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truth-types.mdwn

Purpose

Explore and research truth types of informative statements.

Content

I’m not sure the term “truth type” means anything. I’m not sure it has any significance or effect on the language or on the core software architecture. But I realized I can percept the concept, and that alone makes it worth investigating.

The example which led me to create this research topic is the following. Let’s examine two sentences:

  1. Every vehicle has a current travel speed.
  2. The Earth has a planet revolving around it called “The Moon”.

Both sentences are true, but they are different. Let’s try to imagine the following parallel worlds:

  1. A world like ours, in which moving objects do not have a speed property.
  2. A world like ours, in which no planet revolves around the Earth

Now the difference should be clear: The second world is quite easy to imagine, but how is anyone supposed to imagine the first one? It sounds like a contradiction: How can something move, and not have a moving speed? Take a moving object and ask it “how many length units do you move per time unit?” and the answer would be the speed. We cannot intercept the possibility of a physical object having no speed.

However, there’s a much easier-to-handle difference here: The first sentence refers to the ontology, while the other one refers to actual data. The question now is: Are there sentences which don’t have any conceptual difference besides truth types?

Let’s try defining two ontology statements:

  1. Every vehicle has a speed
  2. Every person has two eyes

Again, we can imagine a person with 3 eyes. Here’s an interesting observation:

  1. A speed property is part of the definition of “vehicle”, i.e. being a vehicle means you have speed
  2. In the same sense we can say the definition of “person” requires to have two eyes, so someone with three eyes is not a person, regardless of which parallel universe we examine.

And that leads us to a conclusion that truth types are not as special as we may have thought - they may simply reflect the difference between the ontology (“how the world behaves”) and objects (“what exists in that world”). But let’s not give up yet, and try to define two data statements with different truth types:

  1. The Earth has a planet revolving around it called “The Moon”.

I can’t find anything. Every sentence I can’t imagine the opposite of, e.g. “the sky is above the ground” has this property that if you make the sentence false, it doesn’t make any sense because the statement here is part of the definition of sky: If it’s not above the ground, it wouldn’t be called sky in the first place and the sentence would be meaningless.

CONCLUSION: For now there is no treatment of truth types. I’ll come back here if I have new ideas or if other languages e.g. Gellish use truth types in a way I haven’t thought of.

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