Truthwhether

Truthwhether is a neologism used in philosophy of language and logic to denote a specific relation between a proposition and the truth status of its embedded whether-clause. The term combines truth with the conditionality introduced by whether, signaling a focus on how truth values are settled when the content is interrogative or alternative.

Formal notion: For a proposition P, truthwhether(P) is the claim that the truth value of P can be determined within a given discourse or context. In classical truth-conditional semantics, truthwhether(P) corresponds to the disjunction P ∨ ¬P, which is a tautology. This highlights that, in standard logics, the mere existence of a whether-question leaves the global truth unsettled unless information is added. In non-classical logics, truthwhether can diverge from mere tautology and serve to model information states, decidability, or epistemic conditions under which a question reduces to a fact about P or about its negation.

Applications: The notion is used in interrogative semantics to analyze how questions contribute to truth-conditions of discourse, in epistemic logic to model knowledge states about uncertain propositions, and in artificial intelligence to handle queries that embed conditional or alternative content. It is also used in linguistic analyses of whether-clauses and their role in reporting and argumentation.

Critiques: Critics note that truthwhether overlaps with standard account of truth-conditions for questions and may be redundant in classical settings, though it can offer clearer vocabulary for non-declarative content. The term remains largely theoretical and is not widely adopted in mainstream logic.