🚀 go-pugleaf

Somewhere along the "Truth" thread, Jamie writes:


" Consider the sentence which would come first on an alphabetized
  list of 100-word sentences of English.

  It is either a true sentence of English or a false one. No one has
  ever interpreted it (I'll wager). With the possible exception of
  one of us, no one ever will. "

That something's amiss becomes clear when you consider that in the event of your
sentence being an imperative (the requirement of alphabetic order may yield
something like "Abandon aardvarks!" at the top of your list) or a question
the sentence is neither true nor false. 

In fact, it is widely held that propositions, as opposed to sentences, are the
bearers of truth value. The process of interpretaion involves nothing less
than establishing a correspondence between sentences and statements (which
also have no truth value) and if possible (and this is not possible in the 
cases mentioned above) between statements and propositions. 
Consider also what truth value you would care to assign to ambiguous sentences. 


(I don't know how helpful this is, I've missed much of the thread.)

Neil Horne
Cape Town