Is the distinction between metaphysical realism & anti realism useless and/or wrong
Here's the minimal description of metaphysical realism. You must be committed to all 3 claims to be a realist.
1. There exist objects that are mind-independent
2. We can grasp the features of objects external to our mind
3. We can justify our knowledge of objects external to our minds
The negation of metaphysical realism can be obtained in the following manner. I will use idealism for it, which includes solipsism.
1. Deny the existence of mind-independent objects and/or
2. We cannot grasp the features of external objects which happen to be mind-independent and/or
3. We cannot justify our knowledge of mind-independent objects
Here's why I believe the distinction is misguided & wrong
1. Regardless of whether idealism or realism is true, our phenomenological experience of the world would remain unchanged. We would still believe in the existence of the same number of objects. In other words, the idealist and realist would live life behaving in similar manner. What this tells us is the idealist and realist distinction does not solve any problems in a unique manner, unlike say the discovery of a new cure or mathematical fact. Even an idealist monk who has allegedly attained enlightenment still feels pain & has to look right or left before crossing the road. At best, this distinction only induces a change in our attitude towards the world. If you value pragmatism, then this should raise your eyebrows. It seems we should accept idealism or realism based on what kind of a life we want to live. It should be guided by our feelings and attitudes, not truth apt facts.
2. The boundary between mental & extra-mental objects is blurry even if we accept this distinction. Pick any object X you regard as extra mental with following features a,b,c..etc. Its conceivable that I can alter all the features you perceive of X by changing your brain chemistry or neural structuring. In which case, the object X would just be some empty "thing in itself" with no inherent features to it, If we still establish an identity across change. Apply this argument to all objects in the world and you will end up reducing the entire world to one substance, which is neither mental nor extra-mental, since it cannot be grasped via concepts or experience. We have arrived at a contradiction. The boundary between extra mental and mental objects belongs to neither camps. Kant ran into this problem and there hasn't really been any satisfactory response to it.
3. The problem of justification and truth commitment mentioned in the 3rd point is deeply connected to your view on the reliability of folk psychology, semantic externalism/internalism & foundationalism/non-foundationalism. Let's start in the opposite direction. I take it that we cannot justify all of our beliefs ad infinitum. Justification comes to an end somewhere, call these basic beliefs. We can either accept them with dogmatism (which I reject) or subject them to the possibility of revision in case there is a great change in our overall worldview. This is known as confirmation holism. How is this connected to metaphysical realism vs anti realism ? I don't see why anyone can't accept realism or idealism as a basic belief that is taken for granted without any justification. As such, this dispute cannot be resolved by any appeal to arguments or evidence. Now let's get to semantic externalism vs internalism. If the first is true, then solipsism would be ruled out on the simple ground that meaning can't just be in your mind. Whereas if the latter is true, then solipsism becomes a lot more plausible. But we have to remember, metaphysical anti realism doesn't always reduce to solipsism. There are many forms of idealism where other minds act as external agents within the mind of God. There can be no help from semantic arguments or philosophy of language here to resolve our dispute. Now let's return to the first point. If science has shown anything, our folk physics, chemistry, biology etc has turned out to be guided by mistaken intuition and inferences. We didn't evolve to study our minds in some retrospective manner. Maybe the whole game of dividing the world into ideas and non-ideas is based on mistaken rules ? It's entirely possible that when we reconstruct our experience in a manner that is not authentic to our experience of the world. Many philosophers are troubled by the fact our inner experience appears to be cashed out in ineffable terms (qualia, propositional attitudes, cognitive content, feelings). We may have to live with this discord between subjective & objective world as a barrier erected by evolution. Call this neo-mysterianism with respect to metaphysical realism vs non realism.
1. There exist objects that are mind-independent
2. We can grasp the features of objects external to our mind
3. We can justify our knowledge of objects external to our minds
The negation of metaphysical realism can be obtained in the following manner. I will use idealism for it, which includes solipsism.
1. Deny the existence of mind-independent objects and/or
2. We cannot grasp the features of external objects which happen to be mind-independent and/or
3. We cannot justify our knowledge of mind-independent objects
Here's why I believe the distinction is misguided & wrong
1. Regardless of whether idealism or realism is true, our phenomenological experience of the world would remain unchanged. We would still believe in the existence of the same number of objects. In other words, the idealist and realist would live life behaving in similar manner. What this tells us is the idealist and realist distinction does not solve any problems in a unique manner, unlike say the discovery of a new cure or mathematical fact. Even an idealist monk who has allegedly attained enlightenment still feels pain & has to look right or left before crossing the road. At best, this distinction only induces a change in our attitude towards the world. If you value pragmatism, then this should raise your eyebrows. It seems we should accept idealism or realism based on what kind of a life we want to live. It should be guided by our feelings and attitudes, not truth apt facts.
2. The boundary between mental & extra-mental objects is blurry even if we accept this distinction. Pick any object X you regard as extra mental with following features a,b,c..etc. Its conceivable that I can alter all the features you perceive of X by changing your brain chemistry or neural structuring. In which case, the object X would just be some empty "thing in itself" with no inherent features to it, If we still establish an identity across change. Apply this argument to all objects in the world and you will end up reducing the entire world to one substance, which is neither mental nor extra-mental, since it cannot be grasped via concepts or experience. We have arrived at a contradiction. The boundary between extra mental and mental objects belongs to neither camps. Kant ran into this problem and there hasn't really been any satisfactory response to it.
3. The problem of justification and truth commitment mentioned in the 3rd point is deeply connected to your view on the reliability of folk psychology, semantic externalism/internalism & foundationalism/non-foundationalism. Let's start in the opposite direction. I take it that we cannot justify all of our beliefs ad infinitum. Justification comes to an end somewhere, call these basic beliefs. We can either accept them with dogmatism (which I reject) or subject them to the possibility of revision in case there is a great change in our overall worldview. This is known as confirmation holism. How is this connected to metaphysical realism vs anti realism ? I don't see why anyone can't accept realism or idealism as a basic belief that is taken for granted without any justification. As such, this dispute cannot be resolved by any appeal to arguments or evidence. Now let's get to semantic externalism vs internalism. If the first is true, then solipsism would be ruled out on the simple ground that meaning can't just be in your mind. Whereas if the latter is true, then solipsism becomes a lot more plausible. But we have to remember, metaphysical anti realism doesn't always reduce to solipsism. There are many forms of idealism where other minds act as external agents within the mind of God. There can be no help from semantic arguments or philosophy of language here to resolve our dispute. Now let's return to the first point. If science has shown anything, our folk physics, chemistry, biology etc has turned out to be guided by mistaken intuition and inferences. We didn't evolve to study our minds in some retrospective manner. Maybe the whole game of dividing the world into ideas and non-ideas is based on mistaken rules ? It's entirely possible that when we reconstruct our experience in a manner that is not authentic to our experience of the world. Many philosophers are troubled by the fact our inner experience appears to be cashed out in ineffable terms (qualia, propositional attitudes, cognitive content, feelings). We may have to live with this discord between subjective & objective world as a barrier erected by evolution. Call this neo-mysterianism with respect to metaphysical realism vs non realism.
Comments (1185)
Well you've just said it now?
Are you perhaps suggesting that it was true before you said it? What does the word "it" here refer to? Does it refer to the sentence "799168003115 + 193637359638 = 992805362753"? Then we're back to what I said above; saying that a sentence is true before it is said makes as little sense as saying that a painting is accurate before it is painted.
Perhaps the word "it" refers to the fact that 799168003115 + 193637359638 = 992805362753? I don't think that facts are the sort of thing that can be true or false, i.e. it's a category error to say that the fact that 1 + 1 = 2 is true. And what if I were to assert the false sentence "1 + 1 = 3"? Was it false before I said it? But the word "it" here can't refer to the fact that 1 + 1 = 3 because 1 + 1 does not equal 3.
It would be worthwhile discussing whether there is anything more to the fact that 799168003115 + 193637359638 = 992805362753 than how the sentence "99168003115 + 193637359638 = 992805362753" ought be interpreted. Because it seems such a thing takes a particular expressible form. If that form precedes[hide=*](weasel word)[/hide] the utterance, all uttering a sentence whose content was that form would do is state what was true anyway on that basis.
Which isn't quite the same thing as "platonism", because there's no mention of mind independence in it: the form's partly determined by the mind, but not totally, and it seems how things are suffices for whether the utterance is true or not. The sufficiency of how things are in determining whether utterances are true or false speaks to that bizarre form of priority - implication is an ordering. And it's certainly not necessary that everything we say is true. So in some sense "how things are" is strictly prior to statements of fact in the order of things.
Which is rather odd, as the order of things resembles the true statements made about it to a large degree.
Quoting Michael
I think this introduces the additional assumption that a sentence must refer to an extant state of affairs, rather than corresponding to it.
There's a real puzzle in trying to say what more is there to the fact that 1+1=2 than the truth of the sentence "1+1=2". Which you can grapple from either side of that purported equivalence. If you take the quoted side as primary, you find it odd that the state of things can determine what would be truly assertible of it regardless of whether there are speakers, since the interpretation of a sentence depends upon their existence. Conversely, if you take the unquoted side as primary, you might find it odd that true shape of things resembles how we interpret sentences., since the state of things determines whether the sentence is true or not regardless of the equivalence between the fact and the sentential content.
Those two issues are the same thing viewed from two perspectives, and taking either for granted advances nothing in the debate (also @Banno).
I guess the realist is thinking that engaging the world just automatically comes with assumptions, some of which aren't held in consciousness until there's a reason to. Maybe a behaviorist would say these un-thought-of assumptions don't exist in a netherworld, but are implicit in behavior until they become explicit in speech?
What do you say? There is a problem on TPF of criticizing views without giving one's own view. You pointed it up in Michael quite well, but to be complete you should also be willing to give your own view.
- :up:
Largely pointless pseudoproblem conjured by insisting upon the meaning of sentences being separate from but mirroring the world they engage with. It's ye olde how does the representation correspond to the represented but with sentences. IMO there isn't a correspondence or symmetry of content, there's mutual constraints of word and world, so I don't care much.
That's pretty explicitly the quantificational interpretation. The "it" in "...it was true before you said it" is the sentence, which is a first order predication, and predicating truth to "it" is a second order predication. That's fine and dandy, so long as you keep this in mind.
Alternately, on a substitutional interpretation, ""...it was true before you said it" is about 799168003115, 193637359638, 992805362753 and how we use "+" and "=". And on that account yes, 799168003115 + 193637359638 = 992805362753 is true regardless of saying so.
Edit:[hide="Reveal"]The substitutionally interpretation, as I understand it, is that since ["p" is true ? p], when someone writes ["p" is true] we can substitute p. This of course for extensional contexts. The unresolved issue is how to extend this to intensional contexts, and here I'll just refer folk to Davidson et al.[/hide]
And moreover, it's not an error to say that the fact that 1 + 1 = 2 is true, it's just redundant. All facts are true. This is why logicians treat the referent of a proposition as ? or ?. "1+1=2" refers to ? and 1+1=3 refers to ?.
All of which may be another way of saying what fdrake said here:
Quoting fdrake
Quoting fdrakeNo need to invoke god here. We do make the predicate, and the constant symbol. Quoting fdrake
The notion that a truth-bearer is a thing in a world is quite problematic. @Michael apparently thinks truth bearers are utterances, and so events in a particular world - this despite calling them "sentences". That's one way to interpret them, but it brings wth it a whole gamete of issues. It seems to be dropping transword identification, for a start. The moon is still the moon regardless of whether a man from the USA or the USSR first stood on it. The T_@ and T_R business is bypassed by adopting an extensional, substitutional interpretation. We are back to the very direct point that in a world in which everything remains the same, except that there are no people, there will, by the very stipulation given, still be gold in those hills; and if there is gold in those hills, then the second order predication "There is gold in those hills" is true, even if never uttered.
Quoting fdrake
Just to be clear, Banno says that you can go either way, saying that the tree makes a noise and dealing with the consequences, or saying that it doesn't, and dealing with a different set of consequences.
Quoting fdrakeNice word.
This second order predication is still a sentence that you have written and have described using the adjective "true", and asserting that it is true even if never uttered is like asserting that a painting is accurate even if never painted. It simply makes no sense.
I'll stop you there and point out that a predication isn't an individual sentence; it is not just an utterance. If I point out again that 1+1=2, I am pointing out something that I said in the previous post, and that you said in the one before that.
There is a reason we have different words for utterance, sentence, statement, proposition, predication...
Which of these is true? Any of them.
And how does this work with the case of "1 + 1 = 3" being false? We certainly can't say that the fact that 1 + 1 = 3 is false. So if you want to say that "it" is false even if not uttered, what other than the sentence is the sort of thing that can be false?
As for redundancy, I addressed something like that several times. The claim that it is true that X can be interpreted in one of two ways:
1. "X" is true
2. X
And the claim that it is false that X can be interpreted in one of two ways:
1. "X" is false
2. not X
If we interpret it as (1) then we're predicating truth of a sentence. If we interpret it as (2) then the phrase "it is true that" is vacuous, with the words "it" and "true" not referring to any entity or any property, and nothing is added by using such grammar, but in using such grammar you risk equivocating.
Sure, but there are no sentences if there are no utterances, there are no statements if there are no utterances, there are no propositions if there are no utterances, and there are no predications if there are no utterances.
There is a red mountain (which isn't truth-apt) and there is the utterance "the mountain is red" (which is truth-apt). There isn't some third thing – the fact that the mountain is red (allegedly truth-apt) – distinct from the former and independent of the latter. Which is why I disagree with platonism.
"1+1=3" is true ? 1+1=3.
I don't see how that answers my question.
Quoting Michael
I'm not surprised.
I haven't claimed otherwise. I've only claimed that the only things that can be true or false are the things we say (which I'm using as a catch-all for speech, writing, signing, thinking, believing, etc.).
Whether you want to interpret "what we say" as referring to an utterance or a sentence or a proposition makes no difference; either way, we must be saying something for something to be true or for something to be false.
The claim that there are true and false sentences/propositions/predications even if nothing is being said is incoherent.
And yet showed you an example that negates your assertion.
Perhaps you start with "there are no utterances without something being said" and erroneously conclude that therefore there are no propositions that are unsaid. But utterances and propositions are not the very same. Here is yet another, different, utterance, expressing a proposition already
No he didn't.
Quoting Banno
I'm not saying that they're the very same. I'm saying that if there are no utterances then there are no propositions, i.e. that platonism is wrong.
Yes, he did.
Quoting Michael
This is a conflation of seperate issues. If you would read my posts. There are unuttered propositions. Srap showed this by uttering one. The only alternative is for you to claim that 799168003115 + 193637359638 = 992805362753 was not a proposition, and also not true, until Srap made it so by uttering it. But that is just to misunderstand addition.
And Platonism is wrong, becasue propositions are not elements of the domain of first order logic. They are constructed in the second order. All that stuff you keep ignoring about a,b,c and f(a) and F(a) is true.
I think Michael is driving in the direction of the kind of consistency I was gesturing towards at the very beginning of this discussion, and I maintain that the best entry point is to ask about whether there can be truths absent minds (rather than talking about sentences or utterances).
I think Nietzsche would have us be nominalists after killing God. At the outset Banno implied that there is gold in Boorara absent minds. The view that we imbibed with our mother's milk is that there is gold in Boorara, and that this is true independent of human utterances and human minds. That makes sense for a Platonist, or an Aristotelian, or a Stoic, or a Christian, or a Muslim. It therefore makes intuitive sense for the Western mind. But it no longer makes sense if we move into a principled atheism.
Quoting fdrake
Does that really address any of the issues? For example, how is the question about the metaphysical status of truth the same as the debates of representationalism? They seem quite distinct, although not entirely unrelated. And I don't see anyone disputing the idea that "there are mutual constraints of world and word."
Only in the trivial sense that there are unborn babies.
Quoting Banno
That's a contradiction. You can't show that there are unuttered propositions by uttering a proposition. In uttering a proposition you only show that there's an uttered proposition.
Quoting Banno
This is like saying "the only alternative is for you to claim that the painting was not accurate until the painter made it so by painting it". You're not making any sense.
I'm not saying that some sentence wasn't true before it was said, because any talk about a sentence before it is said is incoherent. I'm only saying that only the things we say are true or false.
And yet Srap showed that it is so. I'll count this as progress.
Quoting Michael
Of course you can. Show, not say.
You are headed to absurdity, forced to conclude that the number of true additions is finite, since it is limited to only those that have been uttered.
Nonsense.
I am saying that the number of true assertions that have been made is finite, that the number of false assertions that have been made is finite, that platonism is incorrect, and that using the adjectives "true" and "false" to describe something other than an assertion is either a category error or vacuous.
It ain't nonsense.
Yes, it makes no difference. Either way, platonism is wrong and truth- and falsehood-predication only makes sense when the object predicated as either true or false is a feature of language.
The vanity of small differences powers a thread such as this. I agree. But you are saying it wrong.
1. Truth, or some equivalent or substitute, is prior to all the other predicates, underwrites them, and is necessary for doing things like defining their extensions as sets.
You can't define a sentence S as being true if the sentence "S is true" is true without circularity.
2. Intuitively, when you collect things with some property into a set, they're all there because they have something in common.
But if you try to collect true sentences, they each end up in the set for a different reason. "My car is red" goes in because my car is red. "I'm cooking pasta" goes in because I'm cooking pasta.
(I suspect the set of all and only true sentences is incoherent -- Liar? -- but I don't think we have to go there.)
I don't think I am.
Take "there are unuttered propositions" which I compared to "there are unborn babies".
That there are unborn babies just is that new babies will be born in the future, and so that there are unuttered propositions just is that new propositions will be uttered in the future, consistent with everything I have been saying.
That you think that "there are unuttered propositions" is inconsistent with my position suggests that you are being led astray by the grammar of this sentence into thinking it entails something else – something that seems akin to platonism even though you don't seem to want to commit to platonism, which is why it is not clear to me what you are trying to say, and why I think you're falling victim to an unintentional equivocation caused by the imprecise use of the terms "true" and "truth" that I am trying to fix.
Oh. Sorry for putting the wrong words in your mouth.
The first concerns the dispute between platonism and conceptualism – are propositions mind-independent or not?
The second concerns the dispute between realism and anti-realism (as defined by Dummett) – is a proposition’s truth value verification-transcendent or not?
This leaves us with four possible positions:
Platonism + realism: there are mind-independent propositions with verification-transcendent truth conditions.
Conceptualism + realism: there are mind-dependent propositions with verification-transcendent truth-conditions.
Conceptualism + anti-realism: there are mind-dependent propositions with verification-immanent truth-conditions.
Platonism + anti-realism: there are mind-independent propositions with verification-immanent truth-conditions.
I’m not sure how sensible the last of these is, and so perhaps we can dismiss it for now.
Of the other three, only platonism + realism allows for anything that can be considered a “mind-independent truth”.
Now there is some ambiguity with the phrase “mind-independent truth”. On the one hand it might mean “a proposition that is mind-independent and true” and on the other hand it might mean “a proposition that is mind-independently true”.
The former is just platonism.
If the latter does not mean the former then it more accurately means “a proposition that is mind-dependent and mind-independently true”, which is conceptualism, and doesn’t really seem to satisfy the intention of the phrase “mind-independent truth”, and is why I have been arguing that either platonism is correct or there are no truths if there are no minds.
Note specifically that a proposition being mind-dependent does not entail that its truth value is mind-dependent, which I think is where @frank is making his mistake.
My view of truth is Nietzschean. You might want to look more closely at what the SEP said about conceptualism because I don't think you're describing it correctly. Plus Soames' book on truth. You can't beat it.
I doubt it does.
It isn't generically. It's effectively the same in this thread. You've got a sentence content, you've got a fact, there's a bridge, and the fact and the sentence content are somehow the same thing when the sentence is true. The correspondence mechanism ( or merely incidental matching ) works a bit like a mirror, so the bridge is a mirror. If you'll let me put it briefly with an analogy, we're arguing over whether the mirror has one side or two.
When you move to a world where there are no humans, the bridge breaks.
Someone might claim that there is no mirror, and that the sentence content just somehow "is" the fact, or that the truth is an unanalyzable primitive and we're just talking shite doing all this. Nevertheless in all the cases the world resembles the sentences said about it in a manner that the world will be different if a sentence turns out to be true or false, and in a "precise" manner.
Again with the analogy, the mirror makes that precision exact - the picture is perfect both ways.
What makes me think of it like representation is that you've got the same separation/binding dichotomy working between X and what counts as X, being the fact and the true sentence or the represented and its representation in both cases.
Quoting Leontiskos
No, no one is disputing it directly. If I parse the issue like I do above, the correspondence mechanism works like a preservation of content between sentence and fact, they're somehow equivalent. Like if I say "my bottle is 1m along and 30cm forward on my table", that's... where the bottle is. The sentence is true. But it's not quite right, the bottle's an extended object with an ill defined centre, I eyeballed the distances, the table's a shitty IKEA one with a little bend in it... The richness of the world exceeds what you'd expect of if it was exact match, nevertheless the sentence says something right about the table and the bottle
So I don't think that {"my bottle is 1m along and 30cm forward on my table" is true} corresponds to anything, or "displays" a unique matter of fact at all, I think there's a fairly nebulous range of stuff that makes that sentence count as true. But given that you know the sentence is true, it tells you something about the contours of ambiguity. Like the bottle can't be on my ceiling or my lap. But it might be 30.005cm forward.
Which then raises a lot of questions about how a connection like that between the truth of the sentence and the bottle's weird position can be negotiated - and I honestly don't know the details. My intuitions are Sellarsian, and I enjoy Dennett's view of coordinating perceptions with utterances which is pretty similar. Suffice to say I think that the connection is norm mediated, and "is true" means something similar to "is correctly assertible".
With the above account (sketch), the thing which makes me believe it renders our discussion a pseudoproblem is that the interstice between sentences and facts is entirely conventional and doesn't "preserve" anything. We just make conventions of descriptions that try to ensure when people say stuff is blah the stuff counts as blah. That "counts as blah" is the important thing.
Because I believe it's correctly assertible that there were, say, dinosaurs in the world before there were humans. Or if humans never evolved in some world, that world would still have had dinosaurs, all else being equal to ours. And that doesn't bottom out in correspondence to some underlying reality, it bottoms out in something like: "radiocarbon dating has shown dinosaurs existed long before humans" and "the ice age could easily have killed us all" - good reasons for accepting it. Even if those things turn out false, it's still more reasons. But reasons about what is {or what counts as what is :D}.
So roughly, I don't think sentences "bear" truth in the sense required for this debate. It's the norms of use, and we coordinate those by using them in circumstances, and they leave a lot imprecise and unsaid.
Do you deny that some animals other than humans, as well as some predating humans have(form, have, and/or hold)belief?
Quoting fdrake
Indeed. Such is one consequence of conflating belief statements with all belief.
I want to have my cake and eat it though.
I have considerable sympathy for all of this, but I'm not convinced it's the whole story.
I think we can recognize precision and explicitness as thresholds that are negotiated, without idealizing them into unreachable and thus useless perfection. We say enough to be understood, counting on the audience to fill in as much as they need to to get it, and even that can be negotiated.
But that just kills off an unrealistic picture of how conversation works. Even if your speech doesn't have to carry the burden of truth entirely on its own, it has to do its part.
I keep finding myself thinking that the great value of saying something true to someone else is helping them see it ? like when you point out to someone that a photo of the faculty of your department has no women in it. And it's not just a matter of your words being understood and even credited; if I lie to you convincingly, my words hide the world from you, obstruct and undermine your relationship with it, divert your attention into a shadowy fantasy land. But when I tell you the truth, and you see it, my words fall away.
So I don't think norms and assertibility and all that are the whole story. I think even if sentences don't carry truth like a payload, they still ought to be truth-directed and truth-directing.
Yeah I agree with that. Truth (as a concept) definitely seems to play a privileged coordinating role, even if you grant that it's all coordinating norms. There's a fixity to it there isn't to justification. If something counts as true, it counts as something that can be posited without evidence - accepted for what it is. But then you can have a discussion about whether something is true, which seems to be a discussion which leverages the relevant coordinating norms regarding it particularly intensely - it examines them, and enacts what it means to be a coordinating norm to begin with. So when you say:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I think that's very true, when you say something is true, it's a kind of... commitment... but it's not just a personal pledge. It's a pledge you make on behalf of the relevant norms, "see, this is part of that, look at its state". And then you either accept or reject the claim.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yeah. Truth as a process. It's quite Peircian! Infinitism type stuff.
Sure. But there are only a finite number of unborns. There are infinite additions. So, again, if only those additions that have been uttered are true, you are short on additions. By quite a bit. You might decide now to change your argument to those additions that are utterable, rather than just uttered, but that would undermine your contention that it is assertions that are true or false - you are now talking about possible assertions.
That might be, in a human-finitude sort of way. But I was saying something stronger: we don't so much tell the truth as reveal it, or at least do our part in revealing it. Here's that metaphor taken literally: there is a curtain hiding the facts; I pull it back on my side so that you can begin to see what's behind it, and if you pull the rest on your side, things as they are stand revealed. ? Now, maybe it's best to admit we never quite get the curtain pulled all the way clear, maybe in fact all we get are glimpses now and then when we manage a gap in the curtains, but those glimpses are real and what we see and understand is reality to that degree revealed.
Quoting fdrake
Here too, I want to say something stronger. Or at least I want to make sure the norms in play aren't just matters of what we say and do ? the way these things usually cash out ? but in what we think and believe and know.
Whenever I speak to you, I invite you to see through my eyes, to see things as I see them, and that's so whether how I see things is accurate or not. It's the same when I understand you, which I can do even when I think you're wrong, I can see how you see things. But when I see more of the truth than you and I share that, where we want to end up is that your eyes are just fine, you just have to look where I'm looking and attend to what I'm attending to. ? Maybe that's a matter of deeply shared cognitive norms, at some community or even species level, I don't know.
The thing about truth is that perspective ? "No, stand over here and look. See?" ? may be necessary, in at least some circumstances, to get to it, but truth is never truth only from a particular perspective. Once you've bent down and looked from the right angle to understand how the thing works, you can stand back up. If you would have to be me or think like me to get it, we must be talking about an idea of mine rather than truth. So it is that at most you borrow my eyes, look through them just for a moment, and understand there was nothing special about my eyes anyway. It's not even unusual for you to "what's more ..." me. I was in a better position to see than you and I still missed something.
Alright, I'm beating this to death, which is too bad because I think there are limitations to the seeing business, and very often what we really need and share with each other is narrative.
I'm not too sure of (1), in that we can specify the structure of, say, a first order logic in a few steps, and without mentioning that these steps are true - that is kinda taken as granted. But the general point, that our utterances are usually to be understood as being true, stands - only it remains that this takes "...is true" as a predicate over utterances.
It seems to me that "S is true" does define (or commit us to) S being true, and without circularity. I gather you are thinking along the lines of what the Hare asked Achilles. The answer is, it's just what we do; we treat "S is true", "S is true" is true, '"S is true" is true' is true, as read, and just get on with it.
(2) doesn't much count in extensional contexts, but we might fall back on relevance logic. That could be interesting. What they have in common is that they are true... Is that circularity vicious? or jsut a harmless recursion?
The set of true sentences should be coherent, as in consistent, for whatever version of consistency is being used; but it can't be complete. We can kinda infer this from Gödel.
Intersting thoughts, though.
No worries.
Yep, great illustrations. I like the way you pressed that line.
(Coming back to this thread when I have more time...)
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I see what you mean about the seeing. It's something like a stratum of human behaviour which does the revealing, isn't it? And it's inflected by norms but not totally determined by them. I think what draws me to Sellars on the matter is that utterances are of the same ontological order as literally pulling back curtains. The coupling occurs not because there's one ontological regime over here (language) and one over there (world), there was only ever "world and world", but bubbling up representationally through coordinating behaviours.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes. I agree. When someone makes an assertion which claims something is true explicitly, rather than taking it for granted, that deposits what is purported into a crucible of collective behaviour and all the stuff that happens. The claim counting as true in other circumstances is quite different from it being true when it gets deposited in the crucible.
We have an incredible ability to coordinate our behaviour in a manner that depends upon no one in particular (intersubjectivity) but also based upon what no one's done yet (like your maths examples), and through the latter it becomes possible (maybe even correct) to treat truth as mind independent - as it won't matter who says what when, even before humans existed. Because gold existed in the time before humans. That ability to defer to the coordinating norms makes language work well in excess of our current and past enactment of it - as every norm is an expectation, and expectations concern arbitrary states of affairs.
This is a tangent on your tangent, my impression is that philosophical discussions rarely give more than lipservice to the distinction between different uses of truth, or people's behaviour when we claim something is true vs when we claim something. Counting as true and being true get equated, despite being quite different in terms of norms - something can count as true just when it's assumed, believed, intended, hoped for, posited... whatevs. Something counts as being true when... well when it really is the case. Which, as far as language use goes, is when it's correct to assert - and the correctness conditions include the ability to reference all the events and stuff which might "reveal" the truth, as you say.
And so the issue is forced into a juxtaposition. Better to ask how propositions are dependent on mind, and how they are dependent on the world.
Quoting Michael
Which proposition? Why assume there to be one answer for all propositions? Better to ask which propositions are verification-transcendent (a dreadful phrase), an even better to ask what verification is.
Are you arguing for mathematical platonism, or are you arguing for a non-platonic interpretation of "there are an infinite number of true additions and false additions that we could write out"?
Because I don't believe in mathematical platonism.
Returning back to my diagrams:
There are an infinite number of quoted mathematical equations that we could write out inside the World A circle, and in writing them out they are either blue (true) or red (false), but none that we can write out inside the World B circle because there's nobody in that world to assert them. Which is why there are mathematical truths and falsehoods in World A but no mathematical truths or falsehoods in World B.
This is where the platonist disagrees; he would argue that there are an infinite number of blue and red mathematical equations that we could write inside the World B circle even though there's nobody in that world to assert them.
So please clarify your position on this. Is it sensible to write out red and blue mathematical equations inside the World B circle?
Given that the crux of the recent debate is over whether or not there are truths (true propositions) without minds, it's an appropriate juxtaposition.
If there are truths without minds then propositions are mind-independent (platonism).
If propositions are mind-dependent (conceptualism) then there are no truths without minds.
In general there are four different positions on the topic, paraphrased from here:
1. Platonism - there are mind-independent and particular-independent abstract objects
2. Immanent realism - there are mind-independent and particular-dependent abstract objects
3. Conceptualism - there are mind-dependent abstract objects
4. Nominalism - there are no abstract objects
With respect to propositions, I think immanent realism collapses into conceptualism (propositions are particular-dependent, i.e. dependent on meaningful utterances, and meaningful utterances are mind-dependent), giving us three options:
1. Propositions are mind-independent
2. Propositions are mind-dependent
3. There are no propositions
(1) and (2) will argue that truth is a property of propositions, (3) that truth is a property of utterances.
(1) allows for true propositions (truths) without minds, (2) and (3) only for true propositions (truths) with minds.
I reject platonism. I'm undecided on nominalism and conceptualism, but the things I am saying are consistent with both.
That was the point from before though, switching from asserted to assertible, or stated to statable, changes lots of things. There's an infinite number of quotable mathematical equations that you could write, but only a finite numbed of quoted mathematical equations which have been written. You can prove that there's an infinity of true equations like this:
The equation n+(n+1)=2n+1 is an equation, left hand side is right hand side, so " n+(n+1)=2n+1 " is true. But the set of all such equations bijects with the input set - every input has a unique output. In particular it's true for all the natural numbers, so that's an infinity of true equations. All but finitely many have never been written.
But you know they're all true. Even the unwritten ones. Since they satisfy the equation n+(n+1)=2n+1.
Firstly, I don’t think that n+(n+1)=2n+1 proves mathematical platonism.
Secondly, what is true? The equation? What is an equation? Is it a meaningful string of symbols?
This is where I think the grammar is causing confusion. There is both a platonist and a non-platonist interpretation of "there are unwritten equations".
As an analogy, consider something like "there are unpainted red paintings". It's certainly true in the non-platonic sense that someone could paint a red painting that doesn't exist in the present, but it's not true in the platonic sense that there exists in the present some painting that is red but unpainted.
And so "there are unwritten true equations" is true in the non-platonic sense that someone could write a true equation that doesn't exist in the present, but it's not true in the platonic sense that there exists in the present some equation that is true but unwritten.
I'm not sure how. Note the SEP article you cited says of this kind of conceptualism: "As we will see below, this view has serious problems and not very many people endorse it."
Quoting Michael
That's cool. This is the indispensability argument from Quine:
"According to this line of argument, reference to (or quantification over) mathematical entities such as sets, numbers, functions and such is indispensable to our best scientific theories, and so we ought to be committed to the existence of these mathematical entities. To do otherwise is to be guilty of what Putnam has called “intellectual dishonesty” (Putnam 1979b, p. 347)." here
Propositions are also indispensable to folk theories about agreement. Soames lays this out in his book on truth. I think you'd find the argument intriguing.
However you handle abstract objects, you need to look at the consequences of your approach to avoid contradiction.
Quoting frank
Because the immanent realist believes that "properties like redness exist only in the physical world, in particular, in actual red things."
An immanent realist about propositions would have to believe that propositions exist only in particular things, and presumably the only particular things within which a proposition can exist is an utterance. But a sound is only an utterance if there is a mind to interpret the sound as an utterance. And so it's not clear how immanent realism about propositions can be distinguished from conceptualism about propositions.
Hence it seems that with respect to propositions we must be platonists (mind-independent propositions), conceptualists (mind-dependent propositions), or nominalists (no propositions).
Only platonism allows for something that can putatively count as a mind-independent truth, and I think that platonism about propositions is more problematic than the alternatives, most likely because I think that physicalism or property dualism is more parsimonious than the theory that there is the physical, the mental, and the independently abstract.
Quoting Michael
A proposition is the meaning of an uttered sentence. So this would be saying that the meaning of 2 is a prime number resides in the pixels on the screen. That doesn't make any sense to me, but if you like it, just pay attention to the consequences. For instance, what does it mean if you and I agree that 2 is a prime number? What is it that we're both agreeing to? Pixels?
Quoting Michael
Right. Just look at Quine's indispensability argument in the SEP article I cited. Just be aware of what you're giving up if you reject mathematical realism.
I’d be giving up on mind-independent abstract objects, which is of no concern.
Quoting frank
And perhaps you could look at the epistemological argument against platonism.
But are you denying that it's already true?
I don't think you're bothering to look very deeply into this. I was just saying you should look into the consequences so you don't end up contradicting yourself.
I’ve been over this so many times.
The word “it” in the phrase “is it true?” refers to either an utterance or an utterance-dependent proposition, and so asking if an utterance or proposition is true before it is uttered is a nonsensical question, like asking if a painting is accurate before it is painted.
I think I’m looking into it only as deeply as it needs to be. Platonism is a result of being bewitched by language, misinterpreting the grammar as entailing something it doesn’t.
Surely Quine suggests we refer timelessly (non-modally) to the sentence inscribed or uttered in a future region of space-time? And we describe it (rightly by your hypothesis) as true? Is that non-sensical?
You're basically saying Quine was an idiot.
No, I'm saying he's wrong, just as every other conceptualist and immanent realist and nominalists says.
Quoting bongo fury
Yes. I think that Wittgenstein provides a much more sensible approach to language. There's no mystical connection between utterances and mind-independent, non-spatial, non-temportal abstract objects; there's just actual language-use and the resulting psychological and behavioural responses.
Where (on earth) do you find that Quine accepts that kind of mystical connection?
In his supposing some future inscription to exemplify the word "true"?
Or where?
Yeah, Quine is the inscrutability of reference guy, in the neighborhood of behaviorism.
The word “it” in “Is it accurate?” in reference to a painting must, on this argument, refer to either a particular painting (“utterance”) or some other possible pictorialization of the “same thing” (p) that is “pictorialization-dependent”. Are you sure this makes sense as an analogy? I think the difference lies in the fact that utterances can have propositional content whereas paintings cannot. What we refer to, in the case of a possible utterance, is the propositional content. Thus, “utterance- (or pictorialization-) dependent” has two different meanings or implications, in the two cases. This makes the analogy appear more persuasive than it is.
If utterances can have propositional content (whatever that means) then surely pictures can have pictorial content?
So with paintings there is the landscape being painted and the painting. We say that the painting is accurate if it resembles the landscape being painted and inaccurate if it doesn't.
With language there is the landscape being described and the utterance. We say that the utterance is true if its propositional content "resembles" (for want of a better word) the landscape being described and false if it doesn't.
But according to platonists, in most situations there is the landscape being described, the propositional content, but no utterance, and that this propositional content is true if it "resembles" the landscape being described and false if it doesn't.
I don't think the notion that there is false propositional content without an utterance makes any sense, and so I also don't think the notion that there is true propositional content without an utterance makes any sense.
Even if we want to distinguish an utterance from its propositional content, an utterance is required for there to be propositional content. Propositional content, whether true or false, doesn't "exist" as some mind-independent abstract entity that somehow becomes the propositional content of a particular utterance.
So when you ask if the propositional content of an utterance was true before the utterance was made, I literally don't understand you. The propositional content only "came into being" when a meaningful utterance was uttered, which is just to say that we understand an utterance (e.g. conceptualism), and which is perhaps best explained by Wittgenstein.
Quine
We know.
But the point about predicating truth of future utterances now?
It's not clear what you're asking.
Are you asking me if the sentence "we will say true things in the future" is true?
The indispensability argument is about mathematical realism. I just wanted you to look at what Quine was saying, which is that if you deny platonism of any kind, you're rejecting science in general. You can do that, I was just encouraging you to be aware that you're doing that.
You don't need to believe in mind-independent abstract objects to believe in mind-independent physical objects, and you don't need to believe in mind-independent abstract objects to believe that these mind-independent physical objects move and interact with one another.
Yes. Neither of these sentences has anything to do with Quine's argument, which has shaped the prevailing view in phil of math and phil of science. Just check it out, that's all I'm saying.
:100: :up:
You're referring to this argument?
(P1) We ought to have ontological commitment to all and only the entities that are indispensable to our best scientific theories.
(P2) Mathematical entities are indispensable to our best scientific theories.
(C) We ought to have ontological commitment to mathematical entities.
Firstly, "having ontological commitment to mathematical entities" does not entail platonism. Immanent realists and conceptualists also have ontological commitment to mathematical entities.
Secondly, P2 appears to presuppose that nominalism is false. The nominalist might agree that mathematics is indispensable to our scientific theories but won't agree that mathematical entities are indispensable to our best scientific theories, because they believe that no mathematical entities exist.
Quoting Michael
This helps point out the question I was asking. It's the matter of resemblance. I understand you're using that word because there isn't a more perfect one, and you're not claiming some literal resemblance between propositional content and a landscape. But that's the rub. We know what we mean when we say that the picture resembles the landscape, but the whole debate about propositions, utterances, and truth can only occur because we don't know what this resemblance is supposed to consist of, precisely. That's why I'm dubious about picture analogies -- they confer "borrowed certainty," if you will.
Quoting Michael
Agreed, prop. content doesn't exist as a mind-independent entity. But I think we should be careful in saying that "an utterance" is required. Does my thought of p qualify as an utterance? It's tempting to say that I am simply thinking p, the prop. content itself -- utterance-free.
I mentioned elsewhere that terms like "utterance" are being used as a catch-all for speech, writing, signing, believing, thinking, etc.
Some linguistic activity by a suitably intelligent mind is required for there to be propositional content, and so for there to be a true proposition, and so for there to be a truth.
I wouldn't say accepting mathematical entities entails platonism. I would say that platonism best reflects the way we generally think about things like the set of natural numbers N.
An immanent realist is stuck saying that N is a property of something in the world. I don't think anybody knows what exactly that object is, which has N as a property, but the immanent realist is asserting its existence anyway. Immanent realism is more of a gesture toward avoiding platonism rather than a full bodied alternative.
The conceptualist is saying that numbers are mental objects, which means their only existence is in specific acts of thinking about numbers. Do I really need to explain why nobody believes this?
Instead of those, look at the SEP article on philosophy of math. It shows the alternatives to platonism are logicism, intuitionism, formalism, and predicativism.
Do you want to go through those?
That doesn't make it true. As I said earlier, it's us being uncritically bewitched by grammar into thinking that a sentence such are "there are numbers" is saying something it's not.
Quoting frank
No, because it's not relevant to what I am arguing, which concerns whether or not there are mind-independent true propositions. Whether these propositions are about mathematics or physics makes no difference. To repeat what I said above:
Some linguistic activity by a suitably intelligent mind is required for there to be propositional content, and so for there to be a true proposition, and so for there to be a truth.
This is all I am arguing.
Okey dokey. :cool:
The use of words like "truth" or "propositions" or "numbers" as about things in the same sense as "gold" is about things is absolutely coherent imo. Abstraction is by degree, without a determinate or discrete dividing line.
And again, this is just the story of how we use words in relation to the world, and navigate the world - veridically or not, whether or not there are big caveats like: indeterminacy; underdetermination; inherent fuzzyness; perspectival aspects or even isolation due to our biology; vicious or strange circularities in our ability to articulate information about the world, etc. Nothing, "concrete" or "abstract" is exempt. We can have a Quinean jungle where "gavagai" is fundamentally indeterminate and we practise linguistic and epistemic behaviors "blindly", but the scientific story about what is going on is a story about brains bi-directionally interacting with the wider world, responding to it and the world responding back. You can argue about what exactly it means for words to be about something or whether their effectiveness requires or even is "veridicality" - or simply pragmatism by blind Darwin-esque selectionism. I would say this is fundamentally indeterminate - you can plausibly gerrymander or redefine either side in various different ways and the differences may be ones of degree - and all words, all concepts, share a core of this fundamental indeterminacy, fuzzyness, abstraction in the same sense when they are used and related to - or occur in relation to - other parts of experience, including the word about itself ( a word that seems to be about or related to the mappings we make that pick things out in experience). But again, at the same time they all played out in this bi-directional interaction between brains - and the underlying states that cause their dynamics - and what brains cannot see beyond their sensory inputs. At least, that is what makes sense in the idealized scientific story. There must be some statistical coupling in some sense (not excluding the general messyness that might come with talking about it: e.g. indeterminacy, fuzzyness, pluralistic models) to what you might call "events" or "things" in the objective world, regardless of deeper examinations about what that "objectivity" actually means, cannot mean or simply alludes to (also statistical coupling between events in ones own brain). And statistical coupling can be scale-free, with many levels of abstraction. Coupling doesn't have to be unique in some sense either.
[Or maybe our seemings about statistical couplings. Models we want to assert in terms of seeming pragmatic effectiveness. And that could be wrong. But what do we mean when they assert they are true? ... Not strictly determinate.]
So there is at least a fuzzy aboutness; we may debate about veridicality, etc. But nonetheless we can also agree amongst ourselves about the aboutness of words and concepts in a practical sense as we sample the world in real-time.
Part of the paradox is that trivial and non-trivial indeterminacies coexists with a sense in which our lives cannot be made coherent without a world that is actually out there. Another part is that there are no inherent foundations; there is no ultimate story that all others sit on infallibly, just as the scientific one isn't infallible - you can just argue about its virtues based on what people agree or disagree about. But then its our nature as epistemic beings to have stories to make the world we live in coherent, stories that seem to acceptably reflect or communicate what we see.
And I think we can coherently distinguish talk about "truth" and how we coherently use the word, from "meta-truth" - questioning whether that has some objective meaning, analyzing and deconstructing it where the illusions of essentialism are removed. In the same sense you can debate about how to use a certain word in everyday life and then question whether what it actually means for that word to have meaning. Similar to how in ethics, you can have a moral anti-realist say "murder is bad" and really means it, but then you can separate this from the meta-ethical stance of deconstructing "murder is bad" in a kind of anti-realist sense in terms of indeterminacy or other things. You can say the same for the realist though; their claims that "murder is bad" is also different from their claim that "murder is objectively bad" because ethics and meta-ethics are two different topics talking about normative statements in different ways or frameworks, different levels of abstraction or analysis, different assumptions that are added or forgotten. But again, for me, all concepts stand on a similar foundation, whether truth, everyday words, science, ethics, normativity, belief or justification.
Neither. Quoting Michael
One of your mistakes here is to think that one can only write in the circles.
I've been attempting to show you how this misconstrues the issues it attempts to address. That hasn't worked.
There are abstractions. These are constructed by us, doing things using words. The are not the mysterious Platonic forms you fear, but ways of doing stuff with words and with things.
In what I've quoted you suppose that propositions much either be mind-dependent or not mind-dependent. That's like insisting that you have either stoped beating your wife or you have not stoped beating your wife.
Propositions bridge, or rather, transcend or supersede, the supposed gap between world and word. That gap is a figment of philosophy done wrong, a result of cartesian dualism, a mistake. Your repeated unconsidered use of the picture metaphor reinforces this error.
Going back to where this line started, there is gold in the hills of Boorara. If all life disappeared from the world, but everything else stayed the same, there would still be gold in the hills of Boorara, but no one around to say so. There is gold in those hills. "There is gold in those hills" is true. "There is gold in those hills" is true even if there is no one around to say "There is gold in those hills".
And this is where you're not making sense.
You say that propositions are constructed by us doing things using words but then say that there are true propositions even if we're not doing things using words. Make up your mind.
Where in any of this are we not doing things with words?
The mooted "world without anyone in it" is itself a bunch of words.
Quoting Banno
When I was a kid, we used to set the table for dinner, always the same way: on the left, fork, sitting on a paper napkin, on the right, knife and spoon, in that order, dinner plate in between, and all on a placemat. That was our custom. There's logic to it, but it could clearly be done other ways, and was done differently in other homes. There's also a more general norm here, of which we had a specific version, of having silverware for everyone on the table. That too has a logic to it, but needn't be done, much less done this way.
And we could keep going, with more and more general norms that underlie specific ones. But is eating -- rather than eating specific things in specific ways at specific times of day -- is that "just" a norm?
You could say yes if you intend to sweep in everything a human attaches value to; you could make eating a biological norm, so to speak. But we're no longer talking about custom or convention. There is nothing arbitrary about eating. (But it is "optional" if you value something else more highly than your own life, so still arguably a "norm" in some broad sense.)
So I'm just a little leery of a story that's "norms all the way down." The argument that we just happen to say "red" instead of "rouge" for "merely" historical reasons, how well does that extend to eating? If your history takes in the rise of multicellular organisms, which happen to be things that eat, maybe. But to make sense of that, we'd have to look at norms of conversation.
Now what about truth? There are old arguments for and against "truth by convention" that I don't want to rehash. Nor do I want to talk about what people think truth is; for one thing, it's part of the idea of truth that what people think isn't necessarily it. But I do think there's room to talk about the experience of truth, so that's what I've been trying to make a start on here.
We're asking about a hypothetical world in which there are no people doing things with words. This is where the distinction between "truth at" and "truth in" is important.
Obviously we are using the English language to describe this hypothetical world but then also obviously there is no English language in this hypothetical world. You seem unwilling to make this same distinction when discussing propositions and truth, as if somehow they're special entities very unlike the English language.
And I have never disagreed with this.
I have only ever claimed that because there is no language in that hypothetical world there are no propositions in that hypothetical world and so no true propositions (truths) in that hypothetical world.
The fact that we are using the English language and its propositions to truthfully talk about that hypothetical world is irrelevant.
This is your mote-and-bailey fallback.
You want to say that there is no truth to there being gold in that world, but are stuck.
No I don't.
I'm only saying what I am literally saying, which is that there is no language in that hypothetical world and so no propositions in that hypothetical world and so no true propositions (truths) in that hypothetical world.
I have repeatedly said that there is gold in that world.
If you are reading something into my words that isn't there then that's on you.
For twenty pages.
Quoting Michael
You want to say that there are no true propositions in a world without language. Hence you want to say that "there is gold in those hills" is not true in a world in which there is gold in those hills, but no one to say it. Waht I and others here have done is to show that this approach is incoherent.
There is a difference between an utterance and a proposition, hence there is a difference between a world in which there are no utterances and one in which there are no propositions.
But this is going over things that have already been said to you, more than once.
And now you're back to contradicting what you said earlier when you said that propositions are constructed by us using words.
If propositions are constructed by language users using words then if there is no language use in a world then there are no propositions in that world.
You really can't make up your mind.
I think we've had this discussion before. But we might as well have it again to see if we end up somewhere else than last time. It's an enjoyable one to have with you though. I am going to make liberal use of scarequotes so that I can highlight placeholders and weasel words.
I'm tempted to bite the bullet and say yes, eating is "just" a norm, but in a qualified sense. Human behaviour regarding eating is incredibly flexible in a way the necessary and sufficient conditions for counting as eating aren't. I don't really want to say "necessary and sufficient conditions", but let's just leave it there for now. Eating is "the ingestion of food". So if something counts as the ingestion of food, it counts as eating. But that's not quite all there is to the story, is it? Because that might appear to make eating "about" our words for it. Whereas we use the word eating because things in fact do eat.
What I want to say is that things eat in the same sense as they walk, run, dance, skip, speak, interpret... All of those things. There's different degrees of ambiguity in the coordinating norms for what counts as each, which "couple" with different ranges of stuff in the "corresponding" category. Dancing events count as dancing. Eating events count as eating.
So yes, I agree with this, we're no longer "just" talking about custom or convention. But I want to stress that I never was just talking about them, and I don't think custom or convention are "just" custom or convention either. As in, if you join the Masons, you really have joined the masons. "fdrake joined the Masons" would be true or false.
Where I think we differ, at least in respect to your above post, is that you construe custom and convention as a different type of thing than eating, whereas I see them as the same type - flavours of event that have repeating patterns. If we think about coordination as having a "map" and a "territory" as we'd ordinarily expect a representation to behave like, the representation being the map and the represented being the territory - there's no neat correspondence between those in how I see it. The "map" is event sequences of human behaviour, and the "territory" is event sequences of arbitrary types of thing. And then you've got to ask where the types come from in both, right?
I do think "where the types come from in nature and norm" is a very different question than "under what conditions are sentences true", and a slightly different question from "where does the correlation between nature types and norm types come in". I hope that I can talk about the latter without talking about the former two at this point. That is, take that there are such patterns in nature and norms for granted, and wonder how they might come to couple.
I only have toy examples about this, they're from maths rather than nature, but I hope they are illustrative. I was teaching division by 2, with remainder. I got my student to divide the following numbers by 2:
{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10}
and record the quotient and remainder
remainders={1,0,1,0,1,0,1,0,1,0}
quotients={0,1,1,2,2,3,3,4,4,5}
I then asked the student to say the sequence of remainders aloud, after I'd said the number. So:
fdrake: 1, student: 1
fdrake: 2, student: 0
fdrake:3, student 1
...
and so on.
I then asked the student to consider how the sequence might go on. They grokked that it would be alternating 0s and 1s. So they inferred the rule:
"if fdrake just said n, and I said 0 for n-1, say 1. If fdrake just said n, and I said 1 for n-1, say 0", and they could do this arbitrarily.
That's then a particular function which maps natural numbers to their remainder when divided by 2. But it's recited as a sequence of pairs by the student and I, in which I say a number and the student follows the rule.
What we'd thus done is constructed something that counts as the mapping of naturals to their remainders when divided by 2, and what counted as that mapping was our sequence of pairs of vocalisations.
What inculcated the norm in my student was asking them how the sequence might go on, which set up an expectation for what they should do given what I do. They thus could interpret my vocalisations as an imperative for them to utter the next number in the pattern. They would not have experienced them as an imperative without my role as their tutor (giving me some kind of legislative power over their behaviour), or me asking them to continue the pattern. Which they could then do as a distinct idea afterwards. They experienced the "should" I created as a mapping between two things.
I think that smells a lot of an expectation in a probability sense, the student had figured out that they'd get the answer right if they alternated, so they'd been given an imperative to minimise deviation from the expectation I provided with corrections or encouragement... Which starts looking a lot like a probabilistic inference procedure with entropy minimisation. Which is something we know human bodies do all the time.
So I would be really surprised if our bodies abilities to do our homeostatic minimisation of variation wasn't leveraged like hell in our ability to coordinate behaviour and create norms. Since, as I claimed earlier, norms behave a lot like expectations. And correlations are another type of expectation.
That's about how I see it. We end up having coordinating norms through our ability to arbitrarily contextualise things, but then constrain that arbitrariness with expectations. Then we can learn how those constraints work by minimising deviations from token examples which are "generic" in some sense [hide=*](by generic I mean generated in accordance with the target pattern)[/hide]. Which comes with a considerable degree of flexibility of rules you can learn from a given pattern, but it's no longer arbitrary, since we've put some tokens into the type creating engine that it must include and create a function for.
And that function is a recipe for recognising tokens and mapping them to other tokens - which we then enact to varying degrees of success {we do stuff which counts as an attempt to follow the pattern}. If the degree of success of the enactment is sufficiently high, that means counting as doing the thing which counts as the generating pattern. Which sets up the correspondence between our behaviour and the generating pattern as a type of association. Which is then the appropriate type in context.
In the above case, the student had learned the alternating pattern because they said the right things. Where "right things" is what is expected given the pattern and the imperative to reproduce it.
So how does this relate to truthbearers? Well it's not like a sentence in this view even has propositional content in the sense we'd ordinarily consider - it has conditions under which it is correctly assertible, which is already some normy thing. And a "model" where the sentence is true in the extensional semantics sense is more like a context - of stuff, norms, events, blah - in which it is correctly assertible.
I would like to have my cake and it it too, and claim that those contexts can be very object oriented and have exact constraints in them - like the maths example above. The student could say things which were true or false strictly, rather than stuff which counts as true or false for some purpose {like just a posit or a belief or a framing assumption}. And by "strictly" there I mean there being a unique "right" answer {any exemplar of a set of equivalent answers which count as that unique answer...}.
It's not, and I'm sorry you can't see the difference between an utterance and a proposition. Chess is constructed by us using words and wood. When you look at a chess board, do you only see the wood? or can you also see Alekhine's Defence? In a world without wood, can there be no chess? But this has already been addressed; as it stands we are simply rehashing stuff that has already been dismissed.
This, I believe, is your original claim, a response to a post of mine.
Quoting Michael
The consequence of what you have said here is that there is gold in Boorara and yet it is not true that "There is gold in Boorara". This is at odds with [there is gold in Borrara ? "There is gold in Boorara" is true]. Perhaps the error is to think that all there is to a proposition is an utterance. But we dealt with that earlier. I'll repeat that 1+1=2, giving a new utterance of the very same assertion as was used earlier. There is something different about this utterance, but there is also something that is the same.
Or is it that the antecedent "there are no propositions" is a misconstruel? It is clear that there are propositions, including those that set up the world in question.
Again, a rehash of stuff already considered.
There might be something else that is used other than wood but so far you haven't offered any replacement for language that allows for propositions in that world.
At the moment your position is akin to saying that there is chess in a barren world, and I'm the one saying that there isn't – that there is chess in a world only if there are people (or computers) in that world playing chess.
Quoting Banno
We are using language and propositions to talk about that world, but there are no languages or propositions in that world.
You continue to equivocate.
Try reading the section on Truth in a World vs. Truth at a World again. As a very explicit example it offers:
If "there are no propositions" is true at World X then there are no propositions in World X, just as if "there is no English language" is true at World X then there is no English language in World X.
Doesn't that mean World X is empty? A world is basically a set of propositions.
No, a world can be a set of physical objects situated in spacetime.
As I said many pages and weeks ago, the existence of gold does not depend on the existence of the proposition "gold exists".
So what's the ontology of World X? Is it in another dimension?
That depends on whether or not there is an (infinite) multiverse. If there is then there is likely some universe in which there is gold but no people playing chess or using language (and so no propositions). If there isn't then World X is just a fiction.
If World X is just a fiction, then it wouldn't be a set of physical objects in spacetime, would it?
It's a fictional world in which planets and stars exist but people and propositions don't, just as the Lord of the Rings universe is a fictional world in which orcs exist but computers don't.
Like Banno you're equivocating. The fact that we use language and propositions to talk about a fictional world does not entail that there are languages and propositions in this fictional world.
A world without language is, by definition, a world without language and so a world without propositions.
If you want to claim that a world without propositions is incoherent/empty then you must claim that a world without language is incoherent/empty, but that's a strong form of anti-realism, and presumably not something that you (or Banno) are willing to endorse.
You keep misunderstanding me. I'm not on a mission to blow up your viewpoint. I'm just exploring the ideas associated with it. You brought up possible worlds and the in/at distinction. Then you said possible worlds can be sets of physical objects in spacetime. Do you want to back out of that now? Because Frodo definitely isn't a physical object in spacetime. He's just an idea. Do you want to continue talking about possible worlds or just drop that notion?
Again, you're equivocating.
When we talk about a fictional world in which there is gold but no people we are not talking about a fictional world in which there is imaginary gold but no people; we're talking about a fictional world in which there is actual, real, physical gold but no people.
Even if this fictional world is imaginary.
How can you have actual, real, physical gold in a fictional world? That's like if I dream of a cat, I have an actual, real, physical cat in my dream. How can that be?
A world with planets and stars but no people is not an empty world; it's a world with planets and stars.
A world with planets and stars but no languages is not an empty world; it's a world with planets and stars.
A world with planets and stars but no propositions is not an empty world; it's a world with planets and stars.
The fact that these are imaginary worlds and that we are people using language and propositions to talk about them is irrelevant.
Real planets and stars? Or fictional ones?
By the way, I was going to buy one of David Lewis' books one time, but it was three figures, so I decided to wait until the price comes down. We should go in on a purchase.
Do you understand the difference between these two fictions?
1. A world in which magic exists and Santa is a fiction
2. A world in which magic exists and Santa is real
Something can be real within a fiction without being real in the real world.
My question is about the ontology of the world where magic exists and Santa is real. That whole thing is just a set of ideas, right?
Yes, and completely unrelated to anything I am saying.
Here are two more fictions:
1. A world in which vibranium, people, and languages exist
2. A world in which vibranium exists but people and languages don't
And two more fictions:
3. A world in which vibranium, languages, and propositions exist
4. A world in which vibranium exists but languages and propositions don't
You claimed earlier that a world without propositions is an empty world, and you are wrong. (2) and (4) are worlds without propositions but they are not empty; they contain vibranium.
Quoting Michael
Let's call this world wV.
1. wV is a fictional world.
2. everything in wV is fictional.
3. fictional things are ideas
4. fictional vibranium is an idea
5. wV contains fictional vibranium
Conclusion: wV contains an idea.
Correct?
No.
Again, there are fictional worlds in which Santa is an idea (e.g. Breaking Bad) and there are fictional worlds in which Santa is a living, breathing person (The Santa Claus).
But again, this is unrelated to anything I am saying.
Which part of the argument is wrong?
The entire argument equivocates, as I explained earlier.
That we are using language to talk about a world without language does not entail that language exists in this world – by definition, it doesn't.
That we are using propositions to talk about a world without propositions does not entail that propositions exist in this world – by definition, they don't.
And a world without language is a world without propositions.
I think you're the one who's equivocating. You're trying to jump back and forth between here and wV. When you're here, you admit that vibranium is an idea. When you're in wV, you say it's real. But you're never in wV. You're only here.
Analyze the argument from where you actually are: here and now:
Quoting frank
Remember, wV is just and idea. Everything in it is fictional. Fictional things are ideas. Everything in wV is an idea.
I know, and that is why you are equivocating.
In the real world, the film The Santa Claus is a fiction.
You then conclude that within the film The Santa Claus, Santa is a fiction.
Except that is not the case. Within the film The Santa Claus, Santa is a living, breathing person. That is the very premise of the film.
But I've already told you that this has nothing to do with what I have been arguing. I am only arguing that a world without language is a world without propositions is a world without true propositions (truths).
Unless you want to argue that propositions are language-independent (platonism) or that a world without language is incoherent/empty (strong anti-realism), there's nothing else to discuss.
Okey dokey. :smile:
That may be, although I like the story you're telling well enough to have told versions of it myself here on the forum, and pretty recently.
I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with this sort of story, but I keep having the feeling that ? and this may not make sense ? it does less than I want because it does more than I want. It treats the universe as sort of flat and so it tells a story that is sort of flat.
Quoting fdrake
I'm not saying that's wrong, so there's no need to get started on a fix. But I don't always want a framework that doesn't distinguish eating from dancing from speaking, or leaves those distinctions optional, or builds up to them in a similarly generic way (apo).
I think there are other stories we can tell that meet different needs.
Here's one more note ? not a direct commentary on this exchange, but another spanner I can't resist throwing in the works.
There's an interview where Orson Welles says this: "You have to distinguish between realism and truth. Look at Cagney: no one actually behaves like that, but every moment he's on screen is TRUE!"
I have a guess at what you mean. One way into that flatness is that I've used "count as" in a single sense in the post, whereas there's so many ways for people to mean things. And it seems more multifaceted than x counts as y in context z. There'll always be a problem of individuating and binding into contexts too. Individuation - what generates the tokens in one context? And binding - is a context demarcated from others? The way I've set up coordinating norms takes a binding for granted - a context of mutual articulation of event sequences to coordinate. And also individuation for granted - that the tokens involved in the coordination are generable as distinct.
The relationship between individuation and binding is, I think, implicated in setting up a coordinating norm as well, because someone can posit an association and run with it, or note a correlation and study it.
There's a reason for that, already given. If all you are going to do is repeat errors that have already been highlighted then there's not much point to continuing.
Possible worlds in modal logic are not the same as possible worlds in physics.
A modal world is stipulated. It is constructed by setting out how it is different from the actual world. So "What if Elizabeth had died in her sixties, leaving us with King Charles thirty years ago?" stipulates a possibly world in which Charles has been king for thirty years. This is a different ontology to physical worlds mooted in multiverse theories, worlds that come into existence during quantum events. They are quite different.
There was at least one very good philosopher who insisted that possible worlds are also actual, just like this world - David Lewis. It's not a generally accepted view.
Modal logic is a tool for working through the consequences of modal stipulations. "What if all life disappeared and everything else stays the same" stipulates a possible world. In that world there will be gold in those hills, since everything else stays the same. There is gold in those hills, hence it is true that there is gold in those hills, and "there is gold in those hills" is true. There are also no people in that world to say "There is gold in those hills". And it is true that there are no people to say such a thing.
Simple enough.
The alternative offered is that there is gold in those hills, but that truth is a property of statements; and since there is no one in that world to make a statement, "There is gold in those hills" is unstated and so untrue. There are multiple problems with this approach which have been listed over the last twenty or so pages. Perhaps the central one is the claim that there is gold in those hills and yet it is not true that there is gold in those hills, a pretty direct contradiction. So we have modal logic that involves a contradiction, in the presence an alternative that does not. The choice should be easy.
My two bits. Saying things that are true is something we habitually do. Doing otherwise is the exception.
Calling some particular act "eating" is a "counts as..." exercise. Putting it in your mouth, chewing and swallowing counts as eating. I read the PI Wittgenstein as saying that this is just what we do, and that philosophical investigation stops there. We might ask "Why do we call it eating", but this becomes a question for physiologists and etymology.
We should also keep in mind expressions such as 'I'll eat my hat" and "eating humble pie".
Contra Levi-strauss, it's all cooked, by the words we use. We can't step outside language, nor outside our culture into "nature".
"Counts as..." underpins language.
I read as much as I could about David Lewis and needed to go ahead and buy a collection of his papers in order to understand furher, but it was too expensive. Now the fascination has passed. :confused:
Quoting Banno
My two cents worth is that as soon as we stop living and start analyzing, we inevitably end up with gears and springs, wondering how it ever comes back together to create the real.
I'd be happier if you said "...to construct the real".
Yes! Though I think how "counts as" works can be shifted, intentionally or unintentionally. Like your "I'll eat my hat" example. You can say that it works as an expression of incredulity because a hat doesn't count as something which would be eaten - it's more than that of course, but it's part of it. A particularly strong and striking violation of expected word use in one context... becomes an expected word use in another. This isn't quite right. But I think it illustrates the point.
Edit: more vague words - we might disagree about whether "counts as" has a mere functional priority in language, or whether it has a transcendental priority. As in, whether "counts as" is another role of language, behaviour, coordinating norms, or whether it acts as a precondition. Perhaps even an unanalyzable term. I'd side with the former. I think norms modify themselves enough to remove any "a priori" flavour thing from them.
What's the difference?
Not just any consistent narrative will do. One needs to check that the narrative works.
So sometimes the story surprises us, we come across new things. How could that we if it were only our own creation? And we agree on most of the narrative. How can that be if we each were creating our own? And sometimes we are wrong, but how could we be wrong about something that was no more than our own creation?
Novelty, agreement and error - the trinity of realism. :wink:
Even to learn that the practice of "counting as"? I can certainly set it up like: let's pretend that this calculator is a phone... And it's not just an analogy for counting as, it'a a learnable instance. My suspicion is that because it's learnable, and can even be conceptualised abstractly like we're doing now, there's enough there to make it possible to give an account of it. Because there's clear learnable instances which can coordinate with - and maybe modify! - instances of the concept.
Like if instead of pretending my calculator was a phone, my student instead imagined the calculator was a phone. They'd be counting-as differently, even if they're they're counting-as the same thingy. I'd be able to correct them perhaps - if you sit there doing nothing, you're just imagining rather than pretending. They would have understood a context of treating the calculator as if it were something else regardless.
If my student pointed out to me that they were visualising ringing me with the calculator? They'd correct my correction... correctly.
Another toy example, rather than an argument.
I take that as a psychological or neurological question. Arguably neural nets are built in order to continue in some pattern - to "predict" is how it is usually phrase.
My calculator is a phone. Puzzling.
But taking on your example, if one were to treat a calculator - not the phone sort - as a phone, there would quickly be certain problems. Lack of reception, for a start.
So aren't pretending and imagining different to "counting as..."? When we count as, we "carry on" in the same way. We say this paper counts as money, and use it for transactions in an ongoing fashion. But pretend money or imaginary money - say a toy dollar note or a dream of a lottery win - can't do this.
One of the astonishing things I've learned on this forum is that there are folk who didn't learn to "Carry on..." in the requisite sense. Or perhaps they do carry on, but deny that they can.
I don't think you're just hanging around creating the world. The division between you and world arises from reflection on events. Less realism, more mysticism.
I suppose we could quibble about the boundary between philosophy, psychology and neurology. I suspect there isn't too much of one. Considering the degree of interdisciplinary collaborations involving the disciplines.
Quoting Banno
Hah.
Quoting Banno
I think they're species of counting as.
Your paper money counts as money in its ordinary social role. You could use it in its traditional business role as a straw. Or as tinder for a fire. It really does count as paper money in its ordinary social role. But the paper money isn't necessarily counting as money when it's tinder, or a straw. Part of what makes the paper money money is its ongoing use as money (including what it looks like, who created it etc).
You wouldn't refer to it as a straw or as tinder though, as the object isn't baptised that way. Things tend to keep their name from their primary context of use in the broader society - like my plastic crate keeps being called my plastic crate despite its primary use in my home being as a calf raise platform. Which it absolutely counts as for appropriate exercises.
I got a degree in computer science a few years before formally studying philosophy. Some years later as I was reading Plato I finally popped out of the flat paradigm, and it was a bizarre experience.
For the computer scientist (and the analytic philosopher) everything is computer- and computation-centric. The computer is the operating element, and it is just doing things with inputs. Labeling them, classifying them, ordering and combining them in different ways. This looks to be a consequence of the Kantian shift, where everything began to orbit around anthropos. On my view the flatness of such a conception lies in the idea that all inputs are prima facie equivalent (e.g. eating, dancing, speaking, thinking, classifying...). It presupposes the autonomous subject freely interacting with static and rationally manipulable inputs. The knowledge does not go beyond these rational manipulations and comparisons.
While reading Plato that day I finally understood the pre-Kantian and pre-modern view, which is dynamic through and through (in subject and object). Eating, dancing, speaking, and everything else that we encounter are ineliminably distinct and unique. It's a bit like when a psychologist has a tidy personality theory that is supposed to encapsulate all persons. But then they may encounter a string of people who do not at all fit their schema, and come to recognize that the schema is highly artificial. The attempt to make all objects commensurable vis-a-vis the computational motherboard now strikes me as a highly artificial endeavor. It can be done to one limited extent or another, but in the end it is in vain.
This Kantian shift gobbles up conceptions of correspondence, even before pragmatism hits the scene. An Analytic thinks of correspondence between sentence and reality, and looks for some corresponding content. For the pre-modern correspondence of the intellect is something like a shapeshifter taking on the form of different species. To be/know a giraffe is much different than to be/know a woman, or an Indian, or a river. It is not a static relationship between mind/computer and object/input. At the end of the day it is not merely sentential. Knowledge/truth is more than a set of sentences. There is a very important sense in which substances are incommensurably different, and they dynamically interact with us in ways that we cannot anticipate or control. But the solipsistic tendency to take a static-computational paradigm for granted is very natural in our time. In always holding substances at arm's length and requiring them to be commensurable and static we limit our knowledge of them, and we limit our conception of knowledge (indeed, even to speak of substances rather than objects is to shift).
Why?
If I paint a red ball accurately then is the accuracy of that painting "pre-determined", and so evidence that painting-accuracy is not exclusively a property of painted paintings?
What kind of property is accuracy or truth? Like if we weren't around to say the painting is accurate, it wouldn't have that property. We magically make the painting have a property. Then after we're extinct, the property disappears
It makes you wonder if accuracy is just something people say about the painting.
Yes, and "true" and "false" are adjectives that we use to describe a sentence. I think Wittgenstein's account of language is more reasonable than any account that suggests that our utterances are somehow associated with mind-independent abstract objects and properties (related somewhat to this, this, and this).
I think that language is behavioral and psychological, not something more as platonism would seem to require.
I was talking about paintings. How the property of accuracy isn't about the painting so much as about us.
I think we've covered the platonism angle as much as we're going to. I don't disagree with your conclusion, I disagree pervasively with the way you got there, because you just aren't interested in even looking into why propositions still hold a prominent spot in AP and phil of math.
I don't have a problem with propositions. I have a problem with mind-independent propositions, à la platonism.
Even a mathematical platonist like Quine rejects mind-independent propositions, which seems to set up the interesting case where numbers are mind-independent abstract objects but that equations aren't.
And as for maths, I'm not a mathematical platonist, and I don't think that this is the discussion to discuss the merits of mathematical platonism.
It's weird how accuracy appears to be a property of objects, but it's really coming from us. It's like the way redness is a property of roses, but it doesn't really belong to the rose.
We project out our thoughts onto the world when we say the painting is accurate. We sort of ordain the painting.
I'm talking about prime numbers and you change the subject to paintings. Why? It's not an apt analogy. For a start paintings do not enjoy pre-existence prioir to their being painted, and thought as pre-existents they are not determinate objects like prime numbers are. Also, it is an observable object—the painting—which will be assessed for accuracy once it exists. What exactly is it that will be assessed for primeness?
I don't have to propose anything I can simply present some number: say 579,836,642,549,743,762,649 and there is a truth about whether or not that number is prime. No proposition required. In the case of the painting, it is an existent particular—the painting—that determines the truth regarding whether it is accurate.
Also, accuracy is not a precisely determinable quality. What is it in the case of the number whose primeness is yet to be identified, which determines the truth about its primeness; a truth which is precisely determinable?
You appear to be assuming mathematical platonism?
Quoting Janus
The proposition "X is a prime number" is assessed as accurate/true when uttered.
Quoting Janus
But "a truth" means "a true proposition", and so you are saying "there is a true proposition about whether or not that number is prime; no proposition required".
Quoting Janus
Then neither is the truth of the proposition "the painting is accurate".
No, I'm not assuming mathematical Platonism or anything else.
Quoting Michael
As I said I'm not proposing anything. I just write down a number and ask the question as to its primeness. I know the truth regarding its primeness is prior to even writing the number down and certainly prior to my discovering it. And of course I will have to discover it, most especially in the case of extremely large numbers.
Quoting Michael
You are simply asserting, without supporting argument, that truth is only a property of some propositions. If you open your mind and think about it you will see that my example of prime numbers throws that assumption into question—makes it look like the partial, not the whole truth.
Quoting Michael
I agree, but it is irrelevant to the question about prime numbers.
You seem to be saying that the proposition "X is a prime number" is true or false before it is uttered but denying that this is a case of a proposition being true or false.
Quoting Michael
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I went over this with the existence of gold, but I'll do it again with a number being prime:
1. "11 is prime" is true
2. It is true that 11 is prime
3. 11 is prime
(1) asserts that a proposition is true. (3) asserts that a number is prime (and says nothing about truth).
(2) either means the same thing as (1), in which case it asserts that a proposition is true, or it means the same thing as (3), in which case it asserts that a number is prime and the phrase "it is true that" is vacuous, being nothing more than grammatical fluff.
When you ask about the truth regarding a number's primeness it's unclear if you're asking me about the truth of the proposition "X is prime" or if you're asking me about the number's primeness, and this ambiguity is causing you to equivocate.
The unambiguous and correct answers to your question are:
1. If I say that the number 11 is prime then what I say is true
2. The number 11 is prime even if I don't say that it is
3. If I say that the number 12 is prime then what I say is false
4. The number 12 is not prime even if I don't say that it isn't
And to a different question:
1. If I say that gold exists then what I say is true
2. Gold exists even if I don't say that it does
3. If I say that vibranium exists then what I say is false
4. Vibranium does not exist even if I don't say that it doesn't
When you clear up the grammar of the questions and answers then it's clear that truth and falsity are properly properties of propositions/sentences/beliefs/utterances, not something that can be divorced from them by clever word play, and is why the SEP article on truth says:
So the relevant discussion concerns whether or not platonism about truthbearers is correct, or if we should adopt a non-platonistic interpretation that allows for a distinction between truths in a world and truths at a world, and I am firmly in favour of the latter.
It seems to me your thinking is too black and white. If there are countless prime numbers which no one will ever identify, then we can write down extremely large numbers and for any number we write down it will be true or false that it is prime, even if we don't know the answer. If the truth about the primeness of those countless numbers precedes their being enunciated, then what is it that determines that truth or falsity. It's a different case than with concrete particulars because the latter can be observed in order to find out whether what we thought about them prior to knowing the answer is true or false.
This is a difficulty for the idea that truth is simply a property of propositions, but it doesn't follow that Platonism is the answer. Maybe the question cannot be answered, but even so that doesn't remove the difficulty..
What is the word "it" referring to here?
Either it's referring to a proposition, as I have been arguing, or it's not referring to anything, in which case truth and falsity are being predicated of nothing, and so the phrases "it will be true that" and "it will be false that" are vacuous, as I have been arguing.
If all you are saying is that any number we write down is either prime or not, even if we don't know the answer, then I agree and have never claimed otherwise.
That is all I'm saying. It being prime and it being true that it is prime are exactly the same. No proposition need be uttered. Same as with the existence of gold.
Now the tricky part: we can say (although some don't) that existence is independent of minds. Can we likewise say that primeness is independent of minds? If it is, does that necessarily entail Platonism? Or?
Which I addressed above. If "is is prime" and "it is true that it is prime" are being used interchangeably then the phrase "it is true that" is vacuous; "it" refers to nothing and so truth is not being predicating of anything.
But when "truth" and "falsehood" are being predicated of something – when truths and falsehoods are some thing – that thing is a proposition/sentence/utterance, and if platonism about propositions is incorrect then even if there are truths about a world without language there are no truths in a world without language.
Roughly, philosophy does the conceptual stuff and psychology does the empirical stuff. Whether we "learn that the practice of counting as", as you ask, seems to me to be an issue for empirical investigation.
Quoting fdrake
i didn't see that in your example. Sure, the paper can count as different things, bitt hat' not different types of counting as...
Counting as... has a world-to-word direction of fit; the world is changed so that the crate becomes a calf raise platform. (I had to look that up. Though at first it had something to do with animal husbandry.)
That reversal of the direction of fit is what embeds mind into the world. It's what gets mistaken for implying idealism. @Wayfarer does this in many of his posts. @Michael thinks it invokes platonism. But it seems to me a relatively trivial thing.
Yes. Though I don't enjoy limiting it to words, or cleaving language from world as if there could be a single direction of fit between the two. My visual impression of a duck counts as a duck. The duck counts as a duck. "the duck" counts as a duck.
But folk will use that to go all Hegelian.
Yeah it's a quagmire. But Big Mad H might've been on to something.
(p & ~p)?q. That's all.
Brandom sees something in him, I don't know what, but I trust his eyes.
I'm not so keen.
I should admit that I don't really recognize your "counts as" idea:
Quoting fdrake
I think is right that eating is not a custom or convention. If eating is the ingestion of food then someone who ingests food eats. It doesn't make sense to talk about something "counting as eating." Eating is not something we make up. It is not something we ratify.
Quoting fdrake
Names of artifacts are to a large extent arbitrary. Eating is not. A dollar bill has many uses. I don't see anything mysterious or important in this.
One might say that all humans do is coordinate norms, and that the norms are plastic and arbitrary. But things like eating, dancing, copulating, swimming, etc., just aren't plastic and arbitrary norms. And therefore norm-coordination is not all humans do. In fact to think of human behavior as mere norm coordination strikes me as more or less backwards, given that all the norms are grounded in things which are not mere custom or convention, and none of these things that are not custom or convention are grounded in mere norms. It's a bit like trying to make words explain reality, when in fact reality is what explains words. Words aren't worth much apart from their referents in reality.
Quoting fdrake
Do we agree that, "The duck is a duck," is not the same as, "The duck counts as a duck"? Ducks have a different relation to ducks than pictures of ducks or signs of ducks, and to say that a duck counts as a duck is to miss this rather important fact.
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes! We agree. I think the "the duck is a duck" is a form of the duck counting as a duck. But it's a form of a duck counting as a duck which has very strict standards. This isn't to say that a duck is a social construction, even though counting as a duck is. I'd also want to stress that social constructions are real too - if you marry someone, you really are married to them.
Quoting Leontiskos
It's butchered from Sellars. He has a unique combination of nominalism and naturalism, which I really like.
Yep.
Which I think he also considered as falling somewhere within the pragmatist tradition, much as Quine thought of himself. And he was deeply engaged, as they say, with Kant. So everything @Leontiskos finds suspicious in one package.
"Counts as" is a pragmatist move. I think he revived James's talk of the "cash value" of an idea, for similar reasons. Though I might have the history wrong there.
But there is a little problem. Remember that Sellars argued in EPM that you can't reduce all talk of phenomena to talk of "looks" because it makes no sense to say that something looks green unless you know what it means for something to be green. That's his Kantian move. It's about conceptual priority.
Maybe this is different, but you have to wonder: does it make sense to talk about something counting as a duck, if you don't know what it means for something to be a duck?
It's conceptual priority again. It's not obvious that our concepts can be "counts as" all the way down. As a general matter, taking x as y requires that you know what y is, else the gesture is empty.
Unless of course all this talk of what "counts as" what is a suggestive way of talking about what is what.
One of my first lessons in philosophy to my children was the old joke: how many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg? And the answer is: four, because calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.
The thing about "counts as" is that we always have to clarify whether we are distinguishing it from "is". When we pretend, assume, suppose, hypothesize, and so on, we agree to treat something as something knowing that it isn't. But sometimes we do it differently: a win by forfeit counts as a win; we all know it's not the same as winning by the usual process of defeating your opponent, but for the sake of competitive standings it's the same as winning.
So to make our understanding "counts as" all the way down, we first smuggle in our pre-theoretical understanding of "is", and then to recover the usefulness of things "counting as" something, we'll have to tack on some distinction in types of counting as anyway.
Yuck.
'Counts as..." doesn't change the words to match the world, but the world to match the words. So "That counts as a duck" makes that thing a duck, an act of intent on the part of the speaker.
Hence, there is not a something that it means to be a duck until the act is performed.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
...that's not taking the "counts as" act seriously. If the tail counts as a leg, that's five.
Quoting fdrake
Sure, I understand that, even though I haven’t read Sellars. What I mean is that I don’t recognize it as cogent, “I don’t see anything mysterious or important in this [‘counts as’ idea].” Or as Srap said:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
For me “counts as” is not even an epistemological issue. The epistemological issue has to do with what it is to be something, not what it is to count as something. I don’t find it interesting that my belt can count as a tourniquet. For Aristotle there is a fundamental difference between knowledge of artifacts like belts, and knowledge of natural realities like eating. Artifacts can count as whatever you like, for they have no telos qua artifact. But not natural realities. Fire is hot. It doesn’t merely count as hot.
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Quoting fdrake
Do you admit any knowledge which is not reducible to a social construction, custom, or convention? Or is it “counts as” all the way down?
Put slightly differently, if counting as a duck is a social construction, and a duck counts as a duck, then a duck is a social construction (contrary to what you say here).
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Quoting Srap Tasmaner
In a broad-brush sort of way I see this as bound up in philosophical anthropology and the history of philosophy. Our current confluence of Darwinism, post-modernism, and (to a lesser extent) Kant’s reckoning with Hume seems to have minimized our belief in agency. And without agency there seems to be no possibility of really knowing/understanding reality in the classical sense. On this newer view the human capacity for speculative knowledge and truth seems to have been neutered.
So if a pragmatist wants to say that it’s just “counts as” all the way down, this is presumably because their philosophical anthropology precludes any other options. “All humans are doing is trying to survive,” or, “All humans are is a product of genetic-evolutionary factors,” or, “All humans are doing is aiming at different pragmatic goals.” If that’s “all humans are doing,” then they aren’t doing any truth stuff. At least not really or primarily. Hence while it is possible to separate mind from the world and create an unbridgeable gulf, there is also an opposite error where there is not a sufficient distinction between the mind and the world for knowledge and truth to even exist in their robust form.
<Earlier> I claimed that Michael and Banno are upholding something close to the classical view, but in much the same way that one upholds a branch that has been cut from the tree. So they say things like, “That’s just the way it is, and no further story needs to be told.” Whereas their forebears said, “That’s the way it is, and we have all sorts of stories for the underlying basis.” The older theological and metaphysical stories are done away with, and at the same time the opposition has picked up the newer stories—Darwinian, post-modern, and Kantian. Thus as I see it Michael and Banno’s view is not wrong in the main, but it is truncated to the point of being unpersuasive. And fdrake’s view—or what I know of it—is not out of step with contemporary thought, but it does have very serious logical problems (such as trying to make knowledge a matter of “counts as” all the way down).
Thomas Nagel is an example of someone who is with Michael and Banno, except that he is well aware of the metaphysical inadequacies of his view (given his naturalism), and it unsettles him.
I suppose that depends on whether or not numbers are mind-independent, which I discuss in a different topic.
But if we're discussing physical objects then I already stated several times over the past several weeks and pages that gold can exist in a world without minds.
My claim is only that a) truth and falsity are properties of truth-bearers, that b) truth-bearers are propositions, sentences, utterances, beliefs, etc., and that c) propositions, sentences, utterances, beliefs, etc. are not language-independent. This then entails that d) a world without language is a world without truth-bearers is a world without truths and falsehoods.
It's unclear to me which of a), b), c) , or d) you disagree with.
If you accept a), b), and c) but reject d) then you are clearly equivocating, introducing some new meaning to the terms "truth" and "falsehood" distinct from that referenced in a).
I haven't made an error. You have. I explained it quite clearly in my last post here which you opted not to address.
Firstly, you brought up chess as an analogy to propositions. My claim is that there is no chess in a barren world because there is nobody in that world playing chess and that there are no propositions in a barren world because there is nobody in that world using propositions.
Secondly, you conflate propositions about a world and propositions in a world. That we use propositions to talk about a world without language does not entail that there are propositions in a world without language.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I think it does make sense to talk like that. You need to learn what "is" means. Which doesn't mean that "counts as" is prior to "is" in all senses of priority. There are two senses of priority in Sellars I believe. And I think they are helpful. There's an order of being, which concerns what is, and an order of knowing, which concerns our learning. "counts as" is prior to "is" in the order of knowing, but "is" is prior to "counts as" in the order of being.
That's to say that recognising a duck requires there to be a duck and recognitions. The duck would've been there regardless. The process of recognition would've been there regardless. But you can't think about recognising a duck without there being recognition of ducks. Or ducks.
Having one sense of priority - equating between the order of being and the order of knowing - is in my opinion the engine of interminable debate in this thread. People fundamentally understand that in order for there to be recognition of ducks, there needs to be recognition, and ducks. And then ask which comes first. The answer is neither and both. Neither in the sense that ducks and recognition have anything to do with each other insofar as they exist, both in the sense that no one would recognise a duck if there were no ducks and no one would recognise a duck if there were no recognitions.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes. And we need to simultaneously grapple with the fact that we learn to tell what is from what isn't. I guess we should make a distinction between counting as as a concept and counting as as a practice, too. People count stuff as stuff all the time, and that's a practice. And kids do it before they learn what "is" means. But we adults are going to know that counting as as a concept depends upon what is in some sense. I think Brassier put it something like: "in order to know what "is" means, we need to know what "means" is".
So with regard to "all the way down" - that's an intuition based on there being one hierarchy of concepts. Some things are prior to other things. And "prior" in the former sentence means one thing. That thing is: X is unthinkable without Y. Such a hierarchy has an air of applying to everything, but that makes it very bloated. You end up needing to ask whether cheese is prior to geese. Which doesn't make much sense, as cheese has nothing to do with geese. So priority must be restricted.
I'd suggest that this conceptual hierarchy concerns what is thinkable, rather than what is. I'm not going to make an argument for why that is unless demanded to though - I'm just going to look at some examples and describe a pattern.
Cheese and geese have nothing to do with each other. So it seems odd for that reason. I think that can be relaxed a bit: "human settlements would not be thinkable without agriculture" - human settlements have rather a lot to do with agriculture, but we know that there were settlements without agriculture. "history would not be thinkable without time" - you could read that substantively or conceptually, there would've been no human history without time. But also you could read it as claiming the concept of history makes no sense without the concept of time. The last one seems to be closest to the domain where the question crops up.
"Cheese is unthinkable without geese" makes no sense because the two have nothing to do with each other - the two terms in unthinkability need to be relevant to each other, and not just independent entities or types of entities.
"human settlements would not be thinkable without agriculture" - this makes sense, but is false, as there is a substantive counterexample. People did think of one + once you "see" the example, you think of it.
"history would not be thinkable without time" - this makes sense, you can't {easily?} form a counterexample, and it concerns two very abstract flavours of thing which share lots of aspects.
The first two agree with you, the answers depend upon what is. They also agree with you that unthinkability as a concept piggybacks on "is" as a concept. The latter's a different flavour of question since you can't look for examples, even though it shares the same words.
Let's go through the claims again looking at how "counts as" works in them.
"Cheese is unthinkable without geese" - there's absolutely nothing about cheese which impacts what is recognisable as a goose. So the two have nothing to do with each other in terms of "counts as"
"human settelements would not be thinkable without agriculture" - this turned out to be false because there was a human settlement without agriculture. Notably, something counted as a human settlement without agriculture, so it was a counterexample.
"history would not be thinkable without time" - could something be counted as a concept of history without counting as a concept of time? Yeah, mathematised time doesn't count as narrative history. But maybe that's missing the thrust of the question. The idea would be something about... conceptual implication or conceptual involvement, that there could be nothing which counts as a history without implying some involvement of the concept of time in the counting act.
I want to suggest that because the thinkability question makes sense without needing to be able to find an example even in principle, but examples can be relevant, that "is" is involved conceptually in counting as. And isn't thus conceptually dependent upon counting as. And we even understand it as such.
But "is" as a concept does seem to be dependent upon counting as in terms of how it is assessed, learned etc. Learning to tell what is from what isn't. What is... is posited as, and behaves as, independent of the specifics of what we think, and even whether we think at all. And that's it working as intended.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I like it.
It might surprise you, but I agree with this and find it a bad trend. I see all of those as irritating reductionisms. I'm equally irritated by a reduction of our being to ideas/thoughts.
Though I imagine I fall into your condemnation bucket here, since I definitely don't see humans as doing "truth stuff" primarily, we do however do it. I'm of the opinion that a commitment to understanding stuff leads to seeing humans without prioritising our agency {as normally intuited} ontologically though.
Quoting Leontiskos
Aye. I agree with that, in the sense you're meaning "count as" anyway.
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Leontiskos
I don't think that follows. Can you show me how it does? I'm suspicious because the premises are "if counting as a duck...", and "the duck counts as as a duck". I'm also thinking that you think of a social construction quite differently than what I do - I see it more as a verb than as a noun.
Quoting fdrake
I would not want to underestimate the difference between “counting as” and “recognizing.” A very significant shift has occurred here. Srap said:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
When fdrake talks about “counting as,” he is importing a theoretical apparatus into a bit of common language in a way that the common language has trouble supporting. For example, if I go to the Christmas party, point to the hearth, and say, “That counts as a fire,” everyone will have a good laugh. They will say, “Actually that really is a fire!” And:
Quoting fdrake
In my opinion this is a highly controversial claim. I’d say that when a child points to the fire and says, “Fire!,” she is not saying, “This counts as fire,” but rather, “This is fire.” Or rather, whatever she is doing is much closer to the latter than the former.
Now I know what you mean, and I am opening myself to the charge of quibbling here, but the point is worth observing. It is one thing to give ourselves license to use a bit of language in a loose and imprecise way, but when the imprecise language is meant to ground an entire theory of knowledge or language much more is at stake than we realize. So to use the metaphor “counts as” as a fundamental building block of an epistemological program is dangerous in the same way that Wittgenstein’s talk of language games is dangerous. As Aristotle says, a small error in the beginning makes for large errors later on.
Quoting fdrake
Okay, great. But I wonder if there is a more minor reductionism. I take it that “counts as” is an anthropocentric metaphor. The literal sense has to do with counting, which is a human mathematical act. In the metaphorical sense “counts as” is usually indexed to a subject or a community. “It counts, at least for her.” “He counts it as a victory.” “For the American people this counts as an act of terrorism.” This metaphor is usually used to create distance from ‘is’, and if all humans are doing is counting X’s as Y’s then it’s not clear that there is any fact of the matter.
Quoting fdrake
Okay. As long as we do it we’re in agreement on this point. When I said “primarily” I only meant that not every act has the “truth stuff” as secondary and oblique. I certainly left myself open to that misunderstanding.
Quoting fdrake
Aristotle definitely agrees with this, but the trouble is that the moderns seem to think that one must learn epistemology before they can know anything.
Quoting fdrake
Here’s how I read the thread at this point. Banno is challenged on whether truths can exist without minds; Michael is challenged on whether truths are merely properties of sentences; you appeal to a form of pragmatism; and then Srap offers some objections.
Now when you appeal to pragmatism with this notion of “counts as,” it looks as if you are trying to short-circuit the realism circuit, such that we only need to worry about whether it counts as a duck, not whether it truly is a duck. But had you talked about recognizing ducks, the short-circuit tack would not be a natural interpretation.
Quoting fdrake
For me the conceptual priority question is something like this. Suppose you are training a novice in the CIA to root out foreign spies. Are you going to teach them what counts as a spy? Or are you going to teach them how to identify a spy? I think they are quite different. And if—contrary to natural language use—all we mean by “counting as” is “correctly identifying,” then we are really talking about identifying spies.
For me the “all the way down” objection has to do with a form of “counting as” that is not reducible to a form of “correctly identifying” (“a suggestive way of talking about what is what” ). The objection is that this cannot be done “all the way down,” and I think Srap provided the arguments.
At this stage I’m primarily interested in whether you only mean “counting as” as “identifying” or “correctly identifying.”
(Given our discussion of triangles, what I think you mean by “counts as” is, “If we define a triangle as thus-and-such, then it counts as a triangle. If we define it in a different way then it may not.” And in that thread I’m not sure you ever answered my question about whether there are true and false definitions, especially once we get away from triangles.)
Quoting fdrake
Let me try to put it a third way:
Quoting fdrake
How do you know that a duck is not a social construction? If you can only say, “That counts as a duck,” and this act of yours is a social construction, then what license do you have to claim that ducks are not socially constructed? Or do you abstain from that claim?
To say that truth and falsity are properties of sentences, utterances, beliefs, etc seems fine to me. To say they are only properties of those seems overly restrictive. 'Truth' like 'existence' is a word that refers to a concept. Concepts are mind-dependent, but what they conceive is not necessarily.
Do you think animals that lack language have beliefs? If so, do you think those beliefs can be true or false?
If you're asking me how I'd approach the question IRL, I'd just say things like "it's a wild animal", "it's not something like a society or a contract", "it doesn't care about human social life" etc. I think I've got the same recourse here. When you say something is a duck, in all but the most obscure circumstances, that comes along with what I've just said. Which serve as reasons for excluding ducks from being social constructions.
You could reason that I've dodged the question, and substituted a particular case of counting as for the general case - but I don't know why this wouldn't be an available move to me? I've given good reasons for why ducks aren't social constructions. I think it's evident that counting as a duck isn't the same as being a duck, too. Like a picture of a duck isn't a duck, it's a picture of a duck. But you might still say "that's a duck" on the picture.
Moreover, ducks would exist without us. Perhaps that would be a cuter world.
The moral of the story, I think, is that counting as a duck is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a duck. Being a duck is also not a necessary or sufficient condition for counting as a duck. But if something quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, smells like a duck... it probably is a duck. And I imagine it counts as one too.
Quoting Leontiskos
I agree with you about fire, but see the above example about "that's a duck" regarding a picture of a duck. Hence things about pomo and pipes.
Quoting Leontiskos
Yeah. I think this is quite similar to what I was talking about with @Srap Tasmaner earlier. You can read the above as introducing a much higher, much more precise, much more contextually astute, standard for counting someone as a spy. You want a checklist that lets you correctly assert someone is a spy - identifying them right. And in those conditions someone should definitely say "that's a spy".
Quoting Leontiskos
I don't fully embrace the distinction in the way you're framed it, I think. If you satisfy the appropriate standard, I think you can correctly claim that something is the case. Even if later evidence comes to light that one was wrong. That may seem absurd, but I think it's comparable to the death by precision that I mentioned earlier regarding having only a very exacting standard for truth. Is the ruler 30cm long? Obviously, it's a 30cm ruler. Turns out it's 30.0005cm long. Dang it. I'd want to side with someone who said it was 30cm long, and say they spoke the truth.
What I'm interested in with that is how truth as a concept behaves. I've long given up hope that something as bizarre as a sentence can state facts as plainly as we need to believe they are stated. But nevertheless, we need to believe they are stated plainly, so the truth will have to do in its own stead.
Quoting Leontiskos
I didn't mean it like that.
Indeed, I did not address it, becasue I had done so previously. The repetition is tiresome.
I realise this could have been unclear earlier. Ordinarily the conditions under which someone correctly identifies X as a duck immediately count X as a duck too. I see that {and I think Sellars sees that} as a behavioural connection rather than a logical one. If something is identified as X, it counts as X. If something counts as X - there's definitely a thingy which counts as X and a counting as.
The tension which I think you're picking up on is the weirdness that comes with treating counting-as as distinct from identity, even though identifying correctly is norm and theory ladened, involving standards of correctness for counting-as.
I agree that this is weird. But I also think it's a good description of how that works. We treat the world as if some things depend on us and some don't. Like the desk I'm sitting at isn't dependent upon my mind for its existence - it really is hard, I don't just think it's hard. But it's still dependent upon human existence in some sense, since it was manufactured by us. Now if you deleted all the humans and left nothing unchanged, the table would not stop existing. Though something like dancing would disappear. along with us.
So there are standards and norms that concern correctly asserting that something is independent from us. We're usually right about that - but we could be wrong.
It's a giant hall of mirrors. Every time someone is going to say "true", I'm going to replace it with a behavioural concept that's jury rigged to fit just how we use the word. And then I'm going to argue that the jury rigging is also in the territory. Irritatingly for everyone involved, self included, the jury rigging will actually tend to be there, and that can restart our conflict.
I guess my contention is that replacing “true” with jury rigged behavioral concepts is never ultimately going to cut it.
Further, I don’t see any significant difference between, “This is a duck,” and, “It is true that this is a duck.” So when <I asked> whether you recognized the difference between, “The duck is a duck,” and, “The duck counts as a duck,” I was comparing the truth claim to the behavioral-concept claim. I don’t see how we can have behavioral concept claims “all the way down.”
Quoting fdrake
Okay, but then it looks like being a duck (or being identified as a duck) is a sufficient condition for counting as a duck.
Quoting fdrake
Right.
I would say that everything is embedded in contextual and social norms, and yet those norms do not exhaust the content that flows through them. It then follows that studying the norms is not enough.
For example, the English language is a kind of social norm. But it does not follow that the content I receive through the English language is unable to transcend the English language. In fact it does, because the language is not an object so much as a medium. Of course this too does not mean that the medium does not involve objective limitations and constraints, which affect the shape of the content.
So we here have two aspects of the English language: its norm-determinedness, and its nature as a medium. There is a balance between the two. Someone like myself emphasizes the latter along with the truth that language can mediate. Someone like yourself emphasizes the former and the fact that the language is always operating through contextual norms. I want to say that clinging to either extreme too baldly is the most significant error.
But if that’s right, then your insistence that you will “replace [‘true’] with a behavioural concept that's jury rigged to fit just how we use the word” “every time,” looks like one of the two extremes. To do that every time would apparently be to renege on the idea that humans really can do “truth stuff.” Truth stuff requires a relatively contextless and normless intention, insofar as one is dispensing with overbearing qualification. That is why this “truth stuff” has such a remarkable capacity to transcend individual and cultural contexts. Mathematics, for example, is not limited to the regions of the world where the English language is spoken, or where Anglo-Saxon culture thrives. Truth is supposed to require less jury rigging than practical realities. It can fight its own fights, so to speak, because its clout is universally recognized.
I think being successfully identified as a duck counts whatever is identified as a duck. I think a correct identification would let someone correctly assert "that's a duck!" and have it be true. Regardless of whether it really is a duck. I'm putting it this way because I'm stressing that identification is an act, whereas being a duck is not one. You can correctly assert "that's a duck!" on the basis of some {nebulous} standards. But you can't correctly assert the duck being a duck. Because that's just what it is.
Quoting Leontiskos
As a summary before I respond in detail: the world isn't true or false, it's just the world. Which means that true or false concerns our statements about it, and the world. Claiming that something is true correctly is just to correctly claim that something is true. That's about how I see it.
So in detail. I think we're construing the scope of behavioural concepts a bit differently still. I'm including statements like {"this is a duck"} and concepts/norms/behaviours like {what makes "this is a duck" correctly assertible} as part of the same idea. They're functions of a linguistic community and its environment {yes I am that debased, seeing language as functional}. And part of those norms is, somewhat paradoxically, the necessary consideration that what is true of holds true in spite or apart from all norms. Since that's how truth works.
We're in a really odd position with the truth, since lots of statements admit of pernickity countermodels - rendering them false. Like the ruler example. But most statements people are committed to do tend to be true in the sense we care about. Like I could state various perceptually derived/implicated beliefs I have about my house, and they'd be true. And that's normal.
This isn't saying it's language all the way down either, because you can say what you like, part of the norms of correct assertion regards justification, evidence, reasoning, experiment etc... none of which just correspond to an individual saying stuff, they correspond to the person embodying {weasel world} collective standards of behaviour in their acts.
The weird rub is that the former paragraphs show [hide=*](well it doesn't, it's not an argument, it's a series of statements)[/hide] that the truth of a matter needs to be seen as independent of norms despite being governed by norms of correct assertion. But it can't be reducible to norms of language, since those are mutable. Nor can it be reducible to the state of the world, as that's neither true or false, nor an item of knowledge. The state of the world itself isn't people-y, the world itself isn't wholly a collaboration with agents. Even the people stuff, like the fact that I bought my desk at IKEA, holds true regardless of the event's involvement of society and social constructs.
I claim that this is only a puzzle if you come at it from the perspective that people cannot and do not assess mind-independence as part of what we do. But we do that all the time. The acts of assertion and assessment which are implicated in the norms of correct assertion don't change the state of the world, and the knowledge that it doesn't - and that we treat the world as if it doesn't - is leveraged in the execution of those norms. Correctness leverages mind independence and intersubjectivity as concepts, and it does those things because the state of things and the community at large do not depend upon any individuals' views of it. And the norms do not depend decisively upon any individuals use or views of them.
Edit: just to contextualise, "counts as" as a concept lives in the latter register, what we'd normally consider philosophy-wise as the interstice between mind-language-thought and world. I'm contextualising "counts as" as a coordination of acts and events, and there's no barrier between acts+events and the world, since acts elicit events and events elicit acts. Acts also are a type of event, and we understand them as such - as something which happens in a social context.
Everything I've said raises a puzzle about how that content comes about in a positive sense.
In a negative sense, I've already spoken about the world and our acts together constraining practices through the norms of correct assertion, and correct assertion coordinating with event sequences. But I've not explained or even attempted to explain commonalities in event sequences or the content of the coordinating mechanisms. People tend to say things fall down when dropped because things fall down when dropped, how? How do environmental developments place constraints on norms of language use? I think the only answer I've got available for that is that event sequences can already be patterns. But that doesn't specify the relationship of pattern content with coordinating norms regarding that pattern.
Maybe it's possible to construe that as a deflationary solution to the issue - we've already got that event sequences are or are not patterned, what more would we want than a structural symmetry between patterns and our acts? I'm not sure how to answer that question. But I do suspect that there's a ghost of the structure of things haunting my perspective.
And I'm not sure what to do about that. Other than talk about specific pattern contents and appeal to norms of correct assertion regarding statements about pattern contents. Like I set up with my toy example with sequences - I got to set up the underlying pattern because it was just maths. The world's far more unwieldy.
Sure, I agree.
Quoting fdrake
Right, I agree.
Quoting fdrake
This is where I disagree. There is a very important sense in which mind-independence is not part of what we do. Your picture is very activistic, in that it is all about humans doing things, acting, constructing or following social norms, etc. But activity is only half the picture. The other half is receptivity and recognition of what goes before us.
Edit: I now see that I am oversimplifying your position a bit, but even the phrase that "Correctness leverages," strikes me as overly activistic in a metaphorical sense. To say that we leverage mind independence feels strange to me. Or is it "correctness" that leverages it? Either way, to recognize, accept, or receive the fact of mind independence is different than leveraging. It can be leveraged, but that is only one approach.
Recall Srap's paragraph about dining:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Let's look more closely at the dining custom. "Knife left of spoon" - that's a fairly arbitrary social norm, much like driving on the right side of the road. It is "active" in the sense that depends entirely on human decisions about how it should be or will be. "Silverware on the left and right of the plate" - this is less arbitrary, given the spatial arrangement of human arms and hands. We are receptive before the fact that we have two arms and two hands on either side of our body. Our norms and customs are simply required to accommodate this fact if they are to be worthwhile. "Plate/food is placed along the edge of the table, close to the one who will eat" - this is even more 'receptive' and transcending of norms, as it will apply to cultures without silverware and even in a modified sense to most all mammals, given the fact that eating requires physical appropriation of food, which requires spatial juxtaposition. We are receptive to the fact that we are mammals and mammals eat. Our norms and customs must again accommodate this fact, rather than generate it.
I would say that all of the norms and customs that you are so interested in are at bottom grounded in these sorts of receptive facts (and because of this when we go "all the way down" we find something wholly different from a social construction). It is not quite right to say that these receptive facts are "something that we do." They are part of our life, but they are not something that we do. That things fall when dropped, or that mammals eat, are not things that we do. They are things that we recognize. They are truths that we recognize. Language and norms aid us in recognizing them, but the recognition is only an action in part. For it is also a passion in part (i.e. something that happens to us, or something that we yield before). Perhaps the grand-daddy of receptive facts is death, and the grand-daddy of activistic resistance to this fact which must be received is Kubler-Ross' stage of "denial" and distraction. The resolution stage is "acceptance," which is not accurately described as a form of doing.
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Quoting fdrake
Right.
Quoting fdrake
Freewheeling a bit, my hunch is that part of the move to linguistic philosophy was an attempt to simplify the object of study, and to get away from theories of mind or soul or whatnot. It's desirable to get away from those theories because the human is such a strange creature, such a strange mixture of mind and matter, of spiritual and earthly, of activity and passivity/receptivity. But the most characteristically human acts and artifacts inevitably share the same paradoxes of their source. Human languages, art, relationships, communities, etc., all contain those same paradoxes. And language along with the norms inherent therein are both active and receptive in the same way that humans are active and receptive. Language is not only imposed and created, it is also received, and part of that reception involves natural constraints and receptive facts, such as the fact that things fall when dropped. We could make a language that takes no account of that fact, but it would be inferior to one that does take account of it. In this way the social norms can be better or worse, insofar as they better reflect/mediate/receive reality. Thus it will be easier to tell the truth with certain languages and social norms.
Quoting fdrake
Right. I don't know how closely related it is to all of this, but I want to read a bit on Sellars' attack on the "myth of the given."
Edit:
Quoting fdrake
Simplifying this a bit, if I do X then I can choose to not-do X. So if mind-independence or truth or the constraints on norms are things we do, then they should be things we can choose to not-do. Are they?
When I complain about anthropocentric philosophies or ontologies, this is largely what I am thinking of. Such philosophies don't seem to give proper due to the finitude, limitations, passivity, and receptivity of human life. If we talk about everything that exists as "things we do" (even in the sense of perceiving or knowing), then a collective solipsism is just around the corner.
I think I avoided this. I claimed that we assess mind independence - it is something we can establish. Like we'd establish that there are eggs in my supermarket. I'm claiming it's the same flavour of fact as the others. You can tell if something will be there when humanity won't be, or alternatively when its nature is not exhausted by our collective norms.
Quoting Leontiskos
I agree with this. I dislike phrasing things in terms of language alone, I much prefer including perception vocabulary. Though language and perception clearly relate - seeing a duck as a duck is a way of counting that as a duck. And moreover you can't set up speech norms without hearing - coordinating sound pulses with events inferentially/perceptually.
Quoting Leontiskos
So I actually agree with this. But in a manner where I think perception is implicated in custom and vice versa.
Quoting Leontiskos
I agree with this, but:
Quoting Leontiskos
I don't quite agree with this. Because I don't think any of the languages we care about and use are inattentive to perception and the nature of the world. And that's because perception's a required mechanism in setting up coordinations between patterns and sequences of our acts, as well as source of patterns in itself. Like you need to perceive your partner in a dance to lead or follow, and they need to perceive your acts of perception and movements to coordinate with them and thus you. My student needed to perceive the words coming out of my mouth, as well as relate my inferences of whether they were correct or not to their inferences of the sequence pattern.
If you're interested in the myth of the given, it's a notoriously difficult argument, and would probably be worth its own thread. I think the above reference to inferential patterns being "baked into" perception and norms gestures in the direction of the concepts involved. Perception's a constructive endeavour, so's language use, and "giving and receiving" {if I've read you right} get their distinction undermined. Like in the dance example, every giving is a receiving and vice versa, and "what is given" and "what is received" are the same flavour of thing. Acts and events. Pulling with one's hands, going up on tiptoes, coming in for an embrace. Whose content is set up through inferential and practical relations as well as the event+act sequences themselves. It's a big recursive clusterfuck.
How does this address such statements as:
1. The universe was created by a supremely powerful deity
2. Intelligent extra-terrestrial life has visited Earth in secret
3. I will get married next year
4. If Hitler hadn't killed himself then he would have been assassinated
If there's any truth to these statements it certainly doesn't seem to concern norms and behaviours.
Okay that's fair. I added a second edit a bit late, which I will reiterate below.
Quoting fdrake
Okay.
Quoting fdrake
I suppose the question is whether every language is equally attentive. For example, pre-Newtonian language will represent gravity differently than post-Newtonian language, and that difference will increase the further we move from Newton in either direction. The broad idea here is that languages (and customs) can be better or worse for truth talk.
Quoting fdrake
Are you here paraphrasing Sellars? My point is that you seem to be underestimating the receptive side. It's not just actions and events, it's also passions (being-acted-upon). I tickle you and you laugh. You surrender to death (though not necessarily in that order :grin:). Are these actions? Are they events? Both analyses are incomplete without the incorporation of passion. We can call it a dance but if we only ever emphasize "leading" and never talk about "being led," then I don't think we are truly recognizing the dance. ...And in the modern world you have the "activists" who tend towards pure activity, and on the other extreme the determinists who posit pure passivity. Is the human an agent, a patient, or both?
I would say that both perception and knowledge involve crucially passive aspects. For example, Aristotle thought that there was an active part of the intellect and a passive part of the intellect, and that knowledge requires both. Push and pull.
Here is that second edit:
Quoting Leontiskos
(Saying that we "leverage" mind-independence strikes me as a bit like saying that the dance partner who is being led is leading. Of course Anna can lead him to let-her-be-led, but leading and being led are in general two different and opposed things, as are leveraging and recognizing. Even the mechanic who wants to leverage a screw needs first to recognize the screw in order to then leverage it. And if we constantly emphasize the active side and only include the passive side through stretched metaphors, we will inevitably be skewing the landscape.)
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Quoting fdrake
Okay.
These are cases where we pretend the world is like a novel and it has a narrator. It's third person. My theory is that propositions are all like this: we're pretending the world can talk.
Granted, that's a lot to cover. But to make assumptions about his realism and lump it in with Plato is a serious mistake of logic. .... Above all, Peirce was an absolutely brilliant logician.
Oh yes absolutely. I think the perspective I'm advocating accommodates this: the conditions of correct assertibility are historically fungible without being arbitrary, our connection to patterns of events can be revised - tightened or loosened as needed. Sellars draws a distinction between two flavours of discourse, scientific and manifest images. A scientific image is the norms. interpretive devices and posited entities of a scientific discourse, a manifest image is the norms, interpretive devices and posited entities of an everyday discourse. The two overlap and borrow from each other, also contradict along their interstices. They can disagree without one image preferable over the other.
It's correct to say that my table is a wave function. It's also absolutely insane to do so in public.
Quoting Leontiskos
I think this is something we'd need to get into with a hypothetical myth of the given thread.