To think for a minute about different ways that a sentence can be false:
1) It can be the negation of a true sentence, that is, a sentence which accurately describes a state of affairs. 'The dog is sleeping under the table' is true; 'the dog is not sleeping under the table' is therefore false.
2) It can be another sentence which means the same as the negation of the true sentence, or which implies the negation of the true sentence: 'the dog is playing in the back yard' is false.
3) It can include a name with no reference: 'the jabberwock is sleeping under the table', or other imaginary elements: 'the ship's captain was beamed down to earth from the orbiting spacecraft'.
4) It can inaccurately describe facts from the past, or entail the negation of facts from the past: 'Saddam Hussein was involved in planning the destruction of the World Trade Center' and 'Elvis lives!' are both false.
Some sentences are inherently unverifiable, such as concrete assertions about the future and assertions about the past which we have no way of checking. These are not exactly false, but they aren't exactly true, either.
I'll see if I can think of any others by the weekend, and then we can look at the ways that we can make false sentences true through metaphor, and we'll try to characterize the sentences in theories and definitions. I'm trying really hard not to get bogged down, here, but I believe these are important issues, really.
8:18:38 AM 
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