Q:

Truth value of a proverb

One of the key tools of analysis in classical semantics is the concept of truth value. The content of a proposition, when contextualized in a particular world and a particular time, should have a truth value: it is either true or false, tertium non datur. 
However, the study of certain important classes of expressions, e.g., belief, reports, indirect discourse, hearsay evidentials, have raised some issues. While the problem of logical omniscience has been recognized, more recent work has challenged the fundamental distinction between content and context. 
What I am curious about specifically is the issue of whether truth value can meaningfully be attributed to a proverb. To better direct the discussion and provide a common point of reference, let's take the presumably contentful  proverb ``spare the rod and spoil the child," contextualized within the fictional universe of Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations, I'd like to examine the question of whether a proverb can and should have truth value. If, for example, the proverb is considered as a belief report, do an individual's actions serve as data for demonstrating a contradiction between the reported belief and the individual's true beliefs? Or on the other hand, if the proverb is treated as a universal generalization about the world in which it is contextualized, which types of facts about this world would demonstrate its falseness?

A:

Discourse Representation Theory can be used for modelling the universe of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations.
I don't know if you want to treat "spare the rod, and spoil the child" as a belief within this universe or as a hypothesis. If you want to have it as a hypothesis, I suppose you'd have to add the following to the universe:

I generated the DRS by first paraphrasing the sentence as "if a child is not disciplined , the child will be bad ." and then feeding it to appropriate field in the C&C+Boxer demo page.
Since the outermost component of this is a material implication, you can disprove it by finding an instance where the child was not disciplined and was still good.
Also refer to Belief in Discourse Representation Theory, by Nicholas Asher.

