The sky is not blue. The sky is not red. The sky is not yellow. The sky is not pink.
Anyway, it depends on what you mean by “statement”. The vast majority of all possible strings are ungrammatical, the vast majority of all grammatical sentences are meaningless, and most of the rest refer to different propositions if uttered in different contexts (“the sky is ochre” refers to a true proposition if uttered on Mars, or when talking about a picture taken on Mars).
The typical mode of communication is an attempt to convey information by making true statements. One only brings up false statements in much rarer circustances, such as when one entity’s information contradicts another entity’s information. Thus, an optimized language is one where true statements are high in information.
Otherwise, to communicate efficiently, you’d have to go around making a bunch of statements with an extraneous not above the default for the language, which is wierd.
This has the potential to be trans-human, I think.
But whether a statement is true or false depends on things other than the language itself. (The sentence “there were no aces or kings in the flop” is the same length whether or not there were any aces or kings in the flop.) The typical mode of communication is an attempt to convey information by making true but non-tautological statements (for certain values of “typical”—actually implicatures are often at least as important as truth conditions). So, how would such a mechanism work?
The sky is not blue. The sky is not red. The sky is not yellow. The sky is not pink.
Anyway, it depends on what you mean by “statement”. The vast majority of all possible strings are ungrammatical, the vast majority of all grammatical sentences are meaningless, and most of the rest refer to different propositions if uttered in different contexts (“the sky is ochre” refers to a true proposition if uttered on Mars, or when talking about a picture taken on Mars).
The typical mode of communication is an attempt to convey information by making true statements. One only brings up false statements in much rarer circustances, such as when one entity’s information contradicts another entity’s information. Thus, an optimized language is one where true statements are high in information.
Otherwise, to communicate efficiently, you’d have to go around making a bunch of statements with an extraneous not above the default for the language, which is wierd.
This has the potential to be trans-human, I think.
But whether a statement is true or false depends on things other than the language itself. (The sentence “there were no aces or kings in the flop” is the same length whether or not there were any aces or kings in the flop.) The typical mode of communication is an attempt to convey information by making true but non-tautological statements (for certain values of “typical”—actually implicatures are often at least as important as truth conditions). So, how would such a mechanism work?