Mr. Bird, negation, and *ivorousness
John Cowan <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.science.linguistics.lojban.jboske |
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| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
I think the reason for my intuition that statements of the form "Mr. Bird is *ivorous" are false is that "is *ivorous" has a negation in it. If "X is carnivorous" means "X does not [contradictory negation] eat plants", then "Mr. Bird is carnivorous" is false, since there he is, over there, eating birdseed. And mutatis mutandis, "Mr. Bird is herbivorous" is also false. These follow from the (I hope) uncontroversial view that if a statement is true (false), its contradictory negation is false (true). -- He made the Legislature meet at one-horse John Cowan tank-towns out in the alfalfa belt, so that jcowan-k6JZYsoqQQ8PxK1qzZLvrwC/[email protected] hardly nobody could get there and most of http://www.reutershealth.com the leaders would stay home and let him go http://www.ccil.org/~cowan to work and do things as he pleased. --Mencken, _Declaration of Independence_