0700
Message-ID: <j7Z_m.1$ZB2.0_at_newsfe13.iad>
Bob Badour wrote:
> Nam Nguyen wrote:
>
>> Daryl McCullough wrote: >> >>> Marshall says... >>> >>>> I believe Nam is roughly of the opinion that if we can't know which >>>> one of {true, false} a sentence is, then we have no basis for saying >>>> it must be one or the other. >>> >>> But typically, for some statements such as "The Greek philosopher >>> Plato was left-handed" I don't know whether the statement is true >>> or not, and I also don't know whether anyone else knows whether it >>> is true or not, and I don't know whether it is *possible*, at this >>> late date, to find out whether it is true or not. >> >>> But surely, it's either true or false, right? >> >> No. Not surely. Since by our assumption here is nobody would know about >> his handed-ness, his nervous system to both arms might not have >> functioned >> at all to begin with and hence whether or not he was left-handed is moot >> and is not-truth assignable. As well, there are people are strong equally >> on both arms and therefore handed-ness is not applicable to them.
>
> The term is ambidextrous and ambidextrous is not left-handed so the
> predicate would be false if that were the case.
The _analogy_ was under the assumption that we'd logically live under a binary world where the negation of "left-handed" is "right-handed". I don't think we were arguing about precise meanings of biological/physiological matters.
My point still stands: if it's _impossible_ (as opposed to just being difficult) to assign truth values to a formula then the formula is neither true nor false, which means that collectively the naturals isn't a _complete_ model of Q or its extensions.
>
> It doesn't get tricky until handedness is equally strong in both arms
> but not for the same things like a person who writes left-handed but
> shoots right-handed etc.
>
Received on Thu Dec 31 2009 - 09:18:18 CET