🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi,

"Newberry" <newberryxy@gmail.com> skrev i melding 
news:026f9bc3-c984-42e0-b4d0-8a109f4a36b4@k10g2000prm.googlegroups.com...
> We will utilize the following three definitions.
>
> Definition 1: A sentence is meaningful if and only if it is a picture
> of a possible state of affairs.

This is a rather naive theory of meaning. From another thread here:
On the proposition that ...

>" /..../  we know what a proposition "means" when we know the necessary
> and sufficient conditions for it to be true...."

...the answer was:

"No (and this is a mild and charitable term). You understand vacuous,
erroneous, contrafactual, paradoxiccal utterances in your language, although
they couldn't possibly be true; you even, to take an easy one, understand
questions, where the issue of truth conditions simply doesn't arise.

From the same thread (wrt. Austin and speech act theory):

"Austin opens one of his articles by criticizing (sp?) traditional language
philosophy for only being interested in propositions that are true or false,
while we use language for a multitude of other things than asserting.
This parallells Frege's dictum that logic is like a microscope: useful on
short distances, but for that very reason not very useful for any other task
of language.
That the tasks of language is more than just to assert, is so obvious that
sytematic thought on this goes back to at least Aristotle and his
"Rhetoric", which from a slightly different angle, is all about 
perlocution."


> Definition 2: A sentence is true if and only if it corresponds to an
> actual state of affairs.

Yes. The problem is that we only have inferential information about any such 
correspondence, and about the "actual state of affairs".

Wrt. meaning:

"Truth conditions might be related to understanding one meaning of the
concept "true" (Tarski in a nutshell), but hardly even to the meaning of
sentences which are true."


T