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I have a meta-question about why you’re saying these things in this particular way. I suggest rearranging the claims in a more hierarchical fashion. For example I conclude that #1 is wrong, but perhaps not literally false. What is most wrong about #1 is that is draws on fragments of concepts but skips lower level concepts that are necessary for making identifications. As for #1, to if-and-only-if with “meaning”. “sentence” concept to “word” for definition, necessary bypassed which the sticking a have is giving the in scheme relate you order. Oops, I meant, sticking with the if-and-only-if scheme for giving a definition, you have bypassed the concept “sentence” which is necessary in order to relate “word” to “meaning”. So first the word-string must be a sentence: it must follow the rules of sentence-syntax. “String of words” refers to a something bigger than “sentence”. However, between the two, there is also “phrase” e.g. “the members of Congress”, which is not a sentence and does not quality as a statement (=assertion), but it has meaning. Words, as well, have meaning. The correct approach to the topic, IMO, is to start with the fact that words have meaning, and word combinations may have a meaning which is composed via a proposition-building function – the rules of the language (I’ll totally skip the details, but they have to do with how word-combinations in an order have a specific meaning in a language, so that “the dog chased the cat” means something different from “the cat chased the dog”). Being a statement (I assume you consider this to be a synonym for assertion) is a property of certain sentences – other sentences are “questions” or “commands”. Only assertions are true or false. “Congress” or “ruins” is neither true nor false, and “the members of Congress” is neither true not false. However, both have meaning. Questions and commands are kind of sentences – they are not just “strings of words”, and they have meaning, but they are neither true nor false. So I conclude that #2 is false: “meaning” applies to more things than just statements. This is kind of fatal to the enterprise of relating units of language to reality. Your corollary A also has to face the problem that questions and commands have meaning and are sentences, but not statements / assertions. I don’t understand what #3 is intended to say (what is its function in your system?). The assertion “The House voted to condemn Trump” is true, that is, it describes a fact. The assertion “The House voted against condemning Trump” is false, which means that it describes the opposite of a fact, or, its denial describes a fact. The assertion “Trump was assassinated in 2018” is also false (does not correctly describe reality), but it clearly has meaning and it does not mean the same thing as “The House voted against condemning Trump”. I especially do not understand what you mean by the relationship between the something that a statement says and the statement’s referent. I assume this is intended to get at the notion of “correspondence” or the fact that a certain proposition describes a fact – I just need some unraveling of this way of talking about truth. Getting back to those rules of language and the proposition-building interpretative function for sentences, sentences like “Sentence A is true” is actually the same problem as “I just saw a rat” or “You found my watch”. They have “loose end” terms: “I”, “you”, “my”, and “Sentence A”. If you take try to interpret language completely out of context, the watch sentence describes (or misdescribes) at least 520 facts, i.e. it is always huge out-of-context contradiction. Clearly, this sentence is true (or false) once we settle on the intended referent of “you” and “my”. There are social rules about how we objectively determine intended reference especially in sentences contructed by other people, though in the case of “I”, it plainly means “the guy talking”. The problem with “Sentence A” is that out of context there is no hope of assigning any referent to that clause (therefore no hope of determining if the sentence is true), but in context, it may be true or false, or neither. Sentences like “Sentence A is true”, “Sentence A is in Spanish”, and “The dog is barking” presuppose the existence of “Sentence A” or “The dog”. I think that sentences with false presuppositions do not describe a fact, so they are false and not true.

Thank you Boydstun. Another interesting twist. You seem to indicate that a string of words can be meaningful and a sentence if it tries to state something about an identifiable referent... even if that something is inapplicable, or nonexistent. The result is a sentence which is false. "This sentence" is surely a referent. The purported something about the sentence, is its truth or falsity. Let us consider what "truth" or falsity" is. Objectively it identifies a state of the relationship between the "something said" and the referent. As such, the term "true" or "false" must have its own referent, the relationship. Here the content (something) attempted is "truth" but "truth" as such presupposes antecedent relationship which it cannot itself supply. So in a sense, only the content is meaningless, or better, missing. The string of words says nothing about "This sentence" although it promises to. So what about "is true"... do we treat it as inapplicable, nonsensical, or missing entirely? "This sentence is furry." Here "is furry" is inapplicable to words. But is the sentence meaningful? Certainly the referent is clear. But the content is categorically inapplicable, words can never possess furriness or non-furriness. Is this simply an error of degree akin to "this sentence has 2 words in it" or is it an error of a different kind? In some sense this is cleaner than "This sentence is true" because it does not mislead one (quite as much) to presume something... namely that the sentence can be evaluated as true or false... since most sentences can be evaluated as true or false, it sucks us in... whereas since we know sentences cannot be valuated on furriness "This sentence is furry" can easily be dismissed as nonsensical. In what sense can something be nonsensical but meaningful? Alternatively should we adjudge based on higher principles that all sentences which are not true are simply FALSE, and any attempt to distinguish between meaningful, non-meaningful, sensible or nonsensical is somehow artificial? This reminds me in a very indirect way the impotence of the zero... What I like about dropping the idea of meaningful versus meaningless falsehoods, is that it wipes away all the confusions about the so called indeterminate cases. It also seems to take care of fiction. Everything that does not qualify as TRUE is simply FALSE. Now if we ground truth in objectivity, then the referent, the something, and the relationship all each have to be identified with words in a meaningful and rational manner. The words must identify valid concepts and their valid relationships in a logically cogent manner. "This sentence is true" cannot be objectively true, it is nonsensical, meaningfulness is beside the point? Do I have anything to say anymore? Is my OP in any sense useful? I'm not sure...

Still playing around with this. Does anyone have any thoughts about the following: 1. A string of words is a statement if and only if it has meaning. 2. A string of words has meaning if and only if it states something about a referent in reality. 3. Only those strings of words which are statements, are either true or false, the truth or falsity of which only arises as a consequence of the relationship between the something it says and its referent. Corollaries: A. A string of words which is neither true nor false, is meaningless, and cannot be deemed a sentence. B. A statement's truth can also be a referent in reality if and only if the string of words making up the statement can first be evaluated as true or false given the something it states about its referent in reality. Result: P- "Sentence A is true" is either true or false. (if A is not a sentence P is a lie... false) Q-"This sentence is true." is a meaningless string of words. It states nothing about any referent in reality, and hence there is no relationship between what it says and reality which in the first instance could cause it to be true or false, from which one could then evaluate whether the string of words is true or false.

Another sentence Dr. Binswanger used in his example of the fallacy of self reference was: This sentence is true. The problem is that the sentence only refers to itself as true. Here is the example given along with another variation that the good Dr. provided in one of his audio presentations. This sentence has exactly six words. or This sentence is in written in English. True, the latter two sentences refer to themselves, but not purely as self reference. Both name facts that can be verified. An individual can count the words, or recognize the words as belonging to the English language. What about the first sentence can be independently verified as true? What about the first sentence is true? It has no cognitive content. It has no what. He draws a parallel to Miss Rand's identification of "A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms." Again, there is no cognitive content. Welcome to the forum.

I'm going to present another perspective, from that of a programmer. First, I will establish the necessary functions to process this (in very simply terms) function grammatically_correct(sentence) { return true if "sentence" is grammatically correct. return false if "sentence" is not ungrammatically correct. } function evaluate_truthiness(proposition) { extract the subject and predicate from "proposition". call the predicate's associated function passing the subject as the parameter } [/codebox] I will show that sentences presented "This sentence is false" and "This sentence is true" are both infinitely recursive (self-referencing). But before that, let's consider the sentence "This sentence is a properly formed sentence," which is also recursive (self-referencing), but not infinitely so, as I will show. So, we'll make the call evaluate_truthiness("This sentence is a properly formed sentence"); When we do this, inside evaluate_truthiness will perform the following tasks: [codebox]extract the subject and predicate as "This sentence" and "is a properly formed sentence." The subject "This sentence" is a reference to the whole sentence "This sentence is a properly formed sentence". "is a properly formed sentence" is long-hand for the function "grammatically_correct", so we make the call: grammatically_correct("This sentence is grammatically correct"), which returns true, because the sentence is grammatically correct. evaluate_truthiness returns true. When we try to process the original sentence: "This sentence is false" this is what happens: evaluate_truthiness("This sentence is false"); which invokes the following inside evalute_truthiness: extract subject and predicate as "This sentence" and "is false." The subject "This sentence" is a reference to the whole sentence "This sentence is false". "is false" is the negation of the reference to the function evaluate_truthiness, so we make the call: evaluate_truthiness("This sentence is false"), which brings us exactly back to the first step, where we loop forever[/codebox] Ultimately, this proposition can be neither true nor false. "This sentence is false" will forever try to evaluate itself. It's unanswerable, except in saying that by that standard, it is not a proper proposition, as it has neither a true nor false evaluation. (I'm no linguist, I'm a programmer, and these are the terms that make the most sense to me)

I agree with the posters here. In English, statements that are not gramatically complete are called sentence fragments. I.E. The sentence "walking the dog." There is no object of the sentence, who is walking the dog. I would propose that sentences that are purely self-referential such as "This sentence is true" are cognitive fragments. There isn't enough information in the sentence to evaluate it.

There has been some investigation in these search results: "This sentence is true"

Could you consider the sentence a logical short circuit, because the conclusion is the premise? Is there a term for this? Here is another one: "This sentence is true."

Nicko0301 "I don't see the distinction." Really? BogG's reading ("You receive no benefit at all from doing your duty. This includes even a feeling of satisfaction or fulfillment. You will feel nothing.") entails that no action of a moral agent which is required by duty can be beneficial to that agent. But Kant isn't saying that doing your duty can't benefit you. In fact, in the Groundwork he explicitly mentions a case where one could act in a way that benefits oneself and be moral: a shopkeeper who offers inexperienced customers the same prices as experienced customers has two possible motivations - he may be acting out of duty to his fellow man or he may be worried about losing customers if he takes advantage of their ignorance. If the shopkeeper is fully motivated by his duty to his fellow man, then his actions express moral worth, regardless of the fact that he accrues some benefit by his actions. "Kant is still attacking the notion of self-interest." I'm making a point about the content of what Kant is saying, not about the truth of what Kant is saying. That Objectivists will disagree with Kant's view regardless of whether one accepts my reading or BobG's isn't really relevant. "I mean, can you imagine living a life wherein you did absolutely nothing for yourself?" Kant doesn't argue for this. It is entirely permissible in a Kantian framework to do things that are in your own interest. In fact, Kant writes in the Groundwork that "To secure one’s own happiness is a duty". It's just that such acts usually aren't expressions of moral worth because they generally aren't undertaken out of duty. That doesn't mean they're forbidden. Kant even writes that "we should praise and encourage" actions that comport with duty but which are undertaken for selfish reasons. BobG "If your purpose is to understand Kant a mainstream history does not necessarily give you an accurate view. Dr. Peikoff does give you an unadultrated view as close to Kant as is possible." If your purpose is to understand Kant as opposed to strawmanning him, the work of somebody who basically considers Kant a proto-Nazi is not the best place to begin. Even if Peikoff were somehow right about Kant, it would be better to begin with a more charitable reading. That's just a principle of good philosophical scholarship. "If I was talking about actions performed from your own motivation you would be right. Since I was referring to Kant's view of ethical actions you have misread my statement." I'm not quite sure I understand your counterclaim here. "Yet, I am quite sure that Kant explicitly said that a moral action should elicit no emotion in the actor." Kant does not say this. Kant says that to the extent that one acts on the basis of desires and preferences rather than out of respect for duty, one's actions are not expressions of moral worth. (http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdf/kantgw.pdf p10) You can have emotions, it's even permissible to act on the basis of them so long as you are also acting in accordance with duty. It's just that to the extent you act on the basis of those emotions, your actions don't have moral worth. "A moral action would be performed solely because it is moral and have no consequence for the actor." The first half of this sentence is true, that actions which express moral worth are those actions performed solely because of duty. But the not having any consequence stuff isn't in the Groundwork. Kant flatly doesn't care about the consequences of actions, and he repeats over and over again the Groundwork that they are irrelevant to determinations of the moral worth expressed by actions. What Kant cares about is the reasons for action.

The problem is that you can't solely refer to your refering (apart from refering to something). It becomes more clear when you think of the simplified version: "This sentence is true." Exact same problem. It's saying about its saying; it says nothing. I think Matt is right that it's different from the arbitrary, but it has the same effect of being completely cognitively empty. EDIT: The lecture where HB discusses this is "The Metaphysics of Consciousness." He's got a good name for it to, something like the Fallacy of Pure Self-reference. He illuminatingly shows how the Kantian theory of perception commits this fallacy by assuming that man perceives his form of perception, instead of perceiving objects.