a form of life in which both kettles and "kettles" participate — Banno

I'm going to give you a hard time about this, not because I care about you attributing agency to non-persons for purposes of rhetorical grace, but because I want to know what locution you avoided using there.

the one making no sense without the other, — Banno

And now we're back to them being non-persons -- I think. But you could here mean, as you said, that they wouldn't make sense, or you could mean that their behavior wouldn't make sense. The difference matters because one of those things is a word and one of them isn't. If you want to erase the distinction, do that, but do it explicitly.

Talk of kettles makes sense only in making tea, lighting fires, pouring water, seeing steam. — Banno

Okay now a kettle is something we talk about, and it's our talk that may or may not make sense. Above you included both kettles and "kettles" -- or they included themselves -- but here, even as you describe activities that involve kettles, you reach for "talk of kettles." Why? Following all those steps to make tea is not "talk of kettles." But somehow even that seems like "kettles" business to you. What happened to the kettles? Can't how someone uses a kettle also make sense or not? Is that the same kind of sense that talk of kettles makes?

I'm not faulting you. Davidson is slippery, and it's hard not to think this is deliberate. Williamson refers to his "elliptical and somewhat evasive style." He's like the Steven Moffat or J. J. Abrams of philosophy, always hinting at a payoff that's never going to come. What we get instead, what you can actually get your hands on, I always end up finding pretty shallow. He's just not my guy, and I'm less happy every time I try going back to him, which I surely will again. Maybe next time I'll think he's brilliant.

That's pretty plausible, but I wouldn't presume to say what Davidson has chosen not quite to say.

"If a thing is a 'jabberwocky', you ought throw jelly at it."

Don't you now know how to treat something as a jabberwocky? (Ie throw jelly at it)

At no point in that did you need a concept of what a jabberwocky actually is. — Isaac

Ick.

First, that's an argument that we don't need concepts at all. What kind of cognitive psychologist are you? Too much Quine and Wittgenstein in your diet.

Second, absent a concept of jabberwocky-hood, I can't treat anything as a jabberwocky, because for all I know it is a jabberwocky. I am, when it comes to jabberwockies, incapable of pretense.

But suppose, perhaps because I was told to, I throw jelly at something, and do so with the understanding that this is how you treat a jabberwocky. I'm still incapable of inferring that I should pelt something with jelly because I believe, even erroneously, that it is a jabberwocky. And I am incapable of having a disposition to treat anything this way, so you can't even say I'm treating the thing you told me to fling jelly at as I would treat a jabberwocky. And what's behaviorism without dispositions? (A new line for Q-Tip!)

A set of behaviours (including mental ones) — Isaac

There ya go. This is really interesting. You're determined to sound like a behaviorist philosopher of fifty years ago or more, but you know that's a non-starter, so you push some of that style of analysis "inside." I'm sure there's a way of construing this that's uncontroversial -- neuroscientists are prone to talk about your brain telling you stories and so on, but of course that's largely picturesque; there's no cocoa or blankets involved. So did you mean the word "behaviour" as literally as I thought you might?

Something's 'being black' is just saying that we're proceeding under a policy of treating it as black. — Isaac

And I'm saying that's incoherent. We can't treat things as black if we don't have the concept of something being black, so there's no way of explaining being as assuming ((clarifying edit)). This is Sellars's argument about "looks" from EPM, and I see no way around it.

That gets me conceptual priority, but I'm not sure that's what I want.

Or is it infinite tower of models?
— Srap Tasmaner

Yes, basically. — Isaac

The horror! The horror!

Here I think the argument about truth stands only on the basis of what people can possibly be using the word for. — Isaac

Not me. I think that's a different subject, interesting in its own right, but not all questions are about how we use words. To hell with that.

By the way, I liked this:

If you were sure your jar contained 60 marbles, but your clicker has it at 59 is the model of the jar wrong, or the model of how the clicker works? — Isaac

That's a really nice question. I'm trying to avoid knee-jerk responses to it, so no answer yet, but it's on my mind.

proceeding under a policy of assuming it's black will yield fewer surprises. — Isaac

Under a policy of assuming what? That it is black. You're saying the same thing I did but in language that sounds more scrupulous.

Surely he knows that in doing so he can only be asking Marvin's opinion about the barbarians... which Marvin has already given. — Isaac

FWIW, I had the king asking Jack if what Marvin said was true. I did not have the king thinking that

adding a word magically causes Marvin to directly relate the actual position of the actual barbarians — Isaac

You base your belief on your priors. So if your prior model had a 90% confidence that working under a policy of assuming the marble is black will yiedl fewest surprises, then, unless updated by some actual surprise, that's the policy you'll proceed under. — Isaac

And here again, you have actual priors right? Was it really 90% or was it, like maybe any other number at all? And what is the content of that prior? That the actual marble is black. And your beliefs have to be updated by actual surprise? Or is that only what you, perhaps erroneously, modeled as surprise? Shouldn't you be consulting your model of your model? Is there ever any actual input? Or is it an infinite tower of models?

*

Honestly, though, I need to have a think about what this argument is even supposed to show. Is it the "conceptual priority" of knowledge to belief? Am I claiming that no position claiming to cash out everything in terms of beliefs, with no knowledge claims, is even intelligible? I'd really rather argue something else because we still seem to be locked in this bubble of arguing about concepts and assertibility. I'm pretty tired of those kinds of arguments.

Here are two versions of an argument that rather than undermining the traditional understanding of knowledge and truth, partial belief accounts rely on them.

If I'm presented with an urn containing 9 black marbles and 1 white, and asked to reach in and grab one, without looking, then, if I'm rational, my degree of confidence that the marble I pick will be black is 0.9. What is the content of the belief I hold with a confidence of 0.9? That the marble is, in fact, black. I don't know any other way of expressing partial belief except as partial belief about what is in fact the case. In this case, I hold that my confidence should be 0.9 because I know, for a fact, how many marbles are black and how many are white. If I don't know that, upon what would I base my partial belief? If I don't have knowledge but only estimates, those are estimates of how many there actually are, and estimates are better or worse depending on how close they are to being the actual number.

When Frank Ramsey ingeniously measures his confidence that he knows the way to town by wondering how far into a field he'd be willing to walk to ask for directions -- the mother of all "put a number on it"s --to make any use of that, he has to know the result of his imaginary experiment. How far, even roughly, would he walk? There has to be a truth of the matter, even if it comes with error bars, for him to refer back to, or the experiment is a waste of time. In addition to the issue of measuring, there's the issue, as above, of what he's measuring, his confidence that the town is this way; what he's uncertain about is whether he knows which way it is.

We can't conceivably begin to talk about theories or predictions or models if we're unwilling to call anything data.

When do people use 'true'?

To add emphasis to a statement of belief. To convey certainty. To convey trust. To add social weight to their opinion. As a stick to beat their opponents... — Isaac

Marvin tells the king the barbarians are within the walls.

The king asks Jack if that's true.

To me, the simplest way to understand that is that the king is asking, not about Marvin's words, but about what Marvin's words are about, the non-linguistic (gonna use this as often as possible now) barbarians inside our non-linguistic walls wielding genuine non-linguistic axes and other tools of mayhem.

You might prefer to say the king is asking Jack if he agrees. Or, asking if Jack's model agrees with Marvin's to the extent of making similar predictions. Sure. Jack is not a divine oracle, just a guy. But what are these predictions about? You'll want to say it's future states of the model -- that the king is at risk of expecting great loss of blood from the perceived axe in his face, and having that expectation confirmed, just as his model stops running and updating.

I don't really want to hop off @Banno's hobby horse just to hop onto yours, midstream no less, but to my mind that misses the whole point of the word "model," a thing that changes in a way appropriate to it when the thing it's a model of changes in the way appropriate to it. We don't have models, not in science, not in our heads, only to make predictions about what our models will do, but to make predictions about what what we're modeling will do.

Sorry -- I shouldn't be lecturing you right off the bat (maybe later) -- consider it an extended "hello".

But here's a question. is this adaptive-predictive-model sort of view (which is in a poor neighborhood of the city where your actual views live) automatically incompatible with the usual understanding of truth and knowledge, or must something be added to it?

Suppose I collect marbles in a big jar and have fashioned a clicker so that each time a marble is dropped in the jar a counter advances. I have a very simple model of my marble collection that captures only the total quantity. But it does actually capture that, doesn't it? So long as the clicker is properly designed and works as designed, and there are no confounding factors like a hole in the bottom of the jar, my model faithfully represents my collection with respect to quantity. That it is a model, that it substitutes one medium for another, that it is representational, doesn't automatically mean that words like "truth" and "knowledge" are only expressions of confidence does it?

So what gets you from, ahem, the model of predictive modeling to everything being a matter of confidence, narrative, and so on? I honestly don't know what you can say here except that it's your knowledge of how our clickers work, and that they're known to be less accurate and less precise than my marble counter.

Starts out wrong with non-linguistic states of affairs and goes down hill from there. — Banno

This a "No uninterpreted reality" thingybob? — fdrake

What exactly are you saying there, @Banno?

All I did was stipulate a name for something that may not have had a name.

Surely there are objects in the world besides words and sentences. That's as much as I meant by "non-linguistic". Your kettle is not identical to the phrase "Banno's kettle" and is not a token of the word "kettle", it's a kettle, a non-linguistic object. No?

Was it "state of affairs" that you objected to?

It's a parsimonious analysis because all you need is the ability to recognize A situations and to utter S's. We've got both of those, so -- done! — Srap Tasmaner

I'll throw in some non-analytic chit chat.

That sort of analysis ought to look familiar. It's in the shape of the cloud that hangs over pretty much all mid-20th century Anglo-American philosophy of language, the emblematic moment of which is Quine's remark that when it comes to linguistics, you have no choice but to be a behaviorist. The only sort of linguistic research he could imagine looks either like ethnography or like question and answer sessions, which only yield reports from language users.

As things turned out, cognitive science is quite real, and Quine could not have been more completely wrong.

But in the meantime, we have decades of carefully crafted language-centric philosophy that makes all sorts of quasi-behaviorist assumptions, if not always about the facts (about which you can claim to be agnostic), then certainly about methodology. Wittgenstein, Dummett, Quine, Sellars, Davidson, it's everyone. All that work is far from useless, but we have to make an effort to separate their presumptions about what could be said about language and language users from their putting those presumptions to work in creative and illuminating ways.

Would like to see a discussion on how the RHS relates to the world — fdrake

Here's a version of Banno's Davidson's Wittgenstein.

Let's say there's a (non-linguistic) state of affairs A that could obtain in the world, and a statement S that describes that state of affairs.

If you want to say that A obtains, how would you say that? You'd use S. Asserting S is exactly how you claim that A obtains in the world. And the statement S is true (asserted or not) if, and only if, the state of affairs A obtains.

What remains is to specify what this "S describes A" business amounts to, beyond saying "S describes what S describes."

Here things get Murky.

One element here is that we must be capable of recognizing that A obtains or doesn't, and, for many sorts of states of affairs, there's no reason to think we humans are uniquely capable of recognizing that such a state of affairs obtains. Lots of creatures know when it's raining; some are more finely attuned to shifts in the microclimate than we are. So this should be an uncontroversial freebie. (Of course it's not actually that simple, because of all the questions of how we conceptualize A, how we take A as something for which S might be appropriate, or the "always already interpreted" business that suggests our access to A is inherently mediated by S's and such. However that works out, you'll still get to say we recognize A's, so that's that.)

But when it comes to the other element, there will be a temptation to reverse the analysis above. Above I said that if we wish to inform someone that A obtains, we will reach for S because S describes A. But it is possible to say that what's really going on is that we reach for some S-like statement in A-like circumstances, period. We might call that S describing A, but if so, all we can mean by that is that when we want to draw attention to an A we utter an S. It's a parsimonious analysis because all you need is the ability to recognize A situations and to utter S's. We've got both of those, so -- done!

Putting all this together, we find that S is true iff we by and large say something S-like when we perceive ourselves to be in an A-like situation. This is why @Luke suspects that this sort of analysis is just relativism about truth. But that's only if you analyze "S describes A" as above.

It is possible there are alternatives to that analysis, besides of course to the other points sketched in above.

I'm not competent to speak to the program of Davidsonian semantics, but I'm not sure it's been much on display here (possibly anywhere, lately) anyway.

Suppose you have a list of colors {red, blue, green, ...}, and a function that maps an object to a color.

For any color, you could define a predicate based on the function that assigns colors. For example

x is red iff color(x) = red

Is that a definition of red? It is if you mean, narrowly, explaining the use of red as a predicate, given only the use of it as a value. It is a method for turning nouns into adjectives, certainly.

It is not a definition of red that would have been of any use in constructing the color() function. You have to be able to assign color values already. This just shows you how to express your assignment of a color value as predicating.

It's a change in notation. The predicative version is syntactic sugar for the value-assigning version.

And all of this could go the other way, if you start with predicates. You can turn adjectives into nouns by the same method.

If you have neither in hand, this method is no use at all.

the famous possibly apocryphal example of someone flipping off Wittgenstein, "What is the logical structure of this gesture?" — fdrake

It was Piero Sraffa, and it's almost certainly true. He was a very original thinker. (I read his book a lifetime ago.) They were friends at Cambridge.

Did you mean to quote stuff about Hitler instead of the kettle?

We find that "Hitler has been executed" is true in y, so the counterfactual evaluates as true in x. — fdrake

This is more or less the standard view right? But I have to say, "We find that ..." sure looks odd to me.

I guess if I'm going to keep wading into these waters, I'll have to study up some. Presumably you can proceed by defining worlds in which the Allies did and worlds in which they didn't execute Hitler, and then you'll have to defend some way of determining how far each sort is from us, which might be closest, which is close enough, and so on. I'll do my homework.

I didn't know anyone was researching that. — Tate

I was thinking back ages ago, Barwise and Perry, situation semantics.

Enough for the proposition to be understood, I would think. It would be difficult to understand a proposition without any context. — Luke

Indeed, the point should have been made already that the only reason to go questing after non-circular criteria for the "saturation" of a statement is so you can formalize it properly. You have the option of fiddling with logic to do some of that, but if your target is classical logic, that's tenseless and contextless, which means all the statements have to be too.

A simplistic analogy for coders: if you write in a standard imperative style where there's state laying around all over the place, your functions may only need to take an argument or two and pull everything else they need from whatever's in scope; if you write in a functional style -- or, next door, Prolog -- then your functions might have to take a zillion arguments, or one or two plus a big fat one bundling a bunch of others together, because you have to carry the state around with you.

Real life is like the imperative example -- state is laying around and accessible, more state is implicated by your utterance, so you do understand things without maybe even knowing quite how you do, though you might be able to work out a lot of it. Logic isn't like that. Formal semantics isn't like that. If it's not explicit somewhere, it's no help at all.

So yeah in real life, it should be said again, we either don't face these problems or resolve them easily. Disambiguation, for instance, is the easiest thing in the world. This stuff is only challenging when you try to formalize it.

And that's not truth apt. — Tate

So you're using "proposition" to mean something like, fully saturated -- I'm thinking of the way Frege calls predicates "incomplete symbols" or something. "... is red" is a function, and needs a name there or a bound variable to be complete. But it turns out completeness in that sense only works for formal languages, and in everyday usage of natural languages you might need to disambiguate, you might need a certain amount of context or background knowledge, all manner of things before your statement is, as I was putting it, "fully saturated" and ready to be true or false.

I find that general approach reasonable, but how do you deal with the circularity? What I mean is, if asked how much context we need to pull in before a statement is truth-apt, the answer is something like "enough for it to be truth-apt." The initial answer anyway. I guess I'm asking for reams a theory, because I have dim memories of work on this problem. Just wondering if you have any sense of how such a project is faring.

It seems to me that the counterfactual says something about some other possible world. — Michael

Sure, by way of distinguishing it from ours. "If Hitler had not committed suicide, ..." says right up front that in fact he did. You can't be a counterfactual if you don't start with a fact you're countering. And I don't know how else to take "then he would have been executed by the Allies" except as a statement about what the Allies were like, what sort of action they were likely to take. How is any of this not also about our world?

What would it mean for the truth to not be about our world? — Michael

That's a fair question. Some of this is a little odd. If the kettle here hasn't quite come to boil yet, but might have, there is a nearby world where it has. In our world, "The kettle is boiling" is a falsehood, but not so far away it is a truth. Because these come in pairs, you get to say that "The kettle is not boiling" is a truth here. Every falsehood is also "about" our world in this degenerate sense, that its negation is a truth about our world. But this pairing business has another consequence, that you aren't compelled to go theorizing about negative facts and absent truthmakers and such; you only need the positives, because across all possible worlds you have all the positives instantiated -- somewhere. The negatives only duplicate (and then some!) what we already have. Instead of saying there's no truthmaker here for some sentence, you get to say a given sentence does have a truthmaker, it's just that it's somewhere else.

And if you take this positives-only approach, then the question is precisely whether that truthmaker is here, whether it's ours, whether it belongs to this world or another, because it does belong to some world somewhere.

At least we've drawn the scope of our analysis to our experience, as opposed to trying to tie it to something metaphysical. — Tate

If that's what we've done, then I was way off. Wouldn't be the first time.

But my thought was exactly that they go together. The sort of thing you can come to know is the sort of thing that makes our sentences true. If the kettle is not boiling, I can't know that it is, and "The kettle is boiling" remains, let's say, unfulfilled.

Yeah, I'm afraid so. I am thinking it all comes back to being, but I'm in no hurry to get there.

I would quibble a little with the word "evidence," which is appropriate for reasonable belief in the absence of knowledge.

For instance, much of a typical chess game can be played heuristically, with little calculation, but there are times when you need to know the truth of the position. When you see it, it's like finding a really good proof in mathematics (yes, there are good proofs and bad proofs); the whole position sort of lights up and you see the truth in perfect clarity, and everything else you were thinking about blows away like so much smoke. Secrets are revealed, indeed. I'm not saying truth is always like that, of course, but that kind of experience clarifies the distinction between your ignorance, before you had seen the truth, however much evidence you may have had for your beliefs, and your knowledge, once you had.

What about counterfactuals? Are they false (or not truth-apt)? — Michael

In addition to my reply to Tate above, counterfactuals also imply, right up front, something that is the case, and try to show how that matters, in this world, by imagining that it's not. Anyway, why would the counterfactual as a whole just be false? (Whether they're truth-apt at all has in the past been controversial but not so much anymore I think.)

Hypotheticals are also truth apt. "If the volcano blows, a cooling trend will begin.". This isn't specifically about us, and it isn't here. — Tate

Maybe, but even if you're not stating a fact ("The volcano is erupting") you're saying something about how our world works, aren't you? That our world is such that this event would lead to this other event. The place we belong works this way, not some other way, and surely that matters to who we are.

Anyway, this is more hunch than thought right now. Might be nothing to it.

Here are some thoughts on truth I can't figure out how to use. (Possibly in the next neighborhood over from yours @fdrake.)

In thinking about how truth does seem comfortable playing with the other alethic modalities, and still in a possible worlds mood, I was thinking about how truth has to be about our world, about where we live, and is thereby also about us, every time, whether it seems to be or not, because every truth says something about what kind of world we live in and that says something about us as its residents, as part of it. (This is a sort of positive spin on Davidson's Big Fact argument.)

It has to be our kettle boiling, here in this world, for "The kettle is boiling" to be true. There is a sense in which, if our kettle is not boiling, even if it's boiling in many nearby worlds, the sentence "The kettle is boiling" doesn't belong here. (I was tempted to say that a falsehood is like taking a piece from a another puzzle and trying to force it in -- and it's true, falsehoods are an affront, but the puzzle thing ended up sounding more like coherentism, so I've let it go.)

Another way to put it is that truth is when what we say and where we live harmonize. Falsehoods are discordant.

I don't know what to do with any of that, but I do want to understand why truth matters. It does matter, and not only for practical reasons, and I think the answer might be around here. Somehow truth is the speech that is properly of here and properly of us.

Would we expect the child to intuitively "get" the idea of quantity or number from an exercise like that? — Janus

From one time? No. (It takes kids more than a couple weeks to make it from kindergarten to 6th grade.)

I briefly taught math in a homeschool co-op, to a bunch of teenagers. My favorite exercise was asking them why the internal angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees. They knew that they do, and with enough help they could prove it -- but why is it provable? Why is it true?

And now we're back on topic.

Counting without understanding quantity would just be a meaningless regurgitation of words. — Janus

At around the same age you learn your ABC's. That's pure sequence, no quantity.

The, you know, point of math is that things like sequence and quantity end up fitting together.

Learning to count, for instance, is not the same as learning to measure -- right up until it turns out it is.

Or we could do each other's views, but randomly selected, like a secret Santa. ;-)

Anyhow, I can try to summarize where I am at the moment, still in progress.

It seems plain to me that truth is not a property of a sentence, like being in English or in the passive voice or contradictory. It's at least a relation between a sentence and something else; that is, it's the status of that relation that makes a sentence true or false. We use "true" as a 1-place predicate only because the value of the other parameter (or parameters, if we need more) is held fixed, or assumed, or implicated, something like that.

Convention T and other versions of the equivalence thesis may count as adequate descriptions of how we use the word "true," or at least adequate descriptions of a way of using the word common among philosophers, but are only descriptive and offer no explanation for why the LHS tracks the truth-value of the RHS, where all the action is. It notes the material equivalence, and stops. As such, this equivalence should be a consequence of a genuine theory of truth, if such a thing is possible. It may well be that truth has to be taken as a primitive, but I don't think the equivalence thesis either shows that or blocks it.

As for what a theory of truth that goes beyond the equivalence should look like, and whether it's possible, I don't know. Material equivalence is a slightly odd, slightly old-fashioned mechanism to play such a central role in our understanding of the central concept of philosophy. What if, instead, we had all learned in school that if "The kettle is boiling" is true, it's true because the kettle is boiling, and if the kettle weren't boiling, it wouldn't be true. That's a whole different ballpark, logically speaking. I think the natural place to look for why a sentence is true or false is what the sentence is about, and maybe -- this is hard to say without circularity -- what's relevant to its truth or falsehood. The sort of thing you might push over to the epistemic side -- what would enable you to come to know something is the case -- what goes there is the sort of thing that makes the sentence true.

TLDR: if I go on with this, I'll probably be reading up on truth-makers.

Sorry, this was goofy:
It is sometimes desirable to effect such a transformation into a form with only ORs and NOTs (disjunctive normal form) or only ANDs and NOTs (conjunctive normal form).

CNF and DNF are interesting, but not as described. It's a question of whether you have only ANDs outside and ORs inside parentheses or the other way around.

A & (~B v C) & (D v ~E) is CNF
(A & B) v (~C & D) v (~E & ~F) is DNF.

(Your question called them to mind, as getting something into a canonical form, but then I somehow didn't notice I was writing gibberish! Ah well.)

You can also get by with a single connective, if you're so inclined, the Sheffer stroke, " | ", read "not both," or NAND.

Seems a step too far. I think I maintained that truth ranges over propositions — Banno

No progress there, so let's revisit "ranging", then I'll give up:

I don't know what you mean when you say "Truth ranges over propositions and such."
— Srap Tasmaner

Nor do I, apart from that it is propositions and such that are true, or not. In a way this is stipulating the sense of "true" we are using here; as might be opposed to a true friend or a true note. — Banno

So your position is that "true" is a word that can be applied to various things -- statements, beliefs, friends, bicycle wheels, and so on -- and you've chosen some of those things that seem related and said you're using the word "true" in the sense that it applies to those things; and the sense in which the word "true" ranges over some of those things is, well, that you can apply the word "true" to them.

Anything to add?

So you agree that truth is a relation between a proposition and something else. There might be more that goes into that, but it's at least that.

Here's a variation on this theme. Consider the arrow again. You could say Hit(some-target, some-arrow), and that would be a two-place predicate. But you could also, given a target, produce a one-place predicate, Hit-this-target(some-arrow). You get the one-place predicate by partially applying the two-place predicate.

Now compare how we handle truth in possible worlds semantics. Is truth a one-place predicate? It can be, if you have fixed which world you're talking about, but the general form would be True(P, W), right? It's a start, but you'll often see more, adding a catchall "situation", ⟨P, W, S⟩, or time and location, ⟨P, W, L, T⟩. You could certainly add language, and deal directly with sentences. However complex this relation becomes, you could always curry it to get back to a one-place predicate "true".

But truth is only a one-place predicate by assumption or by choice.

It's at the very least a relation between a proposition and something else. Agreed?

In order to miss the target, there must be a target to miss. — Banno

And I must be shooting at it. I do other things as well.

But yes, it stands to reason there's a target. Problem?

it is propositions and such that are true, or not — Banno

And the arrows that are stuck in the target are indeed there, can be counted and so on. But you would count them not because they are arrows, but because they are arrows that are stuck in the target. There are lots of arrows. Arrows are cheap. What makes an arrow interesting, given that I was aiming at the target, is that it hit.

We can move on to nails I hit right on the head, if you're tired of archery.

Truth ranges over propositions and such. — Banno

Is hitting the target a property of the arrow? — Srap Tasmaner

By the way, if I was quoting someone, I didn't know it.

But can you fill it out? — Banno

I can tell you what I was thinking; it's not complicated. In order to tell you some part of how things stand in our shared world, I must be accurate. Big as the world is, it is possible to miss when aiming at it. If I tell you Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election, my arrow has gone wide. It may make a bullseye on some other world, but not on this one.

Now we seem to agree that having struck the target is not merely the condition of the arrow, but involves the target as well. They are related in a certain way, and it is that relation that we call "having hit the target". Examine the arrow, and you will find it is no different from any other, no different from one that missed the target entirely, no different from one still in the quiver. On all this, I take it we agree.

Truth is when you hit the target.

Hence I avoided "Truth is a property of propositions and such". — Banno

Indeed.

But if you don't mean that truth is a property of propositions, I don't know what you mean when you say "Truth ranges over propositions and such." "Ranges over" how? What does that mean? Does the rest of the world play any part in this ranging that truth does?

Truth ranges over propositions and such. — Banno

Is hitting the target a property of the arrow?

I guess I should reread the paper.

I'm tempted to say pragmatics is already all over this sort of thing. If I say, "Hand me the blue one," the meaning of that seems to be readily determined by any English speaker, and it could certainly be unambiguous in context, even though that sentence can be used to request completely different items in different situations. -- That the meaning is clear enough can, I think, be shown by cases of misspeaking or mistaken belief on the part of the speaker: if there isn't a blue one, and you really meant to ask for the green one, I'll understand that you were asking me to do something I can't, without ever fixing the reference of your request.

It would be a little odd to have to extend "situation" to cover the entire history of your species and your planet, though. But that breathtaking expansion of the prerequisites for making sense might be forced on us more often than we think. It's already kinda implied in there being water to talk about in the first place...

But it was gibberish both times.

2. T(q) → ∃x(x=q) — Michael

That's not how that works. You don't need existential generalization to know that q exists; you just predicated something of q!

You're trying to say that if something has a property then it must exist. But the assertion that something has a property presupposes that it exists. Asserting that it doesn't have some property would work just as well.

You don't "find out" that the individuals in your universe, like q, exist; you assumed them when you built it, or you name them (uniquely!) when you create them, as with existential instantiation.

No, I don't think I was saying anything like that, just offering motivation.

(Snipping lots of musing about "It's raining or it's not", which was more fun to write than to read.)

I'll stand by my two suggestions:
(1) it's reasonable to say disjunctions are made true by one their disjuncts being true;
(2) correspondence can naturally be taken as applying only to informative claims, so tautologies need not apply.

I don't think the mere existence of disjunctions or conditionals falsifies correspondence theories. (Seems like we would have heard about that if it were so.)

It can't be luck if whatever sentence we stick in (pv~p) gets us truth. It's structure, not correspondence. — Banno

In the back of my mind I'm thinking of the intuitionist's rejection of p v ~p as an unqualified introduction rule. To introduce p v ~p, you have to have p in hand, or ~p in hand, and use the usual rule for or introduction. I simply allowed the introduction but applied the idea to truthmakers: one or the other of those will be what makes the disjunction true when it's true. The disjunction itself is a freebie, vouched for by whichever of the disjuncts is true. You're right of course that one or the other will always turn up, but we still get to say, on each occasion, here's what makes R v ~R true this time.

(Snipping the rest the past-my-bedtime speculation about truth. Probably shoddy stuff anyway.)

All that's fine -- I think, I didn't check all that carefully -- but again look where you end up, contrasting

(1) Is P true?
(2) Is P possible?

Why are those constructions so similar, and why would it be so natural to contrast the truth of P with the possibility of P, the likelihood of P, and so on?

The intensional revolution in fact sweeps away truth along with possibility, necessity and the rest, and leaves a purely extensional model-theoretic semantics behind. ("True" turns out to be an incomplete symbol, completed as "true at W", which is in turn just defined as satisfaction, and everything is just shorthand for that.)

Which is just more evidence, in a screwy way, that this is the set of concepts truth belongs with -- which is a little surprising, since the stability of truth is nearly what defines the split between extensional and intensional contexts. If truth belongs with this stuff, something isn't what we thought it was.

(R v ~ R) is never untrue. time and place are irrelevant. — Banno

The way I was thinking about this: on each occasion when R v ~R is true, it's because R is true or because ~R is true. We additionally know that this covers all possible occasions, but what makes it true on each occasion is specifically one or specifically the other, not the additional fact that there are no occasions not covered by one disjunct or the other.

R v ~R doesn't need to know it's guaranteed to win in order to win; as far as it knows, it's just always lucky.

there's going to be, at a bare minimum, a partial correspondence (it'll rain OR it'll not) — Agent Smith

Yeah that's it, except partial is full for a disjunction. "Or" means "or", for realsies.

Not so much because that's not an exclusive or. You're talking about something else.



Here's something for you. Was thinking about 'modal' adjectives after my exchange with @Sam26, and it's curious how it's not at all tempting to treat them as properties of sentences (or propositions, whatever).

(1) Sheila says you sent that email. Is that true?

Maybe true is "true of" or "applies to" the sentence Sheila said.

(2) Is it at least possible that you sent that email?

No one wonders if the sentence Sheila said is possible. She's already said it.

Obvious candidates are (a) that "possible" is short for "possibly true" and (b) that we're not talking about the sentence but the state of affairs the sentence describes. (2) and (b) seem to get along fine, but we could have a better match for (a) with something like

(2') Is it at least possible that what Sheila said is true?

which you could continue to interpret as Sheila's sentence maybe possessing this property.

There are ways in which constructions involving "true" and the modal adjectives diverge, but also quite a few where they are very close.

(3) Is what Sheila said true?
(4) Is what Sheila said possible?
(5) No, it's not true because it's impossible.

That last one is a doozy because if you want to take to take "it" as what Sheila said, you can't take both "true" and "impossible" as properties a sentence might have -- that would be nonsense. It doesn't rule out truth as a property but you need a nuanced expansion of (5) into logical form to allow it. (Maybe the second "it" is impersonal, etc. etc.) Not a huge hurdle, maybe, but you have to wonder why ordinary usage would lean toward sometimes treating these so similarly if they're so different.

(6) It's not only possible, it's true.

And if we decide to cut through all this by taking, say, "possible" as meaning "possibly true", there's the peculiarity that these modal adverbs (now) contrast with <null>. Not impossible, but slightly odd.

(6') It's not only possibly true, it's <null> true.

Of course we, knowers of systems modal, will be tempted to say this is also

(6'') It's not only possibly true, it's actually true.

To a normal person, "actually true" will sound a bit like "really pregnant" or "completely off".

Anyhow, once we've added "true" everywhere, what's it doing? It's no longer part of the contrast with "possible". But we can't move on to saying that "true" is short for "actually true" because that would completely undermine our treatment of "possible", "impossible" and the others.

I don't mind resorting to Philenglish ("It is the case that ..." "It is possibly the case that ...") and the formal systems are what they are. I was just wondering if we might learn something from how ordinary usage handles things, and I think I've learned that there is some kind of relationship between truth and the various alethic modes, but the picture is far from clear.

But (~R v R) does not have the same truth value as (R v X), which would be false if it were not raining and X were false. — Banno

Agreed, which is why I mentioned that R v ~R will also correspond with it not raining.

As you like. R v ~R happily corresponds to the fact of it raining, just as R v X, for any X does. Likewise for corresponding to it not raining.

On the other hand, a tautology is uninformative. It says nothing, and saying it commits one to nothing. It's not entirely unnatural to defend correspondence but restrict it to informative claims.

the prosentential view remain undiscussed — Banno

FWIW, I liked what I saw of the prosentential theory, maybe a few years ago on IEP. It has a linguistic feel to it, and provides reasonable motivation for the existence and usefulness of what sometimes appears to be a superfluous word. (The model-theoretic approach more or less shows it to be unnecessary, so much so that Dummett commented that if you didn't already know what truth was, you'd have no idea what you were defining with all those T-schemas and what the point of it could possibly be.) I keep it in the back of my mind when constructing examples.

Blocks the Liar, as I recall, and if that matters.