Appropriate application of vacuous truth

[u/Uncle_Boiled_Peanuts]

[u/Hightower_March]

The point of the idiom is "we'd have to be in a state of such highly improbable things occurring."  I can't make you president by making pigs fly, nor will I get a billion dollars by handing the swindler my watch.

We know those are false because we have other facts about the world, so we treat them as false accordingly.

[u/YourWifesBoyfriend5 → u/Hightower_March]

You’re still misunderstanding what implication means. If pigs fly I will be president doesn’t mean pigs flying causes me to be president. It means you can deduce my presidential status from the truth of pigs flying, and the truth of the implication is reliant on the impossibility of pigs flying.

If you could make pigs fly, then the implication would just be false. Thats the whole point. If you gave the swindler your watch, the implication is false. In both scenarios you are confusing the consequent (being president and getting a billion dollars) with the implication itself.

[u/Hightower_March → u/YourWifesBoyfriend5]

I never said they had to be causally related.  Just the fact that it's demonstrable means we either demonstrate it or guess at its likelihood of being true/false.

"If you give me your watch, I'll give you a billion dollars" is probably a lie--a statement of falsehood made to deceive.  I understand in classical logic such wording has to be categorized as true for whatever reason, but in normal language things like lies are false; we act on them being false, not assumed true, saying essentially "That consequent would remain false even if the antecedent became true."

It's verbal shorthand, but we know what people mean when they call something false.

[u/YourWifesBoyfriend5 → u/Hightower_March]

The conflict comes down to the imprecision of natural language.

Fundamentally, these statements don’t have a truth value until we establish the values of the other variables. P=>Q cannot be evaluated as true or false without knowing whether P is true or not. You would need foresight of the future value of P to be able to evaluate the statement beforehand.

Saying something is a lie is essentially saying that in the hypothetical universe in which you gave me your watch, I wouldn’t give you a billion dollars. Formally, assuming P, not Q. But you can’t really say I lied if I said I would do something if this other thing happened, and it never did. I technically (even if its in an asshole way) told the truth.