[FOM] The Lucas-Penrose Thesis

[Keith Brian Johnson]

--- laureano luna <laureanoluna at yahoo.es> wrote:

>Consider the Strengthened
> Liar:
> 
> (1) (1) expresses no true proposition
> 
> After realizing that (1) has no truth value, I state:
> 
> (2) (1) expresses no true proposition
> 
> and I can take (2) as a different object from (1) only
> because I notice that (1) and (2) do not express
> equivalent thoughts (indeed (1) expresses no thought).
> 
> The reasoning above requires reference to semantical
> features, since the whole point is that two
> syntactically identical sentences have different
> semantical values; and I believe there is no possible
> disambiguation of all linguistic cases of this kind.

Mightn't we view the distinction between (1) and (2) as one of implicit
meaning?  In (1), (1) is taken to have truth-value, so we could write
it as

(1)  The purportedly truth-valued sentence (1) expresses no true
proposition.

We then analyze (1), find that it is neither true nor false, and
conclude that the purportedly truth-valued sentence (1) is actually not
truth-valued.  Then we write

(2)  The actually non-truth-valued sentence (1) expresses no true
proposition.

And that's simply true.  Making them more explicit reveals that (1) and
(2) were never the same sentence; they only appeared to be.

Keith Brian Johnson

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