You can equally ask if it's accurate that it's true. It seems that all those terms; true, accurate, representative, right, "a good interpretation" all presuppose an actuality against which they represent the general idea of assessment. If there were no actuality there would nothing against which truth, accuracy, representation, rightness, and interpretations could be assessed. — Janus

That's about my criticism of the argument, yeah! Seems were on about the same page. Up to possible quibbles about whether actuality is only articulable with reference to the others. If you're using that as a proxy for the word use needing to "terminate" in a relation to things/events not words, I think I agree for the most part.

Sure you can. And then ask if each and every one is true... — Banno

See the bit in my post about recursing the procedure.

But also there are non-boolean notions of truth. — Banno

AFAIK those notions require precise interpretations of their truth values. The words I used have meanings which are far less precise and sometimes are a cluster of overlapping but distinct themes. I doubt the required underlying logic is even polyvalent because that requires the demarcation of sense into a countable set of values; I can't see how you'd map the sense of "representative" or "right" to a subset of the set of non-overlapping senses (valences) in that manner.

Is not a very good argument. You can use lots of words in that place with inequivalent meanings:

Is that true?
Is that accurate?
Is that representative?
Is that right?
Is that a good interpretation?

You can recurse the procedure, asking if it's true that it's accurate, but the other concepts aren't necessarily boolean whereas truth, by stipulation, is. Accuracy is a continuum or qualitative assessment, representativeness is multifaceted, right has multiple overlapping senses and in some regard is broader than accuracy, and a decent chunk of what a good interpretation is depends upon the context (whereas truth, by stipulation, does not).

Also yes to selection bias.

Yes. It is comfy though. The best thing to happen is for a thread to burn bright and die early, before the assumptions underlying the assumptions get doubted, and fundamental points of reference of our discussants don't come into conflict. I think we often get to the same thing, whereas academic discourse maybe doesn't, because we get the luxury of doubting arbitrary assumptions while remaining in the same discourse.

@Andrew M @Srap Tasmaner: we had a discussion about that Rovelli paper a few years ago here.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/1980/evidence-of-consciousness-surviving-the-body/p1

I also remain unconvinced. You gave it a good effort compared to the other responses, but the argument's conclusion follows with a high degree of objective certainty. It's probably one of the strongest inductive arguments you could construct based on testimonial evidence. — Sam26

:up:

That being said, I think the hypothetical trustworthy friend's account would mean exactly nothing to me -- if what's being claimed is that everything I or anyone else has ever known about the world is wrong and the laws of nature have been suspended. That person is simply delusional and wrong, whatever they thought they experienced. The principle still stands: an extraordinary claim (aliens, bigfoot, ghosts, angels, unicorns, Santa Claus, the teapot orbiting Mars) requires extraordinary evidence -- no matter who is claiming it. — Xtrix

Do you think you could play this rejection game on hard mode? Like if you discarded your priors about how nature worked, would you be able to conclude that supernatural claims are bogus methodologically rather than being inconsistent with well established theory? Not saying such a strategy is required, just wondering the style of your disagreement.

We remember that discussion differently then. — Srap Tasmaner

Probably! I remained unconvinced, but it took decent effort for me to feel like I'd unravelled things. Worth engaging with I feel regardless. At the very worst, you engage with a sophisticated reasoner (@Sam26) who's thought a lot about why what they're saying is good evidence. It would be nice if other supernatural claims were that well fleshed out.

@Sam26 's arguments about out of body experiences can be quite convincing. Have a look in their post history if you're interested.

The idea here (for me) is that despite having to posit hidden states as part of our informational meta-thoery (see my post to Srap above), these states can still be proper objects of reference. "the kettle" doesn't refer to my model of a kettle, it refers to (in the informational model) the hidden state itself. It's like us all speculating what's in the room next door. the subject of our speculations isn't our speculations, the subject of our speculations is what's actually in the room next door. As such, the best way I can find of 'translating' an active inference model to talk of "kettles" is to say that "kettle" refers (when it refers at all, that is - not all uses are referenential, of course) to the hidden state we're modelling, the contents of the room we're speculating about. — Isaac

I'm even more confused by this! Can the hidden state denoted by "the kettle" boil? Even though boiling is a collective fiction? The first predicates boiling of the hidden state, the second predicates boiling of the collective or an agent or a modelling system (the kettle boils vs the collective fiction has the kettle boiling).

@Srap Tasmaner - might be interested in post above here.

And then with all the causal language being used "noumena" seems wholly innappropriate as a boundary condition for this discussion. I'd say this falls under "empirical psychology", so the transcendental conditions of knowledge won't effect what we have to say here even if we are Kantians. — Moliere

Thanks for the input. From what I understand of the discussion with @Isaac and @Janus though, a state (or collection of states) being modelled is a precondition of being able to count as knowledge, experience, representation, an object etc. It can be construed to be inappropriate to even say that something is a kettle because, allegedly (if I've read it right), what is related to is not an environmental object but inferential summary of the model's current state. It's something the modelling process is doing, not a direct relationship between mind and world. And we can't 'get behind' the modelling process to "sneak up to the noumenon" so to speak.

I agree with you that it's actually an inappropriate comparison with the noumenon, but my claim is that @Isaac and @Janus seem to be operating under the assumption that such an inferential summary has broadly Kantian import. By that I mean the process of modelling plays the role of the categories+schematism, and the internal+receptive states play the roles of appearance, phenomenon and the modelling process itself plays the role of the faculty of sensible intuition. In total this renders us unable to reach "beyond" experience into the object since experience is equivalent to the modelled state, just as an object is always and only given through/into sensible intuition.

I agree with you that you don't have to interpret the hidden state/internal state/external state/sensory state account with the internal/external split detailed above, but if you do treat it like that internal and external look a lot like phenomenon/noumenon (even when it doesn't have to be interpreted that way). I believe this misalignment is fundamental in keeping this discussion unresolved.

If we accept that model, then the extent to which language mirrors external states is, it seems, not entirely dependant on sensory states, but rather on the intent of active states. To use an analogy with perception, I see language more like saccades than V1 modelling, part of the active state response, not the passive state reception. — Isaac

It's quite difficult for me to tell precisely how this limits your agreement with ""P" is true iff P". I can think of two possibilities, but I doubt they are exhaustive.

( 1 ) The first is that because our engagement with the world is simultaneously pragmatic and representational; passive states feed to active states feed to environmental interventions feed to passive states...; representational accuracy is not the only criterion by which the environment is parsed, so the environmental objects and processes which are referred to in "the kettle is boiling" aren't really environmental since what is referred to is part of the internal states of someone's body/brain/mind.

Your difficulty then comes with the interpretation of equating the kettle boiling with a state of the environment. The equation itself could have two subcases:
( 1 a ) Strict identity; this is undermined by the fact that the process is representational rather than presenting a numerical identity between brain-states/body-states. In other words, there is no one-one correspondence between "brain-stuff" (activation patterns, mind states) and "environmental stuff" (water molecules heating up etc) because modelling provides an inferential summary rather than an unfiltered presentation of environmental stimuli.

(1 b) Representational equivalence; by this I term I mean that the aggregate of brain and body states in the inferential summary in ( 1 a ) counts as an environmental object sortally, even though one is a brain-body state and one is an environmental state. You could "count" the kettle and the class of brain-states regarding it as "the same thing", just one is represented (environmental object) and one is the product of representation (internal state). This is undermined because the inferential summary is pragmatic.

( 2 ) It doesn't matter that the modelling relationship is inferential and pragmatic rather than presentational, what matters is that the states identified as perceptual ones are internal (of the brain, body) rather than external (of the environment).

In both of these cases, the content of language is treated as constrained by the how the content of perception is generated, since the semantic content of any expression is a historically informed inferential summary of internal states which is also an internal state. The distinction representation (models) and symbolisation (expression) doesn't matter for your analysis of truth, since they're both either not the appropriate sort of equivalence as in ( 1 ) or merely internal as in ( 2 ).

The distinction between ( 1 ) and ( 2 ) is that ( 1 ) cares about the properties of the internal state (which block statement truth somehow), and ( 2 ) just cares about the property that they are internal (which blocks statement truth by itself).

@Banno

My exegesis here for the second quibble is more detailed.

Can we please postpone that discussion for now? I don't think our quibble there is too much related to the semantic content and denotation quibbles we're having. We both seem to agree "the kettle" denotes, and that we can say ""the kettle is boiling" is true" asserts the same thing as "the kettle is boiling".

So your claim to know that it isn't "English shaped" is either wrong or I've misunderstood it. — Banno

My worries for that are kinda orthogonal to the current discussion. I've got two flavours of worries; over reliance on an implicit ontology we create through how we use language. The second flavour of worry is here, (make the interpretation discussed linguistic or linguistically mediated). The first one is maybe related to the discussion; there's perhaps relevance in talking about "the kettle" as a construct of folk psychology vs "the kettle is boiling" being an accurate statement when the kettle boils (I agree that it's accurate because the appropriate court of evaluation for it is the pragmatic context it's in). The second one would take us much farther afield.

To be sure, neural models are not representational... So that doesn't look right. — Banno

Ooh. What are they for you then?

So for me there is a veil that doesn't exist...? Again, that doesn't look right. — Banno

I don't think you think there is a veil. What I intended to convey (but failed) was the sub discussion we had about "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme" - that having one shared one is very much the same as there being none at all, so the idea of a conceptual scheme turns out to be too confused to use. Why I think of it as a veil still is because the world ends up "English shaped" due to that shared relation and how it relates to shared environments; whereas I claim we know it isn't "English shaped" and even speak as if isn't. But we can get into that entirely different sub discussion at a later date.

↪fdrake You have nothing to say to my response? — Janus

I do, but I'll do it when I'm less tired because it's finicky. I could default to my usual 900 page essays on trivial bollocks, but I'll try and make it briefer than usual.

Edited the post a bit to be more explicit, if you're got anything further to add, please do.

This doesn't seem to be saying anything cogent; can you explain further? — Janus

It's the difference between a representational relationship ("the kettle" symbols and perceptions of the kettle <-> the kettle), exemplified by a neural model, and the kettle as treated as an experiential object ("imagination", "appearance", "fiction") in a conceptual scheme ("environmental story telling device"). The former is a practical and representational relationship with the states of the environment, in which environment states' content historically+reciprocally determines word semantic content and perceptual content (without necessarily being one to one), the latter is an experiential relationship of what is produce in/by a model to an agent. Is a lens's image in the lens or of what it pictures?

The "hidden state" being "hidden" doesn't necessarily make the claim that the hidden state's "content", whatever it is, is "hidden" from perception or symbolisation since it's used in those processes AFAIK (that needs to be demonstrated or interpreted out of it). That's like placing a semantic or perceptual veil over reality.

From my perspective, what makes @Banno and @Isaac able to agree on a surface level is that they're able to agree that there is a semantic or perceptual veil of some sort; just for Banno it's transparent to the point of non-existence (see sub discussion of the world being English shaped or events taking propositional form) vs for @Isaac the veil is totally opaque, if constraining, to hidden state content in both cases - negative tight constraints ('can't be this...) rather than transmission of content (red approximately equals (these wavelengths for us in this context)).

In my one liner, the cognitive grasp of an object is the interior of a model's state, rather than an environmental one interacting with an internal one (it's the bit in your head), and thus it's not the kettle as it is in the environment (that's the bit in the world). And the limit on possible thought bit corresponds to the claim that neural models place tight constraints on what environmental behaviours are like rather than transmitting a summary of their content.

I suspect that this is what is happening here. — Banno

Yeah. I think there is a distinction between the two; the neural models interact with the kettle, the noumenon is either a limit on possible thought or a cognitive grasp of an object. I imagine our suspicions are the same!

Really? What is it about reality that you are scared of? :wink: — Banno

It's the word "really" I'm scared of in this context. Austin derived methodological worries (what the word "really" does to statements and its ambiguous senses) with Kant inspired metaphysical ones at the same time (thing-in-itself = "really", what is the kettle really? Do we need to know what the kettle really is for "the kettle is boiling" to be true? That sort of thing).

Since the world is all that is the case, it is also a collective story. That does not meant hat just anything goes. You will still burn your hand if you touch the boiling kettle. — Banno

@Isaac - would you actually agree that "you burn your hand if you touch the kettle" would be the same as ""you burn your hand if you touch the kettle" is true" though? I think in @Isaac's world even saying that there is a kettle is problematic. Or whether there "really" is a kettle

Those are scare quotes around "really".

@Olivier5 - you posted just an insult to Tzeetch. If you can't keep a post reasonably civil, don't post it at all.

@boethius , @Tzeentch - if you're going to be snarky try and put some substance in it.

@Isaac @SophistiCat - neither of you needs to have a contest about who wants to talk to the other person the least. Walk away from each other if you can't be constructive.

We could say that it's true that you did something which matches the description. But that just gets us back to where I started (or was it another thread?), where the truth of "I boiled the kettle" amounts to little more than whether you've used the words correctly in your language. "I boiled the kettle" is true because the thing you did is one of the things the expression could rightly be used to describe. — Isaac

"Little more" is a bit of a covering word there right? It's also true because an event occurred which was parsed as the kettle boiling. You can go down the "argument from illusion" route to contest that claim though. It's another of these things that @Srap Tasmaner and @Mww have highlighted are easy to interpret in terms of old philosophical debates.

This one's a lot like Kant's distinction between phenomenon and noumenon (though please correct me if I'm wrong @Mww) in the context of sensible (proximally environmentally caused) and non-sensible intuition (not proximally caused by environment).

Quoting from SEP

In the section “On the ground of the distinction of all objects into phenomena and noumena”, which he substantially revised for the B Edition, Kant reiterates his argument that we cannot cognize objects beyond the bounds of possible experience, and introduces a complex distinction between phenomena and noumena.

Fortunately, it is relatively clear what phenomena are: “appearances to the extent that as objects they are thought in accordance with the unity of the categories are called phenomena” (A249). Earlier, in the “Aesthetic”, Kant had defined appearance as: “the undetermined object of an empirical intuition” (A34/B20). All objects of empirical intuition are appearances, but only those that are “thought in accordance with the unity of the categories” are phenomena. For instance, if I have a visual after-image or highly disunified visual hallucination, that perception may not represent its object as standing in cause-effect relations, or being an alteration in an absolutely permanent substance. These would be appearances but not phenomena. The objects of “universal experience”, as defined in section 3, are phenomena because the categories determine the a priori conceptual form; universal experience represents its objects under the unity of the categories.

Kant’s then introduces the concept of noumena:

if, however, I suppose that there be things that are merely objects of the understanding and that, nevertheless, can be given to an intuition, although not to sensible intuition (as coram intuiti intellectuali), then such things would be called noumena (intelligibilia). (A249)

The concept of a noumenon, as defined here, is the concept of an object of cognition for an intellect that is not, like ours, discursive, and thus has a non-sensible form of intuition, which Kant here designates “intellectual intuition”.[64] A sensible intuition is one that can only intuit objects by being causally affected by them; a non-sensible intuition is one in which the intuition of the object brings the object into existence. Thus, the concept of a noumenon is the concept of an object that would be cognized by an intellect whose intuition brings its very objects into existence. Clearly, we do not cognize any noumena, since to cognize an object for us requires intuition and our intuition is sensible, not intellectual.

We could rehash the old ground of sensible vs non-sensible intuition in the context of the semantic content of "the kettle is boiling" necessarily having a causal relationship with the state of the kettle, vs claiming it does not have one (and instead proximally depends upon the correct use of words). More SEP on the matter:

Fortunately, it is relatively clear what phenomena are: “appearances to the extent that as objects they are thought in accordance with the unity of the categories are called phenomena” (A249). Earlier, in the “Aesthetic”, Kant had defined appearance as: “the undetermined object of an empirical intuition” (A34/B20). All objects of empirical intuition are appearances, but only those that are “thought in accordance with the unity of the categories” are phenomena. For instance, if I have a visual after-image or highly disunified visual hallucination, that perception may not represent its object as standing in cause-effect relations, or being an alteration in an absolutely permanent substance. These would be appearances but not phenomena.

Effectively we're arguing about whether semantic content relates to appearance or phenomenon!

We could say that it's true that you did something which matches the description. But that just gets us back to where I started (or was it another thread?), where the truth of "I boiled the kettle" amounts to little more than whether you've used the words correctly in your language. "I boiled the kettle" is true because the thing you did is one of the things the expression could rightly be used to describe. — Isaac

I can understand the claim that the causal relationships we have with the environment place a constraint on the semantic content of phrases, rather than totally determining them. I would like to ask you though, what do you see as causing phrases to have semantic content that we can collectively relate to and are approximately constant between people in many circumstances? To me the simplest explanation is that the causal constraints are so tight that they are also strongly discriminatory about the environmental properties which generate them; like with @Michael's examples about the colour red and its intervals of light wavelength. We might not fix the edge cases of content between orange, yellow and red with that, but we fix it enough for semantic content to iterate over phrases (be learned and propagate) and be coupled to environmental dynamics so hard we can make demonstrative examples and often correctly infer how to use words.

That's enough. I really want to start all over with this reference and truth stuff, but we'll see. Nothing I've posted so far has gone anywhere. — Srap Tasmaner

I disagree! I think we've come to a better understanding of the discussants' perspectives. Wouldn't've happened without you facilitating it.

And I almost asked if you felt a little queasy when you reached for words like "tracking" and "mirroring," but it turns out you had something quite specific in mind. — Srap Tasmaner

I still do, even though I had something specific in mind. What I'm gesturing towards is quite mechanical sounding but there isn't a specified mechanism. I have in mind something like "custom and habit" of language use (word successions and contextual dependences) coming to summarise, mirror and enact what the language is used for because of a shared causal history and informational links. Both those notions need a lot of fleshing out, and I don't have the chops for it honestly.

Regardless, I think the central issues are: how does semantic content relate to the world and if it does, does it relate proximally to the world or to people or both (in the right ways)?. Those two things are still Kant flavour questions. So I think I get where you and @Mww are coming from. I think @Isaac's criticisms are also of the same flavour (from my perspective), since the "hidden states" which nevertheless have informational impact on "internal states" through content forming constraint seems like another way of having a debate about schemes and content (content informed by scheme = content is proximally scheme flavour, not world flavour) intersecting with the externalism vs internalism (and compromises) of semantic content debate.

In some respect I'm definitely astroturfing old ground.

about — Srap Tasmaner

‘perception is fundamentally the truthful reconstruction of a portion of the physical world through a registering of existing environmental information.’ — Joshs

Not exactly! I don't think it's right (even scientifically) to say that perception always and only aims at accurate representation. That's part of what it does, it has other goals. It is also difficult to distinguish what is accurate from what is useful I think. It'd be a bit shit if we couldn't accurately discern how stuff in the environment behaved - doubt we'd be able to do much, but I don't think that's what perception's "for".

....and from this well-worn and exceedingly comfortable armchair, a very big thing it is. The solution seems to have become the disregard of metaphysical questions, or at the very least turn them into anthropological/psychological questions. Which is, I must say, “...beneath the dignity of philosophy...”. — Mww

Probably not surprising @Srap Tasmaner, I agree with you that it's a metaphysical issue, I'd just frame it that anthropology and psychology are already metaphysical. They're both ways of understanding our understanding of the world and the world itself, they posit entities, have ontological commitments, people quibble over which entities exist, which framework should the entities be interpreted in and so on.

(5) Minor issue. There are differences in intellectual temperament that make your posts difficult for me sometimes. ("You" = fdrake.) You're more "synthetical" and speculative; I'm more "analytical" and -- what's an opposite for "speculative"? Evidence-focused rather than theory-focused? Even with a post like this, I can't help including a folksy example. (Thought maybe I hadn't, but nope, it's right there, end of (3).) Apo said once that I was "too concrete." Analytical me can't ever use words like "enmeshed" or "intertwined" without feeling like I'm cheating. "Enmeshed," to me, is a weasel word -- but it's a perfectly legitimate placeholder when you're model-building! ("These are intimately related, I just can't specify how yet.") — Srap Tasmaner

I do feel uncomfortable with using them, yeah. I'd feel more uncomfortable if I felt I'd done more than gesture towards a mechanism, or a space in which one might be conceptualised at least. I do feel however that terms in philosophy tend to be vague on the mechanisms of how they might work (like how do categories constraint perceptions, tell me in terms of my body plx - how does a denoting expression come to stably denote, give me the history of the word and a theory of language propagation please).

As ↪fdrake states, in an apparently Hume-ian fashion, re: “constant conjunction”, if you say the kettle is boiling, you expect bubbles, which would be the case, for this is at root an analytic judgement. But the tacit understanding the bubbles expected are given by the content of the kettle and not the boiling kettle, immediately makes the statement itself no longer analytic, and thus becomes the source of an illogical inference, and....as we all know....needs awaken one from his “dogmatic slumber”. — Mww

I'm trying not to come at this from a Humean "mere custom and habit" angle of causal succession, I'm trying to come at it from the perspective that patterns of association in language mirror patterns of association in environments; the histories of the two get intertwined through the mirroring relationship. I take this to be closer to Dennett - some sort of realist by my reading - rather than Hume - some sort of anti-realist by my reading. The passage in this paper beginning "To the Left" with the black and white pixillated pictures of elephants.

I realise there's a lot of work left to be done in fleshing out my perspective.

If I've understood you correctly here, this is similar to what I was saying earlier about the environment constraining what can be said. It sets limits on what will work because regardless of out models of it, it is set out in such and such a way and it's not a homogenous soup which we can make of what we will. There may be a wide range of values which will make "the kettle is boiling" true (in that sense), but they will not be infinite. "the kettle is boiling" won't work given certain environmental constraints. Again, pointing to a rough correspondence, but one insufficiently specific to be amenable to the sorts of truth analysis direct correspondence would seem to need. — Isaac

I think that's true, and there's a need to account for how general descriptive terms are in declarative statements vs how specific the behaviour of the concrete particulars denoted in those declarative statements are. There's got to be some means of summary and parsing that contextualises the generality of "boiling" into the context of the kettle.

I also want to stress that behavioural expectations conveyed in a phrase also have positive content even if they don't fully specify the behaviour of some concrete particular. If you say "the kettle is boiling" you expect bubbles of some sort and hot water, even if bubbles and hot water are being treated more like placeholders for fuzzy but satisfiable classes of environmental states rather than as stand ins for the specific behaviour of that kettle at the time. Bubbles, not "these bubbles", hot water, not "these water molecules". If statements needed to do the latter to be true, they'd lose their iterability - you can never boil the same kettle twice.

As with "put the kettle on" above, semantic content doesn't seem to always need to be informative about an object's state. I might not even know of the existence of an object in that expression, so I can't see how my use of the term 'the kettle' could carry information about it's state? — Isaac

I think some of them carry behavioural expectations as norms (prosaically "I expect this to be done") and some of them carry them as predictions ("If I flip the switch, the kettle will boil")

. I'm not (yet) seeing how such vague and ephemeral environmental objects can be amenable to analysis of their properties to make "the kettle is black" something which can be eternally, objectively 'true', outside of the language game in which it was used. — Isaac

I guess I'm not trying to say it needs to be "eternally" true. Though I think it may be "eternally" true to say "I boiled the kettle on the 3rd of March 2022", since I did indeed boil the kettle on that day. That happened, if people forget it doesn't change it. A more striking example may be "my shower broke on October 3rd 2021" - that event had an enduring presence, and it would not have fixed itself.
Declarative statements about past events which contain an indexical of occurrence time maybe do behave like that. They at least seem to behave like that in the "language game" of recording events.

The barrier still in place against correspondence, though, is the lack of specificity. I only need 'the kettle' to be sufficiently similar in our shared expectations about it to maximally reduce surprise. Too specific a object won't do that, it actually needs to be vague to have a chance of my having unsurprising expectations of it. — Isaac

I think that is an issue with the account, but I don't think it's irresolvable. Functions also summarise processes. Like when you flip the switch on a kettle, that will impact the inner circuitry, the plug, the atoms in the element, your electricity bill etc, but that's a set of ambiguously but sometimes required entailments (expectations!) around flipping the switch to boil the kettle. When you flip the switch to boil the kettle, it's expected to set up a relatively complicated environmental process - which is engendered by the semantic content of statements about it.

EG it's really weird to make statements like "The kettle boiled and I poured cold water from it immediately"/ "The kettle boiled and the water stayed still". You convey an expectation of behaviour and then negate it; the meaning of the sentence part "the kettle boiled" is in conflict with the second bit precisely because the first bit doesn't necessarily fix all the events around it, or which can be embedded in relevant descriptions of causal chains involving it, but nevertheless constrains expectations of other sentence parts. The overall sentence "The kettle boiled and I poured cold water from it immediately" doesn't make much sense, despite being grammatical, because the expected behaviour of the environment (the truthmakers of each conjunct) are in a conflict of behavioural expectation.

I think that illustrates the functional roles are also "modulo" perceptual demarcation or other environmental parsing, just like the words about them. Nevertheless, they are in something like a representational relationship with environmental subprocesses - like what is entailed by successfully flipping the switch on a kettle to boil it.

So when someone says "the kettle is boiling", its semantic content reaches out into the world as it's parsed, and its truth presents an match between the parsing of environmental objects and what (parsed) subprocesses those objects bear. It's nevertheless an expectation of the real kettle's behaviour, a parsing of its subprocesses into boiling, which we state with "the kettle is boiling".

I do agree that how a relatively un-detailed statement like "the kettle is boiling" can be made true by the behaviour of a concrete particular is something that needs an account though. I've tried to gesture towards how I think about that account with subprocesses and perceptual demarcation of environmental flows into functional summaries.

As a rough summary by example, ""the kettle is boiling" is true" makes sense at its level of descriptive granularity because: ( 1 ) the definite article "the" picks out a specific kettle in the environment ( 2 ) that kettle is individuated from its environment by parsing it into salient objects with distinct patterns of behaviour ( 3 ) "is boiling" states a type of environmental pattern the kettle partakes in ( 4 ) under our level of demarcation, it's "only" the kettle that could boil, not the electrical currents or the plug socket despite both partaking in the boiling process ( 5 ) the kettle exhibits the parsed expectations which constitute (somewhat fuzzily!) boiling ( 6 ) that makes "the kettle is boiling" true.

As for how that sentence works in the context of a philosophical discussion, it seems to implicitly quantify over environments in which to evaluate kettle boiling - a summary of scenarios in which someone would evaluate the claim. If you zoom in on a context I claim it behaves as above.

Though someone would rarely need to state ""the kettle is boiling" is true", they'd simply say "the kettle is boiling".

So I think, yes, this is all about our shared would, but I don't think the co-operation this is all here to allow requires an actual set of word>reference facts that are external to our intentions. It simply requires that we're similar enough in intentions and co-operative enough in policy that we can see evidence, in another's behaviour, of what we need to do to bring about the state of the world which includes helping the other. — Isaac

This is still on the denotation side of things, it gestures toward what truth might mean with a successful denotation and explores some issues regarding denotation and function.

Yeah I getcha. I'd agree with that. I think that's part of what makes semantic content work through; it holds environmental objects equivalent through how we access them, how they function, and how we expect them to respond to manipulation. It's informational. The object plays an active role in all of these; by having a location + weight + geometry, by having its own propensities that enable developmental trajectories (eg, the speed the kettle boils a cup at), and by how our actions interact with those developmental trajectories. In that regard, the objects themselves and their properties take part in our comportment toward them. For semantic content be informative about an object's state, there must be an association between that object's state and the language about the object.

This includes how we categorise, refer, and carve up the world. In broad strokes, speech acts symbolise or engender these developmental trajectories, properties which imbue these propensities for development and so on. When you say "I will boil the kettle" or "Can you boil the kettle?" or "The kettle is boiling"... I view what's going on there as pattern of linguistic behaviour tracking developmental capacities of the kettle which are individuated into functional roles. Understanding those functional roles is accurate when it mirrors the developmental trajectories of the kettle, so when someone says "the kettle is boiling", it's true to say that when the kettle is boiling... Because the switch was flipped and the water was boiling etc... Something happened to make it true in context, and the pattern of language tracks the properties through shared expectations of environmental development. The association becomes a causal history of interacting environmental events and language.

Rather than the semantic content of the phrase "The kettle is boiling" being embedded in the phrase through the words and sentence parts mapping directly onto developmental trajectory properties - like a descriptive theory - sentence properties and environmental properties are enmeshed through causal relationships of succession; when someone says "the kettle is boiling", it will occur in a context in which the kettle is individuated from its environment as a distinct site of developmental trajectories, and "boiling" will be inferred from the kettle's current state and developmental trajectory. The former individuation resembles denotation, the latter individuation resembles predication ("... is boiling"). Coupling the association of words with perceptually+pragmatically individuated or demarcated environmental trajectories allows environmental events to be a truth maker for sentences without the former being wholly determined by the latter. The causal history; making event-patterns of language co-occur with event-patterns of environments; means both reciprocally inform, and in many use cases reciprocally co-determine - we make our environments navigable and manipulable.

Word structure is sensitised to environmental structure because we've collectively made it so; and the environment is gonna do what it do whether we've perceptually demarcated its objects and developmental trajectories or not. Semantic content is then a historically informed behavioural expectation of the environment, whose developmental trajectories are demarcated through current and prior expectations of development. The causes in the present in both language and the world resemble the causes in the past - the former is a criterion of iterability (like the private language argument against privation), the latter is a criterion of publicisability (like the private language argument against the beetle's wiggling being determinative of sense).

Expectations of development also tend to become shared, as environmental patterns become embedded in a language which is sensitised to environmental development. The causal patterns of language use grow to resemble the environment modulo perceptual individuation. Feedback lets the former and the latter have reciprocal impact; so much so that in many circumstances we can append "I think" to to a phrase, like "I think the kettle is boiling" and convey the same behavioural expectation of the environment but indexed to an agent. But the distinction between the two is precisely useful because the environment's patterns are shared. The causal histories differ, so the behavioural expectations in the environment and in language differ, so the meanings differ. One is true when you think it, one is true when the kettle boils.

The mirroring+coupling of causal patterns of language use and environmental comportment/expectations of development is what sets up the remarkable agreement obtained on whether the kettle is boiling... When it is in fact boiling or not. The causal history of language and environment over time, through constant work and tailoring, becomes discriminative on both environment and language.

As a reference for something similar, I think Evans in "Varieties of Reference" takes up the task of such a causal approach to denotation; there's a causal history of reference which sets up relations between properties of what is referred to and the object itself. The causal history of language use carries with it discriminative information regarding the environments ("forms of life") it constrains and develops within.

I really didn't think that this would be such a controversial point. The world isn't just a conversation we have with each other. The materialist will say that there are material objects that exist and have properties, irrespective of what we say; the idealist will say that there is mental phenomena that occurs and has qualities, irrespective of what we say. That our language "carves up" this stuff isn't that this stuff isn't there, or doesn't factor into a sentence being true. — Michael

Yes. I agree it's strange that it's controversial. But I don't find it surprising any more. Philosophy in both analytic and continental traditions has spent a lot of time in recent years subtly correlating "mind independent" with "mind dependent" reality. I don't think we're a particularly hardline materialist forum, definitely more a correlationist one!

Apologies for the late reply you lot. This thread moves fast.

a. The meaning of the sentence at T1 is the meaning of the sentence at T2
b. The truth value of the sentence at T1 is the not the truth value of the sentence at T2
c. Therefore, the truth value of the sentence is determined by something other than (even if in addition to) the meaning of the sentence
d. The only other thing that differs at T2 is a material object
e. Therefore, the truth value of the sentence is determined by (even if only in part) that material object

I think the argument is valid and that the conclusion refutes (3) and is consistent with (1) and (2). It might not be clear which material object(s) determine (even if only in part) the truth of the sentence, but it is still the case that it is some material object(s) which determine (even if only in part) the truth of the sentence. — Michael

I think that's a pretty strong argument against a position, though I'm not sure that that your opposition would have to accept that it's aimed correctly. I think it highlights the necessary role non-linguistic stuff plays in the language using activities we do. Though I imagine that quibbles are very possible since the argument doesn't contain the phrase "linguistic", so the opportunity to put non-linguistic stuff into semantic content still seems available to an opponent. I believe this was the strategy @Banno gestured towards later; that it's a category error to think that the non-linguistic stuff is "really" non-linguistic since arbitrary environmental objects can be brought into language practice as semantic content.

Certainly that's the discussion that's been going on here, but it's not necessarily the right discussion. — Srap Tasmaner

Glad we see eye to eye. I don't know if we can have the discussion that we'd like to have without clearing the ground, I take it this is what you've been doing.

Again, the idea here is not to smear everything together as "our forms of life," but to note that there are different modalities of reference and there is reason to think they are not entirely independent. We do not agree on how to carve up the world with words arbitrarily, but in, shall we say, consultation with how we perceive the objects and materials in our environment, how we manipulate them, what we know about them from our individual and collective histories. Language is only one of a battery of intentional behaviors that make reference to our environment or are dependent upon such reference. To understand how reference works in language specifically, we probably ought to give some thought to the other modalities as well. — Srap Tasmaner

Nothing more to add. And yes, I was trying to smuggle in more phenomenological accounts of interpretation with how I was using it!

Nice post. However, a "match" sounds a lot like a correspondence to my ears. — Luke

I think correspondence is one way of looking at it; it really can be that a statement is true because it corresponds to the facts. But I think that for a deflationist this simultaneously says too much and too little. Too much because it doesn't necessarily reflect the T-sentence (can you have a correspondence without a truth? A representational relationships truth preserving? That kind of thing) and too little because it confines the enmeshment of world and declarative language to a particular mode (correspondence).

Though I really appreciate the broader thrust towards truth-makers:

And we understand the meaning of "the kettle is boiling" in the abstract without regard for its truth value. But, importantly, why we would say that the proposition is true is that it meets the truth conditions in terms of the collectively enacted meaning of "the kettle is boiling". It is not our language that decides whether the proposition is true or false; our language allows for either option. What decides (or what leads us to decide/agree) that it is true or false is how the world is, or how we find it. Are there plums in the icebox? Let's look and find out. — Luke

:up:

That's pretty close, but I've maybe clarified a bit in my reply to Srap above. That categorisation is about function, not spatio-temporal locations. We're not collectively declaring that that collection of matter-soup there is a 'kettle', so much as declaring that whatever collection of matter-soup is boiling the water is a 'kettle' (plus a boatload of other functional requirements adding specificity - so 'my kettle' is 'whatever aspect of the environment boils water and I can determine where it goes without any counterclaim... 'the black kettle' is 'whatever aspect of the environment boils water and which would be difficult to see against my stove in the dark'... and so on) — Isaac

Thank you for the clarification. I agree that with the functional equivalence angle; namely two expressions will mean the same thing if they function in the same way. As a sub-case, two denotations will denote the same thing if those denotation practices function in the same way. I think where we differ is that I interpret the pragmatic context as part of the function, and the function itself isn't situated within a body, it's situated between bodies, in the environment, and within bodies - like with @Srap Tasmaner 's comment about externalism vs internalism of semantic content. I don't think "the science" sides with either side on that, at least not yet, so it remains a site of substantive philosophical disagreement.

I've never found any of this sort of thing -- reducing objects to collections of fundamental particles -- at all attractive, but your alternative here is a non-starter isn't it? The kettle is not just any vessel for boiling water, but the one in the kitchen, the one you mean, the one you have an intention toward. This is easy peasy if you allow the object to be partially constitutive of your mental state, instead of assuming you need this go-between that is your idea of the object. You don't have intentions toward any such idea -- that's the lesson above -- but toward what you have ideas about. — Srap Tasmaner

I also want to "yes, and" Srap in the context of functionalism + externalism, you don't necessarily need to have language tied to definite mental states with their folk psychology categories to be an externalist on this issue, you just need the functions to involve and sufficiently incorporate stuff in the environment. Like saying "the kettle is boiling" when it is indeed boiling.

That "sufficient incorporation" I believe is where the truth and like concepts come in; accuracy, fidelity, relevance and so on.

You might say "it's that collection of molecules" or something, but I could disagree and say that it properly includes some additional molecules nearby, or historically attached. No fact of the world could resolve that disagreement. Even 'molecules' can be disputed. Is "boiling" exactly at gaseous states, or is it when the water visibly bubbles, or is that just 'simmering'? Does 'boiling' require a lot more bubbles? How much of the water in the kettle has to be gaseous for it to be "boiling"? And so on... — Isaac

That's an interesting way of seeing it. There may be two different presentations of "the world" going on. Under one interpretation, a collective agreement that "the kettle is boiling", when it is in fact boiling, is actually a fact of the world, and in that regard there is not disagreement in the majority of circumstances. If you did an experiment of 100 people in adequate lighting conditions and showed them boiling and non-boiling kettles, asked them whether a given kettle was boiling or not, you'd get a 100% accuracy rate for the label ascribed to the boiling states by the experimenter. In that regard, while individual and novel items of language (protolanguage?) are suspicious from a factual perspective; because they can't easily be generalised without already being expressible in a general way; commonly agreed upon and publicly accessible declarative statements don't have the same property.

(1) "the kettle" is a a referring expression; and
(2) what "the kettle" refers to, or can be used to refer to, is the kettle; and
(3) "the kettle" is an expression, and is not the same as the concrete object the kettle; and
(4) the kettle is a concrete object, and is not the same as the expression "the kettle".

If there's not agreement on this much, we need a different conversation. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree with all of those, I share Isaac's quibble with ( 2 ), but claim that whether it's appropriate to even think of the kettle as a collection of molecules depends upon the practical context. The referring expression "the kettle" I believe has a meaning close to an equivalence class of denoting expressions, you might say "the kettle on the table" and refer to the same concrete object.

I think perhaps the crux of the matter regards the nature of the linguistic dependence of familiar objects. I take it that Isaac has a strong position that they're linguistic all the way down and what they count as publicly is what they are, and the reference mechanism actually references an entity conjured up by collective agreement rather than some concrete fact. The referent of "the kettle" is a collectively enacted categorisation of the environment, rather than some environmental object.

I take it that @Banno has a similar position, but complicates the matter by saying that regardless of the saturation of such interpretations by the categories of language, those expressions nevertheless refer to the kettle because they refer to the kettle in the pragmatic context of the phrase. The environment itself is part of the pragmatic context, and so is the appropriate court of evaluation for statements. You don't have to care about adding molecules to the kettle and severing the reference mechanism of "the kettle" to the kettle, because the necessary enmeshment of world and language is part of how reference works. You can see the expression "the kettle is boiling" both as a string and as what it is used to denote in context. A match between what is referred to, and the properties ascribed to it, and what it denotes in context is a truth, and it says no more to say something is true than this match actually occurring.

But I hope you can see how each conversation is successful at getting outside itself, in this sense: it is those concrete objects, the kettle and the screwdriver, we were interested in, and which our intentions concerned; the conversation need only fix those as the objects to which we are referring. If every object we were concerned with carried a UUID, and we could keep track of those, we could use those to end up in the same place. — Srap Tasmaner

I like where that is going Srap, I think a lot of the present disagreement is related to different intuitions about the nature of the dependence of environmental categories, like what we're (at least allegedly) denoting with "the kettle". There are strong and weak forms of this.

( 1 ) A total determination of the referent of "the kettle" by the underlying collective standards of interpretation.
( 2 ) A partial determination of the referent of "the kettle" by those same standards.
( 3 ) No dependence of the referent of "the kettle" by those same standards.

By the looks of it, no one here is arguing that ( 3 ) is true and no one here is arguing that ( 1 ) is true. (@Michael, correct me if I'm wrong).

Maybe some information regarding the contrast of positions in thread could be gained by considering the different senses of partial determination at work. Let's say that the kettle is boiling is true, what would the proximate cause of that expression's truth be? My intuition for that is that the kettle really did boil. I think @Banno, @Srap Tasmaner and @Michael would agree (though possibly for different reasons), though I suspect @Isaac would have a strong quibble.

Each of the questions contains at least one largely uncharacterised big term, like "selfish", "objective", "subjective" , "free will" and "illusion". The questions also don't have explanatory information which spells out the stakes of the issue, and as written there is no attempt to explain the commonalities between the questions; why should anyone expect them to have commonalities? In what regard could the issues have commonalities?

Yes. I appreciate that was badly written. There's a model in the sense that there are individual interpretations of a single in principle shareable reality, there aren't models in that account in the sense that models are needed to interface with the world.

I think it's a different sense of model from what Isaac meant, from what Banno's using, from that the RHS of the T-sentence is, from the sense that Srap's comments feature a toy model and so on. There are a lot of model words with different meanings flying around the thread.

Which of these is the “no models” view? — Luke

The latter, there's no model in the sense that there's no mediation of contact between word and world via a "conceptual scheme", which is a system of organising experience that is specific to an individual and not parsable in terms of anything communal. I don't think people mean the same thing by "model" in this thread!

I really had no idea we would end up so focused on memory. Honestly hadn't occurred to me that memory would be taken as a sort of proxy for the persistence of knowledge. So this is really interesting. — Srap Tasmaner

So I don't think I could entirely get rid of the category of knowledge as applied to persons, now that you mention that as a possible consequence of my own thoughts. That's definitely worth avoiding if we can. — Moliere

Another spitball from the side, maybe memory is a central concept because it taps into a bodily process which imbues agents with repeatable dispositions toward things. There's a resonance with an analysis of belief which treats it as a "tendency to act as if" (@Isaac), which (very broad strokes) is a pragmatic stance on the connection between what is expressed and what the expression concerns. If you want to know what is expressed, look at the behavioural commitments it imbues in someone.

Whether someone needs to actually do a behavioural (including cognitive) commitment of a belief to count as believing that belief (eg, whether the tendency to act as if ever actually needs to be enacted...) seems a different issue; and maybe there's where statements, as a model, come into it. It's a very clear cut case that someone will believe something if they are willing to assert it.

But, and this is a big but, the focus on belief has a solipsistic connotation I feel in this context. The majority of our beliefs tend to be approximately correct, and in that regard somehow count as knowledge of the real world.

In that regard two more definite paths have been fleshed out here, I think, one is the broadly idealist (transcendetal though) Kantian move @Isaac makes where it's beliefs all the way down and modelling reality is the same thing as putting a filter on it; everything we know and experience lives on "our side" of the filter. The other is a mirror image; Davidson's actually quite similar to this, only the filter is ever expanding and has a tendency toward monopoly over all expression and interpretation (@Banno), which means there's no point of talking about the other side of the filter, so what's the point in even having a filter as an object? I believe the former finds a lack of access to un-modelled reality a necessary consequence of the existence of a filter due to how interpretation works. The latter finds direct access to modelled reality a necessary consequence of the mutuality of the filter, and thus finds no better account of the filter than the variations of a shared environment. Despite being very opposite positions, both can make the move that any other position is speaking about things which are unintelligible, due to placing different conditions for the possibility of interpretation on the filter!

To my reckoning, neither account treats knowledge as a "first class mental state", it's derivative of belief. Perhaps some way forward would be to place accuracy, truth, correctness and so on in whatever process generates belief as a mediating factor. For example recognising a falsehood (you then know not-X is true), or learning you are able to pick up something you could not. Neither of those things speak about knowledge being something which lasts, however.