the extension/intension distinction doesn't matter here. to use 'gold,' you have to be able to pick out samples of gold – that doesn't just mean happening to point to the right samples, it might also mean using 'intensional' capacities that allow you to figure out which things are gold. to do this, however, you may very well need only a superficial sensory clue, as to its color for example. gold, of course, is infinitely complex beyond this mere sensory signal.

michael would like the use of the term to be exhausted by the superficial signal one happens to use to identify the sample. he cannot imagine that there is something to what one refers to beyond the signs by which one recognizes it. for him, language is a closed, self-contained system, like a video game with its own perceptually closed logic.

but this is itself not how we use language; we don't take ourselves to be referring to some metal-insofar-only-as-it's yellow, but that metal, what it is be damned (in fact, we may even, mysteriously as far as michael is concerned, wonder what the metal is, what its properties are! but how oh how, if all there is to say about the referent of the word is locked into how we use it, and all there is to how we use it are the signs by which we recognize how to use it?)

note the precariousness of the position: what you say about the referent of 'gold,' you say about gold – b/c/ the two are of course one and the same. so are we really expected to believe that we know everything about the way this word is used, that things we don't or can't recognize have nothing to do with the use of the word? but how can this be, if the way it's used is to refer to that metal – and there may be next to nothing about that metal we know, or might even be able to know?

Even TGW essentially admits this by allowing that we may have the practical ability to use a word, say "gold", without knowing everything about gold. — Srap Tasmaner

i don't admit this. things we don't know about will very much affect us, and our language use. again the mistake is thinking language is self-contained and transparent. it's kantianism: people live in a self-sustaining bubble (note michael's use of simulations, video games). but what you know ain't the same as what affects you. once michael understands this simple pt., the rest falls apart. there are even many things you don't know, and probably can't know, about your own practices!

philosophy has no method. have u read phil. books or seen prof. philosophers argue? they don't 'justify' shit. same with this thread, michael now seems content to just repeat himself. maybe if he says the same thing again ppl will start to believe him?

Unless you're an antirealist, as per the OP. — Luke

actually sweetie, the way the world works doesn't depend on yr. hot philosophical 'opinions'

To suppose otherwise is to believe – nonsensically – that we could somehow acquire or manifest a grasp of what it takes for that statement to be true (or false) while lacking just the kind of knowledge required to decide the issue either way.

how hard to u have to get hit on the head to read shit like this and nod

what kind of dumb premise is it, 'oh yeah, obviously everything must be something we can epistemically decide – to think otherwise is nonsense' like holy christ, not everything revolves around humans and their knowledge

I mean, a feeling alone is not adequate justificatory ground for dismissing a widely accepted argument. — creativesoul

i don't think it is easier, but i think professional philosophy as practiced allows this kind of move. all i ask is that ppl avoid it

What did you just do above? — creativesoul

How is your conviction that one can avoid bringing their own worldview into a discussion — creativesoul

i avoided my interlocutor's bringing their own worldview into the discussion by not conceding in the discussion when they attempted to do so

i just did it above

One must be able to provide more than just a suspicion or a feeling that something is not right - say with Fitch's proof. Interestingly enough, this notion of what counts as sufficient reason to believe/justification is what underwrites a verification/falsification paradigm. — creativesoul

y, the interlocutor failed to do this above

sure you can. whenever you use it with the pretense that it has argumentative weight, you simply note this and refuse to allow the interlocutor to place that weight, as i did. thus whether anyone 'feels' that fitch's argument must be wrong is simply not relevant – one might think that, but it has no power to be used as a tool of conviction in the debate.

So, I'm not sure how reasonable it would be to expect another person to not already have certain core thought/beliefs in place. — creativesoul

that's not what's being asked, tho - the demand isn't psychological but dialectical. one ought not to bring one's prejudices to bear in the discussion as to whether smth's right, unless those prejudices are specifically framed as part of the parameters of the debate. what the debater might believe for independent reasons, or for independent prejudices, can't help them in the argument, tho of course they're free to think whatever they want, as long as they don't pretend that matters for anything acc. to the debate.

Dummett's argument concludes that the principle of bivalence be rejected based upon the notion that we cannot always recognize whether or not a statement is true/false. — creativesoul

i don't think that's quite it, but it may ultimately hinge on such prejudices. i find dummet's anti-realism in general somewhat tedious, tho, b.c. as with all anti-realist prejudices it's hard to dig at what's actually at stake and the core propositions the anti-realist is endorsing, that drives the rest of their project.

suspending one's judgment and deciding beforehand that any evidence to the contrary of it will be met with a response of 'that can't be true' are not mutually possible. if one does this one is engaging in apologia, which as a domain of inquiry is distinct from philosophy for this reason. or maybe not – my suspicion is most phil. is just apologia for whatever prejudices the 'thinker' happens to have. but then, i'm coming to think phil. is garbage & not a real discipline.

I'm fairly certain that this is close to what TGW has been arguing. — creativesoul

y, the thread seems to be predicated on verificationist prejudices. therefore the only way to progress is to assess verificationism (tho i don't think the para you quotes shows this – rather it's what 'the above argument' points to, and this in turn has to do with the thesis, which i've argued is wrong, that all facets of use must be transparent to users, and the misconception that language use is self-contained and not dependent on the world outside of what's recognized by the language users).

nb: it's fine to feel like smthn's wrong, but i just ask u don't pretend to do philosophy on that pretense, what u feel is irrelevant, so leave it out of the thread and let it bounce in yr. head instead

it's on-topic in that yr. deflecting criticism of a position u hold by falling back on false claims abt. yr. own open-mindedness. u've already obstructed the conversation by admitting yr. not interested in evidence and will stick to 'that can't be right' & then look for a reason why, so why have a conversation? why do phil.?

in other words that there is room for debate is a sign of philosophy's lack of method + subject matter, not yr. open-mindedness.

there is always room for debate in philosophy, because one can always say 'nuh uh' or pull a new distinction out of thin air. u have no criteria for what would convince u and are claiming to be open-minded in bad faith.

and open to being persuaded either way — Srap Tasmaner

but u just said the opposite?

My resistance to an argument or an approach is a hurdle it must clear, that's all. — Srap Tasmaner

a hurdle that u set the standards for, and so will never abandon. the fitch argument is super duper simple, it's hard to see how you could have better proof. if u have no standards for what would convince u, that's no different from nothing being able to convince u. if u see a simple 11 step argument, u'd rather disbelieve the logic than accept the conclusion, so what's the pt.?

this is why philosophy is a joke - it's so lacking in method that 'nuh uh' is always a viable professional option.

why do philosophy if you've decided a priori that whatever prejudices you currently have are sufficient to refute any argument?

i mean i don't think that's a bad way to go, i'd just stop doing philosophy (which incidentally i do recommend)

to me fitch's paradox is fine because it doesn't have an 'unacceptable' conclusion, it just refutes a dumb and already unintuitive philosophical hypothesis (verificationism), unless one has other grounds to believe in collective omniscience, i.e. classical theism or hard idealism

verificationism has so little going for it that i don't sympathize with the need to defend it in the face of any argument

also i should note that in general a bad rhetorical move is:

*asserts implausible opinon [varificationism]*

'ah but here's a bad consequence of that'

'yeah but you didn't take into account this can be salvaged by *asserts further implausible opinion* [intuitionist logic]' it's just digging the hole, why try to keep together the house of cards with a web of dumb philosophical theses there's no reason to believe?

yr. post was regarding yr. own opinions & that was what i was responding to. 'I am far form alone in feeling...' and in the previous: '...I don't find fitch's persuasive...' that yr. suddenly pretending to do dummett exegesis therefore bizarre

i'm talking about your post, not dummett (idc what michael dummett thinks abt. anything)

2. I put it in the same box with the slingshot argument and Gettier cases. They're fascinating, but I am far from alone in feeling that a logical fast one is being pulled. — Srap Tasmaner

what you feel is simply not relevant.

1. If you use intuitionist rules of inference and interpret the logical constants along intuitionist lines, you might be okay, as Dummett is, saying "p→~~Kp" but that's not saying "everyone is omniscient." — Srap Tasmaner

the conclusion that knowers are collectively omniscient, i.e. that there are no truths that aren't known.

i think there's some confusion in thinking the way logical systems work is that you can simply 'choose' to use whichever system you like to validate or invalidate any proof. of course you can just make up a system of inference rules that make any argument, appropriately symbolized, either valid or invalid. so pointing this out is irrelevant as well. if you like, just convert the argument into english, it doesn't matter. english validity isn't contingent on decisions of formal apparatus.

I don't find Fitch's persuasive at all. — Srap Tasmaner

there's no persuasion to be done, it's a proof. so you must either disagree with the premises or find some flaw in the logic.

Does that rule out talk about the future as our example? — Srap Tasmaner

i don't care what the example it is - use whatever you'll accept.

If there are or are not such possibilities, how would we figure that out? Examples don't seem to be doing the trick. — Srap Tasmaner

they do for me - if you can't imagine that there might be something you can't know, then as i said, verificationism is probably true but de facto, in an uninteresting way, and we still need not make any appeal to it in discussing truth anyway. it'll just be an interesting fact that it's impossible for something to be unknowable.

sounds plausible, but controversial opinions about such matters aren't relevant to the point. just imagine any situation where you can't know something, & it will still be able to affect you whether you can know it or not.

if you have trouble imagining such a situation, then the problem is you doubt the coherency of something being unknowable for reasons independent of anything having to do with verificationism. even so, having a notion of verification / lack of 'transcendence' in our notion of truth doesn't help us understand anything (tho if you really doubt anything can be unknowable, verificationism would be true de facto, for uninteresting reasons – also, you will want to look at fitch's paradox, and square the fact that universal knowability leads to collective omniscience).

whether LW's approach to meaning leads, as it did for Dummett, to some form of anti-realism. — Srap Tasmaner

if that is the question (i don't think it is: i think michael is interested in tools to prop up anti-realism, & is essentially debating verificationism), then the answer is negative, because witty doesn't have an approach to meaning coherent or concrete enough to have an authoritative interpretation as to what it is or what its philosophical consequences are. the LI are just a bunch of aphorisms.

It still feels like a contingent matter that I don't know this, not that I am unable to. — Srap Tasmaner

construct the example such that there's no way for you to know

truth conditions have nothing to do with representation or 'viewpoints.' they have to do with whether sentences are true, i.e. whether certain things are so.

also, of course language games get outside of language games! they make reference to all sorts of things totally indifferent to language. this fetishization of language as a self-contained, self-perpetuating masturbatory game is ridiculous. oh, no, that something might be outside our recognition! boy, that's just a reductio, isn't it?

Given all that, I'm not sure that our hypothesis makes sense, namely that there is some property of gold we are unable to learn. What would that property be like? If it's a property that has no effect at all on the way we interact with it -- say, it was God's favorite when he was creating the universe -- then obviously it can never make any difference to how we think and talk about gold. If it does show up somehow, however indirectly, why wouldn't we be able to learn this? — Srap Tasmaner

say gold is god's favorite metal, but we could never figure that out. then someone says, 'gold is god's favorite metal!' maybe they were guessing, or had a vision of some sort, that convinced them of this. did they say something true? i submit, yes.

whether you know something is in principle distinct from whether it has any effect on you – suppose god sends people to hell who waste gold, but no one knows about this. will god's unknowable attitude affect you? yes, it'll send you to hell – your ignorance doesn't change that. likewise, gold will have all the props. it has whether you can figure them out or not, and they will all affect you, even if you can't figure out how or why. likewise for your language – you will in fact be referring to god's favorite metal by using linguistic expressions, whether you know this or not, saying true things when you claim it's god's favorite metal, whether you know it or not, etc.

it doesn't matter what people use to teach others. if they just teach by demonstrating, in learning how to use the term they will have learned how to refer to a material with such a melting pt. again, your mistake is thinking that every facet of the use of the expression must be transparent to its users, or contained in the processes of teaching the word (as if the uses of the word had nothing to do with anything beyond what one said in getting someone to use it, for example, in a classroom!), and this as i've argued is wrong. it's a myopic view of use, as if all there were to use was contained in something you could finitely summarize in a 'teaching session.' on the contrary use has many facets that language users don't know how to summarize and extends beyond their knowledge.

put another way, to judge whether gold is used correctly, one only has to see whether one has referred to gold, i.e. that very substance – but to see this is to see whether one has referred to a substance with such and such a melting pt. and it is irrelevant whether the language users know this fact, or can know it.

in other words michael the above argument has seemed to reduce to yr. doubling down on 6) and 4), respectively, & this doubling down in the face of my refusal to accept them (& giving examples to the contrary) has seemed to be no more than an affirmation that verificationism is true (and so my examples can't be taken to be right b.c. they'd entail verificationism was false). do i have the situation right?

in other words, given what i've written above, to anyone who doesn't accept verificationism, there's no reason to accept 6) / 4), so the argument doesn't work, & you must independently convince that person of verificationism in order to have a case.

i just want to know whether this is 'actually' a thread abt. verificationism, as it seems to be. note that verificationism abt. truth results in the position that gold can't melt unless people have a way of figuring out that it does, if it's taken for granted that there's a language in which smth. semantically equivalent to 'gold melts' can be asserted. is that yr. position? i ask b.c. if it is, that seems to be driving the rest of this, & the comments abt. witty & so on are irrelevant.

re: verificationism itself, i'm not asking you to assume it's wrong (tho i think it is & if you believe it a good place to start would be fitch's knowability paradox: verificationism entails omniscience). i will say tho that prima facie it's absurd (e.g. that gold can't melt unless ppl can figure out that it can).

or if you like just say those temperatures are possible & gold actually melts, but for whatever reason, doesn't matter, they can't figure this out. notice that in such a scenario gold still melts, & they can still claim this truly. example doesn't matter.

replace the scenario with any sort of fact abt. gold they aren't in a position to discover, it doesn't matter, their utterances abt. gold are still t/f w.r.t. those properties they can't figure out, hence their competence in use of the term has to do w/ those properties, whether they know abt. those properties or can figure them out is simply irrelevant

I'm not sure about this. Your hypothesis does seem to beg the question by presupposing that there's an unrecognisable melting temperature. — Michael

so you think that in such a scenario, gold would have no melting pt., just because no one can show that it has a certain melting pt.?

this seems really bizarre, why accept it?

do you hold this sort of verificationist notion of truth generally? if you abandoned it, would you have any reason to believe all this? if so we could, if you want, talk about verificaitonism instead (as i said, that's what this topic seems to be 'actually' abt.)

idk i see no reason to believe 4) and have made my reasons why perfectly clear, respond to those

confuses knowing how w/ knowing that, cf. above

here's a practical ability one has: to refer to a metal with a melting pt. of 1948 f, but this is the relevant sort of truth per the example, hence wright is wrong

his use is sensitive to the melting pt. of the metal since to say the metal melts at that pt. is a truth even tho he doesn't know this, hence his use is sensitive to the 'transcendent' truths tho he doesn't know exactly how.

a speaker's knowing how to use a word doesn't guarantee transparency re: every fact abt. its use

he is competent in use of gold iff he uses it to refer to gold, but gold is a metal w/ melting pt. 1948 f, so to know how to refer to gold is ipso facto to know how to refer to a metal w/ melting pt. 19848 f, which is a transcendent truth, q.e.d.

Michael,

the argument conflates "knowing how" and "knowing that." that we know how to use a word doesn't mean that we know everything about its use.

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an example will help.

suppose a language group finds a yellow metal in the hills and comes up with a word to refer to it, gold. they know how to use the word, to refer to that yellow metal – and that yellow metal is the kind-referent of the word. they also can teach other people the word and how to use it, just by demonstrating the metal in question. now unbeknownst to them, gold has a certain property: it melts at temperatures above 1948 F. now suppose they have no way of figuring this out – they live in a world, say, where such temperatures aren't possible, and so they'll never figure out that gold melts at this temperature. nonetheless, i submit, it's still true that gold melts at that temperature, & if one of their scientists claimed it did, even if he could never prove it in principle, he'd still have said something true (even if people couldn't be sure he had).

so you see, everyone knows how to use the word gold, but they do not know everything about its use. what don't they know? they don't know, for example, that it is used to refer to a metal that melts at 1948 F.

---

to address the argument you have up there directly, (6) simply restates your old assumption, which i previously asked you to defend, and as such the post doesn't add anything new. if for instance a word's use is to refer to some thing, whether anyone realizes this or not, then their competence in using with word will manifest a knowledge of how to use the word in this 'recognition-transcendent' way [in our example, they correctly use it to refer to a metal that melts at 1948 F, which is a recognition-transcendent truth]. of course the people using the word will not know that it does this. but this is the whole point.

Yes, but you do so by recognizing, for example, when it's raining.

"It's raining" is correctly used to speak a truth when it's raining. That's it. Your position seems to commit you to something further: that it raining must therefore be something that people can in principle recognize. But I submit it has nothing to do with this. It doesn't matter whether you can recognize it's raining or not. "It's raining" is true when it's raining, period. The latter constraint simply doesn't enter the picture.

Given that you disagree with this, I'm trying to figure out what premise you accept that makes you disagree. I suspect it's something like this:

If one can recognize how to correctly use a word, then one must know everything about its use.

or perhaps,

A competent user of a language must in principle be able to know everything about the use of their language.

Is that so?

Notice that if you reject those premises, then there's no problem – we don't need a ban on 'recognition-transcendence,' and language is still perfectly learnable, since we can figure out what the right canonical situations are, by say figuring out when it's raining. But notice, this does not guarantee that we always must in principle be able to know whether it's raining! And in fact we can figure out the meaning of the words without needing any such guarantee!

I think you have some faulty notion that everything about a language's use is transparent to its users, and therefore, that use (and hence meaning) can't be constrained by anything that they can't recognize. This, I submit, is just wrong.

I'm saying that the part of the world that has something to do with the meaning of a particular phrase is the part of the world that influences and measures its use. Which then means that the part of the world that has something to do with the meaning of a particular phrase can't be recognition-transcendent. — Michael

Why?

Don't assume this position; convince me of it.

[i should mention, btw, that even speakers of the language recognize this facet of use – they take the right use of it's raining to be that you say it truly when it's raining, not that you say it when you recognize some thing other than it raining. you might use it under certain empirical conditions, but you do so insofar as you take those conditions to indicate that it's raining, i.e. that the world's a certain way. if it's revealed that it actually wasn't raining, but the relevant empirical conditions still held, one would say what one said was false.]

So you say. But Dummett's argument is that meaning-as-use doesn't allow for recognition-transcendent truth conditions. The notion that there's a spoken sound here that has some sort of connection to some other thing there isn't one that seems to work with Wittgenstein's account of meaning. The meaning of the phrase "it is raining" isn't to be understood by positing some metaphysical correspondence between utterance and something else, but by understanding its practical use in recognisable situations. — Michael

The use of it's raining has to do with whether or not it's raining – one uses it roughly to correctly describe a situation in which water falls from the sky. So the idea that language use has nothing to do with how the world is makes no sense.

Again, your false assumption is that all use must be described only in terms of things that are recognizable – so you're essentially assuming a verificationist notion of truth, which I believe Dummett holds. Scratch that and there's no argument – and there's good reason to scratch it, as I've said above.

So it seems that the real issue here is that you disagree more with Wittgenstein's account of meaning than with Dummett's claim that Wittgenstein's account of meaning entails anti-realism. — Michael

Wittgenstein has no account of meaning, tho – the Investigations are too muddy to have an authoritative interpretation. So I'm not sure this will work as exegesis, or as a decent thesis in its own right. I see the temptation to treat Witty as a kind of linguistic anti-realist, but I doubt he'd go along with this interpretation, and in the end, whether he would or not doesn't matter.