By language, here, I mean meaningful sentences (MSs) of the general form S is P. For an MS to be true, it must accurately describe some aspect of reality, that is, be descriptive of a thing.
This is pretty close to the verification principle (or the verifiability criterion of meaning) which is the philosophical theory that only statements that are empirically verifiable (ie. verifiable through the senses) are cognitively meaningful. The most well-known statement of that was A J Ayer's Language Truth and Logic.
MSs like 2+2=4, because they work perfectly, are here deemed perfectly true, or completely and absolutely true.
They are true 'a priori', i.e. true by virtue of logic, tautogically true, as are all mathematical truths or truths of logic, e.g. 'bachelors are unmarried'.
The idea of "table" is certain, so that if it were ever possible to determine that the thing is entirely a table, then the MS that asserts it is a table would be a descriptive MS that was absolutely and completely true.
What does 'certain' mean here? It's rather like a reference to the Platonic form of table - the idea is the perfect archetype of which actual tables are imperfect instances.
The difficulty - my difficulty - is with people who represent their beliefs as being true, and acting on them as if they were.
I suspect this is the real point of the OP. You're basically re-stating the Vienna Circle arguments about verifiable beliefs contra theological, metaphysical or religious ideas, by which means you're trying to define 'truth' in such a way as they can be excluded; exactly as did Carnap, Ayer, and various other positivists.
Metaphysician UndercoverMarch 30, 2017 at 11:31#636390 likes
1. Reality is real.
a. Only reality is real
b. Only things are real
i. For the moment the test of thingness is if in principle it can be felt, seen, smelled, heard, or tasted. Here, at least, neither numbers, love, justice, nor any ideas at all, are things.
Reality is more complex than this. There is also the movement of things. The movement of things creates a difficulty for the "S is P" form of sentence, because it is described as a relationship between one thing and another.
Let's see if some rules help. It seems to me there are really just three ways to respond to rules:
1. agree with them
2. modify and improve them
3. demonstrate where they're wrong.
Of course one may also dislike them, but that's neither here nor there.
Why? You have the unqualified "agree" option - why is there no "disagree" option?
Anyway, you don't have to start from scratch, you know. Truth
3) Within language, rules matter. We can start with the rules of identity, non-contradiction, and the excluded middle. Call it logic, for that's what it is.
You write about presuppositions and here to my mind is one of yours. These three rules are about formal language. They aren't about ordinary language. We all talk about excluded middles, contradictions and non-identity in our ordinary language. The purported rules of logic don't just arise out of 'language'. They are part of a deliberate and brilliant exercise by logicians to use less unruly languages than the ones we actually ordinarily use.
Then in formal language the steps of logic bear truth boldly onwards. Meanwhile I pop round to the Square Orange cafe for tea, to discuss a friend who both is and isn't married to a transexual who goes under many names, including a professional one.
i. For the moment the test of thingness is if in principle it can be felt, seen, smelled, heard, or tasted. Here, at least, neither numbers, love, justice, nor any ideas at all, are things.
Just a thought, but could you not also define something as being a 'thing' if it has an effect? For example, some things, like society, cannot be physically sensed (ie, we cannot 'feel' society, 'see' society, etc.), but their impact can be (ie, we can see the effect of society in physical things like infrastructure, public buildings, etc.).
If, on the other hand, you think that it cannot be considered to be a 'thing', then what exactly is it? If it is not a 'thing', then it doesn't fit into your definition of being 'real' either. At least, that's my interpretation of what you're saying (I could be wrong).
Additionally, if you include 'having an effect' as being a property of 'thingness', then it becomes quite hard to draw lines between 'things' and 'not-things'. For example, justice could be considered to have an effect on the natural world in that it causes humans to do certain things, like kill other humans (using capital punishment as an example), and thus is a 'thing'. However, earlier you mentioned that it could not be considered to be a 'thing' because of it not being a physical entity.
What do you think?
(By the way, I am not necessarily arguing for this amendment to your definition, merely bringing it to your attention).
I am tempted by a theory that defines as 'not real' all of my debts, responsibilities, pangs of conscience and regrets. But I don't think it's altogether, well, realistic. And it also excludes my triumphs, friendships and acts of charity. None of which can be tasted or smelled, thank goodness.
Reply to tim wood HI tTm, I did recently compose an answer to this on another thread, here I copy it for you.
In modern philosophy, truth is defined by formal logic on propositions (statements). There are three main basic kinds of it, which I hear attempt to express in way compatible with the thinking of the formal logicians Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Strawson, Putnam, Searle, Kripke, Popper, Kuhn, and Davidson. According to all these various thinkers, truth is the result of evaluating a proposition, but the relation between truth and the proposition itself can be different depending on epistemological considerations.
Tautological truths within formal systems, such as mathematical equations. These are established by syntactic consistency with core axioms. The core axioms themselves describe the formal systems, and so truths at this level are necessarily true, in accordance with syntactic rules which are themselves defined in formally as logical propositions. These propositional systems can also define rules of deduction and inference without introducing meaningfulness and causality.
Empirical truths, which are determined via ratification by observation of material objects, states and events, as long as the propositions describing material states and events are logically coherent. If the observation verifies the proposition, then the RESULT of the observation is factually true, but the proposition itself without empirical ratification remains a proposition that is neither true nor false, and is simply an assertion. The specific and exact nature of truth itself depends not on facts or data, but on the epistemological factors relating the proposition to the material world in different metaphysical systems, most predominantly in the theories that define the relation of subject and predicate to objects, states, and events in the physical world. These theories add semantics (the meanings of words) to the syntactic relationships described in first-order logic. 'Internal' states, resulting from consciousness, are also evaluated empirically. The nature of consciousness itself is part of the epistemology.
Causal truths, which again first must be generally consistent within the rules of propositional calculus, and additionally, they must not contain any syntactic fallacies of deduction or inference. These are the most complicated forms of truth, and the basis of science. They are the most complicated because causal relationships cannot ever be proven necessarily true. They can only be proven not to be false. That distinction remains one of the least understood aspects of truth in the current world, because causality is so often claimed, yet errors in statements of causal truth are so frequent. The metaphysical factors of causality are more frequently better understood if they are known to exist, but only a small number of people even know that there are metaphysical factors involved. Those who do know the metaphysical factors understand that the relation of the subject and predicate's in the cause, to the subject and predicate of the result, is an abstraction that can be very complex.
While these are the *basic* forms of truth, the truth of many statements rely on combining two or more these forms together. For example, most commonly believe they know that the sun will rise tomorrow. This is based on empirical observations of many prior days where the sun did rise, leading to the simple second-order deduction that it will rise again tomorrow. Logically, one cannot know whether the belief is true that the sun will rise tomorrow until after the event has occurred. But in most cases, when sufficient empirical validation of many prior similar events has occurred, it is loosely assumed true that the same future event will occur again in the same circumstance. This 'axiom of probabilistic certainty' is the foundation of prediction in much scientific theory. The extrapolation of this axiom is the creation of the scientific method, which is designed to define the minimum number of observations necessary to corroborate a theory. As per the rules for causal truth, theories can only be corroborated and not be proven true; but modern science theory might still call a theory true based on the axiom of probabilistic certainty.
Beyond that, there are some other very specific forms of truth in philosophy. For example, there are 'self-generating' truths in linguistics, such as promises, statements of intent, contracts, and some statements of belief, which all become existent by their own statement. One should be aware these kinds of truth have limitations. For example, after making promises, it becomes true that promises were made, but the truth of the promise itself remains an indirect proposition, and still must be determined within the rules for the three basic forms of truth described above.
Truth in theology, morality, ethics, law, and metaphysics
Much confusion about truth has arisen in these fields, but by the above schema, the nature of truth itself is relatively simple. Theological systems make assertions about that which cannot ultimately be proven; morality strives to define that which is good or bad for an individual; ethics defines that which is good or bad for a society; law strives to define that which is right or wrong; and metaphysics strives to define that which is real. In all these cases the absolute truth of the assertions they make is undefinable. However within each of these disciplines, it is possible to evaluate the propositional consistency of statements within formal systems that they define; and from that, to evaluate the truth of their propositions empirically, within the formal systems themselves. so again, when different propositions within, or across, these disciplines contradict each other, it is not possible to evaluate which are true or false in absolute terms. It is only possible to demonstrate whether the claims by each system are coherent.
[Quote=tim wood]"True" and "truth" are words that are not so easy to define (even though we use them all the time and may even think they're simple). In an attempt to gain some clarity about them, I want to try to restrict them to what is clearly the case, and where they turn out to be limited in scope - or where they seem to be maybe not so clearly the case - try to sharpen the focus on them so that they can still be used, even if with some limitation. Let's see if some rules help. It seems to me there are really just three ways to respond to rules:
1. agree with them
2. modify and improve them
3. demonstrate where they're wrong.
Of course one may also dislike them, but that's neither here nor there. If we can establish or agree to some rules, then maybe we can test some things some of us think are true. If the rules are any good, perhaps we can learn something.[/quote]
Umm, Ok
Here goes:
1. Reality is real.
a. Only reality is real
b. Only things are real
i. For the moment the test of thingness is if in principle it can be felt, seen, smelled, heard, or tasted. Here, at least, neither numbers, love, justice, nor any ideas at all, are things.
Saying reality is 'real' is merely tautology or like saying a Cat is a Cat; you can say it but it doesn't show or really do anything. My personal preference is to label "non-real things" as mental and/or abstract concepts. If anyone reading this is a programmer they can a liken a mental construct as a database record as well as a abstract concept as the database metadata that describes how that record is structured (ie a mental concept of a mental concept). While there are additional nuances to this idea, it is safe to say I mental perceptions of a real thing may have aspect to them that make them similar to the real thing, they most likely do not match completely enough that we can be sure that the mental construct and the thing-in-and-of-itself are one and the same.
2. Language qua language is descriptive only. By language, here, I mean meaningful sentences (MSs) of the general form S is P. For an MS to be true, it must accurately describe some aspect of reality, that is, be descriptive of a thing. Because no description can be perfectly accurate, no MS can be completely and absolutely true. And any MS can only be as true as the description is accurate.
Language is just a system where we create,organize,etc various mental constructs, which includes labels. Whether a street is "Main Street" or "Broad Street" is almost completely dependent on how which choose to call it. Numbers are also a kind of label as one can is just called one can if it is by itself but the group of can it is with is called something else when they are together. As far as I know labels are almost always arbitrary and merely used to organize the world around us in order to help us perceive it. Whether it is raining the sky is blue or whether it is raining this is something I think of as a physical attribute of some thing and this attribute may have a descriptive aspect of the real thing but that isn't a given.
Labels can be thought of as variables used in a database record to store arbitrary information about someone or something (such as record ID and/or employee ID) and attributes as a variable used to store real and/or non-arbitrary information (such as employee age, weight, height, etc). I don't have much experience with this but there are gray areas as to what is arbitrary and what is not such as employee name since while it is really arbitrary it is so rare that it changes that it can almost be considered an attribute. At any rate whether there is a grey area or shouldn't make too much of a difference.
[Quote]However, read on.
3) Within language, rules matter. We can start with the rules of identity, non-contradiction, and the excluded middle. Call it logic, for that's what it is.
4. Language applied to ideas can also be true, e.g., 2+2=4. But "true," here, needs clarification, imho. Let's say that the test of the truth of language about ideas - not real things - is whether it works and how well it works. MSs like 2+2=4, because they work perfectly, are here deemed perfectly true, or completely and absolutely true. MSs like "Justice is good," maybe are not perfectly true, or at least not without a lot of work on understanding what is meant by both "justice" and "good."
5) What complicates matters is that descriptive language is always expressed in concepts - ideas. It is easily possible, then, for an MS about reality to have a quality of absolute truth. For example, "That is a table," is true only insofar as the "that " described just is a table. It may not be a table; it may be a table-like thing of some kind. (Keeping in mind that the law of the excluded middle applies only to MSs within language, logic, not descriptive MSs about reality.) So it may not be entirely true that the thing is a table. On the other hand, the idea of "table" is certain, so that if it were ever possible to determine that the thing is entirely a table, then the MS that asserts it is a table would be a descriptive MS that was absolutely and completely true.
And that's it. My goal is a tool to handle beliefs. Beliefs do not have to be true at all to be beliefs. They merely need to be believed. The difficulty - my difficulty - is with people who represent their beliefs as being true, and acting on them as if they were.
I do not think there is anything new or difficult or original here, but I like the idea of limiting "truth" to preserve its strength, by not applying it to ideas or things that are not or cannot be true.[/quote]
2+2=4 because in the mathematical language we choose, it is so according to that language. It is the structure/narrative/context that says it is so. However it could also be II+II=IV if we are using roman numerals or 5+5=A if we happen to be using hexadecimal numbers. In such systems, things may be true because the system of labels we conceive says that they are true (regardless of whether or not they represent an actual physical thing) or they may be true because they accurately describe an aspect of a physical thing.
However nearly every mental construct we can conceive of either has an arbitrary and/or transitory aspect to it when in reference to a physical thing. Also it can be wrong for a variety of reasons and it is a pretty much a given that some mental constructs are more or less arbitrary/transitory/wrong than others. While there might be some mental construct that are not arbitrary/transitory/ and/or wrong (when they are used in referencing physical things), I don't think I have ever found one; therefore while mental constructs could be considered 'true' or even 'truth' when they are not referencing anything real, at best it is also a given that they are only temporary 'true' when used when referencing real physical things.
Also as a side note, I'm merely using database concepts and models just so I don't have to reinvent the wheel and because databases and database records are more or less modeled after our own mental constructs so conceiving of thought of something as a mere database record is probably better than something built entirely from scratch.
[Quote]While these are the *basic* forms of truth, the truth of many statements rely on combining two or more these forms together. For example, most commonly believe they know that the sun will rise tomorrow. This is based on empirical observations of many prior days where the sun did rise, leading to the simple second-order deduction that it will rise again tomorrow. Logically, one cannot know whether the belief is true that the sun will rise tomorrow until after the event has occurred. But in most cases, when sufficient empirical validation of many prior similar events has occurred, it is loosely assumed true that the same future event will occur again in the same circumstance. This 'axiom of probabilistic certainty' is the foundation of prediction in much scientific theory. The extrapolation of this axiom is the creation of the scientific method, which is designed to define the minimum number of observations necessary to corroborate a theory. As per the rules for causal truth, theories can only be corroborated and not be proven true; but modern science theory might still call a theory true based on the axiom of probabilistic certainty.
Beyond that, there are some other very specific forms of truth in philosophy. For example, there are 'self-generating' truths in linguistics, such as promises, statements of intent, contracts, and some statements of belief, which all become existent by their own statement. One should be aware these kinds of truth have limitations. For example, after making promises, it becomes true that promises were made, but the truth of the promise itself remains an indirect proposition, and still must be determined within the rules for the three basic forms of truth described above.
Truth in theology, morality, ethics, law, and metaphysics
Much confusion about truth has arisen in these fields, but by the above schema, the nature of truth itself is relatively simple. Theological systems make assertions about that which cannot ultimately be proven; morality strives to define that which is good or bad for an individual; ethics defines that which is good or bad for a society; law strives to define that which is right or wrong; and metaphysics strives to define that which is real. In all these cases the absolute truth of the assertions they make is undefinable. However within each of these disciplines, it is possible to evaluate the propositional consistency of statements within formal systems that they define; and from that, to evaluate the truth of their propositions empirically, within the formal systems themselves. so again, when different propositions within, or across, these disciplines contradict each other, it is not possible to evaluate which are true or false in absolute terms. It is only possible to demonstrate whether the claims by each system are coherent.[/quote]
I realized the reason you have some differences of opinion is that I did not include Tarski. Some methemeticians stated he really should not be left out. So I added a little to the semantics section to allow for theories of classical and modern realism. Also I added a little on ideas of intent influencing causality, as quite a few people raised issues on that; and clarified why causal truth can only be known not to be false by adding Aristotle's law of excluded middle. Beyond that, if I add anything, I would have to remove something else, because it has rather reached a length limit.
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There’s been much discussion about ‘fake news’ recently, resulting rise to a new interest in the definition of truth. In modern philosophy, truth is defined by formal logic upon propositions (statements). There are three basic kinds of truth evaluation, which I here attempt to express in way compatible with the thinking of the modern philosophers Russell, Whitehead, Moore, Wittgenstein, Tarski, Carnap, Strawson, Putnam, Searle, Mendelson, Kripke, Popper, Kuhn, and Davidson.
Tautological truths within formal systems, such as mathematical equations. These are established by syntactic consistency with core axioms. The core axioms themselves describe the formal systems, and so truths at this level are necessarily true, in accordance with syntactic rules which are themselves defined in formally as logical propositions. These propositional systems can also define rules of deduction and inference without introducing meaningfulness and causality. While the truth evaluation itself requires some semantic definition of ‘truth,’ in order for the proposition to be assessed, the process of evaluating the proposition’s truth value always requires syntactic analysis alone.
Empirical truths, which are determined via ratification by observation of material objects, states and events, as long as the propositions describing material states and events are logically coherent. If the observation verifies the proposition, then the RESULT of the observation is factually true, but the proposition itself without empirical ratification remains a proposition that is neither true nor false, and is simply an assertion. The specific and exact nature of truth itself depends not only on facts or data, but also on the epistemological factors relating the proposition to the material world in different metaphysical systems, most predominantly in the theories that define the relation of subject and predicate to objects, states, and events in the physical world. These theories add semantics (the meanings of words) to the syntactic relationships described in first-order logic. 'Internal' states, resulting from consciousness, are also evaluated empirically. The nature of consciousness itself is part of the epistemology.
Causal truths, which again first must be generally consistent within the rules of propositional calculus, and additionally, they must not contain any syntactic fallacies of deduction or inference. These are the most complicated forms of truth, and the basis of science. They are the most complicated because they involve both syntax, semantics, and additional rules. In particular, causal relationships cannot ever be proven necessarily true. They can only be proven not to be false. That is important because, in proposition logic, Aristotle’s law of excluded middle holds that any statement is either true or false; but in real-world language, there need be no excluded middle, hence, proving that a statement is not false does not imply that it is necessarily true. Metaphysical factors also influence the relation of the subject and predicate's in the cause, to the subject and predicate of the result.
Compound, Contractual, and Scientific Truth
While these are the *basic* forms of truth, the truth of many statements rely on combining two or more these forms together. For example, most commonly believe they know that the sun will rise tomorrow. This is based on empirical observations of many prior days where the sun did rise, leading to the simple second-order deduction that it will rise again tomorrow. Logically, one cannot know whether the belief is true that the sun will rise tomorrow until after the event has occurred. But in most cases, when sufficient empirical validation of many prior similar events has occurred, it is loosely assumed true that the same future event will occur again in the same circumstance. This 'axiom of probabilistic certainty' is the foundation of prediction in much scientific theory. The extrapolation of this axiom is the creation of the scientific method, which is designed to define the minimum number of observations necessary to corroborate a theory. As per the rules for causal truth, theories can only be corroborated and not be proven true; but modern science theory might still call a theory true based on the axiom of probabilistic certainty.
Beyond that, there are some other very specific forms of truth in philosophy. For example, there are 'self-generating' truths in linguistics, such as promises, statements of intent, contracts, and some statements of belief, which all become existent by their own statement. One should be aware these kinds of truth have limitations. For example, after making promises, it becomes true that promises were made, but the truth of the promise itself remains an indirect proposition, and still must be determined within the rules for the three basic forms of truth described above.
Truth in theology, morality, ethics, law, and metaphysics
Much confusion about truth has arisen in these fields, but by the above schema, the nature of truth itself is relatively simple. Theological systems make assertions about that which cannot ultimately be proven; morality strives to define that which is good or bad for an individual; ethics defines that which is good or bad for a society; law strives to define that which is right or wrong; and metaphysics strives to define that which is real. In all these cases the absolute truth of the assertions they make is undefinable. However within each of these disciplines, it is possible to evaluate the propositional consistency of statements within formal systems that they define; and from that, to evaluate the truth of their propositions empirically, within the formal systems themselves. so again, when different propositions within, or across, these disciplines contradict each other, it is not possible to evaluate which are true or false in absolute terms. It is only possible to demonstrate whether the claims by each system are coherent.
The Semantics of Truth
According to all modern logicians, truth is the result of evaluating a proposition, but the relation between truth and the proposition itself can be different depending on epistemological considerations. While one might initially believe the nature of truth to be intuitively obvious, the semantics of truth are complex. This starts with the issue as to whether one believes that tautological propositions are true before any person evaluates them; in which case, the truths must exist independently in some abstract space independent of material reality.
That introduces the metaphysical considerations. Classical realists hold that Platonic ‘ideas’ do exist independent of perception, and truth is simply known by correlation. Modern realists state only external material reality exists, and abstractions are simply known by common sense (as a result, many modern philosophers refer to classical realism as idealism). Dualists hold that there separate domains of physical materiality and conceptual ideas, both of which exist, and some hold tautologies are a priori true (are still truth regardless whether they are considered). Monists hold the known reality is only physical, or only exists in the mind, or something else (such as Wittgenstein's idea of logical positivism, which holds that language is the only thing which can be absolutely known). Such different perspectives change what is actually known when a truth is ‘discovered.’
Regardless whether truth does exist independently of physical reality, a priori or not, empirical and causal truths may be properties attached to the proposition which are not ‘discovered,’ but rather ‘assessed.’ These latter cases introduce the meaningfulness of incorrect assessments, and how exactly something can be meaningful if its truth is beyond simple binary evaluation, such as for example, propositions which refer to non-existent objects or which contain metaphors. Thus the semantics of truth are not so simple, and become involved with metaphysical decisions defining the nature of reality, meaningfulness, and the definition of knowledge itself.
There are also three separate positions on causality. Some hold that there is no causality without intent, and that it is otherwise simply a logical inference or deduction. The second main position is that intent does not really exist either, but is only an apparent phenomena created by the physical workings of the world. The third main group say one or both of those ideas are reductionist, and so do not give any meaning to the word 'because.' The different positions on intent may also influence truth evaluation of empirical observations on internal states, such as emotions.
Truth and Post Truth
One of the most advanced thinkers on the semantics of truth is Donald Davidson, who is an absolute anomalous monist (there are only ideas, or mind, or matter, or language, but it cannot be known which). Therefore, he states truth is ultimately undefinable, yet through our ability to reason meaningfully, truth can be known, even if people do not know that they know the truth.
For example, people can know that the sun will rise tomorrow; but they do not know that they knew that until after the sun has risen.
Rhetorical misconceptions have arisen from this, whereby people state what they wish to be true as being true, then strive to find facts to prove that truth afterwards, giving rise to the ‘post-truth era.’ While one might attempt to dismiss such efforts as obviously absurd, it is not so easy, because of the complexities of formal definitions of what truth actually is. As things are, we are likely to be stuck with this problem for a very long time, because the framework of formal truth described here, with the resulting complex nature of truth in science, is far beyond that which most people who ‘just want to know the truth’ are ready to learn
[Quote="tim wood;63661"]2. Language qua language is descriptive only. By language, here, I mean meaningful sentences (MSs) of the general form S is P. For an MS to be true, it must accurately describe some aspect of reality, that is, be descriptive of a thing. Because no description can be perfectly accurate, no MS can be completely and absolutely true. And any MS can only be as true as the description is accurate.[/quote]
That's Russell's view, and the foundation of almost all modern thought. And as Russell says, it resolves how to handle statements like 'the king of France is bald,' so its certainly useful. The standard objection is that some words don't describe some aspect of reality, for example 'unicorn.'
"Foundation of almost all modern thought" only if you ignore Wittgenstein and many others, e.g. Searle.
First, there are lots of meaningful sentences that are not descriptive. "Please don't be rude," is a meaningful sentence and contains no descriptions.
Second, some descriptions are perfectly accurate. "The only integer greater than two and less than four" perfectly describes the number three because it does describe something and it could describe nothing else.
Third, the truth of a sentence is not necessarily a function of the accuracy of the descriptions in it. Vague descriptions can yield truth. "I met her some time around the birth of rock 'n' roll" is true if I met her any time around the mid to late 1950's. It's false if I met her in 1967.
On the 'unicorn' point, it's time to go back to Aristotle. To speak truth is to say of what is that it is *or of what is not that it is not*. That neatly deals with unicorns and Parmenides.
What you have described is how Plato's Socrates might approach the question - x is true, y is true, z is true - what is this 'truth' that all true things have in common? But it's not always the best way of tackling the problem. Leaving truth aside for a moment, we would have a problem working out what a 'bus' is by asking what all buses have in common. And on reflection we would find out they have no one thing in common. But we would not then conclude that talk about buses is all nonsense. So if the method doesn't work for a straightforward concept, like 'bus', then we might wonder whether it's going to be a good method for a trickier concept like 'truth'. And the fact that we cannot identify a commonality to all true statements may tell us nothing very interesting about the concept of truth because that lack of commonality applies equally to the concept of a bus.
I simply don't believe it is true that you believe anything that you don't believe to be true. Perhaps you could provide an actual example for consideration.
Also, I can't help wondering what the point of discussing a thing could be if you don't believe you can know what it is.
Or you may get the idea that truth is actually something more, perhaps a quality of some kind in its own right. Now here I have a problem: what, exactly, would that property be?
So - what is more true than the truth? Is that what you're asking? That seems to me what you're asking throughout this thread. Like A J Ayer, who is, whether you like it or not, your spiritual forbear, you don't want wishy-washy sentiments when it comes to truth, you want crisply-defined and empirically identifiable criteria that all sensible chaps can agree on.
The bad news is: there aren't any. And that's because every notion of truth rests on some intuition of what must be the case, that admits of no further explication. Somewhere along the line, you have to come to rest on what just is the case, and that is often something you will simply feel the be the case. In other words, there is no ultimate empirical fact (other than the fact that we exist, but Descartes already beat you to that.)
At the end of the day, the philosophical definition of truth is simply: what really matters to you; what you are prepared to live by, or defend. Modern philosophy, on the whole, never gets that, because it has divorced itself from religion, and such an idea sounds religious. Whereas philosophy nowadays is parlour games with words, by and large. Serves a purpose, can make you very good with words, but not so much with truth, as that is not simply a verbal matter.
I disagree. This might be a critique of the true, and you can make it if you like, although I think you're mistaken. Consider these:
1) This (table here) is a table.
2) 7+5=12
3) triangles have three sides
4) Julius Caeser was a ruler of Rome.
These are true, no intuition about it
These are not so much true as they have been labelled as 'true', by you. Other people may well agree with you; in which case they would have also labelled these statements as 'true'. And you might thus arrive at a consensus. But in no way do those statements have the property of truth.
Consider these:
1) This (table here) is a table.
2) 7+5=12
3) triangles have three sides
4) Julius Caeser was a ruler of Rome.
These are true, no intuition about it. But as to the proposition that they all have truth, that I find difficult. Again, no intuition about it. And I think we agree only on this: that "truth" doesn't mean much, if anything.
The first is simply a restatement of the law of identity, A=A
Second is an arithmetical truth.
Third and fourth, matters of definition. But they're all examples of a priori truths.
In any case, it is pointless to ask why A=A, or why triangles have three sides. With respect to both those questions, the answers given are the terminus of explanation. To ask why 7+5 should equal 12, is rather like the child who persistently asks 'why' even when a question has been answered. That is the case with all such necessary truths, which have been debated interminably since Hume.
in no way do those statements have the property of truth.
How do you judge that? You must know what 'the property of truth' is, to know that these statements don't have it. And if you don't know it, then you're simply expressing an opinion, but you can give no reason why anyone ought to agree that it's true.
Metaphysician UndercoverApril 24, 2017 at 14:57#675960 likes
Or you may get the idea that truth is actually something more, perhaps a quality of some kind in its own right. Now here I have a problem: what, exactly, would that property be?
Of course this means that anyone talking about "the truth," or the "absolute truth" (beyond just what in particular makes MS1, or MS2, etc., true), or any of a large number of formulations of this kind, is just talking nonsense.
Consider the difference between an object having the property X, and the concept which is X. So for example, we have an object which is red, and a concept of what it means to be red, and this is the concept of red. It is possible to consider the concept as an object itself, and this is what happens with geometric figures, the concept is the object. We have a point, a line, a right angle, a square, a circle, etc.. All these words refer to concepts, so the concept is the object which is being referred to. When we apprehend concepts as objects like this, we can analyze the concepts, just like we would analyze any object.
Now assume that "true" is a property which we assign to propositions. Accordingly, there is assumed to be a concept of what it means to be true. If we consider this concept itself, as an object, we have "the truth" as an object just like "the circle" or "the square". The problem is that there is no clear and unambiguous definition of "the truth", like there is of "the circle", or 'the square". This leaves us with doubt as to whether there really is a concept, which can be considered as an object, called "the truth". This is the issue which Plato attacked vigorously, with concepts such as "beauty", "love", "just", "knowledge", "virtue", "friendship", etc.. When we cannot agree on the definition of the term, how can we claim that there is such a thing (object) as the concept which is signified by that term. Now you recognize the same problem with "the truth". If there is no agreed upon definition of what it means to be true, how can there be a concept of "the truth"?
in no way do those statements have the property of truth. — A Seagull
How do you judge that? You must know what 'the property of truth' is, to know that these statements don't have it. And if you don't know it, then you're simply expressing an opinion, but you can give no reason why anyone ought to agree that it's true
The 'property of truth' does not really exist, it is superfluous to a consistent theory of truth, in the same way that the centrifugal force is superfluous to the theory of kinematics.
If you want reasons for that, just look at statements... how is it possible for them to have a 'property of truth'? They consist of strings of symbols which can be combined into 'words' whose 'meaning' can be determined (to some degree) by looking them up in a dictionary. That is all they are. Any label of 'truth' can only be applied to the statement by a person.
just look at statements... how is it possible for them to have a 'property of truth'?
If that is true of your statement, then why I am expected to believe it? How can you make an argument? You're just creating strings of characters, right? Why bother typing anything?
Nice joke. Or do you actually know what the words bolded just above mean? I admit I have trouble with them. Do us all a service and in a well-crafted sentence or two or three, tell us what you understand "true" and "believe" to mean.
"True' has a range of senses: for example 'right. 'correct', 'accurate', ' in accordance with actuality', and the like.
'Believe' means most characteristically "hold something to be true'. If you believe in someone then you would think of them as being true in some way: a true friend, or true to their word, or truly good, for example.
I predict that you will now ask what 'right', 'correct', 'actuality' and so on mean. And then if I give you definitions of those in further terms you will ask what those further terms mean. If you want to say that we cannot know what any of our terms mean, then what would be the point in discussing anything? In attempting to discuss, or even think about, anything we would be attempting the impossible, and if that were so, then we would be better to remain altogether silent.
But discussion and thought are not impossible, and the fact is that we all know very well what the words 'true' and 'believe' mean. The game of asking for definitions of definitions of definitions is a childish one; it is like the aggravating game of the child who keeps asking 'but why is that?' and when answered, asks again interminably "Yes, but why is that?".
If there is no agreed upon definition of what it means to be true, how can there be a concept of "the truth"?
There cannot, because truth is more primordial than any concept. In fact concepts would be meaningless without always already taking for granted the possibility of their possession or lack of aptitude; which is to say the possibility of their truth or falsity.
Or if you like, address the question of the OP, as Wayfarer has. Do you agree with him? That truth is turtles all the way down, except there aren't any turtles?
No, truth is not "turtles all the way down"; it is not anything all the way down, although it is "all the way down" insofar as it is groundless ( and yet without a ground there is no "down"). To say that truth is "accordance with actuality' is not to say that it is grounded in actuality. We might just as well say that actuality is grounded in truth. There is no determinate grounding, although I think it must simply be accepted that both actuality and truth must be grounded in the indeterminable, if there is to be any relation between being and thought. No relationship is achieved by collapsing one into the other, or dissolving the distinction altogether.
just look at statements... how is it possible for them to have a 'property of truth'? — A Seagull
If that is true of your statement, then why I am expected to believe it? How can you make an argument? You're just creating strings of characters, right? Why bother typing anything?
y="Wayfarer;67651"]
You are not 'expected' to believe it. It is a communication. And presumably you can understand it because there is a commonality of meaning of the words. Part of my communication is that I am suggesting a cohesive and consistent approach to truth that does not have the inconsistencies of other theories. But whether you believe it or not is entirely up to you.
I am suggesting a cohesive and consistent approach to truth that does not have the inconsistencies of other theories.
This is a statement, right.? You claim that it's 'cohesive and consistent' in the service of making a point - which is trying to persuade others that your theory is true, where other theories aren't. So if you succeed, you undermine your initial claim that statements can't be labelled 'true', because your statement then has the property of being a true theory, which is what you're arguing against. And if it doesn't fit have the property of being true, then it's not a true theory, and you haven't made your case.
I am suggesting a cohesive and consistent approach to truth that does not have the inconsistencies of other theories. — A Seagull
This is a statement, right.? You claim that it's 'cohesive and consistent' in the service of making a point - which is trying to persuade others that your theory is true, where other theories aren't. So if you succeed, you undermine your initial claim that statements can't be labelled 'true', because your statement then has the property of being a true theory, which is what you're arguing against. And if it doesn't fit have the property of being true, then it's not a true theory, and you haven't made your case
I said that statements can be labelled 'true', I also said that statements cannot have the property of 'truth'. I thought I had pointed out the distinction.
So there is no inconsistency. My statements can be labelled as 'true' but they would not have the property of 'truth'.
Certainly you could label it as such if you wanted to; but do you have any criteria for doing so?
Of course! If only the label is 'true', but the statement itself doesn't have 'the property of truth', then the label is not true, because the statement it refers to is not true. It follows from your initial statement, that if no statements have the property of 'being true', then there's nothing meaningful you can say, because whatever you say must either be true, in which case it contradicts your argument, or it's false, in which case it's false.
Metaphysician UndercoverApril 25, 2017 at 12:19#677320 likes
And everyone understands that the standard of truth for a given proposition needn't be the same standard for another. Truth, if it means anything, would just seem to refer to these different "trues." That is, truth is a many posing as and often being taken as a one. In this case, however, being a many is all it is.As a one, it's a nothing.
Well here's the problem then. If each proposition requires a different standard to be judged as true, then "true" has a different meaning in each of these instances of use. That's what I mean when I say there is no unambiguous definition of "true". From this, to say that a proposition is true, is really meaningless unless we indicate by which standard it is true. Clearly, there is no one concept of "truth" unless there is one standard by which we judge something as "true", just like there is one standard to judge something as "square", despite the many different sized squares.
I read John as taking the opposite view, that truth is so far from being arbitrary that it is fundamental, primordial. I think he means the truth of particular propositions, that each is, or is not, true. It raises an interesting question: what come first? The true itself? Or the possibility of being true? I suppose that the true/false divide comes into being somewhere when experience and understanding merged, and that the general term "truth" had to wait a long time before it came into usage. The passage from the descriptor, "true" to the noun-substantive (without a substance) "truth."
What John says makes no sense to me. John seems to think that there is a concept of truth which is prior to the concept of truth, and that's ridiculous.
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Metaphysician UndercoverApril 25, 2017 at 21:42#677950 likes
Reply to tim wood
I think that maybe you've been looking in the wrong place for "truth". You've now exposed "truth" as "attitudes held by more or less rational beings", yet you claim that these attitudes are "not arbitrary". Perhaps we can identify a particular type of attitude, rather than a multitude of different attitudes, and this particular attitude might lend itself as the essence of truth.
Would you agree that there is a relationship between truth and honesty? Have you ever considered that the essence of "truth" might be found in this attitude which we call honesty? It is evident that any statement may deceive, if that is the intent of the author, and the one receiving is not on guard. So despite how truthful the proposition may appear, if it was proposed with the intent to deceive, that truthfulness will be in appearance only. But if the statement is made in honesty, it will always reflect the true thoughts of the author.
Now, what all true statements have in common, is that they were produced from that attitude of honesty. If they were not produced in honesty, they are not true, and some honest statements are still not true by reason of mistake, but all true statements are derived from the honest attitude. So if we are looking to define "truth", by determining what all true statements have in common, then we should consider this honest attitude as the defining feature.
John seems to think that there is a concept of truth which is prior to the concept of truth, and that's ridiculous.
No, what's ridiculous is the amount of effort you put into reading posts before responding. I explicitly stated that I think there cannot be a concept of truth, and that truth is prior to all concepts:
There cannot, because truth is more primordial than any concept. In fact concepts would be meaningless without always already taking for granted the possibility of their possession or lack of aptitude; which is to say the possibility of their truth or falsity.
What do you think a concept of anything consists in? Doesn't a concept of something consist in relating it to other particulars in terms of commonalities and differences in order to establish what kind of thing it is? Is not the possibility of the truth or falsity of these purported relations that form our concepts always prior to the purported relations themselves?
Certainly you could label it as such if you wanted to; but do you have any criteria for doing so? — A Seagull
Of course! If only the label is 'true', but the statement itself doesn't have 'the property of truth', then the label is not true, because the statement it refers to is not true. It follows from your initial statement, that if no statements have the property of 'being true', then there's nothing meaningful you can say, because whatever you say must either be true, in which case it contradicts your argument, or it's false, in which case it's false.
OK Fair enough. But how is it possible for a statement to have the 'property of truth'? And how is it possible to determine whether a statement has such a property? And what advantages are to ascribe a 'property of truth' to a statement rather than merely label it as 'true'?
But how is it possible for a statement to have the 'property of truth'?
You have to allow for at least some statement to be true, to even say anything. Otherwise you're facing the dilemma of universal scepticism - that if every statement is false, then so to is every argument that the sceptic can offer. So the examples Tim Wood provided that you were commenting on, are text-book cases of true statements, but that in itself doesn't really say much.
However, concern with truth is fundamental. I don't know if you're following politics and current affairs, but the current President of the US is notorious for mendacity. His disregard for truth is regarded by many of his critics as not only the sign of a profound character flaw but also a threat to the institutions of democracy itself, which expect at least some level of truthfulness from their elected officials, not least the highest elected official.
The difficulty in these kinds of conversations is the open-ended nature of the question 'what is truth'? As an abstract or general question, it's almost impossible to answer. You could write an essay on the Platonic or Arisotelean or neo-Platonist views on the question, but they're situated within a culture which still had a classical regard for what you could call Capital T Truth. I think as a general tendency modernity is inclined to reject that kind of attitude. We nowadays only talk in terms of falsifiability and provisional hypotheses; maybe that's the best we can hope for!
Metaphysician UndercoverApril 26, 2017 at 01:46#678180 likes
No, what's ridiculous is the amount of effort you put into reading posts before responding. I explicitly stated that I think there cannot be a concept of truth, and that truth is prior to all concepts:
So what would this so-called "truth" consist of, which is independent from all concepts? Is it a physical thing? If not, then how does it differ from a concept?
What do you think a concept of anything consists in? Doesn't a concept of something consist in relating it to other particulars in terms of commonalities and differences in order to establish what kind of thing it is? Is not the possibility of the truth or falsity of these purported relations that form our concepts always prior to the purported relations themselves?
No, I really think you have this backward. How could the truth or falsity of a relationship be prior to the relationship itself. If it is the relationship which is either true or false, then truth or falsity is an attribute of the relationship. So how is it possible that this attribute exists prior to the thing which it is the property of? Are you suggesting that there is this thing called "truth", which floats around independent from any statements, yet attaches itself to a statement making that statement true?
So what would this so-called "truth" consist of, which is independent from all concepts? Is it a physical thing? If not, then how does it differ from a concept?
So, you have decided that there are only physical things and the concepts of them? On what do you base this conclusion?
It is obvious that truth is not a physical thing. If you want to say that truth is a concept, and nothing more than that, then you should be able to give an account of it as such.
How could the truth or falsity of a relationship be prior to the relationship itself.
It's not prior to the relationship, but to our conception of the relationship; we conceive of relationships under the aegis of the possibility of the truth or falsity of our conception of them.
Metaphysician UndercoverApril 26, 2017 at 02:34#678240 likes
So, you have decided that there are only physical things and the concepts of them? On what do you base this conclusion?
No, I haven't decided that. Concepts are not necessarily "of" physical things. But if you want to posit the existence of a non-physical thing, which is not a concept, you'll need to back this up with some sort of explanation.
It is obvious that truth is not a physical thing. If you want to say that truth is a concept, and nothing more than that, then you should be able to give an account of it as such.
According to my discussion with tim wood, I was ready to concede that there is no such thing as truth. So neither is truth a non-physical concept, nor is it a physical thing. Tim went on to suggest that truth might be attitudinal, and you can read my reply to that in the post before you engaged me.
It's not prior to the relationship, but to our conception of the relationship; we conceive of relationships under the aegis of the possibility of the truth or falsity of our conception of them.
If this is what you are saying here as well, that truth is attitudinal? Then we are probably in agreement. Read my post, and tell me what you think, because I've offered an identification of that attitude as honesty.
Concepts are not necessarily "of" physical things.
Can you give me an example of a concept which is not given, even remotely, in terms of physical things or relations between physical things?
I can't see how it could be in accordance with our experience and practices to "concede that there is no such things as truth" because our understandings of everything presuppose it. As I said before, the logical meaning of truth is that it is accordance with actuality. The trouble begins when analysis beyond that is attempted. If actuality is presupposed (as it seems to me that it must be, whatever we might think the nature of it to be) then truth is the accordance of thought with actuality. (Actuality could be otherwise referred to as being or reality).
I can't see how truth can coherently, or productively, be thought to be dependent on attitude, which would be the same as to say that it is dependent on belief. The problem is that beliefs can be true or false.
Can you give me an example of a concept which is not given, even remotely, in terms of physical things or relations between physical things?
Numbers and geometrical forms, laws of grammars, and logical relationships, can all be instantiated in physical forms, but they're essentially intellectual in nature.
It would seem that truth is never "out there" inhering in the propositions; instead it seems to just be the expression of the synthesis of perception, knowledge, and judgment. Every truth is mine, in so far as I recognize it as a truth. But every truth is also prospectively a part of collective mind.
Numbers and geometrical forms, laws of grammars, and logical relationships, can all be instantiated in physical forms, but they're essentially intellectual in nature.
Does that mean the same as to say that they are essentially conceptual in nature? Is a geometrical form, a law of grammar, or a logical relationship a concept or are they rather sets of relations?
What exactly do you mean by saying they are "essentially intellectual in nature".Could they be known apart from their physical instantiations?
What exactly do you mean by saying they are "essentially intellectual in nature"? Could they be known apart from their physical instantiations?
Well - what about mental arithmetic? Irrational numbers? I should say, I was terrible at school maths and boast no intellectual prowess in the subject whatever, and also that this is a very difficult question in philosophy. But I still think it's the case that what mathematicians do is essentially, or even only, intellectual. They represent their ideas with symbols, but the ideas are not themselves physical marks or signs. The signs signify ideas or relations or quantities - the sign itself is physical, but what is signified is purely intellectual. The issue is that in our own thinking, the intellectual is always inextricably combined with the sensory - we're constantly, and unconsciously, interpreting what we see as signs or indicators, but without noticing that we're doing that, as the mind works that way unconsciously (which is directly out of Kant although he didn't use the term 'unconsciously').
Metaphysician UndercoverApril 26, 2017 at 13:37#678650 likes
Can you give me an example of a concept which is not given, even remotely, in terms of physical things or relations between physical things?
The fact that a concept is "given" in terms of physical things does not necessitate that the concept is "of" a physical thing. Quite the opposite is actually the case. The concept is given in terms of physical things because that is how we communicate. We must communicate through the physical world, and we give each other concepts through physical representations. But the physical thing is the representation of the concept, not vise versa.
All the purely abstract concepts such as mathematical concepts are good demonstrations of such. Consider geometry, we have points, lines, right angles, circles, etc., which all have defined essences. We make a copy of the circle, for example, on a piece of paper, to demonstrate it to others, but this is just a representation of the concept, just like a point or a line on the paper acts as a representation of the concept. That it is just a representation is evident from the fact that we cannot make a perfect circle, the "true" circle remains the concept. Nor can we make a non-dimensional point on a paper, the true point is the concept. The one on the paper is a representation of the concept.
To properly apprehend the nature of concepts, it is necessary to see the physical object as the representation of the concept, not vise versa. This is what Plato described in the cave allegory.
The difficulty I'm having here is trying to figure out if truth lies in the intention, or in the speech. Answer, it seems neither. The speaker desires to speak truly, but whether he did or did not is not his judgment to make (except as he hears himself, but he doesn't get a vote). Nor is his (rhetorical) proposition true until it is judged so. In rhetoric/persuasive speech, the desire is part of what is judged, whereas in categorical propositions, the proposition is judged on content alone.
Let me just say here, that you cannot reduce the question of "truth" to a question of whether it is in the intention or in the speech, because the speech, once it is spoken, must be interpreted. So really, the question of "truth", if expressed in this way, ought to be expressed as whether the truth is in the intention of the speaker, or in the intention of the interpreter. And this rapidly becomes a complex issue because there may be multiple interpreters, each with one's own intent.
I do not see any means of positioning truth within the physical existence of the speech itself, because it requires interpretation for meaning in order to be judged. Some will define a statement, or proposition, as an odd sort of conglomeration of physical symbols combined with a particular meaning, but I don't believe this is reality. If we combine a meaning with the physical symbols, such that they exist together, the meaning must be taken as something vague and ambiguous, general, to allow for the reality of many possible interpretations. This ambiguity disallows the possibility of truth, so truth cannot be attributed to the physical existence of the speech, even if we say that meaning is within the physical existence, because this meaning within the physical existence must be inherently ambiguous. So when those people say that "true" may be attributed directly to the statement or proposition, they are assuming that the statement has one unambiguous "objective" meaning. But this is actually beyond the reality of the statement, as even precisely stated mathematical equations are open to some degree of ambiguity, such as when we subject symbols like = to principles of skepticism. So it is the essential property of the physical existence of speech that it contains ambiguity. And this denies the possibility of truth.
So, a candidate MS is All S is P. We judge that it's true (in any of a number of ways, depending on the exact content of the MS). To be sure, our competence of judgment is likely borrowed, and the judgment itself may be ancient - but in at least some sense it's still our judgment.
For truth to exist at all, it seems we must be able to find it just here in our candidate MS..
So here, we can see where the ambiguity lies. Let's say I produce an instance of S which I claim is not P. I insist that this is an instance of S, and it is clearly not P, so I assert "All S is P" is false. You argue, no that is not an instance of S, because it is not P, and therefore it cannot be S, maintaining, "All S is P" is true.
Obviously, we cannot say that truth is in the MS, because truth relies not only on how we interpret the MS, but also on how we interpret the world. In the example, I would argue that you are just interpreting the world in such a way as to maintain the truth of your MS, when I think it is a bad way of interpreting the world, and we should dismiss your MS as false.
It would seem that truth is never "out there" inhering in the propositions; instead it seems to just be the expression of the synthesis of perception, knowledge, and judgment. Every truth is mine, in so far as I recognize it as a truth. But every truth is also prospectively a part of collective mind.
Truth, then, is the recognized accordance of a proposition with the competent judgment of mind, and as such, testimony to the activity of that mind.
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It is this "collective mind" part which makes truth more than just a subjective opinion of you or I, the opinion that X is true. But this is also why it is best described by an attitude which we have towards each other. That is what I called honesty. So truth is not strictly speaking, a testimony to the activity of a mind, it is as you say the testimony to the activity of a special type of mind, which you call a "competent" mind. I would prefer to narrow down "competent" to the more specific, "honest". One can be very competent in making judgements, yet not be honest, and therefore truth does not enter into that competent judgement. Honesty is what allows one to have respect for others in making such judgements.
We take one step towards removing the arbitrariness of pure subjectivity, of truth, by asserting that the judgement must be made by a competent mind. We take the next step by saying that the judgement must be made by an honest, competent, mind. This ensures that the mind making the judgement has the proper attitude toward other minds.
I would ask you now, can we give truth independent, separate existence? There are many things which competent minds working together create in the world, and these things have independent existence. We can start with physical objects, there are many buildings and things like that. But then we can move into things which have less of a physical existence, like mores, laws, and social structures. Can truth be one of those things, created by honest, competent minds working together, yet somehow existing independently of those minds? Where would we find it? We've already determined that it is not within statements or propositions. If it is within the honest mind, then how is it also independent of the honest mind?
Can truth be one of those things, created by honest, competent minds working together, yet somehow existing independently of those minds? Where would we find it? We've already determined that it is not within statements or propositions. If it is within the honest mind, then how is it also independent of the honest mind?
Apart from 'honest', also 'rational'. The problem is that modernism and post-modernism have thrown standards of rationality into question. The idea that there are common standards, or that reality itself is rational, are the very kinds of ideas that have been thrown increasingly into question. That was the theme of Max Horkheimer's book, The Eclipse of Reason, which documents how over history, the initial Platonististic view that the world was 'animated by reason' has become increasingly untenable, and that the prevailing view today is that reason is subjective or an evolved capacity of the mind which is ultimately a function of evolutionary biology.
We nowadays speak of 'scientific rationalism' however scientific rationalism is different in one crucial respect from traditional rationalism, in that the evidence for it has to be available in the third person, and it has to be empirical. There must be some measurable physical effect or consequence of whatever idea or hypothesis is entertained so as to qualify for the moniker 'scientific' rationalism. Whereas traditional rationalism argued from the specific to the general, from the effects to the most general types of causes, whether that be conceived of as the Idea of the Good or the Uncaused Cause. So traditional and scientific rationalism are actually very different in that respect.
One school where respect for that older form of rationalism is preserved, is neo-thomism or neo-scholasticism, as for example in this essay called Think, McFly, Think by Ed Feser.
But how is it possible for a statement to have the 'property of truth'? — A Seagull
You have to allow for at least some statement to be true, to even say anything. Otherwise you're facing the dilemma of universal scepticism - that if every statement is false, then so to is every argument that the sceptic can offer. So the examples Tim Wood provided that you were commenting on, are text-book cases of true statements, but that in itself doesn't really say much.
However, concern with truth is fundamental. I don't know if you're following politics and current affairs, but the current President of the US is notorious for mendacity. His disregard for truth is regarded by many of his critics as not only the sign of a profound character flaw but also a threat to the institutions of democracy itself, which expect at least some level of truthfulness from their elected officials, not least the highest elected official.
The difficulty in these kinds of conversations is the open-ended nature of the question 'what is truth'? As an abstract or general question, it's almost impossible to answer. You could write an essay on the Platonic or Arisotelean or neo-Platonist views on the question, but they're situated within a culture which still had a classical regard for what you could call Capital T Truth. I think as a general tendency modernity is inclined to reject that kind of attitude. We nowadays only talk in terms of falsifiability and provisional hypotheses; maybe that's the best we can hope for!
I think the problems you refer to stem from the presumption that statements can have the property of truth and the presumption that every statement is either true or false.
These problems fade away from the idea that statements are neither true nor false except where they are labelled as such by a person.
All the purely abstract concepts such as mathematical concepts are good demonstrations of such. Consider geometry, we have points, lines, right angles, circles, etc., which all have defined essences.
They are all intelligible only in terms of physical things or analogues.
The signs signify ideas or relations or quantities - the sign itself is physical, but what is signified is purely intellectual.
This is where I disagree; what is represented is thought. 'Intellect' as I understand it pertains to the capacity for thought. We can rationally ( i.e. in a measured way) grasp the nature of finite thought and finite matter, but not the nature of infinite thought and infinite matter.
statements are neither true nor false except where they are labelled as such by a person.
That means complete relativism - that everything is simply a matter of opinion. The problems fade away, but only because you're no longer addressing them.
We can rationally ( i.e. in a measured way) grasp the nature of finite thought and finite matter, but not the nature of infinite thought and infinite matter.
The point I made has got nothing to do with 'infinite thought'. It has to do with the nature of concepts, the fact that concepts are real but immaterial. I think the best arguments for the immaterial nature of mind, are that the objects of thought - abstract truths, and the like - are universal and invariant; the same for any mind capable of grasping them, but only graspable by a mind.
Aristotle, in De Anima, argued that thinking in general (which includes knowledge as one kind of thinking) cannot be a property of a body; it cannot, as he put it, 'be blended with a body'. This is because in thinking, the intelligible object or form is present in the intellect, and thinking itself is the identification of the intellect with this intelligible. Among other things, this means that you could not think if materialism is true… . Thinking is not something that is, in principle, like sensing or perceiving; this is because thinking is a universalising activity. This is what this means: when you think, you see - mentally see - a form which could not, in principle, be identical with a particular - including a particular neurological element, a circuit, or a state of a circuit, or a synapse, and so on. This is so because the object of thinking is universal, or the mind is operating universally.
….the fact that in thinking, your mind is identical with the form that it thinks, means (for Aristotle and for all Platonists) that since the form 'thought' is detached from matter, 'mind' is immaterial too.
Consider that when you think about triangularity, as you might when proving a geometrical theorem, it is necessarily perfect triangularity that you are contemplating, not some mere approximation of it. Triangularity as your intellect grasps it is entirely determinate or exact; for example, what you grasp is the notion of a closed plane figure with three perfectly straight sides, rather than that of something which may or may not have straight sides or which may or may not be closed. Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it. For any mental image of a triangle is necessarily going to be of an isosceles triangle specifically, or of a scalene one, or an equilateral one; but the concept of triangularity that your intellect grasps applies to all triangles alike. Any mental image of a triangle is going to have certain features, such as a particular color, that are no part of the concept of triangularity in general. A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once.
The point I made has got nothing to do with 'infinite thought'. It has to do with the nature of concepts, the fact that concepts are real but immaterial. I think the best arguments for the immaterial nature of mind, are that the objects of thought - abstract truths, and the like - are universal and invariant; the same for any mind capable of grasping them, but only graspable by a mind.
I don't know what you mean by "real, but immaterial". Concepts occur only, as far as I know in physical brains. They are finite thoughts that grasp finite objects in measured ways. The objects grasped are graspable only insofar as they exist in the mode of extension; the grasping is itself the mode of thought; I see no reason to posit dualism; which would introduce an unbridgeable gulf between thought and being.
So, the reality and materiality of things is grasped in thought; and thought is thus a real and material grasping. We know what materiality is in the sense that we can recognize it; but we have no idea what immateriality is except insofar as it is a logical negation of materiality. Being grasps, speaks and thinks itself. What else could we concern ourselves with; what else could there be?
So, I think the very idea of the "immaterial nature of the mind" is unintelligible, and thus of no use to us.The "universality and invariance" of truths is due to the infinite and eternal nature of God I would say; not to any incoherent "immateriality" of God or mind. Don't forget that materiality is infinite and eternal, even though individual material things are not. Likewise, thought is also infinite and eternal even though individual thoughts are not. I believe thought and materiality cannot be separated; they are the two sides of an infinite, eternal coin. I have come to think that the relation between materiality and thought is manifested as the spirit.
I don't know what you mean by "real, but immaterial". Concepts occur only, as far as I know in physical brains.
I have to be very blunt at this point: this is what you have to get past. Nothing is really or purely material, and the brain is certainly not only a material object. No concepts are material in nature, the idea that they can be understood or mapped against neural configurations is incorrect, because concepts and neural configurations are different kinds of things. The whole point about a concept is that it can be realised in many material forms, which shows that it is not in itself material. The point is that the meaning of a concept is independent of its material form, not dependent on it. When a rational intelligence creates a symbol, it represents the concept in material form, but the material form is in some sense arbitrary, i.e. the same symbol can be made out of any kind of material, or the same concept can be represented by different types of symbols. Otherwise, languages would not be possible. As that quote from Gerson says, language and thought are 'inherently universalising'. And universals rely on forms.
You think it's unintelligible, because there's something you're not getting about it, which means it's unintelligible to you. But what I am saying is the original meaning of the term 'intelligibility', which I think has been progressively lost since Descartes. Your notion of the physicality of concepts is actually basic to modern materialism and 'brain-mind identity'.
. I have come to think that the relation between materiality and thought is manifested as the spirit.
What you're saying about the 'infinite nature of thought' is really not part of the Western philosophical tradition - you have probably gotten those ideas from popular mysticism. There's nothing inherently the matter with them but it's not the point at issue .
I think you really need to do more work to map your thoughts against some authentic sources. The above quotation of yours is in some ways an echo of 'the interdependence of the transcendent and immanent', but I don't think you've really gotten that either. The spirit is not 'a manifestation' of anything, but the uncaused cause.
Unfortunately you are showing that you have no clue what I have been saying or how it relates to the Western canon. And you are making unwarranted and somewhat patronizing assumptions about the sources of my ideas, and also about what I have "gotten".
Perhaps you should consider the possibility that I simply don't agree with you, and that maybe there are many ideas I think you have not gotten and others that you need to "get past"; but that I have refrained from saying so because I don't want to be patronizing. Perhaps you should read some Spinoza?
One thing I have noticed is that you don't seem to like it when others disagree with you. I, on the other hand, don't mind others disagreeing; what I do mind is others making unwarranted assumptions about me and/or misreading or, even worse, deliberately distorting what I have said.
If you can explain to me what immateriality is, then you will make it intelligible to me and to yourself. Until then...there is nothing more to be said, I would think.
Reply to John I understand, as I said, I have to be blunt. We have reached this exact point in a number of different threads, and I sincerely think there's something you're not seeing. So I know it sounds patronising and that I probably come across as arrogant.
In regards the question at hand, I have tried to illustrate the point with quotations from Loyd Gerson (which is linked to a video lecture of his. "Platonism vs Naturalism") and also essays by Edward Feser. So it's not simply a matter of my being annoyed because you're disagreeing with me - I expect almost everyone with disagree with me. The whole point of philosophical debates is to disagree.
I agree that the point of philosophy is to address different ideas, which is to say disagreements. And I can accept that you sincerely think there is something I am not seeing. If that "something" is of a rational nature, then it should be explicable, and it can be thrashed out if there is sufficient good will on both sides. If, however it is "something" of a purportedly spiritual nature; then it may not be explicable at all.
The thing about 'spiritual' intuitions, though,is that they do vary from one person to the next; and that fact itself is inexplicable if the presupposition is that there is, spiritually or metaphysically speaking, just one truth, unless it is supposed that there could be rational reasons for such disagreements, and that many people's intuitions are necessarily somehow misguided in their relation to rational discourse.
That's why I ask for an account of immateriality; because I personally think that any intuition which suggests it is misguided. I think this just because the idea does not seem to be amenable to being made intelligible. Now, I don't deny the possibility that some spiritual intuitions are beyond intelligibility; but in that case no propositional concussions, whether of materiality or immateriality, can be drawn form them, and they are outside the range of philosophical discourse.
If that "something" is of a rational nature, then it should be explicable, and it can be thrashed out if there is sufficient good will on both sides. If, however it is "something" of a purportedly spiritual nature; then it may not be explicable at all.
Concepts occur only, as far as I know in physical brains.
That is a canonical statement of philosophical materialism, in that it reduces mind to neural activity. When I studied at Uni of Sydney, the head of philosophy was D M Armstrong, who was a materialist of exactly that kind, so I am familiar with it. Other notable proponents of such a view are Francis Crick, who discovered DNA, and Daniel Dennett.
We have to be very clear about what 'philosophical materialism' is. I'm not referring to social materialism, i.e. putting high value on possessions. Philosophical materialism is the view that ultimately only matter is real, and that mind is an evolved by-product of matter. It is the de facto view of nearly all the philosophy departments in Western university system; it is generally assumed to be the case. So it's deeply embedded in our culture, in fact in order to question it, one has to be somewhat 'counter-cultural'. That's why I acknowledge that a lot of what I say would not be agreed with by many people.
So from what you say, I think that you basically take that view for granted - but in saying that I'm not accusing you of anything, many or even most people would also take it for granted, It seems to be the common-sense view.
I don't deny the possibility that some spiritual intuitions are beyond intelligibility; but in that case no propositional concussions, whether of materiality or immateriality, can be drawn form them, and they are outside the range of philosophical discourse.
So, this I take as a reference to the ineffable nature of spiritual experiences. Again, nothing the matter there - it is often said that such states are beyond words or beyond discursive analysis,
But what I have been talking about is neither of those - neither 'evolutionary materialism', on the one side, or 'the ineffable spiritual' on the other. It is this: there is a philosophical argument for the immaterial nature of mind, that is part of the broadly Platonist/Pythagorean philosophy, It is based on the premise that concepts are real but not material. Such a view is broadly called 'Platonic realism'. It was modified by Aristotle and again by the scholastics, but it is still a recognisable philosophy. That is what I'm on about.
There are many versions of materialism. I don't really think of myself as a materialist, except insofar as I see no justification for positing an ontological separation between matter and thought. As far as I know Aristotle denied the transcendent nature of the forms as conceived by Plato,
There are many subtleties and convolutions in Western thought; and I think the mistake you are making consists in glossing over those subtleties, and demonizing materialism toute court ( although I also recognize that certain brands of materialism deserve to be rejected).
I don't think there is any ontological transcendence, which means there is no duality of substances, although of course some things are transcendental to us, due to their infinite nature. I follow Spinoza in thinking that the very idea of a duality of substances is incoherent. Ontologically, or metaphysically, speaking, I see the infinite as being wholly immanent in the finite, and visa versa. To me this makes the most sense (and I have thought a lot about it). I am not claiming that I am right and that everyone who disagrees is wrong (although I do indeed think that, but I recognize that others may think the opposite and that no one is infallible).
statements are neither true nor false except where they are labelled as such by a person. — A Seagull
That means complete relativism - that everything is simply a matter of opinion. The problems fade away, but only because you're no longer addressing them.
Not at all! The grounds for your assertion are baseless. The problems you referred to diminish to nothing. What other problems are there?
I don't really think of myself as a materialist, except insofar as I see no justification for positing an ontological separation between matter and thought.
That is materialism, and the point at issue. What does 'ontological' mean to you?
It's actually not materialism, because I do not impute any primacy to materiality over thought. This is akin to Spinoza's position, which could be said to be a kind of neutral monism.
Although I am at the same time reluctant to speak in terms of 'one' because without 'an other' the notion has no real meaning.
The puzzling thing is that I'm quite sure I've explained my position to you more than once previously.
Reply to John The particular point at issue, however, was whether 'concepts are physical'. That is what I am taking issue with, from something like a dualist position: that concepts are real, but not physical. I won't repeat the arguments I've given for that, but will say I don't think anything you've said since then addresses that point. Again - 'objects' such as natural numbers and geometric shapes are the same for any observer, but they can only be grasped by a rational intelligence.
From one perspective, of course concepts are not physical entities they are mental entities. But from that, which is really just a matter of definition, I don't believe the conclusion that conceptuality is 'something' substantively other than physicality should be drawn.
That has really been the only point I have been trying to emphasize.
Reply to John I think the fact of their difference really is a ontological distinction - 'ontological' meaning 'belonging to a different order'. That concepts or ideas are real in their own right, and in quite a different way to the reality of tables and chairs, is a fact of profound importance.
if the mental things arising from the minds of living things are a distinct realm of existence, then strictly physical theories about the origins of life, such as Darwinian theory, cannot be entirely correct. Life cannot have arisen solely from a primordial chemical reaction, and the process of natural selection cannot account for the creation of the realm of mind. Biology, in this view, becomes a variety of science that is radically distinct from physics—it deals with a vast and crucial realm of phenomena that physics doesn’t and can’t encompass, precisely because they’re aspects of living things that are not physical:
subjective consciousness, if it is not reducible to something physical, … would be left completely unexplained by physical evolution—even if the physical evolution of such organisms is in fact a causally necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness.
Since neither physics nor Darwinian biology can account for the emergence of a mental world from a physical one, Nagel contends that the mental side of existence must somehow have been present in creation from the very start.
Yet, we have no 'science' of this fact. It's astounding when you start to realise the implications. Our whole culture is founded on a clear and unmistakeable illusion or inversion. It's philosophy's task to shake people out of such delusions.
I tend to think that the order of ideas reflects the order of things; there is really nothing else for it to reflect. If they are two completely different orders then no sense can be made of any connection between them. This is really the Cartesian problem of the interaction between res extensa and res cogitans expressed in a different way.
Also I think it pays to remember that we construct orders ourselves (although not consciously or of our own volition, of course); the order of worldly things as much as the order of our ideas. There is no 'pre-fabricated' order given to us.
I agree that it is philosophy's task to help us become free from the grip of superficial fashionable nonsense. An example of that is the ridiculous idea that everything about human life can be explained in the reductive terms of a genetic engine geared only towards survival.
Some details first. As I read the history of truth (although not specifically so named), I find in it first that "honesty," as the ethos of the speaker, comprising his arete, phroneses, and eunoia, as judged by his auditors, is the test of truth, and it thereby becomes an historical truth. Not that his arguments are true, because they are in fact contingent ("shall we build a wall?" shall we attack at dawn?" and their respective answers could be either true or false). This kind of truth is the province of rhetoric and usually concerns an action to be undertaken.
Honesty must be considered in relation to the attitude of the interpreter as well as the attitude of the speaker. This encompasses what is sometimes called "the principle of charity". So when a proposition is judged for truth or falsity, it must be honestly interpreted. This is why it is useful to have multiple auditors, like a jury, to ensure that there is a true interpretation of the proposition.
Then comes the disinterested, a priori argument that is universally and necessarily so - true - that is demonstrated in a proof (of some sort - perhaps geometrical) that is in no way connected to the ethos of the speaker; indeed, the speaker is mere vehicle in this case and the proof is more appropriately denominated a visual proof - a matter of viewing and coming to understand and agree with the proof - as opposed to the auditory rhetorical "proof" in which the character of the speaker moves the listener to action.
So I would argue that even when a logical argument is being made, honesty is a factor, because the one judging it must interpret it honestly. Agreement is dependent on honest interpretation, just as much as it is dependent on honest expression. The point is that any such logical demonstration requires agreement in defining and use terms. Without honesty there is no agreement, we may decline definitions at will. This is not simply a matter of what you have described as "rhetorical truth", it is relevant to all truth.
A priori truth, on the other hand, is always and universally true, taking in math, science, arguably ethics, each with it's own criteria for truth.
Mathematics certainly has standards for what constitutes truth. Somewhere in here - I'm not sure where - we may find a candidate for your independently existing truth. It may lie in provability.
Science, similarly, with replicability the standard.
Ethics, with maturity of thought. And so forth for any possible class of inquiry.
So all these different truths rely on definitions. The definitions must be agreed to, or accepted, in order that there is truth. If one rejects the definitions, one denies the truth.
The possibility of throwing out reason makes relativism just the shock-troop of nihilism. I do not know if or where Kant expressly argued against nihilism - I can imagine he thought it too silly to be worth considering - but we have a different argument, grown from Heidegger's Sorge, care. We care. Our form of care allows us to modify our notion of truth as being the fitness and rightness of propositions. Care, as I understand it, is a temporal function. It moves, grows, in one direction, towards a maturity of thought that will, I suppose and hope, that will weld all truth together. Fitness and rightness - truth - is always already on the path to perfection, even if the progress along the way is sometimes bumpy. (And your "honesty" finds its way back in, here.)
Yes, I have a limited acquaintance with Heidegger's notion of "care", and I think I would be somewhat in agreement, though I think it has a much broader application for Heidegger. Also, I am in agreement with your designation of "fitness and rightness". A proposition is a proposal, and acceptance implies that one judges the definitions, and use of terms as "right". If not, we reject the proposition. Again though, I'll remind you, that such judgement must be made with an attitude of honesty, and this why we can refer to this attitude with words such as "care", "fair", and "charity".
This, then: truth is the fit and right comportment of propositions with respect to their proper subject matter, as apprehended by competent minds of reason and good will.
Let's hammer on this to see if it stands, or not, or can be improved.
Now you've hit, with your hammer, a whole new can of worms, what you call "proper subject matter". We've been discussing the use of words, composition and interpretation, in relation to truth. Where do we find "subject matter" here? Isn't the real subject matter represented by this word, "proper"? Without proper use, there is no subject matter, and proper use is what creates subject matter. Don't you agree, that without proper use, the proposition is meaningless (having no subject matter), but with proper use there is meaning, and therefore subject matter? This implies that subject matter is itself the manifestation of truth, which is dependent on honesty and proper use. Can we find the essence of "subject matter", because this might be the material existence of truth?
Second try: truth is the name of a kind of relationship that can exist between subject matter and propositions. The relationship comes into being when a proposition says something true about a subject matter, to the extent that it is true.
I'm not so sure about this because neither of us has provided any formal definition of "subject matter". Now your definition of "truth" requires "subject matter", but you say of subject matter, "whatever that is - just is". So you don't appear to have definition of subject matter. What I have stated is that subject matter is the manifestation of truth, and you have stated that subject matter is required for truth. Do you agree with this assessment? I have proposed that truth is somehow equivalent to subject matter, or perhaps even more fundamental than subject matter, while you have proposed that subject matter is prior to truth, truth is something built upon subject matter.
So let's analyze this concept for a moment. I propose that "subject" refers to the thinking human being, and "matter" refers to the content of thought. Whenever there is a thinking subject, there must be content, what is being thought, and this is subject matter. This content may be memories, beliefs, ideas, words, etc.
You have proposed as "truth", a relationship between the content and the proposition. Can we agree that the act of thinking, and the decision made, gives the content some sort of order, and this comes out as the proposition? So you would say "truth" is this ordering process which is the act of thinking. This act of thinking is the relationship between the content and the proposition. I assign "truth" to the content itself, which is the memories, beliefs, ideas, words, etc..
The relationship comes into being when a proposition says something true about a subject matter, to the extent that it is true.
I don't think that we try to say something about the subject matter. The subject matter, as you say, "just is". We take it, formulate it in different ways, to say something. But what the proposition says something about, is not the subject matter itself, it says something about something else.
My argument is that the content, or subject matter, must already say something about something, before we formulate the proposition, and this is where we find truth. If the subject matter didn't say something about something, then thinking would be random, and propositions would be nonsense. So no matter how you break the proposition down into compositional parts, seeking the subject matter, there must be an element of truth in each part or else we get lost in random nonsense. Subject matter then is like a sign, it signifies or represents something. Truth is in the relationship between the sign and what it represents.
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Metaphysician UndercoverMay 06, 2017 at 17:03#693100 likes
What I think tim wood, is that we need to distinguish between true and justified. Modern epistemology clearly assumes a distinction between these two, claiming that knowledge is both true and justified, but the distinction between them is often confused, conflated, vague, or ill-defined.
Presumably this rock is just here, even if no mind ever existed. Do we agree on this? Then you, or someone,comes along, and before you can talk about the rock, you must have something that grounds your talking about the rock. Let's call it perception, apperception, synthesis, knowledge, idea, whatever. I agree that rock somehow has to be in mind before we can talk about it. This mental content is what I understand you to mean by "subject matter." We ought to step carefully here: it is possible that you hold that the mental content, the subject matter, is all there is and is merely a sign of itself - after all, if it's all mental content, etc., then we need an account of how we get to the rock, which is not easy to come by.
I don't believe that we can start with the assumption that the rock is just here even if no mind ever existed. This assumption needs to be justified. Imagine if there were no living things. There would be no distinction of this or that period of time, or individuation of this or that place. There would be the entire universe throughout all time, if we could even assume the universe, throughout all of time, and no one to separate out "the rock" as having existence independent from this mass of eternal time and infinite space.
However, I do think that the assumption of something independent from living minds is reasonable, but we must start with the assumption that whatever it is is indeterminate, until we justify the existence of actual distinct forms like the "rock". The question though, is does this assumption of something independent from living minds, even if it is indeterminate, require an assumption of truth? And I think that this is where we find the fundamental distinction between justified and true. We have a fundamental assumption, you that "the rock is just here", I that there is something indeterminate there. But neither of these assumptions is really justified, they are just assumed to be true. Remember, "true" is what we assign to the premises of a logical argument, the propositions which are accepted simply by assumption. The logic provides justification of the conclusion. The argument is sound when it has true premises and valid logic.
My position is that the rock is real. Likely all we can know about it comes through synthesis of whatever, as above, but that synthesis is grounded in the separate thing we call a rock. I defend this through our ability, basically, to question the rock. We can test it. "If you're a rock, you'll react this way to my test." Granted, when it comes to most rocks, the tests applied can be primitive. But the same approach, with appropriate sophistication, works (eventually) for anything and everything.
What I think you have to pay respect for, is the fact that there are two sides of this issue. Not only do we test the "thing" to see if it is a rock, but we also adjust our definition of "rock" to ensure that it corresponds to the thing which we are testing, because this is the thing we call "rock". So the thing which we are testing may not prove to be a "rock", as we thought what "rock" meant, but we have always been calling this thing a rock, and will continue to do so, so now we have to change what it means to be a "rock", instead of saying "this is not a rock". It is not an insistence of "if you are a rock you will react this way to my test", it is an instance of "I know you are a rock, because that's what we call you, and I thought you would react this way to my test, but you didn't". That doesn't mean that it's not a rock, it means that I didn't have a good understanding of what it means to be a rock when I devised my test
This is where I think we can notice the difference between "truth" and "justification". Remember how we outlined the possibility that truth refers to a type of attitude. Let's say we have isolated and identified a thing which we're going to test. The "true approach" is to say that we are calling this thing which we have individuated, a "rock", though its essence, what it is, is indeterminate. We have no true definition of "rock". That's why we are testing it, we know not "what" it is, but we call it a rock. The other approach, is like you suggested, we have a definition, "rock =...", and we are testing this thing to see if it is a rock. The test determines whether or not we are justified in calling this thing a rock. The former method assumes as "the truth", that we do not know what it means to be a "rock", the latter method assumes as "the truth", the definition of "rock". Of course our definition of "rock" may be incorrect, so we are actually not justified in this latter assumption.
On your idea of truth, then, if truth is to be anything more than mere tautology (A=A), the mental content must refer to something outside of and apart from itself.
So rather than tautology, "truth" refers instead to the unknown, that which cannot be justified, but is still assumed. When the assumption can be demonstrated to be unjustified, such as I explained with the assumption that the definition of "rock" is necessarily correct, then we cannot accept these assumptions as truth. Then the truth is that the fundamental assumptions are really unknowns.
The tautology then, which you express as A=A, is actually the fundamental form of justification, it is not truth. Behind this fundamental justification is still basic assumptions, such as the meaning of "=". In order for the justification to work, we must assume the truth of the meaning of "=", and this is not justified, it is simply assumed, and therefore it is not known.
In sum, it seems to me that truth cannot lie in the relationship between subject matter, understood as mental contents, and what it represents. I still, then, like my definition better than yours. Please hammer again!
Actually, it was you who said that truth lies in such a relationship. I said that truth lies in the subject matter itself, that subject matter is a manifestation of truth. I do not believe that mental content (subject matter) represents anything, it, as you say "just is". It's only when we take subject matter and formulate an idea, or a proposition, that we put it into a form which represents something.
So "truth", as these fundamental assumptions which are essentially "unknowns", because they cannot be justified, do not actually represent anything. They are just assumptions of meaning. So the symbol "A", and "=", and "+", and "4", all mean something to me, and these are fundamental "truths", having the function of assumptions in my thinking, but they are not representations, as they do not represent anything. Nor can we properly say that there is "a relationship" here, because they are simply "particles" of meaning.
Hi MU. We're a bit at sixes and sevens, but I'm not sure if it's a real disagreement or just a lack of clarity. I'm going for clarity. Also brevity. You packed in a lot. If I try to answer all of it, the posts very quickly become unwritable and unreadable.
OK, let's see if we can clarify the difference between us. I think we both agree that what is "true", is true by assumption. That's what you say in 1), the proposition "this is a rock" is "true by assumption". My claim though is that we do not assume the truth of a proposition though, we ask that it be justified. This justification involves defining the terms, so real truth is deeper than the proposition, it is within the terms of the proposition. Otherwise, any proposition could be assumed as true, and we do not just assume as true, any old proposition..
So, we take "this is a rock", and we have two elements which need to be analyzed, and justified, before we can assume this proposition to be true. We need to analyze what it means to be a rock, and we need to analyze the thing being referred to by "this". With respect to the thing itself, we can test it, as you said, and I agree. But with respect to what it means to be a "rock", what I've tried to impress upon you, is that there are two distinct approaches.
We could start with a proposition, "a rock is ...", or, we could point to an object, and assume the proposition "this is a rock", is true. The latter is the "true" way, it is what produces the true assumption of "this is a rock". From this perspective, we need no testing of the thing, it is really true by assumption, because we've established that the very thing pointed to is the thing which is called by the name "rock". Therefore "this is a rock" cannot be false. If we choose the former perspective, and refer to a proposition "a rock is ...", in order to justify calling this a rock, then this proposition (this definition) itself needs to be justified and we risk the possibility of infinite regress in justification. Therefore at some time we have to turn to the thing itself, and say "this is a rock", stipulate so that we can agree, that this is the thing called "rock". We have undeniable truth because so long as there is nothing else called "rock", it is completely unreasonable not to agree to call the thing "rock". "Rock" has no definition, it is just the pointed to thing.
But now we have a problem if we want to call other things by the same name, "rock". This is when we have to test the thing, and test other things, determining principles of consistency, continuity between the thing we have called "rock", and other things, such that we can designate them all of the same family, and call them all "rocks". So it is only when we have two distinct things, and we want to say of them both "this is a rock", then we need justification. We cannot simply assume both propositions as true, because contradiction is implied when we want to call two distinct things by the same name. Therefore we need some reason, justification, to call them both by the same name.
2) ...
But you want to call it the indeterminate. Why? Is it your argument that while an indeterminate may exist that there is no way that we can from indeterminate to rock? If yes, then there's nothing that truth can be true about, because we cannot get from the indeterminate to the rock.
The thing is indeterminate until it has been individuated, pointed to, or named. Once we name it, and agree on the name, then we have truth. The thing is called "rock". Naming it is a type of determination, but in another way it allows that the thing named is still indeterminate. It gives no concept, or form, to the named thing, no description or idea of what it means to be the thing which bears that name. The pointing to the thing indicates that the thing bears the name, but what it means to be that thing remains indeterminate. Therefore we allow that any concept whatsoever may be attributed to that thing which is pointed to, but we still have truth without conceptualization, truth by agreeing on the name. That is why I associate truth with the unknown, because we can have truth concerning the thing without knowing anything about the thing at all, just by having a name for it.
3) I suggested testing the rock as a way to validate the claim it's a rock Because it's a rock by assumption, no test is necessary: your remark about the testing I'm glad to have, but while interesting, it's irrelevant.
Right, this is the key point, no testing is necessary. We have called the thing "rock", agreed that it is rock, and it is true that it is "rock", therefore no testing is necessary. The proposition "this is a rock", is not even properly called a proposition, because it's not saying anything about an item, it is pointing to an item.
5) Maybe here you can agree or clarify: I think by "subject matter" you mean mental contents. By the same expression I mean the thing spoken of, called here the rock. You misread me above - or, always possible, I misspoke: 6) For there to be truth, for truth (as proposition) to mean anything substantive, it must relate to the thing itself, and not the mere idea of the thing.
Now we have the distinction of subject matter. This is where we have our biggest difference of opinion. How could subject matter be the thing itself? It is matter of the subject. We could assume that the thing exists of matter, but the thing is the object, not the subject. So subject matter must be mental content. And we have objective matter which is the substance of the object.
I don't see how we could be dealing with anything other than mental content here. We have an object pointed to, and we assume the name "rock", but that this object is named "rock" is purely mental content. What more can it be? It appears like you want to bring truth outside of the mind, but this is impossible. There is a name "rock", within our minds, and there are associations with that name, memories of pointing, etc., but it's all within the mind, the associations are assumed. It is an assumption that the object is "rock", there is nothing about the object itself which necessitates it being "rock".
It appears to me, like you want to say that the name "rock" necessarily refers to some object outside the mind, and this is truth. But that's not reality. The name "rock" does not necessarily refer to any object whatsoever, it was arbitrarily chosen. So truth is entirely dependent upon this arbitrary choice, made by the mind to call that thing "rock". It is only when we move forward, to justify through testing and theories, that a specific object ought to be called "rock", that we establish such a necessary relationship. But that is why we need to keep justification and truth separate.
The question before us is, given that there are true propositions, is there a single genus we can identify that captures in a single notion what makes all of them true, that we can reasonably call truth? My answer from above, that I think you have actually not addressed, for being distracted by tangential questions, is, "...truth is the name of a kind of relationship that can exist between subject matter (things, understood broadly) and propositions (by reference, one to the other). The relationship comes into being when a proposition says something true about a subject matter, to the extent that it is true."
So we each have a slightly different idea of what truth is. You say that truth is a kind of relationship between things (objects) and propositions. I reduce this, and say that such a relationship is just an arbitrary assumption, like the assumption which attaches the name to the object. That it's anything more than an assumption would require justification, but this justification would be based in the assumption of a more fundamental relationship, and this will now be the "truth" upon which the justification is based.
I call this fundamental relationship "subject matter", because it exists only within the mind. These relationships, that this word relates to this object, are completely arbitrary, existing only within the minds which assume them. In my last post I believe I called this a particle of meaning. It is an assumed association, existing within the mind, and it doesn't have to involve a word, or words, it could be simply memories and feelings, but these associations, particles of meaning, are "truths" because we accept them without the necessity for justification. They just are, just like memories just are.
I think I'll stick with my definition of truth, which is this:
‘P’ is true for S iff S judges ‘P’ to have relation R to either S’s phenomenal P, and/or S’s stock of previously adjudged true propositions, depending on the relation R. Relation R is whatever truth theory relation S feels is the appropriate one(s)—correspondence, coherence, consensus, pragmatic, etc.
So, truth is whatever works? "Relation R is whatever truth theory relation S fells is the appropriate one."
The idea is that truth-value is a judgment that individuals make about the relation of propositions to something else. The something else can vary, because it depends on what that individual counts to be the pertinent information for making the judgment. It can be facts in the world per their perceptual faculties, it could be the set of propositions that are judged to be true by consensus (again per their perceptual faculties), it could be the set of other propositions that they've assigned truth-values to. And so on.
Metaphysician UndercoverMay 11, 2017 at 15:51#699710 likes
We sure do, and not a slight difference either. "...completely arbitrary,...assumed, ...existing only in the minds which assume them." As I read you, this is your bottom line. The ultimate reality of truth is just no reality at all.
But the reality of "truth" as "no reality at all" is not my bottom line. The bottom line is that the reality of truth, is that truth is entirely within the mind. Remember how we've progressed through this discussion. You first suggested truth was a attitude. I responded that it's an attitude of honesty. Isn't "attitude" within the mind? So I described it as subject matter, which is in the mind. But you keep wanting to put the "matter" or substance of truth outside the mind.
All I am doing is trying to bring your attention to the inconsistency in your approach. Why do you have this feeling, that "truth" must be explained through some outside force, when you keep returning to internal aspects to explain truth? I look at this as either a mistake, or downright dishonesty. You describe something by referring to the internal, yet you claim that there's got be something external here or it doesn't make sense. Why do you insist on this external aspect of truth? It appears as an unsupported prejudice which is completely unnecessary. Where do you pull this necessity for the external from?
How do you square this with any notion of reality? Let's look a little deeper: a rock hits you. You're angry (say), at what, at whom, for what? It's all just completely arbitrary assumptions on your part that exist only in your mind.It must needs be that you are angry at, and can be angry only at, yourself (never mind the problems with that notion). Nor are you rescued by the possibility of the existence of indeterminacies; after all, such indeterminacies can only be conjectural.
Why be angry? Was the rock thrown with intent? If so you have reason to be angry, but the anger is caused by, and directed at the intent which threw the rock. There is no anger toward the rock. The rock was just the passive means by which the bad intent was carried out. If there is no intent, if the rock just fell, or you stubbed your toe, there is no reason to direct anger at the rock, you could only be angry with yourself. So it appears like you want to bring ager into the scenario where there is no warrant for anger. Its totally unreasonable to be angry at a rock, so I cannot accept your example as such.
I say, on the other hand, that true-ness is a real property, of propositions.
You have an issue with "meaning" to overcome here. An utterance consists of a collection of symbols, having physical existence which can hit you like a rock. What is judged for trueness is an interpretation of the utterance. I'm sure that you respect the difference between the physical existence of the symbols and the interpretation of the symbols. The physical symbols themselves cannot be judged for truth.
There are some who claim that "proposition" refers to a mysterious conflation of physical symbols with interpretation, as if the physical symbols exist with an interpretation attached to them. You and I, tim wood, know that this is not the case. This could not be reality, it is impossible that there is a interpretation attached to the physical symbols when they hit you like the rock, because it requires a mind to interpret. So if you insist that a proposition exists in this way, as a set of symbols with an attached interpretation, I will insist that you are being dishonest. Therefore we must give up this idea "that true-ness is a real property, of propositions". The collection of symbols needs to be interpreted in order that it may be judged as true or false. Truth of falsity is attributed to the interpretation, and therefore true-ness is a real property of the interpretation.
So if true-ness is attributed to the interpretation, and the interpretation is within the mind, how do you get truth out of the mind? We could assume that the physical words, which hit you like a rock, have meaning inherent within them, but it is the essence of meaning that it must be interpreted before it can be judged. And it is an inherent property of meaning, that it may be interpreted in various ways depending on one's perspective. This is the fact which relativity theories employ. The meaning, or information which is inherent within the physical world will be interpreted in different ways depending on the perspective. Since meaning is interpreted in various ways, how can we get to a truth which is attributed to meaning itself rather than to an interpretation of that meaning?
So we come to an elemental recognition: true-ness is a function of meaning. Probably we knew this all along, but just failed to make it explicit. Where I think you have gone astray is by descending into sub-minimal considerations. I'm thinking that a sign of that confusion is when the real becomes unreal, it's "turtles all the way down," or when the ordinary becomes impossible. Does this put us on one page?
No, see this is the root of our difference in opinion. True-ness cannot be a function of meaning, because it is an essential property of meaning that it can be interpreted in various ways. That is why I keep stressing the importance of indeterminateness. Meaning itself is indeterminate, requiring an interpretation as a mode of determination, in order that we can have any sort of truth. So true-ness is really a function of the interpretation. It cannot be a function of meaning itself, because meaning like information, and everything else with physical existence, (i.e. the entire physical world), must be interpreted before truth can be attributed to the interpretation.
I think we can cut through a whole lot of bullshit about belief and truth by looking at the etymology of "true". It has to do with trust.
Belief is a form of trust/expectation - trust/expectation that the world is the way words propose the world is. And that's all it is, it's not a form of knowledge, nor is knowledge a modified form of belief.
Knowledge is more like "aperiodic crystals" (language, symbols, digits, DNA, etc.) that have an objective structure, that's mediated through our habits (how we "take" those symbols, how we use them, how we embody their instructions) that induce us into particular ways of interacting with the world, with particular expectations and trusts, that are either satisfied or baulked.
Reply to gurugeorge
From Wikipedia :
The English word truth is derived .... perhaps ultimately from PIE (Proto-Indo-European language) *dru- "tree", on the notion of "steadfast as an oak".
So I like to think that something is true if I know it as undoubtedly as I do that there is a tree in front of me.
Metaphysician UndercoverMay 13, 2017 at 02:12#701650 likes
You run close along the line of saying everything is in the mind. But I don't think that's you. Is it? I half agree with, and in that half, completely. That is, I think truth is a creature of mind. And I agree that nothing out there in physical reality is either true or truth. But I think you're putting both halves in mind and nothing out there. And maybe you're right, but that's radical, don't you think? And if you agree, don't you think that kind of radical understanding of truth needs rigorous demonstration?
I'm not saying that everything is in the mind, just that truth is in the mind. Truth is what defines the terms. It is true that a square is an equilateral rectangle. It is true that pi is the ratio between the circumference of a circle and the diameter. It does not matter whether or not one of these things (circle or square) exists in the world. And these are not tautologies, they are definitions. They form the means by which we create these objects (squares and circles) in the world, and the means by which we recognize objects according to these names.
I'm looking for the something out there that grounds truth, makes it a) possible, b) sensible, and maybe c) singular. Let's take a brick of the yellow metal, gold. Clearly everything that is understood about gold is in the mind. But are you willing to exchange what I call real dollars for my mental gold? Of course not. There has to be something out there in reality that corresponds to the gold, that just is gold as understood. That you might be interested in exchanging for, at a good price.
Truth is "grounded" by justification. When we draw a square, we demonstrate yes, it is possible to have such a figure. We draw a circle and demonstrate that it is possible to have this figure. The described figure is justified. These acts justify the definitions, and the truth is grounded. Everything which we know about gold, all those truths, are all justified by our dealings with gold in the world.
Any discussion about how we know it's gold, or how we know anything, is here simply the wrong discussion.
But this is where I think you are really missing the point. The discussion of how we know it's gold is really the relevant discussion. This is where we find the essence of truth, how we know that a thing is actually the proper thing to be called by the name we are using to refer to it. If it is fools gold, then there is no truth to us calling it gold, and all the conclusions we make about its value will be wrong. Therefore how we know that it's gold is of the highest importance, because if it isn't gold yet we are calling it gold, this is an untruth which could have catastrophic consequences.
Generalizing, I think that for each true statement, there is something out there that corresponds to it, and grounds it. "There is a horse," is true if there just is a horse there, and not otherwise. And let's not be distracted by or get lost in notions of real v. fake horses, or how we know it's a horse, or are just mistaken, and so forth. We presuppose we can determine if a horse is there - the question being is it there, or not.
"There is a horse" is only true if there is an animal which is correctly called by that name, "horse". The question is not whether it is there or not. There is always something there, the question is whether it is true to refer to what is there with the word "horse". This determines whether "there is a horse" is true or not. If it's a rock or a house there, then it's not true. Why do you desire to "presuppose" that we can determine whether there is a horse there, without referring to a definition of "horse"? There are ponies which look a lot like horses, so the thing which is there might have to be measured or checked for other features. We need to know which features to check for to confirm that it's a horse. That's why we have to consult the definition. The definition gives us the truth, of what it means to be a horse. We assign "horse" to animals that fulfill these conditions, and that is a fundamental truth.
With true statements about ideas, that themselves have no physical counterpart, I'll simply retreat to the notion of demonstration, which can always be rendered in a physical form. That is, the thing not strictly in the mind can be "out there" in the sense of the demonstration of ideas, and must be in the sense of the horse. So far, all this seems simple, intuitive, practical.
Demonstrations are forms of justification. "Justify" is defined as demonstration. You do agree that there is a difference between truth and justification don't you? I believe that as much as you think that there is some part of truth which is "out there", you are conflating justification with truth, such that you see the justification which is "out there", and you are assuming that this is somehow a part of truth. But you should consider that there is this thing called "knowledge", and knowledge is generally believed to be a combination of justification and truth. So I think that you are looking at knowledge, and calling knowledge by the word "truth", and you see that which is "out there", justification, as a part of this "truth", when it is really a part of knowledge instead.
Meaning is out of court, here, except in the practical sense. If you're going to argue that we cannot really know anything, then I invite you back to the horse and the gold: at some point we know as a practical matter, and correctly, that the horse is a horse and the gold is gold.
There is a problem with your so-called knowing "as a practical matter". Such knowing is often mistaken. What if the thing you called a horse is really a pony, or the thing you called gold was really fools gold? This is why we need clear, coherent, and consistent definitions. Sure, it's practical for you to call your rock gold, and tell everyone you have a golden rock, but when the time comes for you to sell it, and it's fools gold, then the practicality vanishes. Having definitions is a fundamental part of knowledge. Without them you'll insist that the rock is gold, and the buyer will insist that it's not, and how can you proceed other than to fight?
True-ness is the quality - truth - of a single true proposition. Qua itself, it cannot be interpreted in various ways (except in error). The proposition itself may give rise to different truths, but each in itself is univocal with respect to that truth.
If it is true, as you say, that a proposition cannot be interpreted in various ways except in error, then whose interpretation is the correct one?
Now, it may be we're saying the same thing. Let's check. In this context I presuppose that indeterminateness is in the mind, and that it can be resolved into one or more determinatenesses, given appropriate effort. And there is no truth until that task is completed for at least the indeterminateness in question.
The fact is that different minds will interpret the same physical collection of symbols in different ways. Each mind may designate "a meaning" and this creates an illusion of determinateness. It is an illusion because different minds designate different meaning, so the meaning of the symbols is really indeterminate. Therefore if we assume that the physical collection of symbols has meaning, this meaning must be inherently indeterminate.
If it cannot be resolved, then no truth can come from it (other than, perhaps, that it's unresolvable).
That's right, there cannot be truth to the physical collection of symbols, so if you assume that a proposition is a physical collection of symbols there can be no truth to it. That is because, as I said in the last post, the symbols need be interpreted. But they are interpreted within a mind, according to definitions, and there can be truth here, within the mind. If we both agree that a particular proposition is true, our interpretations may be consistent. But if I believe the proposition is true according to my interpretation, and you believe it not true according to yours, then all we can do is attempt to justify our respective interpretations.
I have a new version of truth (grown from this discussion): truth is the capacity for a proposition to be grounded, in a practical sense, outside the mind, whether in exemplification or demonstration. Which seems just another way of saying that truth is the collection of singular true-nesses.
This might be consistent with what I am arguing, where "grounding" is justification.
As to definitions, I fail to see what they have to do with truth.
Why the contradiction? Do you not see this as contradiction? You are interested in "what" truth is, and this implies that you want a definition of "truth", yet you cannot see how "definition" is related to what "truth" is. As I've been explaining, definition is truth, and truth is definition, they are one and the same. You simply reject my definition of truth, as definition, but this does not make my definition false, it means that I have not successfully justified that definition.
Let's try a different approach. Do you agree that truth is what makes a statement true? And do you agree that what constitutes truth is the impossibility of falsity? Whatever it is which is impossible to be false, this type of thing is what truth is. Will you recognize that "definition" fulfills this condition, of that which is impossible to be false?
Suppose I define "square" as equilateral rectangle. I say that this is a definition, it is impossible that it is false, because it is not the type of thing which can be judged as true or false. You may reject my definition, if you do not like it. But your rejection of my definition does not make the definition false, it only means that I have failed to justify it. So a definition is a type of thing which can never be false. It can fail in attempts to be justified, but this does not make it false. Nor is a definition ever really true, it is just accept as that which defines the term. But since a definition can never be false, this is the type of thing which truth is.
What I'm looking for is an understanding of the generalization of this singular case, so I can use it (the understanding) to inform and answer the question, what is truth (if it's anything). The purpose of this example is to kick free of distracting notions of verifiability, indeterminateness, definition, justification, etc., which all seem to presuppose truth, and focus on just truth itself (again, if that's possible)..
I'm telling you, "definition" is the generalization which informs us of what truth is. Suppose in your example, the man offers the proposition "a cow is in the barn". The truth of this statement is determined by the definitions of the terms. Is "barn" defined by the building which the man brought the animal into? Is "cow" defined by the animal which was brought into the building. If so, we have truth. But without such definitions we have no truth.
Not quite. It's probable that every ordinary language proposition has multiple interpretations. Given an interpretation, there is a truth function associated with that interpretation. It is the value of that truth function for that interpretation that I hold is not variable. This implies, and I accept, that different interpretations could have different and inconsistent truth values.
The point here though, is that every interpretation is dependent on a mind, and exists only within that mind. We could offer our interpretations to each other, but this requires that we put them into words, and then these would need to be interpreted. So each separate mind has a separate interpretation of any proposition. The truth function which you refer to, therefore, can only be within that mind as well.
I think truth must have "contact" with something real, that bridges subject and predicate, and makes the proposition true. I think you're stuck in a relative subjectivism. Your position may facilitate critiques of how truth works, or how knowledge may work, or what certain limits of knowledge are. But for the question of what truth is, your position seems to destroy it.
I am only looking for the reality of what truth is, as you claim to be doing as well. If the inquiry leads us to a relative subjectivism, then so be it. It seems to me like you are swayed by some prejudice, so you will not follow the inquiry. But if you look closely you will see that there is something real which bridges the gap between subject and predicate, and this is definition. When one defines the other, the gap is bridged, and we have truth. "The sky is blue." If your premise is that a definition is not something real, then you might be forced to the conclusion that truth is not something real, but how are you defining "real" here?
The general etymology seems to be related to "faith, faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty; veracity, quality of being true; pledge, covenant," from Germanic abstract noun *treuwitho, from Proto-Germanic treuwaz "having or characterized by good faith". A solid oak would be something like a metaphor for someone who is trustworthy.
Not that etymology is some magic key, just that it shows something like the genealogy of a concept, and in this case it's related to trustworthiness Truth is that which you can rely on.
Which is exactly how it is, more or less. You can still be betrayed by a loyal friend, for any number of reasons, but generally loyal friends are loyal friends, and you can rely on them, lean on them. Likewise, at an epistemological level, we know we are fallible, we can sometimes be mistaken when we were ever so sure; but we also know that lots of things about which we are ever so sure are reliable.
This is obviously also related to the pragmatic insight: truth is a guide to action. Propositions set up in us expectations as to how the world is likely to behave in response to our actions. These are our "beliefs" (again, "belief" is etymologically related to faith too).
But I think it's important to note that our beliefs are not knowledge as such, knowledge as such is the picture painted for us by the words, which we can believe or not - these propositions we secondarily call "beliefs" too, but that's been the source of a lot of confusion in philosophy.
The primary sense is all about trust in expectations, which are set up by propositions which are then only secondarily called "beliefs." But if you take that reification seriously, then you have the futile search for things "in the head" ("in the mind") that have a similar structure to the structure of propositions.
We do have things in the head, but they're expectations that are triggered by the propositions, which are objective artifacts in the world (which is why the things going on in the head can vary from person to person and time to time, while the propositional structure that triggers them is invariant, and depends on objective rules, standing social habits, etc.).
Certainly not! Do I agree that being an onion is what makes an onion an onion? Yes. Because the onion always already was an onion. The word for this that comes to my mind is "primordial." The onion-ness of the onion is primordially part of the onion.
How is it that an onion is an onion before it is named as an onion? It is the fact that it is called "onion" which makes it an onion, rather than a thing with a different name. Suppose there is some part of the universe which has yet to be discovered by human beings. Since it has not yet been discovered, and we don't know of its existence, it has no name. Now imagine it is discovered, and given a name "X'. How can you claim that the thing was X prior to being given the name "X"? That doesn't make sense. Prior to being given the name "X", the thing was an unnamed, and undiscovered thing, it was not X.
The "onion-ness of the onion" is our interpretation. It is how we sense and describe the onion, our perceptios. Therefore the onion-ness of the onion is what comes about as a result of our interaction with the onion. It cannot be the primordial part of the onion.
Nonsense, sez I. The truth of "A cow is in the barn," is a function of whether or not a cow is in the barn. To shave this a little closer: We could understand the question this way: "Is there something in the barn and if there is, is it a cow (or something else)?"
You're not getting the point. You are focusing on the word "cow", and neglecting the rest of the statement. You are assuming that there is a barn. But what makes it true that there is a barn? Perhaps there is a shed, a garage, or a house. Why are you so sure that it is a barn where the animal called a "cow" is?
To begin with, when justifying the truth of a statement, we cannot start with any assumption beyond the assumption that there is something, and even that is just an assumption. To assume that what there is, is some specific named thing, is to assume as true, something which is unjustified. So we may assume nothing more than that there is something.
We cannot justify the claim that there is a barn, without a definition of what a barn is, and comparing what there is, to that definition. That definition acts as the fundamental truth, from which we can proceed to justify the claim "there is a barn". Then we can proceed toward the proposition concerning what is in the barn, something called a cow. Now we need a definition of "cow" which acts as a fundamental truth by which we can justify the claim that there is a "cow". Also, we need a definition of "in", which serves as a fundamental truth by which we can judge the relationship between the barn and the cow.
All the terms of the statement must be judged. It doesn't suffice to say that the truth of the statement is dependent on whether there is a cow or some other animal in the barn, because you are then taking for granted the truth of "in the barn". By what principle can you take it for granted that this portion of the statement, "in the barn", is necessarily true?
I suppose I'm a phenomenalist. By that I mean that whatever can be experienced is a phenomenon, of some kind, whether cabbage, onion, justice, unicorns, or dragons. I buy the Kantian notion that we have a hard time grounding phenomena anywhere but in perception.
I can agree with this, but I would proceed to distinguish between reason and experience. If experience is limited to phenomena, then reason must be separate from experience because reason is not phenomenal.
At the same time I find the world as I experience it seems to be consistent with phenomena as I encounter them.
So when you say here, that according to your experience, the world is consistent with the phenomena which you encounter, what you really mean by "consistent" is logically consistent, the world is reasonable. Notice how logic, or reason, bridges the gap between the world which you assume, and the phenomena which you encounter.
That is, there is an entire phenomenology prior to language. Yet it seems to me that you're stuck at language - if there were not a world prior to - primordial to - language, then how would language have anything to talk about? I am not too interested in where the word "onion" comes from, or if indeed we have any understanding or knowledge of onions before we encounter them. Once they're part of our phenomenal world, I simply take it as given, and uninteresting, that they existed before we knew they existed.
I have no doubt that there is a primordial world, prior to language, that is not the issue here. The issue is "truth", and the question now is whether there is truth prior to language. As I've been arguing, truth is in the mind, it is related to reason, and reasoning is dependent on language. So I am very doubtful that there is any truth prior to language.
Your truth, then, appears simply a verbal truth, a consequence of definitions and well-formed propositions. If that's all there is, then truth is a pretty dodgy concept - not even a concept but a rough idea not thought through.
That's right, I really don't see how truth can be anything other than this, the fundamental principles which allow logic or reason to proceed, such as definitions, the law of non-contradiction, etc.. And yes, truth is dodgy, you must know this by now, from your experience.
I'm coming around to seeing that truth is a quality of experience. It's not proved; its judged. (Once judged, it's fair game for your kind of critical analysis, if that's appropriate, and all kinds of things can be said, true or false, depending on the criteria.)
If truth is judged, then what is it judged by, other than reason? If truth is the result of judgement, then it is consequential to reason. If we maintain the necessary separation between experience and reason, described above, then truth cannot be a quality of experience itself. Experience must be judged through the means of reason in order that truth is produced, so it is a property of the judgement not a property of the experience which is being judged.
If your intent is to deny the separation between experience and reason, then you will have to demonstrate how reason is phenomenal. The problem here is that we use reason to judge phenomena, and the judge must be independent from the thing being judged in order that we can have a fair judgement. With no possibility of a fair, unbiased judgement of the phenomena, truth is impossible.
Is there any sense of "truth" that is not existentially contingent upon language? Perhaps this be better put a bit differently:Does any sense of "truth" define something that we discover? Does any sense of "truth" set out something that is not existentially contingent upon language? Is any sense of "truth" necessarily presupposed by all others? Is any sense of "truth" necessarily presupposed by statements, regardless of whether or not they are actually true?
That which makes statements of thought/belief true is correspondence with/to fact/reality. Assuming sincerity in speech, all statements of thought/belief presuppose, regardless of the particular content, their own correspondence with/to fact/reality. An insincere speaker is one who deliberately misrepresents their own thought/belief. An insincere speaker may state 'X', but does not believe 'X'.
Somewhere along the line... all thought/belief and statements thereof presupposes correspondence with/to fact/reality. All worldviews consist of thought/belief about the world and/or ourselves.
Everyone thinks that things are a certain way.
Everyone forms and/or holds thought/belief.
All thought/belief presupposes it's own correspondence with/to fact/reality.
Everyone's worldview presupposes it's own truth everywhere along the line.
Regarding logic...
Premisses presuppose their own correspondence with/to fact/reality. Logic presupposes correspondence with/to fact/reality by virtue of being existentially contingent upon premisses. Premisses presuppose their own correspondence with/to fact reality by virtue of consisting of thought/belief.
Being logically true is nothing more and nothing less than being a valid conclusion from two meaningful and consistent premisses. Being a valid conclusion is insufficient for being a true one. That is because validity is insufficient for truth.
Truth is correspondence with/to fact/reality.
It is humanly impossible to knowingly believe a falsehood. As soon as one realizes that what one thought was the case, was not; as soon as one realizes that one was wrong about something or other; as soon as one comes to know that one held false belief, one can no longer believe it.
Truth is in the mind - check. It is related to reason - um, hm, provisional check. How are you defining reason, here? Reasoning is dependent on language. For true propositions, sure. But maybe just here is your problem (lol). I think most folks acknowledge that animals reason, many manifestly so. But where does that put you? (I.e, animals have language, or animals don't reason.)
No. I don't think most people would say that other animals reason. Animals think, but to reason is to think with the use of logic, which animals do not do. That's why Aristotle defined man as rational animal, it's what sets human beings off from other animals. So I think it's quite clear that other animals don't reason. Here's the definition of reason, used in this context: "The intellectual faculty by which conclusions are drawn from premises."
But why not truth as primordial to language? Maybe "primordial" is too fancy a word, perhaps "underlying" is better.
I've already given all these reasons why truth is not primordial to language, but you just keep insisting that it must be, without properly refuting my reasons, or giving any real support to what you keep asserting.
Here's a straight forward way of putting it. Truth is what we attribute to what people say, i.e., "that person speaks the truth". Can you think of truth being attributed to anything other than what people say? If not, then why not just accept that truth is a property of speech? Creativesoul will argue that truth is attributed to beliefs, but will be unable to demonstrate that these beliefs are anything other than as expressed by words.
Consider: do you have experiences that cause in you a reaction of judgement and then of action (or reaction), all prior to any articulation? Certainly after the fact you can verbalize them, but maybe not entirely.
I can't apprehend the relation you are trying to make between emotional feelings and truth. You appear to be going in the opposite direction to truth, as emotions are far from truth. Truth is more like an ideal, what we seek, and attempt to bring into existence through the use of logical reasoning. This is to proceed away from emotional feelings, which are highly deceptive.
Another example occurs to me: at dinner there's something disgusting on your dinner plate. Do you need/use either of language or reason to react to it? Again, after the fact, sure, but that's after.
That reaction is not a reaction of truth, it is instinct, or habit, and this is far from truth. It might well be that the thing on the dinner plate which appears to be disgusting, is actually very delicious. This is why we look to logical reasoning to provide us with the truth, not to primitive emotions.
Yes, 'counterfactual' just means contrary to actuality and/ or truth. I don't see what Michael seems to think needs accounting for regarding counterfactuals.
Well a couple of problems here. The correspondence theory of truth is really just a test to see which propositions (P) are true, or alternatively, a machine for cranking out true Ps. To call the quality all these Ps possess, that they're true, truth, is simply to use "truth" as a collective term that means only that the Ps in question are true. The question of this thread is if that's all there is to truth (i.e., the set of all Ps true under correspondence), or if there is something more.
Well, there is indeed a couple of problems here. First off, when talking about what there is to truth, the only approach worthy of taking must involve all senses thereof. I do not adhere to the traditional correspondence theory. On my view, correspondence is not a quality. Rather, it is a relationship. That is most certainly not to say that truth is relative in a relativist sense. That inevitably leads to incoherence.
Now things get obscure. (What follows is partly borrowed from an online article, but I forget where.) Let P be "John is married to Jane." Under correspondence, P is true if John is married to Jane. Could not be simpler: the relevant part of the world corresponds to P. But how about P1, John is married? In the world John is married to Jane. That means that P1 is true not as a matter of correspondence, but because P is true. P1, then, is a dialectical truth.
I don't see the purported problem here, though. If P1 is true, then it is so by virtue of corresponding to fact/reality. P could be false, and yet P1 could still be true.
Two points: correspondence clearly does not exhaust the possibilities for there being true Ps. And all that's accomplished is a larger generalization of truth.
I find that correspondence theory accomplished much, but unfortunately mistakenly presupposes that truth is existentially contingent upon language, and perhaps worse yet... Like so many other schools of though across the board do as well, it fails to draw and maintain the crucial distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief.
But for the moment, you take up the question: is there more to truth than just trueness of the P(s) in question? Before answering, read gurugeorge's last post above.
Trust, truth, and meaning are irrevocably entwined and virtually inseparable during initial language acquisition, so the origin is of no surprise here. Relevance to what I've said?
On my view, if it is a fact of the world that John is married to Jane, then it is a fact of the world that John is married. The truth of the latter is not at all contingent upon the truth of the former, as already argued. Again, I'm not defending traditional correspondence theory.
During one's initial language acquisition, s/he cannot doubt whether or not the teaching is truthful. Trust here is akin to faith... unquestioned trust in the truthfulness of a source. Correspondence with/to fact/reality is necessarily presupposed in all thought/belief by virtue of consisting entirely of mental correlations. Meaning consists entirely of mental correlations. Correlation presupposes the existence of it's own content. <-------- That is the presupposition of correspondence to fact/reality at work(during language acquisition).
Is there any sense of "truth" that is not existentially contingent upon language? Perhaps this be better put a bit differently:Does any sense of "truth" define something that we discover? Does any sense of "truth" set out something that is not existentially contingent upon language? Is any sense of "truth" necessarily presupposed by all others? Is any sense of "truth" necessarily presupposed by statements, regardless of whether or not they are actually true?
By calling things that are contrary to fact "counterfactual" given an appropriate context for my doing so.
And that's the problem. Counterfactuals can be true, even though they don't correspond to any fact. "If I were born a woman then my name would be Michelle", for example. I'm not a woman, my name isn't Michelle, and yet this claim is true.
I can tell you what it would take in order for it to be true. Things would have to be different than they are. They're not. Therefore, it's not.
So under your theory of truth, counterfactuals aren't true? I think that's a problem for your theory of truth.
And what about statements about the past or the future? Can they be true (and so correspond to facts)? If so, then what is a fact? Obviously it can't (always, at least) just be some physical state of affairs, as there is no physical state of affairs which corresponds to the true claim "there was a battle at Hastings in 1066" or to the true claim "the Sun will rise tomorrow".
Metaphysician UndercoverJune 23, 2017 at 13:40#801560 likes
Clearly you have never owned a pet. Or if you did you paid no attention to it. My experience is just ordinary cats and dogs, but they figure things out, sometimes difficult things, sometimes quickly! As to logic, what logic? Aristotelian categorical logic, with syllogisms? Mathematical logic? Rhetorical logic? So many kinds. Maybe they use animal logic. And how do you think if you don't use some sort of logic?
Or maybe you just mean they do not reason as people do. That seems intuitively reasonably, but maybe it isn't. At some level, I think all reasoning must be essentially the same, if not at the same level or degree.
Well, I distinguish between thinking and reasoning, as reasoning, I believe, is a type of thinking, described by the definition I provided, "conclusions are drawn from premises". If you want to define all thinking as reasoning, then perhaps I can follow. We could proceed by distinguishing different forms of logic, like you suggest, even including "animal logic" (whatever that might be), as some basic form of logic. Possibly we could identify plant logic, and maybe some type of logic is used by DNA and cell genetics.
In any case, I would restrict "truth" to the higher forms of logic, those practised by human beings. These are the types of logic which proceed from well defined principles, requiring language for those definitions. These are the types of logic which aim specifically at truth. The lower forms of logic are pragmatic, based in practicality, usefulness, and usefulness does not necessarily direct us toward truth. Truth is a very specific ideal, and logic which is essentially pragmatic, must be directed toward truth, or else the logic may produce any sort of untrue conclusions.
By the way, rejecting my definition of reason very nicely demonstrates my point that definition is essential to truth. Without a definition of "reason", there can be no truth to the statement "animals other than human reason". Without definition there is only vague ambiguity. When "reason" means something different to you than it means to me, what could provide us with the truth concerning that matter? Truth cannot be produced by such ambiguity, it comes about only through precise definitions, such as those we find in the higher forms of logic like mathematics. So when "truth" is the ideal which we focus our attention on, we produce clear and precise definitions. When it is our intention to bring this ideal to reality, the only way it can be done is though precise definitions. Can you think of any other way?
I think you're on to something, here. In your sentence you attribute something; the word you use for what is attributed is truth. What, exactly, is that? What do you mean? How can truth be attributed if it's what you say above? I recognize this is just ordinary usage, but the whole point of this thread is to examine these ideas, to part the curtains of ordinary usage, to see if there's anything behind them.
Anything which is attributed is a property. The property exists only as an ideal, the word refers to the idea in the mind of what it means to have that property. In predication, we identify the subject, and attribute the property. So the property is attributed by the mind, it is something (a concept) in the mind, which the subject is said to have. The subject may be a name representing a particular object, but the property which is attributed is always a universal, and therefore a concept devised by the mind. The subject/object representation is what bridges the gap between what's in the mind and what's in the physical world. So "truth" as something we attribute to what has been said, is like any other property which is predicated, it is a concept in the mind, an ideal.
Really? All the books in the world contain zero truth? All the speeches, before they're spoken? And as well my thoughts, and everyone else's, barren of truth? You're stuck on truth as a speech phenomenon, and that sounds like a bespoke definition for sure - a perfectly god one, as far as it goes. But tell me how it's not begging the question in this discussion.
Of course I consider what has been written as part of what has been said. But unspoken words and thoughts are a completely different issue. It is impossible that 'we' can attribute truth to unspoken words because 'we' have no access to them. I can attribute truth to my unspoken words, and you to yours, but I can not attribute truth to your unspoken words. This brings us right back to where we first started this discussion, the inherently subjective nature of "truth", and its relation to honesty. If you speak words which you do not attribute truth to, then you are being dishonest.
So if you would like to proceed toward some primordial truth, prior to language. This is the direction I would recommend. There is an attitude which we have, one toward another, an attitude of respect and honesty, which inspires us to speak the truth. This attitude of cooperation is what allows for the existence of language, definitions, and the higher form of logic which allows us to seek the ideal, "truth". But notice that the ideal, as that which is sought is what we call truth, and the primordial attitude, "honesty", as that which gives us the capacity to seek truth, is not really truth itself, but something different.
But what you do hint at is the aura that goes with, "That person speaks the truth!" This is exactly not simply agreement that P is true. Indeed it does not even say it! For brevity's sake I'll just refer again to Gurugeorge's post. There's an element of revealing/"unconcealing." And this leads to Heidegger, which path I'm content to gesture to, but am not especially eager to travel.
Yes, I agree a lot with what Gurugeorge said. This is what we went through when we first engaged in this discussion, the subjective nature of truth. We described its base as an attitude, a frame of mind which I called "honesty", and Guru calls "trust". Notice that "honesty" is on the side of the speaker, and "trust" is on the side of the hearer. I attribute "truth" more to the speaker, as that which inspires "trust" in the hearer.
I attempted to proceed into an analysis of this subjective nature of "truth", assuming from this starting point, that truth is completely within the mind, but you would not follow, assuming that there must be some sort of truth external to the mind.
Let's try this. I concede the accuracy of all your points, so far as they go. If you say truth goes no further, then I disagree. On the other hand, if you catch a glimpse of the possibility of there being more to truth than just the several trueness of some spoken propositions, then we can continue. But near as I can tell, you have defined us into a dead end.
It's not that I think truth goes no further than the spoken word. I think that truth is an ideal, and all ideals go further than the spoken word, because words are just representations of ideas. But I think that if we want to delve further into the nature of truth, I will only proceed if I think we are heading in the right direction. Therefore we must determine the true nature of an "ideal", before we proceed.
Do you agree that an ideal, is something which has no real existence, but it exists within the mind, as an aim, a goal, something which we desire to bring about, and "truth" is of this nature? So if we look back in time, toward a "primordial truth", it is as you would say, "dodgy", very vague, ambiguous, without clearly defined terms, and therefore 'truth" in this time was extremely limited. But if we look ahead, toward the future, we can envision a highly progressive "truth", based in clear and precise definitions, and infallible forms of logic. Would you agree, that "truth" is something which is becoming, it is coming into existence, from non-existence in the distant past, evolving out of many degrees of privation, towards a perfection in the future?
Terrapin StationJune 23, 2017 at 14:38#801830 likes
Counterfactuals aren't true because they cannot possibly be so... by definition. Statements about past events can be. Statements about future events cannot be. No problem.
Counterfactuals aren't true because they cannot possibly be so... by definition.
No, they're not defined as not being possibly true. They're defined as having a dependent clause that isn't the case.
Statements about past events can be.
How? What is the nature of the facts that they correspond to? Obviously they're not some physical state of affairs as there is no physical state of affairs that is the battle of Hastings having happened in 1066.
Statements about future events cannot be.
Seems perfectly true to say that "the Sun will rise tomorrow" is true.
No problem.
I'd say it is a problem. Counterfactuals and claims about the future can be true, yet this isn't allowed by your theory on truth – and depending on how you answer the above, it may be that your theory doesn't allow for true statements about the past, either. Therefore, your theory of truth fails.
Metaphysician UndercoverJune 23, 2017 at 17:43#802350 likes
Reply to creativesoul
I think Michael's claim is that the counterfactual is true by virtue of some sort of logical principles. If you had two apples, and got another two apples, you would have four apples. This assertion is true despite the fact that you haven't carried out the act of getting any of these apples, and so you may not actually have any apples at all.
We can simplify this by saying that statements concerning possibilities can be true. This allows us to make true propositions concerning the future, and produce reasonable conclusions concerning the future. "If it rains tomorrow, anything left outside will get wet". "If my phone gets wet it will be ruined". These are true propositions. Therefore I ought not leave my phone outside if it is possible that it may rain tomorrow, and I value my phone.
And what about statements about the past or the future? Can they be true (and so correspond to facts)? If so, then what is a fact? Obviously it can't (always, at least) just be some physical state of affairs, as there is no physical state of affairs which corresponds to the true claim "there was a battle at Hastings in 1066" or to the true claim "the Sun will rise tomorrow".
You don't really need counterfactuals or statements about the past to demonstrate that the correspondence theory doesn't work (there's a lot of philosophical controversy surrounding them). Just take the simpler case of negative facts (that is, negated propositions that are true). It is a true statement that Bernie Sanders is not the the president of the US, what is the 'corresponding' thing or the entity that makes it true? It is certainly not the existence of Bernie himself with the negation sign attached to him. Or what about the fact that Barack Obama is not (the current) president of the US? Nothing in the world corresponds to either of these statements yet they are true and have furthermore different truth conditions.
The object that makes it true that Bernie Sanders is not the President is Donald Trump. [ Being POTUS ] is a property only one object can possess at a given time. Since Trump possesses this property, no other object does.
Alternatively, if we're not locked into objects, it could be the fact that Donald Trump is POTUS.
There is mass agreement that Trump is President but mass agreement does not make something true. Someone can easily come along and say the election was fixed and that Trump is not his/her President. General agreement on any statement does not make something true. It just means lots if people agree. This can change and often does.
Truth implies some immobility and as far as I can tell everything is constantly changing, especially history. The victor writes the history.
No, they're not defined as not being possibly true. They're defined as having a dependent clause that isn't the case.
Irrelevant. Counterfactuals pose no problem for my position. I've accounted for them.. without issue, even if not false by their own definition.
I wrote:
[quote]Statements about past events can be(true/false).
You replied:
How? What is the nature of the facts that they correspond to? Obviously they're not some physical state of affairs as there is no physical state of affairs that is the battle of Hastings having happened in 1066.
Statements about past events are true by virtue of their correspondence to past events, and false when such correspondence is lacking. It's not hard to understand. It doesn't require complexity.
I wrote:
Statements about future events cannot be(true/false).
You replied:
Seems perfectly true to say that "the Sun will rise tomorrow" is true.
In order for that statement to be true, the sun would have to rise tomorrow... Until then, it's a prediction and as such cannot be true until what it says will be the case is.
I'd say it is a problem. Counterfactuals and claims about the future can be true, yet this isn't allowed by your theory on truth – and depending on how you answer the above, it may be that your theory doesn't allow for true statements about the past, either. Therefore, your theory of truth fails.
The above presupposes that counterfactuals and claims about the future can be true.
That is precisely what's at issue. That needs argued for. I've done that. You've yet to.
Counterfactuals and predictions cannot be true.
That is not a flaw of my position. It is a consequence thereof.
I've said what it would take for your candidate to be true. Are you rejecting those truth conditions?
That is precisely what's at issue. That needs argued for. I've done that. You've yet to.
You haven't argued that. You've simply said that them being true is incompatible with your theory and so can't be true. But if that's all it takes to argue for a theory then I could put forth any theory I like and dismiss anything that contradicts it as necessarily false. If I say that to be true is to be written by me and you respond by saying that such-and-such a thing is true even though it isn't written by me, can I just argue that it must be false because it isn't written by me? Of course not.
So if you want to argue that counterfactuals are not a problem for your theory then you need to show that counterfactuals cannot be true without assuming that to be true is to correspond to a fact (and again, you're yet to even explain what a fact is).
That is not a flaw of my position. It is a consequence thereof.
And that's the problem. It's a proof by contradiction. If a consequence of your theory is that certain things cannot be true, and if those things can be true, then your theory is wrong. You can't defend against a proof by contradiction by simply reiterating your theory and its consequence.
Reply to Srap Tasmaner That's a good suggestion, but strictly speaking "Trump being the POTUS" is not itself an entity but a fact, i.e., something which depends on a description (Trump being the POTUS is not an intrinsic property of Trump). Because consider that Trump's existence by itself is also compatible with the opposite proposition - viz that Bernie is the president (had Bernie won the presidency, Trump would still exist), so Bernie's not being the president doesn't logically depend on Trump himself. So my point is that the putative truth-maker for "Bernie is not the president" has got somehow to include Bernie himself, because it seems to me that the a truth maker should logically entail the proposition that it makes true; you can't just add to it some other auxiliary descriptions.
But this is not a decisive objection, and I agree that the correspondence theorist has some room to maneuver here.
Here's another objection to correspondence, that I read in Frank Ramsey's "Facts and Propositions". The key idea is that mere physical entities in the world (such as objects or events) cannot serve as truth-makers for propositions because they are too "coarse-grained".
Consider the proposition that "Caesar was murdered". What entity makes this proposition true? It seems that it is the event that Caesar was murdered (-"the murder of Caesar"). But what about the proposition "Caesar died in 44 BC"? Since his death was caused by his murder, his death must be the same event as his murder. But if this is so, it means that the same entity (the same event) corresponds to two different propositions (and they are different propositions because they mean different things: not all deaths are the result of a murder). And now this is a problem, because the correspondence theory is supposed to assign a unique truth-maker to each proposition, that explains why the proposition is true under some specific conditions and not some others. And that entails that if two propositions have the same truth conditions (they correspond to the very same entity, if true) then they are the same proposition. But "Caesar was murdered" and "Caesar died in 44 BC" are not the same proposition, so the correspondence theory is inadequate.
What entity makes this proposition true? It seems that it is the event that Caesar was murdered (-"the murder of Caesar").
To continue, I think even this account has problems. What does it mean for something that has happened to presently be an event? Is there some (physical?) state of affairs that currently is the fact that such-and-such a thing happened? Maybe a block-theory account of time can help here (although even then I'm sceptical), but without such a recourse, what is the ontology of the past, and how does that play into a correspondence theory of truth?
Metaphysician UndercoverJune 24, 2017 at 12:15#804820 likes
What makes a counterfactual true, is the same thing which makes any proposition true, how the words are defined. In most cases, correspondence is inherent within the definitions, so that the definitions correspond with usage of the words. But a definition does not necessarily adhere to correspondence, and usage varies. In some cases we define words the way we want to, regardless of whether this corresponds to the way that the words are used or not.
So, creativesoul defines "true" as corresponding, and this makes it true that counterfactuals cannot be true, despite the fact that Michael would define "true" in another way, making it possible for counterfactuals to be true. One might insist, that there must be an "objective truth" to the matter, but how could there be? We are free to define and use words how we like, and clearly "true or false" depends on how the words are defined. Truth is subjective.
Reply to Michael Sure, but this argument is interesting because it shows that the correspondence theorist gets into trouble even if we grant him that past events can somehow 'correspond' to propositions uttered at the present, so we don't have to make any controversial metaphysical assumptions.
We do want to preserve the intuition that a proposition is true if things are the way it says they are, don't we?
Yes, but this is not a 'metaphysical' explanation of truth. When you say that proposition P is true iff such and such is the case, then you simply repeat P, and this really doesn't explain why P is true, in the sense in which the correspondence theorist attempts to explain it. He thinks that the thing that we have to mention in the right hand side of "P is true iff X" must be (in some sense) something different from P, but the trouble is (as Ramsey's argument and others show) that if we don't mention P itself in right hand side, then whatever you put there wouldn't explain the truth of P (since it is something different); but if we do mention P then the theory becomes trivial and uninformative. This I think shows that we should abandon all metaphysical ambitions to 'explain' truth (i.e., postulating entities that 'correspond' to sentence and so on).
Reply to Srap Tasmaner But you don't have to be a defletionist about truth even if you reject correspondence; one can still maintain that truth is an important and substantive concept, but only reject the idea that it requires some sort of metaphysical explanation.
(there's a wonderful paper by Cora Diamond "Unfolding Truth and Reading Wittgenstein" (-yes she's one of my favorite philosophers) that argues for the possibility of such an intermediary position which is neither deflationist nor metaphysical).
Is there any sense of "truth" that is not existentially contingent upon language? Perhaps this be better put a bit differently:Does any sense of "truth" define something that we discover? Does any sense of "truth" set out something that is not existentially contingent upon language? Is any sense of "truth" necessarily presupposed by all others? Is any sense of "truth" necessarily presupposed by statements, regardless of whether or not they are actually true?
I was reading a bit of Russell's "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism" tonight because I had been reading Nietzsche and his theories of truth are so confusing I felt I needed an antidote and Russell seemed like a good place to start. :-)
I like that he makes the distinction between facts, which have no truth value, and beliefs, which do have a truth value.
Facts have no truth value, Russell says, because you can't have a false fact, and truth requires falsity. There are just facts. And there are facts of many different kinds, i.e. arithmetic mathematical facts, physical facts, etc.
I think part of the reason Nietzsche was making my head spin was because a) I couldn't really get clear on his notion of truth and b) I think in the current American political climate, it is so important to get in touch again with notions like fact and truth.
I don't take these things for granted. I believe that it is true that there are facts. I am not exactly sure how to define a fact, but I suppose as a first pass I'd say a fact is something about the way things really are. In other words, I suppose facts make up reality.
This is, of course, all leading up to some kind of correspondence theory of truth, which I believe during this period of Russell's thinking (1918 I think) he held, although at one point he held something like an identity theory of truth.
I feel very sympathetic to the correspondence theory of truth tonight. It seems so basic and yet feels so right.
My coffee cup has coffee in it right now. This is a fact (although give me a few more minutes and it won't be a fact anymore). The proposition that I put forth in a sentence before, that my coffee cup has coffee in it right now, is true because it corresponds to the fact that my coffee cup does indeed have coffee in it right now. (actually it's decaf, which some people may reject as real coffee, but nevertheless...)
Did Trump collaborate somehow with Russia with the intention of trying to win an election? I do not know the answer to that question (although I have a strong belief). However what I feel quite certain of right now, is that he either did or did not. There is a fact of the matter. One of those facts exists. In other words, there was an event that either took place (call it collusion if you will) or did not take place. If it did take place, if the fact is that Trump colluded, then my belief that he did collude would be true. If he did not, my belief would be false.
So there it is again, the correspondence theory. If my belief corresponds to the event in question, that it is a true belief. If not, then it is a false belief.
That's the common-sense take. Conventional correspondence theory gets mired in attempting some type of one to one nonsense between propositions and facts. Blather. Several different thought/belief can correspond to the same set of events(same facts). The issue is in the conception of "proposition", amongst other places.
I feel very sympathetic to the correspondence theory of truth tonight. It seems so basic and yet feels so right.
My coffee cup has coffee in it right now. This is a fact (although give me a few more minutes and it won't be a fact anymore). The proposition that I put forth in a sentence before, that my coffee cup has coffee in it right now, is true because it corresponds to the fact that my coffee cup does indeed have coffee in it right now. (actually it's decaf, which some people may reject as real coffee, but nevertheless...)
The op is concerned with the difference between "true" and "truth". The difficulty with correspondence theory is that as much as it is concerned with true statements, "it is true that my cup has coffee in it", it has no approach to truth itself. In a sense, you could say that it takes truth for granted, as it takes correspondence for granted.
If we ask the question, what is correspondence, we get a completely different approach to "truth". We cannot just say that it is true that my cup has coffee in it if my cup has coffee in it, as correspondence assumes, because this is just redundancy. So we must look at the two things which are said to correspond, and despite the fact that they are completely different (one is a statement the other a state of the world), they are both interpreted in the very same way. "My cup has coffee in it", and the specified state of the world, must both be interpreted as the same. in order that the statement is true.
1) Let's suppose it is: truth is an ideal. Whence ideals? Which came first, the horse or the ideal (of a ) horse? I think the real horse came first. But what would be the real truth that is prior to the ideal? If this question is legitimate, then it follows that truth is not originally or entirely an ideal. Further, it can reasonably be asked what property the ideal has that is not already manifest in its instances. What property does the ideal horse have that is not already manifest in one or another real horse? (Assuming that the ideal horse is not an unnatural or super-natural horse, although it's fair to include in the one ideal horse all the perfections of many real horses and none of their imperfections.)
As much as many people today do not believe this, it has been well proven by Plato and Aristotle, that the form of the thing is prior in existence, to the particular thing itself. It is best laid out in this way, by Aristotle. Anything which exists is necessarily the thing which it is, or else it would not be the thing that it is, it would be something different. And it is impossible by way of contradiction that a thing is something other than the thing it is. So when a thing comes into existence, it must already be pre-determined what that thing will be, or else that thing might be something other than the thing that it is, and this is impossible according to the above statement. Therefore we must assume that the "form" of the thing, the "whatness" of the thing is prior to the thing itself.
This is what the neo-Platonists expanded on, the immaterial Forms which are necessarily prior to the physical existence of objects. Christian thinkers like Aquinas were clear to distinguish between this immaterial Form which precedes the existence of an object, and human ideas which follow the existence of objects in abstraction. I intentionally used the word "ideal", to allow that even in human activity, the ideal like a template, or prototype, precedes the object which is created as a representation of the ideal. So we cannot speak of a "real truth" which precedes the ideal, because the ideal is the real truth.
2) Let's assume that truth is not just an ideal. It follows immediately, then, that there's more to truth than just being an ideal. Where else would that be but in the real, in praxis.
You always fall back on this, or a similar position, that truth is not in the mind, that it is not an ideal, seemingly not willing to follow where the investigation leads.
This is not the case. Concepts and such are universals, but the ideal is a particular concept, it is the one chosen as the best, the most appropriate, the ideal. It is not a universal, it is a particular. Every object has a particular form unique to itself, and the statement of that form is also a particular statement, unique in reference to that particular object. That is the thing about truth, it is particular to every situation. The truth concerning that situation is the best description of it, the ideal description, it is unique and particular.
Truth, then, becomes the possibility that we trust, or at least can hope for, that is realized in the true. The ideas of truth and true are in part just as MU claims. But as part of being in the world, they extend beyond the idea into that which makes them truth, or true.
OK, let me consider this notion of extending beyond the idea, which you suggest. Consider that the ideal extends beyond the idea, referring to the best, or most perfect idea. Do you see that it is impossible for the ideal to exist within the human mind, due to the deficiencies and fallibilities of the human being? The human mind cannot hold the best, most perfect idea. Therefore truth, in its most perfect and real form is not something within the human mind.
I believe you're thinking temporal priority, when it really is logical priority, and that in thought, as an idea. And even that is arguable. As to coming into existence, I think you're shorting the notions of telos and nisus. The telos of a cat is to be(come) a cat; the kitten's nisus is to realize its telos. While not yet a cat, it is exactly not a cat. But that just means that it is exactly something else, which is a very clumsy pseudo-philosophical way of saying that the kitten grows into a cat, that is, is continually changing.
I think your missing the point. The point is that the logic demonstrates that a sort of "Idea" of each particular, individual thing, precedes in time, the material existence of that thing. Of course, we believe that there have been things long before there were human beings, so these "Ideas" are not human ideas. This is why Neo-Platonism was so well received by Christian theologians, because they designated these Ideas as divine.
Instead of taking a religious perspective though, let's just call these "natural Ideas", or "forms", as Aristotle did. It is very important to notice that these Forms, (I'll use the capital F to distinguish the natural Ideas from the human ideas), are of particular things, rather than universals which human ideas are. So each particular, individual thing, has a Form which precedes in time, its material existence, and therefore the Form of the thing is something separate from the material thing itself. We see an object, like a chair at the table, the chair has a Form, which is necessarily separate from the material chair itself, because it precedes the existence of the material chair, in time. The separation is a temporal separation. The temporal perspective of the human being is extremely limited, as is evident by relativity theory. It is restricted by the material constitution of the human body. You see the material chair at the present, "now", but just prior to the present in which you are seeing the material chair, is the Form of the chair, (the Form is at a different "now", a shifted now, which is prior to the "now" of your experience), and the Form causes the material existence of the chair, at the now of your experience.
And you always are completely correct in this criticism. But the criticism is too narrow and reductionist. All right, truth is in the mind, but not as an ideal. Perhaps as a kind of judgment. Maybe that's it. Truth is the mind's judgment as to whether certain propositions are true. As such it has nothing to do with the particular trueness of any proposition, and is not even in itself a guarantee that the proposition is true. It is just a judgment (Insert Gurugeorge, here).
I don't believe that you completely followed the last passage which I just I wrote. And if you could follow it, you most likely dismissed it as "untrue", from the opening premise, that the Form of each individual thing is necessarily prior in time to the material existence of the thing, so it makes no sense to you anyway. If you've dismissed this as untrue, then we need to go back to the argument from Aristotle, which I presented, and hash this out, because either the premise is wrong or it is right, and what I say about "judgement" now, will be based in the assumption that the premise is correct.
The reason why I insisted for so long, that we do not allow truth out of the ideal realm, was to avoid the notion of truth being a correspondence between human ideas, and material existence. So now I've introduced Forms, which are separate from material existence, and also separate from human ideas. I propose that material existence is a medium between human ideas, and the Forms. Truth, as correspondence, is a correspondence between human ideas, and the separate Forms.
The problem with judgement now, is that the human mind is fallible, and cannot be trusted to accurately judge truth. Judgement is an act of will, a passing of judgement. Many times we judge something as true, when it is false. So if we are to assume that truth is a judgement, then this judgement must be an action carried out not by the human mind, but the Mind in which the Forms exist. But we haven't yet determined that the Forms exist within a Mind, that is the ancient assumption which puts the Forms in the mind of God. All we have is that the Forms are necessarily prior in time, to material existence. There is an act, which is the passing of time, and this act makes material things correspond to the Forms, but what kind of thing could "judge" whether human ideas correspond with the Forms?
So "judgement" may not be the proper concept here because unless we assume a being like God, with the capacity to judge, we cannot have a judgement. It is a left over idea, held over from the times in which human beings thought that the Forms must exist in the mind of God, and the judgement of "truth" was made by God. Now I have presented a slightly more complex model. I have posited material existence as the medium between the Forms and the human ideas. Instead of the Will of God, passing judgement, making material existence correspond to the Forms as independent "truth", I posit the passing of time. Truth, from this perspective is not a judgement, it is the passing of time. We can replace the statement "God is truth" with "The passing of time is truth".
Anyway, can you go with this: that truth is a kind of judgment that invokes the world and the being in the world of the person making the judgment. (And has nothing to do with the trueness of any proposition, except through hope (trust, honesty, etc.). Please feel obliged to clean this up, if you think it needs it.
In the old days, "truth" would be the judgement of God. The human mind is fallible, and judges truth incorrectly quite often, so truth cannot be a judgement of human beings. Our society has grown up as a religious society, where God played an important part, such that many of the foundational concepts like "truth", are supported by the assumption of God. For instance, notice that it is common to say there is an "objective" truth or falsity to every proposition regardless of whether it is believed by human beings to be true. This invokes the "God's eye view". Now we tend to dismiss the reality of God, so concepts such as these, concepts which are foundational within our society, are left hanging.
This is the evolutionary cycle of the progression of knowledge. The foundational concepts of a society are the oldest, well established principles, but ancient. As time passes knowledge progresses and we learn vast new fields. The vast new expansions of extended knowledge will inevitably undermine the ancient principles, which were developed from the full extent of the restricted capacities of ancient people. Consider something like what Wittgenstein says, we cannot doubt these foundational, bedrock concepts. In actuality, what he does is question them, cast doubt on them, exposing the reality that we must doubt them. When we subject these bedrock principles to a complete system of skepticism, it becomes evident just how much modern knowledge has undermined fundamental principles.
So this is the importance of human judgement. Each foundational concept, being a fundamental premise, must be analyzed and judged by a system of skepticism. If the concept has been undermined by modern knowledge, as is the case with the foundational concept of "truth", we must determine the premises which have been added at a higher level, which contradict the foundational concept. The foundational concept, as well as the contradictory concepts, must be analyzed together, and they must be altered to be made consistent.
I don't believe in things like abstract forms in the Platonic sense, so at best I would say that truth is an abstract concept. You could argue its either a logical or psychological concept, I suppose, but to me both boil down to mental entities.
I suppose the first question is: what is the nature or essence of this concept.
I'd have to think through this. My preliminary answer would be something like "Truth is a concept that denotes the reality of a particular proposition, belief, or statement."
Perhaps, taking it a step further, Truth with a capital T is something like the sum totality of all true propositions.
Or perhaps truth is the property a proposition has when it is in fact true. We say things like "Statement X is the truth." In other words, Statement X has the property of being a true statement.
Just thinking as I go here, feel free to shoot holes in it. : )
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 01, 2017 at 12:40#827640 likes
I'd have to think through this. My preliminary answer would be something like "Truth is a concept that denotes the reality of a particular proposition, belief, or statement."
OK, let's start with this. What do you mean by the "reality" of a proposition? Let's assume that a proposition consists of words, either written or spoken, and there is also supposed to be something which the proposition refers to. Each of these may be physical states of the world. Each of these states must be interpreted. If someone interprets them both, the words and the thing referred to, in the same way, that person would say the proposition is true. In other words, if I would describe a particular state of the world, with the same words as used in the proposition, I would say that the proposition is true.
Or perhaps truth is the property a proposition has when it is in fact true. We say things like "Statement X is the truth." In other words, Statement X has the property of being a true statement.
Yes, this is what I would agree with. When we judge a particular collection of words as true, we claim that it has the property of truth. The problem is that truth is not attributed to the physical existence of the words, it is not something which is sensed in the words, it is attributed to the meaning of the words. The meaning is interpretive, and truth is attributed to the meaning, so this makes truth subjective.
When we judge a particular collection of words as true, we claim that it has the property of truth. The problem is that truth is not attributed to the physical existence of the words, it is not something which is sensed in the words, it is attributed to the meaning of the words. The meaning is interpretive, and truth is attributed to the meaning, so this makes truth subjective.
No, it doesn't. It makes the attribution of truth subjective. The objective/subjective dichotomy cannot take an account of that which requires both and is thus neither.
You're conflating being true with being called true. Sure, we could say that we attribute truth. However, that isn't said by someone coherently arguing for correspondence.
Asking what correspondence is leads one astray. If I say that that is a tree, then it is nonsense to ask what a tree is. Truth is correspondence. Correspondence is truth. It is a relationship presupposed within all thought/belief formation itself, and therefore presupposed within all statements thereof...
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 02, 2017 at 13:15#829340 likes
It is best laid out in this way, by Aristotle. Anything which exists is necessarily the thing which it is, or else it would not be the thing that it is, it would be something different. And it is impossible by way of contradiction that a thing is something other than the thing it is. So when a thing comes into existence, it must already be pre-determined what that thing will be, or else that thing might be something other than the thing that it is, and this is impossible according to the above statement. Therefore we must assume that the "form" of the thing, the "whatness" of the thing is prior to the thing itself.
This is the principle which Aristotle took from Plato, and expounded on. Notice that a "form" of the thing, an idea of the thing, is necessarily prior in time, to the existence of the thing, and this must be true for every existing thing.
He covers this principle in the "Metaphysics", where he explains that the fundamental metaphysical question is not why is there something rather than nothing, but why is there what there is, rather than something else. He takes this question much further than Plato, later in the "Metaphysics", where he develops the concept of potential.
The scientific way of understanding why there is what there is, is through "possibility". Prior in time, to the existence of the thing itself, we claim that there is the possibility of that thing. This "potential" for the thing, is the "idea" which precedes the existence of the thing. But this "idea" of possibility, or potential, is created by the human mind, it is a human idea, and therefore cannot be the real "form", in the world, which must precedes the existence of the thing, according to the above argument. This is covered by Aristotle's cosmological argument. The potential must be validated by something actual.
If the actuality, which validates the possibility for existence of a thing, is assigned to another actual thing (which is the common way to dismiss this problem through efficient causation), then we have an infinite regress of existing things. That is why this solution is rejected by later renditions of the cosmological argument, such as Aquinas'. Furthermore, this approach, which leads to infinite regress, just veils the real issue that an actually existing thing, being the potential for something else, is just a human idea, it's the way human beings describe the situation. This perspective fails to account for a necessary aspect of reality, which is "the act", that makes one thing become another thing.
I believe, you introduce an alternate reality, in which immaterial Forms exist - and presumably Truth has a form? As theory, why not? As real, untenable.
Until you address the logic which necessitates the immaterial Forms, and you develop an understanding of the problems involved with this perspective, you have no basis for any claim of "untenable". To simply claim "untenable" without addressing the logic, is just a baseless assertion.
Exacty, and it is not a problem; it is a fact! The fallibility of truth, here, is resolved in whether the truth in question, which (I argue) is necessarily some kind of proposition, is true, or not. Just here is exactly where truth reveals itself as contingent, as possibility - but possibility of a certain kind (what kind a separate discussion). One criterium that suggest itself to me, is "moral certainty."
It is a problem though, because we understand "truth" as infallible. If you resolution to the problem is to redefine "truth" as something fallible, something "possible", instead of something real, something actual, then all you have done is dismissed "truth" as we have come to know the concept, for something less than truth, something fallible. This is a problem, because it's simply your failure to establish an understanding of "truth", as it is meant to be understood, so that you introduce a different definition of "truth".
Concepts are left hanging, willy-nilly, all the time. Beyond the inconvenience, so what?
A concept which is left hanging, not grounded, cannot be judged as true. It is the justification of the concept which allows us to judge its truth. So to judge such concepts as true, is just a willy-nilly judgement.
Wrong, actually. No doubt new knowledge does lead to new understandings, new truth, if you will. But underlying are what are called absolute presuppositions. And these do change, but as a result of a logical process. Temporality is merely incidental.
I don't understand your criticism here, you write "wrong", but then proceed to support my claim. The only difference is that you attempt to remove temporality from a "process". Of course that is what is wrong, we all know that temporality is intrinsic and essential to any process.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 02, 2017 at 13:28#829390 likes
No, it doesn't. It makes the attribution of truth subjective. The objective/subjective dichotomy cannot take an account of that which requires both and is thus neither.
I disagree. What I said is that truth is attributed to the meaning of the statement, it is not attributed to the physical words themselves. The meaning must be interpreted before truth can be attributed, and this interpretation is subjective. So truth is attributed to the interpretation, and any interpretation is subjective. It is not the act of attribution which I am claiming is subjective, but the thing, the interpretation, which truth is being attributed to, which I am claiming is subjective.
You're conflating being true with being called true. Sure, we could say that we attribute truth. However, that isn't said by someone coherently arguing for correspondence.
What I am referring to is the thing which is said to be true. It is not a collection of physically existing words which is said to be true, it is the interpretation of these which is said to be true. But unless you can demonstrate how an interpretation can be objective, I assume that any interpretation is subjective.
Well Meta, you and I have had quite nuanced discussions involving the differences in our positions. These have ranged from things similar to what you've argued with Tim to what counts as being justified. I'm confident that you can recall such conversation, even if - like myself - the recollection isn't a complete one.
You've neglected to address what I've just objected to.
You laid out an argument regarding how "truth" is attributed to the meaning of words, and then erroneously concluded that that is ground for further claiming that truth is subjective. It is no such thing. What follows is that the attribution of "truth" is subjective.
That is one objection left neglected. The other involved the invocation of the subjective/objective dichotomy. While it is a very very popular one, it is inherently incapable of taking an account of that which is neither and/or requires both. All thought/belief is existentially contingent upon subjective and objective things. Correspondence is a relationship 'between' the two. Thus, it requires both and yet is - itself - neither of those. Meaning is in the same boat.
Honestly, I'm not even comfortable with saying that. The objective/subjective dichotomy is inherently lacking in explanatory power regarding all sorts of things. It shoehorns misunderstanding into one's worldview.
Plato's and Aristotle's notion(s) of form is/are based upon an unproven premiss that assumes precisely what needs to be argued for. On my view, both unnecessarily multiply entities where and when no such multiple is required.
There is no justificatory ground for positing the form of A prior to the existence of A.
Potential, if it is to make any sense in my book, must be on par with necessary preconditions. There is no need for a form prior to existence. There is a need for what A consists of/in if A is a composite.
What I am referring to is the thing which is said to be true. It is not a collection of physically existing words which is said to be true, it is the interpretation of these which is said to be true. But unless you can demonstrate how an interpretation can be objective, I assume that any interpretation is subjective.
This seems quite confused. The objective/subjective dichotomy adds nothing but unnecessary confusion.
Interpretation requires the attribution of meaning by one speaker to another speaker's language use. If the interpeter get's it right, then s/he understands the speaker. That says nothing at all with regard to the truth of the speaker's use. Rather, if both draw the same or similar enough correlations, then they have a shared understanding/meaning. It is when different correlations are drawn that misunderstanding takes place.
Understanding(correctly interpreting) another's word use has nothing to do with understanding what it would take for them to be true. I can interpret another's words perfectly and those words be demonstrably false.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 03, 2017 at 01:00#830940 likes
You laid out an argument regarding how "truth" is attributed to the meaning of words, and then erroneously concluded that that is ground for further claiming that truth is subjective. It is no such thing. What follows is that the attribution of "truth" is subjective.
I clarified by saying that truth is attributed to an interpretation of meaning. Since the interpretation is subjective, then the thing which is attributed is subjective as well, as a property of that subjective thing. You haven't yet addressed my clarification.
That is one objection left neglected. The other involved the invocation of the subjective/objective dichotomy. While it is a very very popular one, it is inherently incapable of taking an account of that which is neither and/or requires both. All thought/belief is existentially contingent upon subjective and objective things. Correspondence is a relationship 'between' the two. Thus, it requires both and yet is - itself - neither of those. Meaning is in the same boat.
The only thing objective about an interpretation is the object which is being interpreted. If you believe that there is naturally some type of correspondence between the object, and the interpretation, which is what you seem to be arguing, then the onus is on you to demonstrate this correspondence. To simply assume that there is correspondence is an unjustified assumption. in fact, that there even is an object, has not yet been justified by you.
So perhaps it is true that all thought/belief is contingent on subjective and objective things, but I see no reason to believe this. Instead, I think it is far more likely that some thought/belief may be purely subjective. Until the assumption that there even is an object, is justified, we are much better off to start with the assumption that all thought/belief is purely subjective. Therefore, until you justify the assumption that the object exists, your assertion that "all thought/belief is existentially contingent on subjective and objective things", is completely baseless.
There is no justificatory ground for positing the form of A prior to the existence of A.
I provided a paraphrase of the argument. If you do not agree with it, then demonstrate its weakness. But to claim that there is no justification for the conclusion, without addressing the argument, is just being ridiculous.
Interpretation requires the attribution of meaning by one speaker to another speaker's language use. If the interpeter get's it right, then s/he understands the speaker. That says nothing at all with regard to the truth of the speaker's use. Rather, if both draw the same or similar enough correlations, then they have a shared understanding/meaning. It is when different correlations are drawn that misunderstanding takes place.
Allow me to clarify the point. Assume any statement, like "a cow is in the barn". In order that this statement may be true or false, there must be an interpretation of its meaning. Also, there must be an interpretation of the physical state of the world. If truth is correspondence, then these two interpretations must correspond in order that there is truth. Interpretation is completely subjective (carried out by the mind of a human subject). Since truth as correspondence, is correspondence between two distinct interpretations, which are both subjective, truth as correspondence, is itself subjective.
Allow me to clarify the point. Assume any statement, like "a cow is in the barn". In order that this statement may be true or false, there must be an interpretation of its meaning.
I'm not sure I agree that there must be an interpretation of its meaning. Rather, I think it would be more precise to say there must be an understanding of its meaning. "Understanding" is something like a mental grasp or comprehension. I often like to refer to understanding as "getting it." When something like "a cow is in the barn" is uttered in relation to a set of particulars like, for instance, a particular cow and a particular barn, we must grasp the meaning of the utterance. In this case, the meaning of the sentence is that there is a particular animal, a cow, spatially located in a particular building, the barn. I think as long as we have something like "understanding" we don't need something like "interpretation" here to do any heavy lifting.
Also, there must be an interpretation of the physical state of the world.
In this particular case, I think it would be more correct to say that we must have a *belief* about the world (physical or whatever) rather than an *interpretation* of the world. A belief here meaning something that you hold to be true, whether or not it actually is, in fact, true. In this particular case, you are holding it to be true that there is a particular animal, a cow, in a particular spatial location, inside the structure we refer to as the barn.
If truth is correspondence, then these two interpretations must correspond in order that there is truth.
If truth is something like correspondence, I would argue that the correspondence is actually not between the meaning of the sentence and the world, but rather the belief you are holding and the world. I have a belief B about state of the world Y. Now, there is an actual state of the world, F, which we can call a fact about the world. The fact is the way the world actually is. If B matches up with F, then that is the actual correspondence relationship. Now, the fact is not an interpretation. The fact is simply the way the world is. The belief, on the other hand, is also not an interpretation, but rather an opinion about the world that you happen to hold as true. If the two match, then correspondence obtains and the belief is True.
As to whether this is subjective or objective:
The fact is certainly objective. Regardless of what we think about the situation, the cow (Betsy, let's name her), is either in or not in the barn owned by Old McDonald, who has a farm. The fact of the matter is the objective state of affairs. In this particular instance, let's say that Betsy is NOT in Old McDonald's barn; rather, she is actually grazing in Old McDonald's field at Time T.
Now is the belief subjective or objective. Here we get into the issue of intentionality (one of my favorite topics, as a phenomenologist, I might add!)
A belief is a mental state / psychological state. Now, we have to distinguish the existence of the mental state itself, maybe we we can refer to as its form, from its actual content, which is not the same thing. I have many beliefs, and these are all psychological states, so it could be fair to say that they are the world as I perceive it, which means they are subjective.
HOWEVER, the content of the beliefs are assertions about the world being a certain way or not being a certain way. In this example, I hold it to be true that Betsy is in Old McD's Barn. The structure of the belief is subjective, but the content is asserting something objective about the world. Unfortunately for me, what I am asserting does not actually correspond to the way the world really is. The belief fails to obtain. As a consequence, my belief about the world is False. The world is not the way I believe it to be. It does not meet up with my assertion about it.
Interpretation never really needs, and I think, never does ever actually enter the picture here at all.So I think that any argument against the correspondence theory of truth that hinges on the concept of interpretation is doomed to miss the mark.
I welcome and am looking forward to any disagreements or objections you might have to this thinking though. : )
This topic has become so much more important to me in the era of Donald Trump, in which "Truth" seems to become not a correspondence between a belief and a fact, but simply strongly held belief regardless of whether it corresponds to anything objective at all. So, if Donald Trump believes that "It is not raining outside", the truth of the assertion "it is not raining outside" hinges entirely on whether or not Donald Trump believes it to be true. Not only does this seem to be a wildly, extremely incorrect epistemological theory, I think it's also an extremely dangerous one when it comes to our ability to make decisions about pretty much anything. Our decisions, after all, generally hinge on our beliefs, and if our beliefs have no correspondence with an objective reality, despite the fact that there is an objective reality, we risk taking actions, that may have very negative consequences, for very poor reasons.
I clarified by saying that truth is attributed to an interpretation of meaning. Since the interpretation is subjective, then the thing which is attributed is subjective as well, as a property of that subjective thing. You haven't yet addressed my clarification.
It was addressed. The attribution of truth is not truth. We can mistakenly attribute truth just as we can mistakenly presuppose it.
Allow me to clarify the point. Assume any statement, like "a cow is in the barn". In order that this statement may be true or false, there must be an interpretation of its meaning.
That is false. Interpretation of a claim is not a truth condition for the claim. You're conflating conditions of shared meaning with truth conditions. They're very closely related but not the same thing.
It must be meaningful, but there is no need for an interpretation of it's meaning in order for it to be true/false. In order to be understood, meaning must be shared.
"A cow is in the barn" is true if a cow is in the barn. The cow's being in the barn is what makes the statement true. The absence of a cow in the barn is what makes the statement false. So, the statement could be made, misunderstood, and yet still be true/false. It could also be made, understood, and yet still be true/false.
Seems to me that the notion of interpretation has caused confusion for you Meta.
Thought/belief consists entirely in/of mental correlations drawn 'between' objects of physiological sensory perception and/or the agents own 'state of mind'. Meaning consists of precisely the same. The two(truth and meaning) are virtually inseparable/indistinguishable prior to and in many/most cases long after language acquisition/creation/use. It takes a metacognitive endeavour to isolate them.
Correlation presupposes the existence of it's own content.<---------That is the presupposition of truth at work in all thought/belief and statements thereof, including those that attribute meaning.
Davidson(I think) and others arrived at the notion that if and when a listener knows what it would take for a statement to be true, then s/he knows what the statement means.
The consequence of this is that it is possible for a listener to know more about what a speaker thinks/believes/states than the speaker. An interesting topic in it's own right, that has been borne out by fact...
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 04, 2017 at 00:47#832890 likes
I'm not sure I agree that there must be an interpretation of its meaning. Rather, I think it would be more precise to say there must be an understanding of its meaning. "Understanding" is something like a mental grasp or comprehension. I often like to refer to understanding as "getting it." When something like "a cow is in the barn" is uttered in relation to a set of particulars like, for instance, a particular cow and a particular barn, we must grasp the meaning of the utterance. In this case, the meaning of the sentence is that there is a particular animal, a cow, spatially located in a particular building, the barn. I think as long as we have something like "understanding" we don't need something like "interpretation" here to do any heavy lifting.
I don't see the point in the distinction between interpretation and understanding here. Each of these is subjective, so it doesn't affect the point I am making. We could switch out "interpretation" in favour of "understanding", if that's what you would like. Accordingly, there must be an understanding of the collection of words, and an understanding of the situation which the words refer to, in order that there is truth.
The issue is, that since each of these things which are being related to each other, are "understandings", and these are within the mind of the subject, how is it possible to get beyond subjectivity, to assume an objective truth?
The fact is certainly objective. Regardless of what we think about the situation, the cow (Betsy, let's name her), is either in or not in the barn owned by Old McDonald, who has a farm. The fact of the matter is the objective state of affairs. In this particular instance, let's say that Betsy is NOT in Old McDonald's barn; rather, she is actually grazing in Old McDonald's field at Time T.
You're missing the point Brian. There's an animal in the barn, which you are calling "Betsy". What justifies your claim that Betsy is a cow? So even if this animal is in the building which you call a barn, how is it true that there is a cow in the barn? Isn't it necessary that we have a definition of what it means to be a cow, and someone with an understanding of that definition takes a look at the animal, to get an understanding of the animal, making the judgement, that the animal is a cow? And the same procedure must be carried out for "barn", and the spatial relation, "in". If there is no one with this understanding how could "a cow is in the barn" be true? And even if it is just one person with authority who dictates, this animal is the animal I call "cow", and this building is the building I call "barn", and this is the spatial relation I call "in", therefore it is true by decree, that a cow is in the barn, what makes this an "objective fact"?
It was addressed. The attribution of truth is not truth. We can mistakenly attribute truth just as we can mistakenly presuppose it.
When I say, "the sky is blue", I attribute "blue" to "the sky". Does this mean to you that I am claiming that the attribution of "blue" is blue? I don't think it should, and it sure doesn't to me. So why, when I say that truth is attributed to an interpretation of a statement, do you reply with "the attribution of truth is not truth". Your reply is irrelevant, trivial, drivel. It doesn't at all address my claim that truth is a property of the interpretation, just like blue is a property of the sky.
If you happen to believe that truth can exist somewhere else, other than as a property of interpretation, or as Brian would prefer, as a property of understanding, just like blue exists in places other than as a property of the sky, then I hope you will show me where. Otherwise I will continue to believe that truth only exists as a property of understanding, and is therefore completely subjective, and disregard your irrelevant comments.
That is false. Interpretation of a claim is not a truth condition for the claim. You're conflating conditions of shared meaning with truth conditions. They're very closely related but not the same thing.
It must be meaningful, but there is no need for an interpretation of it's meaning in order for it to be true/false. In order to be understood, meaning must be shared.
"A cow is in the barn" is true if a cow is in the barn. The cow's being in the barn is what makes the statement true. The absence of a cow in the barn is what makes the statement false. So, the statement could be made, misunderstood, and yet still be true/false. It could also be made, understood, and yet still be true/false.
This is completely ridiculous. To say "the cow's being in the barn" is what makes "a cow is in the barn" true is simply begging the question. You are saying nothing more than "a cow is in the barn" is true because it is true that there is a cow in the barn. That's udder (pun) nonsense.
What makes that statement true, is that there is a situation in the world which a human being would apprehend as a building there, which is properly called a "barn" in English, and there is an animal which is properly called a "cow", in a specific spatial relationship with that building which is properly referred to as "in".
Seems to me that the notion of interpretation has caused confusion for you Meta.
Perhaps my use of "interpretation" confused you, but it hasn't confused me. Would you prefer, as Brian suggests, that we use the word "understanding". In any case, if you don't like my belief, that truth is the property of interpretation, or as Brian prefers, understanding, then I'd like to know where you believe truth exists.
So, the statement could be made, misunderstood, and yet still be true/false. It could also be made, understood, and yet still be true/false.
Let's start here then. Suppose a statement is made which is not understood by anyone. You seem to be claiming that the statement is still true or false. Now let's proceed by clarifying this problem, and making it a condition of "a statement", that it is intelligible, in principle it may be understood. This way we don't even have to consider that unintelligible gibberish is a statement. Tell me how this statement could actually be true or false without actually being understood. Of course a conditional such as "if it corresponds" will not suffice, because it is the act of understanding which fulfills that condition.
Ok Meta, this conversation doesn't look promising, as it seems that we cannot agree upon some fundamental issues. This post aims to sort some stuff out.
I began my exchange with you as one who argues in favor of truth as correspondence. Notably, you asserted that certain things needed to be explained by one arguing for correspondence. I explained to you how that was not the case based upon other aspects of my own position. You've since told me that I'm wrong... basically insisting that I use the conceptual framework that you use, despite the fact of my having rejected that very thing... for good reason, I might add, in lieu of the position I do hold.
That's my summary... a very very rough outline of what's taken place here.
So, it is clear that we hold different positions and that those positions employ remarkably different key terms. It is safe to say that that is the basis of our disagreement. So. where do we take it from here?
I suppose the best thing for me to do is ask if you acknowledge and agree with this very rough summary of our exchange?
The issue is, that since each of these things which are being related to each other, are "understandings", and these are within the mind of the subject, how is it possible to get beyond subjectivity, to assume an objective truth?
This is a good question. It's kind of an existential-ontological question. The human situation is that we are in the midst of a world of stuff and things etc. Much like Descartes once did, I find myself sitting here, writing (typing) in my dressing gown by the light of a candle at night, surrounded by various objects like my books, a coffee mug and my computer screen.
So there are two very distinct possibilities here.
1. The first is the kind of radical (just meaning to the root of things) subjectivism that I think you are proffering. Everything I perceive around me is in some way mind-dependent. I think this is in essence an idealist view. The objects surrounding me are products of my mind, and my beliefs about those objects relate various products of mine mind to each other and to me.
2. The second possibility is more of a radical objectivism. I am amidst a world of things that are external to and independent of my mind, that would still be there even if I were not there perceiving them. My beliefs about the world are beliefs about these objects that are external to my mind.and how they relate to each other and to me. In this case, the objects or contents of my beliefs are about objective things - things that are not mind-dependent.
Which possibility is definitively true? I have no idea. At first blush, both are very possible.
I don't know of a good rational argument that can prove that this existing external world of objectivity is not actually just mind-dependent subjectivity. But I also don't know of a good rational argument that proves the opposite view, that everything is definitively mind dependent and subjective.
So I come to an impasse, and yet I must make a decision about what I think the nature of things really is.
My intuition is on the side of objectivity. I wish I had a good argument for or against that intuition, but I do not. But when I have a belief about, say, the coffee cup sitting next to my computer screen, I very much believe that this coffee cup is external and objective qua physical thing to my mind.My belief is about an external physical object, and not just a belief about a subjective psychological state.
That, of course, is where Brentano and Husserl's idea of intentionality comes into play.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 04, 2017 at 11:13#833550 likes
I suppose the best thing for me to do is ask if you acknowledge and agree with this very rough summary of our exchange?
I agree, you argue that it is true that truth is correspondence because truth is correspondence. It is true that the cow is in the barn because the cow is in the barn. What's the point in making such an argument?
Notably, you asserted that certain things needed to be explained by one arguing for correspondence. I explained to you how that was not the case based upon other aspects of my own position.
This about sums it up. If you refuse to acknowledge the difficulties involved with correspondence, because you already believe that it is true that truth is correspondence, then what's the point in discussing truth?
1. The first is the kind of radical (just meaning to the root of things) subjectivism that I think you are proffering. Everything I perceive around me is in some way mind-dependent. I think this is in essence an idealist view. The objects surrounding me are products of my mind, and my beliefs about those objects relate various products of mine mind to each other and to me.
This is a good start, but let me qualify this. I am not arguing that "the objects surrounding me are products of my mind", I accept that there is something independent. What I am arguing is that the way I perceive, apprehend, and understand what's surrounding me is a product of my mind. This I called "interpretation", you prefer "understand".
2. The second possibility is more of a radical objectivism. I am amidst a world of things that are external to and independent of my mind, that would still be there even if I were not there perceiving them. My beliefs about the world are beliefs about these objects that are external to my mind.and how they relate to each other and to me. In this case, the objects or contents of my beliefs are about objective things - things that are not mind-dependent.
The nature of space and time makes it extremely difficult to accept such an objectivism. If I were not here perceiving my surroundings, what would set the here and now, in which these objects exists? I could say that the objects here, where I would have been, at the time which I would have been here, if I were here, would still exist without me being here, but then I am still referring to my own existence to provide a spatial-temporal perspective. Once I theoretically remove my own existence, I have no such spatial-temporal perspective.
To exclude this intuition as misguided, simply imagine the universe, all of existence, and all of time, without you here. What would differentiate a planck time length from a second, from a billion years? Without the capacity to separate out a period of time, during which something exists, how can something exist? In an extremely long period of time, an object like a star or planet, would come into, and pass out of existence, and also exist all over the place, just like a fundamental particle at a very short period of time. What gives the "here and now", which we assign to existence?
This is a good start, but let me qualify this. I am not arguing that "the objects surrounding me are products of my mind", I accept that there is something independent. What I am arguing is that the way I perceive, apprehend, and understand what's surrounding me is a product of my mind. This I called "interpretation", you prefer "understand".
I see - I would accept that as true I think...
I guess I'm just not seeing the next step of how that makes everything subjective and contradicts correspondence theory though.
I guess what I would say is, well, all of our perception of the external world is perspectival - from our own subjective perspective but OF objective things. But I still don't really see the leap to your conclusions from that.
I say, "the sky is blue", I attribute "blue" to "the sky". Does this mean to you that I am claiming that the attribution of "blue" is blue? I don't think it should, and it sure doesn't to me. So why, when I say that truth is attributed to an interpretation of a statement, do you reply with "the attribution of truth is not truth"?(emphasis mine)
Sometimes stating the obvious is the best starting point. I was simply looking for an agreement that the attribution of "truth" is not truth. Despite what's been said heretofore by Meta about my approach, Meta clearly agreed with this obviousness, as the above shows.
So...
The attribution of "truth" is not truth. That is relevant - thus I mention it here as before - because Meta claimed that it followed from the notion that interpretations are subjective, and that we attribute truth to an interpretation, that truth is subjective. That conclusion quite simply doesn't follow, unless the attribution of "truth" is truth.
It's not.
Meta wrote:
If you happen to believe that truth can exist somewhere else, other than as a property of interpretation, or as Brian would prefer, as a property of understanding, just like blue exists in places other than as a property of the sky, then I hope you will show me where. Otherwise I will continue to believe that truth only exists as a property of understanding, and is therefore completely subjective, and disregard your irrelevant comments.
Here, two notions warrant attention; truth as a property and the existence of truth somewhere. Both are quite problematic. I'll explain further...
The notion that truth is a property of true propositions/assertions/statements/interpretations is very commonly held. Holding that truth is a property of statements, assertions, propositions, and/or interpretations is to hold that truth requires language, for all of those are language constructs. That is, all of those are existentially contingent upon language. If truth is a property of those, and nothing more, then truth too requires language. So, this position has logical consequences that leave it inherently incapable of taking an account of pre and/or non-linguistic true thought/belief. It can admit of no such thing.
However...
Thought/belief formation happens prior to language acquisition. Some of those thought/belief are true. If truth were a property of propositions/assertions/statements/interpretations and nothing more, then truth would be existentially contingent upon language and this could not be the case, but it is. Thus, it is a mistake to hold that truth is existentially contingent upon language.
Contrary to talking about truth being a property, on my view, truth is correspondence and correspondence is much better understood as a kind of relationship that is necessarily presupposed within all thought/belief formation(and statements thereof). Relationships are not properties and they certainly cannot be sensibly said to have a spatiotemporal location. Relationships are best understood in terms of understanding their necessary elemental constituents.
Meta wrote:
That's completely ridiculous. To say "the cow's being in the barn" is what makes "a cow is in the barn" true is simply begging the question. You are saying nothing more than "a cow is in the barn" is true because it is true that there is a cow in the barn. That's udder (pun) nonsense.
Evidently Meta and I work from different notions of what counts as nonsense and being ridiculous. On my view, it becomes ridiculous when an interlocutor habitually misunderstands and/or misattributes meaning to another's words and then argues against their own imaginary opponent. Commonly called a non-sequitur, and/or a strawman.
I did not claim that "the cow's being in the barn" is what makes "a cow is in the barn" true. I did not say that "a cow is in the barn" is true because it is true that there is a cow in the barn. If one wants to make strong assertions about what another is saying, then it is always best to quote them verbatim as a starting point.
Meta used quotation marks where none belong. The quotation marks are used by me to distinguish between statements about the case at hand and the case at hand. Meta has attributed meaning where none belongs and the proof of that is the difference between what Meta's report of what I wrote, and what I wrote.
Some other considerations worth mentioning...
What makes that statement true, is that there is a situation in the world which a human being would apprehend as a building there, which is properly called a "barn" in English, and there is an animal which is properly called a "cow", in a specific spatial relationship with that building which is properly referred to as "in".
By my lights, that's a very rough description of what it takes for the statement to be meaningful.
Suppose a statement is made which is not understood by anyone. You seem to be claiming that the statement is still true or false. Now let's proceed by clarifying this problem, and making it a condition of "a statement", that it is intelligible, in principle it may be understood. This way we don't even have to consider that unintelligible gibberish is a statement. Tell me how this statement could actually be true or false without actually being understood. Of course a conditional such as "if it corresponds" will not suffice, because it is the act of understanding which fulfills that condition.
Poisoning the well, based upon falsehood.
One understands a false statement. False statements do not fulfill that condition. Therefore, the act of understanding does not fulfill that condition.
I guess I'm just not seeing the next step of how that makes everything subjective and contradicts correspondence theory though.
I am not saying that everything is subjective, nor am I claiming that correspondence theory is contradicted by what I say. What I am trying to show, is that correspondence theory leaves truth as subjective. The understanding of the statement, and the understanding of the state of reality which is assumed to correspond, are both in the mind, and therefore subjective, unless we assume God or some type of objective mind, to provide an objective truth.
I do not claim that every aspect of knowledge is subjective, because we have a form of objectivity which is established through justification. Justification is accomplished when people agree. When we agree on definitions, through the use of demonstrations and such, and establish conventions of meaning, this is objectivity. So for instance, we find objectivity in mathematical symbols and definitions of geometry, because there is complete agreement on what the terms mean. Their usefulness has been well demonstrated, justified.
I guess what I would say is, well, all of our perception of the external world is perspectival - from our own subjective perspective but OF objective things. But I still don't really see the leap to your conclusions from that.
What do you mean, when you say that your subjective perspective is of objective things? What could you mean by "objective things"? How the world is, is dependent on your perspective. The world is different from my perspective than it is from your perspective, than it is from tim wood's, and creativesoul's. Objectivity only comes about when we find things to agree upon, but the fact that we can agree on things, does not change the fact that the way that the world is, in all its splendour, is perspective dependent. This is the simple consequence of the nature of time, that what is real, in the world, is dependent on one's perspective. So "objective things" are only created by different subjective perspectives getting together to create a unity. This unity of subjective perspectives may be called an objective thing.
Thought/belief formation happens prior to language acquisition. Some of those thought/belief are true.
This is a claim you've made for quite some time, which you still haven't properly supported. I've explained to you in the past, that thought/belief prior to language acquisition is most likely probabilistic, and therefore neither true nor false.
However, if truth is correspondence, then it is impossible that thought/belief prior to language could be true if thought/belief with language may be true. That is because such thought/belief would correspond only to the creature's perspective of the world, and this perspective would not be the same as the perspective which describes the world in words. Therefore either the perspective which describes the world in words is true, or the perspective which doesn't is true. If these two very different types of thought/belief both correspond, then we can conclude that any thought/belief may be said to correspond, and therefore all thought/belief is true.
Contrary to talking about truth being a property, on my view, truth is correspondence and correspondence is much better understood as a kind of relationship that is necessarily presupposed within all thought/belief formation(and statements thereof).
So I assume from this passage, that this is your actual claim, that all thought/belief is true. Truth is "... necessarily presupposed within all thought/belief..." This is my point, correspondence as truth, renders all truth as subjective. Correspondence is what a subject produces with belief, therefore all beliefs correspond, and all beliefs are true. Truth is the essence of believing. One would not believe it if it wasn't true.
That is, if I may paraphrase, that truth is in a mind (and not out there).
I'll remind you that I have qualified this position. The concept of "truth" as we know it is strongly based in religion, and the idea of God. You may have seen the saying, "God is Truth". So traditionally, truth really is "out there", in the mind of God. It is only when we reject God that truth becomes purely subjective.
MU consistently confuses me at one point: he doesn't hold that ideas are real things; he maintains ideas (concepts) are real as concepts; this from above, and I agree. Where I get tossed is where he seems to argue that Forms are real things, and some ideas are real things, without the qualification.
Try thinking of it this way tim. Every material object has a form. The form is what the thing is, it's shape, size, colour, etc., right down to its molecular constitution, atomic makeup, and even the positioning of its subatomic particles and fields. The form is unique, and particular, to each individual thing, and that is why the thing is the thing which it is, and not something else, it has its own unique form.
The form of the thing is changing, with the passing of time, due to the activities of its particles, this what the ancient Greeks referred to as flux, Heraclitus said everything is in flux. So at each moment it has a different form from the last moment, and logically it is a different object at each moment. The material object exists as the material object which it is, only at the moment when it has that form. The next moment it is a different material object because it has a different form.
The argument which I described earlier, concludes that the form which the object will have, in its moment of existence, must precede in time, the actual material existence of that object. This is why we have "Forms", which are as real and particular as the object, and which are separate from the material object, and cannot be sensed. They are prior in time to the present, existing prior to the materialization of the object at its moment of existence, which is the present. In Christian theology, such as Aquinas, these Forms, are from the mind of God, in His creation of the world from day to day as time passes, or angels in their providence over the material world, working to carry out God's creation.
I reject the whole super-naturalization of ideas - of any ideas. In brief, there is no Form of a perfect circle. There is a worked out idea of a what a circle is, and it's simple enough for most folks to grasp it. And that's the secret. Truth isn't in your mind or my mind; it "dwells" in collective mind, worked out over a long time. Just as circle is in collective mind. No Form needed; only the collective understanding. To be sure, that understanding is subject to evolution and refinement - it had better be! - which means that while the truth (collective "wisdom") is true, it could also be in a much larger sense false.
As I explained to Brian above, I believe that the "collective mind" is the product of justification. Justification produces a form of objectivity which is the basis for our claims of "objective knowledge". However, justified is different from true, because even though the masses of humanity may believe something, as a collective mind, that thing believed might still not be true. This was the case when the people believed that the sun circled the earth. So despite the objectivity of the collective mind, the subjectivity of the genius is what brings us out of our ancient (mistaken) beliefs, toward the truth.
Contrary to talking about truth being a property, on my view, truth is correspondence and correspondence is much better understood as a kind of relationship that is necessarily presupposed within all thought/belief formation(and statements thereof). Relationships are not properties and they certainly cannot be sensibly said to have a spatiotemporal location. Relationships are best understood in terms of understanding their necessary elemental constituents.
This is the mistake you make, which you refuse to reconsider: all thought/belief presupposes a relationship of correspondence. Actually, most thought/belief is directed toward action, what should I do now, how should I proceed, how can I resolve this problem. As such, what is presupposed by thought/belief is an ability to act, to move forward in many different ways, and this does not involve any necessary relationship of correspondence. Thought/belief is principally directed toward deciding what to do.
Therefore you completely misrepresent the nature of thought/belief in general, in order to support your position on truth. It is only a particular type of thought/belief, most likely only practised by human beings under the influence of language, which is directed toward establishing a relationship of correspondence.
truth is attributed to the meaning of the statement, it is not attributed to the physical words themselves. The meaning must be interpreted before truth can be attributed, and this interpretation is subjective. So truth is attributed to the interpretation, and any interpretation is subjective. It is not the act of attribution which I am claiming is subjective, but the thing, the interpretation, which truth is being attributed to, which I am claiming is subjective.
But 'interpretation' is not always a subjective thing, in fact the case of language is precisely where interpretation is not subjective in most cases. If we understand an English sentence such as 'cats fly' as saying that cats fly, then our 'interpretation' of the sentence commits us to an understanding of the sentence as depending on whether a certain truth condition obtains; but this is an objective matter - the question whether cats fly is of course a question about cats, not about us.
Granted, it's an arbitrary fact that the sentence 'cats fly' says what it says in English (because other languages use different signs to say that cats fly), but this by itself doesn't diminish from the fact that it is an objective matter that the sentence is either true or false. So your argument simply begs the question (if it can be called an argument - since you just assert that all interpretation is subjective, but why?)
You've added just one more gross misrepresentation of another's position Meta. One must first understand another's position before one can effectively critique it. Luck doesn't count, and you ain't lucky anyway...
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 06, 2017 at 01:44#839170 likes
If we understand an English sentence such as 'cats fly' as saying that cats fly, then our 'interpretation' of the sentence commits us to an understanding of the sentence as depending on whether a certain truth condition obtains; but this is an objective matter - the question whether cats fly is of course a question about cats, not about us.
No one understands "cats fly" as saying that cats fly. This is just repeating the same thing using the same words,, and that is not understanding. Understanding "cats fly", is first, apprehending that there is a type of animal which is called "cat", and there is an activity referred to by "fly", which cats do. That is a first level of understanding. The second, deeper level, is to understand the conditions under which an animal qualifies to be called "cat", and to understand the conditions under which an activity is qualified to be called "flying". That's what understanding is. It's not knowing how to repeat words, parrots do that without understanding.
Since we all understand these various conditions (what qualifies as a cat, and what qualifies as flying) in different ways, our understandings, and therefore interpretations, vary. This variance is a matter of subjectivity. There are idiosyncrasies in relation to understanding, which are specific to the subject, and this produces what we call subjectivity.
So your argument simply begs the question (if it can be called an argument - since you just assert that all interpretation is subjective, but why?)
No Fafner, clearly you have this backwards, it is your argument which begs the question, not mine. Asserting that to understand the sentence "cats fly", is to apprehend it as saying that cats fly, is the most obvious and precise case of begging the question that one could come up with. It's very similar to creativesoul saying "a cow is in the barn" is true because a cow is in the barn. Creative might as well just say, "a cow is in the barn" is true because "a cow is in the barn" is true. And you might as well just say that "cats fly" means that cats fly. Care to beg the question some more?
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 06, 2017 at 01:53#839190 likes
Just to make sure you know, creativesoul, there's a member of tpf whose name is Meta. So, out of respect, you shouldn't make false accusations against that person, just like you shouldn't make false accusations against me.
I assumed(perhaps erroneously) that you were one in the same as MetaphysicianUndiscovered, if not my apologies. Not sure what false accusations I've levied towards you aside from possibly mixing the two of you up. But then if that were the case, it wouldn't make much sense for you to say that you'd told me something in the past about pre and/or non-linguistic thought/belief most likely being probabilistic. That's quite a strange way to put it, by the way... "most likely"...
8-)
I harbor no hard feelings nor ill-will. Just do not like spending time dealing with too many misattributions of meaning to my words. That's happened in this thread more often than not between us. I'll gladly discuss my position. I'll gladly bear any burden it carries. However, I'm not at all inclined to bear the burden of another's misrepresentation of my position.
By the way... begging the question is an informal 'fallacy'. There are times, particularly when one is setting out their own axioms, definitions, key terms, etc. when it takes a method that another could always say was begging the question.
Affirming the consequent is another matter altogether.
More importantly, especially and particularly in discussions such as this one, an astute reader will quickly pick up on someone using the term "truth" to mean more than one thing in the same debate. That is an equivocation fallacy, and it is at hand here in this thread, by more than one participant.
No one understands "cats fly" as saying that cats fly. This is just repeating the same thing using the same words,, and that is not understanding. Understanding "cats fly", is first, apprehending that there is a type of animal which is called "cat", and there is an activity referred to by "fly", which cats do. That is a first level of understanding. The second, deeper level, is to understand the conditions under which an animal qualifies to be called "cat", and to understand the conditions under which an activity is qualified to be called "flying". That's what understanding is. It's not knowing how to repeat words, parrots do that without understanding.
Since we all understand these various conditions (what qualifies as a cat, and what qualifies as flying) in different ways, our understandings, and therefore interpretations, vary. This variance is a matter of subjectivity. There are idiosyncrasies in relation to understanding, which are specific to the subject, and this produces what we call subjectivity.
Sure I agree, it's much more complicated than how I presented it, and the sentence itself is ambiguous in some respects and can have different meanings etc. etc.. What I tried to show is simply that interpreting the meaning of a sentence as saying that such and such is the case can commit you to objective standards of truth. It is up to us to decide what 'cats' and 'fly' mean etc., but once that has been decided then it's not a subjective matter (as you claimed) whether 'cats fly' is true or false. It's just an schematic example which illustrates how 'interpretation of meaning' is compatible with objective standards of truth.
No Fafner, clearly you have this backwards, it is your argument which begs the question, not mine. Asserting that to understand the sentence "cats fly", is to apprehend it as saying that cats fly, is the most obvious and precise case of begging the question that one could come up with. It's very similar to creativesoul saying "a cow is in the barn" is true because a cow is in the barn. Creative might as well just say, "a cow is in the barn" is true because "a cow is in the barn" is true. And you might as well just say that "cats fly" means that cats fly. Care to beg the question some more?
I think that you are confusing use and mention...
It is true that if I say 'cats fly' is true iff cats fly then I repeat the same sentence twice, but it does show that there are two ways of using a sentence (which is what the use/mention distinction is about): one is to talk about the sentence as a bunch of words ('cats fly'), and the other is to use the sentence to state how things are in the world (either truly or falsely), and that is objective.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 06, 2017 at 10:49#839900 likes
What I tried to show is simply that interpreting the meaning of a sentence as saying that such and such is the case can commit you to objective standards of truth.
All you showed is that the sentence is interpreted with words. You did a bad job, and didn't represent how a sentence is really interpreted, because you just repeated the same words. If you do it properly, you would use different words, like I did when I showed how that statement would be understood.
But since you and I would use different words from each other, this shows that there are no objective standards, except through agreement and conventions, as is evident in mathematics. And this is what I already claimed is the basis of "objectivity" in knowledge, agreement, which is itself based in justification.
It's just an schematic example which illustrates how 'interpretation of meaning' is compatible with objective standards of truth.
When we refer to "objective standards", we refer to these agreements and conventions. But this is not "truth", it is "justification". It is evident that it is not truth because sometimes these standards themselves are based in a misunderstanding of reality.
It is true that if I say 'cats fly' is true iff cats fly then I repeat the same sentence twice, but it does show that there are two ways of using a sentence (which is what the use/mention distinction is about): one is to talk about the sentence as a bunch of words ('cats fly'), and the other is to use the sentence to state how things are in the world (either truly or falsely), and that is objective.
I don't accept the use/mention distinction, I think it is unjustified. I see a bunch of words as a bunch of words. If you want to insist that a bunch of words is something other than a bunch of words, you have to demonstrate how this is the case. But how a bunch of words could be something other than a bunch of words is dependent on subjects, so this is something subjective. It is not objective, as you state. "How things are in the world" refers to nothing more than justified statements, what we, as human beings, believed by convention..
But since you and I would use different words from each other, this shows that there are no objective standards, except through agreement and conventions
I don't understand this argument. What you said doesn't show anything of this sort. We can use all sorts of words when explaining something, but what is important is not the particular words that we use, but whether the words are understood the right way; and by 'understood the right way' I mean that one is able to go on acting in a particular way in the appropriate circumstances. So from the mere fact that there are many ways of explaining a sentence such as 'cats fly' it doesn't follow that the sentence itself cannot be used to say what is objectively the case. In other words, the objectivity consists in the use of the sentence, and you've said nothing that would show that use of language in this sense cannot be objective.
Also, I don't understand what you mean by 'agreement' and 'convention' and how it is relevant. There's a sense in which agreements and conventions actually serve the function of precisely creating objective standards. For example, standard unites of measurement such as a 'meter' or 'hour' are defined arbitrary, and are useful because we all agree on what they mean. However it is a perfectly objective matter whether a given object is a meter long, or that a certain event has lasted for an hour, despite the conventionality of the units themselves.
I don't accept the use/mention distinction, I think it is unjustified. I see a bunch of words as a bunch of words. If you want to insist that a bunch of words is something other than a bunch of words, you have to demonstrate how this is the case. But how a bunch of words could be something other than a bunch of words is dependent on subjects, so this is something subjective. It is not objective, as you state. "How things are in the world" refers to nothing more than justified statements, what we, as human beings, believed by convention..
Well if everything is just a bunch of words, then what you say is also a bunch of words, so by your own lights nothing of what you said here or anywhere should be taken as true (or even meaningful), so I don't understand why you even bother typing something on your keyboard.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 07, 2017 at 01:04#841330 likes
We can use all sorts of words when explaining something, but what is important is not the particular words that we use, but whether the words are understood the right way; and by 'understood the right way' I mean that one is able to go on acting in a particular way in the appropriate circumstances.
Are you serious? It's not important which words are used to explain something? So I could explain "apple" as "a round crisp fruit", or as "a bright green liquid", and my choice of words is unimportant.
What does acting have to do with this? The person wants to know, and understand what an apple is, nothing else, just the truth. That person might never use this information toward any action, never being asked, or inclined to actually get an apple. Yet you belief it is unimportant whether the person believes that an apple is a round crisp fruit or a bright green liquid. For you, the person's actions are important, but knowing the truth is unimportant.
That's the thing about truth, it's desired for the sake of itself, not so that "one is able to go on acting in a particular way". This is philosophy, we act in a moral way, so that we can direct our attention toward knowing the truth. We do not simply accept whatever explanation someone gives us, just because it inclines us to behave in the way that they want us to. That's brainwash. You describe "understood the right way" as brainwash, that which inclines one to act in a particular way.
Well if everything is just a bunch of words, then what you say is also a bunch of words, so by your own lights nothing of what you said here or anywhere should be taken as true (or even meaningful), so I don't understand why you even bother typing something on your keyboard.
You are free to interpret the words as you please, that's the point, your interpretation is your interpretation, and it is subjective. if your interpretation leaves you uninterested, then so be it.
Having read through some of your earlier responses in this thread, I'm wondering if you'd be interested in revisiting some of it, particularly the parts about the burdens of one arguing for correspondence. As you may know already, I'm not a typical correspondence theorist, so I'm not so much looking to defend it or my own view. Rather, the aim is to acquire a bit more understanding regarding correspondence theory, it's strengths and weaknesses. Seems to me that that would be helpful to me and the reader...
Reply to Metaphysician Undercover What I meant when I said that words are not important is that there is no necessary definitions that one must understand in order to understand what it means for a sentence to be true or false. There are countless different ways to explain what a sentence means, but what counts as a correct understanding is the ability to use the sentence in the right sort of way.
This is to show that your argument completely miss its target. You said that truth is subjective because it is given by a subjective interpretation of words, or something of that sort. And further, you said that interpretations themselves consist of words. But this is false. To understand what it is for any sentence such as 'cats fly' to be true or false is not to grasp some verbal formula such that "'cats fly' is true iff ....". And this is the reason why I mentioned actions because understanding a sentence is a practical ability, such as being able to discriminate between the circumstances under which the sentence is true and false. And this is not a matter of simply interpreting a bunch of words as you said, because trivially, being able to see that cats can fly has nothing to do with words per se. Similarly, if you have a parrot that can recite some verbal 'interpretation' or 'explanation', it doesn't make it the case that he understands what he says. Words which are not connected to action are empty, so words in isolation are not the right place to look for understanding truth.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 07, 2017 at 10:41#841980 likes
What I meant when I said that words are not important is that there is no necessary definitions that one must understand in order to understand what it means for a sentence to be true or false.
We're in complete agreement then. There are no necessary definitions, and a person is free to define the words as one pleases, so the determination of true or false is completely subjective. That's the exact point I've been trying to make. Why do you think that this demonstrates that my argument misses the point? It seems to be right on the point.
There are countless different ways to explain what a sentence means, but what counts as a correct understanding is the ability to use the sentence in the right sort of way.
This I do not agree with. Using a sentence is speaking, writing, etc.. Explaining what a sentence means is interpretation. The two are distinct, and completely different. You seem to desire to reduce the interpretation of a sentence to a form of using the sentence, but this is impossible. Interpretation is done with the use of other sentences, or demonstrations to oneself, and this is not a case of using the sentence which is being interpreted, it is using something else which is within the demonstration.
And further, you said that interpretations themselves consist of words. But this is false.
As I said, there are different levels of interpretation, or understanding. We can do a shallow interpretation just using words. For example, an interpretation of mathematics may be done with words. But to go to a deeper level, and produce a thorough understanding, I agree that more than just words are required. I normally refer to images in my mind. Producing images in my mind, for understanding, is a form of action, I suppose, but I don't think it's what you mean by "action". And I don't see how it could be a case of using the sentence.
Reply to Metaphysician Undercover It seems to me that you have an idiosyncratic understanding of 'interpretation' that in my opinion is confused. Give me a concrete example of what it would be on your account to interpret a sentence in some way as opposed to other, and we can discuss it.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 08, 2017 at 01:10#843930 likes
Reply to Fafner
Let's take your example, "cats fly" . Person A thinks "cats" refers to domesticated house cats, while person B thinks "cats" refers to wild cats like tigers, lions, and cougars as well as domesticated cats. So we have a difference of interpretation here. Further, person A and person B both think that "fly" refers to what we do in airplanes, and knows that domesticated cats fly on airplanes, and claims "cats fly" is true. Person B says no, wild cats like tigers and lions do not go on airplanes, so "cats fly" is false. Person C says that "fly" refers to what animals and insects with wings do, moving themselves through the air, and neither domesticated nor wild cats have wings, so it is not true that any cats fly. So the truth or falsity of "cats fly" is dependent on interpretation, and is therefore subjective.
If the truth or falsity of "X" is dependent upon interpretation, and there are three different interpretations of "X", all of which conflict with one another, then it would follow that "X" can be both true and false at the same time.
"X" cannot be both, true and false, at the same time.
Thus, it is not the case that the truth or falsity of "X" is dependent upon interpretation.
Nice. I want to revisit a few things you wrote earlier, and take it from there.
Back on page 7 you wrote the following:
You don't really need counterfactuals or statements about the past to demonstrate that the correspondence theory doesn't work (there's a lot of philosophical controversy surrounding them). Just take the simpler case of negative facts (that is, negated propositions that are true). It is a true statement that Bernie Sanders is not the the president of the US, what is the 'corresponding' thing or the entity that makes it true? It is certainly not the existence of Bernie himself with the negation sign attached to him. Or what about the fact that Barack Obama is not (the current) president of the US? Nothing in the world corresponds to either of these statements yet they are true and have furthermore different truth conditions.
This looks like an interesting direction. I'd pose the following question:
What would it take in order for us to be able to sensibly say something like "X is in the world and it corresponds with 'X'?
Consider the proposition that "Caesar was murdered". What entity makes this proposition true? It seems that it is the event that Caesar was murdered (-"the murder of Caesar"). But what about the proposition "Caesar died in 44 BC"? Since his death was caused by his murder, his death must be the same event as his murder. But if this is so, it means that the same entity (the same event) corresponds to two different propositions (and they are different propositions because they mean different things: not all deaths are the result of a murder).
Do you have an argument for why two or more propositions cannot correspond to the same event. That claim just seems plain ridiculous so far.
What would it take in order for us to be able to sensibly say something like "X is in the world and it corresponds with 'X'?
Well, the first problem is that it is simply unclear what 'correspondence' is supposed to be. It is very hard if not impossible to give an non circular or non trivial analysis for the term, therefore it is not very clear what the theory even says.
Do you have an argument for why two or more propositions cannot correspond to the same event. That claim just seems plain ridiculous so far.
Because as I explained they are different propositions with different truth conditions, so if they correspond to the same thing, you cannot explain the difference between them (if we suppose that correspondence is meant to explain what makes every proposition uniquely true). I explained this in more detail in the original post:
this is a problem, because the correspondence theory is supposed to assign a unique truth-maker to each proposition, that explains why the proposition is true under some specific conditions and not some others. And that entails that if two propositions have the same truth conditions (they correspond to the very same entity, if true) then they are the same proposition. But "Caesar was murdered" and "Caesar died in 44 BC" are not the same proposition, so the correspondence theory is inadequate.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 08, 2017 at 11:39#844770 likes
If the truth or falsity of "X" is dependent upon interpretation, and there are three different interpretations of "X", all of which conflict with one another, then it would follow that "X" can be both true and false at the same time.
"X" cannot be both, true and false, at the same time.
Thus, it is not the case that the truth or falsity of "X" is dependent upon interpretation.
How do you justify your second premise, that X cannot be both true and false at the same time? Your first premise defines truth as being dependent on interpretation. Your second premise excludes falsity from truth. All you have done is provided two incompatible definitions of "truth", and denied the first in favour of the second.
I've demonstrated, therefore justified the soundness of the first premise. Now the onus is on you to demonstrate the soundness of the second premise, the one you prefer. How is it the case that X cannot be both true and false at the same time?
Let's start with your use of "X". What does X signify, and why can't this be true and false at the same time?
So the truth or falsity of "cats fly" is dependent on interpretation, and is therefore subjective.
You are talking here only about the assignment of meaning to a sentence, which I already agreed is an arbitrary matter (and therefore you can say 'subjective'), but it doesn't prove what you want to prove. What you are missing is the fact that given a particular interpretation of the sentence 'cats fly', it is objectively true or false; and the mere fact that the sentence can express something different doesn't show that its truth is subjective.
Any event, it seems to me, could correspond to multiple propositions. You haven't explained why correspondence is ruled out by multiplicity. For example the statement that a particular person died at a particular time is true if the person died at that specified time. If the person was murdered it does not follow that the statement that they died fails to correspond with their being murdered; it neither, in the strictest sense, corresponds nor fails to correspond with that further fact because it does not mention murder. However the statement that they died is certainly consistent with their being murdered.
The statement that the person was murdered is not a "more true" proposition, it is merely more comprehensive, unless you think of truth as being analogous to archery where we can be ever closer to the mark. No statement could ever include all the facts of this death, this murder, though, because that would entail stating all the conditions that obtained, leading to the death. This would mean stating all the events that occurred in the body of the victim, down to the levels of tissue, cell, molecule, and so on (exactly how they died) as well as all the events, reaching back into the indefinite past, and around the Earth, that obtained in order to make the murder possible.
Reply to John
Proposition A = Caesar died
Proposition B = Caesar was murdered
Proposition A is true = there's an entity x corresponding to A
Proposition B is true = there's an entity y corresponding to B
x=y (Caesar's death and Caesar's murder is the same event) therefore it follows that A is true whenever B is true and vice versa; but A can be true even if B is false (Caesar could've died without being murdered), therefore it can't be the case that the same entity corresponds to A and B. But Caesar's death and Caesar's murder was the same event (contradiction), therefore the correspondence theory must be false.
That does not follow at all. If Caesar was murdered then x=y obtains; if not, then not. Of course A could be true when B is false, but only in case Caesar was not murdered. You seem seriously confused about this.
I'd have to understand what your argument actually is in order to tell you what part I disagree with. It doesn't seem to be a cogent argument at all. Correspondence is about actuality, not possibility. Statements A and B could possibly either correspond with actual events or not, but they actually do or do not correspond. If both statements do not correspond with actual events, and hence with each other, then they cannot both be true; if they both do correspond with actual events, then they wil both be true. I fail to see any problem at all for correspondence in this.
Terrapin StationJuly 08, 2017 at 22:34#846280 likes
x=y (Caesar's death and Caesar's murder is the same event) therefore it follows that A is true whenever B is true and vice versa; but A can be true even if B is false (Caesar could've died without being murdered), therefore it can't be the case that the same entity corresponds to A and B.
Wait--aside from switching "event" out for "entity," you're arguing that that it can't be the case that x just in case it was possible that not-x.
Reply to John And do you agree that if A and B correspond to the same entity, then a situation in which A is true and B is false is impossible? (it simply follows from the definition of correspondence)
If statement A and B do correspond to actuality, then they do, and if they do not, then they do not. Of course it is logically possible that they might not have both corresponded to the same event, but in that case actuality would have been different. Possibility has nothing to do with actual correspondence, though, as far as I can tell.
Reply to John This is not what the correspondence theory says though. The thing that correspond to a true proposition is not simply 'actuality' but a particular entity which is relevant to the meaning of the proposition. So if you have a true proposition such as "Trump is the president" then not everything which exists in the world is relevant to the truth of the proposition, like the fact that London is the capital of England or whatever. And this is for a simple reason: the proposition that "Trump is the president" still could be true even if London wasn't the capital of England, so surely London and England are irrelevant to the truth of "Trump is the president", even when both propositions happen to be true. So you must select only the entities which 'track' all the possibilities in which the proposition is true (like Trump for example), otherwise you'll get into absurdities.
If statement A and B do correspond to actuality, then they do, and if they do not, then they do not. Of course it is logically possible that they might not have both corresponded to the same event, but in that case actuality would have been different. Possibility has nothing to do with actual correspondence, though, as far as I can tell.
Maybe one way to explain what Fafner is driving at is this: If in the actual world A corresponds to x and B corresponds to y, where
A is the claim that Caesar died,
B is the claim that Caesar was murdered,
x is the event of Caesar's dying,
y is the event of Caesar's being murdered,
then, on the assumption that x and y denote the same numerically identical physical event, what make it the case that A is true is the very same thing that makes it the case that B is true, namely: x
However, it seems that there is something specific about x that makes it the case that B is true, namely that Caesar's actual death was a case of murder. But if it is only in virtue of x being a case of murder that x makes B true, then it would seem that what B "corresponds to" is something intensional about y, and not merely extensional; it is a concept under which the 'event' falls. And therefore it can't be y quaphysical event that makes B true.
(On some accounts, it would rather be because the Fregean thought expressed by B is identical with the fact of Caesar's having been murdered that B is true. But then, this fact and the Fregean proposition expressed by B don't merely correspond to each other. They are identical.)
But any actual entity is only in principle separable from all other entities, not actually separable; so again you are talking about possibility, not actuality. The correspondence account of propositional truth is literally the only game in town it seems. It is the very same logic as Tarski's formulation
Possibility has nothing to do with actual correspondence, though, as far as I can tell.
Possibility has a lot to do with correspondence in general, because claims about possibility follow logically from the definition of correspondence (and therefore I have a full right to use premises about possibility when arguing against correspondence).
P is true = there's entity x corresponding to P
P is false = entity x doesn't exist (= the entity which would correspond to P if P were true)
It follows for the definition that if you have two propositions such that one could be true while the other is false, then it follows logically that they cannot correspond to the same entity when true. Because consider:
1) Assume A is true = entity x exists.
2) Assume B is false = entity y doesn't exist (B would be true if y existed).
3) If x can exist when y doesn't, then x is not identical with y (Leibniz law).
4) Therefore A and B are different propositions, since they don't correspond to the same entity when true.
x is the event of Caesar's dying,
y is the event of Caesar's being murdered,
They are the same event iff Caesar was murdered. " Caesar died" and "Caesar was murdered" are different statements about the event is all. They bear a different relation to one another: if the second statement is true then the first necessarily is. but the obverse does not follow. What's the point of trying to complicate it?
"Caesar was murdered with a knife"
"Caesar was murdered with a knife made in Japan"
"Caesar was murdered with a knife that severed his aorta"
"Caesar was murdered with a knife wielded by a man who was his friend"
They are the same event iff Caesar was murdered. " Caesar died" and "Caesar was murdered" are different statements about the event is all. They bear a different relation to one another: if the second statement is true then the first necessarily is. but the obverse does not follow. What's the point of trying to complicate it?
It follows from the definition of correspondence that if two propositions corresponds to the same entity when true, then they are the same proposition, but "Caesar died" and "Caesar was murdered" are not the same proposition.
Precisely. In my post I only considered the actual world, not any alternative possibilities. And I assumed that Caesar was indeed murdered, and that x and y therefore denoted the same event/entity (on your own account!) It still does not seem to be the case that the actual event makes the claim that Caesar was murdered true. It is rather something specific about this event that makes the claim true: namely that the event happens to be falling under a specific concept expressed by the predicate ("...was murdered") in the claim.
You seem to be saying that the event of Caesar dying cannot be the same event as Caesar being murdered, because Caesar could have died some other way. All that follows is that they could have been different events not they are in fact different events. If Caesar was actually murdered then it is not possible that he was not murdered, so his dying and his being murdered cannot possibly be different events, although they could possibly have been different events. You are confusing yourself over this distinction, it seems to me.
This seems nonsensical. I can state multiple propositions about an entity, any of which will or will not correspond to the entity, and none of which are identical to one another.
"This house was built in 1950"
"This house has sandstone foundations"
The timber that the wall frames were constructed of was milled in Narrabri".
It still does not seem to be the case that the actual event makes the Claim that Caesar was murdered true.
I can't see that, because assuming that Caesar was murdered then it is his being murdered that makes "Caesar was murdered" true, and that also makes Caesar's dying and Caesar's being murdered the very same event.
Neither "Caesar died" nor 'Caesar was murdered" are exhaustive descriptions of the event, though.
You seem to be saying that the event of Caesar dying cannot be the same event as Caesar being murdered
I didn't say this, I only said that the propositions "Caesar died" and "Caesar was murdered" are different, but the event to which they refer is the same (but of course they could've referred to different events).
But what I did claim is that if you have two different proposition, then by the definition of correspondence, they cannot have the same entity corresponding to them when true. So having two different propositions with the same corresponding entity (as in the case of "Caesar died" and "Caesar was murdered") contradicts the definition, and renders the theory incoherent.
I can't see that, because assuming that Caesar was murdered then it is his being murdered that makes "Caesar was murdered" true, and that also makes Caesar's dying and Caesar's being murdered the very same event.
If x is the event of Caesar's dying and y is the event of Caesar's being murdered, then what makes x being a case of murder isn't the same thing as what makes x the same event as y.
What makes it the case that x is the same event as y, presumably, is that both occurrences are instantiated in the same region of space and time. (I am just trying to play along with the token-identity theory that seems to underlie your correspondence theory of truth). But what makes it the case that x is a case of murder is something else entirely. It depends on the significance of the concept of murder in a way its alleged identity with y doesn't.
I didn't say this, I only said that the propositions "Caesar died" and "Caesar was murdered" are different, but the event to which they refer is the same (but of course they could've referred to different events).
If they refer to the same event then they also correspond or fail to correspond to it.
But what I did claim is that if you have two different proposition, then by the definition of correspondence, they cannot have the same entity corresponding to them when true. So having two different propositions with the same corresponding entity (as in the case of "Caesar died" and "Caesar was murdered") contradicts the definition, and renders the theory incoherent.
Are you attempting to draw a distinction between "events" and "entities"?
"Caesar died" and "Caesar was murdered" both refer to the same event, right? Either or both of those statements could correspond, or fail to correspond, to the event, right? But despite their ability to correspond or not, they are both only partial descriptions of the event, no? You seem to be thinking in some absolutist terms of correspondence, which would seem to have little or nothing to do with the ordinary logic of correspondence.
OK, it seems now you are saying that it is a matter of interpretation as to whether he was murdered or justifiably assassinated, or something like that? If that's so, it's a different question, and could be gotten around simply by saying that he was killed.
But despite their ability to correspond or not, they are both only partial descriptions of the event, no?
Sure, but I don't see how this helps (actually this fact is precisely what explains the reason that correspondence fails: descriptions don't overlap neatly with unique entities, because you can have the same entity satisfying many descriptions, and so you cannot define the truth of descriptions by simply referring to the entities which they describe).
You seem to be thinking in some absolutist terms of correspondence, which would seem to have little or nothing to do with the ordinary logic of correspondence.
Well either a proposition corresponds to an entity or it doesn't, what other options are there?
The point is that any statement's correspondence to an event cannot ever be complete, but that that fact in no way rules out the possibility of correspondence. Nothing you have said seems to show that incompleteness of correspondence renders the idea contradictory, inconsistent or incoherent.
OK, it seems now you are saying that it is a matter of interpretation as to whether he was murdered or justifiably assassinated, or something like that? If that's so, it's a different question, and could be gotten around simply by saying that he was killed.
Not at all. Part of the point is that events are particulars whereas being murdered (or being killed) are general concepts expressed by predicates. Claims and sentences have (minimally) subject/predicate form. What purports to "correspond" to claims such as to make them true must therefore have a similar structure.
Say, the claims that a particular apple is red, or that it is tasty, may both "correspond" to the same apple. This is just to say that it is the same apple that is being referred to in both cases, whereas the predicates (and the general properties ascribed) are different. But the apple itself doesn't make both claims true quite appart from its falling under the corresponding predicates. It's the same with events, since just like apples, those are particulars. "Caesar's dying" may seem to be referring to an event, and hence to a particular, but it's only really the individual Caesar (and also, possibly, a specific time, or the values of a time variable being quantified over) that are the particulars being referred to in the judgement expressed by "Caesar died". The "event" all by itself doesn't single out the general properties that it falls under such as to make claims about it true.
The point is that any statement's correspondence to an event cannot ever be complete, but that that fact in no way rules out the possibility of correspondence. Nothing you have said seems to show that incompleteness of correspondence renders the idea contradictory, inconsistent or incoherent.
But the apple itself doesn't make both claims true quite appart from it's falling under the corresponding predicates.
Characteristics of the apple; its sweetness and its redness separately make those corresponding statements true. It is that entity, that apple, which is both red and sweet. Just as with the two statements: that Caesar died and that he was murdered, it is the corresponding characteristics of that event that make them true.
Fair enough, but I honestly can't see your point. I think you are haunted by chimeras of your own making, and confusing yourself over what is really very straightforward and not problematic at all. It seems you are looking for something, some "absolute correspondence" that could somehow come to light on further analysis.
But it doesn't work like that: correspondence is, like truth, irreducible, and you will only produce aporias if you try to dig deeper. I would say there is a correspondence account of truth, and there is no other account; but there cannot really be a correspondence theory of truth, or at least there cannot be a theory of correspondence that explains how correspondence works, because any such theory would assume what it sets out to prove, insofar as it would always already be predicated upon correspondence working, as does all our discourse.
Characteristics of the apple; its sweetness and its redness separately make those corresponding statements true. It is that entity, that apple, which is both red and sweet. Just as with the two statements: that Caesar died and that he was murdered, it is the corresponding characteristics of that event that make them true.
Exactly. That's my main point. But then when you suggest that x and y are numerically the same 'event' you are conflating the physical movements where those events occurred (or some other such allegedly 'neutral' way to characterize what's going on), which are the particulars falling under the predicates "...exemplifying Caesar's being murdered", and "...exemplifying Ceasar's dying", on the one hand, and those particular events falling under the corresponding predicates, on the other hand. The former are particulars, which indeed are numerically identical, but the latter are structured propositions, which aren't.
Well either a proposition corresponds to an entity or it doesn't, what other options are there?
A proposition such as "Caesar died" might be true not because it has a truth-maker of its own, but because it is entailed by a proposition such as "Caesar was murdered" that does have a truth-maker.
In fact, it seems most natural to say that a fact, such as Caesar having been murdered in 44 BC, should buy you not just a single proposition, but a cofinal set of propositions, ordered by entailment. It is after all the occurrence of this one event that makes it true that Caesar was still dead last week and was still dead yesterday, and on and on. Whatever the problem with correspondence theories, it can't be this trivial addition of true propositions.
A proposition such as "Caesar died" might be true not because it has a truth-maker of its own, but because it is entailed by a proposition such as "Caesar was murdered" that does have a truth-maker.
But what if Caesar had not been murdered but died a natural death? In this case it seems that "Caesar died" would have its own truthmaker (distinct from the truthmaker of "Caesar was murdered"), and this will contradict the basic idea of correspondence that for any proposition, there's a unique entity that makes it true if it is the case (because "Caesar died" is the same propositions no matter how he died, but on your account it looks like two different propositions).
And also I think that the correspondence theorist would argue that if P is entailed by Q, then the truthmaker of Q is also the truthmaker of P (but this is just speculation).
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 09, 2017 at 14:16#847750 likes
What you are missing is the fact that given a particular interpretation of the sentence 'cats fly', it is objectively true or false; and the mere fact that the sentence can express something different doesn't show that its truth is subjective.
No, that's not the case, because to be objectively true or false, requires that there is an objective reality which the interpretation of the sentence either corresponds with, or does not. But there is no such thing. The so-called "objective reality" only exists as interpreted. There is no reality without a perspective, so any reality which would be judged as corresponding to an interpretation, is itself subjective because it is dependent on a perspective.
That's the point I was making which creativesoul didn't seem to get, that both sides of the equation are interpretation dependent, subjective. On the one hand we have the words, the sentence, "cats fly", which needs to be interpreted. On the other hand, we have the reality which "cats fly" is supposed to correspond with, and this needs to be interpreted as well. Therefore you cannot say that there is an objective truth or falsity to any interpretation of the sentence because reality, what is real, needs to be interpreted as well, in order that it does or does not correspond to the interpretation of the sentence.
So, for example person A interprets "cats" as referring to domesticated house cats. In order that this interpretation may be true or false, reality must be interpreted to determine whether "cats" properly refers to only these domesticated cats, or all types of feline animals, as person B claims. This is just a matter of interpretation as well, a subjective determination. However, in making this interpretation, we may refer to standards, conventions and agreements, "correct usage", to produce a form of "objectivity", which is supported by justification. The interpretation is justified by referring to these standards of correct usage. But this objectivity which is supported by justification, does not qualify to be called "objective truth", because the objectivity is produced by justification, not by truth..
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 09, 2017 at 14:41#847840 likes
But what I did claim is that if you have two different proposition, then by the definition of correspondence, they cannot have the same entity corresponding to them when true.
This is the point here. The supposed "entity", is the "object" which forms the basis of your "objectively true". But there is no reality to that supposed entity, it is just assumed, to support your claim. The entity, or object referred to, exists only by assumption. Each perspective gives a different proposition, and to claim that different propositions are or, are not, referring to the same entity or object, is an assumption made by the subject (therefore subjective). Therefore your "objective" truth is actually subjective.
No, that's not the case, because to be objectively true or false, requires that there is an objective reality which the interpretation of the sentence either corresponds with, or does not. But there is no such thing. The so-called "objective reality" only exists as interpreted. There is no reality without a perspective, so any reality which would be judged as corresponding to an interpretation, is itself subjective because it is dependent on a perspective.
Now you are changing the argument. Plainly the claim that sentences are subjectively interpreted doesn't logically entail that there's no objective reality. When you try to present an argument you should explicitly mention all the premises on which you are relying from the start.
On the one hand we have the words, the sentence, "cats fly", which needs to be interpreted. On the other hand, we have the reality which "cats fly" is supposed to correspond with, and this needs to be interpreted as well. Therefore you cannot say that there is an objective truth or falsity to any interpretation of the sentence because reality, what is real, needs to be interpreted as well, in order that it does or does not correspond to the interpretation of the sentence.
First I don't accept the correspondence theory of truth, that is, when a sentence is true I don't believe that there is something "corresponding" to the sentence, by virtue of which it is true. On my view, you can have objective truth without correspondence.
Secondly, I can accept your claim that in order to perceive reality you need some sort of interpretation, but again, just as in the case of sentences in language, it doesn't follow that the interpretation must be always subjective. It could be the case that some interpretations of reality are objective, and some are not -- nothing about the concept of 'interpretation' by itself entails that all interpretations are subjective.
Reply to Metaphysician Undercover And another thing: you argument attempts to establish a metaphysical conclusion ("there's no objective reality") from epistemic premises (all the stuff that you say about interpretation), but this is invalid.
Even if you were correct that all interpretation is subjective (and you are not), it wouldn't follow that objective reality doesn't exist. At best, it could only show that reality cannot be known by us, but its existence is a different matter. It's like arguing that since we don't know if there is life on Mars, then it follows that there is no life on Mars.
And that's it. My goal is a tool to handle beliefs. Beliefs do not have to be true at all to be beliefs. They merely need to be believed. The difficulty - my difficulty - is with people who represent their beliefs as being true, and acting on them as if they were.
The difficulty is finding a "truth" that is independent of the subject. The moment it is uttered it becomes dependent on the utterer.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 09, 2017 at 17:19#848110 likes
And another thing: you argument attempts to establish a metaphysical conclusion ("there's no objective reality") from epistemic premises (all the stuff that you say about interpretation), but this is invalid.
You seem to be mixing up the terms Fafner. That there is no objective reality is the premise, not the conclusion. This premise is supported by the fact that any assumption of an objective reality, is an assumption made by a subject. Therefore the assumption of an objective reality is itself subjective, and this negates the assumption that the reality being assumed is objective, because the assumption itself is subjective. The conclusion, which follows from this, is that there is no objective truth. Truth is subjective.
Even if you were correct that all interpretation is subjective (and you are not), it wouldn't follow that objective reality doesn't exist. At best, it could only show that reality cannot be known by us, but its existence is a different matter. It's like arguing that since we don't know if there is life on Mars, then it follows that there is no life on Mars.
That "objective reality doesn't exist", is not a conclusion which follows from "all interpretation is subjective". The inverse is what is the case. The assumption that there is an objective reality is an unsound premise, because it is being made from a subjective perspective, by a subject. What follows from this is that all interpretation, or understanding of reality, is inherently subjective, made by a subject.
Unless the assumption of an objective reality can be made to be sound, then any claim of an objective truth is equally unsound, because this relies on the assumption of an objective reality. You are claiming that there is objective truth, so the onus is on you to support this claim by validating your claim of an objective reality. This claim is just made by you, and you are a subject and therefore the claim is subjective. If you get millions or billions of people to agree with this assumption, then this might justify the assumption, but to justify it does not make it true. Unless your premise is true, your conclusion will not be true. So your conclusion of an objective truth, while it may be justified, it is not true. That there is "objective truth", since it is not a true conclusion, is not real truth, because as I've demonstrated, real truth is subjective.
That real truth is subjective is derived simply from the premise that all claims of objectivity are inherently subjective. You appear to be attempting to take a subjective claim, that there is objective reality, and make this into an objective truth. But this is impossible because it is inherently subjective.
This premise is supported by the fact that any assumption of an objective reality, is an assumption made by a subject. Therefore the assumption of an objective reality is itself subjective, and this negates the assumption that the reality being assumed is objective, because the assumption itself is subjective. The conclusion, which follows from this, is that there is no objective truth. Truth is subjective.
Well no, it doesn't follow. If by "subjective assumption" you mean something like an unjustified or ungrounded belief, then this doesn't show that the belief itself isn't objectively true. It may be the case that my belief that there is life on Mars is ungrounded or unjustified, and yet it still can be the case that it is itself objectively true, and there is life on Mars. Here you are surely trying to derive a metaphysical conclusion from epistemic premises.
Unless the assumption of an objective reality can be made to be sound, then any claim of an objective truth is equally unsound, because this relies on the assumption of an objective reality. You are claiming that there is objective truth, so the onus is on you to support this claim by validating your claim of an objective reality.
I'm not trying to prove to you anything about the objective reality (I have better things to do), but only to show you that your arguments don't work, which is different. I don't have to demonstrate that truth is objective (or that there is an objective reality) in order to show that your arguments that truth is subjective are unsound.
This claim is just made by you, and you are a subject and therefore the claim is subjective.
As my example about the existence of life on Mars shows, you cannot make this inference. The fact that the word 'subject' appears in 'subjective', doesn't license you to treat everything that a subject says as itself subjective. You are equivocating between words with different meaning, and this is a blatant logical fallacy (it's like inferring something about the banks of a river from claims about banks as financial institutions, just on the grounds they are spelled the same).
Terrapin StationJuly 09, 2017 at 18:19#848260 likes
"A can be true even if B is false (Caesar could've died without being murdered)"
That's correct. That's a possibility.
"therefore it can't be the case that the same entity corresponds to A and B."
That is incorrect however. That it's possible that A can be true even if B is false doesn't mean that A IS true while B IS false (or vice versa). And when A and B are both true, then A and B refer to the same event, even though they're different propositions.
In short, the same event can be relevant to different meaning-statements. That the event could have been different with respect to some potential meaning statements doesn't imply that the same event can't be "picked out" by different meaning statements.
In other words, that not-x is possible (not-x could be not-A&B) doesn't imply not-x (not-A&B isn't implied just because it's possible that not A&B. A&B is possible, too, and A&B can pick out the same event, where A is not the same as B semantically.)
Reply to Terrapin Station You are right, but my argument assumed a definition of correspondence on which for every proposition there's a unique entity corresponding when it is true.
And if the correspondence theorist will accept your suggestion that the same entity can make two different propositions true, then I think his theory will loose much of its explanatory power. And the reasons are related to Quine's famous renate/cordate example that shows that if you define meaning extentionally, then it becomes too coarse-grained for many concepts as we normally understand them.
What would it take in order for us to be able to sensibly say something like "X is in the world and it corresponds with 'X'?
You replied:
Well, the first problem is that it is simply unclear what 'correspondence' is supposed to be. It is very hard if not impossible to give an non circular or non trivial analysis for the term, therefore it is not very clear what the theory even says.
Given what I know(or think I know) about correspondence theory, and most academic views regarding truth itself, I would say that that issue is commonly discussed(that truth is unanalyzable). I personally find most of the problems are self-inflicted. Understanding truth(as correspondence) is a consequence of understanding thought/belief.
There have been times that I've visited the SEP and scoured over all I could find. The tangents are daunting. Memory tells me that there were a few issues with correspondence theory that were deep-seated. I mean, if I remember correctly, the differences between my own position and one who typically argues for correspondence theory are fundamental ones involving/revolving around this very issue about what correspondence is and how it works.
On my view truth is a relationship. Correspondence theorists typically posit truth as a quality/property of true statements/assertions/propositions.
If the truth or falsity of "X" is dependent upon interpretation, and there are three different interpretations of "X", all of which conflict with one another, then it would follow that "X" can be both true and false at the same time.
"X" cannot be both, true and false, at the same time.
Thus, it is not the case that the truth or falsity of "X" is dependent upon interpretation.
QED.
You replied:
I like this a lot! It seems to me, though, that this and much of this part of the discussion has ignored the notion of incomplete specification, not only about the content of propositions, but as well their interpretations.
Thanks.
There was only one statement:"Cat's fly". There were three interpretations. All were different. None were "Cat's fly".
This is about meaning v. usage; let's stick with meaning. Let proposition P be appropriately well-formed and meaningful, for present purpose, but not a complete specification of whatever it happens to be about. The expressions P and ~P are, then, are contingent subject to the complete specification of P, whenever that should happen, or be agreed on.
Unrecognized/unacknowledged contingency can cripple discussion. The cure is the recognition that significant questions require some care on approach, and very likely a preliminary definitions section. With these there is a chance that disputants at least may start on the same page.
I would agree with the general thrust of this, but warn against placing too stringent a criterion on the necessary precision.
In consideration of Caeser, above, while it's true not all deaths are from murders, it is certainly true that all murders result in a death; so this, then, is merely a usage problem.
Bottom line, I suppose, is that nearly all Ps that are taken as meaning(ful) are in fact contingent. Converting most of them into a univocal form either by complete specification or definition ranges from impractical to impossible. Fortunately in many cases that effort is also unnecessary.
Again, I think I agree with the general thrust here.
I suppose that the need for establishing what counts as a statement/proposition being precise enough comes into view, particularly when it comes to correctly interpreting another's language use and/or determining what it would take for the statement to be true/false(perhaps even falsifiable/verifiable).
It is as a direct result of Bernie Sanders' not being president, that the statement "Bernie Sanders is not the president of the United States" is true. It is true by virtue of not only what happened(he made an unsuccessful run), but also what did not happen(he did not make a successful run).
A multitude of different true statements can be made about those events.
[quote=creativesoul]If the truth or falsity of "X" is dependent upon interpretation, and there are three different interpretations of "X", all of which conflict with one another, then it would follow that "X" can be both true and false at the same time.[/quote]
A better account of the law of non-contradiction is "contradictory statements cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time". The in the same sense part is avoided if the truth is qualified according to a particular interpretation. So if under one interpretation "X" is true and if under another interpretation "X" is false then they're not true in the same sense, and so there is no contradiction.
It's only if someone were to say that "X" is both true and false under the same interpretation that the law of non-contradiction would be undermined.
I realize that the following quote was directed at Terrapin, however it is of interest to me as well...
You wrote:
And if the correspondence theorist will accept your suggestion that the same entity can make two different propositions true, then I think his theory will loose much of its explanatory power. And the reasons are related to Quine's famous renate/cordate example that shows that if you define meaning extentionally, then it becomes too coarse-grained for many concepts as we normally understand them.
I'm curious about the framework being put to use here...
I hold that different true statements can most certainly be made about the same facts/events/happenings/states of affairs/etc. I wouldn't however call those "entities". The "truth-maker" notion falls flat on my view as well, for it isolates one necessary element for truth and calls it a truth-maker. That would be akin to calling apples "apple pie-makers". It takes more.
A better account of the law of non-contradiction is "contradictory statements cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time". The in the same sense part is avoided if the truth qualified according to a particular interpretation. So if under one interpretation "X" is true and if under another interpretation "X" is false, they're not true in the same sense, and so there is no contradiction.
We were not discussing the truth conditions of an interpretation of "X".
I was objecting to the notion that the truth of "X" was dependent upon the interpretation thereof. Thus, my response fit the bill.
There are no such things as different interpretations in the same sense.
We were not discussing the truth conditions of an interpretation of "X".
You were discussing the claim that the truth of "X" depends upon an interpretation, and claiming that this entails that "X" can be both true and false at the same time, which isn't allowed by the law of non-contradiction. I'm pointing out that you're misstating the law of non-contradiction.
If "X" is true under one interpretation and false under another then it isn't both true and false in the same sense at the same time.
On my view truth is a relationship. Correspondence theorists typically posit truth as a quality/property of true statements/assertions/propositions.
Here's one argument against the view the truth is a relation from the top of my head (I think it originated from either Russell or Wittgenstein).
Consider the two propositions "A loves B" and "B loves A". Clearly they mean different things and therefore they are true under different condition (regrettably, the one can be true without the other). Now, if there's anything they are related with, it must be A, the relation Love and B. However, this by itself cannot explain the difference between the two propositions, since both are related to precisely the same list of entities, so under the relational theory they must be the same proposition (but they aren't), so the theory cannot explain why they differ in their truth conditions.
There are no such things as different interpretations in the same sense.
That's why you're wrong with what you said here:
If the truth or falsity of "X" is dependent upon interpretation, and there are three different interpretations of "X", all of which conflict with one another, then it would follow that "X" can be both true and false at the same time.
"X" cannot be both, true and false, at the same time.
Thus, it is not the case that the truth or falsity of "X" is dependent upon interpretation.
QED.
The different interpretations are not the same sense, and so no contradiction arises if the truth or falsity of "X" is dependent upon interpretation, even if there are "conflicting" interpretations.
I hold that different true statements can most certainly be made about the same facts/events/happenings/states of affairs/etc. I wouldn't however call those "entities". The "truth-maker" notion falls flat on my view as well, for it isolates one necessary element for truth and calls it a truth-maker. That would be akin to calling apples "apple pie-makers". It takes more.
The idea behind truth-makers is to give a metaphysical explanation of truth in terms of entities which are language-independent (or mind independent more generally). But if you appeal to facts or states of affairs instead, then they are too much like propositions (because how do you individuate facts/states of affairs if not by the propositions describing them? - it seems that understanding what facts/states of affairs are already presupposes the understanding of propositions), and that threatens to make the correspondence theory vacuous (because why do we need to talk about correspondence at all, if all we need is to analyze propositions in order to understand what makes them true? -- the later was, incidentally, Wittgenstein's view, both early and late, at least on my understanding of his philosophy).
Contradiction most certainly arises in saying that the truth of a statement is dependent upon interpretation. If that were true, then the statement would be both true and false at the same time, depending upon the interpretation... but a single statement cannot be.
You and Meta are both conflating statements and interpretations thereof.
The primary premiss(the truth of a statement is dependent upon it's interpretation) is false. That is what the counterargument showed. I granted the premiss. Showed how it led to a single statement("X") being both true and false at the same time(by virtue of the different senses/interpretations of "X"). Then applied the law of non-contradiction.
If that were true, then the statement would be both true and false at the same time, depending upon the interpretation
But not both true and false in the same sense, given that whether or not its true depends upon the interpretation. So it doesn't conflict with the law of non-contradiction, which states that a statement cannot be both true and false in the same sense at the same time.
Here's on argument against the view the truth is a relation from the top of my head (I think it originated from either Russell or Wittgenstein).
Both have influenced my thinking...
Consider the two propositions "A loves B" and "B loves A". Clearly they mean different things and therefore they are true under different condition (regrettably, the one can be true without the other). Now, if there's anything they are related to it must be A, the relation Love and B. However, this by itself cannot explain the difference between the two propositions, since they are related to precisely the same entities, so under the relational theory they must be the same proposition (but they aren't), so the theory cannot explain why they differ in their truth conditions.
The problem, as I see it, begins showing itself by talking about what the two propositions "are related to", and is later compounded by the notion that being related to the same entities requires being the same proposition. So, granting that the above is an accurate depiction of an argument against relational theory, and knowing my own issues with traditional correspondence theory, I can only surmise that I'm neither a typical correspondence theorist, nor a typical relational theorist.
May be as a direct result of rejecting what is common to both, the linguistic framework.
Reply to creativesoul I didn't say it was. I said that the truth or falsity of "X" depending on interpretation doesn't lead to a contradiction, contrary to your earlier claim, given that it doesn't entail that "X" is both true and false in the same sense at the same time.
If the truth of a statement were dependent upon interpretation, then all statements would have precisely the same truth conditions as all of the interpretations thereof.
Reply to creativesoul No, because if it's true under one interpretation and false under another then it isn't both true and false in the same sense. It's true in one sense and false in another.
If the truth of a statement were dependent upon interpretation, then all statements would have precisely the same truth conditions as all of the interpretations thereof.
There's no contradiction because you can make different statements by using the same words (consider indexicals such as "I" "here" etc.).
All misinterpretation is interpretation.
The truth of "X" is not dependent upon misinterpretation.
The truth of "X" is not dependent upon interpretation.
No, because if it's true under one interpretation and false under another then it isn't both true and false in the same sense. It's true in one sense and false in another.
The statement is not true in one sense and false in another, because the truth of the statement is not dependent upon all interpretations thereof.
The idea behind truth-makers is to give a metaphysical explanation of truth in terms of entities which are language-independent (or mind independent more generally). But if you appeal to facts or states of affairs instead, then they are too much like propositions (because how do you individuate facts/states of affairs if not by the propositions describing them? - it seems that understanding what facts/states of affairs are already presupposes the understanding of propositions), and that threatens to make the correspondence theory vacuous (because why do we need to talk about correspondence at all, if all we need is to analyze propositions in order to understand what makes them true? -- the later was, incidentally, Wittgenstein's view, both early and late, at least on my understanding of his philosophy).
This could be quite interesting.
Seems that if we are to call something a "truth-maker", it would need to include everything it takes to make truth. If truth is correspondence, and correspondence is a relationship, then everything required to make that relationship would be a truth-maker. As mentioned before, the "truth-maker" notion takes but one necessary element...
The notion of mind-independence is fraught. Truth is prior to mind, but not thought/belief. Mind consists of thought/belief. Not all thought/belief is mind. Truth(as correspondence) is presupposed within all thought/belief.
Language-independence is a road less traveled it seems. On my view, we can use language to become aware of and acquire knowledge of that which is not existentially contingent upon it. Correspondence with/to fact/reality is one such thing.
The former are particulars, which indeed are numerically identical, but the latter are structured propositions, which aren't.
You seem to be alluding to something along the lines of the ideas of thinkers such as Hegel, Brandom and McDowell, that the events: dying, being murdered or whatever, are always already in "conceptual shape". If so, then I agree would and say that that is precisely what enables what we say to correspond or fail to correspond to events.
I would want to add, though, that although the events are in "conceptual shape" (which is what I take you to mean by "structured propositions") they are such in a pre-linguistic sense, so it is a case of linguistic propositions corresponding or failing to correspond to pre-linguistically "structured" "propositions".
Reply to creativesoul Again, it all depends on what one means by 'correspondence'. If it is not meant as some sort of metaphysical theory that attempts to explain the truth of statements/sentences/propositions, but merely as some sort of truism, then it could be a pretty innocuous thing to say (but then it is not clear what exactly you are gaining philosophically by talking about 'correspondence' in the first place).
Again, it all depends on what one means by 'correspondence'. If it is not meant as some sort of metaphysical theory that attempts to explain the truth of statements/sentences/propositions, but merely as some sort of truism, then it could be a pretty innocuous thing to say (but then it is not clear what exactly you are gaining philosophically by talking about 'correspondence' in the first place).
On my view, correspondence isn't a metaphysical theory attempting to explain the correspondence of statements/sentences/propositions.
Correspondence is truth. It is what makes statements true. The lack thereof is what makes them false.
Understanding correspondence and the role it plays in all thought/belief and statements thereof requires having a good grasp upon rudimentary thought/belief formation itself, for that is precisely when, 'where', and how it emerges onto the world stage.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 10, 2017 at 01:21#849390 likes
Well no, it doesn't follow. If by "subjective assumption" you mean something like an unjustified or ungrounded belief, then this doesn't show that the belief itself isn't objectively true. It may be the case that my belief that there is life on Mars is ungrounded or unjustified, and yet it still can be the case that it is itself objectively true, and there is life on Mars. Here you are surely trying to derive a metaphysical conclusion from epistemic premises.
Until you define what "objectively true" is, what you say here is meaningless. And, your definition of "objectively true" will be subjective. So all this, what you say about a belief which could be objectively true, is nonsense. "Objectively true" is a nonsense notion. Until you establish some sort of justification for this notion, which you have not yet done, you are speaking nonsense. And, as I keep telling you, even if you justify this notion of objectively true, it doesn't make it true. So your claim that there could be a belief which is unjustified yet objectively true, is indeed false, because it is not true. That is unless you do not equate not true with false.
As my example about the existence of life on Mars shows, you cannot make this inference.
Your example about Mars shows nothing, because you assume an unjustified notion of "objectively true", and build your example on this. Until you produce a valid concept of "objectively true", you are just begging the question, assuming the reality of "objectively true", as the basis for your claim.
The fact that the word 'subject' appears in 'subjective', doesn't license you to treat everything that a subject says as itself subjective.
What do you base this in? What the subject says, is necessarily of the subject, and therefore subjective. That the subject can say something objective is an assumption which needs to be justified.
As I explained to you already, when the subject says something which is justified, this justification provides a form of objectivity, it is agreed upon by other subjects, because of the justification. This form of objectivity is sometimes known as inter-subjectivity, and is really a form of subjectivity. To use "objective" in this way, meaning inter-subjective, is completely different from the way that you use "objective", in "objectively true", because one refers to justified while the other refers to true. So your assumption that a subject can say something, or believe something, which is "objectively true", is still completely unjustified.
You are equivocating between words with different meaning, and this is a blatant logical fallacy (it's like inferring something about the banks of a river from claims about banks as financial institutions, just on the grounds they are spelled the same).
Clearly it is you Fafner, who is attempting to equivocate, not I. I've maintained my definition of subjective, as "of the subject", and adhered to this. You want to take an epistemological form of "objective", which we know of as "inter-subjective", and make it into an ontological form of "objective" known as "of the object". But clearly the epistemological form of objective, which means inter-subjective, is a completely different meaning of "objective", from the ontological form which means of the object. Now you want to equivocate between the two, such that when you refer to the epistemological form, the inter-subjective form of "objective", with "objective truth", you want this to mean "truth of the object".
As I've been explaining to you, truth of the object (objective truth using "objective" in that way), is an impossibility, because truth is always a property of the subject. It is a relationship between interpretations, and interpretations are property of the subject.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 10, 2017 at 01:30#849400 likes
We are both, objects in the world and subjects taking an account of it and ourselves.
The subjective/objective dichotomy adds nothing but unnecessary confusion... It is inherently incapable of taking proper account of that which consists in/of both, and is thus neither.
The statement "The cat is on the mat" is true if and only if the cat is on the mat.
The statement(within quotes) corresponds to fact/reality(is true) when(if and only if) it is the case that there is a cat on the mat(fact/reality). Easy enough. Even those not versed in philosophy readily agree with this account, and for very good reason.
Here, we need to look at more than just the statement, for being true requires more than that. Being true is akin to corresponding to fact/reality. It requires being meaningful. Thus, the statement's truth is contingent upon language as well as it's being meaningful. The statement and it's meaning are both existentially contingent upon language. Thus, the truth of the statement is as well.
The same holds good for any and all assertions, sentences, propositions, statements, and/or claims. This is part of how we become aware of truth and it's role in thought/belief. There are other considerations as well...
Truth is presupposed within thought/belief.
This is relatively uncontentious. Belief that "X", is belief that "X" is true. Likewise, assuming a sincere speaker, we could add "I believe" or "I think" to any and all statements from that speaker and not change the meaning one iota. Thus, assuming sincerity...
"I believe" and "is true" are both redundant uses of language. They become so, not strictly as a result of how we use language, but rather as a result of what thought/belief consists in/of and the role that correspondence to fact/reality plays within it.
That is not to say that either belief or truth is redundant. Rather, it is only to say that the presupposition of truth within all thought/belief formation is exactly why/how "is true" and "I believe" become redundant.
Here, we need to look at more than just the statement, for being true requires more than that. Being true is akin to corresponding to fact/reality. It requires being meaningful. Thus, the statement's truth is contingent upon language as well as it's being meaningful. The statement and it's meaning are both existentially contingent upon language. Thus, the truth of the statement is as well.
Being true requires being meaningful. Whether or not the statement is meaningful is contingent on interpretation. Therefore being true is contingent on interpretation.
"I believe" and "is true" are both redundant uses of language.
For me, I believe is precisely that, i.e. thoughts that I have with varying degrees of intensity. If someone thinks something is true, s/he may use the verb "know" or something to that effect.
I believe your description of your beliefs is an excellent example why beliefs are everywhere and truths exist to satisfy some desire. So truth exists as a goal for someone, but that a pretty narrow definition, akin to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Being true requires being meaningful. Whether or not the statement is meaningful is contingent on interpretation. Therefore being true is contingent on interpretation.
Let's put this into argumentative form...
p1. Being true requires being meaningful
p2. Being meaningful is contingent upon interpretation
C. Being true is contingent upon interpretation
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 10, 2017 at 02:01#849500 likes
Reply to creativesoul
No, because there are unstated premises involved which are known by principles other than stated in your argument.. If C is dependent on B, and B is dependent on A, then C is dependent on A. Do you agree with this?
Not to someone who distinguishes "I believe" from "I know' and certainly a lot more meaningful that equating "I believe" to "I know".
Basically your whole post it's a personal belief presented as a truth but you don't recognize it as such. However, be that as it may, it is no surprise that yet again a subjective view of truth is presented as Truth.
That is irrelevant. A=A is utterly meaningless in and of itself. Let A be "a belief".
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 10, 2017 at 02:08#849540 likes
Reply to creativesoul
The argument is as stated above. Do you agree or not? Truth is dependent on meaning, and meaning is dependent on interpretation, therefore truth is dependent on interpretation.
So, take your argument as you have stated it, and add the premise stated above. If C is dependent on B and B is dependent on A, then C is dependent on A. Then you will have the desired conclusion. Do you agree with the premise?
That is irrelevant. A=A is utterly meaningless in and of itself. Let A be "a belief
A belief is just a thought about some idea which we feel some personal intensity. Some people feel great intensity about their thoughts and call them truths. It's pretty common by the way. Usually experience tends to modulate such intensity of thoughts.
A belief is just a thought about some idea which we feel some personal intensity. Some people feel great intensity about their thoughts and call them truths. It's pretty common by the way. Usually experience tends to modulate such intensity of thoughts.
It seems to me that you're talking about conviction.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 10, 2017 at 02:15#849600 likes
Do not "requires", and "contingent upon", both imply "is dependent on" to you?
Try this: If C requires B, and B is contingent on A, then C requires A. Therefore truth "requires" interpretation.
I would readily agree with the bit about people calling their own strongly held belief "truth". Such folk are working from a very poor understanding of what sorts of things can be true and what makes them so.
Belief is not truth, for if it were there would be no such thing as false belief, but there is so it's not.
Talking about what sorts of things can be true and what makes them so does make for an interesting discussion between those who claim to know what's true.
So you believe that you know what's going on in my head better than I do?
No, I believe what I believe. There is no greater or less than. I also believe that people who believe in truths constantly change what they believe is true. Everyone and every thing seems to be constantly changing.
And yet if you believe what you write, then you must believe that I am unknowingly presenting my own personal belief as a truth.
Oh, everything you said is your belief. Thanks for sharing them, but I don't share any of them. If you want to call them truths, it's fine with me, but I don't believe any of them are true, just your beliefs. But then again, it's just my belief.
So Rich, do you have anything substantive to add to the conversation about truth, or are you here to put forth ad hominem aimed in my direction instead?
So Rich, do you have anything substantive to add to the conversation about truth, or are you here to put forth ad hominem aimed in my direction instead"?
Nothing other than agreeing with you (now that I have corrected my mistakes) that you are simply expressing your beliefs and that is all you were trying to do. It was my mistake (actually valuable learning experience) when I thought that you were trying to express statements that you thought were true.
I just said I did in response to the same question from you above. I believe everything I say, I just don't elevate it to truth. I just leave myself lots if wiggle room for change, since everything is constantly changing. I think it takes to much effort to attempt to create immobility in a ever changing universe. It's all about intensity, and through experience, I've learned to moderate intensity of my beliefs. In this way, it is easier to change and allow for change.
So then do you or do you not think that your beliefs are true? Do you or do you not think that your statements are statements and/or expressions of your own thought/belief?
So then do you or do you not think that your beliefs are true? Do you or do you not think that your statements are statements and/or expressions of your own thought/belief?
As I said, I understand they are my beliefs that are subject to constant change as my experience and knowledge grows. I find that I learn much more when I am flexible and allow my beliefs to change. What I say it's an expression of my thoughts. But since the utterance comes after the memory of the thought then even my utterances may no longer be an expression of my thoughts. It's really quite impossible for me to create immobility in a highly fluid world of thought. I accept this as the nature of things.
As I said, I understand they are my beliefs that are subject to constant change as my experience and knowledge grows.
Is the above true?
What I say it's an expression of my thoughts. But since the utterance comes after the memory of the thought then even my utterances may no longer be an expression of my thoughts.
Is the above true?
It's really quite impossible for me to create immobility in a highly fluid world of thought. I accept this as the nature of things.
It is an expression of what I believe. This I believe is a reasonable description that brings to me a better understanding of what I am and my relationship to others. To call it true or not true brings me no closer to understanding the nature of my thoughts. I have a thought and I try to express it, maybe using words, oil paint, music, song, poetry, or whatever. But wait! It is not adequate or possibly my thoughts have changed as I express them. So I go back and revise. The link between thought and expression is a fluid one. Trying to create immobility within mobility for me is an unnecessary and futile effort.
Yet, some may wish to pin it down. Create an immobility that they call true. For how long? At the time of the utterance. Have they really managed to stop thought and express it so precisely so that it can be called true for the necessary time allowed. For someone else, they can believe what they wish. I don't find it possible so I allow for simple beliefs and forget about the other hopeless exercise in immobility.
Maybe saying something is true for an instance is practical but practicality should not be confused with what introspection reveals.
Reply to Metaphysician Undercover Statement P is objectively true def= if the truth condition expressed by P obtains (and otherwise it is objectively false).
Correspondence is truth. It is what makes statements true. The lack thereof is what makes them false.
But the question is whether this talk about 'correspondence' adds anything substantial over and above what we can already say just using the notion of truth. If what you mean by 'correspondence' is not meant as an explanation of anything (as you claim) then can we simply drop this words and say everything that you want by using only 'truth'?
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 10, 2017 at 10:54#850550 likes
If some truth requires meaning and some meaning requires interpretation then....
The truth of a proposition or statement requires that the statement has meaning, and this requires that the statement or proposition has been interpreted because without interpretation there is no difference between meaningful and meaningless. Therefore the truth of a proposition or statement requires interpretation.
If this is only "some truth", which requires interpretation, and not all truth, then we're back to what I asked for earlier, an example and demonstration of a type of truth which does not require interpretation. That other type of truth, which does not require interpretation, cannot be a belief, because beliefs require meaning and interpretation in the same way as statements, in order to be true.
if all known instances of truth require meaning, and therefore interpretation because there is no difference between meaningful and meaningless without interpretation, then we can produce the inductive conclusion that all truth requires interpretation. Since this is the case, as no examples to the contrary have been found, therefore, we can say that interpretation is an essential aspect of truth. Truth does not exist without interpretation. Interpretation is the essence of truth.
Now we can proceed to the rest of my claim. All interpretation is subjective. Therefore truth is necessarily subjective.
Statement P is objectively true def= if the truth condition expressed by P obtains (and otherwise it is objectively false).
Are you happy now?
You have expressed a conditional, "if". This means that the condition must be fulfilled, for "objectively true". That condition (the truth condition expressed by P obtains), can only be fulfilled by a subject. A subject must determine, decide, judge, whether the condition obtains. Therefore you define "objectively true" as something subjective. Your use of the term "objectively" only covers up, or disguises the fact that the thing referred to is inherently subjective.
A subject must determine, decide, judge, whether the condition obtains.
Judging that a truth condition obtains is a different thing though from the actual obtainment of that truth condition (you can have the one without the other). You cannot just assume (without begging the question) that they are the same thing.
I agree that in order to know that a truth condition obtains you have to form a judgment, but it doesn't prove that the obtaining of the truth condition itself requires a judgement. You are once again confusing epistemic and metaphysical questions.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 11, 2017 at 02:06#852990 likes
Judging that a truth condition obtains is a different thing though from the actual obtainment of that truth condition (you can have the one without the other).
Statement P is objectively true def= if the truth condition expressed by P obtains (and otherwise it is objectively false).
Without an interpretation of "P", there is no such thing as "the truth condition expressed by P". What is expressed by P is the product of an interpretation of P. Therefore the truth of P is relative to the interpretation. Interpretation is necessarily subjective. So I'll repeat myself, you define "objectively true" as something subjective. Your use of "objectively" only disguises the fact that what you are referring to is something subjective.
without interpretation there is no difference between meaningful and meaningless
I'm a little puzzled by this.
If I speak to you in a language you do not know, it would make sense for you to say, "That's meaningless to me." "Meaningless to me" would mean "I can't understand this." But even if it were meaningless to you, it could be and is meaningful to me and to anyone else who knows that language.
But you seem to have something very different in mind. If I say something to you in a language you know, must you interpret what I said for it to be meaningful to you? I'll grant that conversation usually involves some ambiguity, some ellipsis, and so on, and sometimes those have to be cleared up to understand what someone is saying. I suppose you could call that interpretation.
But that's by and large a matter of clarifying which of several meanings the speaker meant. You could say that until one meaning is settled on, what was said does not have a meaning. But it doesn't look much at all like the case of speech in a language you don't know. If there's an interpreter on hand, she could transform the meaningless into the meaningful for you, but that's not much at all like the problem of selecting one among several meanings.
What the two cases do share is an asymmetry: there is no reason to think I do not understand what I say to you, whether I speak in a language you don't know, or speak ambiguously in a language you do know, or speak with the exemplary clarity of a post such as this one. I have no need of an interpreter to understand what I say; nor do I need to disambiguate it or fill in whatever was elliptical in it. So I cannot see that my own speech was ever meaningless to me in any sense, even without either of the two sorts of interpretation.
But the question is whether this talk about 'correspondence' adds anything substantial over and above what we can already say just using the notion of truth. If what you mean by 'correspondence' is not meant as an explanation of anything (as you claim) then can we simply drop this words and say everything that you want by using only 'truth'?
Using "correspondence" works best. I am a correspondence theorist, just not one who mistakenly holds that thought/belief formation is existentially contingent upon language or it's acquisition.
I'd like for you to read the following quote. This is the third time it's been posted in this thread.
creative wrote:
Is there any sense of "truth" that is not existentially contingent upon language? Perhaps this be better put a bit differently:Does any sense of "truth" define something that we discover? Does any sense of "truth" set out something that is not existentially contingent upon language? Is any sense of "truth" necessarily presupposed by all others? Is any sense of "truth" necessarily presupposed by statements, regardless of whether or not they are actually true?
I'm using the term "correspondence" in as precise a fashion as language allows. On my view, correspondence is presupposed within all rudimentary thought/belief by the very act of drawing a mental correlation between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or oneself;emotional/linguistic state of mind. That 'act' is rudimentary thought/belief formation(cognition). That is as simple as it can sensibly be said to be. All correlation presupposes the very existence of it's own content. All thought/belief consists of correlations being drawn between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or the agent's mental/nervous state.
During initial language acquisition, there is no speech forthcoming from the agent/student. Meaning is being built via memory and recollection(also consisting in/of the same such mental correlations). During initial language acquisition, the student can doubt neither the accuracy of it's own physiological sensory perception, nor the accuracy of the very method being learned in order to talk about the world and/or ourselves(where applicable).
The truth of a proposition or statement requires that the statement has meaning...
Agreed.
...and this requires that the statement or proposition has been interpreted because without interpretation there is no difference between meaningful and meaningless.
Clarity is needed.
Without interpretation a statement would be meaningless to the interpretor.<--------That I would agree to. Interpretation attributes meaning. Not all get it right. However, it does not follow from the fact of an interpretor not successfully grasping the meaning of a statement that the statement in and of itself is meaningless. It cannot be. Statements require meaning. That is precisely what's being interpreted.
Thus... we can find old artifacts and know that they're meaningful, even if we do not grasp it. Even if we do not draw the same correlations as the language users did in past, we can know beyond all reasonable doubt that they drew mental correlations between their own marks/utterances/gestures/etc. and the world and/or themselves.
You wrote:
Therefore the truth of a proposition or statement requires interpretation.
You're failing to properly quantify both truth and meaning. There is more than one kind of each. They all have common denominators.
Some truth requires interpretation. Correspondence with/to fact/reality does not.
Thought/belief formation creates meaning, attributes meaning, interprets meaning, all by virtue of drawing correlations between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or the agent's own mental state. Doing so necessarily presupposes the content of correlation.
Thus, the attribution of meaning presupposes it's own correspondence to fact/reality, by virtue of presupposing the existence of it's own content.
Meta wrote:
If all known instances of truth require meaning, and therefore interpretation because there is no difference between meaningful and meaningless without interpretation, then we can produce the inductive conclusion that all truth requires interpretation. Since this is the case, as no examples to the contrary have been found...
Examples to the contrary are everywhere Meta. You're working from an emaciated notion of thought/belief, and the argument suffers from the fallacy commonly called "affirming the consequent".
All interpretation of statements involves language. Not all thought/belief does. Some is prior, and must be. For there is no ability to learn that this is called "a hand", without necessarily presupposing the existence of this(whatever this may be). One learns that this is called "a hand" by virtue of drawing correlations between this and the utterance.
Interpretation is existentially contingent upon thought/belief, not the other way around. Thought/belief consists entirely in/of mental correlations.
Correlation presupposes the existence of it's own content. That is precisely the emergence of both, truth and meaning, as we know it.
When one is attributing meaning to objects of physiological sensory perception and/or themselves, s/he is doing so by virtue of drawing mental correlations. This does not require being interpreted. A child can burn their fingers for the very first time and involuntarily form thought/belief about those events. Those thought/belief will re-take command their attention the next time the same source of fire arrests their attention. It will command their attention immediately after it happens as well. The child will not voluntarily touch the fire immediately after getting burned. The child will not do so because it has learned that touching fire hurts. It cannot state it's beliefs, and yet it has them none-the-less. It attributed/recognized causality within the event that it found itself in. We know that that's true, regardless of whether or not the child can talk. The attribution/recognition of causality need no language, and yet doing so requires mental correlations be drawn.
That is rudimentary thought/belief.
Attributing/recognizing causality comes very very early on. We've watched it happen long before metacognition has begun in earnest. That's a crucial consideration. Such attribution continues on throughout language use and well into metacognition. The attribution and/or recognition of causality happens through all thinking life, and it does so with varying complexity that is roughly proportional to the complexity of the language being used to do so(when applicable). When there is no language, it is performed by virtue of becoming aware of what's going on around, and much later, within us. We do so, as do all thinking creatures, by virtue of drawing correlations between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or itself.
By the way, it is crucial to draw and maintain the meaningful distinction between attributing meaning and interpretation. The latter consists entirely of the former, but not the other way around. What else are we interpreting when we interpret statements if not the meaning thereof?
Suspending one's judgment is a wise move when appropriate. Taking that to the extreme is unwise at best. Forming and holding true thought/belief does not require immobility. One can be certain that some belief or other is true without closing off the possibility of it's being wrong. That certainty is warranted when and if it is well-grounded.
Denying that your thought/belief presupposes truth doesn't fare well when held alongside everyday relevant facts to see whether or not it makes sense.
Granting that you believe what you write, then all we would need to do is copy some of those statements, put quotes around them and we would have statements of belief.
What's to be believed about those statements if not that they're true?
Without an interpretation of "P", there is no such thing as "the truth condition expressed by P". What is expressed by P is the product of an interpretation of P. Therefore the truth of P is relative to the interpretation. Interpretation is necessarily subjective. So I'll repeat myself, you define "objectively true" as something subjective. Your use of "objectively" only disguises the fact that what you are referring to is something subjective.
You are confusing between meaning and truth. It is the assignment of meaning to P that is relative to an interpretation, but once a particular meaning has been fixed for P, than what P says given that meaning can be objectively true.
Is there any sense of "truth" that is not existentially contingent upon language? Perhaps this be better put a bit differently:Does any sense of "truth" define something that we discover?
Yes, and you don't need correspondence for that. The sentence "there have been dinosaurs" states a truth which existed way before humans or language did.
We can also make sense of the notion of 'discovery' without correspondence. Objective truths exist, and we can discover them. To discover if something is true, we don't need to take the sentence (or psychological state, or whatever) expressing that truth and check if it 'corresponds' to reality; rather what we do is go and look whether things in the world are the same as what the sentence says about them. So the question of correspondence simply doesn't arise in any normal process of inquiry.
On my view, correspondence is presupposed within all rudimentary thought/belief by the very act of drawing a mental correlation between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or oneself;emotional/linguistic state of mind.
Here's one problem with your story. Suppose that you have a mental state that you want to correlate with your sensory perception, let's say seeing an apple. But when you are having that perception, do you know that what you are having is a sensory perception of an apple? If you do, then it means that you already can think about apples or mentally represent them even before you have correlated anything with your mental states, in which case your story seems redundant. But if you don't know that you have a sensory perception of seeing an apple, then it is not clear how correlating you perception with some other mental state could enable you to acquire the ability to mentally represent apples, or to know what apples are. So correspondence is either redundant or useless.
Denying that your thought/belief presupposes truth doesn't fare well when held alongside everyday relevant facts to see whether or not it makes sense.
One must actually try to find truth in the mobility of thought and expression and actually observe the hopelessness in the effort. One cannot freeze the thought. It changes too fast to catch it. This is not a simple phenomenon. It it's intrinsic in understanding the nature of oneself and the universe. However, we do call phenomenon true when it it's close enough for practical purposes. But this is far away from truth.
The sentence "there have been dinosaurs" states a truth which existed way before humans or language did.
So, truth is equivalent to historic states of affairs/happenings/events/they way things were? That would be to conflate truth and fact/reality.
We can also make sense of the notion of 'discovery' without correspondence. Objective truths exist, and we can discover them.
You missed the point, but it may be inconsequential.
Do you have a candidate/example of one of these objective truths?
To discover if something is true, we don't need to take the sentence (or psychological state, or whatever) expressing that truth and check if it 'corresponds' to reality; rather what we do is go and look whether things in the world are the same as what the sentence says about them.
That is precisely what we're doing my friend. Verification/falsification methods presuppose truth as correspondence. If things in the world are the same as what the sentence says about them, then they are true(verified) and false(falsified) if not.
That is precisely what we're doing my friend. Verification/falsification methods presuppose truth as correspondence. If things in the world are the same as what the sentence says about them, then they are true(verified) and false(falsified) if not.
You are not following. You've said that we need correspondence in order to explain x y and z. I've explained x y and z to you without using the notion of correspondence. This shows that correspondence is a redundant concept as I claimed.
Here's one problem with your story. Suppose that you have a mental state that you want to correlate with your sensory perception, let's say seeing an apple. But when you are having that perception, do you know that what you are having is a sensory perception of an apple? If you do, then it means that you already can think about apples or mentally represent them even before you have correlated anything with your mental states, in which case your story seems redundant.
To quite the contrary, if you know that you're looking at an apple, then you have already drawn a multitude of very complex correlations between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or oneself. It is a mistake to speak about 'wanting' to correlate...
But if you don't know that you have a sensory perception of seeing an apple, then it is not clear how correlating you perception with some other mental state could enable you to acquire the ability to mentally represent apples, or to know what apples are. So correspondence is either redundant or useless.
All creatures without complex language are incapable of metacognition. Knowing that one is having a sensory perception is a metacognitive endeavor. Your target is missing the mark.
I've just gave an example of a language-independent truth as you've asked. I didn't say anything about this being equivalent to truth.
So a language independent truth is not equivalent to truth?
The existence of dinosaurs is one such example.
The existence of dinosaurs is an example of a state of affairs/events/happenings/the way things are/were/etc.
You're conflating truth and reality(states of affairs/events/happenings/etc).
I wrote:
Verification/falsification methods presuppose truth as correspondence. If things in the world are the same as what the sentence says about them, then they are true(verified) and false(falsified) if not.
You replied:
You are not following. You've said that we need correspondence in order to explain x y and z. I've explained x y and z to you without using the notion of correspondence. This shows that correspondence is a redundant concept as I claimed.
It is you who are not following. Not using the term "correspondence" is not equivalent to not using correspondence. I suggest that you do not make my claims for me. This topic is quite complex. My understanding is nuanced.
You're in the very process of presupposing correspondence between your expressions here and what was written earlier. Assuming sincerity in speech, you believe that everything you've said here is true, including but not limited to, the bits about what was earlier said.
So a language independent truth is not equivalent to truth?
I didn't mean it as some sort of general definition of truth as your post implied. I didn't say what you've ascribed to me in that post ("truth is equivalent to historic states of affairs").
To quite the contrary, if you know that you're looking at an apple, then you have already drawn a multitude of very complex correlations between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or oneself. It is a mistake to speak about 'wanting' to correlate...
Then I don't understand what you mean by 'correlation'. By virtue of what the mental states are supposed to become correlated in your story, if not by the subject? By accident? Or by God?
All creatures without complex language are incapable of metacognition. Knowing that one is having a sensory perception is a metacognitive endeavor. Your target is missing the mark.
But you are the one who brought up this idea of correlation between mental states, so it is you who are presupposing metacognition.
So a language independent truth is not equivalent to truth?
You replied:
I didn't mean it as some sort of general definition of truth as your post implied. I didn't say what you've ascribed to me in that post ("truth is equivalent to historic states of affairs").
I did not say that you said it. Notably, I'm showing you that you're conflating truth with either fact/reality or true statements. Neither is acceptable. Both fail to be able to account for what kinds of things can be true and what makes them so.
To say that "the existence of dinosaurs is one example"(of a truth) is to either call the past existence of dinosaurs "a truth" or a true statement "a truth".
I wrote: You're conflating truth and reality(states of affairs/events/happenings/etc).
You replied:
It is just a form of speaking "there exists a truth...", which is another way of saying that such and such is true.
Such and such is a true statement in this case. You're conflating true statements with what makes them so.
I wrote:
Not using the term "correspondence" is not equivalent to not using correspondence.
You replied:
It is. If I didn't use the word then I didn't use the word, period.
It is not. Let me clarify, because this is crucial to understand.
One can use a pan without ever using the term "pan". One can form thought/belief without ever being able to use the terms "thought/belief".
You're stating your own thought/belief. You have a thought/belief system(a worldview). Thought/belief formation has long since begun.
All thought/belief presupposes it's own truth(correspondence to fact/reality). That is precisely how thought/belief works, regardless of whether or not you write the word "correspondence".
I wrote:
To quite the contrary, if you know that you're looking at an apple, then you have already drawn a multitude of very complex correlations between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or oneself. It is a mistake to speak about 'wanting' to correlate...
You replied:
Then I don't understand what you mean by 'correlation'.
See the fire example... We'll take it from there.
I wrote:
All creatures without complex language are incapable of metacognition. Knowing that one is having a sensory perception is a metacognitive endeavor. Your target is missing the mark.
You replied:
But you are the one who brought up this idea of correlation between mental states, so it is you who are presupposing metacognition
You're mistaken... slightly. First, I've not mentioned correlation between mental states. I mean, that is not an accurate enough depiction of what I've claimed to be useful. A bun, alone, does not a hotdog make. Second, drawing mental correlations between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or one's own state of mind does not require metacognition.
I did not say that you said it. Notably, I'm showing you that you're conflating truth with either fact/reality or true statements. Neither is acceptable. Both fail to be able to account for what kinds of things can be true and what makes them so.
To say that "the existence of dinosaurs is one example"(of a truth) is to either call the past existence of dinosaurs "a truth" or a true statement "a truth".
First, as I already said, I'm not trying to define truth via facts or reality. I'm not saying that truth is identical or equivalent to such and such things, so there's no conflation of anything in what I say.
Secondly, the concept of truth obviously does apply to reality in a very straightforward way: what a statement does after all is say is how things are in reality if it is true -- and if it is true, then it means that things in reality are exactly the way the statement says they are. So if the statement is about dinosaurs, there is a truth concerning dinosaurs, and there's nothing wrong in saying this.
And it is not the same as conflating the dinosaurs themselves with truth or whatever.
Such and such is a true statement in this case. You're conflating true statements with what makes them so.
No I'm not. You are reading your own metaphysical views into my words. There's no distinctions on my view between statements and what makes them true. A statement just is saying that so and so is the case (or not), and you cannot 'baypass' the statement and ask what makes it true, because the statement itself already tells you (by virtue of being a meaningful expression) how things stand if it is true or if it is false.
It is not. Let me clarify, because this is crucial to understand.
One can use a pan without ever using the term "pan". One can form thought/belief without ever being able to use the terms "thought/belief".
This metaphor is irrelevant, because you never bothered to tell what exactly you yourself mean by the term 'correspondence', so it is simply not clear what it means to "use correspondence" without using the word itself.
All thought/belief presupposes it's own truth(correspondence to fact/reality). That is precisely how thought/belief works, regardless of whether or not you write the word "correspondence".
Here you are just asserting things without any argument.
Second, drawing mental correlations between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or one's own state of mind does not require metacognition.
So what does it require?
And anyway, I don't understand what this story about mental correlations has to do with truth in the first place.
If I speak to you in a language you do not know, it would make sense for you to say, "That's meaningless to me." "Meaningless to me" would mean "I can't understand this." But even if it were meaningless to you, it could be and is meaningful to me and to anyone else who knows that language.
But that's by and large a matter of clarifying which of several meanings the speaker meant. You could say that until one meaning is settled on, what was said does not have a meaning. But it doesn't look much at all like the case of speech in a language you don't know. If there's an interpreter on hand, she could transform the meaningless into the meaningful for you, but that's not much at all like the problem of selecting one among several meanings.
Right, this is why "what the thing means", is subjective. To say "what was said does not have a meaning" requires interpretation. It is interpreted as meaningless despite the fact that it may be meaningful to someone else.
What the two cases do share is an asymmetry: there is no reason to think I do not understand what I say to you, whether I speak in a language you don't know, or speak ambiguously in a language you do know, or speak with the exemplary clarity of a post such as this one. I have no need of an interpreter to understand what I say; nor do I need to disambiguate it or fill in whatever was elliptical in it. So I cannot see that my own speech was ever meaningless to me in any sense, even without either of the two sorts of interpretation.
I don't see your point here, perhaps you could make it more clearly. In the case of "what I say", "What I say" is itself an interpretation of something else.
Without interpretation a statement would be meaningless to the interpretor.<--------That I would agree to. Interpretation attributes meaning. Not all get it right. However, it does not follow from the fact of an interpretor not successfully grasping the meaning of a statement that the statement in and of itself is meaningless. It cannot be. Statements require meaning. That is precisely what's being interpreted.
The point, as I told Srap, is that to say "this is meaningless" is a statement of interpretation. So in essence, it does not matter if the interpreter says this has meaning, or this does not have meaning, both are interpretations. But if what you imply is true, that having been interpreted implies that it has some sort of meaning, whether it is interpreted as meaningful or not, then to say that something is meaningless is somewhat contradictory.
Examples to the contrary are everywhere Meta. You're working from an emaciated notion of thought/belief, and the argument suffers from the fallacy commonly called "affirming the consequent".
If the examples are abundant, then please provide some.
For there is no ability to learn that this is called "a hand", without necessarily presupposing the existence of this(whatever this may be). One learns that this is called "a hand" by virtue of drawing correlations between this and the utterance.
No, people don't learn the different things which are called by the word "hand" by drawing correlations. The hand is shown, and the name said. There is simple repetition of the word in order to learn how to say the word properly. The fact that the person already understands that many different objects (different hands) are called by the same word, and the person immediately proceeds onward to refer to many different objects with that newly learned word, indicates that there is no assumption of correspondence between the word and the object involved with this learning. A similar correlation, or association, drawn between the word and one hand, must be drawn between the word and numerous hands, so this type of correlation is not correspondence, or truth.
Interpretation is existentially contingent upon thought/belief, not the other way around. Thought/belief consists entirely in/of mental correlations.
Whether or not thought/belief is contingent on interpretation, or the other way around is irrelevant. What we are discussing is "truth", and truth is contingent on both of these. You unreasonably insist that there cannot be thought/belief without truth, so you think that if thought/belief is prior to interpretation, then so is truth.
As I said, the claim which needs to be supported, is the claim that there can be truth without interpretation, not the claim that there can be thought/belief without interpretation.
When one is attributing meaning to objects of physiological sensory perception and/or themselves, s/he is doing so by virtue of drawing mental correlations. This does not require being interpreted.
Interpretation and "drawing mental correlations" are closely related. Which one is the more general, such that one is a form of the other, is not relevant here. What we are talking about is truth in the sense of correspondence, so this is what we need to focus on. It is a particular type of correlation which qualifies as corresponding, or truth, not all cases of correlation.
Take a look at what you are doing. You are moving from the more specific, "truth" and "correspondence", to the more general, "correlation", and insinuating that if there is correlation, then there must be correspondence, and truth. But not all cases of correlation are cases of correspondence, or truth. There are clearly cases of drawing mental correlations, which do not presuppose correspondence, or truth. It is only a certain type of correlation which is aimed at truth.
So your example of the child is not an adequate example, it deals with correlations, not correspondence. Primitive thought may be like this, dealing with associations, and correlations, and these give rise to emotions and feelings, like the fear of the fire, which the child has. But we need not assume any correspondence, or truth here. When an animal hears a noise, and scurries off in fear, there is surely some type of association, or correlation going on, but unlikely that there is any presupposition of correspondence.
Suppose there was a presupposition of correspondence, in this example, what would the noise be supposed to correspond with? The noise corresponds with "danger"? We can't expect a little scurrying animal to hold a sophisticated concept like danger? Don't you think that the noise just triggers some associations or correlations, and the animal gets the urge to run? Why do you think that such thought/belief requires a presupposition of correspondence?
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 12, 2017 at 00:51#857340 likes
You are confusing between meaning and truth. It is the assignment of meaning to P that is relative to an interpretation, but once a particular meaning has been fixed for P, than what P says given that meaning can be objectively true.
I'm not confusing meaning and truth Fafner. You said P is true, "if the truth condition expressed by P obtains. I said "the truth condition expressed by P" is necessarily an interpretation of P. And since this is the condition for truth, then interpretation is a condition for truth as well.
If you want to assume a fixed meaning for P, then we can assume eternal Platonic Forms. Is that how you propose to define "objective truth", through reference to Platonic Forms? I am ready to oblige, if you recognize that objective truth requires a fixed meaning, and a fixed meaning is derived from something like Platonic Forms, then I am ready to accept this definition of "objective truth". There is such a thing as objective truth, if there is such a thing as Platonic Forms (fixed meaning).
I'm not confusing meaning and truth Fafner. You said P is true, "if the truth condition expressed by P obtains. I said "the truth condition expressed by P" is necessarily an interpretation of P. And since this is the condition for truth, then interpretation is a condition for truth as well.
Yes you are confusing meaning and truth. Meaning is what P expresses (namely a truth condition), and truth is determined by whether the truth condition obtains. They are completely different things, and interpretation concerns only the former, not the later. Can't you see the difference between asking "what P means?" and "is what P means true?" One is a semantic question, the other is not.
If you want to assume a fixed meaning for P, then we can assume eternal Platonic Forms. Is that how you propose to define "objective truth", through reference to Platonic Forms? I am ready to oblige, if you recognize that objective truth requires a fixed meaning, and a fixed meaning is derived from something like Platonic Forms, then I am ready to accept this definition of "objective truth". There is such a thing as objective truth, if there is such a thing as Platonic Forms (fixed meaning).
I don't see how platonic forms are relevant here. Truth as I defined it, simply means the obtainment of a truth condition, and a truth condition could be anything you want. If the truth condition expressed by a sentence is that cats fly (whatever that means), then the truth condition will involve cats and whatever is relevant to their flying. You don't need platonic forms to talk about truth conditions because anything can count as a truth conditions, as far as truth is concerned.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 12, 2017 at 01:44#857400 likes
Meaning is what P expresses (namely a truth condition), and truth is determined by whether the truth condition obtains.
Yes, the truth condition is the meaning expressed by P. As per your statement, this is a requirement for truth. And, interpretation is required for the expression of this truth condition (the meaning). Therefore interpretation is a requirement for truth. Do you not understand this?
You said "once a particular meaning has been fixed for P, than what P says given that meaning can be objectively true." How do you propose that there can be a fixed meaning for P, when meaning is subject to interpretation? Under Platonic realism, mathematical terms like "two", 'three", "circle", and "square", have eternal fixed meaning, through the assumption of eternal "Forms". There is no need for interpretation, because what these words mean (the meaning) is fixed eternally by these Forms, regardless of whether they are interpreted or not.
Truth as I defined it, simply means the obtainment of a truth condition, and a truth condition could be anything you want. If the truth condition expressed by a sentence is that cats fly (whatever that means), then the truth condition will involve cats and whatever is relevant to their flying. You don't need platonic forms to talk about truth conditions because anything can count as a truth conditions, as far as truth is concerned.
Yes, now look, the truth condition expressed by a sentence, is the meaning, as you say above. There is no meaning, therefore no truth condition, and therefore no truth, unless the sentence is interpreted. Further, interpretation is subjective, so subjectivity is inherent within truth.
You tried to avoid this problem by referring to a "fixed" meaning, but there is no such fixed meaning, unless we assume Platonic Forms as the ideas which exist independently of human subjects, that fix the meaning.
You're conflating true statements with what makes them so.
You replied:
No I'm not. You are reading your own metaphysical views into my words. [b][i]There's no distinctions on my view between statements and what makes them true.(emphasis mine)
That is conflating true statements and what makes them so.
The point, as I told Srap, is that to say "this is meaningless" is a statement of interpretation. So in essence, it does not matter if the interpreter says this has meaning, or this does not have meaning, both are interpretations. But if what you imply is true, that having been interpreted implies that it has some sort of meaning, whether it is interpreted as meaningful or not, then to say that something is meaningless is somewhat contradictory.
I didn't say that.
You wrote:
If the examples are abundant, then please provide some.
I have. Attend to them.
You wrote:...people don't learn the different things which are called by the word "hand" by drawing correlations. The hand is shown, and the name said. There is simple repetition of the word in order to learn how to say the word properly.
So, you are claiming that one need not make a connection between a name and what's being named in order to learn how to use the name?
Sigh...
After reading through the rest... seems that I'm about finished here.
Very very poor form to argue about what depends upon what, and then - after having had your argument refuted - say that what depends upon what is irrelevant.
If you want to understand correspondence, from my 'viewpoint', I suggest that you think about the term "truth" quite a bit differently than you've displayed here.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 12, 2017 at 10:49#858050 likes
So, you are claiming that one need not make a connection between a name and what's being named in order to learn how to use the name?
Your use of "name" is ambiguous, we were talking about learning a word, "hand". I'm saying that one makes an association when learning a word, and this association is not an association of correspondence between the word and the object like a proper noun, as you suggested, or else the word would not be used to refer to other similar objects.
Very very poor form to argue about what depends upon what, and then - after having had your argument refuted - say that what depends upon what is irrelevant.
To argue X is contingent on Y is a proper argument when the claims are justified. When one argues Y is contingent on X, and the claim is not justified, it is not a sound argument. Otherwise one could make an argument that anything is contingent on anything else, and this is pure nonsense, just like your unjustified claim that thought/belief is contingent on truth.
Yes, the truth condition is the meaning expressed by P. As per your statement, this is a requirement for truth. And, interpretation is required for the expression of this truth condition (the meaning). Therefore interpretation is a requirement for truth. Do you not understand this?
"Interpretation is required for truth" only indirectly via the fixing of meaning, but the truth of the sentence--given some determinate interpretation--is not itself open to interpretation.
Also, as I already told you, I completely reject your assumption that all interpretations are subjective by their nature, because there's nothing in the concept itself to suggest that this must be the case.
So your argument is both fallacious and is based on a false premise.
Here's a simply example to illustrate my point. Cows depend on grass for food, but does it follow that cows are like grass, or that they share some of their properties in common? (that they are green like the grass etc.) Obviously not - so the existence of some dependence relation between two things doesn't license you to infer anything from the properties of the one to the properties of the other. So even if I grant you your premise (which I don't) that meaning is in some sense subjective (--grass), it will not follow that truth is also subjective (--cows) only because it is dependent on meaning.
How do you propose that there can be a fixed meaning for P, when meaning is subject to interpretation?
As I already told you several times, "meaning is open to interpretation" only on the linguistic or semantic level, that is, when there is a possibility of choosing between different things that a sentence can mean in a particular language. But what each of those possible 'meanings' mean is itself objective and not open to interpretation. On my view, to understand a sentence is to know its truth condition, and to know its truth conditions means to know in which circumstances the sentence is true and when it is false. So the 'meaning' itself, so to speak, consist in objective knowledge, or an ability to discriminate between the obtaining or non obtaining of objective states of affairs (namely the truth conditions) -- and nothing that you said shows that this is impossible to achieve.
Under Platonic realism, mathematical terms like "two", 'three", "circle", and "square", have eternal fixed meaning, through the assumption of eternal "Forms". There is no need for interpretation, because what these words mean (the meaning) is fixed eternally by these Forms, regardless of whether they are interpreted or not.
All this stuff about forms is irrelevant to what I'm saying. I said that what a sentence means is truth conditions, but platonic forms themselves are not truth conditions but universals. The words 'circle' 'or square' don't say anything by themselves which is true or false, but only when they occur in sentence ("the table in my room is square").
You tried to avoid this problem by referring to a "fixed" meaning, but there is no such fixed meaning, unless we assume Platonic Forms as the ideas which exist independently of human subjects, that fix the meaning.
You don't need platonic forms, since you can simply use ordinary physical objects to fix the references of your terms. So if you take a sentence like "cats fly" and decide what would count as a cat and what would count as flying (and perhaps some other things), then you've fixed an objective meaning for the sentence - that is, your sentence now is 'correlated' with objective states of affairs (its truth and falsehood is sensitive to how the world is like). So for meaning to be objective it need not exist somehow 'in itself' and independently of human beings. We 'construct' meaning by correlating our language with the world, but that which we mean is objective by virtue of the existence of such correlations.
Not the same thought. Different intensity different thought different expressions...
Agree?
The thought itself, in memory is rather vague and fleeting. It doesn't stand still. Then there is the expression of that thought, by the mind which is somewhat more concrete but actually can be vague also. The expression attempts to describe the thought within the limited modes available-all are symbolic and therefore inadequate in some way.
Modernists authors (influenced by Bergson such as Virginia Wolfe) imbued these characteristics of thought and expression directly in their written works. Artists tend to delve into these matters more than philosophers though Bergson did not shy away.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 13, 2017 at 00:47#860050 likes
"Interpretation is required for truth" only indirectly via the fixing of meaning, but the truth of the sentence--given some determinate interpretation--is not itself open to interpretation.
Not so fast. Let's say that we have a fixed, determinate interpretation of the sentence. That interpretation must be related to some sort of reality, in order that there is a truth to that interpretation. As you said, the truth conditions must "obtain". Do you see that reality must be interpreted as well, in order that there is a truth of the sentence? What makes you think that there is a fixed and determinate reality? A fixed meaning of the sentence cannot provide truth if there is no corresponding fixed reality. And, in referring to accepted notions of time, it seems quite evident that there is no such fixed reality.
Also, as I already told you, I completely reject your assumption that all interpretations are subjective by their nature, because there's nothing in the concept itself to suggest that this must be the case.
Are you saying that there is nothing in the concept of interpretation, to suggest that an interpretation is necessarily subjective? Remember how I defined subjective as "of the subject". Do you know of anything else, other than the mind of a subject, which could give us an interpretation? If so, name it. Is it God or something like that? Otherwise I think you're just spouting bullshit.
Here's a simply example to illustrate my point. Cows depend on grass for food, but does it follow that cows are like grass, or that they share some of their properties in common? (that they are green like the grass etc.) Obviously not - so the existence of some dependence relation between two things doesn't license you to infer anything from the properties of the one to the properties of the other. So even if I grant you your premise (which I don't) that meaning is in some sense subjective (--grass), it will not follow that truth is also subjective (--cows) only because it is dependent on meaning.
You haven't provided a proper analogy. My argument would be like this. Grass is dependent on sunlight. Cows are dependent on grass. Therefore cows are dependent on sunlight. The truth conditions of the statement are dependent on interpretation. Truth is dependent on the truth conditions. Therefore truth is dependent on interpretation.
We need to go way back in this thread, to see why I argue that truth is necessarily subjective. This is because not only is the interpretation of the sentence subjective, but also the interpretation of reality, which the sentence is supposed to correspond to, is subjective. That is the point made at the beginning of this post. The way the world is, reality, what is the case, varies according to one's perspective. This is manifestly clear in the special theory of relativity. Your perspective gives you your reality, and therefore reality is subjective. Perhaps, it is because reality itself is perspective dependent, that meaning interpretation is perspective dependent. Reality itself is subjective, and that's why meaning is subjective, because it must be to give us a true perspective of reality.
Creativesoul, I believe, suggested that even if the interpretation is subjective, what it is related to by means of correspondence, is objective. But according to the way that time is understood in modern science, this is not the case, Both sides of the relationship are subjective. This is why truth is completely within the subject's mind, it is a relationship between things which are in the mind. So how do you propose that objectivity enters into truth, when it is a relationship between two subjective things?
You don't need platonic forms, since you can simply use ordinary physical objects to fix the references of your terms.
Clearly, physical objects are constantly moving and changing, and how they exist depends on one's perspective, so we cannot "fix" references by using these things. It is impossible to fix references to things which are changing. If X changes, it is no longer X, but now Y. How could you fix your reference, if the thing you call X, is Y by the time you finish calling it X. In fact, modern physics demonstrates that even in the time that it takes you to call something X, that thing has gone through a large series of changes.
The thought itself, in memory is rather vague and fleeting. It doesn't stand still. Then there is the expression of that thought, by the mind which is somewhat more concrete but actually can be vague also. The expression attempts to describe the thought within the limited modes available-all are symbolic and therefore inadequate in some way.
Modernists authors (influenced by Bergson such as Virginia Wolfe) imbued these characteristics of thought and expression directly in their written works. Artists tend to delve into these matters more than philosophers though Bergson did not shy away.
Indeed. Thoughts can be vague and fleeting. They can also be less vague and ever approaching clarity. It's the combinations that intrigue me.
Knowing the combinations requires knowing what's being combined.
Granting that you believe what you write, then all we would need to do is copy some of those statements, put quotes around them and we would have statements of belief.
What's to be believed about those statements if not that they're true?
With certainty(conviction) comes "I know", and with less comes "I believe". Is that what you're getting at?
You answered:
Yes. It is a feeling that leads us to express a thought with different word characterizations.
Certainty/uncertainty is a feeling that leads us to express a thought with different word characterizations?
So, I'm curious...
What, on your view, counts as being an example of the simplest thought/belief? What is required in order for it to be possible? What preconditions lead to that outcome, each and every time?
Perhaps more importantly...
Do you draw and maintain a meaningful distinction between feeling and thought?
Interpretation is the attribution of meaning. One can mistakenly attribute meaning.
Meta doesn't know the difference, for if s/he did s/he would be forced to admit that meaning is being interpreted. Since interpreting meaning is contingent upon pre-existing meaning, it only follows that interpretation is existentially contingent upon pre-existing meaning. Thus, meaning is not existentially contingent upon interpretation. To quite the contrary, it is the other way around. If that were not the case, one could not be mistaken; one could not misunderstand.
One forms a mistaken interpretation when s/he mistakenly attributes meaning. That is... when one attributes meaning where none belongs... s/he is mistaken; s/he has misunderstood. S/he thinks/believes that something means something other than it does.
Meta's notion of interpretation is just plain wrong.
What makes you think that there is a fixed and determinate reality? A fixed meaning of the sentence cannot provide truth if there is no corresponding fixed reality.
If this is what your argument really comes down to, then surely you've given no reasons to think there's no "fixed reality" (whatever that means).
Are you saying that there is nothing in the concept of interpretation, to suggest that an interpretation is necessarily subjective? Remember how I defined subjective as "of the subject". Do you know of anything else, other than the mind of a subject, which could give us an interpretation? If so, name it. Is it God or something like that? Otherwise I think you're just spouting bullshit.
There are different senses of "subjective" here that we shouldn't mix together. Initially you have used "subjective" to mean something that is incompatible with objective truth, but now you are using it in a weaker and more broader sense as anything that is related to subjects. But subjective in this other sense can be perfectly compatible with objective truth, since many things that have to do with subjects are themselves perfectly objective (e.g., if I have a toothache, it's an objective fact about me). Obviously all cognition is 'subjective' in the sense the it involves subjects, but this is a trivial claim, and doesn't prove that cognition cannot itself objectively grasp reality.
And now, about interpretation, if you think about actual cases where it makes sense to talk about interpretation, then it actually shows that 'interpretation' is something that is usually aimed at achieving an objective grasp of something which itself is not subjective. Here are some examples (and they could be multiplied):
Interpretation of a foreign language: you are using a dictionary to translate sentences in a language that you don't understand into your native tongue. And in this context it makes sense to speak about correct and incorrect interpretation of the text - you've either translated the text correctly into your own language, or you didn't. And what would count in this case as the correct interpretation is not subjective in the sense that it is not up to you to decide what is the correct translation of any given sentence (e.g. that "schnee ist weiß" is correctly translated from German to English as "snow is white" is an objective fact about German and English).
Interpretation of a map: to grasp a map, or know how to use it, you must know all sorts of conventions (such as, this icon stands for this kind of building, a green area is where trees grow etc.). And indeed there's a sense in which to understand a map you must apply some interpretation to understand it, but again there's a distinction between the correct and incorrect interpretation of the map, which itself is not merely a 'subjective' distinction. If you apply the correct interpretation then you would able navigate around using the map, and thus acquire objective knowledge about your surroundings, which would not be possible under just any sort of interpretation of the map that one could choose.
You haven't provided a proper analogy. My argument would be like this. Grass is dependent on sunlight. Cows are dependent on grass. Therefore cows are dependent on sunlight. The truth conditions of the statement are dependent on interpretation. Truth is dependent on the truth conditions. Therefore truth is dependent on interpretation.
Yes, but I already acknowledged that the truth of a sentence is in some sense dependent on how its meaning is interpreted, and this doesn't help you because it doesn't prove that truth is subjective. This is because a) I reject your claim that all interpretations are necessarily subjective (in the sense of being incompatible with objective truth - see above) and b) even if I grant you the premise that all interpretations are subjective (and I don't), as my original example about the cows and grass show, you cannot logically infer from the fact that A is dependent on B, anything about the properties of A from the properties of B (so if B is subjective, and A is dependent on B, it doesn't follow that A itself is subjective).
We need to go way back in this thread, to see why I argue that truth is necessarily subjective. This is because not only is the interpretation of the sentence subjective, but also the interpretation of reality, which the sentence is supposed to correspond to, is subjective.
I would make precisely the same objection to this argument as the objection that I made to your "interpretation of language is subjective" argument. It is possible to achieve perfectly objective interpretations of reality in most normal cases (e.g. if you are watching an action film, and believe that someone is shooting at you from the screen, then you are obviously incorrectly interpreting reality, as opposed to the people who understand that they are only watching a movie, and there are no people behind the screen with guns, and so on). And secondly even if I grant you that all interpretations of reality are subjective (and I don't), then it still doesn't follow that we cannot establish objective standards of truth on the basis of these interpretations, because this sort of inference is logically fallacious.
If X changes, it is no longer X, but now Y. How could you fix your reference, if the thing you call X, is Y by the time you finish calling it X.
This claim is ambiguous. You have to distinguish between a case of an X changing into a completely different thing Y (a cube of ice melting into a puddle of water), and the case of an X that is changing one or more of its properties while remaining the same X (like a car that moves from position a to position b while remaining the same car). In the second case we can perfectly well fix the reference for X even if X changes some of its properties in the process.
Which is why you are comfortable with your position.
As John Bell described, there is a chasm between precision of knowledge and knowledge that is adequate for all practical purposes. [FAPP]. What you are describing as facts are approximations that are practicable but necessarily subject to continuous change depending upon time and observer. Nothing is persistent or consistent long enough to be a fact, though one can label it as such until this belief is undermined by new events. Necessarily different observers will label such differently depending upon time and position. The underlying reality is in constant flux as a whole. Heraclitus observed this whole watching a river as did the Daoists. It is not possible to create immobility in a universe of continuous change.
Nothing is persistent or consistent long enough to be a fact, though one can label it as such until this belief is undermined by new events.
I don't think that fact about cats (or whatever) are in any way any less real or objective just because the subatomic particles from which cats are composed behave in funny ways. We care about cats only in so far as their observable properties and behavior is concerned, and on the macroscopic levels cats (as animals) exhibit perfectly stable and persistent behavior, even if on the subatomic level of description things behave differently (their quantum properties after all don't show up on the macroscopic level, so we are perfectly entitled to ignore them when we deal with cats, or anything else).
and on the macroscopic levels cats (as animals) exhibit perfectly stable and persistent behavior, even if on the subatomic level of description things behave differently (their quantum properties after all don't show up on the macroscopic level).
I have never observed this. What I have observed is constantly changing behavior that may fall within the boundaries of probabilities but totally unpredictable (echoing quantum theory). No one has ever found a boundary between the micro and the macro and the flux in the universe percolates to all levels of observations. Quantum theory hold that all systems are in constant flux.
In any case, the crux of the issue lies in whether one can find immobility in the universe, that is persistent and consistent throughout duration, such that it can be call a truth or a fact. Such beliefs drive one's philosophical views and concurrently create all kinds of paradoxes as Zeno noted.
In any case, the crux of the issue lies in whether one can find immobility in the universe, that is persistent and consistent throughout duration, such that it can be call a truth or a fact.
The question doesn't make sense unless you can tell me in advance what should count as "immobility" and "persistence".
Reply to Fafner I just wanted to provide evidence that the universe is in constant flux everywhere at all time. It is up to you whether this affects your conception of truth and facts.
If it is the case that the constant state of flux causes one to believe that they cannot step into the same river twice, then that person cannot talk about the river. Different rivers have different names. Which river cannot one step into twice?
If it is the case that the constant state of flux causes one to believe that they cannot step into the same river twice, then that person cannot talk about the river. Different rivers have different names. Which river cannot one step into twice?
It's nonsense on stilts.
Not at all. It is the basis of many philosophies. One just needs to observe that what is symbolically called a given river is so named for practicality, recognizing that it is constantly changing and evolving in all manner and form. One only needs to recognize the practical reasons one names a river while still observing what is transpiring over duration.
A river is an excellent example and widely used to exemplify the flux in the universe. If one just studies this one will understand why it appears we live in a universe of mobility.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 14, 2017 at 01:46#864510 likes
Hi tim, nice to see that you've gotten back in the thread, and that you haven't given up hope on finding truth. Nor have I, but I still see no way of getting beyond this problem of interpretation. Do you recognize that some speculative physicists have adopted "information theory" as a means of side-stepping the problem of interpreting quantum uncertainty? When uncertainty is taken as a fundamental property of reality, (which is what special relativity gives us), rather than as an incapacity of the observer to interpret reality, then I believe we forfeit the notion of "truth" as commonly understood by individuals; "truth" as commonly understood being ensured by our commitment to God.
MU has been indefatigably insisting on this through a couple of hundred posts in this thread alone. I think he is in the position of the man who says there is no such thing as a chair because it's all made of atoms, or whatever. I won't say he is that man, but I'll leave it to him to say he isn't. The point is that the chair man is entirely correct, but completely wrong.
This is not quite what I am saying. I am not saying that there is no such thing as a chair, that what you're looking at is atoms, or fundamental particles, or quantum fields, or whatever. What I am saying is that it is a chair, and it is fundamental particles, etc.. What it is, is however it is interpreted. Remember, I do not deny truth, I only assert that it is subjective. Are you familiar with Stephen Hawking's notion of "model-dependent realism", put forth in "The Grand Design"? Essentially, it is an ontology which assumes that there is no fundamental reality independent from the model. Reality is as it is modeled. This perspective is a good introduction to "many worlds", which employs similar principles.
But how is it completely wrong? It destroys the possibility of meaning beyond that agreed to by interested parties or imposed by force. If you say, "Sure, agreement is good; that's all we have anyway!" What you mean is that's all we have as a matter of force. You have thrown reason out the window - after all it's all interpretation.
Let's just assume that there is meaning beyond that which is agreed, or imposed by force (I would prefer "taught" rather than "imposed by force", because any agreement imposed by force is not a true agreement and without agreement how could there be this type of meaning?). What kind of existence could that meaning have? If there is no need for it to be interpreted for it to exist as meaning, what kind of existence could it have?
I believe that it is a common assumption, to assume that there is something which exists independent of being interpreted. We describe that existence and our descriptions have meaning. We observe a compatibility between our descriptions, and the assumed independent existence. Does this compatibility justify the claim that meaning is independent of our descriptions? How do you bridge that gap, to say that our descriptions have meaning, and there is compatibility between the descriptions and the thing described, so the thing described must have meaning?
I don't understand your criticism about throwing reason out the window. Isn't reason a tool of interpretation? How would claiming "it's all interpretation" be a case of throwing reason out the window?
Interpretation is the attribution of meaning. One can mistakenly attribute meaning.
This is where you demonstrate your confusion. An interpretation is an interpretation. There is no right or wrong, or mistaken interpretation, unless it is judged in comparison with another interpretation. There is no mistake inherent within the interpretation, "mistake" is a product of the external judgement which designates the interpretation as inadequate. So when one interprets, or as you say, attributes meaning, this act is never in itself a mistaken act. If one attributes meaning to something, then there is meaning there, and this is not a mistaken act, despite the fact that you might judge it as a mistaken act, claiming there is no meaning there. It is only your judgement which claims that the interpretation is mistaken. Even if millions or billions of people say there is no meaning there, this does not make it true that there is no meaning there. Sure, the fact that the billions of others see no meaning there makes that person "wrong" according to the judgement of the billions, but this does not make it true that there is no meaning there. If the person sees meaning there, then for that person there is meaning there.
There are different senses of "subjective" here that we shouldn't mix together. Initially you have used "subjective" to mean something that is incompatible with objective truth, but now you are using it in a weaker and more broader sense as anything that is related to subjects. But subjective in this other sense can be perfectly compatible with objective truth, since many things that have to do with subjects are themselves perfectly objective (e.g., if I have a toothache, it's an objective fact about me). Obviously all cognition is 'subjective' in the sense the it involves subjects, but this is a trivial claim, and doesn't prove that cognition cannot itself objectively grasp reality.
Are you not paying attention? I've stated numerous times that I am adhering to a definition of subjective which is "of the subject". If you are interpreting anything other than this, then that is your mistake, and the ambiguity is produced by your own mind.
Furthermore, I distinguished between two senses of "objective", which you now demonstrate that you haven't yet understood. The weaker sense of "objective", epistemological objectivity, by which we have "objective knowledge", is produced by common agreement. Since it is an agreement amongst subjects, it is inherently subjective, and better called inter-subjective than "objective". So when a statement is justified, many people agree, and we call this objective knowledge. But the fact that many people agree does not make it truth. The stronger sense of "objective", ontological objectivity, means "of the object". This is what you imply when you say "objective reality", and "objective truth", that what you refer to is a true condition of the object, rather than an idea produced by common agreement.
So in your example, when you say things like having a toothache are objective, you refer to the weaker sense of "objective". That you have a tooth ache, may be justified, and agreed upon, such that it is an inter-subjective reality, therefore it is compatible with this sense of "objective". But the fact that it is justified, and agreed upon, and "objective" in that way, does not make it an objective truth. You may have fooled everyone into thinking that you have a tooth ache, when you really do not. And if you think, "no it is really true, I really do have a tooth ache", then this is what I mean by subjective. It is your mind, the mind of a subject, which "knows" that it is true that you have a toothache, while everyone else is skeptical because you've fooled them in the past. Do you see the gap, between what you as a subject know to be true, and what is known by many, through agreement, because it is justified? The latter knowledge is "objective", because it is justified and agreed upon, and the former is subjective and true. But how do we get to an objective truth?
And now, about interpretation, if you think about actual cases where it makes sense to talk about interpretation, then it actually shows that 'interpretation' is something that is usually aimed at achieving an objective grasp of something which itself is not subjective. Here are some examples (and they could be multiplied):
Your examples display the same sort of confusion as creativesoul demonstrated. There is no such thing as correct or incorrect translation of a language into another. Two translators will translate each in one's own way. If someone judges the two, or one judges the other, it may be argued that one is correct and the other incorrect, or the two might be exactly the same. In any case, a single translation, as an interpretation, is just that, an interpretation, it is neither correct nor incorrect until judged as such. And that the judge believes the translation to be correct or incorrect, is a property of the judge, a belief of the judge, it is not a property of the translation.
I reject your claim that all interpretations are necessarily subjective (in the sense of being incompatible with objective truth - see above)
You haven't yet given me an acceptable definition of "objective truth", just like you've failed in your attempt to provide an acceptable definition of "objective reality". What you gave me above, is "objective" in the sense of agreed upon by others, but this is inter-subjective, justified, and there is a difference between justified and true. Just because many people agree, does not mean that it is true.
This is where you demonstrate your confusion. An interpretation is an interpretation. There is no right or wrong, or mistaken interpretation, unless it is judged in comparison with another interpretation.
This coming from one who incessantly (mis)attributes meaning to my words. If the above is true, then in order for you to be mistaken, it would require your mistaken report of what I said being judged in comparison to my own interpretation of my own words?
Rubbish.
An interpretation is wrong by virtue of (mis)attributing meaning.
I have see no problem with taking change into consideration. The problem arises when it's taken too far. For instance, it is not a matter of practicality that we name things, and their identity endures over time. Rather, we first name things as a matter of building a basis of thought/belief about those things. The river was identified long before anyone thought to say that you cannot step into the same river twice. That is an abuse of the term "same". A nonsensical use.
That statement is false. We can and we do it all the time. I swam in the same river for years. The only counterargument to this is untenable. One would argue that it is not the same river, because it has changed. So, then the obvious question becomes how much change does it take for something to be no longer what it was? If all change results in something no longer being the same thing, then how does one even begin to say that without ending in incoherence?
It cannot be done.
Which river is it again?
That one. Not another. That one, right there. See??? It changed, and yet it's still the same river.
Change happens constantly. So what? We can still say true stuff about ever-changing things, and we do so all the time.
That statement is false. We can and we do it all the time. I swam in the same river for years
You swam in a different river with a persistent name. That you give it the same name does not make the river the same but it is practical to call it with the same name. Someone else may give the river a different name or the river may dry up somewhere else and not even be observed as a river.
Everything is undergoing constant change but for practical reason we use symbolics to provide some persistence, but the symbolic does not prevent the change from occurring.
Are you not paying attention? I've stated numerous times that I am adhering to a definition of subjective which is "of the subject". If you are interpreting anything other than this, then that is your mistake, and the ambiguity is produced by your own mind.
I was just trying to help you... This only makes your argument even weaker than I though it was, because the conclusion is trivial and proves nothing of any interest as I already showed.
But the fact that it is justified, and agreed upon, and "objective" in that way, does not make it an objective truth. You may have fooled everyone into thinking that you have a tooth ache, when you really do not.
Again, you are begging the question. Obviously on my understanding of truth, truth is not the same as justification.
You are going in big circles all the time. You have your own idiosyncratic understanding of the concepts "truth", "objectivity", "subjectivity" and "interpretation", and all your arguments have this understanding built right into them, and so they can't seriously engage anyone who doesn't already agree with you on most things. If you want to have a chance of convincing anybody and not just talking to yourself, you should construct your arguments in such a way that even people who don't agree with your views could still find the arguments convincing.
Yes, why not? Otherwise bilingual dictionaries would be useless.
They are not useless, but depending on who or what it's doing the translation, the results are always quite different. There are over 300 translations of the Dao De Jing, must of which are entirely different. For example, some use concepts that the translator believes were being used at the time the Dao De Jing was written, whenever that might have been instead of modern context.
But, we can even use translation of Shakespeare as an example. How does a translator translate Shakespeare while maintaining all of the nuances of the language and historical context. The art of translation is a tricky one as is the art of interpretation. An example of the issues:
Reply to Rich Translation of literary works is a somewhat different topic than translating between languages, let's say for purposes of simple conversation. What I had in mind is simple cases such as the word 'cat' being translatable into 'katze' in German, since in most cases English and German speakers use the two words in similar ways to talk about the same kind of animal. Also it seems natural to talk about expressions in different languages as capable of expressing the very same thoughts/ideas/propositions. And so for example if I interpret a German speaker that says "es regnet" as meaning that it is raining, then I will be getting his thought or belief right.
Of course things become way more complicated when it comes to translating literature, but this doesn't show that for most intents and purposes you can find very close correlations in meaning between words of different languages. It also partly depends on what one means by "translation", because we can adopt different criteria for "correctness" of translation - say 'literal' as opposed to 'free' etc.
Of course things become way more complicated when it comes to translating literature, but this doesn't show that for most intents and purposes you can find very close correlations in meaning between words of different languages. It also partly depends on what one means by "translation", because we can adopt different criteria for "correctness" of translation - say 'literal' as opposed to 'free' etc.
Yes, it all gets kind of tricky, even for simple situations such as the well known example of the snow and how different cultures symbolically represent it with language.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 14, 2017 at 22:26#867520 likes
Quantum physics is micro-phenomena, irrelevant in the macro world of chairs and cows. I understand that quantum uncertainty attaches a probability that the bow of the battleship USS Massachusetts will appear in my living room (with the rest outside), but I also understand that I really don't have to worry about it. And the same with any other quantum phenomena at "street" level. Truth, then, if it means anything at all, that meaning is neither conditioned nor constrained by any quantum considerations. (The level of precision of this claim, being just the odds against the battleship appearing, is far greater than the level of precision of any other measurement of anything that is measured.)
I think this is a very naïve perspective. It appears like you are limiting "truth", to the concerns of things which we can see with our eyes. But the vast majority of things which exist cannot be seen, either they are too small, or too large, or for some other reason, cannot be seen, like air. Surely you recognize that the activity of electrons plays a very important part in your life. So why would you even consider excluding this from "truth", as if there is truth concerning chairs, but no truth concerning electrons.
There is a related issue which is more and more coming to light in the philosophy of science. Scientists produce experiments in a controlled environment with very specific parameters. The "size" of the experiment is neither micro nor macro, in relation to the things which exist in the universe, which range from very large to very small. from their observations, they may extrapolate, and make conclusions concerning the entirety of the universe, which we might call laws. But there is no reason to believe that the very small things, or the very large things behave in the same way as the medium size things, which are the things that are observed.
If I understand you correctly, you are arguing that there can only be truth relative to these medium size things. But why? Just because the human perspective doesn't give one the capacity to directly observe these huge, and tiny things, which are just as much a part of reality as the medium size things. Why would you think that there can be truth concerning medium size things, but no truth concerning huge things, or tiny things?
I describe, you describe (they describe). We tally the descriptions, and they agree! For present purpose let's suppose we all agree it's a blue chair.
But the descriptions do not all agree, that's the point. We have to force our own descriptions, adapt them, to make them agree. This is compromise. I see the chair as green, you see it as blue, so we decide that it must be bluish green, or greenish blue. In most cases agreement requires discussion. It is not the case that we tally up the descriptions and they agree, we discuss how things appear from each of our own perspective, then make conclusions about how the things "must be", to fulfill the conditions of the different descriptions.
Is their anything objective, here? I think there is. If we can agree on blueness and chairness, and that these are combined in one object, then it seems reasonable to conclude that there is an object that just is blue and a chair: a blue chair.
As I've been saying, I agree, that this is "objective". Agreement produces a form of objectivity, but it is an objectivity based in justification, it does not mean "objective" in the sense of "of the object" as Fafner implies with "objective reality", and "objective truth". The fact that even though we might all agree on something, it might still be false, indicates that the form of "objectivity" derived from agreement or justification, is not the same as "objectivity" when used in "objective truth".
The proposition, "That is a blue chair," then, is true. But it draws from the truth of the matter of there being a blue chair. That truth, I argue, is objective and "lives' in the collective judgment that affirms it. And its objectivity is not that of the blue chair, which is a real existing thing (as established and constituted by collective judgment), it is instead of the same objectivity as numbers, like four, or seven.
The proposition "that is a blue chair", is justified. Agreement constitutes justification, and this justification produces a sort of objectivity which might commonly be referred to as objective knowledge. But this agreement does not necessitate that it is the truth, so this is not an objective truth.
If there is no such thing as being the same, then the very notion of being not the same is rendered utterly meaningless. If all change makes being the same physically impossible, then all there is is change. And yet... there is no such thing as being the same, and yet everything is precisely the same... All is change.
An interpretation is wrong by virtue of (mis)attributing meaning.
Like any other incidence of right or wrong, correct or incorrect, good or bad, an interpretation is only wrong by virtue of being judged as such. That's simply the nature of right and wrong, they are the product of judgement.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 15, 2017 at 11:16#869270 likes
I was just trying to help you... This only makes your argument even weaker than I though it was, because the conclusion is trivial and proves nothing of any interest as I already showed.
What lacks interest to you, may be interesting to me, that's just human nature.
I did give a definition of 'objective truth' way back, in terms of truth conditions. And nothing that you've said shows that it is not 'acceptable'.
Your definition is unacceptable because the way you defined "objective truth" ensures that it is necessarily subjective. If this fact is uninteresting to you, then so be it.
What lacks interest to you, may be interesting to me, that's just human nature.
As I already explained, it is uninteresting because your definition of subjectivity ("involving subjects") is perfectly compatible with the possibility of objective truth, so therefore your argument doesn't prove anything. And the reason that you don't see this is because you are constantly sliding back and forth between different senses of "subjective" without noticing.
And secondly, I also showed you that your argument is logically fallacious anyway, so it doesn't even matter how you define "subjectivity". And I have seen no response from you concerning this point.
Your definition is unacceptable because the way you defined "objective truth" ensures that it is necessarily subjective. If this fact is uninteresting to you, then so be it.
Two days ago I wrote a very detailed post explaining to you where exactly your arguments go wrong, but you have completely ignored most of the points that I made. Why do I even bother.
As I already explained, it is uninteresting because your definition of subjectivity ("involving subjects") is perfectly compatible with the possibility of objective truth, so therefore your argument doesn't prove anything. And the reason that you don't see this is because you are constantly sliding back and forth between different senses of "subjective" without noticing.
I told you that I adhere to one definition of subjective. Despite your assertion, you have yet to demonstrate any equivocation on my part. I believe your assertion is the product of a faulty interpretation on your part.
And secondly, I also showed you that your argument is logically fallacious anyway, so it doesn't even matter how you define "subjectivity". And I have seen no response from you concerning this point.
Further, I haven't seen this demonstration. My argument is that the existence of truth is dependent on the existence of a subject, and therefore cannot be any part of a supposed independent objective reality. Your demonstration of fallaciousness was based on a misrepresentation of my argument. When I showed you this, you just said my conclusion is uninteresting. So be it.
Two days ago I wrote a very detailed post explaining to you where exactly your arguments go wrong, but you have completely ignored most of the points that I made. Why do I even bother...
I addressed any point which appeared relevant. if you're uninterested, then don't bother.Quoting Fafner
And just to remind you why your argument is logically invalid. Your argument goes like this:
1. Truth depends on interpretation
2. Interpretation is subjective,
3. Therefore truth is subjective.
Here's a parallel example that shows why this doesn't work:
1. Cows depend on grass.
2. Grass is green,
3. Therefore, cows are green.
Do you see the problem?
See, your example misrepresents my argument again, just like last time, despite me having explained your misrepresentation. I do not argue predication, like "grass is green". I argue dependence, it is an argument of contingency. That the grass is green is irrelevant. The proper conclusion in your example, should be "therefore cows cannot exist in a world without grass". Just like my conclusion is that truth cannot exist in a world without subjects.
It appears perhaps that you are taking my definition of subjective, "of the subject", and inferring that this means "property of the subject". But I am not arguing properties, I am arguing contingencies, so "of the subject" means derived from the subject, produced, or created by the subject. This may be where your problem of interpretation lies.
The proper conclusion in your example, should be "therefore cows cannot exist in a world without grass". Just like my conclusion is that truth cannot exist in a world without subjects.
But it all depends on what you mean by 'truth' here. Are we talking about truth conditions or truth values? Because indeed sentences having truth conditions is dependent on subjects (i.e., that sentences mean something that can be either true or false), but it is not the case that it depends on subjects whether a sentence itself is true or false.
Here's my old example again:
1. That the sentence 'cats fly' in English means that cats fly (= a truth condition), depends on the existence of subjects.
2. The truth of 'cats fly' doesn't depend on the existence of subjects, but on whether cats fly.
So you cannot argue that the negation of (2) follows from (1), because (1) talks about the meaning of the sentence, while (2) about its truth. To show that (2) is false, it is not enough to appeal to the subject-dependence of interpretation, because truth in the sense of (2) has nothing to do with interpretation (as it is defined) but with what the world itself is like objectively.
Now, you made this argument from transitivity that purported to show that the negation of (2) does follow from (1). I agree that the form of the argument is valid: if A is dependent on B, and B is depend on C, then indeed it follows that A is dependent on C. However this argument is not applicable here. Here's how I understand your argument (based on your latest post):
1'. The meaning of sentence S ('cats fly') is dependent on the existence of subjects.
2'. The truth of S is dependent on the meaning of S.
3'. Therefore, the truth of S is dependent on the existence subjects.
Now the problem here is that the second premise (2') is ambiguous between 'truth' in the sense of having truth conditions (like in (1) - which I accept) and having a truth value (in which case I would reject the premise). But since the conclusion (3') talks about a truth value (you've claimed that the truth of 'cats fly' is dependent on subjects and not the world), then for the argument to be valid 'truth' in (2') must mean the same thing as in (3'). But on this reading of (2'), it is false on my view, because the truth of 'cats fly' is dependent on whether cats fly (according to my understanding of 'truth'), and not on the meaning of the sentence. So you need a different argument to show that (2') is true on this reading.
You have also said that you deny the existence of an objective reality, and therefore no sentence can be objectively true on your view. This however, would be an entirely different argument, since it need not mention anything about 'interpretation', because the conclusion already follows from the premise: if there's no objective reality, then trivially, no sentence is objectively true.
(actually it is not quite true because "no sentence can be objectively true" doesn't follow from "no sentence is objectively true", since form "P is false" (contingently) it doesn't follow that "P is necessarily false". So even if you are correct that there's not objective reality, it doesn't prove that our sentences can't be objectively true. It only proves they happen to be (as a matter of contingency and not necessity) false. And this argument would also prove (ironically) that there are at least subject independent falsehoods. Of course this is itself an incoherent claim (because a falsehood is logically equivalent to a true negation), but I'll let it pass for now)
So it is not clear to me what your original argument concerning 'interpretation' supposed to do, since it neither shows that no sentences are objectively true (or can be objectively true), nor that there's no objective reality. To argue for either of these two claims you need a different argument (which you haven't provided).
the truth of 'cats fly' is dependent on whether cats fly [...] and not on the meaning of the sentence.
and now I think that you can object here that the truth (in the sense of the truth value) of 'cats fly' is in fact dependent on the meaning of the sentence, and I agree that this is true, but only in one sense and not in another, because what I say in the quote is ambiguous between:
a. 'cats fly' having a truth value at all is dependent on its meaning.
b. Which truth value ('true' or 'false') 'cats fly' in fact has, is not dependent on its meaning, but only on whether cats actually fly.
(a) and (b) are mutually consistent, because (a) actually means the same as saying that 'cats fly' has truth conditions, but as I explained already, having truth conditions is not the same as having a (particular) truth value of either 'true' or 'false'.
...an interpretation is only wrong by virtue of being judged as such...
Rubbish.
Being judged as wrong is being called "wrong". Something can be called "wrong", but that doesn't make it so. If what you say here were true, there would be no difference between calling something "wrong" and being wrong.
The irony...
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 15, 2017 at 21:23#871060 likes
But it all depends on what you mean by 'truth' here. Are we talking about truth conditions or truth values? Because indeed sentences having truth conditions is dependent on subjects (i.e., that sentences mean something that can be either true or false), but it is not the case that it depends on subjects whether a sentence itself is true or false.
It was your definition of truth I was working with. You said that truth is when the truth conditions expressed by a sentence obtain. My argument was that according to this definition, truth is dependent on an expression of truth conditions. Further, it was my premise that an expression of truth conditions is dependent on the mind of a subject. Therefore truth, according to your definition is dependent on the mind of a subject.
So you cannot argue that the negation of (2) follows from (1), because (1) talks about the meaning of the sentence, while (2) about its truth. To show that (2) is false, it is not enough to appeal to the subject-dependence of interpretation, because truth in the sense of (2) has nothing to do with interpretation (as it is defined) but with what the world itself is like objectively.
This is false, because according to your definition of "truth", truth is dependent on a sentence expressing a truth condition, and this is dependent on an interpretation from a subject. Therefore, as defined, truth does have something to do with interpretation, interpretation (the expression of its truth condition) is required for truth.
Now the problem here is that the second premise (2') is ambiguous between 'truth' in the sense of having truth conditions (like in (1) - which I accept) and having a truth value (in which case I would reject the premise). But since the conclusion (3') talks about a truth value (you've claimed that the truth of 'cats fly' is dependent on subjects and not the world), then for the argument to be valid 'truth' in (2') must mean the same thing as in (3'). But on this reading of (2'), it is false on my view, because the truth of 'cats fly' is dependent on whether cats fly (according to my understanding of 'truth'), and not on the meaning of the sentence. So you need a different argument to show that (2') is true on this reading.
Earlier, you gave me a definition of "truth". The argument, as you admit is valid, and therefore "truth" as you defined it is dependent on the existence of a subject. Now you are talking about "truth value" which you have yet to define, so you have effectively changed the goal posts, but I have no idea what you mean by "truth value".
b. Which truth value ('true' or 'false') 'cats fly' in fact has, is not dependent on its meaning, but only on whether cats actually fly.
If this is what you mean by "truth value", then truth value is dependent on a judgement. A judgement, as well as a truth condition, is dependent on a thinking subject. Therefore to have a truth value is also dependent on a subject. This is the issue creativesoul has taken up with me. Read my reply below.
Being judged as wrong is being called "wrong". Something can be called "wrong", but that doesn't make it so. If what you say here were true, there would be no difference between calling something "wrong" and being wrong.
Right, being judged as wrong is what makes something wrong. That's not "rubbish" it's reality. To be "wrong" is to be discordant in relation to some principle, rule, or law. That something is in disagreement with such a principle, requires a comparison of the thing with the principle, and a judgement. You can say that this is rubbish all you want, but your assertions won't change reality.
Now you are talking about "truth value" which you have yet to define, so you have effectively changed the goal posts, but I have no idea what you mean by "truth value".
A truth value is simply the truth or falsehood of a given sentence (the truth value (in the present) of "Trump is the president" is "true", and the truth value of "Obama is the president" is "false"). A truth condition on the other hand, is the situation on which the sentence is true when it obtains (and if it doesn't then the sentence is false). So the truth conditions of "cats fly" is that it is true just in case that cats fly, and false if they don't; whereas its truth value happen to be "false" because cats as a matter of fact don't fly, at least in the sense of having wings like birds.
It is also crucial to note that truth conditions by themselves don't determine the actual truth value of a sentence (except in the limiting case of logical tautologies). Because just by knowing what 'cats fly' mean (knowing its truth conditions), you cannot know whether cats actually fly (which truth condition obtains in the world). And this is where the problem with your argument lies, because you start from the premise that truth conditions of sentences depend on interpretation (which I accept), but your conclusion says that it follows that sentences having the truth value that it does is also dependent on interpretation (a claim that I reject), and this is an equivocation because having truth conditions and having a particular truth value are two different things.
I hope that you can see now why all your objections to my post mentioning that "truth is dependent on interpretation" are ambiguous between 'truth' in the sense of truth conditions and the sense of having a truth value. I claimed only that the former is dependent on interpretation but not the letter
(and I actually did define truth in terms of truth values (because a truth value is simply a truth condition that obtains - so it was already implicit in the definition), but I didn't mention this term by name, hoping that you would yourself understand the difference between the two on an intuitive level).
If this is what you mean by "truth value", then truth value is dependent on a judgement. A judgement, as well as a truth condition, is dependent on a thinking subject.
I'd like to see the argument for this claim. Because judging that 'cats fly' is true, is not the same as 'cats fly' itself being true.
And this is where the problem with your argument lies, because you start from the premise that truth conditions of sentences depend on interpretation (which I accept), but your conclusion says that it follows that sentences having the truth value that it does is also dependent on interpretation (a claim that I reject), and this is an equivocation because having truth conditions and having a particular truth value are two different things.
There is no such problem with my argument. The truth value of the sentence (A), is dependent on the truth conditions of the statement (B), which is dependent on the interpretation (C). If A is dependent on B, and B is dependent on C, then A is dependent on C. If cows are dependent on grass, and grass is dependent on the sun, then cows are dependent on the sun.
Yes, the truth value is something which is quite different from the truth condition, as you've graciously explained. Notice my example, grass is quite different from the sun. But there is no ambiguity or equivocation, it's simply the case that there cannot be a truth value of the sentence without a truth condition of the sentence, just like there cannot be a truth condition without an interpretation. Therefore there cannot be a truth value without an interpretation.
What's the difference between saying something is wrong and something being wrong?
That all depends on how you define "being wrong". If it requires a professional judge, a jury, or God, to determine "being wrong", then the average individual saying "that's wrong" is quite different from actually being wrong. If it doesn't require any special judgement criteria, then my word is as good as your word, and you are wrong, because I say so, and I am wrong because you say so. But of course, I think there is a special judgement needed for actually "being wrong". The problem is that the required special judgement is not well agreed upon, some refer to God, and some do not. That's why I ask, what qualifies as "being wrong" for you? What type of special judgement is needed to fulfill the conditions of actually being wrong in your opinion?
I limit truth to things I can know the truth about (whether me, or collective knowledge subject to refinements and adjustments). If I do not or cannot know a truth, it would be an error I try not to make to claim it as truth. But nothing in this denies the possibility of truths I do not know.
Let me see if I understand you. There are things which you do not know, and even human beings do not know, but there is still a possibility for truth there. But this possibility for truth is limited, because you are assuming that there are things which cannot be known.
Why enact such a restriction against "the possibility of truths"? If you are allowing to truth, the status of possibility, such that "possible truths", are something real which we can talk about, on what basis would you limit the "possible truths"? Consider that possible truths, according to your description refers to unknowns. How can you propose a separation within the unknown, such that some of the unknown is knowable, and some is not knowable. Wouldn't you have to know the unknown in order to establish your division. Then wouldn't that division just be a new division between known and unknown (actual truth and possible truth). On what basis would you say that there cannot be truth concerning some things? Isn't that anti-philosophical (philosophy being the unrestricted desire to know), and inconsistent with your claim "that things are consistent with some law"
Justification. Way back I asked you to justify justification. I don't think you did. If you can have any truth or knowledge without justification then you can have it all. The need for justification goes out the window.
Justification is the act of demonstrating the correctness of one's proposition or belief. The act must be successful, in order that the proposition or belief is justified. Agreement is the result. As we've discussed, agreement is more of a hashing out, negotiation, mediation, compromise, rather than a case of I justify my belief through convincing you. However, what comes about from this "process", is justified belief.
Truth, as I've been arguing is perspective dependent. But there is a vast universe which your perspective does not allow you access to. We could apply the term "possible truth" here. These things are in principle knowable, but they are not knowable to me, due to the limitations of my perspective. So I allow that others, such as you, have possible truths, things which I could know if I were in your perspective, but since I am not in your perspective, I don't know them, so they are not actual truths.
You may claim that the things you know are actual truths, just like I would claim that the things I know are actual truths, but I see your truths as possible truths, like you see mine as possible truths. Since I allow that what you claim is possibly true, I invite you to justify your claim. If you can, I might accept it into my personal collection of truths, it becomes part of my perspective.
We cannot throw justification out the window, because it is the means by which we broaden our perspectives. Things which you have observed, learned, and believe may be passed to me, through justification. Justification is the means by which we aspire toward knowing the "whole picture", rather than just a unique perspective. This is the process of unity by which we create a world view.
Or perhaps justification is merely the structure of argumentation that uses and relies on these various groundings. No matter, in every case justification bestows nothing of added significance. If some proposition is accepted as proven, then to say it's justified means - adds - nothing.
Yes, that's kind of how I view justification. Butit's much more than just argumentation, it's the whole process of discussing, arguing, and coming to agreement, on how we should use words, etc.. The point in adding to the discussion, this concept of justification, is to distinguish between true and justified. Propositions are not often "proven", they are offered for one reason or another, for a purpose, for the sake of argument for example. You might say that the one offering a proposition might seek to "prove" it through demonstration, perhaps offering proofs. If the proposition is accepted, we can say that it has been justified, but this does not necessarily mean that it has been "proven". The proposition is accepted because it has been demonstrated to be adequate for the intended purpose. This does not mean that it has been "proven" in the sense of having been demonstrated to be true.
You seem to suggest that, although we may agree this object is a blue chair, we could be mistaken - the proposition, "This is a blue chair," could be false. The short answer is, so what?! If the ultimate collective judgment is that it's a blue chair, then mere doubt or skepticism is out of court. Everyone is free to question and investigate in an appropriately responsible way all day long. But mere ungrounded contrariness is a short road to chaos.
What you express here is not philosophical thought. The accepted "collective judgement" is often wrong, as demonstrated by concepts like geocentrism, and spontaneous generation, to name a couple. You offer the standard argument against skepticism, insinuating that one should only doubt the aspects of collective judgement which are wrong, because to doubt everything would be a waste of time. The problem is, that the aspects which are wrong, are not exposed as wrong, until after they are subjected to the skeptic's tools of doubt. Therefore the skeptic must doubt everything or else the skepticism is not very meaningful.
it appears here that you concede dialectic truth but reserve truth itself as something that apparently cannot be known, about things at any rate. The idea of truths that cannot be known I'm inclined to denominate nonsense. Perhaps you can adduce an example of one, and I do not mean by conjecture or speculation. As to non-things like mathematical entities, i assume you acknowledge that certain propositions about same are true, and draw on the truth of their subject matter.
I don't know what you mean by "dialectic truth". I was only emphasizing the difference between justified and true. I have difficulty with the entire paragraph.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 16, 2017 at 01:43#871720 likes
Reply to creativesoul
You can shout indignities all you want, but the point remains. You haven't explained how you think something could be wrong without having been judged as such.
The truth value of the sentence (A), is dependent on the truth conditions of the statement (B)
Actually no, I don't think this is true, and it doesn't follow from my definition of 'truth' (or of truth conditions). Let me explain.
Recall that I defined 'truth' as the obtaining of a truth condition (e.g. 'cats fly' is true (=has the truth value of "true") just in case its truth conditions obtain). So this means that for a sentence to have a truth value (like "true") all you need is for some truth condition to obtain.
But what does it mean for a sentence to have truth conditions? Well it is something that is relative to a language. So in English, the sentence 'cats fly' express one particular set of truth conditions, but it could've been otherwise (if English had a different history, for example if 'cat' meant what 'dog' means in our English, then 'cats fly' would have different truth conditions in that hypothetical English).
So let's imagine a world where 'cats fly' doesn't have any truth conditions, and that would be a world where English doesn't exist, or any other language (suppose that there are no humans in that world). But now, can the sentence 'cats fly' have a truth value in that world? It seems to me that it can. If cats fly in that world, then the sentence is true in that world, and if they don't then it would be false. So here you have a world where a sentence doesn't have truth conditions but has a truth value. So truth values don't depend on truth conditions, and hence they cannot depended on interpretation either, as you claimed (I take it that if A can exist without B, then it proves that A is not dependent on B (at least logically), and I hope that you would agree).
To be "wrong" is to be discordant in relation to some principle, rule, or law. That something is in disagreement with such a principle, requires a comparison of the thing with the principle, and a judgement.
You've defined here "wrong" as something requiring judgment, but this simply begs the question against someone who doesn't hold your view. If you have a rule that specifies that such and such application of the rule will count as correct, then the application is going to be correct only if it is in fact correct, and that has nothing to do with judgment. You cannot just by stipulation rule out an objective understanding of rules. That's not an argument.
So you yourself defined "wrong" as something that is independent of judgment...
When one uses symbols to represent thought (as is done in logic), one loses the essence of thought and action as a continuous whole. The judgement and utterance of that judgement it's a single unitary event or process. They cannot be made into separate entities. And if one follows the complete process, the understanding of this judgement/utterance by an another observer as well as by the subject of the utterance now also becomes entangled in the same way creating a continuous process engulfing a greater number of participants.
In this manner and description, it is not possible to separate the source from that what the source created, i.e the judgment and symbolic utterance. In order to comprehend this framework it is first necessary to penetrate the continuous flow of nature and jettison symbolic representations as adequate descriptions.
In a prior thread, I suggested that discrete symbolism of any sort it's not only inadequate, it will yield an upside down view if nature.
You can shout indignities all you want, but the point remains. You haven't explained how you think something could be wrong without having been judged as such.
What are you talking about?
The debate between us was about existential dependence. You were asserting that meaning is existentially contingent(dependent) upon interpretation. I argued otherwise.
I've already given the argument for that. You've neglected to address it head on.
Talking about how something could be wrong only serves to further obfuscate the underlying issue. There are all sorts of way to be wrong. Mistaken interpretation(misunderstanding another's language use) is the one that matters here.
Truth depends upon interpretation.
Interpretation is subjective
Truth is subjective
That was one argument that I, and others since, have refuted.
I've argued several things here that refute your claims, none of which you've gotten right in your objections to them. Most of the time your rejoinders have suffered from a failure to properly quantify. In other words, you've been arguing that all this depends on that... when it is only some.
That my friend is the underlying issue of which nearly everyone here suffers from not taking into consideration...
All A's are B. All B's require C. All A's require C.
That is the general outline of argument here. It suffers in scope as a result of improper quantification practice. Here's what I mean by that:
For argument's and understandings' sake, let's first assume that not all A's are B. The scope changes remarkably...
Some A's are B. All B's require C. Some A's require C.
Let's further assume that not all B's require C. The scope, again, changes remarkably...
All A's are B. Some B's require C.... nothing further can be said about A's unless it is the case that all of the B's that require C are A's.
Or...
Some A's are B. Some B's require C... nothing further can be said here either unless it is the case that all of the B's that require C are A's and that that group of A's exhausts all of the A's that are B's.
I'm inclined to agree with the parts regarding what is lost when translating thought/belief into logic. Simply put, logic presupposes truth as correspondence by virtue of presupposing the truth of it's premisses. Furthermore, it is quite misleading to then call a valid conclusion "true" as a result of it's being valid. Validity is insufficient for truth. The examples of this are numerous, and obvious to those reasonably well versed.
On a related matter, it is often the case that thought/belief is represented in terms of "belief that" or "belief in". Now, I would gladly agree to the distinction between the two, however, when we then continue on to represent all statements of belief in terms of "belief that" we must be very careful to not take that process too far, as Witt and many many others have done and continue to do.
There's the notion that any and all belief is statable in terms of "belief that". However, that is to relegate all thought/belief in metacognitive terms. Thought/belief is not the same thing as thinking about thought/belief. The latter is existentially contingent upon the former, not the other way around.
Metacognition(thinking about thought/belief) requires language. Thought/belief does not. Language requires shared meaning. Thought/belief does not. Shared meaning requires thought/belief.
Getting pre/non linguistic thought/belief right is imperative, absolutely crucial, to understanding everything that has ever been written and/or spoken. Including, but not limited to, the operative role that meaning and truth plays in all of it.
Reply to creativesoulReply to creativesoul Thank you for sharing your ideas. It b is always interesting for me penetrate deeper into the process of thoughts and conveyance thereof. As a person who is studying arts, I find that the nature of thought changes (less language oriented, more image oriented) as new skills are.developed. in addition for many artists the emphasis might be more on creativity and less on rationality as they express their nature (some thought is involved but not necessarily). Thus, I observe that describing the nature of thought can be quite challenging at times.
Reply to Fafner
Here's a different example of flying to consider.
In Toy Story, Buzz claims that he can fly, and Woody claims that Buzz cannot. When Buzz performs an action A he believes will count as evidence that indeed he can fly, Woody responds, "That wasn't flying! That was -- falling with style." (Thank you, Joss Whedon.)
Woody's statement could be taken as: That's not what we mean by "flying." As it turns out, although Woody does not yet know this, Buzz and Woody have the same understanding of the word "flying"; neither do they disagree on how to apply the word "flying." That they disagree about whether action A counts as flying is not down to a disagreement in usage; Buzz has a mistaken belief about what action A was. Buzz's epiphany later in the film is not, "I have been misusing the word 'flying,'" even though that is also true: he has been applying it to actions that are not examples of flying. But he has been applying it correctly, and as Woody would, relative to his beliefs; it's his beliefs that were mistaken.
Reply to Srap Tasmaner I don't quite understand what your example is supposed to show. 'Cats fly' was just a stupid random sentence that I chose for no particular reason, and therefore I don't pretend to have a complete analysis of the concept 'fly' (or anything of that sort) to be able to handle every possible sort of example.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 16, 2017 at 19:42#873940 likes
One forms a mistaken interpretation when s/he mistakenly attributes meaning. That is... when one attributes meaning where none belongs... s/he is mistaken; s/he has misunderstood. S/he thinks/believes that something means something other than it does.
To be "wrong" is to be discordant in relation to some principle, rule, or law. That something is in disagreement with such a principle, requires a comparison of the thing with the principle, and a judgement.
The issue at hand is the question of whether an interpretation can be wrong (mistaken) without having been judged as that. You claimed that when one attributes meaning where none belongs, this is a mistake. I claimed that if the person perceives meaning there, then there is meaning there. That this is a mistake is only determined through a further judgement. You seem to think that an interpretation can be inherently mistaken (wrong) without being judged to be wrong.
Indeed. The 'nature' of thought is a difficult topic. Any such notion would need to be able to effectively explain/exhaust all of the different senses(uses) of the term "thought". One issue that arises is the use of the term "thought" as a means to describe active consideration; the 'act' so to speak, rather than what the act consists in/of. Thinking about something or other is re-cognition - 'revisiting' pre-existing thought/belief.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 16, 2017 at 20:02#874070 likes
All A's are B. All B's require C. All A's require C.
This is not a representation of my argument at all. As I explained to Fafner, I only argue contingencies, no predication. I do not say all A's are B's. I say A's are dependent on B's, and B's are dependent on C's, therefore A's are dependent on C's. A= the truth value of the sentence, B= the truth conditions of the sentence, and C= interpretation by the mind of a subject. I conclude that truth is derived from, or "of the subject", and cannot be any part of a supposed independent objective reality.
Furthermore, in our latest round of discussion, we've moved on to the issue of A, the truth value of the sentence. As I've been arguing now, this is an issue which itself requires a judgement. Since the mind of a subject is the only thing (other than God) which might make such a judgement, the subjective nature ("of the subject") is reinforced by this fact. And it becomes increasingly evident that truth cannot be a part of any independent objective reality (unless we assume God or some other mind to make that judgement).
So we can conclude that the mind of a subject is required for truth in two distinct aspects, first to interpret the sentence, and second, to judge the truth value.
Fair enough. Let's revisit your argument as you've clarified...
You wrote:
A's are dependent on B's
B's are dependent on C's
A's are dependent on C's.
A= the truth value of the sentence, B= the truth conditions of the sentence, and C= interpretation by the mind of a subject. I conclude that truth is derived from, or "of the subject", and cannot be any part of a supposed independent objective reality.
Truth value is not truth. Truth conditions are not truth. The conclusion introduces new terms, and as such it is invalid.
In addition, you've restricted the scope to statements of thought/belief. That is... you've restricted truth to language. Big mistake. Common... nonetheless.
The issue at hand is the question of whether an interpretation can be wrong (mistaken) without having been judged as that. You claimed that when one attributes meaning where none belongs, this is a mistake. I claimed that if the person perceives meaning there, then there is meaning there. That this is a mistake is only determined through a further judgement. You seem to think that an interpretation can be inherently mistaken (wrong) without being judged to be wrong.
You're introducing all sorts of new terms... unnecessarily so.
You're conflating being mistaken with being and/or becoming aware of that.
Truth value is not truth. Truth conditions are not truth. The conclusion introduces new terms, and as such it is invalid.
I introduced these terms because the word 'truth' itself is ambiguous (for example, it is not clear to what things it applies). So talking about truth in terms of truth values of sentences instead (and defining their meaning in term of truth conditions) gives us something more concrete to discuss.
Talking about truth in terms of truth values is fine as long as it is done with quite a bit of discipline. Strictly speaking, truth value is a measure of coherency/validity. Truth conditions, when referring to truth tables, measures the same...
Reply to creativesoul Logic has nothing to do with coherency either (though I'm not really sure what you even mean by that term - it can mean different things in philosophy).
Reply to creativesoul In any case, in logic (and philosophy of language in general), a truth value is simply an assignment of "true" or "false" to a sentence. So "Trump is the president of the US" has the truth value "true" while "Obama is the president" has the truth value "false". So talk about truth values simply means that sentences can be either true or false.
The rules of correct inference. Consistency. Coherency. Validity.
Consistency, Coherency and Validity are three different things. Logic indeed deals with consistency and validity, but coherency is an epistemic term, so it is unrelated to logic (unless of course you use it to mean "consistency"). But anyway, truth values are not defined either through coherency or consistency.
I'm ok with that. Just trying to be as clear as possible. Let's go from there then...
So, for our purposes here, a truth value is an assignment of "true" or "false" to a sentence. Again, I would only point out that truth value is not truth.
There's a difference between being true/false and being called so.
There's a difference between being true/false and being called so.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this.
Anyway, you are free to define truth in your own way. I don't claim that my definition is the only 'right' one, only that it suits my particular purpose.
I am quite curious to see an example of a valid conclusion that is either inconsistent or incoherent. Likewise, I am also quite curious to see an example of an invalid conclusion that is either coherent or consistent.
Someone can say that "X" is true when it is not. Being called "true" does not make something so.
Ok, maybe 'assignment' was a misleading choice of words. I didn't mean to say that sentences are made true by calling them so. I simply meant that a sentence has the truth value "true" simply if it is true (and "false" if false).
In logic of course you can assign truth values when you are dealing with P's and Q's etc.
I am quite curious to see an example of a valid conclusion that is either inconsistent or incoherent. Likewise, I am also quite curious to see an example of an invalid conclusion that is either coherent or consistent.
Granted, coherency is usually defined through consistency, but it doesn't show that they are the same thing. It is just a terminological point about common philosophical usage, you are free of course to use "coherency" as equivalent with "consistency".
Though I would insist that validity and consistency mean different things in logic. Validity only applies to arguments, while consistency (or inconsistency) applies to any arbitrary bunch of sentences. Not everything that is consistent is valid (but the converse is true).
1. Cats fly.
2. Therefore, today is Sunday.
The two propositions are consistent (they don't contradict each other), but they don't form a valid argument together.
Reply to Fafner
Quine's attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction goes like this: we all agree that what makes a statement true is in part a matter of what the words mean, and in part a matter of the way the world is, so we think we can separate those, but it turns out that's easier said than done. That's the argument anyway.
It seemed to me the point you & @Metaphysician Undercover had reached was related, in trying to link or unlink meaning, interpretation, truth conditions, and truth value. I thought it might be helpful to look at an actual utterance where there is a contrast between two subjects, and then decide whether that contrast turned out to be differences in word usage or something else.
Reply to Srap Tasmaner I agree. If we take Quine's argument seriously, it does complicate the story considerably. In particular, Quine would reject the idea that we can just fix the meaning of a sentence in isolation, because he thought that meaning only applies to large networks of sentences or theories (this is the meaning holism part).
But I think I can allow myself to ignore this for the purpose of my argument with MU (and anyway, I think that truth conditional semantics is consistent with meaning holism - after all, this was the view of his greatest student Davidson).
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 16, 2017 at 21:57#874750 likes
Truth value is not truth. Truth conditions are not truth. The conclusion introduces new terms, and as such it is invalid.
Actually, I was working off of Fafner's definition of "truth". Fafner defined "truth" as when the truth conditions expressed by a sentence, obtain. My argument was that truth, as defined, is dependent on there being truth conditions of the sentence, and this is dependent on interpretation, therefore truth is dependent on interpretation. Then Fafner changed the terms, to talk about "truth value", claiming that a truth value was not dependent on interpretation, so I adjusted my argument to deal with that new terminology.
If you think that you have a definition of "truth" which does not succumb to this argument, then by all means, present it.
You're conflating being mistaken with being and/or becoming aware of that.
That's not so, because someone can judge you as being mistaken whether or not you are aware of it. This does not change the fact, which I am trying to impress upon you, that being mistaken requires a judgement.
I thought it might be helpful to look at an actual utterance where there is a contrast between two subjects, and then decide whether that contrast turned out to be differences in word usage or something else.
Reply to creativesoul It doesn't, it is just to give a name to something, so that anyone could immediately understand what exactly is being discussed (because as I said, just talking abut 'truth' is ambiguous, and sometimes there's a need for more precise distinctions).
Thought/belief is prior to language.
Some pre-linguistic thought/belief is true.
True thought/belief is existentially contingent upon truth.
Thus, some truth is prior to language.
But what does it mean for a sentence to have truth conditions? Well it is something that is relative to a language. So in English, the sentence 'cats fly' express one particular set of truth conditions, but it could've been otherwise (if English had a different history, for example if 'cat' meant what 'dog' means in our English, then 'cats fly' would have different truth conditions in that hypothetical English).
So let's imagine a world where 'cats fly' doesn't have any truth conditions, and that would be a world where English doesn't exist, or any other language (suppose that there are no humans in that world). But now, can the sentence 'cats fly' have a truth value in that world? It seems to me that it can. If cats fly in that world, then the sentence is true in that world, and if they don't then it would be false. So here you have a world where a sentence doesn't have truth conditions but has a truth value. So truth values don't depend on truth conditions, and hence they cannot depended on interpretation either
This is the part I was looking at.
It looks like you're defining truth as satisfaction: "cats fly" is true in that world iff there is something in that world that is a cat and flies. You're effectively taking triples of as what has truth conditions. It's completely irrelevant whether the language is spoken in the world, or the sentence is ever uttered in the world.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 17, 2017 at 00:23#875250 likes
Truth is dependent on meaning, and meaning is dependent on interpretation, therefore truth is dependent on interpretation.
That is the original argument you offered.
Again, you've offered a dreadful representation of my argument. You even added quotations as if it's what I actually wrote. Here's what I actually wrote:
Being true requires being meaningful. Whether or not the statement is meaningful is contingent on interpretation. Therefore being true is contingent on interpretation.
This was in response to your affirmation that being meaningful is required for the truth of a statement:
That something which is not meaningful could be true, is contrary to what you said earlier. So this new position of yours, "not all truth is dependent on meaning", is something you'll need to clarify. Obviously, we had agreement earlier that meaning is required for the truth of a statement. A sentence which is meaningless cannot be true. Are you rescinding your agreement?
I think I understand what you're trying to get at. You think that there is truth to things other than statements, and this truth does not require meaningfulness. How is this possible, that there could be truth to something which is not meaningful? If you come to respect the reality, that this is not a viable option, then we're back at my argument. For something to be meaningful requires that it is interpreted as such, and therefore truth requires interpretation.
The underlying issue here is clear. You've neglected to take an account of pre and/or non-linguistic thought/belief.
I don't see how non-linguistic thought/belief affects my argument. The truth of non-linguistic thought/belief is still dependent on interpretation even if you define "meaning" in such a way that only language has meaning, and insist that things without meaning could be true. Things other than language are interpreted.
Thought/belief is prior to language.
Some pre-linguistic thought/belief is true.
True thought/belief is existentially contingent upon truth.
Thus, some truth is prior to language.
Well, I really don't know what you mean by "true thought/belief is existentially contingent on truth", or how you could apprehend this as a true premise. What is truth other than a concept? Are you claiming here, that if there is a true belief, then there must be an existing concept of "truth"? How is that a viable premise? If there was green plants on the earth prior to human beings, then the concept of "green" must have existed prior to human beings?
Let's say that there was green plants prior to language, why would these green plants be existentially contingent on the concept of greenness? Likewise, if there was true thought/belief prior to language, why would this be existentially contingent on truth (trueness)?
Reply to Metaphysician Undercover I've changed my mind about some things that I said in my latest reply to you. I want to argue instead for something simpler.
I'm ready to grant you your main claim, viz. that truth (in the sense of sentences having a truth value) is dependent on subjects in your sense. However, I want to reiterate something I already said, and that your argument doesn't prove a lot, because of the way that you've defined subjectivity. After all, your argument only proves that truth is dependent on subjects, but it doesn't prove that truth is dependent only on subjects. It is still possible that truth is dependent both on subjects and the objective reality, in which case sentences would be objectively true despite the dependence of this fact itself on subjective interpretation (and in my sense "objectively true" means dependent on the subject-independent reality).
In other words, proving that truth depends on subjects is not the same as proving that there's no objective truth. And this is for the simple reason that something can both depend on subjects and depend on the objective world (there's no logical inconsistency in this). So even if your argument is sound (and I grant you that), you still need to work harder to prove what you want to prove (that sentences cannot be objectively true).
I think the question, still, is whether truth is a semantic notion.
Hmmmmm....
This is a good question. In some sense yes, if you analyze the meaning of sentences via truth (that is, truth conditions). But there's a sense in which it isn't, but I find it difficult to spell this out. I'll have to think this over.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 17, 2017 at 02:07#875700 likes
It is still possible that truth is dependent both on subjects and the objective reality, in which case sentences would be objectively true despite the dependence of this fact itself on subjective interpretation (and in my sense "objectively true" means dependent on the subject-independent reality).
I believe that this position, that truth is dependent on both a subject, and on an objective reality, is a common one. It excludes the extreme realist position, which doesn't require subjects for truth, but still assumes an objective reality independent of human existence. This position would allow that truth is a property of knowledge, and even that truth is exclusively found in knowledge because it recognizes the role of the subject in truth, and the subject's role in knowledge is evident and compatible with this.
The issue which arises is the nature of the assumed independent objective reality. Are you acquainted with Kant's claims concerning the distinction between phenomena and noumena? How the assumed objective reality appears to us, is what he calls phenomena, and this is what our knowledge is based in. This is what I call one's interpretation of the objective reality, what is produced by one's senses, and brain, and is how the objective reality appears to the individual. I call that interpretation. When a sentence is said to be "objectively true", the interpretation of the sentence is judged as corresponding with the interpretation of the objective reality (how the objective reality appears to us). So we cannot say that the sentence is "objectively true", in the sense of implying that the meaning of the sentence actually corresponds with the assumed objective reality, but that it corresponds with how the objective reality appears to us, our interpretation of it.
In other words, proving that truth depends on subjects is not the same as proving that there's no objective truth.
According to what I just argued, the real object, the thing in itself, the objective reality does not play a part in what you call "objective truth". There is the interpretation of the sentence, carried out by the subject, and the interpretation of the objective reality (how the objective reality appears), carried out by the subject, and the judgement of "true", carried out by the subject. So every aspect of truth is subjective as I defined it. We have no objectivity here.
Now, there is still the assumption of an objective reality, which must be dealt with. Where this assumption plays a role in truth, and it is a pivotal role, is in the trust and faith that we have in ourselves. We have faith, and trust, that our human bodies are giving us an interpretation of the objective reality which is an accurate interpretation. That is to say that we believe that the way that the objective reality appears to us, is a fair representation of how the objective reality actually is. Also, we trust that we have provided ourselves with a proper interpretation of the sentence.
This trust which we have in ourselves, trust in our own capacities, is crucial to truth. It is crucial because we do not define truth as a correspondence between the meaning of the sentence and how the world appears to us, but we define it more as you say, as correspondence between the sentence and the objective reality. So there are two forms of trust in our own capacities, which are involved with truth. We trust our capacity to interpret the sentence, and we trust our capacity to make the objective reality (through sensation and apprehension) appear as it really is. Therefore we define true as "the sentence corresponds with reality", when we really mean that the interpretation of the sentence corresponds with how reality appears to us. That we have interpreted the sentence properly, and that reality appears as it really is, we tend to take for granted because we have confidence, "trust" in our own capacities. This trust, or confidence, is implied within the concept of truth, because without this assumed correspondence between the interpretation and the reality, truth is meaningless.
That argument was yours Meta. I actually clicked on your avatar and scrolled through your comments to find it. Anyone else could do the same, assuming you've not changed it in the meantime. It's back on page 15, about halfway down the page.
:-}
For you to call it "a dreadful representation of your argument" is a bit self-contradictory, to say the least...
Thought/belief is prior to language.
Some pre-linguistic thought/belief is true.
True thought/belief is existentially contingent upon truth.
Thus, some truth is prior to language.
All thought and belief, not reflexive cognitive reaction, is informed by and shaped in language.
There is no pre-linguistic thought/belief that is true, or any actual pre-linguistic thought belief at all.
True thought/belief is existentially contingent upon accurate observation or true as determined by linguistic discourses, not any metaphysical "Truth."
Thus no Truth is prior to language, only the material world as it is prior to observation.
Reply to Fafner
Here's one thing that's curious: "true" takes that-clauses like the propositional attitudes, modal operators, all that intensional stuff. But "true" remains transparent in just the way the other that-clause governors don't. Example:
It's interesting that the number of planets in our solar system is less than 9; there are 8 planets in our solar system; but it is not interesting that 8 is less than 9.
It's true that the number of planets in our solar system is less than 9; there are 8 planets in our solar system; and it is true that 8 is less than 9.
The only other expression I can think of that takes that-clauses and is transparent is "fact."
All thought and belief, not reflexive cognitive reaction, is informed by and shaped in language. There is no pre-linguistic thought/belief that is true, or any actual pre-linguistic thought belief at all.
There's the rub, yes?
We work from conflicting notions of what exactly counts as thought/belief. You're arguing by definitional fiat, it seems. It follows from what you say here that no creature without language forms and/or holds thought/belief. I disagree.
All statements of thought/belief consist in/of predication. All predication is correlation. Not all correlation is predication. All correlation is thought/belief.
Reply to creativesoul We reconcile the difference by defining what you mean by human thought. As of now you equate it with animal thought. I, on the other hand, see similarities but do not equate them.
All thought/belief consists entirely in/of mental correlations drawn 'between' 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or oneself(the creature's state of 'mind').
That holds good for humans and other beasties alike.
All thought/belief consists entirely in/of mental correlations drawn 'between' 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or oneself(the creature's state of 'mind').
That holds good for humans and other beasties alike.
No, all thought/belief consists of contemplation and conception of mental correlations drawn between objects of physiological sensory perception and/or oneself. Using your definition, ants attacking other ants or snakes striking rats would be thinking like humans, they're not.
So, the same does not apply to humans and beasties alike.
That doesn't make much sense to me sand. What is contemplation and conception if not mental correlation? They're typically more complex than simple correlation, but nonetheless they consist in/of mental correlation(s).
Nothing in that definition supports the idea that ants and rats would be thinking like humans. The difference between human and beastie is one of complexity, both of the correlations and states of mind, not of elemental constituents.
That doesn't make much sense to me sand. What is contemplation and conception if not mental correlation? They're typically more complex than simple correlation, but nonetheless they consist in/of mental correlation(s).
It makes perfect sense, Creative. Mental correlation is the mere attaching objects to other objects such as the snake seeing a rat and correlating it with food and its feeling of hunger. (So, yes, your definition does support the idea that rats and ants would think like humans, since you claim that is all there is to thought). There is no conception of what that means or any contemplation over whether or not it is right and wrong to eat that rat. Human contemplation and conception has the ability to move beyond that simple correlation and think about (contemplate/conceive) what is happening, decide its meaning to the world and themselves, and even give an ethical judgment of it. Rats and snakes and ants depending solely on what you define as thought cannot do that.
The difference between human and beastie is one of complexity, both of the correlations and states of mind, not of elemental constituents.
No, as I've shown above, it's more than a matter of complexity, its a matter of elemental constituents of thought the beasties don't have and the humans do.
That something which is not meaningful could be true, is contrary to what you said earlier. So this new position of yours, "not all truth is dependent on meaning", is something you'll need to clarify. Obviously, we had agreement earlier that meaning is required for the truth of a statement. A sentence which is meaningless cannot be true. Are you rescinding your agreement?
Not all correspondence(truth) is dependent upon meaning. That was the claim. I stand by it. I also stand by the agreement that meaning is required for a statement's correspondence(truth). Those two claims are not contradictory. Furthermore, I stand by the claim that not all meaning depends on interpretation.
You wrote:
I don't see how non-linguistic thought/belief affects my argument...
Non-linguistic thought/belief doesn't consist of language. Your argument concerns only that which does. That's how...
You wrote:
Well, I really don't know what you mean by "true thought/belief is existentially contingent on truth"...
That is a matter of logic Meta. Whenever there is true thought/belief there must be truth.
You wrote:
What is truth other than a concept?
Correspondence is a relationship that is necessarily presupposed within all thought/belief formation itself. All concepts consist of thought/belief. All concepts presuppose correspondence.
Truth is correspondence.
You wrote:
Are you claiming here, that if there is a true belief, then there must be an existing concept of "truth"? How is that a viable premise? If there was green plants on the earth prior to human beings, then the concept of "green" must have existed prior to human beings?
Let's say that there was green plants prior to language, why would these green plants be existentially contingent on the concept of greenness? Likewise, if there was true thought/belief prior to language, why would this be existentially contingent on truth (trueness)?
Conceptions of "truth" require language. Correspondence does not.
What is contemplation and conception if not mental correlation? They're typically more complex than simple correlation, but nonetheless they consist in/of mental correlation(s). The difference between human and beastie is one of complexity, both of the correlations and states of mind, not of elemental constituents.
You replied:
Mental correlation is the mere attaching objects to other objects such as the snake seeing a rat and correlating it with food and its feeling of hunger. (So, yes, your definition does support the idea that rats and ants would think like humans, since you claim that is all there is to thought). There is no conception of what that means or any contemplation over whether or not it is right and wrong to eat that rat.
I would concur, aside from the bit in parenthesis.
Human contemplation and conception has the ability to move beyond that simple correlation and think about (contemplate/conceive) what is happening, decide its meaning to the world and themselves, and even give an ethical judgment of it. Rats and snakes and ants depending solely on what you define as thought cannot do that.
Again, I would concur.
You then continued:
...as I've shown above, it's more than a matter of complexity, its a matter of elemental constituents of thought the beasties don't have and the humans do.
Here's where the issue lies, as far as I can surmise.
On my view, contemplation and conception are comprised entirely of much simpler correlations. In other words, contemplation and conception are complex correlations.
I wouldn't say "ants and snakes think like humans." I would say that all thought/belief consists entirely in/of mental correlations drawn between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or oneself(state of 'mind').
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 17, 2017 at 11:07#876500 likes
I take it that true nails down the particulars of the particular. What does truth do? .
I believe it is as I said to creativesoul, truth is the universal, the concept of what it means to be true. So for example, we have individual green things, like we have individual true statements, and we have the concept of what it means to be green, greenness, like we have the concept of what it means to be true, "truth".
When one argues for an independent truth, they are arguing platonic realism.
Non-linguistic thought/belief doesn't consist of language. Your argument concerns only that which does. That's how...
That my argument only concerns language, is only true if you define "meaningful" in such a way that only language is meaningful. But that's simply begging the question with a false premise. Many things other than language are meaningful, and false premises produce false conclusions.
That is a matter of logic Meta. Whenever there is true thought/belief there must be truth.
You mean a matter of logical fallacy don't you? As I said, truth is the concept of what it means to be true, "the quality or state of being true". Wherever there is something green, is there necessarily the concept of greenness?
Correspondence is a relationship that is necessarily presupposed within all thought/belief formation itself
Simply put, if truth=correspondence as your definition indicates, and there is correspondence within all thought/belief formation, then there is truth within all thought/belief. For the sake of argument, I will assume that this is the case. That is completely consistent with my claim that truth is subjective (of the subject). How would you proceed to get truth out of the subject's mind, to make it objective? Your argument only allows that truth is a part of thought/belief formation, it is something presupposed by the thinking subject, therefore within the mind of the subject.
Conceptions of "truth" require language. Correspondence does not.
But "Truth is correspondence" is a conception of truth. An instance of something corresponding is an instance of something being true, it is not truth itself. Correspondence is truth, but correspondence is the concept of what it means to correspond, so you have equated one concept with the other, "correspondence", and "truth".
On my view, contemplation and conception are comprised entirely of much simpler correlations. In other words, contemplation and conception are complex correlations.
It seems you disagree?
Firstly, it's good we have come to some agreement; that is always value in itself. However, there are two problems with your seeing contemplation as merely correlations, albeit complex ones, between objects:
1. Contemplation means profound thought, and profound thought is always thought beyond mere correlation; it is drawing meaning from those correlations and moving into concepts.
2. Human contemplation goes way beyond correlation of objects, which is as far as animals can go. For example, in the following sentence--"We Americans need to defeat the Nazis before they spread their evil they showed in the Holocaust and fully destroy freedom"--we see concepts expounding on and moving beyond mere objects. "We" are no longer just the objects in a group, they are defined by the concept of nationhood: not an object. The same goes with the ideological concepts of evil and freedom, which have no clear object correspondent; they are concepts that have moved beyond them. And we haven't even discussed the lingusistic dynamics giving all these words meaning beyond their object correspondents.
So, human contemplation is not just complex correlations of objects; it is a mode of thinking above it.
When a sentence is said to be "objectively true", the interpretation of the sentence is judged as corresponding with the interpretation of the objective reality (how the objective reality appears to us). So we cannot say that the sentence is "objectively true", in the sense of implying that the meaning of the sentence actually corresponds with the assumed objective reality, but that it corresponds with how the objective reality appears to us, our interpretation of it.
I have a lot to say about this, but it will suffice for now just to note that nothing in what you said (in this quote or in the rest of your post) proves that our 'interpretations' of reality (whatever that means) don't actually correspond with the reality which they interpret. The most that it can show is that we do not know whether out interpretations correspond with reality, but it doesn't prove that they in fact do not.
This means that if our 'interpretations' of reality happen to be the correct ones, and they 'correspond' to our interpretations of sentences, then it is perfectly possible that our sentences are objectively true (correctly represent reality). And nothing that you said proves that this is not the case.
Compare this with the case of believing something you don't know. I believe that somewhere in the universe there's intelligent extraterrestrial life. Now, I do not know whether it exists, but it doesn't prove that if I say "intelligent extraterrestrial life exist" that I said something false, because it might very well be true for all that I know. Ignorance doesn't prove anything about the objectivity of what you are ignorant about.
Here's one thing that's curious: "true" takes that-clauses like the propositional attitudes, modal operators, all that intensional stuff. But "true" remains transparent in just the way the other that-clause governors don't.
This is because, as Frege already noted, adding 'true' to a sentence doesn't change its meaning, and in fact adds nothing over and above what you get when you simply assert the sentence. "Snow is white" and "it is true that snow is white" mean exactly the same thing.
This is because, as Frege already noted, adding 'true' to a sentence doesn't change its meaning, and in fact adds nothing over and above what you get when you simply assert the sentence. "Snow is white" and "it is true that snow is white" mean exactly the same thing.
Do "it is true that snow is white" and "'snow is white' is true" mean the same thing?
Do "it is true that snow is white" and "'snow is white' is true" mean the same thing?
As far as their truth conditions are concerned, yes. The two sentence are true or false in exactly the same circumstances, so therefore they assert the very same thing about the world.
This is because, as Frege already noted, adding 'true' to a sentence doesn't change its meaning, and in fact adds nothing over and above what you get when you simply assert the sentence.
1. You can assert the equivalence in truth-value of "P" and "P is true," but if you want to explain meaning in terms of truth conditions, then you cannot treat that equivalence as an account of truth (i.e., the redundancy theory). You just have to be careful here.
2. What I was thinking was something like this: start with a statement S that you treat as purely extensional in the usual way; most ways of making a new sentence S' out of S by prefacing it with something that governs "that S" change the S part of S' from extensional to intensional -- you lose substitution salva veritate. "I think that," "It is known that," "You believe that," and so on, all do this; but "It is true that," and "It is a fact that" don't effect such a change. (Modal operators are also intensional if you don't have possible worlds.)
That suggests that ordinary language treats truth as a purely extensional notion, unlike belief, judgment, etc. There are at least two ways to take that: maybe ordinary language is on the right track, and there is a fundamental difference here; or maybe ordinary language is misleading and that's why it can be so hard to make sense of truth (and facts). (Frege entrenches the extensional view of truth in an obvious way, and it is further entrenched by Tarski, etc.)
1. You can assert the equivalence in truth-value of "P" and "P is true," but if you want to explain meaning in terms of truth conditions, then you cannot treat that equivalence as an account of truth (i.e., the redundancy theory). You just have to be careful here.
What I said doesn't amount to a redundancy theory though. I was just repeating something that Frege himself said, and surely Frege wasn't a 'redundancy' theorist (or deflationist, or however you call it).
And btw, you don't have to use the predicate 'true' to talk about truth conditions either.
most ways of making a new sentence S' out of S by prefacing it with something that governs "that S" change the S part of S' from extensional to intensional -- you lose substitution salva veritate.
It is more complicated than this (because you also have de-dicto and de-re interpretations etc.).
or maybe ordinary language is misleading and that's why it can be so hard to make sense of truth (and facts).
I'm not quite sure what you have in mind here, because it doesn't really makes sense to speak about truth intensionally (if by 'intensional' you mean expressions not being substitutable salva veritate). After all substitution salva veritate simply means the preservation of truth (literally), and of course the prefix 'true' is going to preserve truth no matter what. If 'P' is true then obviously 'it is true that P' must be true as well - it is a kind of a tautology really.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 18, 2017 at 02:00#878030 likes
As to giving and taking, you seem to say truth really just collapses into true. Seem to. What you really say is that truth "is the "concept of what it means to be true." Just like the concept of what it means to be green.
I wouldn't say that truth collapses into true, because there is a distinction to be made, between the particular instance, something which is true, and the generalization, truth. I admit, that there is a very difficult task to separate these two, especially if we adhere to the principles which I've been insisting on, because both the particular, and the general, are produced by the minds of the subject, so it is quite difficult to avoid category error.
Concept of what it means? Where and how does "concept of what it means" come to ground? What does it mean?
Had you said "truth" is just the generalization of true, akin to "green" as a generalization of greenness in green things, then no problems here. But as you have expressed it, I can't figure it out. No doubt a failure on my part. Would you craft an edit for greater precision?
Remember when I described justification. In my opinion, this is how we get objective concepts, objective knowledge, trough agreement amongst us. This is what is accepted as right, correct. It is objective in the sense of "inter-subjective", so it is not a true objectivity in the sense of "of the object", independent of the subject. It is created by a unification of subjects through communication, and I call this justification because it comes about through the demonstration of what is believed to be the correct way to use words. A concept may come into existence and evolve, as the correct way of using words evolves, and this process is a justification of that usage which is accepted as the correct usage. This is contrary to platonic realism, which places concepts as independent of subjects, making them more truly objective, in the sense of "of the object", resulting in the need to assume eternal concepts or ideas.
So I don't see any immediate difference between "concept of what it means to be true", and "generalization of true". Both seem to express the same thing. But what we refer to as "the concept", or "the generalization", is really the accepted use of the word. So there is an accepted idea of what it means to be true, correspondence with reality, and this is the objective, justified concept of "truth".
The difficulty comes about, as is the case with other abstractions or generalizations, when the thing being conceptualized, or represented by the concept, is not well understood, such that the generalization, the concept, is not an adequate representation of the thing. Or, as is the case in this type of discussion, it becomes evident that there is more than one accepted, justified, and therefore objective concept of the same thing, "truth' in this case. This might signify inconsistency, or perhaps distinct ways in which something could be true.
This means that we have to visit, and analyze the particular instances of being true, to determine exactly why the concept of "truth" is divided, and where the misunderstandings lie. It is extremely difficult, because the only guidance we have to find and identify the particular instances of being true, is our concept of truth. If our concept doesn't give us an adequate representation of what it means to be true, we will be misguided in our effort to identify particular instances of being true.
This is the problem which Plato demonstrates in the "Theaetetus", with respect to the concept of "knowledge". They seek particular instances of knowledge, in order that they may analyze them to learn what knowledge actually is. However, they are unable to find any real instances of knowledge, and they realize at the end, that they had a preconceived notion of "knowledge" which was an inadequate description of how knowledge really is, as it exists. They identified things which might be called knowledge, but found that they were really not knowledge according to the preconceived conditions. So the mistake was that they thought that to be knowledge required that something fulfill the conditions of their preconceived notion, when in reality, what was being called knowledge, and existed as knowledge, could not fulfill the conditions of their preconceived notion. In short, there concept of "knowledge" did not correspond to the existing thing which was being called knowledge. The concept was based in an inadequate understanding of the thing called knowledge.
By the way, the inadequate, preconceived notion of knowledge, which led them astray, was the idea that knowledge had to exclude falsity. They could not find a way that knowledge as we know it could exclude falsity. And we can bring this to bear upon our search for instances of "being true". Should "being true" exclude the possibility that the thing which is true, is false? Is it correct to oppose true with false? It appears to me, like the reason why we can't determine what "being true" means, is that we adhere to this (perhaps untrue) notion that being true is opposed to being false.
I have a lot to say about this, but it will suffice for now just to note that nothing in what you said (in this quote or in the rest of your post) proves that our 'interpretations' of reality (whatever that means) don't actually correspond with the reality which they interpret. The most that it can show is that we do not know whether out interpretations correspond with reality, but it doesn't prove that they in fact do not.
This may be true, but if it is the case that we can never know whether our interpretations correspond with reality, then what is the point in defining "truth" in this way? This renders the word "true" useless. If, when we use the word "true" to refer to a sentence, we know that there is the possibility that the sentence is actually false, then why would we use "true", other than to deceive?
This means that if our 'interpretations' of reality happen to be the correct ones, and they 'correspond' to our interpretations of sentences, then it is perfectly possible that our sentences are objectively true (correctly represent reality). And nothing that you said proves that this is not the case.
That it is "perfectly possible that our sentences are objectively true", does not justify using the word "true" to refer to those sentences. We need something more than "it is possible that the sentence is true", before we judge it as true, and say that it is true. If we cannot get beyond this possibility, then the word "true" is rendered useless.
Compare this with the case of believing something you don't know. I believe that somewhere in the universe there's intelligent extraterrestrial life. Now, I do not know whether it exists, but it doesn't prove that if I say "intelligent extraterrestrial life exist" that I said something false, because it might very well be true for all that I know. Ignorance doesn't prove anything about the objectivity of what you are ignorant about.
Right, you cannot say that it is true that extraterrestrial life exists, even though you believe it does. Now extrapolate this example to assume that everything concerning reality is like this. You cannot say that anything is true, despite the fact that you believe things. The word "true" is completely useless unless you were trying to pretend that you knew something which you didn't.
Not all correspondence(truth) is dependent upon meaning.
You replied:
Ok, then give me an example of an instance of correspondence which is not meaningful.
Every instance when meaning is first attributed.
What follows is a bit more self-contradiction on your part. You asked me how not taking an account of non and/or pre-linguistic thought/belief affected your position/argument. I answered as follows...
I wrote:
Non-linguistic thought/belief doesn't consist of language. Your argument concerns only that which does. That's how...
You then replied:
That my argument only concerns language, is only true if you define "meaningful" in such a way that only language is meaningful. Many things other than language are meaningful...
Here's the argument...
p1. Truth is dependent on meaning p2. Meaning is dependent on interpretation C1. Truth is dependent on interpretation.
The issue Meta, was whether or not truth is dependent upon language. I claimed it's not. You argued otherwise as above. Now you're saying that meaning isn't dependent upon language. If there is meaning without language, then truth is as well.
Firstly, it's good we have come to some agreement; that is always value in itself. However, there are two problems with your seeing contemplation as merely correlations, albeit complex ones, between objects:
I didn't say that. I said that all thought/belief consists in/of mental correlations drawn 'between' 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or oneself(state of 'mind'). I'll address the purported problems anyway, for clarity's sake alone...
1. Contemplation means profound thought, and profound thought is always thought beyond mere correlation; it is drawing meaning from those correlations and moving into concepts.
Here you're affirming the consequent. You're assuming precisely what needs argued for. That said, I wholeheartedly agree that human thought/belief as we know it is far more complex than mere simple correlations. The ability for abstract thought and conceptualization is proof of that. However, it still boils down to mental correlations, no matter how you slice it.
Profound thought is nothing more and nothing less than novel correlation. Conceptualization is often described in terms of a concept being the container, and it's content being everything ever thought/belief and/or attributed to the concept. Again, that starts simply and gains complexity.
I find myself wondering why you keep on saying 'mere correlation'. Complex correlations are not simple ones. Simple ones could be called 'mere' I suppose, but I wouldn't see the point in doing so, except as a display of attitude. I understand that you do not agree with what I'm arguing here, and that's ok. I'm more than willing to answer any and all relevant questions. I'm equally ok with bearing any burden of proof that my claims 'carry'.
2. Human contemplation goes way beyond correlation of objects, which is as far as animals can go...
I cut this out of the rest for two reasons. First, (some)animals draw mental correlations between more than just 'objects' of physiological sensory perception. They too have states of 'mind'. Those scare-quotes are deliberate. I do not like to use the word "mind" for it carries far too much philosophical baggage along with it. Be that as it may, animals have mental ongoings, and mental states as a result. The state is determined solely by virtue of what has arrested it's attention. That holds good for human and beastie alike.
Second, I've agree that human contemplation can and often does consist in/of more than mental correlations drawn between objects. I've never claimed otherwise, nor does that necessarily follow from anything I've claimed.
You're arguing against an opponent borne of your own imagination.
For example, in the following sentence--"We Americans need to defeat the Nazis before they spread their evil they showed in the Holocaust and fully destroy freedom"--we see concepts expounding on and moving beyond mere objects. "We" are no longer just the objects in a group, they are defined by the concept of nationhood: not an object. The same goes with the ideological concepts of evil and freedom, which have no clear object correspondent; they are concepts that have moved beyond them. And we haven't even discussed the lingusistic dynamics giving all these words meaning beyond their object correspondents.
Again, moving beyond 'mere' objects isn't a problem for my position. Getting to very complex notions without those consisting in/of more simple one would be.
Do you figure that that statement just arose out of thin air, in it's entirety? Surely, you get my point here?
1. Contemplation means profound thought, and profound thought is always thought beyond mere correlation; it is drawing meaning from those correlations and moving into concepts.
Here you're affirming the consequent. You're assuming precisely what needs argued for. That said, I wholeheartedly agree that human thought/belief as we know it is far more complex than mere simple correlations. The ability for abstract thought and conceptualization is proof of that. However, it still boils down to mental correlations, no matter how you slice it.
No, I'm not. I'm working from the established definition. We do have to do that in these discussions. So, it goes beyond just mental correlations.
There's something to be said about our ability to become aware of that which is not existentially contingent upon our awareness of it.
Correspondence is one such thing. Thus, calling correspondence a concept would be equivalent to calling anything else that is not existentially contingent upon our awareness of it... a concept.
Correspondence is presupposed within all thought/belief, including but not limited to pre and/or non-linguistic. Correspondence is not "correspondence". The former is the relationship that the latter takes an account of. It doesn't require being taken an account of.
Profound thought is nothing more and nothing less than novel correlation. Conceptualization is often described in terms of a concept being the container, and it's content being everything ever thought/belief and/or attributed to the concept. Again, that starts simply and gains complexity.
That's what you incorrectly say. The definitions of profound and profundity assign much more to it than novel correlation, your personal but erroneous definition. Again, that goes beyond starting simply and gaining complexity.
I find myself wondering why you keep on saying 'mere correlation'.
I keep on saying "mere correlation" because human thought goes beyond mere correlations.
You're arguing against an opponent borne of your own imagination.
"For example, in the following sentence--"We Americans need to defeat the Nazis before they spread their evil they showed in the Holocaust and fully destroy freedom"--we see concepts expounding on and moving beyond mere objects. "We" are no longer just the objects in a group, they are defined by the concept of nationhood: not an object. The same goes with the ideological concepts of evil and freedom, which have no clear object correspondent; they are concepts that have moved beyond them. And we haven't even discussed the lingusistic dynamics giving all these words meaning beyond their object correspondents."
Again, moving beyond 'mere' objects isn't a problem for my position. Getting to very complex notions without those consisting in/of more simple one would be.
My quote above argues against your original statement and it shows exactly why your model is insufficient for human thought and human thought is more than correlations.
The term "we" is meaningful as a result of drawing correlations between the term itself, others, and oneself. The term "American" is meaningful as a result of drawing correlations between the term itself, the country, and a place of birth....
There's something to be said about our ability to become aware of that which is not existentially contingent upon our awareness of it.
Correspondence is one such thing. Thus, calling correspondence a concept would be equivalent to calling anything else that is not existentially contingent upon our awareness of it... a concept.
Correspondence is presupposed within all thought/belief, including but not limited to pre and/or non-linguistic. Correspondence is not "correspondence". The former is the relationship that the latter takes an account of. It doesn't require being taken an account of.
As to your second paragraph, of course correspondence is a concept; there is no material existence of "correspondence" without human conception of it. And saying correspondence is not "correspondence" makes no sense whatsoever.
The term "we" is meaningful as a result of drawing correlations between the term itself, others, and oneself. The term "American" is meaningful as a result of drawing correlations between the term itself, the country, and a place of birth....
How about this, Creative, the term "We" clearly denotes more than the definition in this sentence, it points to a conceptualized people, the "Americans." And the term American does more than draw correlations since everyones' concept of what an American is and how many Americans there are are different. So, there is no common object or even the same concept for people to correlate to. So, your deconstruction fails.
And saying correspondence is not "correspondence" makes no sense whatsoever.
It means you can call anything you like "correspondence" but that does not make it correspondence. I can call a dog's tail a "leg" if I like but the dog still only has four legs.
You can say thought / belief = X and then you can define X in any flexible way you want so that whenever X pitches up in any discourse it's made to mean thought / belief. But all you've done is invented a new word for thought or belief and not explained anything about either of them.
It means you can call anything you like "correspondence" but that does not make it correspondence. I can call a dog's tail a "leg" if I like but the dog still only has four legs.
No, it does not mean that at all, since you've still used the word "correspondence.' And your example fails too since "dogs tail" and "leg" are different phrases; correspondence and "correspondence" are the same words and they're both being used.
Reply to Metaphysician Undercover In this case your argument is really about knowledge and not truth (which are different topics), so it was false advertisement all along.
And also, your argument doesn't really prove that we don't know the objective reality either. You cannot derive this conclusion just from the premise that we somehow 'interpret' reality (and I'm not really sure what you mean by this claim anyway - it is ambiguous between a semantic and epistemic sense of 'interpretation').
Reply to Thanatos Sand You can call anything you like whatever you like. But that is different from explaining it in terms that are to be understood. Scare quotes are a sign that an expression is being used in an unusual or perverse way. So "correspondence" may be quite different from correspondence; just as a "leg" may not be a leg.
Yes, it is indeed the same word. The scare quotes indicate that the same word is being used in two different senses, of which one is perverse or confusing. So to say that a "leg" is not a leg is to say that there are two senses in which the word is being used: one sensibly and correctly and the other equivocally and strangely. Same with "correspondence" and correspondence.
In this case your argument is really about knowledge and not truth
I think this is right and what I have been, too indirectly, trying to suggest. For instance, even if the truth of a sentence is actually the truth of that sentence under a particular interpretation, that interpretation is not subject-relative. Just as whether a sentence is asserted by an individual is irrelevant to its truth, so whether an interpretation is applied to a sentence by an individual is irrelevant to the truth of the sentence under that interpretation. Truth has nothing to do with subjects at all.
But we do want to say that there is an intimate connection between assertion and truth. At the very least, that truth is the goal, or the point, or the intended object, of assertion. The problem here is not just that whatever warrant you have for asserting that P is no guarantee that P is true. We do what we do with an intention or purpose, based on our beliefs and expectations, and truth isn't even in this logical space at all. The connection is clearly through meaning, which is to say meaning has one foot in the space of intention and one in the space of truth.
Here's an example of how this can work. Suppose U assets sentence S, but S is ambiguous; we could use U's intention as a selector: if by S, U meant p, then we give S interpretation A, and treat S as meaning S1; if by S U meant q, then we give S interpretation B and treat S as meaning S2. Now suppose S1, i.e. S under interpretation A, is true, but S2, S under interpretation B, is false. If U meant p, S is true, but it's not true because U meant p; it's true because S is true under interpretation A.
And obviously U can know all of this, and aim at truth by asserting S.
Yes, it is indeed the same word. The scare quotes indicate that the same word is being used in two different senses, of which one is perverse or confusing. So to say that a "leg" is not a leg is to say that there are two senses in which the word is being used: one sensibly and correctly and the other equivocally and strangely. Same with "correspondence" and correspondence.
I know what scare quotes do. That doesn't mean that "correspondence" and correspondence are any different in semantics in their expressions themselves. They need further elaboration for that. But feel free to show how they're different without elaborating beyond the expressions themselves. You can't.
This is the thing about perceptual reports -- "Either I see a truck or I am experiencing an hallucination" -- that sort of thing? Is there another disjunctivism? Care to elaborate?
Reply to Srap Tasmaner Right. The main idea is that unless we understand sense experience as factive (e.g., you can see that P only if P is the case), then it's hard to see how the warrant or justification provided by experience can amount to knowledge. If seeing that P can give you any reason to believe that P, surely it can only because P itself is part of your experience (otherwise, if your experience falls short of being confronted with P itself, then what it has to do with P in the first place?).
This is at any rate McDowell's view of the matter, which I'm quite sympathetic with.
Reply to Fafner
Right, right. I see I was accidentally dissing McDowell.
I was trying to stay kinda neutral, but back of my mind I was thinking about Dummett's idea that truth has its -- I guess "conceptual" -- origin in the idea of an assertion being objectively right or wrong, and that attempts to graft a richer concept of assertion onto Frege are too little, too late.
I'm pretty conflicted about all of this. Everything I post is an experiment.
I was trying to stay kinda neutral, but back of my mind I was thinking about Dummett's idea that truth has its -- I guess "conceptual" -- origin in the idea of an assertion being objectively right or wrong
It's more than that; Dummett's idea was that there's nothing more to truth than what you can justifiably assert. He was an anti-realist like our friend MU.
Reply to Fafner Sure. But antirealism is the position he gets to, not where he starts. (And it's not necessarily universal.) And the getting to is mainly through his reading of Frege and Wittgenstein, and his own work on language and logic. His lifelong intuitionism is in some ways enthusiastic but in some ways reluctant.
Maybe worth noting here that Frege's original Begriffschrift has an "assertion stroke" and a "judgment stroke" but those fall away eventually.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 19, 2017 at 01:09#880360 likes
This is very problematic. When meaning is "first attributed" it is rarely if ever, most likely never, a case of correspondence (truth). You hear a sound for the first time, it is non-random, exhibiting some form of order, therefore meaningful, so you attribute meaning. You haven't the vaguest idea of what that sound corresponds to, yet you know it is meaningful.
Your claim here is way of base. How do you suppose that the instance "when meaning is first attributed" is an instance of correspondence without meaning. If meaning is attributed, then there is meaning. I know you insist that this attribution could be mistaken, but even if I allow your proposition that it could be, then how could there be correspondence in this mistaken instance?
The issue Meta, was whether or not truth is dependent upon language. I claimed it's not. You argued otherwise as above. Now you're saying that meaning isn't dependent upon language. If there is meaning without language, then truth is as well.
You're completely missing the point of the op creativesoul. The intent was to analyze the difference between "true" and "truth". I agree with you that there could be instances of true belief prior to language, this is not an issue. I do no agree that there is truth prior to language. You do not seem to make a consistent distinction between the two. Sometimes you seem to suggest that if there is an instance of being true, then there is truth, and if there is truth then there are instances of being true, as if they are co-dependent. At another time you argued that true belief is existentially contingent on truth.
Tim had offered a working definition of "truth", such that it refers to a generalization. Do you recognize the difference between instances of being true, and the generalization, truth?
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 19, 2017 at 01:29#880400 likes
In this case your argument is really about knowledge and not truth (which are different topics), so it was false advertisement all along.
If this is the case, then could you explain to me how you categorize both knowledge and truth, to maintain this separation which you are inclined to adhere to.
And also, your argument doesn't really prove that we don't know the objective reality either.
You're correct here, I took this as a premise. If you want proof of this premise I would have to proceed to a different argument. That argument is not difficult though. "Objective reality" refers to a reality which is independent of the thinking subject. Knowledge is the property of the thinking subject. If we knew a reality which was independent from thinking subjects (objective reality), this would be a reality in which knowledge is impossible because there would be no thinking subjects. Therefore it is impossible that we know the objective reality. In other words, it is impossible to exclude the thinking subject from knowledge, or else there would be no knowledge. But this is what is required to know the objective reality (reality without the subject), something which is impossible.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 19, 2017 at 02:24#880490 likes
I see it as being unable to speak of - define - the generalization (except generally, of course) without resort to the particular. It seems to me that reduces "truth" to a shorthand that refers to something that truth isn't, and that beyond that "truth" has no meaning at all. Maybe this is a Socratic aporia: we look into the heart of a thing and are thrown back with some violence.
It only "refers to something that truth isn't", because of misconception. If we look at the particular instances of being true, and form a generalization, and this generalization is inconsistent with the common concept of "truth", then there is misunderstanding. Either the common concept of truth is a misconception, or the particular instances of being true which we referred to, are not actually instances of being true. For example, if you look at particular examples of horses, things which are commonly referred to by "horse", and we create a generalization, and then compare this to the biological concept of "horse", and find that there is a serious inconsistency between the two, we would assume that there is some sort of misconception going on.
I'd be happier if you had included the distinction between the a priori and contingently true. One is demonstrated, the other hermeneutic, a matter of persuasion. I assume you have a firm grasp of the difference.... But I take your point. The thing isn't green except as we agree it's green, whence the objectiveness of green.
I do not understand this type of distinction at all, it has never made sense to me, as the two categories seem to reduce into each other. One is demonstrated, the other a matter of persuasion? Isn't demonstration a form of persuasion?
Here that distinction matters. I feel no need to assume eternal concepts, nor an eternal mind to maintain their being. 2+2=4 means nothing at all, except as and until someone has a use for it, on which occasion I trust it will always be so and not otherwise. That is, I create contingent truths; I merely find and recognize the a priori.
So I don't understand this at all. What do you mean when you say that you "find and recognize the a priori"? To recognize implies prior identification. When you "find" an a priori concept, is it through recognition, meaning that you have previously identified it? How would you identify it in the first instance?
Short answer, with the contingent, yes; with the a priori, no. Proof is immediate: the contingent could be false; the necessarily so, cannot not be so.
The a priori you say is necessarily true. But I don't see that anything could truly qualify as a priori. That's where I'm at. Perhaps you could explain this. The only time I can conceive of something that is "necessarily so", is to use "necessary" in the sense of "needed for a specific purpose". I need food to survive, I need a car to drive, etc.. But to use "necessary" in the sense of "impossible that there is a mistake in my thinking", doesn't seem realistic.
Maybe here we catch a glimpse of truth, a gleam of it. Let's go back to green. Green is certainly subjective and a matter of agreement. But spectral analysis isn't. If we elect to denominate the results of the analysis "green," then that green is objective - not a quality of what we think and agree about, instead a recognition of something that is so (and that as it is, it cannot be otherwise).
All you have done here is decided to arbitrarily choose a particular range of the spectrum, and designate this as "green". Do you not see this as equally subjective? It's still a matter of agreement, or indoctrination.
If you agree so far, do you care to assay a new definition of truth?
I don't think I'm prepared for that. It should be evident from what I've said, that I believe there is misconception concerning truth. To rectify this, we must thoroughly analyze instances where people
use "true" to say "this is true", etc.. It is already evident that there is inconsistency between what people refer to as being true, and what people say truth is. Either there is misconception in what people believe "truth" means, or there is misconception in the people who use "true" to refer to things, or both. I do not believe that the dialectic here has progressed far enough to work this problem out.
If this is the case, then could you explain to me how you categorize both knowledge and truth, to maintain this separation which you are inclined to adhere to.
Knowledge has this form: For some subject S and some proposition P, S knows that P.
Truth has this form: For some proposition P, P is true.
Not all correspondence(truth) is dependent upon meaning.
You replied(with a fair amount of skepticism):
Ok, then give me an example of an instance of correspondence which is not meaningful.
So, I answered as plainly as I could:
Every instance when meaning is first attributed.
Now you say this:
This is very problematic. When meaning is "first attributed" it is rarely if ever, most likely never, a case of correspondence (truth). You hear a sound for the first time, it is non-random, exhibiting some form of order, therefore meaningful, so you attribute meaning. You haven't the vaguest idea of what that sound corresponds to, yet you know it is meaningful.
Interesting. Indeed there are some problems beginning to show...
You see the word "therefore" above? It is being misused. It is supposed to be followed by a valid conclusion. It is not. It does not follow from there being an order to things, that there is meaning. As if order is prima facie evidence of meaning. Besides that, the word "so" indicates a dubious presupposition that the agent attributed meaning as a result of recognizing the aforementioned "order".
That is impossible.
When one is first attributing meaning, s/he doesn't have the intellectual capacity/framework to perform the comparitive analysis between order and randomness.
What's above is your worldview being projected onto an hypothetical "you". That amounts to conflating order with meaningfulness. Otherwise, it is a definition and/or a criterion of/for meaning, which would be fine if it didn't contradict what you've been saying all along...
If it is the case that meaning is dependent on interpretation, then there can be no meaning without thought/belief. Interpretation is existentially contingent upon thought/belief. Thus, there is no meaning without an agent. If there is no meaning without an agent, one could not be first attributing meaning to something already meaningful.
You've arrived at incoherence.
I'll answer the questions at the end the next time around...
If this is the case, then could you explain to me how you categorize both knowledge and truth, to maintain this separation which you are inclined to adhere to.
I already explained this. Something can be true without anyone knowing it (e.g., my example of extraterrestrial life), so plainly true and knowledge are not the same thing.
Knowledge is the property of the thinking subject.
No it isn't. Knowledge is a relation between a subject and the known fact. It's not merely a state or a property of a subject taken by itself. If you know that P, then P must be true.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 19, 2017 at 10:59#881110 likes
Knowledge has this form: For some subject S and some proposition P, S knows that P.
Truth has this form: For some proposition P, P is true.
OK, let's go with this then. Can you explain what makes P true, other than S knows that P is true? In other words S knows that P is the condition for P being true. The argument I produced, if you followed it, demonstrates that P is true if S knows that P is true, and nothing further about being true. have you something to add? Further, I would say that not all knowledge consists of things which are true (as knowing-how is distinct for example), being true is a special type of knowledge.
It does not follow from there being an order to things, that there is meaning. As if order is prima facie evidence of meaning.
As I explained earlier, if one judges something as meaningful, there is meaning there. That there is not actually meaning there is an assertion that the first person is wrong, and needs to be justified. It cannot be justified because the second person does not perceive exactly what the first does. The second has a different perspective and cannot perceive all that the first does. Therefore not even order is required for meaning, it could be anything which one judges as meaningful. If it is judged as meaningful by any person, it necessarily is so. The introduction of "order" is irrelevant. In my opinion, if it exists, it is meaningful.
If it is the case that meaning is dependent on interpretation, then there can be no meaning without thought/belief. Interpretation is existentially contingent upon thought/belief. Thus, there is no meaning without an agent. If there is no meaning without an agent, one could not be first attributing meaning to something already meaningful.
My argument was that the judgement "that something is meaningful" is dependent on interpretation, because this is what you claimed was necessary for truth of a proposition, "that it is meaningful". That's why I said the representation of my argument as "meaning is dependent on interpretation" is a dreadful representation". If I wrote it that way, at one point, it was a mistake, and not what I meant, and I apologize for misleading you, but that's why I produced what I really meant, in that post, and what I stated in the first place, in that post.
So I do not assert that there is no meaning without an agent, what I assert is that there is no judgement as to whether or not something is meaningful, without an agent.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 19, 2017 at 11:28#881160 likes
I already explained this. Something can be true without anyone knowing it (e.g., my example of extraterrestrial life), so plainly true and knowledge are not the same thing.
Fafner, we've been through this already, it took us days to get agreement. Have you lost your memory? Are we back to square one? I addressed your example, "extraterrestrial life" requires interpretation, and this requires a subject. It cannot be true without anyone knowing it.
No it isn't. Knowledge is a relation between a subject and the known fact. It's not merely a state or a property of a subject taken by itself. If you know that P, then P must be true.
And we've been through this. "Known fact" (objective knowledge), is what is justified, agreed upon by many subjects. Known fact is not necessarily true. When there is agreement (correspondence) between what the subject believes, and known fact (what is justified or agreed upon by the multitudes), this does not necessitate that what the subject knows is true. There are many examples of when "known fact" gets proven wrong.
Fafner, we've been through this already, it took us days to get agreement. Have you lost your memory? Are we back to square one? I addressed your example, "extraterrestrial life" requires interpretation, and this requires a subject. It cannot be true without anyone knowing it.
We have only agreed that the truth of sentences depends (in some sense) on subjects and the world, but this doesn't entail anything about knowledge per-se. The sentence "extraterrestrial life exist" is true (if it is true) because a) in English the sentence means what it means (this is the part concerning subjects) and b) there is extraterrestrial life (this is how the world itself is). So it is perfectly possible that a sentence is true without anyone knowing it, because it is plain that many sentences that we don't know their truth still make sense, meaning that we already understand what would it take for them to be either true or false without knowing what is actually case.
And we've been through this. "Known fact" (objective knowledge), is what is justified, agreed upon by many subjects. Known fact is not necessarily true. When there is agreement (correspondence) between what the subject believes, and known fact (what is justified or agreed upon by the multitudes), this does not necessitate that what the subject knows is true.
Of course you are free to define knowledge your way (e.g. that you can know falsehoods), but this is not my definition of knowledge (where knowing that P logically entails the truth of P), and nothing that you say shows that there is no knowledge in my sense of the term.
There are many examples of when "known fact" gets proven wrong.
This only shows that the 'known fact' wasn't really a known fact, but was merely believed to be a known fact. These are two different things on my understanding of knowledge.
True. I can't explain how a single word has two senses without first explaining one sense and then explaining the other. So, for example, 'leg' can be used to include tails or it can be used correctly to exclude tails. "Correspondence" can be used to mean what correspondence usually means; or it can be used to mean anything you like in order to shore up a theory that thought and belief are all correspondence. That was the original complaint by another poster. It's worth thinking about even if you don't agree with it.
True. I can't explain how a single word has two senses without first explaining one sense and then explaining the other. So, for example, 'leg' can be used to include tails or it can be used correctly to exclude tails. "Correspondence" can be used to mean what correspondence usually means; or it can be used to mean anything you like in order to shore up a theory that thought and belief are all correspondence. That was the original complaint by another poster. It's worth thinking about even if you don't agree with it.
This doesn't counter or address what I said in any way. I do appreciate the attempt, though.
That doesn't mean that "correspondence" and correspondence are any different in semantics in their expressions themselves. They need further elaboration for that. But feel free to show how they're different without elaborating beyond the expressions themselves. You can't.
Well, "correspondence" is a 14-letter word whereas correspondence is a close similarity, connection, or equivalence between two or more things (or communication by exchange of letters).
Just as "red" is a 3-letter word whereas red is a colour. And just as "Michael" is 7-letter name whereas Michael likes to talk about himself in the third-person.
That doesn't mean that "correspondence" and correspondence are any different in semantics in their expressions themselves. They need further elaboration for that. But feel free to show how they're different without elaborating beyond the expressions themselves. You can't.
— Thanatos Sand
Well, "correspondence" is a 14-letter word whereas correspondence is a close similarity, connection, or equivalence between two or more things (or communication by exchange of letters).
Just as "red" is a 3-letter word whereas red is a colour. And just as "Michael" is 7-letter name whereas Michael likes to talk about himself in the third-person.
Sorry, none of that disputes what I said about the semantics involved. Your definition of correspondence could well apply to "correspondence." So, you fail there.
And "red" and red are both colors and both are 3-letter words. Same applies to what you said about your "Michaels." So, you fail there, too.
No, I don't. And it's astonishing you think Red is not a word and "red" isn't a color. That makes no sense at all.
It makes sense if you understand the distinction between use and mention. So if it doesn't make sense to you then you don't understand the distinction. It's astonishing to think that you don't see it.
No, I don't. And it's astonishing you think Red is not a word and "red" isn't a color. That makes no sense at all.
— Thanatos Sand
It makes sense if you understand the distinction between use and mention. So if it doesn't make sense to you then you don't understand the distinction. There is one. It's astonishing to think that you don't see it.
No it doesn't because the distinction between use and mention you apply to these words is a false one you fail to support. So, it's not astonishing I don't see it. But keep on saying red isn't a word. That's adorable.
The use–mention distinction is especially important in analytic philosophy. Failure to properly distinguish use from mention can produce false, misleading, or meaningless statements or category errors. For example, the following correctly distinguish between use and mention:
1. "Copper" contains six letters, and is not a metal.
2. Copper is a metal, and contains no letters.
The first sentence, a mention example, is a statement about the word "copper" and not the chemical element. Notably, the word is composed of six letters, but not any kind of metal or other tangible thing. The second sentence, a use example, is a statement about the chemical element copper and not the word itself. Notably, the element is composed of 29 electrons and protons and a number of neutrons, but not any letters.
Sorry, now you're trying to flip it around. You were trying to say Michael isnt' a word because you're Michael. And it's still a word. And it is absurd you said you were a word, so you should stop saying it.
No, I don't, you just continue to set up a false separation of them in your misunderstanding of words. Michael is a word, and it's cute you think it isn't. And that blurb you quoted doesn't contradict it at all.
And that blurb you quoted doesn't contradict it at all.
It does.
1. "Copper" contains six letters, and is not a metal.
2. Copper is a metal, and contains no letters.
3. "Michael" contains seven letters, and is not a person.
4. Michael is a person, and contains no letters.
5. "Red" contains three letters, and is not a colour.
6. Red is a colour, and contains no letters.
Thanks for proving my point. All those things you mentioned are still words. And the fact you think copper, Michael, and red contain no letters is very sad.
Further, I would say that not all knowledge consists of things which are true (as knowing-how is distinct for example), being true is a special type of knowledge.
Absolutely. I wouldn't conflate knowing-how and knowing-that, just assumed we were talking about propositional knowledge.
The argument I produced, if you followed it, demonstrates that P is true if S knows that P is true, and nothing further about being true. have you something to add?
Well, sure, "know" is a factive verb. Everyone agrees that if someone knows that P, then P is true. (Someone knowing that P is a sufficient condition for P being true.)
In other words S knows that P is the condition for P being true.
But now this is the converse: if P is true, then someone knows that P. (Someone knowing that P is a necessary condition for P being true.) Its contrapositive is that if no one knows that P, then P is false.
Suppose I have a machine like this: there is a button in Room 1, and a cup in Room 2, and when the button in Room 1 is pushed, the machine drops 1 ball or 2 balls into the cup and then shuts off. You can only see the cup if you are in Room 2.
Now suppose I am in Room 1 and I push the button. No one is in Room 2. Let n = the number of balls in the cup after I push the button. If the machine didn't work, n = 0, otherwise n = 1 or n = 2. I know that (n = 0 ? n = 1 ? n = 2), and it is true that (n = 0 ? n = 1 ? n = 2). No one knows that n = 0, therefore n ? 0; no one knows that n = 1, therefore n ? 1; no one knows that n = 2, therefore n ? 2. Therefore it is not true that (n = 0 ? n = 1 ? n = 2). And that is a contradiction.
Therefore it is false that if P is true, someone knows that P.
Reply to Thanatos Sand
It's a convention. We can talk about a thing by using its name; if we want to talk about the thing's name instead of the thing itself, we put the name in quotation marks. (Talking about the thing by using its name we call "use"; talking about the thing's name by putting the name in quotation marks, we call "mention.")
Thus Michael's name is "Michael," but Michael is not Michael's name, for the obvious reason that things are not identical with their names.
Quotation marks just have multiple uses, and this is one of them.
If you don't like the convention, you're free to ignore it, but it makes it more difficult to distinguish when you're talking about Michael from when you're talking about his name.
Reply to Metaphysician Undercover
We can also say this:
If no one knows n = 0, then n ? 0.
If n ? 0, then someone knows that n ? 0.
Who is this person who knows the cup is not empty?
?Thanatos Sand
It's a convention. We can talk about a thing by using its name; if we want to talk about the thing's name instead of the thing itself, we put the name in quotation marks. (Talking about the thing by using its name we call "use"; talking about the thing's name by putting the name in quotation marks, we call "mention.")
What you and Michael don't get, and what Saussure demonstrated very well, is that the thing and the things's name can't be separated as long as you are using the same word, quotations or no.
Thus Michael's name is "Michael," but Michael is not Michael's name, for the obvious reason that things are not identical with their names.
I know that, but that's not what Michael said. He said "I am Michael, and I am not a word so Michael is not a word," which was wrong in many ways.Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Quotation marks just have multiple uses, and this is one of them.
Quotation marks just have multiple uses, and this is one of them.
They do have many uses. That Is an incorrect use of them.
If you don't like the convention, you're free to ignore it, but it makes it more difficult to distinguish when you're talking about Michael from when you're talking about his name.
You were free to ignore our discussion, but chose to enter and make your erroneous statements. We were discussing the validity of that "convention" and I showed how it is incorrect. You are free to ignore his statement too if you don't like it.
The problem here is not just that whatever warrant you have for asserting that P is no guarantee that P is true.
Fafner replied:
Unless you are a disjunctivist.
This immediately reminded me of Gettier 'problems' with the JTB account. The sleight of hand regarding not taking account of the difference between the candidates' actual belief and Gettier's report upon that. One cannot believe both 'X' and not 'X'. Thus, disjunction does not warrant/justify belief in both.
What you and Michael don't get, and what Saussure demonstrated very well, is that the thing and the things's name can't be separated as long as you are using the same word, quotations or no.
It's been too long since I read Saussure, so I'm not sure what separating involves here and if that's what Michael and I think we're doing.
I might even agree that quotation marks are not the ideal way to do this, but in our circle it's the standard way of talking about a name (I'm speaking loosely here) instead of the name's bearer. Like I said, it's just a convention in our crowd (but evidently not yours) -- we could refer to Michael's name as or Michael-name or Name(Michael) or whatever.
Or are you saying there is no way to talk about a thing's name instead of talking about the thing?
So then never-mind all of the stuff(arguments from contingency) you've been saying heretofore?
That settles it now doesn't it?
I pointed out long ago that you were failing to properly quantify your arguments. If you believe all the stuff you've been writing about the existential contingency regarding meaningful statements, and this new revelation directly above, then I suggest you reconcile these claims by virtue of properly quantifying and categorizing the kinds of things that can be and/or are meaningful, and the kinds of meaning that apply to these things.
This immediately reminded me of Gettier 'problems' with the JTB account.
There is a kind of connection to the argument here. Gettier cases are examples of epistemic luck -- you have a belief, it's true, it's got something that counts as justification, but the proposition believed to be true is true under a different interpretation than the one you intended, and our intuition that these are not examples of knowledge is because the justification you had fit the interpretation under which your sentence was false, not the one under which your sentence was true. (That's probably not all cases -- if it were, I would have just solved the Gettier problem.)
There's another sort of luck that's even easier to get at because there's no question of knowledge at all: that's when you're asked a question on an exam (or a game show, whatever) and you guess -- and your guess is right! If you're asked when the Battle of Hastings was, "1066" is the right answer whether you've ever even heard of the Battle of Hastings or not, because truth is not the same thing as knowledge.
(Not getting into the disjunction thing yet, as I have an argument that uses disjunction still under litigation.)
Nice. Yup. That's pretty much agrees with my understanding of Gettier cases. If memory serves me correctly, all of his cases involve disjunction as a method for justification. I reject them not as lucky, but as unjustified.
I totally agree with truth not being the same thing as knowledge.
There's quite a bit of conflation around these parts regarding the difference between being true and being called "true".
It's been too long since I read Saussure, so I'm not sure what separating involves here and if that's what Michael and I think we're doing.
I might even agree that quotation marks are not the ideal way to do this, but in our circle it's the standard way of talking about a name (I'm speaking loosely here) instead of the name's bearer. Like I said, it's just a convention in our crowd (but evidently not yours) -- we could refer to Michael's name as or Michael-name or Name(Michael) or whatever.
It's certainly not standard convention; so you cant' impose it on others. If it was, people would have to always write in scare quotes to signify they are signifying the actual signified. Not only would that be unwieldy, it is not how we write in English. Its' certainly not how we teach people to write in English departments.
As to Saussure, he correctly points out all words only signify other words that give it meaning; they are not tethered to objects.
My cat's name is "Jack". Jack is my cat. "Jack" is not my cat.
One of the things about use/mention I'm ever so slightly uncomfortable about is that in a sense it's a claim that there is nothing but use, and that by enclosing an expression in quotation marks you have created a name for the expression, and it is this name you are using. I get the motivation, and it seems perfectly safe when dealing with simple expressions, but I'm not convinced this is the right view when you have an entire statement enclosed in quotation marks.
It's certainly not standard convention; so you cant' impose it on others. If it was, people would have to always write in scare quotes to signify they are signifying the actual signified. Not only would that be unwieldy, it is not how we write in English. Its' certainly not how we teach people to write in English departments.
Well a convention is not something one imposes -- do as you like. I'm just telling you it's been standard practice in Anglo-American philosophy for more than a few generations now. Indeed, we do always use quotation marks when we want to signify the signifier. You get used to it.
It's certainly not standard convention; so you cant' impose it on others. If it was, people would have to always write in scare quotes to signify they are signifying the actual signified. Not only would that be unwieldy, it is not how we write in English. Its' certainly not how we teach people to write in English departments.
— Thanatos Sand
Well a convention is not something one imposes -- do as you like. I'm just telling you it's been standard practice in Anglo-American philosophy for more than a few generations now. Indeed, we do always use quotation marks when we want to signify the signifier. You get used to it.
It's certainly something one imposes when you and Michael try to erroneously argue its legitimacy. If you didn't want to impose it; you shouldn't have entered the conversation as a third party defending it. And, indeed, we don't always use quotations when we want to signify the signifier. The fact your post I re-posted used none helps prove it. So, it's not something one should get used to.
I don't intend to argue Saussure with you.
Youre' certainly taking an argumentative tone in your statement, particularly since I was never arguing Saussure; I just explained his ideas for you. So, relax.
This immediately reminded me of Gettier 'problems' with the JTB account. The sleight of hand regarding not taking account of the difference between the candidates' actual belief and Gettier's report upon that. One cannot believe both 'X' and not 'X'. Thus, disjunction does not warrant/justify belief in both.
If anything, disjunctivism can handle the Gettier cases better than other accounts of justification (if they can handle them at all). Because according to disjunctivism, Gettier cases are not instances of a justified belief in the first place (because all of them are build on the assumption that evidence is not factive) and so the problem simply doesn't arise for this view.
Reply to creativesoul
BTW, Gettier case number 1 did not involve disjunction -- it's sort of a faulty definite description, sort of. You believe X will get the job (when it's actually you); X you happen to know has 7 coins in his pocket (and so do you but you don't know it), and you are said to believe the guy who got the job has 7 coins in his pocket, which is true, but not what you meant.
One cannot believe both 'X' and not 'X'. Thus, disjunction does not warrant/justify belief in both.
That's not what "disjunctivism" means in the context of epistemology or philosophical accounts perceptual experience.
In the second case, being a disjunctivist means that for one have a visual experience of a red apple (or its seeming to one that the apple is red) ought not to be construed as one being acquainted with a mere impression: a "common factor" between a veridical experience and a mere illusion, say. It rather must be construed as the disjunctive claim that *either* one is perceiving that the apple is red *or* it merely seems to one (albeit mistakenly) that one is perceiving that the apple is red. The central commitment of the disjunctivist is that in cases where the first disjunct holds -- i.e. when one isn't under any illusion -- then one's perceptual experience puts one into direct contact with the world, and not with a sense datum or some such "internal" experience.
Extended to the case of epistemology, disjunctivism means that when one's warrant to believe that P is good enough to secure one's knowledge that P, and there might be cases where one mistakenly believes that P on (what appears to be) the very same rational grounds, then that doesn't mean that one's warrant is defeasible and hence insufficient on its own to secure knowledge. It rather means that *either* one's warrant is good and sufficient to ground knowledge *or* one mistakenly takes oneself to have a good warrant. As applied to the aforementioned example, this would mean that in the case where there seems to one that there is a red apple in from of one, and one isn't under any illusion (and also, one doesn't have any good ground for believing that the circumstances of observation are abnormal, or that one is being tricked, etc.) then that one experiences the apple to be red is sufficient to secure knowledge since it is (in that case!) an undefeasible warrant for it.
In short, disjunctivism strikes at the ordinary conflations between defeasibility (of "internal" justifications) and fallibility (of epistemic powers). Our epistemic or perceptual abilities are fallible, but their fallibility isn't such as to make the successful exercise of them impossible.
Reply to Thanatos Sand
Take it easy, man. I'm really not trying to pick a fight with you. I joined in not to bully you but to try to support Michael's point. You disagree. Fine.
Reply to Thanatos Sand Just didn't want you to think I had ignored that part of your post, even though I wasn't really going to address it. Maybe my choice of words was poor, but my intention was to be polite. It still is.
On my view the use/mention distinction is a metacognitive tool which enables one to point out the difference between the name and what's being named, when there is a difference between the two, as Banno's cat example clearly shows. Someone else earlier gave a very good rendition as well.
I hold no strong connection to the use/mention distinction, per se.
Placing an entire statement in quotes is a powerful tool that allows us to isolate and talk about thought/belief itself.
If your account is an accurate one, then I've learned something new. That said, Gettier cases hinge upon disjunction, so when Fafner mentioned disjunctivism, the connection I drew wasn't to the school(s) of thought you've since elaborated upon, for they were unbeknownst to me. Rather, as I wrote, it reminded me of Gettier cases...
If you report someone's utterance (or potential utterance) in the exact words they used (or would use), we put those attributed words in quotation marks, just like we were taught in elementary school. But it doesn't look much like a name; it looks like it still has structure. I see a lot of commonality with reports in indirect discourse, so I'm tempted to think of this use of quotation marks not as creating a name but as indicating "null paraphrase," the degenerate case of paraphrase where you have changed no words, just like you learned in school, but otherwise to be treated like any other propositional report, where you typically fiddle with pronouns and indexicals at least.
I'm unfamiliar with disjunctivism. Thus, I wouldn't know much about how well they handle(explain?) Gettier cases. Seems that I would concur with their conclusions regarding them, even if our method for arriving at that conclusion differs, which it may...
Yes. I remember vaguely the case about the coins and who would get the job. I thought(perhaps mistakenly) that that case worked from disjunction as well, although not openly stated as such. At any rate, I would have to revisit the paper again to be sure what I think...
Reply to creativesoul I'm really glad you brought up Gettier -- the more I think about it the more relevant it is to the debate we've been having here.
Forget what I say, now on second thought I don't think that disjunctivism can actually solve the Gettier problem. Never mind.
I think it does actually, since it provides a conception of indefeasible warrant that can be substituted to the misguided notion of merely "internal" justification that makes the construction of Gettier examples possible. And it achieves this consistently with the correct intuition that our epistemic powers are fallible. Although, rather than saying that it solves the Gettier problem, it might be better to say that it makes the problem go away since it undercuts the motivation for providing analyses of knowledge in terms of capacities or concepts that don't presuppose it.
The sentence "extraterrestrial life exist" is true (if it is true) because a) in English the sentence means what it means (this is the part concerning subjects)
The sentence means what it means, without being interpreted? I give up.
So it is perfectly possible that a sentence is true without anyone knowing it, because it is plain that many sentences that we don't know their truth still make sense, meaning that we already understand what would it take for them to be either true or false without knowing what is actually case.
The sentence only makes sense to a person interpreting it. Without a person interpreting it, it makes no sense, and therefore cannot be true.
This only shows that the 'known fact' wasn't really a known fact, but was merely believed to be a known fact. These are two different things on my understanding of knowledge.
We can't tell the difference between a known fact, and something believed to be a known fact, because they both appear to be known facts. So we call them both known facts. Since we can't distinguish between a known fact and what appears to be a known fact, or just believed to be a known fact, then it cannot be incorrect to call the thing which is believed to be known fact, by this name, "known fact", unless you want to ban the use of "known fact". Therefore your definition of "known fact" is untenable, rendering it always incorrect to use "known fact", because we would never know whether it is a known fact or not. However, if it is acceptable to refer to the thing which appears to be a known fact, as "known fact", then your definition is wrong. So your concept of "known fact" is actually useless.
Everyone agrees that if someone knows that P, then P is true. (Someone knowing that P is a sufficient condition for P being true.)
No, I do not agree to that. As per the example of knowing-how, not all knowledge entails truth. Therefore if someone knows that P, this does not mean P is true. We must determine what "that P" means, to see if this is a truth or not. Otherwise, "true" is redundant and meaningless. It only comes about, that "knowing that P" is a sufficient condition for P being true, if you define "knowing that" in a particular way, which supports this. I don't think we've properly determined what "that P" means, in order to jump to this conclusion.
But now this is the converse: if P is true, then someone knows that P. (Someone knowing that P is a necessary condition for P being true.) Its contrapositive is that if no one knows that P, then P is false.
The arguments I produced earlier demonstrate that it is necessary for someone to know P, in order for P to be true. But "knowing P" is not equated with "P is true", knowing P is a necessary condition for P is true. So it does not follow that not knowing P leaves P as false. The problem you refer to is created by your introduction of the phrase "knowing that P". The meaning of this phrase really needs to be justified.
Let's say P = "the dog is wet". And let's say someone knows that the dog is wet. But this is not "knowing that P", because P signifies the phrase, the words, "the dog is wet". What the person knows, is that the dog is wet. So when you propose that the person "knows that P", you commit a category error, because what the person knows is a particular instance of knowledge, and P stands for a proposition. You say, "a person knows that a proposition", and this is really nonsense. The problem you point to is the result of this category error, the very mistake which Michael was trying to explain to TS.
If you believe that P signifies the meaning of the words, not the words themselves, then "P" signifies that the dog is wet, and "that P" would signify that that the dog is wet. And this is nonsense, so clearly "P" signifies the words, and your argument suffers category error.
I think it does actually, since it provides a conception of indefeasible warrant that can be substituted to the misguided notion of merely "internal" justification that makes the construction of Gettier examples possible.
Sorry, but I don't really see how disjunctivism helps here. How does a theory on perception address Gettier's original two examples? They've got nothing to do with non-veridical experiences.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 19, 2017 at 23:30#882800 likes
So then never-mind all of the stuff(arguments from contingency) you've been saying heretofore?
That settles it now doesn't it?
I pointed out long ago that you were failing to properly quantify your arguments. If you believe all the stuff you've been writing about the existential contingency regarding meaningful statements, and this new revelation directly above, then I suggest you reconcile these claims by virtue of properly quantifying and categorizing the kinds of things that can be and/or are meaningful, and the kinds of meaning that apply to these things.
I really don't know what you mean. What is "quantify your arguments"? Are you suggesting mathematics? What is "existential contingency"? And how is my statement not consistent with what I said before? What do you mean by "quantifying and categorizing the kinds of things that can be and/or are meaningful"? Why is any of this relevant? You seem to be writing random nonsense.
Reply to Pierre-Normand So how would you describe the famous fake barn facades case? You are standing in front of a real barn, and therefore you are directly aware of the barn, and so it seems that your are maximally warranted to believe that there's a barn in front of you; but you don't know that there's a barn in front of you (since it is the only real barn in that place, and you found it by mere chance). It seems to me that the disjunctivist would also have to admit that it's a case of a true justified believe that isn't knowledge.
And the reason that I think this case is particularly problematic for the disjunctivist because in this case your evidence consists in precisely the fact itself that you believe to be true, so we are not assuming here the 'highest common factor' view of evidence, or anything of this kind.
I'm saying you've argued that meaning is dependent upon... and truth is dependent upon... and interpretation is dependent upon...
You should've been arguing that some meaning, and some truth, and some...
No, because that's not what I mean, what I mean is that all instances of being true are dependent on interpretation, not some. You keep insisting on "some", but fail to give me any examples of an instance of being true which does not involve interpretation. If you could, I'd have to switch to "some", and this would refute my argument, which is an argument of essences, what is essential to truth.
The sentence means what it means, without being interpreted? I give up.
Sure, you can assume here anything you want about interpretation, but it doesn't matter because you have (b) as well that grounds its objective status.
The sentence only makes sense to a person interpreting it. Without a person interpreting it, it makes no sense, and therefore cannot be true.
In my story I assume that the sentence is interpreted, because after all you understand what the sentence "extraterrestrial life exist" means. But the point is that interpreting the sentence is not sufficient either to guarantee its truth or to guarantee that it is known, because interpretation can only give you the meaning of the sentence.
We can't tell the difference between a known fact, and something believed to be a known fact, because they both appear to be known facts. So we call them both known facts. Since we can't distinguish between a known fact and what appears to be a known fact, or just believed to be a known fact, then it cannot be incorrect to call the thing which is believed to be known fact, by this name, "known fact", unless you want to ban the use of "known fact". Therefore your definition of "known fact" is untenable, rendering it always incorrect to use "known fact", because we would never know whether it is a known fact or not. However, if it is acceptable to refer to the thing which appears to be a known fact, as "known fact", then your definition is wrong. So your concept of "known fact" is actually useless.
Again, you are begging the question. You just assume that knowledge (in my sense) is impossible without an argument. You wrote: "Since we can't distinguish between a known fact and what appears to be a known fact" - I don't accept this and I don't see any argument to support this claim.
Sorry, but I don't really see how disjunctivism helps here. How does a theory on perception address Gettier's original two formulations of justified true belief that can't reasonably be considered knowledge?
Disjunctivism isn't merely a theory about perception. Disjunctive theories of perception and epistemological disjunctivism are two separate topics, though they are very intimately related since they have the same general structure and are animated by the same motivation to root out some of the resilient Cartesian presuppositions that infect both theories of perception and traditional theories of knowledge.
And, of course, disjunctivists agree with Gettier that the JTB account of knowledge can't be correct. It goes further in pointing out how many attempts to buttress the JTB analysis with the addition of supplementary conditions are doomed to fail.
So how would you describe the famous fake barn facades case? You are standing in front of a real barn, and therefore you are directly aware of the barn, and so it seems that your are maximally warranted to believe that there's a barn in front of you; but you don't know that there's a barn in front of you (since it is the only real barn in that place, and you found it by mere chance). It seems to me that the disjunctivist will also have to admit as well that it's a case of a true justified believe that isn't knowledge.
Thanks for bringing that up. This is a problem that I have thought long and hard about. I have imagined lots of puzzling scenarios where commandos are being unknowingly parachuted in Barn Facade County in the vicinity of a real barn, in an area within Barn Facade County where most barns are real, etc.
I think most of the problems that arise in such cases stem from presuppositions that are intimately connected with "highest common factor" theories. And those are presuppositions that epistemic powers of human beings aren't merely supervenient on their "internal" constitutions *and* actual favorable epistemic circumstances, but are independent of the range of counterfactual circumstances where those powers might be expected to be realized. What is peculiar about those ranges, properly defined, is that they always must be relativized to a specific practical context. This is in line with contextualist theories of knowledge according to which what counts as possession of knowledge by an agent whose epistemic powers are fallible is the practical considerations on which the possibility of failure are practically significant (and not merely probable in a statistical sense). Hence, for instance, you may count as knowing that your wife is home while you don't count as knowing that the lottery ticket that you bought is a losing one even though the probability of the former belief being mistaken is much higher than the probability of the latter being mistaken.
And the reason that I think this case is particularly problematic for the disjunctivist because in this case your evidence consists in precisely the fact itself that you believe to be true, so we are not assuming here anything like the 'highest common factor' view of evidence, or anything of this kind.
When the ineliminable contextualist constraints on ascriptions of epistemic powers to individuals are taken into account, then, it seems to me that disjunctivism deals correctly with barn facades. That's Because what is "taken in" as evidence isn't merely the actual object of cognition (a real barn, say) but also relies for its status as good warrant on one's epistemic powers not being suppressed by a contextually relevant range of possible (countrafactual) errors. Since those context can vary according to the perspectives of agents that are differently positioned, this means that the belief expressed by an agent as "there is a (real) barn in front of me" may count as a case of knowledge relativized to one practical context and not to another.
Here is an example. Suppose you are traveling with a friend to Barn Facade County (where most "barns" are actually mere decoy facades) and she knows this to be the case whereas you don't. Suppose then, that you stop by a real barn. The barn thus appear to both of you to be a real barn but only your friend knows that she doesn't know it to be a real barn (since she knows the probability for this to be quite low). According to the standard accounts of such situations, you don't know either that this is a barn since your "justified" true belief that this is a real barn isn't actually justified. And this is because you are mistaken about the objective probability of your experience being an experience of a real barn.
The problem faced by disjunctivim, it would seem, it that it wrongly would conclude in your having knowledge on the ground that circumstances are favorable, in this particular case, for your epistemic abilities being exercized. All that would be required (seemingly) is that this particular barn is real.
However, when suitably conjoined with a contextualist account of knowlege, disjunctivism would not render a unique verdict in this case, as it indeed shouldn't. The mistake that must be avoided is the idea that there is a unique objective probability of the perceptual experience being an experience of a real barn independent of the characterization of the epistemic power being exercized. How might this probability rather to be evaluated? What contextual range of counterfactual circumstances is it that might relevantly be taken into consideration for purpose of determining whether or not your belief that there is a barn counts as knowledge? I'll let you think about it a little before I propose my own suggestion.
However, when suitably conjoined with a contextualist account of knowlege, disjunctivism would not render a unique verdict in this case, as it indeed shouldn't. The mistake that must be avoided is the idea that there is a unique objective probability of the perceptual experience being an experience of a real barn independent of the characterization of the epistemic power being exercized. How might this probability rather to be evaluated? What contextual range of counterfactual circumstances is it that might relevantly be taken into consideration for purpose of determining whether or not your belief that there is a barn count as knowledge? I'll let you think about it a little before I propose my own suggestion.
And I agree that disjunctivist could possibly respond by giving some sort of contextualist account - but this was my point, it doesn't look that the disjunctivist has any inherent advantage over other accounts simply by virtue of being a disjunctivist. He still needs some pretty complicated story to tell in order to explain the difference between ordinary cases of knowledge and the Gettier cases, and that story would probably be as complicated as any of the proposed non-disjunctivist solutions to the problem (like those that appeal to 'sensitivity' or 'safety'), and hence no less contentious. I think the disjunctivict would've had a real advantage if he could handle the Gettier problem without the need of any "fine tuning" to specifically address the Gettier cases (that is, if the solution was built-in from the start).
And besides, I think that many non-disjunctivist epistemologists (at least those with a contextualist leaning - which I think nowadays is the majority view) would agree with most of what you say, and some I'm sure would even agree that we need, as you said, to reject "the idea that there is a unique objective probability of the perceptual experience being an experience of a real barn independent of the characterization of the epistemic power being exercized.". So my point is that it doesn't appear that there are any special resources which are available to the disjunctivist qua-disjunctivist to handle the Gettier problem, which are not also available to other epistemologists.
And I agree that disjunctivist could possibly respond by giving some sort of contextualist account - but this was my point, it doesn't look that the disjunctivist has any inherent advantage over other accounts simply by virtue of being a disjunctivist.
Well, you had suggested rather more strongly that barn facades are "particularly problematic" for disjunctivist accounts of the fallibility of knowledge. And I agree that it might look, at first blush, that they are. On my view, disjunctivism recommends itself quite appart from the way it deals with Gettier cases since it is an account that jettisons the old empiricist conception of beliefs and justifications qua internal representational items the epistemic subject can be fully acquainted with irrespective of the "external" world doing her any favor. It just so happens that, on my view, disjunctivism *also* deals rather elegantly with barn facades through distinguishing much better than empiricism does between (1) the conditions where epistemic powers can be ascribed to subjects from (2) the conditions when those powers are successfully exercised.
I can grant you for the sake of argument that epistemic contextualism could also be made use of by an epistemologist who doesn't endorse disjunctivism in order to deal with Gettier examples. But I am unsure how successfully such an epistemologist would deal with the barn facade case. I haven't done a literature search for this and I have rather produced my own account from scratch in order to bring disjunctivism to bear on issues that were puzzling me. And I have found out that it throws light on the contextualism/invariantism debate regarding knowledge attributions. I also don't think this account produces explanations any more complicated than is warranted by the contrivance of the cases it is brought to bear on. But since this discussion about epistemological disjunctivism is veering off from the topic of this thread (my fault), I may start a new one regarding contextualism and barn facades.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 20, 2017 at 10:53#883930 likes
Sure, you can assume here anything you want about interpretation, but it doesn't matter because you have (b) as well that grounds its objective status.
We've been through this already, your (b) is covered by the other argument which you have not addressed. All we have to refer to, as "the way which the world is", is how the world appears to us. This is our interpretation of the supposed objective reality. And how the world appears to us, may or may not be a true representation of the way which the world is. Both sides, (a) and (b) are subjective.
When we apply the word "true", use the word to say that something is true, the (b) side of the correspondence is not "the way that the world is" but "how the world appears to us". So (b) does not ground the objective status of "true" when we commonly use the word, it refers to our interpretation of reality. If you insist that we can only use the word "true" when how the world appears to us is the way that the world is, then we can never use the word, because all we have is how the world appears to us. This leaves the word "true" useless.
However, we do clearly use the word, and when it is used, (b) does not ground the objective status of truth, because it refers to how the world appears to us, not how the world is, and this is interpretation. Your claim that (b) does objectify , relates to a definition of "truth" which renders the word "true" unusable.
You just assume that knowledge (in my sense) is impossible without an argument. You wrote: "Since we can't distinguish between a known fact and what appears to be a known fact" - I don't accept this and I don't see any argument to support this claim.
See, you just dismissed the argument, as if it were irrelevant. We already agreed that known fact is based in how the world appears to us, and therefore it may or may not be as the world is. Now you've gone back to claiming that "known fact" is necessarily the way that the world is. Clearly this is not the case, because what is referred to as known fact is often proven wrong.
You've accepted that the reality of "known fact", as we use it, is grounded in the way that the world appears to us. However you assume that there is a different sort of "known fact" which is grounded in the way that the world is. But they are both the same name, with the same referent any time "known fact" is used, the way that the world appears to us. When looking at two things called known fact, how do you propose to distinguish whether it's your special sort of "known fact" which cannot ever be proven to have been wrong because it refers to the way that the world is, from the "known fact" of common usage which includes things that could be later proven wrong.
If you have no way to identify facts which are impossible to ever be proven wrong (known with absolute certainty), from those which may be proven wrong, then your claim is unfounded. Furthermore, if it is as you seem to believe, that "known fact" should only be used to refer to things which are known with absolute certainty, then "known fact" is rendered useless.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 20, 2017 at 11:05#883990 likes
Sorry, I can't figure out where you demonstrated this. Would you mind linking the post or posts?
Are you ready to read? It's a series of arguments started at the beginning of the thread. It is complex arguments, because there are two sides of truth, as correspondence, represented lately by Fafner's (a) and (b). I am still repeating those same arguments now. They are not well understood by the other members, so repetition is necessary. I suggest starting from the beginning.
Here's a summary. There is a sentence, belief, or some such thing which is said to be true. Whether or not that sentence, or belief is true, is dependent on the meaning of it, and this is interpretation, which is "of the subject", subjective. On the other side, there is a supposed reality which the meaning corresponds with. But when we judge something as "true" we judge it according to how this reality appears to us, and this is also an interpretation, subjective. Therefore truth is entirely "of the subject", a property of knowledge. There cannot be truth outside of knowledge.
All we have to refer to, as "the way which the world is", is how the world appears to us. This is our interpretation of the supposed objective reality. And how the world appears to us, may or may not be a true representation of the way which the world is. Both sides, (a) and (b) are subjective.
You don't see it, but what you said here actually proves my point. If the world appears to you in a certain way, then it is an objective fact that the world is either the way that it appears to you, or that it isn't. So having a mere appearance of reality already makes your appearance objectively true or false. So for example if you have an appearance of seeing a cat on the sofa, then it is either objectively true that there's a cat on the sofa, or objectively false. Nothing can be an appearance unless it already objectively represents reality to be in a certain way (and "objectively represent" is not the same as representing truly - a false representation is still objective in this sense, since it represents what is not the case, but could have been).
So ironically, interpretation is precisely what grounds objectivity.
Now you've gone back to claiming that "known fact" is necessarily the way that the world is. Clearly this is not the case, because what is referred to as known fact is often proven wrong.
All of this is just irrelevant to my definition (and the rest of what you say in the comment). It doesn't matter what we say or believe about the facts. My definition merely states the conditional that if someone knows that P, then P is a fact. If P is not the case, then by definition the subject cannot known that P (and it doesn't matter if he himself is aware of this). I'm not claiming that we actually know the facts, it is only a definition of what it means to know something.
It seems to me that you either don't understand what definitions are, or what conditionals mean (or both), because your objection simply makes no sense.
Therefore if someone knows that P, this does not mean P is true.
Do you mean to say that under the same scheme of interpretation, some statement P could be false and someone know that P?
For example, "I am at work today," spoken by me, on this day, is false; it would be true spoken today by my buddy Mike; it would be true spoken by me on some other day.
(Note that under this scheme of interpretation, "I am not at work" is true, and there's no issue about knowing that I am not at work. That's still knowing something that's true.)
Is it possible for someone to know that I am at work today, interpreting "I am at work today" the same way I interpret it -- "I" referring to me, and so on -- an interpretation under which it is false?
You've been all over the place with what you've claimed in an attempt to refute my claim that correspondence is prior to language.
You have claimed that correspondence is dependent upon meaning.
You have claimed that if something exists it is meaningful.
You have claimed that meaning depends upon interpretation.
You have claimed that meaning depends upon judgment.
Clearly, it cannot be the case that all of these claims are true. However, one could foreseeably correct the incoherence by virtue of arguing that some meaning is...
Doing that would require re-categorizing meaning into different kinds. That's what I was getting at before. Regarding your suggestion to offer a case where correspondence existed prior to meaning, I gave you that already. Every time meaning is first attributed. So...
I have already presented you a case, based upon my framework, which you haven't actually considered in light of the framework itself. Rather than doing that, you continue to apply a different framework to the words I'm using. Namely, you've applied your own, which has been all over the place. As a matter of fact, it was within your reply to my example that you first claimed that if something exists it is meaningful. Nearly thirty pages into the thread. Arguing by definitional fiat. Moving the goalposts. Creating incoherence with what you've already claimed.
That's unacceptable for all kinds of reasons.
So, it seems that unless there is some much needed attention given to the fact that we're working from two contrary positions, there's not much to be gained by continuing...
Here's a summary. There is a sentence, belief, or some such thing which is said to be true. Whether or not that sentence, or belief is true, is dependent on the meaning of it, and this is interpretation, which is "of the subject", subjective. On the other side, there is a supposed reality which the meaning corresponds with. But when we judge something as "true" we judge it according to how this reality appears to us, and this is also an interpretation, subjective. Therefore truth is entirely "of the subject", a property of knowledge. There cannot be truth outside of knowledge.
The above conflates calling something "true" and truth. That is, it conflates belief(statements thereof) and truth.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 21, 2017 at 02:33#887020 likes
You don't see it, but what you said here actually proves my point. If the world appears to you in a certain way, then it is an objective fact that the world is either the way that it appears to you, or that it isn't. So having a mere appearance of reality already makes your appearance objectively true or false. So for example if you have an appearance of seeing a cat on the sofa, then it is either objectively true that there's a cat on the sofa, or objectively false.
No, it is not an objective fact that either the world is this way, or it is not this way. The concept of "the world" and the existence of the world, as understood by human beings, is supported by the concept of matter. Aristotle demonstrated that matter is necessarily exempt from the law of excluded middle, which you are employing to produce your so-called "objective fact". This refutes your argument.
My definition merely states the conditional that if someone knows that P, then P is a fact. If P is not the case, then by definition the subject cannot known that P (and it doesn't matter if he himself is aware of this). I'm not claiming that we actually know the facts, it is only a definition of what it means to know something.
I addressed the problem with this phrase "knows that P" in my last post to Srap. Your use involves a category error.
Do you mean to say that under the same scheme of interpretation, some statement P could be false and someone know that P?
Yes that is correct. We have to account for the way that the word is used, when we define it. Things which we refer to as "knowledge", often turn out later to have been wrong. Many of the things which we know, are actually false, despite the fact that we claim to know them, and they are referred to as knowledge. The entire body of knowledge consists of things which may later be determined as false. So, we must look at that thing which we are calling by the name "knowledge", analyze that thing, and produce our definitions and descriptions accordingly. Doesn't it seem kind of ridiculous to say that what is essential to knowledge, is that knowledge excludes falsity, when this is not supported by the evidence, the evidence being the knowledge that exists? It's faulty inductive reasoning to say that everything which is known must be true, when clearly many things which are known are not true.
Is it possible for someone to know that I am at work today, interpreting "I am at work today" the same way I interpret it -- "I" referring to me, and so on -- an interpretation under which it is false?
The issue is what we are referring to with the word "know", what we are claiming when we claim to know. We do not claim absolute certainty with no possibility of being wrong. Often when I claim to know something, I end up being wrong. So we can not set up as a premise, for a logical argument, that to know something is to exclude the possibility of falsity. This would be a false premise, because it doesn't represent "know' in the way that it is normally used nor does it represent the thing referred to when we use "know". It is a premise based in faulty inductive reasoning, a false premise.
Doing that would require re-categorizing meaning into different kinds.
Until we have agreement, and understand each other on what meaning is, I see no point in trying to make categories. First we must clearly define what we are categorizing.
have already presented you a case, based upon my framework, which you haven't actually considered in light of the framework itself. Rather than doing that, you continue to apply a different framework to the words I'm using.
Right, we have little agreement or understanding of each others framework. "Meaning" seems to be the stumbling point. I suggest that we could continue in discussion, but we need to concentrate specifically on what is meaning.
The above conflates calling something "true" and truth. That is, it conflates belief(statements thereof) and truth. Granting all the rest, it would follow that calling something "true" is subjective.
OK, now we've gone outside of what I suggested, concentrating on meaning, but I'll make a reply to this, trying to concentrate on meaning. When we call something true, "true" has meaning, it refers to something. What it refers to is something subjective (of the subject). I think that "truth" is a concept we have, agreement between us, or some sort of informal convention, of what it means to be true, so that when different people call something "true", there is consistency between them as to what is meant by "true", because of this unofficial agreement to use the word in the same way. And this is what we call "truth", our agreement as to what constitutes being true. You say that this is "correspondence", and many agree with you, but not everyone. For those who agree with you, truth is correspondence, and they will use "true" accordingly.
Do you agree that, assuming sincerity in speech, that calling a statement "true" displays belief that the statement is true(corresponds to reality, if you like)?
You have claimed that correspondence is dependent upon meaning.
You have claimed that if something exists it is meaningful.
You have claimed that meaning depends upon interpretation.
You have claimed that meaning depends upon judgment.
Clearly, it cannot be the case that all of these claims are true.
You replied:
I don't see why not. Point to a place where you see inconsistency and I'll explain how you've misinterpreted what I said.
If existence alone makes something meaningful, then it is not the case that meaning depends upon interpretation and judgment, for existence doesn't require either.
addressed the problem with this phrase "knows that P" in my last post to Srap. Your use involves a category error.
It's not a "category error." (Btw, the phrase you want, the one Ryle coined, is "category mistake.") It's also not a use/mention violation. "S knows that P" is just an informal schema. It is a stand-in for a proposition formed by concatenating the name of a subject, the phrase " knows that " and a proposition. The name substituted for S is to be used in the resulting sentence -- call it S1 -- and thus does not appear in quotes in S1; the proposition substituted for P is to be used in S1 and thus does not appear in quotes in S1.
The schema is informal in the sense that it is not part of any formal system and we are not committed to quantifying over subjects and propositions, although some informal quantifying seems harmless enough. No domain of discourse is being specified. No rules of inference. It's just a notation, a kind of shorthand. The argument is still being conducted in regular English.
"S knows that P" is also informal in the sense that it is designedly neutral on what sorts of things S and P are -- remember, there is no specified domain of discourse -- except that they would be considered appropriate on the LHS and the RHS of " knows that ". As such it is appropriate for broadly propositional accounts and inappropriate for anything else. It is not intended to be useful for discussion of abilities, skills, or any other sort of knowledge-how. Those things don't go on the RHS of " knows that ".
It's unnatural, but you could try to specify what you intend to substitute for S and for P, without actually doing so. (It's simplest just to do so, unless you start working with classes of S's and P's.) In that case, you might say, "S = 'George Washington', and P = 'life is suffering'." "S" and "P" are informally the names of variables; to specify their values, you write an identity between the name of the variable and the name of the value. In this identity, the names are used, not mentioned. Names for what we intend to substitute are formed by enclosing the expressions in quotes.
When we call something true, "true" has meaning, it refers to something. What it refers to is something subjective (of the subject).
When we say that something "is true", we're talking about thought/belief and/or statements thereof(assertions/propositions). We're saying that the statement/assertion/proposition is true. And yes, thought/belief and statements thereof come through a subject, however the ability to form thought/belief requires something other than the subject. Thus, talking in terms of subjective/objective is inherently incapable of taking proper account of that which consists in/of both, and is thus neither. Truth and meaning are two such things.
...this is what we call "truth", our agreement as to what constitutes being true.
Well, we can be wrong then, can't we?
We(mankind) have had plenty of historical agreements as to what constituted being true, and have been wrong. We've later found out that that which we once thought/believed and agreed was true, was not. Rather much of what we thought/believed was true was false. Truth cannot be false. Agreement about what is true can be. Therefore, agreement is insufficient for truth.
You say that this is "correspondence", and many agree with you, but not everyone. For those who agree with you, truth is correspondence, and they will use "true" accordingly.
Reply to Thanatos Sand You complained that the statement ' "Correspondence" is not the same as correspondence' makes no sense. I explained that it does makes sense, what sense it makes, and how. So that addresses the complaint.
It's a reasonable point that "correspondence" is not (necessarily) the same as correspondence. A *so-called* thing is not necessarily the thing itself. Dismissing that point may be the *end* of a debate. I pointed out that it is not much for a *beginning*.
No, it is not an objective fact that either the world is this way, or it is not this way. The concept of "the world" and the existence of the world, as understood by human beings, is supported by the concept of matter. Aristotle demonstrated that matter is necessarily exempt from the law of excluded middle, which you are employing to produce your so-called "objective fact". This refutes your argument.
Now you are simply appealing to authority. Some famous philosopher said it, therefore it must be true... It seems to me that you've ran out arguments, so I'm out.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 21, 2017 at 11:47#888290 likes
This interpretation, then, is a kind of selection from among possible, and contingent, meanings.
This is where we have to proceed with caution, and not jump to conclusions. You say this as if there are possible meanings, in existence, like possible worlds in existence, but if the interpreter chooses from possible meanings, these possible meanings are produced within the interpreter's mind, just like possible worlds are produced by the logician's propositions.
When an interpreter chooses a meaning, one does so on the assumption that there is a correct meaning. The assumption of a correct meaning is sometimes justified as what the author meant. However, sometime the author might speak intentionally ambiguously, as is often the case in poetry. Furthermore, there is often vagueness within the author's mind as to exactly what one's intentions are, as one's intention are often not completely clear to oneself.
The nature of intention is such that it is often something vague in the background, so if this is extended to "what was meant" by the author, there may not be such a thing as the correct meaning, what was meant. This may cast doubt on the assumption that there is a correct meaning. If this doubt seeps into the interpreter's act of choosing from possible meanings, then the assumption that there is a correct meaning is removed from the interpreter's guiding principles. The selection of possible meanings is produced by the interpreter's mind, and the meaning which is chosen (as the correct choice) is the one which is consistent with the intentions of the interpreter. We may argue that this is faulty interpretation.
The claim that a text is understood means exactly that the author has been understood (although, to be sure, not always as the author expected!), and nothing else.
Yes, this is the result. One claims to have understood the author, but this is based on how one interprets the meaning. Has that individual striven to understand "the correct meaning", assuming that the author intends something, or has the interpreter chosen meaning based on what is appealing to oneself. As you say, much interpretation is done fast, and may be near a subconscious level. So in most interpretation there is degrees of each, considering the author's intentions, and the influence of the interpreter's intention, which enter in. We cannot avoid interpreting according to how we've learned to understand the particular words in use, but if we approach an author with an interpretation, the author might very well say, "that's not what I meant". So it is our due diligence to pay respect to the way that the author uses words, and if it appears to be a way which one is not familiar with, effort must be taken to understand that way.
Now this second "interpretation" is a problem, maybe the problem. It simply is not the same as the first "interpretation." There's a better word: perception. But I think it's a mistake to play word games, here. You have to decide whether you "interpret" reality, or if you perceive it. That is, if reality is a text, you can - one supposes must - interpret it. But the consequence of its being a text is that in itself it has nothing on which to ground it as (a) reality - there is no "it," it's all interpretation!
Yes, this is definitely where the problem lies. When we interpret a text, we always maintain within our minds, or deeper at the subconscious level, that what we are getting out of it must be guided by the assumption that the author intended something, this is what is meant, the assumption of a meaning of the text . So we don't interpret in any willy-nilly way because we are assuming that there is a correct way. This we learn as a child, learning a language.
When we interpret reality, what grounds the assumption of a correct way? And of course we have perception to provide this for us. But what is perception other than a much more general form of interpretation? So take your example of looking at a photograph. When we learn to read, or to speak, by paying attention to what others are saying, we are learning to focus on a very particular aspect of our environment. Using language requires that we focus on this very small portion of what is going on around us. Perception in general involves this same type of focus. That other life forms perceive things in very different ways, indicates that they have evolved to focus on their environment in different ways from us. We can say that there are aspects of the environment which prove to be important to us, we evolve to focus on them. As a child we learn to focus on language use because it is important. And, living creatures have evolved ( therefore learned) to focus on particular aspects of their environment which are important, and this is perception.
Now the issue, where the problem lies, is what guides us towards the "correct" interpretation of reality. In the case of language use, we are guided by the assumption that there is something meant, a definite meaning, given by the author. In the case of interpreting reality, we are not guided by this assumption, so we produce the assumption that there is a way that reality "is", a type of logical basis, the law of identity. The problem is that this "the way that the world is" is inconsistent with the way that the world reveals itself to us through our senses. The world presents itself to us as continually changing through time, with no such thing as "the way that the world is".
Reply to Cuthbert [quote?Thanatos Sand You complained that the statement ' "Correspondence" is not the same as correspondence' makes no sense. I explained that it does makes sense, what sense it makes, and how. So that addresses the complaint.
It's a reasonable point that "correspondence" is not (necessarily) the same as correspondence. A *so-called* thing is not necessarily the thing itself. Dismissing that point may be the *end* of a debate. I pointed out that it is not much for a *beginning*. ][/quote]
You clearly weren't reading the discussion before you entered it with your irrelevant, erroneous point, and you clearly haven't been reading my posts well. So, I am done with our conversation. Continue your erroneous, irrelevant points if you will; I won't be reading your posts on this thread.
Funny thing is that Cuthbert's last point was spot on. The name for a thing is not necessarily the same as the thing. We talk about things we invent/create. We talk about things we discover.
While the use/mention distinction is relevant in discourse about truth, I placed quotes around the term correspondence as a means to talk about the term itself as compared to talking about what the term denotes.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 21, 2017 at 21:57#890350 likes
Now you are simply appealing to authority. Some famous philosopher said it, therefore it must be true... It seems to me that you've ran out arguments, so I'm out.
Ha, ha, that's funny. Either I believe a famous philosopher whose work has stood the test of time, whose arguments are well explained and make sense, and he remains an authority today, or I believe Fafner with the contrary opinion. There's something to be said for authority, don't you think?
Funny thing is that Cuthbert's last point was spot on. The name for a thing is not necessarily the same as the thing. We talk about things we invent/create. We talk about things we discover.
No, the funny thing is he wasn't spot on at all, as I never said the name for a thing is necessarily the same as the thing. Your and Cuthbert's problem is you think when you use the word for the thing you are actually successfully representing the thing itself instead of more words referring to that thing.
And Cuthbert wasn't even saying what you said he was saying. He was trying to explain the difference between a word in scare quotes and one without them, which wasn't the issue I had been discussing.
Reply to Metaphysician Undercover
I would invite you to consider the Toy Story example I presented earlier. Buzz and Woody actually mean exactly the same thing by the word "flying" and falling, with or without style, is excluded from that meaning. Buzz applies the word to events Woody doesn't only because Buzz has a mistaken belief that these are cases of what he and Woody agree is flying.
So it is with your treatment of the word "knowledge."
The world presents itself to us as continually changing through time, with no such thing as "the way that the world is".
A leaf twists, turns, and flutters in the wind, showing us now this side, now that, its color shifting as its angle to the sun changes, but the whole time, it's a leaf.
Language is not designed to describe every detail of every moment, and its failure to do so is actually its success at doing something else: language picks our the relatively invariant. Even the process of the leaf's constant movement has some invariance to it that can be picked out, as I did in the first sentence of this post.
(Besides which, it's largely only a practical not a theoretical limitation: a digitally encoded film is in essence the entire contents of a person's visual field turned into language.)
The invariance we pick out with words is actually there. We have words like "leaf" in our language because leaves are relatively persistent. Even in death, they are still leaves for quite a while before they finally decay enough for us to stop calling them leaves. That boundary is vague and nevertheless useful and effective. What leaves never do is spontaneously turn into mushrooms or fruits or rocks.
No, the funny thing is he wasn't spot on at all, as I never said the name for a thing is necessarily the same as the thing.
He was spot on by virtue of describing something agreeable to my words, not yours. You were arguing against mine earlier, by virtue of misunderstanding. He chimed in earlier in order to share that bit of knowledge with you, seeing that I was quite unsuccessful at it.
Your and Cuthbert's problem is you think when you use the word for the thing you are actually successfully representing the thing itself instead of more words referring to that thing.
Why would you mistakenly conclude that I conflate conceptual meaning with the unknown realm?
And Cuthbert wasn't even saying what you said he was saying. He was trying to explain the difference between a word in scare quotes and one without them, which wasn't the issue I had been discussing...
Cuthbert was pointing out differences between a plurality of different uses/meaning for using quotes. In other words, he set out the the use of quotes two different ways. The bit about the word not being the thing is akin to the map/territory distinction.
Are you familiar with it?
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 22, 2017 at 11:52#891990 likes
"S knows that P" is just an informal schema. It is a stand-in for a proposition formed by concatenating the name of a subject, the phrase " knows that " and a proposition.
You call this "informal", but it is not informal, because P stands for "proposition" and "proposition" signifies something formal. If we remove the formal reference, we say "S knows that A", where "A" signifies "what" S knows. See the difference? In the one case "A" signifies what is known by the subject, and in the other case P signifies a proposition. So A refers directly to what S knows whereas P refers to a bunch of words which themselves signify what is known. To confuse these two is category error.
Let's say that S stands for a particular subject, and P stands for a particular proposition. S is Bob, and P is "the sky is blue". Now "Bob" refers to a particular individual, and "the sky is blue" refers to a particular state of affairs. What purpose does "that" serve? Bob knows the sky is blue, or, Bob knows that the sky is blue?
When we say "Bob knows the sky is blue", what is meant is "Bob knows that the sky is blue", not "Bob knows this proposition "the sky is blue'". If we add "that", to say "Bob knows that the sky is blue", what we are saying is Bob knows the proposition "the sky is blue", as true. What is added then, by adding "that", is that "the sky is blue" now signifies a proposition which is designated as true, instead of a state of affairs. So by adding "that" to "knows", such that we say "knows that", we change what follows (the sky is blue), from signifying a state of affairs to signifying a proposition.
S knows that P" is also informal in the sense that it is designedly neutral on what sorts of things S and P are -- remember, there is no specified domain of discourse -- except that they would be considered appropriate on the LHS and the RHS of " knows that ".
Ok, if "S knows that P" is informal, and says nothing about what S and P are, can we use S and P in the normal way? Let's say S stands for subject and P stands for predicate. When you say S knows that P, what you are really saying is that this proposition P, is attributed to this subject S. Now that we have the category error worked out, we can remove "that" as redundant, and just say S knows P, so that P represents a proposition predicated of S, as knowledge which S has, like any object has properties. S knows P is predication. Using the ancient Parmenidean equation, "Being is Knowing", therefore S is P.
Do you agree that, assuming sincerity in speech, that calling a statement "true" displays belief that the statement is true(corresponds to reality, if you like)?
Yes, there is a relationship between sincerity and truth, so when we say "that one speaks the truth", or "what has been said is true", sincerity is necessarily implied. "Sincerity" being the broader term, does not necessarily imply truth, because we use "sincere" in some other ways.. So "sincerity" in this case signifies that the person saying "true" means true according to that person's understanding of the word. If that person understands "true" as "corresponds to reality", then this is what the person means.
I went through this earlier in the thread with tim woods. It had occurred to me that the essence of truth was to be found in definition. A definition is not itself false, because it must be judged as such, by comparing it to reality, and reality is inductive principles drawn from common usage. So if it is not an acceptable definition according to inductive conclusions, one might try to argue that it is "false". But since usage varies and changes, these inductive principles cannot rule out any possible uses or definitions as impossible, so none can accurately be said to be false. If definitions are the type of thing which cannot be false, and truth is the type of thing which cannot be false, then we have correspondence between truth and definition. That is, if one is assuming that truth is the type of thing which cannot be false, then we find truth as corresponding to definition.
If existence alone makes something meaningful, then it is not the case that meaning depends upon interpretation and judgment, for existence doesn't require either.
Existence, meaning, and things like this, are attributes, properties which are predicated of a subject. But the act of predication requires a subject. Without the subject, there is no existence, or meaning, because these words refer to how subjects describe their environment. There is nothing illogical about saying that all existing things are meaningful, this just makes "meaning" the more general category from "existing", so that all existing things are meaningful, and it is still possible that non-existing things may be meaningful as well.
That is a claim you make, but I don't see how you could ever justify this claim. Just by referring to these marks here, you have made them meaningful. So any such claim, that something meaningless exists, is self-refuting. You have referred to the meaningless thing, making it meaningful. "Existing" is an assumption made by a subject, and one cannot make the assumption without giving meaning to that thing referred to as existing. In reality, what you are attempting to do here is refer to non-existent things, and this just demonstrates that meaning is the more general term than existing, because we can refer to non-existing things, such that they have meaning as well as existing things.
And yes, thought/belief and statements thereof come through a subject, however the ability to form thought/belief requires something other than the subject.
I would say that this is a dubious premise, to say that the ability to form thought/belief requires something other than the subject. We should leave this one as something which can never be demonstrated, and therefore not a sound premise.
We(mankind) have had plenty of historical agreements as to what constituted being true, and have been wrong. We've later found out that that which we once thought/believed and agreed was true, was not. Rather much of what we thought/believed was true was false. Truth cannot be false. Agreement about what is true can be. Therefore, agreement is insufficient for truth.
I agree with the first part of this, that we are sometimes mistaken in what we believe. I don't agree with the second part. When I claim X is true, and I believe it, I am referring to the object, what I believe, as having the property of being true. And other people use "true" in this way as well. It may be the case, that later in time it is demonstrated that this object does not have the property of being true, and I respect this fact, but that does not prevent me, or others from using "true" in this way, and this being an acceptable way of using "true". Therefore, what "true" refers to, in actual usage (and what we should adhere to for our definition, if we wish to maintain accuracy), is not the property described as "impossible to be false". So your statement "truth cannot be false" is inconsistent with reality, because when we use the word "true" we still allow the possibility of falsity. You want to define "truth" in a way which is inconsistent with reality.
No, the funny thing is he wasn't spot on at all, as I never said the name for a thing is necessarily the same as the thing.
He was spot on by virtue of describing something agreeable to my words, not yours. You were arguing against mine earlier, by virtue of misunderstanding. He chimed in earlier in order to share that bit of knowledge with you, seeing that I was quite unsuccessful at it.
Describing something agreeable to your words isnt' being "spot on;" its being replicative. And he didn't even do that.
"Your and Cuthbert's problem is you think when you use the word for the thing you are actually successfully representing the thing itself instead of more words referring to that thing".
Why would you mistakenly conclude that I conflate conceptual meaning with the unknown realm?"
Why would you mistakenly conclude I said anything about an "unknown realm.". Try and read my posts better.
And Cuthbert wasn't even saying what you said he was saying. He was trying to explain the difference between a word in scare quotes and one without them, which wasn't the issue I had been discussing... Cuthbert was pointing out differences between a plurality of different uses/meaning for using quotes. In other words, he set out the the use of quotes two different ways. The bit about the word not being the thing is akin to the map/territory distinction.
Are you familiar with it?
He was doing nothing of the kind. Again, you need to read posts better before addressing them. I'm sure you can.
So, I'm outside this morning doing my normal thing. The adolescent hens, of which there are three, are hanging out nearby. Part of my normal thing is feeding the chickens. They're quite amusing at times. For example, when they see my car pull in the driveway, they come running. When they see me from afar they do the same. I can only surmise that this behaviour is, in part, the result of my feeding them regularly. In addition, these chicks were hand reared from very early on, as a result of losing their mother.
Here's something to consider...
Sometimes the chickens get fed old cereal(cheerios). The cereal is in a plastic bag which is near perfectly clear. I mean, the cereal is quite easily able to be seen through the bag, and yet it seems that the chicks do not take note of that. I say that as a result of the bag never being bothered by the chicks despite it's being left outside and unattended for days on end. And yet, when I pick up the bag and call to the chickens with bag in hand they will come running. At this point, I can lay the bag on the ground and reach into it, grab some food, and spread it around at the chickens' feet and they will eat what's been spread. I can then close the bag with the clip and leave it lay without the chickens ever paying attention to it...
That's a bit odd, but it seems that some things can be surmised from it.
not "Bob knows this proposition "the sky is blue'". If we add "that", to say "Bob knows that the sky is blue", what we are saying is Bob knows the proposition "the sky is blue", as true. What is added then, by adding "that", is that "the sky is blue" now signifies a proposition which is designated as true, instead of a state of affairs. So by adding "that" to "knows", such that we say "knows that", we change what follows (the sky is blue), from signifying a state of affairs to signifying a proposition.
Yeah, "that" doesn't do any of that. That's you. (English doesn't care if it's there or not.)
Believe it or not, "S knows that P" is just an ordinary piece of Anglo-American philosophical shop talk. It is not, for instance, itself a theory of knowledge. You seem to be under the impression that it is. You seem to think it amounts to a claim that knowledge is knowledge of propositions being true, or assenting to them, or holding them true, or whatever. This little shorthand is no such theory; if any claim is made in using this schema, it is only that it is reasonable for us to describe some examples of people knowing things in this way. (And that it can be distinguished from things like knowing how to ride a bike, knowing John Kennedy, knowing the way to San José.)
For instance, I could give you a purely causal theory of knowledge, something like "S knows that P if and only if there is a causal chain (of some special sort) connecting the state of affairs said in P to obtain and S." Nowhere in there is it suggested that S would even recognize P if he sat on it, much less that he holds it true or anything else. Doesn't matter. We can describe S as knowing that P, so far as we're concerned who know all about knowledge.
Now if one believed no one can ever properly be described as knowing something in this broadly propositional sense, then certainly one would want to avoid "S knows that P" like the plague.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 23, 2017 at 14:25#895070 likes
Less complicated. "Third door on the right," requires consideration and rejection of other doors, acceptance of the right door, and the question (which does not cease to be a question, even when answered, and certainly not when answered provisionally), "Is this the right door?" Any question of material existence is out-of-court. If you mean exists as ideas, that's iffy, because my idea of a possible world is no possible world, it is merely my idea of a possible world. In this case, "my idea of a possible world" is a noun substantive and cannot be broken into pieces without destroying the original meaning.
Interpretation of "third door on the right" begins with the assumption that there is a correct door signified.
That produces as you say, the question, "is this the right door?". Possibilities enter the interpretation. The hallway with doors might have two ends to enter from, for example. My point about the "existence" of these "possibilities" is that they are produced, created by, the interpreting mind. But if the interpreting mind assumes a correct interpretation, these possibilities are related to that assumption as a possibility that it is the correct one.
To resolve the issue of possibilities, the interpreter must consult further information. Keeping in mind that there must be a correct interpretation, the interpreter consults the context. The assumption of a correct interpretation inclines one to consult context. Without context, "third door on the right" could refer to any door, so we assume that "correct" is determined by the perspective of the speaker. By "context", and "perspective of the speaker", I mean what is going on within the mind of the speaker, not the speaker's environment. So if you are at one end of the hall, and I am at the other, and you say to me "third door on the right", I will assume that you are giving me information to be interpreted from my perspective, though you would more likely say "third door on your right" to make things more clear.
For a guess. For present purpose it's enough note there's an act of interpretation. In the sense you argue, all interpretation is faulty; which is to say, exactly, that all interpretation is interpretation. In short, I do not think we're here much concerned with quality of interpretation.
But what is key, is the assumption that there is a correct interpretation. To say that all interpretation is somewhat faulty, is just a reflection on how we approach certainty. We never achieve absolute certainty, and we know that, but this does not prevent us from saying "I am certain". So, we have confidence in our interpretation, despite the fact that we know "all interpretation is faulty", as you say. This confidence produces certitude and certainty. The "quality of interpretation" is of the utmost importance, because this is what produces certainty, confidence that the "correct interpretation" has been obtained.
As I indicated, we can abandon the assumption of "correct interpretation" but this brings us to a completely different level of uncertainty.
I can see an argument in favor, but at the expense of being able to talk about reality, because it's all interpretation. We're back to my question: Is this the substance of your argument, that everything is interpretation? Or not?
The issue is the assumption of "correct interpretation". In our approach to reality, there is no question in my mind, that we are interpreting reality, that's what sensing, perceiving, and apprehending is. The question is whether reality consists of a kind of substance or something like that, which can ground our assumptions of a correct interpretation. If not, then nothing grounds our possibilities. There is no such thing as having a high probability of having the correct interpretation, if there is no such thing as the correct interpretation.
In the case of interpreting the sentence, we turn to the context, which is what the author meant, to ground the assumption of a correct interpretation. In the case of interpreting reality, what is the "context" which we should consult? In reality, the context we use is the spatial temporal context. So when I look down the hallway for the "third door on the right", I assume certain fixed spatial relations between the doors, and the assumption of these fixed relations validates my assumption that there is a correct interpretation of what is in front of me. When we add time into the context there doesn't seem to be "fixed" relations, and context becomes extremely complex, such that we might give up on the notion of fixed relations. If we do, then we may give up on the notion of "correct interpretation" of reality as well.
Too many unexamined presuppositions. Let's try this. You encounter a tree - no mystery or confusion, it's a tree. For me, it's a tree. For you its an act of interpretation. Question, why don't you "interpret" it as a car?
I don't interpret the tree as a car, because I learned when I was young, and consequently my habit, is to call it a tree. I don't see the point you're trying to make, someone might call it a bush or a shrub, in different languages they would call it by things other than "tree".
And why would you say that there is no such thing as the way the world is, because it's continually changing? If your idea is that the world does not change, then I can see where you have a problem, but why have that idea? What compels you to it?
As I said, the assumption of a "correct interpretation" is supported by the assumption that there is a "context". We assume that we can produce a correct interpretation by putting the thing being interpreted into the appropriate context. In the case of interpreting reality, the context is time and space. The spatial context alone is very simple, "third door on the right", is direct and straight forward. But if in time, I move to the other end of the hall, "third door on the right" means something completely different.
So if your context is supposed to be "the way that the world is", wouldn't this require determining a particular point in time? But what good would this do for grounding your interpretation of reality, when there is a countless number of points in time which could be chosen?
Hi MU. If your post, that I've spread out here, is an argument, would you please append to this a clear statement of your conclusion, if it isn't included above. I suspect your argument is a piece of extended irony, intended to give some folks a rash.
That was a little summary of what we had been discussing earlier in the thread. Essentially, I was arguing that "correct interpretation" is dependent on accurate definitions. The point I was trying to make, in the last post, is that if we go this route, which opposes truth to falsity by definition, then we can go no further in our enquiry into truth, because "true" is defined as being necessarily opposed to "false", and this would form the complete essence of "true" and therefore truth. The necessity created by that definition would disallow that truth is anything other than this.
What I am trying to impress upon some members of this discussion who are inclined to insist that true is opposed with false, is that we will not ever get to the true essence of truth without looking at how "true" is actually used. And, when we do this, we are forced to give up on this necessity. When we say that something is true, in accepted usage, we do not imply that it is absolutely impossible that it is false, because we never achieve absolute certainty. So to oppose "true" with "false" with that form of necessity, is a type of ideal, which exists in theory, but it isn't practical. Therefore it fails to provide us with a practical understanding of truth.
I would invite you to consider the Toy Story example I presented earlier. Buzz and Woody actually mean exactly the same thing by the word "flying" and falling, with or without style, is excluded from that meaning. Buzz applies the word to events Woody doesn't only because Buzz has a mistaken belief that these are cases of what he and Woody agree is flying.
I don't quite understand this example. It is clear to me that Buzz and Woody don't mean the same thing with the word "flying". On what basis do you assume that they do?
So it is with your treatment of the word "knowledge."
And this is what we find with the word "knowledge", we actually mean different things when we use it. In theory, one says "knowledge excludes falsity". This becomes a premise for deductive logic, and all kinds of epistemological conclusions may follow. In practise though, "knowledge" does not exclude falsity. When we use "knowledge" we believe that falsity has been excluded, but this belief does not necessitate that falsity has actually been excluded. So the meaning of the word "knowledge" is different for the epistemologist who claims that falsity is necessarily excluded from knowledge, and for the average user of the word who recognizes that knowledge is an ever changing, evolving thing, and some knowledge might later be proven to be false.
The invariance we pick out with words is actually there. We have words like "leaf" in our language because leaves are relatively persistent. Even in death, they are still leaves for quite a while before they finally decay enough for us to stop calling them leaves. That boundary is vague and nevertheless useful and effective. What leaves never do is spontaneously turn into mushrooms or fruits or rocks.
All right, I'm on board with this idea, let's go with it and see where it leads. Let's say that there is real invariance, and this is what our words refer to. Can we call this invariance "spatial relations which are maintained for a period of time"? Our senses might have evolved to pick out some of these invariances, allowing us to identify things. However, our senses are vary sharp, and what they seem to really pick out is changes. So hearing for example, is picking out changes in the air. Smelling and tasting is detecting certain changes as well. Even with sight, what attracts our attention, is changes. But with sight, we can see that this invariance which you refer to forms a background, upon which we detect changes.
So invariance is a type of background, perhaps it's the context, within which, changes are occurring. So as I was saying to tim wood, when we interpret reality (sense, perceive, and apprehend it), the assumption of a "correct interpretation" is validated by reference to a broader context. This is the background invariance. The background invariance provided the assumption of something "fixed". The invariance must be grounded as real though, or else our interpretation will not be, and this involves how we relate to space and time.
Believe it or not, "S knows that P" is just an ordinary piece of Anglo-American philosophical shop talk. It is not, for instance, itself a theory of knowledge. You seem to be under the impression that it is. You seem to think it amounts to a claim that knowledge is knowledge of propositions being true, or assenting to them, or holding them true, or whatever. This little shorthand is no such theory; if any claim is made in using this schema, it is only that it is reasonable for us to describe some examples of people knowing things in this way. (And that it can be distinguished from things like knowing how to ride a bike, knowing John Kennedy, knowing the way to San José.)
I have only responded to how "S knows that P" has been used in this thread. It is quite clear that P stands for a proposition. If your claim is that "S knows that P" may be used in many different ways from this, that fact is irrelevant, because you are just taking "S knows that P" out of the context from which it was used here, then basing your defence in this unrelated usage.
I have only responded to how "S knows that P" has been used in this thread. It is quite clear that P stands for a proposition. If your claim is that "S knows that P" may be used in many different ways from this, that fact is irrelevant, because you are just taking "S knows that P" out of the context from which it was used here, then basing your defence in this unrelated usage.
Read again what I said. We may, as theorists, describe something using propositions, without claiming that what we so describe has propositional form. It's practically the point of indicative speech.
For instance, when early Wittgenstein made the additional claim that reality has something like proposition form, most demured, but went on describing reality using propositions. Simply saying "S knows that P" doesn't commit you to thinking S herself entertains the proposition P.
I don't quite understand this example. It is clear to me that Buzz and Woody don't mean the same thing with the word "flying". On what basis do you assume that they do?
I don't know how you could think that if you've seen the movie.
What I am trying to impress upon some members of this discussion who are inclined to insist that true is opposed with false, is that we will not ever get to the true essence of truth without looking at how "true" is actually used. And, when we do this, we are forced to give up on this necessity.
The above concluded that since thought/belief can be false, so too can truth.
That would be the case if, and only if, thought/belief were equivalent to truth. It's not.
When we say that something is true, in accepted usage, we do not imply that it is absolutely impossible that it is false, because we never achieve absolute certainty. So to oppose "true" with "false" with that form of necessity, is a type of ideal, which exists in theory, but it isn't practical. Therefore it fails to provide us with a practical understanding of truth.
Here you're invoking certainty. Not a bad aspect when talking about thought/belief, but it has nothing at all to do with whether or not statements are true/false. One can have unshakable conviction that 'X' is true, and yet 'X' can be either true or false. One can also be quite uncertain whether or not 'X' is true, and 'X' can be either.
Read again what I said. We may, as theorists, describe something using propositions, without claiming that what we so describe has propositional form. It's practically the point of indicative speech.
For instance, when early Wittgenstein made the additional claim that reality has something like proposition form, most demured, but went on describing reality using propositions. Simply saying "S knows that P" doesn't commit you to thinking S herself entertains the proposition P.
OK, so if we are using "S knows that P" in the informal sense, then "S knows that P" is insufficient for "P is true", because many things which we know turn out to be false. "S knows that P" would only be sufficient for "P is true", if knowledge consisted of absolute certainty, which it does not.
The above concluded that since thought/belief can be false, so too can truth.
That would be the case if, and only if, thought/belief were equivalent to truth. It's not.
I am going by the evidence. It is quite evident that when we say "X is true" we do not have absolute certainty, and some times the belief which was said to be true turns out to be false. We know that it could be false, and we have respect for that fact, but we still say "X is true". Therefore if we define "truth" according to how "true" is normally used, truth does not exclude falsity. If you define truth in such a way that it excludes falsity, then you are not remaining true to the way that we use "true", and this definition may constitute a false premise.
One can have unshakable conviction that 'X' is true, and yet 'X' can be either true or false.
Yes, this is exactly the point. Either we define truth according to how it is used, the unshakable conviction which inclines one to say "X is true", or we define truth according to the logical principle principle "either X can be true or X can be false". If the latter, then we need to look no further to understand the nature of truth, because there is nothing more to it other than this definition. But I believe that this is an incorrect definition of truth, to oppose it with false, because this is not reflective of the way that we commonly use the word "true", it only reflects how epistemologists would like us to use "true". How we really use "true", is more like the former definition, having a firm conviction. But even when we have such a conviction, we recognize that what we hold as true may end up being false. So truth does not exclude falsity. We might say that it is improbable that something which is true is false, or something like that.
I wasn't asking about what you call it, but what you interpret it as being. That is, there has to be something by which you know it's a tree and not a car. And for so long as it is just interpretation and nothing more, then you can't know, and my question stands.
I still don't get your point. How I sense things and how I call things by name are tied together, intertwined. How can you ask me "what I interpret it as being", as if this is something different from what I call it. These are one and the same. What I interpret it as being, is what I call it. If I come across something I am unfamiliar with, I can't interpret it as being anything in particular because I don't know what it's called. I can give it a name, and describe it, but I don't think that this is what you mean by "what you interpret it as being". Do you mean "how I would describe it"?
Of course, my understanding of interpretation is assigning or providing meaning.
Right, this is consistent with how I use "interpretation". So for example, when I sense my surroundings, and conclude that I see a tree, this act of assigning "tree" to what I am sensing is an act of assigning meaning. I interpret what I sense as a tree.
In short, something has to be out there, or you got nothing.
Of course something has to be out there, which I assign meaning to, just like there is a text out there which I assign meaning to. Where's the difference? My eyes produce an image and I assign "tree" to it, or I sense the word "tree", and I provide an image to correspond. Aren't these both very similar, only one is the inversion of the other? They are both a matter of assigning meaning.
Context and interpretation of texts is problematic, the difficulties of which are not our topic.
I beg to differ. The truth of the statement or belief depends on the interpretation, and correct interpretation requires reference to the context. We can surrender the notion of correct interpretation, but that is what I think is extremely problematic to truth. How could there be truth if there is no correct interpretation? I do not think it is possible. Therefore in order to maintain a concept of truth, it is necessary to reference context, and allow context as an essential aspect of truth.
This is what doesn't make sense, not my insistence on a spatial-temporal context. What could you possibly mean by "reality just is"? "Is" references the present time. But "the present time" gives us no meaning, it is meaningless, without the context of the past and future. So your claim "reality just is", is meaningless without this context.
We don't perceive the scientist's space and time: we perceive, we experience, the world and things as being in the world. The idea of the world or the things in it being constituted through contextualization is incoherent on its face.
But we do not perceive or experience the world. "The world" is a concept which we create through our understandings of space and time, in order to give context and meaning to the things which we do perceive and experience. This context, which you call "the world", aids us in assigning meaning, and our quest for correct interpretation. So I am not claiming that the world is constituted through contextualization, "the world" itself is a contextual concept. The point being that we need to differentiate between contextual concepts (universals), and particular instances of sensing and perceiving. We understand the individual things which we are sensing, through contextualizing them in relation to universal concepts. The process of understanding involves placing the more specific, particular instances of perception, into the larger context, the more general concepts of the world, to the most
general, space and time.
Given complete specification, then the true proposition is always true.
Here, context is included under the title of "complete specification". And this is the problem with "the true proposition is always true", specification is never complete. In assessing context, one must distinguish relevant from irrelevant factors. "Complete specification" is an impossibility, an ideal, and so the true proposition which is always true, is likewise an ideal, which does not exist in practise. Therefore we have to accept the reality that in practise the true proposition is not always true, it is sometimes false. But the fact that the true proposition is sometimes false, does not prevent us from saying that the proposition is true, nor does it indicate that we are using the word "true" incorrectly when we call it true. It is just this rule, the principle, that true and false are mutually exclusive, which makes this an incorrect use of "true". The problem is that no one really follows this rule in practise, so it's not really a rule of language usage at all, it's just a principle which epistemologists have made up, a faulty one. And so we have to proceed in a different direction to understand what "true" really means.
I am going by the evidence. It is quite evident that when we say "X is true" we do not have absolute certainty, and some times the belief which was said to be true turns out to be false. We know that it could be false, and we have respect for that fact, but we still say "X is true".
We don't continue to say "X is true" after becoming aware that it is not.
I wrote:
One can have unshakable conviction that 'X' is true, and yet 'X' can be either true or false.
You replied:
Yes, this is exactly the point. Either we define truth according to how it is used, the unshakable conviction which inclines one to say "X is true", or we define truth according to the logical principle principle "either X can be true or X can be false". If the latter, then we need to look no further to understand the nature of truth, because there is nothing more to it other than this definition. But I believe that this is an incorrect definition of truth, to oppose it with false, because this is not reflective of the way that we commonly use the word "true", it only reflects how epistemologists would like us to use "true". How we really use "true", is more like the former definition, having a firm conviction. But even when we have such a conviction, we recognize that what we hold as true may end up being false. So truth does not exclude falsity. We might say that it is improbable that something which is true is false, or something like that.
What's the difference between believing that "X is true" and "X" being true?
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 24, 2017 at 00:21#897130 likes
We don't continue to say "X is true" after becoming aware that it is not.
Of course not, one wouldn't say "X is true" when that individual believes X is false, unless that person deceives. But that doesn't mean that we don't say "x is true", when we know full well that it is possible that X is really not true. And, this is acceptable use of "X is true". As I explained to Fafner, if we had to know for sure that the falsity of X was absolutely impossible (absolute certainty) before it was acceptable to use "true", this would render "true" completely useless, because we never obtain such absolute certainty. So in reality, to define "true" as excluding the possibility of falsity, is to produce a definition which renders "true" useless.
What's the difference between believing that "X is true" and "X" being true?
We have yet to determine in this thread, whether or not such a difference exists. It doesn't seem likely to me. Since truth is a property of the subject, true being a property of what the subject believes, I don't see how you could separate X being true from someone believes X to be true. They both appear to say the same thing.
You might be inclined to create a difference, by defining "true" in a way such as "excluding the possibility of falsity". But that would be just an artificial difference, created by that definition which is really a useless definition except for the purpose of creating that difference. What is the point to creating that difference? If the definition is used simply to create such a difference, when no such difference really exists, then creating that definition is just a form of deception.
Meta, what on your view is the difference between belief and truth?
I think that "true" refers to an attitude which we have toward expressing our beliefs to others, such that we are open and honest in our communications. It is closely related to sincerity. A true belief is one which is expressed openly and honestly, not held in secret for the purpose of deception. When you express your beliefs in the way that you really believe them to be, you are expressing true beliefs.
Earlier you concluded that since thought/belief can be false, so too can truth.
"Truth" refers to how we conceive of "being true", and this concept of truth which one holds may not be truly representative of what one believes that "true"means. In that case, what this individual claims that "truth" is, is not what is really believed as the meaning of being true.
It does not follow from the fact that belief can be false that truth can be false. Yet, that is the move you keep making.
The move I am making is to assert that when we refer to a thing such as a belief as "true", we are often fully aware that the thing may actually be false. And, it is acceptable to use "true" in this way, because "true" refers to the sincerity and conviction of one's belief, not the lack of falsity in one's belief. So it is the acceptable use of the word to refer to something which may be false as true.. If "truth" refers to "that which is true", for you, then yes, truth can be false.
I think that "true" refers to an attitude which we have toward expressing our beliefs to others, such that we are open and honest in our communications. It is closely related to sincerity. A true belief is one which is expressed openly and honestly, not held in secret for the purpose of deception. When you express your beliefs in the way that you really believe them to be, you are expressing true beliefs.
Nope. Sincerity is not equal to being true. One can sincerely express false belief.
I think that "true" refers to an attitude which we have toward expressing our beliefs to others, such that we are open and honest in our communications. It is closely related to sincerity. A true belief is one which is expressed openly and honestly, not held in secret for the purpose of deception. When you express your beliefs in the way that you really believe them to be, you are expressing true beliefs.
It is quite evident that when we say "X is true" we do not have absolute certainty, and some times the belief which was said to be true turns out to be false.
You really don't need all this business about changing the meanings of "truth" and "knowledge." That horse has lost before it even gets out of the starting gate.
There's still time to change the road you're on, and I see at least two paths you can go by:
(1) Stop talking about knowledge and truth at all, and instead talk about rational belief. If you do that, everything you want to say about conviction and degrees of certainty finds a home. You could even be a Bayesian if you're so inclined.
(2) Just assert the argument from error: we have been mistaken before, and there is no criterion we can find that enables us to know that our current beliefs will not turn out to be false ... (some intervening proofy steps) ... Therefore knowledge is impossible. The defense usually plays with the definition of "knowledge" to defeat this attack. It is a serious challenge, but leads to the dark heart of scepticism.
It is not perfectly clear that you can start at (2) and claw your way back to (1), but of course you can just leave (2) alone and plump for (1) immediately. You can even secretly believe (2) if you want.
It is quite evident that when we say "X is true" we do not have absolute certainty, and some times the belief which was said to be true turns out to be false.
... and from truth.
The Lucky Schoolboy is our two-for-one special today: Your teacher asks you when the Battle of Hastings was fought. You haven't done the reading, know nothing about the Battle of Hastings, and for all you know this is a trick question and there is no such "Battle of Hastings." You take a wild guess and answer, "The Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066."
What you say is true, even though you don't know it. What you say is true, despite your complete lack of certainty or confidence that it is true.
The Lazy Schoolboy gets us the rest: In this case, you've skimmed the book, and when asked, a bunch of dates swim through your head, you nearly give half a dozen different answers, but something just seems right about "1066?"
In this case, you arguably do know the right answer -- you got "1066" from reading the book after all -- but you have almost no certainty to go with your knowledge. A rising inflection when you answer is appropriate.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 24, 2017 at 12:12#898010 likes
The point seems important to the discussion. I do not see where and how you bridge the gap between object and interpretation. Let's try it from your side. Let's imagine you say, "That is a tree." You don't actually have to say it; you could just have some notion that translates into "that is a tree." What does "that" refer to? Do you begin to see the difficulty? If it's another interpretation, then you never escape from an endless chain of interpretation. On the other hand, if there is something about the tree that is not merely interpreted by you, then you have a grasp of reality not interpreted.
No, I don't see the difficulty. The endless chain of interpretation is avoided by the assumption. For me, it's the assumption that there is actually something there which is being interpreted. For others it is the assumption that the interpretation is somehow, in itself, correct. We all have slightly different assumptions concerning this, and that's why we have differing ontologies, metaphysics. The naïve assumption of naïve realism is that the world is exactly as sensed. So it's really not a "grasp of reality not interpreted", it's just an assumption, and assumption doesn't really qualify as a grasp of reality. The interesting thing is that the further we delve into the nature of this reality, what you call "that" with science, the more we come to realize that none of these basic assumptions are actually correct. So we may be left with the realization that the closer to absolutely nothing we can come with our assumptions, leaving it all to interpretation, the closer to understanding reality we get. But even this is just an assumption, it doesn't really qualify as a grasp of reality.
You have already mentioned sensing, perceiving, apprehending, but then you say these are how we "interpret" reality. Interpret? Are you giving interpret two - at least two - different meanings?
Clearly my uses of "interpretation" are different, but they can be classed together as similar, just different context. Likewise, "meaning" has different uses dependent on whether one refers to the meaning which language has, or the meaning which things have in general. They are similar uses but different context. Reading and listening to speech is a type of sensing, As I argued, it's a very focused type of sensing, with an educated, or trained form of interpretation. This goes far beyond the skills of interpretation which are natural to the human body, developed through evolutionary process.
Or are you satisfied that you can never know it's a tree? but if you cannot know that, then you cannot know anything. And more toward the point of this thread, you can never utter or even think anything true.
I'm satisfied to say that we can know it, and also say that it's true that it's a "tree", but I'm not satisfied to say that this will always be true. We might develop a better way of understanding what is going on there, and describe it in completely different words. "The sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening" cannot be truthfully said to be true anymore, because what the words say is an inappropriate representation of what we believe about that phenomenon.
So the question: how do you bridge the gap between object and perception, or alternatively, how do you get from interpretation to reality?
There is no gap to bridge, as you describe. Reality is within us, the objects are created within us, in interpretation. This all is what Plato described in the cave analogy. The gap which needs to be bridged is the separation between each one of us and the reality which is within us. This we bridge with language, and by creating concepts such as "the world", giving each person a place in "the world". But this unified "world" having us positioned within it is something created by us, and as such it is just a reflection of the reality which is within each one of us. Within each one of us is a different, but real perspective. There is also real separation between us, and this justifies the claim that there is difference between us. The assumption is dualist because there are real thinking minds, and a real separation between them, two distinct aspects of reality. There is no gap between interpretation and reality because these are just two different aspects of reality, interpreter, and what is being interpreted. Getting to know the nature of the separation between us is what bridges the gap between us, creating unity and a unified "world".
You really don't need all this business about changing the meanings of "truth" and "knowledge." That horse has lost before it even gets out of the starting gate.
As I've insisted, it is not me who is changing the meanings of these words. I am simply attempting to maintain consistency with how the words are commonly used. It is those who insist that "truth" and "knowledge" must exclude falsity who are attempting to change the meanings. But this attempt is destined to failure, because as I explained, it renders these words unusable. And that's not going to prevent people from using them, they're going to continue to use them in the way I describe.
It is not perfectly clear that you can start at (2) and claw your way back to (1), but of course you can just leave (2) alone and plump for (1) immediately. You can even secretly believe (2) if you want.
So (1) requests that I quit using these terms. That's not going to prevent others from using them the way I describe. (2) says knowledge is impossible. So I assume that we should never call anything "knowledge"? I see no good reason to start calling everything which we presently call "knowledge" by the name of "rational belief" instead. The proper approach is to get the epistemologists to describe knowledge as it actually is, rather then according to some idealistic notion with no practical application. Epistemology is supposed to be the study of knowledge, so they need to be kept on the right track as to what knowledge really is, or else they're off in some pie in the sky fantasy land. What good is such philosophy?
What you say is true, even though you don't know it.
You've neglected the first point we covered in this thread. "True" is subjective, of the subject. The teacher judges the boy's response as "true", so it is true for the teacher. Before speaking, when the boy is preparing his response, the answer is not a true answer, because the boy does not know, and the answer has not been judged by anyone as true. "True" requires that judgement.
In this case, you arguably do know the right answer -- you got "1066" from reading the book after all -- but you have almost no certainty to go with your knowledge. A rising inflection when you answer is appropriate.
Again, "1066" is not judged by the speaker as "the true" answer, so there is no truth here until it is judged by the teacher as true. Your attempts to separate truth from certainty are unfounded because you do not respect the fact that "true" requires a judgement. That something is true, is a judgement. In you example, you yourself, are judging the answer as "true", and attempting to project your judgement into your example. But I decline your projection as deception, so there really is no truth where you claim there is.
Imagine students taking a standardized test. Their goal is to select answers that will be marked correct. In selecting what they believe is the right answer, they must also have confidence that this is the answer the test-preparer will consider the right answer, that the test has no misprints, that it will be graded correctly, etc. In short, that if they do their part in selecting the right answer, the test-givers will do their part in marking it correct. On the test-giver's side, they have to believe they have made the test properly and that the answers they will mark as correct are the ones well-prepared students will select.
Now suppose you want to cheat. You don't know the others, so you don't know who's worth copying off of. If you could compare their answers to the key, you'd know who to copy off of, but if you could do that you wouldn't need to. No joy there.
Now suppose that in addition to selecting an answer, you rate your confidence in selecting that answer, say on a scale from 1 to 5. You could imagine the test-givers using this as a sort of wager, and giving students more points for confidently selected right answers than for guesses, but otherwise it wouldn't change much for them.
But it would change a lot for the students. Now you have an obvious way of deciding who to copy off of.
Now suppose the test is actually not being graded against a key, that instead the answers selected by the students are being tallied as votes and the biggest vote-getter is treated as the right answer. Without the confidence mechanic, and assuming the students are relatively well-prepared, this makes surprisingly little difference. (I've been running some little "simulations" in Excel. If students mostly choose the right answer and wrong answers are randomly distributed, the right answer still usually wins.)
But with the confidence mechanic, things can get weird, because students can collude to move the answer. As I tried testing this, it looked like it only took two students out of ten so colluding to make a noticeable difference, and three was overkill. (The idea is for the conspirators all to confidently select the same answer; they'll pick up some help from whoever believed this answer actually to be right, and often enough swamp other answers, including the right one, selected with only random confidence. Thus their choice tends to win more than it should.)
What's the point of all this?
I wanted to see if we could build up a community's idea of truth from scratch. Test-taking makes a good stand-in for truth because there is a mechanical sense of correctness here, which we can exchange via voting for something like consensus, and we have a way of adding in confidence or certainty as a factor -- socially this would be something like reputation. The goal is to model a speech community without using the concept of truth, but rather explaining their concept of truth.
But the test-taking example leads naturally to the idea of cheating. In broader social terms, you can imagine cheaters as people who value prestige and standing above truth, and it turns out even a smallish group can collude to manipulate the community's consensus. And by manipulating the consensus they can reinforce their reputation as the people who know and speak the truth, despite having other goals entirely.
So I'm a little stuck. I hadn't foreseen the cheating issue, and I'm not sure where to go with this next.
Reply to creativesoul
The hope was that something we'd be willing to call "truth" would show up.
I think the hinge of the analysis I have so far is this: if your degree of certainty or confidence in asserting something is like a wager, then you can deliberately manipulate the betting market by expressing certainty; on the other hand, your degree of certainty or confidence is the only thing we have to to differentiate your views from another's, so socially it becomes your reputation. Given a choice, it makes sense to cheat off the more confident student. And that will continue to work if the people you are imitating are colluding to manipulate the consensus.
We're avoiding using any sort of "objective" standard of correctness for now.
EDIT: 'cause phone.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 27, 2017 at 15:40#907620 likes
Their goal is to select answers that will be marked correct. In selecting what they believe is the right answer, they must also have confidence that this is the answer the test-preparer will consider the right answer, that the test has no misprints, that it will be graded correctly, etc. In short, that if they do their part in selecting the right answer, the test-givers will do their part in marking it correct.
Do you agree that you have made a distinction here between what the student believes is right, and what the student believes will be marked as right? So the goal of the student is to answer consistently with what the teacher will be marking, not with what the student actually believes is "correct". I say this because we learned in school, from experience, that there are tricks to taking multiple choice tests, starting with the process of elimination, which allow you to improve your grade without actually knowing the right answer.
Now suppose that in addition to selecting an answer, you rate your confidence in selecting that answer, say on a scale from 1 to 5. You could imagine the test-givers using this as a sort of wager, and giving students more points for confidently selected right answers than for guesses, but otherwise it wouldn't change much for them.
This appears like a theoretical which is actually nonsense. If the student is getting marked on one's own claim to confidence, then wouldn't every student claim complete confidence on each answer? How would you enforce an honest rating of one's own confidence level? Perhaps you could penalize a student for claiming high confidence and getting the question wrong, but that would be very complicated. The confidence scale seems to require honesty, and if the goal of the student is to get a high mark, why would there be honesty here?
Furthermore, you have stipulated that the student is attempting to give an answer consistent with what the teacher would mark as correct, not with what the student believes is correct. So without the assumption that there is a "correct" answer which is independent from what the student or teacher believes, which will form the basis for the marking, confidence can never be high. So in this scenario you have presented, "confidence" is nothing better than a random proclamation by the student.
In reality, confidence is produced by the assumption that there is a real "correct" answer, independent of the student's and teacher's belief, and that the chosen answer, as well as the teacher's marking, are consistent with that real correct answer. But in your scenario, there can be no such real confidence, because the student is attempting to establish consistency with how the teacher will mark, and unless there is assumed some standard which the teacher will follow, there will be no confidence.
But with the confidence mechanic, things can get weird, because students can collude to move the answer. As I tried testing this, it looked like it only took two students out of ten so colluding to make a noticeable difference, and three was overkill. (The idea is for the conspirators all to confidently select the same answer; they'll pick up some help from whoever believed this answer actually to be right, and often enough swamp other answers, including the right one, selected with only random confidence. Thus their choice tends to win more than it should.)
Now, in this scenario, when the student colludes with another, or others, "confidence" has some real basis in the relationship of trust which the student has with the others, because giving the same answer as another, is what is being marked rather than giving the answer the teacher wants, or any assumed correct answer.
I wanted to see if we could build up a community's idea of truth from scratch. Test-taking makes a good stand-in for truth because there is a mechanical sense of correctness here, which we can exchange via voting for something like consensus, and we have a way of adding in confidence or certainty as a factor -- socially this would be something like reputation. The goal is to model a speech community without using the concept of truth, but rather explaining their concept of truth.
The problem I see is that you haven't properly modeled confidence. You don't seem to see that confidence is based in the assumption that there is a real correct answer, which is the one given, rather than in the assumption that the answer is consistent with what the teacher wants. This allows you to make the switch, such that the answer which the teacher wants is the one which the other students give, not any assumed correct answer. Then confidence may be produced through collusion, rather than conviction that one has the correct answer, because "correct answer" now becomes whatever answer the students have agreement on.
But the test-taking example leads naturally to the idea of cheating. In broader social terms, you can imagine cheaters as people who value prestige and standing above truth, and it turns out even a smallish group can collude to manipulate the community's consensus. And by manipulating the consensus they can reinforce their reputation as the people who know and speak the truth, despite having other goals entirely.
This is why "true" is so closely related to trust, honesty, and sincerity. It is based in what one truly believes is the correct answer. And this comes from the assumption that there is a correct answer, independent from whatever anyone else believes. The correct answer must be the one believed by the oneself, not by anyone else. So when I am confident that I have the correct answer, I am confident that the answer I have is the correct answer, regardless of how the teacher will mark it. Once you allow, as you do, that the correct answer is to be consistent with someone else's answer, you forfeit the true nature of truth, which is to be true to oneself. And this allows for cheating (selecting an answer to be consistent with others rather than one's true belief). So it is imperative to truth, to allow that there is a correct answer, which I alone might have, independent of whatever anyone else believes. Truth is dependent on the idea that the correct answer is proper to what I believe, myself. And this is not a case of me forcing myself to believe in what others believe, it is me believing in what is true.
Perhaps you could penalize a student for claiming high confidence and getting the question wrong, but that would be very complicated.
That was part of the model but I left it out by mistake. It's no more complicated than the rest of this. And it naturally equates your level of certainty with the risk you accept and the potential reward you can receive.
Do you agree that you have made a distinction here between what the student believes is right, and what the student believes will be marked as right?
Right. We start with the usual "objectively correct," then shift to "what test-giver wants," and then shift to "consensus." I'm not conflating these; I'm seeing what we can get out of the model by subsituting one for another and avoiding talking about being "objectively right."
The correct answer must be the one believed by the oneself, not by anyone else. So when I am confident that I have the correct answer, I am confident that the answer I have is the correct answer, regardless of how the teacher will mark it.
I think most students are asserting their actual beliefs with their actual level of certainty, but some definitely aren't. But then instead of measuring their answers against an "objective" standard like a test key, we are measuring them against the consensus of their community.
You want to use the word "correct" for whatever a student sincerely believes. What about the test-givers? Do they just give everyone a "100"?
On my view, thought/belief always uses correspondence with/to fact/reality, including situations when that presupposition goes unnoticed and/or unmentioned.
So, I'm outside this morning doing my normal thing. The adolescent hens, of which there are three, are hanging out nearby. Part of my normal thing is feeding the chickens. They're quite amusing at times. For example, when they see my car pull in the driveway, they come running. When they see me from afar they do the same. I can only surmise that this behaviour is, in part, the result of my feeding them regularly. In addition, these chicks were hand reared from very early on, as a result of losing their mother.
Here's something to consider...
Sometimes the chickens get fed old cereal(cheerios). The cereal is in a plastic bag which is near perfectly clear. I mean, the cereal is quite easily able to be seen through the bag, and yet it seems that the chicks do not take note of that. I say that as a result of the bag never being bothered by the chicks despite it's being left outside and unattended for days on end. And yet, when I pick up the bag and call to the chickens with bag in hand they will come running. At this point, I can lay the bag on the ground and reach into it, grab some food, and spread it around at the chickens' feet and they will eat what's been spread. I can then close the bag with the clip and leave it lay without the chickens ever paying attention to it...
That's a bit odd, but it seems that some things can be surmised from it.
Since no one else addressed this, according to their own position upon truth, I'll attempt to situate truth(as correspondence) within the series of events reported upon above, as my own position demands. It seems that most would have to situate truth in the report itself as compared/contrasted to within the events themselves. That is, if one holds that truth is a property of true statements, and true statements are contingent upon language, then so too is truth. That seems to be the basis of many, if not most, current positions regarding truth.
I hold that truth is correspondence, and that it(correspondence with/to fact/reality) is necessarily presupposed within thought/belief formation itself. That claim comes as a necessary consequence of all thought/belief and statements thereof consisting entirely of mental correlations drawn between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or the thinking/believing agent's own 'mental state', and all mental correlation necessarily presupposing the existence of it's own content. That is to say that the correlations themselves constitute being thought/belief, and that the act of drawing correlation constitutes thought/belief formation.
That last bit goes a long way in shedding some much needed light upon several long standing philosophical 'problems' and/or contentious matters. The sheer scope of application is daunting. It would be perfectly understandable, as a result of the novelty alone, if this seems difficult to understand. Obviously, as is the case with any and all unfamiliar frameworks, the reader must grant the terms and see it through in order to understand it.
I would think that the sheer amount of historical contention regarding truth, particularly regarding what it is, where it comes from, and/or how it works warrants a novel approach. As far as I'm aware, my position is unique in how it accounts for meaning, truth, thought, and belief. That said...
So the chickens most certainly cannot be said to think/believe that something or other is true. That would be to say that they're capable of thinking in statements, which they clearly aren't. It also wouldn't make much sense to try to account for the chickens' thought/belief in the same terms we account for our own.
Does it make sense to say that the chickens formed and/or held rudimentary thought/belief?
On my view, it does. Do the chickens know this? Nope. Need they? Nope.
Would it make sense to say that the chickens thought/believed that they were going to get fed?
That's a tough one.
I want to say that the chickens' behaviour was driven by getting fed, but that's not right either.
I think most students are asserting their actual beliefs with their actual level of certainty, but some definitely aren't. But then instead of measuring their answers against an "objective" standard like a test key, we are measuring them against the consensus of their community.
Here, I can make this easier. Assume the great majority of students believe the test is being graded with a key, but a small number find out it isn't, and some of those collude to manipulate the results.
(I don't care whether the key is "objectively correct" because the key is the stand-in for "objective reality" here. Comparing it to something else isn't necessary for the scenario to work.)
On my view, thought/belief always uses correspondence with/to fact/reality, including situations when that presupposition goes unnoticed and/or unmentioned.
Sure, that's a point of view. I want to see what I can do without appealing to that at all, since people are always saying this view is fundamentally "mistaken." Okay, let's not use it -- or any other idea of truth --
and see if we can still get something that looks like truth.
So, if you want to get something that looks like truth without using the term, look towards children who have yet to have become aware of their own fallibility. Take proper account of that.
What would count as looking like truth, if not looking like some pre-conceived notion of "truth"?
In this case, it's having the answers you give on the test marked as correct.
In our world, what's on the test is also submitted to scrutiny; there's such a thing as complaining that the answer in the back of the textbook is wrong and getting it changed.
So the question will be whether the way test grades are handed out in my made-up world is similar to the way grades are handed out in this one, whether what "counts as true" for them is similar to what "counts as true" for us. I'm not sure yet.
It's also not a bad idea when trying to explain X to avoid using X in the explanation, so I'm trying to avoid even covert uses of standard ideas of "truth," so no comparing the answers to reality.
I see. In our world, having an answer marked as correct requires only what you've already noted. However, as you've also noted, a correct answer can be wrong.
How do the conspirators choose which answer they will give? A randomly chosen answer will pick up some support, but if it's quite unpopular, though the needle will move they risk still coming out in the minority. They're better off doing some pre-test research to find out what the popular answers are and then going all in on those to make sure they win and our conspirators get the reward.
That raises two issues: the reward will be shared with a lot more people, and that's bad; interestingly, if two answers are roughly equal in popularity, our conspirators get to pick the winner. (The best scenario is to be in the minority who get the answer right, but still better right than wrong.)
So there's some push here toward the consensus representing what most people actually believe, but where there's controversy we're right back to manipulation.
How do the conspirators choose which answer they will give? A randomly chosen answer will pick up some support, but if it's quite unpopular, though the needle will move they risk still coming out in the minority. They're better off doing some pre-test research to find out what the popular answers are and then going all in on those to make sure they win and our conspirators get the reward.
That raises two issues: the reward will be shared with a lot more people, and that's bad; interestingly, if two answers are roughly equal in popularity, our conspirators get to pick the winner. (The best scenario is to be in the minority who get the answer right, but still better right than wrong.)
So there's some push here toward the consensus representing what most people actually believe, but where there's controversy we're right back to manipulation.
The result of understanding truth and the role that it plays in all thought/belief is the lack of being surprised. That may or may not be considered a reward. In the case at hand, if reality meets expectation, then the students have gotten it right. That is, they've hedged their bets correctly as a means of getting what they want.
In the case at hand, if reality meets expectation, then the students have gotten it right. That is, they've hedged their bets correctly as a means of getting what they want.
I think we can use concepts of correctness or success without being forced to treat their appearance as an instance of truth, if that's what you were suggesting.
Obviously we can make it that, but I don't think we have to. If we absolutely have to then there's just no way to do this sort of analysis at all. Which might be true. It might be true that truth can't be analysed or explained at all. But I'm trying.
I don't know. You could be self-deprecating like me, and poking fun at yourself. Or I could be completely missing the point of your reply. I do appreciate your contributions here. That said...
Even if you were poking fun at me, it would be fine if it were done in a respectful well intended way.
Your hypothetical actually reminds me of the current alt right's notion of alternative facts. It's almost as if you are analyzing them and how they choose which narrative to tell.
Here's how this happened: to me, the schoolboy examples make it obvious that truth is not the same thing as knowledge or certainty; but the response I got was disheartening. So I wanted to do something with testing where you take away the "objective" part -- the answers -- and the only thing I could see to put in its place was consensus.
As it has happens, there are people around here who hold exactly this view: that truth is just what people individually or collectively say it is. So now I have a model where the truth is literally determined by vote. As I said before, I didn't foresee the cheating issue, but I agree with you it has some obvious real world analogies.
It is a strange colloquialism. Having lived in many different areas in the US and having many friends from around the globe, it's hard to tell where it was picked up. When in Rome...
The schoolboy example effectively set out my argument against Meta earlier regarding certainty.
The model, I think, is a fairly accurate portrayal of whose version of history(which historical account) is taken as the most accurate and therefore taught as history.
Seems to me that "truth" is whatever the consensus says it is. I mean, that is how the word's definition is established, by virtue of how it is used in speech. That skirts around the problem we find ourselves faced with when attempting to take an account of a)that which is not existentially contingent upon our awareness, b)that which is not existentially contingent upon language, and c)that which is not existentially contingent upon thought/belief.
Parsing those contingencies sheds new light on all sorts of things.
...the problem we find ourselves faced with when attempting to take an account of a)that which is not existentially contingent upon our awareness, b)that which is not existentially contingent upon language, and c)that which is not existentially contingent upon thought/belief...
Our awareness of our own mental ongoings is contingent upon our being able to identify and isolate them. That requires attributing meaning to some placemarker or other so that it can stand in as a proxy for our mental ongoings. There are many of these proxies in our terminology. Becoming aware of our own mental ongoings requires written language. It follows that mental ongoings are prior to our awareness of them. However, we know that not all mental ongoings can be prior to language, for some of our terms talk about things that are clearly existentially contingent upon language. So, we are faced with the need to be able to further discriminate between mental ongoings which are prior to language and those which are not.
The attribution of meaning is required for language. The attribution itself requires drawing correlations between symbol and symbolized. That is a mental act, and thus a mental ongoing. Thus, the attribution of meaning is prior to language. But yet again, we find ourselves needing to further discriminate between kinds of meaning, because we know that some meaning cannot possibly be prior to language.
Surely the aforementioned problem is beginning to make itself known?
It's time to take a look at the different uses of the term "truth" in light of all this..
I find that it is clear that only one sense could be the case of us correctly becoming aware of that which is not existentially contingent upon language but is existentially contingent upon thought/belief.
Correspondence.
Another sense could be the case of us correctly becoming aware of that which is not existentially contingent upon either thought/belief or language. That would be when truth is equivalent to reality, the case at hand, the way things are, etc. The problem with this use is that - if and when it is strictly adhered to - it cannot take account of what makes true statements so, without resorting to the above sense...
Well, on the assumption, which I make, that truth and true are different, I think truth is indifferent to true. If truth just is reality, etc., then that truth does not speak. It grounds; it warrants; it gives license for the expression of true propositions. But it provides nothing towards what makes true propositions true...
We agree on that much. The following portion is a bit ambiguous, so I'm not sure what you're actually saying...
...it provides nothing towards what makes true propositions true - how could it? That requires correct judgment.
The term "that" in the last statement leaves me wondering what it is referring to. I'm unsure what it is exactly that you're claiming requires correct judgment.
Does providing something towards what makes true propositions true require correct judgment, or does what makes propositions true require correct judgment?
I've been looking for a way to build a sort of "economic" model of truth within a population and I think I've gotten something I can use from the test-taking scenario, namely how one's certainty can affect another.
I'm thinking of building on how Grice talks about meaning (simplifying a bit):
A tells B that p,
(1) intending B to believe that p,
(2) intending B to recognize that A intends B to believe that p,
(3) intending B to fulfill (1) on the basis of (2).
(The levels can be multiplied here without end ...)
We could do something like this with certainty: surely A is also expressing to B some degree of certainty that p, and intends B to recognize this, and intends B to embrace p in part on the basis of recognizing A's degree of certainty, and intends that B's degree of certainty that p be reflective of A's degree of certainty.
That's the ideal case, but in real life we often form a judgment about a speaker's entitlement to the degree of certainty he has expressed. So we would have to add that A intends B to recognize A's degree of certainty to be justified.
***
Before trying to flesh all that out, there's another candidate (i.e., another factor we might be able to analyze without talking about comparing statements to reality and such).
Truth is normative. I don't just mean in the sense that one should tell the truth. Generally speaking, one should believe what is true and one should not believe what is false.
So we could do this:
A asserts that p to B,
(1) implying B should believe that p,
(2) intending B to recognize that A believes B should believe that p,
(3) intending B to believe that p on the basis of (2).
(It's tempting to rewrite this using "expect," but unfortunately "expect" is ambiguous between merely predicting and demanding conformance to a norm. One reason for a parent to tell a child, "I expect you to behave," is, oddly, that they don't expect them to behave.)
There is a natural linkage between this normative sense of truth and the certainty calculus I've been playing with. You ask me where your keys are; if I tell you I think they're on the kitchen table but I'm not sure, I do not also think you should believe they're on the kitchen table. I might even think you should not believe this on the flimsy basis I've provided, but you shouldn't rule it out. But if I tell you I saw your keys next to the computer, I think you should believe that's where they are.
Reply to creativesoul
What I'm wondering is this: if we analyze assertions to which we attach the additional normative claim -- "You should believe this" -- would that capture all the cases we usually describe as truth claims? Would it capture too much?
ADDED: Need to backtrack. This is all going to end up being about knowledge. What is claimed to be true is what you claim to know; it's the content.
We're supposing truth is just reality. We select a sample of reality, a brick. In doing so non-critically we sidestep a lot of questions - problems - about how we know it's a brick, and what a brick is anyway, and so forth. I think it is correct in this context to ignore/suspend/bracket for the moment all of those questions. There's no law against coming back to them, but if we cannot get to reality or a sample of it, then we really cannot get anywhere.
No worries. I'm a direct realist.
Anyway, we have a brick, and we say, "This here is a brick." A proposition (p) we can here define as true (T). We can abbreviate a generalization as Tp.
We ought to stop here and think a bit. We have a brick and a Tp. What do they have to do with each other. On the specification that the brick is just a piece of reality, I feel comfortable saying that it - the brick itself - does not and cannot have anything to do with the Tp (or anything else). And what is the Tp? To begin with, it is just a p, a proposition. It could be true or false. If we have constructed it carefully, it is contingently either, but certainly one of them. What it is that settles the contingency? What settles it is the "that" referred to above, that I call an act of correct judgment.
What would incorrect judgment look like if reality(the brick itself) does not and cannot have anything to do with the Tp?
Reply to creativesoul
Sure, but I think rationality is normative in a non-moral sense. I don't think it's just a matter of expecting conformity, but there's "should" and "must" everywhere.
But maybe not. When Hume, he of the "is/ought gap" says "the wise man proportions his belief to the evidence," maybe we just take that as a fact, no implication that people ought to do this. But isn't rationality something we aspire to?
I, for one, have very good reason to think/believe that morality is largely misunderstood(conventionally ill-conceived), again, as a direct result of misunderstanding thought/belief itself. That's a tangent that's probably not worth venturing very far into, but I'll say the following...
We adopt, at least initially, our worldview which includes moral belief(that which is considered acceptable/unacceptable thought/belief and/or behaviour).
To the bit about rationality...
I would say that being rational increases the likelihood of forming and/or holding true thought/belief about the world and/or ourselves, whereas being irrational has the opposite effect/affect. True thought/belief is imperative to successfully navigating the world.
Its brickness just is; and it is its isness, its being-as-a-brick, that allows judgment to create a proposition with respect to its brickness.
The difficulty with this perspective is that when you assume such a thing as "Its brickness ... its being-as-brick", it is implied within this assumption that there is a single correct, or objective definition of what it means to be a brick. If there is no such correct definition of "brick", then brickness is just a bunch of various different ideas, held by different people, and "that is not a brick", is true or false according to these various ideas.
We're supposing truth is just reality. We select a sample of reality, a brick. In doing so non-critically we sidestep a lot of questions - problems - about how we know it's a brick, and what a brick is anyway, and so forth. I think it is correct in this context to ignore/suspend/bracket for the moment all of those questions. There's no law against coming back to them, but if we cannot get to reality or a sample of it, then we really cannot get anywhere.
See, it's not correct to ignore or sidestep theses questions, because these are fundamental issues, and there is no such thing as correct without first resolving the issue of definition. So you want to say:
"let's just assume that there is a brick, without first considering whether it is possible that there is a brick".
If it is impossible that there is a brick, and this might well be the case if there is no correct definition of what it means to be a brick, then the assumption that there is a brick is necessarily a false assumption.
In that case, you would be sidestepping these difficult questions, in order to proceed with a false premise, that there is a brick. In an enquiry such as this, what would be the point to sidestepping difficult questions, in order to proceed from a premise which mat be false?
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 30, 2017 at 12:33#916380 likes
Incidentally, that is why we cannot associate "true" with "correct" as Srap is trying to do. "Correct" is associated with "justified", meaning to be consistent with what others believe. "True" is associated with "certain". So if I say "that is a brick", and "it is true that that is a brick", what I mean is that I am certain that that is a brick. And if we proceed to ask, what makes me certain that that is a brick, often the answer is that I am certain because my belief is justified, but sometimes I can be certain even when my belief is not justified. And this is why we need to look beyond justification to determine what truth is.
When we look at the definition of "brick", this assumed "brickness ...being-as-a-brick", we can ask, is the definition accepted because it is justified, or is it true. Then we must confront the issue of what makes a definition a true definition, rather than a justified definition.
I wrote about "sidestepping" with you in mind, MU. Two problems I have with your way of looking at this are 1) it seems you will never have truth, or really any gold-standard proposition about pretty much anything. If we accept or offer a definition, that's always equivocal. If we just say the heck with it and define it ourselves, then how do we know it's right. I acknowledge the point, but it has narrow application, and beyond that quickly becomes absurd. After all, its atomic structure is always whizzing around, therefore from moment to moment it's never the same brick - we cannot even give it a name.
The point I am trying to make is that we must get past this issue of definition if we want to move on toward what "true" really means, or what truth really is. If we begin with the assumption, that there is "brickness", "being-as-a-brick", then we are basing or understanding of "true", and "truth", in this assumption. But this assumption is not necessarily true. Any definition may be justified, and accepted, but justification does not make it true. So when we base our analysis of true, and truth, in the assumption that there is a correct definition of things like "brick", then our truth is based in justification.
But this is not a true representation of truth, because "true" refers to things beyond justification, things which are not necessarily justified, and also things which are justified are not necessarily true. That is why we need to get beyond this assumption of "brickness", or "being-as-a-brick", because beginning with this assumption will necessarily restrict us to justification, and other things like justification (correct and right) which are to use creativesoul's terms "existentially contingent" on language. From this beginning, this assumption, we will never get to this form of truth which creativesoul insists goes deeper than language.
And 2), in our encounter with the brickness-of-(what we call)-the-brick we did not use any definitions at all. At the building supply store, for example, we might just as well have asked for a pallet of these.
OK, so this is the point right here, why we are lead to certainty in our inquiry into "true" and 'truth" rather than assumptions of correctness. Do you recognize the difference between assuming that something is right or correct, and being certain that something is true? When someone says "that is a brick", or "it is true that that is a brick", what is meant is that the person is certain that that is a brick. This certainty is not based in an assumption that there is such a thing as "brickness", or "being-as-a-brick", it is based in something else, some sort of attitude of confidence.
Therefore what makes us say "true", is this attitude of confidence, not the assumption that there is a correct definition of "brick", and that satisfies the definition. The assumption that there is a correct definition of brick is the assumption that someone else has made a correct judgement, someone has correctly judged what it means to be a brick. The attitude of confidence is the assumption that I have made the true judgement. So this is where we find truth, in the assumption that I have made the true judgement, not the assumption that I am following the judgement of someone else, because it is correct.
And all of this is why I mentioned some time previously the ideas of right focus and right magnification - right understanding. It's getting pretty clear that the absolute quality of true is a product solely of the criteria in force; and of truth, its exemplification in something outside of itself. Admittedly this surrenders any notion of absolutes or ultimates apart from application, but for the price it secures both truth and true. Did I just win? (Did you have a moment to look at the brief article referenced above?)
So I really beg to differ here. We do not find truth in the criteria in force, this is where we find justification. Truth is not necessarily aligned with right, what is aligned with right, is what is justified, but what is justified is sometimes false. We find truth as aligned with one's own personal conviction, the confidence and certitude in one's own power of judgement, to judge the truth, regardless of what others, or society taken as a whole, have designated as "right".
With regards to the referenced article, I think Kant is in a way correct. I base truth in personal certitude. So if anyone like Kant says, we cannot be certain of the truth, then this individual takes a position of skepticism, and lacking that certitude, there is no truth for that person. The non-skeptic, who is confident, has truth.
The criticism I'm leveling at equating "truth" with reality is all about the inherent incapability that that framework has in explaining what makes true statements/propositions so. You've agreed to that, adding that doing so requires judgment. Prior to further summarizing...
For example, in the same way (not sense) we say a lemon is yellow, we are, for the moment, saying that reality is truth (let's call it T1).
I don't understand this meaning of "truth". I don't see that "truth" is ever used in a sense which makes it equivalent to reality. "Truth" is related to "true", and "true" is related to "reality", but I don't see how you can relate "truth" directly to "reality" without going through the medium of "true". Is this what you're trying to do, relate "truth" directly to reality independent of "true"?
It happens that "truth" also has meaning and significance with respect to "true." My point here is that this is a simply a different sense, not to be confused with truth as reality, a distinction not always maintained in this thread. This second truth (T2) appears to derive its meaning from how it employs T1. T2 differs from T1 is that T2 is T1 in use propositionally.
So I really think you have this reversed. T1 is "truth" in relation to "true". If you think that there is such a thing as "truth as reality" (T2), then you need to justify this claim, and this justification will determine exactly how this "truth as reality" relates to "true", and if it is truly independent from "true".
Fair enough. I'd go further. (I think) we're starting with the hypotheses that there is a reality; reality is real; and we're content for the moment to let a brick informally represent what "reality" means. And that "truth" is a word that we define, for the moment, as naming a quality that reality has. For example, in the same way (not sense) we say a lemon is yellow, we are, for the moment, saying that reality is truth (let's call it T1).
See, you have only hypothesized that there is a reality. If we say that this hypothesized reality is truth, then it is independent from "true", because we have no means to judge the hypothesis as true. But what good is a "truth" which is independent from "true"? It's just a hypothesis which we have no means for judging whether or not it's true. Why even hypothesize such a "truth", it seems utterly useless?
Srap TasmanerAugust 01, 2017 at 03:20#920360 likes
The assumption that there is a correct definition of brick is the assumption that someone else has made a correct judgement, someone has correctly judged what it means to be a brick. The attitude of confidence is the assumption that I have made the true judgement. So this is where we find truth, in the assumption that I have made the true judgement, not the assumption that I am following the judgement of someone else, because it is correct.
"Brick" is the English word for what Tim wants to buy.
Fair enough. I'd go further. (I think) we're starting with the hypotheses that there is a reality; reality is real; and we're content for the moment to let a brick informally represent what "reality" means. And that "truth" is a word that we define, for the moment, as naming a quality that reality has. For example, in the same way (not sense) we say a lemon is yellow, we are, for the moment, saying that reality is truth (let's call it T1).
Still same page?
Something seems amiss...
"Truth" is a term that names a quality of reality. Truth is a quality of reality(that reality has).
I was ok to that point, but then you went on to say...
...We are, for the moment, saying that reality is truth (let's call it T1).
This doesn't seem right, tim. It doesn't work with the above..
I was ok to that point, but then you went on to say...
...We are, for the moment, saying that reality is truth (let's call it T1).
This doesn't seem right, tim. It doesn't work with the above..
Reality is a quality of reality?
Consider his example: "the lemon is yellow". He's not saying that the lemon is identical to yellow. And so when he says "reality is truth" he's not saying that reality is identical to truth.
Although I think his grammar is off. He should be saying "reality is true". Otherwise it's akin to saying "the lemon is yellowness".
Well, orange is named after the fruit, and not the other way around. Place, some more ah-hem... hunter gatherer communities still identify colours with the things. "like a tree", "like a tiger, "like a butterfly" etc. Some, maybe an orange is orangeness...
If truth is a quality of reality, then reality cannot be truth. Otherwise it results in reality being a quality of itself.
I think this is just grammatical confusion. He seems to mean it in the sense of saying that being yellow is a property of a lemon. Does it then follow that the lemon cannot be yellow, otherwise it results in the lemon being a quality of itself?
I also wrote "reality is truth." The real criticism - question - here is if truth, in Aristotelian terms, is a substance or an accident. In calling it a quality, I'm calling it an accident, and accidents depend on substances and cannot exist on their own. On the other hand if truth is a substance, then it isn't an accident, cannot be a predicate.
Before going there, it's worth a sentence or two on where we've been and where we're going. The critique of truth given by MU (as I understand it) is that it is always subject to, "how do you know?" MU's answer is judgment; our judgment tells us so. The problem is that judgment is ever-fallible; that is, it's judgment all the way down and at every level subject to the same, "how do you know?"
I think there's an historical factor that ought to be introduced here. I'm referring to the notion of the hierarchy of truth, which is implicit in Platonic epistemology. In The Republic, there is a very important section called the Analogy of the Divided Line - there's quite good summary on Wikipedia here.
A general point is that in the Platonic view, knowledge of sensory objects or of the 'domain of the senses', generally, can't be reliable because the senses are inherently treacherous. But knowledge of mathematical truths are relatively more stable, because they are not subject to the change and mutability that characterises worldly things. The highest knowledge, noesis, pertains to the knowledge of the forms themselves, the ideal archetypes of things, which exist on another level of reality altogether. Because they are the origin or source of the things we see 'here', then knowledge of them is knowledge of the actual origin of things.
Please forgive my pidgin Platonism, I'm no classics scholar and only have a very rudimentary grasp of these ideas. But the reason I mention it, is because in the classical Western tradition, 'certain knowledge' relied on there being an hierarchy of knowing or being, extending down from the One, through angels, then humans, animals, plants, mineral, etc, as depicted in this medieval woodcut:
Of course, in the transition to modernity, that whole schema has been undermined or effectively forgotten. Hence the sense of there not being any terminus of explanation, or foundation of certainty for knowledge, as that, among other things, is one of the things that has become 'lost in transition'.
Metaphysician UndercoverAugust 02, 2017 at 02:02#923120 likes
This isn't for you to understand or see; it is a definition, or hypothesis - a starting point.
The point - my point - is to attempt to ground the meaning of the word "truth" in something secure and unequivocal. If truth just is reality, per definition, then, it seems to me, the only attack possible on truth is to attack reality.
You can define a word however you please, but if it's not a good representation of how the word is used, then what good is that definition? In other words, if you want to talk about what truth is then we should refer to the way that the word is used, the thing which is referred to by "truth", not some made up thing. If you just make up a definition, then truth will be just that, whatever you've made up. But what kind of truth is that, one you can just make up?
Do you challenge that hypothesis? My hypothesis is that, "there is a reality; reality is real." Are you arguing that it is not the case that there is a reality, or that there is a reality, but that it is not real? It must be one of these, else why mention it?
My challenge is this, if it is a hypothesis, "there is a reality", as you claim, then what justifies your claim that it is truth. In order that a hypothesis be recognized as truth, it must be justified. So yes, I challenge your hypothesis, "there is a reality". In order that reality is truth, your hypothesis must be justified or we risk the possibility that there is no such thing as truth. Are you prepared to proceed on an unjustified hypothesis, defining "truth" accordingly, but risking the possibility that there is no such thing as truth, due to the possible failure of your hypothesis?
But maybe we have to start with more primitive notions. Answer yes or no: Is there reality? Is there knowledge?
I believe there is reality, and I believe that there is knowledge. But if I claim that reality is truth, as you do, then I must have certainty in my belief that there is reality. If I have certainty in my belief, then I ought to be able to justify this certainty, or else the certainty is just an illusion, false certainty. That's why I asked you for justification, because you have claimed that reality is truth, implying that reality is a certainty for you. So if it's a certainty for you, you ought to be able to justify it, and make it a certainty for me.
Another point, and to draw on another philosophical tradition, namely, Vedanta (Hinduism). There is a lovely word in that tradition, namely, Sat-Chit-Ananda ( ??????????? ) which denotes 'being-mind-bliss'.
sat (???): In Sanskrit sat means "being, existing", "living, lasting, enduring", "real, actual", "true, good, right", "beautiful, wise, venerable, honest", or "that which really is, existence, essence, true being, really existent, good, true".
cit (????): means "to perceive, fix mind on", "to understand, comprehend, know", "to form an idea in the mind, be conscious of, think, reflect upon". Often translated as "consciousness" or simply "mind".
?nanda (?????):[means "happiness, joy, enjoyment, sensual pleasure", "pure happiness, one of three attributes of Atman or Brahman in the Vedanta philosophy". Frequently translated as "bliss".
The point is, in this tradition (and its cognates), 'reality', 'truth' and 'being' are in some fundamental way inseparable; to know something is to be at one with it. To know 'what is', is to be at one with it, but this is an existential state or condition, rather than propositional knowledge, as such.
Similarly, in Aristotle, the notion of an 'intelligible object' is that when one knows such an object:
in thinking, the intelligible object or form is present in the intellect, and thinking itself is the identification of the intellect with this intelligible.
Lloyd Gerson, Platonism vs Naturalism.
Whilst Aristotelean and Hindu philosophies are worlds apart, this sense of the 'union of knower and known' can be found in both, primarily because it is an aspect of most pre-modern philosophies.
Whereas, the problem for modern philosophy is that 'thinking' is one thing, 'the object' another; 'the world' is one thing, 'the subject' another. There is nowhere any sense of ground or basis in the relentless march of science, which no longer deals in eternal laws, but only 'falsifiable hypotheses'.
I'm unsure if you've made an error at all tim. I want to say here that I have no problem with granting another's conceptual(linguistic) framework and seeing it through. I mean, there is no other way to understand an unfamiliar position. Yours is unfamiliar to me.
So...
I'm struggling to understand the parallel between "truth" being a quality of reality and yellow being a quality of lemons.
"Truth", if it is the name of a quality that reality has then it would be a sensible parallel to draw. I mean, "yellow" is the name of a quality that lemons have.
Reality is what each of us experience. It is a process, not a thing. Similarly, knowledge is an accumulation of experiences. It is a process, not a thing.
Hence, as processes, reality and knowledge are continuously evolving (changing) and are subject to interactions/processes of each individual. To embrace such a model is to believe in it. It is not a concrete thing. It is subject to evolving experiences.
Knowledge, different from truth, has its needs (stability one of them), that are not truth's. An example may settle the point: I have on a mountain ridge in fog and mists completely misunderstood what I was looking at. What I thought was the lodge, our goal, a kilometer distant turned out to be a rock about 150 meters away. I knew it was the lodge, until the wind blew some of the mist away. But it was never true.
You might argue that this is exactly the senses being treacherous (true, with respect to knowledge), but I would argue back that the senses gave true report; rather it was my understanding that failed in supposing what I saw provided enough data for me to draw a conclusion. That conclusion was false with respect to the facts - but true with respect to the information I had.
There is a stock example in Indian philosophy of 'mistaking a rope for a snake'. The analogy is used to illustrate that we misunderstand what we're looking at, in a similar way to your example. I'm sure proponents of that argument would contend that you did not, in fact, know that the rock was the lodge; that you thought it was, but were mistaken about it. It was, therefore, a mistaken belief, based on sense-impression combined with your expectation of what you were wanting to see.
I suspect it is a major cultural flaw (and personal), no doubt incubated in the expectations of science, to wait to be told what is, when at some point each of us needs to actively participate in that investigation.
It's more that scientific method assumes the separation or detachment of observer from object; 'brackets out' the observer, so to speak. Which is all well and good, for a certain class of observations, but which is problematic in other respects, because we're not, actually, separate from, or outside of, life or reality as a whole. That sense of otherness or separateness is something that I think is characteristic of modernism as a mode of being.
Or is it, for a moment, while the error stands? Not as a matter of knowledge: but as truth is prior to knowledge, so as a matter of truth.
Well, if you've said that, you've fallen into the pit of relativism, solipsism, and various other isms, none of them healthy. Surely any proposition concerning either truth or knowledge, has to be grounded in what really is the case.
Is experience a kind of proposition? Well, I would have said not, a proposition is by definition a verbal statement. I suppose you could say, if someone comes at you brandishing a weapon, that they're proposing to attack you, but I would have thought that for it to be actually 'a proposition', it would be more along the lines of 'Let's say we go and attack person X' rather than the act itself.
But the nature of 'experience' is again one of those kinds of questions that sounds obvious, but really isn't. The scientific method constrains what constitutes 'experience', in the sense of requiring that empirical observations be replicable in the third person (notwithstanding the so-called 'replication crisis'). That rules out a lot of what we would like to call 'experience', in that unless it's an 'experience' that can be described in third-person terms, then it is deprecated.
But what constitutes 'knowledge', is, again, a subject that receives a lot of attention in Plato's dialogues. Interestingly, the Theaetetus, which is mainly concerned with those questions, is quite inconclusive; many of the dialogues end in aporia, questions without answers.
If, knowing that it's really a rope, I still claim it's a snake, then that's crazy. But before I know?
before you know, you have a belief, which turns out to be false. If we both saw the same thing, and you said, 'it's a snake'., and I said a rope, then you would have been right. We can and do have mistaken beliefs about many things.
Customarily, it is said that 'knowledge is justified true belief' - which is true, although trite.
That's why I referred back to traditional philosophy - Greek and Indian. They both have a kind of sub-text or background, wherein 'knowledge' is inherently connected with virtue - Plato's 'knowledge of the Good', being an example.
The problem nowadays - and it's a profound issue - is that scientific knowledge is explicitly not concerned with any kind of value or moral normativity. The Universe is supposed to be value-free - most people here will say that value is subjective, something which humans project onto the supposedly blank canvas of the Universe.
most people here will say that value is subjective, something which humans project onto the supposedly blank canvas of the Universe.
While my experience on this forum is not exhaustive, I have yet to witness anyone describe value in this way, since most probably consider themselves part of the Universe and not separate and apart from a blank canvas called the Universe.
As for me, value is an interaction between between me and that which I value, making it more of a feeling, the feeling varying in intensity.
Metaphysician UndercoverAugust 03, 2017 at 01:39#925430 likes
Well, the problem is that the word "truth" in ordinary usage is simply not well-understood.
I don't see a problem with "truth" according to ordinary usage. It's very clearly "that which is true", or "the state of being true. The issue with ordinary usage, where the problem is, and the thing which is not well understood is what it means to be "true". So the difficulty is not with "truth", which ordinarily refers directly to 'true", the difficulty is with "true".
It appears to me. like you think that you can bypass the difficulty of "true", by defining "truth" in some other way, which does not refer to "true".
My definition is a test, a hypothesis: can it stand; is it useful? Or does it fail, and why? As such it is not the conclusion of an argument, instead it is an early waypoint in a discussion. You object to it. Were it a conclusion there might be merit in the objection. But it's a premise, a for-the-sake-of-argument presupposition: objecting to that simply short-circuits the discussion.
I disagree with this. A hypothesis, or proposition, which is a premise "for-the-sake-of-argument", is a proposal, and like any other proposition it needs to be properly supported before we proceed to the argument. This way the true meaning of the proposition, will be fully understood, and any conclusion derived will be fully understood. "Reality is truth" has no straight forward meaning, so it's meaning must be explained in a clear way.
My argument runs this way: given definitions of "truth" all have problems. Is it possible to find for it a substantive and non-trivial definition that is simple and problem free, even if the meaning is constrained as compared with the problematic definitions. I find one in regarding truth as reality (and reality as truth). The constraint is that in-so-far as reality does not speak, so truth does not speak. But like reality, it grounds, evidences, reveals, is; and in these, it is secure, simple, non-problematic. You don't like it because it's not the way you understand truth, but that's the whole point! Incumbent on you if you're engaging is to show where it fails on its own terms.
I don't see any such problems with definitions of "truth". They are very straight forward, but they refer directly to "true". So that is where your argument clearly fails. You insist that there is a problem defining "truth", when no such problem exists. Then you use this as an excuse to produce your own definition of "truth". For what purpose, I do not yet know, but I'm sure there's a reason why you want to define "truth" in this way.
And as I said, the problem is in defining "true" not "truth". "True" is often used to mean "in accordance with reality". So the difficulty is in determining what is meant by in accordance with reality. If we proceed with your definition of "truth", in which truth is reality, then "true" simply means "in accordance with truth". You might claim to have solved the problem, but all this does is create a vicious circle, and avoids dealing with the difficult question of what is meant by "in accordance with reality".
Metaphysician UndercoverAugust 03, 2017 at 01:43#925440 likes
You're simply conflating 'this is truly my belief' with 'this is a true belief'.
No I'm not conflating the two. The first says "I am certain that this is my belief". The second says "this is a belief which I am certain of". Do you see the difference?
Several questions: can experience (by itself, in itself) be true? Is experience a kind of proposition?
Experience is a process not a thing. As far as I can tell, traditional logical syllogisms cannot deal with processes. I was never able to bring myself to read Alfred Whitehead, but brief description on Wikipedia which describes his process metaphysics, that is based upon the concept of extended experiences (I believe he was influenced by Bergson), is less dependent upon logic and more a result of creative intuition.
Alright tim. In the spirit of clarity. I've seen you arguing for an equivalency between truth and reality. That is why the bit about truth being a quality of reality didn't make sense to me. Then there was the comparison between reality and lemons and truth and yellow. I want to move on. In the meantime you've said to another what I took you to be saying from the beginning...
Truth is reality. Reality is truth.
That's a fine starting point. I'll accept that use of both terms. If they're not equivalent then it needs to be made clearer what the relationship is between them. If they are equivalent, then we can move on...
No rhe second just says that the belief is true. Whether I am certain about it is irrelevant. Saying a belief is true, no matter how certain of that I might be, does not make it so.
No rhe second just says that the belief is true. Whether I am certain about it is irrelevant. Saying a belief is true, no matter how certain of that I might be, does not make it so.
I don't understand you, and don't see your point. How does saying "this belief is true" differ from saying "I am certain of this belief"?
This Stanford article lists by my count 118 titles in the bibliography, many - most - with the word "truth" in the title, and none that I saw that had the word "true." And this makes sense, because the the subject is truth, not "true."
We were referring to common usage at that time, not philosophical speculations, you had said that there was difficulty with "truth" in common usage. And that's what my comment referred to, common usage. There is no such difficulty in common usage, "truth" refers to what is true. In philosophy one might look to a concept of "truth", and try to determine what that is. In my opinion, this would be like asking what it means to be true.
Perhaps we should give up the pursuit of Truth (with a capital T) and begin thinking that truth is really a way we have of speaking of what we agree on and what we find persuasive. In this way we should focus on truths (with a small t)."
This is what I disagree with. Truth is not necessarily what we agree on. What we agree on is what is justified, and the things we agree on may not be the truth. Do you recognize that there is a difference between true and justified?
As I explained earlier, truth is of the subject, it is subjective. So it cannot be what "we" agree on. If I am certain of something, I will claim that it is the truth regardless of whether or not we agree on it. Truth does not require agreement. I may have information which neither you nor anyone else has access to, so I know the truth without agreement from anyone else. And if I persuade you, so that you agree, this persuasion is justification it is not truth. Truth is not "what we agree on".
If I recall, your definition of "true" is that which, after a tiresome number of iterations of justifications, falls under a comfortable assumption we can have confidence in.
No, the point is that "true" is not what "we" can have confidence in at all, it is what "I" have confidence in. Individuals claim "X is true", and they will insist that X is true even if others claim something contrary. This is very evident here at tpf. They will attempt to convince others that X is true, to justify their claims. But when "X is true" is claimed, "X" always refers to how I understand X, not how we understand X (of course there is no such thing, because understanding is the act of an individual).
An example occurs to me: You have a large pot of beans, thousands of them. I hold up a bean and ask, "What is this?" "A bean," you answer. "Prove it," sez I. And you do. Then I hold up another bean and ask, "What is this?" At a fundamental level this is a fair question and one that can be asked of every single bean.
This is exactly the nature of "truth". Each individual instance of truth, must be proven, justified. Each item in the pot must be proven as a bean before we can say that it is true that there are only beans in the pot.
So: truth is the -ness of anything that makes that thing what it is. It is real, the reality of the thing. Condensing a bit, we end up with truth is reality and reality is truth.
I agree, that truth has to do with the reality of the thing, but each thing is unique and individual, so truth cannot be a generality. Furthermore, since each thing appears to be different from itself, depending on the perspective it is observed from (i.e., how a thing appears from one perspective is different from how it appears from another), "the reality of the thing" is in itself somewhat contradictory. If the reality of the thing is that it is different from itself, then this defies the law of identity. But that's exactly what a multitude of different perspectives demonstrates to us, that a thing is different from itself.
Or it could be the brick-ness of bricks, or the -ness of anything. The point is the "-ness." It bridges, it seems to me, the gap between the thing and the idea of the thing. How I'm not sure, maybe by putting them together. To have bricks and brickness, you need both. And this is unremarkable. We do it every day, all day, without a second thought, or any thought at all. This -ness is a fact, is real. It has an "always already" quality. Just as a hammer is always already a hammer, even before we have a use for it, or even know what a hammer is.
I believe that attempting to bridge this gap with "truth" is a mistaken approach. The truth is that there is a difference between the individual, particular brick, and the "brick-ness" of the generality, which cannot be dissolved. It is an ontologically real, part of reality (and therefore truth itself according to your def.). The trend of modern philosophy to shy away from dualism, toward monism, inspires the desire to bridge this gap as if the gap were not something real. I believe it is a more appropriate approach to recognize the reality of this gap, and attempt to see what it consists of. What is the ontological status of the separation between the individual brick, and the generality "brick-ness"?
Yeah, I don't know about all that tim. Here's my go to test regarding definitions...
If a term is defined, one ought be able to take the definition and replace each and every use of the term with the definition and lose nothing meaningful while retaining coherence.
I don't understand you, and don't see your point. How does saying "this belief is true" differ from saying "I am certain of this belief"?
The first statement concerns the truth of a belief, and the second concerns your attitude towards the belief. They are two very different things. I think it is incredible that you cannot see the distinction.
Metaphysician UndercoverAugust 05, 2017 at 00:48#931410 likes
The first statement concerns the truth of a belief, and the second concerns your attitude towards the belief. They are two very different things. I think it is incredible that you cannot see the distinction.
The first statement affirms what the speaker thinks of the belief, "it is true", it does not confirm that the belief is true.
There is a speaker of each statement. The first statement says that the speaker believes that the belief is true. It in no way confirms that the belief is true, as you imply. The second statement says that the speaker is certain of the belief.
I really don't see the difference between the first and second. In the first, the speaker affirms confidence in the belief "it is true". In the second, the speaker affirms confidence in the belief "I am certain of it". Where are you seeing this difference?
The first statement affirms what the speaker thinks of the belief, "it is true", it does not confirm that the belief is true.
No that would be "I think this belief is true". 'It is true that X' affirms that it is true that X. Someone for example could say that "people believe that it is true that X, but I don't believe it". The "it is true that X" part is independent of anybody's beliefs. Of course it doesn't confirm that it is true that X, it merely affirms it; but that is irrelevant in any case.
Metaphysician UndercoverAugust 05, 2017 at 01:02#931530 likes
Reply to John
When someone says "this belief is true", what it means to me is "I think this belief is true". If to you, it means that the belief is true, then you'll believe anything anyone ever tells you, and be forever deceived.
The "it is true that X" part is independent of anybody's beliefs.
This doesn't make sense, it's meaningless. You have taken the statement "it is true that X", and removed it from any speaker, claiming that no one has spoken it. This is to completely and absolutely remove it from any possible context, and leave it meaningless.
When someone says "this belief is true", what it means to me is "I think this belief is true". If to you, it means that the belief is true, then you'll believe anything anyone ever tells you, and be forever deceived.
No, when someone says "this belief is true" it just means that this belief is true. Of course it indicates (if they are not lying) that they think the belief is true, but that is not what is explicitly being said. The fact that "'X' is true" means that it is true that X does not entail that X is true. You are equivocating on the word 'means' between its semantic sense and its use that is coterminous with 'entails'.
I can say 'it is true that snow is black' and that sentence means that it is true that snow is black, but it does not entail that it is true that snow is black.
Metaphysician UndercoverAugust 05, 2017 at 01:31#931640 likes
No, when someone says "this belief is true" it just means that this belief is true.
OK, so when Donald Trump says "this belief is true", that's what it means to you, that the belief is true? Good luck with that approach.
Obviously the same statement, someone saying "this belief is true" means something completely different to you from what it means to me. You're set in your interpretation, and I'm set in mine. I warn you though, you'll be deceived if you actually follow through with your interpretation.
Again, you failed to get my distinction between the two senses of "means". So, when Donald Trump asserts that something is true his words mean that the something is true; but it certainly is not entailed by the fact that his words mean the something is true, that the something is true.
Or to put it in way using the word 'mean' in both senses, which hopefully will make it clear to you:
'When Donald Trump asserts that something is true his words mean that the something is true; but the fact that his words mean the something is true, does not mean that the something is true.'
I shouldn't have to explain this again.
Srap TasmanerAugust 05, 2017 at 01:45#931680 likes
If I assert that lighthouses are lovely, what I assert is that lighthouses are lovely, and it can be inferred from my asserting this that I believe it. But I am not asserting that I believe it. At some point you have to get to something that you're willing to call the [I]content [/I] of the belief or the assertion. If you're always sticking "I believe" or something in front, you'll never get to [I] what [/I] you believe.
And truth attaches or doesn't to the content of your beliefs. We say, "What you believe is true (or false)."
Metaphysician UndercoverAugust 05, 2017 at 02:23#931730 likes
Again, you failed to get my distinction between the two senses of "means".
As I explained, I view your second sense of "means", as meaningless nonsense. You remove the statement from its context, the thinking mind which spoke it, and having no context the statement is no longer a statement, it's meaningless.
You can explain it as much as you want, and insist that I don't get it. What is the case, is that I completely get it, but I disagree, because I think it's nonsense to talk about the meaning of a statement with no context.
If I assert that lighthouses are lovely, what I assert is that lighthouses are lovely, and it can be inferred from my asserting this that I believe it. But I am not asserting that I believe it. At some point you have to get to something that you're willing to call the content of the belief or the assertion. If you're always sticking "I believe" or something in front, you'll never get to what you believe.
The content is the belief. When you say "lighthouses are lovely", the content is the belief that this "lighthouses are lovely" refers to. What more are you looking for with your concept of "content"? I don't see the need to assume anything more. I know that you are not asserting "I believe lighthouses are lovely", but as you yourself admit, it is implied that you believe it. Therefore I can assume that you believe it, unless you are acting in deception. So the content is the belief, what is implied by the statement. It is only when you speak in deception, that the content, which is the belief, is negated. But it would be pointless to seek a further content in the act of deception, because there would be no identifiable relationship between the statement and the content, that is the nature of deception.
And truth attaches or doesn't to the content of your beliefs. We say, "What you believe is true (or false)."
"What you belief" is often referred to as "the belief", and this is the content, which is said to be true or false, what you believe, the belief. The statement is a representation in words of what you believe, or, the belief.
This is nonsense; sentences don't get their meanings by being said; sentences can only be sayings at all insofar as they are already meaningful, otherwise it would not be "saying", but would just be meaningless noise or scribble.
Metaphysician UndercoverAugust 05, 2017 at 02:37#931760 likes
This is nonsense; sentences don't get their meanings by being said; sentences can only be sayings at all insofar as they are already meaningful, otherwise the saying would just be meaningless noise or scribble.
Sentences do not exist unless they are said. Being said is what gives existence to a sentence. So first off it is nonsensical to speak of a sentence which wasn't said, unless you are referring to one which someone has in their head without speaking it. But even that sentence in the person's head has an author, that person. So to speak of a statement without an author is nonsense. Secondly, the meaning of a sentence is what is meant by that sentence, and "what is meant" refers to the intention of the author. These are two good reasons why your talk about the meaning of a statement without an author of that statement is nonsense. 1) There is no such thing as a statement without an author. 2) The "meaning of the statement" refers to what was meant by the author.
Sentences as well as actually being said are in potentia as things that could be said. The existence of a language means (in the sense of 'entails' in case you are confused) that there are potentially an infinite number of sentences that could be said; each with at least one literal meaning.
Srap TasmanerAugust 05, 2017 at 02:47#931810 likes
Reply to Metaphysician Undercover
You've given yourself a way to refer to the content of an assertoric utterance -- what's asserted is a belief -- but you've left yourself no way to refer to the content of a belief.
If I believe that lighthouses are lovely, the content of my belief is "Lighthouses are lovely," not "I believe lighthouses are lovely," unless you like infinite regresses.
My believing lighthouses are lovely is a fact about me; lighthouses being lovely is not a fact about me.
This is exactly what I have been trying to, unsuccessfully it seems, explain to him.
Srap TasmanerAugust 05, 2017 at 03:10#931850 likes
Reply to John
We've been doing this off & on for a while. You can go down this road, but it's longer and harder than some people think. You have to give up truth and knowledge completely and just talk about rational belief. You also have to give up logic and have rational inference instead. It's not crazy by any means, but you need to be clear about what you're getting into.
I don't see how there could be any rational belief at all in the absence of truth and knowledge. A rational belief is a belief that is measured (ratio); if there is no actuality (truth) then there is nothing to be measured or measured against, and if there is no knowledge then we wouldn't know how to measure even if there were something to measure and be measured against.
Srap TasmanerAugust 05, 2017 at 03:26#931880 likes
Reply to John
Not my thing so I don't know how it's supposed to work. I suppose you end up some variety of pragmatist. Whatever works better, however you define that, is more rational.
The Bayesians are coming, so we're all going to have to get used to this way of thinking. They might even be right, whatever that means.
LOL, I've never been an admirer of pragmatism except for Peirce's version, and I have reservations about that. If truth is what the community of enquirers come to, or would come to, believe; then it follows that the only knowledge we have is knowledge about what is most consistently believed. No way to guarantee that is in fact rational though, unless you redefine 'rational' I guess. :s
Srap TasmanerAugust 05, 2017 at 03:34#931910 likes
Should've said "less wrong," where I said "right."
I realize that the following quote wasn't directed at me, but it is something I find quite interesting...
If I believe that lighthouses are lovely, the content of my belief is "Lighthouses are lovely," not "I believe lighthouses are lovely," unless you like infinite regresses...
Doesn't this imply that thought/belief is existentially contingent upon language?
...when different propositions within, or across, these disciplines contradict each other, it is not possible to evaluate which are true or false in absolute terms. It is only possible to demonstrate whether the claims by each system are coherent.
The above has all the different senses of "truth" as it's target, and then mistakenly implies that checking for coherency is the only method of discrimination between conflicting senses of "truth".
What I'd prefer to say there is something like this:
If I believe that lighthouses are lovely, the content of my belief is what I might as a speaker of English express by asserting such a sentence as "Lighthouses are lovely."
I realize that the following quote wasn't directed at me, but it is something I find quite interesting...
If I believe that lighthouses are lovely, the content of my belief is "Lighthouses are lovely," not "I believe lighthouses are lovely," unless you like infinite regresses...
Doesn't this imply that thought/belief is existentially contingent upon language?
I think you are pretty much right about this. I had to think about it for a minute. Thinking about animals, who do not possess language, I suddenly find that I don't particularly think they have beliefs or thoughts.
They have a certain basic level of consciousness / awareness, but I wouldn't go as far to say that animals have beliefs. A dog might stare at a lighthouse, even find it pleasant in some way, but I am not thinking that a dog could have a fully formed belief that the lighthouse is indeed lovely.
If I really do hold a belief, I think I have to be able to express it in at least some kind of basic language, verbal, written, mental, on paper, etc.
That goes even more for thought. i don't think you'r really doing what I would call real thinking without some kind of ability to express it in language. Would you agree?
On my view, you're reporting upon your own thought/belief, and identifying the content of the report on it's own terms, and then calling that the content of your belief.
That is the historical mistake.
It is an inevitable consequence of not drawing and maintaining the distinction between cognition and metacognition, and following in the mistaken footsteps of philosophical giants.
I think you are pretty much right about this. I had to think about it for a minute. Thinking about animals, who do not possess language, I suddenly find that I don't particularly think they have beliefs or thoughts.
Just to be clear. I was pointing out the consequence of a specific linguistic/conceptual framework(schema, if you prefer) that I do not agree with.
They have a certain basic level of consciousness / awareness, but I wouldn't go as far to say that animals have beliefs. A dog might stare at a lighthouse, even find it pleasant in some way, but I am not thinking that a dog could have a fully formed belief that the lighthouse is indeed lovely.
I agree, but why not?
If I really do hold a belief, I think I have to be able to express it in at least some kind of basic language, verbal, written, mental, on paper, etc.
But that is precisely what needs to be argued for, doesn't it?
There is a necessary distinction to be drawn and maintained here. Your belief and your report upon your belief are not one in the same thing.
That goes even more for thought. i don't think you'r really doing what I would call real thinking without some kind of ability to express it in language. Would you agree?
No.
I would definitely agree that the overwhelming majority of what most folk call "thinking" is existentially contingent upon language. I would definitely agree that the limit of one's language is the limit of one's worldview.
Srap TasmanerAugust 05, 2017 at 07:32#932570 likes
On my view, you're reporting upon your own thought/belief, and identifying the content of the report on it's own terms, and then calling that the content of your belief.
Hmmmm. I haven't followed your argument about this, so I'm at a disadvantage here, and I apologize for that.
But my instinct is that I'm okay with this.
"Belief" is a term from folk psychology. If you say it rained yesterday, you are taken to have a belief that it rained yesterday. (Moore's paradox drives this home.) It's a report verb. If there is something "underneath" or "prior to" the report, or the attribution, it is of interest perhaps to cognitive scientists but not to me either in my capacity as a person who aspires to rationality or in my capacity as a philosopher who aspires to understand rationality.
One cannot understand rationality if one does not understand one's own thought/belief.
That ought be of prime interest.
Srap TasmanerAugust 05, 2017 at 11:22#933030 likes
Reply to creativesoul
"Understanding" covers a lot of territory. I can understand that it is wrong to cause someone pain without understanding the physiology of pain.
But how about I read through your argument about metacognition before we continue this?
Metaphysician UndercoverAugust 05, 2017 at 11:47#933140 likes
You've given yourself a way to refer to the content of an assertoric utterance -- what's asserted is a belief -- but you've left yourself no way to refer to the content of a belief.
If I believe that lighthouses are lovely, the content of my belief is "Lighthouses are lovely," not "I believe lighthouses are lovely," unless you like infinite regresses.
My believing lighthouses are lovely is a fact about me; lighthouses being lovely is not a fact about me.
It seems to me, that you have confused the issue, and have done exactly what you accuse me of doing.
The thing is, that you are removing the utterance of the statement, just like Janus wants to do. But the utterance of the statement is an action which must be respected as real and very necessary. The utterance is "lighthouses are lovely". The form is the physical presence of the words, and the content is the underlying belief.
We have to be able to make a real distinction between what the utterance means to me, and what it means to you (differences of interpretation), so we cannot say that the content is "lighthouses are lovely", because this assumes that the same content is within your mind and mine. It is not, therefore it is false to claim that this is the content. So, to lay out the content, the belief which is signified, what you believe by this statement, we must refer to something further. The fact that the "something further", will most likely be an expression in words, creates the appearance of infinite regress. But the infinite regress is not real, it is just an appearance created by the desire to express the content in words. The true content cannot be expressed in words because the words are always a formal representation of the content.
That appears to be the problem, you want to express the content in words. And that's what we do naturally, express our beliefs in words. But the words are always a representation of the content, which is the belief itself. So when you put the belief into words, you have a formal representation of the content, not the content itself. You can continue to explain the belief, using words, to an infinite regress, but all you have here is the formal representation, not the content itself. You can never get to the content this way.
So the real content is something assumed, just like we assume real content in the physical world. This is the material aspect of reality. We assume content as fundamental to the existence of beliefs, just like we assume content (matter) as fundamental to the existence of the physical world. Trying to understand the existence of content, or matter, plunges us into mysticism, because it has already been designated by the structure of language and logical systems as that which cannot be spoken about, due to its apparent capacity to defy the fundamental laws of logic.
Sentences as well as actually being said are in potentia as things that could be said. The existence of a language means (in the sense of 'entails' in case you are confused) that there are potentially an infinite number of sentences that could be said; each with at least one literal meaning.
These potential sentences you refer to have no existence, because they have not been created, They have no meaning because they do not exist. You continue to back up this nonsense train of thought with more meaninglessness.
Srap TasmanerAugust 05, 2017 at 13:07#933560 likes
We have to be able to make a real distinction between what the utterance means to me, and what it means to you (differences of interpretation), so we cannot say that the content is "lighthouses are lovely", because this assumes that the same content is within your mind and mine.
Or you could take that as proof that the content is not something in my mind or yours. Can we both believe that Donald Trump is President? I think so. How is this possible on your view? We can't have the same thing in our minds, so how can we share a belief?
How do we agree or disagree about anything? How do we even communicate?
Metaphysician UndercoverAugust 05, 2017 at 18:17#934420 likes
Right, that's the point I made way back at the beginning of the thread, it's not the statement itself which is judged for truth, but the meaning of the statement which is judged. Here, we have been talking about that meaning as the content, what I called "the belief", what you called "what is believed".
Or you could take that as proof that the content is not something in my mind or yours. Can we both believe that Donald Trump is President? I think so. How is this possible on your view? We can't have the same thing in our minds, so how can we share a belief?
We share the belief by means of its form, the words which express the belief, "Donald Trump is President". The content is not the same though, because you and I will have different images of what it means to be Donald Trump, and different ideas of what it means to be President. So as much as we say "Donald Trump is President" represents a belief which is shared by you and I, we say this as a matter of convenience. What is really the case is that these words have different associated ideas for you from what they do for me, so it's not really one belief which is shared, it is different, yet compatible beliefs. That's why the content is different.
How do we agree or disagree about anything? How do we even communicate?
I don't understand the reason for these questions. We agree and disagree depending on the compatibility of our beliefs. This compatibility is what makes communication possible. We are all different though, having different ideas and beliefs within our minds. The fact that our ideas and beliefs are compatible, and we can agree and communicate, does not necessitate the conclusion that our beliefs are one and the same. Nor does it necessitate the conclusion that there is an independent (Platonic) Idea which our own ideas partake in (Platonic participation).
I'm not sure which argument about metacognition you're asking me to provide. There are many I employ, depending upon the context of the discussion. I'm also unsure if those are necessary at this point.
Do you recognize a meaningful distinction between thought/belief and reports thereof?
These potential sentences you refer to have no existence, because they have not been created, They have no meaning because they do not exist. You continue to back up this nonsense train of thought with more meaninglessness.
The meanings are obviously in potentia also. Do you deny that there are many possible sentences that have never yet been spoken? I could write a poem in five minutes time and prove you wrong. Sure, that poem does not yet exist, but its existence is possible in virtue of the range of words in the English language and their possible coherent combinations.
The same kind of potential existence obtains with numbers. There are infinitely many prime numbers, for example, which will never be written out, never be known about at all.
Metaphysician UndercoverAugust 06, 2017 at 02:27#935440 likes
Do you deny that there are many possible sentences that have never yet been spoken?
No I don't deny this but I don't see how it is at all meaningful. And I don't see how a potential sentence has meaning, nor does "meaning in potentia" have any meaning either. Just like a potential sentence does not exist as a sentence, and is therefore not a sentence, potential meaning is not actual meaning and therefore does not have any meaning either.
Srap TasmanerAugust 07, 2017 at 02:30#938270 likes
The thing is, that you are removing the utterance of the statement
I want to have another look at this.
The sentence "It is raining" does not imply, for any given person, that they believe that it is raining, but there is an exception: the person who utters "It is raining." This is the point of Moore's paradox: making an assertion implies belief, and this implication cannot be canceled. It is nonsensical to say "It is raining but I don't believe it."
That does not make "It is raining" synonymous with "I believe that it is raining." We can see this by looking at the audience rather than the speaker. Suppose I ask you what it's like out, and you reply "It's raining"; if "It's raining" is synonymous with "I believe it's raining," I could respond by saying, "I didn't ask what you believe. I asked what it's like out." There is nothing you could say that I could not take as an expression of belief, and therefore not responsive to my question. But we don't do that.
But there is a situation where we do something similar. Suppose your commanding officer has tasked your unit with holding a bridge. As the battle advances, and decisions must be made about deploying reinforcements, the Colonel radios and asks if your unit can hold the bridge. Now suppose you respond, "I think so, sir." The Colonel might very well reply, "I didn't ask you what you think, Captain. I asked if you can hold that bridge."
Let's compare this to the other case. If I ask you what it's like out, and you answer, "I think it's raining," what does that amount to? That you are not certain it's raining? Yes. But so am I, and I have no idea at all. It indicates you have some reason to believe it's raining, but you are not sure that it is. Just answering, "It's raining" would usually imply that you're certain it is.
Now what is the Colonel in our other example asking for? Certainty? In a sense, yes, but everyone knows that certainty about such events is a sketchy business. What would be the point of asking for certainty about the events of a battle?
I don't think it's certainty the Colonel is after exactly. What he needs is to know whether he should send reinforcements. He needs an appraisal of the situation at the bridge that he can rely on in making plans. An honest appraisal. If the bridge needs reinforcements, it doesn't help for you to play John Wayne and say you can handle it, only to be overrun.
The way the Colonel gets the kind of appraisal he needs is by holding you accountable. And not just him, but lots of people. And not just people, but the events about to unfold. If you say you don't need reinforcements when you actually do, it may be the last decision you make.
Unforeseen events may mitigate your responsibility. Nevertheless, I think the essence of the matter is here: what we assert is what we expect to be held to account for. It's not just our "willingness" to be so held, but our expectation that we will be. (This mechanism was at work in the test-taking model I was fooling with a while back, but I didn't notice: the answers you give on the test are exactly what you will be held to account for.)
I would say further that assertion implies certainty indirectly: we need reasons for committing outright to "It is raining," for accepting the accountability of naked assertion, rather than drawing in our horns and sticking with "I think it's raining." Certainty provides such a reason. Certainty means you can welcome being held accountable.
(I'm not addressing whether anything else might provide sufficient reason. Note also that the usual gambling analysis of certainty can still be used here: if you give yourself good odds, you might stake your reputation on an assertion. (See how that idiom works?) It depends a lot on what's at risk, etc. etc.)
What the Colonel needs in the bridge example is not certainty about what will happen, but about the process by which the appraisal is made. It's your confidence in your ability to accurately gauge the strength of your position that will underwrite your willingness to be held accountable for that appraisal. The Colonel knows that you have been trained to make such judgments; he needs to know that you have actually done so. If you tell him, "Yes we can" or "No we can't" without weasel words, he can trust that you have made the best appraisal that can be made. (If you say "I think ..." that implies that you have not been thorough enough in making your appraisal, that you have only gotten as far as finding some reason but nothing definitive.)
(None of this deals directly with truth. I'm just trying to clarify what assertion amounts to.)
Srap TasmanerAugust 07, 2017 at 02:38#938290 likes
Do you recognize a meaningful distinction between thought/belief and reports thereof?
I really don't know. How do you use the distinction?
We're not talking about introspection here. Propositional reports are also propositional attributions. It's just how we talk about beliefs, our own or those of others.
No I don't deny this but I don't see how it is at all meaningful. And I don't see how a potential sentence has meaning, nor does "meaning in potentia" have any meaning either. Just like a potential sentence does not exist as a sentence, and is therefore not a sentence, potential meaning is not actual meaning and therefore does not have any meaning either.
Think about a poem you are yet to read; does it not have a potential meaning?
The reason why "It is raining" implies belief but isn't equal to "I believe it is raining" is because sometimes "I believe" implies doubt/uncertainty.
"It's raining" is also not synonymous with "I'm certain it's raining." Your certainty that it is raining is a fact about you; rain currently falling outside isn't.
It's not the degree of certainty that matters here at all. But yes, the hierarchy in everyday English seems to be from "I think ..." near the weaker end, through "I believe ..." and up to "I am certain ..."
Think about this example: there are 8 ancient writing systems that are yet to be deciphered. MU claims that writings only have meaning in the act of being interpreted. So, it would seem to follow from that claim that those undeciphered writings have no meaning.
So, if we are to distinguish them from mere meaningless marks we must say they currently either have a meaning or at the very least a potential meaning which would become actual when they are deciphered.
What about the last question I asked regarding the content of another's belief and your report thereof?
Srap TasmanerAugust 07, 2017 at 06:11#938690 likes
Reply to creativesoul
I think "yes," although I'd also want to gloss "content" as "semantic value"-- the content that counts for truth, reasoning, etc.
If you and I watch a cat chasing a mouse, and an open-top box falls over trapping the mouse underneath, like an opaque cake-keeper, I would attribute to you and to me and to the cat the belief that the mouse is under the box. What else is there to do?
Metaphysician UndercoverAugust 07, 2017 at 10:45#938980 likes
None of this deals directly with truth. I'm just trying to clarify what assertion amounts to.)
I follow your clarification. It is my argument that it is within this certainty which is inherent within the assertion, that we find the essence of truth. The difference which you speak of between saying "I believe it is raining", and "it is raining", is that the latter is to say "it is true that it is raining", and the former implies no such certainty. And in your example of the captain in the army, his assertion that the bridge will be held, is equivalent to a claim that it is true that the bridge will be held. So this is where we find the meaning of "true", and therefore "truth" itself, within this confidence which allows one to make an assertion.
The difficult issue, as I mentioned already, is that sometimes when we claim such certainty we are proven to be wrong. Therefore the thing which is true, according to the true essence of truth, as outlined above (the confidence which inspires the assertion), may turn into a falsity when one recognizes one's own mistake. So there is false confidence, false truth. The people who oppose true with false will never recognize the true nature of truth, due to their adherence to that artificial definition of truth, which is inconsistent with what "true" is actually used to refer to.
MU claims that writings only have meaning in the act of being interpreted.
No, I was talking about the act of creating the sentences, not interpreting them. I said that a potential sentence cannot have meaning, it has to be created to have meaning. And it has meaning to the one who composed it, even if it hasn't been interpreted by anyone else.
Is your report of another's belief equal - in content - to the other's belief?
You answered:
I think "yes," although I'd also want to gloss "content" as "semantic value"-- the content that counts for truth, reasoning, etc.
And yet not all thought/belief counts as truth, reasoning... So why should it's content?
If you and I watch a cat chasing a mouse, and an open-top box falls over trapping the mouse underneath, like an opaque cake-keeper, I would attribute to you and to me and to the cat the belief that the mouse is under the box. What else is there to do?
Good question.
We could determine whether or not it makes sense to say that the cat believes that the mouse is under the box. If it does, then the content of the cat's thought/belief is equivalent to our own. Yet, the cat cannot think in the English language. How then, can the content of the cat's thought/belief be equivalent to our report of it?
If we're willing to ignore the inherent problems with attributing statements of thought/belief to the cat, we could continue and arrive at the conclusion that the cat has true belief. Continuing on, we find that either true belief does not require truth or truth is not existentially contingent upon language.
None of that seems quite right though, does it?
Srap TasmanerAugust 08, 2017 at 04:36#941330 likes
Reply to creativesoul
To me, the issue is how we are to talk about beliefs, our own and those of others. I see nothing wrong with the usual folk psychology that attributes beliefs based on behavior, behavior which sometimes includes speech or other symbolic actions.
If the cat paces around the box and swats at it occasionally, I'd say its behavior is grounds for attributing a belief to it. I have no reason to think any English sentence is in its mind. If my phone makes a certain sound, I know someone is texting me. Here too, there is no reason to think the English sentence "Someone is texting me" was in my mind, even though I speak English passably well.
Suppose Jerry gets trapped under the box, but there's a hole in the floor he can slip out of. Tom paces around the box, swatting at it occasionally. Why not say that Tom thinks Jerry's still in there but he's wrong? If you don't see Jerry slip out, you have that same belief. You can provide further evidence by saying something, and Tom can't. If I lift the box, you'll each display something like confusion. But at this point, you'll be able work out how your belief was mistaken, and Tom probably won't.
By the way, there's nothing in the last reply that I find unacceptable. I mean, it seems we agree on all that as well... I was moving onward prior to checking. Poor form. My apologies. None-the-less, I think that we still agree here, right?
Tom has no conception of truth, and yet has true belief.
How, exactly can it be the case that Tom has true belief? If true belief requires truth, and truth is prior to language, then Tom can have true belief despite not being able to talk about it, and we can accurately report upon it by virtue of properly taking account of it.
Tom does not think in statements, and yet we report upon Tom's thought/belief. The content of our reports is not equivalent to the content of Toms thought/belief.
If our reports are accurate then it must be the case that true belief is capable of being formed and/or held by a language-less agent.
Either true belief exists without truth, or truth exists prior to language.
Here, we must pause and consider the different sense of "truth". Which one(s), if any are capable of existing prior to language?
Srap TasmanerAugust 08, 2017 at 19:49#943500 likes
Tom does not think in statements, and yet we report upon Tom's thought/belief. The content of our reports is not equivalent to the content of Toms thought/belief.
I'd start here: if you believe that Jerry is under the box, you believe something about Jerry (and the box and so on), not something about the sentence "Jerry is under the box," such as it being true.
When we describe your belief, we use the sentence, "Jerry is under the box," so we're also talking about Jerry (and the box and so on), not the sentence "Jerry is under the box."
If you want to say that the sentence "Jerry is under the box" is true, I'd say you're talking not only about Jerry (and the box and so on) but also about English. Truth is for sentences, really, not beliefs, although it may do no harm now & then to call a belief that something is the case when it really is a "true belief." I expect I've done it somewhere in this thread, but that's speaking loosely.
That ambiguity is not the basis for my claim that the content of Tom's belief can be the same as the content of our report of his belief: the basis for that is that Tom has a belief about Jerry (and the box and so on), and that's exactly what we say he has. We're not talking about language and truth anymore than Tom is.
In the case of ancient writings the "one who composed it" no longer exists, so their intentions could never be known, and the meaning thus no longer exists. But this would mean that the writings can never be deciphered.
Srap TasmanerAugust 08, 2017 at 23:12#944240 likes
I follow your clarification. It is my argument that it is within this certainty which is inherent within the assertion, that we find the essence of truth.
Pretty sure I didn't say certainty is "inherent within assertion"; I said it could function as a reason for you not to fear being held accountable for what you say, but there may be other reasons. For instance, just following consensus or authority is probably all the reason we need much of the time.
In what follows, we need a word for variable certainty and a word for certainty that's absolute or passes some other threshold. I'm going to use "confidence" for the variable one, and "certainty" for something like maximal confidence.
Let's say you have some belief and reasons for that belief. Your confidence is, at least, a measure of the strength of your reasons for that belief. Your confidence is not itself a reason for holding the belief; if you give "I'm certain" as a reason for your belief, you'll just be asked why you're certain.
Acting on your belief, for instance by asserting it, carries risk, and we can naturally extend the above: the greater your confidence the greater the risk you are prepared to take; the greater the risk you expect to face, the greater your confidence in your choice of action must be. Thus, following consensus or authority is generally, but not always, so low-risk, you barely need any reason at all.
But I think where confidence comes in is not as a reason for a particular action; various reasons will line up with various possible courses of action. I think confidence plays a role in the decision to act, and in the choice among various options.
For example, we may be faced with a choice between saying, "I think it's going to rain," and saying, "It's going to rain," or "I know it's going to rain." We have described these before as less and more confident versions of the same belief. (That's not quite true, of course, because the first could actually express greater confidence by means of understatement.)
What we need to sort out, to start with, is the difference between the reasons for holding a belief, which will be attended by a certain level of confidence that the belief is correct (or something), and the reasons for taking the action of asserting that belief, which will be attended by a certain level of confidence about producing the desired effect by your action.
A standard example to show that these need not be the same: you're listening to someone tell a story about a princess and a dragon and all the usual stuff. Now suppose the storyteller at some point in the story asks, "What do you think the princess will do?" You have a compelling reason to think there is no such princess and so she won't do anything; is that a reason for saying, "She will not do anything"?
Metaphysician UndercoverAugust 09, 2017 at 01:14#944550 likes
Tom has no conception of truth, and yet has true belief.
How, exactly can it be the case that Tom has true belief?
It is only your judgement of Tom's belief which says that it is true. You do have a conception of truth, and base your judgement in this. Tom does not believe that his belief is true, he just believes.
If true belief requires truth, and truth is prior to language, then Tom can have true belief despite not being able to talk about it, and we can accurately report upon it by virtue of properly taking account of it.
Tom's belief is not true unless it is judged by someone as being true. I think we went through this already in this thread, true is a judgement. Consider "the grass is green". It might appear like the grass is green without the need for any judgement, but this is not the case. Someone must judge the thing referred to by "grass", as qualifying for being called "green", in order that the grass is green. There's no way around this. You could say "if the grass reflected the right light, then it would be green regardless of whether or not it is judged as green", but all this does is make that necessary judgement. Without that judgement it is impossible that the grass is green, and also impossible that Tom's belief is true.
If our reports are accurate then it must be the case that true belief is capable of being formed and/or held by a language-less agent.
I don't agree with this. A stone is only a stone because it is judged to be a stone. A tree is a tree because it is judged to be a tree. A true belief is a true belief because it is judged to be a true belief. A language-less agent cannot judge a belief as being true, that requires language. It is true that you, a person with language, could judge the language-less agent's belief as true, but since that agent has no language to express that belief to you, that judgement is purely speculative and very unreliable. This is not at all suited to the use of "true", which implies certainty.
Metaphysician UndercoverAugust 09, 2017 at 01:48#944570 likes
Acting on your belief, for instance by asserting it, carries risk, and we can naturally extend the above: the greater your confidence the greater the risk you are prepared to take; the greater the risk you expect to face, the greater your confidence in your choice of action must be. Thus, following consensus or authority is generally, but not always, so low-risk, you barely need any reason at all.
But following consensus, or authority, is a reason for confidence, a very good reason. So when you follow authority it's not that you do not need a reason, you already have the reason, and a very good one at that. This gives us confidence.
And I don't get what you mean by "the greater your confidence the greater the risk you are prepared to take". This seems contradictory. If you are confident, then you don't see yourself as taking a risk. So the higher the confidence, the less the risk, because taking a risk is to proceed with low confidence.
For example, we may be faced with a choice between saying, "I think it's going to rain," and saying, "It's going to rain," or "I know it's going to rain." We have described these before as less and more confident versions of the same belief. (That's not quite true, of course, because the first could actually express greater confidence by means of understatement.)
So in this example, if one has much faith in the weather forecaster who predicts rain, that person will say "it's going to rain". But a person who hasn't listened to the weather forecast, but is still quite skilled in forecasting the weather by looking at the clouds and the wind conditions, might say, with less confidence, "I think it's going to rain".
Pretty sure I didn't say certainty is "inherent within assertion"; I said it could function as a reason for you not to fear being held accountable for what you say, but there may be other reasons. For instance, just following consensus or authority is probably all the reason we need much of the time.
Consider the example now. One person has listened to the weather forecaster, and asserts with certainty "it's going to rain". Are you saying, that if that person turns out to be wrong, the person will just pass off the accountability to the weather forecaster? So the person makes the assertion, as if with certainty, but the person really does not have certainty and is just passing along the certainty of another, because the accountability s passed along in the same way.
Is this an acceptable way of speaking though? Is it acceptable to assert something as if you are certain of it, when you really are believing that if you're wrong you can just pass off the accountability to someone else? We could be making assertions as if we are certain all the time, pretending to be certain, but knowing all along that we really are not certain, and it doesn't matter if we're wrong because the accountability can just be passed along.
Srap TasmanerAugust 09, 2017 at 03:45#945070 likes
But following consensus, or authority, is a reason for confidence, a very good reason.
Yes, it could be, and you may have reason to think consensus or authority are right in the case at hand.
My point is this: actions have consequences. Making an assertion is an action and has consequences. Your audience may rely on your assertion in choosing a course of action, so you will bear some responsibility for the outcome. But there's a class of consequences that's slightly different, that you might think of as the social consequences for your assertion being considered right or wrong. What you say on a test determines your grade, for instance. In such cases, following consensus or authority is pretty safe, more or less by definition.
As science skeptics will tell you, going against the establishment entails risk to your reputation. If you are very confident of your results, you can risk this, believing you will be proven right in the end.
Is it acceptable to assert something as if you are certain of it, when you really are believing that if you're wrong you can just pass off the accountability to someone else?
I don't know why you think this is my position but it isn't.
Suppose I'm about to climb a ladder, and someone I consider an authority assures me it's safe. If the ladder fails and I get a broken arm, I'm still the one who suffers the consequences. On the other hand, that person's assertion having proved wrong, I will be less likely to trust their judgment, so they suffer some consequence as well, just a slightly different sort. I might also suffer that same sort of consequence, if others think it was my mistake in trusting him.
ADDED: I should also have said here that he suffers the natural consequences for his role in my suffering an injury: guilt, remorse, whatever.
If consenus or authority are wrong about something, then everyone who just goes along with the socially acceptable view will bear some responsibility for the natural consequences that follow. There may never have been any consequences of the other sort (what I had in my mind as being held accountable, as a social phenomenon).
By the way, I would have thought it obvious that we all assert things all the time on the basis of consensus and authority alone. You could call that trust if you like, but the fact is I think the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066 because that's what I learned in school, and that's what everyone says.
How many planets are there in our solar system?
Srap TasmanerAugust 09, 2017 at 04:57#945370 likes
Reply to Metaphysician Undercover
At some point we should probably shift to talking about reward as well as risk. There are obvious social payoffs to asserting what everyone else asserts, for instance.
Also, I feel like I'm not presenting assertion clearly enough. I want to maintain a distinction between a belief you hold and the act of asserting it. (In the ladder example, for instance, the authority figure is making an assertion and I am acting on a belief, like the authority, but by climbing not talking.) We have to keep in mind also that there is an audience for an assertion. I'm not quite sure how to treat the case where the audience is only the speaker herself. Is that really assertion?
I'd start here: if you believe that Jerry is under the box, you believe something about Jerry (and the box and so on), not something about the sentence "Jerry is under the box," such as it being true.
When we describe your belief, we use the sentence, "Jerry is under the box," so we're also talking about Jerry (and the box and so on), not the sentence "Jerry is under the box."
I would concur.
If you want to say that the sentence "Jerry is under the box" is true, I'd say you're talking not only about Jerry (and the box and so on) but also about English. Truth is for sentences, really, not beliefs, although it may do no harm now & then to call a belief that something is the case when it really is a "true belief." I expect I've done it somewhere in this thread, but that's speaking loosely.
That ambiguity is not the basis for my claim that the content of Tom's belief can be the same as the content of our report of his belief: the basis for that is that Tom has a belief about Jerry (and the box and so on), and that's exactly what we say he has. We're not talking about language and truth anymore than Tom is.
So, "Jerry is under the box" qualifies as a belief, a sentence, a statement, Tom's belief, and the content of our and Tom's belief.
That seems to be quite a stretch, doesn't it?
Tom doesn't think in statements. Our reports of Tom's belief(and our own) are in the form of a statement. If we both form and hold the belief that Jerry is under the box, and we attend to the fact that Toms doesn't think in statements, then it must be the case that Tom's thought/belief doesn't consist in/of statements. Yet we have the same belief about the same events.
I say that it is because all thought/belief consists in/of mental correlations drawn between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or the agents' own mental state.
Metaphysician UndercoverAugust 10, 2017 at 22:01#949270 likes
Suppose I'm about to climb a ladder, and someone I consider an authority assures me it's safe. If the ladder fails and I get a broken arm, I'm still the one who suffers the consequences. On the other hand, that person's assertion having proved wrong, I will be less likely to trust their judgment, so they suffer some consequence as well, just a slightly different sort. I might also suffer that same sort of consequence, if others think it was my mistake in trusting him.
I think I've lost track of the point your trying to make. But if your boss tells you to climb the ladder and assures you that it is safe, then the boss is the one liable to pay compensation when you get hurt. In any case, you seem to have missed my point. We use "the authorities said so" as an excuse, to pass on the blame, when we are caught making an assertion which turns out wrong. This allows us to nonchalantly make assertions when the information comes from an authority, knowing we will not be held accountable if the assertion proves wrong. So I can assert "it will rain today" when the weather forecaster says so, knowing that if I am wrong, the weather forecaster is due to get the blame, not myself.
So this is a type of confidence, which is real confidence because we have confidence in the authorities, but at the same time it isn't a true confidence, because we are just letting someone else make the decision for us. It is confidence in another person, not self-confidence.
Srap TasmanerAugust 11, 2017 at 01:27#949730 likes
But with the confidence mechanic, things can get weird, because students can collude to move the answer. As I tried testing this, it looked like it only took two students out of ten so colluding to make a noticeable difference, and three was overkill. (The idea is for the conspirators all to confidently select the same answer; they'll pick up some help from whoever believed this answer actually to be right, and often enough swamp other answers, including the right one, selected with only random confidence. Thus their choice tends to win more than it should.)
Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute[1] have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.
Holy crap. My little Excel "simulations" weren't quite this scary.
So this is a type of confidence, which is real confidence because we have confidence in the authorities, but at the same time it isn't a true confidence, because we are just letting someone else make the decision for us. It is confidence in another person, not self-confidence.
I get why you're saying this, but I don't see any justification for it. Not the right kind of confidence? You're just defining your way to the conclusion you're already committed to.
I think I've lost track of the point your trying to make.
Okay, so backing up: trying to clarify the relation between a belief held with some degree of confidence based on certain reasons, and acting on that belief by asserting it. We've been looking at the different sorts of consequences an assertion can have, which should factor into the decision to make an assertion or not. (For instance, the sort of common-sense view here would be you make an assertion with the intent of "inducing" a belief in your audience. I haven't really addressed this yet because this vaguely causal way of putting it doesn't feel right and I don't have an alternative yet.)
I'm now reading Ramsey's "Truth and Probability" which deals with at least some of this. He gets from Peirce the idea that your degree of belief is the extent to which you are willing to act on it, which for me would include making an assertion. There's something obviously right about this, but it misses out some other things. (For instance, with my story-telling example, the princess not existing is indeed a reason for asserting that she won't do anything, but there are other reasons for not making this assertion that are usually better. If you were dealing with someone who actually thought, incorrectly, that the story was true, you would say things like this. This is what happens in Toy Story.)
Srap TasmanerAugust 11, 2017 at 02:12#949870 likes
Reply to Metaphysician Undercover
One other thought on bosses and ladders: his ordering me up is in itself interesting. Giving a command based on a belief -- we can suppose he honestly believes the ladder is safe -- is another way of acting, just like making an assertion that the ladder is safe.
Metaphysician UndercoverAugust 12, 2017 at 00:16#953610 likes
One other thought on bosses and ladders: his ordering me up is in itself interesting. Giving a command based on a belief -- we can suppose he honestly believes the ladder is safe -- is another way of acting, just like making an assertion that the ladder is safe.
I don't think the boss would order you up the ladder if he didn't think it was safe, unless he's practising some form of deception. Safety is the boss's responsibility.
Comments (791)
This is pretty close to the verification principle (or the verifiability criterion of meaning) which is the philosophical theory that only statements that are empirically verifiable (ie. verifiable through the senses) are cognitively meaningful. The most well-known statement of that was A J Ayer's Language Truth and Logic.
Quoting tim wood
They are true 'a priori', i.e. true by virtue of logic, tautogically true, as are all mathematical truths or truths of logic, e.g. 'bachelors are unmarried'.
Quoting tim wood
What does 'certain' mean here? It's rather like a reference to the Platonic form of table - the idea is the perfect archetype of which actual tables are imperfect instances.
Quoting tim wood
I suspect this is the real point of the OP. You're basically re-stating the Vienna Circle arguments about verifiable beliefs contra theological, metaphysical or religious ideas, by which means you're trying to define 'truth' in such a way as they can be excluded; exactly as did Carnap, Ayer, and various other positivists.
Reality is more complex than this. There is also the movement of things. The movement of things creates a difficulty for the "S is P" form of sentence, because it is described as a relationship between one thing and another.
Why? You have the unqualified "agree" option - why is there no "disagree" option?
Anyway, you don't have to start from scratch, you know. Truth
You write about presuppositions and here to my mind is one of yours. These three rules are about formal language. They aren't about ordinary language. We all talk about excluded middles, contradictions and non-identity in our ordinary language. The purported rules of logic don't just arise out of 'language'. They are part of a deliberate and brilliant exercise by logicians to use less unruly languages than the ones we actually ordinarily use.
Then in formal language the steps of logic bear truth boldly onwards. Meanwhile I pop round to the Square Orange cafe for tea, to discuss a friend who both is and isn't married to a transexual who goes under many names, including a professional one.
True? :)
Just a thought, but could you not also define something as being a 'thing' if it has an effect? For example, some things, like society, cannot be physically sensed (ie, we cannot 'feel' society, 'see' society, etc.), but their impact can be (ie, we can see the effect of society in physical things like infrastructure, public buildings, etc.).
If, on the other hand, you think that it cannot be considered to be a 'thing', then what exactly is it? If it is not a 'thing', then it doesn't fit into your definition of being 'real' either. At least, that's my interpretation of what you're saying (I could be wrong).
Additionally, if you include 'having an effect' as being a property of 'thingness', then it becomes quite hard to draw lines between 'things' and 'not-things'. For example, justice could be considered to have an effect on the natural world in that it causes humans to do certain things, like kill other humans (using capital punishment as an example), and thus is a 'thing'. However, earlier you mentioned that it could not be considered to be a 'thing' because of it not being a physical entity.
What do you think?
(By the way, I am not necessarily arguing for this amendment to your definition, merely bringing it to your attention).
In modern philosophy, truth is defined by formal logic on propositions (statements). There are three main basic kinds of it, which I hear attempt to express in way compatible with the thinking of the formal logicians Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Strawson, Putnam, Searle, Kripke, Popper, Kuhn, and Davidson. According to all these various thinkers, truth is the result of evaluating a proposition, but the relation between truth and the proposition itself can be different depending on epistemological considerations.
While these are the *basic* forms of truth, the truth of many statements rely on combining two or more these forms together. For example, most commonly believe they know that the sun will rise tomorrow. This is based on empirical observations of many prior days where the sun did rise, leading to the simple second-order deduction that it will rise again tomorrow. Logically, one cannot know whether the belief is true that the sun will rise tomorrow until after the event has occurred. But in most cases, when sufficient empirical validation of many prior similar events has occurred, it is loosely assumed true that the same future event will occur again in the same circumstance. This 'axiom of probabilistic certainty' is the foundation of prediction in much scientific theory. The extrapolation of this axiom is the creation of the scientific method, which is designed to define the minimum number of observations necessary to corroborate a theory. As per the rules for causal truth, theories can only be corroborated and not be proven true; but modern science theory might still call a theory true based on the axiom of probabilistic certainty.
Beyond that, there are some other very specific forms of truth in philosophy. For example, there are 'self-generating' truths in linguistics, such as promises, statements of intent, contracts, and some statements of belief, which all become existent by their own statement. One should be aware these kinds of truth have limitations. For example, after making promises, it becomes true that promises were made, but the truth of the promise itself remains an indirect proposition, and still must be determined within the rules for the three basic forms of truth described above.
Truth in theology, morality, ethics, law, and metaphysics
Much confusion about truth has arisen in these fields, but by the above schema, the nature of truth itself is relatively simple. Theological systems make assertions about that which cannot ultimately be proven; morality strives to define that which is good or bad for an individual; ethics defines that which is good or bad for a society; law strives to define that which is right or wrong; and metaphysics strives to define that which is real. In all these cases the absolute truth of the assertions they make is undefinable. However within each of these disciplines, it is possible to evaluate the propositional consistency of statements within formal systems that they define; and from that, to evaluate the truth of their propositions empirically, within the formal systems themselves. so again, when different propositions within, or across, these disciplines contradict each other, it is not possible to evaluate which are true or false in absolute terms. It is only possible to demonstrate whether the claims by each system are coherent.
1. agree with them
2. modify and improve them
3. demonstrate where they're wrong.
Of course one may also dislike them, but that's neither here nor there. If we can establish or agree to some rules, then maybe we can test some things some of us think are true. If the rules are any good, perhaps we can learn something.[/quote]
Umm, Ok
Saying reality is 'real' is merely tautology or like saying a Cat is a Cat; you can say it but it doesn't show or really do anything. My personal preference is to label "non-real things" as mental and/or abstract concepts. If anyone reading this is a programmer they can a liken a mental construct as a database record as well as a abstract concept as the database metadata that describes how that record is structured (ie a mental concept of a mental concept). While there are additional nuances to this idea, it is safe to say I mental perceptions of a real thing may have aspect to them that make them similar to the real thing, they most likely do not match completely enough that we can be sure that the mental construct and the thing-in-and-of-itself are one and the same.
Language is just a system where we create,organize,etc various mental constructs, which includes labels. Whether a street is "Main Street" or "Broad Street" is almost completely dependent on how which choose to call it. Numbers are also a kind of label as one can is just called one can if it is by itself but the group of can it is with is called something else when they are together. As far as I know labels are almost always arbitrary and merely used to organize the world around us in order to help us perceive it. Whether it is raining the sky is blue or whether it is raining this is something I think of as a physical attribute of some thing and this attribute may have a descriptive aspect of the real thing but that isn't a given.
Labels can be thought of as variables used in a database record to store arbitrary information about someone or something (such as record ID and/or employee ID) and attributes as a variable used to store real and/or non-arbitrary information (such as employee age, weight, height, etc). I don't have much experience with this but there are gray areas as to what is arbitrary and what is not such as employee name since while it is really arbitrary it is so rare that it changes that it can almost be considered an attribute. At any rate whether there is a grey area or shouldn't make too much of a difference.
[Quote]However, read on.
3) Within language, rules matter. We can start with the rules of identity, non-contradiction, and the excluded middle. Call it logic, for that's what it is.
4. Language applied to ideas can also be true, e.g., 2+2=4. But "true," here, needs clarification, imho. Let's say that the test of the truth of language about ideas - not real things - is whether it works and how well it works. MSs like 2+2=4, because they work perfectly, are here deemed perfectly true, or completely and absolutely true. MSs like "Justice is good," maybe are not perfectly true, or at least not without a lot of work on understanding what is meant by both "justice" and "good."
5) What complicates matters is that descriptive language is always expressed in concepts - ideas. It is easily possible, then, for an MS about reality to have a quality of absolute truth. For example, "That is a table," is true only insofar as the "that " described just is a table. It may not be a table; it may be a table-like thing of some kind. (Keeping in mind that the law of the excluded middle applies only to MSs within language, logic, not descriptive MSs about reality.) So it may not be entirely true that the thing is a table. On the other hand, the idea of "table" is certain, so that if it were ever possible to determine that the thing is entirely a table, then the MS that asserts it is a table would be a descriptive MS that was absolutely and completely true.
And that's it. My goal is a tool to handle beliefs. Beliefs do not have to be true at all to be beliefs. They merely need to be believed. The difficulty - my difficulty - is with people who represent their beliefs as being true, and acting on them as if they were.
I do not think there is anything new or difficult or original here, but I like the idea of limiting "truth" to preserve its strength, by not applying it to ideas or things that are not or cannot be true.[/quote]
2+2=4 because in the mathematical language we choose, it is so according to that language. It is the structure/narrative/context that says it is so. However it could also be II+II=IV if we are using roman numerals or 5+5=A if we happen to be using hexadecimal numbers. In such systems, things may be true because the system of labels we conceive says that they are true (regardless of whether or not they represent an actual physical thing) or they may be true because they accurately describe an aspect of a physical thing.
However nearly every mental construct we can conceive of either has an arbitrary and/or transitory aspect to it when in reference to a physical thing. Also it can be wrong for a variety of reasons and it is a pretty much a given that some mental constructs are more or less arbitrary/transitory/wrong than others. While there might be some mental construct that are not arbitrary/transitory/ and/or wrong (when they are used in referencing physical things), I don't think I have ever found one; therefore while mental constructs could be considered 'true' or even 'truth' when they are not referencing anything real, at best it is also a given that they are only temporary 'true' when used when referencing real physical things.
Also as a side note, I'm merely using database concepts and models just so I don't have to reinvent the wheel and because databases and database records are more or less modeled after our own mental constructs so conceiving of thought of something as a mere database record is probably better than something built entirely from scratch.
Beyond that, there are some other very specific forms of truth in philosophy. For example, there are 'self-generating' truths in linguistics, such as promises, statements of intent, contracts, and some statements of belief, which all become existent by their own statement. One should be aware these kinds of truth have limitations. For example, after making promises, it becomes true that promises were made, but the truth of the promise itself remains an indirect proposition, and still must be determined within the rules for the three basic forms of truth described above.
Truth in theology, morality, ethics, law, and metaphysics
Much confusion about truth has arisen in these fields, but by the above schema, the nature of truth itself is relatively simple. Theological systems make assertions about that which cannot ultimately be proven; morality strives to define that which is good or bad for an individual; ethics defines that which is good or bad for a society; law strives to define that which is right or wrong; and metaphysics strives to define that which is real. In all these cases the absolute truth of the assertions they make is undefinable. However within each of these disciplines, it is possible to evaluate the propositional consistency of statements within formal systems that they define; and from that, to evaluate the truth of their propositions empirically, within the formal systems themselves. so again, when different propositions within, or across, these disciplines contradict each other, it is not possible to evaluate which are true or false in absolute terms. It is only possible to demonstrate whether the claims by each system are coherent.[/quote]
Close enough for me. :D
----
There’s been much discussion about ‘fake news’ recently, resulting rise to a new interest in the definition of truth. In modern philosophy, truth is defined by formal logic upon propositions (statements). There are three basic kinds of truth evaluation, which I here attempt to express in way compatible with the thinking of the modern philosophers Russell, Whitehead, Moore, Wittgenstein, Tarski, Carnap, Strawson, Putnam, Searle, Mendelson, Kripke, Popper, Kuhn, and Davidson.
Compound, Contractual, and Scientific Truth
While these are the *basic* forms of truth, the truth of many statements rely on combining two or more these forms together. For example, most commonly believe they know that the sun will rise tomorrow. This is based on empirical observations of many prior days where the sun did rise, leading to the simple second-order deduction that it will rise again tomorrow. Logically, one cannot know whether the belief is true that the sun will rise tomorrow until after the event has occurred. But in most cases, when sufficient empirical validation of many prior similar events has occurred, it is loosely assumed true that the same future event will occur again in the same circumstance. This 'axiom of probabilistic certainty' is the foundation of prediction in much scientific theory. The extrapolation of this axiom is the creation of the scientific method, which is designed to define the minimum number of observations necessary to corroborate a theory. As per the rules for causal truth, theories can only be corroborated and not be proven true; but modern science theory might still call a theory true based on the axiom of probabilistic certainty.
Beyond that, there are some other very specific forms of truth in philosophy. For example, there are 'self-generating' truths in linguistics, such as promises, statements of intent, contracts, and some statements of belief, which all become existent by their own statement. One should be aware these kinds of truth have limitations. For example, after making promises, it becomes true that promises were made, but the truth of the promise itself remains an indirect proposition, and still must be determined within the rules for the three basic forms of truth described above.
Truth in theology, morality, ethics, law, and metaphysics
Much confusion about truth has arisen in these fields, but by the above schema, the nature of truth itself is relatively simple. Theological systems make assertions about that which cannot ultimately be proven; morality strives to define that which is good or bad for an individual; ethics defines that which is good or bad for a society; law strives to define that which is right or wrong; and metaphysics strives to define that which is real. In all these cases the absolute truth of the assertions they make is undefinable. However within each of these disciplines, it is possible to evaluate the propositional consistency of statements within formal systems that they define; and from that, to evaluate the truth of their propositions empirically, within the formal systems themselves. so again, when different propositions within, or across, these disciplines contradict each other, it is not possible to evaluate which are true or false in absolute terms. It is only possible to demonstrate whether the claims by each system are coherent.
The Semantics of Truth
According to all modern logicians, truth is the result of evaluating a proposition, but the relation between truth and the proposition itself can be different depending on epistemological considerations. While one might initially believe the nature of truth to be intuitively obvious, the semantics of truth are complex. This starts with the issue as to whether one believes that tautological propositions are true before any person evaluates them; in which case, the truths must exist independently in some abstract space independent of material reality.
That introduces the metaphysical considerations. Classical realists hold that Platonic ‘ideas’ do exist independent of perception, and truth is simply known by correlation. Modern realists state only external material reality exists, and abstractions are simply known by common sense (as a result, many modern philosophers refer to classical realism as idealism). Dualists hold that there separate domains of physical materiality and conceptual ideas, both of which exist, and some hold tautologies are a priori true (are still truth regardless whether they are considered). Monists hold the known reality is only physical, or only exists in the mind, or something else (such as Wittgenstein's idea of logical positivism, which holds that language is the only thing which can be absolutely known). Such different perspectives change what is actually known when a truth is ‘discovered.’
Regardless whether truth does exist independently of physical reality, a priori or not, empirical and causal truths may be properties attached to the proposition which are not ‘discovered,’ but rather ‘assessed.’ These latter cases introduce the meaningfulness of incorrect assessments, and how exactly something can be meaningful if its truth is beyond simple binary evaluation, such as for example, propositions which refer to non-existent objects or which contain metaphors. Thus the semantics of truth are not so simple, and become involved with metaphysical decisions defining the nature of reality, meaningfulness, and the definition of knowledge itself.
There are also three separate positions on causality. Some hold that there is no causality without intent, and that it is otherwise simply a logical inference or deduction. The second main position is that intent does not really exist either, but is only an apparent phenomena created by the physical workings of the world. The third main group say one or both of those ideas are reductionist, and so do not give any meaning to the word 'because.' The different positions on intent may also influence truth evaluation of empirical observations on internal states, such as emotions.
Truth and Post Truth
One of the most advanced thinkers on the semantics of truth is Donald Davidson, who is an absolute anomalous monist (there are only ideas, or mind, or matter, or language, but it cannot be known which). Therefore, he states truth is ultimately undefinable, yet through our ability to reason meaningfully, truth can be known, even if people do not know that they know the truth.
For example, people can know that the sun will rise tomorrow; but they do not know that they knew that until after the sun has risen.
Rhetorical misconceptions have arisen from this, whereby people state what they wish to be true as being true, then strive to find facts to prove that truth afterwards, giving rise to the ‘post-truth era.’ While one might attempt to dismiss such efforts as obviously absurd, it is not so easy, because of the complexities of formal definitions of what truth actually is. As things are, we are likely to be stuck with this problem for a very long time, because the framework of formal truth described here, with the resulting complex nature of truth in science, is far beyond that which most people who ‘just want to know the truth’ are ready to learn
That's Russell's view, and the foundation of almost all modern thought. And as Russell says, it resolves how to handle statements like 'the king of France is bald,' so its certainly useful. The standard objection is that some words don't describe some aspect of reality, for example 'unicorn.'
First, there are lots of meaningful sentences that are not descriptive. "Please don't be rude," is a meaningful sentence and contains no descriptions.
Second, some descriptions are perfectly accurate. "The only integer greater than two and less than four" perfectly describes the number three because it does describe something and it could describe nothing else.
Third, the truth of a sentence is not necessarily a function of the accuracy of the descriptions in it. Vague descriptions can yield truth. "I met her some time around the birth of rock 'n' roll" is true if I met her any time around the mid to late 1950's. It's false if I met her in 1967.
On the 'unicorn' point, it's time to go back to Aristotle. To speak truth is to say of what is that it is *or of what is not that it is not*. That neatly deals with unicorns and Parmenides.
Don't all people generally "represent their beliefs as being true" and "act on them as if they
were" ?
Would you hold a belief that you did not count as true and/ or were not prepared to act upon?
I will answer your question after you answer mine. Again, do you hold any beliefs which you do not think are true?
I simply don't believe it is true that you believe anything that you don't believe to be true. Perhaps you could provide an actual example for consideration.
Also, I can't help wondering what the point of discussing a thing could be if you don't believe you can know what it is.
So - what is more true than the truth? Is that what you're asking? That seems to me what you're asking throughout this thread. Like A J Ayer, who is, whether you like it or not, your spiritual forbear, you don't want wishy-washy sentiments when it comes to truth, you want crisply-defined and empirically identifiable criteria that all sensible chaps can agree on.
The bad news is: there aren't any. And that's because every notion of truth rests on some intuition of what must be the case, that admits of no further explication. Somewhere along the line, you have to come to rest on what just is the case, and that is often something you will simply feel the be the case. In other words, there is no ultimate empirical fact (other than the fact that we exist, but Descartes already beat you to that.)
At the end of the day, the philosophical definition of truth is simply: what really matters to you; what you are prepared to live by, or defend. Modern philosophy, on the whole, never gets that, because it has divorced itself from religion, and such an idea sounds religious. Whereas philosophy nowadays is parlour games with words, by and large. Serves a purpose, can make you very good with words, but not so much with truth, as that is not simply a verbal matter.
These are not so much true as they have been labelled as 'true', by you. Other people may well agree with you; in which case they would have also labelled these statements as 'true'. And you might thus arrive at a consensus. But in no way do those statements have the property of truth.
The first is simply a restatement of the law of identity, A=A
Second is an arithmetical truth.
Third and fourth, matters of definition. But they're all examples of a priori truths.
In any case, it is pointless to ask why A=A, or why triangles have three sides. With respect to both those questions, the answers given are the terminus of explanation. To ask why 7+5 should equal 12, is rather like the child who persistently asks 'why' even when a question has been answered. That is the case with all such necessary truths, which have been debated interminably since Hume.
Quoting A Seagull
How do you judge that? You must know what 'the property of truth' is, to know that these statements don't have it. And if you don't know it, then you're simply expressing an opinion, but you can give no reason why anyone ought to agree that it's true.
Consider the difference between an object having the property X, and the concept which is X. So for example, we have an object which is red, and a concept of what it means to be red, and this is the concept of red. It is possible to consider the concept as an object itself, and this is what happens with geometric figures, the concept is the object. We have a point, a line, a right angle, a square, a circle, etc.. All these words refer to concepts, so the concept is the object which is being referred to. When we apprehend concepts as objects like this, we can analyze the concepts, just like we would analyze any object.
Now assume that "true" is a property which we assign to propositions. Accordingly, there is assumed to be a concept of what it means to be true. If we consider this concept itself, as an object, we have "the truth" as an object just like "the circle" or "the square". The problem is that there is no clear and unambiguous definition of "the truth", like there is of "the circle", or 'the square". This leaves us with doubt as to whether there really is a concept, which can be considered as an object, called "the truth". This is the issue which Plato attacked vigorously, with concepts such as "beauty", "love", "just", "knowledge", "virtue", "friendship", etc.. When we cannot agree on the definition of the term, how can we claim that there is such a thing (object) as the concept which is signified by that term. Now you recognize the same problem with "the truth". If there is no agreed upon definition of what it means to be true, how can there be a concept of "the truth"?
But in no way do those statements have the property of truth
. Great! Now, what is that property?
What is what property? Truth? Truth is not a property, it is a label.
When one affixes a label to a suitcase, it can hardly be said that that label becomes a property of the suitcase.
The 'property of truth' does not really exist, it is superfluous to a consistent theory of truth, in the same way that the centrifugal force is superfluous to the theory of kinematics.
If you want reasons for that, just look at statements... how is it possible for them to have a 'property of truth'? They consist of strings of symbols which can be combined into 'words' whose 'meaning' can be determined (to some degree) by looking them up in a dictionary. That is all they are. Any label of 'truth' can only be applied to the statement by a person.
If that is true of your statement, then why I am expected to believe it? How can you make an argument? You're just creating strings of characters, right? Why bother typing anything?
"True' has a range of senses: for example 'right. 'correct', 'accurate', ' in accordance with actuality', and the like.
'Believe' means most characteristically "hold something to be true'. If you believe in someone then you would think of them as being true in some way: a true friend, or true to their word, or truly good, for example.
I predict that you will now ask what 'right', 'correct', 'actuality' and so on mean. And then if I give you definitions of those in further terms you will ask what those further terms mean. If you want to say that we cannot know what any of our terms mean, then what would be the point in discussing anything? In attempting to discuss, or even think about, anything we would be attempting the impossible, and if that were so, then we would be better to remain altogether silent.
But discussion and thought are not impossible, and the fact is that we all know very well what the words 'true' and 'believe' mean. The game of asking for definitions of definitions of definitions is a childish one; it is like the aggravating game of the child who keeps asking 'but why is that?' and when answered, asks again interminably "Yes, but why is that?".
There cannot, because truth is more primordial than any concept. In fact concepts would be meaningless without always already taking for granted the possibility of their possession or lack of aptitude; which is to say the possibility of their truth or falsity.
No, truth is not "turtles all the way down"; it is not anything all the way down, although it is "all the way down" insofar as it is groundless ( and yet without a ground there is no "down"). To say that truth is "accordance with actuality' is not to say that it is grounded in actuality. We might just as well say that actuality is grounded in truth. There is no determinate grounding, although I think it must simply be accepted that both actuality and truth must be grounded in the indeterminable, if there is to be any relation between being and thought. No relationship is achieved by collapsing one into the other, or dissolving the distinction altogether.
y="Wayfarer;67651"]
You are not 'expected' to believe it. It is a communication. And presumably you can understand it because there is a commonality of meaning of the words. Part of my communication is that I am suggesting a cohesive and consistent approach to truth that does not have the inconsistencies of other theories. But whether you believe it or not is entirely up to you.
This is a statement, right.? You claim that it's 'cohesive and consistent' in the service of making a point - which is trying to persuade others that your theory is true, where other theories aren't. So if you succeed, you undermine your initial claim that statements can't be labelled 'true', because your statement then has the property of being a true theory, which is what you're arguing against. And if it doesn't fit have the property of being true, then it's not a true theory, and you haven't made your case.
I said that statements can be labelled 'true', I also said that statements cannot have the property of 'truth'. I thought I had pointed out the distinction.
So there is no inconsistency. My statements can be labelled as 'true' but they would not have the property of 'truth'.
*[/quote]
In other words, the label would be false!
Quoting Wayfarer
Certainly you could label it as such if you wanted to; but do you have any criteria for doing so?
Of course! If only the label is 'true', but the statement itself doesn't have 'the property of truth', then the label is not true, because the statement it refers to is not true. It follows from your initial statement, that if no statements have the property of 'being true', then there's nothing meaningful you can say, because whatever you say must either be true, in which case it contradicts your argument, or it's false, in which case it's false.
Well here's the problem then. If each proposition requires a different standard to be judged as true, then "true" has a different meaning in each of these instances of use. That's what I mean when I say there is no unambiguous definition of "true". From this, to say that a proposition is true, is really meaningless unless we indicate by which standard it is true. Clearly, there is no one concept of "truth" unless there is one standard by which we judge something as "true", just like there is one standard to judge something as "square", despite the many different sized squares.
Quoting tim wood
What John says makes no sense to me. John seems to think that there is a concept of truth which is prior to the concept of truth, and that's ridiculous.
I think that maybe you've been looking in the wrong place for "truth". You've now exposed "truth" as "attitudes held by more or less rational beings", yet you claim that these attitudes are "not arbitrary". Perhaps we can identify a particular type of attitude, rather than a multitude of different attitudes, and this particular attitude might lend itself as the essence of truth.
Would you agree that there is a relationship between truth and honesty? Have you ever considered that the essence of "truth" might be found in this attitude which we call honesty? It is evident that any statement may deceive, if that is the intent of the author, and the one receiving is not on guard. So despite how truthful the proposition may appear, if it was proposed with the intent to deceive, that truthfulness will be in appearance only. But if the statement is made in honesty, it will always reflect the true thoughts of the author.
Now, what all true statements have in common, is that they were produced from that attitude of honesty. If they were not produced in honesty, they are not true, and some honest statements are still not true by reason of mistake, but all true statements are derived from the honest attitude. So if we are looking to define "truth", by determining what all true statements have in common, then we should consider this honest attitude as the defining feature.
No, what's ridiculous is the amount of effort you put into reading posts before responding. I explicitly stated that I think there cannot be a concept of truth, and that truth is prior to all concepts:
Quoting John
What do you think a concept of anything consists in? Doesn't a concept of something consist in relating it to other particulars in terms of commonalities and differences in order to establish what kind of thing it is? Is not the possibility of the truth or falsity of these purported relations that form our concepts always prior to the purported relations themselves?
OK Fair enough. But how is it possible for a statement to have the 'property of truth'? And how is it possible to determine whether a statement has such a property? And what advantages are to ascribe a 'property of truth' to a statement rather than merely label it as 'true'?
You have to allow for at least some statement to be true, to even say anything. Otherwise you're facing the dilemma of universal scepticism - that if every statement is false, then so to is every argument that the sceptic can offer. So the examples Tim Wood provided that you were commenting on, are text-book cases of true statements, but that in itself doesn't really say much.
However, concern with truth is fundamental. I don't know if you're following politics and current affairs, but the current President of the US is notorious for mendacity. His disregard for truth is regarded by many of his critics as not only the sign of a profound character flaw but also a threat to the institutions of democracy itself, which expect at least some level of truthfulness from their elected officials, not least the highest elected official.
The difficulty in these kinds of conversations is the open-ended nature of the question 'what is truth'? As an abstract or general question, it's almost impossible to answer. You could write an essay on the Platonic or Arisotelean or neo-Platonist views on the question, but they're situated within a culture which still had a classical regard for what you could call Capital T Truth. I think as a general tendency modernity is inclined to reject that kind of attitude. We nowadays only talk in terms of falsifiability and provisional hypotheses; maybe that's the best we can hope for!
So what would this so-called "truth" consist of, which is independent from all concepts? Is it a physical thing? If not, then how does it differ from a concept?
Quoting John
No, I really think you have this backward. How could the truth or falsity of a relationship be prior to the relationship itself. If it is the relationship which is either true or false, then truth or falsity is an attribute of the relationship. So how is it possible that this attribute exists prior to the thing which it is the property of? Are you suggesting that there is this thing called "truth", which floats around independent from any statements, yet attaches itself to a statement making that statement true?
So, you have decided that there are only physical things and the concepts of them? On what do you base this conclusion?
It is obvious that truth is not a physical thing. If you want to say that truth is a concept, and nothing more than that, then you should be able to give an account of it as such.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It's not prior to the relationship, but to our conception of the relationship; we conceive of relationships under the aegis of the possibility of the truth or falsity of our conception of them.
No, I haven't decided that. Concepts are not necessarily "of" physical things. But if you want to posit the existence of a non-physical thing, which is not a concept, you'll need to back this up with some sort of explanation.
Quoting John
According to my discussion with tim wood, I was ready to concede that there is no such thing as truth. So neither is truth a non-physical concept, nor is it a physical thing. Tim went on to suggest that truth might be attitudinal, and you can read my reply to that in the post before you engaged me.
Quoting John
If this is what you are saying here as well, that truth is attitudinal? Then we are probably in agreement. Read my post, and tell me what you think, because I've offered an identification of that attitude as honesty.
Can you give me an example of a concept which is not given, even remotely, in terms of physical things or relations between physical things?
I can't see how it could be in accordance with our experience and practices to "concede that there is no such things as truth" because our understandings of everything presuppose it. As I said before, the logical meaning of truth is that it is accordance with actuality. The trouble begins when analysis beyond that is attempted. If actuality is presupposed (as it seems to me that it must be, whatever we might think the nature of it to be) then truth is the accordance of thought with actuality. (Actuality could be otherwise referred to as being or reality).
I can't see how truth can coherently, or productively, be thought to be dependent on attitude, which would be the same as to say that it is dependent on belief. The problem is that beliefs can be true or false.
Numbers and geometrical forms, laws of grammars, and logical relationships, can all be instantiated in physical forms, but they're essentially intellectual in nature.
Quoting tim wood
(Y)
Does that mean the same as to say that they are essentially conceptual in nature? Is a geometrical form, a law of grammar, or a logical relationship a concept or are they rather sets of relations?
What exactly do you mean by saying they are "essentially intellectual in nature".Could they be known apart from their physical instantiations?
Well - what about mental arithmetic? Irrational numbers? I should say, I was terrible at school maths and boast no intellectual prowess in the subject whatever, and also that this is a very difficult question in philosophy. But I still think it's the case that what mathematicians do is essentially, or even only, intellectual. They represent their ideas with symbols, but the ideas are not themselves physical marks or signs. The signs signify ideas or relations or quantities - the sign itself is physical, but what is signified is purely intellectual. The issue is that in our own thinking, the intellectual is always inextricably combined with the sensory - we're constantly, and unconsciously, interpreting what we see as signs or indicators, but without noticing that we're doing that, as the mind works that way unconsciously (which is directly out of Kant although he didn't use the term 'unconsciously').
The fact that a concept is "given" in terms of physical things does not necessitate that the concept is "of" a physical thing. Quite the opposite is actually the case. The concept is given in terms of physical things because that is how we communicate. We must communicate through the physical world, and we give each other concepts through physical representations. But the physical thing is the representation of the concept, not vise versa.
All the purely abstract concepts such as mathematical concepts are good demonstrations of such. Consider geometry, we have points, lines, right angles, circles, etc., which all have defined essences. We make a copy of the circle, for example, on a piece of paper, to demonstrate it to others, but this is just a representation of the concept, just like a point or a line on the paper acts as a representation of the concept. That it is just a representation is evident from the fact that we cannot make a perfect circle, the "true" circle remains the concept. Nor can we make a non-dimensional point on a paper, the true point is the concept. The one on the paper is a representation of the concept.
To properly apprehend the nature of concepts, it is necessary to see the physical object as the representation of the concept, not vise versa. This is what Plato described in the cave allegory.
Quoting John
But that's not the meaning of "truth", that's the meaning of "true", and this distinction is the one being focused on in this thread.
Quoting tim wood
Let me just say here, that you cannot reduce the question of "truth" to a question of whether it is in the intention or in the speech, because the speech, once it is spoken, must be interpreted. So really, the question of "truth", if expressed in this way, ought to be expressed as whether the truth is in the intention of the speaker, or in the intention of the interpreter. And this rapidly becomes a complex issue because there may be multiple interpreters, each with one's own intent.
I do not see any means of positioning truth within the physical existence of the speech itself, because it requires interpretation for meaning in order to be judged. Some will define a statement, or proposition, as an odd sort of conglomeration of physical symbols combined with a particular meaning, but I don't believe this is reality. If we combine a meaning with the physical symbols, such that they exist together, the meaning must be taken as something vague and ambiguous, general, to allow for the reality of many possible interpretations. This ambiguity disallows the possibility of truth, so truth cannot be attributed to the physical existence of the speech, even if we say that meaning is within the physical existence, because this meaning within the physical existence must be inherently ambiguous. So when those people say that "true" may be attributed directly to the statement or proposition, they are assuming that the statement has one unambiguous "objective" meaning. But this is actually beyond the reality of the statement, as even precisely stated mathematical equations are open to some degree of ambiguity, such as when we subject symbols like = to principles of skepticism. So it is the essential property of the physical existence of speech that it contains ambiguity. And this denies the possibility of truth.
Quoting tim wood
So here, we can see where the ambiguity lies. Let's say I produce an instance of S which I claim is not P. I insist that this is an instance of S, and it is clearly not P, so I assert "All S is P" is false. You argue, no that is not an instance of S, because it is not P, and therefore it cannot be S, maintaining, "All S is P" is true.
Obviously, we cannot say that truth is in the MS, because truth relies not only on how we interpret the MS, but also on how we interpret the world. In the example, I would argue that you are just interpreting the world in such a way as to maintain the truth of your MS, when I think it is a bad way of interpreting the world, and we should dismiss your MS as false.
Quoting tim wood
It is this "collective mind" part which makes truth more than just a subjective opinion of you or I, the opinion that X is true. But this is also why it is best described by an attitude which we have towards each other. That is what I called honesty. So truth is not strictly speaking, a testimony to the activity of a mind, it is as you say the testimony to the activity of a special type of mind, which you call a "competent" mind. I would prefer to narrow down "competent" to the more specific, "honest". One can be very competent in making judgements, yet not be honest, and therefore truth does not enter into that competent judgement. Honesty is what allows one to have respect for others in making such judgements.
We take one step towards removing the arbitrariness of pure subjectivity, of truth, by asserting that the judgement must be made by a competent mind. We take the next step by saying that the judgement must be made by an honest, competent, mind. This ensures that the mind making the judgement has the proper attitude toward other minds.
I would ask you now, can we give truth independent, separate existence? There are many things which competent minds working together create in the world, and these things have independent existence. We can start with physical objects, there are many buildings and things like that. But then we can move into things which have less of a physical existence, like mores, laws, and social structures. Can truth be one of those things, created by honest, competent minds working together, yet somehow existing independently of those minds? Where would we find it? We've already determined that it is not within statements or propositions. If it is within the honest mind, then how is it also independent of the honest mind?
Apart from 'honest', also 'rational'. The problem is that modernism and post-modernism have thrown standards of rationality into question. The idea that there are common standards, or that reality itself is rational, are the very kinds of ideas that have been thrown increasingly into question. That was the theme of Max Horkheimer's book, The Eclipse of Reason, which documents how over history, the initial Platonististic view that the world was 'animated by reason' has become increasingly untenable, and that the prevailing view today is that reason is subjective or an evolved capacity of the mind which is ultimately a function of evolutionary biology.
We nowadays speak of 'scientific rationalism' however scientific rationalism is different in one crucial respect from traditional rationalism, in that the evidence for it has to be available in the third person, and it has to be empirical. There must be some measurable physical effect or consequence of whatever idea or hypothesis is entertained so as to qualify for the moniker 'scientific' rationalism. Whereas traditional rationalism argued from the specific to the general, from the effects to the most general types of causes, whether that be conceived of as the Idea of the Good or the Uncaused Cause. So traditional and scientific rationalism are actually very different in that respect.
One school where respect for that older form of rationalism is preserved, is neo-thomism or neo-scholasticism, as for example in this essay called Think, McFly, Think by Ed Feser.
I think the problems you refer to stem from the presumption that statements can have the property of truth and the presumption that every statement is either true or false.
These problems fade away from the idea that statements are neither true nor false except where they are labelled as such by a person.
PS I learnt to sail in a wayfarer. :)
They are all intelligible only in terms of physical things or analogues.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Truth is the property of being true; if something is true then it embodies or expresses truth.
This is where I disagree; what is represented is thought. 'Intellect' as I understand it pertains to the capacity for thought. We can rationally ( i.e. in a measured way) grasp the nature of finite thought and finite matter, but not the nature of infinite thought and infinite matter.
Nice. I learned that there is also a popular sunglasses line of the same name.
Quoting A Seagull
That means complete relativism - that everything is simply a matter of opinion. The problems fade away, but only because you're no longer addressing them.
Quoting John
The point I made has got nothing to do with 'infinite thought'. It has to do with the nature of concepts, the fact that concepts are real but immaterial. I think the best arguments for the immaterial nature of mind, are that the objects of thought - abstract truths, and the like - are universal and invariant; the same for any mind capable of grasping them, but only graspable by a mind.
Lloyd Gerson, Platonism vs Naturalism, 39:00
Feser, Some Brief Arguments for Dualism
Both those arguments are Aristotelean.
I don't know what you mean by "real, but immaterial". Concepts occur only, as far as I know in physical brains. They are finite thoughts that grasp finite objects in measured ways. The objects grasped are graspable only insofar as they exist in the mode of extension; the grasping is itself the mode of thought; I see no reason to posit dualism; which would introduce an unbridgeable gulf between thought and being.
So, the reality and materiality of things is grasped in thought; and thought is thus a real and material grasping. We know what materiality is in the sense that we can recognize it; but we have no idea what immateriality is except insofar as it is a logical negation of materiality. Being grasps, speaks and thinks itself. What else could we concern ourselves with; what else could there be?
So, I think the very idea of the "immaterial nature of the mind" is unintelligible, and thus of no use to us.The "universality and invariance" of truths is due to the infinite and eternal nature of God I would say; not to any incoherent "immateriality" of God or mind. Don't forget that materiality is infinite and eternal, even though individual material things are not. Likewise, thought is also infinite and eternal even though individual thoughts are not. I believe thought and materiality cannot be separated; they are the two sides of an infinite, eternal coin. I have come to think that the relation between materiality and thought is manifested as the spirit.
I have to be very blunt at this point: this is what you have to get past. Nothing is really or purely material, and the brain is certainly not only a material object. No concepts are material in nature, the idea that they can be understood or mapped against neural configurations is incorrect, because concepts and neural configurations are different kinds of things. The whole point about a concept is that it can be realised in many material forms, which shows that it is not in itself material. The point is that the meaning of a concept is independent of its material form, not dependent on it. When a rational intelligence creates a symbol, it represents the concept in material form, but the material form is in some sense arbitrary, i.e. the same symbol can be made out of any kind of material, or the same concept can be represented by different types of symbols. Otherwise, languages would not be possible. As that quote from Gerson says, language and thought are 'inherently universalising'. And universals rely on forms.
You think it's unintelligible, because there's something you're not getting about it, which means it's unintelligible to you. But what I am saying is the original meaning of the term 'intelligibility', which I think has been progressively lost since Descartes. Your notion of the physicality of concepts is actually basic to modern materialism and 'brain-mind identity'.
Quoting John
What you're saying about the 'infinite nature of thought' is really not part of the Western philosophical tradition - you have probably gotten those ideas from popular mysticism. There's nothing inherently the matter with them but it's not the point at issue .
I think you really need to do more work to map your thoughts against some authentic sources. The above quotation of yours is in some ways an echo of 'the interdependence of the transcendent and immanent', but I don't think you've really gotten that either. The spirit is not 'a manifestation' of anything, but the uncaused cause.
Unfortunately you are showing that you have no clue what I have been saying or how it relates to the Western canon. And you are making unwarranted and somewhat patronizing assumptions about the sources of my ideas, and also about what I have "gotten".
Perhaps you should consider the possibility that I simply don't agree with you, and that maybe there are many ideas I think you have not gotten and others that you need to "get past"; but that I have refrained from saying so because I don't want to be patronizing. Perhaps you should read some Spinoza?
One thing I have noticed is that you don't seem to like it when others disagree with you. I, on the other hand, don't mind others disagreeing; what I do mind is others making unwarranted assumptions about me and/or misreading or, even worse, deliberately distorting what I have said.
If you can explain to me what immateriality is, then you will make it intelligible to me and to yourself. Until then...there is nothing more to be said, I would think.
In regards the question at hand, I have tried to illustrate the point with quotations from Loyd Gerson (which is linked to a video lecture of his. "Platonism vs Naturalism") and also essays by Edward Feser. So it's not simply a matter of my being annoyed because you're disagreeing with me - I expect almost everyone with disagree with me. The whole point of philosophical debates is to disagree.
I agree that the point of philosophy is to address different ideas, which is to say disagreements. And I can accept that you sincerely think there is something I am not seeing. If that "something" is of a rational nature, then it should be explicable, and it can be thrashed out if there is sufficient good will on both sides. If, however it is "something" of a purportedly spiritual nature; then it may not be explicable at all.
The thing about 'spiritual' intuitions, though,is that they do vary from one person to the next; and that fact itself is inexplicable if the presupposition is that there is, spiritually or metaphysically speaking, just one truth, unless it is supposed that there could be rational reasons for such disagreements, and that many people's intuitions are necessarily somehow misguided in their relation to rational discourse.
That's why I ask for an account of immateriality; because I personally think that any intuition which suggests it is misguided. I think this just because the idea does not seem to be amenable to being made intelligible. Now, I don't deny the possibility that some spiritual intuitions are beyond intelligibility; but in that case no propositional concussions, whether of materiality or immateriality, can be drawn form them, and they are outside the range of philosophical discourse.
But you say on one hand:
Quoting John
That is a canonical statement of philosophical materialism, in that it reduces mind to neural activity. When I studied at Uni of Sydney, the head of philosophy was D M Armstrong, who was a materialist of exactly that kind, so I am familiar with it. Other notable proponents of such a view are Francis Crick, who discovered DNA, and Daniel Dennett.
We have to be very clear about what 'philosophical materialism' is. I'm not referring to social materialism, i.e. putting high value on possessions. Philosophical materialism is the view that ultimately only matter is real, and that mind is an evolved by-product of matter. It is the de facto view of nearly all the philosophy departments in Western university system; it is generally assumed to be the case. So it's deeply embedded in our culture, in fact in order to question it, one has to be somewhat 'counter-cultural'. That's why I acknowledge that a lot of what I say would not be agreed with by many people.
So from what you say, I think that you basically take that view for granted - but in saying that I'm not accusing you of anything, many or even most people would also take it for granted, It seems to be the common-sense view.
But then the other thing you often say is:
Quoting John
Quoting John
So, this I take as a reference to the ineffable nature of spiritual experiences. Again, nothing the matter there - it is often said that such states are beyond words or beyond discursive analysis,
But what I have been talking about is neither of those - neither 'evolutionary materialism', on the one side, or 'the ineffable spiritual' on the other. It is this: there is a philosophical argument for the immaterial nature of mind, that is part of the broadly Platonist/Pythagorean philosophy, It is based on the premise that concepts are real but not material. Such a view is broadly called 'Platonic realism'. It was modified by Aristotle and again by the scholastics, but it is still a recognisable philosophy. That is what I'm on about.
There are many versions of materialism. I don't really think of myself as a materialist, except insofar as I see no justification for positing an ontological separation between matter and thought. As far as I know Aristotle denied the transcendent nature of the forms as conceived by Plato,
There are many subtleties and convolutions in Western thought; and I think the mistake you are making consists in glossing over those subtleties, and demonizing materialism toute court ( although I also recognize that certain brands of materialism deserve to be rejected).
I don't think there is any ontological transcendence, which means there is no duality of substances, although of course some things are transcendental to us, due to their infinite nature. I follow Spinoza in thinking that the very idea of a duality of substances is incoherent. Ontologically, or metaphysically, speaking, I see the infinite as being wholly immanent in the finite, and visa versa. To me this makes the most sense (and I have thought a lot about it). I am not claiming that I am right and that everyone who disagrees is wrong (although I do indeed think that, but I recognize that others may think the opposite and that no one is infallible).
Not at all! The grounds for your assertion are baseless. The problems you referred to diminish to nothing. What other problems are there?
PS Quoting Wayfarer
Is that where your name comes from?
That is materialism, and the point at issue. What does 'ontological' mean to you?
It's actually not materialism, because I do not impute any primacy to materiality over thought. This is akin to Spinoza's position, which could be said to be a kind of neutral monism.
Although I am at the same time reluctant to speak in terms of 'one' because without 'an other' the notion has no real meaning.
The puzzling thing is that I'm quite sure I've explained my position to you more than once previously.
From one perspective, of course concepts are not physical entities they are mental entities. But from that, which is really just a matter of definition, I don't believe the conclusion that conceptuality is 'something' substantively other than physicality should be drawn.
That has really been the only point I have been trying to emphasize.
Thomas Nagel: Thoughts are Real.
Yet, we have no 'science' of this fact. It's astounding when you start to realise the implications. Our whole culture is founded on a clear and unmistakeable illusion or inversion. It's philosophy's task to shake people out of such delusions.
I tend to think that the order of ideas reflects the order of things; there is really nothing else for it to reflect. If they are two completely different orders then no sense can be made of any connection between them. This is really the Cartesian problem of the interaction between res extensa and res cogitans expressed in a different way.
Also I think it pays to remember that we construct orders ourselves (although not consciously or of our own volition, of course); the order of worldly things as much as the order of our ideas. There is no 'pre-fabricated' order given to us.
I agree that it is philosophy's task to help us become free from the grip of superficial fashionable nonsense. An example of that is the ridiculous idea that everything about human life can be explained in the reductive terms of a genetic engine geared only towards survival.
Honesty must be considered in relation to the attitude of the interpreter as well as the attitude of the speaker. This encompasses what is sometimes called "the principle of charity". So when a proposition is judged for truth or falsity, it must be honestly interpreted. This is why it is useful to have multiple auditors, like a jury, to ensure that there is a true interpretation of the proposition.
Quoting tim wood
So I would argue that even when a logical argument is being made, honesty is a factor, because the one judging it must interpret it honestly. Agreement is dependent on honest interpretation, just as much as it is dependent on honest expression. The point is that any such logical demonstration requires agreement in defining and use terms. Without honesty there is no agreement, we may decline definitions at will. This is not simply a matter of what you have described as "rhetorical truth", it is relevant to all truth.
Quoting tim wood
So all these different truths rely on definitions. The definitions must be agreed to, or accepted, in order that there is truth. If one rejects the definitions, one denies the truth.
Quoting tim wood
Yes, I have a limited acquaintance with Heidegger's notion of "care", and I think I would be somewhat in agreement, though I think it has a much broader application for Heidegger. Also, I am in agreement with your designation of "fitness and rightness". A proposition is a proposal, and acceptance implies that one judges the definitions, and use of terms as "right". If not, we reject the proposition. Again though, I'll remind you, that such judgement must be made with an attitude of honesty, and this why we can refer to this attitude with words such as "care", "fair", and "charity".
Quoting tim wood
Now you've hit, with your hammer, a whole new can of worms, what you call "proper subject matter". We've been discussing the use of words, composition and interpretation, in relation to truth. Where do we find "subject matter" here? Isn't the real subject matter represented by this word, "proper"? Without proper use, there is no subject matter, and proper use is what creates subject matter. Don't you agree, that without proper use, the proposition is meaningless (having no subject matter), but with proper use there is meaning, and therefore subject matter? This implies that subject matter is itself the manifestation of truth, which is dependent on honesty and proper use. Can we find the essence of "subject matter", because this might be the material existence of truth?
I'm not so sure about this because neither of us has provided any formal definition of "subject matter". Now your definition of "truth" requires "subject matter", but you say of subject matter, "whatever that is - just is". So you don't appear to have definition of subject matter. What I have stated is that subject matter is the manifestation of truth, and you have stated that subject matter is required for truth. Do you agree with this assessment? I have proposed that truth is somehow equivalent to subject matter, or perhaps even more fundamental than subject matter, while you have proposed that subject matter is prior to truth, truth is something built upon subject matter.
So let's analyze this concept for a moment. I propose that "subject" refers to the thinking human being, and "matter" refers to the content of thought. Whenever there is a thinking subject, there must be content, what is being thought, and this is subject matter. This content may be memories, beliefs, ideas, words, etc.
You have proposed as "truth", a relationship between the content and the proposition. Can we agree that the act of thinking, and the decision made, gives the content some sort of order, and this comes out as the proposition? So you would say "truth" is this ordering process which is the act of thinking. This act of thinking is the relationship between the content and the proposition. I assign "truth" to the content itself, which is the memories, beliefs, ideas, words, etc..
Quoting tim wood
I don't think that we try to say something about the subject matter. The subject matter, as you say, "just is". We take it, formulate it in different ways, to say something. But what the proposition says something about, is not the subject matter itself, it says something about something else.
My argument is that the content, or subject matter, must already say something about something, before we formulate the proposition, and this is where we find truth. If the subject matter didn't say something about something, then thinking would be random, and propositions would be nonsense. So no matter how you break the proposition down into compositional parts, seeking the subject matter, there must be an element of truth in each part or else we get lost in random nonsense. Subject matter then is like a sign, it signifies or represents something. Truth is in the relationship between the sign and what it represents.
Quoting tim wood
I don't believe that we can start with the assumption that the rock is just here even if no mind ever existed. This assumption needs to be justified. Imagine if there were no living things. There would be no distinction of this or that period of time, or individuation of this or that place. There would be the entire universe throughout all time, if we could even assume the universe, throughout all of time, and no one to separate out "the rock" as having existence independent from this mass of eternal time and infinite space.
However, I do think that the assumption of something independent from living minds is reasonable, but we must start with the assumption that whatever it is is indeterminate, until we justify the existence of actual distinct forms like the "rock". The question though, is does this assumption of something independent from living minds, even if it is indeterminate, require an assumption of truth? And I think that this is where we find the fundamental distinction between justified and true. We have a fundamental assumption, you that "the rock is just here", I that there is something indeterminate there. But neither of these assumptions is really justified, they are just assumed to be true. Remember, "true" is what we assign to the premises of a logical argument, the propositions which are accepted simply by assumption. The logic provides justification of the conclusion. The argument is sound when it has true premises and valid logic.
Quoting tim wood
What I think you have to pay respect for, is the fact that there are two sides of this issue. Not only do we test the "thing" to see if it is a rock, but we also adjust our definition of "rock" to ensure that it corresponds to the thing which we are testing, because this is the thing we call "rock". So the thing which we are testing may not prove to be a "rock", as we thought what "rock" meant, but we have always been calling this thing a rock, and will continue to do so, so now we have to change what it means to be a "rock", instead of saying "this is not a rock". It is not an insistence of "if you are a rock you will react this way to my test", it is an instance of "I know you are a rock, because that's what we call you, and I thought you would react this way to my test, but you didn't". That doesn't mean that it's not a rock, it means that I didn't have a good understanding of what it means to be a rock when I devised my test
This is where I think we can notice the difference between "truth" and "justification". Remember how we outlined the possibility that truth refers to a type of attitude. Let's say we have isolated and identified a thing which we're going to test. The "true approach" is to say that we are calling this thing which we have individuated, a "rock", though its essence, what it is, is indeterminate. We have no true definition of "rock". That's why we are testing it, we know not "what" it is, but we call it a rock. The other approach, is like you suggested, we have a definition, "rock =...", and we are testing this thing to see if it is a rock. The test determines whether or not we are justified in calling this thing a rock. The former method assumes as "the truth", that we do not know what it means to be a "rock", the latter method assumes as "the truth", the definition of "rock". Of course our definition of "rock" may be incorrect, so we are actually not justified in this latter assumption.
Quoting tim wood
So rather than tautology, "truth" refers instead to the unknown, that which cannot be justified, but is still assumed. When the assumption can be demonstrated to be unjustified, such as I explained with the assumption that the definition of "rock" is necessarily correct, then we cannot accept these assumptions as truth. Then the truth is that the fundamental assumptions are really unknowns.
The tautology then, which you express as A=A, is actually the fundamental form of justification, it is not truth. Behind this fundamental justification is still basic assumptions, such as the meaning of "=". In order for the justification to work, we must assume the truth of the meaning of "=", and this is not justified, it is simply assumed, and therefore it is not known.
Quoting tim wood
Actually, it was you who said that truth lies in such a relationship. I said that truth lies in the subject matter itself, that subject matter is a manifestation of truth. I do not believe that mental content (subject matter) represents anything, it, as you say "just is". It's only when we take subject matter and formulate an idea, or a proposition, that we put it into a form which represents something.
So "truth", as these fundamental assumptions which are essentially "unknowns", because they cannot be justified, do not actually represent anything. They are just assumptions of meaning. So the symbol "A", and "=", and "+", and "4", all mean something to me, and these are fundamental "truths", having the function of assumptions in my thinking, but they are not representations, as they do not represent anything. Nor can we properly say that there is "a relationship" here, because they are simply "particles" of meaning.
OK, let's see if we can clarify the difference between us. I think we both agree that what is "true", is true by assumption. That's what you say in 1), the proposition "this is a rock" is "true by assumption". My claim though is that we do not assume the truth of a proposition though, we ask that it be justified. This justification involves defining the terms, so real truth is deeper than the proposition, it is within the terms of the proposition. Otherwise, any proposition could be assumed as true, and we do not just assume as true, any old proposition..
So, we take "this is a rock", and we have two elements which need to be analyzed, and justified, before we can assume this proposition to be true. We need to analyze what it means to be a rock, and we need to analyze the thing being referred to by "this". With respect to the thing itself, we can test it, as you said, and I agree. But with respect to what it means to be a "rock", what I've tried to impress upon you, is that there are two distinct approaches.
We could start with a proposition, "a rock is ...", or, we could point to an object, and assume the proposition "this is a rock", is true. The latter is the "true" way, it is what produces the true assumption of "this is a rock". From this perspective, we need no testing of the thing, it is really true by assumption, because we've established that the very thing pointed to is the thing which is called by the name "rock". Therefore "this is a rock" cannot be false. If we choose the former perspective, and refer to a proposition "a rock is ...", in order to justify calling this a rock, then this proposition (this definition) itself needs to be justified and we risk the possibility of infinite regress in justification. Therefore at some time we have to turn to the thing itself, and say "this is a rock", stipulate so that we can agree, that this is the thing called "rock". We have undeniable truth because so long as there is nothing else called "rock", it is completely unreasonable not to agree to call the thing "rock". "Rock" has no definition, it is just the pointed to thing.
But now we have a problem if we want to call other things by the same name, "rock". This is when we have to test the thing, and test other things, determining principles of consistency, continuity between the thing we have called "rock", and other things, such that we can designate them all of the same family, and call them all "rocks". So it is only when we have two distinct things, and we want to say of them both "this is a rock", then we need justification. We cannot simply assume both propositions as true, because contradiction is implied when we want to call two distinct things by the same name. Therefore we need some reason, justification, to call them both by the same name.
Quoting tim wood
The thing is indeterminate until it has been individuated, pointed to, or named. Once we name it, and agree on the name, then we have truth. The thing is called "rock". Naming it is a type of determination, but in another way it allows that the thing named is still indeterminate. It gives no concept, or form, to the named thing, no description or idea of what it means to be the thing which bears that name. The pointing to the thing indicates that the thing bears the name, but what it means to be that thing remains indeterminate. Therefore we allow that any concept whatsoever may be attributed to that thing which is pointed to, but we still have truth without conceptualization, truth by agreeing on the name. That is why I associate truth with the unknown, because we can have truth concerning the thing without knowing anything about the thing at all, just by having a name for it.
Quoting tim wood
Right, this is the key point, no testing is necessary. We have called the thing "rock", agreed that it is rock, and it is true that it is "rock", therefore no testing is necessary. The proposition "this is a rock", is not even properly called a proposition, because it's not saying anything about an item, it is pointing to an item.
Quoting tim wood
Now we have the distinction of subject matter. This is where we have our biggest difference of opinion. How could subject matter be the thing itself? It is matter of the subject. We could assume that the thing exists of matter, but the thing is the object, not the subject. So subject matter must be mental content. And we have objective matter which is the substance of the object.
I don't see how we could be dealing with anything other than mental content here. We have an object pointed to, and we assume the name "rock", but that this object is named "rock" is purely mental content. What more can it be? It appears like you want to bring truth outside of the mind, but this is impossible. There is a name "rock", within our minds, and there are associations with that name, memories of pointing, etc., but it's all within the mind, the associations are assumed. It is an assumption that the object is "rock", there is nothing about the object itself which necessitates it being "rock".
It appears to me, like you want to say that the name "rock" necessarily refers to some object outside the mind, and this is truth. But that's not reality. The name "rock" does not necessarily refer to any object whatsoever, it was arbitrarily chosen. So truth is entirely dependent upon this arbitrary choice, made by the mind to call that thing "rock". It is only when we move forward, to justify through testing and theories, that a specific object ought to be called "rock", that we establish such a necessary relationship. But that is why we need to keep justification and truth separate.
Quoting tim wood
So we each have a slightly different idea of what truth is. You say that truth is a kind of relationship between things (objects) and propositions. I reduce this, and say that such a relationship is just an arbitrary assumption, like the assumption which attaches the name to the object. That it's anything more than an assumption would require justification, but this justification would be based in the assumption of a more fundamental relationship, and this will now be the "truth" upon which the justification is based.
I call this fundamental relationship "subject matter", because it exists only within the mind. These relationships, that this word relates to this object, are completely arbitrary, existing only within the minds which assume them. In my last post I believe I called this a particle of meaning. It is an assumed association, existing within the mind, and it doesn't have to involve a word, or words, it could be simply memories and feelings, but these associations, particles of meaning, are "truths" because we accept them without the necessity for justification. They just are, just like memories just are.
I think I'll stick with my definition of truth, which is this:
‘P’ is true for S iff S judges ‘P’ to have relation R to either S’s phenomenal P, and/or S’s stock of previously adjudged true propositions, depending on the relation R. Relation R is whatever truth theory relation S feels is the appropriate one(s)—correspondence, coherence, consensus, pragmatic, etc.
The idea is that truth-value is a judgment that individuals make about the relation of propositions to something else. The something else can vary, because it depends on what that individual counts to be the pertinent information for making the judgment. It can be facts in the world per their perceptual faculties, it could be the set of propositions that are judged to be true by consensus (again per their perceptual faculties), it could be the set of other propositions that they've assigned truth-values to. And so on.
But the reality of "truth" as "no reality at all" is not my bottom line. The bottom line is that the reality of truth, is that truth is entirely within the mind. Remember how we've progressed through this discussion. You first suggested truth was a attitude. I responded that it's an attitude of honesty. Isn't "attitude" within the mind? So I described it as subject matter, which is in the mind. But you keep wanting to put the "matter" or substance of truth outside the mind.
All I am doing is trying to bring your attention to the inconsistency in your approach. Why do you have this feeling, that "truth" must be explained through some outside force, when you keep returning to internal aspects to explain truth? I look at this as either a mistake, or downright dishonesty. You describe something by referring to the internal, yet you claim that there's got be something external here or it doesn't make sense. Why do you insist on this external aspect of truth? It appears as an unsupported prejudice which is completely unnecessary. Where do you pull this necessity for the external from?
Quoting tim wood
Why be angry? Was the rock thrown with intent? If so you have reason to be angry, but the anger is caused by, and directed at the intent which threw the rock. There is no anger toward the rock. The rock was just the passive means by which the bad intent was carried out. If there is no intent, if the rock just fell, or you stubbed your toe, there is no reason to direct anger at the rock, you could only be angry with yourself. So it appears like you want to bring ager into the scenario where there is no warrant for anger. Its totally unreasonable to be angry at a rock, so I cannot accept your example as such.
Quoting tim wood
You have an issue with "meaning" to overcome here. An utterance consists of a collection of symbols, having physical existence which can hit you like a rock. What is judged for trueness is an interpretation of the utterance. I'm sure that you respect the difference between the physical existence of the symbols and the interpretation of the symbols. The physical symbols themselves cannot be judged for truth.
There are some who claim that "proposition" refers to a mysterious conflation of physical symbols with interpretation, as if the physical symbols exist with an interpretation attached to them. You and I, tim wood, know that this is not the case. This could not be reality, it is impossible that there is a interpretation attached to the physical symbols when they hit you like the rock, because it requires a mind to interpret. So if you insist that a proposition exists in this way, as a set of symbols with an attached interpretation, I will insist that you are being dishonest. Therefore we must give up this idea "that true-ness is a real property, of propositions". The collection of symbols needs to be interpreted in order that it may be judged as true or false. Truth of falsity is attributed to the interpretation, and therefore true-ness is a real property of the interpretation.
So if true-ness is attributed to the interpretation, and the interpretation is within the mind, how do you get truth out of the mind? We could assume that the physical words, which hit you like a rock, have meaning inherent within them, but it is the essence of meaning that it must be interpreted before it can be judged. And it is an inherent property of meaning, that it may be interpreted in various ways depending on one's perspective. This is the fact which relativity theories employ. The meaning, or information which is inherent within the physical world will be interpreted in different ways depending on the perspective. Since meaning is interpreted in various ways, how can we get to a truth which is attributed to meaning itself rather than to an interpretation of that meaning?
Quoting tim wood
No, see this is the root of our difference in opinion. True-ness cannot be a function of meaning, because it is an essential property of meaning that it can be interpreted in various ways. That is why I keep stressing the importance of indeterminateness. Meaning itself is indeterminate, requiring an interpretation as a mode of determination, in order that we can have any sort of truth. So true-ness is really a function of the interpretation. It cannot be a function of meaning itself, because meaning like information, and everything else with physical existence, (i.e. the entire physical world), must be interpreted before truth can be attributed to the interpretation.
Belief is a form of trust/expectation - trust/expectation that the world is the way words propose the world is. And that's all it is, it's not a form of knowledge, nor is knowledge a modified form of belief.
Knowledge is more like "aperiodic crystals" (language, symbols, digits, DNA, etc.) that have an objective structure, that's mediated through our habits (how we "take" those symbols, how we use them, how we embody their instructions) that induce us into particular ways of interacting with the world, with particular expectations and trusts, that are either satisfied or baulked.
True is what's trustworthy.
From Wikipedia :
The English word truth is derived .... perhaps ultimately from PIE (Proto-Indo-European language) *dru- "tree", on the notion of "steadfast as an oak".
So I like to think that something is true if I know it as undoubtedly as I do that there is a tree in front of me.
I'm not saying that everything is in the mind, just that truth is in the mind. Truth is what defines the terms. It is true that a square is an equilateral rectangle. It is true that pi is the ratio between the circumference of a circle and the diameter. It does not matter whether or not one of these things (circle or square) exists in the world. And these are not tautologies, they are definitions. They form the means by which we create these objects (squares and circles) in the world, and the means by which we recognize objects according to these names.
Quoting tim wood
Truth is "grounded" by justification. When we draw a square, we demonstrate yes, it is possible to have such a figure. We draw a circle and demonstrate that it is possible to have this figure. The described figure is justified. These acts justify the definitions, and the truth is grounded. Everything which we know about gold, all those truths, are all justified by our dealings with gold in the world.
Quoting tim wood
But this is where I think you are really missing the point. The discussion of how we know it's gold is really the relevant discussion. This is where we find the essence of truth, how we know that a thing is actually the proper thing to be called by the name we are using to refer to it. If it is fools gold, then there is no truth to us calling it gold, and all the conclusions we make about its value will be wrong. Therefore how we know that it's gold is of the highest importance, because if it isn't gold yet we are calling it gold, this is an untruth which could have catastrophic consequences.
Quoting tim wood
"There is a horse" is only true if there is an animal which is correctly called by that name, "horse". The question is not whether it is there or not. There is always something there, the question is whether it is true to refer to what is there with the word "horse". This determines whether "there is a horse" is true or not. If it's a rock or a house there, then it's not true. Why do you desire to "presuppose" that we can determine whether there is a horse there, without referring to a definition of "horse"? There are ponies which look a lot like horses, so the thing which is there might have to be measured or checked for other features. We need to know which features to check for to confirm that it's a horse. That's why we have to consult the definition. The definition gives us the truth, of what it means to be a horse. We assign "horse" to animals that fulfill these conditions, and that is a fundamental truth.
Quoting tim wood
Demonstrations are forms of justification. "Justify" is defined as demonstration. You do agree that there is a difference between truth and justification don't you? I believe that as much as you think that there is some part of truth which is "out there", you are conflating justification with truth, such that you see the justification which is "out there", and you are assuming that this is somehow a part of truth. But you should consider that there is this thing called "knowledge", and knowledge is generally believed to be a combination of justification and truth. So I think that you are looking at knowledge, and calling knowledge by the word "truth", and you see that which is "out there", justification, as a part of this "truth", when it is really a part of knowledge instead.
Quoting tim wood
There is a problem with your so-called knowing "as a practical matter". Such knowing is often mistaken. What if the thing you called a horse is really a pony, or the thing you called gold was really fools gold? This is why we need clear, coherent, and consistent definitions. Sure, it's practical for you to call your rock gold, and tell everyone you have a golden rock, but when the time comes for you to sell it, and it's fools gold, then the practicality vanishes. Having definitions is a fundamental part of knowledge. Without them you'll insist that the rock is gold, and the buyer will insist that it's not, and how can you proceed other than to fight?
Quoting tim wood
If it is true, as you say, that a proposition cannot be interpreted in various ways except in error, then whose interpretation is the correct one?
Quoting tim wood
The fact is that different minds will interpret the same physical collection of symbols in different ways. Each mind may designate "a meaning" and this creates an illusion of determinateness. It is an illusion because different minds designate different meaning, so the meaning of the symbols is really indeterminate. Therefore if we assume that the physical collection of symbols has meaning, this meaning must be inherently indeterminate.
Quoting tim wood
That's right, there cannot be truth to the physical collection of symbols, so if you assume that a proposition is a physical collection of symbols there can be no truth to it. That is because, as I said in the last post, the symbols need be interpreted. But they are interpreted within a mind, according to definitions, and there can be truth here, within the mind. If we both agree that a particular proposition is true, our interpretations may be consistent. But if I believe the proposition is true according to my interpretation, and you believe it not true according to yours, then all we can do is attempt to justify our respective interpretations.
Quoting tim wood
This might be consistent with what I am arguing, where "grounding" is justification.
Why the contradiction? Do you not see this as contradiction? You are interested in "what" truth is, and this implies that you want a definition of "truth", yet you cannot see how "definition" is related to what "truth" is. As I've been explaining, definition is truth, and truth is definition, they are one and the same. You simply reject my definition of truth, as definition, but this does not make my definition false, it means that I have not successfully justified that definition.
Let's try a different approach. Do you agree that truth is what makes a statement true? And do you agree that what constitutes truth is the impossibility of falsity? Whatever it is which is impossible to be false, this type of thing is what truth is. Will you recognize that "definition" fulfills this condition, of that which is impossible to be false?
Suppose I define "square" as equilateral rectangle. I say that this is a definition, it is impossible that it is false, because it is not the type of thing which can be judged as true or false. You may reject my definition, if you do not like it. But your rejection of my definition does not make the definition false, it only means that I have failed to justify it. So a definition is a type of thing which can never be false. It can fail in attempts to be justified, but this does not make it false. Nor is a definition ever really true, it is just accept as that which defines the term. But since a definition can never be false, this is the type of thing which truth is.
Quoting tim wood
I'm telling you, "definition" is the generalization which informs us of what truth is. Suppose in your example, the man offers the proposition "a cow is in the barn". The truth of this statement is determined by the definitions of the terms. Is "barn" defined by the building which the man brought the animal into? Is "cow" defined by the animal which was brought into the building. If so, we have truth. But without such definitions we have no truth.
Quoting tim wood
The point here though, is that every interpretation is dependent on a mind, and exists only within that mind. We could offer our interpretations to each other, but this requires that we put them into words, and then these would need to be interpreted. So each separate mind has a separate interpretation of any proposition. The truth function which you refer to, therefore, can only be within that mind as well.
Quoting tim wood
I am only looking for the reality of what truth is, as you claim to be doing as well. If the inquiry leads us to a relative subjectivism, then so be it. It seems to me like you are swayed by some prejudice, so you will not follow the inquiry. But if you look closely you will see that there is something real which bridges the gap between subject and predicate, and this is definition. When one defines the other, the gap is bridged, and we have truth. "The sky is blue." If your premise is that a definition is not something real, then you might be forced to the conclusion that truth is not something real, but how are you defining "real" here?
The general etymology seems to be related to "faith, faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty; veracity, quality of being true; pledge, covenant," from Germanic abstract noun *treuwitho, from Proto-Germanic treuwaz "having or characterized by good faith". A solid oak would be something like a metaphor for someone who is trustworthy.
Not that etymology is some magic key, just that it shows something like the genealogy of a concept, and in this case it's related to trustworthiness Truth is that which you can rely on.
Which is exactly how it is, more or less. You can still be betrayed by a loyal friend, for any number of reasons, but generally loyal friends are loyal friends, and you can rely on them, lean on them. Likewise, at an epistemological level, we know we are fallible, we can sometimes be mistaken when we were ever so sure; but we also know that lots of things about which we are ever so sure are reliable.
This is obviously also related to the pragmatic insight: truth is a guide to action. Propositions set up in us expectations as to how the world is likely to behave in response to our actions. These are our "beliefs" (again, "belief" is etymologically related to faith too).
But I think it's important to note that our beliefs are not knowledge as such, knowledge as such is the picture painted for us by the words, which we can believe or not - these propositions we secondarily call "beliefs" too, but that's been the source of a lot of confusion in philosophy.
The primary sense is all about trust in expectations, which are set up by propositions which are then only secondarily called "beliefs." But if you take that reification seriously, then you have the futile search for things "in the head" ("in the mind") that have a similar structure to the structure of propositions.
We do have things in the head, but they're expectations that are triggered by the propositions, which are objective artifacts in the world (which is why the things going on in the head can vary from person to person and time to time, while the propositional structure that triggers them is invariant, and depends on objective rules, standing social habits, etc.).
Actually, I didn't see Tim's reply to my post at the time, and I was sort of busy. Maybe I'll make a stab at a reply right now.
Quoting tim wood
How is it that an onion is an onion before it is named as an onion? It is the fact that it is called "onion" which makes it an onion, rather than a thing with a different name. Suppose there is some part of the universe which has yet to be discovered by human beings. Since it has not yet been discovered, and we don't know of its existence, it has no name. Now imagine it is discovered, and given a name "X'. How can you claim that the thing was X prior to being given the name "X"? That doesn't make sense. Prior to being given the name "X", the thing was an unnamed, and undiscovered thing, it was not X.
The "onion-ness of the onion" is our interpretation. It is how we sense and describe the onion, our perceptios. Therefore the onion-ness of the onion is what comes about as a result of our interaction with the onion. It cannot be the primordial part of the onion.
Quoting tim wood
You're not getting the point. You are focusing on the word "cow", and neglecting the rest of the statement. You are assuming that there is a barn. But what makes it true that there is a barn? Perhaps there is a shed, a garage, or a house. Why are you so sure that it is a barn where the animal called a "cow" is?
To begin with, when justifying the truth of a statement, we cannot start with any assumption beyond the assumption that there is something, and even that is just an assumption. To assume that what there is, is some specific named thing, is to assume as true, something which is unjustified. So we may assume nothing more than that there is something.
We cannot justify the claim that there is a barn, without a definition of what a barn is, and comparing what there is, to that definition. That definition acts as the fundamental truth, from which we can proceed to justify the claim "there is a barn". Then we can proceed toward the proposition concerning what is in the barn, something called a cow. Now we need a definition of "cow" which acts as a fundamental truth by which we can justify the claim that there is a "cow". Also, we need a definition of "in", which serves as a fundamental truth by which we can judge the relationship between the barn and the cow.
All the terms of the statement must be judged. It doesn't suffice to say that the truth of the statement is dependent on whether there is a cow or some other animal in the barn, because you are then taking for granted the truth of "in the barn". By what principle can you take it for granted that this portion of the statement, "in the barn", is necessarily true?
I can agree with this, but I would proceed to distinguish between reason and experience. If experience is limited to phenomena, then reason must be separate from experience because reason is not phenomenal.
Quoting tim wood
So when you say here, that according to your experience, the world is consistent with the phenomena which you encounter, what you really mean by "consistent" is logically consistent, the world is reasonable. Notice how logic, or reason, bridges the gap between the world which you assume, and the phenomena which you encounter.
Quoting tim wood
I have no doubt that there is a primordial world, prior to language, that is not the issue here. The issue is "truth", and the question now is whether there is truth prior to language. As I've been arguing, truth is in the mind, it is related to reason, and reasoning is dependent on language. So I am very doubtful that there is any truth prior to language.
Quoting tim wood
That's right, I really don't see how truth can be anything other than this, the fundamental principles which allow logic or reason to proceed, such as definitions, the law of non-contradiction, etc.. And yes, truth is dodgy, you must know this by now, from your experience.
Quoting tim wood
If truth is judged, then what is it judged by, other than reason? If truth is the result of judgement, then it is consequential to reason. If we maintain the necessary separation between experience and reason, described above, then truth cannot be a quality of experience itself. Experience must be judged through the means of reason in order that truth is produced, so it is a property of the judgement not a property of the experience which is being judged.
If your intent is to deny the separation between experience and reason, then you will have to demonstrate how reason is phenomenal. The problem here is that we use reason to judge phenomena, and the judge must be independent from the thing being judged in order that we can have a fair judgement. With no possibility of a fair, unbiased judgement of the phenomena, truth is impossible.
Regarding positive assertions, propositions, assertions...
That which makes statements of thought/belief true is correspondence with/to fact/reality. Assuming sincerity in speech, all statements of thought/belief presuppose, regardless of the particular content, their own correspondence with/to fact/reality. An insincere speaker is one who deliberately misrepresents their own thought/belief. An insincere speaker may state 'X', but does not believe 'X'.
Somewhere along the line... all thought/belief and statements thereof presupposes correspondence with/to fact/reality. All worldviews consist of thought/belief about the world and/or ourselves.
Everyone thinks that things are a certain way.
Everyone forms and/or holds thought/belief.
All thought/belief presupposes it's own correspondence with/to fact/reality.
Everyone's worldview presupposes it's own truth everywhere along the line.
Regarding logic...
Premisses presuppose their own correspondence with/to fact/reality. Logic presupposes correspondence with/to fact/reality by virtue of being existentially contingent upon premisses. Premisses presuppose their own correspondence with/to fact reality by virtue of consisting of thought/belief.
Being logically true is nothing more and nothing less than being a valid conclusion from two meaningful and consistent premisses. Being a valid conclusion is insufficient for being a true one. That is because validity is insufficient for truth.
Truth is correspondence with/to fact/reality.
It is humanly impossible to knowingly believe a falsehood. As soon as one realizes that what one thought was the case, was not; as soon as one realizes that one was wrong about something or other; as soon as one comes to know that one held false belief, one can no longer believe it.
How do you account for counterfactuals?
No. I don't think most people would say that other animals reason. Animals think, but to reason is to think with the use of logic, which animals do not do. That's why Aristotle defined man as rational animal, it's what sets human beings off from other animals. So I think it's quite clear that other animals don't reason. Here's the definition of reason, used in this context: "The intellectual faculty by which conclusions are drawn from premises."
Quoting tim wood
I've already given all these reasons why truth is not primordial to language, but you just keep insisting that it must be, without properly refuting my reasons, or giving any real support to what you keep asserting.
Here's a straight forward way of putting it. Truth is what we attribute to what people say, i.e., "that person speaks the truth". Can you think of truth being attributed to anything other than what people say? If not, then why not just accept that truth is a property of speech? Creativesoul will argue that truth is attributed to beliefs, but will be unable to demonstrate that these beliefs are anything other than as expressed by words.
Quoting tim wood
I can't apprehend the relation you are trying to make between emotional feelings and truth. You appear to be going in the opposite direction to truth, as emotions are far from truth. Truth is more like an ideal, what we seek, and attempt to bring into existence through the use of logical reasoning. This is to proceed away from emotional feelings, which are highly deceptive.
Quoting tim wood
That reaction is not a reaction of truth, it is instinct, or habit, and this is far from truth. It might well be that the thing on the dinner plate which appears to be disgusting, is actually very delicious. This is why we look to logical reasoning to provide us with the truth, not to primitive emotions.
You wrote:
By calling things that are contrary to fact "counterfactual" given an appropriate context for my doing so. It's use by me is rare.
Yes, 'counterfactual' just means contrary to actuality and/ or truth. I don't see what Michael seems to think needs accounting for regarding counterfactuals.
You wrote:
Well, there is indeed a couple of problems here. First off, when talking about what there is to truth, the only approach worthy of taking must involve all senses thereof. I do not adhere to the traditional correspondence theory. On my view, correspondence is not a quality. Rather, it is a relationship. That is most certainly not to say that truth is relative in a relativist sense. That inevitably leads to incoherence.
I don't see the purported problem here, though. If P1 is true, then it is so by virtue of corresponding to fact/reality. P could be false, and yet P1 could still be true.
I find that correspondence theory accomplished much, but unfortunately mistakenly presupposes that truth is existentially contingent upon language, and perhaps worse yet... Like so many other schools of though across the board do as well, it fails to draw and maintain the crucial distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief.
Trust, truth, and meaning are irrevocably entwined and virtually inseparable during initial language acquisition, so the origin is of no surprise here. Relevance to what I've said?
On my view, if it is a fact of the world that John is married to Jane, then it is a fact of the world that John is married. The truth of the latter is not at all contingent upon the truth of the former, as already argued. Again, I'm not defending traditional correspondence theory.
During one's initial language acquisition, s/he cannot doubt whether or not the teaching is truthful. Trust here is akin to faith... unquestioned trust in the truthfulness of a source. Correspondence with/to fact/reality is necessarily presupposed in all thought/belief by virtue of consisting entirely of mental correlations. Meaning consists entirely of mental correlations. Correlation presupposes the existence of it's own content. <-------- That is the presupposition of correspondence to fact/reality at work(during language acquisition).
And that's the problem. Counterfactuals can be true, even though they don't correspond to any fact. "If I were born a woman then my name would be Michelle", for example. I'm not a woman, my name isn't Michelle, and yet this claim is true.
So under your theory of truth, counterfactuals aren't true? I think that's a problem for your theory of truth.
And what about statements about the past or the future? Can they be true (and so correspond to facts)? If so, then what is a fact? Obviously it can't (always, at least) just be some physical state of affairs, as there is no physical state of affairs which corresponds to the true claim "there was a battle at Hastings in 1066" or to the true claim "the Sun will rise tomorrow".
Well, I distinguish between thinking and reasoning, as reasoning, I believe, is a type of thinking, described by the definition I provided, "conclusions are drawn from premises". If you want to define all thinking as reasoning, then perhaps I can follow. We could proceed by distinguishing different forms of logic, like you suggest, even including "animal logic" (whatever that might be), as some basic form of logic. Possibly we could identify plant logic, and maybe some type of logic is used by DNA and cell genetics.
In any case, I would restrict "truth" to the higher forms of logic, those practised by human beings. These are the types of logic which proceed from well defined principles, requiring language for those definitions. These are the types of logic which aim specifically at truth. The lower forms of logic are pragmatic, based in practicality, usefulness, and usefulness does not necessarily direct us toward truth. Truth is a very specific ideal, and logic which is essentially pragmatic, must be directed toward truth, or else the logic may produce any sort of untrue conclusions.
By the way, rejecting my definition of reason very nicely demonstrates my point that definition is essential to truth. Without a definition of "reason", there can be no truth to the statement "animals other than human reason". Without definition there is only vague ambiguity. When "reason" means something different to you than it means to me, what could provide us with the truth concerning that matter? Truth cannot be produced by such ambiguity, it comes about only through precise definitions, such as those we find in the higher forms of logic like mathematics. So when "truth" is the ideal which we focus our attention on, we produce clear and precise definitions. When it is our intention to bring this ideal to reality, the only way it can be done is though precise definitions. Can you think of any other way?
Quoting tim wood
Anything which is attributed is a property. The property exists only as an ideal, the word refers to the idea in the mind of what it means to have that property. In predication, we identify the subject, and attribute the property. So the property is attributed by the mind, it is something (a concept) in the mind, which the subject is said to have. The subject may be a name representing a particular object, but the property which is attributed is always a universal, and therefore a concept devised by the mind. The subject/object representation is what bridges the gap between what's in the mind and what's in the physical world. So "truth" as something we attribute to what has been said, is like any other property which is predicated, it is a concept in the mind, an ideal.
Quoting tim wood
Of course I consider what has been written as part of what has been said. But unspoken words and thoughts are a completely different issue. It is impossible that 'we' can attribute truth to unspoken words because 'we' have no access to them. I can attribute truth to my unspoken words, and you to yours, but I can not attribute truth to your unspoken words. This brings us right back to where we first started this discussion, the inherently subjective nature of "truth", and its relation to honesty. If you speak words which you do not attribute truth to, then you are being dishonest.
So if you would like to proceed toward some primordial truth, prior to language. This is the direction I would recommend. There is an attitude which we have, one toward another, an attitude of respect and honesty, which inspires us to speak the truth. This attitude of cooperation is what allows for the existence of language, definitions, and the higher form of logic which allows us to seek the ideal, "truth". But notice that the ideal, as that which is sought is what we call truth, and the primordial attitude, "honesty", as that which gives us the capacity to seek truth, is not really truth itself, but something different.
Quoting tim wood
Yes, I agree a lot with what Gurugeorge said. This is what we went through when we first engaged in this discussion, the subjective nature of truth. We described its base as an attitude, a frame of mind which I called "honesty", and Guru calls "trust". Notice that "honesty" is on the side of the speaker, and "trust" is on the side of the hearer. I attribute "truth" more to the speaker, as that which inspires "trust" in the hearer.
I attempted to proceed into an analysis of this subjective nature of "truth", assuming from this starting point, that truth is completely within the mind, but you would not follow, assuming that there must be some sort of truth external to the mind.
Quoting tim wood
It's not that I think truth goes no further than the spoken word. I think that truth is an ideal, and all ideals go further than the spoken word, because words are just representations of ideas. But I think that if we want to delve further into the nature of truth, I will only proceed if I think we are heading in the right direction. Therefore we must determine the true nature of an "ideal", before we proceed.
Do you agree that an ideal, is something which has no real existence, but it exists within the mind, as an aim, a goal, something which we desire to bring about, and "truth" is of this nature? So if we look back in time, toward a "primordial truth", it is as you would say, "dodgy", very vague, ambiguous, without clearly defined terms, and therefore 'truth" in this time was extremely limited. But if we look ahead, toward the future, we can envision a highly progressive "truth", based in clear and precise definitions, and infallible forms of logic. Would you agree, that "truth" is something which is becoming, it is coming into existence, from non-existence in the distant past, evolving out of many degrees of privation, towards a perfection in the future?
But what is correspondence with/to fact/reality?
It's a judgment that people make about how propositions relate to what they perceive.
Counterfactuals aren't true because they cannot possibly be so... by definition. Statements about past events can be. Statements about future events cannot be. No problem.
No, they're not defined as not being possibly true. They're defined as having a dependent clause that isn't the case.
How? What is the nature of the facts that they correspond to? Obviously they're not some physical state of affairs as there is no physical state of affairs that is the battle of Hastings having happened in 1066.
Seems perfectly true to say that "the Sun will rise tomorrow" is true.
I'd say it is a problem. Counterfactuals and claims about the future can be true, yet this isn't allowed by your theory on truth – and depending on how you answer the above, it may be that your theory doesn't allow for true statements about the past, either. Therefore, your theory of truth fails.
I think Michael's claim is that the counterfactual is true by virtue of some sort of logical principles. If you had two apples, and got another two apples, you would have four apples. This assertion is true despite the fact that you haven't carried out the act of getting any of these apples, and so you may not actually have any apples at all.
We can simplify this by saying that statements concerning possibilities can be true. This allows us to make true propositions concerning the future, and produce reasonable conclusions concerning the future. "If it rains tomorrow, anything left outside will get wet". "If my phone gets wet it will be ruined". These are true propositions. Therefore I ought not leave my phone outside if it is possible that it may rain tomorrow, and I value my phone.
You don't really need counterfactuals or statements about the past to demonstrate that the correspondence theory doesn't work (there's a lot of philosophical controversy surrounding them). Just take the simpler case of negative facts (that is, negated propositions that are true). It is a true statement that Bernie Sanders is not the the president of the US, what is the 'corresponding' thing or the entity that makes it true? It is certainly not the existence of Bernie himself with the negation sign attached to him. Or what about the fact that Barack Obama is not (the current) president of the US? Nothing in the world corresponds to either of these statements yet they are true and have furthermore different truth conditions.
I'll play devil's advocate.
The object that makes it true that Bernie Sanders is not the President is Donald Trump. [ Being POTUS ] is a property only one object can possess at a given time. Since Trump possesses this property, no other object does.
Alternatively, if we're not locked into objects, it could be the fact that Donald Trump is POTUS.
Truth implies some immobility and as far as I can tell everything is constantly changing, especially history. The victor writes the history.
Irrelevant. Counterfactuals pose no problem for my position. I've accounted for them.. without issue, even if not false by their own definition.
You replied:
Statements about past events are true by virtue of their correspondence to past events, and false when such correspondence is lacking. It's not hard to understand. It doesn't require complexity.
I wrote:
You replied:
In order for that statement to be true, the sun would have to rise tomorrow... Until then, it's a prediction and as such cannot be true until what it says will be the case is.
The above presupposes that counterfactuals and claims about the future can be true.
That is precisely what's at issue. That needs argued for. I've done that. You've yet to.
Counterfactuals and predictions cannot be true.
That is not a flaw of my position. It is a consequence thereof.
I've said what it would take for your candidate to be true. Are you rejecting those truth conditions?
You haven't argued that. You've simply said that them being true is incompatible with your theory and so can't be true. But if that's all it takes to argue for a theory then I could put forth any theory I like and dismiss anything that contradicts it as necessarily false. If I say that to be true is to be written by me and you respond by saying that such-and-such a thing is true even though it isn't written by me, can I just argue that it must be false because it isn't written by me? Of course not.
So if you want to argue that counterfactuals are not a problem for your theory then you need to show that counterfactuals cannot be true without assuming that to be true is to correspond to a fact (and again, you're yet to even explain what a fact is).
And that's the problem. It's a proof by contradiction. If a consequence of your theory is that certain things cannot be true, and if those things can be true, then your theory is wrong. You can't defend against a proof by contradiction by simply reiterating your theory and its consequence.
What makes a counterfactual true?
But this is not a decisive objection, and I agree that the correspondence theorist has some room to maneuver here.
Consider the proposition that "Caesar was murdered". What entity makes this proposition true? It seems that it is the event that Caesar was murdered (-"the murder of Caesar"). But what about the proposition "Caesar died in 44 BC"? Since his death was caused by his murder, his death must be the same event as his murder. But if this is so, it means that the same entity (the same event) corresponds to two different propositions (and they are different propositions because they mean different things: not all deaths are the result of a murder). And now this is a problem, because the correspondence theory is supposed to assign a unique truth-maker to each proposition, that explains why the proposition is true under some specific conditions and not some others. And that entails that if two propositions have the same truth conditions (they correspond to the very same entity, if true) then they are the same proposition. But "Caesar was murdered" and "Caesar died in 44 BC" are not the same proposition, so the correspondence theory is inadequate.
To continue, I think even this account has problems. What does it mean for something that has happened to presently be an event? Is there some (physical?) state of affairs that currently is the fact that such-and-such a thing happened? Maybe a block-theory account of time can help here (although even then I'm sceptical), but without such a recourse, what is the ontology of the past, and how does that play into a correspondence theory of truth?
Quoting creativesoul
What makes a counterfactual true, is the same thing which makes any proposition true, how the words are defined. In most cases, correspondence is inherent within the definitions, so that the definitions correspond with usage of the words. But a definition does not necessarily adhere to correspondence, and usage varies. In some cases we define words the way we want to, regardless of whether this corresponds to the way that the words are used or not.
So, creativesoul defines "true" as corresponding, and this makes it true that counterfactuals cannot be true, despite the fact that Michael would define "true" in another way, making it possible for counterfactuals to be true. One might insist, that there must be an "objective truth" to the matter, but how could there be? We are free to define and use words how we like, and clearly "true or false" depends on how the words are defined. Truth is subjective.
I read a bit about truth-makers after I posted this, and what you say here makes sense. I'm going to think about this stuff some more.
Yes, but this is not a 'metaphysical' explanation of truth. When you say that proposition P is true iff such and such is the case, then you simply repeat P, and this really doesn't explain why P is true, in the sense in which the correspondence theorist attempts to explain it. He thinks that the thing that we have to mention in the right hand side of "P is true iff X" must be (in some sense) something different from P, but the trouble is (as Ramsey's argument and others show) that if we don't mention P itself in right hand side, then whatever you put there wouldn't explain the truth of P (since it is something different); but if we do mention P then the theory becomes trivial and uninformative. This I think shows that we should abandon all metaphysical ambitions to 'explain' truth (i.e., postulating entities that 'correspond' to sentence and so on).
That deflationary impulse is powerful too, I'll grant you. I'm keeping an open mind for now.
(there's a wonderful paper by Cora Diamond "Unfolding Truth and Reading Wittgenstein" (-yes she's one of my favorite philosophers) that argues for the possibility of such an intermediary position which is neither deflationist nor metaphysical).
So counterfactuals are existentially contingent upon language.
I like that he makes the distinction between facts, which have no truth value, and beliefs, which do have a truth value.
Facts have no truth value, Russell says, because you can't have a false fact, and truth requires falsity. There are just facts. And there are facts of many different kinds, i.e. arithmetic mathematical facts, physical facts, etc.
I think part of the reason Nietzsche was making my head spin was because a) I couldn't really get clear on his notion of truth and b) I think in the current American political climate, it is so important to get in touch again with notions like fact and truth.
I don't take these things for granted. I believe that it is true that there are facts. I am not exactly sure how to define a fact, but I suppose as a first pass I'd say a fact is something about the way things really are. In other words, I suppose facts make up reality.
This is, of course, all leading up to some kind of correspondence theory of truth, which I believe during this period of Russell's thinking (1918 I think) he held, although at one point he held something like an identity theory of truth.
I feel very sympathetic to the correspondence theory of truth tonight. It seems so basic and yet feels so right.
My coffee cup has coffee in it right now. This is a fact (although give me a few more minutes and it won't be a fact anymore). The proposition that I put forth in a sentence before, that my coffee cup has coffee in it right now, is true because it corresponds to the fact that my coffee cup does indeed have coffee in it right now. (actually it's decaf, which some people may reject as real coffee, but nevertheless...)
Did Trump collaborate somehow with Russia with the intention of trying to win an election? I do not know the answer to that question (although I have a strong belief). However what I feel quite certain of right now, is that he either did or did not. There is a fact of the matter. One of those facts exists. In other words, there was an event that either took place (call it collusion if you will) or did not take place. If it did take place, if the fact is that Trump colluded, then my belief that he did collude would be true. If he did not, my belief would be false.
So there it is again, the correspondence theory. If my belief corresponds to the event in question, that it is a true belief. If not, then it is a false belief.
Either way, there is a fact of the matter.
Anyway, facts. I like 'em.
That's the common-sense take. Conventional correspondence theory gets mired in attempting some type of one to one nonsense between propositions and facts. Blather. Several different thought/belief can correspond to the same set of events(same facts). The issue is in the conception of "proposition", amongst other places.
My coffee cup has coffee in it right now. This is true.
How do our statements differ?
The op is concerned with the difference between "true" and "truth". The difficulty with correspondence theory is that as much as it is concerned with true statements, "it is true that my cup has coffee in it", it has no approach to truth itself. In a sense, you could say that it takes truth for granted, as it takes correspondence for granted.
If we ask the question, what is correspondence, we get a completely different approach to "truth". We cannot just say that it is true that my cup has coffee in it if my cup has coffee in it, as correspondence assumes, because this is just redundancy. So we must look at the two things which are said to correspond, and despite the fact that they are completely different (one is a statement the other a state of the world), they are both interpreted in the very same way. "My cup has coffee in it", and the specified state of the world, must both be interpreted as the same. in order that the statement is true.
As much as many people today do not believe this, it has been well proven by Plato and Aristotle, that the form of the thing is prior in existence, to the particular thing itself. It is best laid out in this way, by Aristotle. Anything which exists is necessarily the thing which it is, or else it would not be the thing that it is, it would be something different. And it is impossible by way of contradiction that a thing is something other than the thing it is. So when a thing comes into existence, it must already be pre-determined what that thing will be, or else that thing might be something other than the thing that it is, and this is impossible according to the above statement. Therefore we must assume that the "form" of the thing, the "whatness" of the thing is prior to the thing itself.
This is what the neo-Platonists expanded on, the immaterial Forms which are necessarily prior to the physical existence of objects. Christian thinkers like Aquinas were clear to distinguish between this immaterial Form which precedes the existence of an object, and human ideas which follow the existence of objects in abstraction. I intentionally used the word "ideal", to allow that even in human activity, the ideal like a template, or prototype, precedes the object which is created as a representation of the ideal. So we cannot speak of a "real truth" which precedes the ideal, because the ideal is the real truth.
Quoting tim wood
You always fall back on this, or a similar position, that truth is not in the mind, that it is not an ideal, seemingly not willing to follow where the investigation leads.
Quoting tim wood
This is not the case. Concepts and such are universals, but the ideal is a particular concept, it is the one chosen as the best, the most appropriate, the ideal. It is not a universal, it is a particular. Every object has a particular form unique to itself, and the statement of that form is also a particular statement, unique in reference to that particular object. That is the thing about truth, it is particular to every situation. The truth concerning that situation is the best description of it, the ideal description, it is unique and particular.
Quoting tim wood
OK, let me consider this notion of extending beyond the idea, which you suggest. Consider that the ideal extends beyond the idea, referring to the best, or most perfect idea. Do you see that it is impossible for the ideal to exist within the human mind, due to the deficiencies and fallibilities of the human being? The human mind cannot hold the best, most perfect idea. Therefore truth, in its most perfect and real form is not something within the human mind.
.
I think your missing the point. The point is that the logic demonstrates that a sort of "Idea" of each particular, individual thing, precedes in time, the material existence of that thing. Of course, we believe that there have been things long before there were human beings, so these "Ideas" are not human ideas. This is why Neo-Platonism was so well received by Christian theologians, because they designated these Ideas as divine.
Instead of taking a religious perspective though, let's just call these "natural Ideas", or "forms", as Aristotle did. It is very important to notice that these Forms, (I'll use the capital F to distinguish the natural Ideas from the human ideas), are of particular things, rather than universals which human ideas are. So each particular, individual thing, has a Form which precedes in time, its material existence, and therefore the Form of the thing is something separate from the material thing itself. We see an object, like a chair at the table, the chair has a Form, which is necessarily separate from the material chair itself, because it precedes the existence of the material chair, in time. The separation is a temporal separation. The temporal perspective of the human being is extremely limited, as is evident by relativity theory. It is restricted by the material constitution of the human body. You see the material chair at the present, "now", but just prior to the present in which you are seeing the material chair, is the Form of the chair, (the Form is at a different "now", a shifted now, which is prior to the "now" of your experience), and the Form causes the material existence of the chair, at the now of your experience.
Quoting tim wood
I don't believe that you completely followed the last passage which I just I wrote. And if you could follow it, you most likely dismissed it as "untrue", from the opening premise, that the Form of each individual thing is necessarily prior in time to the material existence of the thing, so it makes no sense to you anyway. If you've dismissed this as untrue, then we need to go back to the argument from Aristotle, which I presented, and hash this out, because either the premise is wrong or it is right, and what I say about "judgement" now, will be based in the assumption that the premise is correct.
The reason why I insisted for so long, that we do not allow truth out of the ideal realm, was to avoid the notion of truth being a correspondence between human ideas, and material existence. So now I've introduced Forms, which are separate from material existence, and also separate from human ideas. I propose that material existence is a medium between human ideas, and the Forms. Truth, as correspondence, is a correspondence between human ideas, and the separate Forms.
The problem with judgement now, is that the human mind is fallible, and cannot be trusted to accurately judge truth. Judgement is an act of will, a passing of judgement. Many times we judge something as true, when it is false. So if we are to assume that truth is a judgement, then this judgement must be an action carried out not by the human mind, but the Mind in which the Forms exist. But we haven't yet determined that the Forms exist within a Mind, that is the ancient assumption which puts the Forms in the mind of God. All we have is that the Forms are necessarily prior in time, to material existence. There is an act, which is the passing of time, and this act makes material things correspond to the Forms, but what kind of thing could "judge" whether human ideas correspond with the Forms?
So "judgement" may not be the proper concept here because unless we assume a being like God, with the capacity to judge, we cannot have a judgement. It is a left over idea, held over from the times in which human beings thought that the Forms must exist in the mind of God, and the judgement of "truth" was made by God. Now I have presented a slightly more complex model. I have posited material existence as the medium between the Forms and the human ideas. Instead of the Will of God, passing judgement, making material existence correspond to the Forms as independent "truth", I posit the passing of time. Truth, from this perspective is not a judgement, it is the passing of time. We can replace the statement "God is truth" with "The passing of time is truth".
Quoting tim wood
In the old days, "truth" would be the judgement of God. The human mind is fallible, and judges truth incorrectly quite often, so truth cannot be a judgement of human beings. Our society has grown up as a religious society, where God played an important part, such that many of the foundational concepts like "truth", are supported by the assumption of God. For instance, notice that it is common to say there is an "objective" truth or falsity to every proposition regardless of whether it is believed by human beings to be true. This invokes the "God's eye view". Now we tend to dismiss the reality of God, so concepts such as these, concepts which are foundational within our society, are left hanging.
This is the evolutionary cycle of the progression of knowledge. The foundational concepts of a society are the oldest, well established principles, but ancient. As time passes knowledge progresses and we learn vast new fields. The vast new expansions of extended knowledge will inevitably undermine the ancient principles, which were developed from the full extent of the restricted capacities of ancient people. Consider something like what Wittgenstein says, we cannot doubt these foundational, bedrock concepts. In actuality, what he does is question them, cast doubt on them, exposing the reality that we must doubt them. When we subject these bedrock principles to a complete system of skepticism, it becomes evident just how much modern knowledge has undermined fundamental principles.
So this is the importance of human judgement. Each foundational concept, being a fundamental premise, must be analyzed and judged by a system of skepticism. If the concept has been undermined by modern knowledge, as is the case with the foundational concept of "truth", we must determine the premises which have been added at a higher level, which contradict the foundational concept. The foundational concept, as well as the contradictory concepts, must be analyzed together, and they must be altered to be made consistent.
I don't believe in things like abstract forms in the Platonic sense, so at best I would say that truth is an abstract concept. You could argue its either a logical or psychological concept, I suppose, but to me both boil down to mental entities.
I suppose the first question is: what is the nature or essence of this concept.
I'd have to think through this. My preliminary answer would be something like "Truth is a concept that denotes the reality of a particular proposition, belief, or statement."
Perhaps, taking it a step further, Truth with a capital T is something like the sum totality of all true propositions.
Or perhaps truth is the property a proposition has when it is in fact true. We say things like "Statement X is the truth." In other words, Statement X has the property of being a true statement.
Just thinking as I go here, feel free to shoot holes in it. : )
OK, let's start with this. What do you mean by the "reality" of a proposition? Let's assume that a proposition consists of words, either written or spoken, and there is also supposed to be something which the proposition refers to. Each of these may be physical states of the world. Each of these states must be interpreted. If someone interprets them both, the words and the thing referred to, in the same way, that person would say the proposition is true. In other words, if I would describe a particular state of the world, with the same words as used in the proposition, I would say that the proposition is true.
Quoting Brian
Yes, this is what I would agree with. When we judge a particular collection of words as true, we claim that it has the property of truth. The problem is that truth is not attributed to the physical existence of the words, it is not something which is sensed in the words, it is attributed to the meaning of the words. The meaning is interpretive, and truth is attributed to the meaning, so this makes truth subjective.
You wrote:
No, it doesn't. It makes the attribution of truth subjective. The objective/subjective dichotomy cannot take an account of that which requires both and is thus neither.
You're conflating being true with being called true. Sure, we could say that we attribute truth. However, that isn't said by someone coherently arguing for correspondence.
Asking what correspondence is leads one astray. If I say that that is a tree, then it is nonsense to ask what a tree is. Truth is correspondence. Correspondence is truth. It is a relationship presupposed within all thought/belief formation itself, and therefore presupposed within all statements thereof...
Let me quote what I said a few posts back:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is the principle which Aristotle took from Plato, and expounded on. Notice that a "form" of the thing, an idea of the thing, is necessarily prior in time, to the existence of the thing, and this must be true for every existing thing.
He covers this principle in the "Metaphysics", where he explains that the fundamental metaphysical question is not why is there something rather than nothing, but why is there what there is, rather than something else. He takes this question much further than Plato, later in the "Metaphysics", where he develops the concept of potential.
The scientific way of understanding why there is what there is, is through "possibility". Prior in time, to the existence of the thing itself, we claim that there is the possibility of that thing. This "potential" for the thing, is the "idea" which precedes the existence of the thing. But this "idea" of possibility, or potential, is created by the human mind, it is a human idea, and therefore cannot be the real "form", in the world, which must precedes the existence of the thing, according to the above argument. This is covered by Aristotle's cosmological argument. The potential must be validated by something actual.
If the actuality, which validates the possibility for existence of a thing, is assigned to another actual thing (which is the common way to dismiss this problem through efficient causation), then we have an infinite regress of existing things. That is why this solution is rejected by later renditions of the cosmological argument, such as Aquinas'. Furthermore, this approach, which leads to infinite regress, just veils the real issue that an actually existing thing, being the potential for something else, is just a human idea, it's the way human beings describe the situation. This perspective fails to account for a necessary aspect of reality, which is "the act", that makes one thing become another thing.
Quoting tim wood
Until you address the logic which necessitates the immaterial Forms, and you develop an understanding of the problems involved with this perspective, you have no basis for any claim of "untenable". To simply claim "untenable" without addressing the logic, is just a baseless assertion.
Quoting tim wood
It is a problem though, because we understand "truth" as infallible. If you resolution to the problem is to redefine "truth" as something fallible, something "possible", instead of something real, something actual, then all you have done is dismissed "truth" as we have come to know the concept, for something less than truth, something fallible. This is a problem, because it's simply your failure to establish an understanding of "truth", as it is meant to be understood, so that you introduce a different definition of "truth".
Quoting tim wood
A concept which is left hanging, not grounded, cannot be judged as true. It is the justification of the concept which allows us to judge its truth. So to judge such concepts as true, is just a willy-nilly judgement.
Quoting tim wood
I don't understand your criticism here, you write "wrong", but then proceed to support my claim. The only difference is that you attempt to remove temporality from a "process". Of course that is what is wrong, we all know that temporality is intrinsic and essential to any process.
I disagree. What I said is that truth is attributed to the meaning of the statement, it is not attributed to the physical words themselves. The meaning must be interpreted before truth can be attributed, and this interpretation is subjective. So truth is attributed to the interpretation, and any interpretation is subjective. It is not the act of attribution which I am claiming is subjective, but the thing, the interpretation, which truth is being attributed to, which I am claiming is subjective.
Quoting creativesoul
What I am referring to is the thing which is said to be true. It is not a collection of physically existing words which is said to be true, it is the interpretation of these which is said to be true. But unless you can demonstrate how an interpretation can be objective, I assume that any interpretation is subjective.
Well Meta, you and I have had quite nuanced discussions involving the differences in our positions. These have ranged from things similar to what you've argued with Tim to what counts as being justified. I'm confident that you can recall such conversation, even if - like myself - the recollection isn't a complete one.
You've neglected to address what I've just objected to.
You laid out an argument regarding how "truth" is attributed to the meaning of words, and then erroneously concluded that that is ground for further claiming that truth is subjective. It is no such thing. What follows is that the attribution of "truth" is subjective.
That is one objection left neglected. The other involved the invocation of the subjective/objective dichotomy. While it is a very very popular one, it is inherently incapable of taking an account of that which is neither and/or requires both. All thought/belief is existentially contingent upon subjective and objective things. Correspondence is a relationship 'between' the two. Thus, it requires both and yet is - itself - neither of those. Meaning is in the same boat.
Honestly, I'm not even comfortable with saying that. The objective/subjective dichotomy is inherently lacking in explanatory power regarding all sorts of things. It shoehorns misunderstanding into one's worldview.
There is no justificatory ground for positing the form of A prior to the existence of A.
Potential, if it is to make any sense in my book, must be on par with necessary preconditions. There is no need for a form prior to existence. There is a need for what A consists of/in if A is a composite.
Just a bit of criticism regarding this part...
This seems quite confused. The objective/subjective dichotomy adds nothing but unnecessary confusion.
Interpretation requires the attribution of meaning by one speaker to another speaker's language use. If the interpeter get's it right, then s/he understands the speaker. That says nothing at all with regard to the truth of the speaker's use. Rather, if both draw the same or similar enough correlations, then they have a shared understanding/meaning. It is when different correlations are drawn that misunderstanding takes place.
Understanding(correctly interpreting) another's word use has nothing to do with understanding what it would take for them to be true. I can interpret another's words perfectly and those words be demonstrably false.
I clarified by saying that truth is attributed to an interpretation of meaning. Since the interpretation is subjective, then the thing which is attributed is subjective as well, as a property of that subjective thing. You haven't yet addressed my clarification.
Quoting creativesoul
The only thing objective about an interpretation is the object which is being interpreted. If you believe that there is naturally some type of correspondence between the object, and the interpretation, which is what you seem to be arguing, then the onus is on you to demonstrate this correspondence. To simply assume that there is correspondence is an unjustified assumption. in fact, that there even is an object, has not yet been justified by you.
So perhaps it is true that all thought/belief is contingent on subjective and objective things, but I see no reason to believe this. Instead, I think it is far more likely that some thought/belief may be purely subjective. Until the assumption that there even is an object, is justified, we are much better off to start with the assumption that all thought/belief is purely subjective. Therefore, until you justify the assumption that the object exists, your assertion that "all thought/belief is existentially contingent on subjective and objective things", is completely baseless.
Quoting creativesoul
I provided a paraphrase of the argument. If you do not agree with it, then demonstrate its weakness. But to claim that there is no justification for the conclusion, without addressing the argument, is just being ridiculous.
Quoting creativesoul
Allow me to clarify the point. Assume any statement, like "a cow is in the barn". In order that this statement may be true or false, there must be an interpretation of its meaning. Also, there must be an interpretation of the physical state of the world. If truth is correspondence, then these two interpretations must correspond in order that there is truth. Interpretation is completely subjective (carried out by the mind of a human subject). Since truth as correspondence, is correspondence between two distinct interpretations, which are both subjective, truth as correspondence, is itself subjective.
I'm not sure I agree that there must be an interpretation of its meaning. Rather, I think it would be more precise to say there must be an understanding of its meaning. "Understanding" is something like a mental grasp or comprehension. I often like to refer to understanding as "getting it." When something like "a cow is in the barn" is uttered in relation to a set of particulars like, for instance, a particular cow and a particular barn, we must grasp the meaning of the utterance. In this case, the meaning of the sentence is that there is a particular animal, a cow, spatially located in a particular building, the barn. I think as long as we have something like "understanding" we don't need something like "interpretation" here to do any heavy lifting.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In this particular case, I think it would be more correct to say that we must have a *belief* about the world (physical or whatever) rather than an *interpretation* of the world. A belief here meaning something that you hold to be true, whether or not it actually is, in fact, true. In this particular case, you are holding it to be true that there is a particular animal, a cow, in a particular spatial location, inside the structure we refer to as the barn.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If truth is something like correspondence, I would argue that the correspondence is actually not between the meaning of the sentence and the world, but rather the belief you are holding and the world. I have a belief B about state of the world Y. Now, there is an actual state of the world, F, which we can call a fact about the world. The fact is the way the world actually is. If B matches up with F, then that is the actual correspondence relationship. Now, the fact is not an interpretation. The fact is simply the way the world is. The belief, on the other hand, is also not an interpretation, but rather an opinion about the world that you happen to hold as true. If the two match, then correspondence obtains and the belief is True.
As to whether this is subjective or objective:
The fact is certainly objective. Regardless of what we think about the situation, the cow (Betsy, let's name her), is either in or not in the barn owned by Old McDonald, who has a farm. The fact of the matter is the objective state of affairs. In this particular instance, let's say that Betsy is NOT in Old McDonald's barn; rather, she is actually grazing in Old McDonald's field at Time T.
Now is the belief subjective or objective. Here we get into the issue of intentionality (one of my favorite topics, as a phenomenologist, I might add!)
A belief is a mental state / psychological state. Now, we have to distinguish the existence of the mental state itself, maybe we we can refer to as its form, from its actual content, which is not the same thing. I have many beliefs, and these are all psychological states, so it could be fair to say that they are the world as I perceive it, which means they are subjective.
HOWEVER, the content of the beliefs are assertions about the world being a certain way or not being a certain way. In this example, I hold it to be true that Betsy is in Old McD's Barn. The structure of the belief is subjective, but the content is asserting something objective about the world. Unfortunately for me, what I am asserting does not actually correspond to the way the world really is. The belief fails to obtain. As a consequence, my belief about the world is False. The world is not the way I believe it to be. It does not meet up with my assertion about it.
Interpretation never really needs, and I think, never does ever actually enter the picture here at all.So I think that any argument against the correspondence theory of truth that hinges on the concept of interpretation is doomed to miss the mark.
I welcome and am looking forward to any disagreements or objections you might have to this thinking though. : )
You wrote:
It was addressed. The attribution of truth is not truth. We can mistakenly attribute truth just as we can mistakenly presuppose it.
That is false. Interpretation of a claim is not a truth condition for the claim. You're conflating conditions of shared meaning with truth conditions. They're very closely related but not the same thing.
It must be meaningful, but there is no need for an interpretation of it's meaning in order for it to be true/false. In order to be understood, meaning must be shared.
"A cow is in the barn" is true if a cow is in the barn. The cow's being in the barn is what makes the statement true. The absence of a cow in the barn is what makes the statement false. So, the statement could be made, misunderstood, and yet still be true/false. It could also be made, understood, and yet still be true/false.
Seems to me that the notion of interpretation has caused confusion for you Meta.
Correlation presupposes the existence of it's own content.<---------That is the presupposition of truth at work in all thought/belief and statements thereof, including those that attribute meaning.
The consequence of this is that it is possible for a listener to know more about what a speaker thinks/believes/states than the speaker. An interesting topic in it's own right, that has been borne out by fact...
I don't see the point in the distinction between interpretation and understanding here. Each of these is subjective, so it doesn't affect the point I am making. We could switch out "interpretation" in favour of "understanding", if that's what you would like. Accordingly, there must be an understanding of the collection of words, and an understanding of the situation which the words refer to, in order that there is truth.
The issue is, that since each of these things which are being related to each other, are "understandings", and these are within the mind of the subject, how is it possible to get beyond subjectivity, to assume an objective truth?
Quoting Brian
You're missing the point Brian. There's an animal in the barn, which you are calling "Betsy". What justifies your claim that Betsy is a cow? So even if this animal is in the building which you call a barn, how is it true that there is a cow in the barn? Isn't it necessary that we have a definition of what it means to be a cow, and someone with an understanding of that definition takes a look at the animal, to get an understanding of the animal, making the judgement, that the animal is a cow? And the same procedure must be carried out for "barn", and the spatial relation, "in". If there is no one with this understanding how could "a cow is in the barn" be true? And even if it is just one person with authority who dictates, this animal is the animal I call "cow", and this building is the building I call "barn", and this is the spatial relation I call "in", therefore it is true by decree, that a cow is in the barn, what makes this an "objective fact"?
Quoting creativesoul
When I say, "the sky is blue", I attribute "blue" to "the sky". Does this mean to you that I am claiming that the attribution of "blue" is blue? I don't think it should, and it sure doesn't to me. So why, when I say that truth is attributed to an interpretation of a statement, do you reply with "the attribution of truth is not truth". Your reply is irrelevant, trivial, drivel. It doesn't at all address my claim that truth is a property of the interpretation, just like blue is a property of the sky.
If you happen to believe that truth can exist somewhere else, other than as a property of interpretation, or as Brian would prefer, as a property of understanding, just like blue exists in places other than as a property of the sky, then I hope you will show me where. Otherwise I will continue to believe that truth only exists as a property of understanding, and is therefore completely subjective, and disregard your irrelevant comments.
Quoting creativesoul
This is completely ridiculous. To say "the cow's being in the barn" is what makes "a cow is in the barn" true is simply begging the question. You are saying nothing more than "a cow is in the barn" is true because it is true that there is a cow in the barn. That's udder (pun) nonsense.
What makes that statement true, is that there is a situation in the world which a human being would apprehend as a building there, which is properly called a "barn" in English, and there is an animal which is properly called a "cow", in a specific spatial relationship with that building which is properly referred to as "in".
Quoting creativesoul
Perhaps my use of "interpretation" confused you, but it hasn't confused me. Would you prefer, as Brian suggests, that we use the word "understanding". In any case, if you don't like my belief, that truth is the property of interpretation, or as Brian prefers, understanding, then I'd like to know where you believe truth exists.
Quoting creativesoul
Let's start here then. Suppose a statement is made which is not understood by anyone. You seem to be claiming that the statement is still true or false. Now let's proceed by clarifying this problem, and making it a condition of "a statement", that it is intelligible, in principle it may be understood. This way we don't even have to consider that unintelligible gibberish is a statement. Tell me how this statement could actually be true or false without actually being understood. Of course a conditional such as "if it corresponds" will not suffice, because it is the act of understanding which fulfills that condition.
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Ok Meta, this conversation doesn't look promising, as it seems that we cannot agree upon some fundamental issues. This post aims to sort some stuff out.
I began my exchange with you as one who argues in favor of truth as correspondence. Notably, you asserted that certain things needed to be explained by one arguing for correspondence. I explained to you how that was not the case based upon other aspects of my own position. You've since told me that I'm wrong... basically insisting that I use the conceptual framework that you use, despite the fact of my having rejected that very thing... for good reason, I might add, in lieu of the position I do hold.
That's my summary... a very very rough outline of what's taken place here.
So, it is clear that we hold different positions and that those positions employ remarkably different key terms. It is safe to say that that is the basis of our disagreement. So. where do we take it from here?
I suppose the best thing for me to do is ask if you acknowledge and agree with this very rough summary of our exchange?
This is a good question. It's kind of an existential-ontological question. The human situation is that we are in the midst of a world of stuff and things etc. Much like Descartes once did, I find myself sitting here, writing (typing) in my dressing gown by the light of a candle at night, surrounded by various objects like my books, a coffee mug and my computer screen.
So there are two very distinct possibilities here.
1. The first is the kind of radical (just meaning to the root of things) subjectivism that I think you are proffering. Everything I perceive around me is in some way mind-dependent. I think this is in essence an idealist view. The objects surrounding me are products of my mind, and my beliefs about those objects relate various products of mine mind to each other and to me.
2. The second possibility is more of a radical objectivism. I am amidst a world of things that are external to and independent of my mind, that would still be there even if I were not there perceiving them. My beliefs about the world are beliefs about these objects that are external to my mind.and how they relate to each other and to me. In this case, the objects or contents of my beliefs are about objective things - things that are not mind-dependent.
Which possibility is definitively true? I have no idea. At first blush, both are very possible.
I don't know of a good rational argument that can prove that this existing external world of objectivity is not actually just mind-dependent subjectivity. But I also don't know of a good rational argument that proves the opposite view, that everything is definitively mind dependent and subjective.
So I come to an impasse, and yet I must make a decision about what I think the nature of things really is.
My intuition is on the side of objectivity. I wish I had a good argument for or against that intuition, but I do not. But when I have a belief about, say, the coffee cup sitting next to my computer screen, I very much believe that this coffee cup is external and objective qua physical thing to my mind.My belief is about an external physical object, and not just a belief about a subjective psychological state.
That, of course, is where Brentano and Husserl's idea of intentionality comes into play.
I agree, you argue that it is true that truth is correspondence because truth is correspondence. It is true that the cow is in the barn because the cow is in the barn. What's the point in making such an argument?
Quoting creativesoul
This about sums it up. If you refuse to acknowledge the difficulties involved with correspondence, because you already believe that it is true that truth is correspondence, then what's the point in discussing truth?
Quoting Brian
This is a good start, but let me qualify this. I am not arguing that "the objects surrounding me are products of my mind", I accept that there is something independent. What I am arguing is that the way I perceive, apprehend, and understand what's surrounding me is a product of my mind. This I called "interpretation", you prefer "understand".
Quoting Brian
The nature of space and time makes it extremely difficult to accept such an objectivism. If I were not here perceiving my surroundings, what would set the here and now, in which these objects exists? I could say that the objects here, where I would have been, at the time which I would have been here, if I were here, would still exist without me being here, but then I am still referring to my own existence to provide a spatial-temporal perspective. Once I theoretically remove my own existence, I have no such spatial-temporal perspective.
Quoting Brian
To exclude this intuition as misguided, simply imagine the universe, all of existence, and all of time, without you here. What would differentiate a planck time length from a second, from a billion years? Without the capacity to separate out a period of time, during which something exists, how can something exist? In an extremely long period of time, an object like a star or planet, would come into, and pass out of existence, and also exist all over the place, just like a fundamental particle at a very short period of time. What gives the "here and now", which we assign to existence?
I see - I would accept that as true I think...
I guess I'm just not seeing the next step of how that makes everything subjective and contradicts correspondence theory though.
I guess what I would say is, well, all of our perception of the external world is perspectival - from our own subjective perspective but OF objective things. But I still don't really see the leap to your conclusions from that.
Meta wrote the following:
Sometimes stating the obvious is the best starting point. I was simply looking for an agreement that the attribution of "truth" is not truth. Despite what's been said heretofore by Meta about my approach, Meta clearly agreed with this obviousness, as the above shows.
So...
The attribution of "truth" is not truth. That is relevant - thus I mention it here as before - because Meta claimed that it followed from the notion that interpretations are subjective, and that we attribute truth to an interpretation, that truth is subjective. That conclusion quite simply doesn't follow, unless the attribution of "truth" is truth.
It's not.
Meta wrote:
Here, two notions warrant attention; truth as a property and the existence of truth somewhere. Both are quite problematic. I'll explain further...
The notion that truth is a property of true propositions/assertions/statements/interpretations is very commonly held. Holding that truth is a property of statements, assertions, propositions, and/or interpretations is to hold that truth requires language, for all of those are language constructs. That is, all of those are existentially contingent upon language. If truth is a property of those, and nothing more, then truth too requires language. So, this position has logical consequences that leave it inherently incapable of taking an account of pre and/or non-linguistic true thought/belief. It can admit of no such thing.
However...
Thought/belief formation happens prior to language acquisition. Some of those thought/belief are true. If truth were a property of propositions/assertions/statements/interpretations and nothing more, then truth would be existentially contingent upon language and this could not be the case, but it is. Thus, it is a mistake to hold that truth is existentially contingent upon language.
Contrary to talking about truth being a property, on my view, truth is correspondence and correspondence is much better understood as a kind of relationship that is necessarily presupposed within all thought/belief formation(and statements thereof). Relationships are not properties and they certainly cannot be sensibly said to have a spatiotemporal location. Relationships are best understood in terms of understanding their necessary elemental constituents.
Meta wrote:
Evidently Meta and I work from different notions of what counts as nonsense and being ridiculous. On my view, it becomes ridiculous when an interlocutor habitually misunderstands and/or misattributes meaning to another's words and then argues against their own imaginary opponent. Commonly called a non-sequitur, and/or a strawman.
I did not claim that "the cow's being in the barn" is what makes "a cow is in the barn" true. I did not say that "a cow is in the barn" is true because it is true that there is a cow in the barn. If one wants to make strong assertions about what another is saying, then it is always best to quote them verbatim as a starting point.
Meta used quotation marks where none belong. The quotation marks are used by me to distinguish between statements about the case at hand and the case at hand. Meta has attributed meaning where none belongs and the proof of that is the difference between what Meta's report of what I wrote, and what I wrote.
Some other considerations worth mentioning...
By my lights, that's a very rough description of what it takes for the statement to be meaningful.
Poisoning the well, based upon falsehood.
One understands a false statement. False statements do not fulfill that condition. Therefore, the act of understanding does not fulfill that condition.
I am not saying that everything is subjective, nor am I claiming that correspondence theory is contradicted by what I say. What I am trying to show, is that correspondence theory leaves truth as subjective. The understanding of the statement, and the understanding of the state of reality which is assumed to correspond, are both in the mind, and therefore subjective, unless we assume God or some type of objective mind, to provide an objective truth.
I do not claim that every aspect of knowledge is subjective, because we have a form of objectivity which is established through justification. Justification is accomplished when people agree. When we agree on definitions, through the use of demonstrations and such, and establish conventions of meaning, this is objectivity. So for instance, we find objectivity in mathematical symbols and definitions of geometry, because there is complete agreement on what the terms mean. Their usefulness has been well demonstrated, justified.
Quoting Brian
What do you mean, when you say that your subjective perspective is of objective things? What could you mean by "objective things"? How the world is, is dependent on your perspective. The world is different from my perspective than it is from your perspective, than it is from tim wood's, and creativesoul's. Objectivity only comes about when we find things to agree upon, but the fact that we can agree on things, does not change the fact that the way that the world is, in all its splendour, is perspective dependent. This is the simple consequence of the nature of time, that what is real, in the world, is dependent on one's perspective. So "objective things" are only created by different subjective perspectives getting together to create a unity. This unity of subjective perspectives may be called an objective thing.
Quoting creativesoul
This is a claim you've made for quite some time, which you still haven't properly supported. I've explained to you in the past, that thought/belief prior to language acquisition is most likely probabilistic, and therefore neither true nor false.
However, if truth is correspondence, then it is impossible that thought/belief prior to language could be true if thought/belief with language may be true. That is because such thought/belief would correspond only to the creature's perspective of the world, and this perspective would not be the same as the perspective which describes the world in words. Therefore either the perspective which describes the world in words is true, or the perspective which doesn't is true. If these two very different types of thought/belief both correspond, then we can conclude that any thought/belief may be said to correspond, and therefore all thought/belief is true.
Quoting creativesoul
So I assume from this passage, that this is your actual claim, that all thought/belief is true. Truth is "... necessarily presupposed within all thought/belief..." This is my point, correspondence as truth, renders all truth as subjective. Correspondence is what a subject produces with belief, therefore all beliefs correspond, and all beliefs are true. Truth is the essence of believing. One would not believe it if it wasn't true.
Quoting tim wood
I'll remind you that I have qualified this position. The concept of "truth" as we know it is strongly based in religion, and the idea of God. You may have seen the saying, "God is Truth". So traditionally, truth really is "out there", in the mind of God. It is only when we reject God that truth becomes purely subjective.
Quoting tim wood
Try thinking of it this way tim. Every material object has a form. The form is what the thing is, it's shape, size, colour, etc., right down to its molecular constitution, atomic makeup, and even the positioning of its subatomic particles and fields. The form is unique, and particular, to each individual thing, and that is why the thing is the thing which it is, and not something else, it has its own unique form.
The form of the thing is changing, with the passing of time, due to the activities of its particles, this what the ancient Greeks referred to as flux, Heraclitus said everything is in flux. So at each moment it has a different form from the last moment, and logically it is a different object at each moment. The material object exists as the material object which it is, only at the moment when it has that form. The next moment it is a different material object because it has a different form.
The argument which I described earlier, concludes that the form which the object will have, in its moment of existence, must precede in time, the actual material existence of that object. This is why we have "Forms", which are as real and particular as the object, and which are separate from the material object, and cannot be sensed. They are prior in time to the present, existing prior to the materialization of the object at its moment of existence, which is the present. In Christian theology, such as Aquinas, these Forms, are from the mind of God, in His creation of the world from day to day as time passes, or angels in their providence over the material world, working to carry out God's creation.
Quoting tim wood
As I explained to Brian above, I believe that the "collective mind" is the product of justification. Justification produces a form of objectivity which is the basis for our claims of "objective knowledge". However, justified is different from true, because even though the masses of humanity may believe something, as a collective mind, that thing believed might still not be true. This was the case when the people believed that the sun circled the earth. So despite the objectivity of the collective mind, the subjectivity of the genius is what brings us out of our ancient (mistaken) beliefs, toward the truth.
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:-}
Quoting creativesoul
This is the mistake you make, which you refuse to reconsider: all thought/belief presupposes a relationship of correspondence. Actually, most thought/belief is directed toward action, what should I do now, how should I proceed, how can I resolve this problem. As such, what is presupposed by thought/belief is an ability to act, to move forward in many different ways, and this does not involve any necessary relationship of correspondence. Thought/belief is principally directed toward deciding what to do.
Therefore you completely misrepresent the nature of thought/belief in general, in order to support your position on truth. It is only a particular type of thought/belief, most likely only practised by human beings under the influence of language, which is directed toward establishing a relationship of correspondence.
But 'interpretation' is not always a subjective thing, in fact the case of language is precisely where interpretation is not subjective in most cases. If we understand an English sentence such as 'cats fly' as saying that cats fly, then our 'interpretation' of the sentence commits us to an understanding of the sentence as depending on whether a certain truth condition obtains; but this is an objective matter - the question whether cats fly is of course a question about cats, not about us.
Granted, it's an arbitrary fact that the sentence 'cats fly' says what it says in English (because other languages use different signs to say that cats fly), but this by itself doesn't diminish from the fact that it is an objective matter that the sentence is either true or false. So your argument simply begs the question (if it can be called an argument - since you just assert that all interpretation is subjective, but why?)
No one understands "cats fly" as saying that cats fly. This is just repeating the same thing using the same words,, and that is not understanding. Understanding "cats fly", is first, apprehending that there is a type of animal which is called "cat", and there is an activity referred to by "fly", which cats do. That is a first level of understanding. The second, deeper level, is to understand the conditions under which an animal qualifies to be called "cat", and to understand the conditions under which an activity is qualified to be called "flying". That's what understanding is. It's not knowing how to repeat words, parrots do that without understanding.
Since we all understand these various conditions (what qualifies as a cat, and what qualifies as flying) in different ways, our understandings, and therefore interpretations, vary. This variance is a matter of subjectivity. There are idiosyncrasies in relation to understanding, which are specific to the subject, and this produces what we call subjectivity.
Quoting Fafner
No Fafner, clearly you have this backwards, it is your argument which begs the question, not mine. Asserting that to understand the sentence "cats fly", is to apprehend it as saying that cats fly, is the most obvious and precise case of begging the question that one could come up with. It's very similar to creativesoul saying "a cow is in the barn" is true because a cow is in the barn. Creative might as well just say, "a cow is in the barn" is true because "a cow is in the barn" is true. And you might as well just say that "cats fly" means that cats fly. Care to beg the question some more?
8-)
I harbor no hard feelings nor ill-will. Just do not like spending time dealing with too many misattributions of meaning to my words. That's happened in this thread more often than not between us. I'll gladly discuss my position. I'll gladly bear any burden it carries. However, I'm not at all inclined to bear the burden of another's misrepresentation of my position.
Corrected what's bolded above...
Affirming the consequent is another matter altogether.
More importantly, especially and particularly in discussions such as this one, an astute reader will quickly pick up on someone using the term "truth" to mean more than one thing in the same debate. That is an equivocation fallacy, and it is at hand here in this thread, by more than one participant.
Sure I agree, it's much more complicated than how I presented it, and the sentence itself is ambiguous in some respects and can have different meanings etc. etc.. What I tried to show is simply that interpreting the meaning of a sentence as saying that such and such is the case can commit you to objective standards of truth. It is up to us to decide what 'cats' and 'fly' mean etc., but once that has been decided then it's not a subjective matter (as you claimed) whether 'cats fly' is true or false. It's just an schematic example which illustrates how 'interpretation of meaning' is compatible with objective standards of truth.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I think that you are confusing use and mention...
It is true that if I say 'cats fly' is true iff cats fly then I repeat the same sentence twice, but it does show that there are two ways of using a sentence (which is what the use/mention distinction is about): one is to talk about the sentence as a bunch of words ('cats fly'), and the other is to use the sentence to state how things are in the world (either truly or falsely), and that is objective.
All you showed is that the sentence is interpreted with words. You did a bad job, and didn't represent how a sentence is really interpreted, because you just repeated the same words. If you do it properly, you would use different words, like I did when I showed how that statement would be understood.
But since you and I would use different words from each other, this shows that there are no objective standards, except through agreement and conventions, as is evident in mathematics. And this is what I already claimed is the basis of "objectivity" in knowledge, agreement, which is itself based in justification.
Quoting Fafner
When we refer to "objective standards", we refer to these agreements and conventions. But this is not "truth", it is "justification". It is evident that it is not truth because sometimes these standards themselves are based in a misunderstanding of reality.
Quoting Fafner
I don't accept the use/mention distinction, I think it is unjustified. I see a bunch of words as a bunch of words. If you want to insist that a bunch of words is something other than a bunch of words, you have to demonstrate how this is the case. But how a bunch of words could be something other than a bunch of words is dependent on subjects, so this is something subjective. It is not objective, as you state. "How things are in the world" refers to nothing more than justified statements, what we, as human beings, believed by convention..
I don't understand this argument. What you said doesn't show anything of this sort. We can use all sorts of words when explaining something, but what is important is not the particular words that we use, but whether the words are understood the right way; and by 'understood the right way' I mean that one is able to go on acting in a particular way in the appropriate circumstances. So from the mere fact that there are many ways of explaining a sentence such as 'cats fly' it doesn't follow that the sentence itself cannot be used to say what is objectively the case. In other words, the objectivity consists in the use of the sentence, and you've said nothing that would show that use of language in this sense cannot be objective.
Also, I don't understand what you mean by 'agreement' and 'convention' and how it is relevant. There's a sense in which agreements and conventions actually serve the function of precisely creating objective standards. For example, standard unites of measurement such as a 'meter' or 'hour' are defined arbitrary, and are useful because we all agree on what they mean. However it is a perfectly objective matter whether a given object is a meter long, or that a certain event has lasted for an hour, despite the conventionality of the units themselves.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well if everything is just a bunch of words, then what you say is also a bunch of words, so by your own lights nothing of what you said here or anywhere should be taken as true (or even meaningful), so I don't understand why you even bother typing something on your keyboard.
Are you serious? It's not important which words are used to explain something? So I could explain "apple" as "a round crisp fruit", or as "a bright green liquid", and my choice of words is unimportant.
What does acting have to do with this? The person wants to know, and understand what an apple is, nothing else, just the truth. That person might never use this information toward any action, never being asked, or inclined to actually get an apple. Yet you belief it is unimportant whether the person believes that an apple is a round crisp fruit or a bright green liquid. For you, the person's actions are important, but knowing the truth is unimportant.
That's the thing about truth, it's desired for the sake of itself, not so that "one is able to go on acting in a particular way". This is philosophy, we act in a moral way, so that we can direct our attention toward knowing the truth. We do not simply accept whatever explanation someone gives us, just because it inclines us to behave in the way that they want us to. That's brainwash. You describe "understood the right way" as brainwash, that which inclines one to act in a particular way.
Quoting Fafner
You are free to interpret the words as you please, that's the point, your interpretation is your interpretation, and it is subjective. if your interpretation leaves you uninterested, then so be it.
Greetings Fafner...
Having read through some of your earlier responses in this thread, I'm wondering if you'd be interested in revisiting some of it, particularly the parts about the burdens of one arguing for correspondence. As you may know already, I'm not a typical correspondence theorist, so I'm not so much looking to defend it or my own view. Rather, the aim is to acquire a bit more understanding regarding correspondence theory, it's strengths and weaknesses. Seems to me that that would be helpful to me and the reader...
Would you be interested?
(Y)
This is to show that your argument completely miss its target. You said that truth is subjective because it is given by a subjective interpretation of words, or something of that sort. And further, you said that interpretations themselves consist of words. But this is false. To understand what it is for any sentence such as 'cats fly' to be true or false is not to grasp some verbal formula such that "'cats fly' is true iff ....". And this is the reason why I mentioned actions because understanding a sentence is a practical ability, such as being able to discriminate between the circumstances under which the sentence is true and false. And this is not a matter of simply interpreting a bunch of words as you said, because trivially, being able to see that cats can fly has nothing to do with words per se. Similarly, if you have a parrot that can recite some verbal 'interpretation' or 'explanation', it doesn't make it the case that he understands what he says. Words which are not connected to action are empty, so words in isolation are not the right place to look for understanding truth.
We're in complete agreement then. There are no necessary definitions, and a person is free to define the words as one pleases, so the determination of true or false is completely subjective. That's the exact point I've been trying to make. Why do you think that this demonstrates that my argument misses the point? It seems to be right on the point.
Quoting Fafner
This I do not agree with. Using a sentence is speaking, writing, etc.. Explaining what a sentence means is interpretation. The two are distinct, and completely different. You seem to desire to reduce the interpretation of a sentence to a form of using the sentence, but this is impossible. Interpretation is done with the use of other sentences, or demonstrations to oneself, and this is not a case of using the sentence which is being interpreted, it is using something else which is within the demonstration.
Quoting Fafner
As I said, there are different levels of interpretation, or understanding. We can do a shallow interpretation just using words. For example, an interpretation of mathematics may be done with words. But to go to a deeper level, and produce a thorough understanding, I agree that more than just words are required. I normally refer to images in my mind. Producing images in my mind, for understanding, is a form of action, I suppose, but I don't think it's what you mean by "action". And I don't see how it could be a case of using the sentence.
Let's take your example, "cats fly" . Person A thinks "cats" refers to domesticated house cats, while person B thinks "cats" refers to wild cats like tigers, lions, and cougars as well as domesticated cats. So we have a difference of interpretation here. Further, person A and person B both think that "fly" refers to what we do in airplanes, and knows that domesticated cats fly on airplanes, and claims "cats fly" is true. Person B says no, wild cats like tigers and lions do not go on airplanes, so "cats fly" is false. Person C says that "fly" refers to what animals and insects with wings do, moving themselves through the air, and neither domesticated nor wild cats have wings, so it is not true that any cats fly. So the truth or falsity of "cats fly" is dependent on interpretation, and is therefore subjective.
"X" cannot be both, true and false, at the same time.
Thus, it is not the case that the truth or falsity of "X" is dependent upon interpretation.
QED.
Nice. I want to revisit a few things you wrote earlier, and take it from there.
This looks like an interesting direction. I'd pose the following question:
What would it take in order for us to be able to sensibly say something like "X is in the world and it corresponds with 'X'?
Do you have an argument for why two or more propositions cannot correspond to the same event. That claim just seems plain ridiculous so far.
I took note of the same thing...
Well, the first problem is that it is simply unclear what 'correspondence' is supposed to be. It is very hard if not impossible to give an non circular or non trivial analysis for the term, therefore it is not very clear what the theory even says.
Because as I explained they are different propositions with different truth conditions, so if they correspond to the same thing, you cannot explain the difference between them (if we suppose that correspondence is meant to explain what makes every proposition uniquely true). I explained this in more detail in the original post:
Quoting Fafner
How do you justify your second premise, that X cannot be both true and false at the same time? Your first premise defines truth as being dependent on interpretation. Your second premise excludes falsity from truth. All you have done is provided two incompatible definitions of "truth", and denied the first in favour of the second.
I've demonstrated, therefore justified the soundness of the first premise. Now the onus is on you to demonstrate the soundness of the second premise, the one you prefer. How is it the case that X cannot be both true and false at the same time?
Let's start with your use of "X". What does X signify, and why can't this be true and false at the same time?
You are talking here only about the assignment of meaning to a sentence, which I already agreed is an arbitrary matter (and therefore you can say 'subjective'), but it doesn't prove what you want to prove. What you are missing is the fact that given a particular interpretation of the sentence 'cats fly', it is objectively true or false; and the mere fact that the sentence can express something different doesn't show that its truth is subjective.
What do you mean by "uniquely true"?
Any event, it seems to me, could correspond to multiple propositions. You haven't explained why correspondence is ruled out by multiplicity. For example the statement that a particular person died at a particular time is true if the person died at that specified time. If the person was murdered it does not follow that the statement that they died fails to correspond with their being murdered; it neither, in the strictest sense, corresponds nor fails to correspond with that further fact because it does not mention murder. However the statement that they died is certainly consistent with their being murdered.
The statement that the person was murdered is not a "more true" proposition, it is merely more comprehensive, unless you think of truth as being analogous to archery where we can be ever closer to the mark. No statement could ever include all the facts of this death, this murder, though, because that would entail stating all the conditions that obtained, leading to the death. This would mean stating all the events that occurred in the body of the victim, down to the levels of tissue, cell, molecule, and so on (exactly how they died) as well as all the events, reaching back into the indefinite past, and around the Earth, that obtained in order to make the murder possible.
Proposition A = Caesar died
Proposition B = Caesar was murdered
Proposition A is true = there's an entity x corresponding to A
Proposition B is true = there's an entity y corresponding to B
x=y (Caesar's death and Caesar's murder is the same event) therefore it follows that A is true whenever B is true and vice versa; but A can be true even if B is false (Caesar could've died without being murdered), therefore it can't be the case that the same entity corresponds to A and B. But Caesar's death and Caesar's murder was the same event (contradiction), therefore the correspondence theory must be false.
That does not follow at all. If Caesar was murdered then x=y obtains; if not, then not. Of course A could be true when B is false, but only in case Caesar was not murdered. You seem seriously confused about this.
So what? I don't see how it is relevant. Which part of the argument you don't agree with?
I'd have to understand what your argument actually is in order to tell you what part I disagree with. It doesn't seem to be a cogent argument at all. Correspondence is about actuality, not possibility. Statements A and B could possibly either correspond with actual events or not, but they actually do or do not correspond. If both statements do not correspond with actual events, and hence with each other, then they cannot both be true; if they both do correspond with actual events, then they wil both be true. I fail to see any problem at all for correspondence in this.
Wait--aside from switching "event" out for "entity," you're arguing that that it can't be the case that x just in case it was possible that not-x.
I don't understand what you mean.
Of course, and I have already stated that. This is so because even if we say we know that Caesar died, we don't know whether Caesar was murdered.
If statement A and B do correspond to actuality, then they do, and if they do not, then they do not. Of course it is logically possible that they might not have both corresponded to the same event, but in that case actuality would have been different. Possibility has nothing to do with actual correspondence, though, as far as I can tell.
Maybe one way to explain what Fafner is driving at is this: If in the actual world A corresponds to x and B corresponds to y, where
A is the claim that Caesar died,
B is the claim that Caesar was murdered,
x is the event of Caesar's dying,
y is the event of Caesar's being murdered,
then, on the assumption that x and y denote the same numerically identical physical event, what make it the case that A is true is the very same thing that makes it the case that B is true, namely: x
However, it seems that there is something specific about x that makes it the case that B is true, namely that Caesar's actual death was a case of murder. But if it is only in virtue of x being a case of murder that x makes B true, then it would seem that what B "corresponds to" is something intensional about y, and not merely extensional; it is a concept under which the 'event' falls. And therefore it can't be y qua physical event that makes B true.
(On some accounts, it would rather be because the Fregean thought expressed by B is identical with the fact of Caesar's having been murdered that B is true. But then, this fact and the Fregean proposition expressed by B don't merely correspond to each other. They are identical.)
But any actual entity is only in principle separable from all other entities, not actually separable; so again you are talking about possibility, not actuality. The correspondence account of propositional truth is literally the only game in town it seems. It is the very same logic as Tarski's formulation
Possibility has a lot to do with correspondence in general, because claims about possibility follow logically from the definition of correspondence (and therefore I have a full right to use premises about possibility when arguing against correspondence).
P is true = there's entity x corresponding to P
P is false = entity x doesn't exist (= the entity which would correspond to P if P were true)
It follows for the definition that if you have two propositions such that one could be true while the other is false, then it follows logically that they cannot correspond to the same entity when true. Because consider:
1) Assume A is true = entity x exists.
2) Assume B is false = entity y doesn't exist (B would be true if y existed).
3) If x can exist when y doesn't, then x is not identical with y (Leibniz law).
4) Therefore A and B are different propositions, since they don't correspond to the same entity when true.
They are the same event iff Caesar was murdered. " Caesar died" and "Caesar was murdered" are different statements about the event is all. They bear a different relation to one another: if the second statement is true then the first necessarily is. but the obverse does not follow. What's the point of trying to complicate it?
"Caesar was murdered with a knife"
"Caesar was murdered with a knife made in Japan"
"Caesar was murdered with a knife that severed his aorta"
"Caesar was murdered with a knife wielded by a man who was his friend"
And so, ad infintum...
It follows from the definition of correspondence that if two propositions corresponds to the same entity when true, then they are the same proposition, but "Caesar died" and "Caesar was murdered" are not the same proposition.
Precisely. In my post I only considered the actual world, not any alternative possibilities. And I assumed that Caesar was indeed murdered, and that x and y therefore denoted the same event/entity (on your own account!) It still does not seem to be the case that the actual event makes the claim that Caesar was murdered true. It is rather something specific about this event that makes the claim true: namely that the event happens to be falling under a specific concept expressed by the predicate ("...was murdered") in the claim.
You seem to be saying that the event of Caesar dying cannot be the same event as Caesar being murdered, because Caesar could have died some other way. All that follows is that they could have been different events not they are in fact different events. If Caesar was actually murdered then it is not possible that he was not murdered, so his dying and his being murdered cannot possibly be different events, although they could possibly have been different events. You are confusing yourself over this distinction, it seems to me.
This seems nonsensical. I can state multiple propositions about an entity, any of which will or will not correspond to the entity, and none of which are identical to one another.
"This house was built in 1950"
"This house has sandstone foundations"
The timber that the wall frames were constructed of was milled in Narrabri".
Ans so on...
I can't see that, because assuming that Caesar was murdered then it is his being murdered that makes "Caesar was murdered" true, and that also makes Caesar's dying and Caesar's being murdered the very same event.
Neither "Caesar died" nor 'Caesar was murdered" are exhaustive descriptions of the event, though.
I didn't say this, I only said that the propositions "Caesar died" and "Caesar was murdered" are different, but the event to which they refer is the same (but of course they could've referred to different events).
But what I did claim is that if you have two different proposition, then by the definition of correspondence, they cannot have the same entity corresponding to them when true. So having two different propositions with the same corresponding entity (as in the case of "Caesar died" and "Caesar was murdered") contradicts the definition, and renders the theory incoherent.
If x is the event of Caesar's dying and y is the event of Caesar's being murdered, then what makes x being a case of murder isn't the same thing as what makes x the same event as y.
What makes it the case that x is the same event as y, presumably, is that both occurrences are instantiated in the same region of space and time. (I am just trying to play along with the token-identity theory that seems to underlie your correspondence theory of truth). But what makes it the case that x is a case of murder is something else entirely. It depends on the significance of the concept of murder in a way its alleged identity with y doesn't.
If they refer to the same event then they also correspond or fail to correspond to it.
Quoting Fafner
Are you attempting to draw a distinction between "events" and "entities"?
"Caesar died" and "Caesar was murdered" both refer to the same event, right? Either or both of those statements could correspond, or fail to correspond, to the event, right? But despite their ability to correspond or not, they are both only partial descriptions of the event, no? You seem to be thinking in some absolutist terms of correspondence, which would seem to have little or nothing to do with the ordinary logic of correspondence.
OK, it seems now you are saying that it is a matter of interpretation as to whether he was murdered or justifiably assassinated, or something like that? If that's so, it's a different question, and could be gotten around simply by saying that he was killed.
No, I treat events as entities for the sake of argument.
Quoting John
Sure, but I don't see how this helps (actually this fact is precisely what explains the reason that correspondence fails: descriptions don't overlap neatly with unique entities, because you can have the same entity satisfying many descriptions, and so you cannot define the truth of descriptions by simply referring to the entities which they describe).
Quoting John
Well either a proposition corresponds to an entity or it doesn't, what other options are there?
Well, that's right, and if it corresponds then it is true, and if not, then it's not.
Quoting Fafner
The point is that any statement's correspondence to an event cannot ever be complete, but that that fact in no way rules out the possibility of correspondence. Nothing you have said seems to show that incompleteness of correspondence renders the idea contradictory, inconsistent or incoherent.
Not at all. Part of the point is that events are particulars whereas being murdered (or being killed) are general concepts expressed by predicates. Claims and sentences have (minimally) subject/predicate form. What purports to "correspond" to claims such as to make them true must therefore have a similar structure.
Say, the claims that a particular apple is red, or that it is tasty, may both "correspond" to the same apple. This is just to say that it is the same apple that is being referred to in both cases, whereas the predicates (and the general properties ascribed) are different. But the apple itself doesn't make both claims true quite appart from its falling under the corresponding predicates. It's the same with events, since just like apples, those are particulars. "Caesar's dying" may seem to be referring to an event, and hence to a particular, but it's only really the individual Caesar (and also, possibly, a specific time, or the values of a time variable being quantified over) that are the particulars being referred to in the judgement expressed by "Caesar died". The "event" all by itself doesn't single out the general properties that it falls under such as to make claims about it true.
I give up.
Characteristics of the apple; its sweetness and its redness separately make those corresponding statements true. It is that entity, that apple, which is both red and sweet. Just as with the two statements: that Caesar died and that he was murdered, it is the corresponding characteristics of that event that make them true.
Fair enough, but I honestly can't see your point. I think you are haunted by chimeras of your own making, and confusing yourself over what is really very straightforward and not problematic at all. It seems you are looking for something, some "absolute correspondence" that could somehow come to light on further analysis.
But it doesn't work like that: correspondence is, like truth, irreducible, and you will only produce aporias if you try to dig deeper. I would say there is a correspondence account of truth, and there is no other account; but there cannot really be a correspondence theory of truth, or at least there cannot be a theory of correspondence that explains how correspondence works, because any such theory would assume what it sets out to prove, insofar as it would always already be predicated upon correspondence working, as does all our discourse.
Exactly. That's my main point. But then when you suggest that x and y are numerically the same 'event' you are conflating the physical movements where those events occurred (or some other such allegedly 'neutral' way to characterize what's going on), which are the particulars falling under the predicates "...exemplifying Caesar's being murdered", and "...exemplifying Ceasar's dying", on the one hand, and those particular events falling under the corresponding predicates, on the other hand. The former are particulars, which indeed are numerically identical, but the latter are structured propositions, which aren't.
A proposition such as "Caesar died" might be true not because it has a truth-maker of its own, but because it is entailed by a proposition such as "Caesar was murdered" that does have a truth-maker.
But what if Caesar had not been murdered but died a natural death? In this case it seems that "Caesar died" would have its own truthmaker (distinct from the truthmaker of "Caesar was murdered"), and this will contradict the basic idea of correspondence that for any proposition, there's a unique entity that makes it true if it is the case (because "Caesar died" is the same propositions no matter how he died, but on your account it looks like two different propositions).
And also I think that the correspondence theorist would argue that if P is entailed by Q, then the truthmaker of Q is also the truthmaker of P (but this is just speculation).
No, that's not the case, because to be objectively true or false, requires that there is an objective reality which the interpretation of the sentence either corresponds with, or does not. But there is no such thing. The so-called "objective reality" only exists as interpreted. There is no reality without a perspective, so any reality which would be judged as corresponding to an interpretation, is itself subjective because it is dependent on a perspective.
That's the point I was making which creativesoul didn't seem to get, that both sides of the equation are interpretation dependent, subjective. On the one hand we have the words, the sentence, "cats fly", which needs to be interpreted. On the other hand, we have the reality which "cats fly" is supposed to correspond with, and this needs to be interpreted as well. Therefore you cannot say that there is an objective truth or falsity to any interpretation of the sentence because reality, what is real, needs to be interpreted as well, in order that it does or does not correspond to the interpretation of the sentence.
So, for example person A interprets "cats" as referring to domesticated house cats. In order that this interpretation may be true or false, reality must be interpreted to determine whether "cats" properly refers to only these domesticated cats, or all types of feline animals, as person B claims. This is just a matter of interpretation as well, a subjective determination. However, in making this interpretation, we may refer to standards, conventions and agreements, "correct usage", to produce a form of "objectivity", which is supported by justification. The interpretation is justified by referring to these standards of correct usage. But this objectivity which is supported by justification, does not qualify to be called "objective truth", because the objectivity is produced by justification, not by truth..
This is the point here. The supposed "entity", is the "object" which forms the basis of your "objectively true". But there is no reality to that supposed entity, it is just assumed, to support your claim. The entity, or object referred to, exists only by assumption. Each perspective gives a different proposition, and to claim that different propositions are or, are not, referring to the same entity or object, is an assumption made by the subject (therefore subjective). Therefore your "objective" truth is actually subjective.
Now you are changing the argument. Plainly the claim that sentences are subjectively interpreted doesn't logically entail that there's no objective reality. When you try to present an argument you should explicitly mention all the premises on which you are relying from the start.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
First I don't accept the correspondence theory of truth, that is, when a sentence is true I don't believe that there is something "corresponding" to the sentence, by virtue of which it is true. On my view, you can have objective truth without correspondence.
Secondly, I can accept your claim that in order to perceive reality you need some sort of interpretation, but again, just as in the case of sentences in language, it doesn't follow that the interpretation must be always subjective. It could be the case that some interpretations of reality are objective, and some are not -- nothing about the concept of 'interpretation' by itself entails that all interpretations are subjective.
Even if you were correct that all interpretation is subjective (and you are not), it wouldn't follow that objective reality doesn't exist. At best, it could only show that reality cannot be known by us, but its existence is a different matter. It's like arguing that since we don't know if there is life on Mars, then it follows that there is no life on Mars.
The difficulty is finding a "truth" that is independent of the subject. The moment it is uttered it becomes dependent on the utterer.
You seem to be mixing up the terms Fafner. That there is no objective reality is the premise, not the conclusion. This premise is supported by the fact that any assumption of an objective reality, is an assumption made by a subject. Therefore the assumption of an objective reality is itself subjective, and this negates the assumption that the reality being assumed is objective, because the assumption itself is subjective. The conclusion, which follows from this, is that there is no objective truth. Truth is subjective.
.Quoting Fafner
That "objective reality doesn't exist", is not a conclusion which follows from "all interpretation is subjective". The inverse is what is the case. The assumption that there is an objective reality is an unsound premise, because it is being made from a subjective perspective, by a subject. What follows from this is that all interpretation, or understanding of reality, is inherently subjective, made by a subject.
Unless the assumption of an objective reality can be made to be sound, then any claim of an objective truth is equally unsound, because this relies on the assumption of an objective reality. You are claiming that there is objective truth, so the onus is on you to support this claim by validating your claim of an objective reality. This claim is just made by you, and you are a subject and therefore the claim is subjective. If you get millions or billions of people to agree with this assumption, then this might justify the assumption, but to justify it does not make it true. Unless your premise is true, your conclusion will not be true. So your conclusion of an objective truth, while it may be justified, it is not true. That there is "objective truth", since it is not a true conclusion, is not real truth, because as I've demonstrated, real truth is subjective.
That real truth is subjective is derived simply from the premise that all claims of objectivity are inherently subjective. You appear to be attempting to take a subjective claim, that there is objective reality, and make this into an objective truth. But this is impossible because it is inherently subjective.
Then see my other comment above.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well no, it doesn't follow. If by "subjective assumption" you mean something like an unjustified or ungrounded belief, then this doesn't show that the belief itself isn't objectively true. It may be the case that my belief that there is life on Mars is ungrounded or unjustified, and yet it still can be the case that it is itself objectively true, and there is life on Mars. Here you are surely trying to derive a metaphysical conclusion from epistemic premises.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I'm not trying to prove to you anything about the objective reality (I have better things to do), but only to show you that your arguments don't work, which is different. I don't have to demonstrate that truth is objective (or that there is an objective reality) in order to show that your arguments that truth is subjective are unsound.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
As my example about the existence of life on Mars shows, you cannot make this inference. The fact that the word 'subject' appears in 'subjective', doesn't license you to treat everything that a subject says as itself subjective. You are equivocating between words with different meaning, and this is a blatant logical fallacy (it's like inferring something about the banks of a river from claims about banks as financial institutions, just on the grounds they are spelled the same).
You had said:
"A can be true even if B is false (Caesar could've died without being murdered)"
That's correct. That's a possibility.
"therefore it can't be the case that the same entity corresponds to A and B."
That is incorrect however. That it's possible that A can be true even if B is false doesn't mean that A IS true while B IS false (or vice versa). And when A and B are both true, then A and B refer to the same event, even though they're different propositions.
In short, the same event can be relevant to different meaning-statements. That the event could have been different with respect to some potential meaning statements doesn't imply that the same event can't be "picked out" by different meaning statements.
In other words, that not-x is possible (not-x could be not-A&B) doesn't imply not-x (not-A&B isn't implied just because it's possible that not A&B. A&B is possible, too, and A&B can pick out the same event, where A is not the same as B semantically.)
And if the correspondence theorist will accept your suggestion that the same entity can make two different propositions true, then I think his theory will loose much of its explanatory power. And the reasons are related to Quine's famous renate/cordate example that shows that if you define meaning extentionally, then it becomes too coarse-grained for many concepts as we normally understand them.
Given what I know(or think I know) about correspondence theory, and most academic views regarding truth itself, I would say that that issue is commonly discussed(that truth is unanalyzable). I personally find most of the problems are self-inflicted. Understanding truth(as correspondence) is a consequence of understanding thought/belief.
There have been times that I've visited the SEP and scoured over all I could find. The tangents are daunting. Memory tells me that there were a few issues with correspondence theory that were deep-seated. I mean, if I remember correctly, the differences between my own position and one who typically argues for correspondence theory are fundamental ones involving/revolving around this very issue about what correspondence is and how it works.
On my view truth is a relationship. Correspondence theorists typically posit truth as a quality/property of true statements/assertions/propositions.
Thanks.
There was only one statement:"Cat's fly". There were three interpretations. All were different. None were "Cat's fly".
I would agree with the general thrust of this, but warn against placing too stringent a criterion on the necessary precision.
Again, I think I agree with the general thrust here.
I suppose that the need for establishing what counts as a statement/proposition being precise enough comes into view, particularly when it comes to correctly interpreting another's language use and/or determining what it would take for the statement to be true/false(perhaps even falsifiable/verifiable).
A multitude of different true statements can be made about those events.
A better account of the law of non-contradiction is "contradictory statements cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time". The in the same sense part is avoided if the truth is qualified according to a particular interpretation. So if under one interpretation "X" is true and if under another interpretation "X" is false then they're not true in the same sense, and so there is no contradiction.
It's only if someone were to say that "X" is both true and false under the same interpretation that the law of non-contradiction would be undermined.
I realize that the following quote was directed at Terrapin, however it is of interest to me as well...
I'm curious about the framework being put to use here...
I hold that different true statements can most certainly be made about the same facts/events/happenings/states of affairs/etc. I wouldn't however call those "entities". The "truth-maker" notion falls flat on my view as well, for it isolates one necessary element for truth and calls it a truth-maker. That would be akin to calling apples "apple pie-makers". It takes more.
We were not discussing the truth conditions of an interpretation of "X".
I was objecting to the notion that the truth of "X" was dependent upon the interpretation thereof. Thus, my response fit the bill.
There are no such things as different interpretations in the same sense.
You were discussing the claim that the truth of "X" depends upon an interpretation, and claiming that this entails that "X" can be both true and false at the same time, which isn't allowed by the law of non-contradiction. I'm pointing out that you're misstating the law of non-contradiction.
If "X" is true under one interpretation and false under another then it isn't both true and false in the same sense at the same time.
There are no such things as different interpretations in the same sense.
Here's one argument against the view the truth is a relation from the top of my head (I think it originated from either Russell or Wittgenstein).
Consider the two propositions "A loves B" and "B loves A". Clearly they mean different things and therefore they are true under different condition (regrettably, the one can be true without the other). Now, if there's anything they are related with, it must be A, the relation Love and B. However, this by itself cannot explain the difference between the two propositions, since both are related to precisely the same list of entities, so under the relational theory they must be the same proposition (but they aren't), so the theory cannot explain why they differ in their truth conditions.
That's why you're wrong with what you said here:
The different interpretations are not the same sense, and so no contradiction arises if the truth or falsity of "X" is dependent upon interpretation, even if there are "conflicting" interpretations.
The idea behind truth-makers is to give a metaphysical explanation of truth in terms of entities which are language-independent (or mind independent more generally). But if you appeal to facts or states of affairs instead, then they are too much like propositions (because how do you individuate facts/states of affairs if not by the propositions describing them? - it seems that understanding what facts/states of affairs are already presupposes the understanding of propositions), and that threatens to make the correspondence theory vacuous (because why do we need to talk about correspondence at all, if all we need is to analyze propositions in order to understand what makes them true? -- the later was, incidentally, Wittgenstein's view, both early and late, at least on my understanding of his philosophy).
I think you've misunderstood.
Contradiction most certainly arises in saying that the truth of a statement is dependent upon interpretation. If that were true, then the statement would be both true and false at the same time, depending upon the interpretation... but a single statement cannot be.
You and Meta are both conflating statements and interpretations thereof.
The primary premiss(the truth of a statement is dependent upon it's interpretation) is false. That is what the counterargument showed. I granted the premiss. Showed how it led to a single statement("X") being both true and false at the same time(by virtue of the different senses/interpretations of "X"). Then applied the law of non-contradiction.
"X" is not interpretation of "X".
But not both true and false in the same sense, given that whether or not its true depends upon the interpretation. So it doesn't conflict with the law of non-contradiction, which states that a statement cannot be both true and false in the same sense at the same time.
Both have influenced my thinking...
The problem, as I see it, begins showing itself by talking about what the two propositions "are related to", and is later compounded by the notion that being related to the same entities requires being the same proposition. So, granting that the above is an accurate depiction of an argument against relational theory, and knowing my own issues with traditional correspondence theory, I can only surmise that I'm neither a typical correspondence theorist, nor a typical relational theorist.
May be as a direct result of rejecting what is common to both, the linguistic framework.
Sigh...
It is not the case that the truth of "X" is contingent upon misinterpretation.
There's no contradiction because you can make different statements by using the same words (consider indexicals such as "I" "here" etc.).
The truth of "X" is not dependent upon misinterpretation.
The truth of "X" is not dependent upon interpretation.
The statement is not true in one sense and false in another, because the truth of the statement is not dependent upon all interpretations thereof.
This could be quite interesting.
Seems that if we are to call something a "truth-maker", it would need to include everything it takes to make truth. If truth is correspondence, and correspondence is a relationship, then everything required to make that relationship would be a truth-maker. As mentioned before, the "truth-maker" notion takes but one necessary element...
The notion of mind-independence is fraught. Truth is prior to mind, but not thought/belief. Mind consists of thought/belief. Not all thought/belief is mind. Truth(as correspondence) is presupposed within all thought/belief.
Language-independence is a road less traveled it seems. On my view, we can use language to become aware of and acquire knowledge of that which is not existentially contingent upon it. Correspondence with/to fact/reality is one such thing.
You seem to be alluding to something along the lines of the ideas of thinkers such as Hegel, Brandom and McDowell, that the events: dying, being murdered or whatever, are always already in "conceptual shape". If so, then I agree would and say that that is precisely what enables what we say to correspond or fail to correspond to events.
I would want to add, though, that although the events are in "conceptual shape" (which is what I take you to mean by "structured propositions") they are such in a pre-linguistic sense, so it is a case of linguistic propositions corresponding or failing to correspond to pre-linguistically "structured" "propositions".
On my view, correspondence isn't a metaphysical theory attempting to explain the correspondence of statements/sentences/propositions.
Correspondence is truth. It is what makes statements true. The lack thereof is what makes them false.
Understanding correspondence and the role it plays in all thought/belief and statements thereof requires having a good grasp upon rudimentary thought/belief formation itself, for that is precisely when, 'where', and how it emerges onto the world stage.
Until you define what "objectively true" is, what you say here is meaningless. And, your definition of "objectively true" will be subjective. So all this, what you say about a belief which could be objectively true, is nonsense. "Objectively true" is a nonsense notion. Until you establish some sort of justification for this notion, which you have not yet done, you are speaking nonsense. And, as I keep telling you, even if you justify this notion of objectively true, it doesn't make it true. So your claim that there could be a belief which is unjustified yet objectively true, is indeed false, because it is not true. That is unless you do not equate not true with false.
Quoting Fafner
Your example about Mars shows nothing, because you assume an unjustified notion of "objectively true", and build your example on this. Until you produce a valid concept of "objectively true", you are just begging the question, assuming the reality of "objectively true", as the basis for your claim.
Quoting Fafner
What do you base this in? What the subject says, is necessarily of the subject, and therefore subjective. That the subject can say something objective is an assumption which needs to be justified.
As I explained to you already, when the subject says something which is justified, this justification provides a form of objectivity, it is agreed upon by other subjects, because of the justification. This form of objectivity is sometimes known as inter-subjectivity, and is really a form of subjectivity. To use "objective" in this way, meaning inter-subjective, is completely different from the way that you use "objective", in "objectively true", because one refers to justified while the other refers to true. So your assumption that a subject can say something, or believe something, which is "objectively true", is still completely unjustified.
Quoting Fafner
Clearly it is you Fafner, who is attempting to equivocate, not I. I've maintained my definition of subjective, as "of the subject", and adhered to this. You want to take an epistemological form of "objective", which we know of as "inter-subjective", and make it into an ontological form of "objective" known as "of the object". But clearly the epistemological form of objective, which means inter-subjective, is a completely different meaning of "objective", from the ontological form which means of the object. Now you want to equivocate between the two, such that when you refer to the epistemological form, the inter-subjective form of "objective", with "objective truth", you want this to mean "truth of the object".
As I've been explaining to you, truth of the object (objective truth using "objective" in that way), is an impossibility, because truth is always a property of the subject. It is a relationship between interpretations, and interpretations are property of the subject.
Let's take this nice and slow. Take your statement, X. Why do you insist that X must be either true or false?
We are both, objects in the world and subjects taking an account of it and ourselves.
The subjective/objective dichotomy adds nothing but unnecessary confusion... It is inherently incapable of taking proper account of that which consists in/of both, and is thus neither.
The statement(within quotes) corresponds to fact/reality(is true) when(if and only if) it is the case that there is a cat on the mat(fact/reality). Easy enough. Even those not versed in philosophy readily agree with this account, and for very good reason.
Here, we need to look at more than just the statement, for being true requires more than that. Being true is akin to corresponding to fact/reality. It requires being meaningful. Thus, the statement's truth is contingent upon language as well as it's being meaningful. The statement and it's meaning are both existentially contingent upon language. Thus, the truth of the statement is as well.
The same holds good for any and all assertions, sentences, propositions, statements, and/or claims. This is part of how we become aware of truth and it's role in thought/belief. There are other considerations as well...
Truth is presupposed within thought/belief.
This is relatively uncontentious. Belief that "X", is belief that "X" is true. Likewise, assuming a sincere speaker, we could add "I believe" or "I think" to any and all statements from that speaker and not change the meaning one iota. Thus, assuming sincerity...
"I believe" and "is true" are both redundant uses of language. They become so, not strictly as a result of how we use language, but rather as a result of what thought/belief consists in/of and the role that correspondence to fact/reality plays within it.
That is not to say that either belief or truth is redundant. Rather, it is only to say that the presupposition of truth within all thought/belief formation is exactly why/how "is true" and "I believe" become redundant.
Our debate was about your claim that the truth of a statement is dependent upon interpretation of that statement. I've since argued against that.
If it was further qualified by saying something like the truth of a statement is contingent upon it's being meaningful, I would agree.
Being true requires being meaningful. Whether or not the statement is meaningful is contingent on interpretation. Therefore being true is contingent on interpretation.
In what frame of reference? Yours or mine?
By the time you utter the sentence, the cat may no longer be on the mat.
Quoting creativesoul
This is surely a subjective viewpoint. Personally, for me a belief is a belief.
Quoting creativesoul
For me, I believe is precisely that, i.e. thoughts that I have with varying degrees of intensity. If someone thinks something is true, s/he may use the verb "know" or something to that effect.
I believe your description of your beliefs is an excellent example why beliefs are everywhere and truths exist to satisfy some desire. So truth exists as a goal for someone, but that a pretty narrow definition, akin to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Let's put this into argumentative form...
p1. Being true requires being meaningful
p2. Being meaningful is contingent upon interpretation
C. Being true is contingent upon interpretation
Are you ok with that thus far?
"a belief is a belief" is meaningless.
No, because there are unstated premises involved which are known by principles other than stated in your argument.. If C is dependent on B, and B is dependent on A, then C is dependent on A. Do you agree with this?
Can you give an argument along those lines that you're ok with then?
I was attempting to put your words into one, based upon how they were written.
Not to someone who distinguishes "I believe" from "I know' and certainly a lot more meaningful that equating "I believe" to "I know".
Basically your whole post it's a personal belief presented as a truth but you don't recognize it as such. However, be that as it may, it is no surprise that yet again a subjective view of truth is presented as Truth.
That is irrelevant. A=A is utterly meaningless in and of itself. Let A be "a belief".
The argument is as stated above. Do you agree or not? Truth is dependent on meaning, and meaning is dependent on interpretation, therefore truth is dependent on interpretation.
So, take your argument as you have stated it, and add the premise stated above. If C is dependent on B and B is dependent on A, then C is dependent on A. Then you will have the desired conclusion. Do you agree with the premise?
A belief is just a thought about some idea which we feel some personal intensity. Some people feel great intensity about their thoughts and call them truths. It's pretty common by the way. Usually experience tends to modulate such intensity of thoughts.
You changed the terms. I do not agree that truth is dependent upon meaning. Nor do I agree that meaning is dependent upon interpretation.
It seems to me that you're talking about conviction.
Try this: If C requires B, and B is contingent on A, then C requires A. Therefore truth "requires" interpretation.
If some truth requires meaning and some meaning requires interpretation then....
8-)
Which is exactly what people who claim they know the truth display, lots of conviction.
I would readily agree with the bit about people calling their own strongly held belief "truth". Such folk are working from a very poor understanding of what sorts of things can be true and what makes them so.
Belief is not truth, for if it were there would be no such thing as false belief, but there is so it's not.
Makes for an interesting discussion between those who claim to know what's true. The cat is in the mat might certainly provide lots of discussion.
I would think that that's(conviction) exactly what anyone anytime making an assertion displays.
Edited for clarity's sake alone.
Indeed.
Talking about what sorts of things can be true and what makes them so does make for an interesting discussion between those who claim to know what's true.
If someone is asserting something is true. But one can simply assert a belief and if there is interest explain how s/he came to such a belief.
Ah... Interesting.
Going back to your earlier post, I took first notice of a previously unforeseen edit.
Do you not believe what you write?
It is what I believe but my beliefs are in a constant state of change, mostly because of good ideas I find on YouTube and forums.
No, I believe what I believe. There is no greater or less than. I also believe that people who believe in truths constantly change what they believe is true. Everyone and every thing seems to be constantly changing.
And yet if you believe what you write, then you must believe that I am unknowingly presenting my own personal belief as a truth.
On that, my friend, you'll just have to trust me.
Oh, everything you said is your belief. Thanks for sharing them, but I don't share any of them. If you want to call them truths, it's fine with me, but I don't believe any of them are true, just your beliefs. But then again, it's just my belief.
I've never called my beliefs "truths".
Great. Thanks for sharing all your beliefs with me.
No problem. We all have our own beliefs.
Nothing other than agreeing with you (now that I have corrected my mistakes) that you are simply expressing your beliefs and that is all you were trying to do. It was my mistake (actually valuable learning experience) when I thought that you were trying to express statements that you thought were true.
Do you?
I just said I did in response to the same question from you above. I believe everything I say, I just don't elevate it to truth. I just leave myself lots if wiggle room for change, since everything is constantly changing. I think it takes to much effort to attempt to create immobility in a ever changing universe. It's all about intensity, and through experience, I've learned to moderate intensity of my beliefs. In this way, it is easier to change and allow for change.
Well this is kind of silly already. It was an interesting learning experience.
As I said, I understand they are my beliefs that are subject to constant change as my experience and knowledge grows. I find that I learn much more when I am flexible and allow my beliefs to change. What I say it's an expression of my thoughts. But since the utterance comes after the memory of the thought then even my utterances may no longer be an expression of my thoughts. It's really quite impossible for me to create immobility in a highly fluid world of thought. I accept this as the nature of things.
Is the above true?
Is the above true?
Is the above true?
It is an expression of what I believe. This I believe is a reasonable description that brings to me a better understanding of what I am and my relationship to others. To call it true or not true brings me no closer to understanding the nature of my thoughts. I have a thought and I try to express it, maybe using words, oil paint, music, song, poetry, or whatever. But wait! It is not adequate or possibly my thoughts have changed as I express them. So I go back and revise. The link between thought and expression is a fluid one. Trying to create immobility within mobility for me is an unnecessary and futile effort.
Yet, some may wish to pin it down. Create an immobility that they call true. For how long? At the time of the utterance. Have they really managed to stop thought and express it so precisely so that it can be called true for the necessary time allowed. For someone else, they can believe what they wish. I don't find it possible so I allow for simple beliefs and forget about the other hopeless exercise in immobility.
Maybe saying something is true for an instance is practical but practicality should not be confused with what introspection reveals.
Are you happy now?
But the question is whether this talk about 'correspondence' adds anything substantial over and above what we can already say just using the notion of truth. If what you mean by 'correspondence' is not meant as an explanation of anything (as you claim) then can we simply drop this words and say everything that you want by using only 'truth'?
The truth of a proposition or statement requires that the statement has meaning, and this requires that the statement or proposition has been interpreted because without interpretation there is no difference between meaningful and meaningless. Therefore the truth of a proposition or statement requires interpretation.
If this is only "some truth", which requires interpretation, and not all truth, then we're back to what I asked for earlier, an example and demonstration of a type of truth which does not require interpretation. That other type of truth, which does not require interpretation, cannot be a belief, because beliefs require meaning and interpretation in the same way as statements, in order to be true.
if all known instances of truth require meaning, and therefore interpretation because there is no difference between meaningful and meaningless without interpretation, then we can produce the inductive conclusion that all truth requires interpretation. Since this is the case, as no examples to the contrary have been found, therefore, we can say that interpretation is an essential aspect of truth. Truth does not exist without interpretation. Interpretation is the essence of truth.
Now we can proceed to the rest of my claim. All interpretation is subjective. Therefore truth is necessarily subjective.
Quoting Fafner
You have expressed a conditional, "if". This means that the condition must be fulfilled, for "objectively true". That condition (the truth condition expressed by P obtains), can only be fulfilled by a subject. A subject must determine, decide, judge, whether the condition obtains. Therefore you define "objectively true" as something subjective. Your use of the term "objectively" only covers up, or disguises the fact that the thing referred to is inherently subjective.
I don't agree with that.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Judging that a truth condition obtains is a different thing though from the actual obtainment of that truth condition (you can have the one without the other). You cannot just assume (without begging the question) that they are the same thing.
I agree that in order to know that a truth condition obtains you have to form a judgment, but it doesn't prove that the obtaining of the truth condition itself requires a judgement. You are once again confusing epistemic and metaphysical questions.
This is what you said:
Quoting Fafner
Without an interpretation of "P", there is no such thing as "the truth condition expressed by P". What is expressed by P is the product of an interpretation of P. Therefore the truth of P is relative to the interpretation. Interpretation is necessarily subjective. So I'll repeat myself, you define "objectively true" as something subjective. Your use of "objectively" only disguises the fact that what you are referring to is something subjective.
I'm a little puzzled by this.
If I speak to you in a language you do not know, it would make sense for you to say, "That's meaningless to me." "Meaningless to me" would mean "I can't understand this." But even if it were meaningless to you, it could be and is meaningful to me and to anyone else who knows that language.
But you seem to have something very different in mind. If I say something to you in a language you know, must you interpret what I said for it to be meaningful to you? I'll grant that conversation usually involves some ambiguity, some ellipsis, and so on, and sometimes those have to be cleared up to understand what someone is saying. I suppose you could call that interpretation.
But that's by and large a matter of clarifying which of several meanings the speaker meant. You could say that until one meaning is settled on, what was said does not have a meaning. But it doesn't look much at all like the case of speech in a language you don't know. If there's an interpreter on hand, she could transform the meaningless into the meaningful for you, but that's not much at all like the problem of selecting one among several meanings.
What the two cases do share is an asymmetry: there is no reason to think I do not understand what I say to you, whether I speak in a language you don't know, or speak ambiguously in a language you do know, or speak with the exemplary clarity of a post such as this one. I have no need of an interpreter to understand what I say; nor do I need to disambiguate it or fill in whatever was elliptical in it. So I cannot see that my own speech was ever meaningless to me in any sense, even without either of the two sorts of interpretation.
Using "correspondence" works best. I am a correspondence theorist, just not one who mistakenly holds that thought/belief formation is existentially contingent upon language or it's acquisition.
I'd like for you to read the following quote. This is the third time it's been posted in this thread.
Correspondence to fact/reality.
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I'm using the term "correspondence" in as precise a fashion as language allows. On my view, correspondence is presupposed within all rudimentary thought/belief by the very act of drawing a mental correlation between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or oneself;emotional/linguistic state of mind. That 'act' is rudimentary thought/belief formation(cognition). That is as simple as it can sensibly be said to be. All correlation presupposes the very existence of it's own content. All thought/belief consists of correlations being drawn between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or the agent's mental/nervous state.
During initial language acquisition, there is no speech forthcoming from the agent/student. Meaning is being built via memory and recollection(also consisting in/of the same such mental correlations). During initial language acquisition, the student can doubt neither the accuracy of it's own physiological sensory perception, nor the accuracy of the very method being learned in order to talk about the world and/or ourselves(where applicable).
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Agreed.
Clarity is needed.
Without interpretation a statement would be meaningless to the interpretor.<--------That I would agree to. Interpretation attributes meaning. Not all get it right. However, it does not follow from the fact of an interpretor not successfully grasping the meaning of a statement that the statement in and of itself is meaningless. It cannot be. Statements require meaning. That is precisely what's being interpreted.
Thus... we can find old artifacts and know that they're meaningful, even if we do not grasp it. Even if we do not draw the same correlations as the language users did in past, we can know beyond all reasonable doubt that they drew mental correlations between their own marks/utterances/gestures/etc. and the world and/or themselves.
You're failing to properly quantify both truth and meaning. There is more than one kind of each. They all have common denominators.
Some truth requires interpretation. Correspondence with/to fact/reality does not.
Thought/belief formation creates meaning, attributes meaning, interprets meaning, all by virtue of drawing correlations between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or the agent's own mental state. Doing so necessarily presupposes the content of correlation.
Thus, the attribution of meaning presupposes it's own correspondence to fact/reality, by virtue of presupposing the existence of it's own content.
Examples to the contrary are everywhere Meta. You're working from an emaciated notion of thought/belief, and the argument suffers from the fallacy commonly called "affirming the consequent".
All interpretation of statements involves language. Not all thought/belief does. Some is prior, and must be. For there is no ability to learn that this is called "a hand", without necessarily presupposing the existence of this(whatever this may be). One learns that this is called "a hand" by virtue of drawing correlations between this and the utterance.
Interpretation is existentially contingent upon thought/belief, not the other way around. Thought/belief consists entirely in/of mental correlations.
Correlation presupposes the existence of it's own content. That is precisely the emergence of both, truth and meaning, as we know it.
When one is attributing meaning to objects of physiological sensory perception and/or themselves, s/he is doing so by virtue of drawing mental correlations. This does not require being interpreted. A child can burn their fingers for the very first time and involuntarily form thought/belief about those events. Those thought/belief will re-take command their attention the next time the same source of fire arrests their attention. It will command their attention immediately after it happens as well. The child will not voluntarily touch the fire immediately after getting burned. The child will not do so because it has learned that touching fire hurts. It cannot state it's beliefs, and yet it has them none-the-less. It attributed/recognized causality within the event that it found itself in. We know that that's true, regardless of whether or not the child can talk. The attribution/recognition of causality need no language, and yet doing so requires mental correlations be drawn.
That is rudimentary thought/belief.
Attributing/recognizing causality comes very very early on. We've watched it happen long before metacognition has begun in earnest. That's a crucial consideration. Such attribution continues on throughout language use and well into metacognition. The attribution and/or recognition of causality happens through all thinking life, and it does so with varying complexity that is roughly proportional to the complexity of the language being used to do so(when applicable). When there is no language, it is performed by virtue of becoming aware of what's going on around, and much later, within us. We do so, as do all thinking creatures, by virtue of drawing correlations between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or itself.
By the way, it is crucial to draw and maintain the meaningful distinction between attributing meaning and interpretation. The latter consists entirely of the former, but not the other way around. What else are we interpreting when we interpret statements if not the meaning thereof?
Suspending one's judgment is a wise move when appropriate. Taking that to the extreme is unwise at best. Forming and holding true thought/belief does not require immobility. One can be certain that some belief or other is true without closing off the possibility of it's being wrong. That certainty is warranted when and if it is well-grounded.
Denying that your thought/belief presupposes truth doesn't fare well when held alongside everyday relevant facts to see whether or not it makes sense.
Granting that you believe what you write, then all we would need to do is copy some of those statements, put quotes around them and we would have statements of belief.
What's to be believed about those statements if not that they're true?
You are confusing between meaning and truth. It is the assignment of meaning to P that is relative to an interpretation, but once a particular meaning has been fixed for P, than what P says given that meaning can be objectively true.
Yes, and you don't need correspondence for that. The sentence "there have been dinosaurs" states a truth which existed way before humans or language did.
We can also make sense of the notion of 'discovery' without correspondence. Objective truths exist, and we can discover them. To discover if something is true, we don't need to take the sentence (or psychological state, or whatever) expressing that truth and check if it 'corresponds' to reality; rather what we do is go and look whether things in the world are the same as what the sentence says about them. So the question of correspondence simply doesn't arise in any normal process of inquiry.
Quoting creativesoul
Here's one problem with your story. Suppose that you have a mental state that you want to correlate with your sensory perception, let's say seeing an apple. But when you are having that perception, do you know that what you are having is a sensory perception of an apple? If you do, then it means that you already can think about apples or mentally represent them even before you have correlated anything with your mental states, in which case your story seems redundant. But if you don't know that you have a sensory perception of seeing an apple, then it is not clear how correlating you perception with some other mental state could enable you to acquire the ability to mentally represent apples, or to know what apples are. So correspondence is either redundant or useless.
One must actually try to find truth in the mobility of thought and expression and actually observe the hopelessness in the effort. One cannot freeze the thought. It changes too fast to catch it. This is not a simple phenomenon. It it's intrinsic in understanding the nature of oneself and the universe. However, we do call phenomenon true when it it's close enough for practical purposes. But this is far away from truth.
So, truth is equivalent to historic states of affairs/happenings/events/they way things were? That would be to conflate truth and fact/reality.
You missed the point, but it may be inconsequential.
Do you have a candidate/example of one of these objective truths?
That is precisely what we're doing my friend. Verification/falsification methods presuppose truth as correspondence. If things in the world are the same as what the sentence says about them, then they are true(verified) and false(falsified) if not.
I've just gave an example of a language-independent truth as you've asked. I didn't say anything about this being equivalent to truth.
Quoting creativesoul
The existence of dinosaurs is one such example.
Quoting creativesoul
You are not following. You've said that we need correspondence in order to explain x y and z. I've explained x y and z to you without using the notion of correspondence. This shows that correspondence is a redundant concept as I claimed.
To quite the contrary, if you know that you're looking at an apple, then you have already drawn a multitude of very complex correlations between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or oneself. It is a mistake to speak about 'wanting' to correlate...
All creatures without complex language are incapable of metacognition. Knowing that one is having a sensory perception is a metacognitive endeavor. Your target is missing the mark.
So a language independent truth is not equivalent to truth?
The existence of dinosaurs is an example of a state of affairs/events/happenings/the way things are/were/etc.
You're conflating truth and reality(states of affairs/events/happenings/etc).
It is you who are not following. Not using the term "correspondence" is not equivalent to not using correspondence. I suggest that you do not make my claims for me. This topic is quite complex. My understanding is nuanced.
You're in the very process of presupposing correspondence between your expressions here and what was written earlier. Assuming sincerity in speech, you believe that everything you've said here is true, including but not limited to, the bits about what was earlier said.
I didn't mean it as some sort of general definition of truth as your post implied. I didn't say what you've ascribed to me in that post ("truth is equivalent to historic states of affairs").
Quoting creativesoul
It is just a form of speaking, "there exists a truth..." is just another way of saying that such and such is true.
Quoting creativesoul
It is. If I didn't use the word then I didn't use the word, period.
Quoting creativesoul
What do you mean?
Quoting creativesoul
Then I don't understand what you mean by 'correlation'. By virtue of what the mental states are supposed to become correlated in your story, if not by the subject? By accident? Or by God?
Quoting creativesoul
But you are the one who brought up this idea of correlation between mental states, so it is you who are presupposing metacognition.
I did not say that you said it. Notably, I'm showing you that you're conflating truth with either fact/reality or true statements. Neither is acceptable. Both fail to be able to account for what kinds of things can be true and what makes them so.
To say that "the existence of dinosaurs is one example"(of a truth) is to either call the past existence of dinosaurs "a truth" or a true statement "a truth".
Such and such is a true statement in this case. You're conflating true statements with what makes them so.
It is not. Let me clarify, because this is crucial to understand.
One can use a pan without ever using the term "pan". One can form thought/belief without ever being able to use the terms "thought/belief".
You're stating your own thought/belief. You have a thought/belief system(a worldview). Thought/belief formation has long since begun.
All thought/belief presupposes it's own truth(correspondence to fact/reality). That is precisely how thought/belief works, regardless of whether or not you write the word "correspondence".
See the fire example... We'll take it from there.
You're mistaken... slightly. First, I've not mentioned correlation between mental states. I mean, that is not an accurate enough depiction of what I've claimed to be useful. A bun, alone, does not a hotdog make. Second, drawing mental correlations between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or one's own state of mind does not require metacognition.
Again... See the fire example.
Earlier you mentioned the distinction between "I believe" and "I know"...
I'd like for you to set that out for us. Would you?
First, as I already said, I'm not trying to define truth via facts or reality. I'm not saying that truth is identical or equivalent to such and such things, so there's no conflation of anything in what I say.
Secondly, the concept of truth obviously does apply to reality in a very straightforward way: what a statement does after all is say is how things are in reality if it is true -- and if it is true, then it means that things in reality are exactly the way the statement says they are. So if the statement is about dinosaurs, there is a truth concerning dinosaurs, and there's nothing wrong in saying this.
And it is not the same as conflating the dinosaurs themselves with truth or whatever.
Quoting creativesoul
No I'm not. You are reading your own metaphysical views into my words. There's no distinctions on my view between statements and what makes them true. A statement just is saying that so and so is the case (or not), and you cannot 'baypass' the statement and ask what makes it true, because the statement itself already tells you (by virtue of being a meaningful expression) how things stand if it is true or if it is false.
Quoting creativesoul
This metaphor is irrelevant, because you never bothered to tell what exactly you yourself mean by the term 'correspondence', so it is simply not clear what it means to "use correspondence" without using the word itself.
Quoting creativesoul
Here you are just asserting things without any argument.
Quoting creativesoul
So what does it require?
And anyway, I don't understand what this story about mental correlations has to do with truth in the first place.
Some words that someone might use to express different degrees of intensity of assuredness regarding a statement.
Right, that's why interpretation is subjective.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Of course, how could it be meaningful to you without some interpretation?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Right, this is why "what the thing means", is subjective. To say "what was said does not have a meaning" requires interpretation. It is interpreted as meaningless despite the fact that it may be meaningful to someone else.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I don't see your point here, perhaps you could make it more clearly. In the case of "what I say", "What I say" is itself an interpretation of something else.
Quoting creativesoul
The point, as I told Srap, is that to say "this is meaningless" is a statement of interpretation. So in essence, it does not matter if the interpreter says this has meaning, or this does not have meaning, both are interpretations. But if what you imply is true, that having been interpreted implies that it has some sort of meaning, whether it is interpreted as meaningful or not, then to say that something is meaningless is somewhat contradictory.
Quoting creativesoul
If the examples are abundant, then please provide some.
Quoting creativesoul
No, people don't learn the different things which are called by the word "hand" by drawing correlations. The hand is shown, and the name said. There is simple repetition of the word in order to learn how to say the word properly. The fact that the person already understands that many different objects (different hands) are called by the same word, and the person immediately proceeds onward to refer to many different objects with that newly learned word, indicates that there is no assumption of correspondence between the word and the object involved with this learning. A similar correlation, or association, drawn between the word and one hand, must be drawn between the word and numerous hands, so this type of correlation is not correspondence, or truth.
Quoting creativesoul
Whether or not thought/belief is contingent on interpretation, or the other way around is irrelevant. What we are discussing is "truth", and truth is contingent on both of these. You unreasonably insist that there cannot be thought/belief without truth, so you think that if thought/belief is prior to interpretation, then so is truth.
As I said, the claim which needs to be supported, is the claim that there can be truth without interpretation, not the claim that there can be thought/belief without interpretation.
Quoting creativesoul
Interpretation and "drawing mental correlations" are closely related. Which one is the more general, such that one is a form of the other, is not relevant here. What we are talking about is truth in the sense of correspondence, so this is what we need to focus on. It is a particular type of correlation which qualifies as corresponding, or truth, not all cases of correlation.
Take a look at what you are doing. You are moving from the more specific, "truth" and "correspondence", to the more general, "correlation", and insinuating that if there is correlation, then there must be correspondence, and truth. But not all cases of correlation are cases of correspondence, or truth. There are clearly cases of drawing mental correlations, which do not presuppose correspondence, or truth. It is only a certain type of correlation which is aimed at truth.
So your example of the child is not an adequate example, it deals with correlations, not correspondence. Primitive thought may be like this, dealing with associations, and correlations, and these give rise to emotions and feelings, like the fear of the fire, which the child has. But we need not assume any correspondence, or truth here. When an animal hears a noise, and scurries off in fear, there is surely some type of association, or correlation going on, but unlikely that there is any presupposition of correspondence.
Suppose there was a presupposition of correspondence, in this example, what would the noise be supposed to correspond with? The noise corresponds with "danger"? We can't expect a little scurrying animal to hold a sophisticated concept like danger? Don't you think that the noise just triggers some associations or correlations, and the animal gets the urge to run? Why do you think that such thought/belief requires a presupposition of correspondence?
I'm not confusing meaning and truth Fafner. You said P is true, "if the truth condition expressed by P obtains. I said "the truth condition expressed by P" is necessarily an interpretation of P. And since this is the condition for truth, then interpretation is a condition for truth as well.
If you want to assume a fixed meaning for P, then we can assume eternal Platonic Forms. Is that how you propose to define "objective truth", through reference to Platonic Forms? I am ready to oblige, if you recognize that objective truth requires a fixed meaning, and a fixed meaning is derived from something like Platonic Forms, then I am ready to accept this definition of "objective truth". There is such a thing as objective truth, if there is such a thing as Platonic Forms (fixed meaning).
Yes you are confusing meaning and truth. Meaning is what P expresses (namely a truth condition), and truth is determined by whether the truth condition obtains. They are completely different things, and interpretation concerns only the former, not the later. Can't you see the difference between asking "what P means?" and "is what P means true?" One is a semantic question, the other is not.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't see how platonic forms are relevant here. Truth as I defined it, simply means the obtainment of a truth condition, and a truth condition could be anything you want. If the truth condition expressed by a sentence is that cats fly (whatever that means), then the truth condition will involve cats and whatever is relevant to their flying. You don't need platonic forms to talk about truth conditions because anything can count as a truth conditions, as far as truth is concerned.
Yes, the truth condition is the meaning expressed by P. As per your statement, this is a requirement for truth. And, interpretation is required for the expression of this truth condition (the meaning). Therefore interpretation is a requirement for truth. Do you not understand this?
Quoting Fafner
You said "once a particular meaning has been fixed for P, than what P says given that meaning can be objectively true." How do you propose that there can be a fixed meaning for P, when meaning is subject to interpretation? Under Platonic realism, mathematical terms like "two", 'three", "circle", and "square", have eternal fixed meaning, through the assumption of eternal "Forms". There is no need for interpretation, because what these words mean (the meaning) is fixed eternally by these Forms, regardless of whether they are interpreted or not.
Quoting Fafner
Yes, now look, the truth condition expressed by a sentence, is the meaning, as you say above. There is no meaning, therefore no truth condition, and therefore no truth, unless the sentence is interpreted. Further, interpretation is subjective, so subjectivity is inherent within truth.
You tried to avoid this problem by referring to a "fixed" meaning, but there is no such fixed meaning, unless we assume Platonic Forms as the ideas which exist independently of human subjects, that fix the meaning.
That is conflating true statements and what makes them so.
I rest my case regarding that.
Certainty?
With certainty(conviction) comes "I know", and with less comes "I believe".
Is that what you're getting at?
I didn't say that.
I have. Attend to them.
So, you are claiming that one need not make a connection between a name and what's being named in order to learn how to use the name?
Sigh...
After reading through the rest... seems that I'm about finished here.
Very very poor form to argue about what depends upon what, and then - after having had your argument refuted - say that what depends upon what is irrelevant.
Sophistry.
If you want to understand correspondence, from my 'viewpoint', I suggest that you think about the term "truth" quite a bit differently than you've displayed here.
Your use of "name" is ambiguous, we were talking about learning a word, "hand". I'm saying that one makes an association when learning a word, and this association is not an association of correspondence between the word and the object like a proper noun, as you suggested, or else the word would not be used to refer to other similar objects.
Quoting creativesoul
I have demonstrated how your examples are false. You seem to have no respect for that.
Quoting creativesoul
To argue X is contingent on Y is a proper argument when the claims are justified. When one argues Y is contingent on X, and the claim is not justified, it is not a sound argument. Otherwise one could make an argument that anything is contingent on anything else, and this is pure nonsense, just like your unjustified claim that thought/belief is contingent on truth.
Yes. It is a feeling that leads us to express a thought with different word characterizations.
"Interpretation is required for truth" only indirectly via the fixing of meaning, but the truth of the sentence--given some determinate interpretation--is not itself open to interpretation.
Also, as I already told you, I completely reject your assumption that all interpretations are subjective by their nature, because there's nothing in the concept itself to suggest that this must be the case.
So your argument is both fallacious and is based on a false premise.
Here's a simply example to illustrate my point. Cows depend on grass for food, but does it follow that cows are like grass, or that they share some of their properties in common? (that they are green like the grass etc.) Obviously not - so the existence of some dependence relation between two things doesn't license you to infer anything from the properties of the one to the properties of the other. So even if I grant you your premise (which I don't) that meaning is in some sense subjective (--grass), it will not follow that truth is also subjective (--cows) only because it is dependent on meaning.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
As I already told you several times, "meaning is open to interpretation" only on the linguistic or semantic level, that is, when there is a possibility of choosing between different things that a sentence can mean in a particular language. But what each of those possible 'meanings' mean is itself objective and not open to interpretation. On my view, to understand a sentence is to know its truth condition, and to know its truth conditions means to know in which circumstances the sentence is true and when it is false. So the 'meaning' itself, so to speak, consist in objective knowledge, or an ability to discriminate between the obtaining or non obtaining of objective states of affairs (namely the truth conditions) -- and nothing that you said shows that this is impossible to achieve.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
All this stuff about forms is irrelevant to what I'm saying. I said that what a sentence means is truth conditions, but platonic forms themselves are not truth conditions but universals. The words 'circle' 'or square' don't say anything by themselves which is true or false, but only when they occur in sentence ("the table in my room is square").
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You don't need platonic forms, since you can simply use ordinary physical objects to fix the references of your terms. So if you take a sentence like "cats fly" and decide what would count as a cat and what would count as flying (and perhaps some other things), then you've fixed an objective meaning for the sentence - that is, your sentence now is 'correlated' with objective states of affairs (its truth and falsehood is sensitive to how the world is like). So for meaning to be objective it need not exist somehow 'in itself' and independently of human beings. We 'construct' meaning by correlating our language with the world, but that which we mean is objective by virtue of the existence of such correlations.
It is best to leave you with your (mis)understanding.
Not the same thought. Different intensity different thought different expressions...
Agree?
The thought itself, in memory is rather vague and fleeting. It doesn't stand still. Then there is the expression of that thought, by the mind which is somewhat more concrete but actually can be vague also. The expression attempts to describe the thought within the limited modes available-all are symbolic and therefore inadequate in some way.
Modernists authors (influenced by Bergson such as Virginia Wolfe) imbued these characteristics of thought and expression directly in their written works. Artists tend to delve into these matters more than philosophers though Bergson did not shy away.
Not so fast. Let's say that we have a fixed, determinate interpretation of the sentence. That interpretation must be related to some sort of reality, in order that there is a truth to that interpretation. As you said, the truth conditions must "obtain". Do you see that reality must be interpreted as well, in order that there is a truth of the sentence? What makes you think that there is a fixed and determinate reality? A fixed meaning of the sentence cannot provide truth if there is no corresponding fixed reality. And, in referring to accepted notions of time, it seems quite evident that there is no such fixed reality.
Quoting Fafner
Are you saying that there is nothing in the concept of interpretation, to suggest that an interpretation is necessarily subjective? Remember how I defined subjective as "of the subject". Do you know of anything else, other than the mind of a subject, which could give us an interpretation? If so, name it. Is it God or something like that? Otherwise I think you're just spouting bullshit.
Quoting Fafner
You haven't provided a proper analogy. My argument would be like this. Grass is dependent on sunlight. Cows are dependent on grass. Therefore cows are dependent on sunlight. The truth conditions of the statement are dependent on interpretation. Truth is dependent on the truth conditions. Therefore truth is dependent on interpretation.
We need to go way back in this thread, to see why I argue that truth is necessarily subjective. This is because not only is the interpretation of the sentence subjective, but also the interpretation of reality, which the sentence is supposed to correspond to, is subjective. That is the point made at the beginning of this post. The way the world is, reality, what is the case, varies according to one's perspective. This is manifestly clear in the special theory of relativity. Your perspective gives you your reality, and therefore reality is subjective. Perhaps, it is because reality itself is perspective dependent, that meaning interpretation is perspective dependent. Reality itself is subjective, and that's why meaning is subjective, because it must be to give us a true perspective of reality.
Creativesoul, I believe, suggested that even if the interpretation is subjective, what it is related to by means of correspondence, is objective. But according to the way that time is understood in modern science, this is not the case, Both sides of the relationship are subjective. This is why truth is completely within the subject's mind, it is a relationship between things which are in the mind. So how do you propose that objectivity enters into truth, when it is a relationship between two subjective things?
Quoting Fafner
Clearly, physical objects are constantly moving and changing, and how they exist depends on one's perspective, so we cannot "fix" references by using these things. It is impossible to fix references to things which are changing. If X changes, it is no longer X, but now Y. How could you fix your reference, if the thing you call X, is Y by the time you finish calling it X. In fact, modern physics demonstrates that even in the time that it takes you to call something X, that thing has gone through a large series of changes.
Indeed. Thoughts can be vague and fleeting. They can also be less vague and ever approaching clarity. It's the combinations that intrigue me.
Knowing the combinations requires knowing what's being combined.
That question remains unanswered.
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Certainty/uncertainty is a feeling that leads us to express a thought with different word characterizations?
So, I'm curious...
What, on your view, counts as being an example of the simplest thought/belief? What is required in order for it to be possible? What preconditions lead to that outcome, each and every time?
Perhaps more importantly...
Do you draw and maintain a meaningful distinction between feeling and thought?
Meta doesn't know the difference, for if s/he did s/he would be forced to admit that meaning is being interpreted. Since interpreting meaning is contingent upon pre-existing meaning, it only follows that interpretation is existentially contingent upon pre-existing meaning. Thus, meaning is not existentially contingent upon interpretation. To quite the contrary, it is the other way around. If that were not the case, one could not be mistaken; one could not misunderstand.
One forms a mistaken interpretation when s/he mistakenly attributes meaning. That is... when one attributes meaning where none belongs... s/he is mistaken; s/he has misunderstood. S/he thinks/believes that something means something other than it does.
Meta's notion of interpretation is just plain wrong.
If this is what your argument really comes down to, then surely you've given no reasons to think there's no "fixed reality" (whatever that means).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There are different senses of "subjective" here that we shouldn't mix together. Initially you have used "subjective" to mean something that is incompatible with objective truth, but now you are using it in a weaker and more broader sense as anything that is related to subjects. But subjective in this other sense can be perfectly compatible with objective truth, since many things that have to do with subjects are themselves perfectly objective (e.g., if I have a toothache, it's an objective fact about me). Obviously all cognition is 'subjective' in the sense the it involves subjects, but this is a trivial claim, and doesn't prove that cognition cannot itself objectively grasp reality.
And now, about interpretation, if you think about actual cases where it makes sense to talk about interpretation, then it actually shows that 'interpretation' is something that is usually aimed at achieving an objective grasp of something which itself is not subjective. Here are some examples (and they could be multiplied):
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, but I already acknowledged that the truth of a sentence is in some sense dependent on how its meaning is interpreted, and this doesn't help you because it doesn't prove that truth is subjective. This is because a) I reject your claim that all interpretations are necessarily subjective (in the sense of being incompatible with objective truth - see above) and b) even if I grant you the premise that all interpretations are subjective (and I don't), as my original example about the cows and grass show, you cannot logically infer from the fact that A is dependent on B, anything about the properties of A from the properties of B (so if B is subjective, and A is dependent on B, it doesn't follow that A itself is subjective).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I would make precisely the same objection to this argument as the objection that I made to your "interpretation of language is subjective" argument. It is possible to achieve perfectly objective interpretations of reality in most normal cases (e.g. if you are watching an action film, and believe that someone is shooting at you from the screen, then you are obviously incorrectly interpreting reality, as opposed to the people who understand that they are only watching a movie, and there are no people behind the screen with guns, and so on). And secondly even if I grant you that all interpretations of reality are subjective (and I don't), then it still doesn't follow that we cannot establish objective standards of truth on the basis of these interpretations, because this sort of inference is logically fallacious.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This claim is ambiguous. You have to distinguish between a case of an X changing into a completely different thing Y (a cube of ice melting into a puddle of water), and the case of an X that is changing one or more of its properties while remaining the same X (like a car that moves from position a to position b while remaining the same car). In the second case we can perfectly well fix the reference for X even if X changes some of its properties in the process.
The evolving quantum state of any system per the Schrodinger's equation.
I don't see how this is relevant.
Which is why you are comfortable with your position.
As John Bell described, there is a chasm between precision of knowledge and knowledge that is adequate for all practical purposes. [FAPP]. What you are describing as facts are approximations that are practicable but necessarily subject to continuous change depending upon time and observer. Nothing is persistent or consistent long enough to be a fact, though one can label it as such until this belief is undermined by new events. Necessarily different observers will label such differently depending upon time and position. The underlying reality is in constant flux as a whole. Heraclitus observed this whole watching a river as did the Daoists. It is not possible to create immobility in a universe of continuous change.
I don't think that fact about cats (or whatever) are in any way any less real or objective just because the subatomic particles from which cats are composed behave in funny ways. We care about cats only in so far as their observable properties and behavior is concerned, and on the macroscopic levels cats (as animals) exhibit perfectly stable and persistent behavior, even if on the subatomic level of description things behave differently (their quantum properties after all don't show up on the macroscopic level, so we are perfectly entitled to ignore them when we deal with cats, or anything else).
I have never observed this. What I have observed is constantly changing behavior that may fall within the boundaries of probabilities but totally unpredictable (echoing quantum theory). No one has ever found a boundary between the micro and the macro and the flux in the universe percolates to all levels of observations. Quantum theory hold that all systems are in constant flux.
In any case, the crux of the issue lies in whether one can find immobility in the universe, that is persistent and consistent throughout duration, such that it can be call a truth or a fact. Such beliefs drive one's philosophical views and concurrently create all kinds of paradoxes as Zeno noted.
You have never observed what? I'm not sure what your are referring to.
Quoting Rich
It doesn't prove that there are no such boundaries though.
Quoting Rich
The question doesn't make sense unless you can tell me in advance what should count as "immobility" and "persistence".
It's nonsense on stilts.
Not at all. It is the basis of many philosophies. One just needs to observe that what is symbolically called a given river is so named for practicality, recognizing that it is constantly changing and evolving in all manner and form. One only needs to recognize the practical reasons one names a river while still observing what is transpiring over duration.
A river is an excellent example and widely used to exemplify the flux in the universe. If one just studies this one will understand why it appears we live in a universe of mobility.
Hi tim, nice to see that you've gotten back in the thread, and that you haven't given up hope on finding truth. Nor have I, but I still see no way of getting beyond this problem of interpretation. Do you recognize that some speculative physicists have adopted "information theory" as a means of side-stepping the problem of interpreting quantum uncertainty? When uncertainty is taken as a fundamental property of reality, (which is what special relativity gives us), rather than as an incapacity of the observer to interpret reality, then I believe we forfeit the notion of "truth" as commonly understood by individuals; "truth" as commonly understood being ensured by our commitment to God.
Quoting tim wood
This is not quite what I am saying. I am not saying that there is no such thing as a chair, that what you're looking at is atoms, or fundamental particles, or quantum fields, or whatever. What I am saying is that it is a chair, and it is fundamental particles, etc.. What it is, is however it is interpreted. Remember, I do not deny truth, I only assert that it is subjective. Are you familiar with Stephen Hawking's notion of "model-dependent realism", put forth in "The Grand Design"? Essentially, it is an ontology which assumes that there is no fundamental reality independent from the model. Reality is as it is modeled. This perspective is a good introduction to "many worlds", which employs similar principles.
Quoting tim wood
Let's just assume that there is meaning beyond that which is agreed, or imposed by force (I would prefer "taught" rather than "imposed by force", because any agreement imposed by force is not a true agreement and without agreement how could there be this type of meaning?). What kind of existence could that meaning have? If there is no need for it to be interpreted for it to exist as meaning, what kind of existence could it have?
I believe that it is a common assumption, to assume that there is something which exists independent of being interpreted. We describe that existence and our descriptions have meaning. We observe a compatibility between our descriptions, and the assumed independent existence. Does this compatibility justify the claim that meaning is independent of our descriptions? How do you bridge that gap, to say that our descriptions have meaning, and there is compatibility between the descriptions and the thing described, so the thing described must have meaning?
I don't understand your criticism about throwing reason out the window. Isn't reason a tool of interpretation? How would claiming "it's all interpretation" be a case of throwing reason out the window?
Quoting creativesoul
This is where you demonstrate your confusion. An interpretation is an interpretation. There is no right or wrong, or mistaken interpretation, unless it is judged in comparison with another interpretation. There is no mistake inherent within the interpretation, "mistake" is a product of the external judgement which designates the interpretation as inadequate. So when one interprets, or as you say, attributes meaning, this act is never in itself a mistaken act. If one attributes meaning to something, then there is meaning there, and this is not a mistaken act, despite the fact that you might judge it as a mistaken act, claiming there is no meaning there. It is only your judgement which claims that the interpretation is mistaken. Even if millions or billions of people say there is no meaning there, this does not make it true that there is no meaning there. Sure, the fact that the billions of others see no meaning there makes that person "wrong" according to the judgement of the billions, but this does not make it true that there is no meaning there. If the person sees meaning there, then for that person there is meaning there.
Quoting Fafner
Are you not paying attention? I've stated numerous times that I am adhering to a definition of subjective which is "of the subject". If you are interpreting anything other than this, then that is your mistake, and the ambiguity is produced by your own mind.
Furthermore, I distinguished between two senses of "objective", which you now demonstrate that you haven't yet understood. The weaker sense of "objective", epistemological objectivity, by which we have "objective knowledge", is produced by common agreement. Since it is an agreement amongst subjects, it is inherently subjective, and better called inter-subjective than "objective". So when a statement is justified, many people agree, and we call this objective knowledge. But the fact that many people agree does not make it truth. The stronger sense of "objective", ontological objectivity, means "of the object". This is what you imply when you say "objective reality", and "objective truth", that what you refer to is a true condition of the object, rather than an idea produced by common agreement.
So in your example, when you say things like having a toothache are objective, you refer to the weaker sense of "objective". That you have a tooth ache, may be justified, and agreed upon, such that it is an inter-subjective reality, therefore it is compatible with this sense of "objective". But the fact that it is justified, and agreed upon, and "objective" in that way, does not make it an objective truth. You may have fooled everyone into thinking that you have a tooth ache, when you really do not. And if you think, "no it is really true, I really do have a tooth ache", then this is what I mean by subjective. It is your mind, the mind of a subject, which "knows" that it is true that you have a toothache, while everyone else is skeptical because you've fooled them in the past. Do you see the gap, between what you as a subject know to be true, and what is known by many, through agreement, because it is justified? The latter knowledge is "objective", because it is justified and agreed upon, and the former is subjective and true. But how do we get to an objective truth?
Quoting Fafner
Your examples display the same sort of confusion as creativesoul demonstrated. There is no such thing as correct or incorrect translation of a language into another. Two translators will translate each in one's own way. If someone judges the two, or one judges the other, it may be argued that one is correct and the other incorrect, or the two might be exactly the same. In any case, a single translation, as an interpretation, is just that, an interpretation, it is neither correct nor incorrect until judged as such. And that the judge believes the translation to be correct or incorrect, is a property of the judge, a belief of the judge, it is not a property of the translation.
Quoting Fafner
You haven't yet given me an acceptable definition of "objective truth", just like you've failed in your attempt to provide an acceptable definition of "objective reality". What you gave me above, is "objective" in the sense of agreed upon by others, but this is inter-subjective, justified, and there is a difference between justified and true. Just because many people agree, does not mean that it is true.
Quoting creativesoul
Why the stilts? Afraid to step into the river of truth?
This coming from one who incessantly (mis)attributes meaning to my words. If the above is true, then in order for you to be mistaken, it would require your mistaken report of what I said being judged in comparison to my own interpretation of my own words?
Rubbish.
An interpretation is wrong by virtue of (mis)attributing meaning.
I have see no problem with taking change into consideration. The problem arises when it's taken too far. For instance, it is not a matter of practicality that we name things, and their identity endures over time. Rather, we first name things as a matter of building a basis of thought/belief about those things. The river was identified long before anyone thought to say that you cannot step into the same river twice. That is an abuse of the term "same". A nonsensical use.
That statement is false. We can and we do it all the time. I swam in the same river for years. The only counterargument to this is untenable. One would argue that it is not the same river, because it has changed. So, then the obvious question becomes how much change does it take for something to be no longer what it was? If all change results in something no longer being the same thing, then how does one even begin to say that without ending in incoherence?
It cannot be done.
Which river is it again?
That one. Not another. That one, right there. See??? It changed, and yet it's still the same river.
Change happens constantly. So what? We can still say true stuff about ever-changing things, and we do so all the time.
You swam in a different river with a persistent name. That you give it the same name does not make the river the same but it is practical to call it with the same name. Someone else may give the river a different name or the river may dry up somewhere else and not even be observed as a river.
Everything is undergoing constant change but for practical reason we use symbolics to provide some persistence, but the symbolic does not prevent the change from occurring.
I was just trying to help you... This only makes your argument even weaker than I though it was, because the conclusion is trivial and proves nothing of any interest as I already showed.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No I'm not.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, you are begging the question. Obviously on my understanding of truth, truth is not the same as justification.
You are going in big circles all the time. You have your own idiosyncratic understanding of the concepts "truth", "objectivity", "subjectivity" and "interpretation", and all your arguments have this understanding built right into them, and so they can't seriously engage anyone who doesn't already agree with you on most things. If you want to have a chance of convincing anybody and not just talking to yourself, you should construct your arguments in such a way that even people who don't agree with your views could still find the arguments convincing.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
And I say there is such a thing, so?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I did give a definition of 'objective truth' way back, in terms of truth conditions. And nothing that you've said shows that it is not 'acceptable'.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Objective reality def= anything that could be described truly or falsely.
Really? This is really what you believe? Do you believe this is a fact or a truth?
But, we can even use translation of Shakespeare as an example. How does a translator translate Shakespeare while maintaining all of the nuances of the language and historical context. The art of translation is a tricky one as is the art of interpretation. An example of the issues:
http://www.npr.org/2008/11/22/97002969/the-art-of-translation
Of course things become way more complicated when it comes to translating literature, but this doesn't show that for most intents and purposes you can find very close correlations in meaning between words of different languages. It also partly depends on what one means by "translation", because we can adopt different criteria for "correctness" of translation - say 'literal' as opposed to 'free' etc.
Yes, it all gets kind of tricky, even for simple situations such as the well known example of the snow and how different cultures symbolically represent it with language.
I think this is a very naïve perspective. It appears like you are limiting "truth", to the concerns of things which we can see with our eyes. But the vast majority of things which exist cannot be seen, either they are too small, or too large, or for some other reason, cannot be seen, like air. Surely you recognize that the activity of electrons plays a very important part in your life. So why would you even consider excluding this from "truth", as if there is truth concerning chairs, but no truth concerning electrons.
There is a related issue which is more and more coming to light in the philosophy of science. Scientists produce experiments in a controlled environment with very specific parameters. The "size" of the experiment is neither micro nor macro, in relation to the things which exist in the universe, which range from very large to very small. from their observations, they may extrapolate, and make conclusions concerning the entirety of the universe, which we might call laws. But there is no reason to believe that the very small things, or the very large things behave in the same way as the medium size things, which are the things that are observed.
If I understand you correctly, you are arguing that there can only be truth relative to these medium size things. But why? Just because the human perspective doesn't give one the capacity to directly observe these huge, and tiny things, which are just as much a part of reality as the medium size things. Why would you think that there can be truth concerning medium size things, but no truth concerning huge things, or tiny things?
Quoting tim wood
But the descriptions do not all agree, that's the point. We have to force our own descriptions, adapt them, to make them agree. This is compromise. I see the chair as green, you see it as blue, so we decide that it must be bluish green, or greenish blue. In most cases agreement requires discussion. It is not the case that we tally up the descriptions and they agree, we discuss how things appear from each of our own perspective, then make conclusions about how the things "must be", to fulfill the conditions of the different descriptions.
Quoting tim wood
As I've been saying, I agree, that this is "objective". Agreement produces a form of objectivity, but it is an objectivity based in justification, it does not mean "objective" in the sense of "of the object" as Fafner implies with "objective reality", and "objective truth". The fact that even though we might all agree on something, it might still be false, indicates that the form of "objectivity" derived from agreement or justification, is not the same as "objectivity" when used in "objective truth".
Quoting tim wood
The proposition "that is a blue chair", is justified. Agreement constitutes justification, and this justification produces a sort of objectivity which might commonly be referred to as objective knowledge. But this agreement does not necessitate that it is the truth, so this is not an objective truth.
Nope. As I said, it was the same river.
Oh, pray tell...
What does?
This could be fun.
Untenable. Reductio.
Everything is a goat.
Like any other incidence of right or wrong, correct or incorrect, good or bad, an interpretation is only wrong by virtue of being judged as such. That's simply the nature of right and wrong, they are the product of judgement.
What lacks interest to you, may be interesting to me, that's just human nature.
Quoting Fafner
Your definition is unacceptable because the way you defined "objective truth" ensures that it is necessarily subjective. If this fact is uninteresting to you, then so be it.
As I already explained, it is uninteresting because your definition of subjectivity ("involving subjects") is perfectly compatible with the possibility of objective truth, so therefore your argument doesn't prove anything. And the reason that you don't see this is because you are constantly sliding back and forth between different senses of "subjective" without noticing.
And secondly, I also showed you that your argument is logically fallacious anyway, so it doesn't even matter how you define "subjectivity". And I have seen no response from you concerning this point.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Two days ago I wrote a very detailed post explaining to you where exactly your arguments go wrong, but you have completely ignored most of the points that I made. Why do I even bother.
1. Truth depends on interpretation
2. Interpretation is subjective,
3. Therefore truth is subjective.
Here's a parallel example that shows why this argument is invalid:
1. Cows depend on grass
2. Grass is green,
3. Therefore, cows are green.
Do you see the problem? the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises, even if the premises are true.
I told you that I adhere to one definition of subjective. Despite your assertion, you have yet to demonstrate any equivocation on my part. I believe your assertion is the product of a faulty interpretation on your part.
Quoting Fafner
Further, I haven't seen this demonstration. My argument is that the existence of truth is dependent on the existence of a subject, and therefore cannot be any part of a supposed independent objective reality. Your demonstration of fallaciousness was based on a misrepresentation of my argument. When I showed you this, you just said my conclusion is uninteresting. So be it.
Quoting Fafner
I addressed any point which appeared relevant. if you're uninterested, then don't bother.Quoting Fafner
See, your example misrepresents my argument again, just like last time, despite me having explained your misrepresentation. I do not argue predication, like "grass is green". I argue dependence, it is an argument of contingency. That the grass is green is irrelevant. The proper conclusion in your example, should be "therefore cows cannot exist in a world without grass". Just like my conclusion is that truth cannot exist in a world without subjects.
It appears perhaps that you are taking my definition of subjective, "of the subject", and inferring that this means "property of the subject". But I am not arguing properties, I am arguing contingencies, so "of the subject" means derived from the subject, produced, or created by the subject. This may be where your problem of interpretation lies.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But it all depends on what you mean by 'truth' here. Are we talking about truth conditions or truth values? Because indeed sentences having truth conditions is dependent on subjects (i.e., that sentences mean something that can be either true or false), but it is not the case that it depends on subjects whether a sentence itself is true or false.
Here's my old example again:
1. That the sentence 'cats fly' in English means that cats fly (= a truth condition), depends on the existence of subjects.
2. The truth of 'cats fly' doesn't depend on the existence of subjects, but on whether cats fly.
So you cannot argue that the negation of (2) follows from (1), because (1) talks about the meaning of the sentence, while (2) about its truth. To show that (2) is false, it is not enough to appeal to the subject-dependence of interpretation, because truth in the sense of (2) has nothing to do with interpretation (as it is defined) but with what the world itself is like objectively.
Now, you made this argument from transitivity that purported to show that the negation of (2) does follow from (1). I agree that the form of the argument is valid: if A is dependent on B, and B is depend on C, then indeed it follows that A is dependent on C. However this argument is not applicable here. Here's how I understand your argument (based on your latest post):
1'. The meaning of sentence S ('cats fly') is dependent on the existence of subjects.
2'. The truth of S is dependent on the meaning of S.
3'. Therefore, the truth of S is dependent on the existence subjects.
Now the problem here is that the second premise (2') is ambiguous between 'truth' in the sense of having truth conditions (like in (1) - which I accept) and having a truth value (in which case I would reject the premise). But since the conclusion (3') talks about a truth value (you've claimed that the truth of 'cats fly' is dependent on subjects and not the world), then for the argument to be valid 'truth' in (2') must mean the same thing as in (3'). But on this reading of (2'), it is false on my view, because the truth of 'cats fly' is dependent on whether cats fly (according to my understanding of 'truth'), and not on the meaning of the sentence. So you need a different argument to show that (2') is true on this reading.
You have also said that you deny the existence of an objective reality, and therefore no sentence can be objectively true on your view. This however, would be an entirely different argument, since it need not mention anything about 'interpretation', because the conclusion already follows from the premise: if there's no objective reality, then trivially, no sentence is objectively true.
(actually it is not quite true because "no sentence can be objectively true" doesn't follow from "no sentence is objectively true", since form "P is false" (contingently) it doesn't follow that "P is necessarily false". So even if you are correct that there's not objective reality, it doesn't prove that our sentences can't be objectively true. It only proves they happen to be (as a matter of contingency and not necessity) false. And this argument would also prove (ironically) that there are at least subject independent falsehoods. Of course this is itself an incoherent claim (because a falsehood is logically equivalent to a true negation), but I'll let it pass for now)
So it is not clear to me what your original argument concerning 'interpretation' supposed to do, since it neither shows that no sentences are objectively true (or can be objectively true), nor that there's no objective reality. To argue for either of these two claims you need a different argument (which you haven't provided).
and now I think that you can object here that the truth (in the sense of the truth value) of 'cats fly' is in fact dependent on the meaning of the sentence, and I agree that this is true, but only in one sense and not in another, because what I say in the quote is ambiguous between:
a. 'cats fly' having a truth value at all is dependent on its meaning.
b. Which truth value ('true' or 'false') 'cats fly' in fact has, is not dependent on its meaning, but only on whether cats actually fly.
(a) and (b) are mutually consistent, because (a) actually means the same as saying that 'cats fly' has truth conditions, but as I explained already, having truth conditions is not the same as having a (particular) truth value of either 'true' or 'false'.
Rubbish.
Being judged as wrong is being called "wrong". Something can be called "wrong", but that doesn't make it so. If what you say here were true, there would be no difference between calling something "wrong" and being wrong.
The irony...
It was your definition of truth I was working with. You said that truth is when the truth conditions expressed by a sentence obtain. My argument was that according to this definition, truth is dependent on an expression of truth conditions. Further, it was my premise that an expression of truth conditions is dependent on the mind of a subject. Therefore truth, according to your definition is dependent on the mind of a subject.
Quoting Fafner
According to the argument above, this is a false premise.
Quoting Fafner
This is false, because according to your definition of "truth", truth is dependent on a sentence expressing a truth condition, and this is dependent on an interpretation from a subject. Therefore, as defined, truth does have something to do with interpretation, interpretation (the expression of its truth condition) is required for truth.
Quoting Fafner
Earlier, you gave me a definition of "truth". The argument, as you admit is valid, and therefore "truth" as you defined it is dependent on the existence of a subject. Now you are talking about "truth value" which you have yet to define, so you have effectively changed the goal posts, but I have no idea what you mean by "truth value".
Quoting Fafner
If this is what you mean by "truth value", then truth value is dependent on a judgement. A judgement, as well as a truth condition, is dependent on a thinking subject. Therefore to have a truth value is also dependent on a subject. This is the issue creativesoul has taken up with me. Read my reply below.
Quoting creativesoul
Right, being judged as wrong is what makes something wrong. That's not "rubbish" it's reality. To be "wrong" is to be discordant in relation to some principle, rule, or law. That something is in disagreement with such a principle, requires a comparison of the thing with the principle, and a judgement. You can say that this is rubbish all you want, but your assertions won't change reality.
A truth value is simply the truth or falsehood of a given sentence (the truth value (in the present) of "Trump is the president" is "true", and the truth value of "Obama is the president" is "false"). A truth condition on the other hand, is the situation on which the sentence is true when it obtains (and if it doesn't then the sentence is false). So the truth conditions of "cats fly" is that it is true just in case that cats fly, and false if they don't; whereas its truth value happen to be "false" because cats as a matter of fact don't fly, at least in the sense of having wings like birds.
It is also crucial to note that truth conditions by themselves don't determine the actual truth value of a sentence (except in the limiting case of logical tautologies). Because just by knowing what 'cats fly' mean (knowing its truth conditions), you cannot know whether cats actually fly (which truth condition obtains in the world). And this is where the problem with your argument lies, because you start from the premise that truth conditions of sentences depend on interpretation (which I accept), but your conclusion says that it follows that sentences having the truth value that it does is also dependent on interpretation (a claim that I reject), and this is an equivocation because having truth conditions and having a particular truth value are two different things.
I hope that you can see now why all your objections to my post mentioning that "truth is dependent on interpretation" are ambiguous between 'truth' in the sense of truth conditions and the sense of having a truth value. I claimed only that the former is dependent on interpretation but not the letter
(and I actually did define truth in terms of truth values (because a truth value is simply a truth condition that obtains - so it was already implicit in the definition), but I didn't mention this term by name, hoping that you would yourself understand the difference between the two on an intuitive level).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I'd like to see the argument for this claim. Because judging that 'cats fly' is true, is not the same as 'cats fly' itself being true.
What's the difference between saying something is wrong and something being wrong?
:-|
There is no such problem with my argument. The truth value of the sentence (A), is dependent on the truth conditions of the statement (B), which is dependent on the interpretation (C). If A is dependent on B, and B is dependent on C, then A is dependent on C. If cows are dependent on grass, and grass is dependent on the sun, then cows are dependent on the sun.
Yes, the truth value is something which is quite different from the truth condition, as you've graciously explained. Notice my example, grass is quite different from the sun. But there is no ambiguity or equivocation, it's simply the case that there cannot be a truth value of the sentence without a truth condition of the sentence, just like there cannot be a truth condition without an interpretation. Therefore there cannot be a truth value without an interpretation.
Quoting Fafner
Did you read the part of my last post addressed to creativesoul?
Quoting creativesoul
That all depends on how you define "being wrong". If it requires a professional judge, a jury, or God, to determine "being wrong", then the average individual saying "that's wrong" is quite different from actually being wrong. If it doesn't require any special judgement criteria, then my word is as good as your word, and you are wrong, because I say so, and I am wrong because you say so. But of course, I think there is a special judgement needed for actually "being wrong". The problem is that the required special judgement is not well agreed upon, some refer to God, and some do not. That's why I ask, what qualifies as "being wrong" for you? What type of special judgement is needed to fulfill the conditions of actually being wrong in your opinion?
I didn't invoke the term, you did. I was talking about mistaken interpretation. You changed the terms, as always... to "wrong". Now you're squirming.
You're wrong because I judged you to be...
That is exactly what follows from your nonsensical language use.
Let me see if I understand you. There are things which you do not know, and even human beings do not know, but there is still a possibility for truth there. But this possibility for truth is limited, because you are assuming that there are things which cannot be known.
Why enact such a restriction against "the possibility of truths"? If you are allowing to truth, the status of possibility, such that "possible truths", are something real which we can talk about, on what basis would you limit the "possible truths"? Consider that possible truths, according to your description refers to unknowns. How can you propose a separation within the unknown, such that some of the unknown is knowable, and some is not knowable. Wouldn't you have to know the unknown in order to establish your division. Then wouldn't that division just be a new division between known and unknown (actual truth and possible truth). On what basis would you say that there cannot be truth concerning some things? Isn't that anti-philosophical (philosophy being the unrestricted desire to know), and inconsistent with your claim "that things are consistent with some law"
Quoting tim wood
Justification is the act of demonstrating the correctness of one's proposition or belief. The act must be successful, in order that the proposition or belief is justified. Agreement is the result. As we've discussed, agreement is more of a hashing out, negotiation, mediation, compromise, rather than a case of I justify my belief through convincing you. However, what comes about from this "process", is justified belief.
Truth, as I've been arguing is perspective dependent. But there is a vast universe which your perspective does not allow you access to. We could apply the term "possible truth" here. These things are in principle knowable, but they are not knowable to me, due to the limitations of my perspective. So I allow that others, such as you, have possible truths, things which I could know if I were in your perspective, but since I am not in your perspective, I don't know them, so they are not actual truths.
You may claim that the things you know are actual truths, just like I would claim that the things I know are actual truths, but I see your truths as possible truths, like you see mine as possible truths. Since I allow that what you claim is possibly true, I invite you to justify your claim. If you can, I might accept it into my personal collection of truths, it becomes part of my perspective.
We cannot throw justification out the window, because it is the means by which we broaden our perspectives. Things which you have observed, learned, and believe may be passed to me, through justification. Justification is the means by which we aspire toward knowing the "whole picture", rather than just a unique perspective. This is the process of unity by which we create a world view.
Quoting tim wood
Yes, that's kind of how I view justification. Butit's much more than just argumentation, it's the whole process of discussing, arguing, and coming to agreement, on how we should use words, etc.. The point in adding to the discussion, this concept of justification, is to distinguish between true and justified. Propositions are not often "proven", they are offered for one reason or another, for a purpose, for the sake of argument for example. You might say that the one offering a proposition might seek to "prove" it through demonstration, perhaps offering proofs. If the proposition is accepted, we can say that it has been justified, but this does not necessarily mean that it has been "proven". The proposition is accepted because it has been demonstrated to be adequate for the intended purpose. This does not mean that it has been "proven" in the sense of having been demonstrated to be true.
Quoting tim wood
What you express here is not philosophical thought. The accepted "collective judgement" is often wrong, as demonstrated by concepts like geocentrism, and spontaneous generation, to name a couple. You offer the standard argument against skepticism, insinuating that one should only doubt the aspects of collective judgement which are wrong, because to doubt everything would be a waste of time. The problem is, that the aspects which are wrong, are not exposed as wrong, until after they are subjected to the skeptic's tools of doubt. Therefore the skeptic must doubt everything or else the skepticism is not very meaningful.
Quoting tim wood
I don't know what you mean by "dialectic truth". I was only emphasizing the difference between justified and true. I have difficulty with the entire paragraph.
You can shout indignities all you want, but the point remains. You haven't explained how you think something could be wrong without having been judged as such.
Actually no, I don't think this is true, and it doesn't follow from my definition of 'truth' (or of truth conditions). Let me explain.
Recall that I defined 'truth' as the obtaining of a truth condition (e.g. 'cats fly' is true (=has the truth value of "true") just in case its truth conditions obtain). So this means that for a sentence to have a truth value (like "true") all you need is for some truth condition to obtain.
But what does it mean for a sentence to have truth conditions? Well it is something that is relative to a language. So in English, the sentence 'cats fly' express one particular set of truth conditions, but it could've been otherwise (if English had a different history, for example if 'cat' meant what 'dog' means in our English, then 'cats fly' would have different truth conditions in that hypothetical English).
So let's imagine a world where 'cats fly' doesn't have any truth conditions, and that would be a world where English doesn't exist, or any other language (suppose that there are no humans in that world). But now, can the sentence 'cats fly' have a truth value in that world? It seems to me that it can. If cats fly in that world, then the sentence is true in that world, and if they don't then it would be false. So here you have a world where a sentence doesn't have truth conditions but has a truth value. So truth values don't depend on truth conditions, and hence they cannot depended on interpretation either, as you claimed (I take it that if A can exist without B, then it proves that A is not dependent on B (at least logically), and I hope that you would agree).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes I did, but I didn't find it very convincing. You wrote:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You've defined here "wrong" as something requiring judgment, but this simply begs the question against someone who doesn't hold your view. If you have a rule that specifies that such and such application of the rule will count as correct, then the application is going to be correct only if it is in fact correct, and that has nothing to do with judgment. You cannot just by stipulation rule out an objective understanding of rules. That's not an argument.
When one uses symbols to represent thought (as is done in logic), one loses the essence of thought and action as a continuous whole. The judgement and utterance of that judgement it's a single unitary event or process. They cannot be made into separate entities. And if one follows the complete process, the understanding of this judgement/utterance by an another observer as well as by the subject of the utterance now also becomes entangled in the same way creating a continuous process engulfing a greater number of participants.
In this manner and description, it is not possible to separate the source from that what the source created, i.e the judgment and symbolic utterance. In order to comprehend this framework it is first necessary to penetrate the continuous flow of nature and jettison symbolic representations as adequate descriptions.
In a prior thread, I suggested that discrete symbolism of any sort it's not only inadequate, it will yield an upside down view if nature.
What are you talking about?
The debate between us was about existential dependence. You were asserting that meaning is existentially contingent(dependent) upon interpretation. I argued otherwise.
I've already given the argument for that. You've neglected to address it head on.
Talking about how something could be wrong only serves to further obfuscate the underlying issue. There are all sorts of way to be wrong. Mistaken interpretation(misunderstanding another's language use) is the one that matters here.
Truth depends upon interpretation.
Interpretation is subjective
Truth is subjective
That was one argument that I, and others since, have refuted.
I've argued several things here that refute your claims, none of which you've gotten right in your objections to them. Most of the time your rejoinders have suffered from a failure to properly quantify. In other words, you've been arguing that all this depends on that... when it is only some.
That my friend is the underlying issue of which nearly everyone here suffers from not taking into consideration...
That is the general outline of argument here. It suffers in scope as a result of improper quantification practice. Here's what I mean by that:
For argument's and understandings' sake, let's first assume that not all A's are B. The scope changes remarkably...
Some A's are B. All B's require C. Some A's require C.
Let's further assume that not all B's require C. The scope, again, changes remarkably...
All A's are B. Some B's require C.... nothing further can be said about A's unless it is the case that all of the B's that require C are A's.
Or...
Some A's are B. Some B's require C... nothing further can be said here either unless it is the case that all of the B's that require C are A's and that that group of A's exhausts all of the A's that are B's.
I'm inclined to agree with the parts regarding what is lost when translating thought/belief into logic. Simply put, logic presupposes truth as correspondence by virtue of presupposing the truth of it's premisses. Furthermore, it is quite misleading to then call a valid conclusion "true" as a result of it's being valid. Validity is insufficient for truth. The examples of this are numerous, and obvious to those reasonably well versed.
On a related matter, it is often the case that thought/belief is represented in terms of "belief that" or "belief in". Now, I would gladly agree to the distinction between the two, however, when we then continue on to represent all statements of belief in terms of "belief that" we must be very careful to not take that process too far, as Witt and many many others have done and continue to do.
There's the notion that any and all belief is statable in terms of "belief that". However, that is to relegate all thought/belief in metacognitive terms. Thought/belief is not the same thing as thinking about thought/belief. The latter is existentially contingent upon the former, not the other way around.
Metacognition(thinking about thought/belief) requires language. Thought/belief does not. Language requires shared meaning. Thought/belief does not. Shared meaning requires thought/belief.
Getting pre/non linguistic thought/belief right is imperative, absolutely crucial, to understanding everything that has ever been written and/or spoken. Including, but not limited to, the operative role that meaning and truth plays in all of it.
Here's a different example of flying to consider.
In Toy Story, Buzz claims that he can fly, and Woody claims that Buzz cannot. When Buzz performs an action A he believes will count as evidence that indeed he can fly, Woody responds, "That wasn't flying! That was -- falling with style." (Thank you, Joss Whedon.)
Woody's statement could be taken as: That's not what we mean by "flying." As it turns out, although Woody does not yet know this, Buzz and Woody have the same understanding of the word "flying"; neither do they disagree on how to apply the word "flying." That they disagree about whether action A counts as flying is not down to a disagreement in usage; Buzz has a mistaken belief about what action A was. Buzz's epiphany later in the film is not, "I have been misusing the word 'flying,'" even though that is also true: he has been applying it to actions that are not examples of flying. But he has been applying it correctly, and as Woody would, relative to his beliefs; it's his beliefs that were mistaken.
Quoting creativesoul
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Quoting creativesoul
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Quoting creativesoul
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The issue at hand is the question of whether an interpretation can be wrong (mistaken) without having been judged as that. You claimed that when one attributes meaning where none belongs, this is a mistake. I claimed that if the person perceives meaning there, then there is meaning there. That this is a mistake is only determined through a further judgement. You seem to think that an interpretation can be inherently mistaken (wrong) without being judged to be wrong.
Indeed. The 'nature' of thought is a difficult topic. Any such notion would need to be able to effectively explain/exhaust all of the different senses(uses) of the term "thought". One issue that arises is the use of the term "thought" as a means to describe active consideration; the 'act' so to speak, rather than what the act consists in/of. Thinking about something or other is re-cognition - 'revisiting' pre-existing thought/belief.
This is not a representation of my argument at all. As I explained to Fafner, I only argue contingencies, no predication. I do not say all A's are B's. I say A's are dependent on B's, and B's are dependent on C's, therefore A's are dependent on C's. A= the truth value of the sentence, B= the truth conditions of the sentence, and C= interpretation by the mind of a subject. I conclude that truth is derived from, or "of the subject", and cannot be any part of a supposed independent objective reality.
Furthermore, in our latest round of discussion, we've moved on to the issue of A, the truth value of the sentence. As I've been arguing now, this is an issue which itself requires a judgement. Since the mind of a subject is the only thing (other than God) which might make such a judgement, the subjective nature ("of the subject") is reinforced by this fact. And it becomes increasingly evident that truth cannot be a part of any independent objective reality (unless we assume God or some other mind to make that judgement).
So we can conclude that the mind of a subject is required for truth in two distinct aspects, first to interpret the sentence, and second, to judge the truth value.
Fair enough. Let's revisit your argument as you've clarified...
Truth value is not truth. Truth conditions are not truth. The conclusion introduces new terms, and as such it is invalid.
In addition, you've restricted the scope to statements of thought/belief. That is... you've restricted truth to language. Big mistake. Common... nonetheless.
You're introducing all sorts of new terms... unnecessarily so.
You're conflating being mistaken with being and/or becoming aware of that.
I introduced these terms because the word 'truth' itself is ambiguous (for example, it is not clear to what things it applies). So talking about truth in terms of truth values of sentences instead (and defining their meaning in term of truth conditions) gives us something more concrete to discuss.
Coherency is insufficient for truth.
Logic has nothing to do with coherency?
That is all logic concerns itself with. The rules of correct inference. Consistency. Coherency. Validity.
Consistency, Coherency and Validity are three different things. Logic indeed deals with consistency and validity, but coherency is an epistemic term, so it is unrelated to logic (unless of course you use it to mean "consistency"). But anyway, truth values are not defined either through coherency or consistency.
So, for our purposes here, a truth value is an assignment of "true" or "false" to a sentence. Again, I would only point out that truth value is not truth.
There's a difference between being true/false and being called so.
Agree?
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this.
Anyway, you are free to define truth in your own way. I don't claim that my definition is the only 'right' one, only that it suits my particular purpose.
Someone can say that "X" is true when it is not. Being called "true" does not make something so.
Ok, maybe 'assignment' was a misleading choice of words. I didn't mean to say that sentences are made true by calling them so. I simply meant that a sentence has the truth value "true" simply if it is true (and "false" if false).
In logic of course you can assign truth values when you are dealing with P's and Q's etc.
Granted, coherency is usually defined through consistency, but it doesn't show that they are the same thing. It is just a terminological point about common philosophical usage, you are free of course to use "coherency" as equivalent with "consistency".
Though I would insist that validity and consistency mean different things in logic. Validity only applies to arguments, while consistency (or inconsistency) applies to any arbitrary bunch of sentences. Not everything that is consistent is valid (but the converse is true).
1. Cats fly.
2. Therefore, today is Sunday.
The two propositions are consistent (they don't contradict each other), but they don't form a valid argument together.
Quine's attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction goes like this: we all agree that what makes a statement true is in part a matter of what the words mean, and in part a matter of the way the world is, so we think we can separate those, but it turns out that's easier said than done. That's the argument anyway.
It seemed to me the point you & @Metaphysician Undercover had reached was related, in trying to link or unlink meaning, interpretation, truth conditions, and truth value. I thought it might be helpful to look at an actual utterance where there is a contrast between two subjects, and then decide whether that contrast turned out to be differences in word usage or something else.
Well put Fafner.
All valid arguments are consistent(coherent). Thus, validity requires coherence.
But I think I can allow myself to ignore this for the purpose of my argument with MU (and anyway, I think that truth conditional semantics is consistent with meaning holism - after all, this was the view of his greatest student Davidson).
Actually, I was working off of Fafner's definition of "truth". Fafner defined "truth" as when the truth conditions expressed by a sentence, obtain. My argument was that truth, as defined, is dependent on there being truth conditions of the sentence, and this is dependent on interpretation, therefore truth is dependent on interpretation. Then Fafner changed the terms, to talk about "truth value", claiming that a truth value was not dependent on interpretation, so I adjusted my argument to deal with that new terminology.
If you think that you have a definition of "truth" which does not succumb to this argument, then by all means, present it.
Quoting creativesoul
That's not so, because someone can judge you as being mistaken whether or not you are aware of it. This does not change the fact, which I am trying to impress upon you, that being mistaken requires a judgement.
I prefer to deal with the easy cases first...
I don't see how this helps our understanding.
I fear that you've begun to confuse the different conversations. Here is ours. Keeping it separate from the others is crucial...
That is the original argument you offered.
I've since put it to you several times over that you've succumbed to inadequate quantification issues.
Not all truth is dependent upon meaning. Not all meaning is dependent upon interpretation.
The underlying issue here is clear. You've neglected to take an account of pre and/or non-linguistic thought/belief.
Try this...
Thought/belief is prior to language.
Some pre-linguistic thought/belief is true.
True thought/belief is existentially contingent upon truth.
Thus, some truth is prior to language.
This is the part I was looking at.
It looks like you're defining truth as satisfaction: "cats fly" is true in that world iff there is something in that world that is a cat and flies. You're effectively taking triples of
Again, you've offered a dreadful representation of my argument. You even added quotations as if it's what I actually wrote. Here's what I actually wrote:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This was in response to your affirmation that being meaningful is required for the truth of a statement:
Quoting creativesoul
Now you claim:
Quoting creativesoul
That something which is not meaningful could be true, is contrary to what you said earlier. So this new position of yours, "not all truth is dependent on meaning", is something you'll need to clarify. Obviously, we had agreement earlier that meaning is required for the truth of a statement. A sentence which is meaningless cannot be true. Are you rescinding your agreement?
I think I understand what you're trying to get at. You think that there is truth to things other than statements, and this truth does not require meaningfulness. How is this possible, that there could be truth to something which is not meaningful? If you come to respect the reality, that this is not a viable option, then we're back at my argument. For something to be meaningful requires that it is interpreted as such, and therefore truth requires interpretation.
Quoting creativesoul
I don't see how non-linguistic thought/belief affects my argument. The truth of non-linguistic thought/belief is still dependent on interpretation even if you define "meaning" in such a way that only language has meaning, and insist that things without meaning could be true. Things other than language are interpreted.
Quoting creativesoul
Well, I really don't know what you mean by "true thought/belief is existentially contingent on truth", or how you could apprehend this as a true premise. What is truth other than a concept? Are you claiming here, that if there is a true belief, then there must be an existing concept of "truth"? How is that a viable premise? If there was green plants on the earth prior to human beings, then the concept of "green" must have existed prior to human beings?
Let's say that there was green plants prior to language, why would these green plants be existentially contingent on the concept of greenness? Likewise, if there was true thought/belief prior to language, why would this be existentially contingent on truth (trueness)?
And I didn't mean that a triplet of
I think the question, still, is whether truth is a semantic notion.
I'm ready to grant you your main claim, viz. that truth (in the sense of sentences having a truth value) is dependent on subjects in your sense. However, I want to reiterate something I already said, and that your argument doesn't prove a lot, because of the way that you've defined subjectivity. After all, your argument only proves that truth is dependent on subjects, but it doesn't prove that truth is dependent only on subjects. It is still possible that truth is dependent both on subjects and the objective reality, in which case sentences would be objectively true despite the dependence of this fact itself on subjective interpretation (and in my sense "objectively true" means dependent on the subject-independent reality).
In other words, proving that truth depends on subjects is not the same as proving that there's no objective truth. And this is for the simple reason that something can both depend on subjects and depend on the objective world (there's no logical inconsistency in this). So even if your argument is sound (and I grant you that), you still need to work harder to prove what you want to prove (that sentences cannot be objectively true).
Hmmmmm....
This is a good question. In some sense yes, if you analyze the meaning of sentences via truth (that is, truth conditions). But there's a sense in which it isn't, but I find it difficult to spell this out. I'll have to think this over.
I believe that this position, that truth is dependent on both a subject, and on an objective reality, is a common one. It excludes the extreme realist position, which doesn't require subjects for truth, but still assumes an objective reality independent of human existence. This position would allow that truth is a property of knowledge, and even that truth is exclusively found in knowledge because it recognizes the role of the subject in truth, and the subject's role in knowledge is evident and compatible with this.
The issue which arises is the nature of the assumed independent objective reality. Are you acquainted with Kant's claims concerning the distinction between phenomena and noumena? How the assumed objective reality appears to us, is what he calls phenomena, and this is what our knowledge is based in. This is what I call one's interpretation of the objective reality, what is produced by one's senses, and brain, and is how the objective reality appears to the individual. I call that interpretation. When a sentence is said to be "objectively true", the interpretation of the sentence is judged as corresponding with the interpretation of the objective reality (how the objective reality appears to us). So we cannot say that the sentence is "objectively true", in the sense of implying that the meaning of the sentence actually corresponds with the assumed objective reality, but that it corresponds with how the objective reality appears to us, our interpretation of it.
Quoting Fafner
According to what I just argued, the real object, the thing in itself, the objective reality does not play a part in what you call "objective truth". There is the interpretation of the sentence, carried out by the subject, and the interpretation of the objective reality (how the objective reality appears), carried out by the subject, and the judgement of "true", carried out by the subject. So every aspect of truth is subjective as I defined it. We have no objectivity here.
Now, there is still the assumption of an objective reality, which must be dealt with. Where this assumption plays a role in truth, and it is a pivotal role, is in the trust and faith that we have in ourselves. We have faith, and trust, that our human bodies are giving us an interpretation of the objective reality which is an accurate interpretation. That is to say that we believe that the way that the objective reality appears to us, is a fair representation of how the objective reality actually is. Also, we trust that we have provided ourselves with a proper interpretation of the sentence.
This trust which we have in ourselves, trust in our own capacities, is crucial to truth. It is crucial because we do not define truth as a correspondence between the meaning of the sentence and how the world appears to us, but we define it more as you say, as correspondence between the sentence and the objective reality. So there are two forms of trust in our own capacities, which are involved with truth. We trust our capacity to interpret the sentence, and we trust our capacity to make the objective reality (through sensation and apprehension) appear as it really is. Therefore we define true as "the sentence corresponds with reality", when we really mean that the interpretation of the sentence corresponds with how reality appears to us. That we have interpreted the sentence properly, and that reality appears as it really is, we tend to take for granted because we have confidence, "trust" in our own capacities. This trust, or confidence, is implied within the concept of truth, because without this assumed correspondence between the interpretation and the reality, truth is meaningless.
That argument was yours Meta. I actually clicked on your avatar and scrolled through your comments to find it. Anyone else could do the same, assuming you've not changed it in the meantime. It's back on page 15, about halfway down the page.
:-}
For you to call it "a dreadful representation of your argument" is a bit self-contradictory, to say the least...
All thought and belief, not reflexive cognitive reaction, is informed by and shaped in language.
There is no pre-linguistic thought/belief that is true, or any actual pre-linguistic thought belief at all.
True thought/belief is existentially contingent upon accurate observation or true as determined by linguistic discourses, not any metaphysical "Truth."
Thus no Truth is prior to language, only the material world as it is prior to observation.
Here's one thing that's curious: "true" takes that-clauses like the propositional attitudes, modal operators, all that intensional stuff. But "true" remains transparent in just the way the other that-clause governors don't. Example:
The only other expression I can think of that takes that-clauses and is transparent is "fact."
There's the rub, yes?
We work from conflicting notions of what exactly counts as thought/belief. You're arguing by definitional fiat, it seems. It follows from what you say here that no creature without language forms and/or holds thought/belief. I disagree.
How do we reconcile this difference?
That holds good for humans and other beasties alike.
No, all thought/belief consists of contemplation and conception of mental correlations drawn between objects of physiological sensory perception and/or oneself. Using your definition, ants attacking other ants or snakes striking rats would be thinking like humans, they're not.
So, the same does not apply to humans and beasties alike.
That doesn't make much sense to me sand. What is contemplation and conception if not mental correlation? They're typically more complex than simple correlation, but nonetheless they consist in/of mental correlation(s).
Nothing in that definition supports the idea that ants and rats would be thinking like humans. The difference between human and beastie is one of complexity, both of the correlations and states of mind, not of elemental constituents.
It makes perfect sense, Creative. Mental correlation is the mere attaching objects to other objects such as the snake seeing a rat and correlating it with food and its feeling of hunger. (So, yes, your definition does support the idea that rats and ants would think like humans, since you claim that is all there is to thought). There is no conception of what that means or any contemplation over whether or not it is right and wrong to eat that rat. Human contemplation and conception has the ability to move beyond that simple correlation and think about (contemplate/conceive) what is happening, decide its meaning to the world and themselves, and even give an ethical judgment of it. Rats and snakes and ants depending solely on what you define as thought cannot do that.
No, as I've shown above, it's more than a matter of complexity, its a matter of elemental constituents of thought the beasties don't have and the humans do.
Not all correspondence(truth) is dependent upon meaning. That was the claim. I stand by it. I also stand by the agreement that meaning is required for a statement's correspondence(truth). Those two claims are not contradictory. Furthermore, I stand by the claim that not all meaning depends on interpretation.
Non-linguistic thought/belief doesn't consist of language. Your argument concerns only that which does. That's how...
That is a matter of logic Meta. Whenever there is true thought/belief there must be truth.
Correspondence is a relationship that is necessarily presupposed within all thought/belief formation itself. All concepts consist of thought/belief. All concepts presuppose correspondence.
Truth is correspondence.
Conceptions of "truth" require language. Correspondence does not.
I would concur, aside from the bit in parenthesis.
Again, I would concur.
Here's where the issue lies, as far as I can surmise.
On my view, contemplation and conception are comprised entirely of much simpler correlations. In other words, contemplation and conception are complex correlations.
It seems you disagree?
I believe it is as I said to creativesoul, truth is the universal, the concept of what it means to be true. So for example, we have individual green things, like we have individual true statements, and we have the concept of what it means to be green, greenness, like we have the concept of what it means to be true, "truth".
When one argues for an independent truth, they are arguing platonic realism.
Quoting creativesoul
Ok, then give me an example of an instance of correspondence which is not meaningful.
Quoting creativesoul
That my argument only concerns language, is only true if you define "meaningful" in such a way that only language is meaningful. But that's simply begging the question with a false premise. Many things other than language are meaningful, and false premises produce false conclusions.
Quoting creativesoul
You mean a matter of logical fallacy don't you? As I said, truth is the concept of what it means to be true, "the quality or state of being true". Wherever there is something green, is there necessarily the concept of greenness?
Quoting creativesoul
Simply put, if truth=correspondence as your definition indicates, and there is correspondence within all thought/belief formation, then there is truth within all thought/belief. For the sake of argument, I will assume that this is the case. That is completely consistent with my claim that truth is subjective (of the subject). How would you proceed to get truth out of the subject's mind, to make it objective? Your argument only allows that truth is a part of thought/belief formation, it is something presupposed by the thinking subject, therefore within the mind of the subject.
Quoting creativesoul
But "Truth is correspondence" is a conception of truth. An instance of something corresponding is an instance of something being true, it is not truth itself. Correspondence is truth, but correspondence is the concept of what it means to correspond, so you have equated one concept with the other, "correspondence", and "truth".
Firstly, it's good we have come to some agreement; that is always value in itself. However, there are two problems with your seeing contemplation as merely correlations, albeit complex ones, between objects:
1. Contemplation means profound thought, and profound thought is always thought beyond mere correlation; it is drawing meaning from those correlations and moving into concepts.
2. Human contemplation goes way beyond correlation of objects, which is as far as animals can go. For example, in the following sentence--"We Americans need to defeat the Nazis before they spread their evil they showed in the Holocaust and fully destroy freedom"--we see concepts expounding on and moving beyond mere objects. "We" are no longer just the objects in a group, they are defined by the concept of nationhood: not an object. The same goes with the ideological concepts of evil and freedom, which have no clear object correspondent; they are concepts that have moved beyond them. And we haven't even discussed the lingusistic dynamics giving all these words meaning beyond their object correspondents.
So, human contemplation is not just complex correlations of objects; it is a mode of thinking above it.
All posts by MU are less than 100 words
This is a post by MU
Therefore this post is less than 100 words
Two false premises, valid reasoning, true conclusion.
I have a lot to say about this, but it will suffice for now just to note that nothing in what you said (in this quote or in the rest of your post) proves that our 'interpretations' of reality (whatever that means) don't actually correspond with the reality which they interpret. The most that it can show is that we do not know whether out interpretations correspond with reality, but it doesn't prove that they in fact do not.
This means that if our 'interpretations' of reality happen to be the correct ones, and they 'correspond' to our interpretations of sentences, then it is perfectly possible that our sentences are objectively true (correctly represent reality). And nothing that you said proves that this is not the case.
Compare this with the case of believing something you don't know. I believe that somewhere in the universe there's intelligent extraterrestrial life. Now, I do not know whether it exists, but it doesn't prove that if I say "intelligent extraterrestrial life exist" that I said something false, because it might very well be true for all that I know. Ignorance doesn't prove anything about the objectivity of what you are ignorant about.
This is because, as Frege already noted, adding 'true' to a sentence doesn't change its meaning, and in fact adds nothing over and above what you get when you simply assert the sentence. "Snow is white" and "it is true that snow is white" mean exactly the same thing.
Do "it is true that snow is white" and "'snow is white' is true" mean the same thing?
As far as their truth conditions are concerned, yes. The two sentence are true or false in exactly the same circumstances, so therefore they assert the very same thing about the world.
1. You can assert the equivalence in truth-value of "P" and "P is true," but if you want to explain meaning in terms of truth conditions, then you cannot treat that equivalence as an account of truth (i.e., the redundancy theory). You just have to be careful here.
2. What I was thinking was something like this: start with a statement S that you treat as purely extensional in the usual way; most ways of making a new sentence S' out of S by prefacing it with something that governs "that S" change the S part of S' from extensional to intensional -- you lose substitution salva veritate. "I think that," "It is known that," "You believe that," and so on, all do this; but "It is true that," and "It is a fact that" don't effect such a change. (Modal operators are also intensional if you don't have possible worlds.)
That suggests that ordinary language treats truth as a purely extensional notion, unlike belief, judgment, etc. There are at least two ways to take that: maybe ordinary language is on the right track, and there is a fundamental difference here; or maybe ordinary language is misleading and that's why it can be so hard to make sense of truth (and facts). (Frege entrenches the extensional view of truth in an obvious way, and it is further entrenched by Tarski, etc.)
What I said doesn't amount to a redundancy theory though. I was just repeating something that Frege himself said, and surely Frege wasn't a 'redundancy' theorist (or deflationist, or however you call it).
And btw, you don't have to use the predicate 'true' to talk about truth conditions either.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
It is more complicated than this (because you also have de-dicto and de-re interpretations etc.).
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I'm not quite sure what you have in mind here, because it doesn't really makes sense to speak about truth intensionally (if by 'intensional' you mean expressions not being substitutable salva veritate). After all substitution salva veritate simply means the preservation of truth (literally), and of course the prefix 'true' is going to preserve truth no matter what. If 'P' is true then obviously 'it is true that P' must be true as well - it is a kind of a tautology really.
I wouldn't say that truth collapses into true, because there is a distinction to be made, between the particular instance, something which is true, and the generalization, truth. I admit, that there is a very difficult task to separate these two, especially if we adhere to the principles which I've been insisting on, because both the particular, and the general, are produced by the minds of the subject, so it is quite difficult to avoid category error.
Quoting tim wood
Remember when I described justification. In my opinion, this is how we get objective concepts, objective knowledge, trough agreement amongst us. This is what is accepted as right, correct. It is objective in the sense of "inter-subjective", so it is not a true objectivity in the sense of "of the object", independent of the subject. It is created by a unification of subjects through communication, and I call this justification because it comes about through the demonstration of what is believed to be the correct way to use words. A concept may come into existence and evolve, as the correct way of using words evolves, and this process is a justification of that usage which is accepted as the correct usage. This is contrary to platonic realism, which places concepts as independent of subjects, making them more truly objective, in the sense of "of the object", resulting in the need to assume eternal concepts or ideas.
So I don't see any immediate difference between "concept of what it means to be true", and "generalization of true". Both seem to express the same thing. But what we refer to as "the concept", or "the generalization", is really the accepted use of the word. So there is an accepted idea of what it means to be true, correspondence with reality, and this is the objective, justified concept of "truth".
The difficulty comes about, as is the case with other abstractions or generalizations, when the thing being conceptualized, or represented by the concept, is not well understood, such that the generalization, the concept, is not an adequate representation of the thing. Or, as is the case in this type of discussion, it becomes evident that there is more than one accepted, justified, and therefore objective concept of the same thing, "truth' in this case. This might signify inconsistency, or perhaps distinct ways in which something could be true.
This means that we have to visit, and analyze the particular instances of being true, to determine exactly why the concept of "truth" is divided, and where the misunderstandings lie. It is extremely difficult, because the only guidance we have to find and identify the particular instances of being true, is our concept of truth. If our concept doesn't give us an adequate representation of what it means to be true, we will be misguided in our effort to identify particular instances of being true.
This is the problem which Plato demonstrates in the "Theaetetus", with respect to the concept of "knowledge". They seek particular instances of knowledge, in order that they may analyze them to learn what knowledge actually is. However, they are unable to find any real instances of knowledge, and they realize at the end, that they had a preconceived notion of "knowledge" which was an inadequate description of how knowledge really is, as it exists. They identified things which might be called knowledge, but found that they were really not knowledge according to the preconceived conditions. So the mistake was that they thought that to be knowledge required that something fulfill the conditions of their preconceived notion, when in reality, what was being called knowledge, and existed as knowledge, could not fulfill the conditions of their preconceived notion. In short, there concept of "knowledge" did not correspond to the existing thing which was being called knowledge. The concept was based in an inadequate understanding of the thing called knowledge.
By the way, the inadequate, preconceived notion of knowledge, which led them astray, was the idea that knowledge had to exclude falsity. They could not find a way that knowledge as we know it could exclude falsity. And we can bring this to bear upon our search for instances of "being true". Should "being true" exclude the possibility that the thing which is true, is false? Is it correct to oppose true with false? It appears to me, like the reason why we can't determine what "being true" means, is that we adhere to this (perhaps untrue) notion that being true is opposed to being false.
Quoting Fafner
This may be true, but if it is the case that we can never know whether our interpretations correspond with reality, then what is the point in defining "truth" in this way? This renders the word "true" useless. If, when we use the word "true" to refer to a sentence, we know that there is the possibility that the sentence is actually false, then why would we use "true", other than to deceive?
Quoting Fafner
That it is "perfectly possible that our sentences are objectively true", does not justify using the word "true" to refer to those sentences. We need something more than "it is possible that the sentence is true", before we judge it as true, and say that it is true. If we cannot get beyond this possibility, then the word "true" is rendered useless.
Quoting Fafner
Right, you cannot say that it is true that extraterrestrial life exists, even though you believe it does. Now extrapolate this example to assume that everything concerning reality is like this. You cannot say that anything is true, despite the fact that you believe things. The word "true" is completely useless unless you were trying to pretend that you knew something which you didn't.
Every instance when meaning is first attributed.
What follows is a bit more self-contradiction on your part. You asked me how not taking an account of non and/or pre-linguistic thought/belief affected your position/argument. I answered as follows...
Here's the argument...
p1. Truth is dependent on meaning
p2. Meaning is dependent on interpretation
C1. Truth is dependent on interpretation.
The issue Meta, was whether or not truth is dependent upon language. I claimed it's not. You argued otherwise as above. Now you're saying that meaning isn't dependent upon language. If there is meaning without language, then truth is as well.
Sophistry.
I didn't say that. I said that all thought/belief consists in/of mental correlations drawn 'between' 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or oneself(state of 'mind'). I'll address the purported problems anyway, for clarity's sake alone...
Here you're affirming the consequent. You're assuming precisely what needs argued for. That said, I wholeheartedly agree that human thought/belief as we know it is far more complex than mere simple correlations. The ability for abstract thought and conceptualization is proof of that. However, it still boils down to mental correlations, no matter how you slice it.
Profound thought is nothing more and nothing less than novel correlation. Conceptualization is often described in terms of a concept being the container, and it's content being everything ever thought/belief and/or attributed to the concept. Again, that starts simply and gains complexity.
I find myself wondering why you keep on saying 'mere correlation'. Complex correlations are not simple ones. Simple ones could be called 'mere' I suppose, but I wouldn't see the point in doing so, except as a display of attitude. I understand that you do not agree with what I'm arguing here, and that's ok. I'm more than willing to answer any and all relevant questions. I'm equally ok with bearing any burden of proof that my claims 'carry'.
I cut this out of the rest for two reasons. First, (some)animals draw mental correlations between more than just 'objects' of physiological sensory perception. They too have states of 'mind'. Those scare-quotes are deliberate. I do not like to use the word "mind" for it carries far too much philosophical baggage along with it. Be that as it may, animals have mental ongoings, and mental states as a result. The state is determined solely by virtue of what has arrested it's attention. That holds good for human and beastie alike.
Second, I've agree that human contemplation can and often does consist in/of more than mental correlations drawn between objects. I've never claimed otherwise, nor does that necessarily follow from anything I've claimed.
You're arguing against an opponent borne of your own imagination.
Again, moving beyond 'mere' objects isn't a problem for my position. Getting to very complex notions without those consisting in/of more simple one would be.
Do you figure that that statement just arose out of thin air, in it's entirety? Surely, you get my point here?
No, I'm not. I'm working from the established definition. We do have to do that in these discussions. So, it goes beyond just mental correlations.
Correspondence is one such thing. Thus, calling correspondence a concept would be equivalent to calling anything else that is not existentially contingent upon our awareness of it... a concept.
Correspondence is presupposed within all thought/belief, including but not limited to pre and/or non-linguistic. Correspondence is not "correspondence". The former is the relationship that the latter takes an account of. It doesn't require being taken an account of.
That's what you incorrectly say. The definitions of profound and profundity assign much more to it than novel correlation, your personal but erroneous definition. Again, that goes beyond starting simply and gaining complexity.
I keep on saying "mere correlation" because human thought goes beyond mere correlations.
Sigh. Offer an example and I'll gladly deconstruct it for you. I've seen no definition which claims what you've stated...
My quote above argues against your original statement and it shows exactly why your model is insufficient for human thought and human thought is more than correlations.
I gave you an example with my sentence I gave you earlier. You didn't deconstruct it and you won't be able to do so now.
And as I showed, human thought involves more than simple and complex correlations.
The term "we" is meaningful as a result of drawing correlations between the term itself, others, and oneself. The term "American" is meaningful as a result of drawing correlations between the term itself, the country, and a place of birth....
As to your first sentence: OK
As to your second paragraph, of course correspondence is a concept; there is no material existence of "correspondence" without human conception of it. And saying correspondence is not "correspondence" makes no sense whatsoever.
Of course I have, Creative, and you haven't shown I haven't.
Be well Sand. Come back when you actually know how to present an argument.
How about this, Creative, the term "We" clearly denotes more than the definition in this sentence, it points to a conceptualized people, the "Americans." And the term American does more than draw correlations since everyones' concept of what an American is and how many Americans there are are different. So, there is no common object or even the same concept for people to correlate to. So, your deconstruction fails.
Yes there are reading comprehension issues, and they're all yours.
Be well, Creative, I well presented my argument; you need to learn how to actually present your own.
It means you can call anything you like "correspondence" but that does not make it correspondence. I can call a dog's tail a "leg" if I like but the dog still only has four legs.
You can say thought / belief = X and then you can define X in any flexible way you want so that whenever X pitches up in any discourse it's made to mean thought / belief. But all you've done is invented a new word for thought or belief and not explained anything about either of them.
No, it does not mean that at all, since you've still used the word "correspondence.' And your example fails too since "dogs tail" and "leg" are different phrases; correspondence and "correspondence" are the same words and they're both being used.
And also, your argument doesn't really prove that we don't know the objective reality either. You cannot derive this conclusion just from the premise that we somehow 'interpret' reality (and I'm not really sure what you mean by this claim anyway - it is ambiguous between a semantic and epistemic sense of 'interpretation').
I think this is right and what I have been, too indirectly, trying to suggest. For instance, even if the truth of a sentence is actually the truth of that sentence under a particular interpretation, that interpretation is not subject-relative. Just as whether a sentence is asserted by an individual is irrelevant to its truth, so whether an interpretation is applied to a sentence by an individual is irrelevant to the truth of the sentence under that interpretation. Truth has nothing to do with subjects at all.
But we do want to say that there is an intimate connection between assertion and truth. At the very least, that truth is the goal, or the point, or the intended object, of assertion. The problem here is not just that whatever warrant you have for asserting that P is no guarantee that P is true. We do what we do with an intention or purpose, based on our beliefs and expectations, and truth isn't even in this logical space at all. The connection is clearly through meaning, which is to say meaning has one foot in the space of intention and one in the space of truth.
Here's an example of how this can work. Suppose U assets sentence S, but S is ambiguous; we could use U's intention as a selector: if by S, U meant p, then we give S interpretation A, and treat S as meaning S1; if by S U meant q, then we give S interpretation B and treat S as meaning S2. Now suppose S1, i.e. S under interpretation A, is true, but S2, S under interpretation B, is false. If U meant p, S is true, but it's not true because U meant p; it's true because S is true under interpretation A.
And obviously U can know all of this, and aim at truth by asserting S.
Unless you are a disjunctivist.
I know what scare quotes do. That doesn't mean that "correspondence" and correspondence are any different in semantics in their expressions themselves. They need further elaboration for that. But feel free to show how they're different without elaborating beyond the expressions themselves. You can't.
This is the thing about perceptual reports -- "Either I see a truck or I am experiencing an hallucination" -- that sort of thing? Is there another disjunctivism? Care to elaborate?
This is at any rate McDowell's view of the matter, which I'm quite sympathetic with.
Right, right. I see I was accidentally dissing McDowell.
I was trying to stay kinda neutral, but back of my mind I was thinking about Dummett's idea that truth has its -- I guess "conceptual" -- origin in the idea of an assertion being objectively right or wrong, and that attempts to graft a richer concept of assertion onto Frege are too little, too late.
I'm pretty conflicted about all of this. Everything I post is an experiment.
It's more than that; Dummett's idea was that there's nothing more to truth than what you can justifiably assert. He was an anti-realist like our friend MU.
Maybe worth noting here that Frege's original Begriffschrift has an "assertion stroke" and a "judgment stroke" but those fall away eventually.
This is very problematic. When meaning is "first attributed" it is rarely if ever, most likely never, a case of correspondence (truth). You hear a sound for the first time, it is non-random, exhibiting some form of order, therefore meaningful, so you attribute meaning. You haven't the vaguest idea of what that sound corresponds to, yet you know it is meaningful.
Your claim here is way of base. How do you suppose that the instance "when meaning is first attributed" is an instance of correspondence without meaning. If meaning is attributed, then there is meaning. I know you insist that this attribution could be mistaken, but even if I allow your proposition that it could be, then how could there be correspondence in this mistaken instance?
Quoting creativesoul
You're completely missing the point of the op creativesoul. The intent was to analyze the difference between "true" and "truth". I agree with you that there could be instances of true belief prior to language, this is not an issue. I do no agree that there is truth prior to language. You do not seem to make a consistent distinction between the two. Sometimes you seem to suggest that if there is an instance of being true, then there is truth, and if there is truth then there are instances of being true, as if they are co-dependent. At another time you argued that true belief is existentially contingent on truth.
Tim had offered a working definition of "truth", such that it refers to a generalization. Do you recognize the difference between instances of being true, and the generalization, truth?
If this is the case, then could you explain to me how you categorize both knowledge and truth, to maintain this separation which you are inclined to adhere to.
Quoting Fafner
You're correct here, I took this as a premise. If you want proof of this premise I would have to proceed to a different argument. That argument is not difficult though. "Objective reality" refers to a reality which is independent of the thinking subject. Knowledge is the property of the thinking subject. If we knew a reality which was independent from thinking subjects (objective reality), this would be a reality in which knowledge is impossible because there would be no thinking subjects. Therefore it is impossible that we know the objective reality. In other words, it is impossible to exclude the thinking subject from knowledge, or else there would be no knowledge. But this is what is required to know the objective reality (reality without the subject), something which is impossible.
It only "refers to something that truth isn't", because of misconception. If we look at the particular instances of being true, and form a generalization, and this generalization is inconsistent with the common concept of "truth", then there is misunderstanding. Either the common concept of truth is a misconception, or the particular instances of being true which we referred to, are not actually instances of being true. For example, if you look at particular examples of horses, things which are commonly referred to by "horse", and we create a generalization, and then compare this to the biological concept of "horse", and find that there is a serious inconsistency between the two, we would assume that there is some sort of misconception going on.
Quoting tim wood
I do not understand this type of distinction at all, it has never made sense to me, as the two categories seem to reduce into each other. One is demonstrated, the other a matter of persuasion? Isn't demonstration a form of persuasion?
Quoting tim wood
So I don't understand this at all. What do you mean when you say that you "find and recognize the a priori"? To recognize implies prior identification. When you "find" an a priori concept, is it through recognition, meaning that you have previously identified it? How would you identify it in the first instance?
Quoting tim wood
The a priori you say is necessarily true. But I don't see that anything could truly qualify as a priori. That's where I'm at. Perhaps you could explain this. The only time I can conceive of something that is "necessarily so", is to use "necessary" in the sense of "needed for a specific purpose". I need food to survive, I need a car to drive, etc.. But to use "necessary" in the sense of "impossible that there is a mistake in my thinking", doesn't seem realistic.
Quoting tim wood
All you have done here is decided to arbitrarily choose a particular range of the spectrum, and designate this as "green". Do you not see this as equally subjective? It's still a matter of agreement, or indoctrination.
Quoting tim wood
I don't think I'm prepared for that. It should be evident from what I've said, that I believe there is misconception concerning truth. To rectify this, we must thoroughly analyze instances where people
use "true" to say "this is true", etc.. It is already evident that there is inconsistency between what people refer to as being true, and what people say truth is. Either there is misconception in what people believe "truth" means, or there is misconception in the people who use "true" to refer to things, or both. I do not believe that the dialectic here has progressed far enough to work this problem out.
Knowledge has this form: For some subject S and some proposition P, S knows that P.
Truth has this form: For some proposition P, P is true.
Interesting. Indeed there are some problems beginning to show...
You see the word "therefore" above? It is being misused. It is supposed to be followed by a valid conclusion. It is not. It does not follow from there being an order to things, that there is meaning. As if order is prima facie evidence of meaning. Besides that, the word "so" indicates a dubious presupposition that the agent attributed meaning as a result of recognizing the aforementioned "order".
That is impossible.
When one is first attributing meaning, s/he doesn't have the intellectual capacity/framework to perform the comparitive analysis between order and randomness.
What's above is your worldview being projected onto an hypothetical "you". That amounts to conflating order with meaningfulness. Otherwise, it is a definition and/or a criterion of/for meaning, which would be fine if it didn't contradict what you've been saying all along...
If it is the case that meaning is dependent on interpretation, then there can be no meaning without thought/belief. Interpretation is existentially contingent upon thought/belief. Thus, there is no meaning without an agent. If there is no meaning without an agent, one could not be first attributing meaning to something already meaningful.
You've arrived at incoherence.
I'll answer the questions at the end the next time around...
I already explained this. Something can be true without anyone knowing it (e.g., my example of extraterrestrial life), so plainly true and knowledge are not the same thing.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No it isn't. Knowledge is a relation between a subject and the known fact. It's not merely a state or a property of a subject taken by itself. If you know that P, then P must be true.
OK, let's go with this then. Can you explain what makes P true, other than S knows that P is true? In other words S knows that P is the condition for P being true. The argument I produced, if you followed it, demonstrates that P is true if S knows that P is true, and nothing further about being true. have you something to add? Further, I would say that not all knowledge consists of things which are true (as knowing-how is distinct for example), being true is a special type of knowledge.
Quoting creativesoul
As I explained earlier, if one judges something as meaningful, there is meaning there. That there is not actually meaning there is an assertion that the first person is wrong, and needs to be justified. It cannot be justified because the second person does not perceive exactly what the first does. The second has a different perspective and cannot perceive all that the first does. Therefore not even order is required for meaning, it could be anything which one judges as meaningful. If it is judged as meaningful by any person, it necessarily is so. The introduction of "order" is irrelevant. In my opinion, if it exists, it is meaningful.
Quoting creativesoul
My argument was that the judgement "that something is meaningful" is dependent on interpretation, because this is what you claimed was necessary for truth of a proposition, "that it is meaningful". That's why I said the representation of my argument as "meaning is dependent on interpretation" is a dreadful representation". If I wrote it that way, at one point, it was a mistake, and not what I meant, and I apologize for misleading you, but that's why I produced what I really meant, in that post, and what I stated in the first place, in that post.
So I do not assert that there is no meaning without an agent, what I assert is that there is no judgement as to whether or not something is meaningful, without an agent.
Fafner, we've been through this already, it took us days to get agreement. Have you lost your memory? Are we back to square one? I addressed your example, "extraterrestrial life" requires interpretation, and this requires a subject. It cannot be true without anyone knowing it.
Quoting Fafner
And we've been through this. "Known fact" (objective knowledge), is what is justified, agreed upon by many subjects. Known fact is not necessarily true. When there is agreement (correspondence) between what the subject believes, and known fact (what is justified or agreed upon by the multitudes), this does not necessitate that what the subject knows is true. There are many examples of when "known fact" gets proven wrong.
We have only agreed that the truth of sentences depends (in some sense) on subjects and the world, but this doesn't entail anything about knowledge per-se. The sentence "extraterrestrial life exist" is true (if it is true) because a) in English the sentence means what it means (this is the part concerning subjects) and b) there is extraterrestrial life (this is how the world itself is). So it is perfectly possible that a sentence is true without anyone knowing it, because it is plain that many sentences that we don't know their truth still make sense, meaning that we already understand what would it take for them to be either true or false without knowing what is actually case.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Of course you are free to define knowledge your way (e.g. that you can know falsehoods), but this is not my definition of knowledge (where knowing that P logically entails the truth of P), and nothing that you say shows that there is no knowledge in my sense of the term.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This only shows that the 'known fact' wasn't really a known fact, but was merely believed to be a known fact. These are two different things on my understanding of knowledge.
True. I can't explain how a single word has two senses without first explaining one sense and then explaining the other. So, for example, 'leg' can be used to include tails or it can be used correctly to exclude tails. "Correspondence" can be used to mean what correspondence usually means; or it can be used to mean anything you like in order to shore up a theory that thought and belief are all correspondence. That was the original complaint by another poster. It's worth thinking about even if you don't agree with it.
This doesn't counter or address what I said in any way. I do appreciate the attempt, though.
Well, "correspondence" is a 14-letter word whereas correspondence is a close similarity, connection, or equivalence between two or more things (or communication by exchange of letters).
Just as "red" is a 3-letter word whereas red is a colour. And just as "Michael" is 7-letter name whereas Michael likes to talk about himself in the third-person.
Sorry, none of that disputes what I said about the semantics involved. Your definition of correspondence could well apply to "correspondence." So, you fail there.
And "red" and red are both colors and both are 3-letter words. Same applies to what you said about your "Michaels." So, you fail there, too.
Red is a colour, not a word, and "red" is a word, not a colour.
No, I don't. And it's astonishing you think Red is not a word and "red" isn't a color. That makes no sense at all.
It makes sense if you understand the distinction between use and mention. So if it doesn't make sense to you then you don't understand the distinction. It's astonishing to think that you don't see it.
No it doesn't because the distinction between use and mention you apply to these words is a false one you fail to support. So, it's not astonishing I don't see it. But keep on saying red isn't a word. That's adorable.
I am Michael. I am not a word. Therefore, Michael is not a word.
"Michael" is a 7-letter word. I am not a 7-letter word. Therefore, I am not "Michael".
The distinction between use and mention is pretty straightforward.
You just said you're a word when you used the word Michael to write "I am Michael." Try to avoid contradicting yourself.
No I didn't.
Just as when I write "I am an English web developer who dabbles in philosophy" I'm not saying that I'm a sentence.
You're talking nonsense.
Of course you did. You wrote that and those are all words, including the Michaels.
That I wrote the words "I am Michael" is not that I'm saying that I'm a word. It's absurd to think I am.
You continue to conflate use and mention.
Here's a simple overview for you:
You tried to do it right here, and that was wrong. Michael is still a word:
No, I don't, you just continue to set up a false separation of them in your misunderstanding of words. Michael is a word, and it's cute you think it isn't. And that blurb you quoted doesn't contradict it at all.
It does.
1. "Copper" contains six letters, and is not a metal.
2. Copper is a metal, and contains no letters.
3. "Michael" contains seven letters, and is not a person.
4. Michael is a person, and contains no letters.
5. "Red" contains three letters, and is not a colour.
6. Red is a colour, and contains no letters.
So, no, that blurb did not contradict it.
Absolutely. I wouldn't conflate knowing-how and knowing-that, just assumed we were talking about propositional knowledge.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well, sure, "know" is a factive verb. Everyone agrees that if someone knows that P, then P is true. (Someone knowing that P is a sufficient condition for P being true.)
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But now this is the converse: if P is true, then someone knows that P. (Someone knowing that P is a necessary condition for P being true.) Its contrapositive is that if no one knows that P, then P is false.
Suppose I have a machine like this: there is a button in Room 1, and a cup in Room 2, and when the button in Room 1 is pushed, the machine drops 1 ball or 2 balls into the cup and then shuts off. You can only see the cup if you are in Room 2.
Now suppose I am in Room 1 and I push the button. No one is in Room 2. Let n = the number of balls in the cup after I push the button. If the machine didn't work, n = 0, otherwise n = 1 or n = 2. I know that (n = 0 ? n = 1 ? n = 2), and it is true that (n = 0 ? n = 1 ? n = 2). No one knows that n = 0, therefore n ? 0; no one knows that n = 1, therefore n ? 1; no one knows that n = 2, therefore n ? 2. Therefore it is not true that (n = 0 ? n = 1 ? n = 2). And that is a contradiction.
Therefore it is false that if P is true, someone knows that P.
It's a convention. We can talk about a thing by using its name; if we want to talk about the thing's name instead of the thing itself, we put the name in quotation marks. (Talking about the thing by using its name we call "use"; talking about the thing's name by putting the name in quotation marks, we call "mention.")
Thus Michael's name is "Michael," but Michael is not Michael's name, for the obvious reason that things are not identical with their names.
Quotation marks just have multiple uses, and this is one of them.
If you don't like the convention, you're free to ignore it, but it makes it more difficult to distinguish when you're talking about Michael from when you're talking about his name.
We can also say this:
If no one knows n = 0, then n ? 0.
If n ? 0, then someone knows that n ? 0.
Who is this person who knows the cup is not empty?
What you and Michael don't get, and what Saussure demonstrated very well, is that the thing and the things's name can't be separated as long as you are using the same word, quotations or no.
I know that, but that's not what Michael said. He said "I am Michael, and I am not a word so Michael is not a word," which was wrong in many ways.Quoting Srap Tasmaner
They do have many uses. That Is an incorrect use of them.
You were free to ignore our discussion, but chose to enter and make your erroneous statements. We were discussing the validity of that "convention" and I showed how it is incorrect. You are free to ignore his statement too if you don't like it.
You might note that I wasn't addressing you here.
I found this bit of your discourse interesting...
This immediately reminded me of Gettier 'problems' with the JTB account. The sleight of hand regarding not taking account of the difference between the candidates' actual belief and Gettier's report upon that. One cannot believe both 'X' and not 'X'. Thus, disjunction does not warrant/justify belief in both.
It's been too long since I read Saussure, so I'm not sure what separating involves here and if that's what Michael and I think we're doing.
I might even agree that quotation marks are not the ideal way to do this, but in our circle it's the standard way of talking about a name (I'm speaking loosely here) instead of the name's bearer. Like I said, it's just a convention in our crowd (but evidently not yours) -- we could refer to Michael's name as
Or are you saying there is no way to talk about a thing's name instead of talking about the thing?
So then never-mind all of the stuff(arguments from contingency) you've been saying heretofore?
That settles it now doesn't it?
I pointed out long ago that you were failing to properly quantify your arguments. If you believe all the stuff you've been writing about the existential contingency regarding meaningful statements, and this new revelation directly above, then I suggest you reconcile these claims by virtue of properly quantifying and categorizing the kinds of things that can be and/or are meaningful, and the kinds of meaning that apply to these things.
X-)
My cat's name is "Jack". Jack is my cat. "Jack" is not my cat.
There is a kind of connection to the argument here. Gettier cases are examples of epistemic luck -- you have a belief, it's true, it's got something that counts as justification, but the proposition believed to be true is true under a different interpretation than the one you intended, and our intuition that these are not examples of knowledge is because the justification you had fit the interpretation under which your sentence was false, not the one under which your sentence was true. (That's probably not all cases -- if it were, I would have just solved the Gettier problem.)
There's another sort of luck that's even easier to get at because there's no question of knowledge at all: that's when you're asked a question on an exam (or a game show, whatever) and you guess -- and your guess is right! If you're asked when the Battle of Hastings was, "1066" is the right answer whether you've ever even heard of the Battle of Hastings or not, because truth is not the same thing as knowledge.
(Not getting into the disjunction thing yet, as I have an argument that uses disjunction still under litigation.)
Nice. Yup. That's pretty much agrees with my understanding of Gettier cases. If memory serves me correctly, all of his cases involve disjunction as a method for justification. I reject them not as lucky, but as unjustified.
I totally agree with truth not being the same thing as knowledge.
There's quite a bit of conflation around these parts regarding the difference between being true and being called "true".
It's certainly not standard convention; so you cant' impose it on others. If it was, people would have to always write in scare quotes to signify they are signifying the actual signified. Not only would that be unwieldy, it is not how we write in English. Its' certainly not how we teach people to write in English departments.
As to Saussure, he correctly points out all words only signify other words that give it meaning; they are not tethered to objects.
One of the things about use/mention I'm ever so slightly uncomfortable about is that in a sense it's a claim that there is nothing but use, and that by enclosing an expression in quotation marks you have created a name for the expression, and it is this name you are using. I get the motivation, and it seems perfectly safe when dealing with simple expressions, but I'm not convinced this is the right view when you have an entire statement enclosed in quotation marks.
Well a convention is not something one imposes -- do as you like. I'm just telling you it's been standard practice in Anglo-American philosophy for more than a few generations now. Indeed, we do always use quotation marks when we want to signify the signifier. You get used to it.
I don't intend to argue Saussure with you.
It's certainly something one imposes when you and Michael try to erroneously argue its legitimacy. If you didn't want to impose it; you shouldn't have entered the conversation as a third party defending it. And, indeed, we don't always use quotations when we want to signify the signifier. The fact your post I re-posted used none helps prove it. So, it's not something one should get used to.
Youre' certainly taking an argumentative tone in your statement, particularly since I was never arguing Saussure; I just explained his ideas for you. So, relax.
If anything, disjunctivism can handle the Gettier cases better than other accounts of justification (if they can handle them at all). Because according to disjunctivism, Gettier cases are not instances of a justified belief in the first place (because all of them are build on the assumption that evidence is not factive) and so the problem simply doesn't arise for this view.
BTW, Gettier case number 1 did not involve disjunction -- it's sort of a faulty definite description, sort of. You believe X will get the job (when it's actually you); X you happen to know has 7 coins in his pocket (and so do you but you don't know it), and you are said to believe the guy who got the job has 7 coins in his pocket, which is true, but not what you meant.
That's not what "disjunctivism" means in the context of epistemology or philosophical accounts perceptual experience.
In the second case, being a disjunctivist means that for one have a visual experience of a red apple (or its seeming to one that the apple is red) ought not to be construed as one being acquainted with a mere impression: a "common factor" between a veridical experience and a mere illusion, say. It rather must be construed as the disjunctive claim that *either* one is perceiving that the apple is red *or* it merely seems to one (albeit mistakenly) that one is perceiving that the apple is red. The central commitment of the disjunctivist is that in cases where the first disjunct holds -- i.e. when one isn't under any illusion -- then one's perceptual experience puts one into direct contact with the world, and not with a sense datum or some such "internal" experience.
Extended to the case of epistemology, disjunctivism means that when one's warrant to believe that P is good enough to secure one's knowledge that P, and there might be cases where one mistakenly believes that P on (what appears to be) the very same rational grounds, then that doesn't mean that one's warrant is defeasible and hence insufficient on its own to secure knowledge. It rather means that *either* one's warrant is good and sufficient to ground knowledge *or* one mistakenly takes oneself to have a good warrant. As applied to the aforementioned example, this would mean that in the case where there seems to one that there is a red apple in from of one, and one isn't under any illusion (and also, one doesn't have any good ground for believing that the circumstances of observation are abnormal, or that one is being tricked, etc.) then that one experiences the apple to be red is sufficient to secure knowledge since it is (in that case!) an undefeasible warrant for it.
In short, disjunctivism strikes at the ordinary conflations between defeasibility (of "internal" justifications) and fallibility (of epistemic powers). Our epistemic or perceptual abilities are fallible, but their fallibility isn't such as to make the successful exercise of them impossible.
Take it easy, man. I'm really not trying to pick a fight with you. I joined in not to bully you but to try to support Michael's point. You disagree. Fine.
All good. We are an example to us all.
On my view the use/mention distinction is a metacognitive tool which enables one to point out the difference between the name and what's being named, when there is a difference between the two, as Banno's cat example clearly shows. Someone else earlier gave a very good rendition as well.
I hold no strong connection to the use/mention distinction, per se.
Placing an entire statement in quotes is a powerful tool that allows us to isolate and talk about thought/belief itself.
Nice. Well put.
If your account is an accurate one, then I've learned something new. That said, Gettier cases hinge upon disjunction, so when Fafner mentioned disjunctivism, the connection I drew wasn't to the school(s) of thought you've since elaborated upon, for they were unbeknownst to me. Rather, as I wrote, it reminded me of Gettier cases...
I have seriously mixed feelings about it.
If you report someone's utterance (or potential utterance) in the exact words they used (or would use), we put those attributed words in quotation marks, just like we were taught in elementary school. But it doesn't look much like a name; it looks like it still has structure. I see a lot of commonality with reports in indirect discourse, so I'm tempted to think of this use of quotation marks not as creating a name but as indicating "null paraphrase," the degenerate case of paraphrase where you have changed no words, just like you learned in school, but otherwise to be treated like any other propositional report, where you typically fiddle with pronouns and indexicals at least.
Not sure either way though.
I'm unfamiliar with disjunctivism. Thus, I wouldn't know much about how well they handle(explain?) Gettier cases. Seems that I would concur with their conclusions regarding them, even if our method for arriving at that conclusion differs, which it may...
Yes. I remember vaguely the case about the coins and who would get the job. I thought(perhaps mistakenly) that that case worked from disjunction as well, although not openly stated as such. At any rate, I would have to revisit the paper again to be sure what I think...
I think it does actually, since it provides a conception of indefeasible warrant that can be substituted to the misguided notion of merely "internal" justification that makes the construction of Gettier examples possible. And it achieves this consistently with the correct intuition that our epistemic powers are fallible. Although, rather than saying that it solves the Gettier problem, it might be better to say that it makes the problem go away since it undercuts the motivation for providing analyses of knowledge in terms of capacities or concepts that don't presuppose it.
The sentence means what it means, without being interpreted? I give up.
Quoting Fafner
The sentence only makes sense to a person interpreting it. Without a person interpreting it, it makes no sense, and therefore cannot be true.
Quoting Fafner
We can't tell the difference between a known fact, and something believed to be a known fact, because they both appear to be known facts. So we call them both known facts. Since we can't distinguish between a known fact and what appears to be a known fact, or just believed to be a known fact, then it cannot be incorrect to call the thing which is believed to be known fact, by this name, "known fact", unless you want to ban the use of "known fact". Therefore your definition of "known fact" is untenable, rendering it always incorrect to use "known fact", because we would never know whether it is a known fact or not. However, if it is acceptable to refer to the thing which appears to be a known fact, as "known fact", then your definition is wrong. So your concept of "known fact" is actually useless.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
No, I do not agree to that. As per the example of knowing-how, not all knowledge entails truth. Therefore if someone knows that P, this does not mean P is true. We must determine what "that P" means, to see if this is a truth or not. Otherwise, "true" is redundant and meaningless. It only comes about, that "knowing that P" is a sufficient condition for P being true, if you define "knowing that" in a particular way, which supports this. I don't think we've properly determined what "that P" means, in order to jump to this conclusion.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
The arguments I produced earlier demonstrate that it is necessary for someone to know P, in order for P to be true. But "knowing P" is not equated with "P is true", knowing P is a necessary condition for P is true. So it does not follow that not knowing P leaves P as false. The problem you refer to is created by your introduction of the phrase "knowing that P". The meaning of this phrase really needs to be justified.
Let's say P = "the dog is wet". And let's say someone knows that the dog is wet. But this is not "knowing that P", because P signifies the phrase, the words, "the dog is wet". What the person knows, is that the dog is wet. So when you propose that the person "knows that P", you commit a category error, because what the person knows is a particular instance of knowledge, and P stands for a proposition. You say, "a person knows that a proposition", and this is really nonsense. The problem you point to is the result of this category error, the very mistake which Michael was trying to explain to TS.
If you believe that P signifies the meaning of the words, not the words themselves, then "P" signifies that the dog is wet, and "that P" would signify that that the dog is wet. And this is nonsense, so clearly "P" signifies the words, and your argument suffers category error.
What connections are you drawing between Gettier and the present debate(s)?
Sorry, but I don't really see how disjunctivism helps here. How does a theory on perception address Gettier's original two examples? They've got nothing to do with non-veridical experiences.
I really don't know what you mean. What is "quantify your arguments"? Are you suggesting mathematics? What is "existential contingency"? And how is my statement not consistent with what I said before? What do you mean by "quantifying and categorizing the kinds of things that can be and/or are meaningful"? Why is any of this relevant? You seem to be writing random nonsense.
I'm saying you've argued that meaning is dependent upon... and truth is dependent upon... and interpretation is dependent upon...
You should've been arguing that some meaning, and some truth, and some...
And the reason that I think this case is particularly problematic for the disjunctivist because in this case your evidence consists in precisely the fact itself that you believe to be true, so we are not assuming here the 'highest common factor' view of evidence, or anything of this kind.
Given what you've been arguing, I can only laugh when you write things like...
As before, you're projecting...
No, because that's not what I mean, what I mean is that all instances of being true are dependent on interpretation, not some. You keep insisting on "some", but fail to give me any examples of an instance of being true which does not involve interpretation. If you could, I'd have to switch to "some", and this would refute my argument, which is an argument of essences, what is essential to truth.
Sure, you can assume here anything you want about interpretation, but it doesn't matter because you have (b) as well that grounds its objective status.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In my story I assume that the sentence is interpreted, because after all you understand what the sentence "extraterrestrial life exist" means. But the point is that interpreting the sentence is not sufficient either to guarantee its truth or to guarantee that it is known, because interpretation can only give you the meaning of the sentence.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, you are begging the question. You just assume that knowledge (in my sense) is impossible without an argument. You wrote: "Since we can't distinguish between a known fact and what appears to be a known fact" - I don't accept this and I don't see any argument to support this claim.
Disjunctivism isn't merely a theory about perception. Disjunctive theories of perception and epistemological disjunctivism are two separate topics, though they are very intimately related since they have the same general structure and are animated by the same motivation to root out some of the resilient Cartesian presuppositions that infect both theories of perception and traditional theories of knowledge.
And, of course, disjunctivists agree with Gettier that the JTB account of knowledge can't be correct. It goes further in pointing out how many attempts to buttress the JTB analysis with the addition of supplementary conditions are doomed to fail.
Thanks for bringing that up. This is a problem that I have thought long and hard about. I have imagined lots of puzzling scenarios where commandos are being unknowingly parachuted in Barn Facade County in the vicinity of a real barn, in an area within Barn Facade County where most barns are real, etc.
I think most of the problems that arise in such cases stem from presuppositions that are intimately connected with "highest common factor" theories. And those are presuppositions that epistemic powers of human beings aren't merely supervenient on their "internal" constitutions *and* actual favorable epistemic circumstances, but are independent of the range of counterfactual circumstances where those powers might be expected to be realized. What is peculiar about those ranges, properly defined, is that they always must be relativized to a specific practical context. This is in line with contextualist theories of knowledge according to which what counts as possession of knowledge by an agent whose epistemic powers are fallible is the practical considerations on which the possibility of failure are practically significant (and not merely probable in a statistical sense). Hence, for instance, you may count as knowing that your wife is home while you don't count as knowing that the lottery ticket that you bought is a losing one even though the probability of the former belief being mistaken is much higher than the probability of the latter being mistaken.
When the ineliminable contextualist constraints on ascriptions of epistemic powers to individuals are taken into account, then, it seems to me that disjunctivism deals correctly with barn facades. That's Because what is "taken in" as evidence isn't merely the actual object of cognition (a real barn, say) but also relies for its status as good warrant on one's epistemic powers not being suppressed by a contextually relevant range of possible (countrafactual) errors. Since those context can vary according to the perspectives of agents that are differently positioned, this means that the belief expressed by an agent as "there is a (real) barn in front of me" may count as a case of knowledge relativized to one practical context and not to another.
Here is an example. Suppose you are traveling with a friend to Barn Facade County (where most "barns" are actually mere decoy facades) and she knows this to be the case whereas you don't. Suppose then, that you stop by a real barn. The barn thus appear to both of you to be a real barn but only your friend knows that she doesn't know it to be a real barn (since she knows the probability for this to be quite low). According to the standard accounts of such situations, you don't know either that this is a barn since your "justified" true belief that this is a real barn isn't actually justified. And this is because you are mistaken about the objective probability of your experience being an experience of a real barn.
The problem faced by disjunctivim, it would seem, it that it wrongly would conclude in your having knowledge on the ground that circumstances are favorable, in this particular case, for your epistemic abilities being exercized. All that would be required (seemingly) is that this particular barn is real.
However, when suitably conjoined with a contextualist account of knowlege, disjunctivism would not render a unique verdict in this case, as it indeed shouldn't. The mistake that must be avoided is the idea that there is a unique objective probability of the perceptual experience being an experience of a real barn independent of the characterization of the epistemic power being exercized. How might this probability rather to be evaluated? What contextual range of counterfactual circumstances is it that might relevantly be taken into consideration for purpose of determining whether or not your belief that there is a barn counts as knowledge? I'll let you think about it a little before I propose my own suggestion.
Sorry, I can't figure out where you demonstrated this. Would you mind linking the post or posts?
Quoting Pierre-Normand
And I agree that disjunctivist could possibly respond by giving some sort of contextualist account - but this was my point, it doesn't look that the disjunctivist has any inherent advantage over other accounts simply by virtue of being a disjunctivist. He still needs some pretty complicated story to tell in order to explain the difference between ordinary cases of knowledge and the Gettier cases, and that story would probably be as complicated as any of the proposed non-disjunctivist solutions to the problem (like those that appeal to 'sensitivity' or 'safety'), and hence no less contentious. I think the disjunctivict would've had a real advantage if he could handle the Gettier problem without the need of any "fine tuning" to specifically address the Gettier cases (that is, if the solution was built-in from the start).
And besides, I think that many non-disjunctivist epistemologists (at least those with a contextualist leaning - which I think nowadays is the majority view) would agree with most of what you say, and some I'm sure would even agree that we need, as you said, to reject "the idea that there is a unique objective probability of the perceptual experience being an experience of a real barn independent of the characterization of the epistemic power being exercized.". So my point is that it doesn't appear that there are any special resources which are available to the disjunctivist qua-disjunctivist to handle the Gettier problem, which are not also available to other epistemologists.
Well, you had suggested rather more strongly that barn facades are "particularly problematic" for disjunctivist accounts of the fallibility of knowledge. And I agree that it might look, at first blush, that they are. On my view, disjunctivism recommends itself quite appart from the way it deals with Gettier cases since it is an account that jettisons the old empiricist conception of beliefs and justifications qua internal representational items the epistemic subject can be fully acquainted with irrespective of the "external" world doing her any favor. It just so happens that, on my view, disjunctivism *also* deals rather elegantly with barn facades through distinguishing much better than empiricism does between (1) the conditions where epistemic powers can be ascribed to subjects from (2) the conditions when those powers are successfully exercised.
I can grant you for the sake of argument that epistemic contextualism could also be made use of by an epistemologist who doesn't endorse disjunctivism in order to deal with Gettier examples. But I am unsure how successfully such an epistemologist would deal with the barn facade case. I haven't done a literature search for this and I have rather produced my own account from scratch in order to bring disjunctivism to bear on issues that were puzzling me. And I have found out that it throws light on the contextualism/invariantism debate regarding knowledge attributions. I also don't think this account produces explanations any more complicated than is warranted by the contrivance of the cases it is brought to bear on. But since this discussion about epistemological disjunctivism is veering off from the topic of this thread (my fault), I may start a new one regarding contextualism and barn facades.
We've been through this already, your (b) is covered by the other argument which you have not addressed. All we have to refer to, as "the way which the world is", is how the world appears to us. This is our interpretation of the supposed objective reality. And how the world appears to us, may or may not be a true representation of the way which the world is. Both sides, (a) and (b) are subjective.
When we apply the word "true", use the word to say that something is true, the (b) side of the correspondence is not "the way that the world is" but "how the world appears to us". So (b) does not ground the objective status of "true" when we commonly use the word, it refers to our interpretation of reality. If you insist that we can only use the word "true" when how the world appears to us is the way that the world is, then we can never use the word, because all we have is how the world appears to us. This leaves the word "true" useless.
However, we do clearly use the word, and when it is used, (b) does not ground the objective status of truth, because it refers to how the world appears to us, not how the world is, and this is interpretation. Your claim that (b) does objectify , relates to a definition of "truth" which renders the word "true" unusable.
Quoting Fafner
See, you just dismissed the argument, as if it were irrelevant. We already agreed that known fact is based in how the world appears to us, and therefore it may or may not be as the world is. Now you've gone back to claiming that "known fact" is necessarily the way that the world is. Clearly this is not the case, because what is referred to as known fact is often proven wrong.
You've accepted that the reality of "known fact", as we use it, is grounded in the way that the world appears to us. However you assume that there is a different sort of "known fact" which is grounded in the way that the world is. But they are both the same name, with the same referent any time "known fact" is used, the way that the world appears to us. When looking at two things called known fact, how do you propose to distinguish whether it's your special sort of "known fact" which cannot ever be proven to have been wrong because it refers to the way that the world is, from the "known fact" of common usage which includes things that could be later proven wrong.
If you have no way to identify facts which are impossible to ever be proven wrong (known with absolute certainty), from those which may be proven wrong, then your claim is unfounded. Furthermore, if it is as you seem to believe, that "known fact" should only be used to refer to things which are known with absolute certainty, then "known fact" is rendered useless.
Are you ready to read? It's a series of arguments started at the beginning of the thread. It is complex arguments, because there are two sides of truth, as correspondence, represented lately by Fafner's (a) and (b). I am still repeating those same arguments now. They are not well understood by the other members, so repetition is necessary. I suggest starting from the beginning.
Here's a summary. There is a sentence, belief, or some such thing which is said to be true. Whether or not that sentence, or belief is true, is dependent on the meaning of it, and this is interpretation, which is "of the subject", subjective. On the other side, there is a supposed reality which the meaning corresponds with. But when we judge something as "true" we judge it according to how this reality appears to us, and this is also an interpretation, subjective. Therefore truth is entirely "of the subject", a property of knowledge. There cannot be truth outside of knowledge.
You don't see it, but what you said here actually proves my point. If the world appears to you in a certain way, then it is an objective fact that the world is either the way that it appears to you, or that it isn't. So having a mere appearance of reality already makes your appearance objectively true or false. So for example if you have an appearance of seeing a cat on the sofa, then it is either objectively true that there's a cat on the sofa, or objectively false. Nothing can be an appearance unless it already objectively represents reality to be in a certain way (and "objectively represent" is not the same as representing truly - a false representation is still objective in this sense, since it represents what is not the case, but could have been).
So ironically, interpretation is precisely what grounds objectivity.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
All of this is just irrelevant to my definition (and the rest of what you say in the comment). It doesn't matter what we say or believe about the facts. My definition merely states the conditional that if someone knows that P, then P is a fact. If P is not the case, then by definition the subject cannot known that P (and it doesn't matter if he himself is aware of this). I'm not claiming that we actually know the facts, it is only a definition of what it means to know something.
It seems to me that you either don't understand what definitions are, or what conditionals mean (or both), because your objection simply makes no sense.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Do you mean to say that under the same scheme of interpretation, some statement P could be false and someone know that P?
For example, "I am at work today," spoken by me, on this day, is false; it would be true spoken today by my buddy Mike; it would be true spoken by me on some other day.
(Note that under this scheme of interpretation, "I am not at work" is true, and there's no issue about knowing that I am not at work. That's still knowing something that's true.)
Is it possible for someone to know that I am at work today, interpreting "I am at work today" the same way I interpret it -- "I" referring to me, and so on -- an interpretation under which it is false?
Look.
You've been all over the place with what you've claimed in an attempt to refute my claim that correspondence is prior to language.
You have claimed that correspondence is dependent upon meaning.
You have claimed that if something exists it is meaningful.
You have claimed that meaning depends upon interpretation.
You have claimed that meaning depends upon judgment.
Clearly, it cannot be the case that all of these claims are true. However, one could foreseeably correct the incoherence by virtue of arguing that some meaning is...
Doing that would require re-categorizing meaning into different kinds. That's what I was getting at before. Regarding your suggestion to offer a case where correspondence existed prior to meaning, I gave you that already. Every time meaning is first attributed. So...
I have already presented you a case, based upon my framework, which you haven't actually considered in light of the framework itself. Rather than doing that, you continue to apply a different framework to the words I'm using. Namely, you've applied your own, which has been all over the place. As a matter of fact, it was within your reply to my example that you first claimed that if something exists it is meaningful. Nearly thirty pages into the thread. Arguing by definitional fiat. Moving the goalposts. Creating incoherence with what you've already claimed.
That's unacceptable for all kinds of reasons.
So, it seems that unless there is some much needed attention given to the fact that we're working from two contrary positions, there's not much to be gained by continuing...
The above conflates calling something "true" and truth. That is, it conflates belief(statements thereof) and truth.
No, it is not an objective fact that either the world is this way, or it is not this way. The concept of "the world" and the existence of the world, as understood by human beings, is supported by the concept of matter. Aristotle demonstrated that matter is necessarily exempt from the law of excluded middle, which you are employing to produce your so-called "objective fact". This refutes your argument.
Quoting Fafner
I addressed the problem with this phrase "knows that P" in my last post to Srap. Your use involves a category error.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes that is correct. We have to account for the way that the word is used, when we define it. Things which we refer to as "knowledge", often turn out later to have been wrong. Many of the things which we know, are actually false, despite the fact that we claim to know them, and they are referred to as knowledge. The entire body of knowledge consists of things which may later be determined as false. So, we must look at that thing which we are calling by the name "knowledge", analyze that thing, and produce our definitions and descriptions accordingly. Doesn't it seem kind of ridiculous to say that what is essential to knowledge, is that knowledge excludes falsity, when this is not supported by the evidence, the evidence being the knowledge that exists? It's faulty inductive reasoning to say that everything which is known must be true, when clearly many things which are known are not true.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
The issue is what we are referring to with the word "know", what we are claiming when we claim to know. We do not claim absolute certainty with no possibility of being wrong. Often when I claim to know something, I end up being wrong. So we can not set up as a premise, for a logical argument, that to know something is to exclude the possibility of falsity. This would be a false premise, because it doesn't represent "know' in the way that it is normally used nor does it represent the thing referred to when we use "know". It is a premise based in faulty inductive reasoning, a false premise.
Quoting creativesoul
I don't see why not. Point to a place where you see inconsistency and I'll explain how you've misinterpreted what I said.
Quoting creativesoul
Until we have agreement, and understand each other on what meaning is, I see no point in trying to make categories. First we must clearly define what we are categorizing.
Quoting creativesoul
Right, we have little agreement or understanding of each others framework. "Meaning" seems to be the stumbling point. I suggest that we could continue in discussion, but we need to concentrate specifically on what is meaning.
Quoting creativesoul
OK, now we've gone outside of what I suggested, concentrating on meaning, but I'll make a reply to this, trying to concentrate on meaning. When we call something true, "true" has meaning, it refers to something. What it refers to is something subjective (of the subject). I think that "truth" is a concept we have, agreement between us, or some sort of informal convention, of what it means to be true, so that when different people call something "true", there is consistency between them as to what is meant by "true", because of this unofficial agreement to use the word in the same way. And this is what we call "truth", our agreement as to what constitutes being true. You say that this is "correspondence", and many agree with you, but not everyone. For those who agree with you, truth is correspondence, and they will use "true" accordingly.
Do you agree that, assuming sincerity in speech, that calling a statement "true" displays belief that the statement is true(corresponds to reality, if you like)?
The term "meaning" has meaning.
Kinda odd isn't it?
What makes it meaningful? What are the necessary preconditions for meaning?
Earlier you said existence.
I disagree.
X-)
If existence alone makes something meaningful, then it is not the case that meaning depends upon interpretation and judgment, for existence doesn't require either.
And...
Meaningless marks exist.
It's not a "category error." (Btw, the phrase you want, the one Ryle coined, is "category mistake.") It's also not a use/mention violation. "S knows that P" is just an informal schema. It is a stand-in for a proposition formed by concatenating the name of a subject, the phrase " knows that " and a proposition. The name substituted for S is to be used in the resulting sentence -- call it S1 -- and thus does not appear in quotes in S1; the proposition substituted for P is to be used in S1 and thus does not appear in quotes in S1.
The schema is informal in the sense that it is not part of any formal system and we are not committed to quantifying over subjects and propositions, although some informal quantifying seems harmless enough. No domain of discourse is being specified. No rules of inference. It's just a notation, a kind of shorthand. The argument is still being conducted in regular English.
"S knows that P" is also informal in the sense that it is designedly neutral on what sorts of things S and P are -- remember, there is no specified domain of discourse -- except that they would be considered appropriate on the LHS and the RHS of " knows that ". As such it is appropriate for broadly propositional accounts and inappropriate for anything else. It is not intended to be useful for discussion of abilities, skills, or any other sort of knowledge-how. Those things don't go on the RHS of " knows that ".
It's unnatural, but you could try to specify what you intend to substitute for S and for P, without actually doing so. (It's simplest just to do so, unless you start working with classes of S's and P's.) In that case, you might say, "S = 'George Washington', and P = 'life is suffering'." "S" and "P" are informally the names of variables; to specify their values, you write an identity between the name of the variable and the name of the value. In this identity, the names are used, not mentioned. Names for what we intend to substitute are formed by enclosing the expressions in quotes.
When we say that something "is true", we're talking about thought/belief and/or statements thereof(assertions/propositions). We're saying that the statement/assertion/proposition is true. And yes, thought/belief and statements thereof come through a subject, however the ability to form thought/belief requires something other than the subject. Thus, talking in terms of subjective/objective is inherently incapable of taking proper account of that which consists in/of both, and is thus neither. Truth and meaning are two such things.
Well, we can be wrong then, can't we?
We(mankind) have had plenty of historical agreements as to what constituted being true, and have been wrong. We've later found out that that which we once thought/believed and agreed was true, was not. Rather much of what we thought/believed was true was false. Truth cannot be false. Agreement about what is true can be. Therefore, agreement is insufficient for truth.
I do not say that any of that is correspondence.
A stipulative definition can't. A lexical definition is if it fails to describe how the word is actually used.
What about the cases in which we use some term or other to talk about something or other that existed prior to our becoming aware of it?
It's a reasonable point that "correspondence" is not (necessarily) the same as correspondence. A *so-called* thing is not necessarily the thing itself. Dismissing that point may be the *end* of a debate. I pointed out that it is not much for a *beginning*.
Now you are simply appealing to authority. Some famous philosopher said it, therefore it must be true... It seems to me that you've ran out arguments, so I'm out.
This is where we have to proceed with caution, and not jump to conclusions. You say this as if there are possible meanings, in existence, like possible worlds in existence, but if the interpreter chooses from possible meanings, these possible meanings are produced within the interpreter's mind, just like possible worlds are produced by the logician's propositions.
When an interpreter chooses a meaning, one does so on the assumption that there is a correct meaning. The assumption of a correct meaning is sometimes justified as what the author meant. However, sometime the author might speak intentionally ambiguously, as is often the case in poetry. Furthermore, there is often vagueness within the author's mind as to exactly what one's intentions are, as one's intention are often not completely clear to oneself.
The nature of intention is such that it is often something vague in the background, so if this is extended to "what was meant" by the author, there may not be such a thing as the correct meaning, what was meant. This may cast doubt on the assumption that there is a correct meaning. If this doubt seeps into the interpreter's act of choosing from possible meanings, then the assumption that there is a correct meaning is removed from the interpreter's guiding principles. The selection of possible meanings is produced by the interpreter's mind, and the meaning which is chosen (as the correct choice) is the one which is consistent with the intentions of the interpreter. We may argue that this is faulty interpretation.
Quoting tim wood
Yes, this is the result. One claims to have understood the author, but this is based on how one interprets the meaning. Has that individual striven to understand "the correct meaning", assuming that the author intends something, or has the interpreter chosen meaning based on what is appealing to oneself. As you say, much interpretation is done fast, and may be near a subconscious level. So in most interpretation there is degrees of each, considering the author's intentions, and the influence of the interpreter's intention, which enter in. We cannot avoid interpreting according to how we've learned to understand the particular words in use, but if we approach an author with an interpretation, the author might very well say, "that's not what I meant". So it is our due diligence to pay respect to the way that the author uses words, and if it appears to be a way which one is not familiar with, effort must be taken to understand that way.
Quoting tim wood
Yes, this is definitely where the problem lies. When we interpret a text, we always maintain within our minds, or deeper at the subconscious level, that what we are getting out of it must be guided by the assumption that the author intended something, this is what is meant, the assumption of a meaning of the text . So we don't interpret in any willy-nilly way because we are assuming that there is a correct way. This we learn as a child, learning a language.
When we interpret reality, what grounds the assumption of a correct way? And of course we have perception to provide this for us. But what is perception other than a much more general form of interpretation? So take your example of looking at a photograph. When we learn to read, or to speak, by paying attention to what others are saying, we are learning to focus on a very particular aspect of our environment. Using language requires that we focus on this very small portion of what is going on around us. Perception in general involves this same type of focus. That other life forms perceive things in very different ways, indicates that they have evolved to focus on their environment in different ways from us. We can say that there are aspects of the environment which prove to be important to us, we evolve to focus on them. As a child we learn to focus on language use because it is important. And, living creatures have evolved ( therefore learned) to focus on particular aspects of their environment which are important, and this is perception.
Now the issue, where the problem lies, is what guides us towards the "correct" interpretation of reality. In the case of language use, we are guided by the assumption that there is something meant, a definite meaning, given by the author. In the case of interpreting reality, we are not guided by this assumption, so we produce the assumption that there is a way that reality "is", a type of logical basis, the law of identity. The problem is that this "the way that the world is" is inconsistent with the way that the world reveals itself to us through our senses. The world presents itself to us as continually changing through time, with no such thing as "the way that the world is".
It's a reasonable point that "correspondence" is not (necessarily) the same as correspondence. A *so-called* thing is not necessarily the thing itself. Dismissing that point may be the *end* of a debate. I pointed out that it is not much for a *beginning*. ][/quote]
You clearly weren't reading the discussion before you entered it with your irrelevant, erroneous point, and you clearly haven't been reading my posts well. So, I am done with our conversation. Continue your erroneous, irrelevant points if you will; I won't be reading your posts on this thread.
While the use/mention distinction is relevant in discourse about truth, I placed quotes around the term correspondence as a means to talk about the term itself as compared to talking about what the term denotes.
Ha, ha, that's funny. Either I believe a famous philosopher whose work has stood the test of time, whose arguments are well explained and make sense, and he remains an authority today, or I believe Fafner with the contrary opinion. There's something to be said for authority, don't you think?
No, the funny thing is he wasn't spot on at all, as I never said the name for a thing is necessarily the same as the thing. Your and Cuthbert's problem is you think when you use the word for the thing you are actually successfully representing the thing itself instead of more words referring to that thing.
And Cuthbert wasn't even saying what you said he was saying. He was trying to explain the difference between a word in scare quotes and one without them, which wasn't the issue I had been discussing.
I would invite you to consider the Toy Story example I presented earlier. Buzz and Woody actually mean exactly the same thing by the word "flying" and falling, with or without style, is excluded from that meaning. Buzz applies the word to events Woody doesn't only because Buzz has a mistaken belief that these are cases of what he and Woody agree is flying.
So it is with your treatment of the word "knowledge."
A leaf twists, turns, and flutters in the wind, showing us now this side, now that, its color shifting as its angle to the sun changes, but the whole time, it's a leaf.
Language is not designed to describe every detail of every moment, and its failure to do so is actually its success at doing something else: language picks our the relatively invariant. Even the process of the leaf's constant movement has some invariance to it that can be picked out, as I did in the first sentence of this post.
(Besides which, it's largely only a practical not a theoretical limitation: a digitally encoded film is in essence the entire contents of a person's visual field turned into language.)
The invariance we pick out with words is actually there. We have words like "leaf" in our language because leaves are relatively persistent. Even in death, they are still leaves for quite a while before they finally decay enough for us to stop calling them leaves. That boundary is vague and nevertheless useful and effective. What leaves never do is spontaneously turn into mushrooms or fruits or rocks.
He was spot on by virtue of describing something agreeable to my words, not yours. You were arguing against mine earlier, by virtue of misunderstanding. He chimed in earlier in order to share that bit of knowledge with you, seeing that I was quite unsuccessful at it.
Why would you mistakenly conclude that I conflate conceptual meaning with the unknown realm?
Cuthbert was pointing out differences between a plurality of different uses/meaning for using quotes. In other words, he set out the the use of quotes two different ways. The bit about the word not being the thing is akin to the map/territory distinction.
Are you familiar with it?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
You call this "informal", but it is not informal, because P stands for "proposition" and "proposition" signifies something formal. If we remove the formal reference, we say "S knows that A", where "A" signifies "what" S knows. See the difference? In the one case "A" signifies what is known by the subject, and in the other case P signifies a proposition. So A refers directly to what S knows whereas P refers to a bunch of words which themselves signify what is known. To confuse these two is category error.
Let's say that S stands for a particular subject, and P stands for a particular proposition. S is Bob, and P is "the sky is blue". Now "Bob" refers to a particular individual, and "the sky is blue" refers to a particular state of affairs. What purpose does "that" serve? Bob knows the sky is blue, or, Bob knows that the sky is blue?
When we say "Bob knows the sky is blue", what is meant is "Bob knows that the sky is blue", not "Bob knows this proposition "the sky is blue'". If we add "that", to say "Bob knows that the sky is blue", what we are saying is Bob knows the proposition "the sky is blue", as true. What is added then, by adding "that", is that "the sky is blue" now signifies a proposition which is designated as true, instead of a state of affairs. So by adding "that" to "knows", such that we say "knows that", we change what follows (the sky is blue), from signifying a state of affairs to signifying a proposition.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Ok, if "S knows that P" is informal, and says nothing about what S and P are, can we use S and P in the normal way? Let's say S stands for subject and P stands for predicate. When you say S knows that P, what you are really saying is that this proposition P, is attributed to this subject S. Now that we have the category error worked out, we can remove "that" as redundant, and just say S knows P, so that P represents a proposition predicated of S, as knowledge which S has, like any object has properties. S knows P is predication. Using the ancient Parmenidean equation, "Being is Knowing", therefore S is P.
Quoting creativesoul
Yes, there is a relationship between sincerity and truth, so when we say "that one speaks the truth", or "what has been said is true", sincerity is necessarily implied. "Sincerity" being the broader term, does not necessarily imply truth, because we use "sincere" in some other ways.. So "sincerity" in this case signifies that the person saying "true" means true according to that person's understanding of the word. If that person understands "true" as "corresponds to reality", then this is what the person means.
Quoting creativesoul
I went through this earlier in the thread with tim woods. It had occurred to me that the essence of truth was to be found in definition. A definition is not itself false, because it must be judged as such, by comparing it to reality, and reality is inductive principles drawn from common usage. So if it is not an acceptable definition according to inductive conclusions, one might try to argue that it is "false". But since usage varies and changes, these inductive principles cannot rule out any possible uses or definitions as impossible, so none can accurately be said to be false. If definitions are the type of thing which cannot be false, and truth is the type of thing which cannot be false, then we have correspondence between truth and definition. That is, if one is assuming that truth is the type of thing which cannot be false, then we find truth as corresponding to definition.
Quoting creativesoul
Existence, meaning, and things like this, are attributes, properties which are predicated of a subject. But the act of predication requires a subject. Without the subject, there is no existence, or meaning, because these words refer to how subjects describe their environment. There is nothing illogical about saying that all existing things are meaningful, this just makes "meaning" the more general category from "existing", so that all existing things are meaningful, and it is still possible that non-existing things may be meaningful as well.
Quoting creativesoul
That is a claim you make, but I don't see how you could ever justify this claim. Just by referring to these marks here, you have made them meaningful. So any such claim, that something meaningless exists, is self-refuting. You have referred to the meaningless thing, making it meaningful. "Existing" is an assumption made by a subject, and one cannot make the assumption without giving meaning to that thing referred to as existing. In reality, what you are attempting to do here is refer to non-existent things, and this just demonstrates that meaning is the more general term than existing, because we can refer to non-existing things, such that they have meaning as well as existing things.
Quoting creativesoul
I would say that this is a dubious premise, to say that the ability to form thought/belief requires something other than the subject. We should leave this one as something which can never be demonstrated, and therefore not a sound premise.
Quoting creativesoul
I agree with the first part of this, that we are sometimes mistaken in what we believe. I don't agree with the second part. When I claim X is true, and I believe it, I am referring to the object, what I believe, as having the property of being true. And other people use "true" in this way as well. It may be the case, that later in time it is demonstrated that this object does not have the property of being true, and I respect this fact, but that does not prevent me, or others from using "true" in this way, and this being an acceptable way of using "true". Therefore, what "true" refers to, in actual usage (and what we should adhere to for our definition, if we wish to maintain accuracy), is not the property described as "impossible to be false". So your statement "truth cannot be false" is inconsistent with reality, because when we use the word "true" we still allow the possibility of falsity. You want to define "truth" in a way which is inconsistent with reality.
Describing something agreeable to your words isnt' being "spot on;" its being replicative. And he didn't even do that.
Why would you mistakenly conclude I said anything about an "unknown realm.". Try and read my posts better.
He was doing nothing of the kind. Again, you need to read posts better before addressing them. I'm sure you can.
So, Meta...
You claim that truth can be false.
I've nothing further.
The bit about the word not being the thing is akin to the map/territory distinction.
Are you familiar with it?
Have a good day. You and I are done here; I won't read anymore of your posts.
Sigh...
It would be shown to you in the only way it can be if you a)understand the map/territory distinction and b)re-read my earlier post while applying it.
Here's something to consider...
Sometimes the chickens get fed old cereal(cheerios). The cereal is in a plastic bag which is near perfectly clear. I mean, the cereal is quite easily able to be seen through the bag, and yet it seems that the chicks do not take note of that. I say that as a result of the bag never being bothered by the chicks despite it's being left outside and unattended for days on end. And yet, when I pick up the bag and call to the chickens with bag in hand they will come running. At this point, I can lay the bag on the ground and reach into it, grab some food, and spread it around at the chickens' feet and they will eat what's been spread. I can then close the bag with the clip and leave it lay without the chickens ever paying attention to it...
That's a bit odd, but it seems that some things can be surmised from it.
Any takers?
The term "chickens" is not chickens.
X-)
Hmmmmm.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yeah, "that" doesn't do any of that. That's you. (English doesn't care if it's there or not.)
Believe it or not, "S knows that P" is just an ordinary piece of Anglo-American philosophical shop talk. It is not, for instance, itself a theory of knowledge. You seem to be under the impression that it is. You seem to think it amounts to a claim that knowledge is knowledge of propositions being true, or assenting to them, or holding them true, or whatever. This little shorthand is no such theory; if any claim is made in using this schema, it is only that it is reasonable for us to describe some examples of people knowing things in this way. (And that it can be distinguished from things like knowing how to ride a bike, knowing John Kennedy, knowing the way to San José.)
For instance, I could give you a purely causal theory of knowledge, something like "S knows that P if and only if there is a causal chain (of some special sort) connecting the state of affairs said in P to obtain and S." Nowhere in there is it suggested that S would even recognize P if he sat on it, much less that he holds it true or anything else. Doesn't matter. We can describe S as knowing that P, so far as we're concerned who know all about knowledge.
Now if one believed no one can ever properly be described as knowing something in this broadly propositional sense, then certainly one would want to avoid "S knows that P" like the plague.
Interpretation of "third door on the right" begins with the assumption that there is a correct door signified.
That produces as you say, the question, "is this the right door?". Possibilities enter the interpretation. The hallway with doors might have two ends to enter from, for example. My point about the "existence" of these "possibilities" is that they are produced, created by, the interpreting mind. But if the interpreting mind assumes a correct interpretation, these possibilities are related to that assumption as a possibility that it is the correct one.
To resolve the issue of possibilities, the interpreter must consult further information. Keeping in mind that there must be a correct interpretation, the interpreter consults the context. The assumption of a correct interpretation inclines one to consult context. Without context, "third door on the right" could refer to any door, so we assume that "correct" is determined by the perspective of the speaker. By "context", and "perspective of the speaker", I mean what is going on within the mind of the speaker, not the speaker's environment. So if you are at one end of the hall, and I am at the other, and you say to me "third door on the right", I will assume that you are giving me information to be interpreted from my perspective, though you would more likely say "third door on your right" to make things more clear.
Quoting tim wood
But what is key, is the assumption that there is a correct interpretation. To say that all interpretation is somewhat faulty, is just a reflection on how we approach certainty. We never achieve absolute certainty, and we know that, but this does not prevent us from saying "I am certain". So, we have confidence in our interpretation, despite the fact that we know "all interpretation is faulty", as you say. This confidence produces certitude and certainty. The "quality of interpretation" is of the utmost importance, because this is what produces certainty, confidence that the "correct interpretation" has been obtained.
As I indicated, we can abandon the assumption of "correct interpretation" but this brings us to a completely different level of uncertainty.
Quoting tim wood
The issue is the assumption of "correct interpretation". In our approach to reality, there is no question in my mind, that we are interpreting reality, that's what sensing, perceiving, and apprehending is. The question is whether reality consists of a kind of substance or something like that, which can ground our assumptions of a correct interpretation. If not, then nothing grounds our possibilities. There is no such thing as having a high probability of having the correct interpretation, if there is no such thing as the correct interpretation.
In the case of interpreting the sentence, we turn to the context, which is what the author meant, to ground the assumption of a correct interpretation. In the case of interpreting reality, what is the "context" which we should consult? In reality, the context we use is the spatial temporal context. So when I look down the hallway for the "third door on the right", I assume certain fixed spatial relations between the doors, and the assumption of these fixed relations validates my assumption that there is a correct interpretation of what is in front of me. When we add time into the context there doesn't seem to be "fixed" relations, and context becomes extremely complex, such that we might give up on the notion of fixed relations. If we do, then we may give up on the notion of "correct interpretation" of reality as well.
Quoting tim wood
I don't interpret the tree as a car, because I learned when I was young, and consequently my habit, is to call it a tree. I don't see the point you're trying to make, someone might call it a bush or a shrub, in different languages they would call it by things other than "tree".
Quoting tim wood
As I said, the assumption of a "correct interpretation" is supported by the assumption that there is a "context". We assume that we can produce a correct interpretation by putting the thing being interpreted into the appropriate context. In the case of interpreting reality, the context is time and space. The spatial context alone is very simple, "third door on the right", is direct and straight forward. But if in time, I move to the other end of the hall, "third door on the right" means something completely different.
So if your context is supposed to be "the way that the world is", wouldn't this require determining a particular point in time? But what good would this do for grounding your interpretation of reality, when there is a countless number of points in time which could be chosen?
Quoting tim wood
That was a little summary of what we had been discussing earlier in the thread. Essentially, I was arguing that "correct interpretation" is dependent on accurate definitions. The point I was trying to make, in the last post, is that if we go this route, which opposes truth to falsity by definition, then we can go no further in our enquiry into truth, because "true" is defined as being necessarily opposed to "false", and this would form the complete essence of "true" and therefore truth. The necessity created by that definition would disallow that truth is anything other than this.
What I am trying to impress upon some members of this discussion who are inclined to insist that true is opposed with false, is that we will not ever get to the true essence of truth without looking at how "true" is actually used. And, when we do this, we are forced to give up on this necessity. When we say that something is true, in accepted usage, we do not imply that it is absolutely impossible that it is false, because we never achieve absolute certainty. So to oppose "true" with "false" with that form of necessity, is a type of ideal, which exists in theory, but it isn't practical. Therefore it fails to provide us with a practical understanding of truth.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I don't quite understand this example. It is clear to me that Buzz and Woody don't mean the same thing with the word "flying". On what basis do you assume that they do?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
And this is what we find with the word "knowledge", we actually mean different things when we use it. In theory, one says "knowledge excludes falsity". This becomes a premise for deductive logic, and all kinds of epistemological conclusions may follow. In practise though, "knowledge" does not exclude falsity. When we use "knowledge" we believe that falsity has been excluded, but this belief does not necessitate that falsity has actually been excluded. So the meaning of the word "knowledge" is different for the epistemologist who claims that falsity is necessarily excluded from knowledge, and for the average user of the word who recognizes that knowledge is an ever changing, evolving thing, and some knowledge might later be proven to be false.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
All right, I'm on board with this idea, let's go with it and see where it leads. Let's say that there is real invariance, and this is what our words refer to. Can we call this invariance "spatial relations which are maintained for a period of time"? Our senses might have evolved to pick out some of these invariances, allowing us to identify things. However, our senses are vary sharp, and what they seem to really pick out is changes. So hearing for example, is picking out changes in the air. Smelling and tasting is detecting certain changes as well. Even with sight, what attracts our attention, is changes. But with sight, we can see that this invariance which you refer to forms a background, upon which we detect changes.
So invariance is a type of background, perhaps it's the context, within which, changes are occurring. So as I was saying to tim wood, when we interpret reality (sense, perceive, and apprehend it), the assumption of a "correct interpretation" is validated by reference to a broader context. This is the background invariance. The background invariance provided the assumption of something "fixed". The invariance must be grounded as real though, or else our interpretation will not be, and this involves how we relate to space and time.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I have only responded to how "S knows that P" has been used in this thread. It is quite clear that P stands for a proposition. If your claim is that "S knows that P" may be used in many different ways from this, that fact is irrelevant, because you are just taking "S knows that P" out of the context from which it was used here, then basing your defence in this unrelated usage.
Read again what I said. We may, as theorists, describe something using propositions, without claiming that what we so describe has propositional form. It's practically the point of indicative speech.
For instance, when early Wittgenstein made the additional claim that reality has something like proposition form, most demured, but went on describing reality using propositions. Simply saying "S knows that P" doesn't commit you to thinking S herself entertains the proposition P.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't know how you could think that if you've seen the movie.
The above concluded that since thought/belief can be false, so too can truth.
That would be the case if, and only if, thought/belief were equivalent to truth. It's not.
Here you're invoking certainty. Not a bad aspect when talking about thought/belief, but it has nothing at all to do with whether or not statements are true/false. One can have unshakable conviction that 'X' is true, and yet 'X' can be either true or false. One can also be quite uncertain whether or not 'X' is true, and 'X' can be either.
OK, so if we are using "S knows that P" in the informal sense, then "S knows that P" is insufficient for "P is true", because many things which we know turn out to be false. "S knows that P" would only be sufficient for "P is true", if knowledge consisted of absolute certainty, which it does not.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I'm just going by your post. I suppose I missed the point?
Quoting creativesoul
I am going by the evidence. It is quite evident that when we say "X is true" we do not have absolute certainty, and some times the belief which was said to be true turns out to be false. We know that it could be false, and we have respect for that fact, but we still say "X is true". Therefore if we define "truth" according to how "true" is normally used, truth does not exclude falsity. If you define truth in such a way that it excludes falsity, then you are not remaining true to the way that we use "true", and this definition may constitute a false premise.
Quoting creativesoul
Yes, this is exactly the point. Either we define truth according to how it is used, the unshakable conviction which inclines one to say "X is true", or we define truth according to the logical principle principle "either X can be true or X can be false". If the latter, then we need to look no further to understand the nature of truth, because there is nothing more to it other than this definition. But I believe that this is an incorrect definition of truth, to oppose it with false, because this is not reflective of the way that we commonly use the word "true", it only reflects how epistemologists would like us to use "true". How we really use "true", is more like the former definition, having a firm conviction. But even when we have such a conviction, we recognize that what we hold as true may end up being false. So truth does not exclude falsity. We might say that it is improbable that something which is true is false, or something like that.
Quoting tim wood
I still don't get your point. How I sense things and how I call things by name are tied together, intertwined. How can you ask me "what I interpret it as being", as if this is something different from what I call it. These are one and the same. What I interpret it as being, is what I call it. If I come across something I am unfamiliar with, I can't interpret it as being anything in particular because I don't know what it's called. I can give it a name, and describe it, but I don't think that this is what you mean by "what you interpret it as being". Do you mean "how I would describe it"?
Quoting tim wood
Right, this is consistent with how I use "interpretation". So for example, when I sense my surroundings, and conclude that I see a tree, this act of assigning "tree" to what I am sensing is an act of assigning meaning. I interpret what I sense as a tree.
Quoting tim wood
Of course something has to be out there, which I assign meaning to, just like there is a text out there which I assign meaning to. Where's the difference? My eyes produce an image and I assign "tree" to it, or I sense the word "tree", and I provide an image to correspond. Aren't these both very similar, only one is the inversion of the other? They are both a matter of assigning meaning.
Quoting tim wood
I beg to differ. The truth of the statement or belief depends on the interpretation, and correct interpretation requires reference to the context. We can surrender the notion of correct interpretation, but that is what I think is extremely problematic to truth. How could there be truth if there is no correct interpretation? I do not think it is possible. Therefore in order to maintain a concept of truth, it is necessary to reference context, and allow context as an essential aspect of truth.
Quoting tim wood This is what doesn't make sense, not my insistence on a spatial-temporal context. What could you possibly mean by "reality just is"? "Is" references the present time. But "the present time" gives us no meaning, it is meaningless, without the context of the past and future. So your claim "reality just is", is meaningless without this context.
Quoting tim wood
But we do not perceive or experience the world. "The world" is a concept which we create through our understandings of space and time, in order to give context and meaning to the things which we do perceive and experience. This context, which you call "the world", aids us in assigning meaning, and our quest for correct interpretation. So I am not claiming that the world is constituted through contextualization, "the world" itself is a contextual concept. The point being that we need to differentiate between contextual concepts (universals), and particular instances of sensing and perceiving. We understand the individual things which we are sensing, through contextualizing them in relation to universal concepts. The process of understanding involves placing the more specific, particular instances of perception, into the larger context, the more general concepts of the world, to the most
general, space and time.
Quoting tim wood
Here, context is included under the title of "complete specification". And this is the problem with "the true proposition is always true", specification is never complete. In assessing context, one must distinguish relevant from irrelevant factors. "Complete specification" is an impossibility, an ideal, and so the true proposition which is always true, is likewise an ideal, which does not exist in practise. Therefore we have to accept the reality that in practise the true proposition is not always true, it is sometimes false. But the fact that the true proposition is sometimes false, does not prevent us from saying that the proposition is true, nor does it indicate that we are using the word "true" incorrectly when we call it true. It is just this rule, the principle, that true and false are mutually exclusive, which makes this an incorrect use of "true". The problem is that no one really follows this rule in practise, so it's not really a rule of language usage at all, it's just a principle which epistemologists have made up, a faulty one. And so we have to proceed in a different direction to understand what "true" really means.
We don't continue to say "X is true" after becoming aware that it is not.
What's the difference between believing that "X is true" and "X" being true?
Of course not, one wouldn't say "X is true" when that individual believes X is false, unless that person deceives. But that doesn't mean that we don't say "x is true", when we know full well that it is possible that X is really not true. And, this is acceptable use of "X is true". As I explained to Fafner, if we had to know for sure that the falsity of X was absolutely impossible (absolute certainty) before it was acceptable to use "true", this would render "true" completely useless, because we never obtain such absolute certainty. So in reality, to define "true" as excluding the possibility of falsity, is to produce a definition which renders "true" useless.
Quoting creativesoul
We have yet to determine in this thread, whether or not such a difference exists. It doesn't seem likely to me. Since truth is a property of the subject, true being a property of what the subject believes, I don't see how you could separate X being true from someone believes X to be true. They both appear to say the same thing.
You might be inclined to create a difference, by defining "true" in a way such as "excluding the possibility of falsity". But that would be just an artificial difference, created by that definition which is really a useless definition except for the purpose of creating that difference. What is the point to creating that difference? If the definition is used simply to create such a difference, when no such difference really exists, then creating that definition is just a form of deception.
Earlier you concluded that since thought/belief can be false, so too can truth.
That would be the case if, and only if, thought/belief were equivalent to truth.
I think that "true" refers to an attitude which we have toward expressing our beliefs to others, such that we are open and honest in our communications. It is closely related to sincerity. A true belief is one which is expressed openly and honestly, not held in secret for the purpose of deception. When you express your beliefs in the way that you really believe them to be, you are expressing true beliefs.
Quoting creativesoul
"Truth" refers to how we conceive of "being true", and this concept of truth which one holds may not be truly representative of what one believes that "true"means. In that case, what this individual claims that "truth" is, is not what is really believed as the meaning of being true.
Quoting creativesoul
The move I am making is to assert that when we refer to a thing such as a belief as "true", we are often fully aware that the thing may actually be false. And, it is acceptable to use "true" in this way, because "true" refers to the sincerity and conviction of one's belief, not the lack of falsity in one's belief. So it is the acceptable use of the word to refer to something which may be false as true.. If "truth" refers to "that which is true", for you, then yes, truth can be false.
Nope. Sincerity is not equal to being true. One can sincerely express false belief.
That's candor, not truth.
You really don't need all this business about changing the meanings of "truth" and "knowledge." That horse has lost before it even gets out of the starting gate.
There's still time to change the road you're on, and I see at least two paths you can go by:
(1) Stop talking about knowledge and truth at all, and instead talk about rational belief. If you do that, everything you want to say about conviction and degrees of certainty finds a home. You could even be a Bayesian if you're so inclined.
(2) Just assert the argument from error: we have been mistaken before, and there is no criterion we can find that enables us to know that our current beliefs will not turn out to be false ... (some intervening proofy steps) ... Therefore knowledge is impossible. The defense usually plays with the definition of "knowledge" to defeat this attack. It is a serious challenge, but leads to the dark heart of scepticism.
It is not perfectly clear that you can start at (2) and claw your way back to (1), but of course you can just leave (2) alone and plump for (1) immediately. You can even secretly believe (2) if you want.
... because certainty is a different issue entirely from knowledge ...
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
... and from truth.
The Lucky Schoolboy is our two-for-one special today: Your teacher asks you when the Battle of Hastings was fought. You haven't done the reading, know nothing about the Battle of Hastings, and for all you know this is a trick question and there is no such "Battle of Hastings." You take a wild guess and answer, "The Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066."
What you say is true, even though you don't know it. What you say is true, despite your complete lack of certainty or confidence that it is true.
The Lazy Schoolboy gets us the rest: In this case, you've skimmed the book, and when asked, a bunch of dates swim through your head, you nearly give half a dozen different answers, but something just seems right about "1066?"
In this case, you arguably do know the right answer -- you got "1066" from reading the book after all -- but you have almost no certainty to go with your knowledge. A rising inflection when you answer is appropriate.
No, I don't see the difficulty. The endless chain of interpretation is avoided by the assumption. For me, it's the assumption that there is actually something there which is being interpreted. For others it is the assumption that the interpretation is somehow, in itself, correct. We all have slightly different assumptions concerning this, and that's why we have differing ontologies, metaphysics. The naïve assumption of naïve realism is that the world is exactly as sensed. So it's really not a "grasp of reality not interpreted", it's just an assumption, and assumption doesn't really qualify as a grasp of reality. The interesting thing is that the further we delve into the nature of this reality, what you call "that" with science, the more we come to realize that none of these basic assumptions are actually correct. So we may be left with the realization that the closer to absolutely nothing we can come with our assumptions, leaving it all to interpretation, the closer to understanding reality we get. But even this is just an assumption, it doesn't really qualify as a grasp of reality.
Quoting tim wood
Clearly my uses of "interpretation" are different, but they can be classed together as similar, just different context. Likewise, "meaning" has different uses dependent on whether one refers to the meaning which language has, or the meaning which things have in general. They are similar uses but different context. Reading and listening to speech is a type of sensing, As I argued, it's a very focused type of sensing, with an educated, or trained form of interpretation. This goes far beyond the skills of interpretation which are natural to the human body, developed through evolutionary process.
Quoting tim wood
I'm satisfied to say that we can know it, and also say that it's true that it's a "tree", but I'm not satisfied to say that this will always be true. We might develop a better way of understanding what is going on there, and describe it in completely different words. "The sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening" cannot be truthfully said to be true anymore, because what the words say is an inappropriate representation of what we believe about that phenomenon.
Quoting tim wood
There is no gap to bridge, as you describe. Reality is within us, the objects are created within us, in interpretation. This all is what Plato described in the cave analogy. The gap which needs to be bridged is the separation between each one of us and the reality which is within us. This we bridge with language, and by creating concepts such as "the world", giving each person a place in "the world". But this unified "world" having us positioned within it is something created by us, and as such it is just a reflection of the reality which is within each one of us. Within each one of us is a different, but real perspective. There is also real separation between us, and this justifies the claim that there is difference between us. The assumption is dualist because there are real thinking minds, and a real separation between them, two distinct aspects of reality. There is no gap between interpretation and reality because these are just two different aspects of reality, interpreter, and what is being interpreted. Getting to know the nature of the separation between us is what bridges the gap between us, creating unity and a unified "world".
Quoting creativesoul
I didn't say it's equal, I said it's closely related.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
As I've insisted, it is not me who is changing the meanings of these words. I am simply attempting to maintain consistency with how the words are commonly used. It is those who insist that "truth" and "knowledge" must exclude falsity who are attempting to change the meanings. But this attempt is destined to failure, because as I explained, it renders these words unusable. And that's not going to prevent people from using them, they're going to continue to use them in the way I describe.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
So (1) requests that I quit using these terms. That's not going to prevent others from using them the way I describe. (2) says knowledge is impossible. So I assume that we should never call anything "knowledge"? I see no good reason to start calling everything which we presently call "knowledge" by the name of "rational belief" instead. The proper approach is to get the epistemologists to describe knowledge as it actually is, rather then according to some idealistic notion with no practical application. Epistemology is supposed to be the study of knowledge, so they need to be kept on the right track as to what knowledge really is, or else they're off in some pie in the sky fantasy land. What good is such philosophy?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
You've neglected the first point we covered in this thread. "True" is subjective, of the subject. The teacher judges the boy's response as "true", so it is true for the teacher. Before speaking, when the boy is preparing his response, the answer is not a true answer, because the boy does not know, and the answer has not been judged by anyone as true. "True" requires that judgement.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Again, "1066" is not judged by the speaker as "the true" answer, so there is no truth here until it is judged by the teacher as true. Your attempts to separate truth from certainty are unfounded because you do not respect the fact that "true" requires a judgement. That something is true, is a judgement. In you example, you yourself, are judging the answer as "true", and attempting to project your judgement into your example. But I decline your projection as deception, so there really is no truth where you claim there is.
Here's what I've been working on...
Imagine students taking a standardized test. Their goal is to select answers that will be marked correct. In selecting what they believe is the right answer, they must also have confidence that this is the answer the test-preparer will consider the right answer, that the test has no misprints, that it will be graded correctly, etc. In short, that if they do their part in selecting the right answer, the test-givers will do their part in marking it correct. On the test-giver's side, they have to believe they have made the test properly and that the answers they will mark as correct are the ones well-prepared students will select.
Now suppose you want to cheat. You don't know the others, so you don't know who's worth copying off of. If you could compare their answers to the key, you'd know who to copy off of, but if you could do that you wouldn't need to. No joy there.
Now suppose that in addition to selecting an answer, you rate your confidence in selecting that answer, say on a scale from 1 to 5. You could imagine the test-givers using this as a sort of wager, and giving students more points for confidently selected right answers than for guesses, but otherwise it wouldn't change much for them.
But it would change a lot for the students. Now you have an obvious way of deciding who to copy off of.
Now suppose the test is actually not being graded against a key, that instead the answers selected by the students are being tallied as votes and the biggest vote-getter is treated as the right answer. Without the confidence mechanic, and assuming the students are relatively well-prepared, this makes surprisingly little difference. (I've been running some little "simulations" in Excel. If students mostly choose the right answer and wrong answers are randomly distributed, the right answer still usually wins.)
But with the confidence mechanic, things can get weird, because students can collude to move the answer. As I tried testing this, it looked like it only took two students out of ten so colluding to make a noticeable difference, and three was overkill. (The idea is for the conspirators all to confidently select the same answer; they'll pick up some help from whoever believed this answer actually to be right, and often enough swamp other answers, including the right one, selected with only random confidence. Thus their choice tends to win more than it should.)
What's the point of all this?
I wanted to see if we could build up a community's idea of truth from scratch. Test-taking makes a good stand-in for truth because there is a mechanical sense of correctness here, which we can exchange via voting for something like consensus, and we have a way of adding in confidence or certainty as a factor -- socially this would be something like reputation. The goal is to model a speech community without using the concept of truth, but rather explaining their concept of truth.
But the test-taking example leads naturally to the idea of cheating. In broader social terms, you can imagine cheaters as people who value prestige and standing above truth, and it turns out even a smallish group can collude to manipulate the community's consensus. And by manipulating the consensus they can reinforce their reputation as the people who know and speak the truth, despite having other goals entirely.
So I'm a little stuck. I hadn't foreseen the cheating issue, and I'm not sure where to go with this next.
What are the words "the concept of" doing here?
Is the concept of truth equivalent to correspondence with/to fact/reality?
The hope was that something we'd be willing to call "truth" would show up.
I think the hinge of the analysis I have so far is this: if your degree of certainty or confidence in asserting something is like a wager, then you can deliberately manipulate the betting market by expressing certainty; on the other hand, your degree of certainty or confidence is the only thing we have to to differentiate your views from another's, so socially it becomes your reputation. Given a choice, it makes sense to cheat off the more confident student. And that will continue to work if the people you are imitating are colluding to manipulate the consensus.
We're avoiding using any sort of "objective" standard of correctness for now.
EDIT: 'cause phone.
Do you agree that you have made a distinction here between what the student believes is right, and what the student believes will be marked as right? So the goal of the student is to answer consistently with what the teacher will be marking, not with what the student actually believes is "correct". I say this because we learned in school, from experience, that there are tricks to taking multiple choice tests, starting with the process of elimination, which allow you to improve your grade without actually knowing the right answer.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
This appears like a theoretical which is actually nonsense. If the student is getting marked on one's own claim to confidence, then wouldn't every student claim complete confidence on each answer? How would you enforce an honest rating of one's own confidence level? Perhaps you could penalize a student for claiming high confidence and getting the question wrong, but that would be very complicated. The confidence scale seems to require honesty, and if the goal of the student is to get a high mark, why would there be honesty here?
Furthermore, you have stipulated that the student is attempting to give an answer consistent with what the teacher would mark as correct, not with what the student believes is correct. So without the assumption that there is a "correct" answer which is independent from what the student or teacher believes, which will form the basis for the marking, confidence can never be high. So in this scenario you have presented, "confidence" is nothing better than a random proclamation by the student.
In reality, confidence is produced by the assumption that there is a real "correct" answer, independent of the student's and teacher's belief, and that the chosen answer, as well as the teacher's marking, are consistent with that real correct answer. But in your scenario, there can be no such real confidence, because the student is attempting to establish consistency with how the teacher will mark, and unless there is assumed some standard which the teacher will follow, there will be no confidence.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Now, in this scenario, when the student colludes with another, or others, "confidence" has some real basis in the relationship of trust which the student has with the others, because giving the same answer as another, is what is being marked rather than giving the answer the teacher wants, or any assumed correct answer.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
The problem I see is that you haven't properly modeled confidence. You don't seem to see that confidence is based in the assumption that there is a real correct answer, which is the one given, rather than in the assumption that the answer is consistent with what the teacher wants. This allows you to make the switch, such that the answer which the teacher wants is the one which the other students give, not any assumed correct answer. Then confidence may be produced through collusion, rather than conviction that one has the correct answer, because "correct answer" now becomes whatever answer the students have agreement on.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
This is why "true" is so closely related to trust, honesty, and sincerity. It is based in what one truly believes is the correct answer. And this comes from the assumption that there is a correct answer, independent from whatever anyone else believes. The correct answer must be the one believed by the oneself, not by anyone else. So when I am confident that I have the correct answer, I am confident that the answer I have is the correct answer, regardless of how the teacher will mark it. Once you allow, as you do, that the correct answer is to be consistent with someone else's answer, you forfeit the true nature of truth, which is to be true to oneself. And this allows for cheating (selecting an answer to be consistent with others rather than one's true belief). So it is imperative to truth, to allow that there is a correct answer, which I alone might have, independent of whatever anyone else believes. Truth is dependent on the idea that the correct answer is proper to what I believe, myself. And this is not a case of me forcing myself to believe in what others believe, it is me believing in what is true.
.
That was part of the model but I left it out by mistake. It's no more complicated than the rest of this. And it naturally equates your level of certainty with the risk you accept and the potential reward you can receive.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Right. We start with the usual "objectively correct," then shift to "what test-giver wants," and then shift to "consensus." I'm not conflating these; I'm seeing what we can get out of the model by subsituting one for another and avoiding talking about being "objectively right."
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I think most students are asserting their actual beliefs with their actual level of certainty, but some definitely aren't. But then instead of measuring their answers against an "objective" standard like a test key, we are measuring them against the consensus of their community.
You want to use the word "correct" for whatever a student sincerely believes. What about the test-givers? Do they just give everyone a "100"?
On my view, thought/belief always uses correspondence with/to fact/reality, including situations when that presupposition goes unnoticed and/or unmentioned.
Since no one else addressed this, according to their own position upon truth, I'll attempt to situate truth(as correspondence) within the series of events reported upon above, as my own position demands. It seems that most would have to situate truth in the report itself as compared/contrasted to within the events themselves. That is, if one holds that truth is a property of true statements, and true statements are contingent upon language, then so too is truth. That seems to be the basis of many, if not most, current positions regarding truth.
I hold that truth is correspondence, and that it(correspondence with/to fact/reality) is necessarily presupposed within thought/belief formation itself. That claim comes as a necessary consequence of all thought/belief and statements thereof consisting entirely of mental correlations drawn between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or the thinking/believing agent's own 'mental state', and all mental correlation necessarily presupposing the existence of it's own content. That is to say that the correlations themselves constitute being thought/belief, and that the act of drawing correlation constitutes thought/belief formation.
That last bit goes a long way in shedding some much needed light upon several long standing philosophical 'problems' and/or contentious matters. The sheer scope of application is daunting. It would be perfectly understandable, as a result of the novelty alone, if this seems difficult to understand. Obviously, as is the case with any and all unfamiliar frameworks, the reader must grant the terms and see it through in order to understand it.
I would think that the sheer amount of historical contention regarding truth, particularly regarding what it is, where it comes from, and/or how it works warrants a novel approach. As far as I'm aware, my position is unique in how it accounts for meaning, truth, thought, and belief. That said...
So the chickens most certainly cannot be said to think/believe that something or other is true. That would be to say that they're capable of thinking in statements, which they clearly aren't. It also wouldn't make much sense to try to account for the chickens' thought/belief in the same terms we account for our own.
Does it make sense to say that the chickens formed and/or held rudimentary thought/belief?
On my view, it does. Do the chickens know this? Nope. Need they? Nope.
Would it make sense to say that the chickens thought/believed that they were going to get fed?
That's a tough one.
I want to say that the chickens' behaviour was driven by getting fed, but that's not right either.
Here, I can make this easier. Assume the great majority of students believe the test is being graded with a key, but a small number find out it isn't, and some of those collude to manipulate the results.
(I don't care whether the key is "objectively correct" because the key is the stand-in for "objective reality" here. Comparing it to something else isn't necessary for the scenario to work.)
Sure, that's a point of view. I want to see what I can do without appealing to that at all, since people are always saying this view is fundamentally "mistaken." Okay, let's not use it -- or any other idea of truth --
and see if we can still get something that looks like truth.
What would count as looking like truth, if not looking like some pre-conceived notion of "truth"?
In this case, it's having the answers you give on the test marked as correct.
In our world, what's on the test is also submitted to scrutiny; there's such a thing as complaining that the answer in the back of the textbook is wrong and getting it changed.
So the question will be whether the way test grades are handed out in my made-up world is similar to the way grades are handed out in this one, whether what "counts as true" for them is similar to what "counts as true" for us. I'm not sure yet.
It's also not a bad idea when trying to explain X to avoid using X in the explanation, so I'm trying to avoid even covert uses of standard ideas of "truth," so no comparing the answers to reality.
I see. In our world, having an answer marked as correct requires only what you've already noted. However, as you've also noted, a correct answer can be wrong.
That obviously requires more than one standard.
Here's another wrinkle.
How do the conspirators choose which answer they will give? A randomly chosen answer will pick up some support, but if it's quite unpopular, though the needle will move they risk still coming out in the minority. They're better off doing some pre-test research to find out what the popular answers are and then going all in on those to make sure they win and our conspirators get the reward.
That raises two issues: the reward will be shared with a lot more people, and that's bad; interestingly, if two answers are roughly equal in popularity, our conspirators get to pick the winner. (The best scenario is to be in the minority who get the answer right, but still better right than wrong.)
So there's some push here toward the consensus representing what most people actually believe, but where there's controversy we're right back to manipulation.
The result of understanding truth and the role that it plays in all thought/belief is the lack of being surprised. That may or may not be considered a reward. In the case at hand, if reality meets expectation, then the students have gotten it right. That is, they've hedged their bets correctly as a means of getting what they want.
I think we can use concepts of correctness or success without being forced to treat their appearance as an instance of truth, if that's what you were suggesting.
Obviously we can make it that, but I don't think we have to. If we absolutely have to then there's just no way to do this sort of analysis at all. Which might be true. It might be true that truth can't be analysed or explained at all. But I'm trying.
I'm not so sure that truth cannot be analyzed.
I appreciate your contributions here, Srap...
8-)
Contribution: something given freely without recompense.
:P
The smilie means you don't actually think I am, right? I never know what those things are supposed to mean.
Even if you were poking fun at me, it would be fine if it were done in a respectful well intended way.
Your hypothetical actually reminds me of the current alt right's notion of alternative facts. It's almost as if you are analyzing them and how they choose which narrative to tell.
Not poking fun at you. (That is a strange idiom.)
Here's how this happened: to me, the schoolboy examples make it obvious that truth is not the same thing as knowledge or certainty; but the response I got was disheartening. So I wanted to do something with testing where you take away the "objective" part -- the answers -- and the only thing I could see to put in its place was consensus.
As it has happens, there are people around here who hold exactly this view: that truth is just what people individually or collectively say it is. So now I have a model where the truth is literally determined by vote. As I said before, I didn't foresee the cheating issue, but I agree with you it has some obvious real world analogies.
The schoolboy example effectively set out my argument against Meta earlier regarding certainty.
The model, I think, is a fairly accurate portrayal of whose version of history(which historical account) is taken as the most accurate and therefore taught as history.
Seems to me that "truth" is whatever the consensus says it is. I mean, that is how the word's definition is established, by virtue of how it is used in speech. That skirts around the problem we find ourselves faced with when attempting to take an account of a)that which is not existentially contingent upon our awareness, b)that which is not existentially contingent upon language, and c)that which is not existentially contingent upon thought/belief.
Parsing those contingencies sheds new light on all sorts of things.
Our awareness of our own mental ongoings is contingent upon our being able to identify and isolate them. That requires attributing meaning to some placemarker or other so that it can stand in as a proxy for our mental ongoings. There are many of these proxies in our terminology. Becoming aware of our own mental ongoings requires written language. It follows that mental ongoings are prior to our awareness of them. However, we know that not all mental ongoings can be prior to language, for some of our terms talk about things that are clearly existentially contingent upon language. So, we are faced with the need to be able to further discriminate between mental ongoings which are prior to language and those which are not.
The attribution of meaning is required for language. The attribution itself requires drawing correlations between symbol and symbolized. That is a mental act, and thus a mental ongoing. Thus, the attribution of meaning is prior to language. But yet again, we find ourselves needing to further discriminate between kinds of meaning, because we know that some meaning cannot possibly be prior to language.
Surely the aforementioned problem is beginning to make itself known?
It's time to take a look at the different uses of the term "truth" in light of all this..
I find that it is clear that only one sense could be the case of us correctly becoming aware of that which is not existentially contingent upon language but is existentially contingent upon thought/belief.
Correspondence.
Another sense could be the case of us correctly becoming aware of that which is not existentially contingent upon either thought/belief or language. That would be when truth is equivalent to reality, the case at hand, the way things are, etc. The problem with this use is that - if and when it is strictly adhered to - it cannot take account of what makes true statements so, without resorting to the above sense...
Hey tim!
We agree on that much. The following portion is a bit ambiguous, so I'm not sure what you're actually saying...
The term "that" in the last statement leaves me wondering what it is referring to. I'm unsure what it is exactly that you're claiming requires correct judgment.
Does providing something towards what makes true propositions true require correct judgment, or does what makes propositions true require correct judgment?
I'm thinking of building on how Grice talks about meaning (simplifying a bit):
A tells B that p,
(1) intending B to believe that p,
(2) intending B to recognize that A intends B to believe that p,
(3) intending B to fulfill (1) on the basis of (2).
(The levels can be multiplied here without end ...)
We could do something like this with certainty: surely A is also expressing to B some degree of certainty that p, and intends B to recognize this, and intends B to embrace p in part on the basis of recognizing A's degree of certainty, and intends that B's degree of certainty that p be reflective of A's degree of certainty.
That's the ideal case, but in real life we often form a judgment about a speaker's entitlement to the degree of certainty he has expressed. So we would have to add that A intends B to recognize A's degree of certainty to be justified.
***
Before trying to flesh all that out, there's another candidate (i.e., another factor we might be able to analyze without talking about comparing statements to reality and such).
Truth is normative. I don't just mean in the sense that one should tell the truth. Generally speaking, one should believe what is true and one should not believe what is false.
So we could do this:
A asserts that p to B,
(1) implying B should believe that p,
(2) intending B to recognize that A believes B should believe that p,
(3) intending B to believe that p on the basis of (2).
(It's tempting to rewrite this using "expect," but unfortunately "expect" is ambiguous between merely predicting and demanding conformance to a norm. One reason for a parent to tell a child, "I expect you to behave," is, oddly, that they don't expect them to behave.)
There is a natural linkage between this normative sense of truth and the certainty calculus I've been playing with. You ask me where your keys are; if I tell you I think they're on the kitchen table but I'm not sure, I do not also think you should believe they're on the kitchen table. I might even think you should not believe this on the flimsy basis I've provided, but you shouldn't rule it out. But if I tell you I saw your keys next to the computer, I think you should believe that's where they are.
Anyway this looks promising.
Interesting none-the-less...
What I'm wondering is this: if we analyze assertions to which we attach the additional normative claim -- "You should believe this" -- would that capture all the cases we usually describe as truth claims? Would it capture too much?
ADDED: Need to backtrack. This is all going to end up being about knowledge. What is claimed to be true is what you claim to know; it's the content.
No worries. I'm a direct realist.
What would incorrect judgment look like if reality(the brick itself) does not and cannot have anything to do with the Tp?
I don't know Srap. I would be very hesitant in combining moral assertions with assertions of thought/belief(truth claims).
Sure, but I think rationality is normative in a non-moral sense. I don't think it's just a matter of expecting conformity, but there's "should" and "must" everywhere.
Well Srap...
I, for one, have very good reason to think/believe that morality is largely misunderstood(conventionally ill-conceived), again, as a direct result of misunderstanding thought/belief itself. That's a tangent that's probably not worth venturing very far into, but I'll say the following...
We adopt, at least initially, our worldview which includes moral belief(that which is considered acceptable/unacceptable thought/belief and/or behaviour).
To the bit about rationality...
I would say that being rational increases the likelihood of forming and/or holding true thought/belief about the world and/or ourselves, whereas being irrational has the opposite effect/affect. True thought/belief is imperative to successfully navigating the world.
The difficulty with this perspective is that when you assume such a thing as "Its brickness ... its being-as-brick", it is implied within this assumption that there is a single correct, or objective definition of what it means to be a brick. If there is no such correct definition of "brick", then brickness is just a bunch of various different ideas, held by different people, and "that is not a brick", is true or false according to these various ideas.
Quoting tim wood
See, it's not correct to ignore or sidestep theses questions, because these are fundamental issues, and there is no such thing as correct without first resolving the issue of definition. So you want to say:
"let's just assume that there is a brick, without first considering whether it is possible that there is a brick".
If it is impossible that there is a brick, and this might well be the case if there is no correct definition of what it means to be a brick, then the assumption that there is a brick is necessarily a false assumption.
In that case, you would be sidestepping these difficult questions, in order to proceed with a false premise, that there is a brick. In an enquiry such as this, what would be the point to sidestepping difficult questions, in order to proceed from a premise which mat be false?
When we look at the definition of "brick", this assumed "brickness ...being-as-a-brick", we can ask, is the definition accepted because it is justified, or is it true. Then we must confront the issue of what makes a definition a true definition, rather than a justified definition.
The point I am trying to make is that we must get past this issue of definition if we want to move on toward what "true" really means, or what truth really is. If we begin with the assumption, that there is "brickness", "being-as-a-brick", then we are basing or understanding of "true", and "truth", in this assumption. But this assumption is not necessarily true. Any definition may be justified, and accepted, but justification does not make it true. So when we base our analysis of true, and truth, in the assumption that there is a correct definition of things like "brick", then our truth is based in justification.
But this is not a true representation of truth, because "true" refers to things beyond justification, things which are not necessarily justified, and also things which are justified are not necessarily true. That is why we need to get beyond this assumption of "brickness", or "being-as-a-brick", because beginning with this assumption will necessarily restrict us to justification, and other things like justification (correct and right) which are to use creativesoul's terms "existentially contingent" on language. From this beginning, this assumption, we will never get to this form of truth which creativesoul insists goes deeper than language.
Quoting tim wood
OK, so this is the point right here, why we are lead to certainty in our inquiry into "true" and 'truth" rather than assumptions of correctness. Do you recognize the difference between assuming that something is right or correct, and being certain that something is true? When someone says "that is a brick", or "it is true that that is a brick", what is meant is that the person is certain that that is a brick. This certainty is not based in an assumption that there is such a thing as "brickness", or "being-as-a-brick", it is based in something else, some sort of attitude of confidence.
Therefore what makes us say "true", is this attitude of confidence, not the assumption that there is a correct definition of "brick", and that satisfies the definition. The assumption that there is a correct definition of brick is the assumption that someone else has made a correct judgement, someone has correctly judged what it means to be a brick. The attitude of confidence is the assumption that I have made the true judgement. So this is where we find truth, in the assumption that I have made the true judgement, not the assumption that I am following the judgement of someone else, because it is correct.
Quoting tim wood
So I really beg to differ here. We do not find truth in the criteria in force, this is where we find justification. Truth is not necessarily aligned with right, what is aligned with right, is what is justified, but what is justified is sometimes false. We find truth as aligned with one's own personal conviction, the confidence and certitude in one's own power of judgement, to judge the truth, regardless of what others, or society taken as a whole, have designated as "right".
With regards to the referenced article, I think Kant is in a way correct. I base truth in personal certitude. So if anyone like Kant says, we cannot be certain of the truth, then this individual takes a position of skepticism, and lacking that certitude, there is no truth for that person. The non-skeptic, who is confident, has truth.
The criticism I'm leveling at equating "truth" with reality is all about the inherent incapability that that framework has in explaining what makes true statements/propositions so. You've agreed to that, adding that doing so requires judgment. Prior to further summarizing...
Is that account accurate enough on it's face?
I don't understand this meaning of "truth". I don't see that "truth" is ever used in a sense which makes it equivalent to reality. "Truth" is related to "true", and "true" is related to "reality", but I don't see how you can relate "truth" directly to "reality" without going through the medium of "true". Is this what you're trying to do, relate "truth" directly to reality independent of "true"?
Quoting tim wood
So I really think you have this reversed. T1 is "truth" in relation to "true". If you think that there is such a thing as "truth as reality" (T2), then you need to justify this claim, and this justification will determine exactly how this "truth as reality" relates to "true", and if it is truly independent from "true".
Quoting tim wood
See, you have only hypothesized that there is a reality. If we say that this hypothesized reality is truth, then it is independent from "true", because we have no means to judge the hypothesis as true. But what good is a "truth" which is independent from "true"? It's just a hypothesis which we have no means for judging whether or not it's true. Why even hypothesize such a "truth", it seems utterly useless?
"Brick" is the English word for what Tim wants to buy.
Something seems amiss...
"Truth" is a term that names a quality of reality. Truth is a quality of reality(that reality has).
I was ok to that point, but then you went on to say...
This doesn't seem right, tim. It doesn't work with the above..
Reality is a quality of reality?
Consider his example: "the lemon is yellow". He's not saying that the lemon is identical to yellow. And so when he says "reality is truth" he's not saying that reality is identical to truth.
Although I think his grammar is off. He should be saying "reality is true". Otherwise it's akin to saying "the lemon is yellowness".
If truth is a quality of reality, then reality cannot be truth. Otherwise it results in reality being a quality of itself.
I'm just trying to be as clear and committed to meaningful language use as we can be.
I think this is just grammatical confusion. He seems to mean it in the sense of saying that being yellow is a property of a lemon. Does it then follow that the lemon cannot be yellow, otherwise it results in the lemon being a quality of itself?
Talk about properties and qualities and comparing the two...
Reeks of yet another false and/or utterly inadequate dichotomy.
I'll accept something sensible but calling "truth" a quality of reality in the way that yellow is a quality/property of lemons seems unsustainable.
Truth is intangible. Yellow is not.
Yellow is a color. Colors are kinds of qualities/properties.
What kind/group of qualities does truth belong to with regard to reality?
I think there's an historical factor that ought to be introduced here. I'm referring to the notion of the hierarchy of truth, which is implicit in Platonic epistemology. In The Republic, there is a very important section called the Analogy of the Divided Line - there's quite good summary on Wikipedia here.
A general point is that in the Platonic view, knowledge of sensory objects or of the 'domain of the senses', generally, can't be reliable because the senses are inherently treacherous. But knowledge of mathematical truths are relatively more stable, because they are not subject to the change and mutability that characterises worldly things. The highest knowledge, noesis, pertains to the knowledge of the forms themselves, the ideal archetypes of things, which exist on another level of reality altogether. Because they are the origin or source of the things we see 'here', then knowledge of them is knowledge of the actual origin of things.
Please forgive my pidgin Platonism, I'm no classics scholar and only have a very rudimentary grasp of these ideas. But the reason I mention it, is because in the classical Western tradition, 'certain knowledge' relied on there being an hierarchy of knowing or being, extending down from the One, through angels, then humans, animals, plants, mineral, etc, as depicted in this medieval woodcut:
Of course, in the transition to modernity, that whole schema has been undermined or effectively forgotten. Hence the sense of there not being any terminus of explanation, or foundation of certainty for knowledge, as that, among other things, is one of the things that has become 'lost in transition'.
You can define a word however you please, but if it's not a good representation of how the word is used, then what good is that definition? In other words, if you want to talk about what truth is then we should refer to the way that the word is used, the thing which is referred to by "truth", not some made up thing. If you just make up a definition, then truth will be just that, whatever you've made up. But what kind of truth is that, one you can just make up?
Quoting tim wood
See, what kind of truth is this? This is what truth is, and I don't need to justify this, because I assert it, this is truth.
Quoting tim wood
My challenge is this, if it is a hypothesis, "there is a reality", as you claim, then what justifies your claim that it is truth. In order that a hypothesis be recognized as truth, it must be justified. So yes, I challenge your hypothesis, "there is a reality". In order that reality is truth, your hypothesis must be justified or we risk the possibility that there is no such thing as truth. Are you prepared to proceed on an unjustified hypothesis, defining "truth" accordingly, but risking the possibility that there is no such thing as truth, due to the possible failure of your hypothesis?
Quoting tim wood
I believe there is reality, and I believe that there is knowledge. But if I claim that reality is truth, as you do, then I must have certainty in my belief that there is reality. If I have certainty in my belief, then I ought to be able to justify this certainty, or else the certainty is just an illusion, false certainty. That's why I asked you for justification, because you have claimed that reality is truth, implying that reality is a certainty for you. So if it's a certainty for you, you ought to be able to justify it, and make it a certainty for me.
Another point, and to draw on another philosophical tradition, namely, Vedanta (Hinduism). There is a lovely word in that tradition, namely, Sat-Chit-Ananda ( ??????????? ) which denotes 'being-mind-bliss'.
sat (???): In Sanskrit sat means "being, existing", "living, lasting, enduring", "real, actual", "true, good, right", "beautiful, wise, venerable, honest", or "that which really is, existence, essence, true being, really existent, good, true".
cit (????): means "to perceive, fix mind on", "to understand, comprehend, know", "to form an idea in the mind, be conscious of, think, reflect upon". Often translated as "consciousness" or simply "mind".
?nanda (?????):[means "happiness, joy, enjoyment, sensual pleasure", "pure happiness, one of three attributes of Atman or Brahman in the Vedanta philosophy". Frequently translated as "bliss".
The point is, in this tradition (and its cognates), 'reality', 'truth' and 'being' are in some fundamental way inseparable; to know something is to be at one with it. To know 'what is', is to be at one with it, but this is an existential state or condition, rather than propositional knowledge, as such.
Similarly, in Aristotle, the notion of an 'intelligible object' is that when one knows such an object:
Lloyd Gerson, Platonism vs Naturalism.
Whilst Aristotelean and Hindu philosophies are worlds apart, this sense of the 'union of knower and known' can be found in both, primarily because it is an aspect of most pre-modern philosophies.
Whereas, the problem for modern philosophy is that 'thinking' is one thing, 'the object' another; 'the world' is one thing, 'the subject' another. There is nowhere any sense of ground or basis in the relentless march of science, which no longer deals in eternal laws, but only 'falsifiable hypotheses'.
I'm unsure if you've made an error at all tim. I want to say here that I have no problem with granting another's conceptual(linguistic) framework and seeing it through. I mean, there is no other way to understand an unfamiliar position. Yours is unfamiliar to me.
So...
I'm struggling to understand the parallel between "truth" being a quality of reality and yellow being a quality of lemons.
"Truth", if it is the name of a quality that reality has then it would be a sensible parallel to draw. I mean, "yellow" is the name of a quality that lemons have.
Is that rendering acceptable to you?
Hence, as processes, reality and knowledge are continuously evolving (changing) and are subject to interactions/processes of each individual. To embrace such a model is to believe in it. It is not a concrete thing. It is subject to evolving experiences.
There is a stock example in Indian philosophy of 'mistaking a rope for a snake'. The analogy is used to illustrate that we misunderstand what we're looking at, in a similar way to your example. I'm sure proponents of that argument would contend that you did not, in fact, know that the rock was the lodge; that you thought it was, but were mistaken about it. It was, therefore, a mistaken belief, based on sense-impression combined with your expectation of what you were wanting to see.
Quoting tim wood
It's more that scientific method assumes the separation or detachment of observer from object; 'brackets out' the observer, so to speak. Which is all well and good, for a certain class of observations, but which is problematic in other respects, because we're not, actually, separate from, or outside of, life or reality as a whole. That sense of otherness or separateness is something that I think is characteristic of modernism as a mode of being.
You're simply conflating 'this is truly my belief' with 'this is a true belief'.
Well, if you've said that, you've fallen into the pit of relativism, solipsism, and various other isms, none of them healthy. Surely any proposition concerning either truth or knowledge, has to be grounded in what really is the case.
Is experience a kind of proposition? Well, I would have said not, a proposition is by definition a verbal statement. I suppose you could say, if someone comes at you brandishing a weapon, that they're proposing to attack you, but I would have thought that for it to be actually 'a proposition', it would be more along the lines of 'Let's say we go and attack person X' rather than the act itself.
But the nature of 'experience' is again one of those kinds of questions that sounds obvious, but really isn't. The scientific method constrains what constitutes 'experience', in the sense of requiring that empirical observations be replicable in the third person (notwithstanding the so-called 'replication crisis'). That rules out a lot of what we would like to call 'experience', in that unless it's an 'experience' that can be described in third-person terms, then it is deprecated.
But what constitutes 'knowledge', is, again, a subject that receives a lot of attention in Plato's dialogues. Interestingly, the Theaetetus, which is mainly concerned with those questions, is quite inconclusive; many of the dialogues end in aporia, questions without answers.
Quoting tim wood
before you know, you have a belief, which turns out to be false. If we both saw the same thing, and you said, 'it's a snake'., and I said a rope, then you would have been right. We can and do have mistaken beliefs about many things.
Customarily, it is said that 'knowledge is justified true belief' - which is true, although trite.
That's why I referred back to traditional philosophy - Greek and Indian. They both have a kind of sub-text or background, wherein 'knowledge' is inherently connected with virtue - Plato's 'knowledge of the Good', being an example.
The problem nowadays - and it's a profound issue - is that scientific knowledge is explicitly not concerned with any kind of value or moral normativity. The Universe is supposed to be value-free - most people here will say that value is subjective, something which humans project onto the supposedly blank canvas of the Universe.
While my experience on this forum is not exhaustive, I have yet to witness anyone describe value in this way, since most probably consider themselves part of the Universe and not separate and apart from a blank canvas called the Universe.
As for me, value is an interaction between between me and that which I value, making it more of a feeling, the feeling varying in intensity.
I don't see a problem with "truth" according to ordinary usage. It's very clearly "that which is true", or "the state of being true. The issue with ordinary usage, where the problem is, and the thing which is not well understood is what it means to be "true". So the difficulty is not with "truth", which ordinarily refers directly to 'true", the difficulty is with "true".
It appears to me. like you think that you can bypass the difficulty of "true", by defining "truth" in some other way, which does not refer to "true".
Quoting tim wood
I disagree with this. A hypothesis, or proposition, which is a premise "for-the-sake-of-argument", is a proposal, and like any other proposition it needs to be properly supported before we proceed to the argument. This way the true meaning of the proposition, will be fully understood, and any conclusion derived will be fully understood. "Reality is truth" has no straight forward meaning, so it's meaning must be explained in a clear way.
Quoting tim wood
I don't see any such problems with definitions of "truth". They are very straight forward, but they refer directly to "true". So that is where your argument clearly fails. You insist that there is a problem defining "truth", when no such problem exists. Then you use this as an excuse to produce your own definition of "truth". For what purpose, I do not yet know, but I'm sure there's a reason why you want to define "truth" in this way.
And as I said, the problem is in defining "true" not "truth". "True" is often used to mean "in accordance with reality". So the difficulty is in determining what is meant by in accordance with reality. If we proceed with your definition of "truth", in which truth is reality, then "true" simply means "in accordance with truth". You might claim to have solved the problem, but all this does is create a vicious circle, and avoids dealing with the difficult question of what is meant by "in accordance with reality".
No I'm not conflating the two. The first says "I am certain that this is my belief". The second says "this is a belief which I am certain of". Do you see the difference?
Experience is a process not a thing. As far as I can tell, traditional logical syllogisms cannot deal with processes. I was never able to bring myself to read Alfred Whitehead, but brief description on Wikipedia which describes his process metaphysics, that is based upon the concept of extended experiences (I believe he was influenced by Bergson), is less dependent upon logic and more a result of creative intuition.
Alright tim. In the spirit of clarity. I've seen you arguing for an equivalency between truth and reality. That is why the bit about truth being a quality of reality didn't make sense to me. Then there was the comparison between reality and lemons and truth and yellow. I want to move on. In the meantime you've said to another what I took you to be saying from the beginning...
Truth is reality. Reality is truth.
That's a fine starting point. I'll accept that use of both terms. If they're not equivalent then it needs to be made clearer what the relationship is between them. If they are equivalent, then we can move on...
No rhe second just says that the belief is true. Whether I am certain about it is irrelevant. Saying a belief is true, no matter how certain of that I might be, does not make it so.
I don't understand you, and don't see your point. How does saying "this belief is true" differ from saying "I am certain of this belief"?
Quoting tim wood
We were referring to common usage at that time, not philosophical speculations, you had said that there was difficulty with "truth" in common usage. And that's what my comment referred to, common usage. There is no such difficulty in common usage, "truth" refers to what is true. In philosophy one might look to a concept of "truth", and try to determine what that is. In my opinion, this would be like asking what it means to be true.
Quoting tim wood
This is what I disagree with. Truth is not necessarily what we agree on. What we agree on is what is justified, and the things we agree on may not be the truth. Do you recognize that there is a difference between true and justified?
As I explained earlier, truth is of the subject, it is subjective. So it cannot be what "we" agree on. If I am certain of something, I will claim that it is the truth regardless of whether or not we agree on it. Truth does not require agreement. I may have information which neither you nor anyone else has access to, so I know the truth without agreement from anyone else. And if I persuade you, so that you agree, this persuasion is justification it is not truth. Truth is not "what we agree on".
Quoting tim wood
No, the point is that "true" is not what "we" can have confidence in at all, it is what "I" have confidence in. Individuals claim "X is true", and they will insist that X is true even if others claim something contrary. This is very evident here at tpf. They will attempt to convince others that X is true, to justify their claims. But when "X is true" is claimed, "X" always refers to how I understand X, not how we understand X (of course there is no such thing, because understanding is the act of an individual).
Quoting tim wood
This is exactly the nature of "truth". Each individual instance of truth, must be proven, justified. Each item in the pot must be proven as a bean before we can say that it is true that there are only beans in the pot.
Quoting tim wood
I agree, that truth has to do with the reality of the thing, but each thing is unique and individual, so truth cannot be a generality. Furthermore, since each thing appears to be different from itself, depending on the perspective it is observed from (i.e., how a thing appears from one perspective is different from how it appears from another), "the reality of the thing" is in itself somewhat contradictory. If the reality of the thing is that it is different from itself, then this defies the law of identity. But that's exactly what a multitude of different perspectives demonstrates to us, that a thing is different from itself.
Quoting tim wood
I believe that attempting to bridge this gap with "truth" is a mistaken approach. The truth is that there is a difference between the individual, particular brick, and the "brick-ness" of the generality, which cannot be dissolved. It is an ontologically real, part of reality (and therefore truth itself according to your def.). The trend of modern philosophy to shy away from dualism, toward monism, inspires the desire to bridge this gap as if the gap were not something real. I believe it is a more appropriate approach to recognize the reality of this gap, and attempt to see what it consists of. What is the ontological status of the separation between the individual brick, and the generality "brick-ness"?
Yeah, I don't know about all that tim. Here's my go to test regarding definitions...
If a term is defined, one ought be able to take the definition and replace each and every use of the term with the definition and lose nothing meaningful while retaining coherence.
The first statement concerns the truth of a belief, and the second concerns your attitude towards the belief. They are two very different things. I think it is incredible that you cannot see the distinction.
The first statement affirms what the speaker thinks of the belief, "it is true", it does not confirm that the belief is true.
There is a speaker of each statement. The first statement says that the speaker believes that the belief is true. It in no way confirms that the belief is true, as you imply. The second statement says that the speaker is certain of the belief.
I really don't see the difference between the first and second. In the first, the speaker affirms confidence in the belief "it is true". In the second, the speaker affirms confidence in the belief "I am certain of it". Where are you seeing this difference?
No that would be "I think this belief is true". 'It is true that X' affirms that it is true that X. Someone for example could say that "people believe that it is true that X, but I don't believe it". The "it is true that X" part is independent of anybody's beliefs. Of course it doesn't confirm that it is true that X, it merely affirms it; but that is irrelevant in any case.
When someone says "this belief is true", what it means to me is "I think this belief is true". If to you, it means that the belief is true, then you'll believe anything anyone ever tells you, and be forever deceived.
Quoting John
This doesn't make sense, it's meaningless. You have taken the statement "it is true that X", and removed it from any speaker, claiming that no one has spoken it. This is to completely and absolutely remove it from any possible context, and leave it meaningless.
.
No, when someone says "this belief is true" it just means that this belief is true. Of course it indicates (if they are not lying) that they think the belief is true, but that is not what is explicitly being said. The fact that "'X' is true" means that it is true that X does not entail that X is true. You are equivocating on the word 'means' between its semantic sense and its use that is coterminous with 'entails'.
I can say 'it is true that snow is black' and that sentence means that it is true that snow is black, but it does not entail that it is true that snow is black.
OK, so when Donald Trump says "this belief is true", that's what it means to you, that the belief is true? Good luck with that approach.
Obviously the same statement, someone saying "this belief is true" means something completely different to you from what it means to me. You're set in your interpretation, and I'm set in mine. I warn you though, you'll be deceived if you actually follow through with your interpretation.
Again, you failed to get my distinction between the two senses of "means". So, when Donald Trump asserts that something is true his words mean that the something is true; but it certainly is not entailed by the fact that his words mean the something is true, that the something is true.
Or to put it in way using the word 'mean' in both senses, which hopefully will make it clear to you:
'When Donald Trump asserts that something is true his words mean that the something is true; but the fact that his words mean the something is true, does not mean that the something is true.'
I shouldn't have to explain this again.
It's clearer if you leave out "is true":
If I assert that lighthouses are lovely, what I assert is that lighthouses are lovely, and it can be inferred from my asserting this that I believe it. But I am not asserting that I believe it. At some point you have to get to something that you're willing to call the [I]content [/I] of the belief or the assertion. If you're always sticking "I believe" or something in front, you'll never get to [I] what [/I] you believe.
And truth attaches or doesn't to the content of your beliefs. We say, "What you believe is true (or false)."
As I explained, I view your second sense of "means", as meaningless nonsense. You remove the statement from its context, the thinking mind which spoke it, and having no context the statement is no longer a statement, it's meaningless.
You can explain it as much as you want, and insist that I don't get it. What is the case, is that I completely get it, but I disagree, because I think it's nonsense to talk about the meaning of a statement with no context.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
The content is the belief. When you say "lighthouses are lovely", the content is the belief that this "lighthouses are lovely" refers to. What more are you looking for with your concept of "content"? I don't see the need to assume anything more. I know that you are not asserting "I believe lighthouses are lovely", but as you yourself admit, it is implied that you believe it. Therefore I can assume that you believe it, unless you are acting in deception. So the content is the belief, what is implied by the statement. It is only when you speak in deception, that the content, which is the belief, is negated. But it would be pointless to seek a further content in the act of deception, because there would be no identifiable relationship between the statement and the content, that is the nature of deception.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
"What you belief" is often referred to as "the belief", and this is the content, which is said to be true or false, what you believe, the belief. The statement is a representation in words of what you believe, or, the belief.
This is nonsense; sentences don't get their meanings by being said; sentences can only be sayings at all insofar as they are already meaningful, otherwise it would not be "saying", but would just be meaningless noise or scribble.
Sentences do not exist unless they are said. Being said is what gives existence to a sentence. So first off it is nonsensical to speak of a sentence which wasn't said, unless you are referring to one which someone has in their head without speaking it. But even that sentence in the person's head has an author, that person. So to speak of a statement without an author is nonsense. Secondly, the meaning of a sentence is what is meant by that sentence, and "what is meant" refers to the intention of the author. These are two good reasons why your talk about the meaning of a statement without an author of that statement is nonsense. 1) There is no such thing as a statement without an author. 2) The "meaning of the statement" refers to what was meant by the author.
Sentences as well as actually being said are in potentia as things that could be said. The existence of a language means (in the sense of 'entails' in case you are confused) that there are potentially an infinite number of sentences that could be said; each with at least one literal meaning.
You've given yourself a way to refer to the content of an assertoric utterance -- what's asserted is a belief -- but you've left yourself no way to refer to the content of a belief.
If I believe that lighthouses are lovely, the content of my belief is "Lighthouses are lovely," not "I believe lighthouses are lovely," unless you like infinite regresses.
My believing lighthouses are lovely is a fact about me; lighthouses being lovely is not a fact about me.
This is exactly what I have been trying to, unsuccessfully it seems, explain to him.
We've been doing this off & on for a while. You can go down this road, but it's longer and harder than some people think. You have to give up truth and knowledge completely and just talk about rational belief. You also have to give up logic and have rational inference instead. It's not crazy by any means, but you need to be clear about what you're getting into.
I don't see how there could be any rational belief at all in the absence of truth and knowledge. A rational belief is a belief that is measured (ratio); if there is no actuality (truth) then there is nothing to be measured or measured against, and if there is no knowledge then we wouldn't know how to measure even if there were something to measure and be measured against.
Not my thing so I don't know how it's supposed to work. I suppose you end up some variety of pragmatist. Whatever works better, however you define that, is more rational.
The Bayesians are coming, so we're all going to have to get used to this way of thinking. They might even be right, whatever that means.
LOL, I've never been an admirer of pragmatism except for Peirce's version, and I have reservations about that. If truth is what the community of enquirers come to, or would come to, believe; then it follows that the only knowledge we have is knowledge about what is most consistently believed. No way to guarantee that is in fact rational though, unless you redefine 'rational' I guess. :s
I realize that the following quote wasn't directed at me, but it is something I find quite interesting...
Doesn't this imply that thought/belief is existentially contingent upon language?
:s
The above has all the different senses of "truth" as it's target, and then mistakenly implies that checking for coherency is the only method of discrimination between conflicting senses of "truth".
It's not.
Explanatory power. Fewest unprovable assumptions. Necessary consequences.
I was -- let's call it "simplifying."
What I'd prefer to say there is something like this:
If I believe that lighthouses are lovely, the content of my belief is what I might as a speaker of English express by asserting such a sentence as "Lighthouses are lovely."
I'd like to be as neutral as possible here.
I think you are pretty much right about this. I had to think about it for a minute. Thinking about animals, who do not possess language, I suddenly find that I don't particularly think they have beliefs or thoughts.
They have a certain basic level of consciousness / awareness, but I wouldn't go as far to say that animals have beliefs. A dog might stare at a lighthouse, even find it pleasant in some way, but I am not thinking that a dog could have a fully formed belief that the lighthouse is indeed lovely.
If I really do hold a belief, I think I have to be able to express it in at least some kind of basic language, verbal, written, mental, on paper, etc.
That goes even more for thought. i don't think you'r really doing what I would call real thinking without some kind of ability to express it in language. Would you agree?
On my view, you're reporting upon your own thought/belief, and identifying the content of the report on it's own terms, and then calling that the content of your belief.
That is the historical mistake.
It is an inevitable consequence of not drawing and maintaining the distinction between cognition and metacognition, and following in the mistaken footsteps of philosophical giants.
Hey Brian!
Just to be clear. I was pointing out the consequence of a specific linguistic/conceptual framework(schema, if you prefer) that I do not agree with.
I agree, but why not?
But that is precisely what needs to be argued for, doesn't it?
There is a necessary distinction to be drawn and maintained here. Your belief and your report upon your belief are not one in the same thing.
No.
I would definitely agree that the overwhelming majority of what most folk call "thinking" is existentially contingent upon language. I would definitely agree that the limit of one's language is the limit of one's worldview.
Hmmmm. I haven't followed your argument about this, so I'm at a disadvantage here, and I apologize for that.
But my instinct is that I'm okay with this.
"Belief" is a term from folk psychology. If you say it rained yesterday, you are taken to have a belief that it rained yesterday. (Moore's paradox drives this home.) It's a report verb. If there is something "underneath" or "prior to" the report, or the attribution, it is of interest perhaps to cognitive scientists but not to me either in my capacity as a person who aspires to rationality or in my capacity as a philosopher who aspires to understand rationality.
That ought be of prime interest.
"Understanding" covers a lot of territory. I can understand that it is wrong to cause someone pain without understanding the physiology of pain.
But how about I read through your argument about metacognition before we continue this?
It seems to me, that you have confused the issue, and have done exactly what you accuse me of doing.
The thing is, that you are removing the utterance of the statement, just like Janus wants to do. But the utterance of the statement is an action which must be respected as real and very necessary. The utterance is "lighthouses are lovely". The form is the physical presence of the words, and the content is the underlying belief.
We have to be able to make a real distinction between what the utterance means to me, and what it means to you (differences of interpretation), so we cannot say that the content is "lighthouses are lovely", because this assumes that the same content is within your mind and mine. It is not, therefore it is false to claim that this is the content. So, to lay out the content, the belief which is signified, what you believe by this statement, we must refer to something further. The fact that the "something further", will most likely be an expression in words, creates the appearance of infinite regress. But the infinite regress is not real, it is just an appearance created by the desire to express the content in words. The true content cannot be expressed in words because the words are always a formal representation of the content.
That appears to be the problem, you want to express the content in words. And that's what we do naturally, express our beliefs in words. But the words are always a representation of the content, which is the belief itself. So when you put the belief into words, you have a formal representation of the content, not the content itself. You can continue to explain the belief, using words, to an infinite regress, but all you have here is the formal representation, not the content itself. You can never get to the content this way.
So the real content is something assumed, just like we assume real content in the physical world. This is the material aspect of reality. We assume content as fundamental to the existence of beliefs, just like we assume content (matter) as fundamental to the existence of the physical world. Trying to understand the existence of content, or matter, plunges us into mysticism, because it has already been designated by the structure of language and logical systems as that which cannot be spoken about, due to its apparent capacity to defy the fundamental laws of logic.
Quoting Janus
These potential sentences you refer to have no existence, because they have not been created, They have no meaning because they do not exist. You continue to back up this nonsense train of thought with more meaninglessness.
Yes.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, it's an action. Actions are not truth-apt.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Or you could take that as proof that the content is not something in my mind or yours. Can we both believe that Donald Trump is President? I think so. How is this possible on your view? We can't have the same thing in our minds, so how can we share a belief?
How do we agree or disagree about anything? How do we even communicate?
Right, that's the point I made way back at the beginning of the thread, it's not the statement itself which is judged for truth, but the meaning of the statement which is judged. Here, we have been talking about that meaning as the content, what I called "the belief", what you called "what is believed".
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
We share the belief by means of its form, the words which express the belief, "Donald Trump is President". The content is not the same though, because you and I will have different images of what it means to be Donald Trump, and different ideas of what it means to be President. So as much as we say "Donald Trump is President" represents a belief which is shared by you and I, we say this as a matter of convenience. What is really the case is that these words have different associated ideas for you from what they do for me, so it's not really one belief which is shared, it is different, yet compatible beliefs. That's why the content is different.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I don't understand the reason for these questions. We agree and disagree depending on the compatibility of our beliefs. This compatibility is what makes communication possible. We are all different though, having different ideas and beliefs within our minds. The fact that our ideas and beliefs are compatible, and we can agree and communicate, does not necessitate the conclusion that our beliefs are one and the same. Nor does it necessitate the conclusion that there is an independent (Platonic) Idea which our own ideas partake in (Platonic participation).
I'm not sure which argument about metacognition you're asking me to provide. There are many I employ, depending upon the context of the discussion. I'm also unsure if those are necessary at this point.
Do you recognize a meaningful distinction between thought/belief and reports thereof?
The meanings are obviously in potentia also. Do you deny that there are many possible sentences that have never yet been spoken? I could write a poem in five minutes time and prove you wrong. Sure, that poem does not yet exist, but its existence is possible in virtue of the range of words in the English language and their possible coherent combinations.
The same kind of potential existence obtains with numbers. There are infinitely many prime numbers, for example, which will never be written out, never be known about at all.
No I don't deny this but I don't see how it is at all meaningful. And I don't see how a potential sentence has meaning, nor does "meaning in potentia" have any meaning either. Just like a potential sentence does not exist as a sentence, and is therefore not a sentence, potential meaning is not actual meaning and therefore does not have any meaning either.
I want to have another look at this.
The sentence "It is raining" does not imply, for any given person, that they believe that it is raining, but there is an exception: the person who utters "It is raining." This is the point of Moore's paradox: making an assertion implies belief, and this implication cannot be canceled. It is nonsensical to say "It is raining but I don't believe it."
That does not make "It is raining" synonymous with "I believe that it is raining." We can see this by looking at the audience rather than the speaker. Suppose I ask you what it's like out, and you reply "It's raining"; if "It's raining" is synonymous with "I believe it's raining," I could respond by saying, "I didn't ask what you believe. I asked what it's like out." There is nothing you could say that I could not take as an expression of belief, and therefore not responsive to my question. But we don't do that.
But there is a situation where we do something similar. Suppose your commanding officer has tasked your unit with holding a bridge. As the battle advances, and decisions must be made about deploying reinforcements, the Colonel radios and asks if your unit can hold the bridge. Now suppose you respond, "I think so, sir." The Colonel might very well reply, "I didn't ask you what you think, Captain. I asked if you can hold that bridge."
Let's compare this to the other case. If I ask you what it's like out, and you answer, "I think it's raining," what does that amount to? That you are not certain it's raining? Yes. But so am I, and I have no idea at all. It indicates you have some reason to believe it's raining, but you are not sure that it is. Just answering, "It's raining" would usually imply that you're certain it is.
Now what is the Colonel in our other example asking for? Certainty? In a sense, yes, but everyone knows that certainty about such events is a sketchy business. What would be the point of asking for certainty about the events of a battle?
I don't think it's certainty the Colonel is after exactly. What he needs is to know whether he should send reinforcements. He needs an appraisal of the situation at the bridge that he can rely on in making plans. An honest appraisal. If the bridge needs reinforcements, it doesn't help for you to play John Wayne and say you can handle it, only to be overrun.
The way the Colonel gets the kind of appraisal he needs is by holding you accountable. And not just him, but lots of people. And not just people, but the events about to unfold. If you say you don't need reinforcements when you actually do, it may be the last decision you make.
Unforeseen events may mitigate your responsibility. Nevertheless, I think the essence of the matter is here: what we assert is what we expect to be held to account for. It's not just our "willingness" to be so held, but our expectation that we will be. (This mechanism was at work in the test-taking model I was fooling with a while back, but I didn't notice: the answers you give on the test are exactly what you will be held to account for.)
I would say further that assertion implies certainty indirectly: we need reasons for committing outright to "It is raining," for accepting the accountability of naked assertion, rather than drawing in our horns and sticking with "I think it's raining." Certainty provides such a reason. Certainty means you can welcome being held accountable.
(I'm not addressing whether anything else might provide sufficient reason. Note also that the usual gambling analysis of certainty can still be used here: if you give yourself good odds, you might stake your reputation on an assertion. (See how that idiom works?) It depends a lot on what's at risk, etc. etc.)
What the Colonel needs in the bridge example is not certainty about what will happen, but about the process by which the appraisal is made. It's your confidence in your ability to accurately gauge the strength of your position that will underwrite your willingness to be held accountable for that appraisal. The Colonel knows that you have been trained to make such judgments; he needs to know that you have actually done so. If you tell him, "Yes we can" or "No we can't" without weasel words, he can trust that you have made the best appraisal that can be made. (If you say "I think ..." that implies that you have not been thorough enough in making your appraisal, that you have only gotten as far as finding some reason but nothing definitive.)
(None of this deals directly with truth. I'm just trying to clarify what assertion amounts to.)
I really don't know. How do you use the distinction?
We're not talking about introspection here. Propositional reports are also propositional attributions. It's just how we talk about beliefs, our own or those of others.
Think about a poem you are yet to read; does it not have a potential meaning?
"It's raining" is also not synonymous with "I'm certain it's raining." Your certainty that it is raining is a fact about you; rain currently falling outside isn't.
It's not the degree of certainty that matters here at all. But yes, the hierarchy in everyday English seems to be from "I think ..." near the weaker end, through "I believe ..." and up to "I am certain ..."
Why do you say that?
Think about this example: there are 8 ancient writing systems that are yet to be deciphered. MU claims that writings only have meaning in the act of being interpreted. So, it would seem to follow from that claim that those undeciphered writings have no meaning.
So, if we are to distinguish them from mere meaningless marks we must say they currently either have a meaning or at the very least a potential meaning which would become actual when they are deciphered.
Ancient writing systems are meaningful. There are no examples of potential meaning.
So Srap...
What about the last question I asked regarding the content of another's belief and your report thereof?
I think "yes," although I'd also want to gloss "content" as "semantic value"-- the content that counts for truth, reasoning, etc.
If you and I watch a cat chasing a mouse, and an open-top box falls over trapping the mouse underneath, like an opaque cake-keeper, I would attribute to you and to me and to the cat the belief that the mouse is under the box. What else is there to do?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I follow your clarification. It is my argument that it is within this certainty which is inherent within the assertion, that we find the essence of truth. The difference which you speak of between saying "I believe it is raining", and "it is raining", is that the latter is to say "it is true that it is raining", and the former implies no such certainty. And in your example of the captain in the army, his assertion that the bridge will be held, is equivalent to a claim that it is true that the bridge will be held. So this is where we find the meaning of "true", and therefore "truth" itself, within this confidence which allows one to make an assertion.
The difficult issue, as I mentioned already, is that sometimes when we claim such certainty we are proven to be wrong. Therefore the thing which is true, according to the true essence of truth, as outlined above (the confidence which inspires the assertion), may turn into a falsity when one recognizes one's own mistake. So there is false confidence, false truth. The people who oppose true with false will never recognize the true nature of truth, due to their adherence to that artificial definition of truth, which is inconsistent with what "true" is actually used to refer to.
Quoting Janus
That poem has already been written, so I don't see how the example is relevant.
No, I was talking about the act of creating the sentences, not interpreting them. I said that a potential sentence cannot have meaning, it has to be created to have meaning. And it has meaning to the one who composed it, even if it hasn't been interpreted by anyone else.
Ok.
And yet not all thought/belief counts as truth, reasoning... So why should it's content?
Good question.
We could determine whether or not it makes sense to say that the cat believes that the mouse is under the box. If it does, then the content of the cat's thought/belief is equivalent to our own. Yet, the cat cannot think in the English language. How then, can the content of the cat's thought/belief be equivalent to our report of it?
If we're willing to ignore the inherent problems with attributing statements of thought/belief to the cat, we could continue and arrive at the conclusion that the cat has true belief. Continuing on, we find that either true belief does not require truth or truth is not existentially contingent upon language.
None of that seems quite right though, does it?
To me, the issue is how we are to talk about beliefs, our own and those of others. I see nothing wrong with the usual folk psychology that attributes beliefs based on behavior, behavior which sometimes includes speech or other symbolic actions.
If the cat paces around the box and swats at it occasionally, I'd say its behavior is grounds for attributing a belief to it. I have no reason to think any English sentence is in its mind. If my phone makes a certain sound, I know someone is texting me. Here too, there is no reason to think the English sentence "Someone is texting me" was in my mind, even though I speak English passably well.
Suppose Jerry gets trapped under the box, but there's a hole in the floor he can slip out of. Tom paces around the box, swatting at it occasionally. Why not say that Tom thinks Jerry's still in there but he's wrong? If you don't see Jerry slip out, you have that same belief. You can provide further evidence by saying something, and Tom can't. If I lift the box, you'll each display something like confusion. But at this point, you'll be able work out how your belief was mistaken, and Tom probably won't.
It's not statements.
Agree?
How, exactly can it be the case that Tom has true belief? If true belief requires truth, and truth is prior to language, then Tom can have true belief despite not being able to talk about it, and we can accurately report upon it by virtue of properly taking account of it.
If our reports are accurate then it must be the case that true belief is capable of being formed and/or held by a language-less agent.
Either true belief exists without truth, or truth exists prior to language.
Here, we must pause and consider the different sense of "truth". Which one(s), if any are capable of existing prior to language?
Quoting creativesoul
I'd start here: if you believe that Jerry is under the box, you believe something about Jerry (and the box and so on), not something about the sentence "Jerry is under the box," such as it being true.
When we describe your belief, we use the sentence, "Jerry is under the box," so we're also talking about Jerry (and the box and so on), not the sentence "Jerry is under the box."
If you want to say that the sentence "Jerry is under the box" is true, I'd say you're talking not only about Jerry (and the box and so on) but also about English. Truth is for sentences, really, not beliefs, although it may do no harm now & then to call a belief that something is the case when it really is a "true belief." I expect I've done it somewhere in this thread, but that's speaking loosely.
That ambiguity is not the basis for my claim that the content of Tom's belief can be the same as the content of our report of his belief: the basis for that is that Tom has a belief about Jerry (and the box and so on), and that's exactly what we say he has. We're not talking about language and truth anymore than Tom is.
In the case of ancient writings the "one who composed it" no longer exists, so their intentions could never be known, and the meaning thus no longer exists. But this would mean that the writings can never be deciphered.
Pretty sure I didn't say certainty is "inherent within assertion"; I said it could function as a reason for you not to fear being held accountable for what you say, but there may be other reasons. For instance, just following consensus or authority is probably all the reason we need much of the time.
In what follows, we need a word for variable certainty and a word for certainty that's absolute or passes some other threshold. I'm going to use "confidence" for the variable one, and "certainty" for something like maximal confidence.
Let's say you have some belief and reasons for that belief. Your confidence is, at least, a measure of the strength of your reasons for that belief. Your confidence is not itself a reason for holding the belief; if you give "I'm certain" as a reason for your belief, you'll just be asked why you're certain.
Acting on your belief, for instance by asserting it, carries risk, and we can naturally extend the above: the greater your confidence the greater the risk you are prepared to take; the greater the risk you expect to face, the greater your confidence in your choice of action must be. Thus, following consensus or authority is generally, but not always, so low-risk, you barely need any reason at all.
But I think where confidence comes in is not as a reason for a particular action; various reasons will line up with various possible courses of action. I think confidence plays a role in the decision to act, and in the choice among various options.
For example, we may be faced with a choice between saying, "I think it's going to rain," and saying, "It's going to rain," or "I know it's going to rain." We have described these before as less and more confident versions of the same belief. (That's not quite true, of course, because the first could actually express greater confidence by means of understatement.)
What we need to sort out, to start with, is the difference between the reasons for holding a belief, which will be attended by a certain level of confidence that the belief is correct (or something), and the reasons for taking the action of asserting that belief, which will be attended by a certain level of confidence about producing the desired effect by your action.
A standard example to show that these need not be the same: you're listening to someone tell a story about a princess and a dragon and all the usual stuff. Now suppose the storyteller at some point in the story asks, "What do you think the princess will do?" You have a compelling reason to think there is no such princess and so she won't do anything; is that a reason for saying, "She will not do anything"?
It is only your judgement of Tom's belief which says that it is true. You do have a conception of truth, and base your judgement in this. Tom does not believe that his belief is true, he just believes.
Quoting creativesoul
Tom's belief is not true unless it is judged by someone as being true. I think we went through this already in this thread, true is a judgement. Consider "the grass is green". It might appear like the grass is green without the need for any judgement, but this is not the case. Someone must judge the thing referred to by "grass", as qualifying for being called "green", in order that the grass is green. There's no way around this. You could say "if the grass reflected the right light, then it would be green regardless of whether or not it is judged as green", but all this does is make that necessary judgement. Without that judgement it is impossible that the grass is green, and also impossible that Tom's belief is true.
Quoting creativesoul
I don't agree with this. A stone is only a stone because it is judged to be a stone. A tree is a tree because it is judged to be a tree. A true belief is a true belief because it is judged to be a true belief. A language-less agent cannot judge a belief as being true, that requires language. It is true that you, a person with language, could judge the language-less agent's belief as true, but since that agent has no language to express that belief to you, that judgement is purely speculative and very unreliable. This is not at all suited to the use of "true", which implies certainty.
But following consensus, or authority, is a reason for confidence, a very good reason. So when you follow authority it's not that you do not need a reason, you already have the reason, and a very good one at that. This gives us confidence.
And I don't get what you mean by "the greater your confidence the greater the risk you are prepared to take". This seems contradictory. If you are confident, then you don't see yourself as taking a risk. So the higher the confidence, the less the risk, because taking a risk is to proceed with low confidence.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
So in this example, if one has much faith in the weather forecaster who predicts rain, that person will say "it's going to rain". But a person who hasn't listened to the weather forecast, but is still quite skilled in forecasting the weather by looking at the clouds and the wind conditions, might say, with less confidence, "I think it's going to rain".
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Consider the example now. One person has listened to the weather forecaster, and asserts with certainty "it's going to rain". Are you saying, that if that person turns out to be wrong, the person will just pass off the accountability to the weather forecaster? So the person makes the assertion, as if with certainty, but the person really does not have certainty and is just passing along the certainty of another, because the accountability s passed along in the same way.
Is this an acceptable way of speaking though? Is it acceptable to assert something as if you are certain of it, when you really are believing that if you're wrong you can just pass off the accountability to someone else? We could be making assertions as if we are certain all the time, pretending to be certain, but knowing all along that we really are not certain, and it doesn't matter if we're wrong because the accountability can just be passed along.
That's not really how gambling works.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, it could be, and you may have reason to think consensus or authority are right in the case at hand.
My point is this: actions have consequences. Making an assertion is an action and has consequences. Your audience may rely on your assertion in choosing a course of action, so you will bear some responsibility for the outcome. But there's a class of consequences that's slightly different, that you might think of as the social consequences for your assertion being considered right or wrong. What you say on a test determines your grade, for instance. In such cases, following consensus or authority is pretty safe, more or less by definition.
As science skeptics will tell you, going against the establishment entails risk to your reputation. If you are very confident of your results, you can risk this, believing you will be proven right in the end.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't know why you think this is my position but it isn't.
Suppose I'm about to climb a ladder, and someone I consider an authority assures me it's safe. If the ladder fails and I get a broken arm, I'm still the one who suffers the consequences. On the other hand, that person's assertion having proved wrong, I will be less likely to trust their judgment, so they suffer some consequence as well, just a slightly different sort. I might also suffer that same sort of consequence, if others think it was my mistake in trusting him.
ADDED: I should also have said here that he suffers the natural consequences for his role in my suffering an injury: guilt, remorse, whatever.
If consenus or authority are wrong about something, then everyone who just goes along with the socially acceptable view will bear some responsibility for the natural consequences that follow. There may never have been any consequences of the other sort (what I had in my mind as being held accountable, as a social phenomenon).
By the way, I would have thought it obvious that we all assert things all the time on the basis of consensus and authority alone. You could call that trust if you like, but the fact is I think the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066 because that's what I learned in school, and that's what everyone says.
How many planets are there in our solar system?
At some point we should probably shift to talking about reward as well as risk. There are obvious social payoffs to asserting what everyone else asserts, for instance.
Also, I feel like I'm not presenting assertion clearly enough. I want to maintain a distinction between a belief you hold and the act of asserting it. (In the ladder example, for instance, the authority figure is making an assertion and I am acting on a belief, like the authority, but by climbing not talking.) We have to keep in mind also that there is an audience for an assertion. I'm not quite sure how to treat the case where the audience is only the speaker herself. Is that really assertion?
I would concur.
So, "Jerry is under the box" qualifies as a belief, a sentence, a statement, Tom's belief, and the content of our and Tom's belief.
That seems to be quite a stretch, doesn't it?
Tom doesn't think in statements. Our reports of Tom's belief(and our own) are in the form of a statement. If we both form and hold the belief that Jerry is under the box, and we attend to the fact that Toms doesn't think in statements, then it must be the case that Tom's thought/belief doesn't consist in/of statements. Yet we have the same belief about the same events.
I say that it is because all thought/belief consists in/of mental correlations drawn between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or the agents' own mental state.
I think I've lost track of the point your trying to make. But if your boss tells you to climb the ladder and assures you that it is safe, then the boss is the one liable to pay compensation when you get hurt. In any case, you seem to have missed my point. We use "the authorities said so" as an excuse, to pass on the blame, when we are caught making an assertion which turns out wrong. This allows us to nonchalantly make assertions when the information comes from an authority, knowing we will not be held accountable if the assertion proves wrong. So I can assert "it will rain today" when the weather forecaster says so, knowing that if I am wrong, the weather forecaster is due to get the blame, not myself.
So this is a type of confidence, which is real confidence because we have confidence in the authorities, but at the same time it isn't a true confidence, because we are just letting someone else make the decision for us. It is confidence in another person, not self-confidence.
Stumbled across this today while working nearby:
Quoting Wikipedia
Holy crap. My little Excel "simulations" weren't quite this scary.
Says something about leaders and followers, amongst other things, if it's true...
Ah, sorry, by "authority" I didn't mean someone in a position to order me to climb, but someone I considered an expert, whose opinion I trusted.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I get why you're saying this, but I don't see any justification for it. Not the right kind of confidence? You're just defining your way to the conclusion you're already committed to.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Okay, so backing up: trying to clarify the relation between a belief held with some degree of confidence based on certain reasons, and acting on that belief by asserting it. We've been looking at the different sorts of consequences an assertion can have, which should factor into the decision to make an assertion or not. (For instance, the sort of common-sense view here would be you make an assertion with the intent of "inducing" a belief in your audience. I haven't really addressed this yet because this vaguely causal way of putting it doesn't feel right and I don't have an alternative yet.)
I'm now reading Ramsey's "Truth and Probability" which deals with at least some of this. He gets from Peirce the idea that your degree of belief is the extent to which you are willing to act on it, which for me would include making an assertion. There's something obviously right about this, but it misses out some other things. (For instance, with my story-telling example, the princess not existing is indeed a reason for asserting that she won't do anything, but there are other reasons for not making this assertion that are usually better. If you were dealing with someone who actually thought, incorrectly, that the story was true, you would say things like this. This is what happens in Toy Story.)
One other thought on bosses and ladders: his ordering me up is in itself interesting. Giving a command based on a belief -- we can suppose he honestly believes the ladder is safe -- is another way of acting, just like making an assertion that the ladder is safe.
Oh, well I consider the boss on my job to be the expert, whose opinion I should trust. Isn't that the case for you?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I don't think the boss would order you up the ladder if he didn't think it was safe, unless he's practising some form of deception. Safety is the boss's responsibility.
It could be the case that the boss hasn't even considered the safety aspect.