Truth is actuality
When someone says "I'm seeking the truth" or "We fear we'll never know the truth about what happened to Bill..", what's meant by "truth" is actuality: of all the things that could be, what actually is.
This is pretty intuitive, but I think it would generally be dismissed as an example of the flexibility of language. Truth as a property of statements is supposed to be the meat and potatoes of philosophy. I think this preoccupation with truth as a property results in the adoption of weird externalist approaches where, for example, scientific knowledge arises simply from noting reliability.
Imagine that truth as actuality is closer to the heart of the matter. The truth of statements is the oddity of language use and the conundrums that arise there are the result of missing the use of metaphor.
I'm looking for challenges to this view... to help me think it through. What am I missing?
This is pretty intuitive, but I think it would generally be dismissed as an example of the flexibility of language. Truth as a property of statements is supposed to be the meat and potatoes of philosophy. I think this preoccupation with truth as a property results in the adoption of weird externalist approaches where, for example, scientific knowledge arises simply from noting reliability.
Imagine that truth as actuality is closer to the heart of the matter. The truth of statements is the oddity of language use and the conundrums that arise there are the result of missing the use of metaphor.
I'm looking for challenges to this view... to help me think it through. What am I missing?
Comments (68)
It's all about atheism, I'm afraid. God died. We're trying to figure out what portion of our interests were affected by that.
We love science. We prefer naturalistic answers to: "It's that way because God loves Americans." That's can't be right. Why would God have a preference for morons?
I'm saying that understanding the cultural mileau of the issue of truth requires understanding stuff like the legacy of Descartes, how indirect realism is assumed by scientists, and catching sight of the high-wire act of Fools trying to avoid Nihilism that characterizes contemporary life.
In other words, the stakes are a lot higher than they might seem to be on casual observation. It's all Philosophy of Mind. Is the universe alive? Or is it dead and our intuitions about ourselves.. just illusions?
What's wrong with "Truth is actuality?" Why doesn't this work?
Hi Mongrel:
You're putting a value claim on existence.
If what is, is actuality and actuality is truth then existence is truth, but I think existence is neutral, neither true nor false, it simply is.
Also we talk about truth in a lot of ways: logical, metaphysical, mathematical, historic, narrative, moral, aesthetic.
Some thoughts:
Aristotle (I think) said that Truth compels.
I think historicity is an essential component of Truth.
Truth as in the Truth of a proposition, is different to my mind than the truth that Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492. The truth of a proposition requires a conclusion, Chris's mistake only requires recognition.
Perhaps there are only a multiplicity of particulars truths. The sum of these 'truths' are our inductive conclusions, which may be transcended/transformed by reason into necessary relationships, necessary truths, when they are realized.
Yea... analytic truths. With those, all we can do is think of truth as a property of statements. We can't think of them as situations that may or may not be actual. Good point.
If you're thinking of the quantum theory sort of "multiple worlds," something strange is going to happen to truth if you have a transcendent vantage point.
That's a restatement of the correspondence theory of truth. It's discussed here in detail, with all the various arguments for and against: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-correspondence/#5
In your formulation, you will need to define "actuality," which you've equated to truth. Is it something as it is, unmediated by the perceiver, and what would that look like?
If some blah are mah
and all mah are grah.
Is it true that some blah are grah?
Is it actuality?
I do agree. The next bit of my journey is to see whether there's anything in the suggestion that this is rather like what Heidegger was worrying about. With 'being' for 'actuality'. Wouldn't you say?
No, it's not correspondence. I'm saying truth is the object of knowledge (or potentially the object of it) as opposed to a property of statements.
Actuality is the world I inhabit (as opposed to some other possible world). Apriori, all the parts of this world have to relate to one another in some way, so actuality is, in a sense, all there is from beginning to end.
One assumes that the world can be accurately perceived. This assumption may be wrong. This is a good thing to keep in mind if you're ever in the bar of the Overlook Hotel and you're being offered free booze.
Sure I do. Snake oil salesmen, politicians, and my own tendency to believe my own bullshit require me to focus on it.
Philosophically, it shows up when we ponder the workings of the mind.
Heidegger recognized that being is a combo of subject and object.
I think you might be right. I'm thinking of aesthetic truth.
I'm not quite sure how knowledge fits into that, though.
I don't know what blah and mah are. I think the Actuality Theory could be refined to accommodate the different things we talk about. Philosophers have resorted to examining artificial languages to try to grasp things about language. Some ended up concluding that human speech has no more meaning than the barking of dogs. That sets the bar about as low as it can go, I think.
So I feel free to refine. :)
"What happens" is synonymous with "what the truth is." If you tell me what happened and tell you that something else actually happened, then our dispute is over what happened, which is a dispute over the truth.
But clearly Mongrel takes issue with the word "truth". He wants it to also refer to "actuality". So why not just use the word "actuality"? What's gained in using the word "truth"?
Philosophically, it shows up when we ponder the workings of the mind.[/quote]
You missed the point. If the word "truth" is troublesome for you then why not abandon the term? You can get by simply by talking about "actuality" as you say, or by talking about statements that describe actuality.
If your argument is epistemological, setting out what knowledge is, it's generally (although certainly not universally) accepted that knowledge is a justified true belief. That being the case, it's generally accepted that truth is an element of knowledge.
Quoting Mongrel
I don't know if it's a priori that all parts of the world must interrelate unless you are referring to the world in an external sense. Dreams need not interrelate with one another, and I don't see why it's necessary that actuality not simply be a dream. I'll acknowledge that we intuitively believe the rock we perceive is "out there," but that's not necessarily true nor is it universally accepted as true.
It's not the job of philosophers to dictate the words people use. For an extended period, philosophers have thought of truth as a property of statements. Though this outlook is gravely afflicted, it keeps coming back around.
While pondering knowledge internalism/externalism, it occurred to me that truth is really about knowledge. It's the object of knowledge. In the cases where we speak of it as a property, the use of metaphor is in play. I don't take credit for noticing that. But those who have noticed it have tended to go the route of truth skepticism... which isn't viable.
What do you mean by this? That we use the word "truth" to talk about knowledge?
Gettier problem. Theories of knowledge are in flux at present. The problem is central to philosophy of mind.
[quote=Hanover]
I don't know if it's a priori that all parts of the world must interrelate unless you are referring to the world in an external sense. Dreams need not interrelate with one another, and I don't see why it's necessary that actuality not simply be a dream. I'll acknowledge that we intuitively believe the rock we perceive is "out there," but that's not necessarily true nor is it universally accepted as true.[/quote]
In an external sense, yea, all the parts of the world have to interrelate.
If actuality is a dream, all the parts still have to interrelate. Try to imagine a portion of a dream that in no way relates to anything else in the dream. Give an example of that.
The world may be a dream. If it is, that is actuality. Of all the things the world could have been, that's what it is. When we seek the truth, we seek to know that actuality.
I think the only viable understanding of truth (in the propositional not in the 'truth as aletheia' sense ) we have is that truth corresponds to, or is about actuality. (In the 'truth as aletheia' sense actuality is not a state of affairs but the living truth as it is revealed).
You could say that, yea. Truth is the object of knowledge. It's actuality... what is, as opposed to what could be.
Frege's proof that truth is unanalyzable assumes that truth is a property of statements. Obviously there are sentences where truth does not appear in the role of a property. AP tends to dismiss these cases, preferring to examine truth as a property.
When we use "truth" as a property, we're employing metaphor, but this is generally overlooked. This is where the AP trainwreck starts... I think.
This is a common view, although it was rejected by philosophers post Frege. In spite of that, it persists as a common view. Some philosophers point out that it has intuitive appeal. Plus indirect realism is pretty much embedded in the average scientific outlook. This causes consternation because correspondence entails dualism of some kind.
One of the problems with a dualistic outlook is the challenge of explaining how the two supposed "realms" relate to one another. In other words... how does a truth-bearer correspond to a truth-maker? This is obviously intimately tied to the issue of how mind relates to the world.
An externalist approach to knowledge says that there is no need to work that question out. We just start by acknowledging that there are sentient beings who interact with their world. We note cases of "reliablity" in these interactions. That reliability is all there is to knowledge.
That's a case of picturing truth as a property of statements, and it works well in managing necessary truths.
The question I have there is: necessary truths can't be false. So how does truth even come up in regard to them? I think it's cases like:
John believes that 4 is a prime number.
John is mistaken. It's necessarily true that 4 isn't prime. John's belief is false.
But if we persist in saying that "It's false that 4 is a prime number"... there's a subtle problem that arises having to do with the status of this false proposition, or really of any proposition. It's the unstated statement problem.
We can ditch that problem by declaring that we're speaking poetically when we talk about a proposition as existing in some abstract way... hanging in the void possibly unknown by any qualified knower. What we're saying is that if anyone believes that 4 is a prime number, their belief is wrong.
Eh... I gotta think about this some more.
Correspondence, as I see it is a purely logical relation between what I say and what I experience or what I would experience. So if I say "it is raining" that assertion is understood to correspond to my experience of the rain. If I say "it is either raining or not right now at such and such a location in the Amazon" that is understood to correspond to what I would experience if I was in the Amazon right now.
I am not convinced that the disquotational account has dispensed with correspondence. I only care what philosophers "since Frege" have said if it is convincing. "'It is raining' is true iff it is raining", logically depends on a correspondence between "'It is raining"' and "it is raining" where the former is a statement of or about the latter actuality.
This is a metaphysical problem you are referring to here not an issue about logical correspondence. The question about what correspondence could be in some metaphysical dimension is a malformed question in my view; we simply don't know what we are asking when we ask that.
The idea of "sentient beings interacting with their world " implies dualism equally as much as correspondence does in my view; that is it does so if it is taken as a metaphysical claim.
Your epiphany was that truth was an object of knowledge, and my response was that your epiphany was what was already traditionally accepted.Quoting Mongrel
Quoting Mongrel
Unless I can dream up an example where they don't.
Logical relations are between sentences. It doesn't make sense to say that some sentence is logically related to an experience (whether actual or counter-factual).
If there were no logical relation between your experiences and what you say about them, then you would not actually be saying anything about them, would you?
I find that neither two objections are sufficient for defeating correspondence theory; in fact I think both of them end up utilizing correspondence whether they realize it or not.
For a pragmatist, what is true is what is useful. However, this means that a person who believes in god and finds great value in their religion would be said to hold a true belief, which to many others would strike them as irrational. For pragmatism, truth is inherently relative, which is quite unsettling. Furthermore, what is useful is very often what actually is the case (correspondence), so it seems like pragmatism simply is a facet of correspondence theory.
For a coherentist, what is conceptually harmonized is what is true. But this is problematic; the coherentist theory of truth is actually a theory of justification. The related, justifying propositions are exactly what we use as evidence for some proposition.
So there's my two cents. If I got any of this wrong, someone correct me.
If that's the implication. Because it is a fact that a logical relation is "an interpropositional relation in which a proposition is related to another, in reasoning, as a premise to a conclusion or as an antecedent to a consequent."[sup]1[/sup]
So either we can't talk about things or talking about things doesn't require a logical relation between sentences and experiences. I think it obvious that we can talk about things. Therefore talking about things doesn't require a logical relation between sentences and experiences.
[sup]1[/sup]http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/glossaryoflinguisticterms/WhatIsALogicalRelation.htm
You are using a narrow definition of logic as propositional or predicate logic; so apparently we are talking about different things.
In any case the point stands, that if what you say about your experiences does not correspond, somehow, to your experiences then you cannot be saying anything about them. The question that raises is: in what way could what you say about your experiences correspond to your experiences other than in a logical/conceptual way?
Correspondence theory didn't fall out of favor because somebody thought disquotationalism was a better idea. It was because of a brick shit-house of an argument that it doesn't make sense (by way of Frege.)
I wrote Frege's argument out twice on the old forum. I'm not writing it again. See Scott Soames if you're interested.
Unfortunately, Nagase didn't join us over here.
Damn.
Thanks for all your comments! I think I may have fuel to keep going with my scheme. Does it matter if it makes sense to anyone else? In the final analysis... probably not.
Then there would be the question -- is it true that truth is actuality? How would you deal with that?
I don't know if these are problems. Just thoughts of mine.
The one extra thing I'd add is that Habermas isn't much read by us Anglo-Americans, and so far I only know his stuff mostly second-hand, but he does have a different way of approaching these things, which would fall into the 'pragmatic' rather than correspondence or coherentist camps. Worth adding to the reading. For him it's a question of the linguistic community 'validating' talk among themselves, as far as I grasp it at one remove.
I'll look for Habermas. Sounds interesting.
What did you come up with on the Heidegger front?
... I find truth (or certainty) to be a 'process' rather than an 'actuality'. It is a dynamic process subject to adaptation of actuality of status via the accumulation of information/experience.
I find this to be more deductive and empirical than intuitive.
Meow!
GREG
To suggest that the truth doesn't matter is itself a truth claim. Hence, it clearly does matter, otherwise, the person making such a claim would never make it in the first place.
I'm not going to pop up with anything pronto on that front. I'm attending a course of lectures starting tomorrow, so it may be March before I even have a semblance or appearance of knowing what H is talking about!
Could you explain how I'm reifying it?
My thinking is that it's a word. I'm defining it. This is AP heresy because of Frege's proof that it's unanalyzable. That proof starts with the assumption that truth is a property of statements or propositions.
"True" does appear in language as a property of statements. But I think it's easy enough to translate these usages to "truth" as an object of knowledge. The truth is what we want to know.
Most often, it's that we want to know what is, as opposed to what could be. In short: actuality.
Mathematical truth is something I handle with tongs. I'm not a mathematician, and I've concluded that Banno is right. Math is a game. Truth in math works pretty much the way truth works in a game.
I think Yaha was thinking that I've dug myself a ditch for no reason. Not very charitable of him.
I wasn't digging a ditch. I expressed something that occurred to me while studying theories of knowledge on the way to understanding Chalmers' book: "Constructng the World."
As my lately adopted mense on issues of mental health, I pay close attention to what you say.
But I wasn't saying that truth is empirical or intuitive. It's the way things are, whether we observe it or intuit it. The truth may be beyond our grasp. What this means, though, is that truth is the way things are.... that which actually is.
Banno would sniff at non-propositional truth.
But he's not on this forum, so we can proceed without his council.
Interesting. I got interested in AP for wanting to know how their answers to questions would vary from H's. So.... I would love to hear from you after you've digested some of H's ideas.
I've long wanted to do a group reading of the OWA. Maybe you'd be interested after your sojourn?
That sort of makes me feel, well... hell... I don't even pay close attention to what I say... that kind of freaked me out. That must be a good thing.... I hope.
Quoting Mongrel
I get ya...
... I sort of thin that truth, that is truth is all possible context, is beyond our grasp, as there is always some sort of context or information that we don't have to take into consideration, as well as the influx of new context and information after the fact of fielding a notion of truth that will in some way or another influence that notion and make adaptations/revisions in that notion... my silly idea that there are no fixed points in value attributon, except for stubborness.... perhaps it says more about the (relative) state of our being than the (relative/absolute) state of what is truth itself happens to be in?
Let me know if that makes any sense. (I'm not too sure it did.)
Quoting Mongrel
Indeed...
... Banno has a way of reducing my statements of racing thoughts into a short sound bite. A master of brevity... a talent I wish I could employ as well, but I fear will never be mine.
Meow!
GREG
I'm confused. The bit you quoted from Thorongil was directed at mcdoodle, not me.
I don't know where charity comes into it. If you want to use the word "truth" to refer to a sentence that successfully describes something about the world then you can, and if you want to use the word "truth" to refer to the thing about the world which sentences try to describe then you can. As long as you make it clear to your interlocutor which you're doing it really doesn't matter. You could even drop the word "truth" and just talk either about sentences that successfully describe something about the world or about the things about the world that sentences try to describe.
The reason I thought you were reifying truth is because actuality is thing-like . . . or at least contains things in it. So my thinking was that if truth is actuality, then the lamp on my desk and the desk and my phone, and so forth, are all parts of truth, because they are also parts of actuality. Though stating it like this makes me think that the whole is different from the parts, so perhaps not. But even so, then it would seem that truth is part of reality, where I would say that reality or actuality are metaphysical questions, and truth is a concept. There's no truth "out there", so to speak, or behind the veil of appearances.
But I think when you say "truth is what we want to know" that this isn't necessarily the case, either. Like I said, it was just the first thought that popped into my head.
A world contains things. We reside in the actual world, as opposed to the one in which Christianity never came into being, for example
There's something interesting that happens when we consider actuality in the light of probability. In a sense, the actual world is the only possible world.
Chalmers starts his book, Constructing the World, by contemplating Laplace's Demon. He reviews the main objections to it and refines the idea to dispense with those objections. If you're interested, we could sort through that. What is a world really? I think we're basically examining the way we think when we talk about worlds.
But to answer your question, the meaning of "actual" is bound up with our ability to imagine, to hypothesize, to create fiction, and to lie. Obviously, truth and actuality are associated in meaning in a fundamental way.
My guess is that the most common use of "true" has to do with deception. Consider the requirements of a good lie. It has to be believable. It has to be a possible world. What is the truth in these cases? The actual world.
What this thread lacks is a clear explanation for why philosophical examinations of truth tend to center around the idea of truth as a property of statements. It's a good question.
Reality and actuality are also concepts... both closely related to the concept of truth.
My point would be that when you want to know the truth about your lamp, you aren't saying you'd like to become acquainted with a useful speech act.
I would. I'll be reading that in mid-Feb if all goes according to plan.
I can't say I agree with that. Someone who says that the aesthetic doesn't matter isn't making an aesthetic claim, they're claiming that aesthetics lacks importance in a schema involving various other things which presumably are more important.
But indeed it feels like the way analytic approaches keep talking about truth; it seems like a residue that will never evaporate :)
The plausible is not the true. I feel much conversation hinges on plausibility not truth. And the pleasure of fiction seduces us by being plausible...ok, so what if...? - and then...?
Now, my Heidegger reading has already reached 'Higher than actuality stands possibility.' For me actuallity flits by and then is irretrievable, ah, memories, evidence, ghosts, what am I to believe? All we can do is make up dialogues and narratives about it. The possible is great fun, and rebounds back on the actual. Rub on a lamp of Moliere's and a genie appears to grant a wish, tell a marvellous story. So they say over in 'fiction'. Or over there in 'science', it turns out we can use lamps for wifi - who'd have thought there was even such a possibility until some geek imagined it?
It seems like truth and actuality are conceptually distinct. Statements that describe non-actual states of affairs can be true (e.g. "Harry Potter is married to Ginny Weasley"), and things can be actual without being true (e.g. I would not describe the actual tree in my back yard as being "true"). Seems like a category error to equate the two.
I wasn't building an edifice here. I just meant to suggest that thinking of truth as a property of statements is a recipe for confusion. The fact that "the truth" often stands in contrast to a state of affairs that conceivably could be indicates that truth is actuality.
The motto of the IEEE used to be something like: 'Engineering: Bringing Ideas into Reality.'
On the one hand, you're right. Possibility is an engine of the mind. Any case of determining actuality is a little grave because it's a question answered.
On the other hand, you say actuality is something we make up stories about. If that true, it is actual.
I think you're illustrating why truth as a property of statements is a confusing way to think of it.
The actuality is that a story is told involving a character named Harry Potter. In the story, he marries somebody (I assume? I never got that far.) There's the way the story is actually told, and the way it could have been... for instance the story could have been told that Harry Potter emigrated to Zaire and became a malachite dealer.
If you want to know the truth about the story.. look for the way it's actually told.
If you describe a tree in your backyard as "actual," what do you mean by that? I would assume you mean what is (as opposed to what could have been.)
I agree that thinking about truth as a property of statements is confusing. Nevertheless, truth is something that is most commonly ascribed to statements/propositions. There's ways of accommodating this fact without theorizing truth as a property. That's what deflationary approaches are all about, right?
[quote=Mongrel]
The actuality is that a story is told involving a character named Harry Potter. In the story, he marries somebody (I assume? I never got that far.) There's the way the story is actually told, and the way it could have been... for instance the story could have been told that Harry Potter emigrated to Zaire and became a malachite dealer.
[/quote]
Yes, but the events described by the both the actual Harry Potter story and the non-actual Harry Potter story are non-actual events.
[quote=Mongrel]
If you describe a tree in your backyard as "actual," what do you mean by that? I would assume you mean what is (as opposed to what could have been.)[/quote]
I am being a little loose here. In philosophy/modal logic the word "actual" is commonly used in opposition to "possible", but the word is also commonly used in opposition to "fake", "fictional", "imaginary", "abstract", "deontic", etc. So the actual tree in my yard is the one that I believe to be "there right now" as opposed to trees I might plant in the future, or trees that I might have dreamt about last night, or the plastic tree that my neighbor discarded in my yard while I was out getting groceries, etc.
Most common among philosophers? Yea. Most common in everyday speech? I don't know. When you speak of truth outside a philosophical discussion are you thinking of speech acts? Or the way things are?
A deflationist is likely to admit that truth is a property of statements. They just don't attempt to define truth.
Quoting Aaron R
This issue can easily be resolved without rejecting truth as a property of statements.
What's interesting to me is that if we insist that truth is a property of statements, then it appears that there are statements which have never been stated which are true. The unstated statement problem is a plague to a realist.
Quoting Aaron R
Of all the possible worlds, the actual world is the most possible. :)
I don't understand this objection in the slightest. Do you have a subject connected to a predicate? Well, congratulations, you've just made a truth claim. "The truth (subject) doesn't (copula) matter (predicate)." One has just asserted as true that the truth does not matter. Ergo, the person making such a claim does value the truth, inasmuch as it is necessary to make such a statement at all.
Quoting mcdoodle
No, it won't, so long as you continue to make truth claims such as this. All language would have to cease for truth not to matter.
In every day speech I most commonly hear the word truth being used in sentences such as "well, yes, I suppose that's true", "that is so true!", "you tell me the truth, or else!", "but if that were true, then...", "is that really true?", etc., in which the referent is some claim that has been made. That's not the only way to use the word, but I find these to be very common indeed.
Quoting Mongrel
Yes and no. A deflationist will say that truth is a property only in the "thinnest" possible sense. SEP explains this better than I can:
[quote=http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-deflationary/#TruPro]
It is commonly said that, according to the deflationary theory, truth is not a property and therefore that, according to the theory, if a proposition is true, it is mistaken to say that the proposition has a property, the property of being true. There is something right and something wrong about this view, and to see what is wrong and right about it will help us to understand the deflationary theory.
Consider the two true propositions (5) and (6):
(5) Caracas is the capital of Venezuela.
(6) The earth revolves around the sun.
Do these propositions share a property of being true? Well, in one sense of course they do: since they are both true, we can say that there both have the property of being true. In this sense, the deflationary theory is not denying that truth is a property: truth is the property that all true propositions have.
On the other hand, when we say that two things share a property F, we often mean more than simply that they are both F; we mean in addition that there is intuitively a common explanation as to why they are both F. It is in this second sense in which deflationists are denying that truth is a property. Thus, in the case of our example, what explains the truth of (5) is that Caracas is the capital of Venezuela; and what explains this is the political history of Venezuela. On the other hand, what explains the truth of (6) is that the earth revolves around the sun; and what explains this is the nature of the solar system. The nature of the solar system, however, has nothing to do with the political history of Venezuela (or if it does the connections are completely accidental!) and to that extent there is no shared explanation as to why (5) and (6) are both true. Therefore, in this stronger sense, they have no property in common.
[/quote]
Quoting Mongrel
Perhaps, but my point was more that a statement can be true even if what it is about is not actual. I can't see how that would be possible if truth and actuality were equivalent.
Quoting Mongrel
This is a peculiar claim:"there are statements which have never been stated which are true" (emphasis mine). To my mind, a statement that has never been stated does not and has never existed, by definition. If truth is a property (ontological) of statements, then there are no true statements that have never been stated.
Quoting Mongrel
Ha! How does one measure possibility, anyway? :)
So let's cut to the chase, Aaron. Do you adhere to Correspondence Theory?
Quoting Aaron R
What we can do is just credit one another with some familiarity with the topic. I wouldn't insult you by suggesting otherwise.
Quoting Aaron R
You're pressing this point, so I'll press back. If you assert that Harry Potter married someone, I would answer that this can't be true because Harry Potter doesn't exist.
Quoting Aaron R
The claim that there are unstated statements is peculiar to realism. It's a very odd metaphysics that suggests that there are no truths which have not yet been stated.
Quoting Aaron R
What I was pointing out to you is that the actual world is considered to be a possible world. This is uncontroversial.
I'm undecided. I tend to think that correspondence has some role to play in the theory of truth, but I don't think it works on its own.
Quoting Mongrel
So you don't acknowledge a difference in truth-value between "Harry Potter married Ginny Weasley" and "Harry Potter married Lord Voldemort"? How could you ever hold a discussion about a fictional story?
Quoting Mongrel
How so?
You're expressing some ambivalence. What I'll say is that if you accept that the proper way to think of truth is as a property of statements, then Frege's argument is a brick shit-house. There's no room for being undecided. There's no addition to Correspondence that's going to redeem it. End of story.
Quoting Aaron R
In the actual world, there is a way the Harry Potter story is told. I think you know that.
Quoting Aaron R
I think we're done here. Thanks!