Scorpion

:banghead:

-S-

Dr. Retard

Let's back up:

Look at propositions that ascribe meaningless predicates -- "New York is fsdhksd" or "The number 2 is wjlbtwer". It looks like such propositions are themselves meaningless. And, being meaningless, they're neither true nor false.

What if you inflate the propositions into new "it is true that" propositions? "It is true that New York is fsdhksd" or "It is true that the number 2 is wjlbtwer". Obviously, these propositions aren't true. But are they false or are they meaningless? Good question.

What about inflated negations of such propositions? "It is false that New York is fsdhksd" or "It is false that the number 2 is wjlbtwer". Obviously, these propositions aren't false. But are they true or are they meaningless? Again, good question.

So there seem to be two ways of handling these inflated propositions. You can say that they're meaningless -- just like their 'parent' propositions. Or you can say that the inflated affirmations are false and the inflated negations are true.

You seem to go with the first way. That is, you say that these inflated propositions are themselves meaningless. Fine, let's try it that way. And let's be MMNers: "Good", "evil", and "morally neutral" are all meaningless predicates. Then...

(1) It is true that it is good to torture infants for pleasure.

...is meaningless. And...

(2) It is false that it is good to torture infants for pleasure.

...is likewise meaningless. And...

(3) It is morally neutral to torture infants for pleasure.

...is meaningless too. So all of them are meaningless. So we're committed to a (4)-style proposition:

(4) The following propositions are meaningless: (1), (2), and (3).

So what's the problem? You write:

I disagree. If (4) is true, then "It is true that it is good to torture infants for pleasure" and "It is false that it is good to torture infants for pleasure" are both meaningless. So neither proposition is true, and neither is false. Your conditional relies on the proposition "it is neither good nor evil to torture infants for pleasure". But we aren't committed to that proposition. Far from it. We're saying that ascriptions of these predicates, and inflations of such ascriptions, are all meaningless. That means "it is neither good nor evil to torture infants for pleasure" is itself meaningless.