🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct7.013230.20350@tamsun.tamu.edu> e343mh@tamuts.tamu.edu (Michael Hand) writes:
>Frank Adams writes:
>>If I assert, "I saw the man come in.  He was tall, thin,
>>brown-haired, wore glasses, and smoking a cigar.", and it turns out his hair
>>is actually black instead of brown, you don't necessarily conclude that my
>>assertion was "false".  It *do* conclude that it was not correct in every
>>detail.
>
>No, you don't *necessarily* conclude this, but it's true anyway -- 
>assuming the definite description successfully denotes.  The second
>claim is a conjunction, and is thus false if even one conjunct is
>false.
>Does this really need pointing out in sci.philosophy.TECH, for x's sake?

It is correct that a literal interpretation of my statement is false (under
the given assumptions).  But the essential import of my statement is not
this literal interpretation, but rather more like, "he looked approximately
like this".  And *this* is not falsified by my being incorrect about some
details.

This kind of imprecision is very common in ordinary discourse.  Any theory
of human utterances which fails to take it into account is grossly
insufficient, and it is not surprising that such a theory might produce
absurd results like "scientific theories are not assertions".