[FOM] Consistency and completeness in natural language

[Hartley Slater]

Sandy Hodges (FOM Digest Vol 4 Issue 7) thinks there is a special 
difficulty with

>So we posit that, on July 1st, 1972, Jones says, as his only utterance
>of the day:
>
>"Nixon's first statement made on June 19th, 1972 is false."
>
>and posit that, on June 19th, 1972, Nixon says, of his only utterance of
>the day:
>
>"The first statement Jones will make on July 1st, 1972, will be true."
>
>And posit that Jones does not know what Nixon said, and Nixon does not
>know what Jones will say.   Would you say that both Jones and Nixon made
>coherent utterances?
>...
>As far as I can tell from [Dean's] posting, and Hartley's, you have not
>considered the importance of Jones not knowing what Nixon said, and
>continue to repeat arguments based the other case.

But the  very first case involving the portion of  protothetic which 
Prior later developed, was 'A says that anything which B says is 
false, and B says that something which A says is true' (R.L. 
Goodstein, 'On the Formalisation of Indirect Discourse', JSL 23 
(1958), p417).  So there is no requirement that A and B, or Jones and 
Nixon, know what each other said.


-- 
Barry Hartley Slater
Honorary Senior Research Fellow
Philosophy, School of Humanities
University of Western Australia
35 Stirling Highway
Crawley WA 6009, Australia
Ph: (08) 9380 1246 (W), 9386 4812 (H)
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Url: http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/PhilosWWW/Staff/slater.html