Just going over this page.

As you (@Sam26) point out, a fact can either be true or false. — 013zen

The logical form of a true proposition matches the logical form of a positive fact. — Sam26

There can be no false facts.

I gather, Sam, you have been misunderstood by 013zen?

what I said had nothing to di with popularity. The thread topic is confused.

Well here's a new trick. When folk point out that the thesis in your OP shows a misunderstanding of the topic, go back and edit the OP to change the topic.

well, no, it means that my responses to him must seem to him to be novel.

Maybe. Definitely means that my same old same old is the "most stimulatingly fresh pathways imaginable".

The best new stuff is old stuff, you claim. But not in so few words.

And as I read that I can't help but notice your need to obfuscate rather than explain.

To profound to be of much use.

That something is, is found in a proposition. Quantification or domain of discourse.

Since justification presumably makes use of propositions, then of course it has such implications.

But justification is not truth. There is a reason that both truth and justification are listed in the JBT account.

How'r the fish?

...and?

Sure, we recognise new stuff in terms of old stuff. Yet there is novelty. The conclusion is that there are unknown truths.

How many postmodern writers have you read who you believe to have set out their account clearly? — Joshs

Who do you count amongst your brethren? Foucault is the better of those you list.

But here, in this thread, while it seems that you are disagreeing with what I have said, but it is far from clear to me what that disagreement consists in.

I entered this thread in order to set out a distinction between belief and truth, which apparently conflates.

What are you doing here?

Depends on what is meant by a proposition. — Astrophel

Generally, a noun and a predicate, but there are complications in the syntax.

Your account is that we only have beliefs, that the world is what Astrophel believes and nothing else. But this is nonsense. We interact with the world, doing things together in it in ways sometimes limited by what is the case and sometimes expanded by what we make the case.

That is, I know the beer is in the fridge because I put it there.

You are jumping from topic to topic chaotically. First, JTB, then intentionality, now solipsism. — Lionino

Just so. It is a bit foggy this morning, so I may be overusing misty metaphors, but here again one might hope Astrophel's cloud might eventually also condense into something a bit more transparent.

For now it might be best left to itself.

That’s right, but because novelty is not a neutral in-itself, the world will inflict novelty within the boundaries of specifically organized discursive structures of intelligibility. — Joshs

Hmm. One recognises novelty from a base of familiarity. If that is what you are trying to say, then yes. But the world need not be bound by what you are capable of recognising, if that is what you are trying to imply.

Otherwise, we would understand novelty as soon as we encounter it. But while we might recognise that something is new, it does not follow that we recognise what that something is.

This is a corollary of Fitch's knowability. If any truth can be known it follows that every truth is indeed known. If every truth is known, whence novelty? Antirealism, which I take to be your position, is indeed forced to deny surprise.

But the better way to treat this is as a reductio: we are on occasion surprised; therefore there are things we do not know; therefore not every truth can be known.

Thus we can avoid the hubris of antirealism; the irony that in attempting to humanism truth by equating it with belief, one finds one is omniscient.

If that is your claim. But once again I am attempting to condense a droplet of clarity from the cloud of chestnuts and quotes that habituate your posts. By not setting your account out clearly, you leave yourself plausible deniability.

Which I find wearying.

I'm not sure whether you are saying that the T-sentences resolve the problem or not. — Ludwig V

More that it sets the issue out clearly. Yep, saying and showing and so on. It's not a complete answer, but not a denial

So perhaps the project of positing the world in a stand-alone way is a mistake? — Ludwig V

Yep. It's as if their argument were "we only say how things are using language, therefore we cannot say how things are".

Well, an agent judging a proposition is an agent of a propositional nature "it" self. — Astrophel

An agent is you or I, not a proposition. A judgement might be put in propositional terms, if that is what you mean.

Agency conceived apart from propositional possibilities is metaphysics. — Astrophel

I do not follow what this says. In so far as agency produces an effect, of course it can be put into propositional terms. I went to the fridge to get a beer. I gather that we agree that actions can be put into statements. That's not metaphysics.

So it is really that beliefs are between beliefs and beliefs. — Astrophel

Are you claiming not to have any beliefs about the way things are? About chairs and cups and trees and so on? Folk believe in chairs and cups and trees, and have beliefs about them, but have enough sense to realise that chairs and cups and trees are different to beliefs. If you think that somehow all there are, are beliefs about beliefs, then enjoy your solipsism, and I'll leave you to it.

I judge the cup to have a handle, but what makes for such a judgment if not the body of implicit propositional beliefs that are at the ready every time I encounter cups, handles and their possibilities. — Astrophel

Simply the cup's having a handle. Sure, that the cup has a handle is a human expression, but that does not imply that the cup is a belief, or that the cup has no handle.

You sometimes misjudge, perhaps believing the cup has a handle when it does not. But if all there are, are your beliefs, then such a situation could not even be framed.

I am doxastically predisposed in any occurrent doxastic event. — Astrophel

The world does not much care what you believe, and will continue to inflict novelty and surprise on your beliefs.

The world is what is the case, not what you believe to be the case.

Which is the point at which I entered the this thread.

So truth is a monadic predicate? But this just assumes truth to be some stand alone singularity in the world. Such a thing has never been, nor can it be, witnessed apart from belief. — Astrophel

A monadic predicate like "the cup has a handle". Which is a very different proposition to "Astrophel does not believe that the cup has a handle". You've segregated yourself from the world by poor logic.

But I don't see that truth is monadic. — Ludwig V

truth has other senses, with other logics The individuals being considered here are propositions. “This angle” is not a proposition.

These two sentences look contradictory to me. — Ludwig V

Why? The point it simply to mark belief as a non-extensional context. That is, you can’t substitute extensionally equivalent expressions. Louise Lane believes clark Kent wears glasses, but not Superman.

That might come down to a difference in grammar, whether one wants to accept a bivalent logic and realism, or some alternative logic and antirealism.

Idealism hangs on in the form of antirealsim.

But it seems that @Astrophel has not seen that he is advocating antirealism.

Truth is analysable in terms of T-sentences.

"The cup has a handle" is true if and only if the cup has a handle.

A few things are important here.

First, the equivalence is truth-functional. It's "≡", and you can look up the truth table in any basic logic text.

Second, the statement on the left is in quotes. It is understood as a reference to the utterance in question. If you like, the statement on the left is mentioned, the one on the right is used.

Pretty much all other analyses of truth bring problems. This is far and away the simplest, and pretty hard to deny. It sets out a bare minimum for any understanding of truth.


The statement on the left is about language. The statement on the right is about how things are. T-sentences show that truth concerns how language links to how things are.

Statements are combinations of nouns and verbs and such like; Some statements are either true or false, and we can call these propositions. "The cup has a handle." is true, or it is false.

Beliefs are stated as a relation between an agent and a proposition. This superficial structure serves to show that a belief is always both about a proposition and about some agent. It might be misleading as the proposition is not the object of the belief but constitutes the belief. Adam believes that the cup has a handle.

So truth is a monadic predicate, while belief is dyadic.

A statement's being true is a different thing to its being believed.

Do you honestly believe that propositions are somehow IN the things we talk about? I don't know why this is not clear. There are no propositions over there where the cows are. — Astrophel

I haven't claimed anything of the sort.

Again, "the cow is over there" is a construct. It's presumably used in a speech act making a statement.

But rarely will a statement be true simply because of the observer - if that is how "truth lies IN the observer" is to be understood. "The cows are over there" will be true entirely and only if the cows are indeed over there; and this will be so regardless of the status of the observer, be they convinced of the position of the cows or not.

Let's try to regroup. I was struck by this:

And the great flaw in the traditional analysis of knowledge has always been the assumption that P is true, — Astrophel

Everything you know is true. That's not an assumption. If you think you know something, but what you think you know is not true, then you are mistaken about your knowing it.

And also, a seperate point, in the JTB account, a statement's being true is quite distinct from it's being justified.

But having said that, there is indeed a close relation between epistemology and ontology. Statements being true or false is indeed dependent on what there is in the world.

Yes, the sentence is a construct, the cow, not so much.

And..?

But it is that when I acknowledge this as true, this true event is a logical construction that only comes into existence when in the acknowledging. — Astrophel

So are you saying that the cows are only over there when acknowledged? That gives a vast power to acknowledgement.

I suggest that the cows are over there, whether you say so or not; and that it is the sentence "The cows are over there" that is constructed. And further, we can use the term "...is true" in the following way:

"The cows are over there" is true if and only if the cows are over there.

Further, isn't it the case that the cows can be over there even if it is not the case that you, I or anyone else knows that they are over there, or has justification for claiming that they are over there.

I don't have any idea of what a transcendental cow might be. Nor of what a cow might be, apart from the things we calls "cows". Some might maintain that had we not been raised in a culture that does nto use the word "cow", we might not be able to identify the cows from the trees. That might be so, but even if the cows might thereby cease to be spoken about, the cows would not thereby cease to be.

It is to say that truth occurs in the proposition, and there are no propositions "out there". Discoveries are events of constructing a truth. — Astrophel

Yep, that's common, or garden, antirealism. It follows from Fitch that you know everything that is true.

It seems pretty clear that conditions in the world are really impossible to speak of outside of the grid of logic and language. — Astrophel

So you can't say anything without using words, and so you cannot say anything? Or is it just that you cannot say anything true? What would you have us conclude here?

Of course not. But they won't listen... :smirk:

Pretty much. As I put, a ways back,

If they say I am not seeing my hand, but a "mental image of my hand" or some such, my reply is that, the "mental image", so far as it makes any sense, is me seeing my hand. — Banno

No, not really. It is not as if there are conditions in the waiting for discovery that are true outside of discovery itself. — Astrophel

There are no unknown truths? Then I will bow to your omniscience, since you know everything that is true.

truth is a property of propositions — Astrophel

Indeed, but knowledge is a relation between a proposition and the knower, as is justification.

Consider any proposition "P"; At a bare minimum,

"P" is true if and only if P

That is, it may be true, or otherwise, regardless of any relation to an individual knowing it to be true.

You continue to confuse P being true with P being justified or being known.

Your antirealism betrays you.

For something to be true, there must be a reason why it is true — Lionino

That does not look right.

A sentence's being true is very different to it being justified. A sentence might be true, yet unjustified.

Being true is different to being known to be true. There are unknown truths.

"S knows P iff S believes P, is justified in believing P and P is true" has no business simply assuming "P is true" without itself having justification — Astrophel

The "is true" in the JTB account simple rules out knowing things that are not true. It is distinct from the justification.

One cannot know things that are not true.

I've not a single issue with that. — creativesoul

SO more than one, then?

:wink:

. What would be an example of a property that is known without interaction? — Count Timothy von Icarus

See the "known"? That implies an attitude, and hence someone having the attitude. Yep, if something is known, then there is someone who knows.

There are no cases where something is known to have a property, without there being a knower.

That does not rule out there being cases in which something has a property, that no one knows about.

, . Scientism sees only scientific explanations as cogent. Scientific explanations are understood as inferences from the evidence. So scientism might well be tempted to understand perception as an inference from evidence.

Just a conjecture.

There's a very odd use of "inference" in @Michael's account.

I don't think changes in logic affect the larger issue, which is that, upon close inspection, relations don't end up being some sort of special case of properties, or somehow more ephemeral, they end up being the only type of property. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not sure what to make of this.

Properties are set out in single placed predicates - f(a). "f" is the predicate, "a" an individual - that is, a thing or an item in the world of discourse.

Relations in many-placed predicates - f(a,b), or f(a,b,c) or f(a,b,c,d) and so on, as many places as you want.

f(a,b) does not reduce to f(a). Relations are not properties.

But in first-order logic the number of places a predicate has is

Epistemicly, there is no way to discover a non-relational property. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Seems to me that all you have said here is that epistemic notions like knowing are relations between an individual and a proposition.

Yeah, a species in which half the population sees the world upside down doesn't seem scientifically plausible. — wonderer1

Yep. What we see is not an upside-down sense-impression created by the brain, but the things in the world.

But Michael now thinks there isn't an upside down and a right way up anyway, so the point is moot, so far as the thread goes. One can't nail jelly to the wall, the discussion hereabouts being the jelly.

So could there be a species in which half the population see the world upside down?

Wouldn't they "flip" the image in the way your paper describes, seeing the world right way up?

You haven't shown how. It doesn't. — Jamal

Yep. Thanks.

Righto. This is getting nowhere. I tried.

Yep. What does this tell us?

Yeah, that sort of response why these threads are unceasing.

Again, there is no disagreement as to the science.

Have you noticed how little of the SEP article on the problem of perception has to do with either direct/indirect realism, or with the science?

The problem of perception is not about the science.

Pointing out the grammar doesn't address the epistemological problem of perception — Michael

Philosophy is mostly grammatical issues.

You seem to have just co-opted the label "direct realism" to describe something else entirely. — Michael

Funny, that. Yep, what I call direct realism is unlikely to be what you call direct realism.

The indirect realist almost has to invent the direct realist in order to get this debate going. So they think they are arguing against direct realists, when they are actually arguing against folk who reject the direct/ indirect realist framing of the problem.

They're the ones actually studying how the world and perception works. — Michael

Direct and indirect realists agree as to the physics and physiology. Their disagreement is not about the science.

That's one of the main issues - that the indirect realist thinks they are giving a scientific account, against the direct realist, while the direct realist is agreeing as to the science but pointing out the grammar.

It's why we keep talking past each other.

I supose I'd best add a bit of content.

The recent New Scientist has an article about AI empathy.

...human participants and ChatGPT were given descriptions of different scenarios and asked to write short, compassionate answers. When other participants rated the various responses, they scored the AI responses as highest for empathy.

I find that somewhat surprising.

And this:

Concerns over the danger of machines that can “read” us but don’t care about us are more than theoretical. In March 2023, a Belgian man reportedly died by suicide after six weeks of discussions with an AI chatbot. Media outlets reported that he had been sharing his fears about the climate crisis. The chatbot seemed to feed his worries and to express its own emotions – including encouraging him to kill himself so that they would “live together in paradise”. Pretending at empathy to too great a degree without the common-sense guard rails that a human is likely to offer can, it appears, be lethal.

The AI's don't know how it feels...

Sperm in the gutter, so to speak.

I wonder who we left behind, and who else is cultured.

Your word's but a whisper, anyway.