Wittgenstein, Dummett, and anti-realism
I stumbled across a short article that summarised Dummett's views on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and its implications for the debate between realists and anti-realists and thought it might be interesting to discuss. The key section is this:
The part in bold is the part that I think needs greater clarification. As I understand it, it can be explained by the following analogy.
Let's say that we are each put in a shared simulation that may or may not represent the world outside the simulation. We assume that the simulation is an accurate representation of the outside world, and so assume that when we talk about it raining when it rains in the simulation we are talking about it raining outside the simulation, and that our claim is true if it is raining outside the simulation and false if it isn't. The issue, however, is that the actual practice of our language-use when the simulation is accurate is indistinguishable from the actual practice of our language-use when the simulation isn't accurate. Whatever happens outside the simulation, we say "it is raining" when it rains inside the simulation.
Dummett's claim then is that because Wittgenstein's account of meaning is such that it is to be found in the actual practice of using language, and that because the actual practice of using language is not affected by what happens outside the simulation, it follows that whatever's happening outside the simulation has nothing to do with the meaning of the words we use inside the simulation.
Dummett then goes on to claim that the principle of bivalence – an essential part of realist metaphysics – requires that what happens outside the simulation does have something to do with the meaning of the words inside the simulation. As an example, the statement "there's a cat in the cupboard" is either true or false, even if the inside of the cupboard isn't being simulated. This only works if the world outside the simulation has something to do with the meaning of this phrase when used inside the simulation. But the argument above is that the outside world is irrelevant. As such, the statement cannot be either true or false as nothing in the simulation determines it to be one or the other, and so the principle of bivalence fails, and along with it realism.
So is Dummett's argument valid? Does the Philosophical Investigations refute realism?
Michael Dummett has claimed that Wittgenstein's Investigations view of the linguistic sign is incompatible with a recognition-transcendent notion of truth, which in turn rules out realist metaphysics.
In regard to the linguistic sign, Dummett's argument is, in outline, that recognition-transcendent truth-conditions could attach to our statements only if such conditions could play an active role in language use. The key Wittgensteinian thought that drives the argument is the idea that if we did suppose ourselves to be able to grasp a particular meaning for our words that attached to a recognition-transcendent condition then the whole practice of language use would go on the same even if we had got it wrong. But this, the argument goes, is to posit a difference that makes no difference. Consequently, it drops out of consideration as irrelevant (Dummett 1993, pp.312-14).
The principal connection with metaphysics is via the notion of bivalence—the semantic principle that every statement is determinately true or false. If the truth of our statements depended on the obtaining of a worldy state of affairs (as the realist maintains), then our statements would have to be determinately true or false, according to whether or not that state of affairs obtained. However, given that we cannot guarantee that every statement is recognisable as true or recognisable as false, we are only entitled to this principle if our notion of truth is recognition-transcendent. By the above argument, it is not, and hence bivalence must be rejected and metaphysical anti-realism follows (Dummett 1963).
The part in bold is the part that I think needs greater clarification. As I understand it, it can be explained by the following analogy.
Let's say that we are each put in a shared simulation that may or may not represent the world outside the simulation. We assume that the simulation is an accurate representation of the outside world, and so assume that when we talk about it raining when it rains in the simulation we are talking about it raining outside the simulation, and that our claim is true if it is raining outside the simulation and false if it isn't. The issue, however, is that the actual practice of our language-use when the simulation is accurate is indistinguishable from the actual practice of our language-use when the simulation isn't accurate. Whatever happens outside the simulation, we say "it is raining" when it rains inside the simulation.
Dummett's claim then is that because Wittgenstein's account of meaning is such that it is to be found in the actual practice of using language, and that because the actual practice of using language is not affected by what happens outside the simulation, it follows that whatever's happening outside the simulation has nothing to do with the meaning of the words we use inside the simulation.
Dummett then goes on to claim that the principle of bivalence – an essential part of realist metaphysics – requires that what happens outside the simulation does have something to do with the meaning of the words inside the simulation. As an example, the statement "there's a cat in the cupboard" is either true or false, even if the inside of the cupboard isn't being simulated. This only works if the world outside the simulation has something to do with the meaning of this phrase when used inside the simulation. But the argument above is that the outside world is irrelevant. As such, the statement cannot be either true or false as nothing in the simulation determines it to be one or the other, and so the principle of bivalence fails, and along with it realism.
So is Dummett's argument valid? Does the Philosophical Investigations refute realism?
Comments (294)
Quoting Michael
What does it mean that the "external world" is "irrelevant"? If we're talking pragmatic use, then truth claims are valuable only by how they help us accomplish our goals. But something can be useful and yet still be completely wrong. Or we might have purely accidental knowledge, and not even realize it.
So if we talk about it raining, our behavior might be identical regardless of how the external world actually is, but it still stands that our belief, that it is raining, is either true or false. True knowledge just becomes epiphenomenal.
It's irrelevant in the sense that it has no bearing on how we use language. And Wittgenstein's point was that the meaning of our words is to be found in their use. Therefore these supposed recognition-transcendent things are irrelevant when it comes to the meaning of our words. And if they're irrelevant when it comes to the meaning of our words then they're irrelevant when it comes to the truth of our words.
The point is that the external world has nothing to do with the meaning of the phrase "it is raining", and so nothing to do with the truth of the claim that it is raining. Only the things that play a role in how we use the phrase are relevant, which in my analogy is the simulation.
Incidentally, this is similar to Putnam's remarks in his Brain in a Vat argument (which I believe influenced Dummett).
I looked up the reference in The Logical Basis of Metaphysics, which I've not yet read, and you're on the right track here. (He does a thing, like your simulation, with glasses that invert your visual field.)
(Wow, Dummett's prose produces both awe and horror in me.)
Off to work, but I'll come back later.
I think it has to be "could play" rather than "play" there: what's being rejected is any role for something in principle inaccessible.
Alright I'm confused.
The meaning of a word is determined by its use. What use? Its use in sentences. What sentences?
The answer to that cannot be just whatever sentences have already been uttered. That would be absurd. It has to be something like whatever sentences the speech community might utter.
Just as they currently agree on how to use the word "yellow" and agree on what things are yellow, they will, faced with new objects, continue to agree on whether they're yellow or not. (Although you can imagine new objects requiring some revision.)
But if you tell me there are invisible yellow unicorns, what am I to do with that? That's not how we use color words.
I want to say it's "use" in the sense of "way of using" that matters, not "use" in the sense of "what people have said", if that makes sense. And a way of using a word takes in utterances in situations and for purposes like the ones we're familiar with from our actual uses of it, but not "uses" so called in situations that that differ fundamentally from these.
I'm sure that's not clear, but we'll get it.
This seems to say no more than that we might say things that are false and not realize it. So what?
Agreed. It's also not clear to me that either Wittgenstein or Dummett held such a position, if that matters.
It is hard to give up the commonsense-seeming notion that words refer to things. So the way you talk about this philosophically looks to presume the two realms of the mental and the physical. And then we can point to objects in both realms - real qualia and real things. And that reality then allows true correspondence relations. There is the experience of yellow in my head. There is the yellowness or wavelength energy out there in the world. Words can then safely refer - ostensively point to - some thing that is a fact of the matter. Whether out there or in my head.
So commonsense defends a dualistic paradigm of realms with real objects - both mental and physical. Then words are simply labels or tokens. All they do is add a tag for talking about the real.
But another approach - pragmatic or semiotic - would be to give words a properly causal role in reality. So now rather than merely pointing - an uninvolved position that changes no real facts - words are a habit of constraint. Speaking is part of the shaping of reality - mental or physical (to the degree that divide still exists).
So to speak of an invisible yellow unicorn is to create constraints on possibility (physical or mental). It restricts interpretation in a way that is meaningful. We are saying this unicorn, if it were visible, would be yellow (calling anything yellow itself being a general interpretive constraint on experience).
Of course unicorns are fictions. Invisible colour a contradiction. So the actual set of invisible yellow unicorns would be very empty indeed.
But that is not the point. It is how words actually function. And their role - as signs - is not to point from a mental idea to a material instance, as is "commonsense". Their role is to place pragmatic limits on existence. Or rather, restrict the interpretive relation we have with "the world" in some useful or meaningful goal achieving fashion.
So with yellow, it doesn't matter what we each have privately in our heads. What matters is that there is some reliable social habit of communication where "yellow" is a sign that acts to constrain all our mental activity in a fashion where we are most likely to respond to the world in sufficiently similar ways.
The big change here is from demanding the need for absolute truth or certainty - the pointer that points correctly - to a more relaxed view of word use where word meaning is only as constraining as useful. The fact that there is irreducible uncertainty - like do we all have the same qualia when we agree we are seeing "yellow" - becomes thankfully a non-issue. This kind of fundamentally unknowability is accepted because we can always tighten shared definitions if wanted. But more importantly, not having to sweat such detail is a huge semantic saving of effort - and the basic source of language creativity. You want slippery words otherwise you would be as uninventive as a machine or computer.
So it is a paradigm shift. Words work by restricting states of interpretation or experience. They don't have to point from an idea to a world, or connect every physical object with its mental equivalent object in "true referential" fashion.
But words do have to be effective as encoding habits of thought. They have to produce the kinds of relational states of which they attempt to speak. An "invisible yellow unicorn" is an example of the kind of word combination that is perfectly possible, but which could have no meaning as either something we could physically encounter or properly imagine.
There's seems to be quite a conflation going on here between truth and meaning. The two are joined at the hip, but...
Indeed, there are many many reasons to say that meaning is determined by use. However, what's not being taken into consideration, is how meaning is first attributed...
No world... no meaning.
Again, that just restates the metaphysics that leads to the blind alley of dualism. Sure, in simple-minded fashion, we can insist the world actually exists - just as we experience it. And just as words socially construct that experiencing.
It has the status of unquestioned pragmatic utility as a belief. Kick a stone, and it should hurt.
But philosophy is kind of supposed to rise above that as an inquiry. The issue is not really whether there "actually is a world". Instead it is what "meaning" really is in "the world". And neither realists, nor idealists, have a good approach to that.
It's hard to think of any coherent sense in which (at least noun) words could be said not to refer to things.
So reference and representationalism is just taken for granted. You literally "can't see it" due to a background of presuppositions that is also not being acknowledged.
Yes, nouns name things. And within a certain metaphysics - a metaphysics of thingness - that is a perfectly self-consistent stance. But once "thingness" is brought into question, then we can start to wonder at the things we so happily give a name.
Isn't that Wittgenstein 101? Many of philosophy's traditional central puzzles are simply a misunderstanding of language use.
But then why Wittgenstein is inadequate - despite Ramsey whispering Peircean semiotics in his ear - is that rather than this making metaphysics bunk, it is why better metaphysics is demanded. The proper focus of philosophy has to shift to semiotics - a theory of meaning - in general.
(And not PoMo with its dyadic Saussarean semiotics, but proper triadic or structuralist semiotics. :) )
It's not really dualism, though. You have the word, the thing, and the 'referring' relation between the two. It's triadic. Hegel is explicit about this if I am not mistaken, and I have no doubt it had been widely and well recognized before him. Trinitarian thought is rife in all cultures. In any case, how else could we make sense of our talk about things, other than to accept that our talk is indeed about things?
Hey apo...
I'm not much on 'isms'. That said, on a whole, I reject many a common but inadequate dichotomy.
I'm not sure what you're getting at and/or talking about, given what was written.
How is meaning first attributed?
The correct answer to that question gleans much. What counts as a correct answer to that question? To what do we turn our attention?
I say that there is only one place to look... for starters.
We pay very close attention to the common denominators extant within all cases and/or examples of meaning by virtue of isolating and assessing all the prevalent senses of the term "meaning" - all the while setting aside the aforementioned commonalities. Then, we further discriminate between these by virtue of establishing relevancy to the task at hand. Next, we see if what's left satisfies a bare minimum requirement for an initial attribution of meaning.
Something to become symbol, symbolized, and an agent capable of drawing a mental correlation between the two and/or itself.
All meaning consists entirely of mental correlations drawn between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or oneself(state of 'mind'). Syntax finds no place here.
So...
Does that make me a realist or an idealist?
X-)
Good to see you here.
That's not it at all because it doesn't do sufficient justice to the "mind" with its goals and meanings. You are only talking about two physically real things - a physical mark and a physical thing - and then throwing in the "third thing" of some vague "referring relation". And everything that is troublesome is then swept under that rug.
Quoting Janus
And you did it again. Who is this "our" or "we" that suddenly pops up? You just ticked off the three things that are just two physical things in interaction - a mark and a thing - and now it is back to dualism where it is a mind that hovers over the proceedings in some vague fashion.
It doesn't say that the use of words has nothing to do with the world. It says that it has nothing to do with recognition-transcendent things. The recognised world is the world that has something to do with language use as it is that which influences and measures it.
No, it's saying that whether or not our words attach to recognition-transcendent conditions has nothing to do with their meaning, given that our language use is identical in the situation that it does and in the situation that it doesn't, and that language use is all there is to meaning, and so nothing to do with their truth.
Is a recognition-transcendent condition a recognition-transcendent truth condition? Is a recognition-transcendent truth condition a truth condition where we can't figure out whether something is true or not? Or whether something makes it true that's beyond our capacity to figure out in some way? None of these seem to be a problem to me. Is there a way you can better convey why they seem to be a problem to you? If this doesn't adequately characterize what you mean, can you explain what recognition-trnascendence is in layman's terms?
This, if taken seriously, is tautological: swapping in the definitions for each other, we get: "language use has nothing to do with things that have nothing to do with language use." That's obvious and uninteresting, but surely you can't mean that, so I must be making a mistake somewhere in translation; but surely you see how that interpretation comes about from the above paragraph.
The more substantive claim seems to be something like: "it's not possible for language use to have to do with things we don't recognize [meaning what?]." Well, that's just false on a charitable construal: language use can conventionally allow us to make reference to all sorts of things we have little to no understanding of, and the truth conditions that follow may be ones we aren't equipped to figure out or deal with. For example, to use the word gold we need only isolate some substance by its extremely superficial properties – yet in doing so we refer to that substance, in all its chemical complexity, and can make true or false claims about it, even though we have no idea what that complexity is, or what it entails.
We can even not know what certain words mean, despite their use committing them to mean certain things – for instance, we may use 'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus' to refer to the very same thing, yet not recognize we're doing so, and so fail to realize the words mean the very same thing.
Quoting Michael
But language use isn't self-contained – use of a word to refer to a thing, for example, depends on the thing. If the word's use arises with respect to two different things, the usage is different – in one case it refers to one thing, and in another to the other. Again, you deny that it's about use having nothing to do with the world, but what else am I to make of your claim here? Different external circumstances, different uses.
Why should we think that something's truth or falsity should always be recognizable? Surely there are things we get wrong without knowing it?
If truth is bivalent, sure. But Dummett is arguing that bivalent truth requires recognition-transcendent truth conditions, that recognition-transcendent truth conditions do not work under Wittgenstein's account of meaning, and so that truth isn't bivalent under Wittgenstein's account of meaning. So a statement that does not have a recognisable truth value doesn't have a truth value at all.
But so what? How does this show anything about realism? The truth conditions are what they are, and they depend on what they depend on (viz. happenings inside the simulation, which are still external matters). That there is also something going on outside the simulation is as irrelevant to the entire matter as if there were another reality beyond ours, that consisted not of the objects we speak about, but of something else entirely.
Perhaps this is your point – but I fail to see how it refutes, or has anything to do with, realism.
The people inside the simulation were put inside the simulation late in life.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Because realism, according to Dummett, requires truth to be bivalent. But truth is only bivalent if truth-conditions are recognition-transcendent, and meaning-as-use doesn't allow for recognition-transcendent truth conditions.
It's similar to Putnam's argument regarding the brain in a vat. Realism entails that "we could be brains in a vat" is true, the causal theory of meaning entails that "we could be brains in a vat" isn't true, and so the causal theory of meaning entails that realism isn't the case. In both cases the issue is that meaning doesn't allow for the type of truth conditions that realism requires.
Then there's a fork, and a lot of ambiguity. Early on, it might be reasonable to say that they all start saying false things w/o realizing it (and indeed they'd recognize they'd been saying false things on waking up!) It might also be correct, tho, to say the use of the language changed via the changing circumstances, meaning they continue to say true things because the changed use, due to changed external circumstances, means changed truth conditions.
Either of these sounds plausible, and there's probably no hard fact of the matter about which obtains. Tho the longer you remain in the simulation, the more the 'truth-changing' scenario seems plausible as the use of the language genuinely changes.
Quoting Michael
Again, I just don't see how it has anything to do with anything. Even in your simulation example, there can be facts about the simulation that are recognition-transcendent, too, and the lang. will potentially have truth conditions dealing w/ things beyond the simulation anyway. So the existence of a simulation is an irrelevancy.
I see nothing about bivalent truth or realism here – just an insistence that truth conditions have to deal only with things that language users recognize. So it's some kind of verificationist account of meaning & truth conditions, which as I've already argued in a couple points, is wrong (& if you don't believe those points, look up Fitch's knowability paradox).
So you say. But Dummett's argument is that meaning-as-use doesn't allow for recognition-transcendent truth conditions. The notion that there's a spoken sound here that has some sort of connection to some other thing there isn't one that seems to work with Wittgenstein's account of meaning. The meaning of the phrase "it is raining" isn't to be understood by positing some metaphysical correspondence between utterance and something else, but by understanding its practical use in recognisable situations.
So it seems that the real issue here is that you disagree more with Wittgenstein's account of meaning than with Dummett's claim that Wittgenstein's account of meaning entails anti-realism.
The use of it's raining has to do with whether or not it's raining – one uses it roughly to correctly describe a situation in which water falls from the sky. So the idea that language use has nothing to do with how the world is makes no sense.
Again, your false assumption is that all use must be described only in terms of things that are recognizable – so you're essentially assuming a verificationist notion of truth, which I believe Dummett holds. Scratch that and there's no argument – and there's good reason to scratch it, as I've said above.
Quoting Michael
Wittgenstein has no account of meaning, tho – the Investigations are too muddy to have an authoritative interpretation. So I'm not sure this will work as exegesis, or as a decent thesis in its own right. I see the temptation to treat Witty as a kind of linguistic anti-realist, but I doubt he'd go along with this interpretation, and in the end, whether he would or not doesn't matter.
I didn't say it has nothing to do with how the world is. I'm saying that the part of the world that has something to do with the meaning of a particular phrase is the part of the world that influences and measures its use. Which then means that the part of the world that has something to do with the meaning of a particular phrase can't be recognition-transcendent. If as learners of a language we want to know what someone means when they say "it is raining" or "il pleut" or "wubalubadubdub" then we have to look at the occasions in which the speakers utter it, and agree to it, and so on.
Why?
Don't assume this position; convince me of it.
Goals and meaning are all in relation to things,doing things with things and speaking about things and their activities ('things' in the very broadest sense, meaning entities). Ironically, it seems you are the one wanting to reify some kind of separate mind, which is "hovering over" the triadic realtion between thought, being and their inter-activity.
Of course you wouldn't be able to talk about the external world if you couldn't recognize it. What's the point of pointing that out?
"It's raining" is correctly used to speak a truth when it's raining. That's it. Your position seems to commit you to something further: that it raining must therefore be something that people can in principle recognize. But I submit it has nothing to do with this. It doesn't matter whether you can recognize it's raining or not. "It's raining" is true when it's raining, period. The latter constraint simply doesn't enter the picture.
Given that you disagree with this, I'm trying to figure out what premise you accept that makes you disagree. I suspect it's something like this:
If one can recognize how to correctly use a word, then one must know everything about its use.
or perhaps,
A competent user of a language must in principle be able to know everything about the use of their language.
Is that so?
Notice that if you reject those premises, then there's no problem – we don't need a ban on 'recognition-transcendence,' and language is still perfectly learnable, since we can figure out what the right canonical situations are, by say figuring out when it's raining. But notice, this does not guarantee that we always must in principle be able to know whether it's raining! And in fact we can figure out the meaning of the words without needing any such guarantee!
I think you have some faulty notion that everything about a language's use is transparent to its users, and therefore, that use (and hence meaning) can't be constrained by anything that they can't recognize. This, I submit, is just wrong.
I think there is an equivocation on the meaning of "recognition-transcendent" at work here. Of course we recognize the world, but from that it does not follow that the world is recognition-immanent. the world is not exhausted by our recognition of it; that is to say the world does not have its being 'inside' our recognition of it.
the argument conflates "knowing how" and "knowing that." that we know how to use a word doesn't mean that we know everything about its use.
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an example will help.
suppose a language group finds a yellow metal in the hills and comes up with a word to refer to it, gold. they know how to use the word, to refer to that yellow metal – and that yellow metal is the kind-referent of the word. they also can teach other people the word and how to use it, just by demonstrating the metal in question. now unbeknownst to them, gold has a certain property: it melts at temperatures above 1948 F. now suppose they have no way of figuring this out – they live in a world, say, where such temperatures aren't possible, and so they'll never figure out that gold melts at this temperature. nonetheless, i submit, it's still true that gold melts at that temperature, & if one of their scientists claimed it did, even if he could never prove it in principle, he'd still have said something true (even if people couldn't be sure he had).
so you see, everyone knows how to use the word gold, but they do not know everything about its use. what don't they know? they don't know, for example, that it is used to refer to a metal that melts at 1948 F.
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to address the argument you have up there directly, (6) simply restates your old assumption, which i previously asked you to defend, and as such the post doesn't add anything new. if for instance a word's use is to refer to some thing, whether anyone realizes this or not, then their competence in using with word will manifest a knowledge of how to use the word in this 'recognition-transcendent' way [in our example, they correctly use it to refer to a metal that melts at 1948 F, which is a recognition-transcendent truth]. of course the people using the word will not know that it does this. but this is the whole point.
I'm not sure about this. Your hypothesis does seem to beg the question by presupposing that there's an unrecognisable melting temperature.
Quoting The Great Whatever
The last part of that post defends 6):
here's a practical ability one has: to refer to a metal with a melting pt. of 1948 f, but this is the relevant sort of truth per the example, hence wright is wrong
his use is sensitive to the melting pt. of the metal since to say the metal melts at that pt. is a truth even tho he doesn't know this, hence his use is sensitive to the 'transcendent' truths tho he doesn't know exactly how.
a speaker's knowing how to use a word doesn't guarantee transparency re: every fact abt. its use
he is competent in use of gold iff he uses it to refer to gold, but gold is a metal w/ melting pt. 1948 f, so to know how to refer to gold is ipso facto to know how to refer to a metal w/ melting pt. 19848 f, which is a transcendent truth, q.e.d.
1. From Frege, to understand a sentence is to know its truth-conditions.
2. From Wittgenstein, to understand a sentence is to possess the practical ability to use it
3. Therefore, to possess the practical ability to use a sentence is to know its truth-conditions.
4. Possessing the practical ability to use a sentence is recognition-immanent.
5. Therefore, truth conditions are recognition-immanent.
Regarding 4), possessing the practical ability to use the sentence amounts to nothing more than "be[ing] able to appraise evidence for or against it, should any be available, or to recognize that no information in his possession bears on it ... be[ing] able to recognize at least some of its logical consequences, and to identify beliefs from which commitment to it would follow ... show[ing] himself sensitive to conditions under which it is appropriate to ascribe propositional attitudes embedding the statement to himself and to others, and sensitiv[ity] to the explanatory significance of such ascriptions."
You seem to take issue with 4), claiming that there's more to the practical ability to use the sentence than the above, but is that consistent with Wittgenstein's account of meaning-as-use, especially given that meaning is public and so the practical ability to use a sentence must be public (i.e. not transcend recognition)?
I think that whatever you mean when you talk about recognition-transcendent conditions playing a role in the meaning of a sentence, you're not talking about the practical ability to use the sentence, and so not committing to Wittgenstein's view on language. And I'm not here to defend Wittgenstein's view on language, but to ask if Dummett is right in arguing that it entails anti-realism.
I think this essay provides a good gist of Wittgenstein's philosophy and an answer to the OP.
You seem to be forgetting that language itself would be part of the simulation. Language is sounds and visual scribbles - no different from any other sound or visual that we would categorize in the simulation. Language means things because we have established a new category for these particular sounds and scribbles as referring to the other kinds of sounds and visuals we experience. We can even use a sound or scribble to refer to itself when we use quotes around a word.
And how would you know that the words you read on this forum (which would be part of the simulation) accurately represent the words on the forum in the outside world (that they actually mean the same thing in both the simulation and reality) - unless you are saying that language isn't part of the outside world but then that would answer the question about whether the simulation is an accurate representation of the outside world.
Your argument seems to only state that our words only mean something if they refer to what is happening in the simulation, and that they would be meaningless if they didn't. It is irrelevant that the simulation does or doesn't represent the outside world. Either the words we use mean something because they can refer to things that we all experience in the simulation or not. Our words would still be true in referring to the true state of the simulation. Whether or not the simulation accurately represents the world outside is something different. That is where we would discuss how our visual system evolved (or was designed in the simulation) and how better visual systems tend to leave more offspring.
so you think that in such a scenario, gold would have no melting pt., just because no one can show that it has a certain melting pt.?
this seems really bizarre, why accept it?
do you hold this sort of verificationist notion of truth generally? if you abandoned it, would you have any reason to believe all this? if so we could, if you want, talk about verificaitonism instead (as i said, that's what this topic seems to be 'actually' abt.)
In your hypothesis, "they live in a world, say, where such temperatures aren't possible". If such temperatures aren't possible then it isn't possible for gold to melt. And if it isn't possible for gold to melt then it what sense is it correct to say that gold has a melting temperature?
Aren't you just asking me to assume your conclusion here?
i just want to know whether this is 'actually' a thread abt. verificationism, as it seems to be. note that verificationism abt. truth results in the position that gold can't melt unless people have a way of figuring out that it does, if it's taken for granted that there's a language in which smth. semantically equivalent to 'gold melts' can be asserted. is that yr. position? i ask b.c. if it is, that seems to be driving the rest of this, & the comments abt. witty & so on are irrelevant.
re: verificationism itself, i'm not asking you to assume it's wrong (tho i think it is & if you believe it a good place to start would be fitch's knowability paradox: verificationism entails omniscience). i will say tho that prima facie it's absurd (e.g. that gold can't melt unless ppl can figure out that it can).
in other words, given what i've written above, to anyone who doesn't accept verificationism, there's no reason to accept 6) / 4), so the argument doesn't work, & you must independently convince that person of verificationism in order to have a case.
In the scenario you described, people would make no use of gold's melting point in teaching others how to use the word "gold", and by hypothesis could not, if the melting point of gold is something they are unable to know. They would make no use of the melting point of gold, and could not, in judging whether the word "gold" was being used correctly.
This much is agreed, yes?
Then what do you mean by "has to do with" in the above quote?
Here's a variation on your simulation:
Suppose the tv series "Game of Thrones" followed the book series exactly in Season 1, but began to diverge halfway through Season 2.
Can we sensibly describe the behavior of characters in Season 3 (and later) in terms of what happens in the books?
I think we could sensibly describe the behaviour, but that there aren't any determinant truth-conditions, and so it would be wrong to claim that such descriptions are either true or false. The third season hasn't been written yet, and nothing about the existence of the books makes it the case that the third season will follow them. It isn't until the third season is written that there is a (recognition-immanent) truth-maker.
Sorry, I wasn't placing us before Season 3. I meant roughly as we have things in the real world, with 5 books and however many seasons of the tv show. You could think of the tv series as a simulation of the books that diverges; in the first season and a half, what characters on the tv show do and say is a reasonable guide to what happens in the books and vice versa. But after the divergence, what happens in the books and on the tv show no longer "happens" to be a guide to what happens in the other.
put another way, to judge whether gold is used correctly, one only has to see whether one has referred to gold, i.e. that very substance – but to see this is to see whether one has referred to a substance with such and such a melting pt. and it is irrelevant whether the language users know this fact, or can know it.
Thanks for replying. I'm always interested in your posts.
Let's say that gold has whatever properties it has, whether we know it or not, whether we could know it or not, and obeys whatever physical laws whether we know it or not, whether we could know it it or not. Then gold being the way it is and acting the way it does will play a role in the way we think and talk about gold, even if we don't completely understand it. The situations in which there's gold to talk about -- it's never floating through the air or growing on trees, it never melts at room temperature, etc. -- what we can do with it and what we can't, etc.
Given all that, I'm not sure that our hypothesis makes sense, namely that there is some property of gold we are unable to learn. What would that property be like? If it's a property that has no effect at all on the way we interact with it -- say, it was God's favorite when he was creating the universe -- then obviously it can never make any difference to how we think and talk about gold. If it does show up somehow, however indirectly, why wouldn't we be able to learn this?
say gold is god's favorite metal, but we could never figure that out. then someone says, 'gold is god's favorite metal!' maybe they were guessing, or had a vision of some sort, that convinced them of this. did they say something true? i submit, yes.
whether you know something is in principle distinct from whether it has any effect on you – suppose god sends people to hell who waste gold, but no one knows about this. will god's unknowable attitude affect you? yes, it'll send you to hell – your ignorance doesn't change that. likewise, gold will have all the props. it has whether you can figure them out or not, and they will all affect you, even if you can't figure out how or why. likewise for your language – you will in fact be referring to god's favorite metal by using linguistic expressions, whether you know this or not, saying true things when you claim it's god's favorite metal, whether you know it or not, etc.
Whether truth conditions are recognition-transcendent or not assumes an impossible viewpoint from outside our language games (and outside our recognition!). In the words of the article, this is an attempt "to represent outside all representation." It may be consistent with Wittgenstein's account of meaning (possibly), but it is not consistent with Wittgenstein's philosophy.
also, of course language games get outside of language games! they make reference to all sorts of things totally indifferent to language. this fetishization of language as a self-contained, self-perpetuating masturbatory game is ridiculous. oh, no, that something might be outside our recognition! boy, that's just a reductio, isn't it?
What do you mean by "as they really are"? The scribbles are just patterns of light displayed by your screen.
And what does that mean? I just press keys on my keyboard. Me pressing keys on my keyboard isn't anything like the patterns of light displayed by your screen.
An excellent response!
I'm okay with distinguishing whether a sentence is true from whether someone happens to know it. Guesses can be right, sure.
Quoting The Great Whatever
This is a little odd though.
God clearly knows that gold is his favorite metal. If I end up in hell and don't know why, isn't it because he has chosen not to tell me? It still feels like a contingent matter that I don't know this, not that I am unable to. If a lot of us end up in hell and have eternity to compare notes, what would stop us from figuring out why we were there? Something contingent, like eternal torment.
We are now essentially debating verificationism, which isn't to @Michael's question: whether LW's approach to meaning leads, as it did for Dummett, to some form of anti-realism. I'm still not sure; it depends on how you take the connection between meaning and truth conditions.
Yes, my original account missed off an important premise of Dummett's argument, which I clarified here. It includes Frege's claim that to understand a sentence is to know its truth conditions.
Dummett never accepted Davidson's view that truth conditions give you an account or an explanation of meaning. But they do run together, "agreement in judgements" and all that.
If, as Dummett says, the meaning of a sentence is exhaustively determined by its use, I think you conclude that recognition-transcendent truth conditions can play no part in determining the sentence's meaning. That feels like it's allowing truth conditions to determine meaning, but only if you ignore the bit about recognizing that they obtain or not, which gets you back to how a population uses the sentence.
Does that make sense? If that's right, then the answer is "yes".
I'm not sure it's a sound doctrine though.
I know that he didn't accept Davidson's view, but he accepted a similar kind of view. As explained here, "However, [Dummett] distinguishes between a strong and a weak sense in which truth can be the central notion of a meaning-theory. In the strong sense, meaning is to be explained in terms of truth-conditions, as above [Davidson], and it is simply taken for granted that we know what truth is. If truth is central to the meaning-theory only in the weak sense, then although knowledge of the meaning of a sentence is equated with knowledge of its truth-conditions [my emphasis], some further explanation is offered of what it is for a sentence to be true (Dummett, 1991b 113, 161-163). "
Also, I took the argument, with the Fregean premise, verbatim from here, so maybe the author of that is mistaken in his summary of Dummett?
If GRRM had that as part of his outline for how the series ends, then yes. Otherwise, the truth value becomes determinate in the future.
I wouldn't say "equated". There's an "if and only if" between knowing one and knowing the other ...
He does explicitly reject what's here called the "strong" view, and that means rejecting the idea that truth conditions explain meaning. I know one of the various arguments he tries is, roughly, that you can't possibly know whether the truth conditions of a sentence obtain if you don't already know what the sentence means. (Recognition again.)
But then he himself has to come up with these sort of Quinean feature report sentences to get the linguistic ball rolling -- to learn the first words of your language there have to be sentencelets you can count as true ("true"?) like "Grass!" "Ball!" and so on that depend only on recognizing salient features of your environment. Otherwise you can never break into language.
I've only muddied the waters, haven't I?
Quoting Michael
As I clarified, I didn't mean to make an argument about statements about the future, but maybe I should have!
Now to more muddiness ...
Dummett may very well reject bivalence, if not across the board, then at least for this domain, statements about the future. He will not say, " 'Jon Snow will sit on the Iron Throne' is either true or false." But Dummett also rejects truth-value gaps, so he will not say, " 'Jon Snow will sit on the Iron Throne' is neither true nor false."
Well?
You might conclude that "Jon Snow will sit on the Iron Throne" is not really a statement, somewhat like a logical positivist. It's normally meaningful words put together to look like something you could assert but it isn't really.
I don't think Dummett actually says that sort of thing anywhere, and Wittgenstein sort of quit saying it, and instead suggested wrapping it in a context where it could make sense -- making predictions among your friends or placing a wager on the outcome of the show is not the same sort of activity as stating facts. A prediction or a wager is not an assertion. Something like that anyway.
I think Dummett's view must be near there, but it's never been clear to me.
It does relate to the issue of how the meaning of a sentence is determined, and whether recognition-transcendent truth conditions can play a part. If the truth conditions of the assertion "Jon Snow will sit on the Iron Throne" are inaccessible, I think you conclude that this sentence cannot be used as an assertion in the usual way -- that you must be doing something else. And "what you mean" is tied to that.
I think the most that could get you is "GRRM planned to have Jon Snow sit on the Iron Throne" but that can be followed by all sorts of stuff -- who knows what the producers actually end up doing. Jesse was not supposed to be a major character in "Breaking Bad".
Except it isn't a given that the TV show will follow the books. There's already been deviations. Maybe there will be big ones.
Besides, if it helps with the example, assume it's a TV show that isn't based on a book. Do claims about what will happen have a determinant truth value?
And here's the thing: everything else I've been doing around here lately is pushing me toward thinking these actually are very similar activities. But all that's still up in the air ...
construct the example such that there's no way for you to know
if that is the question (i don't think it is: i think michael is interested in tools to prop up anti-realism, & is essentially debating verificationism), then the answer is negative, because witty doesn't have an approach to meaning coherent or concrete enough to have an authoritative interpretation as to what it is or what its philosophical consequences are. the LI are just a bunch of aphorisms.
I think statements about the future might fit the bill.
Thoughts?
if you have trouble imagining such a situation, then the problem is you doubt the coherency of something being unknowable for reasons independent of anything having to do with verificationism. even so, having a notion of verification / lack of 'transcendence' in our notion of truth doesn't help us understand anything (tho if you really doubt anything can be unknowable, verificationism would be true de facto, for uninteresting reasons – also, you will want to look at fitch's paradox, and square the fact that universal knowability leads to collective omniscience).
I don't find Fitch's persuasive at all.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Does that rule out talk about the future as our example?
If there are or are not such possibilities, how would we figure that out? Examples don't seem to be doing the trick.
Yes, in the future.
there's no persuasion to be done, it's a proof. so you must either disagree with the premises or find some flaw in the logic.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
i don't care what the example it is - use whatever you'll accept.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
they do for me - if you can't imagine that there might be something you can't know, then as i said, verificationism is probably true but de facto, in an uninteresting way, and we still need not make any appeal to it in discussing truth anyway. it'll just be an interesting fact that it's impossible for something to be unknowable.
I'll say two things about Fitch's:
1. If you use intuitionist rules of inference and interpret the logical constants along intuitionist lines, you might be okay, as Dummett is, saying "p?~~Kp" but that's not saying "everyone is omniscient."
2. I put it in the same box with the slingshot argument and Gettier cases. They're fascinating, but I am far from alone in feeling that a logical fast one is being pulled.
Quoting The Great Whatever
I don't really know what to say about this, so I'm going to go away and think about it for a while. It's an interesting question I honestly haven't thought about, so you have my thanks for raising the issue.
what you feel is simply not relevant.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
the conclusion that knowers are collectively omniscient, i.e. that there are no truths that aren't known.
i think there's some confusion in thinking the way logical systems work is that you can simply 'choose' to use whichever system you like to validate or invalidate any proof. of course you can just make up a system of inference rules that make any argument, appropriately symbolized, either valid or invalid. so pointing this out is irrelevant as well. if you like, just convert the argument into english, it doesn't matter. english validity isn't contingent on decisions of formal apparatus.
Then it's a good thing this is not what Michael Dummett did.
I don't know what to tell you.
It's a thread largely about Michael Dummett. I've been doing my best to make sense of his position. If you're asking which side I'm on or something, I'm really not inclined to commit at the moment. Why should I?
*asserts implausible opinon [varificationism]*
'ah but here's a bad consequence of that'
'yeah but you didn't take into account this can be salvaged by *asserts further implausible opinion* [intuitionist logic]' it's just digging the hole, why try to keep together the house of cards with a web of dumb philosophical theses there's no reason to believe?
That proposition would have a determinate (in principle only, of course) truth value iff metaphysical determinism is the case, and not otherwise. If the future is open then nothing about the present can determine exactly how things will be in the future. In that case "Jon Snow will sit on the Iron Throne will only be true 'retrospectively' if and when Jon Snow does sit on that throne.
I see your point, yes.
There were two different stands of thought there I was trying to keep separate. I even numbered them: one is Dummett's intuitionist response; one is my own sense that there's something odd going on in Fitch's argument.
The first time Dagfinn Føllesdal saw the slingshot argument in [I] Word and Object [/I] (iirc), his immediate reaction was, roughly, "There's no way that's right." People do feel that way about Gettier, and I feel that way about Fitch's paradox. All three have produced cottage industries attempting to refute them.
I don't have handy a refutation of any of those arguments, but I still don't trust them.
That's not to say there isn't much to be learned from arguing about these, and about the Liar, for that matter. But I do not feel compelled to accept Fitch's argument as a refutation of anything.
i mean i don't think that's a bad way to go, i'd just stop doing philosophy (which incidentally i do recommend)
to me fitch's paradox is fine because it doesn't have an 'unacceptable' conclusion, it just refutes a dumb and already unintuitive philosophical hypothesis (verificationism), unless one has other grounds to believe in collective omniscience, i.e. classical theism or hard idealism
verificationism has so little going for it that i don't sympathize with the need to defend it in the face of any argument
Oh no! I wouldn't say that at all. I am intensely curious about everything I've mentioned in this thread, and open to being persuaded either way. My resistance to an argument or an approach is a hurdle it must clear, that's all.
but u just said the opposite?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
a hurdle that u set the standards for, and so will never abandon. the fitch argument is super duper simple, it's hard to see how you could have better proof. if u have no standards for what would convince u, that's no different from nothing being able to convince u. if u see a simple 11 step argument, u'd rather disbelieve the logic than accept the conclusion, so what's the pt.?
this is why philosophy is a joke - it's so lacking in method that 'nuh uh' is always a viable professional option.
I think there's room for debate.
Whether philosophy as a whole or my approach to it are intellectually bankrupt is off-topic here. We should have ended this long ago.
TGW
I just want to say that both of the following can be the case simultaneously:One can have no criterion for what would convince them, and still be arguing in good faith. Those are not mutually exclusive. That is the case because deliberately suspending one's judgment is a required means for entertaining another worldview.
A statement's being true/false depends upon certain states of affairs obtaining, if by that we mean what was said to be so was, and/or what was said to not be so, was not. However, a prediction about what will be the case has yet to have been determined as either true/false. That doesn't make it unable to be determined at a future time. So, it is still determinately true/false.
What does a statement being recognizable as true or recognizable as false have to do with it's being determinately true/false?
Dummett's argument seems to rest upon this conflation...
Being verifiable/falsifiable is not equivalent to being true/false.
It's a sleight of hand.
Quoting creativesoul
y, the thread seems to be predicated on verificationist prejudices. therefore the only way to progress is to assess verificationism (tho i don't think the para you quotes shows this – rather it's what 'the above argument' points to, and this in turn has to do with the thesis, which i've argued is wrong, that all facets of use must be transparent to users, and the misconception that language use is self-contained and not dependent on the world outside of what's recognized by the language users).
I thought the answers to your questions should be obvious given your example of an outside world and a simulation of it. Are the scribbles only patterns of light displayed by your screen in the simulation or in the outside world? Is your post in the outside world, or only in the simulation? In your example, is the outside world meant to represent reality as it is, and the simulation meant to represent our minds?
There's an inherent difficulty in suspending one's judgment that arises by virtue of how thought/belief formation works. I mean, we look at the world and/or ourselves and make sense of it all by virtue of a pre-existing baseline. So, I'm not sure how reasonable it would be to expect another person to not already have certain core thought/beliefs in place. These would be what underwrites one's "oh, well that can't be true, because of X", where X represents some pre-existing thought/belief.
I think that the trick is not to disallow such pre-existing thought/belief to do their job, but rather it is to become aware of how that works and thus be as careful as possible to work from the strongest ground possible, if for no other reason than to minimize likelihood for error.
At any rate, Dummett's argument concludes that the principle of bivalence be rejected based upon the notion that we cannot always recognize whether or not a statement is true/false. The principle of bivalence only says that all statements are determinately true/false, not that we can recognize them as such. The criterion for being determinately true/false is remarkably different than being recognized as true/false.
Knowing what it would take for a statement to be true/false includes recognizing that there are some times when those conditions/events have yet to have taken place, and other times when we know what it would take but quite simply do not have the ability to recognize it. You've given examples of these...
that's not what's being asked, tho - the demand isn't psychological but dialectical. one ought not to bring one's prejudices to bear in the discussion as to whether smth's right, unless those prejudices are specifically framed as part of the parameters of the debate. what the debater might believe for independent reasons, or for independent prejudices, can't help them in the argument, tho of course they're free to think whatever they want, as long as they don't pretend that matters for anything acc. to the debate.
Quoting creativesoul
i don't think that's quite it, but it may ultimately hinge on such prejudices. i find dummet's anti-realism in general somewhat tedious, tho, b.c. as with all anti-realist prejudices it's hard to dig at what's actually at stake and the core propositions the anti-realist is endorsing, that drives the rest of their project.
I suppose what I'm getting at is that one cannot avoid bringing their pre-existing worldview into a discussion.
One must be able to provide more than just a suspicion or a feeling that something is not right - say with Fitch's proof. Interestingly enough, this notion of what counts as sufficient reason to believe/justification is what underwrites a verification/falsification paradigm.
Quoting creativesoul
y, the interlocutor failed to do this above
I agree though, in this case, that Srap offered little to no justificatory ground regarding Fitch's proof. Seemed a flippant dismissal.
What did you just do above?
Quoting creativesoul
i avoided my interlocutor's bringing their own worldview into the discussion by not conceding in the discussion when they attempted to do so
i assume u r refer/g 2 anal-style phil, & not phil-as-luv-of-wisdom?
Hmmm. I think that we're not talking about the same thing when saying "worldview". I would say that you demanded that your interlocutor justify his dismissal of Fitch's proof by more than just 'a feeling'. I mean, a feeling alone is not adequate justificatory ground for dismissing a widely accepted argument.
I see no distinction between the simulation and the external world. The simulation is the shared reality, making it external to to each person sharing that reality. An indirect realist would hold that the truth of a statement is dependent upon the way it's perceived and talk of an objective (i.e. non-simulated reality) is incoherent.
So, "the cat is on the mat" is true if we all agree it's true, but we're agreeing on something external to us, whether it be the contents of God's reality or Michael's simulator. You've just distinguished phenomena from noumena.
i don't think it is easier, but i think professional philosophy as practiced allows this kind of move. all i ask is that ppl avoid it
Unless you're an antirealist, as per the OP.
Quoting The Great Whatever
I don't know what this means.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Language has no feelings or desires, so everything is indifferent to language..?
Quoting The Great Whatever
Yes, "something". Quite absurd.
By "external world" I meant the world outside the simulation. It has no bearing on the meaning of the words said inside the simulation. Dummett's argument, using Wittgenstein's account of meaning, is that recognition-transcendent things have no bearing on the meaning of our words, given that the meaning of our words just consists of our practical ability to use them; i.e. the actual acts of speaking, the recognition-immanent things that influence our speech-acts, the recognition-immanent things that result from our speech-acts, and so on.
The point isn't that things are true if we all agree that they're true, but that some propositions are neither true nor false. If the inside of the cupboard isn't being simulated then "the cat is in the cupboard" is neither true nor false, because for it to be true requires that a cat be simulated inside the cupboard and for it to be false requires something else (or nothing) be simulated inside the cupboard.
I understand your distictions, but I'm saying they're irrelevant. What you're saying is P is true if P corresponds to X, where X is some event independent of the speaker. It's obvious to everyone other than naive realists that X is undefinable without resort to the subjective interpretation of the observor, and it's assumed that all or most observors impose similar subjective interpretations on the object.
You're just now using the term "simulator" to describe the collective subjective interpretation of the community. This makes the simulator the "meta" reality, which is that which exists outside the observer. P is therefore true if it corresponds to that metaphysical reality, thus begging the question of what the simulator is composed of and why it causes sensations in people.
I'd define the simulator as you have: That which causes sensations. What it "really" is without subjective interpretation is incoherent, or noumenal.
P has a truth value at all times, you're just misapplying the rules of the direct realist on the indirect realist. If you ask an indirect realist if there's a tree in the woods when no one is looking at it, he'd say there is, but he's also be saying a description of a tree without reference to the way it is seen is meaningless. That is, all the conditions for the tree being present exist when unseen, so P is true if those conditions are present when unseen.
And now back to your simulator. If I say "the cat is in the cupboard," such is true now if I look later and he's there. That is, even when he isn't presently simulated and observed, all the conditions for his appearance exist even while not simulated. Those conditions, all which exist independent of the observor, and which are part of the mysterious composition of the simulator, are the metaphysical reality which must be true for P to be true. If they are not, P is false.
This seems to misunderstand the argument. In the example, the simulation might be nothing like the external world. The external world might just consist of a brain in a vat. The only cupboard is the simulated cupboard. Given that the contents of the simulated cupboard aren't being simulated, and given that the external world has nothing to do with the contents of the simulated cupboard, there are no relevant conditions which determine whether or not there's a cat in the cupboard.
This has nothing to do with direct or indirect realism. It's about recognition-transcendent conditions having nothing to do with the meaning, and so truth, of a proposition.
When we don't see the cat in the cupboard we don't presently see the cat, but we note that everytime we look in the cupboard, there's that cat. We therefore conclude that even when we see no cat, something continues to exist that will cause the cat to appear when we open the cupboard. The laws of the simulator exist outside us. That is the cat.
I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that to explain what we mean by "because there's a cat", we have to look to our practical ability to use the phrase "because there's a cat". And that practical ability can only be explained by looking at the simulation. So "we see the cat because there's a cat" is true. But this has nothing to do with the world outside the simulation.
Perhaps it's clearer if I use the example of Mario jumping on a Goomba. I see Mario jumping on a Goomba because Mario is jumping on a Goomba. To understand what I mean by the proposition "Mario is jumping on a Goomba" you have to look to the use that such a proposition is put. And that use is concerned with the video game I'm playing. It would be a category error to look outside the video game to determine what is meant by the proposition and to determine whether or not it's true.
Quoting Hanover
In my example we've never looked inside the cupboard.
The world is the simulation, composed of the simulated facts transmitted by the simulator and the simulator itself, which is the independent metaphysical reality that determines truth values.Quoting Michael
That's irrelevant. The cat is in the cupboard if all conditions presently exist which would cause an observor to see the cat if the cupboard is opened. You try to say nothing exists when things aren't observed, but then you offer no explanation for why things pop into existence consistently. But then you do admit that something exists independent of you, and you call it the simulator. I call it a cat when it simulates a cat.
But who made the simulator? The programmer would refer to this particular code that makes up the simulator program as "Michael playing a video game called Mario causing Mario to jump on a Goomba".
When I write a computer program I'm thinking about what I want to happen in the game (a simulator), and I need to write code, which isn't the image of what is going to happen on the screen, in order to make that happen in the game. In the outside world the happenings in the simulator is computer language and my idea and intent to make that happen in the simulator. A programmer can't even imagine, much less program, something that he/she has never experienced before. So their simulation will always include aspects and notions of the world outside the simulator.
That's not what I'm saying at all.
We, as impartial observers, can talk about the simulation and the world external to the simulation, but my point is that given Wittgenstein's account of language, the world external to the simulation has nothing to do with the meaning of the things said inside the simulation.
This strikes me being comparable to saying that the cupboard is open if all conditions presently exist which would cause an observer to see an open cupboard if the cupboard is opened.
What does that have to do with anything? To understand what is meant by the phrase "Mario is jumping on a Goomba" and to determine whether or not it is true you have to look at what is happening in the game. Whether or not there is some comparable event happening outside the game is irrelevant.
That is also what the programmer would have you say in this internet forum as an example of your position. The programmer would speak the same language as you. In other words, they'd be using language to refer to the happenings and things inside the simulator, the same way you'd be using inside the simulator.
Both you inside the simulator, and the programmer outside the simulator, would be using language to refer to what is happening inside the simulator, you both would be referring to the code AND what the code makes happen in the simulator. This is similar to how we refer to things in the world. By talking about the color red on an apple, we are talking about the color (which only exists in our minds (the simulator)) and a particular wavelength of EM energy that only exists in the outside world.
No, I'm not dyslexic. And I know what you said. What I don't understand is what it has to do with the claim that the meaning and truth of the claim "Mario is jumping on a Goomba" is to be explained by looking at what happens in the game. I'm pointing out that it would be wrong to look to some "corresponding" event outside the game, and so it would be wrong to say that the phrase "there's a cat in a cupboard" (when spoken in the simulation) is true if there's a cat in a cupboard outside the simulation.
But there is a corresponding event in regards to your other example of playing Mario. The corresponding event would be the computer code. The same can be said about the "cat in the cupboard" There would be corresponding code for looking in a cupboard and seeing a cat. Not only that but there is also code for your use of language. How would you speak, and what language would you speak in, in the simulator? You'd talk about whatever the programmer wishes and in whatever language he wishes, when he wishes.
There is the experience of seeing red, and the corresponding event of a particular wavelength of light entering your eye. Natural selection is the process of improving our knowledge of the world by selecting organisms that see more truly than their competitors.
Given Wittgenstein's account of language (or Dummett's interpretation at least) it doesn't. To understand the meaning of the sentence "there's a cat in the cupboard" is just to have the practical ability to use it. Given that there's some use to it inside the simulation, it doesn't matter what's happening (or isn't happening) outside the simulation. The external world "drops out of consideration as irrelevant", as the author of the article in the OP says.
Quoting Hanover
I don't think that this is right either. Light is what makes me see a cat, but the metaphysical cat isn't light. Or if we're using the example of a computer game, the hard drive and monitor is what makes me see Mario, but Mario isn't the hard drive or the monitor.
By "corresponding" you appear to just mean "causally responsible". That's not the kind of correspondence I'm talking about. Obviously things have a cause. Consider the correspondence theory of truth. It claims that a statement is true if it corresponds to some obtaining state of affairs. If "correspondence" just meant "causally responsible" then every statement would be true as every utterance is caused by something.
I should add though this cat-in-a-cupboard example wasn't a good one. Recognition-transcendent truth conditions are truth conditions that we cannot determine. Opening the cupboard and seeing a cat counts as a recognition immanent truth condition, as we have a means of verifying or falsifying the claim.
There's a good summary of it here:
I appreciate that last post Michael... Cleared some stuff up for me... semantics.
how hard to u have to get hit on the head to read shit like this and nod
what kind of dumb premise is it, 'oh yeah, obviously everything must be something we can epistemically decide – to think otherwise is nonsense' like holy christ, not everything revolves around humans and their knowledge
actually sweetie, the way the world works doesn't depend on yr. hot philosophical 'opinions'
I have always worked under the assumption that when one enters into a philosophical debate, particularly a retired or working professional, that s/he voluntarily enters into an obligation to justify the position they're arguing for. I take that to include providing warrant for rejecting common historical arguments and/or positions which contradict and/or negate one's own.
Michael's last post helped me by virtue of sharpening up some of the key notions. That is, it helped me to better understand Dummett's criticism.
If you approach things from the intensional side, you get a clear view of how a population uses words. If you approach things from the extensional side, you get a clear view of what it means for a statement to be true.
The intensional, use-oriented approach has trouble accounting for truth. I take this to be @The Great Whatever's point, and it is well taken.
From the other side, we have Dummett's argument that truth alone does not explain how a population uses language.
Mostly the two camps talk past each other. Dummett is attempting to extend the reach of the intensional account into the extensional camp's home territory: whatever goes on beyond our recognition won't affect how we use our language. Even TGW essentially admits this by allowing that we may have the practical ability to use a word, say "gold", without knowing everything about gold. It's also not clear if the extensional camp can provide any account for that practical ability.
But the intensional camp still has no plausible account of truth, and has trouble explaining how the meaning of the word "gold" can be extended beyond the sort of situations in which it has heretofore been used.
It's clear that the battleground is truth, and that ideally we'd be able to combine the two approaches. David Lewis tries in Convention, but I haven't made much sense of the last chapter. :-(
Here's a simple consideration that cuts the heart out of the matter...
Statements do not suddenly become true/false upon inspection.
Hey Michael! I want to critique the following...
I'm not even sure if the above is an accurate report of "for the realist". I note a bit of confusion though. The reason given for a statement's truth-value being undecidable doesn't square with what is later claimed to decide that value. Both are utterly inadequate on my view, and I tend to call myself a realist.
Sometimes we cannot check to see if a statement is true/false. So, in these cases we cannot determine whether or not it is true/false by virtue of looking. However our determination of that isn't necessary. The statement is either true or false despite our inability to check and see which. Justification for that?
Common sense:Statements don't suddenly become true/false upon verification/falsification.
What sense does it make to say that the statement's 'truth-value' is 'undecidable' in these situations? None as far as I'm concerned. Such talk unnecessarily complicates the matter and adds nothing but terminological confusion, by virtue of conflating what a statement's being true takes with what our awareness of that takes. A bewitchment - like many and/or most - stemming from a gross misunderstanding of the role that correspondence and the necessary presupposition thereof plays in everything ever thought, believed, spoken and/or written.
Truth-makers and truth-bearers = Bewitchment.
Talk about truth-value, truth-makers, and truth-bearers leading to conclusions about truth = Bewitchment.
Truth-apt = able to be verified/falsified.
Common sense:Statements don't suddenly become true/false upon verification/falsification.
Conclusion = the notion of truth-apt conflates being true/false with being verifiable/falsifiable.
So...
Both sides conflate what a statement's being true takes with what our awareness of that takes. Both sides work from an emaciated conceptual framework. The degree of equivocation regarding the term "truth" is astounding. The degree of acceptance...
Shameful.
i don't admit this. things we don't know about will very much affect us, and our language use. again the mistake is thinking language is self-contained and transparent. it's kantianism: people live in a self-sustaining bubble (note michael's use of simulations, video games). but what you know ain't the same as what affects you. once michael understands this simple pt., the rest falls apart. there are even many things you don't know, and probably can't know, about your own practices!
Then I misunderstood. I thought you had said all there is to using the word "gold" correctly was getting its extension right, which you can do whether you know or can know everything about gold.
The battleground is the conflation of truth and meaning...
michael would like the use of the term to be exhausted by the superficial signal one happens to use to identify the sample. he cannot imagine that there is something to what one refers to beyond the signs by which one recognizes it. for him, language is a closed, self-contained system, like a video game with its own perceptually closed logic.
but this is itself not how we use language; we don't take ourselves to be referring to some metal-insofar-only-as-it's yellow, but that metal, what it is be damned (in fact, we may even, mysteriously as far as michael is concerned, wonder what the metal is, what its properties are! but how oh how, if all there is to say about the referent of the word is locked into how we use it, and all there is to how we use it are the signs by which we recognize how to use it?)
note the precariousness of the position: what you say about the referent of 'gold,' you say about gold – b/c/ the two are of course one and the same. so are we really expected to believe that we know everything about the way this word is used, that things we don't or can't recognize have nothing to do with the use of the word? but how can this be, if the way it's used is to refer to that metal – and there may be next to nothing about that metal we know, or might even be able to know?
But whether the word "gold" has been used correctly doesn't depend on whether you just happen to be pointing at the right sample or used some sensory clues or something. You don't even have to know that it's gold.
Of course all that only holds under interpretations that map "gold" to gold.
My understanding of your view was that you're using the word "gold" right so long as you use it to pick out gold. When you talk about gold, you're talking about a substance that has properties you don't (and maybe can't) know about, but that doesn't mean you're using the word wrong.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yeah, that was very poorly expressed. Of course it would "affect" our language use, vaguely described. The issue I was aiming at was whether things we don't or can't know would show up in the meanings of our words. And they needn't, if we can still use the word "gold" correctly without knowing all sorts of things about gold.
For instance, suppose in the absence of temperatures at which gold melts, a population believes gold does not melt. We could say they're using the word "gold" correctly -- to pick out gold -- and have a false belief about it, about something they are successfully referring to; or we could say that "metal that does not melt" is part of the meaning of "gold" for them. In one sense, it doesn't matter, because in the circumstances in which they use the word "gold", their version of the word overlaps completely with the version that includes "melts above 1948F".
I'm not really seeing how "meaning" helps here. (Unless there are possible worlds in which gold doesn't melt, and I don't know how to figure that out.) In which case, we stick to what you said at first, that these folks are using the word "gold" correctly and have a false belief about gold. (All this hangs together: we can only say they have a false belief about gold, because we say they're using the word "gold" correctly.)
So the fact that there's a property of gold they cannot know doesn't affect whether they're using the word correctly. But the melting point of gold affects them in that they form a false belief about gold. It affects their language use in that, if asked to list metals that can melt, they won't list gold. But that's still using the word "gold" correctly, just saying something false about gold.
Are we on the same page up to here?
competence with use of a word doesn't just involve accidents, tho; if u don't know what gold is but just happen to use the word to point out what's actually gold on accident a bunch of times, in one sense u've used it 'correctly,' but in another u 'don't know how' to use the word, i.e. your competence isn't such that it guides you to actually referring to gold non-accidentally. this latter notion of competence makes use of what'd traditionally be called 'intensional' capacities, viz. a way of mapping words to their extensions via appropriate criteria.
there are of course many legitimate notions of 'using a word correctly,' & u must make clear which is at stake.
I agree, but it's a complication I was putting off.
So are you inclined to say that people who think gold doesn't melt know how to use the word "gold"?
Stay on target. Your argument was that language can't be used to refer to things outside of the simulation. I showed that if language can be used in the outside world to refer to things in the simulation, then why couldn't it be the reverse? Both the programmer and the simulated Michael would both be referring to the things in the simulation with their words. The programmer created the language you'd be using, and how you use it, in the first place. Your whole example of a simulation and how "language is use" is nonsense when you get down to the root of it.
The "language-is-use" crowd seems to forget that language is used primarily for communication - for transmitting information from one head to another. Information is about things, so we are transmitting sounds and scribbles that refer to other things that are not sounds or scribbles. When you speak or write, it creates ideas in my head that are not sounds and scribbles, but mostly visuals of what it is you are referring to.
I'm not here to defend Wittgenstein's argument that meaning is use. I'm here to discuss if Dummett is right that such a view of language entails anti-realism.
Alright, so I want to see if we can work our way back toward the OP.
If we want to link meaning and truth conditions, we want not the word "gold" on its own, but the one-place predicate "... is gold". Then "Gold melts" comes out as a conditional, "If x is gold, then x melts."
Our hypothetical population correctly uses the predicate "... is gold" but incorrectly treats the conditional "If x is gold, then x melts" as false. But because they cannot (or do not) achieve temperatures at which gold would melt, then there are sentences they count as true for the wrong reason: place a golden idol over a campfire and they will say "It will not melt," which is true.
In fact, all of their statements about gold (and other metals) would be true if we substituted for "melts" something like "melts at temperatures we observe". Or maybe a better approach, more suitable for the campfire example, is "melts at this temperature". We can take "melts" as carrying with it an implied indexical.
In fact, the problem with our folks is the invalid inference from "We have only observed temperatures under 1500F" (say) to "There are only temperatures under 1500F." There may be scientists (or even philosophers!) among them who suggest they should really be saying "Gold has not been observed to melt at temperatures we have observed." (That will look like pedantry to some people, as just another way of saying, "Gold has not been observed to melt." Of course we have only observed the temperatures we have observed!)
All of these considerations seem to relate to the beliefs of our population rather than to the meanings of their words. But the sort of competence we were looking for should give us a way of mapping words onto observations, what we might describe as associating meanings with truth conditions.
The questions we are trying to get to have to do with how that function is constrained by its domain and by its range, by the domain of observations or possible observations, on the one hand, and the range of meanings that will get us from truth conditions, observed or not, to words, on the other.
i just don't see what observations have to do with anything. if the ppl say 'gold doesn't melt,' and by that it's understood to mean it doesn't melt ever, then they're wrong. what does it matter what they've observed?
competence is a slippery term. i think to be competent with 'gold,' all you have to know basically is that it refers to gold. of course all 'knowing that' and 'knowing what' is gradient, you can know how or that in some respects & not others. further, it's likely no competence is actually complete (as in frege puzzles, where speakers don't realize two expressions refer to the same thing).
Quoting The Great Whatever
That's the sort of thing I mean. I just mean "observation" in the sense that, presented with a sample of gold, you would assent to "That's gold." Nothing more subtle than that.
Very roughly, you could imagine recognizing gold, looking up gold in your lexicon, and finding it maps to the word "gold", so you say "That's gold." It's simplistic, but kind of what we want, right?
i don't think competence with the word 'gold' requires an ability always to recognize gold. it just requires knowing that the word refers to that substance. there may be difficulties in actually figuring out when you're faced with that substance, and these are not semantic problems, but empirical ones with figuring out what something is (is it gold or not? my semantic competence will not tell me, though it will tell me, given that I already know it's gold, to call it 'gold' – my semantic competence will tell me, given that i know it's gold, to call it 'oro' instead).
It doesn't because truth becomes redundant with utility and use. If anything it draws a distinction between meaning derived from social-cultural use and scientific realism.
There's a distinction there, yes, and someone whose linguistic competence includes using the word "gold" properly, in whatever sense, may occasionally fail, but that failure we wouldn't usually describe as not knowing which word to use (though that happens too) but as not knowing whether the word applies in the case at hand.
But we immediately face an issue I'm not sure how to handle: competence using the word "gold" does require competence in recognizing gold. Neither needs to be perfect, but pretty reliable. We don't expect the congenitally blind to be able to acquire competence in using color words, for instance. And the only way we have to judge another's linguistic competence is by observing how consistently they link occasion features we recognize to words we expect. I don't want to leap to the conclusion that this is what competence consists of, but it is the criteria by which we judge it. (Just as there are criteria by which we pick out gold.)
And honestly the ideal would be high empirical competence coupled with high linguistic competence. Failure of either sort degrades the effectiveness of communication, right?
they could fail all the time (say, if for some reason it became hard to identify gold, because the sign by which people identified it before went away)
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
it'd be described as not knowing whether something's gold. a consequence of that would be not knowing the word applies, but that's just an epiphenomenon. the point is they can't figure out it's gold.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
right. it only means knowing that 'gold' refers to gold.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
i don't think this is right. the blind might have certain difficulties figuring out that things are certain colors (though sometimes not - there are many ways to do this besides seeing them), but they know what the words mean, at least to a large extent. perhaps loss of vision results in some lack of semantic competence, but certainly not total.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
this is just not right. we don't judge whether someone knows what 'gold' means by how good of a prospector they are.
criteria by which we happen to pick out a material don't determine what the word referring to the material means; 'gold' just means that very stuff, gold. we might use any number of criteria to pick it out, and these might change over time or disappear, or new ones might arise.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
lack of empirical competence only constrains communication in the sense that it'll be harder to say certain true things, because you can't figure out what's true. in general it would be absurd to expect competence in all empirical matters that involve the use of a word - then we could be omniscient just by learning a language.
Does it? Or does it not just require that we accept that there is such a thing as gold, and that the word is correctly used when it refers to that substance?
For example can I not competently say "Gold used to be found in those hills", even if I am not someone who can tell real gold from fool's gold?
Also, re the OP I would say that this kind of competent use presupposes some kind of realism and would be incompatible with antirealism; it presupposes that there really is such a substance as gold, and that it really was found in those hills, and so on.
right. the above position claims, absurdly, that a competence in prospecting, metalworking, etc. is required to know what 'gold' means.
perhaps some minimal acquaintance with gold's features is needed to know what gold is, but the semantic competence is just to know, that given one knows what gold is, that the word 'gold' is what's used to refer to it.
This isn't incompatible with anti-realism. As I've said many times before, anti-realism isn't un-realism.
What's the difference between realism and anti-realism then?
That looks like a nice example. If you pushed it farther, say gold has long since disappeared, you might say things like "They used to find something here they called 'gold'." But even if you're using the word they used, doesn't this seem like, I don't know, a lesser competence than they had, who actually knew what gold was?
Well I'm certainly not suggesting that. After all, we already agreed you can be competent using a word without knowing everything there is to know about either the referent or further uses of the word.
But when you teach a child "moon" they call everything in the sky "moon" and gradually zero in on restricting their utterances of "moon" to when the Moon is up there. That's when we'll start attributing competence, isn't it?
I think you're just saying this: attributing to someone knowledge of what the word for gold is, presupposes that they know what gold is.
And that seems pretty straightforward.
But you don't want to say that to know a word refers to gold, you have to know what gold is?
I should have posed a narrower question: what would it mean, in the context of antirealism, to say that gold really was found in the hills? Realism, as I understand it, would say that it means that gold was found in those hills and that the fact that it was found is not dependent upon anyone believing, thinking and/or saying that it was found.
I think the next simple, common sense step is to say that a population using the word "gold" to refer to gold is a convention, but there being such a thing as gold is not.
And then maybe we're ready to get back to melting points and such ...
Yes.
Quoting The Great Whatever
But here I'd like to slow down. Did you say "what's expressed by a sentence" rather than just "a sentence" for a reason? Is it the sentence that's true or false, or is it what's expressed by the sentence? If it's the latter, what sort of thing is that?
i take it that what's expressed by a sentence is distinct from the sentence qua linguistic object, since different sentences, both in the same language or in different languages, can express roughly the same thing.
it doesn't matter what you want to call it - to avoid theoretical commitments, just make it whatever you refer to when you use propositional anaphora like 'that,' when you say 'john thinks gold can't melt, and mary thinks that too.' you can call it a thought, proposition, whatever, it's just the thing one thinks or says in saying the sentence. even more colloquially, it's what people refer to when they say 'are you thinking what i'm thinking?' or 'i said what you said.'
That "gold really was found in the hills" has a verification-immanent truth condition, because the meaning of the phrase "gold really was found in the hills" is to be explained by looking at the practical ability to use such a phrase; a practical ability that is to be understood according to the empirical situations that would warrant its assertion.
Your account of realism seems to take a step back and not explain the issue at all. What does it mean for gold to really have been found in the hills? What do we understand the truth conditions to be? Obviously simply re-asserting the claim that gold was really found in the hills is no answer at all, and it is this kind of non-answer that Dummett takes issue with and tries to examine. A Tarskian answer such as "X" is true if X isn't a sufficient account.
I'm good with pretty much all of this, or something close to it. But this is the hard part.
Allowing truth to attach to sentence tokens allows a cleaner treatment of indexicals -- I think -- but then you have to make truth dependent on a language+interpretation as well as on how the world is, which I take it you're not inclined to do.
I am persuaded that the sort of equivalence you describe in your first paragraph means there must be some way of dealing with the theoretical entity issue you allude to in the second. Also hard, though.
I have been tempted to see if I can have my cake and eat it too by having equivalence classes of sentences as truth-bearers, but I have no idea if that can be made to work. Yet.
ADDED: Ignore the indexicals comment. You don't have issues with indexicals or ambiguity or ellipsis, etc., if truth-bearers just aren't linguistic at all.
truth can attach to sentence tokens, by having what those sentence tokens express be true.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
whether someone says something true is of course dependent on the language, because what someone says is a matter of linguistic convention. but whether this latter thing is so is not (unless of course it deals with matters of linguistic convention).
i don't think there's any problem of truth bearers. if you like you can say propositions are t/f, and sentences, assertions, etc. derivatively of this in the obvious way. but then propositions are completely theoretically trivial: for the prop p to be true is just for p. there's nothing to a 'proposition' other than that, and the notion is eliminable.
why is that not an answer? it's the right answer, surely - we might say other things about what it means for gold to be found, having to do with what exactly gold is, what a hill is, what finding is, etc. we might be able to do this, or we might not - what does it matter? if you want to know more abt. what gold is, ask a matallurgist, prospector, or chemist. if you want to know more about what a hill is, ask a geologist or a surveyor or a storyteller. what makes it true that gold was found in the hills? that gold was found in the hills. nothing less, and nothing more. the anti-realist acct. makes it both less and more, and so gets it wrong on both fronts.
the insistence that the conditions under which smth's true must be 'verification-immanent' is simply added for no reason. truth has nothing to do with verification.
Okay, yes. Of course.
(Been at work for 11 hours now and should probably quit trying to do philosophy at the same time.)
I think this is the problem. It's not the case that the realist and the anti-realist agree on what it means to be true and just disagree on what it takes for something to be true, but that they disagree on what it means to be true.
Dummett's account seems to be that the statement "'it is raining' is true" just means "there are rational and/or empirical grounds to justify the assertion 'it is raining'". And, of course, that there are rational and or/empirical grounds to justify an assertion has everything to do with verification. The realist, on the other hand, argues something like the statement "'it is raining' is true" meaning "'it is raining' corresponds to some relevant recognition-transcendent state-of-affairs". But Dummett's argument is that Wittgenstein's account of meaning entails the former and is incompatible with the latter.
for p to be true is just for p.
'it's true that it's raining' means the same as 'it's raining.'
that's it.
this:
Quoting Michael
is wrong. '"it is raining" is true' does not mean anything more or less than 'it is raining.'
now, what does it take for it to be raining? well, water has to be falling from the sky, or something like that. does that have to do with 'rational and/or empirical grounds to justify an assertion?' no, it has to do with water falling from the sky.
given what the words, mean, can 'it is raining' be true if it's not raining? no. can it be raining, and 'it is raining' not be true? no. so we have a biconditional equivalence. but then, for 'it is raining' to be true (given what the words mean) just is for it to be raining. but now notice what you're claiming: that whether it's raning has to do with reasons, empirical grounds, justification of assertions, etc. no. it has to do with whether water falls from the sky.
hope that clears it up.
whether it's raining is a recognition-transcendent state of affairs (it doesn't matter whether you know/think/can figure out whether it's raining – all that matters is that water's falling from the sky). but for it to be true that it's raining, it just has to be raining, and vice-versa. hence, even on this construal of realism, the realist is right (tho i would avoid the baggage of using any of this terminology).
notice also the anti-reliast is wrong: the anti-realist is now committed to saying that whether it's raining depends on there being a linguistic community with such-and-such conventions, empirical faculties, etc. whatever. nope. it rains whether or not there is any language at all.
This is very strange coming from you. You've long argued against this Tarskian approach (e.g. here).
But then even if we take this approach, how am I to understand what you mean when you use the phrase "it's raining" (or "water is falling from the clouds")? According to Dummett (as per Wittgenstein), the meaning of the sentence isn't to be understood by appealing to some recognition-transcendent state-of-affairs that the statement corresponds to, but by looking to its practical use. On what occasions do we find ourselves justified to utter it? On what occasions do we find ourselves justified to reject it? The meaning of the phrase is to be understood according to the conditions that warrant its use. Verifiability is tied into the notion of meaning, and so also tied into the notion of truth.
That can't be right.
What precedes "because" doesn't follow from what comes after. It should.
It doesn't follow from the fact that one knows when asserting "gold really was found in the hills" is warranted that the claim itself is either verifiable or true. What you've called a verification-immanent truth condition admits both unverifiable and false claims.
It's verifiable in the sense that we understood what it would take to verify (or falsify) the claim. Dummett's point is that if we can't even make sense of how to determine if the claim is true then we can't understand what it means for the claim to be true, and as per Fichte if we can't understand what it means for the claim to be true then we can't understand what the claim means.
Not meaning to derail the thread, but briefly, do you think it's impossible for philosophy to acquire any kind of method? And if it isn't why don't we establish method in philosophy?
Understanding what it takes to be verifiable is about us. Being verifiable is about the claim. It makes no sense whatsoever to create a criterion for "verifiably immanent truth conditions" if those conditions can be satisfied by unverifiable false claims.
That needs to be acknowledged.
if u look to its practical use, you'll find it's correctly used when it's raining. this has to do with water falling form the sky, not epistemic conditions and verification and justification & blah blah blah
Quoting Michael
nope. respond to the above.
for it to be true that it's raining is just doe it to be raining.
so according to u, for it to be raining, there have to be assertion conditions & justification & empirical conditions & verifiability & blah blah blah. nope. water just has to be falling from the sky.
in fact u seem to be committed to saying that for anything to be true, these inguistic conditions have to be set up, which is the same as to say for anything to be so, they have to be, i.e. a hard linguistic idealism. acc. to u, can't rain w/o a linguistic community - absurd
Quoting Michael
it works when u add the qualifier, as i did, 'given the meaning of the words.' i won't go into why the biconditionals u used to propose were wrong b/c i have learned form experience that it's pointless to try.
yes, all methodology is granted by fiat. philosophy fails to have a methodology, probably because it has no subject matter.
Well, yes, because truth is predicated of statements. Only statements are the sort of things that can be true, correct?
Quoting The Great Whatever
And how am I to understand what you mean when you say that water just has to be falling from the sky? Any claim you make about the conditions for truth must be understood, and as per Wittgenstein the only way I can understand the claims you make is by understanding the rational and/or empirical occasions that warrant the use of those words. Else you might as well just be speaking to me in Japanese.
How exactly do you expect someone to learn a language if they can't recognise when they should or shouldn't make a particular claim? Language-acquisition would be impossible if recognition-transcendent conditions were part of a word's meaning.
I don't understand what needs to be acknowledged.
As an example of what I mean, you wouldn't know what "sugar is sweet" means if you didn't know that putting some sugar in your mouth would be the method to verify the claim.
no, for example, if i say 'it's true that it's raining,' i'm not saying anything about a statement. it can be true that it;s raining even if there are no statements and no one to make them - it just has to be raining. truth is predicated of propositions, which are the sorts of things clauses like: '...that p' denote.
Quoting Michael
what part don't you understand? do you not know what water is? what falling is? what the sky is? shall i explain them to you?
Quoting Michael
yes and the occasions that make the use of 'it's raining' true are when it's raining. that's how the words are used, per their truth conditions. we might recognize it's raining by all sorts of means, or be wrong, or even never be able to figure it out. there may even be conditions on assertion and warrant that require we have at least some evidence for what we say, or we commit an epistemic faux pas of some sort. but that has no bearing on whether ot not it's true that it's raining, which is just for it to be raining. it's raining or not raining regardless of what evidence we may or may not have, and regardless of whether we can have any.
Quoting Michael
wrong - whether it's raining doesn't depend on anyone recognizing that it does. yet we can still figure out how to use words like 'rain' by recognizing cases where it rains. that doesn't mean that it raining requires us to be able to recognize that it is. capiche?
OK, you say to assert that gold having been found in those hills is the truth condition for "gold was found in those hills" is "no answer at all" or not a "sufficient account". Why do you say it is it not a sufficient account, that is, what more do you expect? Or, what would be an alternative truth condition for "gold was found in those hills"; one that we might count as a 'real answer'?
It makes no sense whatsoever to create a criterion for "verifiably immanent truth conditions" if those conditions can be satisfied by unverifiable false claim.
Nonsense.
One can draw mental correlations between the physiological sensory effects/affects of sugar and the statement "sugar is sweet" without any awareness of verification methods.
How does one get to the physiological sensory effects of sugar? And which physiological effects? The ones that happen when I hold some in my hand?
but for it to be true, you don't.
Two year olds can understand and think/believe the claim is true by virtue of stating it. They have no metacognition.
What I'm saying is that to understand what it means for a statement to be true one must understand what would count as verifying that claim. If someone doesn't understand what would count as verifying the claim that sugar is sweet then they don't understand what it means for sugar to be sweet.
So, if I were to show someone water falling from the clouds and they don't recognise that this verifies the claim that it is raining then they don't understand what "it is raining" means.
Dummett's claim is that realism requires that some meaningful statements have unknown truth conditions – and by this I don't just mean that they have truth conditions that aren't known to obtain but that we don't even know what such truth conditions would be.
There has to be a known method for the claim "it is raining" to mean something.
What the realist needs to do is provide an example of a meaningful statement that has unknown truth conditions.
how is it misleading?
Because we have a method of verifying the claim "it is raining", and so the claim "it is raining" means something to us. Your question improperly injects our perspective into a hypothetical situation which is supposed to not be our perspective (one in which there isn't a method to verify the claim). It's like supposing a God's eye view to explain what things look like when they're not being looked at.
What matters is whether or not a meaningful statement can have unknown truth conditions.
does there need to be a method for verifying that it's raining, for it to be raining?
A better question would be to ask if some hypothetical people can in their language have a statement that means "it is raining" without understanding that water falling from the clouds would verify their statement. The answer, according to Dummett, is "no". Any meaningful statement in their language must have truth conditions that they would recognize as its truth conditions.
let's talk abt. what it takes for it to be raining. here's my position: for it to be raining, water has to be falling from the sky (or something to that effect). there don't have to be any languages, or any verification procedures, for it to be raining.
in fact, i claim it rained lots of times on this planet long before there were any such things.
does that sound right?
Yes, it sounds right. The above claims have recognisable truth conditions, and we have both rational and empirical grounds that warrant their assertion.
I don't see how this helps you. It's entirely consistent with my position.
The relevant issue is the issue I raised in my previous comment (albeit edited in, so you may have missed it).
This seems entirely self-refuting even of your positions. You blame your opponents for just repeating themselves and saying no, but if what you say here is true, then you're doing just the same!
now let's bring truth into it. here's my claim: for it to be true that it's raining is just for it to be raining. that is, in any situation in which it's raining, it's true that it's raining, and in any situation in which it's true that it's raining, it's raining. these are just the very same thing.
does that sound right?
better?
Quoting The Great Whatever
There need to be languages in order for "it to be raining" to have meaning - the same meaning that you still want it to have without any languages.
"So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.—But such a sound is an expression only as it occurs in a particular language-game, which should now be described." (Philosophical Investigations §261)
How else could you solve the problems of philosophy except by talking about them though? I'd go as far as saying that philosophy doesn't have problems as such. Philosophy is about everything and nothing by its very nature. Philosophy is really about arranging everything into a coherent whole, not new discoveries.
Right, that's what "raining" means.
But philosophy is responsible for taking the results of chemistry and linguistics and forming a coherent puzzle out of them no? It is responsible for telling us how things "hang together" in the most general sense of the term.
Given that you've said that "it is true that it is raining" and "it is raining" mean the same thing, obviously this sounds right. It's a tautology. But tautologies like this don't address the issue. The issue, again, is whether or not a meaningful statement can have unknown truth conditions. Or, to avoid the use of the word "truth" and to bring up my earlier question, whether or not a people can have a statement that means "it is raining" but not understand that water falling from the clouds warrants such an assertion.
what does it take for it to be raining? for water to fall from the sky.
what does it take for it to be true that it's raining? just for it to be raining.
so, what does it take for it to be true that it's raining? just for water to fall from the sky.
viola. nothing about languages or verification procedures – and notice you admit that water can fall from the sky even though there are neither of these things around.
What about Schopenhauer? I remember you found WWR to be quite interesting, at least at some point. But yes, philosophy cannot, by its very nature, contribute anything to human knowledge. Philosophy is that which plays with knowledge, not that which creates it. Philosophy only arranges knowledge.
Philosophy is a meta-cognitive art form more than a science which aims to clarify that "big picture" of the whole of reality.
Quoting The Great Whatever
How very Humean of you.
Given that "it is raining" and "it is true that it is raining" and "water is falling from the sky" all mean the same thing, you're just asserting the truism that it's raining if it's raining. But this doesn't address the fact that for your assertion to mean something we must understand the rational and/or empirical grounds that justify such an assertion. Its truth conditions do not transcend recognition. That's Dummett's point.
yep. so what's the matter? do you dissent to anything i've said? notice that i introduced truth with no reference to verification. so if what i say is trivial, you can't be right. you must haver made a mistake somewhere.
philosophy doesn't help with that.
Now you're changing your tune though. Previously you only claimed that philosophy doesn't produce any knowledge (or almost no knowledge).
Now it seems you're taking the very Humean position that we need to stop thinking about it and go play some billiards and we'll see the world aright :D
This presupposes once again that philosophy ought to teach us some new knowledge, and we both agreed that there is no such knowledge to be gained out of philosophy right? So to say we don't stop thinking (but we do stop philosophising) in order to go study whatever it is we want to know about is problematic. It underlines that we were thinking that we're studying philosophy in order to know something, which isn't the case.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Of course! So what?
Philosophy is meta-cognitive. It doesn't add to cognition, but it can help you see things aright.
That it's raining if it's raining isn't inconsistent with the claim that "it's raining" must have recognisable truth conditions for it to be mean something.
Just because your claim here isn't wrong it doesn't then mean that it's an exhaustive account of the issue. It's a common response to semantic theories of truth, for example, that even though they're right, they require supplementary theories. How do we "cash out" the right-hand side of the biconditional claim that 'it's raining' is true iff it's raining?
Realism, according to Dummett, allows for a people to have a statement in their language that means "it is raining" without understanding that water falling from the clouds would verify their assertion. Wittgenstein, according to Dummett, doesn't allow for this. Therefore, Wittgenstein, according to Dummett, doesn't allow for realism.
what are the truth conditions for "it's raining?" surely this is true iff it's raining. but as we just agreed, it's raining iff water is falling from the sky, and as we just showed, this has nothing to do with verification.
no it can't.
The truth conditions are recognizable, whatever they are. We know what they would be. If we didn't then we wouldn't know what "it's raining" means. "It's raining" wouldn't be a meaningful sentence in our language.
Quoting Agustino
Oh, that is indeed one thing we have in common ;)
By this account, you've identified 3 levels of reality: (1) what you experience, (2) what immediately causes the experience (you call this "the simulator), and (3) what's really out there (you call this "the external world").
External world --> Simulation --> Perception
When I see the cup, you claim it's caused by the simulator. We don't know what causes the simulator to simulate, and we don't really understand why the simulator causes the same experiences in each person. We just know that it does. The external world is therefore deemed pragmatically irrelevant so we ignore it.
The external world, though, is not truly irrelevant because we know that the simulator was caused by something (because everything has a cause), and that something must be something in the external world. So, on a meta-analysis, the external world is relevant, but, in day to day communication, it's pragmatically irrelevant.
What has been set out here just strikes me as basic indirect realism. There is the object out there. By the time it finds its way into your consciousness, it has been transformed by all sorts of things from light, gravity, air, the composition of your eye, and the interpretive ability of your brain.
External World --> Transformation --> Perception
You say "simulation," I say "transformation," but they are the same. By the time the thing gets to your consciousness, there's no reason to think (or care) if it bears any meaningful relationship to the original thing out there. All we can say is that we have received a simulation in our heads and it was caused by something in the external world, but what that something is, we have no idea of. That thing in itself is beyond the limits of what we can know. All of this is just a basic definition of noumena.
This isn't about perception, which is why it isn't indirect realism. It's about meaning. The same argument can apply even if direct realism is the case. The point of the simulation analogy is that the external world has no bearing on what the people in the simulation mean by "it is raining", even if the simulation is an exact representation of the external world.
So imagine a simulation in two different possible worlds. The simulations are identical but the external worlds in each are different. In one of these worlds the simulation is an exact representation of the external world and in the other the simulation is entirely different. Given the premise that meaning is use, the phrase "it is raining" in the first simulation means the same thing as the phrase "it is raining" in the second simulation, and so the phrases in both simulations have the same truth conditions; namely what is happening in the simulation. And if it's raining in the simulation then the phrase "it is raining" is true. Whether or not it is also raining in the external world isn't relevant.
However, looking back at this, I wonder if this is actually closer to Putnam's related remarks on the subject (his brain in a vat argument) rather than Dummett's. It might not quite be the right analogy to explain the emphasised part of the original quotation, which I think is better addressed with my question here.
This just makes no sense to me. You can't say it's not about perception, but only about meaning, when the only meaning you're interested in is the meaning of the perception. We've already broken this down to clarify that the perception isn't equivalent to the meta-meta reality of the external world, but only the meta-reality of the simulator, but this whole inquiry is in figuring out what the products of the simulator mean to the perceivers.
Quoting Michael
I get all this, but that doesn't address my point. My point is that the simulator was caused by the external world. It had to be because it was caused by something. The external world is therefore relevant as the cause of the simulator, but irrelevant to the pragmatic question of what you're currently perceiving. That is, whether the simulator bears a direct relationship to the external world doesn't matter to the truth value of a proposition if the truth value you're measuring is that of the simulator. When I say "it is raining," I mean "according to the simulator, it is raining," so the truth value of "it is raining" is evaluated entirely upon what the simulator is indicating. To suggest otherwise would be asking the question whether we were having a noumenal rainstorm.
It's not relevant in the relevant sense. Yes, there's a causal connection (maybe; perhaps the simulator is protected from the external world rain and so the external world rain has nothing to do with the simulator at all), but that has nothing to do with what "it is raining" means inside the simulation.
As an example, given that I've caught a ball, you having thrown it at me is relevant in one sense (it is causally responsible for me having caught the ball), but it has nothing to do with what I mean when I say "this is a ball".
The real issue I have is in the first part of my post, which is the crux of my belief that this "meaning is use" talk is nonsense to the extent it's an attempt to eliminate metaphysics from the conversation by suggesting that everything can be explained away by reference to how we use language. Your simulator discussion was in fact a metaphysical discussion, and it correlated meaning to reality, to the extent you defined reality as the products of the simulator.
I didn't mean it like that (and nor did Dummett, as far as I'm aware). Rather it's the lesser claim that the world talked about (by the people in the simulation) is a product of the simulator, and anything else that we as outside observers can see happening in the external world isn't a truth condition for anything said inside the simulation. It's the notion that words can "reach out" beyond their practical use that doesn't sit well (with Wittgenstein at least). Such a metaphysical notion of reference/correspondence is problematic. Although, again, I wonder if this is actually encroaching on Putnam's territory.
To say that something is a "transformation" of " the original thing out there", or that it is "caused" by it is to make an assertion that it has a "meaningful relationship" to, or with, it.
But there are.
Thus, it is not the case that the meaning of a statement is existentially contingent upon a known verification/falsification method.
If the meaning of a statement is existentially contingent upon a known verification/falsification method, then either our knowledge of verification/falsification methodology emerges prior to our ability to name things or naming things includes knowledge of verification/falsification methodology.
But it doesn't.
Thus, it is not the case that the meaning of a statement is existentially contingent upon a known verification/falsification method.
Bewitchment.
Let's.
Let's say something can be true whether you know it or not, whether you even can know it or not, either in principle or just as a matter of fact.
So what? If it's something we can't know, who cares? Now let's grant @The Great Whatever's claim that something can affect you even if you cannot possibly know it does.
What we can still say is this: if there is something, which we cannot know, that affects us, and we cannot know this, we cannot act in response, not in any rational way I can think of.
Even if you happened to enunciate that such a state of affairs holds, through sheer luck, you couldn't know that you had, you couldn't convince others, you couldn't learn more, form a plan of action, nothing.
Such a truth would be a truth we cannot rationally act on.
That's it in a nutshell...
That's approaching the level of making a metaphysical claim. I see no grounds to assert that. There's a bigger issue at play though. Does everything have to be demonstrably true or false for it to be real? I don't think so... Just look at numbers or other abstract entities.
That's not entirely true. Godel's incompleteness theorem asserts that there are some propositions within a system that cannot be proven inside that system (such as the consistency of said system), thus implying a sort of recognition-transcendence. Or not?
"This is a hand"
Learning what that means requires thought/belief. Learning what makes it true requires thinking about thought/belief.
may of the things ppl car emost deeply about are things they don't have any way of figuring out. so in answer to your question, everyone
i mean just a beyond obvious example, we have no way of figuring out if the abrahamic god exists (let's say), but the matter is of extreme importance for one's fate after death
Well, it is true for any formal system. Again, making the distinction between believing a proposition is true from it actually being true. For all else, redundancy in truth value or meaning.
Yes. And in fact Dummett was a devout Roman Catholic, iirc.
I was aiming for, let's say, "strategic overstatement", but I think I wound up with bollocks instead.
Unknowability just doesn't look like a big deal in this context. People act on what they believe to be true, or even believe to be probable, and either is rational. You could even know, for a fact, that a proposition has arbitrarily high probability of being true without knowing that it is true; that's surely rational grounds to act on.
I'm still thinking about other ways to approach the OP, but this doesn't look like one ...
My Wittgensteinian claim is that 'it's raining' and 'it isn't raining' do not exhaust the possibilities. I live in the Pennines, where yesterday it was neither raining nor not-raining. That's just the way it is here: perhaps we can rename ourselves ExcludedMiddlesex.
To talk about the law of the excluded middle is to talk about a formal language, not about natural language. Natural language accepts excluded middles and enjoys contradictions all the time.
I don't follow this. Could you elucidate?
I like to use Godel's incompleteness theorem to elucidate the matter. There are some propositions in any formal language that can be true; but, can't be proven to be true from with in the same formal language.
Isn't that about definitions/axioms/premisses? I'm not seeing the relevance to "for all else... redundancy..."
What part are you agreeing with Banno? Just curious.
That's not what he's doing at all. From this summary, "any truth-apt statement has to meet the condition that its truth-value can be specified in terms of some available proof-procedure or method of verification".
He isn't saying that a sentence is only true if we verify it. He's saying that verification must be conceivable for the statement to mean something. The principle of bivalence, however, entails that a sentence can be true even if verification is inconceivable. Therefore, the principle of bivalence is wrong.
In our discussion here, this always turned into the possibility of knowing that a statement is true. Is that the same thing?
Something else: we talked a lot about being able to recognize (or not) that a statement's truth conditions are satisfied; does that presume that we know what the truth conditions of the statement are? You made the point several times, Michael, that the issue is whether there can be a meaningful statement such that we could not recognize whether its truth conditions are satisfied; would that be a statement that we know the meaning of but do not know the truth conditions of? What it would be like to know what the truth conditions of a sentence are but not how you could recognize whether they are satisfied or not, or whether you could recognize whether they are so satisfied?
I, for one, am still not clear on how the meaning of a statement, its truth conditions, and the recognizability of those conditions being satisfied are all related.
Pragmatism would flip this on its head by saying everything is probabilistic. Reality is not deterministic - in the fashion conventional thinking about true facts or states of affairs presumes - but is instead only a constraint on indeterminism.
That means there is an element of chance or creativity in every act of "verification". We can frame a proposition as a deterministic choice - the principle of bivalence - yet then the measurement process itself can only be informal in the end, as on the fine-grain, nature can still fool us, as Gettier cases illustrate.
So the job of proposition verification is not to establish deterministic certainty - that is impossible. But what we can demonstrate transparently is a reduction in uncertainty. We can aim to reduce indeterminism to the level of what we deem mere probabilistic noise.
In asserting a truth, it is a practical fact that there is a level of error that matters (because we are asserting with some purpose in mind) and then a level of error where we are no longer bothered any more, so it makes no difference whether the facts are either "true" or "false". Or determinate vs random.
Take the height of Mt Everest. As a mountain climber, it doesn't really matter if it is X metres high, give or take another minute or two of climbing. At some level of truth-telling, our interest fuzzes out. The pull of the moon might have some measurable effect on Mt Everest so its "true height" changes by nanometres constantly all day. But this becomes noise - unless we establish some purpose that makes a more exact measurement seem reasonable.
And then doing that is probably going to change the very assertion anyway. I may have to concede Mt Everest doesn't "have a height" in the simple fashioned sense I was trying to posit. At the nanometre scale, it all becomes relative or vague as reality doesn't come with that kind of fixed measurement baseline.
So the point is that AP agonises about truth because it embeds a certain metaphysics. Pragmatism rebuilt theories of truth by advancing a quite different metaphysics. One worries about arriving at certainty. The other concerns itself with the regulation of uncertainty. Pragmatism accepts verification is a practical affair closely tied to interests. So that justifies acts of verification petering out in vagueness or noise - whether or not that is due to ontic or epistemic reasons.
It could be that we just don't care beyond a certain level of fine-grain detail. Or it might be that there just isn't any fine-grain detail to be had - as quantum indeterminism suggests. Either way, pragmatism works.
Can you expand on this?
Would you also describe this as the process of becoming "less and less wrong"? Is there a succinct way to describe that without presupposing a bivalence of right and wrong?
Quoting Banno
I was going to ignore this, but seriously Banno?
Rather than play Dummett, I'll just ask both of you for a citation. Since I haven't read nearly everything he published, not by a long shot, perhaps I haven't seen the passage where he does this conflating you speak of. Show me.
It is scientific reasoning. So I guess bivalence might be replaced by the null hypothesis. We propose that X is a hypothetical cause of an observable. Then we presume the existence of measurement error. And so we compare X to the null hypothesis - the counterfactual that the observable is caused only by randomness in the system in question. There is always going to be false positives due to irreducible chance or indeterminism (in the world, or in our acts of measurement).
But bivalence is not wrong as a tool of inquiry. We can't test anything unless we frame the alternatives crisply. We have to formalise a claim in terms of a definite yes or no question.
However then, we should recognise this is a necessary quality of our epistemic tool and not of the world. The world itself could be vague foundationally. So bivalence is simply a way of formalising a definite hypothesis. And (following Robert Rosen) our acts of measurement are then the informal part of the business. What counts as an acceptable degree of measurement becomes bound up by the purposes we might have in mounting an enquiry after truth, and so how easily we might feel satisfied. It is tacit knowledge - what counts as good enough - that AP theories of truth don't really appear to recognise.
Scientific reasoning instead actually does pay close attention to the business of making measurements. It has well developed probability theory (which Peirce pioneered) to make measurement as "formalised" as possible, despite the fact that a hypothesis is forever going to be a guess that suggests its own "sign" or answering measurement.
Guesses embed their preconceptions in a way that can't ultimately be avoided. So pragmatism would be about controlling the consequences of that situation.
So when it comes to bivalence, note that Peirce was explicit on how to handle it as part of his work on logic.
Vagueness is that to which the principle of contradiction fails to apply. Ultimately crisp bivalence fails as states of affairs are simply vague or indeterminate.
And then generality is that to which the law of the excluded middle fails to apply. Again, ultimately bivalence ceases to make sense once there is no longer any particularity to speak of.
So bivalence is great and effective in positing a world of crisp particulars - a state of affairs in which things are are the case, or are not the case. And that metaphysics can take us almost everywhere we seem to what to go. We don't have to worry about the limits of knowledge as so much can be logically inquired into using this tool.
But once we get down to theories of truth, we are talking about the limits of a bivalent framing. And Peirce says flip it around. Accept that fundamentally things will be vague. Uncertainty rules at ground level - and it doesn't matter because our own purposes place epistemic limits on how much we even could care. Let's not pretend to worry about things that don't in practice worry us.
That's helpful. And we do this even if we don't expect to get "yes" or "no", but closer to "yes" or closer to "no", right?
Quoting apokrisis
"AP"?
I would put it the other way round. We know that to dichotomise strongly is the way to be sure that any answer is going to fall within the bounds of the possible. So the concern is about asking the question in the logically broadest sense so to ensure we encompass the whole range of any resulting answer.
We can't reliably get closer to either limit - yes vs no - unless we are secure about the fact that the limits actually limit. So bivalence is part of that effort of framing questions in ways that answers at least land inside their counterfactual bounds.
I could say that thing over there is either a gnat or a 7. You can see how hard it would be to assign a truth value to statements that don't properly suggest actual bounds on our uncertainty.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Analytic philosophy.
It's in the OP Srap...
Here it is again, for your convenience...
I stand by my earlier reply, which is a re-iteration of my first analysis of the above paragraph. Here it is again...
Dummett's argument concludes that the principle of bivalence be rejected because we cannot always recognize whether or not a statement is true/false. The principle of bivalence only says that all statements are determinately true/false, not that we can recognize them as such. The criterion for being determinately true/false is remarkably different than being recognized as true/false. Dummett conflates the two. I see no reason to think/believe that Witt's writing leads to that or suffers from the same.
Moreover, as my initial reply to this thread asserts. There is a conflation of truth and meaning at hand as well, but that's another matter altogether and it is quite nuanced. Very.
No.
There may be a simple misunderstanding here: that's not a quote from Michael Dummett. It's a summary of a position he argued for off & on in various ways over several decades, and includes a reference, to the 1963 article on "Realism", iirc.
Quoting creativesoul
That's just false, and not even what the summary presented says.
Quoting creativesoul
Dummett would be "conflating" if he did not notice the distinction between a proposition's being true and its being recognizable as being true, or didn't consistently preserve the distinction throughout his argument. I see no evidence for this at all.
I'll give you a comparison: the general knock on OLP is that it conflates conditions of assertibility for truth conditions. Sellars argues, in "Presupposing", that Strawson does something like this in "On Referring".* It is a common argument against Austin. For instance, suppose Austin argues (this is hypothetical) that because we wouldn't in ordinary circumstances say "He sat in the chair voluntarily" or "He sat in the chair involuntarily" -- normally "voluntarily" and "involuntarily" imply something unusual about the situation of his sitting that we address with those words -- there's no reason to feel we have to say "He sat in the chair voluntarily" is necessarily true or false. You could respond that he's conflating whether it's appropriate to say such a thing with whether it's true.
Dummett does nothing like this. He doesn't miss the distinction; he makes an argument about the place of this distinction in a theory of meaning.
* Sellars's article includes this memorable footnote: "In short our hearts beat (believe) with Russell even when our tongue wags (asserts) with Strawson."
Poor wording on my parts, perhaps. What I meant to say is that if the truth condition of some statement X is Y and if we were to recognise that Y obtains but not then realise that X is true then we can't be said to know what X means. So it's not that we must be able to recognise that its truth conditions obtain but that we must be able to recognise its truth conditions as being its truth conditions.
As an example, if we were to take Mary out of her room and show her a red apple, if she doesn't then recognise this as verifying the sentence "this apple is red" then she doesn't know what "red" means.
This post might explain it better, where it offers this example (from Wright):
Well, no. It's not false. The author(whomever it was) did conclude that the principle of bivalence be rejected because we cannot always recognize whether or not a statement is true or false. Here it is again...
FULL STOP.
That conflates the two criterion...
The thought above that is labeled as "The key Wittgensteinian thought" is about meaning, not truth. The thought above earlier labeled "Dummett's argument" and now labeled the author's argument is about truth, not meaning.
you attempt to use philosophical bivalence as an argument point, but I believe that it is currently irrelevant to the current conversation as said that was trying to remove the fact of bivalence from the discussion as it would perpetrate a right or wrong opinion.
Well I guess it depends on how you mean "always recognize". My understanding of Dummett is that he takes assertion to drag along with it some idea of how what is asserted could be demonstrated, either by an effective procedure (for mathematics) or the usual empirical methods of evidence and inference. The idea here is not that anyone has actually done this, or even that as a practical matter it could be done, only that we have a sense of what it would be like to do it. This is being summarized as the truth conditions of an assertoric utterance being recognizable, but there's no reliance on actual acts of recognizing. It's not some sort of argument from ignorance. It's supposed to be about the nature of assertion and what conception of truth that implies. At least that's my understanding of how Dummett ends up here. And that's why what matters for the realism bit is propositions that we haven't the faintest idea what verifying them would even be like. Dummett is not willing to extend the principle of bivalence to such propositions.
Mathematics is an interesting case. Fermat's last theorem didn't count as true until there was a proof. That's how math works. But there was always wide, if evolving, agreement on what would count as proof, and thus Fermat's last theorem was a meaningful assertion long before it was proved.
(The realism stuff is actually pretty straightforward: Dummett's suggestion is that the domain of propositions to which you apply the principle of bivalence is the domain you are a realist about. Thus Quine, being pretty nearly an anti-realist about meaning, famously says "there is no fact of the matter" about a translation being right or wrong.)
As for conflating truth and meaning, just read almost anything he ever published. It's not there. He was pretty much obsessed with understanding how they were related, rather than conflating them. (For what it's worth, I also think he was constitutionally unable to conflate anything, to ignore any distinction. Again, read almost anything he ever wrote, he is almost cripplingly careful.)
I've tried a few different ways of going on from here, but I just don't have it in me right now.
One thing that's a little haywire about this whole conversation: we've been talking about "meaning" when we might have considered talking about "sense" and "reference", Dummett being much more Fregean than LW was, for instance. The major challenge to Dummett's approach comes from a purely referential semantics, in which the meaning of a word like "gold" is the stuff gold, what it refers to. If you don't allow sense to play a role, you've basically tied one of Dummett's arms behind his back.
Nice context Srap. I'll take your word for who holds/says what. As I said earlier, I'm interested in what's being said. I'll talk in general terms...
One who holds that making an assertion/statement drags along with it some idea of how it could be demonstrated is working from a notion of what it takes to make a statement that is unsatisfied by many folk who make them regularly. So, either those folk aren't making assertions/statements or the idea that assertions drag along with them some idea of how what is asserted could be demonstrated is ill-conceived. I'd go with the latter. I mean, every language speaker - without exception - learns how to talk about the world prior to learning about truth conditions and/or verification/falsification methods.
This looks to me like yet another consequence stemming from the historical mistake of conflating thought/belief with thinking about thought/belief. Assertion requires only the former. Having some idea of how what is asserted could be demonstrated requires the latter.
If the consideration is the nature of assertion and what conception of truth it implies, then I would strongly argue that the aforementioned distinction be drawn and maintained by virtue of using it when and where applicable. Doing so adds clarity. The nature of verification is much different than the nature of assertion. If what you claim about Dummett is accurate, he seems to have not drawn a distinction between what statements/assertions require and what verification/falsification requires. That is a consequence of not having drawn and maintained the crucial distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief.
Everything ever thought/believed, spoken and/or written presupposes correspondence to fact/reality. Both, thought/belief formation and the attribution of meaning, require it. Arriving at that requires knowing what thought/belief consist of. Knowing that requires drawing the aforementioned distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief.
I cannot think of a meaningful statement that we haven't the faintest idea what verification/falsification would take, or what verifying them would 'be like'. That is not to say that all statements are verifiable/falsifiable. It is to say that all verifiable statements are meaningful. All statements are meaningful, and as such are either determinately true or false, despite whether or not they are verifiable/falsifiable.
If one does not know what it would take for his/her assertions/statements to be true, then s/he does not know what they're talking about. If one does not know how to verify/falsify an assertion/statement, then s/he does not know what it would take for them to be true. Knowing what a statement means doesn't necessarily require knowing what it would take in order for it to be true, or knowing how to check to see if it is.
Domains of propositions... I take that to be the kind of proposition?
I like Quine, particularly the insight within Ontological Relativity. I think that was the name of it, but I could be wrong. It's been a number of years ago since reading it. Sheds light upon the arbitrary nature of name choice, and/or what people build a worldview upon.
That said, he is wrong regarding there is no fact of the matter regarding a translation being right or wrong. I mean, translations can most certainly be wrong. So, on second thought, given what little I remember of Quine, I am probably misunderstanding what he meant. Surely he acknowledged that people misunderstand one another by virtue of mistranslation.
We translate pre-existing meaning. We attribute meaning. The former requires the latter. We can be wrong in both cases. Though being wrong in the latter can be much different than being wrong in the former. We're wrong in the former when our translation misattributes meaning. We can be wrong in the latter, aside from misunderstanding/mistranslating pre-existing meaning, when we talk about things that are not existentially contingent upon language. It is here that we can do both, correctly and incorrectly conceive. That's yet another affront to current convention.
And yet again, setting out that which is not existentially contingent upon language requires drawing and maintaining the distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief.