My my, has it really been 100 blogs full to the brim with Anchorman references and pseudo intelligent ramblings? Well according to my Blogger, yes it has. Some of these blogs were published and then taken away in a more lucid moment once I'd seen how terrible the writing was, but 100 blogs nonetheless. To continue the trend, here's yet another blog in which I attempt to understand philosophy and boy was this one difficult.
I'm going to throw you in right at the deep end by asking you to think about this statement for a second: 'The present King of France is bald'. May not seem earth shattering on your first look but is the statement true or false? Is it even meaningless? The first thing to consider is that there is no present King of France, making the statement false, but the negation of this statement, 'It is not true that the present King of France is bald' and its logical equivalent 'The present King of France is not bald' are no more true than the original statement, even though that is also false. Some philosophers would suggest this makes the statement meaningless, especially since it fails to refer, even though it seems to mean something we can clearly understand. Confused yet, because by this point in Anthony Kenny's book, my head was spinning. This is without a doubt the hardest philosophy we've had to do so far but it's also one of the most important. The logic that you need to solve problems like this was what gave us the ability to programme today's computers. Whenever your computer crashes, you have to ctrl+alt+delete, you get the spinning wheel of death or the computer just gives up on you, it probably means you asked to do something that it couldn't process logically.
I really enjoyed the seminar this week though as the discussion we had really helped me gain an understanding of the subject. The lecture and the reading only succeeded in confusing me but the examples we used in the seminar, whilst still confusing, definitely helped me. I felt that the most interesting thing whilst looking at the philosophy of language was its influence on the computer world. To think that if we had stuck with the Aristotelian logic of, 'All men are mortal, Aristotle is mortal therefore Aristotle is a man' you wouldn't be reading this blog, and arguably you'd be better off. It helped me understand the sense and reference mode of logic that can make even nonsense statements have sense... yeah exactly, that shouldn't work. The phrase, "The morning star is the same as the evening star" is stupid when viewed logically because the morning star and the evening star are both Venus, however you can understand it. You take the sign and the word and come up with the sense with a reference which is the connection you make in your mind. In works of fiction we force a reference onto things that can have no reference to make them understandable. The meaning of a sentence arises from its structure, the predicate (or an object) gives the subject meaning and then we are able to understand it.
To deal with this sort of logic and the philosophy of language, you can't become hung up on the nominal meaning of words like a school teacher would. You need to be thinking about it with cold hard logic of a computer. The phrase "There is nobody on the road" seems simple enough, but it could mean a whole host of things to a computer, it is not logical enough. If there's nobody on the road does that mean there's somebody? Is it just this road or all roads? This can only work if you say "For all possible roads, on this one there is a man. False." Computers work in true or false, in binary in fact. Phrases like "you're evil" have absolutely no meaning to a computer, first you would have to define what evil is. You need to have the three elements of language (words, grammar and syntax) for a sentence to make any sense at all. The main philosophers of language, Frege, Wittgenstein and Russell all see music as the perfect language because it is logical and has grammar and syntax.
As a final point, a statement becomes truer with the more sources of verification there are so if, as in the seminar, you decide that all people who wear blue shirts are evil (I was wearing a blue shirt, read what you will into that) the statement would need to define what evil was, but if you could do that then you would only need to find more examples of where someone in a blue shirt was evil to make your statement truer. It was AJ Ayres who said "The truth of the statement is the verification." Probably with the italics.
Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.
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