Not all statements are precise enough to be nailed down as definitely true or false. If there’s any leeway or ambiguity in exactly what is being stated, there might also be ambiguity in whether it’s true or false.
As a trivial example, consider this statement: “If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s nobody around to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound”. Is the statement true or false? Well, it depends on what you mean by “sound”: if you mean acoustic vibrations in the air, the tree does make a sound and the statement is false; if you mean auditory experiences induced in a brain, the tree does not make a sound and the statement is true.
Much more complicated cases are possible, and come up pretty regularly. Politics and the sciences very frequently have debates where nobody has quite nailed down precisely what proposition is being debated. For example, Slate Star Codex has an ongoing series of posts about disagreements over what “growth mindset” even is, which is very relevant to whether or not claims about growth mindset are true.
I like your reasoning but my stance still remains. In the above explained situations I would say that in that case simply put their are multiple answers each of which can in the eyes of a different person he true or false. It is evident that each person is entitled to their own opinion so it is up to your own reasoning capabilities to tell whether you view it as true or false. but what I am stating is sometime they literally say it is both good and bad. Like he killed a man so its bad BUT that man who was killed had also killed a man so it was good. Choose one it cant be both and the judge of any court knows that.
In the above explained situations I would say that in that case simply put their are multiple answers each of which can in the eyes of a different person he true or false.
Yes, except often it really is important to nail down which question we’re asking, rather than just accepting that different interpretations yield different answers.
Like he killed a man so its bad BUT that man who was killed had also killed a man so it was good. Choose one it cant be both and the judge of any court knows that.
In logic, we have the law of excluded middle, which states that truth and falsehood are the only possibilities, and they are mutually exclusive.
There is no such law for “good” and “bad”. There is no reason whatsoever that a single action can’t have two (or more) consequences which, in isolation, would be unmitigated good or bad. I once took a medication which successfully treated a medical problem (good), but gave me constant nausea (bad), which incidentally made me lose weight (good), but caused me to develop dysregulated eating habits (bad), which eventually prompted me to eat healthier (good), which sometimes causes me stress in social situations (bad), which...
Now you can, in principle, sum up and compare the goodness and the badness and reach an overall verdict (assuming you subscribe to something like utilitarianism), and then you can say that on balance a certain thing was good or bad. But in practice, this is very often prohibitively difficult. Sometimes, the best answer is to just admit that you don’t know, that there are points in both columns but you can’t be sure which outweighs the other.
There are also lots of ways to get this wrong, and I certainly agree that dealing with sloppy reasoning is frustrating.
Not all statements are precise enough to be nailed down as definitely true or false. If there’s any leeway or ambiguity in exactly what is being stated, there might also be ambiguity in whether it’s true or false.
As a trivial example, consider this statement: “If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s nobody around to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound”. Is the statement true or false? Well, it depends on what you mean by “sound”: if you mean acoustic vibrations in the air, the tree does make a sound and the statement is false; if you mean auditory experiences induced in a brain, the tree does not make a sound and the statement is true.
Much more complicated cases are possible, and come up pretty regularly. Politics and the sciences very frequently have debates where nobody has quite nailed down precisely what proposition is being debated. For example, Slate Star Codex has an ongoing series of posts about disagreements over what “growth mindset” even is, which is very relevant to whether or not claims about growth mindset are true.
You might enjoy the sequence on 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong, from which I have shamelessly stolen the above example.
I like your reasoning but my stance still remains. In the above explained situations I would say that in that case simply put their are multiple answers each of which can in the eyes of a different person he true or false. It is evident that each person is entitled to their own opinion so it is up to your own reasoning capabilities to tell whether you view it as true or false. but what I am stating is sometime they literally say it is both good and bad. Like he killed a man so its bad BUT that man who was killed had also killed a man so it was good. Choose one it cant be both and the judge of any court knows that.
Yes, except often it really is important to nail down which question we’re asking, rather than just accepting that different interpretations yield different answers.
In logic, we have the law of excluded middle, which states that truth and falsehood are the only possibilities, and they are mutually exclusive.
There is no such law for “good” and “bad”. There is no reason whatsoever that a single action can’t have two (or more) consequences which, in isolation, would be unmitigated good or bad. I once took a medication which successfully treated a medical problem (good), but gave me constant nausea (bad), which incidentally made me lose weight (good), but caused me to develop dysregulated eating habits (bad), which eventually prompted me to eat healthier (good), which sometimes causes me stress in social situations (bad), which...
Now you can, in principle, sum up and compare the goodness and the badness and reach an overall verdict (assuming you subscribe to something like utilitarianism), and then you can say that on balance a certain thing was good or bad. But in practice, this is very often prohibitively difficult. Sometimes, the best answer is to just admit that you don’t know, that there are points in both columns but you can’t be sure which outweighs the other.
There are also lots of ways to get this wrong, and I certainly agree that dealing with sloppy reasoning is frustrating.