When you say “straightforwardly false”, do you intend to refer to any particular theory of truth? While I have long known of different philosophical concepts and theories of “truth”, I’ve only recently been introduced to the idea that some significant fraction of people don’t understand the words “true” and “false” to refer at-least-primarily to correspondent truth (that is, the type of truth measured by accurate reflection of the state of the world). I am not sure if that idea is itself accurate, nor whether you believe that thing about some/many/most others, or what your individual understanding of truth is, so I find it hard to interpret your use of the word “false”.
What I mean by false is not something I have pinned down in a deeply rigorous philosophical sense. But here are some calibrating examples:
Everybody loves Tom Hanks!
The sky is often green.
God does not play dice with the universe.
This is the best book ever written. (← It is an unfortunate side effect of this sort of common hyperbole that in the rare case when one actually means to make this claim literally, one has to say many more words to make that clear.)
I’m certain we will be there by 5PM.
There’s absolutely no other explanation for X.
You’re not listening to me. (← Here there is both the trivial and somewhat silly layer in which you’re clearly expecting the person to parse the sentence, but also the deeper layer in which you are asserting as if fact something about the other person’s internal experience that you do not and cannot know (as opposed to having high credence in a model).)
Absolutes are a pretty good way to achieve the “straightforwardly false” property in a hurry, and I suspect they make up at least a plurality of instances in practice, if not a straight majority.
In short, though: I don’t expect that I’m capable of catching all of the instances of straightforward falsehoods around me, or that I could describe a detection algorithm that would do so. But I’ve got detection algorithms that catch plenty anyway; the airwaves are full of ’em.
When you say “straightforwardly false”, do you intend to refer to any particular theory of truth? While I have long known of different philosophical concepts and theories of “truth”, I’ve only recently been introduced to the idea that some significant fraction of people don’t understand the words “true” and “false” to refer at-least-primarily to correspondent truth (that is, the type of truth measured by accurate reflection of the state of the world). I am not sure if that idea is itself accurate, nor whether you believe that thing about some/many/most others, or what your individual understanding of truth is, so I find it hard to interpret your use of the word “false”.
What I mean by false is not something I have pinned down in a deeply rigorous philosophical sense. But here are some calibrating examples:
Everybody loves Tom Hanks!
The sky is often green.
God does not play dice with the universe.
This is the best book ever written. (← It is an unfortunate side effect of this sort of common hyperbole that in the rare case when one actually means to make this claim literally, one has to say many more words to make that clear.)
I’m certain we will be there by 5PM.
There’s absolutely no other explanation for X.
You’re not listening to me. (← Here there is both the trivial and somewhat silly layer in which you’re clearly expecting the person to parse the sentence, but also the deeper layer in which you are asserting as if fact something about the other person’s internal experience that you do not and cannot know (as opposed to having high credence in a model).)
Absolutes are a pretty good way to achieve the “straightforwardly false” property in a hurry, and I suspect they make up at least a plurality of instances in practice, if not a straight majority.
In short, though: I don’t expect that I’m capable of catching all of the instances of straightforward falsehoods around me, or that I could describe a detection algorithm that would do so. But I’ve got detection algorithms that catch plenty anyway; the airwaves are full of ’em.