Reading Like a Writer makes it clear just how much work is involved in being a writer before, during and after the formulation of a sentence, and that's a point that can't be made often enough.
÷4 says that, unless α is tautological, the agent should really give up her belief that α is true if she contracts by α. ÷5 says that the particular formulation of the sentence the agent gives up should not matter; in other words, the objects of belief should really be propositions rather than sentences.
The machinery is rich enough to allow formulation of the liar sentence.
Jeffery Ketland (2004) argues in detail that the Newman objection trivialises the Ramsey sentence formulation of ESR.
Melia and Saatsi (2006) also argue that intensional notions, such as naturalness and causal significance, may be applied to properties to save the Ramsey sentence formulation of ESR from triviality.
So conceived, a theory can be adequately represented by more than one linguistic formulation because it is not a system of sentences or propositions.
An alternate interpretation, advanced in different ways by Tuckness, draws attention to the fact that in the following sentences the formulation of natural law that Locke focuses on is a positive one, that "as much as possible" mankind is to be preserved.
A friend once told him, "In great writing, the proportion between the total number of sentences and those sentences whose formulation was especially striking or pregnant was about one to thirty whereas it was more like one to two in [your] case".
A friend once told him, "In great writing, the proportion between the total number of sentences and those sentences whose formulation was especially striking or pregnant was about one to thirty — whereas it was more like one to two in [your] case".
(As we will soon see, at the very least Tarski clearly would want his definition to be applicable to some languages whose set of sentences is that of some formulations of the simple theory of types).
