Thursday, June 3, 2010

Tractatus 2.0211, two ways

The original says:

"whether a proposition has sense cannot depend on whether another proposition is true."

But this is contradicted by, for example, the H & K semantic approach. For them [[both]] = \lambda f \in D_et st |f| = 2 . \lambda g \in D_et . f \subseteq g; any sentence of the form "Both Fs are G" will have a truth-value only if there are (exactly) two f's. But that, of course, is true iff the proposition "there are two Fs" is true. The semantic entry for "both" is presupposition-laden; if what Wittgenstein is envisioning is a semantics without presupposition, then it is certainly a semantics that is very far from the way formal semantics is currently used to model natural language.

The use Stalnaker makes in "Assertion" of Tractatus 2.0211 is importantly different:

"The same proposition is expressed relative to each possible world in the context set." (88)

Now we are ok! Perhaps the way to gloss Wittgenstein's remark should be: "which proposition is expressed by an assertion cannot be different in different worlds in the context. "

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