alt Hacker News> I think it is very logical to allow for vacuous truths. Doing otherwise would not be logical.
I guess I disagree, although I don't mean that disrespectfully. Vacuous truth is one reason why nonclassical logics exist. The wikipedia article gives a good example of how allowing for vacuous truth can lead to absurdities: "All my children are goats" said by someone without children. This is a statement that is vacuously true technically, but (assuming laws of biology hold, and a human is making the statement), it is something that could never be true even if the antecedent ("I have children") were true. It's not just something playing on incorrect intuition, it's a statement that is true only by convention or a certain line of reasoning that to me is made only out of convenience because of certain implications.
It stretches the definition of "true" so far that the term "vacuous truth" no longer means "truth" in the general sense in which it is understood. It plays on the use of the term "truth" more than anything else to me; one could redefine "vacuously true" statements as "vacuous" statements in the sense of "undefined" and then the "gotcha" would no longer apply.
I think the example also captures a sort of flaw in applying classical logic (at least classical logic with vacuous statements) to everyday speech in another way that I don't think is just incorrect intuition. If someone asserts "All my hats are green", it's understood to be an assertion that the speaker does in fact have hats, otherwise there would be no point in structuring the statement as it is. That is, the statement is evaluated as true or false with reference to the antecedent because it (the antecedent itself) exists, and another, different statement could have been made. Classical logic evaluates the statement "All my hats are green" as if it were the same as "If I had hats, all my hats would be green" — but they are not the same statement, they have different meanings. There's a counterfactual possibility in natural language, which I think requires nonclassical logic.
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i think its relevant that the liar has to say false things, which is more limited than just not-true things.
if you dont assume the vacuous truth, and instead leave it undefined, then when hes got no hats, "all my hats are green" is absurd, rather than false.
the gotcha only stops applying when you put a vacuous false, rather than true or undefined.
is this really a flaw in applying classical logic? with the vacuous true, the only information you get from "all my hats are green" being false is that they have at least a hat, same as the intuitive result
Thank you for taking the time to write this. I don't have any formal training in the field but it matches my intuition and I am surprised, astonished even, to see this explanation so far down.