The example introduces a difficulty unrelated to the topic of the article. The statement “this is the strongest painkiller I have”, or even better “This will help your pain” is such that its truth value depends on it having been pronounced. This complicates the issue of whether it’s true, because “platonically”, taken outside the context of being pronounced, it’s “not technically a lie”, while when it’s actually pronounced, it becomes true to the situation, less misleading.
This is an intuitive difficulty akin to that with reflective consistency: at the moment, you prefer one decision, and later you prefer another. The situation changes, and so do decisions or valuations of decisions. In this case, before the statement is pronounced, it seems to be more untrue than after it’s pronounced. The reflectively consistent solution is to value what remains possible as a result of your decisions (and use that as a basis for your decisions). In this case, the true valuation takes into account how true the statement is given that it’s pronounced, at which point it’s more true than not.
The example introduces a difficulty unrelated to the topic of the article. The statement “this is the strongest painkiller I have”, or even better “This will help your pain” is such that its truth value depends on it having been pronounced. This complicates the issue of whether it’s true, because “platonically”, taken outside the context of being pronounced, it’s “not technically a lie”, while when it’s actually pronounced, it becomes true to the situation, less misleading.
This is an intuitive difficulty akin to that with reflective consistency: at the moment, you prefer one decision, and later you prefer another. The situation changes, and so do decisions or valuations of decisions. In this case, before the statement is pronounced, it seems to be more untrue than after it’s pronounced. The reflectively consistent solution is to value what remains possible as a result of your decisions (and use that as a basis for your decisions). In this case, the true valuation takes into account how true the statement is given that it’s pronounced, at which point it’s more true than not.