Wednesday, December 2, 2015

The 'story' as noun type

I was thinking that 'story', as a noun type, has certain verbs associated to it:

person-tell->story
story-listened by->person
story-believed by->person

The persistent forms are:
story_/told
person_/affect of story
person_/permanent affect of story

Also we have attributes of story that do not arise as persistent states after actions:
story_/true
[I suppose this can only occur when there in a storyB that is about a storyA.]

And maybe a new operator {} for 'about'. 'Cept I am not sure how to use this. I can see how if a person believes a story then the content, what the story is 'about', becomes part of the person's reaction to circumstances that bring up similar content. Or, in a purely linguistic context, would add to the person's truism repository. Let's think about this a bit.

Not that I plan to write about "truth" but: people who become sufficiently enlightened (I guess like Frege and Ramsay) realize that saying a sentence is "true" does not add to to the meaning of the original expression. But they make a serious logical "type" error when they overlook that "X is true" is a meta statement about X. Its meaning does not "add to" the meaning of X, as it is of a different type. As a meta statement "X is true" does indeed have content. It is just that when this is projected back into the original statement the projection has no content. In other words there is a failure to respect the algebra of 'about'.
One minor note about "truth": as a mathematician I was quite interested in the definition of truth and was well aware of it having multiple varieties. A=A is not true in the same way as "my name is Peter". I guess Kant probably got some of these varieties of truth correct. One variety I found to be most pleasing was this one: a statement is "true" if its consequences are already known. [In a system of propositions, "closed" under some set of operations: a new proposition can be considered "true" when it, together with the operations and the existing propositions can only generate other propositions that are already in the system.]. I never met a serious mathematician who was confident they understood all these possibilities. There are a lot of amateurish approaches that pretend "truth" is a single, well understood concept.

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