dclayh comments on Deleting paradoxes with fuzzy logic - Less Wrong

6 [deleted] 11 August 2009 04:27AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (70)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: dclayh 11 August 2009 05:46:16PM 0 points [-]

Okay, this is getting silly. Warrigal says "The sentence 'this sentence's truth value is less than 0.5' has a sharp jump in truth value at 0.5, but the sentence 'this sentence's truth value is significantly less than 0.5' does not [and we will ban the first form]". In the same way, my sentence "This sentence's truth value is less than epsilon" has a discontinuity at epsilon. Both sentences make discontinuous claims about their truth values.

What is the "different approach" that you claim this sentence is in reference to?

(Incidentally, I agree with you that my sentence has a fixed point at 0.5 under Warrigal's system. That's why my original comment was criticizing the presentation and not necessarily the content of the theory.)

Comment author: PhilGoetz 12 August 2009 05:47:42PM *  0 points [-]

The sentence we were discussing was "This statement has truth value 0". I assumed that when you said it was structurally identical to Warrigal's sample sentence, you were referring to this passage:

"This sentence is false" is not a valid sentence there, because it refers to itself, but no ordinal number is less than itself.

That sentence refers to the traditional ways around Russell's paradox.

You seem to say discontinuity when you mean a noncontinuous first derivative.