But fictionalists cannot say this; they're committed to saying that all four of these sentences are untrue.
What he likely has in mind is this: on a literal reading, mathematical sentences are untrue, as fictionalism says, but there's an alternative reading on which they come out true (and nominalistically kosher).
We continue to hope that Bassel will be able to take his position at the Media Lab, and we desperately hope the rumors of his death sentence are untrue.
Alexander's very first sentence is untrue, "The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments last week in the Hobby Lobby case, to decide whether a business that provides health-care insurance to its employees can be forced to include abortifacients in its coverage".
Her slangy style, combined with frequent solecisms and awkward sentences, sometimes seems untrue to Hawthorne's fastidious artistry and smooth Latinate diction.
Joyce starts out from the assumption that, when taken literally, moral sentences are systematically untrue, and seeks to show that it can still be practically useful to pretend that it is not so.
For since paraphrase nominalists don't believe in the existence of mathematical objects, if they admit that ordinary utterances of '3 is prime' are best interpreted as being about mathematical objects, or purporting to be about such objects, then they will have to admit that such sentences are literally untrue, as fictionalists maintain.
(If you ever read a sentence that starts with "Neocons believe," there is a 99.44 percent chance everything else in that sentence will be untrue).
The first, fifth, and sixth sentences of that passage are patently untrue (and the second, third and fourth are debatable), but that last sentence is, I think, inarguable.
Just as we obviously don't think that every sentence containing the word "phlogiston" is untrue (consider "Phlogiston doesn't exist" and "17th-century chemists believed in phlogiston"), nor does the moral error theorist hold that every sentence containing a moral term is untrue; indeed, the use of such terms is surely essential to articulating and advocating the error theory.
This is patently untrue 4 and almost reaches the level of lunacy attained two sentences later when it is stated that because there were not much missing data, the data were assumed to be missing at random.
