Good to see that philosophical education is finally starting to pay some real-world dividends.
But, if I follow, "the remaining 10%" might as well be "the remaining 339%", with no loss of truthfulness.
I'm not sure -- "the remaining 339%" seems to me to make the sentence incoherent, which (maybe? Dunno? Not a philosopher?) makes it hard to talk about its truth or falsity.
it is true that 90% of the congressional staffers John Kyl impregnates end up getting abortions, and also true that the remaining 10% of the congressional staffers John Kyl impregnates commit infanticide
In what sense is this statement true? I'm assuming that you're assuming that "the congressional staffers John Kyl impregnates" is an empty set, but wouldn't your statement therefore imply both that [.9][x]=[y] and [.1][x]=[z], where [y] /= [z] (because [y]="getting abortions" and [z]="commit infanticide"). If [x] is an empty set, both those equations can't be true, can they, unless [y]=[z]? (And if both equations can't be true, isn't your statement false?)
"[y]" doesn't equal "getting abortions". [y], if I understand your strange notation, is "90% of the staffers John Kyl impregnates". Of each of them we go on to say, they all got abortions. There are none of them, so this is true.
"[z]", similarly, is not "commit infanticide". [z] is 10% of the staffers John Kyl impregnates. Of each of them we go on to say, they all commit infanticide. Again, this is true.
[z] and [y] are in this case the same in number, that is, they have no elements.
You might say that y = the set of staffers impregnated by Kyl who get abortions while z = the set of staffers impregnated by Kyl who commit infanticide, but then y does equal z, since each is the empty set.
It still strikes me as so misleading as to be properly classified as a false statement (even if not technically logically false), rather than a true one. Surely philosophy has such a concept?
Yes, the concept is "misleading statement".
… or if you like the concept of the conversational implicature.
I can understand why you wouldn't say the statement was false, and if that had been your claim, I wouldn't have objected. I only object to going further and saying it is actually true. It's not actually true, it's simply not-false.
Answers.com is helpful here:
It is best to regard such a statement as neither right nor wrong, but meaningless. One good test (not universal, but useful) is to see whether the negation of the statement is true. A logically valid statement in most systems is either right or wrong; if it is right its negation is wrong and if it is wrong its negation is right.
Both your statement and its negation appear to be true, which seems like a good proxy for meaninglessness.
A brief excerpt from Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand:
...An arbitrary claim is one for which there is no evidence, either perceptual or conceptual. It is a brazen assertion, based neither on direct observation nor on any attempted logical inference therefrom.... The answer to all such statements, according to Objectivism, is: an arbitrary claim is automatically invalidated.
Well, ignoring the "90%" part and eliding issues of tense and aspect, the theory that validates the truth of the statement "the congressional staffers Kyl impregnates get abortions" requires construing it as the universally quantified claim (∀x)(x is a congressional staffer impregnated by Kyl → x gets an abortion), and the negation of that claim can be written as (∃x)(¬(CSIKx → Ax)), or (∃x)(¬(¬CSIKx ∨ Ax)), or (∃x)(CSIKx ∧ ¬Ax), which is false, not true, or at least, which I assume is false.
13: I'm not sure recourse to Objectivism is going to buy you much, here, urple=urple.
I'm not really sure why you posted 13, to be honest.
Maybe I'll cite that passage in a brief to a right-wing judge.
I'm not even close to following the notiation in 14, but it seems to be that one negation of (x is a congressional staffer impregnated by Kyl → x gets an abortion) is (x is a congressional staffer impregnated by Kyl → x does not get an abortion), which is true, or at least, which I assume is true.
I suspect it was just to wind you lot up, really.
I was looking for something marginally more authoritative than answers.com.
21: in that quest, I do believe you failed.
18: one negation ... is (x is a congressional staffer impregnated by Kyl → x does not get an abortion), which is true, or at least, which I assume is true.
Run that by me again? You say it's true that there's a congressional staffer impregnated by Kyl who did not get an abortion?
You say it's true that there's a congressional staffer impregnated by Kyl who did not get an abortion?
It's exactly as true as it is that there's a congressional staffer impregnated by Kyl who did get an abortion. Which was my point.
But what I actually said, or at least thought I was saying, was if x is a congressional staffer impregnated by Kyl, then it's true that x does not get an abortion.
It's exactly as true as it is that there's a congressional staffer impregnated by Kyl who did get an abortion.
Well, the orignal statement (reformulated in 14 without percentages) wasn't "there's a congressional staffer . . .", but rather "all the congressional staffers . . ."
Though it starts off badly by unnecessarily adding "inherently" to "false" when talking about the antecedents of vacuously true conditionals, Wikipedia seems pretty good on why you would want vacuously true statements to come out as true:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuous_truth
Also, this
if x is a congressional staffer impregnated by Kyl, then it's true that x does not get an abortion.
is true, but it's not the negation of the original statement.
26: oh, that's even better than the objectivism link. Although, I'm only seeing a good and convincing section entitled "Arguments against taking all vacuously true statements to be false", which I conceded in 11. The sections "Arguments for taking all vacuously true statements to be true" and "Arguments that only some vacuously true statements are true" seem both to have reasonable points, and the latter seems moreso.
Is 'not intended to be a factual statement' not a factual statement ?
I was expecting a comment about tense before 14.
OP paragraph 2 looks like a undergraduate's attempt at randomized trials. But I am not fully informed about all of this month's internet traditions.
To pile on (pro Nosflow & Bulgar), you don't want to mix up internal vs. external negation. The real (i.e. external) negation of the original statement is:
not (for all x( if x is a congressional staffer impregnated by John Kyl --> x got an abortion))
which is equivalent to:
there exists x (x is a congressional staffer impregnated by John Kyl & not (x got an abortion))
which is false, so the original claim is (vacuously) true.
All this aside, however, it's arguable that although such a statement presented in a satirical context happens to be true, it's still not governed by the norm of truth, intended to be true, etc. After all, most of those tweets are factually false statements, but because of the satirical context aren't governed by the norm according to which you should try not to make false statements.
(The above is intended to be governed by the norm of blog comments, where I will argue my position no matter how indefensible it may turn out to be on reflection.)
Is 'not intended to be a factual statement' not a factual statement ?
It is very likely true that Harry Frankfurt's death was too soon.
Because none of his staffers had yet committed infanticide?
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Go watch/listen to the new album by TV on the Radio. I could sing its praises all night (both as a collection of songs and as mostly great to amazing videos and interstitial bits), but I'll just say stick around for the reference to a "Peanuts-based LARPing community."
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Most vacuously true statements appear to me to be true (but vacuously so). For some reason the precision of the 90% and 10% claims here seemed to make the statement clearly not affirmatively true. I'm not really sure why; it doesn't make sense.
Kyl's statement (that 90% of Planned Parenthood's services are for abortions) was truly awesome, in any event, for the statement later issued by his office ("it was not intended to be a factual statement") was to mean that it was not intended to be a true-or-false statement, but that it was intended to be a metaphorical -- indeed, deeply hyperbolic -- statement. That is so clever! It was outside the realm of truth and falsity!
(/end obvious)
I guess on train-bound reflection the situation could be thought to be more complicated in this way:
Let's grant that universal quantification is not existentially committing, and let's also grant (much more contentiously) that the English sentence "all the congressional staffers impregnated by Kyl got an abortion" contains, ihr logischen Form nach, a universal quantification. Still, you might think that "90% of the congressional staffers impregnated by Kyl got an abortion" is more like "many of the …" than like "all of the …", and that "many" is, like "some", existentially committing. I could certainly persuaded about "many" (hell, I might have persuaded myself in writing this sentence), but I don't think it's true about "90%".
Then again, even if we allow that 90% isn't existentially committing, urple's complaint tha the negation of "90% of the …" is true seems valid; that does distinguish it from "all of the …". It is not obvious that we can push the "not" in "not: 90% of the congressional staffers impregnated by Kyl got abortions" any further inside, since it doesn't seem to be paraphrasable in any form susceptible to De Morgan's laws, but it does seem (pace Bulgur and One of Many) that it (the negated sentence) is true just when this sentence is true: "10+ε% of the congressional staffers impregnated by Kyl did not get an abortion", assuming, as presumably we are, that we're only talking about abortions following on pregnancies caused by Kyl and there's only one such pregnancy per impregnated staffer. But that sentence also isn't existentially committing, and is true. (Though that sentence isn't the logical negation of the given sentence.)
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Every now and then, a simple explanation can cause you to completely revise your understanding of a work of art or literature.
"The Giving Tree" always struck me as a creepy fable about a horrible boy and his companion, the tree, who was the boy's victim in a brutally abusive relationship.
Then I saw this item on the "Better Book Titles" blog. Now I know what Silverstein's book is actually about.
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39 seems to be something along the lines I was ineloquently grasping towards. I am not a professionally trained logician.
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Uh-oh.
I didn't watch, and this is probably mean, but it did make me smile.
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43: I couldn't bring myself to watch, but I read enough comments to learn that she used a food processor to sift her flour. I would subscribe to cable to watch a cooking show co-hosted by her and Sandra Lee.
she used a food processor to sift her flour
I ... would not have thought of that.
It's not as if the role of the sifter is to make the flour yet finer.
You wouldn't think so. It's really bad that I'm snickering, given that I'm not a baking sort myself.
If Megan had stated that in the olden days 1-2-3-4 cakes were actually 1-2-300-4 cakes, then blamed her calculator but asserted that her overall point was true, that would be the perfect video.
In her grandmother's era, there were no sticks of butter!
What's that, Lassie Wikipedia? You say that "In the United States, butter is usually produced in 4-ounce sticks, wrapped in waxed or foiled paper and sold four to a one-pound carton. This practice is believed to have originated in 1907, when Swift and Company began packaging butter in this manner for mass distribution"?
It wasn't intended to be a factual statement, redfox.
Speaking of which, the paternalism/chivalry in helping protect the one girl from the guy who likes to punch everything on the real world. Really wierded me.
"Is not intended to be a factual statement when appended to its quotation" is not intended to be a factual statement when appended to its quotation.
Which is good, because "Is not intended to be a factual statement when appended to its quotation" isn't a statement at all, factual or otherwise.
"Yields a statement not intended to be factual when appended to its quotation" yields a statement not intended to be factual when appended to its quotation.
Still doesn't get there.
Quine to pun all day. Quine to pun all night.
Then I saw this item on the "Better Book Titles" blog. Now I know what Silverstein's book is actually about.
Thanks for the guilt-trip, PF. Hrmph.
You've Goedel lot of nerve saying that.
I will find out where youse live ...
60: You Cantor ways get what you want.
Put on that dress, it so makes your eyes Popper.
I'm sure he can Russell something up.
If there's no snow you can always try to Tarski.
64: But when there's white, head for the slopes.
Except on Sundays, then do go to Church.
What I want to say is: Hume or me!
No need to be so Searle-y about it.
I know but I'm clinging on to a Strawson here.
74: Grasping, Guido. You're grasping at Strawson here. But don't let that stop you.
76: Thanks. That is the problem with young people these days, we always want Habermas.
For ttaM, I guess we should have some sort of break - maybe a musical interlude. Does anybody here play the Peano?
If ttaM doesn't stop us the Hegel.
82. No, but as it's for ttaM, I know a Piper.
Anyway, after 76 I feel Von Humboldt.
We should really stop Prior to the point at which ttaM gets Barcan mad.
Was it really just a mistake on Ben's part that he wrote "John Kyl" not "Jon Kyl"? No one else noticed?
86: but every time he gets mad it's just Kuhn us to keep Putnam up.
Highest Marx for that one; it took me a Weil.
We'll let you know for a Nagel. (Hint: You've come in late with the first repeat. Good job.)
Ah, crap. Stupid CTRL+F not looking for all-caps me.
Yeah, I recently discovered that Google n-grams are case sensitive just before I posted something that would have been wrongity-wrong at LGM. (But the accompanying example search results are not, which is what indirectly led me to figure that out.)
You know, I really preferred Brunschvicg's work as a drummer to his work as a producer.
100: For instance, "Kobe vs. "kobe".
He who posts the last comment in the most threads wins.
At one point I thought of making a collection of last comments culled from various web sites and calling it "Sad Puppies".
Rest assured that I'm not just trying to win.
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?