No one anywhere can utter 'I am talking now' without saying something true. Indeed, that is necessarily the case: it doesn't just happen to be the case. Letting T = 'I am talking now,' we can write
1. Necessarily, for any speaker S, if S utters T, then T is true.
But it would be a mistake to infer
2. For any speaker S, if S utters T, then T is necessarily true.
All Related Posts (on one page) | Some Related Posts:
- More on Williams on Existence
- C. J. F. Williams' Analysis of 'I Might Not Have Existed'
- Are First-Person Denials of Existence Nonsense?
- A Modal Fallacy to Watch Out For
- Self-Reference, Nonsense, and Existence
- Notes on Van Inwagen on Modal Epistemology
- Imaginable, Conceivable, Possible
- Towards a Taxonomy of the Senses of 'Possible'
- Metaphilosophical Interlude: On Appeals to Ordinary Language
- The Reality of the Merely Possible
- Epistemic/Doxastic Possibility
- From Possibilities to Possible Worlds
- Might There Have Been Just Nothing At All?

2. Disallowing comments from a particular person, or deleting an offensive, off-topic, or otherwise substandard comment, has nothing to do with censorship. People who think otherwise confuse censorship with lack of sponsorship. I am under an obligation not to interfere with anyone's exercise of legitimate free speech rights. But I am not under any obligation to aid and abet anyone's exercise of free speech rights, legitimate or illegitimate.
3. The Comments area is not an open forum for anyone to say anything about any topic. As the name implies, it is primarily for commenting on the author(s)' posts. But to comment on them, one must have read them. And if I have spent three hours on a post, a reader will not understand it in thirty seconds. Secondarily, the Comments area is to facilitate civil discussion between and among commenters as long as the discussion remains on-topic.
4. Some undesirables: The skimmers, those who cannot read but only read-in. The sophists who, abusing argument, argue for the sake of argument. The ideologues, those who are out for power, not truth. The uncivil. The illogical. The politically correct. Worst of all, perhaps, are those who exemplify the anti-Socratic property: those who think they know what they don't know. If Socrates was famous for his learned ignorance, these types are marked by their ignorant unlearnededness.