#1 How can one know what truth is, without knowing what truth is in the first place?
Since a) we all hold the capacity to lie, b) we are all adults (more or less), and c) the adults that affirm they have never told a lie will most certainly be lying, we can then safely conclude that we all experientially know what lies are. Then, one can start addressing the question by observing that truth is what occurs in the absence of lies - contextually, this within awareness related givens, such as statements and beliefs, regarding what is experienced. (But I acknowledge that in at least a tacit matter all those who have told at least one lie in their lives already knew this.) From this can then be further inferred that delusions, illusion, hallucinations, etc. are a type of self-deception and that truth - being the opposite of deception - will, roughly speaking, be an accordance to that which is non-deceptive; the latter being roughly equivalent to what is termed reality.
The short version of the same answer: experientially.
Though not without faults, I yet find this response to be good enough to get the ball rolling.
As to the second issue, what alternatives to justification are there? Same can be said for reasoning, btw.
bongo furyFebruary 02, 2020 at 16:12#3779760 likes
#1 How can one know what truth is, without knowing what truth is in the first place?
good question and of course, the answer is that one cannot. in that sense, truth is that on the basis of which truth is already understood.
a sense of truth is constitutive of our nature (which does not make us necessarily truthful). we could not make our way about in the world without a sense of truth.
Reply to Isaac I suspect that knowing and understanding are not synonymous and I would rephrase your question as "how can one formulate a question about truth without an understanding of what truth is?"
But that is just me being picky as your question is an excellent question.
In some sense, I think we "live" in the truth (which does not make us truthful). Instead, we have an understanding of truth and we use that understanding to either uncover or conceal the truth.
Reply to Arne May it be true that questioning(desire for certainty of truth) promises more than answers(meant/designed/forced by logical-, and various theories to be true)?
Is it necessary to know x, to formulate a question regarding x ?
yes. you must have some understanding of X in order to formulate a question regarding X. all your question can do is give a deeper understanding than the one you must have to even ask the question.
Not really, if you don't know and I don't know there is probably no one that does know. Hence there is no answer or at least no answer that is accepted universally.
Is it necessary to know x, to formulate a question regarding x ?
Yes, I think so. What people often think of as an exception to this is, say, if you'd heard a word "pegasus" you might sensibly ask "what is pegasus?". But this is just a linguistic illusion of a problem. What you really mean is to ask about the word 'pegasus', not the actual thing 'pegasus'. You can't ask about the actual thing 'pegasus' without knowing something about what the thing is.
You could reasonably ask "what do people mean by the word truth?". If you did, my answer would be "really, really...."
Reply to Monist except you already conceded you know the name Jessica. and even if you did not know the name Jessica, you would not ask what a Jessica was if you had not already heard "Jessica" as a reference to some person, place, thing, or group.
If we use “true” in the adjectival sense we know what it means. If we use “truth” in the noun sense we do not. Once we change adjectives into nouns we are left trying to search our minds for qualities and other specters that do not exist.
#1 How can one know what truth is, without knowing what truth is in the first place?
Truth is a label, in the same way that colour is a label. We learn to recognise what is referred to as a 'blue' object. Then we can categorise all the objects that appear blue as being 'blue'. It is the same with truth, we label ideas as being 'true' when they have the appearance of being true. Sometimes those ideas can be summarised in statements, so we label those statements as being 'true'.
How one recognises which ideas have the appearance of being true is another question.
We learn to recognise what is referred to as a 'blue' object. Then we can categorise all the objects that appear blue as being 'blue'. It is the same with truth, we label ideas as being 'true' when they have the appearance of being true. Sometimes those ideas can be summarised in statements, so we label those statements as being 'true'.
I don't see how this could be the case. If there was substantial disagreement about which things were 'blue' it would be impossible to learn how to use the word. There is substantial disagreement about what is 'true'.
Maybe you could use that argument to justify a simplistic correspondence theory of truth. In which case virtually all of philosophy is misusing the word 'true'.
Reply to NOS4A2 there is no loss of clarity in going from the adjective triangular to the noun triangle. I suspect there are examples where going from adjective to noun may increase clarity. just saying.
creativesoulFebruary 02, 2020 at 18:57#3780780 likes
Statements are the sort of thing that can be true/false. "Truth" can be used to denote true statements. "Truth" can be used to denote coherence/consistency. "Truth" can be used to denote validity(following the rules of correct inference). "Truth" can be used to denote belief.
"Truth" - as a term - has many accepted different meanings.
We learn to recognise what is referred to as a 'blue' object. Then we can categorise all the objects that appear blue as being 'blue'. It is the same with truth, we label ideas as being 'true' when they have the appearance of being true. Sometimes those ideas can be summarised in statements, so we label those statements as being 'true'. — A Seagull
I don't see how this could be the case. If there was substantial disagreement about which things were 'blue' it would be impossible to learn how to use the word. There is substantial disagreement about what is 'true'.
Maybe you could use that argument to justify a simplistic correspondence theory of truth. In which case virtually all of philosophy is misusing the word 'true'.
I think there is substantial agreement about what is 'true' in the world. And I think people actually label things as being true in much the same way. The disagreement arises when people try to make truth out to be some objective property of the world or statements. Whereas truth is necessarily subjective. Without a brain/mind to label ideas or statements as 'true' there would be no truth.
When we nominalize adjectives we make it function as a noun in our language, and perhaps it does so in our thoughts. The adjective “conscious”, when nominalized, becomes “consciousness”, which has lead many thinkers in search of this quality. When we nominalize adjectives we simply mean “all things with this quality”. Truth could simply be shorthand denoting all things that are true,
I think there is substantial agreement about what is 'true' in the world.
I agree (using your 'labelling' type definition of 'true'). But if the definition were limited to the sort of thing about which there is such agreement, then virtually no proposition in philosophy could be labelled 'true'.
think there is substantial agreement about what is 'true' in the world. — A Seagull
I agree (using your 'labelling' type definition of 'true'). But if the definition were limited to the sort of thing about which there is such agreement, then virtually no proposition in philosophy could be labelled 'true'.
Propositions (or statements) can be labelled as 'true' when they are considered to be an accurate representation of an idea that the brain/mind has labelled as 'true'.
I maintain the proper distinction here is not between adjective and noun but between meaning and definition.
The former requires thought while the latter requires a dictionary which might define truth as "all things that are true."
In that sense, truth is very much the product of our encountering, engaging with, and coming to understand the entities within the world that we are in. When our assertions reveal those entities as they show themselves to be, then our assertions are true. When our assertions conceal how entities would otherwise show themselves to be, then our assertions are false. Either way, our regular and ongoing concernful engagement in the world is permeated through and through with truth. We are either trying to reveal or to conceal the world as it shows itself to be. Either way, we are in the truth/false business.
I maintain the proper distinction here is not between adjective and noun but between meaning and definition.
The former requires thought while the latter requires a dictionary which might define truth as "all things that are true."
In that sense, truth is very much the product of our encountering, engaging with, and coming to understand the entities within the world that we are in. When our assertions reveal those entities as they show themselves to be, then our assertions are true. When our assertions conceal how entities would otherwise show themselves to be, then our assertions are false. Either way, our regular and ongoing concernful engagement in the world is permeated through and through with truth. We are either trying to reveal or to conceal the world as it shows itself to be. Either way, we are in the truth/false business.
I think that when we equivocate between adjectives and nouns so easily we are presented with errors of grammar, not meaning. Nominalizing adjectives is to mentally turn descriptive terms into nouns, giving being to things that cannot themselves be described. So though there are things that are true, there are no truths that are things.
So though there are things that are true, there are no truths that are things.
Whether "thingness" can/cannot be attached to the term "truth" fails to enlighten. Though certainly many would consider truth to be a concept and a concept to be a thing and therefore the concept of truth would be a thing. But that really matters not as thingness is the ultimate Cartesian red herring upon which I will waste no more time.
The deeper issue is not which distinction (adjective/noun or meaning/definition) is more fraught with potential error. Instead, the deeper issue is which distinction is more useful to illuminating a meaningful understanding of the world in which you find yourself.
And if you think the grammar distinction is the way to go, then good luck to you.
Propositions (or statements) can be labelled as 'true' when they are considered to be an accurate representation of an idea that the brain/mind has labelled as 'true'.
Sure, but that would be a really weird use of the word. Totally out of kilter with the way it's used at the moment so I don't think you'll get many takers.
Indeed. That's the point I was making. If we're only using 'true' like 'blue', limiting ourselves to that which we all agree on, we're not going to have a great many of the most interesting concepts labelled 'true'. Maybe that's as it should be though.
Indeed. That's the point I was making. If we're only using 'true' like 'blue', limiting ourselves to that which we all agree on, we're not going to have a great many of the most interesting concepts labelled 'true'. Maybe that's as it should be though.
Indeed. But that is not necessarily "as it should be." For Example A Seagull is essentially pushing a correspondence theory of truth that could be fruitful if tweaked.
Propositions (or statements) can be labelled as 'true' when they are considered to be an accurate representation of an idea that the brain/mind has labelled as 'true'.
I would tweak it as "an assertion is true if the entity toward which it is directed shows itself to be as asserted." As a result, we move beyond a correspondence between a proposition and what the mind has labeled as true to a correspondence between a proposition and how entities within the world show themselves to be. We have now shed the pesky and unnecessary "representation of an idea".
Propositions (or statements) can be labelled as 'true' when they are considered to be an accurate representation of an idea that the brain/mind has labelled as 'true'. — A Seagull
Sure, but that would be a really weird use of the word. Totally out of kilter with the way it's used at the moment so I don't think you'll get many takers.
I don't expect to get many 'takers'. And yes it is at odds with many people's ideas about truth.
But that doesn't mean it is not part of a better system.
If one wants a simple, self-consistent and comprehensive philosophy, then IMO it is not only the best but the only way to go.
Propositions (or statements) can be labelled as 'true' when they are considered to be an accurate representation of an idea that the brain/mind has labelled as 'true'. — A Seagull
I would tweak it as "an assertion is true if the entity toward which it is directed shows itself to be as asserted." As a result, we move beyond a correspondence between a proposition and what the mind has labeled as true to a correspondence between a proposition and how entities within the world show themselves to be. We have now shed the pesky and unnecessary "representation of an idea".
You seem to be making the assumption of 'naïve reality' whereby the world is pretty much or even exactly as we perceive it. For me this is a naïve assumption, albeit a popular one.
It makes more logical sense to only assume that we have a model of the world.
#1 How can one know what truth is, without knowing what truth is in the first place?
We understand, or learn how to use, "truth" in our language-games, including the "knowing" ones. Same as understand, or learn how to use, knowledge without "knowing" what knowledge is.
Similar question #2 Can we justify justification?
Can we even justify this question?
Noble DustFebruary 03, 2020 at 06:00#3782240 likes
#1 How can one know what truth is, without knowing what truth is in the first place?
Similar question #2 Can we justify justification?
I don't know what exactly truth is but the concept itself applies to propositions: if the propostions reflect states of reality then the propositions are true and if not the propositions are false. I'm probably stating the correspondence theory of truth which I feel has a very wide reach.
As for the notion of justification I think it stems of the simple fact that we can be deceived, either deliberately or otherwise. Imagine our ancestors (sorry but everyone seems to believe in evolution) whose primary concern, apart from scoodlypooping, was to tell predator and prey apart. Consider the scenario that a band of our hunter-gatherer forefathers chance upon an animal they've never encountered. How would they know predator or prey? A good place to start would be size, presence of fangs and claws. These other truths would settle the matter for them: Big, fangs and claws implies predator and if absent, prey.
As you can see any given proposition implies or is implied by some other propositions and so if ever we're in doubt, and that is almost always the case, we need the other truths or falsehoods which either imply or are implied by the proposition under consideration. In other words every proposition appears in a context of other truths and falsehoods and when we assess this background information we can determine truths. This is the nature of justification and it appears to me as quite a natural way of thinking.
#1 How can one know what truth is, without knowing what truth is in the first place?
One way in which it can work, is to (arbitrarily) declare particular basic sentences to be true. Next, all sentences that necessarily follow from these basic sentences are also true, in accordance with the rules of logic that you consider to apply. Therefore, a sentence is logically "true" when it has the same truth status as the basic sentences of the theory created by the basic sentences.
So, yes, agreed. Logical truth is injected from outside the universe-world-model in which it applies.
You seem to be making the assumption of 'naïve reality' whereby the world is pretty much or even exactly as we perceive it. For me this is a naïve assumption, albeit a popular one.
It makes more logical sense to only assume that we have a model of the world.
A Seagull
15 hours ago
You are mistaken. If anything, I am a robust realist.
I am discussing the already existing process by which we attach "true/not true" to an assertion directed towards entities within the world or within a model of the world and at those times when such judgments are needed.
The only value in knowing the world or model of the world may be different than it appears at the time the judgment is needed lay in its usefulness for consoling yourself when you have made the wrong judgment.
It makes more logical sense to only assume that we have a model of the world.
Yes, let us create a model of the world, declare it to be the real, and treat the world as less real than the model of the world. That is not a winning argument.
Accepting that the world in which you find yourself may far more complex than it appears to be does not require you to presume it is a model. It just requires you to accept that the world in which you find yourself may be far more complex than it appears to be.
It makes more logical sense to only assume that we have a model of the world. — A Seagull
Yes, let us create a model of the world, declare it to be the real, and treat the world as less real than the model of the world. That is not a winning argument.
One does not need to declare that a model of the world is 'real', all one needs to do is to realise that the model is all one knows about the world.
If one wants a simple, self-consistent and comprehensive philosophy, then IMO it is not only the best but the only way to go. — A Seagull
'Better/, 'Fruitful' for what? What is it these systems are trying to achieve that you think this approach might make more likely?
What people want from philosophy ( or at least what I want from philosophy) is a simple, self-consistent, accurate and comprehensive system for describing what knowledge is and how it is achieved as this will allow for a more effective and efficient means of interacting with the world; a system that can link all facets of one's experience of the world from the inner to the outer without schisms or discontinuities and without arbitrary assumptions.
One way in which it can work, is to (arbitrarily) declare particular basic sentences to be true. Next, all sentences that necessarily follow from these basic sentences are also true, in accordance with the rules of logic that you consider to apply. Therefore, a sentence is logically "true" when it has the same truth status as the basic sentences of the theory created by the basic sentences
Ok. you can 'declare particular sentences to be 'true'. But what then? What logical process are you going to use to find those sentences that 'necessarily follow from those basic sentences'? Even if you do have such a logical process, those sentences that follow and are declared 'true' are only true within that particular system; ie they rely on the truth of the original basic sentences for their truth.
One does not need to declare that a model of the world is 'real', all one needs to do is to realise that the model is all one knows about the world.
That is just a word game.
I am my world. And within my world is the realization that my world is all I know about the world.
Nothing is to be gained by saying:
I am my model world. And within my model world is my realization that my model world is all I know about the model world.
The best model of the world is the world.
If it helps, you may add the word "model" to the word "world" every time I use the word "world." It would probably be more efficient if you just did it in your head.
Reply to Arne
Perhaps the point to realise is that your model of the world differs from everybody else's and that their is no perfect or 'real' model with which to compare it.
Perhaps the point to realise is that your model of the world differs from everybody else's and that their is no perfect or 'real' model with which to compare it.
I already know that.
But adding the word "model" does not overcome the problem unless everyone knows that "model" is a synonym for "my" (as opposed to yours) and if "model" is a synonym for "my" then we can just use the world "my".
So not only is "model" not going to clarify any confusion regarding differences among or between worlds, it is actually likely to create such confusion in that it connotes replica, copy, facsimile, etc. as if my [model] world were some how less than real. And you may rest assured there are no worlds that are more "real" than mine.
Indeed. But that is not necessarily "as it should be." For Example A Seagull is essentially pushing a correspondence theory of truth that could be fruitful if tweaked.
Propositions (or statements) can be labelled as 'true' when they are considered to be an accurate representation of an idea that the brain/mind has labelled as 'true'.
In terms of correspondence theories of truth, your above statement would be restated as below:
Propositions are true when they CORRESPOND to an idea that is considered true.
It is not my intent to put words in your mouth. Instead, my intent is to simply clarify the "type" of theory of truth you are pushing. And the theory of truth you are pushing clearly is of the type referred to as correspondence. And that is okay. Correspondence theories of truth have been widely accepted since Descartes and continuing to the present.
That I disagree with them does not mean that they are incorrect (though they are).
Propositions are labelled as 'true' when they are an accurate representation of an idea that a person believes.
and
B.
"Propositions are labelled as 'true' when they" [CORRESPOND to] "an idea that a person believes."
Again, my restatement is more concise and adds clarity.
3.
It matters not to me if you prefer wordiness and lack of clarity. I am just trying to help.
Either way, the theory you are pushing is of the type contemporary philosophy refers to as "correspondence." And that is simply correct whether you agree or not.
Ok. you can 'declare particular sentences to be 'true'. But what then? What logical process are you going to use to find those sentences that 'necessarily follow from those basic sentences'?
You can use provability to verify how the truth of new theorems in a theory depends on the assumed truth of the theory's basic sentences.
Even if you do have such a logical process, those sentences that follow and are declared 'true' are only true within that particular system; ie they rely on the truth of the original basic sentences for their truth.
Yes, agreed.
The truth of the original basic sentences must necessarily be supplied from outside such system. Such atomic sentences are assigned truth values disquotationally. When reasoning from first principles, the truth of such first principles is always assumed. From within the system, its basic truths are deemed to be of arbitrary nature.
Propositions (or statements) can be labelled as 'true' when they are considered to be an accurate representation of an idea that the brain/mind has labelled as 'true'.
...and that's just as circular.
creativesoulFebruary 04, 2020 at 02:05#3785270 likes
How can one know what truth is, without knowing what truth is in the first place?
— Monist
You learn what true is by learning about false.
Yup.
It is only after becoming aware that things aren't the way one thought they were(only after becoming aware of being mistaken), that one begins to understand the role that truth/falsity play in all thought, belief, and statements thereof.
It is meaningless to state that a statement 'is true' ( As opposed to having a 'label of true'), except that the statement is part of an explicit axiomatic formal system; and even then it is only true within that axiomatic system.
So is it also meaningless to state that a statement is false?
Or are you in the process of re-inventing the redundancy theory of truth?
No I agree with the redundancy theory of truth, 'truth' is just a label of convenience (as is falsity).
For someone to claim that a statement or proposition is true, it means ''I believe this statement'. if the 'I' is removed from the claim then the claim becomes meaningless.
To the extent truth is taken to mean what really is, devoid of any subjective judgment, it is unknowable. I think Kant clarified that. So, if we have a statement that demands a non-subjective interpretation of an external referent (e.g. "the cat is on the mat"), we cannot know whether that is true. In fact, we can't even fathom what would be required to prove it.
The simple "the cat is on the mat" is true if the cat is on the mat is correct, although it's sort of a useless statement epistemologically, considering we can never know objectively if the cat is on the mat, or even what it would mean to be an objective cat on an objective mat.
It seems only the theologians and the scientists know what truth is. The philosophers don't, mostly because they lack the faith of the theologian and the pragmatism of the scientist.
o the extent truth is taken to mean what really is, devoid of any subjective judgment, it is unknowable. I think Kant clarified that. So, if we have a statement that demands a non-subjective interpretation of an external referent (e.g. "the cat is on the mat"), we cannot know whether that is true. In fact, we can't even fathom what would be required to prove it.
It is extraordinary! The extent that those with a philosophical bent will go to deny themselves the obvious. There is the cat, on the mat, before poor Hanover, and yet he cannot know that the cat is on the mat!
It is extraordinary! The extent that those with a philosophical bent will go to deny themselves the obvious. There is the cat, on the mat, before poor Hanover, and yet he cannot know that the cat is on the mat!
It's delusional.
I didn't claim to be a philosopher, and I'm sure not a scientist, so I must be a theologian. My faith in the cat being on the mat saves me from one form of delusion, but maybe my faith is my highest delusion.
At any rate, your reference to what you know seems to ignore the question at hand, which is what truth is. You have a justified belief I'm sure, but what does it mean to say it is true the cat is on the mat? Does it just mean you have a really good justification for it and you believe it? As has been alluded to in other posts, is the truth element superfluous? If not, what does it mean?
"The cat is on the mat" is true IFF the cat is on the mat.
...
All else is sophistry.
And it's not sophistry to try and claim that "the cat is on the mat" is something epistemically different from the cat is on the mat, simply because of the quotation marks?
The cat is on the mat" is true IFF the cat is on the mat
I acknowledged that. Scroll up and you'll see. But we've said nothing of whether the cat is on the mat. We've only explained what makes a statement true. I'm my world, truth relates to things outside language.
People can still be mistaken, in fact people are often mistaken.
...yes, indeed; so we treat what you said as a reductio, and conclude that your "For someone to claim that a statement or proposition is true, it means ''I believe this statement'" is wrong...
...yes, indeed; so we treat what you said as a reductio, and conclude that your "For someone to claim that a statement or proposition is true, it means ''I believe this statement'" is wrong...
...yes, indeed; so we treat what you said as a reductio, and conclude that your "For someone to claim that a statement or proposition is true, it means ''I believe this statement'" is wrong...
SO we agree that people make mistakes. A mistake is when someone believes something that is not true.
But you had claimed that, that a statement is true means that someone believes it. IF that were so, then it could never be the case that something were believed and yet not true.
Consider "Seagull believes that such-and-such"; According to what you said, this means that such-and-such is true. There could never be a case in which Seagul believes such-and-such, and yet such-and-such is not true.
No. The first statement you just wrote also has six words, the second has six words. They both have six words.
I'm being facetious, I know what you're trying to say really, but I disagree with the fact that it makes any useful claim about truth. As you write it, the two propositions are different, but as soon as it is in the public domain, your unquoted proposition becomes a quote, and it's pointless outside of the public domain, as we both know.
So all you're left with is the proposition - when someone else says "the cat is on the mat" it is true IFF I would say "the cat is on the mat" in the same circumstances.
So all you're left with is the proposition - when someone else says "the cat is on the mat" it is true IFF I would say "the cat is on the mat" in the same circumstances.
...which is to say that when someone else and I say "the cat is on the mat", we mean the same thing.
I'm not offering a substantive theory of truth - quite the opposite. For me the issue in this thread is the error, explicit in Seagull, incipient in Hanover - that truth is much the same as belief. It's the inept move that would take one from your
when someone else says "the cat is on the mat" it is true IFF I would say "the cat is on the mat" in the same circumstances
and make it
when someone else says "the cat is on the mat" it is true IFF I believe "the cat is on the mat" in the same circumstances
...which is to say that when someone else and I say "the cat is on the mat", we mean the same thing.
This, quite nicely, ties in with what Anscombe is saying in Modern Moral Philosophy (or at least, what I think she's saying). When someone else and I say "the cat is on the mat", we mean the same thing, in normal circumstances. There are exceptions, and the full list is not countable (not infinite, just non-countable). It is psychological state, historical conventions around language use that make it the case that you both mean the same thing (in normal circumstances).
So. A more encompassing definition of 'true' is perhaps - statements which are true are those which we are likely to say they are true in normal circumstances.
But in that sense, it is like 'blue' after all. Those things which are blue are exactly those of which we are likely to say they are 'blue' in normal circumstances.
Where this gets us into trouble is it makes it sound like what is 'true' changes as the likely response does, which intuitively seems wrong. "The earth is flat" was never true. But here I think we mistake what it is we're saying. The only two options we can talk about (according to the above) are;
a) what would they at the time be likely to say of such a proposition? Or
b) what would we be likely to say of such a proposition?
To presume the truth has anything to do with (a) is simply to mistake what 'truth' means. 'Slut' used to mean a maid, it doesn't anymore.
So. A more encompassing definition of 'true' is perhaps - statements which are true are those which we are likely to say they are true in normal circumstances.
...and that would be wrong, wouldn't it; because we can be wrong about the things we might say.
There is the cat, on the mat, before poor Hanover, and yet he cannot know that the cat is on the mat!
How do I know the cat is on the mat? Poor Hanover cannot know. What element of JTB am I missing? I have a justification because I see it, and I believe what I see. But is the cat there? All you've said is that the cat is there if it's there. That was really helpful.
What the hell is the cat and the mat we're speaking of? We've already figured out it's something independent of you, or at least that's what you've said.
The OP, to remind ourselves, asks what Truth is. When I speak of the cat, and all it's wonderful characteristics, which are true and which are not? It's a metaphysical question ultimately, but I'll agree with that it is whatever it is, which is another way of saying "The cat is on the mat" iff the cat is on the mat.
Reply to Banno I get that metaphysics is different from epistemology, but epistemology relies upon metaphysics because the T in the JTB is a direct link to what is.
So, yes, "the cat is on the mat" iff the cat is on the mat, but it's a pretty useless statement if you don't know whether the cat is on the mat.
Anyway, you pitied me for not knowing the cat was on the mat:
There is the cat, on the mat, before poor Hanover, and yet he cannot know that the cat is on the mat!
I guess I now pity you. Do you know that that the cat is on the mat, or do you just know that the proposition "the cat is on the mat" has a positive truth value if the the cat is on the mat?
I guess I now pity you. Do you know that that the cat is on the mat, or do you just know that the proposition "the cat is on the mat" has a positive truth value if the the cat is on the mat?
SO we agree that people make mistakes. A mistake is when someone believes something that is not true.
But you had claimed that, that a statement is true means that someone believes it. IF that were so, then it could never be the case that something were believed and yet not true.
I think you misundertsood @A Seagull. ( It's easy to do: I've misunderstood many seagulls!).
A Seagull did not say that for some proposition to be true is for someone to believe it, but that when someone says some proposition is true, what they really mean to say is that they believe it. There's a difference that makes a difference there...
I guess I now pity you. Do you know that that the cat is on the mat, or do you just know that the proposition "the cat is on the mat" has a positive truth value if the the cat is on the mat?
Hanover cracked an apophat!
(But Banno's probably too tight and dry to receive it!)
I just don't understand this. I thought "He's on the chair" iff he's on the chair, but you seem to be using some other method for determining that he's on the chair.
I think I know what "he's on the chair means" when it has quotes on it. What does it mean to be on the chair without quotes? Is that a reference to metaphysical reality?
How can I know the truth of whether the cat is on the mat if I don't know what a cat is?
But things are not true or false because they are justified or unjustified...
I didn't say they were, I'm only asking how you would justify such a theory of truth. You said a proposition is 'true' IIF {that proposition}, "A" is true IFF A. So you've provided me with a proposition about what truth is, "T". In orer for it to be true then T has to be the case. How do we go about finding out is T is the case. With "the cat is on the mat" we look at the mat and see if there's a cat on . If the there is, the the cat is on the mat so "the cat is on the mat " is true.
You said (note the additional quotation marks) ""the cat is on the mat" is true IFF the cat is on the mat", now what do I look at to see if {"the cat is on the mat" is true IFF the cat is on the mat}?
So... one never asserts a proposition that is false?
I never said anything about "one" asserting it. I said "we" assert it. We collectively never assert a proposition which is false, how could we? I suppose we could have some kind of global agreement to all lie at the same time about something - on the stroke of midnight we're all going to say that the earth is flat - something like that. But we'd all know we were lying.
Again, you confuse his being on the chair with you being able to tell, to know, to believe that he is on the chair.
And you confuse the fact that I'm not confused.
Knowledge requires truth. Your assertion that your cat is on the chair asserts it is true the cat is on the chair. What does that mean?
You've got to define your entire sentence, not just the part you decide to put into quotes. "The cat is on the mat" iff the cat is on the mat. X iff Y. What is Y?
Or it's just you enjoy evasiveness and get some rise out of not being open to actual discussion because you think your position so obvious and correct that it's beneath you to have to explain it. That's at least as it seems.
bongo furyFebruary 06, 2020 at 18:50#3794820 likes
You propose that if we let the beast semantics on our land at all, we shackle it with the T-schema? Allow, if we must, theoretical talk of linguistic entities and their semantic relations with cats and mats, but be prepared to exchange it for talk about only the cats and mats, as in proper science?
Fine if so, but mustn't you then stay out of arguments about kinds of assertion and belief, and how we learn to recognise them?
?Banno I get that metaphysics is different from epistemology, but epistemology relies upon metaphysics because the T in the JTB is a direct link to what is.
Yes and that is the rub. Metaphysics is beyond epistemology and hence is beyond knowledge which means it is indistinguishable from fantasy. The T of JTB is cannot be directly linked to 'what is' , it is based on naïve reality, in other words it is a fantasy. All one knows is what can be derived from epistemology.
Or it's just you enjoy evasiveness and get some rise out of not being open to actual discussion because you think your position so obvious and correct that it's beneath you to have to explain it. That's at least as it seems.
Pretty much.
Two distinct questions: what is truth? What do we know?
The answer to the first question: "p" is true IFF p. And that is all there is to say on it, apart from some psychological footnotes on performatives.
The answer to the second question: we know all sorts of different things, from how to ride bikes thru how to multiply numbers to where you left your keys.
The supposed bit in between, the philosophical musings about justified true beliefs, is a philosophical quagmire, a bottle trap for blow flies.
SO I've provided the answer to "when is it true that the cat is on the mat". You are now asking the quite different question: how do I know that the cat is on the mat? And the answer to that question is multifarious and subject to change. Because I can see him; because WIfe told me so; because he was there when last I looked.
Yes and that is the rub. Metaphysics is beyond epistemology and hence is beyond knowledge which means it is indistinguishable from fantasy. The T of JTB is cannot be directly linked to 'what is' , it is based on naïve reality, in other words it is a fantasy. All one knows is what can be derived from epistemology.
Here's a fine fly-bottle. A Seagull who writes eloquently, yet without knowing.
I put it to you that you know plenty of cool stuff, but philosophy tells you otherwise. Drop the philosophy.
Twas once commonly asserted that the sun is the centre of the cosmos.
Yes, but not by us, nit by the ones for whom "the sun is the centre of the cosmos" is false. We would never say that (and mean it), and it is us for whom it is false (now or then).
Well... it's simpler than any other? I don't see any substance in your reply.
"The cat is on the mat" is true iff the cat is on the mat, right? That remains contingent, we can't say if the statement "the cat is on the mat" is true or not, only the circumstances under which it is true - the cat is on the mat. "A" is true IFF A.
So now take your statement "" the cat is on the mat" is true IFF the cat is on the mat". That statement (the whole thing in the quotation marks, with another statement referenced inside it), we'll call it "B". At the moment, it's not actually the case, it's only contingent. It's contingent on B - "the cat is on the mat" is true IFF the cat is on the mat.
So all you've offered is something which could be the case. I'm asking how we establish if it is.
With "the cat is on the mat" we just look at the mat and see if there's a cat on it. What do we do with your statement B to see if it is, in fact, the case?
The JTB account is described as so much farting, in the last few lines of the Theaetetus account from whence it came.
I think it better to treat knowledge as a family resemblance word; what we know must be true, must be believed; but what is to count as a justification cannot be set out in an algorithm. Hence no general account of knowledge can be complete.
Which should not be a surprise. One cannot know everything.
Yes, but not by us, nit by the ones for whom "the sun is the centre of the cosmos" is false. We would never say that (and mean it), and it is us for whom it is false (now or then).
IT was false for them, too. They were what We In The Trade call wrong.
Two distinct questions: what is truth? What do we know?
The answer to the first question: "p" is true IFF p. And that is all there is to say on it, apart from some psychological footnotes on performatives.
The answer to the second question: we know all sorts of different things, from how to ride bikes thru how to multiply numbers to where you left your keys.
The supposed bit in between, the philosophical musings about justified true beliefs, is a philosophical quagmire, a bottle trap for blow flies.
SO I've provided the answer to "when is it true that the cat is on the mat". You are now asking the quite different question: how do I know that the cat is on the mat? And the answer to that question is multifarious and subject to change. Because I can see him; because WIfe told me so; because he was there when last I looked.
All I'm doing here is pointing out that "how de we know that the cat is on the mat?" and "How do we know that 'the cat is on the mat' is true?" are pretty much the same question.
IT was false for them, too. They were what We In The Trade call wrong.
We would say it was false for them, they wouldn't. Its what "we in the trade" call wrong, not what "they at the time" call wrong. Note, I'm not going for relativism here, I'm a solid redundancy theorist (Ramsey variety) when it comes to truth. I'm just interested in the epistemic implications. You can't have your cake and eat it here. If the statement "the cat is on the mat" is only contingently 'true' (upon whether the cat is indeed on the mat) then the statement ""A" is true IFF A" is itself only contingently true (upon it being the case that "A" is true if A). You've only done half the job of making your case.
So the second half shows your statement to actually be true (not just true IFF). It's the looking for the cat. Ramsey would say "the cat is on the mat" is true if when we look at the mat we see the cat there. The addition of the behaviour consistent with the state of affairs is important because it encompasses what we're doing with the term 'true'. It's why the Tarskian version alone is unsatisfying.
?A Seagull Doubtless; I have honours and a masters, and have been studying philosophy for over forty years.
But I could lean some more.
So, educate me.
I am not here to educate people.
I would only say that there is a distinct distinction between history of philosophy, which is the main focus of universities, and philosophy itself. The distinction is similar to that of actually climbing mountains and reading accounts of people who have climbed mountains.
Philosophy is necessarily based upon assumptions, a good philosophy will identify those assumptions, a poor one will just leave them as implicit.
Including:
Fantasies are real?
Logic of language is irrefutable?
Everything Kant wrote is true?
Philosophy as taught at universities is true?
People are born into sin?
Life is a misery?
So we have "A" is true IFF A" iff "A" is true IFF A"
You're missing the quotations marks (the issue which I stated with. I probably should be putting this in some sort of notation which will make it clearer, but I don't know how to use it so I'll just end up making matter's worse. I'll try one more time with.
1. "The cat is on the mat" is true iff the cat is on the mat. -> "A" (in quotation marks) is true iff A (no quotation marks. That much is what you've stated, is that right?
2. The second A can be replaced with some justificatory action - procedure X - so "the cat is on the mat" is true iff procedure X produces the expected results (we go to pick up the cat and it is indeed there)
3. The problem with this as a truth theory is that procedure X is not the same for all propositions. It's a 'family resemblance' type collection of procedures. The procedure for verifying that the cat is on the mat might be to look, ask someone, feel for it etc.
4. Ramsey gets round this by unifying all types of procedure, adding a pinch of watered-down Cambridge Pragmatism, by saying they'll all some version of 'act as if A was true, and if everything works, then A is true' - Ramsey avoids 'true', he uses 'is the case'.
5. Now you have a proposition which you'd like us to consider is the case - that proposition is that {""the cat is on the mat" is true iff the cat is on the mat"}. The whole proposition is the one contained in the curly braces, I've put quotation marks around the whole thing (they're double at the beginning because the proposition starts with reference to another proposition). We'll call your proposition B (the whole thing - all that is contained in the curly braces. "B" is true iff B, right?
6. So you've given us the conditions under which your proposition would be the case - {""the cat is on the mat" is true iff the cat is on the mat"} would itself, as a whole proposition, be true iff were the case that "the cat is on the mat" is true iff the cat is on the mat.
7. Now, recall the collection of acceptable verification procedures to establish if the cat was indeed on the mat - look, ask someone, feel for it etc.
8. Now replace 'the cat is on the mat' in all propositions above with 'the earth is flat' and work backwards, imagining you're 1000 years ago
First we verify if the earth is indeed flat - we look, we ask others, we feel it - yep the earth is indeed flat. Then we check your second proposition - the one about when a proposition is true. It says that {""the earth is flat" is true iff the earth is flat"}. Now we can check that too, against language use. Just like we checked the first proposition (about the shape of the earth). That too seems to be the case (1000 years ago) people are indeed using the word 'true' about the proposition "the earth is flat" in cases where (according to their verification procedures) the earth is flat. All good...
...Until you want to say those people were wrong. What they said was untrue. They didn't do the verification procedure as well as we can now, they made a mistake. Fine. But what about your proposition (the one about when propositions are true). Well, our 1000 year old scholar doesn't seem to have made any error there. People were indeed using the word 'true' about the proposition "the earth is flat" on the basis that their verification procedures showed the earth to be flat. After all, your proposition was not {""the cat is on the mat is true iff (all verification procedures ever invented show that) the cat is on the mat"}.
But when you say they were wrong, "it not only isn't true, but it wasn't 'true' that the earth is flat", you're missing a verification procedure for proposition (the equivalent of checking to see if the cat is on the mat), because if we use the procedure [check to see if people are using the word 'true' about "the earth is flat" iff the earth is flat], then we get a sound "No". If we ignore their verification procedures, but use ours instead, then people are using the word 'true' about the proposition "the earth is flat" in cases when the earth isn't flat. So what now? Were they all using the word wrongly? Are we saying the entire community of language users 1000 years ago did not know the meaning of the word 'true'?
The second A can be replaced with some justificatory action - procedure X - so "the cat is on the mat" is true iff procedure X produces the expected results (we go to pick up the cat and it is indeed there)
But that's not right.
At the best you could claim a procedure was needed to justify belief in A.
But the error here has you replacing redundancy with verification, and hence heading off down some garden path.
IvoryBlackBishopFebruary 07, 2020 at 23:20#3799620 likes
It seems to me that very few people have a serious vested interest in critically studying or examining such a thing to begin with, as opposed to mindlessly regurgitating media propaganda marketed to the 6th grade reading level, in the worst cases outright known that it is nonsense or contradictory and simply not caring, in many cases merely using outdated and archaic "system 1" thinking, as documented by experts such as Philip Tetlock to filter out the truth or inconventient details, not because it is "true" in any ultimate or axiomatic sense, but simply because it is "convenient" and provides a means of structure or consistenty to life, in regards to what to filter in and what to filter out, without ever bother to second guess or double check whether or not the axiom or judgment was ever or even 'correct' to begin with.
Right. We're probably approaching this problem differently then. I'm quite a strong "meaning is use" person. I gathered from some of your previous posts that you were too - but that may have just been an poor summary.
To me, if someone asks "what is truth?" the only coherent answer to that is the answer to "what do we use the word 'truth' for, what circumstances is it useful in?"
So "the cat is in the mat is 'true' IFF...?" just means "what circumstances do people say, of "the cat is on the mat", that it is true, and what are they trying to get done by using the word.
In the case of 'true' those circumstances always involve verification of some sort.
Person A "The cat is on the roof"- Person B goes out to check.
Person B "the cat is on the roof, it's true"
Person A "is it true, today's your birthday?"
Person B (checks his calendar and personal memory) "yes"
Person A "is all the evidence given here true?"
Person B (checks, corroborates, asks experts) "yes , all the evidence given here is true"
etc...
You trying to claim that what is 'true' (even for the people at the time) is what we currently think is the case is just not how 'true' is used. If you're not defining 'true' by how it is used, then I'm not interested in going any further because I don't hold with trying to define what things should mean, only what they do mean.
Play with it a bit, and you may find that T-sentences exactly capture what you are saying here.
OK. I have had a look at T-sentence stuff before and couldn't make the jump from formal languages to real languages, but I'm prepared give it another try, I've got a few papers on Tarski, I'll give them another look through and see if I can see what you're seeing.
If the existence of a verification procedure or justification for a statement was necessary for a statement's truth, "There are dinosaurs" would be false before the advent of humanity because there would be no verification procedures or justifications.
If a particular verification procedure or justification was sufficient for a statement's truth, then in order to avoid true falsehoods and false truths, this verification procedure or justification must be infallible; as in this model, X being verified or justified forces "X" is true.
So long as justification and verification are fallible, and there are truths prior to the advent of humanity, justification and verification are logically independent (in the sense of not formally entailing anything about) of statement truth value.
If belief in a statement was necessary for a statement's truth, then "There are dinosaurs" would be false before the advent of humanity because there would be no beliefs in statements (since it is not believed, and belief is necessary for truth, then it is false).
If belief in a statement was sufficient for a statement's truth, then in order to avoid true falsehoods or false truths, this belief must be infallible; as in this model, X being believed forces "X" is true.
So long as belief is fallible, and there are no beliefs in statements prior to the advent of humanity, belief in statements and their truth are logically independent.
What we can say is true is not what is true! Though what we say is true is largely what seems true to us or what can be asserted with adequate justification.
Are there still relationships between justifications/verifications procedures, beliefs and truths? Ideally, a justification or verification procedure connects a truth evidentially and conceptually to a belief. An inquiry may cause us to question, reevaluate and re-contextualise held beliefs to better connect our beliefs to the truth and to dispel false statements and connections.
Epistemology (of statements/declarative knowledge) dwells in the rupture between belief and truth, trying to analyse the bridges we build between them.
the existence of a verification procedure or justification for a statement was necessary for a statement's truth, "There are dinosaurs" would be false before the advent of humanity because there would be no verification procedures or justifications.
We tend to assume that there were no utterances prior to the advent of humanity, so no "P"'s.
Or we could look at propositions as eternal content distinct from utterances, which is how most people think of it (if they do think if it), but that seems too Platonic to some.
"There are dinosaurs" would be false before the advent of humanity because there would be no verification procedures or justifications.
There'd be no one to say anything of "there are dinosaurs", so I don't think it would be false. It just wouldn't be labelled either way.
To say "the cat is on the mat" is true IFF the cat is on the mat makes 'true' something which acts like a property of propositions. But if you want it to have an opposite, then it acts like a set, the membership of which is according to some 'family resemblance' type of criteria, much like Wittgenstein's 'game', or at least, that's how I understand it at the moment.
So to answer the "what are games?" we answer the question which activities are 'games'? You have to defer to convention "cards is usually called a game, football is... Carpentry isn't...". You could try to summarise a few common features, and that would be very useful (despite the inevitable loss of accuracy).
I see it exactly the same answering the question "what is truth". There's no better answer than to list all of the propositions which are considered members of the set 'truth'. Like with 'games' though, we can provide a useful (if slightly less accurate) summary. "Propositions which, when treated as though they were the case, work as expected" would be one such non-exhaustive, but pragmatic summary.
What I can't get to is some definition of truth which holds outside of convention. It's just a word after all, no magic force.
So when we say "the earth is flat" was not true, even for the people 1000years ago, we're saying that their category {true propositions} did not contain "the earth is flat". But it almost certainly did.
If we we take the opposite view, that their category {true propositions} did contain "the earth is flat", but they were wrong to put it there, then we're saying that language comes before the people using it. That it's not the case that a culture evolves some use of a word, but rather the categories are all pre-ordained somehow, and there's a right and wrong about what goes in them.
This is why Ramsey ends up analysing beliefs, not truths. 'True' can only (like any other word) be understood in terms of what people do with it, which a) requires people, and b) requires beliefs about the objects/actions being referred to by it.
Having said all that, I will re-read Tarski, as advised and try to take on board what you've said whilst doing so. Maybe I can get a better perspective on this.
There'd be no one to say anything of "there are dinosaurs", so I don't think it would be false. It just wouldn't be labelled either way.
I am pretty sure it would be false if the logic has excluded middle.
(There is someone that believes that P) necessitates (P is true)
is equivalent to
(P is true) entails (There is someone that believes that P)
is equivalent to
(not (There is someone that believes that P)) entails (not (P is true))
When there is no one that believes that P, the last implication allows us to derive (not (P is true)).
Then with excluded middle for all P (P or not P) you get:
P is false.
So "there are dinosaurs" would be false. It'd also be false that "There was plantlife prior to the advent of people capable of belief" until people capable of belief came about, despite everything indicating otherwise.
I am pretty sure it would be false if the logic has excluded middle.
Yeah, I trust your logic. I obviously can't accept the excluded middle though, following any language-based analysis of 'true' and 'false'. Not(true) is just not(true), false is something else.
"Mozart is a better composer than Beethoven" us not(true), but it's not(false) either.
So "there are dinosaurs" at the beginning of the earth would be like "Mozart is a better composer than Beethoven", neither true nor false (at the time) because they'd be no language community (at that time) using the terms 'true' and 'false' from which to derive their meaning.
The rate at which truth can be injected is too harsh and can lead to this confusion"There are dinosaurs' - is true. It's true. Truth of the matter suggests.
"It's true" can be used in any statement.
Yes, it's true there were dinosaurs, but that's only I because you're highlighting it's truth value.
Play with it a bit, and you may find that T-sentences exactly capture what you are saying here.
I'm not getting anything out of the Tarski I'm reading, I'm afraid. All I'm coming across is that chasm between formal languages that Tarski was talking about and the semantically closed natural languages. He even says that
"A thorough analysis of the meaning current in everyday life of the term ‘true’ is not intended here"
And he seems, if anything, to agree with my analysis of the natural language meaning of 'true' being something of an incompletely definable set {things which are true}
"We should reconcile ourselves with the fact that we are confronted, not with one concept, but with several different concepts which are denoted by one word"
Is there something else you think I'd benefit from reading to better understand how you're crossing that chasm? More Davidson perhaps (I ask, teeth clenched!)?
creativesoulFebruary 08, 2020 at 19:17#3802600 likes
"We should reconcile ourselves with the fact that we are confronted, not with one concept, but with several different concepts which are denoted by one word"
Indeed. My only reply here thus far, prior to this one, began exactly on that focus...
Substitution practices clarify the differences. It's good for determining which is more primary/foundational; which is existentially dependent upon which.
creativesoulFebruary 08, 2020 at 19:21#3802610 likes
Truth(as reality or correspondence to what's happened/happening) is not existentially dependent upon language. All conceptions of "truth" are.
creativesoulFebruary 08, 2020 at 19:29#3802680 likes
Tarski focuses upon "is true" or as it's sometimes described "truth as a predicate". The problem with Tarski is that "is true" is not equivalent to truth. It(Convention T) is a perfect semantic rendering of "is true" though.
Maybe it's the remnants of it. But it's the reason some people claim string theory doesn't qualify as science: because it can't presently be verified. I'll see if I can find it.
Reply to Banno It's a debate between realists and anti-realists. Dummett:
1. The meaning of a sentence consists in its truth conditions. To understand a sentence is to know the conditions in which it is true; such knowledge explains understanding.
2. The notion of truth required by realism is one that may apply to sentences independently of our ability to recognize it as applying.
3. If truth is understood in the manner required by realism, it will be impossible to explain what it means for a speaker to know the truth conditions of unverifiable sentences.
4. Because of this, the realist theory of meaning fails.
5. Since (1) is correct, the verification-transcendent conception of truth required by realism must be rejected in favor of a verificationist conception.
Reply to frank so, put the cup in the cupboard. We can’t see it, we can’t verify that it is true that the cup is in the cupboard.
But I say that it can still be true that the cup is in the cupboard, and further that it will be true that the cup is in the cupboard if the truth condition that the cup is in the cupboard holds.
And finally, this level of analysis is just weird.
So long as justification and verification are fallible, and there are truths prior to the advent of humanity, justification and verification are logically independent (in the sense of not formally entailing anything about) of statement truth value.
If truth is a property of statements, and there were no statements prior to the advent of humanity, how could there have been truths prior to the advent of humanity?
put the cup in the cupboard. We can’t see it, we can’t verify that it is true that the cup is in the cupboard. — Banno
It's verifiable in principle. Just open the door.
You didn't believe that meaning is truth conditions anyway, did you? You're more meaning-is-use.
A believes that there is a cup in the cupboard. He/she opens the door and realises that he/she was mistaken.
What is so hard about that? Why complicate things by bringing in all this talk about 'truth'?
What you have shown here is that sometimes folk use "that's true" for "I agree with you".
And sometimes for "that has been checked by methods we both approve of", and sometimes for "I really, really believe that", and sometimes for "I really, really want you to believe that"...But never, in my experience, for "that is what people in the future will come to think when science has advanced sufficiently far". As I said
You trying to claim that what is 'true' (even for the people at the time) is what we currently think is the case is just not how 'true' is used. If you're not defining 'true' by how it is used, then I'm not interested in going any further because I don't hold with trying to define what things should mean, only what they do mean.
bongo furyFebruary 09, 2020 at 13:52#3806290 likes
sometimes folk use "that's true" for "I agree with you".
— Banno
...But never, in my experience, for "that is what people in the future will come to think when science has advanced sufficiently far".
Isn't that exactly how you use it when you speculate (with or without committing) as to the relative merits of competing (and perhaps currently unfalsifiable) theories?
If you're not defining 'true' by how it is used, then I'm not interested in going any further because I don't hold with trying to define what things should mean, only what they do mean.
Perhaps Banno and Davidson are saying that any term (including 'true' and 'mean') means only what it should mean, and/or what it will eventually mean (when science has advanced sufficiently far)?
Ok, I don't fancy the odds that Banno will agree to that. But I'm always surprised when anyone takes "what they do mean" to be a matter of fact. So I hope someone would question that.
Isn't that exactly how you use it when you speculate (with or without committing) as to the relative merits of competing (and perhaps currently unfalsified) theories?
I don't think anyone would use 'true' in that situation. 'Likely' maybe, or 'possible'. Either way, I'm not ruling out niche cases, only aiming at a summary of normal use.
I'm always surprised when anyone takes "what they do mean" to be a matter of fact.
Being interested in the question and presuming the answer is a matter of fact are not the same thing. I think we can say it's a matter of fact that 'game' does not mean [small bag for keeping a wallet in]. We can discover this 'fact' empirically. That doesn't mean we now know everything 'game' does mean, but our investigation has certainly given us something useful about the word. We can continue this way with any unfamiliar or troubling word in the hope that situations describing its normal use can help dissolve problems associated with its abnormal use.
so that’s a planet we would see if we went there. Same as a cup we would see if we opened the cupboard.
It's a planet we can't in principle know about, in the past or during the heat death of the universe where it's expanded to the point that it's impossible to travel there. Or it's cloaked by the Romulans.
The point is: we can't observe it, so we cant know about it. Dummett isnt saying planets are dependent on observers, he's questioning the meaningfulness of talking about what we cant know.
This is a cool summation of why we might relate meaning to truth conditions:
But it's the reason some people claim string theory doesn't qualify as science: because it can't presently be verified.
— frank
I thinks it's rejected because it is thought that it cannot be verified (or falsified) in principle,as opposed to merely "presently".
O'Dowd of PBS Spacetime says we might develop a way to test it in a thousand years or so. He emphasizes that the universe is not obligated to make all of its aspects observable to us. I'm in no position to judge it for myself.
Reply to frank If it could be tested in principle then it could be true or false. Those who say string theory is not even wrong are claiming, whether rightly or not, that it is not testable in principle. A statement or theory which is not testable in principle would be deemed to be inconsistent with the common notion of truth.
Does this mean the statement must be incoherent? I don't know, but (as far as my limited knowledge of it goes) I don't think string theory is incoherent. If that's right does that mean it is testable in principle? How would we know if something is testable in principle, anyway? Would or should it be deemed to be untestable in principle, just because we cannot presently imagine any possible way it could be tested?
IvoryBlackBishopFebruary 09, 2020 at 21:22#3807450 likes
Reply to Janus
?frank If it could be tested in principle then it could be true or false. Those who say string theory is not even wrong are claiming, whether rightly or not, that it is not testable in principle. A statement or theory which is not testable in principle would be deemed to be inconsistent with the common notion of truth.
That's based on a particular system or methodology of testing, invented from pure mathematics, based on axioms and particular standards and methods of testing (e.x. induction), when of course the defintions of testing themselves can be changed or redefined, much as how Bacon's method defined them to begin with.
So in practice, when hear this argument, it generally strikes me as blind faith (rather than experience) in a particular system, or institution of testing and testability, however the prime truths or axioms upon which said system was mathematically built upon to begin with are held to be absolute, at least as in regards to the scope or proceedures of the method itself, in a way which is completely independent from testing.
(Since the prime truth or axiom that Bacon's 17th century method based on induction is how things should be tested to begin with, is not in itself testable but merely held either to be knowable a priori, or based on an argument from authority on behalf of Bacon's wisdom, or that of those who practice his method).
The way 'truth' is most commonly used is simply that it consists in what says how things really are.
Well that can't possibly be the case because otherwise we'd never use it. We don't know how things really are, we only know how we believe them to be, so 'true' would correspond with our beliefs, not the world.
Reply to Isaac People may justifiably think they know the way things really are. This is not problematic when it comes to everyday observable matters; whether it is raining, whether Paris is the capital of France, whether someone owes you money, whether cars commonly are powered by internal combustion and so on for countless details about the world of everyday common experience.
The skeptical concern that we may not know how things "REALLY" are is based on the assumption that things really are some way, and this doesn't at all change the fact that truth, whatever it might be, whether known by us or not, is thought to accord with the way things really are.
this doesn't at all change the fact that truth, whatever it might be, whether known by us or not, is thought to accord with the way things really are.
'Truth', in the sense you're referring to it here, is a category in which we place certain propositions and from which we reject others. To say ""Paris is the capital of France" is true", is to say that the proposition "Paris is the capital of France" belongs in that category {propositions which are true}. Philosophically, I'm happywwith the deflationary position, the "is true" bit adds nothing ontologically. But as a linguistic expression, the above categorisation is what it's mostly doing. It's how we can use it even circumventing deflation in "everything he just said was true".
But in order to use a category, we must know what the criteria for membership are. If the criteria for membership were {things which really are true} then we should not be able to put anything in that category. At best it can be {things we're happy to assume are the case}. It can only ever be about belief/judgement because that's all we have, we cannot check with some higher authority.
Nor can we appeal, in claiming truth of our proposition "P" to an accord with the fact that P, because to say it is a fact that P is just to assert P.
I really don't understand whysso much mental effort is put into this convoluted project of trying to rescue the divinity of the term 'true' from the clutches of the evils of justified beliefs. Some leftover of religious certainty our secular culture is still trying to fill, I think.
But in order to use a category, we must know what the criteria for membership are. If the criteria for membership were {things which really are true} then we should not be able to put anything in that category. At best it can be {things we're happy to assume are the case}. It can only ever be about belief/judgement because that's all we have, we cannot check with some higher authority.
I think it's not a matter of knowing which things can be put in the category "true", but of defining what criteria justify anything being in that category. So, the common logic is "accordance with actuality". As I said before; in countless ordinary cases we know what accords with actuality as long as we don't try to introduce some radical (and mostly inappropriate) skepticism as to what "really" constitutes actuality.
In other cases, for example, propositions about the nature of distant galaxies which we cannot observe at all because they are beyond the "light horizon", we can say that there would be actualities about which true or false statements could be made if only we were there to observe them.
I really don't understand whysso much mental effort is put into this convoluted project of trying to rescue the divinity of the term 'true' from the clutches of the evils of justified beliefs. Some leftover of religious certainty our secular culture is still trying to fill, I think.
I think the reason is that it is important to acknowledge that there are actualities which are independent of human opinion. In some sense truth just is actuality. But we think of actuality as different to truth in the sense that truth consists in what can rightly be said about actuality.
The inherent logic of this doesn't change even if it is accepted that there must be actualities about which we cannot say anything at all.
I think the reason is that it is important to acknowledge that there are actualities which are independent of human opinion. In some sense truth just is actuality. But we think of actuality as different to truth in the sense that truth consists in what can rightly be said about actuality.
Important or not, it simply cannot be done and, especially in philosophy, I'm just not seeing the merit in being inaccurate for the sake of...what, exactly?
When we say a proposition is 'true' we are saying that we believe it accords with reality. It is a statement about our judgement, not about the world. "the cat is on the mat" is a statement about the world. ""The cat is on the mat" is true", is a statement about how I feel about the statement "the cat is on the mat". I don't see how anyone can deny this is what's happening - "...is true" means "I believe it".
The objection that people can be wrong about what is true ""the earth is flat" is true", is no more troubling than that people can say " discos are fun". They're wrong, discos are not fun - except they are fun for them.
Now you can argue that 'fun' is subjective, but what evidence would you bring to bear to prove that? That people disagree about what's fun? Well they disagree about what's true too. That fun describes a state of mind? Well believing a statement to be true also describes a state of mind.
As Ramsey said "it is‘immediately obvious that if we have analysed judgment we have solved the problem of truth"
I get that a distinction is useful between those things only a few crackpots believe and those things which the vast majority of well-educated people believe. I'm perfectly happy that in general colloquial use 'true' is used to make that distinction . Here 'true' is used to mean "this proposition has a good standard of justification". I'm fine with that, but...
If we reject scepticism about actuality, then that might well serve the interests of philosophers who want to get get on with the business of telling people what's what, but it doesn't very well serve the interests of psychology or neuroscience. You may think that...
in countless ordinary cases we know what accords with actuality
... but you really don't. I could set up a situation in the space of a couple of hours wherein you'd be convinced the cat was on the mat when in fact there was no cat. Suggestion, priming, false memory creation...Give me a few years and I could have you seeing cats everywhere. The point is, this is not because of some psychological trick I could play on top of, or masking, your normal accurate methods of recognising reality, It's because your normal methods of recognising reality do all this fabrication anyway. You really don't see a cat (as in pick up all the light waves reflected from the shape of the object). You make up that a cat is probably there from a few sketchy outlines and a lot of prior expectation and then you don't even bother checking unless something gives you reason to. That is - by the best science we currently have - actually how your perception works.
Now that being the case, what are the psychologist and the neuroscientist supposed to do with a definition assuming what we perceive accords with what is actually the case? If we reject scepticism, how are we supposed to talk about the state of affairs scientific investigation of the brain is revealing to us?
You make up that a cat is probably there from a few sketchy outlines and a lot of prior expectation and then you don't even bother checking unless something gives you reason to. That is - by the best science we currently have - actually how your perception works.
IMO the only way that it can be logically inferred that a 'cat is on a 'mat' is from a boot strap process of pattern identification from sense data. I discuss this in some detail in my book 'The Pattern Paradigm'.
When we say a proposition is 'true' we are saying that we believe it accords with reality. It is a statement about our judgement, not about the world.
No, when we say a proposition is true we are saying that it accords with reality, not merely that we believe it accords with reality. If I say that it is true that Donald Trump is POTUS, I am not saying (only) that I believe that Donald Trump is POTUS, but that Donald Trump is POTUS. You are conflating belief with actuality.
It doesn't matter that I might not know what the actuality is. When I make a statement about what is true, my intention is to say what is true, not merely to say what I believe is true. On a "meta-level" what I am saying may be merely an expression of my belief (it also may happen to be an expression of the truth, even if I can never be certain that it is). But that "meta-caveat" is not the same thing as the logic that is inherent in the intention underlying truth-statements. You are conflating the two.
It doesn't matter that I might not know what the actuality is. When I make a statement about what is true, my intention is to say what is true, not merely to say what I believe is true.
But then you are entering a world of fiction, fantasy.
Reply to Janus Because if you choose to believe something for which there is no rationality, then you leave the rational world and enter a fantasy world.
And there is no rationality that can show how any statement can have a direct correspondence to the 'world of actuality'.
Reply to A Seagull I haven't said anything about "showing how any statement can have a dierct correspondence to the world of actuality"; whatever "showing" in such a context could even mean or consist in!
I've said that the way we commonly talk and think about truth presupposes an actuality that our statements are either in accordance with or not. That accordance or lack of accordance just is what we mean by truth and falsity respectively. The logic of accordance is the logic of the relationship between truth and actuality, between propositions or statements and things and events, as we commonly understand it.
The point is that it can't be justified or "shown" from some position outside it, some "god's eye" view, but only from within the logic and facts of everyday practice. In fact it's not a matter of justification at all, as I see it; if you start thinking in those terms, you have already gone astray.
And there is no rationality that can show how any statement can have a direct correspondence to the 'world of actuality'.
It's pretty easy to show how "Donald Trump is POTUS" is true, though. If I said instead, "Alien life exists out there.", then your criticism would apply, as we don't have any way of justifying that statement, so we don't know the truth of the matter.
Now if I knew you were guessing that about the president of the US, but didn't really know, then it would be a matter of belief.
Reply to Marchesk
It is the interpretation of the statement (as opposed to the statement itself) and its correspondence to one's model of the world that enables it to be labelled as true.
The statement itself consists of a string of alphanumeric characters and has no direct correspondence to the world except through its interpretation.
Reply to Janus
You are referring to the common or normative usage of the word 'true', in which case I would agree with you. But it is IMO a naive usage. It works fine for most people, but on closer examination for philosophy, it is plain that one only knows a model of the world rather than the 'actuality of reality'.
It is akin to whether one believes the Sun goes around the Earth or not. For most people the idea that the Sun goes around the Earth works fine (or at least it did in the past) but on closer examination for the purposes of astronomy one learns that that model is ineffective.
You are referring to the common or normative usage of the word 'true', in which case I would agree with you. But it is IMO a naive usage. It works fine for most people, but on closer examination for philosophy, it is plain that one only knows a model of the world rather than the 'actuality of reality'.
The idea, though, is that there is an actuality which we could, in principle, experience and know more comprehensively, that what we now experience and know is not exhaustive. It's an entirely different idea that there is an actuality or an aspect of actuality (the "ding an sich", for example) that we could never in principle, experience and know.
We know what we perceive, but we cannot hold what we perceive up for comparison against some purported thing we cannot, in principle, perceive. The very idea of something we cannot in principle perceive is incoherent. How could such an idea itself reflect reality?
The idea reflects itself in the imagination the way poetry works
"As something factical [real, factual], the understanding self-projection of Being is always already together with a discovered world." Heidegger
Yet how can you be together with what you are? Welcome to modern philosophy my friends, a beautiful garden. When Hegel says the world is thought, he in no ways means it, yet he does. Modern philosophy deals with the accidents of truth, and in the end rejects the substance, creating a self-consistent system that sounds like a Buddhism traditional sung mantra
when we say a proposition is true we are saying that it accords with reality, not merely that we believe it accords with reality.
Interesting. So you're saying that 'believing' is one attitude we can have toward a proposition's content, but there's some other attitude we can have toward it which you're saying is the one we use to apply the label 'true'? Do you have a name for this other attitude? When does it kick in?
Let's take your example of a 'truth',"Donald Trump is POTUS". If, after the election, a friend tells you that "Donald Trump is POTUS", do you merely believe that this accords with reality, or do you have this other attitude yet? If not yet then maybe you read it in the paper. Do you now have this attitude. I'm intrigued as to what point a mere belief transitions into this other attitude, but more importantly, I'm intrigued as to how you distinguish between the two.
It's possible the answer to all these questions is actually in your last paragraph, but if so, I'm afraid I couldn't make any sense of it, so I'd be grateful for a re-wording.
creativesoulFebruary 13, 2020 at 19:54#3822290 likes
We don't know how things really are, we only know how we believe them to be...
Isn't this just a rehashing of Kant?
In order to know that we do not know how things are, we must already know both... how things are and what we believe about how things are. We must perform a comparative analysis between the way things are and what we believe about the way things are. But if we do not know how things are, we cannot possibly perform this comparison.
It's untenable.
creativesoulFebruary 13, 2020 at 20:00#3822310 likes
Truth is presupposed in within all thought and belief. This is shown by the redundancy of adding "is true" to statements of thought and belief.
Meaningful correspondence between what is thought and/or believed about what has happened and/or is happening, and what has happened and/or is happening is existentially dependent upon belief formation. That is not to say that in order for a statement to be true, it must also be believed by anyone in particular. Rather, it is to point out that all statements are existentially dependent upon belief about what has happened and/or is happening and what has happened and/or is happening. Statements are statements of belief(assuming a sincere speaker of course).
Truth is correspondence 'between' thought and belief about the world and/or ourselves(what has happened and/or is happening), and the world and/or ourselves(what has happened and/or is happening.
That's only the half of it though. Talk of truth without meaning is nonsense.
All thought and belief are meaningful as well. All meaning is attributed solely by virtue of drawing correlations between different things. Drawing correlations between different things requires a plurality of things, at least one of which is capable of detecting, perceiving, and/or drawing a distinction between different things.
All thought and belief consist(s) of the aforementioned correlations. Across the entire gamut, from the simplest to the most complex... each and every thought and belief consists of correlations drawn between different things.
In order to know that we do not know how things are, we must already know both... how things are and what we believe about how things are. We must perform a comparative analysis between the way things are and what we believe about the way things are.
No. If we have no reasonable grounds or mechanism by which the two could be assumed to be the same then we must conclude that they would only be so by chance. A perfectly reasonable default hypothesis therefore, is that they aren't. Put that to some experimental testing showing overwhelmingly the extent to which our experience of the same object differs and you have, what is currently the leading theory on perception. We do not perceive reality directly. Not even close.
creativesoulFebruary 13, 2020 at 21:54#3823040 likes
Now it's Stove's worst argument?
The leading theory of perception? Is it physicalist? Does it include notions like perception that is informed by language as well as perception that is not?
It's possible the answer to all these questions is actually in your last paragraph, but if so, I'm afraid I couldn't make any sense of it, so I'd be grateful for a re-wording.
Interesting. So you're saying that 'believing' is one attitude we can have toward a proposition's content, but there's some other attitude we can have toward it which you're saying is the one we use to apply the label 'true'? Do you have a name for this other attitude? When does it kick in?
It doesn't matter that I might not know what the actuality is. When I make a statement about what is true, my intention is to say what is true, not merely to say what I believe is true. On a "meta-level" what I am saying may be merely an expression of my belief (it also may happen to be an expression of the truth, even if I can never be certain that it is). But that "meta-caveat" is not the same thing as the logic that is inherent in the intention underlying truth-statements. You are conflating the two.
Apologies if my wording is not clear to you. The name for the "other attitude" is 'acknowledgement that my belief could be wrong if it happens not to accord with reality'.
If I could be wrong in believing that Donald Trump is POTUS, then this possibility is contingent upon there being an actual state of affairs: Donald Trump being or not being POTUS at the time in question, that would make my belief true or false.
If I could be wrong in believing that Donald Trump is POTUS, then this possibility is contingent upon there being an actual state of affairs
Not necessarily. It depends if you take a pragmatic definition of 'wrong' or not. Being 'wrong' can amount to nothing more than having a theory which is superseded by a more useful one. I'm not saying that there is no state of affairs, by the way, I think there is. I'm just saying that being 'wrong' need not be contingent on there being one.
Donald Trump being or not being POTUS at the time in question, that would make my belief true or false.
So, if 'true' is a property of a belief, and a belief is a state of affairs in the brain, a 'true' belief should be distinguishable from a 'false' one one, no? For a belief to have the property of being 'true' (unless we're invoking dualism) it would have to have some physical difference from a false one.
Better, I think, to have 'true' as a category of beliefs, not a property of them. Far less problems with dualism. But if 'true' is a category of belief, then nothing about the real world determines what goes in that category, it's a human-made one. We decide what's in and what's out. Like 'blue'.
"Of course , innerworldly beings in the sense of what is real, as merely objectively present, can still remain covered up. However, what is real, too, is discoverable only on the basis of a world already disclosed. And only on this basis can what is real still remain concealed." Heidegger
creativesoulFebruary 14, 2020 at 18:15#3826740 likes
It's a planet we can't in principle know about, in the past or during the heat death of the universe where it's expanded to the point that it's impossible to travel there. Or it's cloaked by the Romulans.
So it's like the chairs at the end of the universe.
People are allowed to inflict pain on someone to give them sexual pleasure,.But up to a point because there is a discrete difference between enjoying sex and being suicidal. There is no soul though because truth is relative, coming from within since it is unsubstantial
If truth is a property of statements, and there were no statements prior to the advent of humanity, how could there have been truths prior to the advent of humanity?
Let * be [ (y is true => there exists a human x that can express y)]
* is equivalent to "if there is no human x that can express y, y is false" - the antecedent is true whenever there are no humans, so if * holds an arbitrary y is false (when there are no humans). Implications of trivialism aside, the interesting thing is:
The counterintuitive thing about "There were dinosaurs before the advent of humanity" isn't that there were no human languages capable of expressing a truth about dinosaurs at the time; which is obviously true when there are no humans capable of language; it's about the falsehood of there being dinosaurs before the advent of humanity. There really were no dinosaurs before humans existed if * holds. It's less about human language, and more about the dinosaurs winking into existence in the past if * holds. The truth conditions of claims regarding dinosaurs existing come to depend on the existence of humans, not just whether the articulability or expressibility of the truth of those claims requires humans.
We know the dinosaurs didn't wink into existence in the past when humans became capable of expressing "Dinosaurs existed in the past", so * does not hold.
Reply to fdrake I wasn't suggesting there were no dinosaurs prior to the advent of humanity. There being dinosaurs would be an actuality, not a truth (in a context where truth is considered to be a property of propositions or statements).
On the other hand I tend to think of truth as simply being actuality; its propositional "face" so to speak. So there actually and truly were dinosaurs prior to the advent of humanity, but there was no human there to see the truth's propositional face (or the actuality for that matter!).
Yes. I make that presumption. I don't think we could provide much by way of justification, but I also don't think we're capable of doubting it.
Right and all we're talking about here is the inherent logic in the human understanding of truth. I say that the primary feature of that logic is the ineliminable idea that there is an actuality to which true propositions would correspond, even if we don't (always or even ever) know exactly which propositions those would be.
Also I think once you start talking about physical differences between beliefs you have gone seriously astray.
creativesoulFebruary 25, 2020 at 05:09#3858300 likes
If we have no reasonable grounds or mechanism by which the two could be assumed to be the same then we must conclude that they would only be so by chance.
This is rubbish.
We need not assume that our thoughts are true. We can often check and know for sure. Chance has nothing at all to do with it.
Besides that, the criticism levied has been ignored. Your claim that our perception of reality is not reality means nothing. That's trivial. Of course, our perception of reality is not equal to reality, nor need it be.
In order for you to know that we cannot and/or do not perceive anything as it is(or that we cannot perceive reality directly), you must know the difference between the two. Knowing that requires knowing both, and then performing a subsequent comparative analysis between the two. That cannot be done, of course, by your very own admission.
It's untenable.
creativesoulFebruary 25, 2020 at 05:34#3858340 likes
Truth - as correspondence that is prior to language acquisition, and as coherence within language use - emerges within thought and belief. Thought and belief begins simply and grows in it's complexity, as it must, according to the tenets underwriting my viewpoint. In evolutionary terms, thought and belief must evolve and they clearly do, as can be readily ascertained by careful poignent observation.
...if 'true' is a category of belief, then nothing about the real world determines what goes in that category, it's a human-made one. We decide what's in and what's out. Like 'blue'.
We very well may decide what we choose to place into such a category, but our criterion for what counts as being true will show it's inherent weaknesses in the process, under careful scrutiny.
If "true" is a category of individual beliefs, all of which meet the criterion of being true, and true belief does not require our taking account of it in order for it to be so, then either truth is prior to language, or true belief does not require truth.
I put it to everyone participating here that true thought and/or belief is not existentially dependent upon being reported upon. In other words, some true thought and/or belief does not require language; some true thought and/or belief does not consist of language; some true belief is prior to language.
That says something important about truth, as well as something important about the different senses of the term "truth". Accompanied by the earlier post, we have thought, belief, meaning, and truth... all of which emerge simultaneously within the simplest of true thought and belief. Falsity emerges during this timeframe as well, but it is not until we come to realize our own fallibility that we become aware that we have false belief or true ones.
I wasn't suggesting there were no dinosaurs prior to the advent of humanity. There being dinosaurs would be an actuality, not a truth (in a context where truth is considered to be a property of propositions or statements).
Do you believe in a modified version of * where
[y is actual => there exists a human x that can express y]
?
Mayor of SimpletonFebruary 25, 2020 at 15:22#3859280 likes
#1 How can one know what truth is, without knowing what truth is in the first place?
Perhaps it's just me, but I'm not sure if truth in this question is being used to mean the same thing in both mentions.
Truth is (perhaps pun intended) I'm not sure which way to think of this question.
That probably made no sense (not a first for me), so I'll try to expain what I mean (which usually makes it far worse).
Are we refering to truth, as in what is infered from fact or are we refering to truth as the same thing as fact?
These are the possible option that are muddling around in my thoughts:
a) How can one know what truth (infered from facts) is, without knowing what facts are in the first place?
b) How can one know what truth (facts infered from facts) is, without knowing what truth (facts infered from facts that makes up those aforementioned facts?) is in the first place?
c) How can one know what facts are, without knowing what truth (facts that makes up those aforementioned facts) is in the first place?
d) How can one know what facts are, without knowing what facts (leading to those facts) are in the first place?
e) Something else.
I know this probably seems silly, but when I read the OP all that popped into mind was the lawyer speak from Rudi G * stating "truth isn't truth". It was a wonderful example to misdirection for whatever reasons he might have had at the time, but what he said was "someone's interpretation of the truth isn't always fact". His use of the same word twice in a sentence, but with two different means next to each other caused confusion (and quite a bit of comedy). Since then I have noticed this tendency more and more; thus my asking before making any further commentary.
Meow!
GREG
* The Rudi G reference is not a means to drag this into such a political deathpit, but rather an example of what may or may not have occurred with the question in the OP.
Reply to fdrake No, I would say that actualities abound absent the human. It would take a human or equivalent to say what any actuality is, though. So, in a sense 'there were dinosaurs' is always going to be spoken from a human perspective. We could say that what would appear to us as dinosaurs (if we had been there) were there prior to human life.
Let * be [ (y is true => there exists a human x that can express y)]
* is equivalent to "if there is no human x that can express y, y is false" - the antecedent is true whenever there are no humans, so if * holds an arbitrary y is false (when there are no humans). Implications of trivialism aside, the interesting thing is:
P is the proposition that there were dinosaurs during the Triassic. Even if a sentence that expresses P was never uttered at any time, P would still be truth-apt.
We could say that what would appear to us as dinosaurs (if we had been there) were there prior to human life.
That's quite different from being able to say "There were dinosaurs before there were humans", which is true. Why do we need (if this is the point you're making) to change from "There was X before there were humans" to "There was what would appear to humans as X before there were humans" to get a meaningful statement when "There were X before there were humans" means something and doesn't mean the same thing as "There was what would appear to humans as X before there were humans". The first statement is about X, the second statement is about a human in relation to X.
Though, I think that so long as we agree that there really were dinosaurs before humans (not just counterfactual "things which would appear as dinosaurs"), we're in agreement.
Even if a sentence that expresses P was never uttered at any time, P would still be truth-apt.
I don't see the problem? We can interpret "What would there be without humans?" and "What was there before humans?" questions unproblematically; the Earth would orbit the sun even if there were no humans.
don't see the problem? We can interpret "What would there be without humans?" and "What was there before humans?" questions unproblematically; the Earth would orbit the sun even if there were no humans.
You just end up with these eternal abstract objects, some if which are false.
You just end up with these eternal abstract objects, some if which are false.
Why? "The Earth would orbit the sun even if there were no humans" is about the real Earth, the real sun and real humans. It's a stipulation, but it's not about the stipulated content (the content isn't merely possible, it's actual, and we stipulate about it). If there were no humans, the Earth would orbit the sun - are the Earth and the sun eternal abstract objects there?
Reply to fdrake It's a fascinating and frustrating aspect of philosophy that no path leads to something complete. Every path has its unpalatable consequences, no matter how good the rest of it feels.
We get by with focusing on the problems of the paths we don't like. We avoid turning and seeing the problems we've adopted.
Even when we think we've outsmarted philosophy by way of someone like Heidegger, new unsolvables await.
The trick to seeing the situation is to become emotionally neutral. Emotion is the thing that binds me to my precious view and blinds me to its flaws.
Why is it necessary to believe that a truth condition of a statement, considered as a state of affairs, is an eternal abstract object when all that it concerns are contingently formed material particulars or events or generalisations thereof? "There were dinosaurs before there were humans" is true, because dinosaurs existed before there were humans is a fact.
Counterfactuals are more difficult, "The Earth would still orbit around the sun even if there were no humans" is true because what drives Earth's orbit around the sun is not existentially or causally dependent upon the existence of humans; because it works in a way indifferent to our existence it would work the same way without us.
Why is it necessary to believe that a truth condition of a statement, considered as a state of affairs, is an eternal abstract object when all that it concerns are contingently formed material particulars or events or generalisations thereof?
A proposition is timeless. This is what you wanted to avoid the problem of there being truths during a time when there were no truthbearers. A proposition has no location in time or space, and yet it somehow exists. We know a proposition is not any particular sentence or utterance because multiple sentences and utterances can express the same proposition. It's outside the universe (in much the same we appear to be when we speak as realists).
This issue has driven some philosophers to reject propositions and deflate truth to a property of sentences or utterances. If you do this, you'll be back with your question about how an 'unstated statement' could be true. You'll have to allow that the only truths are those which have at some point been uttered.
It's either realism and fishy propositions, or anti-realism and concrete truthbearers.
Am I to read this as a suggestion that I'm blinded to the flaws of realist intuitions because I'm emotionally attached to them?
I actually don't know. I was signalling to you that I'm not attacking realism per se, not in the sense of trying to win. I'm just pointing out the zit on its face. You do a lot of sophistisizing, so I may just be talking to myself.
A proposition has no location in time or space, and yet it somehow exists.
This isn't a particularly remarkable property.
A friendship has no location in time or space. "Where is my friendship?" "Over there by the rug".
A law doesn't (it instead has a domain of applicability). Corporations and institutions don't ("Where's the university? You just showed me a building.), colours don't ("You just showed me a rose, I wanted to see red!"), moral values don't ("I found a picture of justice in this manifesto" "You mean metaphorically?" "No, justice was literally contained in the pages"), golf doesn't (Watch Tiger Woods play, and you'll never see golf as such), artworks don't (where is "The Scream" when you can print two copies of it?)...
This issue has driven some philosophers to reject propositions and deflate truth to a property of sentences or utterances. If you do this, you'll be back with your question about how an 'unstated statement' could be true. You'll have to allow that the only truths are those which have at some point been uttered.
Please spell the reasoning out for me from: " "There are dinosaurs now" would be true 66 million years ago" to "unstated statement", to me it looks equivalent to "There were dinosaurs 66 million years ago". Incidentally there were no humans then. When we stipulate such scenarios in which there are no humans, we obviously use our current language abilities to do so, but that does not suggest that the sense of the counterfactual scenario or possibility itself is dependent upon the existence of humans; the truth conditions of "There were dinosaurs 66 million years ago" has nothing to do with the existence of humans or our language abilities, we just have a nice ability to attach language to actualities and possibilities and discuss such matters. The truth conditions are just reality shifting underneath the words.
A friendship has no location in time or space. "Where is my friendship?" "Over there by the rug".
Some would want to say that friendship is a bundle of physical things. A proposition is not.
Propositions aren't usually put in quotes. When you do that, you're pointing to an utterance. We frequently point out propositions with the word "that." So let's look at the proposition that the moon orbits the earth.
The proposition does not contain the moon, the earth, or orbiting. It's not any particular sentence, and its not an utterance. What we usually do is just not worry about what it is because it's a necessary aspect of agreement. We're stuck with it unless we want to become anti-realist behaviorists. It's fun to ponder how we could think about it.
"There are dinosaurs now" would be true 66 million years ago" to "unstated statement", to me it looks equivalent to "There were dinosaurs 66 million years ago".
It isn't equivalent. The quotes indicate an utterance.
The question is: what do you want to do with the utterance: "There were dinosaurs 66 million years ago."
Do you want its truth to be a matter of social convention? Can it be a matter of people nodding their heads up and down, or taking action associated with the sequence of words?
Or do you want it to be more than that? If you want it to be taken in full-blown realist fashion, you'll say it's not social convention, it has nothing to do with human behavior, it's not the utterance or sentence that's true,
It isn't equivalent. The quotes indicate an utterance.
I meant that they had the same truth conditions. not that they were equal as strings or utterances. The "would" maybe behaves differently for past events.
The proposition does not contain the moon, the earth, or orbiting. It's not any particular sentence, and its not an utterance
I think in this case it's more illuminating to focus on truth conditions of statements; which are broadly construable as states of affairs; rather than distilling the proposition as an abstract object that is somehow equivalent to the truth condition but also expresses it.
Could you comment on whether realism requires propositions? Am I wrong about that?
I know this wasn't direct at me, but realism about stuff generally concerns the notion of mind independence of that stuff. Minimally it requires something like "Dinosaurs existed on Earth 66 million years ago", considered as a statement or a proposition (and these don't mean the same thing) is about dinosaurs and the Earth 66 million years ago, and that how this statement is true is not a matter of convention as the statement somehow satisfies the world. This "how" maybe a correspondence relation, or an "is true" iff (truth condition) in a deflationary account. There're lots of variables.
The "abstract idea" notion of a proposition (as some statement content) is very Fregean, and you certainly don't need to have an apparatus of associating eternal mental content with statements to assert the mind independence of whether statements are true or not.
I don't see why. One can either take an abstract notion of sentence as one's paradigm (for instance, a sentence is just a set-theoretical object), which delivers the result that most languages will contain sentences that will never be uttered. Or one can define realism directly in terms of facts or situations or something similar (obviously, this may not avoid the issue if you identify facts with propositions, but this is controversial anyway). There are probably other options as well.
I don't see why. One can either take an abstract notion of sentence as one's paradigm (for instance, a sentence is just a set-theoretical object), which delivers the result that most languages will contain sentences that will never be uttered. Or one can define realism directly in terms of facts or situations or something similar (obviously, this may not avoid the issue if you identify facts with propositions, but this is controversial anyway). There are probably other options as well.
I don't understand how that works, though. If I use sentences as truthbearers, I still have to take their meaning in context in order to meet realism's standards for truth, right? Isn't that basically using propositions?
Well, one can hope to bypass the need for propositions by adopting (for instance) a Davidsonian truth-theoretical semantics. In that case, the "meaning" of a sentence is given by a canonical derivation of the truth-conditions for the sentence, without any need to invoke propositions.
Well, one can hope to bypass the need for propositions by adopting (for instance) a Davidsonian truth-theoretical semantics. In that case, the "meaning" of a sentence is given by a canonical derivation of the truth-conditions for the sentence, without any need to invoke propositions.
Have you read Soames' explanation for why Davidson's truth theory doesn't work?
I meant that they had the same truth conditions. not that they were equal as strings or utterances. The "would" maybe behaves differently for past events.
I thought you were talking about a "P" spoken at time T. Otherwise, why did you put the quotes in?
I think in this case it's more illuminating to focus on truth conditions of statements; which are broadly construable as states of affairs; rather than distilling the proposition as an abstract object that is somehow equivalent to the truth condition but also expresses it.
I'm not sure how a proposition is different from a state of affairs. Neither is made of physical objects.
you certainly don't need to have an apparatus of associating eternal mental content with statements to assert the mind independence of whether statements are true or not.
I've read a lot of Soames, yes, and I don't think he's right on this issue---see Ludwig & Lepore's reply in their book on Davidson. (That is not to say that I think Davidson's truth-theoretical semantics is the way to go, since I don't.) But whether or not Davidsonian truth-theoretic semantics is the right semantics for natural languages or not is besides the point. The point is that it is not obviously incoherent to adopt this semantics when trying to avoid propositions while at the same time maintaining realism.
I've read a lot of Soames, yes, and I don't think he's right on this issue---see Ludwig & Lepore's reply in their book on Davidson. (That is not to say that I think Davidson's truth-theoretical semantics is the way to go, since I don't.) But whether or not Davidsonian truth-theoretic semantics is the right semantics for natural languages or not is besides the point. The point is that it is not obviously incoherent to adopt this semantics when trying to avoid propositions while at the same time maintaining realism.
So we would have sentences that don't have to be contextualized, they gain their meaning in a holistic sort of way? Could you explain that again?
It was a gesture toward Frege. I also gave you gestures towards deflationism and correspondence in general, which in general are not (intended to anyway) work with propositions considered as eternal mental content. The relationship is between some statement and its truth conditions, an eternal abstract idea need not play a mediating role in every account - well, maybe it really does need to, but realist accounts don't make use of it constantly.
More generally, consider that when someone focusses on truth conditions of statements, the truth conditions are not easily construable as necessarily mental content at all, they can be events, states of affairs, etc - world stuff, worldly happenings not necessarily mind stuff.
More generally, consider that when someone focusses on truth conditions of statements, the truth conditions are not easily construable as necessarily mental content at all, they can be events, states of affairs, etc - world stuff, worldly happenings not necessarily mind stuff.
World stuff is not true or false. Propositions aren't mind stuff. They're abstract objects.
Of course they have to be contextualized, but so what? Davidson's truth-theoretical semantics has the resources to deal with context-sensitivity (cf. Lepore & Ludwig, Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language, and Reality, chapter 5, for a sketch, and their Donald Davidson's Truth-Theoretic Semantics for details on various context-sensitive constructions such as indexicals and demonstratives). As for your sample sentence, it's meaning can be given by canonically deriving its truth-conditions from the axioms (1) "the moon" refers (at context c) to the moon; (2) "the earth" refers (at context c) to the earth;(3) if a and b are referring expressions, then the result of the concatenation of a with "orbits" concatenated with b is true iff the reference (at c) of a orbits the reference (at c) of b.
I'm not sure how a proposition is different from a state of affairs. Neither is made of physical objects.
I think the relationship of a state of affairs to composition of necessarily physical objects (for some account of physical) is an intuition you're bringing to the table, rather than one which is an intended necessary feature of the accounts.
If you contextualize a sentence, how is that different from using a proposition (except for not mentioning the word?)
I think you and @Nagase have very different ideas of what contextualising means. A statement having contextual truth conditions requires spelling out how the truth conditions depend on the context - usually in some function like way. So "I am eating dinner now" is false, but it was true earlier. The truth conditions depend on the "now" like a timestamp or an alarm, the truth conditions are satisfied when the "now" alarm goes off and it is true at the present moment. The truth conditions for the dependence on "I" are similar.
I believe you're imagining that if the truth conditions of a statement depend upon the context of the statement, and the context is something which is ultimately mind dependent, then the truth conditions depend upon something which is mind dependent, and so the truth conditions are mind dependent.
I'm not sure what your doubt is. Some semantical theories make use of propositions in stating the meanings of sentences. For example, both (a time slice of) Lewis and Stalnaker use propositions in their respective semantics, construed as sets of possible worlds. So you give the meaning of a sentence by associating with it a set of possible worlds. Other semantical theories make no use of propositions in stating the meaning of sentences. These are theories like Davidson's, which directly state the truth-conditions for sentences without any need to invoke propositions. Let's see an example of the latter in more detail.
Consider the sentence "I am hungry". In order to give the meaning of this sentence, we need to give the meaning of "I" and "is hungry" (I'll ignore the inflection for ease of exposition). So we need two axioms:
(R1) For any speaker S, at any time t, the reference of "I" at t is S;
(P1) For any referring term a, speaker S, time t, and utterance u, if u is an utterance by S at t of a followed by "is hungry, then u is true iff the reference of a said by S at t is hungry.
Using these, we have:
(1) For any speaker S and time t, an utterance by S at t of "I" followed by "is hungry" is true iff the reference of "I" said by S at t is hungry (By P1);
(2) For any speaker S and time t, an utterance by S at t of "I am hungry" is true iff S is hungry (by 1 and R1).
Since the meaning of a sentence is given by its truth conditions, and this derivation displays the truth conditions of the sentence, this derivation gives the meaning of the sentence. Notice that I did not invoke at any time propositions.
Why does this matter if we're already going to stipulate that a sentence is truth apt? Like "There were dinosaurs 66 million years ago".
S is the sentence "There were dinosaurs 66 million years ago."
S could mean "We don't have enough popcorn." The way we usually come to know what Bill means when he utters S is we look at the context.
What Davidson is telling us is that we could use a buttload of axioms to work out what it means. I mean, as an interesting puzzle for how to bypass propositions, I'll go ahead and grant that it might work, but does it relate to real life in some way?
I'm not sure I understand your point. The axioms are meant to be interpretive, that is, they are meant to reflect the real understanding that speakers have of their language. So it relates to "real life" by stating the (actual) conditions under which certain linguistic items refer to objects (in the case of referring expressions) or are true of an object (in the case of predicates).
I'm not sure I understand your point. The axioms are meant to be interpretive, that is, they are meant to reflect the real understanding that speakers have of their language. So it relates to "real life" by stating the (actual) conditions under which certain linguistic items refer to objects (in the case of referring expressions) or are true of an object (in the case of predicates).
So when Bill utters S, I understand his meaning because I know and rely on an axiom held to be true by my people.
If Bill points to a 2 and says, "That's a prime number.", then I know axioms regarding the use of "that" and so forth. But this has nothing to do with the proposition that 2 is a prime number, or that Bill is expressing that proposition.
I don't want to waste your time, but I still don't get it. It seems like the axioms are just trying to explain how we derive propositions from scenes involving utterances. Do I just need to go back and read more about what propositions are?
The end result of the derivation is not a proposition, it is a sentence stating a truth-condition. In the case of "I am hungry", we have (simplifying) "I am hungry" is true iff the speaker is hungry. There is no mention of "propositions" in the theory. Obviously, if you are a fan of propositions, you can then use the above derivation and, given certain assumptions, obtain something like '"I am hungry" expresses the proposition that the speaker is hungry' or whatever. But the point is that if you are not a fan of propositions, you don't need to take that extra step.
Though, I think that so long as we agree that there really were dinosaurs before humans (not just counterfactual "things which would appear as dinosaurs"), we're in agreement.
The different locution is only to emphasize that we are not warranted in assuming the naive realist view that there are real things, absent us, that are uniquely and exhaustively just as they appear to us. Of course we can in the ordinary sense rightly say "there really were dinosaurs" in other words, but that way of speaking easily leads to reificational thinking as to what exists, and how it exists, absent human perception. It's really not an accurate way of speaking insofar as there being dinosaurs, in the way we understand that being, is a relational, not an absolute, fact.
You're welcome! As for my own stance, well, this is completely unrelated to the thread at hand, and is rather complicated. I think truth-theoretical semantics is too apart from linguistic research; in particular, it is too apart from what people like Chomsky are doing, so that there is little to no syntax-semantics interface (Davidson has some half-heart remarks in this regard in "Semantics for Natural Languages", but even those remarks show that he was not interested in this kind of problem). Moreover, I have no behavioristic aspersions to intensional idioms, so I see no reason not to employ propositions, meanings, etc., as needed. So I tend to think a more faithful model for natural language semantics is given by something like Montague Grammar or something similar.
Most of the time, we know what these words mean. But what about (let's take the mat) when the mat is being fabricated?
If we don't know exactly when the mat-in-process-of-being-manufactured is in fact a mat, then we don't *really* know what the mat is. (Same thing with a cat as it's being biologically conceived and developing in the womb, or as it is dying, let's hope at a ripe old age.) Or the mat when it is falling apart eventually.
Cats and mats have not only spatial but also temporal extents ... but we don't know what those extents are. (Or as the cat is digesting and assimilating its food, when exactly does the food become the cat?)
The fact that these questions have no clear answers means that the truth (or not) of a simple statement like "The cat is on the mat" is much less clear than it may first appear.
If we don't know exactly when the mat-in-process-of-being-manufactured is in fact a mat, then we don't *really* know what the mat is. (Same thing with a cat as it's being biologically conceived and developing in the womb, or as it is dying, let's hope at a ripe old age.) Or the mat when it is falling apart eventually.
Cats and mats have not only spatial but also temporal extents ... but we don't know what those extents are. (Or as the cat is digesting and assimilating its food, when exactly does the food become the cat?)
The fact that these questions have no clear answers means that the truth (or not) of a simple statement like "The cat is on the mat" is much less clear than it may first appear.
I think you're unnecessarily imbuing the terms "mat" and "cat" with some sort of essential "mat-ness" and "cat-ness". The problem you're describing disappears when we simply accept the terms "mat" and "cat" as fuzzy categories meant to simplify communication. As long as we can describe the exact physical characteristics of whatever we are talking about, the name we give it is irrelevant.
What was the question again? Truth? Who said anything about being able to "describe the exact physical characteristics" of the cat or the mat?
Are we talking about how to communicate conveniently, or are we discussing what truth consists of? I thought it was the latter.
And my point was that the conventions in place to allow convenient communication don't change what the truth is. If you refer to one thing as a "mat", and I to another, the problem isn't to find truth, but to fix the misunderstanding.
There is reality, then the way this reality is perceived, then there are words aimed at expressing that which is perceived. Words are truthful or not to the extent they reflect reality. Yet, as we've seen there is the world of perception between reality and words and there's no guarantee that what is perceived is reality. Ergo, it must be that words can only be of perception and not of reality. If so, there can be no truths if meant as of reality and all that maybe achieved is words capturing perception, that and that alone is possible. Is this the veil of perception?
Well, to say "The cat is on the mat" means I'm thinking of a certain thing that is a cat, and of another thing that is a mat, and the first thing is on the second thing."
But my point was that this kind of statement is slippery since both cats and mats are not clearly defined.
christian2017March 24, 2020 at 12:53#3953710 likes
We all by the age of 5 know some truth. 1 + 1 =2 . The definition of 4 is 3 + 1. Some basic truths are just intuitive. All complex truths are based on simple truths.
Cabbage FarmerMarch 24, 2020 at 16:51#3954700 likes
#1 How can one know what truth is, without knowing what truth is in the first place?
Our talk about truth is informed by our grasp of the facts.
Truth and falsehood are values we assign to judgments and statements. We don't fabricate these values out of whole cloth. They arise from features of experience common to human beings and other rational animals.
Sometimes our perceptual judgments turn out to be correct, other times incorrect. We recognize this distinction in experience. It is reflected in our talk of truth and falsehood.
Sometimes an expectation we have, or an outcome we conceive ahead of time, is fulfilled in the course of events; other times the course of events runs contrary to that expectation or conceived outcome. We recognize this distinction in experience. It is reflected in our talk of truth and falsehood.
Such ordinary experiences inform ordinary use of the term "truth", and guide our application of that term in assessing the truth and falsehood of judgments in a wide range of particular cases.
Special problems arise when it's not clear that there is a criterion according to which we may distinguish true judgments from false judgments. Some of these problems motivate a distinction between matters of fact on the one hand, and matters of taste and value on the other, and likewise a distinction between matters of fact that can be determined on the basis of evidence and matters of fact that cannot be determined on the basis of evidence.
P is the proposition that there were dinosaurs during the Triassic. Even if a sentence that expresses P was never uttered at any time, P would still be truth-apt.
This is realism. Notice the cost of it.
If that is realism, carte blanche, then I'm certainly no realist. Statements do not express propositions. They express thought and belief. There are no exceptions.
Propositions consist of words about stuff. There are no exceptions.
States of affairs are not propositions. States of affairs are what has happened and/or is currently happening. Propositions are about states of affairs.
"Proposition" is a name that we've given to a variety of different things.
Some things named existed in their entirety prior to our name, while others... well... not so much.
"Truth" is also - perhaps most often - used as a name.
As skirted around above... The interesting part of examining names is taking proper account of that which is being given the name. Some things named exist in their entirety prior to the name. Others do not.
"Truth" the term, when used to name correspondence between thought and belief about what's happened and/or is happening and what's happened and/or is happening is being used to pick out a relationship between thought or belief and reality(states of affairs) that exists in it's entirety prior to the term itself.
Thought or belief and statements thereof can be true. Correspondence between thought or belief and states of affairs is precisely what makes them true. A lack thereof, is precisely what makes them false. Let me digress...
The problem with the notion of "propositions" is that they do not offer adequate enough account of meaning and what it consists of. For if they did, they would know that meaning is not the sort of thing that can be carried.
The reason why several languages express the same thing - called "a proposition" by those who do not know better - is because we share a world and what's being expressed in different languages is nothing more than talking about the same things.
Sometimes an expectation we have, or an outcome we conceive ahead of time, is fulfilled in the course of events; other times the course of events runs contrary to that expectation or conceived outcome. We recognize this distinction in experience. It is reflected in our talk of truth and falsehood.
Yup.
Predictions, in particular, are verified/falsified in just the same manner. Of course, we develop expectations long before we can begin performing experiments to test our predictive powers. That's just one part of it all though.
Expectations can become true(or not). Statements about what has already happened and/or is currently happening are already true(or not).
The key in understanding the role that truth plays in all thought, belief, and statements thereof(including but not necessarily limited to expectations(prediction)... is... I think... taking proper account of the common denominator... thought or belief.
That's what can be be true(or not), but not all of them...
Expectations, while they definitely consist of thought and belief, are not true or false - nor can they be - because they are about what has not yet happened. They are thought and belief about what's to come. They are thought and belief about future events; what's going to happen.
Expectations/predictions cannot be either true or false because there are no states of affairs for them to correspond to(or not). That particular time has not yet come/arrived.
Well, from what I remember about the notion(the academic one), I do not agree with the notion of "truthbearer"...
But yes, not that I care, but I've been called an anti-realist. Do not think that my position aligns with any of the well trodden academic names though. Actually, I know it doesn't, but it makes no difference to me.
Events are currently showing all of us how important thought, belief, meaning and truth are...
The key in understanding the role that truth plays in all thought, belief, and statements thereof(including but not necessarily limited to expectations(prediction)... is... I think... taking proper account of the common denominator... thought or belief.
That's what can be be true(or not), but not all of them...
Somewhere down the line I became accustomed to using the term "judgment" to indicate the thing that's said to be true or false in a wide range of contexts, even in some cases where there is no linguistic expression, even in some cases where there is no language.
It may be this habit of mine has been influenced by talk among philosophers of "perceptual judgment".
I'm content to say that beliefs, judgments, assertions, and thoughts that resemble such things, are among the things we call true or false.
I might say some thoughts do not resemble assertions and have no truth value; it depends on how we decide to use the word "thought". Perhaps I leave this undetermined in my own use of the term, to accommodate the wide variety of uses I encounter in the speech of others.
It seems truth value is also implicated in the distinction between perception and misperception. Perhaps we should say it's the "perceptual judgment" involved in an instance of perception or misperception that bears the truth value?
Expectations, while they definitely consist of thought and belief, are not true or false - nor can they be - because they are about what has not yet happened. They are thought and belief about what's to come. They are thought and belief about future events; what's going to happen.
Expectations/predictions cannot be either true or false because there are no states of affairs for them to correspond to(or not). That particular time has not yet come/arrived.
I see no reason to say that truth values of assertions about states of affairs blink in and out of existence along with the corresponding states of affairs. But what difference would this theoretical construct make for us, as speakers who make assertions about states of affairs, who test and try such assertions, who affirm and deny and suspend judgment on such assertions?
It's surely true that, from our point of view as human animals, the future is yet to come and the past is no longer.
I'm not sure this entails that the truth value of assertions about future states of affairs is yet to come, nor that the truth value of assertions about past states of affairs is no longer.
I might be content to say our assertions about future and past states of affairs are true or false when we assert them, though we can't observe the relevant states of affairs at the time of assertion. I suppose this plight would be at least somewhat analogous to our plight in making assertions about current states of affairs in places we cannot observe at the time of assertion.
In any case, to speak of things like "truth values" in this way is to speak of abstractions. I'm not sure it matters how we work out such details, and I'm not sure there are objective criteria according to which we can definitively resolve divergent accounts in such matters. To me it seems preferable to follow Ockham's advice in such discursive contexts, and favor the simplest among accounts of equal utility.
The key in understanding the role that truth plays in all thought, belief, and statements thereof(including but not necessarily limited to expectations(prediction)... is... I think... taking proper account of the common denominator... thought or belief.
That's what can be be true(or not), but not all of them...
— creativesoul
Somewhere down the line I became accustomed to using the term "judgment" to indicate the thing that's said to be true or false in a wide range of contexts, even in some cases where there is no linguistic expression, even in some cases where there is no language.
In short, judgment is a metacognitive endeavor and as such it requires pre-existing thought and belief, and the ability/faculty for thinking about thought and belief and/or reports/accounts thereof.
"Judgment", on my view, refers to quite a complex thought or belief process. It is to assent/dissent to some statement or other, which involves focused deliberation and/or contemplation of whether or not some thought or belief, as expressed by the statement thereof, is true/false. Done well, it includes knowing what it would take in order for the statement under consideration to be so, in addition to knowing whether or not such conditions have been or could be met. As such, it requires language use replete with the ability to think about thought and belief itself in addition to some awareness and/or knowledge of which ones can be true(are truth-apt) and what makes them so. As a result, I find that judgment is not even possible for language less creatures, whereas some other kinds of thought and belief most certainly are.
It may be this habit of mine has been influenced by talk among philosophers of "perceptual judgment".
I'm content to say that beliefs, judgments, assertions, and thoughts that resemble such things, are among the things we call true or false.
It's commonplace for philosophers to talk of perception in ways that I reject. The term itself is a catch-all which is often used in ways that conflate simple and complex thought or belief with each other. This shows itself throughout history by subsuming simple language less thought and belief as well as very complex linguistically informed thought and belief into the same category. In doing so the crucial distinction between kinds of thought and belief is lost along with the ability to properly account for them. Be that as it may..
Perhaps saying that beliefs, judgments, assertions, and thoughts are among the things we call "true" or "false" is as good a starting point as any.
I might say some thoughts do not resemble assertions and have no truth value; it depends on how we decide to use the word "thought". Perhaps I leave this undetermined in my own use of the term, to accommodate the wide variety of uses I encounter in the speech of others.
Perfectly understandable, and I would agree that not all thoughts(thought) are(is) truth apt without hesitation. The very notion of "truth value" causes me serious pause however...
It seems truth value is also implicated in the distinction between perception and misperception. Perhaps we should say it's the "perceptual judgment" involved in an instance of perception or misperception that bears the truth value?
...as does the idea of bearing truth value.
I'll attend to the rest of your reply later. It takes an interesting path and deserves separation from the above part.
I'd love someone to sell truth to me. Because from where I stand, it's a totally incoherent concept that has no defined meaning apart from some everyday lingo that we use it in.
"I saw Donald Trump in studio the other day."
"Sure..."
"It's true, he was eating a taco bowl with the production crew."
"It's true, he was eating a taco bowl with the production crew."
But otherwise, don't know what truth means
I think you're implying that if Trump was eating taco with the crew then the statement that Trump was eating taco with the crew is true. Truth is to say of what is the case that it is the case; or of what is not the case, that it is not the case. That was Aristotle's theory and I'm guessing from your example that it's yours too?
Truth is what your whole body tells you it is, for one can only know the world through the body, so truth is the body's truth and operates upon the principles of pain, pleasure, and desire. Alter the bodily organism and you alter its apparent reality. We cannot, at presently know what ultimate reality is, we can only know what our biology is capable of sensing, that range or spectrum is adequate for the exitential well-being of the body but is not infallible mainly because the body is fallible to altered states. This is basically why morality should be based upon our common biology, it produces common truths.
Agent SmithDecember 27, 2021 at 11:50#6357310 likes
Comments (295)
Since a) we all hold the capacity to lie, b) we are all adults (more or less), and c) the adults that affirm they have never told a lie will most certainly be lying, we can then safely conclude that we all experientially know what lies are. Then, one can start addressing the question by observing that truth is what occurs in the absence of lies - contextually, this within awareness related givens, such as statements and beliefs, regarding what is experienced. (But I acknowledge that in at least a tacit matter all those who have told at least one lie in their lives already knew this.) From this can then be further inferred that delusions, illusion, hallucinations, etc. are a type of self-deception and that truth - being the opposite of deception - will, roughly speaking, be an accordance to that which is non-deceptive; the latter being roughly equivalent to what is termed reality.
The short version of the same answer: experientially.
Though not without faults, I yet find this response to be good enough to get the ball rolling.
As to the second issue, what alternatives to justification are there? Same can be said for reasoning, btw.
Not, according to Carroll's Tortoise
I, btw, don't take the occurrence of experience - be it in general or in particular - to be an assumption.
(I have to take off for now.)
good question and of course, the answer is that one cannot. in that sense, truth is that on the basis of which truth is already understood.
a sense of truth is constitutive of our nature (which does not make us necessarily truthful). we could not make our way about in the world without a sense of truth.
How can one formulate a question about truth without knowing what truth is?
But that is just me being picky as your question is an excellent question.
In some sense, I think we "live" in the truth (which does not make us truthful). Instead, we have an understanding of truth and we use that understanding to either uncover or conceal the truth.
Do you agree with that?
Do you mean how can one discover or learn what truth is without previously knowing it?
P) I know what truth is
P2) I know what truth is
P<=>P2
How can I know if this proposition is true, without knowing previously what truth is then?
yes. you must have some understanding of X in order to formulate a question regarding X. all your question can do is give a deeper understanding than the one you must have to even ask the question.
So there is your answer, we do not know.
Not really, if you don't know and I don't know there is probably no one that does know. Hence there is no answer or at least no answer that is accepted universally.
Yes, I think so. What people often think of as an exception to this is, say, if you'd heard a word "pegasus" you might sensibly ask "what is pegasus?". But this is just a linguistic illusion of a problem. What you really mean is to ask about the word 'pegasus', not the actual thing 'pegasus'. You can't ask about the actual thing 'pegasus' without knowing something about what the thing is.
You could reasonably ask "what do people mean by the word truth?". If you did, my answer would be "really, really...."
What is a spickledeerfork?
If we use “true” in the adjectival sense we know what it means. If we use “truth” in the noun sense we do not. Once we change adjectives into nouns we are left trying to search our minds for qualities and other specters that do not exist.
Truth is a label, in the same way that colour is a label. We learn to recognise what is referred to as a 'blue' object. Then we can categorise all the objects that appear blue as being 'blue'. It is the same with truth, we label ideas as being 'true' when they have the appearance of being true. Sometimes those ideas can be summarised in statements, so we label those statements as being 'true'.
How one recognises which ideas have the appearance of being true is another question.
What about it?
I don't see how this could be the case. If there was substantial disagreement about which things were 'blue' it would be impossible to learn how to use the word. There is substantial disagreement about what is 'true'.
Maybe you could use that argument to justify a simplistic correspondence theory of truth. In which case virtually all of philosophy is misusing the word 'true'.
"Truth" - as a term - has many accepted different meanings.
I think there is substantial agreement about what is 'true' in the world. And I think people actually label things as being true in much the same way. The disagreement arises when people try to make truth out to be some objective property of the world or statements. Whereas truth is necessarily subjective. Without a brain/mind to label ideas or statements as 'true' there would be no truth.
When we nominalize adjectives we make it function as a noun in our language, and perhaps it does so in our thoughts. The adjective “conscious”, when nominalized, becomes “consciousness”, which has lead many thinkers in search of this quality. When we nominalize adjectives we simply mean “all things with this quality”. Truth could simply be shorthand denoting all things that are true,
I agree (using your 'labelling' type definition of 'true'). But if the definition were limited to the sort of thing about which there is such agreement, then virtually no proposition in philosophy could be labelled 'true'.
Propositions (or statements) can be labelled as 'true' when they are considered to be an accurate representation of an idea that the brain/mind has labelled as 'true'.
I maintain the proper distinction here is not between adjective and noun but between meaning and definition.
The former requires thought while the latter requires a dictionary which might define truth as "all things that are true."
In that sense, truth is very much the product of our encountering, engaging with, and coming to understand the entities within the world that we are in. When our assertions reveal those entities as they show themselves to be, then our assertions are true. When our assertions conceal how entities would otherwise show themselves to be, then our assertions are false. Either way, our regular and ongoing concernful engagement in the world is permeated through and through with truth. We are either trying to reveal or to conceal the world as it shows itself to be. Either way, we are in the truth/false business.
low hanging fruit.
I think that when we equivocate between adjectives and nouns so easily we are presented with errors of grammar, not meaning. Nominalizing adjectives is to mentally turn descriptive terms into nouns, giving being to things that cannot themselves be described. So though there are things that are true, there are no truths that are things.
Whether "thingness" can/cannot be attached to the term "truth" fails to enlighten. Though certainly many would consider truth to be a concept and a concept to be a thing and therefore the concept of truth would be a thing. But that really matters not as thingness is the ultimate Cartesian red herring upon which I will waste no more time.
The deeper issue is not which distinction (adjective/noun or meaning/definition) is more fraught with potential error. Instead, the deeper issue is which distinction is more useful to illuminating a meaningful understanding of the world in which you find yourself.
And if you think the grammar distinction is the way to go, then good luck to you.
Sure, but that would be a really weird use of the word. Totally out of kilter with the way it's used at the moment so I don't think you'll get many takers.
Indeed. That's the point I was making. If we're only using 'true' like 'blue', limiting ourselves to that which we all agree on, we're not going to have a great many of the most interesting concepts labelled 'true'. Maybe that's as it should be though.
Indeed. But that is not necessarily "as it should be." For Example A Seagull is essentially pushing a correspondence theory of truth that could be fruitful if tweaked.
Quoting A Seagull
I would tweak it as "an assertion is true if the entity toward which it is directed shows itself to be as asserted." As a result, we move beyond a correspondence between a proposition and what the mind has labeled as true to a correspondence between a proposition and how entities within the world show themselves to be. We have now shed the pesky and unnecessary "representation of an idea".
I don't expect to get many 'takers'. And yes it is at odds with many people's ideas about truth.
But that doesn't mean it is not part of a better system.
If one wants a simple, self-consistent and comprehensive philosophy, then IMO it is not only the best but the only way to go.
You seem to be making the assumption of 'naïve reality' whereby the world is pretty much or even exactly as we perceive it. For me this is a naïve assumption, albeit a popular one.
It makes more logical sense to only assume that we have a model of the world.
We understand, or learn how to use, "truth" in our language-games, including the "knowing" ones. Same as understand, or learn how to use, knowledge without "knowing" what knowledge is.
Can we even justify this question?
Removing "in the first place" should clear things up, I would think. In other words, the question is non sensical.
Quoting A Seagull
'Better/, 'Fruitful' for what? What is it these systems are trying to achieve that you think this approach might make more likely?
I don't know what exactly truth is but the concept itself applies to propositions: if the propostions reflect states of reality then the propositions are true and if not the propositions are false. I'm probably stating the correspondence theory of truth which I feel has a very wide reach.
As for the notion of justification I think it stems of the simple fact that we can be deceived, either deliberately or otherwise. Imagine our ancestors (sorry but everyone seems to believe in evolution) whose primary concern, apart from scoodlypooping, was to tell predator and prey apart. Consider the scenario that a band of our hunter-gatherer forefathers chance upon an animal they've never encountered. How would they know predator or prey? A good place to start would be size, presence of fangs and claws. These other truths would settle the matter for them: Big, fangs and claws implies predator and if absent, prey.
As you can see any given proposition implies or is implied by some other propositions and so if ever we're in doubt, and that is almost always the case, we need the other truths or falsehoods which either imply or are implied by the proposition under consideration. In other words every proposition appears in a context of other truths and falsehoods and when we assess this background information we can determine truths. This is the nature of justification and it appears to me as quite a natural way of thinking.
The reality of the matter, is not the truth. The parts of that statement, don't connect neatly.
If I say, 'it's true there's a door in my room', it's in response to a contemplation or redundant.
Truth/lie is expansion of a subject and detection of an object.
One way in which it can work, is to (arbitrarily) declare particular basic sentences to be true. Next, all sentences that necessarily follow from these basic sentences are also true, in accordance with the rules of logic that you consider to apply. Therefore, a sentence is logically "true" when it has the same truth status as the basic sentences of the theory created by the basic sentences.
So, yes, agreed. Logical truth is injected from outside the universe-world-model in which it applies.
You are mistaken. If anything, I am a robust realist.
I am discussing the already existing process by which we attach "true/not true" to an assertion directed towards entities within the world or within a model of the world and at those times when such judgments are needed.
The only value in knowing the world or model of the world may be different than it appears at the time the judgment is needed lay in its usefulness for consoling yourself when you have made the wrong judgment.
Oh well.
Yes, let us create a model of the world, declare it to be the real, and treat the world as less real than the model of the world. That is not a winning argument.
Accepting that the world in which you find yourself may far more complex than it appears to be does not require you to presume it is a model. It just requires you to accept that the world in which you find yourself may be far more complex than it appears to be.
One does not need to declare that a model of the world is 'real', all one needs to do is to realise that the model is all one knows about the world.
What people want from philosophy ( or at least what I want from philosophy) is a simple, self-consistent, accurate and comprehensive system for describing what knowledge is and how it is achieved as this will allow for a more effective and efficient means of interacting with the world; a system that can link all facets of one's experience of the world from the inner to the outer without schisms or discontinuities and without arbitrary assumptions.
Ok. you can 'declare particular sentences to be 'true'. But what then? What logical process are you going to use to find those sentences that 'necessarily follow from those basic sentences'? Even if you do have such a logical process, those sentences that follow and are declared 'true' are only true within that particular system; ie they rely on the truth of the original basic sentences for their truth.
That is just a word game.
I am my world. And within my world is the realization that my world is all I know about the world.
Nothing is to be gained by saying:
I am my model world. And within my model world is my realization that my model world is all I know about the model world.
The best model of the world is the world.
If it helps, you may add the word "model" to the word "world" every time I use the word "world." It would probably be more efficient if you just did it in your head.
And you are welcome.
:-)
Perhaps the point to realise is that your model of the world differs from everybody else's and that their is no perfect or 'real' model with which to compare it.
I already know that.
But adding the word "model" does not overcome the problem unless everyone knows that "model" is a synonym for "my" (as opposed to yours) and if "model" is a synonym for "my" then we can just use the world "my".
So not only is "model" not going to clarify any confusion regarding differences among or between worlds, it is actually likely to create such confusion in that it connotes replica, copy, facsimile, etc. as if my [model] world were some how less than real. And you may rest assured there are no worlds that are more "real" than mine.
There is no correspondence.
Quoting A Seagull
Yes there is.
Quoting A Seagull
In terms of correspondence theories of truth, your above statement would be restated as below:
Propositions are true when they CORRESPOND to an idea that is considered true.
It is not my intent to put words in your mouth. Instead, my intent is to simply clarify the "type" of theory of truth you are pushing. And the theory of truth you are pushing clearly is of the type referred to as correspondence. And that is okay. Correspondence theories of truth have been widely accepted since Descartes and continuing to the present.
That I disagree with them does not mean that they are incorrect (though they are).
And what is meant by 'an idea that is considered true'? Sounds tautological to me.
Propositions are labelled as 'true' when they are an accurate representation of an idea that a person believes.
You are arguing with yourself.
1.
What I mean by an idea that is considered true is Quoting A Seagull
Both versions are equally tautological. My restatement is concise and adds clarity.
2.
Similarly, there is no functional difference between
A.
Quoting A Seagull
and
B.
"Propositions are labelled as 'true' when they" [CORRESPOND to] "an idea that a person believes."
Again, my restatement is more concise and adds clarity.
3.
It matters not to me if you prefer wordiness and lack of clarity. I am just trying to help.
Either way, the theory you are pushing is of the type contemporary philosophy refers to as "correspondence." And that is simply correct whether you agree or not.
You can use provability to verify how the truth of new theorems in a theory depends on the assumed truth of the theory's basic sentences.
Quoting A Seagull
Yes, agreed.
The truth of the original basic sentences must necessarily be supplied from outside such system. Such atomic sentences are assigned truth values disquotationally. When reasoning from first principles, the truth of such first principles is always assumed. From within the system, its basic truths are deemed to be of arbitrary nature.
You learn what true is by learning about false.
That's quite circular, and hence not an explanation at all.
...and that's just as circular.
Yup.
It is only after becoming aware that things aren't the way one thought they were(only after becoming aware of being mistaken), that one begins to understand the role that truth/falsity play in all thought, belief, and statements thereof.
So is it also meaningless to state that a statement is false?
Or are you in the process of re-inventing the redundancy theory of truth?
Are you in the state of denying the redundancy theory?
No I agree with the redundancy theory of truth, 'truth' is just a label of convenience (as is falsity).
For someone to claim that a statement or proposition is true, it means ''I believe this statement'. if the 'I' is removed from the claim then the claim becomes meaningless.
That's not right. As in, you've just sown that you do not understand the redundancy theory.
IF that were so, no one would ever be mistaken; for to be mistaken is to beleive that such-and-such is true, when it is not.
The simple "the cat is on the mat" is true if the cat is on the mat is correct, although it's sort of a useless statement epistemologically, considering we can never know objectively if the cat is on the mat, or even what it would mean to be an objective cat on an objective mat.
It seems only the theologians and the scientists know what truth is. The philosophers don't, mostly because they lack the faith of the theologian and the pragmatism of the scientist.
It is extraordinary! The extent that those with a philosophical bent will go to deny themselves the obvious. There is the cat, on the mat, before poor Hanover, and yet he cannot know that the cat is on the mat!
It's delusional.
I didn't claim to be a philosopher, and I'm sure not a scientist, so I must be a theologian. My faith in the cat being on the mat saves me from one form of delusion, but maybe my faith is my highest delusion.
At any rate, your reference to what you know seems to ignore the question at hand, which is what truth is. You have a justified belief I'm sure, but what does it mean to say it is true the cat is on the mat? Does it just mean you have a really good justification for it and you believe it? As has been alluded to in other posts, is the truth element superfluous? If not, what does it mean?
What is extraordinary is that it is so hard for some to understand the answer.
"The cat is on the mat" is true IFF the cat is on the mat.
That's all there is to it.
What is the meaning of "the cat is on the mat? That the cat is on the mat.
All else is sophistry.
And it's not sophistry to try and claim that "the cat is on the mat" is something epistemically different from the cat is on the mat, simply because of the quotation marks?
The cat is on the mat.
"The cat is on the mat" contains six words.
See the difference?
I acknowledged that. Scroll up and you'll see. But we've said nothing of whether the cat is on the mat. We've only explained what makes a statement true. I'm my world, truth relates to things outside language.
How's that?
I'm not looking for the definition of when "the cat is on the mat is true. In your house, you have a cat and a mat, right? Is the cat on the mat?
Quoting Banno
I don't think you have a coherent objection.
How can one know what a door is, without knowing what a door is in the first place?
How can one know how to ride a bike without knowing how to ride a bike in the first place?
Is your cat on your mat or not?
Knowing what something is, and being able to say what it is, do not necessarily go "hand in hand".
But I have answered that question. "The cat is on the mat" is true exactly when the cat is on the mat.
You are unable to articulate your objection.
I'm quite certain my question demands a yes, no, or I don't know. You've failed to answer. I've not posited an objection. In asked a question.
What more could you want?
Nothing, of course - hence, you are unable to articulate your objection.
So you see your cat not on your mat? So, your cat is on the mat if you see him on the mat?
Now he's in the bathroom.
Quoting Hanover
That's silly. Sometimes he is on the mat, and I'm not even in the house.
Make your point. If there is one.
People can still be mistaken, in fact people are often mistaken.
Perhaps you do not understand it, it does seem fairly simple.
But without a process of actually determining whether the cat is actually on the mat or not it is effectively meaningless.
...yes, indeed; so we treat what you said as a reductio, and conclude that your "For someone to claim that a statement or proposition is true, it means ''I believe this statement'" is wrong...
BUt you said it was redundant, so... yes, it is effectively meaningless.
Your claim that it is wrong is false.
Slowly...
Quoting A Seagull
Quoting Banno
Quoting A Seagull
Quoting Banno
SO we agree that people make mistakes. A mistake is when someone believes something that is not true.
But you had claimed that, that a statement is true means that someone believes it. IF that were so, then it could never be the case that something were believed and yet not true.
Consider "Seagull believes that such-and-such"; According to what you said, this means that such-and-such is true. There could never be a case in which Seagul believes such-and-such, and yet such-and-such is not true.
No. The first statement you just wrote also has six words, the second has six words. They both have six words.
I'm being facetious, I know what you're trying to say really, but I disagree with the fact that it makes any useful claim about truth. As you write it, the two propositions are different, but as soon as it is in the public domain, your unquoted proposition becomes a quote, and it's pointless outside of the public domain, as we both know.
So all you're left with is the proposition - when someone else says "the cat is on the mat" it is true IFF I would say "the cat is on the mat" in the same circumstances.
ie, something is true if I think it is.
Quoting Isaac
Who said that it was useful? All I am claiming is that it is right! :wink:
Quoting Isaac
...which is to say that when someone else and I say "the cat is on the mat", we mean the same thing.
I'm not offering a substantive theory of truth - quite the opposite. For me the issue in this thread is the error, explicit in Seagull, incipient in Hanover - that truth is much the same as belief. It's the inept move that would take one from your
and make it
So by 'right' you mean 'true'? How do you go about justifying a claim that a theory of truth is true? Isn't that where we started?
Quoting Banno
This, quite nicely, ties in with what Anscombe is saying in Modern Moral Philosophy (or at least, what I think she's saying). When someone else and I say "the cat is on the mat", we mean the same thing, in normal circumstances. There are exceptions, and the full list is not countable (not infinite, just non-countable). It is psychological state, historical conventions around language use that make it the case that you both mean the same thing (in normal circumstances).
So. A more encompassing definition of 'true' is perhaps - statements which are true are those which we are likely to say they are true in normal circumstances.
But in that sense, it is like 'blue' after all. Those things which are blue are exactly those of which we are likely to say they are 'blue' in normal circumstances.
Where this gets us into trouble is it makes it sound like what is 'true' changes as the likely response does, which intuitively seems wrong. "The earth is flat" was never true. But here I think we mistake what it is we're saying. The only two options we can talk about (according to the above) are;
a) what would they at the time be likely to say of such a proposition? Or
b) what would we be likely to say of such a proposition?
To presume the truth has anything to do with (a) is simply to mistake what 'truth' means. 'Slut' used to mean a maid, it doesn't anymore.
...and that would be wrong, wouldn't it; because we can be wrong about the things we might say.
SO the analogy with colour quickly fails.
I don't see how. The moment we are wrong about a proposition, it is no longer likely that we would say that proposition was 'true'.
The point is that the cat's being on the mat isn't dependent upon your seeing it. That was your point at least.
As you noted:
Quoting Banno
How do I know the cat is on the mat? Poor Hanover cannot know. What element of JTB am I missing? I have a justification because I see it, and I believe what I see. But is the cat there? All you've said is that the cat is there if it's there. That was really helpful.
What the hell is the cat and the mat we're speaking of? We've already figured out it's something independent of you, or at least that's what you've said.
The OP, to remind ourselves, asks what Truth is. When I speak of the cat, and all it's wonderful characteristics, which are true and which are not? It's a metaphysical question ultimately, but I'll agree with that it is whatever it is, which is another way of saying "The cat is on the mat" iff the cat is on the mat.
But things are not true or false because they are justified or unjustified...
So... one never asserts a proposition that is false?
And here is your problem - conflating the cat being on the mat with your knowing that the cat is on the mat.
You are wrong to think they are the same.
The cat can be on the mat and you can believe that the cat is on the mat.
The cat can be on the mat, and yet you do not believe that the cat is on the mat.
The cat can be elsewhere, and you believe that the cat is elsewhere.
The cat can be elsewhere, and yet you believe that it is on the mat.
You will only know that the cat is on the mat in cases where the cat is indeed on the mat.
If you believe that the cat is on the mat, but the cat is elsewhere, then what you believe is false.
So, yes, "the cat is on the mat" iff the cat is on the mat, but it's a pretty useless statement if you don't know whether the cat is on the mat.
Anyway, you pitied me for not knowing the cat was on the mat:
Quoting Banno
I guess I now pity you. Do you know that that the cat is on the mat, or do you just know that the proposition "the cat is on the mat" has a positive truth value if the the cat is on the mat?
He's not on the mat. He's on the chair.
DO you hav a point of any substance to make?
I think you misundertsood @A Seagull. ( It's easy to do: I've misunderstood many seagulls!).
A Seagull did not say that for some proposition to be true is for someone to believe it, but that when someone says some proposition is true, what they really mean to say is that they believe it. There's a difference that makes a difference there...
Hanover cracked an apophat!
(But Banno's probably too tight and dry to receive it!)
I just don't understand this. I thought "He's on the chair" iff he's on the chair, but you seem to be using some other method for determining that he's on the chair.
I think I know what "he's on the chair means" when it has quotes on it. What does it mean to be on the chair without quotes? Is that a reference to metaphysical reality?
How can I know the truth of whether the cat is on the mat if I don't know what a cat is?
Obviously, the way one determines if he is on the chair or no is not the same as his being on the chair, or not.
Yet you seem to think they are.
Again, you confuse his being on the chair with you being able to tell, to know, to believe that he is on the chair.
Or perhaps it is the lack of competent foreplay.
I didn't say they were, I'm only asking how you would justify such a theory of truth. You said a proposition is 'true' IIF {that proposition}, "A" is true IFF A. So you've provided me with a proposition about what truth is, "T". In orer for it to be true then T has to be the case. How do we go about finding out is T is the case. With "the cat is on the mat" we look at the mat and see if there's a cat on . If the there is, the the cat is on the mat so "the cat is on the mat " is true.
You said (note the additional quotation marks) ""the cat is on the mat" is true IFF the cat is on the mat", now what do I look at to see if {"the cat is on the mat" is true IFF the cat is on the mat}?
Quoting Banno
I never said anything about "one" asserting it. I said "we" assert it. We collectively never assert a proposition which is false, how could we? I suppose we could have some kind of global agreement to all lie at the same time about something - on the stroke of midnight we're all going to say that the earth is flat - something like that. But we'd all know we were lying.
And you confuse the fact that I'm not confused.
Knowledge requires truth. Your assertion that your cat is on the chair asserts it is true the cat is on the chair. What does that mean?
You've got to define your entire sentence, not just the part you decide to put into quotes. "The cat is on the mat" iff the cat is on the mat. X iff Y. What is Y?
Quoting Banno
Or it's just you enjoy evasiveness and get some rise out of not being open to actual discussion because you think your position so obvious and correct that it's beneath you to have to explain it. That's at least as it seems.
Or worse still, semantics! :wink:
You propose that if we let the beast semantics on our land at all, we shackle it with the T-schema? Allow, if we must, theoretical talk of linguistic entities and their semantic relations with cats and mats, but be prepared to exchange it for talk about only the cats and mats, as in proper science?
Fine if so, but mustn't you then stay out of arguments about kinds of assertion and belief, and how we learn to recognise them?
Ready to hear why not.
Yes and that is the rub. Metaphysics is beyond epistemology and hence is beyond knowledge which means it is indistinguishable from fantasy. The T of JTB is cannot be directly linked to 'what is' , it is based on naïve reality, in other words it is a fantasy. All one knows is what can be derived from epistemology.
'Twas once commonly asserted that the sun is the centre of the cosmos.
Well... it's simpler than any other? I don't see any substance in your reply.
Pretty much.
Two distinct questions: what is truth? What do we know?
The answer to the first question: "p" is true IFF p. And that is all there is to say on it, apart from some psychological footnotes on performatives.
The answer to the second question: we know all sorts of different things, from how to ride bikes thru how to multiply numbers to where you left your keys.
The supposed bit in between, the philosophical musings about justified true beliefs, is a philosophical quagmire, a bottle trap for blow flies.
SO I've provided the answer to "when is it true that the cat is on the mat". You are now asking the quite different question: how do I know that the cat is on the mat? And the answer to that question is multifarious and subject to change. Because I can see him; because WIfe told me so; because he was there when last I looked.
Is it much ado about nothing?
Ha ha, probably :joke:
Here's a fine fly-bottle. A Seagull who writes eloquently, yet without knowing.
I put it to you that you know plenty of cool stuff, but philosophy tells you otherwise. Drop the philosophy.
Yes, but not by us, nit by the ones for whom "the sun is the centre of the cosmos" is false. We would never say that (and mean it), and it is us for whom it is false (now or then).
Quoting Banno
"The cat is on the mat" is true iff the cat is on the mat, right? That remains contingent, we can't say if the statement "the cat is on the mat" is true or not, only the circumstances under which it is true - the cat is on the mat. "A" is true IFF A.
So now take your statement "" the cat is on the mat" is true IFF the cat is on the mat". That statement (the whole thing in the quotation marks, with another statement referenced inside it), we'll call it "B". At the moment, it's not actually the case, it's only contingent. It's contingent on B - "the cat is on the mat" is true IFF the cat is on the mat.
So all you've offered is something which could be the case. I'm asking how we establish if it is.
With "the cat is on the mat" we just look at the mat and see if there's a cat on it. What do we do with your statement B to see if it is, in fact, the case?
The JTB account is described as so much farting, in the last few lines of the Theaetetus account from whence it came.
I think it better to treat knowledge as a family resemblance word; what we know must be true, must be believed; but what is to count as a justification cannot be set out in an algorithm. Hence no general account of knowledge can be complete.
Which should not be a surprise. One cannot know everything.
IT was false for them, too. They were what We In The Trade call wrong.
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Banno
I suspect that if you knew a little bit more about philosophy you would realise how little you actually know.
But I could lean some more.
So, educate me.
We would say it was false for them, they wouldn't. Its what "we in the trade" call wrong, not what "they at the time" call wrong. Note, I'm not going for relativism here, I'm a solid redundancy theorist (Ramsey variety) when it comes to truth. I'm just interested in the epistemic implications. You can't have your cake and eat it here. If the statement "the cat is on the mat" is only contingently 'true' (upon whether the cat is indeed on the mat) then the statement ""A" is true IFF A" is itself only contingently true (upon it being the case that "A" is true if A). You've only done half the job of making your case.
So the second half shows your statement to actually be true (not just true IFF). It's the looking for the cat. Ramsey would say "the cat is on the mat" is true if when we look at the mat we see the cat there. The addition of the behaviour consistent with the state of affairs is important because it encompasses what we're doing with the term 'true'. It's why the Tarskian version alone is unsatisfying.
Dude, help me here....
"A" is true IFF A" is equivalent to it being the case that "A" is true IFF A"...
So we have "A" is true IFF A" iff "A" is true IFF A"
which is a tautology; and hence not contingent.
What have I missed?
Sure - Ramsey has one demonstrate one's understanding of "the cat is on the mat" by making use of it.
That's not an objection to what I have said.
I'm at a loss to understand where it is you think we disagree.
I am not here to educate people.
I would only say that there is a distinct distinction between history of philosophy, which is the main focus of universities, and philosophy itself. The distinction is similar to that of actually climbing mountains and reading accounts of people who have climbed mountains.
Philosophy is necessarily based upon assumptions, a good philosophy will identify those assumptions, a poor one will just leave them as implicit.
What assumptions does your philosophy make?
All of them.
Including:
Fantasies are real?
Logic of language is irrefutable?
Everything Kant wrote is true?
Philosophy as taught at universities is true?
People are born into sin?
Life is a misery?
Touché (inadéquat ou inepte?).
You're missing the quotations marks (the issue which I stated with. I probably should be putting this in some sort of notation which will make it clearer, but I don't know how to use it so I'll just end up making matter's worse. I'll try one more time with.
1. "The cat is on the mat" is true iff the cat is on the mat. -> "A" (in quotation marks) is true iff A (no quotation marks. That much is what you've stated, is that right?
2. The second A can be replaced with some justificatory action - procedure X - so "the cat is on the mat" is true iff procedure X produces the expected results (we go to pick up the cat and it is indeed there)
3. The problem with this as a truth theory is that procedure X is not the same for all propositions. It's a 'family resemblance' type collection of procedures. The procedure for verifying that the cat is on the mat might be to look, ask someone, feel for it etc.
4. Ramsey gets round this by unifying all types of procedure, adding a pinch of watered-down Cambridge Pragmatism, by saying they'll all some version of 'act as if A was true, and if everything works, then A is true' - Ramsey avoids 'true', he uses 'is the case'.
5. Now you have a proposition which you'd like us to consider is the case - that proposition is that {""the cat is on the mat" is true iff the cat is on the mat"}. The whole proposition is the one contained in the curly braces, I've put quotation marks around the whole thing (they're double at the beginning because the proposition starts with reference to another proposition). We'll call your proposition B (the whole thing - all that is contained in the curly braces. "B" is true iff B, right?
6. So you've given us the conditions under which your proposition would be the case - {""the cat is on the mat" is true iff the cat is on the mat"} would itself, as a whole proposition, be true iff were the case that "the cat is on the mat" is true iff the cat is on the mat.
7. Now, recall the collection of acceptable verification procedures to establish if the cat was indeed on the mat - look, ask someone, feel for it etc.
8. Now replace 'the cat is on the mat' in all propositions above with 'the earth is flat' and work backwards, imagining you're 1000 years ago
First we verify if the earth is indeed flat - we look, we ask others, we feel it - yep the earth is indeed flat. Then we check your second proposition - the one about when a proposition is true. It says that {""the earth is flat" is true iff the earth is flat"}. Now we can check that too, against language use. Just like we checked the first proposition (about the shape of the earth). That too seems to be the case (1000 years ago) people are indeed using the word 'true' about the proposition "the earth is flat" in cases where (according to their verification procedures) the earth is flat. All good...
...Until you want to say those people were wrong. What they said was untrue. They didn't do the verification procedure as well as we can now, they made a mistake. Fine. But what about your proposition (the one about when propositions are true). Well, our 1000 year old scholar doesn't seem to have made any error there. People were indeed using the word 'true' about the proposition "the earth is flat" on the basis that their verification procedures showed the earth to be flat. After all, your proposition was not {""the cat is on the mat is true iff (all verification procedures ever invented show that) the cat is on the mat"}.
But when you say they were wrong, "it not only isn't true, but it wasn't 'true' that the earth is flat", you're missing a verification procedure for proposition (the equivalent of checking to see if the cat is on the mat), because if we use the procedure [check to see if people are using the word 'true' about "the earth is flat" iff the earth is flat], then we get a sound "No". If we ignore their verification procedures, but use ours instead, then people are using the word 'true' about the proposition "the earth is flat" in cases when the earth isn't flat. So what now? Were they all using the word wrongly? Are we saying the entire community of language users 1000 years ago did not know the meaning of the word 'true'?
But that's not right.
At the best you could claim a procedure was needed to justify belief in A.
But the error here has you replacing redundancy with verification, and hence heading off down some garden path.
Probably just as well.
Right. We're probably approaching this problem differently then. I'm quite a strong "meaning is use" person. I gathered from some of your previous posts that you were too - but that may have just been an poor summary.
To me, if someone asks "what is truth?" the only coherent answer to that is the answer to "what do we use the word 'truth' for, what circumstances is it useful in?"
So "the cat is in the mat is 'true' IFF...?" just means "what circumstances do people say, of "the cat is on the mat", that it is true, and what are they trying to get done by using the word.
In the case of 'true' those circumstances always involve verification of some sort.
Person A "The cat is on the roof"- Person B goes out to check.
Person B "the cat is on the roof, it's true"
Person A "is it true, today's your birthday?"
Person B (checks his calendar and personal memory) "yes"
Person A "is all the evidence given here true?"
Person B (checks, corroborates, asks experts) "yes , all the evidence given here is true"
etc...
You trying to claim that what is 'true' (even for the people at the time) is what we currently think is the case is just not how 'true' is used. If you're not defining 'true' by how it is used, then I'm not interested in going any further because I don't hold with trying to define what things should mean, only what they do mean.
OK. I have had a look at T-sentence stuff before and couldn't make the jump from formal languages to real languages, but I'm prepared give it another try, I've got a few papers on Tarski, I'll give them another look through and see if I can see what you're seeing.
If a particular verification procedure or justification was sufficient for a statement's truth, then in order to avoid true falsehoods and false truths, this verification procedure or justification must be infallible; as in this model, X being verified or justified forces "X" is true.
So long as justification and verification are fallible, and there are truths prior to the advent of humanity, justification and verification are logically independent (in the sense of not formally entailing anything about) of statement truth value.
If belief in a statement was necessary for a statement's truth, then "There are dinosaurs" would be false before the advent of humanity because there would be no beliefs in statements (since it is not believed, and belief is necessary for truth, then it is false).
If belief in a statement was sufficient for a statement's truth, then in order to avoid true falsehoods or false truths, this belief must be infallible; as in this model, X being believed forces "X" is true.
So long as belief is fallible, and there are no beliefs in statements prior to the advent of humanity, belief in statements and their truth are logically independent.
What we can say is true is not what is true! Though what we say is true is largely what seems true to us or what can be asserted with adequate justification.
Are there still relationships between justifications/verifications procedures, beliefs and truths? Ideally, a justification or verification procedure connects a truth evidentially and conceptually to a belief. An inquiry may cause us to question, reevaluate and re-contextualise held beliefs to better connect our beliefs to the truth and to dispel false statements and connections.
Epistemology (of statements/declarative knowledge) dwells in the rupture between belief and truth, trying to analyse the bridges we build between them.
We tend to assume that there were no utterances prior to the advent of humanity, so no "P"'s.
Or we could look at propositions as eternal content distinct from utterances, which is how most people think of it (if they do think if it), but that seems too Platonic to some.
There'd be no one to say anything of "there are dinosaurs", so I don't think it would be false. It just wouldn't be labelled either way.
To say "the cat is on the mat" is true IFF the cat is on the mat makes 'true' something which acts like a property of propositions. But if you want it to have an opposite, then it acts like a set, the membership of which is according to some 'family resemblance' type of criteria, much like Wittgenstein's 'game', or at least, that's how I understand it at the moment.
So to answer the "what are games?" we answer the question which activities are 'games'? You have to defer to convention "cards is usually called a game, football is... Carpentry isn't...". You could try to summarise a few common features, and that would be very useful (despite the inevitable loss of accuracy).
I see it exactly the same answering the question "what is truth". There's no better answer than to list all of the propositions which are considered members of the set 'truth'. Like with 'games' though, we can provide a useful (if slightly less accurate) summary. "Propositions which, when treated as though they were the case, work as expected" would be one such non-exhaustive, but pragmatic summary.
What I can't get to is some definition of truth which holds outside of convention. It's just a word after all, no magic force.
So when we say "the earth is flat" was not true, even for the people 1000years ago, we're saying that their category {true propositions} did not contain "the earth is flat". But it almost certainly did.
If we we take the opposite view, that their category {true propositions} did contain "the earth is flat", but they were wrong to put it there, then we're saying that language comes before the people using it. That it's not the case that a culture evolves some use of a word, but rather the categories are all pre-ordained somehow, and there's a right and wrong about what goes in them.
This is why Ramsey ends up analysing beliefs, not truths. 'True' can only (like any other word) be understood in terms of what people do with it, which a) requires people, and b) requires beliefs about the objects/actions being referred to by it.
Having said all that, I will re-read Tarski, as advised and try to take on board what you've said whilst doing so. Maybe I can get a better perspective on this.
I am pretty sure it would be false if the logic has excluded middle.
(There is someone that believes that P) necessitates (P is true)
is equivalent to
(P is true) entails (There is someone that believes that P)
is equivalent to
(not (There is someone that believes that P)) entails (not (P is true))
When there is no one that believes that P, the last implication allows us to derive (not (P is true)).
Then with excluded middle for all P (P or not P) you get:
P is false.
So "there are dinosaurs" would be false. It'd also be false that "There was plantlife prior to the advent of people capable of belief" until people capable of belief came about, despite everything indicating otherwise.
Yeah, I trust your logic. I obviously can't accept the excluded middle though, following any language-based analysis of 'true' and 'false'. Not(true) is just not(true), false is something else.
"Mozart is a better composer than Beethoven" us not(true), but it's not(false) either.
So "there are dinosaurs" at the beginning of the earth would be like "Mozart is a better composer than Beethoven", neither true nor false (at the time) because they'd be no language community (at that time) using the terms 'true' and 'false' from which to derive their meaning.
"It's true" can be used in any statement.
Yes, it's true there were dinosaurs, but that's only I because you're highlighting it's truth value.
I'm not getting anything out of the Tarski I'm reading, I'm afraid. All I'm coming across is that chasm between formal languages that Tarski was talking about and the semantically closed natural languages. He even says that
"A thorough analysis of the meaning current in everyday life of the term ‘true’ is not intended here"
And he seems, if anything, to agree with my analysis of the natural language meaning of 'true' being something of an incompletely definable set {things which are true}
"We should reconcile ourselves with the fact that we are confronted, not with one concept, but with several different concepts which are denoted by one word"
Is there something else you think I'd benefit from reading to better understand how you're crossing that chasm? More Davidson perhaps (I ask, teeth clenched!)?
Indeed. My only reply here thus far, prior to this one, began exactly on that focus...
Substitution practices clarify the differences. It's good for determining which is more primary/foundational; which is existentially dependent upon which.
Lol
The first thing people need to learn before they can get educated is that there is something they need, or at least want, to learn.
PS Does it not bother you at all that you don't (or at least seem not to) know what assumptions your philosophy is based on?
Quoting Isaac
is the same as
Person A "The cat is on the roof"- Person B goes out to check.
Person B "The cat is on the roof"
or,
Person A "The cat is on the roof"- Person B goes out to check.
Person B '"The cat is on the roof" is true'
"The cat is on the roof" is true IFF the cat is on the roof.
Kind of like the way statements about possible worlds are evaluated "at" a world, not as if P was spoken in that world. Right?
Kind of like you can evaluate the fork being on the left for the person sitting opposite you, despite it being on your right.
The earth's being flat was not true-for-them. They believed it was flat, but they were wrong. It was not flat.
But there is a view that says a statement has to be verifiable in order to be truth apt. I can't remember how it worked, though.
Do you?
Maybe it's the remnants of it. But it's the reason some people claim string theory doesn't qualify as science: because it can't presently be verified. I'll see if I can find it.
1. The meaning of a sentence consists in its truth conditions. To understand a sentence is to know the conditions in which it is true; such knowledge explains understanding.
2. The notion of truth required by realism is one that may apply to sentences independently of our ability to recognize it as applying.
3. If truth is understood in the manner required by realism, it will be impossible to explain what it means for a speaker to know the truth conditions of unverifiable sentences.
4. Because of this, the realist theory of meaning fails.
5. Since (1) is correct, the verification-transcendent conception of truth required by realism must be rejected in favor of a verificationist conception.
How's that? What's this bit mean? Can you fill it out?
But what does P even mean if we dont know its truth conditions?
And if we can't understand P, what does it mean to say P is true?
But I say that it can still be true that the cup is in the cupboard, and further that it will be true that the cup is in the cupboard if the truth condition that the cup is in the cupboard holds.
And finally, this level of analysis is just weird.
It's verifiable in principle. Just open the door.
You didn't believe that meaning is truth conditions anyway, did you? You're more meaning-is-use.
It's handy tho.
That was not verifiable in principle?
That there is a planet in some inaccessible part of space.
I'll read more Dummett tomorrow to understand what's at stake.
If truth is a property of statements, and there were no statements prior to the advent of humanity, how could there have been truths prior to the advent of humanity?
Quoting frank
I thinks it's rejected because it is thought that it cannot be verified (or falsified) in principle,as opposed to merely "presently".
A believes that there is a cup in the cupboard. He/she opens the door and realises that he/she was mistaken.
What is so hard about that? Why complicate things by bringing in all this talk about 'truth'?
And sometimes for "that has been checked by methods we both approve of", and sometimes for "I really, really believe that", and sometimes for "I really, really want you to believe that"...But never, in my experience, for "that is what people in the future will come to think when science has advanced sufficiently far". As I said
Quoting Isaac
Isn't that exactly how you use it when you speculate (with or without committing) as to the relative merits of competing (and perhaps currently unfalsifiable) theories?
Quoting Isaac
Perhaps Banno and Davidson are saying that any term (including 'true' and 'mean') means only what it should mean, and/or what it will eventually mean (when science has advanced sufficiently far)?
Ok, I don't fancy the odds that Banno will agree to that. But I'm always surprised when anyone takes "what they do mean" to be a matter of fact. So I hope someone would question that.
I don't think anyone would use 'true' in that situation. 'Likely' maybe, or 'possible'. Either way, I'm not ruling out niche cases, only aiming at a summary of normal use.
Quoting bongo fury
Being interested in the question and presuming the answer is a matter of fact are not the same thing. I think we can say it's a matter of fact that 'game' does not mean [small bag for keeping a wallet in]. We can discover this 'fact' empirically. That doesn't mean we now know everything 'game' does mean, but our investigation has certainly given us something useful about the word. We can continue this way with any unfamiliar or troubling word in the hope that situations describing its normal use can help dissolve problems associated with its abnormal use.
It's a planet we can't in principle know about, in the past or during the heat death of the universe where it's expanded to the point that it's impossible to travel there. Or it's cloaked by the Romulans.
The point is: we can't observe it, so we cant know about it. Dummett isnt saying planets are dependent on observers, he's questioning the meaningfulness of talking about what we cant know.
This is a cool summation of why we might relate meaning to truth conditions:
Because it's fun.
O'Dowd of PBS Spacetime says we might develop a way to test it in a thousand years or so. He emphasizes that the universe is not obligated to make all of its aspects observable to us. I'm in no position to judge it for myself.
The way 'truth' is most commonly used is simply that it consists in what says how things really are.
In other words its logic is one of correspondence, as formulated by the T-sentence.
Does this mean the statement must be incoherent? I don't know, but (as far as my limited knowledge of it goes) I don't think string theory is incoherent. If that's right does that mean it is testable in principle? How would we know if something is testable in principle, anyway? Would or should it be deemed to be untestable in principle, just because we cannot presently imagine any possible way it could be tested?
?frank If it could be tested in principle then it could be true or false. Those who say string theory is not even wrong are claiming, whether rightly or not, that it is not testable in principle. A statement or theory which is not testable in principle would be deemed to be inconsistent with the common notion of truth.
That's based on a particular system or methodology of testing, invented from pure mathematics, based on axioms and particular standards and methods of testing (e.x. induction), when of course the defintions of testing themselves can be changed or redefined, much as how Bacon's method defined them to begin with.
So in practice, when hear this argument, it generally strikes me as blind faith (rather than experience) in a particular system, or institution of testing and testability, however the prime truths or axioms upon which said system was mathematically built upon to begin with are held to be absolute, at least as in regards to the scope or proceedures of the method itself, in a way which is completely independent from testing.
(Since the prime truth or axiom that Bacon's 17th century method based on induction is how things should be tested to begin with, is not in itself testable but merely held either to be knowable a priori, or based on an argument from authority on behalf of Bacon's wisdom, or that of those who practice his method).
Well that can't possibly be the case because otherwise we'd never use it. We don't know how things really are, we only know how we believe them to be, so 'true' would correspond with our beliefs, not the world.
Well I congratulate you! It is good to find fun in the little things, but personally I have had more fun having a root canal. :)
The skeptical concern that we may not know how things "REALLY" are is based on the assumption that things really are some way, and this doesn't at all change the fact that truth, whatever it might be, whether known by us or not, is thought to accord with the way things really are.
'Truth', in the sense you're referring to it here, is a category in which we place certain propositions and from which we reject others. To say ""Paris is the capital of France" is true", is to say that the proposition "Paris is the capital of France" belongs in that category {propositions which are true}. Philosophically, I'm happywwith the deflationary position, the "is true" bit adds nothing ontologically. But as a linguistic expression, the above categorisation is what it's mostly doing. It's how we can use it even circumventing deflation in "everything he just said was true".
But in order to use a category, we must know what the criteria for membership are. If the criteria for membership were {things which really are true} then we should not be able to put anything in that category. At best it can be {things we're happy to assume are the case}. It can only ever be about belief/judgement because that's all we have, we cannot check with some higher authority.
Nor can we appeal, in claiming truth of our proposition "P" to an accord with the fact that P, because to say it is a fact that P is just to assert P.
I really don't understand whysso much mental effort is put into this convoluted project of trying to rescue the divinity of the term 'true' from the clutches of the evils of justified beliefs. Some leftover of religious certainty our secular culture is still trying to fill, I think.
I think it's not a matter of knowing which things can be put in the category "true", but of defining what criteria justify anything being in that category. So, the common logic is "accordance with actuality". As I said before; in countless ordinary cases we know what accords with actuality as long as we don't try to introduce some radical (and mostly inappropriate) skepticism as to what "really" constitutes actuality.
In other cases, for example, propositions about the nature of distant galaxies which we cannot observe at all because they are beyond the "light horizon", we can say that there would be actualities about which true or false statements could be made if only we were there to observe them.
Quoting Isaac
I think the reason is that it is important to acknowledge that there are actualities which are independent of human opinion. In some sense truth just is actuality. But we think of actuality as different to truth in the sense that truth consists in what can rightly be said about actuality.
The inherent logic of this doesn't change even if it is accepted that there must be actualities about which we cannot say anything at all.
Important or not, it simply cannot be done and, especially in philosophy, I'm just not seeing the merit in being inaccurate for the sake of...what, exactly?
When we say a proposition is 'true' we are saying that we believe it accords with reality. It is a statement about our judgement, not about the world. "the cat is on the mat" is a statement about the world. ""The cat is on the mat" is true", is a statement about how I feel about the statement "the cat is on the mat". I don't see how anyone can deny this is what's happening - "...is true" means "I believe it".
The objection that people can be wrong about what is true ""the earth is flat" is true", is no more troubling than that people can say " discos are fun". They're wrong, discos are not fun - except they are fun for them.
Now you can argue that 'fun' is subjective, but what evidence would you bring to bear to prove that? That people disagree about what's fun? Well they disagree about what's true too. That fun describes a state of mind? Well believing a statement to be true also describes a state of mind.
As Ramsey said "it is‘immediately obvious that if we have analysed judgment we have solved the problem of truth"
I get that a distinction is useful between those things only a few crackpots believe and those things which the vast majority of well-educated people believe. I'm perfectly happy that in general colloquial use 'true' is used to make that distinction . Here 'true' is used to mean "this proposition has a good standard of justification". I'm fine with that, but...
If we reject scepticism about actuality, then that might well serve the interests of philosophers who want to get get on with the business of telling people what's what, but it doesn't very well serve the interests of psychology or neuroscience. You may think that...
Quoting Janus
... but you really don't. I could set up a situation in the space of a couple of hours wherein you'd be convinced the cat was on the mat when in fact there was no cat. Suggestion, priming, false memory creation...Give me a few years and I could have you seeing cats everywhere. The point is, this is not because of some psychological trick I could play on top of, or masking, your normal accurate methods of recognising reality, It's because your normal methods of recognising reality do all this fabrication anyway. You really don't see a cat (as in pick up all the light waves reflected from the shape of the object). You make up that a cat is probably there from a few sketchy outlines and a lot of prior expectation and then you don't even bother checking unless something gives you reason to. That is - by the best science we currently have - actually how your perception works.
Now that being the case, what are the psychologist and the neuroscientist supposed to do with a definition assuming what we perceive accords with what is actually the case? If we reject scepticism, how are we supposed to talk about the state of affairs scientific investigation of the brain is revealing to us?
IMO the only way that it can be logically inferred that a 'cat is on a 'mat' is from a boot strap process of pattern identification from sense data. I discuss this in some detail in my book 'The Pattern Paradigm'.
"Is X true?" is a question that must resound in all truth qualititive statements.
It's true that grass is commonly green, in response to 'is X true?'.
If I had said this without the resounding question, it may not have any context.
The grass is green, thus, in response to "is X true?", I would say it's true the grass is green.
If I hold a truth - I may not just as well hold reality - truth can make reality more personal.
It has value but it's not to be confused with reality. Why would we hold truth? It helps us detect falsehoods.
No, when we say a proposition is true we are saying that it accords with reality, not merely that we believe it accords with reality. If I say that it is true that Donald Trump is POTUS, I am not saying (only) that I believe that Donald Trump is POTUS, but that Donald Trump is POTUS. You are conflating belief with actuality.
It doesn't matter that I might not know what the actuality is. When I make a statement about what is true, my intention is to say what is true, not merely to say what I believe is true. On a "meta-level" what I am saying may be merely an expression of my belief (it also may happen to be an expression of the truth, even if I can never be certain that it is). But that "meta-caveat" is not the same thing as the logic that is inherent in the intention underlying truth-statements. You are conflating the two.
But then you are entering a world of fiction, fantasy.
And there is no rationality that can show how any statement can have a direct correspondence to the 'world of actuality'.
I've said that the way we commonly talk and think about truth presupposes an actuality that our statements are either in accordance with or not. That accordance or lack of accordance just is what we mean by truth and falsity respectively. The logic of accordance is the logic of the relationship between truth and actuality, between propositions or statements and things and events, as we commonly understand it.
The point is that it can't be justified or "shown" from some position outside it, some "god's eye" view, but only from within the logic and facts of everyday practice. In fact it's not a matter of justification at all, as I see it; if you start thinking in those terms, you have already gone astray.
It's pretty easy to show how "Donald Trump is POTUS" is true, though. If I said instead, "Alien life exists out there.", then your criticism would apply, as we don't have any way of justifying that statement, so we don't know the truth of the matter.
Now if I knew you were guessing that about the president of the US, but didn't really know, then it would be a matter of belief.
It is the interpretation of the statement (as opposed to the statement itself) and its correspondence to one's model of the world that enables it to be labelled as true.
The statement itself consists of a string of alphanumeric characters and has no direct correspondence to the world except through its interpretation.
You are referring to the common or normative usage of the word 'true', in which case I would agree with you. But it is IMO a naive usage. It works fine for most people, but on closer examination for philosophy, it is plain that one only knows a model of the world rather than the 'actuality of reality'.
It is akin to whether one believes the Sun goes around the Earth or not. For most people the idea that the Sun goes around the Earth works fine (or at least it did in the past) but on closer examination for the purposes of astronomy one learns that that model is ineffective.
The idea, though, is that there is an actuality which we could, in principle, experience and know more comprehensively, that what we now experience and know is not exhaustive. It's an entirely different idea that there is an actuality or an aspect of actuality (the "ding an sich", for example) that we could never in principle, experience and know.
We know what we perceive, but we cannot hold what we perceive up for comparison against some purported thing we cannot, in principle, perceive. The very idea of something we cannot in principle perceive is incoherent. How could such an idea itself reflect reality?
The idea reflects itself in the imagination the way poetry works
"As something factical [real, factual], the understanding self-projection of Being is always already together with a discovered world." Heidegger
Yet how can you be together with what you are? Welcome to modern philosophy my friends, a beautiful garden. When Hegel says the world is thought, he in no ways means it, yet he does. Modern philosophy deals with the accidents of truth, and in the end rejects the substance, creating a self-consistent system that sounds like a Buddhism traditional sung mantra
OK perhaps I misunderstood you.
Certainly as part of ones model of the world is the idea that there is a real world out there that one can learn about and improve one's model.
Interesting. So you're saying that 'believing' is one attitude we can have toward a proposition's content, but there's some other attitude we can have toward it which you're saying is the one we use to apply the label 'true'? Do you have a name for this other attitude? When does it kick in?
Let's take your example of a 'truth',"Donald Trump is POTUS". If, after the election, a friend tells you that "Donald Trump is POTUS", do you merely believe that this accords with reality, or do you have this other attitude yet? If not yet then maybe you read it in the paper. Do you now have this attitude. I'm intrigued as to what point a mere belief transitions into this other attitude, but more importantly, I'm intrigued as to how you distinguish between the two.
It's possible the answer to all these questions is actually in your last paragraph, but if so, I'm afraid I couldn't make any sense of it, so I'd be grateful for a re-wording.
Isn't this just a rehashing of Kant?
In order to know that we do not know how things are, we must already know both... how things are and what we believe about how things are. We must perform a comparative analysis between the way things are and what we believe about the way things are. But if we do not know how things are, we cannot possibly perform this comparison.
It's untenable.
Meaningful correspondence between what is thought and/or believed about what has happened and/or is happening, and what has happened and/or is happening is existentially dependent upon belief formation. That is not to say that in order for a statement to be true, it must also be believed by anyone in particular. Rather, it is to point out that all statements are existentially dependent upon belief about what has happened and/or is happening and what has happened and/or is happening. Statements are statements of belief(assuming a sincere speaker of course).
Truth is correspondence 'between' thought and belief about the world and/or ourselves(what has happened and/or is happening), and the world and/or ourselves(what has happened and/or is happening.
That's only the half of it though. Talk of truth without meaning is nonsense.
All thought and belief are meaningful as well. All meaning is attributed solely by virtue of drawing correlations between different things. Drawing correlations between different things requires a plurality of things, at least one of which is capable of detecting, perceiving, and/or drawing a distinction between different things.
All thought and belief consist(s) of the aforementioned correlations. Across the entire gamut, from the simplest to the most complex... each and every thought and belief consists of correlations drawn between different things.
Thought, belief, meaning, and truth...
No. If we have no reasonable grounds or mechanism by which the two could be assumed to be the same then we must conclude that they would only be so by chance. A perfectly reasonable default hypothesis therefore, is that they aren't. Put that to some experimental testing showing overwhelmingly the extent to which our experience of the same object differs and you have, what is currently the leading theory on perception. We do not perceive reality directly. Not even close.
The leading theory of perception? Is it physicalist? Does it include notions like perception that is informed by language as well as perception that is not?
Meh.
Gibberish.
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Janus
Apologies if my wording is not clear to you. The name for the "other attitude" is 'acknowledgement that my belief could be wrong if it happens not to accord with reality'.
If I could be wrong in believing that Donald Trump is POTUS, then this possibility is contingent upon there being an actual state of affairs: Donald Trump being or not being POTUS at the time in question, that would make my belief true or false.
This assumes that there is a reality to be perceived or not perceived directly, no?
Not necessarily. It depends if you take a pragmatic definition of 'wrong' or not. Being 'wrong' can amount to nothing more than having a theory which is superseded by a more useful one. I'm not saying that there is no state of affairs, by the way, I think there is. I'm just saying that being 'wrong' need not be contingent on there being one.
Quoting Janus
So, if 'true' is a property of a belief, and a belief is a state of affairs in the brain, a 'true' belief should be distinguishable from a 'false' one one, no? For a belief to have the property of being 'true' (unless we're invoking dualism) it would have to have some physical difference from a false one.
Better, I think, to have 'true' as a category of beliefs, not a property of them. Far less problems with dualism. But if 'true' is a category of belief, then nothing about the real world determines what goes in that category, it's a human-made one. We decide what's in and what's out. Like 'blue'.
Quoting Janus
Yes. I make that presumption. I don't think we could provide much by way of justification, but I also don't think we're capable of doubting it.
This is dead wrong.
So it's like the chairs at the end of the universe.
But that debate disappeared long ago.
To my next party, you are invited.
Did it? Ok then.
Let * be [ (y is true => there exists a human x that can express y)]
* is equivalent to "if there is no human x that can express y, y is false" - the antecedent is true whenever there are no humans, so if * holds an arbitrary y is false (when there are no humans). Implications of trivialism aside, the interesting thing is:
The counterintuitive thing about "There were dinosaurs before the advent of humanity" isn't that there were no human languages capable of expressing a truth about dinosaurs at the time; which is obviously true when there are no humans capable of language; it's about the falsehood of there being dinosaurs before the advent of humanity. There really were no dinosaurs before humans existed if * holds. It's less about human language, and more about the dinosaurs winking into existence in the past if * holds. The truth conditions of claims regarding dinosaurs existing come to depend on the existence of humans, not just whether the articulability or expressibility of the truth of those claims requires humans.
We know the dinosaurs didn't wink into existence in the past when humans became capable of expressing "Dinosaurs existed in the past", so * does not hold.
On the other hand I tend to think of truth as simply being actuality; its propositional "face" so to speak. So there actually and truly were dinosaurs prior to the advent of humanity, but there was no human there to see the truth's propositional face (or the actuality for that matter!).
Right and all we're talking about here is the inherent logic in the human understanding of truth. I say that the primary feature of that logic is the ineliminable idea that there is an actuality to which true propositions would correspond, even if we don't (always or even ever) know exactly which propositions those would be.
Also I think once you start talking about physical differences between beliefs you have gone seriously astray.
This is rubbish.
We need not assume that our thoughts are true. We can often check and know for sure. Chance has nothing at all to do with it.
Besides that, the criticism levied has been ignored. Your claim that our perception of reality is not reality means nothing. That's trivial. Of course, our perception of reality is not equal to reality, nor need it be.
In order for you to know that we cannot and/or do not perceive anything as it is(or that we cannot perceive reality directly), you must know the difference between the two. Knowing that requires knowing both, and then performing a subsequent comparative analysis between the two. That cannot be done, of course, by your very own admission.
It's untenable.
Quoting Isaac
We very well may decide what we choose to place into such a category, but our criterion for what counts as being true will show it's inherent weaknesses in the process, under careful scrutiny.
If "true" is a category of individual beliefs, all of which meet the criterion of being true, and true belief does not require our taking account of it in order for it to be so, then either truth is prior to language, or true belief does not require truth.
I put it to everyone participating here that true thought and/or belief is not existentially dependent upon being reported upon. In other words, some true thought and/or belief does not require language; some true thought and/or belief does not consist of language; some true belief is prior to language.
That says something important about truth, as well as something important about the different senses of the term "truth". Accompanied by the earlier post, we have thought, belief, meaning, and truth... all of which emerge simultaneously within the simplest of true thought and belief. Falsity emerges during this timeframe as well, but it is not until we come to realize our own fallibility that we become aware that we have false belief or true ones.
Do you believe in a modified version of * where
[y is actual => there exists a human x that can express y]
?
Perhaps it's just me, but I'm not sure if truth in this question is being used to mean the same thing in both mentions.
Truth is (perhaps pun intended) I'm not sure which way to think of this question.
That probably made no sense (not a first for me), so I'll try to expain what I mean (which usually makes it far worse).
Are we refering to truth, as in what is infered from fact or are we refering to truth as the same thing as fact?
These are the possible option that are muddling around in my thoughts:
a) How can one know what truth (infered from facts) is, without knowing what facts are in the first place?
b) How can one know what truth (facts infered from facts) is, without knowing what truth (facts infered from facts that makes up those aforementioned facts?) is in the first place?
c) How can one know what facts are, without knowing what truth (facts that makes up those aforementioned facts) is in the first place?
d) How can one know what facts are, without knowing what facts (leading to those facts) are in the first place?
e) Something else.
I know this probably seems silly, but when I read the OP all that popped into mind was the lawyer speak from Rudi G * stating "truth isn't truth". It was a wonderful example to misdirection for whatever reasons he might have had at the time, but what he said was "someone's interpretation of the truth isn't always fact". His use of the same word twice in a sentence, but with two different means next to each other caused confusion (and quite a bit of comedy). Since then I have noticed this tendency more and more; thus my asking before making any further commentary.
Meow!
GREG
* The Rudi G reference is not a means to drag this into such a political deathpit, but rather an example of what may or may not have occurred with the question in the OP.
P is the proposition that there were dinosaurs during the Triassic. Even if a sentence that expresses P was never uttered at any time, P would still be truth-apt.
This is realism. Notice the cost of it.
That's quite different from being able to say "There were dinosaurs before there were humans", which is true. Why do we need (if this is the point you're making) to change from "There was X before there were humans" to "There was what would appear to humans as X before there were humans" to get a meaningful statement when "There were X before there were humans" means something and doesn't mean the same thing as "There was what would appear to humans as X before there were humans". The first statement is about X, the second statement is about a human in relation to X.
Though, I think that so long as we agree that there really were dinosaurs before humans (not just counterfactual "things which would appear as dinosaurs"), we're in agreement.
Quoting frank
I don't see the problem? We can interpret "What would there be without humans?" and "What was there before humans?" questions unproblematically; the Earth would orbit the sun even if there were no humans.
You just end up with these eternal abstract objects, some if which are false.
Why? "The Earth would orbit the sun even if there were no humans" is about the real Earth, the real sun and real humans. It's a stipulation, but it's not about the stipulated content (the content isn't merely possible, it's actual, and we stipulate about it). If there were no humans, the Earth would orbit the sun - are the Earth and the sun eternal abstract objects there?
We get by with focusing on the problems of the paths we don't like. We avoid turning and seeing the problems we've adopted.
Even when we think we've outsmarted philosophy by way of someone like Heidegger, new unsolvables await.
The trick to seeing the situation is to become emotionally neutral. Emotion is the thing that binds me to my precious view and blinds me to its flaws.
Why is it necessary to believe that a truth condition of a statement, considered as a state of affairs, is an eternal abstract object when all that it concerns are contingently formed material particulars or events or generalisations thereof? "There were dinosaurs before there were humans" is true, because dinosaurs existed before there were humans is a fact.
Counterfactuals are more difficult, "The Earth would still orbit around the sun even if there were no humans" is true because what drives Earth's orbit around the sun is not existentially or causally dependent upon the existence of humans; because it works in a way indifferent to our existence it would work the same way without us.
Am I to read this as a suggestion that I'm blinded to the flaws of realist intuitions because I'm emotionally attached to them?
A proposition is timeless. This is what you wanted to avoid the problem of there being truths during a time when there were no truthbearers. A proposition has no location in time or space, and yet it somehow exists. We know a proposition is not any particular sentence or utterance because multiple sentences and utterances can express the same proposition. It's outside the universe (in much the same we appear to be when we speak as realists).
This issue has driven some philosophers to reject propositions and deflate truth to a property of sentences or utterances. If you do this, you'll be back with your question about how an 'unstated statement' could be true. You'll have to allow that the only truths are those which have at some point been uttered.
It's either realism and fishy propositions, or anti-realism and concrete truthbearers.
Quoting fdrake
I actually don't know. I was signalling to you that I'm not attacking realism per se, not in the sense of trying to win. I'm just pointing out the zit on its face. You do a lot of sophistisizing, so I may just be talking to myself.
This isn't a particularly remarkable property.
A friendship has no location in time or space. "Where is my friendship?" "Over there by the rug".
A law doesn't (it instead has a domain of applicability). Corporations and institutions don't ("Where's the university? You just showed me a building.), colours don't ("You just showed me a rose, I wanted to see red!"), moral values don't ("I found a picture of justice in this manifesto" "You mean metaphorically?" "No, justice was literally contained in the pages"), golf doesn't (Watch Tiger Woods play, and you'll never see golf as such), artworks don't (where is "The Scream" when you can print two copies of it?)...
Where must the word "egg" live?
Quoting frank
Please spell the reasoning out for me from: " "There are dinosaurs now" would be true 66 million years ago" to "unstated statement", to me it looks equivalent to "There were dinosaurs 66 million years ago". Incidentally there were no humans then. When we stipulate such scenarios in which there are no humans, we obviously use our current language abilities to do so, but that does not suggest that the sense of the counterfactual scenario or possibility itself is dependent upon the existence of humans; the truth conditions of "There were dinosaurs 66 million years ago" has nothing to do with the existence of humans or our language abilities, we just have a nice ability to attach language to actualities and possibilities and discuss such matters. The truth conditions are just reality shifting underneath the words.
Some would want to say that friendship is a bundle of physical things. A proposition is not.
Propositions aren't usually put in quotes. When you do that, you're pointing to an utterance. We frequently point out propositions with the word "that." So let's look at the proposition that the moon orbits the earth.
The proposition does not contain the moon, the earth, or orbiting. It's not any particular sentence, and its not an utterance. What we usually do is just not worry about what it is because it's a necessary aspect of agreement. We're stuck with it unless we want to become anti-realist behaviorists. It's fun to ponder how we could think about it.
Quoting fdrake
It isn't equivalent. The quotes indicate an utterance.
The question is: what do you want to do with the utterance: "There were dinosaurs 66 million years ago."
Do you want its truth to be a matter of social convention? Can it be a matter of people nodding their heads up and down, or taking action associated with the sequence of words?
Or do you want it to be more than that? If you want it to be taken in full-blown realist fashion, you'll say it's not social convention, it has nothing to do with human behavior, it's not the utterance or sentence that's true,
It's the proposition.
Could you comment on whether realism requires propositions? Am I wrong about that?
I meant that they had the same truth conditions. not that they were equal as strings or utterances. The "would" maybe behaves differently for past events.
Quoting frank
I think in this case it's more illuminating to focus on truth conditions of statements; which are broadly construable as states of affairs; rather than distilling the proposition as an abstract object that is somehow equivalent to the truth condition but also expresses it.
Quoting frank
I know this wasn't direct at me, but realism about stuff generally concerns the notion of mind independence of that stuff. Minimally it requires something like "Dinosaurs existed on Earth 66 million years ago", considered as a statement or a proposition (and these don't mean the same thing) is about dinosaurs and the Earth 66 million years ago, and that how this statement is true is not a matter of convention as the statement somehow satisfies the world. This "how" maybe a correspondence relation, or an "is true" iff (truth condition) in a deflationary account. There're lots of variables.
The "abstract idea" notion of a proposition (as some statement content) is very Fregean, and you certainly don't need to have an apparatus of associating eternal mental content with statements to assert the mind independence of whether statements are true or not.
I don't see why. One can either take an abstract notion of sentence as one's paradigm (for instance, a sentence is just a set-theoretical object), which delivers the result that most languages will contain sentences that will never be uttered. Or one can define realism directly in terms of facts or situations or something similar (obviously, this may not avoid the issue if you identify facts with propositions, but this is controversial anyway). There are probably other options as well.
I don't understand how that works, though. If I use sentences as truthbearers, I still have to take their meaning in context in order to meet realism's standards for truth, right? Isn't that basically using propositions?
Well, one can hope to bypass the need for propositions by adopting (for instance) a Davidsonian truth-theoretical semantics. In that case, the "meaning" of a sentence is given by a canonical derivation of the truth-conditions for the sentence, without any need to invoke propositions.
Have you read Soames' explanation for why Davidson's truth theory doesn't work?
I thought you were talking about a "P" spoken at time T. Otherwise, why did you put the quotes in?
Quoting fdrake
I'm not sure how a proposition is different from a state of affairs. Neither is made of physical objects.
Quoting fdrake
They can be the same thing. Depends.
Quoting fdrake
Some would say Platonic. So?
Quoting fdrake
Mmmm.. I think you do.
I've read a lot of Soames, yes, and I don't think he's right on this issue---see Ludwig & Lepore's reply in their book on Davidson. (That is not to say that I think Davidson's truth-theoretical semantics is the way to go, since I don't.) But whether or not Davidsonian truth-theoretic semantics is the right semantics for natural languages or not is besides the point. The point is that it is not obviously incoherent to adopt this semantics when trying to avoid propositions while at the same time maintaining realism.
So we would have sentences that don't have to be contextualized, they gain their meaning in a holistic sort of way? Could you explain that again?
Sentence S is The moon orbits the earth.
And it's true IFF
wait, what?
It was a gesture toward Frege. I also gave you gestures towards deflationism and correspondence in general, which in general are not (intended to anyway) work with propositions considered as eternal mental content. The relationship is between some statement and its truth conditions, an eternal abstract idea need not play a mediating role in every account - well, maybe it really does need to, but realist accounts don't make use of it constantly.
More generally, consider that when someone focusses on truth conditions of statements, the truth conditions are not easily construable as necessarily mental content at all, they can be events, states of affairs, etc - world stuff, worldly happenings not necessarily mind stuff.
Quoting frank
Yes. I use them ("proposition", "statement") interchangeably most of the time, specifically when I think the distinction doesn't matter.
Propositions aren't eternal mental content. They're just eternal in that they don't have concrete physicality the way an utterance does.
Quoting fdrake
World stuff is not true or false. Propositions aren't mind stuff. They're abstract objects.
Quoting fdrake
Some philosophers do, some don't.
Of course they have to be contextualized, but so what? Davidson's truth-theoretical semantics has the resources to deal with context-sensitivity (cf. Lepore & Ludwig, Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language, and Reality, chapter 5, for a sketch, and their Donald Davidson's Truth-Theoretic Semantics for details on various context-sensitive constructions such as indexicals and demonstratives). As for your sample sentence, it's meaning can be given by canonically deriving its truth-conditions from the axioms (1) "the moon" refers (at context c) to the moon; (2) "the earth" refers (at context c) to the earth;(3) if a and b are referring expressions, then the result of the concatenation of a with "orbits" concatenated with b is true iff the reference (at c) of a orbits the reference (at c) of b.
Thanks for the reference. I'll keep an eye out.
It is substantially different because it makes no mention of intensional entities such as propositions...
I think the relationship of a state of affairs to composition of necessarily physical objects (for some account of physical) is an intuition you're bringing to the table, rather than one which is an intended necessary feature of the accounts.
Quoting frank
I think you and @Nagase have very different ideas of what contextualising means. A statement having contextual truth conditions requires spelling out how the truth conditions depend on the context - usually in some function like way. So "I am eating dinner now" is false, but it was true earlier. The truth conditions depend on the "now" like a timestamp or an alarm, the truth conditions are satisfied when the "now" alarm goes off and it is true at the present moment. The truth conditions for the dependence on "I" are similar.
I believe you're imagining that if the truth conditions of a statement depend upon the context of the statement, and the context is something which is ultimately mind dependent, then the truth conditions depend upon something which is mind dependent, and so the truth conditions are mind dependent.
Why does this matter if we're already going to stipulate that a sentence is truth apt? Like "There were dinosaurs 66 million years ago".
I'm not sure what your doubt is. Some semantical theories make use of propositions in stating the meanings of sentences. For example, both (a time slice of) Lewis and Stalnaker use propositions in their respective semantics, construed as sets of possible worlds. So you give the meaning of a sentence by associating with it a set of possible worlds. Other semantical theories make no use of propositions in stating the meaning of sentences. These are theories like Davidson's, which directly state the truth-conditions for sentences without any need to invoke propositions. Let's see an example of the latter in more detail.
Consider the sentence "I am hungry". In order to give the meaning of this sentence, we need to give the meaning of "I" and "is hungry" (I'll ignore the inflection for ease of exposition). So we need two axioms:
(R1) For any speaker S, at any time t, the reference of "I" at t is S;
(P1) For any referring term a, speaker S, time t, and utterance u, if u is an utterance by S at t of a followed by "is hungry, then u is true iff the reference of a said by S at t is hungry.
Using these, we have:
(1) For any speaker S and time t, an utterance by S at t of "I" followed by "is hungry" is true iff the reference of "I" said by S at t is hungry (By P1);
(2) For any speaker S and time t, an utterance by S at t of "I am hungry" is true iff S is hungry (by 1 and R1).
Since the meaning of a sentence is given by its truth conditions, and this derivation displays the truth conditions of the sentence, this derivation gives the meaning of the sentence. Notice that I did not invoke at any time propositions.
I'm trying to relate that to ordinary language use, notice:
Quoting fdrake
S is the sentence "There were dinosaurs 66 million years ago."
S could mean "We don't have enough popcorn." The way we usually come to know what Bill means when he utters S is we look at the context.
What Davidson is telling us is that we could use a buttload of axioms to work out what it means. I mean, as an interesting puzzle for how to bypass propositions, I'll go ahead and grant that it might work, but does it relate to real life in some way?
I'm not sure I understand your point. The axioms are meant to be interpretive, that is, they are meant to reflect the real understanding that speakers have of their language. So it relates to "real life" by stating the (actual) conditions under which certain linguistic items refer to objects (in the case of referring expressions) or are true of an object (in the case of predicates).
So when Bill utters S, I understand his meaning because I know and rely on an axiom held to be true by my people.
If Bill points to a 2 and says, "That's a prime number.", then I know axioms regarding the use of "that" and so forth. But this has nothing to do with the proposition that 2 is a prime number, or that Bill is expressing that proposition.
I don't want to waste your time, but I still don't get it. It seems like the axioms are just trying to explain how we derive propositions from scenes involving utterances. Do I just need to go back and read more about what propositions are?
The end result of the derivation is not a proposition, it is a sentence stating a truth-condition. In the case of "I am hungry", we have (simplifying) "I am hungry" is true iff the speaker is hungry. There is no mention of "propositions" in the theory. Obviously, if you are a fan of propositions, you can then use the above derivation and, given certain assumptions, obtain something like '"I am hungry" expresses the proposition that the speaker is hungry' or whatever. But the point is that if you are not a fan of propositions, you don't need to take that extra step.
Yes, I think so.
Cool. You said it's not the way you would go. Could you say why and which way you like better?
Thanks for the explanations. It helped.
The different locution is only to emphasize that we are not warranted in assuming the naive realist view that there are real things, absent us, that are uniquely and exhaustively just as they appear to us. Of course we can in the ordinary sense rightly say "there really were dinosaurs" in other words, but that way of speaking easily leads to reificational thinking as to what exists, and how it exists, absent human perception. It's really not an accurate way of speaking insofar as there being dinosaurs, in the way we understand that being, is a relational, not an absolute, fact.
You're welcome! As for my own stance, well, this is completely unrelated to the thread at hand, and is rather complicated. I think truth-theoretical semantics is too apart from linguistic research; in particular, it is too apart from what people like Chomsky are doing, so that there is little to no syntax-semantics interface (Davidson has some half-heart remarks in this regard in "Semantics for Natural Languages", but even those remarks show that he was not interested in this kind of problem). Moreover, I have no behavioristic aspersions to intensional idioms, so I see no reason not to employ propositions, meanings, etc., as needed. So I tend to think a more faithful model for natural language semantics is given by something like Montague Grammar or something similar.
Most of the time, we know what these words mean. But what about (let's take the mat) when the mat is being fabricated?
If we don't know exactly when the mat-in-process-of-being-manufactured is in fact a mat, then we don't *really* know what the mat is. (Same thing with a cat as it's being biologically conceived and developing in the womb, or as it is dying, let's hope at a ripe old age.) Or the mat when it is falling apart eventually.
Cats and mats have not only spatial but also temporal extents ... but we don't know what those extents are. (Or as the cat is digesting and assimilating its food, when exactly does the food become the cat?)
The fact that these questions have no clear answers means that the truth (or not) of a simple statement like "The cat is on the mat" is much less clear than it may first appear.
I think you're unnecessarily imbuing the terms "mat" and "cat" with some sort of essential "mat-ness" and "cat-ness". The problem you're describing disappears when we simply accept the terms "mat" and "cat" as fuzzy categories meant to simplify communication. As long as we can describe the exact physical characteristics of whatever we are talking about, the name we give it is irrelevant.
Are we talking about how to communicate conveniently, or are we discussing what truth consists of? I thought it was the latter.
And my point was that the conventions in place to allow convenient communication don't change what the truth is. If you refer to one thing as a "mat", and I to another, the problem isn't to find truth, but to fix the misunderstanding.
There is reality, then the way this reality is perceived, then there are words aimed at expressing that which is perceived. Words are truthful or not to the extent they reflect reality. Yet, as we've seen there is the world of perception between reality and words and there's no guarantee that what is perceived is reality. Ergo, it must be that words can only be of perception and not of reality. If so, there can be no truths if meant as of reality and all that maybe achieved is words capturing perception, that and that alone is possible. Is this the veil of perception?
But my point was that this kind of statement is slippery since both cats and mats are not clearly defined.
We all by the age of 5 know some truth. 1 + 1 =2 . The definition of 4 is 3 + 1. Some basic truths are just intuitive. All complex truths are based on simple truths.
Our talk about truth is informed by our grasp of the facts.
Truth and falsehood are values we assign to judgments and statements. We don't fabricate these values out of whole cloth. They arise from features of experience common to human beings and other rational animals.
Sometimes our perceptual judgments turn out to be correct, other times incorrect. We recognize this distinction in experience. It is reflected in our talk of truth and falsehood.
Sometimes an expectation we have, or an outcome we conceive ahead of time, is fulfilled in the course of events; other times the course of events runs contrary to that expectation or conceived outcome. We recognize this distinction in experience. It is reflected in our talk of truth and falsehood.
Such ordinary experiences inform ordinary use of the term "truth", and guide our application of that term in assessing the truth and falsehood of judgments in a wide range of particular cases.
Special problems arise when it's not clear that there is a criterion according to which we may distinguish true judgments from false judgments. Some of these problems motivate a distinction between matters of fact on the one hand, and matters of taste and value on the other, and likewise a distinction between matters of fact that can be determined on the basis of evidence and matters of fact that cannot be determined on the basis of evidence.
Quoting Monist
Yes, on similar grounds. But all justification comes to an end somewhere.
There are always conceivable questions, alternatives, and doubts that cannot be definitively ruled out by justifications.
That's not a philosophical problem. It's a fact of life for minds like ours.
If that is realism, carte blanche, then I'm certainly no realist. Statements do not express propositions. They express thought and belief. There are no exceptions.
Propositions consist of words about stuff. There are no exceptions.
States of affairs are not propositions. States of affairs are what has happened and/or is currently happening. Propositions are about states of affairs.
"Proposition" is a name that we've given to a variety of different things.
Some things named existed in their entirety prior to our name, while others... well... not so much.
"Truth" is also - perhaps most often - used as a name.
As skirted around above... The interesting part of examining names is taking proper account of that which is being given the name. Some things named exist in their entirety prior to the name. Others do not.
"Truth" the term, when used to name correspondence between thought and belief about what's happened and/or is happening and what's happened and/or is happening is being used to pick out a relationship between thought or belief and reality(states of affairs) that exists in it's entirety prior to the term itself.
Thought or belief and statements thereof can be true. Correspondence between thought or belief and states of affairs is precisely what makes them true. A lack thereof, is precisely what makes them false. Let me digress...
The problem with the notion of "propositions" is that they do not offer adequate enough account of meaning and what it consists of. For if they did, they would know that meaning is not the sort of thing that can be carried.
The reason why several languages express the same thing - called "a proposition" by those who do not know better - is because we share a world and what's being expressed in different languages is nothing more than talking about the same things.
Venus.
Yup.
Predictions, in particular, are verified/falsified in just the same manner. Of course, we develop expectations long before we can begin performing experiments to test our predictive powers. That's just one part of it all though.
Expectations can become true(or not). Statements about what has already happened and/or is currently happening are already true(or not).
The key in understanding the role that truth plays in all thought, belief, and statements thereof(including but not necessarily limited to expectations(prediction)... is... I think... taking proper account of the common denominator... thought or belief.
That's what can be be true(or not), but not all of them...
Expectations, while they definitely consist of thought and belief, are not true or false - nor can they be - because they are about what has not yet happened. They are thought and belief about what's to come. They are thought and belief about future events; what's going to happen.
Expectations/predictions cannot be either true or false because there are no states of affairs for them to correspond to(or not). That particular time has not yet come/arrived.
Exactly.
True and false belief exist in their entirety long before we become aware of them.
Beliefs can be used as truthbearers. If we exclude all others, it would appear that truth is only about living things.
That would be a kind of anti-realism.
Well, from what I remember about the notion(the academic one), I do not agree with the notion of "truthbearer"...
But yes, not that I care, but I've been called an anti-realist. Do not think that my position aligns with any of the well trodden academic names though. Actually, I know it doesn't, but it makes no difference to me.
Events are currently showing all of us how important thought, belief, meaning and truth are...
Somewhere down the line I became accustomed to using the term "judgment" to indicate the thing that's said to be true or false in a wide range of contexts, even in some cases where there is no linguistic expression, even in some cases where there is no language.
It may be this habit of mine has been influenced by talk among philosophers of "perceptual judgment".
I'm content to say that beliefs, judgments, assertions, and thoughts that resemble such things, are among the things we call true or false.
I might say some thoughts do not resemble assertions and have no truth value; it depends on how we decide to use the word "thought". Perhaps I leave this undetermined in my own use of the term, to accommodate the wide variety of uses I encounter in the speech of others.
It seems truth value is also implicated in the distinction between perception and misperception. Perhaps we should say it's the "perceptual judgment" involved in an instance of perception or misperception that bears the truth value?
Quoting creativesoul
I see no reason to say that truth values of assertions about states of affairs blink in and out of existence along with the corresponding states of affairs. But what difference would this theoretical construct make for us, as speakers who make assertions about states of affairs, who test and try such assertions, who affirm and deny and suspend judgment on such assertions?
It's surely true that, from our point of view as human animals, the future is yet to come and the past is no longer.
I'm not sure this entails that the truth value of assertions about future states of affairs is yet to come, nor that the truth value of assertions about past states of affairs is no longer.
I might be content to say our assertions about future and past states of affairs are true or false when we assert them, though we can't observe the relevant states of affairs at the time of assertion. I suppose this plight would be at least somewhat analogous to our plight in making assertions about current states of affairs in places we cannot observe at the time of assertion.
In any case, to speak of things like "truth values" in this way is to speak of abstractions. I'm not sure it matters how we work out such details, and I'm not sure there are objective criteria according to which we can definitively resolve divergent accounts in such matters. To me it seems preferable to follow Ockham's advice in such discursive contexts, and favor the simplest among accounts of equal utility.
In short, judgment is a metacognitive endeavor and as such it requires pre-existing thought and belief, and the ability/faculty for thinking about thought and belief and/or reports/accounts thereof.
"Judgment", on my view, refers to quite a complex thought or belief process. It is to assent/dissent to some statement or other, which involves focused deliberation and/or contemplation of whether or not some thought or belief, as expressed by the statement thereof, is true/false. Done well, it includes knowing what it would take in order for the statement under consideration to be so, in addition to knowing whether or not such conditions have been or could be met. As such, it requires language use replete with the ability to think about thought and belief itself in addition to some awareness and/or knowledge of which ones can be true(are truth-apt) and what makes them so. As a result, I find that judgment is not even possible for language less creatures, whereas some other kinds of thought and belief most certainly are.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
It's commonplace for philosophers to talk of perception in ways that I reject. The term itself is a catch-all which is often used in ways that conflate simple and complex thought or belief with each other. This shows itself throughout history by subsuming simple language less thought and belief as well as very complex linguistically informed thought and belief into the same category. In doing so the crucial distinction between kinds of thought and belief is lost along with the ability to properly account for them. Be that as it may..
Perhaps saying that beliefs, judgments, assertions, and thoughts are among the things we call "true" or "false" is as good a starting point as any.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Perfectly understandable, and I would agree that not all thoughts(thought) are(is) truth apt without hesitation. The very notion of "truth value" causes me serious pause however...
...as does the idea of bearing truth value.
I'll attend to the rest of your reply later. It takes an interesting path and deserves separation from the above part.
"I saw Donald Trump in studio the other day."
"Sure..."
"It's true, he was eating a taco bowl with the production crew."
But otherwise, don't know what truth means.
Interesting. I'm not quite there yet, but I'm interested in that view.
I think you're implying that if Trump was eating taco with the crew then the statement that Trump was eating taco with the crew is true. Truth is to say of what is the case that it is the case; or of what is not the case, that it is not the case. That was Aristotle's theory and I'm guessing from your example that it's yours too?
Truth is what your whole body tells you it is, for one can only know the world through the body, so truth is the body's truth and operates upon the principles of pain, pleasure, and desire. Alter the bodily organism and you alter its apparent reality. We cannot, at presently know what ultimate reality is, we can only know what our biology is capable of sensing, that range or spectrum is adequate for the exitential well-being of the body but is not infallible mainly because the body is fallible to altered states. This is basically why morality should be based upon our common biology, it produces common truths.
1. Correspondence.
2. Coherence.
3. Convenience.