Wait--aside from switching "event" out for "entity," you're arguing that that it can't be the case that x just in case it was possible that not-x. — Terrapin Station

I don't understand what you mean.

But do you agree that it is possible for proposition A to be true while B is false?

Of course A could be true when B is false, but only in case Caesar was not murdered. — John

So what? I don't see how it is relevant. Which part of the argument you don't agree with?

Proposition A = Caesar died
Proposition B = Caesar was murdered

Proposition A is true = there's an entity x corresponding to A
Proposition B is true = there's an entity y corresponding to B

x=y (Caesar's death and Caesar's murder is the same event) therefore it follows that A is true whenever B is true and vice versa; but A can be true even if B is false (Caesar could've died without being murdered), therefore it can't be the case that the same entity corresponds to A and B. But Caesar's death and Caesar's murder was the same event (contradiction), therefore the correspondence theory must be false.

The meaning of my words only diverge from my intention when I misspeak, which is to say that my words were unintentional. — Harry Hindu

But In the example that I gave they were intentional.

Let me change it slightly. Imagine someone who doesn't speak English very well, and he utters the sentence "it is raining", while intending to say that it is sunny, because for some reason he believes that this is how you say that it is sunny in English. You cannot say that he was insincere or lying, or using a metaphor, or telling a joke etc; he had the intention to mean something different from what his words in fact mean. How do you explain this?

But what makes it the case the certain words match your intention, and others don't? Obviously what they mean. But what explains their meaning? It cannot be your intention, since the meaning of your words can diverge from your intention, so it is false that meaning=intention. Get it?

(and also as a sidenote, it's not an objection to an argument simply to change the example - you should've answered the question that I posed from within the example as I described it - if it bothers you that I included you in my example, then substitute yourself with some hypothetical person.)

More quotes about 'forms of life' and 'communal agreement', this time from Wittgenstein himself (taken from "Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics"):

147. Suppose I had said: those people pay for wood on the ground of calculation; they accept a calculation as proof that they have to pay so much.--Well, that is simply a description of their procedure (of their behavior).

148. Those people--we should say--sell timber by cubic measure--but are they right in doing so? Wouldn't it be more correct to sell it by weight--or by the time that it took to fell the timber--or by the labour of felling measured by the age and strength of the woodsman? And why should they not hand it over for a price which is independent of all this: each buyer pays the same however much he takes (they have found it possible to live like that). And is there anything to be said against simply giving the wood away?

149. Very well; but what if they piled the timber in heaps of arbitrary, varying height and then sold it at a price proportionate to the area covered by the piles? And what if they even justified this with the words: "Of course, if you buy more timber, you must pay more"?

150. How could I show them that--as I should say--you don't really buy more wood if you buy a pile covering a bigger area?--I should, for instance, take a pile which was small by their ideas and, by laying the logs around, change it into a 'big' one. This might convince them--but perhaps they would say: "Yes, now it's a lot of wood and costs more"--and that would be the end of the matter.--We should presumably say in this case: they simply do not mean the same by "a lot of wood" and "a little wood" as we do; and they have a quite different system of payment from us.

153. What does people's agreement about accepting a structure as a proof consist in? In the fact that they use words as language? As what we call "language".
Imagine people who used money in transactions; that is to say coins, looking like our coins, which are made of gold and silver and stamped and are also handed over for goods--but each person gives just what he pleases for the goods, and the merchant does not give the customer more or less according to what he pays. In short this money, or what looks like money, has among them a quite different role from among us. We should feel much less akin to these people than to people who are not yet acquainted with money at all and practice a primitive kind of barter.--"But these people's coins will surely also have some purpose!"--Then has everything that one does a purpose? Say religious actions--.
It is perfectly possible that we should be inclined to call people who behaved like this insane. And yet we don't call everyone insane who acts similarly within the forms of our culture, who uses words 'without purpose'. (Think of the coronation of a King.)

To complement StreetlightX's quote from Cavell, here's another quote from Cora Diamond that gives a particularly good illustration in my opinion to the idea of "forms of life" or Cavell's "whirl of organism": (from "Rules: Looking in the Right Place")

[H]ow do we tell that some people distant from ourselves are telling the time? It is not a matter of their glancing at the sun and saying something; rather, on the supposition that they glance at the sun and say things, it is telling time if they coordinate their activities by such means, or refer to such matters in their narratives in certain ways. Or they say such things as 'He left at dawn, it is half a day's trip; he should be back by now', and then they begin to prepare a meal for him, or start worrying about why he is so late. That they are telling the time is not a matter of any 'technique', taken in isolation from the place of the technique in their lives. Even if they had clocks just like ours, and said 'six o'clock' just when the hands stood, as we say, at six (and so on), it might be anything at all that they were doing. There is nothing in such a technique, described in that sort of way, which suggests that they are telling time. If they think that it is appropriate to pray when they see the hands standing at six, we cannot merely on that account say that they think it appropriate to pray at a particular time, six o'clock: 'six o'clock' does not have in their lives the grammar of being a term for a particular time.

So the truth or falsity of "cats fly" is dependent on interpretation, and is therefore subjective. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are talking here only about the assignment of meaning to a sentence, which I already agreed is an arbitrary matter (and therefore you can say 'subjective'), but it doesn't prove what you want to prove. What you are missing is the fact that given a particular interpretation of the sentence 'cats fly', it is objectively true or false; and the mere fact that the sentence can express something different doesn't show that its truth is subjective.

The difficulty is that when you describe people's linguistic behavior (as in all the examples that you've listed) it may appear like a behaviorist analysis of meaning (meaning X = saying such and such words under such and such conditions), and this is something we should avoid. And I believe that it wasn't Wittgenstein's analysis either. By 'language use' he didn't simply mean "making a certain type of utterance" (pace Austin) but he was interested in the logical role that words play in our activities, where the purely verbal aspect is not always the most important part.

Do you have an argument for why two or more propositions cannot correspond to the same event. That claim just seems plain ridiculous so far. — John

Because as I explained they are different propositions with different truth conditions, so if they correspond to the same thing, you cannot explain the difference between them (if we suppose that correspondence is meant to explain what makes every proposition uniquely true). I explained this in more detail in the original post:

this is a problem, because the correspondence theory is supposed to assign a unique truth-maker to each proposition, that explains why the proposition is true under some specific conditions and not some others. And that entails that if two propositions have the same truth conditions (they correspond to the very same entity, if true) then they are the same proposition. But "Caesar was murdered" and "Caesar died in 44 BC" are not the same proposition, so the correspondence theory is inadequate. — Fafner

What would it take in order for us to be able to sensibly say something like "X is in the world and it corresponds with 'X'? — creativesoul

Well, the first problem is that it is simply unclear what 'correspondence' is supposed to be. It is very hard if not impossible to give an non circular or non trivial analysis for the term, therefore it is not very clear what the theory even says.

At any rate, yes, the next step is to look at the occasion of utterance, the context of the utterance, and so on. Do we agree on that? — Srap Tasmaner

Sure. But the challenge is not make it sound too anti-realistic or conventionalist. We want our sentences to have objective truth conditions at the end, don't we?

In my opinion, the right place to start from is actually Witt's early philosophy. If you take from the Tractatus the basic idea of the 'picture theory' (that is, of propositions having sense by virtue of being correlated with reality in a certain way), and you modify the details according to his later philosophy -- you can get something pretty interesting and promising in my opinion.

I just wanted to pose an open question without trying to answer it :)

And I don't want to use any loaded terms like 'language-games', especially since many people here completely reject the Wittgensteinian framework (and anyway, the term itself requires a lot of explanation and unpacking to be of any use).

Of course there's a story to be told why certain words are appropriate for saying that it rained yesterday, and not some others, but I intended to remain neutral on that question. And I don't doubt that their 'conventional meaning' plays a very import role here (though Travis' argument shows that conventional meaning doesn't fix completely what words mean on any given occasion of use).

But still, I don't think that shifting the burden to communal conventions can tell you the whole story of how sentences can mean what they mean. What kind of facts make it the case that a given community uses certain words to mean X rather than Y?

and the fact that he's playing a guitar — Thorongil

That's a lute, not a guitar :)

What I'm disagreeing with is your circular reasoning. You said, "the point is that what one can 'intend' to mean is constrained by the purpose for which it is used". I pointed out that "purpose" is equivalent to intent. The purpose of saying what you said is dependent upon the information you intend to convey. So what you are really saying is, "the point is that what one can 'intend' to mean is constrained by the intent (or goal) for which it is used. If the goal is to convey that the leaves are painted green, then that is what you mean. If the goal is to convey that the leaves process the energy of the sun in such a way that makes them green, then that is what you mean. — Harry Hindu

So do you want to say something like "meaning of a sentence=intent"? If so, then I think it is very implausible that intending something by a sentence is sufficient to make it mean what you intend.

For example, can you intend to mean that it is sunny outside by the sentence "it is raining"? Suppose someone asks you what is the whether outside, and you answer "it is raining" while intending to convey to him that it is sunny; would you say that you've told a lie or the truth? (and suppose that it is indeed sunny outside). It seems to me that in this example, what you really intend has little to do with the meaning of the sentence that you are using, on a pretty intuitive notion of "meaning".

I think the moral from this story is that for a sentence to mean something that you intend, it must be (in some sense) appropriate to use that sentence to say this particular thing. And what makes it appropriate to use a sentence such as "it is raining" on certain circumstances and not some others, is not decided solely by what one intends. Therefore intention by itself doesn't look like a plausible explanation of linguistic meaning.

You wrote: " so it follows that the conjunction of a. and b. cannot obtain." That's false. The conjunction of a and b can obtain. The conjunction of KP and a&b is what can't obtain. — Terrapin Station

Oh I see what you mean, yes I made a mistake in my formulation, I'll fix it.

It's not changing the subject, it's just saying that "there are unknown truths" is false. That's the same subject. It's just disagreeing with the premise. — Terrapin Station

As they say in the Stanford article, the paradox is interesting because (a) and (b) don't seem to be mutually inconsistent (and thus it is surprising if they are), and this is something that people who don't accept one of the premises can agree about.

That's not the case. It's only the case that both KP and a&b can't obtain. a&b would be fine on its own. — Terrapin Station

Which is exactly what I said... You can't know the conjunction of a&b.

At any rate, this is easily solvable under my epistemology. There are no propositions that someone doesn't know. The idea of that is nonsensical. Propositions only obtain, and truth-value only obtains, when someone has the proposition or the truth-value judgment in mind. — Terrapin Station

This is not a solution because you change the subject. The paradox is directed at someone who believes that both a) there are unknown truths and b) all truths are knowable in principle, and the challenge is to show how both can be true at the same time.

It seems to me that you have an idiosyncratic understanding of 'interpretation' that in my opinion is confused. Give me a concrete example of what it would be on your account to interpret a sentence in some way as opposed to other, and we can discuss it.

What I meant when I said that words are not important is that there is no necessary definitions that one must understand in order to understand what it means for a sentence to be true or false. There are countless different ways to explain what a sentence means, but what counts as a correct understanding is the ability to use the sentence in the right sort of way.

This is to show that your argument completely miss its target. You said that truth is subjective because it is given by a subjective interpretation of words, or something of that sort. And further, you said that interpretations themselves consist of words. But this is false. To understand what it is for any sentence such as 'cats fly' to be true or false is not to grasp some verbal formula such that "'cats fly' is true iff ....". And this is the reason why I mentioned actions because understanding a sentence is a practical ability, such as being able to discriminate between the circumstances under which the sentence is true and false. And this is not a matter of simply interpreting a bunch of words as you said, because trivially, being able to see that cats can fly has nothing to do with words per se. Similarly, if you have a parrot that can recite some verbal 'interpretation' or 'explanation', it doesn't make it the case that he understands what he says. Words which are not connected to action are empty, so words in isolation are not the right place to look for understanding truth.

Sure, ask me anything you want.

Both :)

What is it like to be a disciple of Wittgenstein? — geospiza

It ain't easy, nobody understands you.

My personal feeling is that the fishy bit occurs where we take the "P is unknown" part and ask whether it can be known in some possible world where P is the case. My feeling is that we simply aren't talking about the same P when we do this, but I'm struggling to formulate precisely what I have in mind.

Perhaps it has something to do with context: if we take a phrase such as "I know that P" and move it across different contexts, then there's no reason to expect that P should mean the same thing each time (think for example about Wittgenstein's "I know this is a tree" from OC 349).

Mine is self explanatory... I'm a fanatical follower of St. Ludwig.

It is constrained by the information you intend to convey. "Purpose" is the goal you intend to accomplish. So you can say that it is constrained by your intent. Your intent is what chooses the words to say in order to convey the right information in order to accomplish your goal. — Harry Hindu

So are you disagreeing with me? I'm not sure what is your objection (if you have any) to the argument about the leaves.

How convenient. Meaning is use where "use" is the conventional, or traditional, use of the word, EXCEPT for the term, "meaning". — Harry Hindu

But do you agree that the sentence 'the leaves are green' has different meanings in the two different examples?

Then what you mean is what you intend to convey. Do you intend to convey that the leaves are green because they are painted or that they are green because of photosynthesis? What did you intend to convey? — Harry Hindu

Of course there is intent in the example, but the point is that what one can 'intend' to mean is constrained by the context of the utterance; that is, the purpose for which it is used (in other words, the words that you use plus the context provide you different possible 'meanings' for the sentence to choose from, so it's not wholly up to you to decide what your words can mean).

But since you and I would use different words from each other, this shows that there are no objective standards, except through agreement and conventions — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't understand this argument. What you said doesn't show anything of this sort. We can use all sorts of words when explaining something, but what is important is not the particular words that we use, but whether the words are understood the right way; and by 'understood the right way' I mean that one is able to go on acting in a particular way in the appropriate circumstances. So from the mere fact that there are many ways of explaining a sentence such as 'cats fly' it doesn't follow that the sentence itself cannot be used to say what is objectively the case. In other words, the objectivity consists in the use of the sentence, and you've said nothing that would show that use of language in this sense cannot be objective.

Also, I don't understand what you mean by 'agreement' and 'convention' and how it is relevant. There's a sense in which agreements and conventions actually serve the function of precisely creating objective standards. For example, standard unites of measurement such as a 'meter' or 'hour' are defined arbitrary, and are useful because we all agree on what they mean. However it is a perfectly objective matter whether a given object is a meter long, or that a certain event has lasted for an hour, despite the conventionality of the units themselves.

I don't accept the use/mention distinction, I think it is unjustified. I see a bunch of words as a bunch of words. If you want to insist that a bunch of words is something other than a bunch of words, you have to demonstrate how this is the case. But how a bunch of words could be something other than a bunch of words is dependent on subjects, so this is something subjective. It is not objective, as you state. "How things are in the world" refers to nothing more than justified statements, what we, as human beings, believed by convention.. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well if everything is just a bunch of words, then what you say is also a bunch of words, so by your own lights nothing of what you said here or anywhere should be taken as true (or even meaningful), so I don't understand why you even bother typing something on your keyboard.

Sure. That's why I'm pointing out that the problem doesn't exist in natural language, because the proof is written in formal language. This isn't a case of a natural language statement that we all believe being unfairly torn down by formalism. It's a case of an attempt by Fitch to formally prove a natural language statement that nobody believes. So it is entirely pertinent to point out that the purported formal proof is syntactically invalid.

It's Fitch that chose to play by the rules of formal languages, not me.

If there's a natural language version of the purported proof, that a non-philosopher would accept as credible, we can discuss that but, so far as I'm aware, there isn't.

So, as far as I can see, there is no natural language problem to be solved. — andrewk

I think the problem can be formulated without the use of formal language, that is, it doesn't arise merely because of some formal peculiarity of this or that notation. I don't think that we even have to use propositions as variables to formulate the problem. The KP principle can be formulated as a claim about all truths (as it appears in the Stanford article) rather then all propositions (as I formulated it), and then it can be easily shown that some truths must be unknowable.

No one understands "cats fly" as saying that cats fly. This is just repeating the same thing using the same words,, and that is not understanding. Understanding "cats fly", is first, apprehending that there is a type of animal which is called "cat", and there is an activity referred to by "fly", which cats do. That is a first level of understanding. The second, deeper level, is to understand the conditions under which an animal qualifies to be called "cat", and to understand the conditions under which an activity is qualified to be called "flying". That's what understanding is. It's not knowing how to repeat words, parrots do that without understanding.

Since we all understand these various conditions (what qualifies as a cat, and what qualifies as flying) in different ways, our understandings, and therefore interpretations, vary. This variance is a matter of subjectivity. There are idiosyncrasies in relation to understanding, which are specific to the subject, and this produces what we call subjectivity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sure I agree, it's much more complicated than how I presented it, and the sentence itself is ambiguous in some respects and can have different meanings etc. etc.. What I tried to show is simply that interpreting the meaning of a sentence as saying that such and such is the case can commit you to objective standards of truth. It is up to us to decide what 'cats' and 'fly' mean etc., but once that has been decided then it's not a subjective matter (as you claimed) whether 'cats fly' is true or false. It's just an schematic example which illustrates how 'interpretation of meaning' is compatible with objective standards of truth.

No Fafner, clearly you have this backwards, it is your argument which begs the question, not mine. Asserting that to understand the sentence "cats fly", is to apprehend it as saying that cats fly, is the most obvious and precise case of begging the question that one could come up with. It's very similar to creativesoul saying "a cow is in the barn" is true because a cow is in the barn. Creative might as well just say, "a cow is in the barn" is true because "a cow is in the barn" is true. And you might as well just say that "cats fly" means that cats fly. Care to beg the question some more? — Metaphysician Undercover

I think that you are confusing use and mention...

It is true that if I say 'cats fly' is true iff cats fly then I repeat the same sentence twice, but it does show that there are two ways of using a sentence (which is what the use/mention distinction is about): one is to talk about the sentence as a bunch of words ('cats fly'), and the other is to use the sentence to state how things are in the world (either truly or falsely), and that is objective.

There's no problem with that statement, provided P is a constant, not a variable.

The restrictions to second-order logic that are needed to prevent inconsistency do not prohibit such a statement.

But if P is a variable, inconsistency will creep in, because we can then (unless prevented by other constraints) substitute a wff S containing KP for one or more instances of P in S, thereby generating circularity and in some cases infinite regress. It is often straightforward to generate a contradiction from such constructs. — andrewk

And how do you think 'P' is treated in the formulation of the paradox (say in the Stanford article) as a constant or a variable?

One difference is that formal languages are invented for particular purposes which are quite different from chatting with your friends or singing "happy birthday". There are also stipulative definitions in formal languages, but no such definitions exist for natural language, so it makes a big difference when we ask philosophical questions about natural languages as opposed to formal languages.

Yes exactly, Travis' argument is aimed precisely against views that employ Grice's distinction. Conversational impicature seems to be the favorite device of philosophers nowadays for dealing with alleged context dependence of meaning (it's all over the literature, and not only in the philosophy of language).

Btw, there's a (barely readable) paper by Travis called "annals of analysis" which criticizes Grice's distinction, you might enjoy it...

Sure, we can interpret a sentence to mean whatever we want it to mean. Thus, we can make sense of the famously uninterpretable sentence 'This sentence is false' by just interpreting it to mean 'Blue is a colour'. But I don't see how that is any way a useful thing to do. — andrewk

I agree that this would not be very useful, but it is also the case that talk about ''syntax error" as a criterion for meaningfulness is also just as useless thing to say.

I don't know 'there's no such thing as a theory of types' means in this context. Here's the one I had in mind. — andrewk

Yes this is also what I had in mind. I said that there's no such thing as a 'theory of types' because in natural languages 'type distinctions' are constantly violated without rendering the sentences meaningless, so it's not clear what work logical type distinctions are supposed to do (e.g. we sometimes use names predicatively as in "he thinks he's Einstein" etc.).

Yes you can have a theory of types in formal language (maybe), but what's its use for explaining phenomena in natural languages?

That's not the way syntax rules work. Most syntax rules operate on a 'rule in' basis, not a 'rule out' basis. A positive justification is needed for a sequence of words being valid syntax - not just an absence of breaching any 'thou shalt not' laws. — andrewk

Ok, but what kind of justification is that?

I might sympathise with the 'cheap trick' complaint if the syntactic objection prevented us accepting a purported theorem that was highly intuitive. In such a case it would be natural to ask - is the problem with the theorem or with our syntax rules?

But in this case the purported theorem is completely contrary to our intuitions, and the syntax rules help us to understand why (ie because it is not a theorem at all). I would see that as case closed, with complete satisfaction, and intuition vindicated. — andrewk

My point is simply that if you solve a certain problem in a constructed formal language, it doesn't by itself prove that you've solved the problem as it exists in natural language. Maybe it does, but it is something you have to demonstrate (and you cannot do this without taking a substantial philosophical position on whatever thing the problem is concerned with).

Wait, did you assume that I quoted Fodor as someone who agrees that meaning cannot be specified in advance? Because I quoted him as an example of someone who believes the opposite of what Travis does.

Yes, this is my reading of Fodor as well, and what you said about the meaning of a word not being specifiable in advance is also the view that I've been arguing for.

The tokens are not identical. Right? — Mongrel

Right. (that is, they are not numerically identical)

Again no, what is identical is not the token but the type to which they belong.

Is the sentence "objects A and B have an identical color" an assertion that A and B are the same object?