Do we need objective truth?
The concept of objective truth seems incoherent to me. If we say objective truth is something everyone agrees on, it seems that there is nothing everyone agrees on, and not everyone agrees that "there is nothing everyone agrees on", and so on and so forth.
If we say that objective truth exists out there but we can't access it or not all of us can access it, then how is that an objective truth? If no one can access it then it's an idea, not a thing, and if only some can access it then it is personal, not objective.
However if we say "There is only personal truth", then we are not stating an objective truth, we are stating a personal truth, and that way we can remain coherent.
Thoughts?
If we say that objective truth exists out there but we can't access it or not all of us can access it, then how is that an objective truth? If no one can access it then it's an idea, not a thing, and if only some can access it then it is personal, not objective.
However if we say "There is only personal truth", then we are not stating an objective truth, we are stating a personal truth, and that way we can remain coherent.
Thoughts?
Comments (398)
So in short, we need both objective and normative truths.
No, that doesn't fly. Objectivity is basic, in areas which it is applicable, like journalism, history, jurisprudence, and many more. For instance, you wouldn't read an account of the Holocaust by a Holocaust-denier, as his/her opinions would clearly be tendentious. If your daughter was in a talent quest, you wouldn't expect to be called as a judge. And so on. Yes, they're perfectly mundane examples, but that's part of the point.
Furthermore, if you are engaged in almost any kind of skilled activity, then you will have to learn and use the accumulated knowledge of other exponents of that activity, whether this be science, or many other forms. In that corpus of knowledge, there are vast numbers of facts and principles that everyone agrees on; again it doesn't make them all perfectly correct but pragmatically speaking it is something that has to be acknowledged.
I would agree that there is no such thing as ultimate objectivity - that objectivity is contextual and dependent on underlying factors, not all of which can be spelled out. But that doesn't mean that it is not something to strive for where it counts.
We could call it something like intersubjectivity, but at the end of the day there doesn't seem to be much point. Calling it "objective" conveys the meaning, even if, in an epistemological debate, you might want to qualify the term further.
What is meant by "access"? I suppose in some sense of "access" everyone has access to the objective truth, and in another sense, they don't.
PA
First re "If no one can access it, it's an idea."
Say that there's a particular rock on a planet a million light years away. It turns out that we're the only technological creatures in the universe, and some catastrophe wipes us out soon. Is that rock on a distant planet just an idea?
I agree with you that there is no objective truth and no need for objective truth. I don't agree with your take on what "objective" refers to. I also don't agree that objective (external to mind) things are inaccessible.
In other words, you'd avoid people biased in particular ways, while going with people biased in other ways.
Haha--aka "the bias for 'total unbias.'"
"Objective truth" is a redundancy. What is objective is the truth. It is objective that the Earth is a sphere, not flat, despite what people believed, or still believe. You are even making the objective claim that reality is such a way independent of what others think or believe - that there is no objective truth. If I were to say that there is only objective truth, am I right or wrong in disagreeing with you? What would be the point of disagreeing?
Your personal truth is just another "objective truth". Your beliefs are such that they exist independent of what I think or believe about them. I can refer to your "personal truths" with language just as I can refer to a sunset with language and I would be right or wrong about your personal truths based on how accurate my description of your personal truths are.
If there is no objective truth, then why do so many people on this forum feel the need to quote other philosophers as if those other philosophers hold some truth about others than just the philosopher being quoted?
That's exactly how it is, and it's (IMO) the reason why Objectivism and analytic philosophy are a pointless waste of time.
Quoting leo
In fairness, there's rather more to it than that. Objective Reality is 'that which actually is', and Objective Truth is an accurate statement describing some aspect of Objective Reality. This is so regardless of the thoughts, opinions or beliefs of any individual or group of individuals. An Objective Truth is true. It cannot be challenged or doubted. It's a lot more than "something everyone agrees on".
Where is objective truth in science, engineering, philosophy, common sense? Scientific laws change through history. Some philosophers of science say that scientific laws aren't even an approximation to truth, they are just working models. You may assume that there is an underlying objective reality, but if you assume it it isn't objective truth, it is an assumption.
Quoting Wayfarer
You could read an account by a Holocaust-denier to attempt to understand why they think differently about it. There are plenty of examples of conflicts of interest in all sorts of domains, including judges in a contest who have an incentive to make a particular contestant win. People usually expect more of objective truth than simply "something the majority agrees on".
Quoting PossibleAaran
The ability to formulate that objective truth in a language, to say what it is or to give an example of it. But if we say that something is objective truth and some people disagree, then how is that an objective truth?
Quoting sime
Cambridge dictionary defines truth as "the real facts about a situation, event, or person". Who gets to determine what the real facts are? If I say what the real facts are and others disagree, who is right? The same dictionary defines objective as "based on real facts". If we say that the real facts are determined through social consensus, then truth is a social consensus.
Quoting Terrapin Station
If we have detected that rock in some way then we could access it in some way. If we haven't detected that rock, then some people would say it makes no sense to say this rock exists as anything more than an idea. Some people think that we aren't creatures in a universe, but that the universe is in minds, and in that view there is no sense in which the universe exists without minds.
Quoting Harry Hindu
What is the difference between truth and belief? Cambridge dictionary defines belief as "the feeling of being certain that something exists or is true". You're implicitly saying that there is a true way to differentiate between truth and belief. You're saying it is true that the Earth is a sphere, but many people say it is true that the Earth is an ellipsoid, and many other people say that it is true the Earth is neither a sphere nor an ellipsoid but something that approximates these shapes, and many other people say it is true that the Earth is flat. Who is right? Who is stating a truth and who is stating a belief?
Quoting Harry Hindu
If I disagree with you, how is your truth objective?
Quoting Harry Hindu
Solipsists do not agree with that, so how are my beliefs objective?
Quoting Harry Hindu
Because they agree with these philosophers, they share the same point of view about something, or they believe they do. This is my view, my personal truth. If you disagree with me, then you have a different truth, and we're not sharing the same truth, so it isn't objective.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
If it cannot be challenged or doubted then it is something everyone agrees on, no? If it is more than "something everyone agrees on", then what is this "more"?
Some people would say that, yes.
Do you think there's any merit in saying that?
The individual might use the social consensus as an estimator for what is true, but ultimately it is environmental feedback, experience and reason that determines an individual's concept of truth and not social consensus per-se.
However, social consensus certainly decides how a person's private use of language is to be publicly interpreted, and therein lies the root of many philosophical confusions. For another person's beliefs could be interpreted as being necessarily and always true, regardless of whatever the person says or does, with any apparent error on that person's behalf being an illusion caused by the public misinterpreting the person's words, actions and intentions. Conversely, another person's beliefs could be interpreted as being necessarily and always false.
An Objective statement is one that correctly describes some aspect of Objective Reality, i.e. that which actually is. A statement correctly identified as Objective cannot be challenged or doubted because there is no possibility of it being wrong. And that is the "more" you asked for. :smile:
The silliness comes in when we remember that Objective statements cannot be correctly made by humans, except to say that Objective Reality exists. So this is all hypothetical. In practice, because we don't have a means to apprehend OR directly, it doesn't exist for us. N.B. I said "in practice"! :wink:
I think the interesting question is which of the attributes that make up the category of "rock" can still be identified after said catastrophe.
Quoting leo
Scientific theories work though. You can fly a plane. So while whatever model was used to design the plane may not have been complete, it was still objective in that it made accurate predictions.
If no people exist afterwards, there are no categories, there's no one to identify anything, etc.
So in what sense can "rocks" be said to exist, if none of the things that make a thing a "rock" exist?
Sometimes it seems like almost everyone here is stuck in an infantile/juvenile preoperational stage of development.
Why would the existence of something like a rock hinge on anything about us?
As I've explained many times, I use "truth" in the traditional analytic philosophy sense of it being a property of propositions.
Propositions are (non-controversially in analytic phil) the meanings of statements.
In my ontology, meaning is a mental phenomenon, and truth, as a property of propositions, is thus a judgment about the relation of a proposition to facts (states of affairs). As such, the ontological status of truth value (that it's a mental phenomenon on my view) has no bearing on ontology in general or just how perception works (which is what you're asking about).
I'd be happy to continue the phil of perception discussion, but only if you answer the last post in the other thread, where I asked you a non-rhetorical question that I expected you to think about and directly respond to (via quoting something and filling in the blank).
You're not answering the question. And your counter-question doesn't concern me, since I haven't claimed that just the existence of "something" depends on humans. I am asking in what way distinct objects with their specific properties exist outside of human cognition. In a way, I am granting "existence" itself, but asking what (other) properties outlast humans.
And I'm asking why we'd think the existence of anything would hinge on human cognition (which is something we'd need to grant for your question to not indicate institutionalization). My suggestion is that some adults never developed beyond the pre-operational stage. Do you have a better suggestion?
If you find yourself unable to answer the question, you can just walk away (figuratively). Not sure what you hope to accomplish here other than poisoning the well.
What I was hoping to accomplish was you offering why we'd think that the existence of anything hinges on us. (And that should have been pretty obvious.)
The argument for that position is implicit in my question. You could try answering it. You do not seem to be arguing in good faith (belittling your discussion partners is always a bad sign), so I am not offering another angle of discussion.
How about making it explicit instead? Because it's a ridiculous thing to assume.
Once the model implicit in the question is on the table, one would be swimming uphill starting to respond. Once, say the subject object split is assumed, for example. The subject here, controlling the existence of things out there.
I'm not an anti-realist or solipsist, so it's not my position, but it seems like answering that question is problematic for those who are, but because it presumes realism.
I don't know what a more neutral formulation would be,since that would depend on their philosophy, its ontology. And there's certainly nothing wrong with formulating the question from your perspective. But it's also a Trojan Horse.
Truth and objectivity are distinct properties. For example, a proposition can be both objective and true, but it can also be both objective and false.
Sentences express propositions. Truth is a property of sentences. There are various theories about truth, but a popular one is correspondance. A sentence is true in so far as the proposition corresponds with what is the case. For example:
[math] <<\mathrm{Snow\ is\ white}>> is\ true \Leftrightarrow Snow\ is\ white[/math]
This says that the sentence "snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white.Objectivity, on the other hand, says only that a sentence has a determinate truth-value. This is independent of whether it is true or false and also independent of whether or not we know it is true or false.
The sentence "The sky is orange" is objective. It is objective because it is truth-evaluable. It happens to be false, but so be it.
Quoting leo
I believe the explanation I gave above settles this issue. Objectivity and truth are two different things. Moreover, a sentence can be objective if it is truth-evaluable and even if no one agrees on whether it is true or false.
A sentence is not objective if it is not truth-evaluable, i.e., it does not have determinate truth-conditions (or is not true or false). An easy example of a sentence that is not objective is the following: "I don't like art". This is not a truth-evaluable sentence, in so far as it is merely expressing personal taste. "Kornelius doesn't like art" is, however, an objective sentence. Notice that this is the case whether or not I in fact like art.
A more contentious example would be ethical claims. Consider a rather morbid example:
"Raping and cannibalizing a person is morally impermissible".
I am an objectivist here. I think this sentence is true or false (indeed I think it is true).
To say that such a statement is not objective is to say that it isn't truth-evaluable: that it is making no claim about the world. This seems extremely hard to swallow.
Thus, denying objectivity is actually an extremely radical position. You would need to explain a whole lot of things. Why would such a sentence have no determinate truth-conditions, for example? It seems to express an obvious truth-evaluable thought.
If we go into more straightforward examples, i.e., "The sky is orange", a radical subjectivist would need to explain why this sentence is not truth-evaluable. It seems obviously truth-evaluable to me. It expresses a thought that is either true or false.
Well, since I think that idealism is pretty stupid--I'm not joking when I say that I think it amounts to adults being stuck in a preoperational (a la Piaget) development phase, I'm not going to assume idealism in answering a question. It would need to be supported somehow as to why it should be treated as a default.
Why wouldn't it? That we perceive something that we call a rock does not imply that this rock has an outside existence that doesn't depend on us. Which may be hard to see if you remain stuck in a physicalist mindset, seeing minds as parts of a universe rather than the universe as a part of minds. Outside of a physicalist mindset, physical death does not necessarily imply death of the mind. I think you finding idealism to be stupid has more to do with you being a fervent physicalist than with idealism being objectively stupid.
Quoting sime
Do you then agree with the idea that truth is individual-dependent and not something that has independent existence?
Quoting Kornelius
That's the thing, is it true that "The sky is orange" is false? What if I'm watching a sunset and I see the sky orange? What if someone perceives differently and see the sky orange when others see it blue? What if someone doesn't perceive a sky (in which case the sentence wouldn't be truth-evaluable for that person)? How could we say that "The sky is orange" is false for everyone? How could we find anything that is necessarily false (or true) for everyone?
My point is we can't find anything that is true for everyone. And that even the sentence "we can't find anything that is true for everyone" wouldn't be true for everyone. And so on in an infinite regress.
Because we're no longer infants. Our brains have developed past a stage where we believe that we're the entirety of the world, so that if we cover ourselves in a blanket, we've effectively disappeared, where we believe that the world is centered on us, and where we are not capable of understanding difference from ourselves.
Why are you avoiding answering the question I asked in the other thread?
(And apparently why are you avoiding answering why you're avoiding answering the question I asked in the other thread?)
I explained that your answer needs to be in this form:
""The way that you can take a cookie, despite taking being a function of your arm/hand is ___________"
Where you're filling in the blank.
After my last post to you in that thread, which was this:
"The way you take something, such as a cookie, is with your arm/hand. But how do you actually do this if taking is something your arm and hand do? Doesn't that imply that really all you can take is your arm/hand? "
You didn't respond at all.
But we can even challenge or doubt that "Objective Reality exists", so "objective truth exists" is not an objective truth, it is a personal truth.
If we can't find any statement that cannot be challenged or doubted then what use do we have for the concept of objective truth? It seems to me that the concept is used by people who want to impose their personal truth on others, as if they had a transcendent access to a supposed objective reality beyond perception. The statement "I have access to objective reality" could be challenged itself.
And if we say "There is no objective truth is an objective truth" then we're contradicting ourselves, so again it seems to me the concept of objective truth is incoherent, or at least very problematic, we'd be better off simply talking about personal truth, and not pretend that our personal truths somehow apply to everyone and everything.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Or maybe as we develop even more we realize that we are not passive observers of a world that doesn't depend on us, that we are actively involved in constructing our idea of the world from our perceptions and thoughts, that what we call imagination or dreams or spiritual experiences can be interpreted as perceptions of a world rather than as internal visions of a brain in a material world, that what we call the material world could be interpreted as a shared imagination, and then why would imagination depend on us but not shared imagination?
From where are you getting the notion of someone positing "passive observers of a world that doesn't (in any way) depend on us"? I just want to check whose views you're referring to, in order to make sure that you're not suggesting a straw man that you're reverting to an infant/todder/juvenile stage of development in response to.
You do realize that this puts you in the camp of people who can't read, right?
I've denied that certain things are objective. I've not denied objectivity wholesale. Not at all. If that's what you were thinking, you're grossly misreading me for some reason.
What determines whether something is objective or subjective on my view is ultimately, simply where the "thing" in question is located. What it's a property or process of.
It doesn't matter. What we call the material world can also be interpreted as a shared imagination, under this interpretation the existence of a rock depends on us. That shared imagination doesn't stop if you die, but it would stop if we all die. Why would your imagination depend on you and our shared imagination not depend on us? Why would your personal experiences depend on you, and our shared experiences not depend on us?
And the reason that you'd pick that option is?
Our concept of a material world stems from experiences we have in common. If you are willing to believe that your subjective experiences depend on you (in the sense they stop when you die), what prevents you from believing that your shared experiences depend on you and those you share them with?
Wait, is that telling me why you'd pick one option over other options? Or are you ignoring that question and asking me other questions instead?
Hi Leo,
Thanks for the reply, but I have to admit that as it stands this does not seem to be a defensible position. I used that sentence as an example for what is fairly obvious. We could make our sentences as precise as we need to in order to avoid any issues with reasonable disagreement. There will always be disagreement, but it would likely be unreasonable.
I can enumerate for you an infinite number of objectively true propositions. I will start with one:
[math] (P \wedge (P\rightarrow Q)) \rightarrow Q[/math]
This is objectively true. It is objective because I can easily create a truth-table to show its relevant truth-conditions for any truth-value assignments for [math]P[/math] and [math]Q[/math]. It is true because this sentence is true on any possible truth-value assignments. That is, it is a logical truth.
Now let [math]M_1, M_2, M_3,\dots[/math] be an enumeration of infinitely many propositions with different contents. It is easy to see that:
[math] ((P \wedge (P\rightarrow Q)) \rightarrow Q) \vee M_1[/math]
Is a logical truth and, so, both objective and true. Further,
[math] (((P \wedge (P\rightarrow Q)) \rightarrow Q) \vee M_1)\vee M_2[/math]
is also objective and true for the same reasons. By [math]\vee[/math] introduction, it is easy to see that I can generate infinitely many of these. In fact, I didn't even a list of infinitely many proposition to do that. I could have started with a logical truth, and simply generated infinitely many propositions by applying [math]\vee[/math] introduction infinitely many times with the proposition [math]P[/math].
I can equally generate many empirical sentences that are both objective and true. For example, "More than two lions exist in Africa at this moment", where we can qualify "this moment" with the precise time of my writing. There are so many propositions of this sort.
Radical skepticism is fine, but I am not bothered if this is the only way you find to deny that propositions can be objective and true.
I also think that radical skepticism tends to work only with conditions we need not accept (on what constitutes knowledge), but I am out of time so I will leave this point to another reply.
It's supposed to. I find that option no less plausible than believing the experiences we have in common stem from a world that exists independently of us. I am sure that I have experiences, I am confident that others have some experiences in common with me, I am less certain that these experiences stem from a world independent of us (as in a world that doesn't depend on minds).
I have evidence of mind (my own), I don't have evidence of something that doesn't depend on mind.
Wait--you'd say that you're more certain that the experiences stem from a world that doesn't exist aside from our minds?
Please. Allow me?
None at all. The things that make a thing a “rock”, that is, a general representation of a real kind of material object in the world, are the myriad of conceptions developed from experience by a rational being. Absent the rational being, the object of his thought in conformity to the conceptions belonging to it, ceases to exist, but of the object itself, no sense of existence can be forthcoming. If there is no thinker, there is nothing to be thought.
Quoting Echarmion
Same thing: They don’t, as such. Objects are only distinct because of their properties, that which makes a thing that thing and no other. Properties are nothing but named conceptions, themselves mere representations of appearances, developed from experience by rational beings. It follows necessarily that without the cognizant rational being the distinction of objects by means of their representative conceptions, disappears. But again, that says nothing whatsoever about the real existence of objects as they happen to be in themselves, or even if there are any such objects irrespective of human cognition.
If it is presented to us, it is as we understand it; if we are not present, questions about anything are irrational. And foolish. Which is what I think you were trying to show.
If not, then in the words of the immortal Gilda Radner .........never mind.
No.
Yes, as far as truth is concerned, perspectivism is unavoidable. But that isn't to say that I necessarily believe in the possibility of first-person centered epistemology. A far as epistemology is concerned, the 'third-person' subject seems unavoidable, in so far as knowledge is communicable representation.
The issue I see with calling these objective truth is, I am sure this is true to you, and I am sure you think this is true in general, but what if I don't know what these symbols mean? What if these arrows, chevrons and parentheses do not evoke anything in me beyond shapes drawn on a screen? Then these statements wouldn't be true to me, they would be drawings, and while I could say it is true to me that I see these drawings, I couldn't say these drawings refer to some independent truth.
Now you may say that I would simply have to learn about propositional logic and what these symbols mean in it, and that once I do I too would see the truth of these propositions, but propositional logic was created by other people, and I too could create my own system in which I assign truth to such or such proposition, but that doesn't mean that the truth of these propositions would extend beyond the system they were formulated in.
Because the way I see it, such a system was created out of perceptions and thoughts, and it doesn't apply to people who have perceptions/thoughts incompatible with it, or who haven't created that system in their mind (I see learning as an act of creation in one's mind).
It seems inevitable to me that truth is personal, that we can't find a truth that applies to everyone, unless we force everyone to agree with our personal truth or silence in some way those who disagree, but then we wouldn't create objective truth, we would create the illusion of it. (by objective truth I refer to a truth that would apply to everyone)
Quoting Kornelius
What if some great catastrophe occurred in Africa very recently and I am not yet aware of it and it turns out all lions are dead? Or what if I consider that it is meaningless to talk about what goes on in a place "at this moment" if I am not in that place? Or what if I have never seen a lion and I consider that what I haven't seen doesn't exist? People could very well disagree with that proposition in a reasonable way according to them, and with other propositions of this sort.
I think the third-person perspective gives rise to a lot of confusion though, because it gives the impression that what we say applies to everyone and everything, instead of simply to the people who share a given truth. And then people fight each other to prove that their truth is right and others are wrong, to make their truth prevail. If we stopped having that third-person perspective, I think there are a lot of things we could solve, a lot of problems that would disappear. We would listen more, and impose less.
This problem, of course, is due to the conflation of truth and meaning. The 'official' semantics of our shared language is too coarse and inflexible to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of every person's bespoke use and interpretation of their national language. One can imagine a futuristic society in which each person's private dialect of their national language is publicly translatable into every other person's private dialect. If in addition the causes of every person's utterances were also understood, then every utterance in the language could be publicly interpreted as being necessarily correct.
Don't forget to answer: "You'd say that you're more certain that the experiences stem from a world that doesn't exist aside from our minds?"
The reason I agree that there is no objective truth is because of a "technical" issue re truth in analytic philosophy that I described above. (Truth is a property of propositions in analytic phil, propositions are the meanings of statements, and then my view stems from what I think the ontology of meaning is and how I think that the "link" between propositions and other things work--namely, that it's a judgment that a mind has to make.)
I do, however, think that there are objective facts. Most folks on the board seem to use "truth" so that it amounts to the same thing as "fact" (even though a couple different senses of "fact" tend to be conflated here, too). So that leads to some confusion.
Re objective facts, in general they don't hinge on whether you're aware of them, whether you understand them, whether you agree that they're facts. You're irrelevant to most of them. If you're not aware of them, don't understand them, don't agree that they're facts, then that's your problem. It doesn't change the facts.
You seem to implicitly assume an objective reality that can be somehow accessed, referring to 'causes' as something objective that everyone would agree on, to personal dialects as being objectively translatable into one another. How could we agree on causes of what we experience if we don't agree on what we experience? How could we agree on an objective translation if in the first place we don't have access to what other people experience?
We use language as a rough way to try to see what others experience, if we had direct access to what others experience then your idea would be practical, but we don't, and that's the problem. Seeing the problem as a mere limitation of our current language is masking the deeper issue, it isn't a limit of our language, it is a limit of our ability to know what others experience. Words do not convey what others experience, they convey what we believe they experience, from our first-person point of view, making our language more precise wouldn't change that.
If there are experiences some people have that other people don't, why would the people who don't have these experiences agree that these experiences exist? For all they know those who claim having such experiences could be lying, or they could interpret these experiences falsely in terms of other experiences they've had. And that's not a limitation of our current language, that's a fundamental limitation of us not being omniscient. It seems to me that if we have different experiences, then we can't find something that everyone agrees on, or maybe everyone could agree on something temporarily but later on some would realize that they didn't have the same thing in mind when they were agreeing.
Maybe you will come to agree with me on this, but if you don't then that would only serve to support the idea that truth is personal. Until we find an example of truth that everyone agrees on, the concept of truth that applies to everyone is merely an idea that some people have.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I don't have a third-person perspective to know for sure, but then the very idea of a third-person perspective stems from a mind. My view is everything is mind-dependent in some way. Your view is that there are mind-independent things. In my view you can't use the mind-dependent concept of mind-independent things to prove that there are mind-independent things.
What you see as objective facts, I see as ideas that some minds try to impose on others based on mind-dependent criteria.
Truth is just a made up word for you to believe something works on how it should work when everything is just works how it should be.
Everything is just present.
I don't see how this answers the question I asked you. My question is whether you're more certain about one particular claim than another, and then I'd ask how you're more certain of that.
Re my views, they have nothing to do with certainty, proof, etc. Those things are red herrings for empirical claims. I'm not asking you for anything like that, either. (The only reason I used the phrase "more certain" was because you used that phrase about your own views.)
Your own definition makes the same distinction I am making. A belief is a feeling and feelings tend to be projected onto things that have no feelings, which is how subjectivity crops up. A belief is a feeling of being certain, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it is true. You can feel certain, but that doesn't necessarily mean that what your feeling is about is true. As your definition states, it is what those feelings are about - meaning some state of affairs independent of your beliefs and feelings - that are true. Your feelings are just another state-of-affairs which I can have beliefs about, but your feelings exist in a such a way independent of any of my feelings or beliefs about them. How your feelings are are true, but what they are about is a different story entirely.
Quoting leo
We are all stating beliefs. The real shape of the Earth, independent of our statements about it's shape, is the truth - objective. Some of our terms are meant to be approximations, like the terms we use to describe the Earth's shape. "Accuracy" is a term that I like to use when it comes to the relationship between our claims and the truth. Our claims are more or less accurate when it comes to describing how things actually are (the truth). So some of these terms may be more accurate, but not necessarily entirely accurate, than others when describing the shape of the Earth.
Quoting leo
Asking how truth is objective is incoherent because truth and objectivity are the same thing. If truth/objective is independent of our beliefs then it doesn't matter whether you disagree or not. It doesn't even matter if you are aware of it or not. Truth is independent of your awareness.
Do you admit that there are things that are happening right now that you aren't aware of so your feelings about them have no bearing on their existence or their objectivity?
Quoting Harry Hindu
Quoting leo
It is incoherent to use Solipsist in the plural sense. If solipsism is the case, then there can only be one solipsist. If solipsism is the case, then beliefs become incoherent as there would be no aboutness to beliefs. The idea of solipsism makes the concept of "mind" incoherent.
Quoting leo
Then we would always be talking past each other - never talking about the same thing.
l was actually arguing for your position. I'm saying that truth is personal, as evidenced by the fact a super-flexible linguistic convention could be publicly adopted relative to which the public notion of truth is trivially and vacuously true. But that wouldn't abolish what each of us individually means by 'truth', but merely serve to highlight that truth is a non-representational, personal and practical notion.
That is indeed where I was going, but I simply wanted to show that simply saying "well obviously the rock still exists, everything else would be stupid", as @Terrapin Station seems to be doing, ignores half the problem.
Edit: one could perhaps say that the simple "obviously rocks won't just disappear if humans die out" treats all idealism as solipsism.
If a proposition is true when it matches a fact - and the fact is objective - then why in your view would that truth not be objective? I understand meaning requires a mind to think it, but a proposition could be thought false by everyone, yet still be true. To exist the meaning/proposition requires a thinking mind, but its truth doesn’t depend on what anyone thinks beyond that, making it objective.
Or if a proposition is neither true nor false until someone judges it, which one is it when two people judge differently, and why?
We literally just forcing ourselves to believe its the truth while the real thing is remains what it is
What's stupid about it is that it's believed despite the complete lack of any cogent support for it. It's as bad as religious belief.
Come up with a good reason to entertain it, and then it might be worth bothering with it.
The matching would have to be objective. That is, it would have to be a property of extramental things.
How are we supposed to arrive at extramental matching?
Quoting AJJ
True to the people who judge it to match. False to people who judge otherwise. (Simplifying so there are no other options.)
Because something can match another thing regardless of anyone thinking it does. The existence of the proposition depends on thought, but I don’t see that the matching does.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Can either group be said to be right?
How would that work? We'd need to be able to describe/detail the process.
What I'm challenging is that there's no way for it to work outside of minds. That's one of the primary unique things about minds--intentionality, the "aboutness" ability, the ability to think about something as denoting other things.
It seems a shame to delve into the one and only statement of Objective Truth that can - knowingly and correctly - be made by a human. Personally, I am convinced that we can deduce from the cogito - despite problems with "Who is this 'I'?", and so forth - that something has actual (Objective) existence. Therefore Objective Reality exists, and that something is all or part of it. But there are no other such claims to Objective correctness that a human can knowingly make. That's why what-we-might-call hard Objectivity is so pointless. It can only ever apply to issues that are hypothetical, and must remain so.
Quoting leo
:up: That is surely one possible explanation. It's the one I personally favour, but I have no Objective evidence, obviously, so.... :wink: :lol:
Quoting leo
Again, how could I disagree? :up: :wink:
The dog is on the rug. If the dog is on the rug, then that proposition matches a fact. If it isn’t, it doesn’t. I’m not seeing where I come in to that matching process.
Right, so we're talking about what matching, text marks that look like this: "The dog is on the rug"? Those sounds, or what?
We can't be talking about meaning, which is what is usually taken to be what a proposition is, because meaning is a mental phenomenon. Otherwise, if you're going to argue that we can somehow have extramental meaning, then you'd need to present the argument for that (and I'll offer my objections as you present the argument, because I don't believe that there's any way to make sense of meaning being something extramental, and I'm familiar with all of the standard tactics/arguments.)
You said above that propositions are the meanings of statements. So I’m talking about the meaning of those words matching a fact.
I just added this while you were typing:
We can't be talking about meaning, which is what is usually taken to be what a proposition is, because meaning is a mental phenomenon. Otherwise, if you're going to argue that we can somehow have extramental meaning, then you'd need to present the argument for that (and I'll offer my objections as you present the argument, because I don't believe that there's any way to make sense of meaning being something extramental, and I'm familiar with all of the standard tactics/arguments.)
I don’t think meaning is extramental. I’m saying once a meaning/proposition such as “the dog is on the rug” is created, whether it matches a fact or not does not actually depend on whether we think it does.
I do, and I don't think there's any way to make it extramental at any point.
You'd need to argue how it can be extramental or at least how it can be made extramental.
Even assuming the obvious misreading (I said I don’t think meaning is extramental) your response seems strange... A misreading and a typo?
Yeah, I read you as saying that you don't think that meaning is mental.
So once a meaning is created, which is an event in someone's head, then the way that we can extramentally see if a fact matches the proposition is . . . what?
We don’t recognise the match extramentally, but there’s the point: The match is something we recognise, rather than cause. The match is independent of our mental recognition of it.
Again, we need to detail how. So pick an example and detail it.
It doesn't work to just claim that it's the case. That's not good enough. I can just claim that it's not the case. Is that good enough? Detail how it's supposed to work with an example. I can suggest an example if you like.
I’ve given an example. Your response was to basically insist I was arguing meaning to be extramental, when there was no indication I was.
The dog is on the rug. If the dog is on the rug, then that proposition matches a fact. If it isn’t, it doesn’t. I’m not seeing where I come in to that matching process.
When you go to sleep, do you need someone to observe you to maintain your existence so that you can wake up later? What happens to us when we go to sleep by ourselves?
It is inconsistent to be confident in the existence of other minds when the only evidence you have are the observations of the behavior of other bodies (you never observe other minds), and yet claim that you can't be sure that your experiences are of a world that exists independent of your observations of it.
What makes you confident that minds (whose properties you can't observe) exists, but not so confident the actual bodies (with properties that you do observe) exists when you aren't looking?
What is the medium that separates minds and why would any separate mind have common experiences?
All knowledge that a person has of the world stems from subjective experience. There is no such thing as "objective truth".
And I take it you inferred this universal property of subjective experience, which will always and forever limit them, irrelevant of their content... from subjective experience.
This has no bearing on whether or not a proposition is objective or whether or not it is true (or false). A proposition can be objective even if a person fails to understand it.
Quoting leo
It doesn't matter whether you recognize the truth of said propositions. Again, a proposition can be true (or false) regardless of whether any particular person recognizes its truth.
Quoting leo
The point of the proposition I highlighted is that it is true on any possible truth-value assignments for its subterms [math] P[/math] or [math]Q[/math].
Perhaps you meant you could devise a logical system in which the logical constants behave differently, i.e., you could define different truth-functions. But no matter how you define them, there would be a corresponding truth-function (or complex of truth-functions) in the propositional logic that would behave exactly the same way.
Quoting leo
Again, people may simply be mistaken. This happens all the time.
Quoting leo
What might be inevitable is that not all people will agree, but it doesn't follow from this that there aren't objective truths. Again, something can be objectively true despite the fact that many people disagree about the truth of the proposition in question.
Quoting leo
Then the proposition would, in fact, be false (but still objective). It would be objectively false. It would not matter what you knew or did not know at the time of asserting the given propositions.
Propositions are made true or false by facts/states of affairs, which are independent of the epistemological state of any person asserting a proposition.
Quoting leo
This would be a mistake. I can most definitely construct grammatically well-formed and truth-evaluable sentences about places I am not currently in.
Quoting leo
The mistake you are making is in supposing that what is reasonable is internal to an individual. It is not. Norms of logic are constitutive of rationality and, thus, what is reasonable. One cannot deny these norms and claim to be thinking.
So "The dog is on the rug," in terms of meaning, is a set of mental states in someone's head. You said that you agree with that. So how do we go from that to the meaning in an individual's head matching a fact, where we're no longer talking about the meaning in the person's head?
I’ve not said anything about the meaning leaving an individual’s head. I’m saying the meaning either matches a fact or it doesn’t. What role does a person play in the matching of fact to proposition, beyond thinking up the proposition?
Right, and I'm asking you to specify the details of how the matching obtains. We have the meaning in the person's head and we have a fact. What determines if the two match? What are the details for that?
The irony here is you seem to be making the same objections I was making to you about this in my objective values thread.
The meaning describes a possible state of affairs. If that state of affairs is actual, then the meaning/proposition is true. Is that not basically what you’ve said to me?
I'm not sure what you're thinking of, but no, that's not what I would have said.
But I'll work with it for a moment. "If that state of affairs is actual" per what? What's making the determination if something described is actual? That's the question here. Let's detail how the determination is made, because that's the matching.
I don’t see how the above is really any different from what I’ve just said, but whatever.
Quoting Terrapin Station
It’s actual if it’s actual. You’ve said in this thread you believe there are objective facts. How we tell something is an objective fact is beside the point; the point being that if a proposition matches an objective fact then it is true. I’m asking what role does a person play in this matching, beyond thinking up the proposition?
You're not understanding the issue here. Describing a cat being on a mat isn't identical to the thing in question, is it? And neither is the meaning that someone might assign to "the cat is on the mat" identical to the state of affairs of a cat being on a mat, is it?
The problem with thinking of objectivity exclusively in general terms, as elimination of prejudice or bias, is that it encourages an absolutist view of objectivity. The prime example of such an absolutist conception is the view from nowhere.
There are two problems with this conception. First, the idea that we are being guided towards *the* truth is wholly misleading. What we are being guided towards are the best answers to the questions that we pose. If you deploy objective procedures in answering a misconceived, confused or misleading question, it is highly likely that the answer will get you nowhere.
Second, any attempt to assimilate objectivity and truth faces the difficulty that they behave in different ways. Note in particular that objectivity comes in degrees. One theory can be more objective than another, but a theory cannot be truer than another.
Whereas truth is absolute and does not come in degrees, objectivity *only* comes in degrees. The idea of absolute objectivity is a misconception. encouraged by thinking of it as a view from nowhere.
What we are seeking to do in imposing standards of objectivity in our judgments in modern science is to identify and separate the informative and the uninformative, with a view to producing reliable results.
I’m not saying those things. If I have you’ll have to quote where I did.
What? I'm asking you questions in order to try to give you a better idea of what the issue is.
And I’m saying your questions are irrelevant, since I haven’t said anything about meanings being identical to states of affairs.
You're not understanding the issue I'm getting at. Given that, how can you say whether the questions I'm asking are relevant to understanding it?
You could say that it is the case that there is an abstract universal "truth" that all knowledge stems from subjective experience and that, in so far that there is "objective truth", there is only one objective truth which is that, but, to speak of "objective truth" within such a worldview would effectively be meaningless.
Your questions indicate the issue is around taking meanings to be identical to states of affairs, which is not something I’ve been saying. But fine: I agree that meanings are not identical to states of affairs. Now what?
Your experience is subjective, but what it's experience of often isn't subjective.
Imagine we have the word "manusive," defined as "of an arm or hand." Manusive taking is something your arm & hand do. But what you take isn't manusive. You're not taking your arm or hand. You're taking things like cookies, baseballs, etc. Subjective experience is the same.
So matching isn't a matter of them being the same. What is it a matter of instead?
It’s a matter of a proposition describing a state of affairs.
And a description isn't the same as what it's describing but it has what relationship instead?
A description is a picture in words or representation of something.
It's obviously not literally "a picture in words." How could it amount to being "a picture in words" aside from someone thinking about it that way?
All right mate, I figure you’re just messing around now. Good talk, all very interesting.
Oy vey. I'm trying--unsuccessfully, apparently--to impart an understanding of the issue re "matching" or "corresponding."
Feel free to explicate that if that was really your intention, but without the questions.
You're not going to understand it if you don't think about it in a focused way. The questions are designed to do that.
What I should have asked you was about the relation between a description or meaning or whatever you'd claim and the state of affairs in question. Correspondence or matching is a type of relation. So where and how would you say that relation obtains? For example, the relation of being "the parent of" obtains via an entity being temporally prior to another and having causal connections to the later developing offspring. Or the relation of "being to the left of" obtains when two things are looked at from a particular frame of reference and one thing is spatially oriented towards the other in a particular way from that frame of reference.
The matching or correspondence relation would have to obtain somehow, where we'd need to be able to describe just what's going on that amounts to the relation.
Which is similar to saying that all anyone takes is situated in their own manusive experience.
Well, yeah. Duh. You have to use your arm/hand to take things with your arm/hand. That's just like you need to use your brain in a mental capacity to know things because knowing is something you do with your brain in a mental capacity. But we can't conflate that with what we know. We can't conflate the manusive with what we take. We're not taking our own arm/hand, even though we need to take with our arm/hand.
Re truth, again, I agree that it's not objective, but because of what I explained earlier (and I'm explaining in far more detail re the conversation with AJJ)
I understand all that perfectly well mate, no need for the daft questions. But isn’t correspondence theory your thing? You’re in effect arguing against yourself in my objective values thread here.
Anyway: I would personally say the relation of being a description obtains via a set of words with particular meanings representing a person, object or event by way of concept and mental imagery.
Please don’t ask never ending questions in disagreement. Just say if don’t agree, then explain your alternative.
Truth simply bears the semblance of being revealed to a person. All that is discovered are the particular deviations and convergences as to how a person agrees or disagrees with whatever it is that is considered to be "true".
I don't think that I confuse my experience of the world with the world itself if that's what you're suggesting. There is a world that exists and it does exist in a particular way, but, all that I can know of it stems from my own limited subjective experience. Because everyone is like that, the validity of the concept of truth gets called into question. By stating that "nothing is true", I do not mean that there are not things that people can generally agree that do exist. This forum, for instance, exists. We can both agree that it exists by that we are both using it. I only, however, see this forum from the laptop that I am using at home. My experience is situated by that I only interact on the forum as such.
Sorry......I’m missing halfs. For my benefit alone, and for no particular reason other than peace of mind....what are the halfs you had in mind? General idea will do; no names needed.
And I take your edit to indicate not all formulations of idealism should be treated as solipsism, to which I would agree.
As always.
It seems different people have different ideas about truth, objectivity, reality, what can be known and what can't be known. There are statements I strongly disagree with, and I attempt to explain why I disagree, but then the back and forth shows me that my point doesn't get through. But I'm sure that on the other side it must feel like their point isn't getting through either.
Which leads me again to the idea that truth is personal, we all have our own world view, and when we don't understand each other we realize that we don't have the same world view. But I think it's fine to let world views coexist, rather than attempt to convert the other guys and say they are wrong or stupid if they don't agree with our own view.
My world view has changed profoundly over the years, I used to be a naïve realist, and back then probably no discussion could have shaken me out of that view, I would have seen idealists as a weird bunch who got lost in their mind, but then some experiences and observations made me realize I was mistaken. And sometimes words aren't enough to provoke these experiences in others. I wouldn't say that I'm right and they're wrong though, we just have a different reality.
I agree that I can say that something exists, but I wouldn't call that existence necessarily objective. Because to me, objective existence means existing independently of minds. Now, if there are only minds, there is nothing that exists independently of minds, so in this case nothing has objective existence (not even minds, which wouldn't exist independently of minds).
If instead we say that what is objective is what everyone agrees on, I agree with you that something exists, but I'm not even sure that everyone would agree on that. There are people who claim that consciousness doesn't exist, so it wouldn't be such a stretch for them to claim that nothing exists. Also, it is an experience in itself to have the realization (or reach the conclusion) that something exists: if someone hasn't had that experience, if they have never thought about it, then in a sense "something exists" doesn't exist to them. The concept of existence might not even have a meaning to some people, in a way that we couldn't understand without living in their reality. So even there I'm tempted to see "something exists" as subjective, it's probably not a popular point of view, but it's mine :)
The question as to whether there are mind-independent objective facts is not en empirical question. Empirical questions are decidable by observation and experiment, whereas the question in question is not.
Quoting Terrapin Station
If you extend your logic here you will realize that there's no way to match what we see with any purported mind independent existence of the things we see. All that suggests the mind-independent existence of objects is the internal consensus between our different senses, the more or less invariant persistence of the objects of the senses and the external, inter-subjective consensus among percipient subjects that tells us we are seeing the same things.
There do seem to be only two explanations for those facts, though. First there is the idea that the objects of the senses are mind-independently existent, and second there is the idea that all minds are, despite appearances, somehow connected. We have no direct evidence for either of these views, or even to definitively guide us as to which view we should adopt, though I know which one I find most plausible.
It's interesting to speculate which view a genuinely unbiased ( in the sense of unmoved by their own wishes) thinker would adopt; I suspect it would be the view that things do indeed enjoy mind-independent existence, but it is very hard to argue cogently for that. So, I say it just comes down to personal preference and that it doesn't really matter what you believe. It's good to be honest and admit that it comes down to personal preference, though. You, to be consistent with your subjectivism, should be totally on board with that, I would have thought.
I didn't actually say that. With my pragmatist's hat on I might say 'truth' is 'what works for you'...'objective truth; is a claim about 'what works for everybody'.
Usain Bolt (and many others) had/have achieved certain running speeds that some people (not necessarily unfit) cannot. Michael Jordan (or Vince Carter among others) have jumped to heights that some people (not necessarily short) cannot; Albert Einstein (and other geniuses) had/have levels of intelligence that some people (not necessarily stupid) do not, etc, etc.
My point is:
First, truth is not relative. Otherwise, there would be no possibility of objectivity whatsoever. (Also, subjectivity does not negate objectivity, and vice versa. Because, again, there would be no objectivity since subjectivity is an ever-present aspect of an individual consciousness.)
Secondly, objectivity does not imply ubiquity. Objectivity is just a perspective in relation to certain collective agreements of interacting consciousness.
Lastly, like anything else, truth is there for all those who wish to avail themselves of it depending on how they apply themselves and their capacity to achieve.
Quoting leo
Then, there would be a collection/multitude of personal truths and which still maintain 'coherence'. I prefer to think there's just truth and which we refer according to our limited perspectives.
I don't think I did. I gave the pragmatists reaction to those who do/
Just curious what those experiences and observations were.
How are you encountering other people to agree with, by the way?
Yes it is. Maybe look up "empirical" in a dictionary? Let's settle this part before moving on to additional issues.
The one half is saying that there is an existence that is independent of human cognition at all, and that that existence doesn't disappear when humans do.
The other half is realising that, for the reasons you outlined very well, it doesn't follow that specific entities, like "a rock on Mars" exist in and of themselves outside of human cognition. That would be going from one extreme (solipsism) directly to the other extreme (naïve realism).
So the apparent absurdity: "why would this rock wink out of existence if humans died" is something of a strawman. The substrate for both rocks and minds will still exist, but this isn't the same as "rocks" existing. A "rock" is a combination of human perceptions and as such cannot be imagined as mind-independent.
Quoting Terrapin Station
By "no congent support", do you mean to say that no idealistic philosopher ever advanced an argument that convinced you, or that they are all fundamentally flawed?
Or is this merely about "good reasons" in practical terms, as in ”why bother"?
They're all flawed.
Most arguments in philosophy in general, proportional to the extent to which they're presented more formally as arguments, are pretty stupid, if they're taken as anything but a formalism.
Since I know we won't resolve what counts as empirical or not, and I think this is worth commenting on, I'll start a second thread for you to argue with: what we're matching is a proposition with a state of affairs. The way we do that is by thinking about what we mean by the statement in question, and judging whether we consider that to be the "same" (more or less), as the state of affairs that we're focusing on, and that's obviously going to be from our perspective.
(And maybe it's worth commenting again, for other folks who might be reading this at some point in the future, that the above is framed in terms of correspondence, whereas my truth theory is actually a meta-theory that's not just about correspondence, even though correspondence is what I personally use.)
Do you discover that through inquiry?
(I'm also a relativist, by the way.)
If we're talking past each other or living in different realities, then how can you say that we are disagreeing? Agreements and disagreements would be incoherent. Your view loses any distinction between delusions and any other kind of thought. And if we can only talk past each other, then what is the point of talking at all? Why should anyone care about your's or anyone else's subjective "truths"?
Its so funny to watch you claim that truths are subjective while in the same post you go about telling how it is for all of us not just yourself. From my point of view you are simply maintaining your own delusion of having your cake and eating it too.
All you have done this entire thread is render your own posts and ideas as useless because they don't apply to anyone else's reality except yours.
D’accord. Thanks.
You figure things out by just whatever general way that it is that have that you go about doing things. Things just become revealed to you through living your life. There's a philosophical process that could be compared to inquiry. You experience "truth" as if it becomes revealed to you. Inquiry is one of the processes that a person goes through so that they can discover what is "true".
You don't actually discover what is true, though. You just discover how to better communicate in regards to what is considered as "true".
There can be a limited common ground that gives a basis for disagreements, our use of the same language is a common ground, even if we often don't mean the same thing when we use the same word.
You talk of delusions, delusion is defined as a belief that contradicts reality, the concept of delusion presupposes a mind-independent reality, right now I don't believe in a mind-independent reality so to me the concept of delusion is meaningless, see the problem? That's just one example out of many. There is not only talking past each other, but there is a lot of it.
I'm not saying how it is for everyone in an objective sense, I am saying how it is for everyone from my point of view. In my point of view, some people agree with me because their reality is similar to mine, and some disagree because their reality has a lot of differences. Others may agree with that, or they may disagree.
That doesn't make talking with one another and sharing ideas pointless. Precisely because in my view, our realities are not disconnected, they can influence one another, and through speech we can get an idea of the commonalities and the differences. But when there are too many differences discussion becomes difficult, because one side uses concepts that the other finds meaningless, because I feel misunderstood and I see that my attempts to make myself understood do not work, and when that's the case it usually doesn't lead anywhere to keep trying, it ends up being an endless debate on semantics and at the end it doesn't feel like we understand one another any better, the kind of debate that ends in "let's agree to disagree" or in some heated exchange because of the frustration in not being understood.
I don't have any hard feelings against anyone who may disagree with me, I'm just hoping I can offer thoughts that some people find interesting. I know some people will find what I say useless, whatever we do or say there will always be some who find it useless, but I believe and hope that some people can get something out of it. If I didn't see a point I wouldn't do it.
What form does a meta-theory of truth have? What is it about truth that a meta-theory can be constructed around it?
This is reposting something I've posted here a number of times over the years, but here it is again:
‘P’ is true for S iff S judges ‘P’ to have relation R to either S’s phenomenal P, and/or S’s stock of previously adjudged true propositions, depending on the relation R. Relation R is whatever truth theory relation S feels is the appropriate one(s)—correspondence, coherence, consensus, pragmatic, etc.
So in other words, what it is for some proposition, 'P' (quotation marks denoting the proposition literally as a sentence), to be true to some individual, some S, is for the proposition to have the relation R to S's phenomenal P (their phenomenal perception etc. of some state of affairs) or their stock of previously adjudged true propositions, in S's judgment.
If we dont mean the same thing when we use the same word then we are talking past each other.
Quoting leo
Thats what I said: that your view obliterates the distinction between delusions and other thoughts. Delusions would be just as true as any deductive conclusion, which is preposterous.
Quoting leo
Exactly. So you're misusing language by implying that you are talking about other's views when you're really talking only about your view. So you're really talking past everyone who talks about their views or about a mind independent world. What is the point of having such a conversation? What would it be about?
Just as "delusions" would be meaningless to you, so to would "other views" be meaningless to you, so you need to adjust your use of terms so that it is implied that it is only your view that youre referring to, and not anyone else's view.
Quoting leo
Another misuse of language. You're misusing the term "reality".
Understood, and accepted......as far as it goes.
I attest that I do not always think in sentences yet I hold a whole passel of self-evident truths. Am I to understand your meta-theory covers that?
It's in the tradition of treating truth as a property of propositions. (Where propositions are usually understood as the meanings of statements.)
Ok.
And what is the difference between P's being true and P's being called "true"?
Talk about "P is true for S" conflates truth and belief. It also looks like a conflation between propositions and belief, much along the same lines that gave Gettier a foothold.
I can try talking about some of them, but I can't guarantee they will have the same effect on you, considering they were fundamentally personal experiences, and words only give a vague idea.
When I was a kid I used to be impressed that scientists have found laws of the universe. I was thinking, how did they do it? How did they get access to these laws? I struggled for a long time trying to understand how Newton found his laws of motion, how he found for instance that Force is equal to Mass times Acceleration, how did he find such a simple law relating these seemingly very different concepts, what does it mean that force is equal to mass times acceleration? And eventually I realized that Newton's laws weren't laws of the universe, they are definitions, mathematical definitions of the concepts of force and mass, in themselves they don't say anything about the universe. That realization really changed things for me, because then I started being really skeptical of what I was taught, since I had to struggle on my own to understand that teachers were the ones responsible for my confusion by calling a definition a law of the universe.
Several years later I had a similar experience, but this time with the concept of curved spacetime in Einstein's relativity, teachers would say for instance that gravitation is the curvature of spacetime, and that bodies are attracted gravitationally because they follow straight lines in curved spacetime, but again this was a misconception. Curved spacetime is not a cause of motion, it is a mental concept, that theory was formulated in a way that gravitational bodies follow straight lines in curved spacetime, but we could as well formulate a theory that is as accurate where there is no such thing as curved spacetime. And so curved spacetime cannot be an objective cause of what we observe, it is a mathematical model, a model in the mind, a tool of thought.
Then I started reading philosophy of science, in particular Feyerabend and Lakatos helped me understand that a theory can never be verified nor falsified: if an observation seems to contradict a theory, it is always possible to save the theory by saying that the discrepancy is due to an invisible phenomenon that wasn't taken into account (for instance like astrophysicists and cosmologists do nowadays to account for the difference between Einstein's relativity and observations, by invoking the unseen presence of dark matter and dark energy), or due to errors in the instruments of measurement. In other words, a set of observations can always be made consistent with any theory. Even the theory that the Earth is flat can be made consistent with observations and be considered as scientific, for instance by modeling the motion of light in such a way that Earth appears round to us even though it is flat, our fundamental theories of physics would have to be formulated differently but they could be made to have the same accuracy than the ones we have now. So fundamentally, any belief is compatible with observations, which undermines the idea that science can tell us anything about an objective reality.
I have noticed that what I believe shapes the way I see the world in a profound sense, it shapes what I perceive, what I focus on, how I interpret what I see. So I have stopped seeing what I perceive as the image of some objective reality, rather I see that I am involved in shaping what I experience. I have also noticed that what I experience is shaped by others, and what others experience is shaped by me to some extent, we're not just some passive beings seeing an outside world that doesn't depend on us, we are profoundly involved.
I have had experiences that I wouldn't classify as perception, or feeling, or thought, or imagination, it was just something else, something I wouldn't think existed if I hadn't experienced it. And it is pretty much impossible to communicate, because I cannot compare it to anything, so to others who haven't had this kind of experience it doesn't exist, but to me it exists. And so it is possible that some people have experiences that they couldn't communicate to me in a way I could understand, in a similar way that someone who has always been blind cannot understand colors. I can't say it doesn't exist just because I haven't experienced it.
And then I had psychedelic experiences, which opened myself up to the idea that there is much more than what we usually call the universe. The best way I could describe these experiences, is that while I was having them I could understand things that I am not able to understand the rest of the time, I could see things that I do not have the ability to see or even to imagine the rest of the time. If 10 years ago someone had told me what I am saying now, I would have thought they were just hallucinating. But these experiences weren't hallucinations, they were much more profound than anything else. I remember telling myself that by the time the effect wears down I would stop understanding what I understood then. And indeed, there are things I wrote down during these experiences that have lost their meaning and depth, if I read them now they just sound cheesy, because I am not able to understand them anymore, I only have a vague feeling that remains, but on psychedelics I do understand, and they are more profound than anything else, and science cannot even begin to grasp it, what we usually see with the eyes doesn't even scratch the surface. Which reminds me that I promised myself I would take some again, it's been a few years, it's long overdue. I remember it is worth it, in a way that cannot be overstated.
Think on that for a minute...
Perhaps the writings you made while under the influence of hallucinatory substances do not make sense now because they did not make sense then. Altering your mind does not allow you to see things that you cannot see without the altering, or make sense of writings that you cannot make sense of any other way.
Rather, altering your mind(thought/belief) with hallucinatory substances makes it so that you are seeing things that are not there, and using language in a nonsensical manner.
Perhaps?
:brow:
As I note, it's a judgment about the relation between a proposition and something else. I wouldn't say that judgments in this sense are beliefs.
A judgment about the relation between meaning and something else is the difference between P's being true and P's being called "true"?
This judgment(calling P "true") is not belief?
I'm not following here.
Quoting leo
As I've suggested before, the word objective gets in the way here. Consider instead: "the idea that science can tell us anything about reality".
This, of course, is true. Science tells us enough about reality for you and I to be able to communicate with each other using the lumps of sand, metal and crude oil on which we type.
But is it really, truely, objective reality? That's just a silly question. Like the Meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything, we never stoped to work out what objective means. See this thread, if you think otherwise.
More...
"p" is true only if p; the proposition "p" is made to fit the world, p
Believing implies that one will act in certain ways. The world is treated as if p were the case. The world is made to fit the proposition, "p"
The direction of fit for a truth is the reverse of the direction of fit for a belief.
This might be what @Terrapin Station means, that belief requires a judgement.
And it may be what @leo is missing in musing that science does not tell us how things are.
Talking past each other. Calling these substances "hallucinatory" is a point of view. You can choose to believe they are hallucinations, or you can believe they are more real than what we usually call reality, which is the feeling that many people get when they try them. I think there is no way you can understand what it's like if you have never tried. You call it altering, I call it seeing through.
What I have written while on them is not nonsensical at all, it is the kind of stuff that some spiritual people say, on the surface it doesn't sound deep, but there is much more to it than the surface. Except we usually only see the surface.
It is quite sad to get this sort of reaction, considering that I am talking about a substance (psilocybin) that is not addictive, not dangerous, and that has improved the lives of many people who have taken it.
Here's a peer-reviewed study published in Nature, on the effect of this substance for treatment-resistant depression: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-13282-7
Read that again: out of 19 patients who had depression that resisted treatment, all of them had decreased depressive symptoms one week after taking that substance. Would you really expect nonsensical hallucinations to have that kind of effect, or might it be the sign that there is something more profound going on?
You want to be a good scientist? Give it a try and report your results. It is not addictive, it is not dangerous for your health (as long as you do it in a safe place), and you might come to realize things that you can't even imagine now.
Depression has a solution... one solution. It requires coming to different acceptable terms about what's happened and/or is happening. There are many ways to achieve it.
I wouldn't talk about hallucinogens had I not already had the experience of taking them. If it doesn't make sense or is not profoundly enlightening when you're sober, then it doesn't make sense when you're not... the writings, that is. The only reason it seems to make sense when under the influence is because you're under the influence.
Nothing I would object to there... the direction of fit bit isn't understood rightly by me, I suspect.
There's also a difference between a proposition and a belief. What makes a proposition true, depends upon several different possible meanings. What makes a belief(in propositional form) true depends upon one, and only one.
I was objecting to the notion of P's being true for me, or you, or someone else, and wanting to see how Terrapin deals with that. I suspect he's working from a notion of relative truth... in the sense that conflates truth and belief.
P's being true does not require any particular person to believe it.<------ in that sense, it(the truth of P) is objective. Although, I prefer a different framework.
Didn't think there would be.
Quoting creativesoul
I agree. It's unclear. But he is (it seems) working within a model of meaning as mental furniture, transmitted and translated from head to head. So there's that.
Might start another thread.
edit: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6148/language-is-not-moving-information-from-one-head-to-another
Yes. On a strictly individual - not shared - level. I forgot about that.
In this sense, everyone has access to objective truth. Everyone (who knows at least one language) can say objectively true things in a language.
As to your question: if I say that P is the objective truth and you disagree, that does not entail that P is not the objective truth, since "objectivity" doesn't mean "what everyone agrees on" (at least I don't mean this by "objectivity"). As I use the phrase, to say thay something is objectively true is to say that it corresponds to the way things are, and this may hold whether or not anyone agrees that it does.
PA
It's what "being true" is--when you make a "positive" judgment about the relation (for example, judging that "yes, the proposition corresponds to this fact from my perspective," rather than "no, it does not," which would be the "negative" judgment--aka the proposition is false). "Being called true" occurs because one has made the positive judgment in question.
And again, no, I wouldn't call the judgment a belief. If a belief is strong enough, one makes a claim that so and so is the case, as in factually the case, where the claim can be wrong (but the subject believes that it's the case until convinced otherwise). That's not the sense in which I'm using "judgment" here. The judgment here is simply a personal assessment as to whether the meaning the subject has applied has the positive relation in question (such as correspondence, for example) to something else (such as facts from the subject's perspective, if we're talking about correspondence; if we were talking about coherence instead, for a different example, the positive judgment would be "yes, this coheres with the other propositions I have assigned "true" to).
Thanks for sharing all of that.
Wouldn't other conclusions for most of that simply be that
(a) people can believe things, including theoretical things, etc., that are incorrect,
(b) people can and some do make whatever psychological moves necessary to not arrive at a subsequent belief that previous beliefs were incorrect,
(c) beliefs can "color" experiences,
and so on?
Obviously truth is always to someone on my view, and the notion of it possibly being the case independently of anyone is incoherent on my view (incoherent because it winds up making a category error about what meaning is/how it works, what assessment relations are and how they work, etc.)
The important thing to always keep in mind about my truth theory is that it's in the context of the traditional analytic philosophy tenets that truth and facts are importantly different things, that facts are largely mind-independent states of affairs, that truth is a property of propositions and that propositions are the meanings of statements.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Cool, I think. So belief does not require thinking about truth conditions/relations, whereas judgment does?
Judging that this or that is true results in belief, wouldn't you say?
You have a belief that the cat is on the mat, say. You have a belief that such and such is the state of affairs that obtains.
Truth, on the other hand, is a judgment about the relationship of the proposition "the cat is on the mat" to the fact (as you believe) that the cat is on the mat.
(Again, under correspondence theory, by the way.)
the people at the air craft control tower need to agree on objective truth. If i think you are a bad person you can probably deal with that. If 10000 of your neighbors think you are a bad person, you might be in trouble. Life is extremely complex, stay away from the dark side. lol
Correspondence isn't.
How do you believe the relation obtains outside of a judgment?
They do not have the same effects, have you tried the one I mentioned? Also the effects can be different on different people.
Quoting creativesoul
That's not my point of view. If you are blind and you take something that makes you see, would you call it an hallucination? The only reason you wouldn't call it an hallucination is if what you saw is part of the socially accepted reality. If most people were blind, colors would not be part of the socially accepted reality, then if you saw a world of colors others would deem you to be hallucinating. In my view, what we call a reality and what we call hallucination is a social convention.
If you are blind and you take something that makes you temporarily see, and you write about what you see, when you become blind again what you wrote doesn't make as much sense, not because your thoughts have become clear again, but because you don't have access anymore to what you were seeing. That's how I see it. What I saw was real to me, as real as anything else we call real, but I didn't see with my eyes, I was seeing some other way. If you can't relate to what I'm saying, then again to me that means you haven't had the experiences I've had, you try to rationalize what I say so it fits your world view, but your rationalization doesn't explain what I experienced, only to you it does. Using a common language is not sufficient to understand one another, words can't communicate experiences that the other hasn't had.
So, again, we have different realities, there is only a problem if you force the assumption that you have access to objective reality. The problem I see with your rationalization is that if you were blind, you would explain away reports of visual experiences the same way you explain away my experiences. Unless the majority disagreed with you, in which case you would probably go with the majority and accept that others see while you don't.
Quoting PossibleAaran
The problem is how can you tell the way things are? You can tell the way things are to you, if others disagree with your idea of the way things are what then? Who is right?
If you belong to an objective reality, you don't look at it from the outside, you are within, your thoughts and perceptions depend on that reality in some unknown way, so you don't have access to the way things are, your thoughts and perceptions do not show you the way things are, they show you something that depends on the way things are. If we can't tell what's objectively true then what's the point of using the concept?
But that problem disappears if we stop assuming we have access to an objective reality, rather each of us has their own reality. If we want to assume there is an underlying objective reality, then we can say that our realities stem from the objective reality, but we can't say what the objective reality is, so there's no point in talking about objective truth.
Quoting christian2017
They share a truth. There are some aspects most of us agree on, and there are some aspects where most of us disagree. If you only focus on the agreements you get the idea that we share the same reality, but when you focus on the disagreements you realize that it's not so simple.
That's what I implied, you don't understand me.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Preposterous in your own view, indeed. The funny thing is you elevate deductive conclusions as more true than delusions, but you can't deductively conclude what is a delusion and what isn't, so your stance is preposterous to me.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I'm not misusing language, I made it clear several times that I am talking about my own view, I'm not gonna start every sentence with "to me", "in my view", it's implied. I also talk about what the view of others is in my view. To me, others are only talking about their own view as well, that doesn't mean I find what they say useless, because as I mentioned, in my view again, our realities intersect partially, and we can communicate about our realities through speech to some extent.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I'm using the term "realities", to refer to the idea that we don't have access to the supposed objective reality, rather each person has their own reality, their own set of experiences, truths, facts. You could see it as a neologism, seeing it as a misuse of language is, again, your own point of view, not an objective one, and not mine.
The problem is many post modernists can't judge correctly what are important issues. Many post modernists such as Richard Dawkins think that pedaphilia is ok. When a society gets that dumb, the end of that society is right around the corner.
I don't think about that which exists in it's entirety prior to our account of it in such terms.
Haha, well that's what you should be doing to do philosophy--think about this stuff. If we're going to claim that the relation obtains outside of a judgment, if we're going to claim that that's how it exists, how it works, then we should have some idea of what, exactly, we're claiming about it ontologically, some idea of how it works, some support of our contentions, etc. especially aside from the fact that it's a common belief or a common way to talk about it.
Truth is not judgment. That's where you arrived. That's not my problem. "We" is the wrong pronoun to use here. I reject the position you argue for/from.
Judgment - per your description - is very complex metacognitive thought/belief. Judgment about the truth conditions of a statement requires language use.
Correspondence to what's happened/happening does not. True and false belief is prior to language. Judgment is based upon pre-existing thought/belief. Sound judgment is based upon true thought/belief. Poor judgment, well...
Stop, while you're ahead.
There's more than one way to take account of things. I should not use a framework that I know is riddled with issues.
That's a claim. I'm asking for your support of that claim. How does correspondence work sans thought?
So correspondence requires thought on your view?
Did you ever explain what possible role judgement has in correspondence, beyond a person thinking up a proposition?
The cat is on the mat. If that’s an objective fact, then the proposition is true even if someone judges it to be false. This shows judgement has nothing to do with whether the proposition is true/corresponds.
How is the proposition true? Well, by corresponding to the fact (assuming we're going with correspondence, of course, and not coherence, etc.) But how does it correspond to the fact, exactly? That is, just how does the correspondence relation obtain? The way it obtains is via a judgment about whether the meaning "matches" the fact.
Then how can a proposition still be true even if I judge it to be false?
On my view, propositions are true or false to someone. It makes no sense to talk of them being true or false where that's independent of anyone.
So the only way it can be true when you judge it to be false is that it's true to someone else (or to you at a later time). Otherwise, it's not true (to anyone) when you judge it to be false.
You’ve said you believe in objective facts. If it’s an objective fact the cat is on the mat, then that proposition matches that fact. That would be the case even if no one ever finds out whether the cat really is on the mat. If two people judge differently, then the one judging that proposition to be true must be correct, given that objective fact.
HOW DOES IT MATCH THE FACT?
I'm shouting because you don't seem to be able to hear me asking you that.
We have a proposition (we can just leave that unanalyzed for a moment--what it is for there to be a proposition).
We have a fact.
Now, we need matching of the proposition and fact to occur or obtain somehow.
How does that work?
This is where we got to last time. I gave an explanation and you went quiet.
Descriptions obtain via a set of words with particular meanings representing a person, object or event by way of concept and mental imagery. I describe a cat on a mat. I’m referring to a particular cat and mat, and the concept of being on something. All it takes for my proposition to be true is for that cat to be on that mat.
(I'm writing an additional reply rather than editing the above posts just in case you've already read the above and wouldn't read them again)
A couple suggestions as an assist to you:
One way that we say that things match is if they're very similar. For example, two prints of the same picture. They're similar formally. Their sizes, the arrangement of shapes, colors, etc. will all be similar enough that casually we call them "the same." (As a nominalist, I wouldn't say that they're literally the same, but they're close enough call them "the same" in a loose/casual/colloquial manner of speaking.)
Re propositions and facts, the tactic that some people to take is to say that they have a "similar logical structure." However, on my view, "logical structure" isn't something that exists independent of persons, and it's difficult to say how we can make sense out of meaning or a statement having the same "logical structure" as a fact (like a cat on a mat) independent of thinking about such things.
So that's the sort of answer I'm looking for, even though neither of those would work in this case. If you're going to explain how correspondence/matching works, the answer needs to be something like the above.
So meanings, concepts, mental imagery can somehow exist or amount to something outside of a person's mind on your view? (Otherwise, how are such things matching something else independent of thinking about it and making a judgment about whether they match? (and if they're only mental, how is someone (or something?) seeing your mental content to check if it matches (and if something, how is it doing this?))
I believe absolutely objective truth and absolutely subjective truth are not possible, therefore it is not something I desire, though one could argue in favor of desiring the impossible (that will be a later discussion, perhaps).
Let me offer my definition of "objective" and "subjective" such that both are defining limits of a particular topic: truth. I keep agreement with the general notion that what is objective (truth) is realized when it conforms to a set of standards or crietia that are in common within a particular community. Subjective (truth) is that which does not share the qualities of conforming to any external standard. Of course, this could be a great place to disagree with me, but I offer this definition in the hopes that what follows will justify my thinking.
Objective truth and subjective truth being defining limits are never realized in total. For example, nothing can ever be absolutely objective because it is an infinite regression of references to external standards to qualify. Because a propisition is true by a set of particualr standards, it might make it objectively true in that binary relationship, but it does not ensure the standards, themselves, are true in a similar fashion, etc... Godel's Proof and Carl Hemple's Confirmation Theory are good references here. Suffice it to say that any declaration that something is objectively true will reference an external standard that is held true a priori and itself not subject to proof. Therefore, there is no ultimate truth that transcends reference to external critera which themselves, eventually, must rest on unproven criteria. So, it would be best to talk aboutrelative objective truth rather thanabsolute objective truth. Something may be said to be more or less objective, but it would not be accurate to say that something is absolutely objective; such an absolute, I have argued, is elusive.
So it is with subjective truth. It suffers a similar problem than absolute objective truth. In order for something to be absolutely subjectiveit must be absent in conformity to any external standard. Typically, we arrive at a particular belief, at least initially, though a process of inductive thought. Such thought, of course, is governed by a set of assumptions as to what constitue truth and are set, consciously or not, as standards. Ultimately, the drive to justify those standards as being worthy so justify such an inductive "logic" present more infinite regressions in the search for an absolutely true standard by which to guide one's inductive thought process. Inductive reasoning like deductive reasoning reference a system of thought, itself, left as a series of axioms. Therefore, we can say something is relatively subjective, but never absolutely subjective.
No.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Because the thing they’re matching is not in a person’s mind. I’ve been asking the whole time: What role does a person play in correspondence, beyond thinking up the proposition?
Checking whether a proposition matches is beside the point. What I’m saying is they can match whether anyone checks or not. There’s an independent reality in play; if a proposition conforms to it then it’s true regardless. A proposition conforming to reality would mean it described a specific event, such as a particular cat being on a particular mat, with that event being a reality.
This is the issue. If a proposition conforms to independent reality how? Is it structurally similar?
It describes it, and I’ve already given my explanation of what a description is. The cat is on the mat. That proposition describes/represents a particular cat being on a particular mat by using words with those particular meanings/referents. All of that comes from me. However, the reality of that particular cat being on that particular mat has nothing to do with me, and that reality is what allows my proposition to correspond to it.
What does a description amount to outside of thinking about the description?
What words do you want him to use? Could you just skip to that part for a sec so I can stop following the micro point/counterpoint thing you guys have going on? I promise I won’t follow it up with anything, im just curious.
Nothing. That you’re asking that only shows you’re not understanding my point. A proposition/description is a thing within a person’s mind. However, it will only correspond with an independent reality if that reality is as the proposition describes. If it is, the proposition is true; if it isn’t, it isn’t. The question you have never actually answered: What role does a mind play there, beyond thinking up the proposition?
Another thought that seems to contradict the above:
The cat is on the mat. You make that proposition and on seeing the cat judge that it corresponds with a fact. But if the cat was on the mat prior to your judgment, what relationship did the fact and proposition have then? If they don’t correspond until you judge them to, on what basis are you making that judgment in the first place?
If the proposition/description amounts to nothing outside of thinking about it, then how does it mind-independently correspond with anything? Mind-independently, it's nothing. Nothing can't correspond with anything, can it?
The words that indicate that he understands that correspondence can't occur outside of making a judgment about it. ;-)
He's not understanding that correspondence needs to occur or obtain somehow, and I'm focusing on just how it occurs or obtains. He's not addressing that. He just keeps taking for granted that it works without wanting to analyze how it works.
...
...Because its correspondence depends on something independent of the mind...
...
I’ve addressed that over and over again.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I am understanding that, and have given explanations in answer to your requests. I have addressed it over and over again. You ignore what I say, you ignore my questions, or you go quiet when presumably you have nothing to say.
You're saying that literally NOTHING corresponds with something. You understand that, right?
Quoting AJJ
Let's try this to check if you understand the issue I'm getting at: paraphrase the dilemma in a way that I'd agree that it's what I'm saying.
Buddy, I don’t think you have any idea what I’ve been saying, or in fact what you’ve been saying. I’m happy to leave this alone now.
In other words, no, you can't paraphrase the dilemma in a way that I'd agree that it's what I'm saying.
Yet, you understand it. Suuuure.
You edited your post. I’m responding to that now.
Correspondence obtains via a judgement made that a meaning matches a fact; judgements are mind-dependent, so therefore correspondence/truth is mind dependent.
I’ve had a look back over the posts on this page and that seems to be your argument. But the first part is just something you assert. You’ve ignored or bizarrely misunderstood every response I’ve made to that idea.
No. Not my argument. What the dilemma is. If you don't understand what the dilemma is, then no wonder you're not addressing it.
Does it matter that it obtains mentally, if thats what you are getting at? Its based on something non-mental is the point, not that the connecting tissue (or lack of I guess) or process. I think this AJJ would concede thats all mental.
Well, AJJ asked this: "If a proposition is true when it matches a fact - and the fact is objective - then why in your view would that truth not be objective?"
I'm trying to explain the issue to him in a way that he can understand it. But it seems to be a Sisyphean task . . . which is unfortunately par for the course with him.
The above is what you said. I’ve just demonstrated I understand your argument. I’ve made objections to your argument and offered my own explanation on how correspondence obtains. I don’t know what dilemma you’re referring to, but assume it’s buried somewhere in your tragic misunderstandings and refusal to engage properly with what I say.
Right. And that's the problem. You can't address it if you're not even clear on what I'm asking you to address.
I've explained this a number of times. The dilemma is that correspondence/matching--whatever we want to call it that amounts to the same thing--has to work some way. It needs to be some process that occurs, or some property that obtains in something . . . somehow. We need to be able to describe how it works, or just what the property is (or properties are). I gave you a couple examples of the sort of answer that addresses this dilemma from "your side"--from a perspective claiming that correspondence can occur mind-independently, and I talked about what the problems with those answers are for this particular issue.
I’ve given my explanation several times of how correspondence obtains. You ignore it and assert your own view. I’m sorry mate that I wan’t giving you the answers you wanted (the ones you already had responses to); I didn’t know that’s how arguments work.
No, you said things like "S proposes a description and then the description corresponds with a fact" (paraphrasing, obviously). That doesn't address how the description corresponds with a fact, especially not mind-independently. You're leaving the actual correspondence part unanalyzed.
"That proposition describes/represents a particular cat being on a particular mat by using words with those particular meanings/referents. "
What I'm asking you is how a description/representation corresponds with the cat being on the mat?
How do the meanings/referents correspond to the cat being on the mat?
You're giving an alternate description of what a proposition is and then just claiming that the proposition corresponds without analyzing what correspondence actually IS.
Yeah. I accuse you of ignoring my explanations and your response is to “paraphrase” my explanation in a way that ignores all of it.
See above. I quoted you and explained that you're not addressing what I'm asking you.
You didn’t quote my explanation. You’re still ignoring that.
I quoted one of them. This is a quote from an earlier post of yours that you believe is describing how it works: "That proposition describes/represents a particular cat being on a particular mat by using words with those particular meanings/referents."
And don’t think I don’t notice when you ignore important points of mine as well.
All I care about is that you think about and address what I'm asking you to think about and address. I want you to be able to realize something about an ontological point.
No. That wasn’t my full explanation. You’re ignoring that.
Thank you mate for caring about what I think, but I’d like to stop this now.
Do you believe that objective reality can be known in any way or not?
If not, what point is there in talking about what conforms or doesn't conform to it?
If yes, how? If your thoughts and perceptions belong to that objective reality but you don't know in the first place how that reality influences your thoughts and perceptions, how can you know whether your thoughts and perceptions conform to objective reality?
It seems to me we can't know anything about it, so if we stop thinking about what reality independent of us is like then the conundrum disappears. Instead we only talk about what we experience, and when what we say conforms to what we experience according to us then that's our truth, and when it doesn't conform then that's a lie. Doesn't all the confusion disappear that way?
We're shaping reality, so I think it would be more productive to think about how we're shaping reality, and how we can shape it, rather than about what it would be like without us. It's like we want to believe we don't exist, that we have no influence, that we're just passive observers, as if we were already dead, but we're alive, so let's think and act like it.
Indeed, and in a very specific way. The presupposition of truth(correspondence), the attribution of meaning, and thought/belief are irrevocably entwined. Truth and meaning are existentially dependent upon a creature capable of thought/belief. Both emerge onto the world stage via a creature capable of drawing correlations between different things, and all of this happens prior to language.
Judgment is not truth. If it were, there could be no such thing as mistaken judgment. Judgment is belief, not truth. Truth is presupposed within both.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Sure it can, and must. Lest there could be no mistakes made. The statement is true regardless of any particular individual's belief/judgment about it and/or whether or it it is worthy of being called "true".
I don’t want the confusion to disappear. Knowing what’s true is important, and so is being unsure of things. It doesn’t seem coherent to say there is no objective truth, and I assume it can be known; I don’t know how a person could consistently live otherwise.
thanks for the concise answer to a very basic notion. I agree with this completely. Most post modernists dismiss many important things and then they have a handful of things that they feel are important, but God forbid anyone argue with the post modernist's list of important things.
Cheers, it’s nice to be agreed with from time to time.
Ignorance and bad choices make us better people than those who know full well between right and wrong and do the bad choice anyway.
We all need to forgive ourselves and move on with our lives. For those of you who are going to attack me on this last sentence, i would like to remind you that emotional health is a universal concept (keyword: universal) and also is paramount to a healthy culture.
If we aren't willing to put extremely bad people out of thier misery (for whatever reason) then i believe we should give them a way to be happy every day using practical means.
If i say some things matter, but still hold that some things matter alot. That is not a contradiction.
I just want to address this first. On my view, a mistaken truth-value judgment is either (i) a different person having a different judgment about the relationship of a proposition to a state of affairs--it's mistaken in the different persons' views, or (ii) the same person having a different judgment at a later time, where they feel they should have had the later judgment at the earlier time (and it's mistaken in their view, but perhaps the revision is what's mistaken in other persons' views at that point).
Of course, part of making the judgment in question, if we're using correspondence theory, is the person in question's perception of facts, where facts are not usually belief-dependent (the exceptions are facts re what someone believes).
So, on your view, this can't account for mistaken judgments because?
If you assume it can be known, then how? Can you give any example of such objective truth?
You can live consistently by your truths, that's what people do. Some believe in a higher truth that doesn't depend on them, but again I simply see that truth as their truth.
Is it objectively true that the Sun won't suddenly disappear tomorrow? How could you know? I don't live by objective truths I cannot know, I live by my own truths. And in my view others do the same, it's just that sometimes they believe their truth applies everywhere, to everyone, for all eternity, regardless of whether others disagree with them.
What I wonder is why do you so badly need a truth that doesn't depend on you? What are you afraid of?
Quoting christian2017
To say that in my view there is no objective truth is not to say that nothing matters, it is to say that some things matter to me, and what matters to others is not necessarily the same as what matters to me. Why would something not matter to me just because it doesn't matter to everyone?
Despite the growing popular opinion, humans must work together and agree on some things in order to make a society work. Common values is important to some extent.
By thinking about and examining the world. I think that “something exists” is an example of objective truth.
Quoting leo
What I was saying was you can’t live consistently as if there’s no objective truth. You have to behave as if certain things are objectively true, such as that rat poison affects the body differently to aspirin.
Quoting leo
I’m afraid, or troubled anyway, by you lot; because I think you’re motivated in your belief by a desire to avoid right and wrong.
Proposition: a declarative subject/predicate linguistic construction;
State-of-affairs: a given condition of some physical domain.
A subject/predicate linguistic construction is a rational capacity;
The condition of any physical domain is given by the human sensory capacity and is the ground of experience;
Therefore, that a proposition relates to a state of affairs is the relation between reason and experience.
All rational constructions are the determinations of the understanding;
All intuitions are the representations of the sensory capacity;
Therefore, the relation between reason and experience is the relation between intuition and understanding.
It follows necessarily that correspondence, re: whether or not, and the manner in which, a proposition relates to a state of affairs, must be determined by a human faculty that is not intuition nor understanding, and is called the faculty of judgement and is a spontaneous determinant. If the judgement is such that an intuition conforms to a conception, it is affirmative and the cognition which follows from it is true, and serves as a definition of truth, insofar as a cognition absolutely must conform to its object. If the judgement is such that the intuition does not conform to the conception, the judgement is either negative or undetermined, but in either case, no affirmative cognition is at all possible, and therefore no truth is given. Truth follows from a judgement, but a judgement does not necessarily offer truth, even if it is always the means to the possibility of it.
In addition, it is clear the advocate of the correspondence theory should have an ontological theory to support his truth claims, in order to justify, at least, his consideration of whatever a physical state of affairs might be. It is equally clear any ontological theory must use the correspondence theory it is trying to support, in order to claim any such state of affairs actually does in fact obtain, and the use of subject/predicate propositions is the form of such claim.
Bottom line........truth is what we think it is, until it becomes contradictory to maintain the thought. The truth about an object is the only permissible sense of the term “objective truth”, because all truths are, when properly critiqued, merely thought, hence predicated on a rational condition alone. Proofs of them, on the other hand, have their own predication.
“And now you know the RREEESSSSTTT of the story”.
The cup is on the table. Person A judges that false. Person B judges that true. According to you, both are mistaken.
You're conflating truth and belief.
They're not judging anything about the cup being on the table per the conventional analytic philosophy sense of truth-value that I'm using. They'd be judging something about a proposition, which could be the proposition "The cup is on the table," and that proposition's relation to the cup being on the table.
Squirming...
Some humans already agree on some things. What about those who don't agree, what should we do in your opinion? Force them to change their mind? Lock them up? That's not the dream society I have in mind. That's a society ripe for totalitarianism, tyranny. Sure, tyranny seems fine when you're the tyrant.
Quoting AJJ
Speaking for myself, that's not the desire motivating me. I'm rather motivated by the desire to combat those who carry out and justify the worse atrocities in the name of objective truth, while it's only their truth, they pretext they're doing it in the name of some higher principle and so they aren't responsible, supposedly the culprit is not them it's something outside of them, but they are responsible. Impose your truth onto others, silence all who disagree, and your truth becomes objective truth, something that people must not and cannot question. Then kids grow up into a world where they are made to accept the truths of tyrants.
You are responsible for how you treat others, regardless of whether you call it right or wrong. Saying truth is personal is not a pretext to go around making others suffer, you create your truth doesn't mean something outside you is forcing you to create a truth where making others suffer is fine. You participate in shaping the world, you decide how you want to shape it. If you decide to shape it in a way that you enslave others and kill for fun, that says more about you than about those who don't think there is such a thing as objective truth, beyond a concept in the mind of those who want to impose their truth onto everyone else.
Quoting AJJ
You can behave as if certain things are true to you, you don't have to behave as if they are true independently of you, because that leads you to want to impose it onto others. Let's say you think it is objective truth that aspirin is good to give to people who suffer, then you give it to someone and they suffer even more, well turns out that wasn't objective truth, back to the drawing board. That something works for you in some way doesn't mean it's gonna work the same way for everyone else. Or you've never had spiritual experiences and you think it is objective truth that spirituality is bullshit, some mass delusion, well that's your truth, not objective truth.
I agree with what you said. These are all bad ways to deal with a problem. Certain types of extreme sexual perversion should be dealt with severely. I'm sure you would agree with that. Murder can't go unhindered, and i'm sure you would agree with that. Where is it you feel we are in disagreement?
The thing is you can oppose tyranny and believe in objective truth, and you can be tyrant who believes there is no objective truth; so I don’t buy your claimed motivation.
If it’s not objectively true rat poison harms people (barring some peculiar exceptions maybe), then there’d be no problem arbitrarily feeding it to children. Its harms might be true to you, but not to the parents feeding it to their kids. So there’s no problem with them doing that, right?
Sure. So why do you think I'd say they're both mistaken?
Perhaps you can answer this for me:
State of affairs (objective fact): the cat is on the mat
Proposition: “the cat is on the mat”
Person A judges the proposition true
Person B judges the proposition false
Who is correct (from our perspective)?
Person A, Person B, both, or neither
I use the "abbreviation," too, but we know that "the cat is on the mat" isn't literally the proposition, right?
I’m just going to reply to Mww here.
Cool. I'm going to comment on whatever strikes my fancy. ;-)
I think I can answer this myself. The answer, as far as I’m concerned, is Person A. This is because the proposition “Person A is correct” matches the reality of person A being correct, since I’ve judged the example proposition to be true also. All of that is mind-dependent judgment. So the more pertinent question is this:
If the example proposition doesn’t correspond to the state of affairs unless I judge it to, on what basis am I making that judgment in the first place?
Quoting AJJ
I think I can answer this as well. You’re making it on the basis of whether the proposition relates properly to the state of affairs. That too is a judgement, which you’re making on the basis of what? Your answer to that will be a judgment also, so on what basis are you making that?
It seems, so long as you lock truth within the mind, you get an explanatory regress.
You performed a mind-independent judgment? :brow:
Read it again you tendentious nitwit.
Yes, I misread that, because you were arguing that the relation can obtain mind-independently.
Guy calls me up, says....dude, guess what? The cat’s on the mat. What else could I say but....wonderful. Glad to hear it. There’s no way possible for me to grant the truth of the proposition, because I have no means to eliminate it’s negation. The most reductive judgement I’m allowed is granting that it is certainly possible the cat is indeed on the mat, because it is conceivable that he is, in turn because I have extant intuitions of cats and mats and no experience of them ever being mutually exclusive. Conversely, I am also not rightly allowed to judge that the cat is not on the mat.
This is why care needs be taken to understand just what is corresponding to what. The correspondence theory of truth says a proposition is true if it matches a state of affairs, but one still is absolutely required to know with apodeictic certainty what that state is, if he is to cognize a truth about it by means of a subject/object proposition. This is why logicians say P is true IFF it is the case P. If follows that the empirical condition must be antecedent to the proposition itself, anything else warrants merely a possible truth. And.....er......truth be told, the proposition actually presupposes the state of affairs to which it’s asked to correspond.
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Addendum the first:
Quoting AJJ
Herein lay the problem with the correspondence theory of truth understood in this manner. If the proposition does not correspond to the state of affairs to which it is asked to assign a truth value, it’s because a judgement has been made by which the subject of the proposition does not belong to the predicate, state of affairs be what it may. One does not judge whether the proposition corresponds, but whether the subject and object correspond, or not, from which the truth is cognized, or not, with respect to a certain empirical condition. This is a lot easier to grasp if it be granted that any truth is thought long before it is ever put in propositional form, and the only reason to put any thought at all in propositional form is to communicate it.
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Addendum the second:
Quoting AJJ
I would rather say, not so much an explanatory regress, but a tentative quality of knowledge, and by association, of truth itself. I shy away from explanatory regress because there are theoretical predicates for the human rational system, logically consistent and governed by the principles of universality and necessity. In other words, laws. But then, no matter what anybody says about it, somebody else can say something else, so.......so much for laws. That being said, experience informs us empirical knowledge is never static, even if pure a priori knowledge most certainly is.
I think we say we lock truth with the mind because that’s the only way we can, being the kind of agency we are. It’s why fundamental dualism is impossible to refute. And also why, even if we are not entitled to our own facts, we are sometimes entitled to our own truths.
This strikes me as prevarication. I can’t see where it answers the problem of there being an explanatory regress, which in effect means there is no foundational reason for judging a proposition to be true.
The correspondence relation is a judgment made on the basis of what you have in mind with the proposition versus the facts from your perspective. The two components that you're checking against each other aren't judgments. They're rather the meaning(s) you assign and your perception (or apperception as the case might be, or even a stipulation in some cases).
There’s an obvious reply to this, but there’s no point making it if you can’t figure it out yourself.
I don’t see a prevarication, or equivocation. I don’t judge the proposition/state of affairs duality for its correspondence, but rather I judge the subject/predicate duality for its correspondence. In this view, there can’t be any explanatory regress; either intuition corresponds to conception by rule or it does not. End of story. Well......end of that story anyway.
Where do you see prevarication coming from? If by it you mean the occasion where one person cognizes a truth but another person does not, under the exact same conditions, I am reminded of......
“....For although education may furnish, and, as it were, engraft upon a limited understanding rules borrowed from other minds, yet the power of employing these rules correctly must belong to the pupil himself; and no rule which we can prescribe to him with this purpose is, in the absence or deficiency of this gift of nature, secure from misuse. Deficiency in judgement is properly that which is called stupidity; and for such a failing we know no remedy. A dull or narrow-minded person, to whom nothing is wanting but a proper degree of understanding, may be improved by tuition, even so far as to deserve the epithet of learned. But as such persons frequently labour under a deficiency in the faculty of judgement, it is not uncommon to find men extremely learned who in the application of their science betray a lamentable degree this irremediable want....”
I think my objection still stands.
I understand you as saying a proposition is true when, in reality, its subject (the cat) corresponds to its predicate (on the mat). The way you judge this correspondence is by seeing if your conception (how you think of it) matches your intuition (what you perceive). But on what basis are you judging this to be the way you judge truth? Then, whatever your answer, on what basis are you judging that to be your reason? And so on.
I think it's harder to be a tyrant when you see that your point of view is a point of view, rather than when you believe it applies to everyone everywhere for all eternity.
Feeding rat poison to children would be a problem to me, it wouldn't be a problem to these parents feeding it to their kids, otherwise presumably they wouldn't do it. At that point I would ask them why they do it and why they believe it's not dangerous, and if they believe it's dangerous then why do they want to hurt their kids. Maybe it will turn out that what I thought was rat poison was something else, or that they mistaked it for something else, or some other reason that doesn't necessarily imply they were trying to kill their kids. Not believing in objective truth doesn't mean we can't interact with people, or that we can't agree on some things. I don't know about you, maybe to you it would be objective truth that the label on the container meant it really was rat poison and you would torture these parents without asking them anything.
Maybe it’s easier because you think you can do no wrong.
The parents are feeding rat poison to their children. The children are dying. The parents, however, believe it’s true the rat poison is harmless and they’re actually looking after them. According to you they’re not wrong.
aka conflating truth with objective facts. Not the same thing.
I actually take facts to be true things, since I don’t see a problem with that (that analytic philosophers say otherwise I don’t take to be a problem). It’s just that I’ve been arguing with you on your terms.
Fair enough. :up:
No need to match because facts are always already in propositional form. If you disagree then give me an example of a fact that is not in propositional form.
No, it's easier because you don't feel like your point of view is more important than everyone else's.
Quoting AJJ
According to me they shouldn't do that. I wouldn't say they're objectively wrong, because what if it's not rat poison? What if the children aren't dying? What if these children have such a peculiar metabolism that it isn't bad for them? What if the parents have found that mixing rat poison with something else is actually good for health?
If I believe the children are dying because of what their parents feed them, as I mentioned I would react, I would go talk to them, attempt to clarify the situation, see if I haven't misinterpreted something, attempt to understand the motivations of the parents. I wouldn't storm in and torture them because supposedly I have access to objective truth and I can't be wrong.
You're assuming it is objective truth that they are feeding them rat poison, that the children are dying, and that the children are dying because of what they're being fed. Isn't it possible that you could be mistaken about any of those? Or are you so better than everyone else that you have access to objective truth? Are you God maybe?
You take this holier-than-thou attitude with your appeal to emotion using an extreme example, but I'm more worried about all the other more frequent situations, where you would impose what you want onto others because you are convinced you are right and others are wrong. Silencing or locking up or torturing people you see as heretics because they have beliefs or practices that don't match yours.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Because coherency(lack of equivocation and/or self-contradiction) matters, and you've already claimed the following...
Quoting Terrapin Station
You're conflating belief and truth and bordering upon utter nonsense.
Are we drawing a distinction between what my report is existentially dependent upon and what I'm reporting upon?
If facts are true propositions/statements, then the approach you've taken has some purchase.
What if facts are events(what's happened and/or is happening)?
All sorts of things happen that are not in propositional form.
I think we agree here.
I don't see the mere existence of disagreement as a problem. Some people think their heads are made of glass. They are wrong. No problem there.
Quoting leo
Here is the interesting part. I don't think my thoughts and perceptions depend on reality in some "unknown way". Its actually very well understood. See the biology of perception. Any way, even supposing that my perceptions do depend on reality in some unknown way, it does not follow from this that my perceptions don't show me the way things are. The way that they depend on reality might be compatible with them revealing the way things are.
There is then this metaphor about being part of reality and looking at it from "within" rather than from "outside". I don't see that it follows from this that I can't tell how things are either. If I were looking at the inside of a box from some point inside the box, I could see how the box really is - that it has sides and edges and corners etc.
Do you have an argument in mind for the claim that we can't tell how things objectively are? Perhaps you could make it clearer? And anyway, what is the sense of "tell" being used here? If all I need to do in order to "tell" that something is the case is have a true belief about it, then it seems obvious that I can tell how things are. I might just have a true belief. Presumably, you mean something stronger than that by "tell". Perhaps you could clarify what?
PA
Yeah. You’re just axe-grinding against ‘religion’. It’s understandable, not wanting to believe in God, but there’s really no need pretending people who do are looking to “torture people” who believe different. It shouldn’t need pointing out that evil isn’t exclusively done by religious believers.
Quoting leo
Well yeah, I should hope I am “holier-than-thou”. Your attitude seems to be we should let people do what they like, including murdering their children, so long as they can provide an excuse. Then presumably - with the world crashing down around you - you say, “Well it’s not actually crashing down,” and get upset with anyone who tries to re-establish some order.
I thought you were evading the question (of the regress).
It does seem to be the case that if truth is only in the mind there isn’t a foundational reason for judging it. You have to make an appeal to the theories of analytic philosophers, which is to make an appeal to their reason, then reason in general. But why judge reason to be a foundational reason for judging truth? You’re left suspended unless you posit that truth isn’t a judgement, but something we discover.
As I said, it's mistaken in the different person's view. If I have the same judgment as one of them, I'm not going to think they're mistaken. I'll think the other person is.
And this would mean so long as the fact is objective, the proposition is objectively true?
Ahhhh.....I see what you mean. Yes, well, the human cognitive system is for the most part purely speculative in its fundamental operations. So it may be said reason is judged to be the foundational reason for judging.....a roundabout way of overstating the obvious. It is, after all, absurd to posit we don’t think as a matter of course; it’s what we do. If it is natural for us to think, it is just as natural to claim reason is the be-all end-all of the human mental apparatus, for reason is nothing if not merely the elaboration of the act of thinking. That should be foundation enough, and perhaps the proof of it is that it’s negation is impossible, but on the other hand is encountered the intrinsic circularity of reason investigating itself.
The idea of truth by discovery presupposes truth is a property in itself. Even if it is, as long as humans are involved, things like meaning and value enter the scene, and we’re right back where we started. Still, if you like your objective truth.......go for it.
It’s not that I like my objective truth (although I do); it’s that you’re left without an explanation of truth unless it is objective. You end up asserting reason allows us to judge what is true, just because it does. I, however, can posit discoverable, transcendental truth, which isn’t a property of anything but is rather something that everything participates in. Our role is to discover what does and does not participate.
Very well, but are you not then left with the need to show how it is true that something has participated in it? In effect, would you not have to judge whether that something has participated? To say something about X is true because it has participated in truth is just an ill-disguised tautology, is it not? It really doesn’t tell you anything.
Quoting AJJ
Truth can be properly defined, but I’m not sure that’s the same as an explanation of it. I’m not sure truth being something we discover the participation in, as being any more so. To say truth is that a cognition conforms to its object is irreducible, and perhaps therefore sufficient for an explanation?
Quoting AJJ
Quoting AJJ
Quoting AJJ
Quoting AJJ
Quoting AJJ
Quoting AJJ
All of this is in your mind, not mine. You're the epitome of the problem I see with objective truth. You believe your idea of what I think and what I feel is objective truth, rather than your own projections and your own misconceptions. You don't know my intentions. You know nothing about me, you just have what you believe. And I think self-righteous narrow-minded people like you are responsible for making the world I see a worst place to live in, so I won't stop pointing out that your beliefs are not objective truth, they are your point of view. And regarding what you say about me, your point of view is pure crap, because even if I don't know objective truth, I at least know what I think, whereas you don't.
Yes, but our judgements in my view cannot coherently be described as “truth”, but only true or false.
Quoting Mww
You’re always left with something to justify. Why judge truth on the basis of a cognition conforming to its object being irreducible?
Transcendental truth takes some explaining, sure, and I think Aquinas’s Fourth Way deals with that. But perhaps that leads to a deficient explanation also.
Is it?
Quoting leo
Am I?
Quoting leo
Do I?
Quoting leo
Don’t I? Do I?
Quoting leo
Do you? Won’t you? Are they?
Quoting leo
Is it? Don’t you? Don’t I?
Perhaps the meanings of my words are totally different to your own interpretation. Why believe I said what you think I said?
The only fact that's in a propositional form is the fact of a proposition being thought.
All other facts are not in propositional form.
Propositions are the meanings of statements.
The fact of my computer keyboard sitting on my desk is not the meaning of a statement. It's my computer keyboard sitting on a desk.
(I didn't see your post until now, by the way. I don't know if I don't receive some notifications that I have a reply, or if I just don't notice all of them sometimes.)
They are wrong to you. Maybe they don't mean the same thing by "glass". Or maybe they mean to say that they have a bone disease such that their head is fragile like glass. Maybe they have experiences where their head feels like it's made of glass. And so they think their head is made of glass, because to them it describes better what they experience than saying it is made of a skull and so on.
Quoting PossibleAaran
Your thoughts and perceptions do not model yourself, they model your thoughts and perceptions of yourself. I think you can agree that with your eyes you don't see yourself as you are, you see a perception of yourself. When you look at other people, you don't see what they perceive or what they think, so you don't see them as they are, they do not reduce to their body, you see an image of them. So when you attempt to model how their perception works, you're not actually modeling how their perception works, you're modeling your image of how their perception works. That's why I say you don't have access to the way things are, you model things within your perceptions and thoughts that do not show you the whole picture, so your models are not models of the whole picture.
Otherwise if you think your perceptions show you the way things are, then you should believe that other people do not perceive nor think anything, because otherwise you would see their perceptions and thoughts in your perceptions.
You just keep going on with your misconceptions about my point of view.
I don't see much point in continuing to clarify my view to you, because indeed you really don't care to understand what I say, your self-righteousness has taken over. If you cared to read the thread I already addressed what you believe makes my position incoherent.
In my view we share a common reality to some extent, I believe I am right about what I'm saying about you, and I believe you and I don't interpret words differently, that's my personal truth, and I act on it. Maybe others would have a different point of view about the situation, but I have my own. My idea that there is only personal truth leads me to be open-minded, to listen and try to not impose my point of view onto others. However if you shit on my point of view, if you don't change your course despite my warnings, then expect consequences, I am nice but not too nice. Not much I can do on a forum (maybe mods could warn you?), but in other conditions your incessant arrogance wouldn't get you far. But I think you know that, I happen to believe from our previous exchanges that you know very well what you are doing.
And before you characterize me as a tyrant, I am very open to discussing things calmly and respectfully, when I'm disrespected not so much. In my view you understand that you are disrespecting me, so stop pushing, when I've seen enough you have to deal with me. Then maybe at that point you'll tone down the self-righteousness and start listening a bit more. Others who believe in objective truths that don't match yours might not be as nice as I am with you.
We can continue this in private if you want, you're just shitting on the thread otherwise.
Bloody hell mate. Well being threatened is quite unpleasant, even anonymously across the internet, so I will leave you alone now and ask you do the same for me.
Agreed. Judgements are not described as truth. A state of affairs empirically, or analytic propositions a priori, are described as truths.
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Quoting AJJ
I guess because its negation is absurd. If I see a cat on a mat, and I judge the cat is not on the mat, such that I can say the proposition “the cat is on the mat” is false, after I’ve perceived it to be so, I am what the aforementioned passage indicated: I’m just plain stupid.
“The moon is made of green cheese” is a valid proposition, and before anybody got there to determine what the moon is actually made of, no judgement is intellectually valid about the truth of the proposition**. Silly, yes; exemplary foolishness, yes; truthful?.....unknown, because the criteria for establishing the truth of the moon’s composition has not been met. Now that it is known with certainty what the moon is made of, even though I have no direct experience of it, there is still empirical evidence available to me, which satisfies the logical criteria for the affirmative judgement that the proposition “the moon is made of dirt and rocks and stuff” falsifies the proposition “the moon is made of green cheese”.
** Feynman advanced a similar proposition in his “sum over histories” paradigm, when he said because we don’t know which path the particle took on it’s way to it’s exhibition, we can just as honestly say it went every path available to it. Which are, of course, infinite.
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I shall leave you with your medieval transcendentalism, preferring the continental Enlightenment version, myself. As you say....we all speak from our personal prejudices.
I accept those are truths, yeah. I just think their truth is based on their participation in the transcendental truth.
I guess I think all definitions of truth are ultimately arbitrary unless it’s grounded in the transcendent, and unless we take the final cause of reason to be the discovery of it. But yeah, we believe what we want.
There is that, but humans always seek truth, yet have no access to the transcendent. So if truth somehow reside in, or is predicated on, that which we have no contact outside our idea of its possibility, truth itself can be no more than possible. Which relegates logic and mathematics to being dead in the water. Seems to me the best way to relieve truth’s arbitrariness, is to predicate it on something a little more available to our reason.
There is an argument that the final cause of reason, that which is itself unconditioned, giving irreducibility its ground, suggests the transcendent domain logically. But we live in the phenomenal domain, so what we think truth is should be derived from it or its manifestations alone. Even then, we still have things we can’t explain with empirical principles.
Sucks to be us, don’t it?
I don’t believe our minds (immaterial in my view) are part only of the phenomenal world. At least I think the reasoning is something along those lines; I’m not very familiar with it, so there’s my current prejudice I guess.
On my view truth is a judgment.
Yeah, there’s always been a philosophy built on that idea, from Anaxagoras to Hegel. Could be, I dunno. I guess it depends on what one chooses for his bottom line.....some basic assumption from which all else is given rise, everything from usefulness to mere possibility. The logical laws of thought come to mind, as being absolute, irreducible, necessary truths.
We have yet to evolve from our proclivity to imagine what experience cannot teach.
I think it can teach more than it’s typically given credit for, but either way I’m fine keeping that particular proclivity.
OK, I accept that. I’d rather go with truth is a cognition. Judgement is always the means, truth is only one of three possibly ends, along with falsity and indeterminacy. Cognition is that part of the whole operation we’re actually aware of, usually as an image. While there’s no harm in saying truth follows from a judgement, that’s not the same as saying truth is a judgement.
It’s the same as saying “I understand what you mean”. Saying I understand is just a shortcut for the whole mental process, a simple version of “what you just said about X conforms exactly to what I think about X”. We say truth is a judgement because the most obvious capacity for arriving at a truth is to judge something internal and related to it, but overlooked is the fact there are certain analytic propositions, necessarily true, for which no judgement is at all required.
Put the proverbial shoe on the other existential foot, and we have the problem of synthetic propositions, which all correspondence theories entail by definition, which in their turn require a judgement regarding the subject/predicate correspondence contained by the proposition itself, for the truth which may or may not follow from it with respect to a certain condition in the empirical world. If one is to claim truth is a judgement, it is only with synthetic proposition does the claim carry any weight, but at the same time stands to be easily dismissed as an insufficient claim.........if one digs deep enough into the metaphysical weeds.
Take your water bottle; it’s dry and dusty down there.
I've been trying to avoid responding here beyond offering brief comments because time is precious for me at the moment. So I'll keep it as short as possible. There are two senses of 'fact': facts as verbal statements and facts as ostensive ontological propositions or conceptions of states of affairs. States of affairs are propositional in the sense that they are always given, even prior to their expressions, in the form that 'such and such is the case'. The verbal propositional equivalent is just the expression of what is already recognized to be the case. The fact need not be expressed, but it is always already in propositional form by virtue of its recognition as fact nonetheless.
As I understand it all facts are objective. The idea of a "subjective fact" seems incoherent. (Unless something like a "fact about a subject" is meant, but such a fact is an objective fact about a subject. We don't need to say "objective fact", though because facts just are objective; objectivity is implicit in the very idea of fact).
:brow:
Those aren't the only senses...
Verbal statements can be false. Propositions can be false. Conceptions can be false.
Facts cannot.
Please do. Spell it all out. A true one?
I will. I've come a long way, I deeply care about people and about the world, so when I'm told that I don't, when my intentions/feelings/thoughts get misrepresented repeatedly, when my ideas get ridiculed without being properly considered, I end up reacting like that.
I used to think like you that there is objective truth, but I've found too much that doesn't fit that view. That doesn't mean people can't agree on things, that doesn't mean it's fine to let people suffer, in my view we are responsible for how the world is, we are responsible for how we treat others, we are responsible for how we educate our kids. And obviously there are some who don't agree with that, so why should I say that my view is objective truth? Many don't live by that view. It's my truth however.
I see the concept of objective truth as responsible for a lot of suffering, because people who believe they hold objective truth are not able to listen to others anymore, they attempt to impose their truth onto everyone else, because they feel justified, no matter the consequences. And they don't feel responsible for what they do, because they see themselves as being guided by something independent of them, rather than by their own will.
On the other hand I don't see the concept of personal truth as dangerous in itself. What's worse, parents who believe it is their personal truth that rat poison is good for their kids, or parents who believe it is objective truth? In the first case you might change their minds, in the latter case you can't.
And people's points of view will clash whether they call their point of view personal truth or objective truth. But again, if they see their point of view as personal then they can listen, if they see it as objective truth then they see the other side as wrong anyway.
It seems it was objective truth to you that those who don't believe in objective truth are fine with chaos and murder and suffering and letting people do whatever without interacting with them in any way, and in my view that's why you wouldn't listen to what I said, you specifically said "I don't buy your claimed motivation", you couldn't hear me over the sound of your objective truth, and that's what I see as the real danger.
We don't see with our eyes what others perceive and think, but we can learn about it by listening to them, not just hear the sounds they emit or read their words but really listen, attempt to understand their point of view, put ourselves into their shoes, and in my view that's how we can realize the world is much greater than the one we see with our eyes. While if we believe that we have objective truth we just live within our own bubble, we are disconnected from one another and from nature, and then we destroy one another and nature.
What other senses of 'fact are there?
What relevance does the fact that verbal statements, propositions and conceptions can be false have to facts being in propositional form?
Facts cannot be false, all three things you mentioned can.
If these are all to be called "facts", then what do we call the false ones?
Clearly, because some are false and facts cannot be, not all verbal statements, propositions, and/or conceptions are facts.
What makes them either true/false? What makes them a fact?
Correspondence to fact/reality/events/what's happened/what's happening. Wait, that doesn't work.
Calling them true/false statements, propositions, and conceptions works just fine. There's no need to call them "facts". They are true - and not false - because of their correspondence to fact.
I wish everyone would keep it as short as possible--seriously. So I appreciate that.
Quoting Janus
The sense of "fact" that I use (which isn't a novel sense, but that's not important), is simply that facts are states of affairs. A billion years ago, there were countless facts. There was no language, there were no propositions, etc.
The sense of "proposition" that I use (which again isn't novel), is that propositions are the meanings of statements.
So again, a billion years ago, there were no propositions, as there was no meaning, because there were no creatures of the sort that create meaning, yet there were plenty of facts.
Facts are not propositional, they're not conceptions, they're not verbal statements. Facts are not in the form that "such and such is the case." They're in the form simply of existent things/processes, in (dynamic) relation(s) to other existent things/processes. Facts are certainly not in the form of meanings, and meanings are also not identical to any words, gestures, behavior, etc. (Well, or the only facts that are in the form of meanings are facts of meanings; that is, that so and so is thinking in some particular way that amounts to meaning.)
The proper dialectically consistent response to a proposition with a singular conception in its predicate (truth is a judgement), is with a predicate containing a singular conception of its own, hence truth is a cognition. However, just as judgement in and of itself is not the prime explication for truth, neither is cognition, in and of itself, insofar as truth is a relation, and no singular conception can in any way be relatable.
A more exact formulation for truth with respect to judgement might be: judgement is the necessary means to truth, and by association, the more exact formulation for truth with respect to cognition would be: cognition which conforms to its object is the necessary condition for truth.
You can work with whatever definition of the term 'fact' you like, of course. For me yours is an impoverished definition that removes the distinction between actuality and factuality. For me the notion of a fact is the notion of a Janus-faced semantic entity that "looks" or points both towards truth and towards actuality.
Of course facts can be thought of ontologically as synonymous with states of affairs and this understanding is shown in statements like "Global warming is a fact." But facts can also be thought of semantically as shown in the sentence "An encyclopedia is a compendium of facts". That factuality is also thinkable as synonymous with truth is shown by the univocity of the the statements: 'It is true that..." and "It is a fact that..."
Even as considered ontologically, though, facts as states of affairs only have meaning insofar as they are determined, and as determined they take conceptual or propositional forms. The very idea of a "state of affairs' is propositional; that affairs are in such and such a determinate state. Actuality, considered as the (human) mind-independent "in-itself" is indeterminate. It takes a sapient percipient to, in terms of some perspective or other, determine the indeterminate actuality as a factuality.
So, I would say that there were no facts, just as there were no truths or any determinate actuality, prior to the advent of humans.
Non-facts?
This is not how I use these two terms. A proposition will be true or false regardless of your or my judgement. Judgement comes in when you decide to believe.
Trouble is, it's the fact that the cat is on the mat that makes "the cat is on the mat" true.
That is, we state facts and in the process we indulge in interpretation.
Which is what I suspect @Janus doesn't see.
You don't think I agree that facts are stated and that they are always already interpretations? You need to improve your reading skills my man!
And so what makes a proposition, statement, and/or conception true(fact)?
It would follow from the first formulation that no creature lacking the faculty of judgment could have true cognitions, or they could if the aforementioned true cognitions are not existentially dependent upon - and thus do not require - truth.
Looks like a conflation between what's required for thinking about whether or not some thought/belief and/or statement is true, and what's required for some thought/belief to be true. Terrapin does the same thing. Judgment, as set out by him, is a metacognitive endeavor. True belief is prior.
If judgment were necessary for truth, true thought/belief could not be had by a creature incapable of judgment. I'm (vaguely)familiar with the introduction of CPR where Kant called judgment an innate talent that cannot be taught, etc. I disagree because judgment is far too complex a thought/process for a human to be born with already fully intact and working(innate). Rather, depending upon the notion of judgment, it comes later, sometimes much later in the individual and collective evolutionary progression of thought/belief.
So the conformity of cognition to it's object. Like Saran Wrap? I'm trying to wrap my mind around this...
:meh:
Indeed. It's what already happened, and/or is happening that makes the statement(which is about those events) true.
Tarski shows this well.
Mark me up in that column as well. All that is required for facts and truths to arise may very well be extant, but in their own natural form, not in some form constructed by human understanding as a means to organize itself.
Right, but I ask, "How is that supposed to work, exactly?" And my conclusion is that it can't. The notion of it rests on a number of confusions, misconceptions, etc.
That's just the usual Kantian nonsense that's so prevalent among regulars on the board. I'm not at all a Kantian. I think Kant was wrong . . . and he was a horrible writer to boot.
We've been doing that in other threads, but okay, first, do you use the definition that propositions are the meanings of statements?
Now, now....go easy on the po’ boy. He’s just jealous there isn’t a decent naive realist philosopher that can’t be run aground by even a mediocre Kantian espousing a logically consistent epistemological dualism.
(Chuckles to self....ego? ME??? Nahhhhh)
They are not, necessarily. Any analytic proposition is true in itself, without judgement related to it. “All bodies are extended”, “A = A” require no judgement whatsoever; extension belongs to bodies necessarily, and that an identity is not itself is both logically impossible and absurd. That “logically impossible” and “absurd” are themselves judgements, but under the conditions given in separate propositions which are not analytic.
Judgement is the means to a truth in synthetic propositions only, wherein the subject concept and the entirely different predicate concept contained by the proposition are understood as standing in logical relation to each other, or they are not, judgement decides, and cognition is the demonstration.
(E.g., I thought wrong, because I misjudged the situation as I understood it)
Right. So the first problem is that there's no meaning aside from someone actively thinking in a meaning-oriented manner.
They do, because outside of thinking about it, those are just marks on paper or a screen that mean nothing, refer to nothing, etc.
You're saying that meaning is thinking, propositions are the meaning of statements, so the meaning of a statement is a thought, not a state of affairs?
Yes, obviously, if meaning is a subset of thinking, then we have no meaning if we do not have that subset of thinking.
Suppose instead that the meaning of a proposition is whatever you are doing with it. Then the meaning is a part of the world, not of thinking.
Nothing is ever written, spoken or displayed, that isn’t first thought. Seems like we should analyze how we came to our thoughts before we analyze how other minds are affected by our communication of them.
Do you really think the whole thing out before you set it into words? That's not my experience. The setting out happens with the thinking.
One never thinks about the physicality of getting a fork to his mouth, but let something go haywire, and he invariably recalls the very physicality in order to figure out what happened. Given enough experience in some thing, attentive thinking diminishes with respect to that thing, but cannot be said to be non-existence. Otherwise, it would be impossible to recall anything at all.
The setting out happens after the thinking, although the time differential borders on immediate. But it obviously cannot be instantaneous. We see this in, e.g., when the eye looks aside during verbal communication.
It's statements that are true or false. Statements are generally about how things are. So a given statement will be true, or it will be false.
Under what circumstances will it be true, or false? Under the circumstances set out in the statement.
So the statement will be true exactly in the case that it sets out what is the case.
"The cat is on the mat" is true only if the cat is on the mat. "2+2=7" is true only if 2+2=7. And generaly, the statement "P" will be true only if P.
I wouldn't say it's an "issue with truth." It's simply an analysis of it.
It's not a matter of simply redefining meaning. It doesn't matter what we call anything. It's a matter of what phenomena occur where and how--whatever we choose to call the phenomena in question. Phenomena that occur outside of our brains (well, or outside of anything that would amount to mentality--I'm not arguing that mentality necessarily could only occur in brains) can't refer or correspond to anything.
We could talk instead about "what you do with a proposition," whatever that's supposed to amount to--you'd have to present what it's supposed to amount to, present examples, etc., and then you could say just how that's supposed to have a relation to anything else, especially a la anything like a truth or correspondence relation.
I'm fine with that (even though there could be exceptions), but how does it help some truth-value not be a matter of judgment?
How do you get to "about" without thought being present?
I'm not so much wanting to redefine meaning as drop it altogether.
Quoting Terrapin Station
"il pleut" means that it is raining. One way of saying this is that they set out the same proposition. Another is that they have the same use. But one would not suppose that the french speaker and the English speaker have the very same brain state...
It does not follow from the availability of an innate capacity, that it’s proper employment is thereby given.
“.....A physician therefore, a judge or a statesman, may have in his head many admirable pathological, juridical, or political rules, in a degree that may enable him to be a profound teacher in his particular science, and yet in the application of these rules he may very possibly blunder—either because he is wanting in natural judgement (though not in understanding) and, whilst he can comprehend the general in abstracto, cannot distinguish whether a particular case in concreto ought to rank under the former; or because his faculty of judgement has not been sufficiently exercised by examples and real practice. Indeed, the grand and only use of examples, is to sharpen the judgement....”
Note “real practice”, a.k.a......experience. The capacity to judge is innate; the capacity to judge the synthesis of intuition to conception is developed, because both intuition and conception are themselves developed.
It's not the whole of it in the sense of what we're thinking about, what influences our thinking, etc. That's obvious enough, right? It's not like I'm arguing that there's thinking in a vacuum set aside from other things.
But the place where meaning occurs, where correspondence occurs, etc. is brains in the process of thinking.
Thus a proposition isn't true or false outside of this. It requires someone to think about it and to make a judgment about whether it corresponds (or coheres, or whatever relation we're using). It's not like the words on a page or a computer screen or anything like that can determine this themselves somehow.
Some truth values are a matter of judgement. I am well aware that “Terrapin Station” is the name of a 1977 Grateful Dead album (I owned it on 8-track, as a matter of fact), but the proposition “you are a Dead-Head because you use a facsimile of it to represent yourself”, is nothing but my personal judgement. The truth value of which is no more than merely possible, however, because there is no contradiction between the conception contained by the subject of the proposition I constructed for myself (“Terrapin Station” represents something) and the conception contained by the predicate of that same proposition (Dead-Heads sometimes use representations of Grateful Dead experiences).
The whole point is that there are some truths without judgement, therefore judgement cannot be an absolutely necessary qualification for all truth. That is not to say what is absolutely necessary, but only what isn’t.
The point I'm making is that the relationship of a proposition to, say, a state of affairs (if one is using correspondence theory) can only obtain via a judgment that an individual makes that the proposition "matches" or corresponds to the state of affairs. That relation can't obtain some other way that doesn't involve a judgment.
A week ago I wrote, “Understood, and accepted......as far as it goes.”, in response to practically the same point you’re making here.
Nevertheless, I defer from the correspondence in the theory you use, to the correspondence in the theory I use. I don’t think your version goes far enough in the explication of what is correspondent. What I accept is that there is a certain relation between propositions and states-of-affairs.
But as you are often inclined to say.....how does that work, to which I say.....change the realm of the correspondence and you’ll have the how, at least from one point of view.
No religiosity required. Not even a “cosmic religious feeling”, as Albert would have us know.
What realm are we changing it to, though?
The same place everything else human comes from, that isn’t fully and sufficiently biologically/physiologically explanatory.......pure reason.
Yeah yeah yeah....I know. Brain states and all that. Even if the words cat and mat relate to certain action potentials across certain gaps in certain pathways in certain brains, it is completely irrelevant, because we don’t think or express thoughts in those terms. Be that as it may, and it is of course, if we don’t give reason its just reward, which is the juxtaposition of those terms into the terms we actually do use, we may as well stop talking. By “we” I mean everybody.
If we say that something is true, by what method have we arrived at this truth? And why is it true that that method gives truth, and why is it true that the explanation for why that method gives truth is true, and why is it true that the explanation of the explanation ... and so on and so forth.
So from this I think we can agree that truth is problematic, and that it might be better to forgo truth altogether, and just speak of beliefs or assumptions instead?
Earlier in this thread it was mentioned that doing away with truth could be dangerous, because then for instance we can't say it's true that parents shouldn't give rat poison to their children. But I argue that the statement "parents shouldn't give rat poison to their children" doesn't stop working just because we don't assign a truth value to it, even as a belief we can act on it, people act on their beliefs all the time, and then it could be argued that when people act on truth they act on what they believe is true.
In practice I would say truth is treated differently than belief, truth is not seen as belief but as "what ought to be believed". But then there is coercion implicit in the concept of truth, what we consider to be true is not just what we believe, but what we think ought to be believed.
Thoughts?
Interesting.
You're equating meaning and correspondence?
Consider the Slab game. The correspondence of "Slab" to a slab is a small part o f what is going on. Saying that the builder was referring to a slab goes only a very small way towards explaining the meaning of his utterance. The exercise is about the apprentice bringing a slab so the work can continue. There's more going on here than just what is in their heads.
So the phrase "think before you speak" is meaningless to you? And what would "You don't know what you're talking about." mean? What is the language game being played when using those phrases?
Does speaking it require different thinking that writing it? Why if you're saying the same thing?
No, Harry. That's not what was claimed.
This paragraph seems to be changing the topic to proprioception. So I'll not respond.
Quoting Mww
I'm saying that this is in point of fact wrong. The setting out happens as the text is produced. We can, on occasion, set it out before hand, privately as it where. But this is the exception, not the rule.
Isnt that what it means to "think before you speak". To think about the implications of what you want to say before you say it.
Suit yourself.
And straight away you have replaced truth with belief. Propositions are true, or false, regardless of what you say is true. Justifications are for beliefs, not truths.
One way to put it is that we say too much about true and truth. Yes, truth is redundant, because only if "the act is on the mat" is true, will 'it is true that: 'The cat is on the mat'" also be true. So one says no more than the other; Adding "it's true that:..." adds emphasis or other illocutionary force to the very same utterance.
Quoting tim wood
This approach relies on reference. A better approach relies instead on what one is doing with the words one is using. So to understand 2+2=4 is to be able to add, count and so on. Someone who claimed that 2+2=4 is false has either misunderstood what was being done or is engaging in subterfuge.
Similarly someone who claims it is wrong that water boils at 100ºC might have misunderstood; or may be engaged in some pedantry about air pressure and water purity; or is engaged in some activity unrelated to the boiling point of water and is bullshitting.
That is, belief, action and language are interlocked - Davidson's triangulation. I'm only beginning to understand how this notion replaces his radical interpretation.
Quoting tim wood
Yes... Truth is redundant. It is also not available for analysis - it cannot be broken into simpler notions. Yet it is fundamental.
That's unclear. Is it a bit like @creativesoul's "thought/belief" that wants it's language before it can speak?
Perhaps the judgement is in choosing the statement that suits the purpose here.
That's a mischaracterization my friend. Thought/belief is not the sort of thing that wants. I would disagree with tim wood regarding that quote as well...
So...
"The cat is on the mat" is not a true statement/proposition unless we look to determine if it is?
:brow:
Certainly the cat is either on the mat or not regardless of our checking to determine if it is.
No.
Clearly set out the referent of "it is(it's)"...
What exactly is being determined again that is a proposition beforehand?
So...
During the time period before we check, what is it that you are calling a proposition?
I reject the conventional notion of proposition. It's tied up in far too much mistake.
Thought/belief and statements thereof are the sort of thing that we all know and agree can be true or false. So, to answer your question with that in mind...
The statement "The cat is on the mat" is true if, and only if, the cat is on the mat.
What makes a proposition true? That it matches a 'fact'? What makes the fact a fact, how do you know it's a fact, and then how do you know the proposition matches the fact? Therein lies the issue with the concept of truth.
I like it. Most of it.
I don’t care who y’are; that right there was funny.
I shall not rain on your well-organized parade, but I do wonder about that aporia thing. Just seems like if there are general logical laws, specifics plugged into those laws properly shouldn’t be susceptible to aporia.
I never took you for such an epistemic nihilist. You done went and killed off knowledge!!!!
Riddle me this, my good man: If the general expression X + Y = Z is a logical truth, the denial of which, as was mentioned herein would trash the system of mathematics, why wouldn’t anything specific you plugged into the expression....that would fit of course....be just as true?
There are two things to be decide here - that the cat is indeed on the mat, and that "Le chat est sur le tapis" sets out that the cat is on the mat.
Considering the right side of the equivalence, it makes no sense to say that the cat is on the mat but that you do not believe that the cat is on the mat (Moore's paradox). SO deciding that the cat is on the mat is exactly believing that the cat is on the mat.
Considering the left side of the equivalence, we are deciding on the use of an appropriate expression of the belief given on the right. But change the expression on the left to '"The cat is on the mat is true' and this decision dissipates.
Quoting tim wood
What is the difference between the bald fact, and the determination of that bald fact, if not the deciding that the cat is on the mat? But then the distinction is between the cat being on the mat and one's deciding to believe that the cat is on the mat.
The problem for your position is that the cat being on the mat is riddled with perceptual, that is to say, conceptual underpinnings. Sure, it's true the cat is on the mat if you can see the cat on the mat. If you can't find out whether the cat is on the mat then it might be true or false that the cat is on the mat. I know you want to say that it is true regardless of whether we can find out that the cat is on the mat, if the cat is on the mat.
And of course, logically speaking that's right, but it doesn't really mean anything of any importance to say that something might be true even if we cannot discover it to be so. All it does is to reveal the already bleeding obvious logic of our ways of talking about (empirical) things.
You appear to be some kind of monomaniac; going on and on about the same tired old, super-obvious (from a kind of naive commonsense point of view) point over and over, insisting on it again and again perhaps hoping that eventually you will bore us all into submission. :joke:
Rubbish. Either it is true or it isn't, regardless of what one sees.
Your approach is just wrong.
That's pretty much right. Thank you.
You're taking that out of context. My approach in everyday commonsense parlanace is no different from yours. I just don't take that approach to be be very interesting or relevant when it comes to philosophical thinking, where we should start to become aware of the inextricable perceptual and conceptual elements of a phenomenon such as the cat being on the mat.
You have said yourself that the world is always already interpreted, and I agree with that. It means the world is a human world, and the truth of the cat being on the mat is a human truth. Sure, we can imagine a cat being on a mat in a world where there are no humans, but we conveniently ignore the relational elements in such states of affairs which can only obtain in the presence of humans.
I am a realist though, so I will say that regarding a "state of affairs obtaining" that we would call 'the cat on the mat', absent any humans there would be some structural or dynamic actuality that would reliably appear as the cat being on the mat if there were humans to interact with that actuality via visual or tactile perception.
Quoting Banno
Ah, self-knowledge...it's a beautiful thing! :cool:
Yes, I am taking it out of a context into which it was erroneously placed.
Here's the thing, undeniable, yet denied: Either it is true or it isn't, regardless of what one sees.
It's true in the naive context; I admit that. That's obvious. And it's not that it's not true in the extra-human context, but more that's it's being true or untrue in that context is not what we naively take it to be. So, what I am doing is allowing for different conceptual framings; but you being a Davidsonian, I presume would want to deny that distinction and even the coherence of the very notion of conceptual framing.
My point is, though, that that denial is misguided, given that we can indeed (at least begin to) think about how things might be conceptually and epistemologically different in extra-human contexts. So, given that most everyone will admit that what you say is right in terms of the naive everyday conceptual framework; what is it exactly that you are wanting to deny?
But we are talking about what is true, not about what we know...
When we introduce knowledge, we add belief. If we are going to talk about what is true, we must take care not to add what is believed, since that is something quite different.
Quoting tim wood
Phew. I agree that there are facts we do not know. This of course implies that there are true, unknown propositions. SO I do not think that to be a fact is to be known - quite the opposite.
SO I do not think we disagree here.
Quoting tim wood
Indeed. We do not disagree here, either. Quoting tim wood
OK, good.
I had suspected that we would be pretty much in agreement.
As @Janus said, I'm just pointing to the obvious grammatical point that what is true is a different thing to what is believed, and hence to what is known.
This is an excellent sentence. I love "we can indeed... think about how things might be conceptually and epistemologically different in extra-human contexts"!
Here is exactly Davidson's point in One the very idea... To take an extra-human context and to think about it is to make it no longer extra-human...
Quoting Janus
...hence you cannot possibly make comment on this.
(@Janus)
That is, the objective-subjective distinction is not about truth.
In fact this is exactly Hegel's point against Kant's idea of noumena. And in one sense I agree with it, but in another I don't. We can think about things in a human context, and we can (at least try to) think about things in an extra-human context. I would say that the obvious fact that thinking about either context is human thinking does not entail that we have not thought about, in the sense of tried to imagine, an extra-human context.
But, in any case, even remaining within the human context, take thinking in QM terms, a different conceptual framework, about the cat on the mat (which is not really thinking about the cat on the mat at all but we can stipulate that we are thinking about the dynamic field that appears to us as 'cat on mat'). The perceived cat and mat disappear on that view, so the statement that is true in the everyday context "the cat is on the mat" becomes meaningless in the QM context. There are no entities such as cats and mats in that context.
Quoting Banno
I think the notion of subjective truth is meaningless; we are then talking about belief. All truths that we can know are objective, that is empirical, truths. We can say there might be metaphysical or ontological truths, but we cannot know if there are, or if there are what they are.
Quoting Janus
So we cannot talk in QM terms about the cat being on the mat? And yet Schrödinger has a quantum cat in a box.
I'm not at all convinced you are not just muddled.
The thought experiment could be re-framed so that if a uranium particles decays a lever is actuated which pushes the cat onto the mat. Then the point would be like my point about the extra-human context being indeterminate; that, prior to the human observer "collapsing the wave function'" to find out whether the cat was on the mat, and thus whether the uranium particle had decayed, the cat would be in "superposition"; neither on the mat nor not on the mat.
All of which points to the more general point of the nonsense of incommensurable contextual frames or frames of reference or paradigms or whatever; and hence to the absurdity of an incommensurable distinction between subjective truth and objective truth.
It is well-accepted by Quantum theorists that QM cannot even be understood in "everyday" terms.
And it seems that despite what I said above, which you didn't even attempt to address, you still haven't realized that there are no subjective truths, but only subjective beliefs. There are only objective truths and subjective beliefs, but even the objective truths only have meaning, even existence, within the inter-subjective context. I don't see how you can disagree with this last, since you acknowledge that the world is always already interpreted.
Neat switch. But I was watching.
I've no idea where to go with that. I guess we are talking past each other.
Cheers.
Wha......that was all you were trying to get across the first time? Ok, fine. At least I see a way clear of that aporia issue.
Which leaves us with.......because, as you say, truth depends on which set of criteria is in use, it is reasonable to ask which set of criteria the rational agent uses? If a human uses a logical system, insofar as cognition logically sustains or contradicts observation, then we’re right back where we started.
(Major premise, minor premise, conclusion; understanding, judgement, cognition. The conclusion we call valid or sound, the cognition we call true or false. Same-o, same-o.)
With that in mind, we don’t prove it’s hot outside, per se, but rather, we prove that the observation it’s hot outside is sustained.
——————-
Quoting tim wood
And I will hold up the other end, by saying knowledge is reducible to one, but necessarily of many things. Knowledge *of* and knowledge *that* is still just knowledge. Knowledge itself being no more than the condition of the intellect.
I’m out of shoes.
Not really that much of a deal, given the Big Picture. Human empirical knowledge, that is, what we think of as true as detailed in propositions, is absolutely predicated on experience. Because extant experience is a minute fraction of possible experience, it follows necessarily that extant knowledge is a minute fraction of possible knowledge. Hence, what we think of as true is only so, until experience shows it isn’t.
Agreed. Looking back, after recognizing the empirical truth of some proposition, and then saying such truth was always the case, or the conditions that enabled that truth were always the case, is just absolutely useless practical information. Who gives two shits and half a dollar if a thing always was before anything is known about what it is.