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Of course i'm talking about knowledge. Empirical knowledge of a proposition being true or false.
by scoofy 11y ago
Of course i'm talking about knowledge. Empirical knowledge of a proposition being true or false.
- Retra 11y agoOk, so you can know if a proposition is false, or you can know if it is true, and these two things fundamentally behave differently if the proposition contains the word 'not' in it?
- scoofy 11y agoYes, because a proposition without it is a statement about a thing: "I exist." Whereas, with not in it is a statement about everything that exists: "Black swans do not exist." You need knowledge of one thing in the former, you need knowledge of everything in the latter. It's not just the word "not" it's an odd number of nots (double negatives and all that).
- Retra 11y ago"Black swans do not exist" isn't wholly a statement about everything that exists. It's a statement about the possibility of the property of "being a black swan" to exist. It is a statement about an abstraction, not existence. Like saying "the cup is above the table" is a statement about the existence of the "above-ness with respect to the table" of the cup. One needn't survey all of reality to know if it is possible for some abstraction to exist. It need only be consistent with the rest of your language, so that's all you need to survey.
- ectoplasm 11y agoI would describe what you're talking about as "black swans cannot exist". That is an even stronger statement, because it also implies that black swans do not currently exist.