Falsehood Value (Was: Grice's "Truth Value"

-- by JLS
----- for the GC.

JONES, "Strand 5", this blog:

"Grice talks of the essential characteristic of propositions
as having a truth value, but this is not enough, they need
to have truth conditions. It's not enough for a proposition
to have a truth value, it must have one in every possible
situation."

Hear, hear.

I think the best way to deal with this is actually assume the position in Jones's pdf page for truth and falsity and start using

"T" for truth

and

the inverted T for falsehood.

As per

http://www.rbjones.com/rbjpub/logic/log050.htm

(Apparently, I am not able to copy the symbol here and can't find it online! -- but you'll get my drift.

For it's the same 'stroke', only inverted.

(The American idea of 'diff'rent strokes' is perhaps rhetorical? -- Yes, 'folks' are implicated).

Jones:

"Grice talks of the essential characteristic of propositions
as having a truth value, but this is not enough, they need
to have truth conditions. It's not enough for a proposition
to have a truth value, it must have one in every possible
situation."

So, to repeat

Tp -- p is true

INVERTED-Tp -- p is false.

What about truth-conditions?

The good thing about 'truth-conditions' over 'true' is that 'Columbus discovered Mars, not America" has a truth-condition, and a falsehood value. Philosophers, such as Jones or I, find THIS important.

"Grice talks of the essential characteristic of propositions
as having a truth value, but this is not enough, they need
to have truth conditions. It's not enough for a proposition
to have a truth value, it must have one in every possible
situation."

This may relate to Grice's examples (almost, WoW:ii)

Women are not women.
War is not war.

These Carnap and Bar-Hillel dubbed, "too informative to be true". I suppose their simile went over my head.

But the idea is that these get INVERTED-T all over the place. Yet they are MAXIMALLY informative.

Usually, people are better at truth-conditions than 'truth-values'. Knowing a language, Davidson claims, involves truth-conditions, not truth-values.

"It's 5 o'clock".

Surely the truth-value of that varies, and by the time it is "five o'clock" it's no longer ('five o'clock'). Yet, to tell the time is one of the first things kids (I use that metaphorically) learn to use.

A different case is with 'kid' to mean 'child'.

Grice wants to say it's a metaphor, and thus a conversational implicature ("My kids were in the stable"). "My kids were not really the offspring of a goat" either involves a 'transcategorial mistake' (Grice, WoW:ii 'metaphor') or the speaker is being metaphorical.

But Davidson objected: "The whole point of saying that your kids are in the stable is that you are TREATING your children as if ('als ob') they were kids. I cannot see the point of wanting to save the speaker's idiotic attempt at a metaphor by rationalising, as Grice does, into an 'implicature'. I agree.

That's why I seldom use a metaphor.

Jones, however, who knows, does. This Friday I'm giving a talk which I called "Polione at the stake". Jones uses 'at stake' ("Strand 5", this blog). It seems to me that 'stake' can be metaphorical. NOT in the case of Polione who was actually burned (We are seeing Bellini's "Norma" soon).

Lakoff was irriated by that. While he attended Grice's lectures in 1967, the William James, and went on to write "Conversational Postulates" in Cole/Morgan (along with Grice 1975), he never took Grice on metaphor too seriously.

I had to read that rather boring book (the boring bits are by Johnson) by Lakoff, "Metaphors we live by" -- my PhD thesis advisor, E. A. Rabossi, was giving a seminar on them -- and there's only one mean reference to the author of "Meaning"!

But Grice is never clear as to 'metaphor'. He surely wants to say that NO ambiguity is involved.

For Lakoff, everything is metaphorical.

"Curly is between Moe and Larry"

'between'?

Grice wants to say that whether ("archival material" by Chapman) this refers to 'the spatial location' or 'some order of merit', is immaterial: "between" does not TRANSMOGRIFY its sense. The truth-conditions are unique (uniguity).