Philosophy Now Forum

Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water.


If that is a statement, how do you determine its truth value?
If it is not a statement, what is it?

Grammatical constructions cannot be classified according to content, but only according to form. What any communication is about does not determine whether it is a statement, a question, an exclamation or an interjection.

Skip wrote:Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water.


If that is a statement, how do you determine its truth value?

We don't 'determine' whether or not statements are true.

If it is not a statement, what is it?

It's a sentence consisting of two statements.

Grammatical constructions cannot be classified according to content, but only according to form.

Not true.

What any communication is about does not determine whether it is a statement, a question, an exclamation or an interjection.

True.

Skip wrote:Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water.


If that is a statement, how do you determine its truth value?
If it is not a statement, what is it?

Grammatical constructions cannot be classified according to content, but only according to form. What any communication is about does not determine whether it is a statement, a question, an exclamation or an interjection.

But grammatical constructions can be classified according to whether they are stated communications or not.

In this instance "Jack and Jill .... " is not a stated communication, hence it is not a statement.
Hence it is a string of alphanumeric characters.

Jack and Jill were dogs...

fetch us some truth...

-Imp

Impenitent wrote:Jack and Jill were dogs...

fetch us some truth...

-Imp

Make some sense.

I miss the good old days when grammar was taught in school.
T / F

Skip wrote:Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water.


If that is a statement, how do you determine its truth value?
If it is not a statement, what is it?

Grammatical constructions cannot be classified according to content, but only according to form. What any communication is about does not determine whether it is a statement, a question, an exclamation or an interjection.

The veracity of the statement cannot be determined by the quality of the statement, the construction of the statement, or anything else about it. That it is a statement is in no way related to its 'truth value'.
If the statement refers to a matter of fact, that is an empirical question.

wtf wrote:

A_Seagull wrote: Is this a reasonable distinction? Because it seems to me that too often the two types are conflated and there is confusion.

I believe there is a distinction that is sometimes made between a statement and a proposition. Statements don't have truth values. Propositions do. In fact the very definition of a proposition is that it is a statement that has a truth value. It's a "truth bearer," a philosophical phrase I've come across.
.

What then of the 'laws of logic'? Do they apply to statements or propositions? Or both or neither?

wtf wrote:
I believe there is a distinction that is sometimes made between a statement and a proposition. Statements don't have truth values. Propositions do. In fact the very definition of a proposition is that it is a statement that has a truth value. It's a "truth bearer," a philosophical phrase I've come across.
.

You have that completely backwards.
A statement is mostly deemed to be a reflection of fact. For example a financial statement has to be truthful and accurate.
On the other hand a proposition is a type of statement that is designed to examine veracity. It is a thing to be tested for truth or factuality.

wtf wrote:I believe there is a distinction that is sometimes made between a statement and a proposition.

Maybe in some idiosyncratic view or two, but I'm challenging that there's at all a standard distinction.

Can you give a couple citations of any academic literature stressing a distinction?

Terrapin Station wrote:

wtf wrote:I believe there is a distinction that is sometimes made between a statement and a proposition.

Maybe in some idiosyncratic view or two, but I'm challenging that there's at all a standard distinction.

Can you give a couple citations of any academic literature stressing a distinction?

I think your elephant trap has been telegraphed by what I have already said above. To repeat, if there is a 'normative' distinction, I think the examples I have furnished would give you cause to think that they are opposite to that which wtf hs suggested.

I thought the idea, at least in Logic, was that statements express propositions and its the proposition or state of affairs that is the truth-bearer. So the statements "Schnee ist weiß", "Snow is white" and "la neige est blanche" all express the state of affair or proposition that snow is white, which is true.

To quote Wittgenstein - "We must not say, “The complex sign 'aRb' says 'a stands in relation R to b' “; but we must say, “That 'a' stands in a certain relation to 'b' says that aRb”. " Or some such but I know his picture meaning is out of favour nowadays.

A_Seagull wrote: What then of the 'laws of logic'? Do they apply to statements or propositions? Or both or neither?

I think propositions can have the value 'true' or 'false', but as far as logic is concerned that is all they are - they are not true or false 'about' anything.

It is like seeing +1 or -1 in a sum, we would not feel we needed to know 'one what?' Or, if we insisted we did, then others might think we had a fundamental problem with maths!

To put it another way, in logic we can just use symbols, like 'P' to represent the propositions. And the logic bit works irrespective of what that 'P' might represent, even if the 'P' was replaced by a bit of nonsense. For the logic all we need to know is whether it is true-nonsense or false-nonsense.

Arising_uk wrote:I thought the idea, at least in Logic, was that statements express propositions and its the proposition or state of affairs that is the truth-bearer. So the statements "Schnee ist weiß", "Snow is white" and "la neige est blanche" all express the state of affair or proposition that snow is white, which is true.

To quote Wittgenstein - "We must not say, “The complex sign 'aRb' says 'a stands in relation R to b' “; but we must say, “That 'a' stands in a certain relation to 'b' says that aRb”. " Or some such but I know his picture meaning is out of favour nowadays.

That's the only distinction that makes sense on the standard view: statements are the specific linguistic expressions of propositions, so that the statement "Schnee ist weiß" is different than the statement "Snow is white," because one is in German and the other English, one contains "schnee" and the other does not, and so on, but they express the same proposition (pretending that we're not nominalists at least . . . and also that statement/proposition distinction requires that we're not meaning internalists.)

true (or false)