Re: Exploring the idea of an incorrect question
Posted: Sun Jul 16, 2023 8:23 pm
Sure, I didn't really know the context.PeteOlcott wrote: ↑Sun Jul 16, 2023 5:26 pm Unless we have the correct/incorrect dichotomy computer science people
will reject what I am saying as vague and thus having no relevance to
computer science what-so-ever.
Well, I'm just some guy on the internet and I'm not a philosopher or linguistI also must have the support of linguists and philosophers of language
otherwise the computer science people will construe my ideas as baseless.
Incorrect statements are assertions of natural language that cannot possibly
be resolved to true or false because of some fault of the statement.
In the formal languages of mathematics they would be propositions
that cannot possible have a Boolean value (of true or false).
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously was composed by Noam Chomsky
in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is
grammatically well-formed, but semantically nonsensical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless ... _furiously
I'd say that sentence of Chomsky's is nonsense, not false.Is simply false since there cannot be any "Colorless green ideas" we can know that
they don't "sleep furiously "
That seems strange.It has been 2000 years and many modern day philosophers still do not understand
"This sentence is not true."
Cannot be resolved to a truth value because it is not a truth bearer because
it is self-contradictory. Recent papers are still trying to resolve it to a truth value.
Incorrect questions are questions that because of some fault of the question
cannot possibly have a correct answer. If it works in with computer scientists, then use 'incorrect'. You know my issues with that in other contexts. I'd prefer labels like: unresolvable, unanswerable, irresolvable, solutionless, self-undermining, indeterminable, self-cancelling, unfullfillable (request), self-subverting...
and then more controversially (for me):
spurious
illusory
mirage
pseudo
So, you think this will help in, for example, politics?Incorrect polar (yes/no) questions are polar questions because of some fault
of the question cannot possibly have a correct (yes/no) answer.
(This is a brand new category that I am establishing)
(1) What time it is (yes or no)?
(2) "This sentence is not true." Is it (a) true or (b) false?
(3) "Can you correctly answer "no" to this question?"
(4) When posed to Carol: "Can Carol correctly answer "no" to this question?"
The reason that this is important is that all of computer science is artificially
constrained by a notions of undecidability that includes the inability of correctly
answering incorrect questions thus preventing huge strides in more powerful
computation under the misconception that these advancements are impossible.
The key life or extinction of humanity depends on these advancements coming
to fruition. We really need to mathematically formalize the notion of (analytic)
truth so that dangerous counter-factual propaganda can be utterly disavowed
every which way before it gets any chance to take root.