Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Vacuous truth/archive1
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- Vacuous truth - an entry speaking of a mathematical subject, that I actually learned something from, and was entertained by readin. -- Smerdis of Tlön 01:14, 23 Dec 2003 (UTC)
- Seconded. Clear and entertaining. moink 20:20, 26 Dec 2003 (UTC)
- The article is generally fine-to-excellent, but the section dealing with the following sentence needs attention:
- If Peter wins the lottery tomorrow, then he will buy a new house.
- The treatment assumes that this "natural language" statement must be treated as a formal statement in conventional two-valued logic. There are other (perhaps more plausible) treatments. Suppose, for example, that Peter did not win the lottery on the specified day, but that Peter was in fact dead at the time the utterance was made. Must we say that, in retrospect, the statement was true at the time the utterance was made simply because Peter did not win the lottery? We might say it was false because there is an implicit (and false) claim that Peter was alive at the time the utterance was made; or we might say that for this kind of "if/then" statement about the future to be true at the time it is proposed, there must be some possibility that the consequent will be true. In brief, let's not encourage confusion between meaning and symbolic logic. Peak 09:20, 9 Jan 2004 (UTC)
