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worldor, if you prefer, I am speaking of cases in which the only world I am concerned with is the world of the text I am processing. Suppose someone tells me p (p = I love my wife Jean). I interpret that the utterer is not a bachelor. Very easy. In Truth terms, my interpretation would be more complicated. I would say: the utterer of p says first of all that it is True2 that in the external world there is an individual called Jean, related to him by a marriage relationship. I am not supposed to verify the existence of Jean (that the utterer presupposes). I take for granted that Jean exists, and I score Jean's existence as %%%. Then I find in E.15 that, if it is True1 ($$) that Jean is a wife, then it is True1 ($$) that Jean is a woman, and I infer that the utterer loves a given woman (and I have no reason to doubt that he is asserting something True2). But why should I use these three notions of True? I find it embarrassingly complicated. True2 is useless: my interpretation would not change even if I knew that there is no Jean in the external world. I took Jean for granted, I put her in a world, maybe the world of the utterer's hallucinations. Once I have taken Jean for granted, according to E.15 Jean is a woman. Suppose that the utterer lies and that I know it. In terms of meaning, I would continue to process his sentence in the same wayonly I would be obliged to say that the nonexistent Jean (whom I took for textually existent even though I knew she was empirically nonexistent) is Truly ($$) a woman. Why should I proceed in such a complex way, with the risk of mixing up three senses of True? |
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Smith: Why would you be risking the mixing up of these three senses? |
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CSP: Personally, I am not risking anything. I know very well the logical difference between $$, ££, and %%%. I can say that the utterer loves an x (%%%) who is a woman ($$). But my masters can be linguisticallythen philosophicallypuzzled by these usages of True. Suppose they use a declarative sentence in order to instantiate a content instruction (for instance, All Antipodeans are two-legged, instead of saying Take two-legged as a $$ property of "Antipodean"). Some of my masters could be surrepticiously compelled to mix up assertions in the encyclopedia and assertions in the world, meaning and reference, True1 and True2 (not to speak of True3). It is not a matter of logic; it is a matter of rhetoric. You must know that, from the beginning of philosophical speculation on this planet, my masters were told that isolated terms do not say what is true or false, whereas sentencesat least declarative onesdo. When my masters want to say that something is the case, they utter sentences. It thus happens that, when they hear a sentence, their first reaction is to take it as an assertion about a given state |
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