4

According to the principle of excluded middle, every statement is either true or false.

It might sound a little ridiculous, but consider the following statement:

Mountains believe in God.

Believing in God has no meaning for things and beings that do not have intelligence. So what truth value should be determined for the above statement? If it is false, the statement "mountains do not believe in God" must be true, which again has no meaning for something that does not have intelligence.

This was just an example. In general, what truth value should be determined for such statements that say something about something that has no meaning for it?

Other examples can be:

God is tall.

Souls are bald.

Etc.

(Maybe this question is somehow similar to "this question", but I am not sure)

Improve this question
7
  • 3
    Bad poetry is bad.
    – Boba Fit
    Commented Mar 23, 2023 at 13:10
  • 4
    If the expression has no meaning, it is not a statement.
    – Mauro ALLEGRANZA
    Commented Mar 23, 2023 at 13:18
  • 1
    "Who the hell are these guys?"//"Aryaks"//"From?"//"Nobody knows."//"Whaddaya mean nobody knows?"//"Nobody knows means nobody knows.//"Hasn't anyone asked them?"//"Those who know are dead."
    – Hudjefa
    Commented Mar 23, 2023 at 13:43
  • 1
    "And that's the news from Lake Wobegon, where the women are tall, the men are good looking, and all the children are above average."
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Mar 26, 2023 at 1:46
  • 1
    "Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe." Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky intentionally created nonsense words, & galumphing is now part of the English language because of it.
    – CriglCragl
    Commented Jul 13, 2023 at 18:38

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
5
+100

You seem to be referring to what are usually called category mistakes, with a bit of Russell's analysis of "the King of France is bald" thrown in. §3.2 of the linked SEP entry reads:

[There] are three different semantic accounts of category mistakes: according to the first (‘the meaninglessness view’), category mistakes are syntactically well-formed but meaningless; according to the second (‘the contentlessness view’) they are meaningful but lack content; according to the third (‘the truthvaluelessness view’), they are meaningful and have a content, but lack a truth-value (or at least lack one of the two standard truth-values, true and false).

The immediately next subsection discusses reasons for and against the meaninglessness thesis; the third next subsection includes the following:

According [to Strong Kleene logic], a sentence with a truth-valueless constituent isn’t automatically deemed truth-valueless. Specifically, a sentence of the form ‘If A then B’ (with the conditional interpreted as material) is true if A is false and B is truth-valueless, and an existentially quantified sentence is true if it has one true instance (even if some other instances are truth-valueless)...

However, they instantly bring up some troubles with the SK approach to the issue, and of course as a typical SEP article, they are not interested in proclaiming one analysis to be the obviously correct one (note: there are actually a few SEP entries that are dogmatic or pretentious; I will not link to any of them, here, as those are mostly irrelevant tangents for the purposes of this PhilosophySE question, but I would like to explain what I mean by "typical" in the preceding).

Recommended further reading (from the SEP):

  1. The Logic of Conditionals
  2. Impossible fictions (§2.4 of the article on fiction in general)
  3. Impossible Worlds
  4. Nonexistent Objects
Improve this answer
3

The truth value for such statements is false. The statement [1] "mountains do not believe in God" is true. Mountains are not intelligent, therefore they don't believe, therefore they don't believe in God.

Perhaps you are conflating statement [1] with the statement [2] "mountains have beliefs but the belief in God is not one of them". Unlike statement [1], statements [2] is false. Perhaps this error arose because the property "do not believe in God" is usually discussed in relations to entities that have beliefs.

Similarly the other two statements are also false (using common understanding of God and souls).

Improve this answer
1

According to the principle of excluded middle, every statement is either true or false.

This is only true of statements which say something meaningful of something real. So "Caesar was flexthengtric" presumably is neither true nor false.

Mountains believe in God.

Mountains are real, and we understand what it means to believe in God, so this is a meaningful statement about something real, and there does not seem to be any problem deciding that the statement is false. Nobody needs to know that God to exist to understand the statement. We just need to understand that making this statement implies that the speaker believes that God exists.

Rudolf Carnap probably would have disagreed that the statement is meaningful on the ground that mountains are not the sort of things which may either believe or not believe in God. He would have called that a category error. However, this is wrong. It is a fact that mountains do not believe in God. This of course has nothing to do with the idea of God. By their nature, mountains do not believe in anything, at least as far as we know.

Believing in God has no meaning for things and beings that do not have intelligence.

Yes it does. We know what mountains are, we understand what it is to believe in God, and we certainly all think that it is simply not possible for mountains to believe in God, so the statement is juste false, and trivially false.

So what truth value should be determined for the above statement? If it is false, the statement "mountains do not believe in God" must be true, which again has no meaning for something that does not have intelligence.

I don't see any difficulty in accepting that it is true that mountains do not believe in God.

We can just dismiss statements as neither true nor false because they are ridiculous. This one is ridiculous because it is self-evident that mountains not only do not believe in God, but cannot believe in anything due to their nature. But this makes the statement false, not neither true nor false.

God is tall.

This depends on what exactly you think God is. People who would think that Victor Wembanyama is God would presumably say that at 2m26, God is tall. If they thought instead that it is Daniel Villalva who is God, they would probably say that at 1m59, God is not tall. But if God can be and why not both Victor Wembanyama and Daniel Villalva, then I don't know what it would mean to say that God is tall or not tall.

Statements are true or false of what we mean when we use them, so the semantic is crucial. Usually, the semantic is understood from context, and this works fine most of the time, but to decide whether a statement is true or false, we first need to be able to decide of what it is that it means.

Improve this answer
0

Only going to work with the examples of meaningless statements in the OP

  1. Mountains do not believe in God. This should be translated as Mountains can form beliefs and Mountains don't believe in God. The first conjunct (Mountains can form beliefs) is false and so the conjunction, therefore the original statement, is false.

  2. God is tall. This becomes God has a body and God is tall. The first conjunct (God has a body) is false and so the conjunction, therefore the original statement, is false.

  3. Souls are bald. The same treatment here too. Souls have heads and Souls are bald. The first conjunct is false, so the conjunction, therefore the original statement is false.

My two bitcoins worth...

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.