Xref: utzoo comp.ai:3234 sci.lang:4035
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!agate!violet.berkeley.edu!sp299-ad
From: sp299-ad@violet.berkeley.edu (Celso Alvarez)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Fun with the semantics of paradox
Summary: The current king of France is bald
Message-ID: <19625@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 28 Jan 89 11:59:42 GMT
References: <479@aipna.ed.ac.uk> <3038@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <43843@linus.UUCP> <32698@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <374@rpi.edu>
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 50

From an absolutely non-technical, lay perspective, here are some ideas about
the truth value of "The current king of France is bald".  My intuition is
that the logic paraphrasis of the sentence is

>> "There exists an x, such that x is the current king of France and x is
>> bald."  [which is false]
(Diana Smetters <diana@cis.ohio-state.edu> in article
<32698@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>).

Compare:

	"The king of France [Louis XIV] was bald"

is true; but both

	"The current king of France is bald", and
	"The current king of France WAS (used to be) bald"

contain a linguistic presupposition (rather than an assumption)
that a king exists in France that is 'current'.  Since this is false,
the falsehood of the entire proposition lies on the fact of the non-
existence of a king in France, not on whether he is or used to be
bald (verb tense makes no difference).  (In fact, aren't we dealing with
several, embedded logical propositions?).  And since the statement

	"The current king of France" 

(uttered while pointing at a portrait or photograph) is false in itself,
why claim that the whole sentence is "meaningless"? (cf. Christopher A.
Welty (weltyc@cs.rpi.edu) in article <374@rpi.edu>):

CW>The point is that we, as humans, are able to form sentences like this and
CW>understand that there is no `truth value' associated with it - it's
CW>meaningless.

In fact, I have the feeling that people understand that the whole statement is
false (fallacious) precisely because there is no king in France, that is,
precisely due to
powerful mechanisms of linguistic pressuposition.  While the statement does
not *assert* that there is a current king of France, it *presupposes* it
linguistically, in very much the same way as the statement "The sun shines"
presupposes `The sun is' (for clarity, I hope, compare the meaningless of

	The current kangkt of France is bald ,

where the presupposed proposition `The kangkt is' cannot be true nor
false.  Or not?).

Celso Alvarez
sp299-ad@violet.berkeley.edu