I don't care. I need to be a genius so people won't make fun of me.

That is where strength comes from, practise. — Metaphysician Undercover

And steroids.

Sincerity would be another way to put it. You're either sincere or you aren't.

There was never any need to tangle ourselves up regarding the real extension of the hand. What on earth?

There are a variety of reasons a person might be habitually insincere. Maybe it's just a bad case of being British. There's nothing wrong with that. But if a person wanted to step outside those habits, a little conscious attention to the structure and history of said habits would be helpful. This is all pretty obvious isn't it?

it could be. Where I come from it's part of commonplace greetings...usually between people meeting for the first time. Genuine means real...as opposed to fake. A greeting that lacks warmth is in some way false or fake. Just going through the motions...ya know?

The notion that one can't apply oneself to bringing authenticity to social interactions is false.

So I can see the motivation for wanting another theory of truth aside from correspondence. I just haven't found that bridge into the topic which makes it easy for me to make heads or tails of. — Moliere

Deflation isn't so bad. You know what truth means in the sense that you know how to use the word. There probably isn't any definition that would be useful for teaching people what truth is. Since a definition is an assertion, the learner has to know what truth is in order to understand what a definition is. So the learner knows what truth is prior to hearing any particular definition.

And yet we still find Correspondence valuable (and in my case, fascinating.) Why? Somebody earlier in this thread (I think.. too lazy to look back) said that true propositions represent the actual world. So what do false propositions represent? Other possible worlds? Maybe the ultimate truthmaker is the actual.

A ritual is just a form...marriage, funerals..yes, westerners have rituals. The book I read about Confucius said his world was pervasively ritualized.

Execution can be rigid and hollow or warm and alive. That human presence is one way to understand "genuine."

And I'm really not being genuine right now.

Sure I wasn't contradicting anybody. Just offering a perspective that's cool to me. It involved Confucius. What dickhead would disagree with him? ;)

Correspondence doesn't have value as definition of truth. It obviously has some value though. More later...

Consider a handshake. What's going on when there's genuineness there? Confucius says breathe life into rituals. Contemporary westerners don't have as many rituals to exercise genuineness in.

Interestingly, the SEP article on truthmakers starts with an image of clapping hands to convey how truthmakers and truth-bearers relate... each one is a hand and it takes both of them to get the clapping. What I notice is that entering into the topic of Correspondence is like entering a self-contained world where every bit implies other bits. Once you take that first step into accepting representation, the skeleton of the whole theory is there as if innate. It's just waiting for the flesh to be stuck on in the form of specific truth-bearers being chosen and specific ideas about truthmakers.

That's why the alternate viewpoint has the character of a giant step out of the representational scheme.

The SEP mentions several candidates for how we might understand truthmaker. This one is cool:

(Entailment-T)
a truth-maker is a thing the very existence of which entails that something is true.
So x is a truth-maker for a truth p iff x exists and another representation that says x exists entails the representation that p. It is an attraction of this principle that the key notion it deploys, namely entailment, is ubiquitous, unavoidable and enjoys a rich life outside philosophy—both in ordinary life and in scientific and mathematical practice. — SEP article on truthmakers

The challenge to entailment is confusing and involves necessity. It might take me a while to get to the bottom of it. Anybody who already understands it... help would be appreciated.

I have in mind the idea that different statements--in different languages, even--can express the same proposition. I can even express a proposition without using words at all--e.g., holding out a gift-wrapped box is not a statement, but it can indicate (in a certain context) that I am giving you a present. — aletheist

You're sounding like Austin, but he didn't use "proposition." I don't hold that there's one way the words should be used. But no worthwhile discussion can be had where there is no agreement about how to use the words.

Justification has precious little to do with truth, on my view. Sure, insofar that we want to know we want to believe what is true. But justification has to do with belief and persuasion more than truth. — Moliere

Yes. Looking at the question with Redundancy goggles on, the question: "By virtue of what is P true?" doesn't make a lot of sense. Redundancy says that there is no more to truth than a certain attitude on the part of a speaker... an attitude that makes the speaker an asserter.

What gives a speaker that little extra oomph such that we call him an asserter? Justification?

Eh.. anyway. The way you have framed the issue makes it sound like you accept Correspondence theory. Is this the case?

I'm used to Scott Soames' terminology. Propositions are expressed by uttered sentences. "Proposition" and "statement" mean the same thing.

So Correspondence says that truth is independent of knowledge, right? So how is the ontology of unstated statements handled? Or is it?

Dude. That's why it's called the t-sentence rule.

I think the SEP description covers the appropriate bases. The t-sentence doesn't have anything to do with propositions...

Then that's not the t-sentence. It's something else. Many have dreamed of replacing correspondence with the t-sentence. Hasn't been accomplished though.


What are the angle brackets supposed to mean?

Can you point out a source that uses the t-sentence to describe Correspondence theory?

"P" is true IFF P is not an expression of Correspondence, is it? That's the t-sentence. It's trivially true and it's the banner of Redundancy, which is truth skepticism.

Who uses the t-sentence to describe Correspondence?

The asserter believes the asserted statement to be true and the justification is the grounding for that belief.

A truthmaker grounds the statement in a different way? How?

What is the statement? A representation? Are there unasserted statements in your view?

It's a kind of stupidity, yes.

I don't use "ego-maniac" in an official sense. It's the name I pinned to a certain kind of person I've met in my travels. They're arrogant, yes, but that's not the problem. It's that they can't learn from their mistakes. Like.. there's an interaction between the world and the ego that's supposed to be taking place, but it isn't. People like that are beyond help. They'll just eventually die from their stupidity.

On a milder note, any individual can put off accepting the pain of failure. In fact, most shrink from the weight of condemnation. That's why people are so quick to rationalize. A well-known side-effect of this is sleeplessness.

Crazy:

That, in itself in my mind, offers quite possibly the best protection from mental illness as well as all the other things life can throw at ya — Agustino

Yea.. taken in the right way, I think you may be right. There's a wrong way to take it, though. That's all I was saying.

Is a corporation verification-transcendent? Ordinary existence claim: yes. Metaphysically? no.

I think I've got it.

Who says they have to be like the men are to be worthy? — Agustino

Nobody as far as I know.

Recently actresses do refer to themselves as actors. For reals, dude.

Um. OK.

No. I suck at lying.

What question?

Be silent and be thought a fool. Speak a remove all doubt.

I ask you and expect you to answer, — Agustino

"Now answer my question" is not a request in American English. It's a command. It's a sentence a parent would utter to a child.

Street psychology... what power strategy did I just employ?

I wasn't trying to insult you. If I said to somebody "Now answer my question." I'd expect them to respond: "Go fuck yourself."

Some people enjoy talking to barking dogs. I don't, Agustino.

Have you ever read Nassim Taleb's Anti-Fragile? — Agustino

No. Should I?

So what then are the essential elements of worldview and self-conception, according to you, that enable a positive reaction to failure? — Agustino

Ever heard of Stephen Covey? When I worked for AT&T, everybody in management had to take a Covey course. I was taken in by it at first. It's actually very similar to the founding principle of Zen. There's a fly in the ointment. I'll share it with you in PM if you're interested. Bottom line: failure is supposed to hurt. It's supposed to bring you to your knees. That's what makes you stop and learn something. People who don't go through that pain are ego-maniacs. They'll fail over and over because they can't learn.

Given more time than 10 minutes, person X could use that information to alter his sense of self - or perceive why such an alteration would be beneficial to him. — Agustino

OK. Practice without a license if you want. If you aren't an ego-maniac you'll discover the downside to that. :)

What do you think about people who fail to live up to their own standards? Don't you think they are also more prone to mental illness? — Agustino

Everybody screws up, Agustino. It's how you react to failure that signals your mental health.

OK.

Haha, oh--well, I wouldn't say that realism implies any particular epistemological view. — Terrapin Station

Really? I thought it's primary weakness is that it falls back on Correspondence.

I think the easiest way to understand the independence of things is with reference to Dummett's account of realism and anti-realism. If the truth of "X exists" is verification transcendent than X is an independent thing, and if it isn't then it isn't. — Michael

So if something has the property of independence are we not supposed to ask: "Independent of what?"

And to say that a cause is physical is to say that the causal object/process is made of physical stuff? — Michael

You know, I may have been thinking of naturalism: all causes are natural causes.