In our world, time passes, and things change as time passes. — Metaphysician Undercover

For instance, if there were so many coins in the jar that I would die before I could finish counting them, then I would have to pass this sacred duty on to my son, and no doubt him to his daughter, and now we're writing a Kafka short story, not doing philosophy.

The issue here is not all of metaphysics but a simple conditional: if they can be counted -- if -- then there must be a specific number of coins in the jar right now. All of these other issues are different ways of saying that as a matter of fact they can't be counted. (And that doesn't tell us whether the jar has a specific number of coins or not.)

I say the conditional is true. Do you say it is false?

if a pointer is measured to be pointing North along the North-South axis, then what direction is it pointing along the West-East axis? — Andrew M

I feel like I'm doing something wrong because I keep wanting to refute the examples. (Also, it reminds of my first my earliest experiences in philosophy, when I kept thinking that old-timey philosophers just didn't know enough math.) I'll try to think of an example after I do this one.

In this example, since you're only interested in direction from a point, defining that relative to a pair of orthogonal axes is at best an intermediate step (if you defined a location first and then converted it). What you ought to be saying is that the pointer is 0° off North. For jollies, you can throw in that it's 270° off East and 90° off West, but why bother? The extra axis adds nothing.

You didn't even have to align your direction right on the North-South axis to get here: if it were pointing exactly Northeast (45° off North), or, you know, almost anywhere, it's not aligned on either of your canonical axes! Oh my god! Its direction is undefined!

The only measurement always available is how far off a given axis it is. So just start there, and only use the half-axis from origin to North. Or take that direction as the default, define it as 0° and do other directions relative to that, whatever, but why would you define more than one axis in the first place? (Put this way, East-West is, to begin with, defined as passing through 90° off North and 270° off North, or 90° off South, defined as 180° from North.)

I think it's presented as pointing exactly North to support the illusion than some measurements could be made and some couldn't. But that's not what's happening here. We have a system that is useless for measuring anything but one or maybe two directions, which means we're not measuring at all, we're classifying directions as "North" (and maybe as "South") and "not North". That's not measuring.

I'm doing all this because it looks like this was a purely verbal conundrum. It seems to present a genuine problem (like the lap) but does not, and one way you know it doesn't is that it doesn't even do properly what it was pretending to do. The suggestion seems to be that directions generally have a North-South component and an East-West component, except for the degenerate case where you're actually on one of the axes, and then the other value doesn't go to zero but is suddenly undefined and maybe can have any value at all! Horrors! But the system supposedly breaking down only works for the case of pointing exactly North or, I guess, exactly South. This wasn't a genuine question but an intuition pump.

What I said, is that your logic is not valid without a premise of temporal continuity. That a coin might disappear without one noticing, is just a simple example as to why such a premise is necessary. — Metaphysician Undercover

If you mean that my argument is only valid in a world very much like ours, I agree. If you wanted to discuss jars of coins in a hypothetical world in which coins randomly appear and disappear, that's rather different from the discussion I believed we were having. I understood you to be making a point about the necessity of a free human judgment that assigns a number to the coins, but it appears I was mistaken.

To return to the issue at hand: I consider my arguments valid in worlds very much like this one. In worlds like this, if the number of coins in a jar can be determined by counting them, then you can know, without counting, that there is a specific number of coins in the jar.

Do you agree?

for the agent, there would be a potential (but not actual) number of coins in the jar that is only actualized in the counting of the coins. — Andrew M

I think the mathematical vocabulary is clearer: if they can be counted, then the cardinality of the set of coins in the jar exists and is unique, though we do not know its value until we count.

If that's what's meant by "potential but not actual," then cool. MU's position is that there is no number "associated with" the cardinality of the set of coins in the jar until they have been counted, because no one has made a judgment assigning a number to the set; my position is that if they can be counted, then there must be a specific number of them, though we do not know that number. If the counting procedure can be followed, but will not yield a result, that can only be because it will not terminate, and that can only be because there is an infinite number of coins in the jar, and then indeed there is no natural number equal to the cardinality of the set of coins in the jar. Whether we call aleph-null a number I did not address. Whether a jar can hold an infinite number of coins, I did not address.

There's modal language all over this, and I'm fine with that. In part, that's simply because MU agreed that they can be counted, and if they were to be counted, then we would know how many coins are in the jar. I was simply working within a counterfactual framework already accepted. A possible world in which coins appear and disappear at random is not a world in which coins can be counted, so it is not, as we might say, salient for this case. A possible world in which coins sometimes disappear after I've touched them is a world in which I can count coins, but my count cannot be verified, and in such a world my count applies only to the past, to the coins that were in the jar in its initial state.

To use a macroscopic analogy, an interpretation which rejects counterfactual definiteness views measuring the position as akin to asking where in a room a person is located, while measuring the momentum is akin to asking whether the person's lap is empty or has something on it. If the person's position has changed by making him or her stand rather than sit, then that person has no lap and neither the statement "the person's lap is empty" nor "there is something on the person's lap" is true. Any statistical calculation based on values where the person is standing at some place in the room and simultaneously has a lap as if sitting would be meaningless. — Same wiki article on counterfactuals in QM

A person who has no lap has nothing in their lap. Russell's analysis of definite descriptions works just fine here, but physicists don't read Bertrand Russell. It's also tempting here to give a counterfactual analysis: if a standing person holding nothing were to sit, they would have an empty lap; if a standing person holding a child on their back and nothing else were to sit, they would have an empty lap, until another child scrambled onto it; if a standing person holding a child against their chest were to sit and loosen their grip upon the child even a little, they would have a child in their lap, and they would sigh with relief.

Quantum mechanics may have some specific prohibitions on the use of counterfactual values in calculations, but it is, for me anyway, inconceivable (!) that we could get along without counterfactuals. They're hiding absolutely everywhere.

Could I christen yesterday at 10:30 pm "now"? — Tate

In a sense, yes, though I'm not sure it helps with the question at hand.

i think we have three options:
(1) Tensed language centered on our notional now (most common);
(2) Untensed language with "timestamps" or times as parameters (common among scientists and not too uncommon among philosophers);
(3) Tensed language centered on some other time than our notional now (pretty uncommon except for the historical present -- the option you asked about).

You can, to some degree, use these three strategies interchangeably and just translate among them. I think they aren't entirely equivalent though, and it shows up not in the content of propositions but in our attitudes toward them. We do not remember the future, for instance, under any scheme. And speaking yesterday of the rock as it is today was future-tense speculation, but for us, looking at it in the present, it's merely fact. I think there's more to all that, but again I'm not sure it helps at all.

I think this is just too vague.
— Srap Tasmaner

Just trying to capture the essential idea here! Apparently not successfully... — Andrew M

Wasn't trying to lay that at your feet!

I think the other issue is that standards can vary according to context. For example, Alice might know that it's raining outside, having looked. But when challenged with the possibility of Bob hosing the window, making that possibility salient, she might doubt it and go and look more carefully. — Andrew M

I'll have to read the rest of Lewis paper to see what he was getting up to. I think I get the intent of this example, but it feels like we're screwing around with justification and I don't know why anyone would think that road leads to knowledge. It leads to high-quality beliefs, that's it. Maybe Lewis has something up his sleeve...

I addressed in my posts a single issue you raised: must the coins in a jar actually be counted, by you, me, God, or anyone, to know that there is a specific number of coins in such a jar?

That question I answered as clearly as I could, and even provided informal proofs to support my position.

If you have no rebuttal besides "maybe coins spontaneously appear and disappear," then we're done here.

I wasn't convinced either but it was a really interesting discussion. I'm grateful you brought us your arguments and gave us the opportunity to deal with some really interesting issues.

I'm none too solid on the statistics but I think in many cases the mistake people are making is really just exactly a statistical mistake.

Every piece of evidence should move the needle; the mistake people make is thinking a single piece of evidence moves the needle more than it does. (The classic example is doctors misjudging the chances of breast cancer given a positive test.)

Agreed. And I just invoked your name in post about Sam's central focus, the evidentiary value of eyewitness accounts. Freaking kismet.

The reason for not believing in these claims is the same for everything else: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Carl Sagan was right. — Xtrix

And David Hume.

That maxim is not by itself dispositive though. If an eyewitness account comes from someone you are inclined to consider trustworthy, unlikely to be mistaken, and with no reason to lie, that has to count for something. @fdrake could fill in the details much better than I, but the point can be made in Bayesian terms: the chances of Reliable Ron making such a claim, given that it's true, are higher than the chances of him making such a claim given that it's false. If you believe your boyfriend is visiting his parents, but a good friend tells you she saw him at a bar last night, you're going to take that seriously, and it's going to move your prior.

We remember that discussion differently then.

That we "exclude the possibility of mistake" is not a condition of knowledge, as ordinarily defined and used. — Andrew M

I think this is just too vague.

If S knows that p, then S is incapable of knowing that ~p. But S is still capable of mistakenly believing that ~p in various ways: S may have forgotten for the moment that they know that p and have reason at the time to believe that ~p; there may be some subtlety they have failed to reason through, may believe some q that would support ~p without realizing that p excludes q, and so on. Our knowledge must be consistent, but our beliefs show no such discipline. I think.

The trouble is not our knowledge, but our beliefs, and around here it's our beliefs that we know that p, which clearly can be mistaken even though our knowledge cannot.

And I think there are at least two senses of "fallibility." One is when you hold only partial belief, so you can consistently say "I think he's in the office, but he could be elsewhere." The other is when you are willing to endorse your individual beliefs taken singly, in sensu diviso, but hold something like partial belief with regard to your total beliefs, taken altogether, in sensu composito, that is, when you hold that some subset of your beliefs may be mistaken -- which you are also willing to say of many individual beliefs -- or that some subset of your beliefs is mistaken.

That latter is a little paradoxical, but defensible. (Your belief in sensu composito doesn't entail the corresponding set of beliefs in sensu diviso. You can fall to make an inference, be lacking some connective knowledge, etc.)

It's also possible that generally people only believe that they're probably wrong about something, and that's as much "fallibility" as they're committed to.

++++

One more note: I think people sometimes reason *from* what they take to be reasonable doubt that they're right about *everything*, *to* the conclusion that they should treat each of their beliefs with a certain amount of suspicion. The thinking is, if I'm probably wrong in at least one of my beliefs, some small part of that probability should attach to each and every one of my beliefs. Even though the original claim was that my beliefs are overwhelmingly right, I have the epistemic problem of not knowing which are the good ones and which the bad. (But attaching a modicum of doubt to all your beliefs is so ham-fisted, I don't think anyone actually does it or can do it.)

We must premise a temporal continuity of the quantity in order to conclude that the quantity at the time prior to being counted was the same as the quantity at the later time of being counted — Metaphysician Undercover

I see. No, we needn't take that as a premise. We can argue for it.

But to say that there will be one number, after being counted, out of a present infinite number of possibilities, is not the same as saying that there is one number presently. — Metaphysician Undercover

Suppose a jar containing some coins at a time t₀. We agree that we can count the coins by removing them one at a time, and that doing so would result in a unique natural number m, at some time t_m, after t₀.

If we remove a coin from the jar, then there is some time t₁, after t₀ and after we have removed one coin but before we have removed another. If the jar is empty at t₁, then the initial state of the jar at t₀ was that it contained 1 coin, and 1 is a natural number. If the jar is not empty at t₁, we go again. If we remove another coin, then there is a time t₂, after t₁ and after we have removed another coin but before removing any others (if there are any). If the jar is empty at t₂, then it contained 1 coin at t₁, and 2 coins at t₀, and 2 is a natural number. If the jar is not empty at t₂, we go again.

For any step of the counting process, there is a time t_k, after we have removed k coins from the jar but before we have removed another (if we can), and at t_k the jar is empty or the jar still has some coins in it. If the jar is empty, then the initial state of the jar at t₀ was that it had k coins in it, k a natural number. (If the jar is empty at t_k, then at t₁, the jar had k - 1 coins in it; at t₂, it had k - 2 coins in it; and so on, up to time t_k.)

If there is no natural number n such that the jar is empty at time t_n, then the process never terminates and the coins in the jar cannot be counted (except by Zeus).

Retroactively, after counting, we can now employ a premise about temporal continuity, to conclude that this was the number before counting. — Metaphysician Undercover

The temporal continuity of what? I don't understand the point you're making here.

prior to counting, we have to admit numerous possibilities. — Metaphysician Undercover

The procedure I described, if it terminates at all, yields a unique value. It cannot do otherwise unless the procedure is undermined by other premises. Did you have such a premise in mind?

I agree, that prior to counting, we can truthfully say that we might count the coins, apply logic, and say how many coins are in the jar now. But that does not mean that the coins in the jar have a number now. — Metaphysician Undercover

Suppose a jar contains some coins, but for no natural number n is it the case that the jar contains n coins. Then for no natural number n is it the case that removing exactly n coins from the jar would leave the jar empty. If the number of coins in the jar could be determined by counting to be some natural number k, then removing exactly k coins from the jar would leave the jar empty; therefore the number of coins in the jar cannot be determined by counting to be any natural number k.

I think it's a perfectly good question.

Our experience seems to suggest to many that there is something special, something unique about the present moment, about now, and it is tempting to think that the universe is continuously changing from one instantaneous state into another and exists only as it is in such an instantaneous state.

There are, I understand, weighty arguments against such a view, but it is how we seem to experience things.

In your sense, fairies on mars exist as much as my nose.
— hypericin

Yep. Both may be the. subject of a predicate. — Banno

?

"All the fairies on Mars like rice pudding" appears to predicate of these martian fairies but doesn't entail that any exist.

The truth of the phrase "the number of coins in the jar" implies that there is one specific number attached to, associated with, or related to, the quantity of coins in the jar. Can you agree with that? Now do you honestly believe that a particular number has already been singled out, and related to the quantity of coins in the jar, prior to them being counted? How is that possible? — Metaphysician Undercover

A jar of coins either has no coins in it, or some coins in it. For the moment only, assume there is no other possible state for a jar. (We need neither claim nor stipulate that the number of coins in an empty jar is 0.) If a jar has no coins in it, we cannot remove a coin from it; if a jar has some coins in it, we can remove a coin from it, and If we were to remove one coin, then again the jar would have in it either no coins or some coins. This we know because a jar must have no coins in it or some coins in it. We count, from 1, as we remove coins from the jar, stopping when there are no coins in the jar; if the procedure does not terminate, then there is no number of coins in the jar. If the procedure terminates, then the number we have reached is the number of coins that were in the jar before we started counting.

The only difficulty we face is determining what it means for a coin to be in the jar. If the jar is quite full, so that some coins rest on other coins but above the lip of the jar -- that is, outside the space we think of as bounded by the jar -- shall we count those as in the jar or not? If a coin is partially within the space bounded by the jar and partially outside that space, shall we say the coin is in the jar or not? If our jar of coins is in such a problematic state, then our counting procedure is of no use until we agree which coins will be considered to be in the jar. If we cannot agree which coins to count, there is no point in counting them. Similar considerations apply to what is a coin.

But if we do agree what to count as a coin and which coins to count, we know there is a procedure available, and that we will be able to determine the number of coins currently in the jar, even if we have not yet made that determination.

Proof that such a procedure, if it yields an answer, must yield a unique answer, is left to the reader.

Infallibility isn't a condition of knowledge, as ordinarily defined and used. — Andrew M

I'm not proposing that possessing knowledge means that one knows one is infallibly correct, but that the knowledge we possess, if it is to be knowledge, must be infallible. — Janus

If S's knowledge that p is infallible, then S "cannot be wrong" that p. If that's just to say it is not possible that S knows that p and yet ~p, sure, that's impossible.

If S knows that p, and if we consider only possible worlds consistent with S's total knowledge, then p is true at all of those. p is, for S, epistemically necessary. But that's not to say that p is metaphysically necessary, which means there's a sort of odd gap. Any ~p-worlds that might exist are just epistemically inaccessible to S.

And that strikes me as curious. My knowledge that p creates in me an incapacity -- I become unable to know that ~p. Which is as it should be, but imagine reversing the analysis: suppose I do not know that p, and suppose further that I am, for whatever reason, utterly incapable of knowing that ~p. Then p-worlds are, ceteris paribus, consistent with my total knowledge, and only ~p-worlds at which I do not know that ~p. (At none of those will I know p either, because ~p.) This inability to be epistemically committed to ~p seems to greatly increase the likelihood of my landing at a p-world and knowing it. An inability to be wrong doesn't guarantee that you will be right -- you may never come even to hold a belief regarding p either way, much less know the truth -- but it surely helps.

(It's also curious that because we're interested in the complement, the weaker the commitment to ~p you are unable to make, the better for your chances of knowing that p: excluding worlds at which you only believe that ~p would be better; excluding worlds at which you take seriously ~p but are undecided, better still; excluding worlds at which you merely entertain the notion that ~p, better still.)

David Lewis has a paper that addresses infallibility. I've not read it yet.

++++

Dots I forgot to connect.

There's nothing particularly interesting about being right when you're right. Being right means really, really not being wrong.

But when Roman Catholics say that the pope is infallible with regard to certain, though not all, matters, what they mean is not only that whatever he has said is right, but that whatever he will say is right. He is unable to be wrong in these matters.

So the point I was making above is that when you're right, you pick up -- for free -- that inability to be wrong on this matter, and that feels like it's in the neighborhood of infallibility, though it's really just what being right is.

And that's why the reverse is interesting. An inability to speak ungrammatically doesn't mean you produce every grammatical sentence, but that every sentence you produce is grammatical. If you were unable to make faulty inferences, you wouldn't have every reasonable belief, but every belief you had would be reasonable, given your total evidence.

Maybe that's not much to get excited about though. Sounds a bit like playing not to lose, which is a notoriously bad strategy.

More ellipsis. — Banno

I just don't see the point of being gnomic when doing philosophy, but you do you.

For instance, as you note,

sometimes we use propositions. — Banno

and you yourself intend someday to tell a story that begins "Once upon a time there was an entity with a neural network,..." and ends "And they used propositions happily ever after."

If you don't know the middle bit yet, that's understandable. I suppose people waiting for the next installment would like some reassurance that there will be a middle bit. "Blah blah blah, the end" is not a good story.

But there are no propositions present in neural nets. — Banno

There is somewhere that propositions are present?

Do you want to keep truth functions?

might be interested — fdrake

Will be reading back through this latest run of posts and maybe commenting. Threw in something else in the meantime.

I can say "there are 66 coins in the jar" and that claim can be true even if I haven't counted the coins in the jar and even if nobody knows how many coins are in the jar. — Michael

You seem to be missing the point that @Metaphysician Undercover is an anti-realist, and his account of truth is some version of verificationism. (For meaning, it is sufficient that the coins can be counted, but for truth, it must actually have been done.)

Thus, as a self-organising system, we must, by definition, have internal states, and boundary states (and there must exist external states). Without these three states we cannot say that there is a system at all, we cannot define it from 'not-system' without defining a boundary and (as far as data is concerned) that boundary must be Markov boundary if the internal network is any more complex than a single ring of nodes. — Isaac

I can't imagine disagreeing with any of this.

But it is also evident, to me at least, that our language and how we conceive mentality does not match up, in any simple way, with this description. Now what?

One option is to say, well, we've moved on. Our languages are the ossification of a folk psychology that we know better than now. Of course we'll have trouble expressing this new view of things in the terms of the old paradigm. You can even soften the pitch a little by claiming only that the new view is different, rather than less wrong, but the hope is still that it is a more fruitful paradigm for inquiry. There must be reason to switch, and problems with the old paradigm provide plenty of motivation there.

But I think it's not that simple. There is an almost irresistible temptation to identify mentality with the internal states of such a system -- a sort of "what else could it be?" But much of the last fifty years of philosophy in the English-speaking world has been devoted to showing that this identification is mistaken. This cluster of issues became important precisely because of the promise of early work in artificial intelligence, generative linguistics, and brain science -- everything that would become cognitive science -- and the realization of some philosophers that we might be able to say we had finally found the mind, and it is the brain. Endless debate ensued, some of which continues, and some of which seems very old-fashioned now. But in the meantime, other philosophers noticed that our mental concepts and all of our language, in fact, seem not to respect this apparently natural identification of the mental with the internal. I find those arguments pretty persuasive.

There's no problem for science here. If you tell a scientist that what he's investigating turns out not to be X, he can shrug and go on investigating whatever it is he is investigating. Whether it's X is not really his concern. He may have been considering writing a popular piece for Scientific American explaining how his work changes our understanding of X, and now he can just not do that and spend his time in the lab instead. (Occasionally a scientist will decide that showing up philosophers is part of the job.)

But there's still plenty for philosophy to worry about. Science, so far, may have failed to straight up solve issues of mentality for us, but it has perhaps sharpened (at least indirectly) what those issues are.

What I think we need to be careful about, is thinking the mismatch between a particular scientific model, on the one hand, and a philosophical one, on the other, indicates that one has not sufficiently slurped up the other yet, but it will. It's that "if all you have is a hammer" thing.

All of which is to say that knowledge, for instance, is not a relation that holds or fails to hold between the internal and inferred external data nodes of a self-organizing system. Apples and oranges.

Since the world is all that is the case, it is also a collective story. — Banno

'According to the Bible' or 'Fred says that' are not restricting modifiers; they do not pass through the truth-functional connectives. 'Fred says that not P' and 'Not: Fred says that P' are independent: both, either, or neither might be true. If worlds were like stories or story-tellers, there would indeed be room for worlds according to which contradictions are true. The sad truth about the prevarications of these worlds would not itself be contradictory. But worlds, as I understand them, are not like stories or story-tellers. They are like this world; and this world is no story, not even a true story. — David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds

@Isaac

Before you post "pragmatism" and count that as a job well done, plan on explaining exactly how pragmatism answers any of the questions I asked, or shows the questions to be ill-conceived. Jobs to be done, purposes, free-energy gradients, surprise minimization -- all part of the model, after all. You don't get to have your cake and eat it too, not even by saying that pragmatism entitles you to the impossible.

Because the hidden states the world is a collective model of may be modelled imperfectly. — Isaac

I

If we have modeled imperfectly some detail of the hidden states, but we never encounter evidence that would encourage us to update our model, were we wrong?

Another question: can our model be properly said to supervene upon the hidden states? That is, can there be a change in our model without a change in the ("underlying") hidden states?

If the answer is "no," if our model is not so tightly coupled to the hidden states as that, what is the source of that relative freedom? And if our model is then, to some undetermined degree, independent of the hidden states, what entitles us to describe changes to our model as updates rather than just changes, which could, for all we know, be arbitrary, or, if not arbitrary, free?

There is nothing, it seems, that we can point to as "evidence" that is outside the model, not even surprise; surprise is not a fact, but part of our model of ourselves.

II

There's an impressive set of studies showing just how constructed our visual perception of the world is, the ones with the flashing lights. Put some people in a dark room facing a screen or a wall and flash a sequence of lights in just the right way and people will report seeing a single light moving, say, left to right. Even better, if you arrange the lights as you would to go around a small obstacle, people will report actually seeing the obstacle -- or at least report that there was "something" there that the light had to go around. That latter result shows just how much "filling in" we do from our priors, as you might say, about how the world works.

But this study requires carefully controlled circumstances. To determine the speed at which to flash the lights and how far apart to space them, no doubt experiments were needed. I doubt they nailed it the very first time, and there's a range -- I don't know how big -- outside of which the illusion of a single moving light would not hold. Similarly, there must be no other sensible information about the space where the light "detours," else people would report that the light behaved as if something were there but there wasn't.

Outside the lab, none of those restrictions apply. The simulacrum we are said to inhabit is so detailed that we can test it however we like. We can prove to our satisfaction that a tree before us is not a plastic model by cutting into it and seeing the rings, the xylem and phloem, all that. We can study a bit of the wood under a microscope and see more, even under an electron microscope if we choose, we can "touch" individual molecules of water in the tree sample. And we can do this sort of thing anywhere to any degree we are capable.

If a map reproduces every last detail of the territory, and does so not with ink on paper, but using the same materials, for all we know, as the territory, then the map is in fact a perfect duplicate of the territory, not a map at all, and to find your way around the so-called "map" is exactly the same process as finding your way around the territory.

What becomes questionable is the claim that the "map" is not the territory but only a map, and the positing of a "genuine" territory out there, somewhere, that the "map" we wander around in is a copy of. That will surely strike most residents of the "map" as an article of faith. Anything can count as evidence for it, and nothing can count as evidence for it.

III

I don't think it will quite do to answer that "data underdetermines theory." What "data" there is, is not just theory-laden; it is crushed under the weight of the theory it's carrying on its back. It could, for all we know, be 100% theory.

You want to call your view a sort of realism because you maintain there is "something" outside our Markov blanket. Is that "something" similar to the non-existent "something" that the non-moving light did not actually detour around?

If this is realism, it is indistinguishable from idealism, if only in some suitably circumspect Kantian sense of idealism.

IV

We seem to have a sort of antinomy here. On the one hand, we claim to know only our conception of the world, loosely enough coupled to it that it can deviate from the world's supposed true state. But (1) nothing entitles us to make any claim that there is such a true state, or to make any claim about how close our conception is to it, and (2) our conception is so complete that it qualifies as itself a world of the sort we claim only to have a conception of.

We have a model that is, for all we know, 100% mistaken, and at the same time, for all we know, all there is and no model at all.

But there will be no one to judge him to be dead, therefore he will not be dead,

Oh, and there will be no one to judge him to be alive, therefore he will not be alive.

No matter, because there will neither be nor not be a universe that includes or does not include him either not alive or not dead.

Your turn. Philosophy is fun!

No.

Since we've been trafficking in this thread lately with more than accounts of truth, or even phenomena that are quite nearby, like reference and knowledge, but in what amount to complete theories (or sketches of theories) of mental life, I thought I'd share a comment of Herbert Simon's, in defense of the sort of computational model he helped develop in the 50s and 60s: our mental life is indeed complex, but it is not complex because we are complex -- the mechanisms of mental activity are relatively simple -- but our environments are quite complex.

It may be that the history of research in artificial intelligence refutes that suggestion -- I'm in no position to say -- but it is a pregnant thought as we imagine modeling our mental lives, or at least a reminder to give some thought to the source of its evident complexity.

Here's some chitchat about one of his cases, since I can't help it. There are lots of big problems with Hazlett's account, not least his use of Grice.

(1) Alice knew that stealing is a crime.
(2) Alice knew that stealing isn't a crime.
(3) Alice didn't know that stealing is a crime.
(4) Alice wasn't aware that stealing is a crime.

Hazlett points out that both (1) and (3) implicate (either imply or entail) that stealing is a crime, supporting, he thinks, the case that "stealing is a crime" is a (conversational, i.e., non-conventional?) implicature of (1). But what it supports, if anything, is that "stealing is a crime" is a presupposition of (1) and (3). Presupposition is not the same thing as conversational implicature. (On Strawson's account, roughly, where "The present king of France is bald" and "The present king of France is not bald" both presuppose that there is a present king of France.)

Every philosophy neophyte learns to distinguish (2) from (3), and that (2) is not the negation of (1), but at the same time learns that (3) is ambiguous between (2) and (4). The version of (3) that aligns with (2) could be expanded to

(3') Alice didn't know that stealing is a crime because it is isn't.

Now we're in the territory of something else that might look like conversational (rather than conventional) implicature, because this looks like cancellation, just as one might say

(5) I haven't stopped beating my spouse, because I never started beating my spouse.

But similarly, we might say

(6) The present king of France is not bald, because there is no present king of France.

And that's Russell's account, which disambiguates the scope as

(7) It is not the case that the present king of France is bald, because there is no present king of France.

But Russell's account is not based on conversational, non-conventional implicature, but simply entailment. On Russell's account,

(8) The present king of France is bald.

has the logical form

(9) There is a unique entity such that it is the present king of France, and that entity is bald.

Can we apply a similar analysis to Alice's knowledge of the criminality of theft? On the one hand, (3) could have the form:

(10) Stealing is a crime but Alice didn't know that.

or

(11) Stealing is not a crime, so Alice could not know that it is, and therefore did not know that it is.

((Or, "what's more, she didn't know," etc. There are options here.))

(10) makes a simple claim about Alice's epistemic state. (11) makes a claim about what Alice's epistemic state could or could not possibly be, and then infers what it was. Both make simple claims about the criminality of theft, which allow us to negate them by negating that claim, without reference to Alice, as with Russell's analysis.

(10) is noncommittal on whether knowledge entails truth, as it simply states two facts, one about stealing and one about Alice; (11) is not only consistent with a claim that knowledge entails truth, but relies on it.

Where does that leave the question of conversational implicature?

Grice claims that conversational implicature is "triggered" by an apparent violation of a maxim of conversation, which suggests that what you mean by uttering p must be different from the plain meaning of p, in order to preserve the assumption that you are cooperative (and not after all violating a maxim).

It does seem that the most natural reading of

(3) Alice didn't know that stealing is a crime.

is

(10) Stealing is a crime but Alice didn't know that.

rather than (11), and if you mean (11), you need to say so explicitly. Why should that be? And is this indication of how you expect (3) to be understood a case of implicature?

One reason (10) might be the more natural reading is because we expect the clause governed by "know" to be true or to be asserted to be true, so it is surprising bordering on misuse to place after "know" a proposition you assert to be false, just because you intend also to deny that this is a case of knowledge, precisely because its object is false. To speak in such a way would be a rhetorical flourish. ("I know no such thing, because it is not so!")

There may be other points in favor of (10): it is simpler, and more to the point, suggesting compliance with other maxims to be relevant and concise. But what we're looking for, as evidence of implicature, is apparent maxim violation, not compliance.

I'm also tempted to wonder whether (10) is more natural because it is "common knowledge" that stealing is a crime, but that's not (to my memory) part of Grice's account.

I haven't resolved the implicature issue but I still see nothing to support "knows" not being factive.

+++

To clarify: the presupposition analysis relies on a pair of entailments, not implicature; neither of those entails that Alice knows something that is not the case.

(10) says stealing is wrong and she doesn't know it; (11) is perhaps most simply taken as the negation of (2):

(12) Alice did not know that stealing is not a crime.

But then we have ambiguity again, so that's no help, hence (11).

******

Actually there's no need to stress over (11) and its relation to (10). (Or about implicature, since his usage has other issues anyway.)

What Hazlett is interested in is the straightforward (10), because then we have both Kp → p and ~Kp → p. That's the point of his argument. That's supposed to undercut the unique entailment from Kp to p. But that's because he gets there by (10), rather than (11), which doesn't even lead there.

And (10) interprets "Alice didn't know that stealing is a crime" as "Stealing is a crime, and Alice didn't know that," which of course entails that stealing is a crime.

The issue here is how we justify the (10) interpretation of (3). We would not treat all content this way; we would not, for instance, render

(B1) Harry thinks today is Sunday.

as

(B2) Today is Sunday and Harry thinks that.

Why not?

The simplest answer is that "believes" is not factive, but "knows" is. It allows us to rewrite

(K1) S knows that p

as

(K2) p and S knows that.

Another Russellian move would be to look at the scope: we're taking

(3) Alice didn't know that stealing is a crime.

as

(3') It is not the case that: Alice knew that stealing is a crime.

That means we have all of (1) embedded, and it's form should come out that same as before, without negation in front of it. If that's as above, we have a negated conjunction, and our ambiguity is a matter of which conjunct is negated.

(3'') Not both (i) stealing is a crime, and (ii) Alice knew that.

And, again, that analysis only comes off if we have the rewrite rule (K2).

There are responses to the paper; I have three queued up that aren't buying it.

Should probably be pushed off to another thread if people want to get into this.

Just to play devil's advocate: The Myth of Factive Verbs. — Michael

Nice find, reading it now.

Even though “knows” is, according to Hazlett, not a factive verb, even Hazlett accepts that knowledge itself is a state that can only obtain if its content is true.

We'll see how it goes. I've been using "factive" as a shorthand for this:

The inference rule

     Kp ⊢ p

Allows you to conclude p from Kp — Srap Tasmaner

I would rather take the inference rule as primary and say that our usage of "know" mostly, though imperfectly, follows that -- that this is the nature of knowledge -- rather than saying the inference rule rests on an analysis of how we use the word "knows." (But there's a whole mess there on the relation of logic to the ordinary words we use for reasoning.)

Hazlett says

I'm suggesting, in other words, a divorce for the linguistic theory of knowledge attributions and traditional epistemology.

And I might be okay with that. Still reading.

the initial metaphysical question cannot be answered with empirical examples. — Mww

This is a thing.

patterns of association in language mirror patterns of association in environments; the histories of the two get intertwined through the mirroring relationship. — fdrake

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.

I found your post really interesting but couldn't help feeling -- sorry -- that it was old wine in a new bottle. That is, same problem in new language that doesn't have the apparent baggage of the old, but must if it's to do what we want -- so if universally accepted among philosophers, would lead to sixty years of debate about what mirroring is and whether it's a real thing, as a sequel to the debate over reference. That's not a substantive reply so I didn't -- though now I have!

I think @Mww had a gut reaction near mine, that this is just not what a solution to the question at hand must look like, and that's why I felt it must be a restatement of the problem instead of a solution.

Issues I am alive to in what I'm writing:

(1) Not all questions get answers. Some questions are ill-conceived and attempts to answer them, no matter how circumspect, are doomed to fail. (So, above, "what we want" might be something we shouldn't want, or we only think that's what we want but it isn't, etc.)

(2) There is a difference between a problem-and-proposed-solutions approach, and a model-building approach. Model-builders claim, in part, that the problem can only be a problem within a given -- which may mean, presumed -- model.

(3) One can claim, not quite to the converse, that a model is a framework for presenting and clarifying a problem; problem first, then model. That's one, more or less happy, way of taking "within."

But there are two sides here, and while they agree that a problem can only be presented within a framework, the other side -- model first -- has the option of claiming that a problem "within" a model (or framework) can also be taken as a problem for the model, an indication there is something wrong with it. In that case, the solution is always a new model, even if that model is merely an extension or outgrowth of the old one. Correct models -- Zeus's models -- do not have problems.

This is kinda what the progress of science looks like sometimes, this iterative (and cumulative, ratcheting) re-modeling structured around eliminating each generation's problems in the next generation. (Eliminating in a way consistent with the evidence, not just defining away. Why are these variable related but not those? --- Oh my god! If you rotate the axes, you can see that ..., and that must mean we were actually measuring ..., and so on.)

(4) And that question, of the fidelity and effectiveness of a model, looks shockingly like the substantive issue under discussion. Enter @Mww with his (?) reminder that there are metaphysical stakes here.

(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.")

*

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.

Right, right. I forgot she added a step.

'Warsaw was bombed in World War II' is asserted in the Bible iff Warsaw was bombed in World War II.

I really expected something like this:

'Warsaw was bombed in World War II' is true iff 'Warsaw was bombed in World War II' is asserted in the Bible.

Now I feel like I've misunderstood something.

I'm also no longer sure what I had mind when I wrote this:

there is no other conceivable way to do so — Srap Tasmaner

The things that you're liable
To read in the Bible
It ain't necessarily so

Yes, that's how I'm looking at it. And not only does it fix the extension of true, there is no other conceivable way to do so. That's why it must be a consequence of any substantive theory of truth.

For us, a lot of the interesting stuff is on the intensional side, modal contexts, propositional attitudes, all that business.

And there is still plenty of room for a metaphysical theory of what makes true sentences true, because this is not such a theory but only a semantics of true -- and the semantics of true is, for model-theoretic truth-conditional Montague-style semantics, trivial.

This is from page 4 of a classic textbook on formal semantics:

1. Truth-Conditional Semantics

A truth-conditional theory of semantics is one which adheres to the following dictum: To know the meaning of a (declarative) sentence is to know what the world would have to be like for the sentence to be true. Put another way, to give the meaning of a sentence is to specify its truth conditions, i.e., to give necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of that sentence. (Note, by the way, that we are using "true" to indicate something like "corresponding to the way the world is." We are thus implicitly adopting a correspondence theory of truth.) — Dowty, Wall, and Peters (italics in original)

And that's the difference between doing philosophy and doing linguistics, I guess.

'X' doesn't refer at all, it's a type of action that gets a job done — Isaac

Here's a link to a post of mine about this. If you clink on that link, it takes you right to what I said. In this context, we could say it refers to what I said. Following that link is how you get the job done of finding out what I said.

So "p" and "'p' is true" have the same extension but might have a different intension? — Michael

Well, something like that has always been the complaint about purely extensional semantics. From "The Meaning of 'Meaning'," which just happens to be on another tab in my browser:

the timeworn example of the two terms "creature with a kidney" and "creature with a heart" does show that two terms can have the same extension and yet differ in intension.