I took this completely seriously until you said that propositions "are sentences that can be true or false," at which point I lit my laptop on fire and stormed off to yell at whoever they've got teaching intro to logic these days.
Also: "You shouldn't trust the things I say about utilitarianism." Have no fear :)
Propositions are typically defined as something like the meanings of declarative sentences, not the sentences themselves. To illustrate, "the snow is white" and "la neige est blanche" express the same proposition (and have exactly the same truth conditions), even though they're clearly distinct sentences (they employ different words, they're grammatically distinct, and so on).
I took this completely seriously until you said that propositions "are sentences that can be true or false," at which point I lit my laptop on fire and stormed off to yell at whoever they've got teaching intro to logic these days.
Also: "You shouldn't trust the things I say about utilitarianism." Have no fear :)
Wait, what's wrong with that definition?
Propositions are typically defined as something like the meanings of declarative sentences, not the sentences themselves. To illustrate, "the snow is white" and "la neige est blanche" express the same proposition (and have exactly the same truth conditions), even though they're clearly distinct sentences (they employ different words, they're grammatically distinct, and so on).
Oh yeah, true.