[lit-ideas] Re: Statements True False and Otherwise
- From: wokshevs@xxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Eric Dean <ecdean99@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2007 14:56:04 -0330
A few remarks on Eric D's thoughtful reply:
What I find interesting in Eric's post below is the focus now on the question
of whether a given utterance is a statement or not. I agree that in some cases
it isn't quite clear. I believe such utterances as "I like vanilla ice cream"
are not statements as they possess no truth-value. The norms governing such
expressions are sincerity/insincerity, truthfulness/untruthfulness - not true
or false, right or wrong. Such expressions of personal preference or taste are,
hence, like the issuing of commands and the making of promises or jokes.
(I'm not clear on how discoveries about body chemistry can turn an expression
of
taste into an assertion of a statement. Is it that we now know what causes me
to
like vanilla ice cream? But that isn't what I express in my utterance. Consider
another case: A student tells her professor: "I feel it's wrong for students to
have affairs with their professors, but I'm willing to ignore my feelings
temporarily." There are many questions that arise here: 1) Is it really
possible to "feel" something like that? 2) If so, can science, psychoanalysis
or body chemistry show that this expression of feeling is really an assertion
of a truth-claim?)
I think that "Walter likes vanilla ice cream," expressed by anyone except
Walter, is a statement. For the speaker is committed to providing evidence or
argumentation as to the truth of that claim.
I don't think that my "I like vanilla ice cream" is "translated" by "at the
moment ...." If I wanted to assert the latter, I would have done so.
R: "I intend to become a glorious philosopher within 5 years." I think that's
the kind of expression that poses the most difficulties for my position
regarding S. At first sight, it looks like an expression of personal
intention, and like the expression of personal taste, it doesn't seem to
possess a truth-value. How can I be wrong in disclosing intentions that I have?
(And if I can't be wrong, I can't possibly be right either.)
Surely I have immediate and privileged access to my own mind. Eric's
reflections now make me wonder whether R is indeed a statement. Imagine Eric
were to observe me over a period of time and notice that I have taken no steps
whatsoever to fulfilling my stated intention. Instead, I have lived a life of
hedonic luxury for the past 4 years. Would Eric not be correct in
concluding that R is/was false? (The thought I had in my earlier Rocky Balboa
reference.) Thanks to Robert Pippin for impressing upon me the significance of
the future for the truth or falsity of one's present assertions.
But notice what this shows. It doesn't show that my "S" is false. Only that in
some cases, we're not clear on whether an utterance is a statement or not.
There is an apriori here, I think, and that is the classification of utterances
into statements and non-statements. We should be wary of epistemologizing
truth,
psychologizing or sociologizing philosophical and logical truths, or
historicizing the transcendental.
Thanks to Eric for yet another interesting post.
Walter O
MUN
Quoting Eric Dean <ecdean99@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
> I appreciate Walter O's extended comments on my lengthy discussion of the
> generalization of his erstwhile innocuous assertion about a (particular)
> statement. I called the generalization S: All statements are either T or F
> irrespective of our ability to establish their truth or falsity.
>
> Perhaps a story would help make my point clearer.
>
> Many years ago, when Arthur Andersen was still a very widely respected Firm,
> and still deservedly so, with a large and thriving business around the world,
> I was a new partner in the Firm who had just been given responsibility for
> managing the operations of our global computer systems, i.e. the ones we used
> to run our own business (not the ones we built for clients).
>
> Shortly after I got this responsibility, something went wrong with the
> accounting system. I don't remember exactly what it was, but the net effect
> was that the partners' income for one month was mis-stated. Since Andersen
> was an accounting firm, it needn't have been that much of a mis-statement for
> there to have been quite a hullabaloo.
>
> Since I'd just gotten the responsibility for overseeing all that, I had to
> ask a lot of people a lot of questions to find out what went wrong. As I
> learned, there were several systems that were tied together in order to
> produce the financial reports which included the partnership's (and therefore
> the partners') income statement. Something had fallen through the cracks
> between a couple of those systems, resulting in the mis-statement.
>
> Easy enough to fix once we knew what had happened -- we restored the data
> that should have been passed from one system to the next and re-ran the rest
> of the systems, producing the corrected results -- but one of the questions I
> had to ask, after we fixed the problem, was how come no one had recognized
> that anything had fallen through the cracks until the partners had received
> their income statements and the hullabaloo had commenced.
>
> In the course of those conversations I was asking the guy who ran the data
> center how come our production systems didn't have the controls that would
> have alerted us to the data being lost before we sent the income statements
> to the partners. He said "Oh, but they do." I said, with a due measure of
> skepticism, "Then why didn't we stop the income statements from going out?"
> He said, "Because the system that produces the income statements isn't a
> production system."
>
> That was a surreal moment. The phrase "production system" was, and still is
> in many organizations, a term of art. A production system is one for which
> the IT organization has accepted responsibility to ensure that it runs
> reliably and consistently -- it runs when it's supposed to run and when you
> put the right data in you get the right data out. Since the partnership
> income statement tells the owners of the company, the partners, what their
> take is, one would think that the system producing that statement would be a
> production system if anything was.
>
> The more I asked, the more I learned about the long and painful relationship
> between the Firm's controller and the guys who wrote the accounting system we
> used. They had been working together for twenty years -- I was the newcomer,
> and several years younger than the combatants. They were all concerned to
> enlist me on their side of the squabble.
>
> But the simple fact was that whether the system producing the financial
> statements was a production system or not, we all -- the Firm controller and
> the IT group -- were responsible for ensuring that the results it produced
> were correct. The partners weren't going to care whether the financial
> statements were a production system or not. They just wanted the results
> correctly reported. Moreover, even if that system was not a production
> system it was still possible to ensure that it produced accurate results.
> "Production" is just one technique, or one collection of techniques, for
> ensuring accuracy, it's not the only possible technique.
>
> The reason I tell this story is that my discussion of 'S' was motivated by
> considerations related to the situation in the story. I think that 'S' works
> when one construes 'statement' as being the sort of thing about which S is
> true -- i.e. by making 'statement' a term of art such that a statement is
> exactly the sort of thing which is either T or F whether we can establish its
> truth or falsity or not. It is, as it were, a feature of 'production
> systems'.
>
> However there are lots of things which appear to be statements but for which
> S is not true, for example "I like vanilla ice cream", to use one of Walter's
> examples. These are, as it were, the 'non-production systems'. The problem
> is that for some sentences the fact that they express things standing on one
> side or the other of that boundary is a historical accident, like the fact
> that the financial statement report system was a non-production system.
>
> Perhaps, at a particular point in time, sentences could be divided up,
> roughly, provisionally, into the following categories:
>
> (a) Sentences that express statements (i.e. sentences which conform to S);
> (b) Sentences that appear to express statements but which do not in fact
> express statements in the sense of class (a) (e.g. "Walter likes vanilla ice
> cream")
> (c) Sentences that appear to fall into category (b) but which either now or
> shortly will fall into class (a) (perhaps because we learn something new
> about our body chemistry, etc.)
> (d) Everything else (questions, commands, etc.)
>
> It's category (c) that I was concerned about when I was asserting that S does
> not apply to all statements. If we human beings could know that we could
> today define class (a) for all time, why then class (c) would be empty and if
> (c) were empty, then my concerns would be moot -- there would be no sentences
> that appear (on the surface) to express statements but also appear (at the
> next level of analysis) to express something that's not a statement but, upon
> yet further understanding, turn out to express statements after all.
>
> But we have a planet full of corporations who are trying their damnedest to
> turn a lot of (c)'s into (a)'s -- a lot of market research amounts to just
> that. I think that a lot of nonsense, and pernicious nonsense at that, gets
> justified by people demanding that class (c) must be large, though I also
> think that class (c) is not empty (otherwise we'd know at least a lot more
> about (a) than I think we do).
>
> Corporations and their boards of directors who, lest we try to distance
> ourselves from them, represent the shareholders which includes many of us on
> this list by way of pension funds, 401k's, mutual funds, etc., demand that
> everything must be 'objective', by which they mean expressible in sentences
> from class (a), and 'measurable' by which they mean amenable to being
> engineered, all of which is just an elaborately disguised form of trying to
> manage the whims of the goddess Fortuna...
>
> The problem is that most of what precipitates poor outcomes in companies
> involves things expressed by sentences from classes (b) or (c). Note,
> moreover, that just because a sentence may be in class (b) doesn't mean that
> a particular token of it might not actually be in class (a) -- i.e. on some
> occasion, Walter may be making a statement with "I like vanilla ice cream,"
> which statement might be translated into something like "at the moment, all
> other things being equal I will choose vanilla over other flavors of ice
> cream" or something like that.
>
> Anyway, the result is that if one really does want to manage successfully,
> one needs to deal directly with the reality one is confronted with,
> irrespective of whether that reality is best expressed by sentences of type
> (a), (b) or (c), but what 'dealing with' means varies by whether the relevant
> reality is expressed by sentences of type (a), (b) or (c).
>
> In other words, whether the system is production or not, the results still
> matter. My no-doubt obtuse way of making that point was to say that just
> because a system isn't production doesn't mean it's not a system -- i.e. just
> because a statement doesn't conform to S doesn't mean it's not a statement.
>
>
> Regards to one and all,
> Eric Dean
> Washington DC
>
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