In the section on ‘Common Language vs Formal Logic’, he mentions the two propositions
The room is noisy
There is noise in the room
and says the former is epistemological while the latter is ontological. Can anyone explain why this how this is the case? I can’t make out the distinction at all, and infact parse the former as the latter.
I’d guess that what he’s getting at is that the first statement is merely reporting an observation while the second is making a claim about the state of the world and the entities within it. Of course such claims are somewhat implicit in the first to the extent that they are implicit in language but it is mainly reporting observations without explicitly tying them to claims about the world. The second statement is more explicitly calling out the existence of a thing called noise and a thing called a room and saying that the latter contains the former.
In the section on ‘Common Language vs Formal Logic’, he mentions the two propositions
The room is noisy
There is noise in the room
and says the former is epistemological while the latter is ontological. Can anyone explain why this how this is the case? I can’t make out the distinction at all, and infact parse the former as the latter.
I’d guess that what he’s getting at is that the first statement is merely reporting an observation while the second is making a claim about the state of the world and the entities within it. Of course such claims are somewhat implicit in the first to the extent that they are implicit in language but it is mainly reporting observations without explicitly tying them to claims about the world. The second statement is more explicitly calling out the existence of a thing called noise and a thing called a room and saying that the latter contains the former.