Rationality Quotes February 2014

A1987dM

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

That SEP page is curious, because this:

According to such a view, it is possible that when John asserts “Stealing is wrong” he is saying something true, but that when Jenny asserts “Stealing is wrong” she is saying something false.

would seem to be trivially true, if they are in fact talking about sentences there. Just have Jenny be speaking a foreign language that contains the same symbols with a different meaning. By that standard, anything anyone says ever could safely be considered relative.

On the other hand if they're talking about propositions then it would seem to be trivially false, because propositions have truth values.

On the other hand if they're talking about propositions then it would seem to be trivially false, because propositions have truth values.

It doesn't follow from the fact that propositions have truth values that the SEP quote is trivially false. "Stealing is wrong" as asserted by John and "Stealing is wrong" as asserted by Jenny both have truth values, they just don't have the same truth values. You need another premise.

0TheAncientGeek12y

It's not trivially false because philosophers take a sentence that appears to be in certain language to have its normal meaning in that language. It's not trivially true because identical sentences can have different truth values when spoken by different people, eg "my name is John"

6Creutzer12y

They are talking about propositions, and the point is that the sentence "Stealing is wrong" expresses different propositions when uttered by different people, just like "I'm sleepy" does. That's what indexicality is!

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Rationality Quotes February 2014

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Rationality Quotes February 2014

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