No.

When we say "Bob knows the sky is blue", what is meant is "Bob knows that the sky is blue", — Metaphysician Undercover

Hmmmmm.

not "Bob knows this proposition "the sky is blue'". If we add "that", to say "Bob knows that the sky is blue", what we are saying is Bob knows the proposition "the sky is blue", as true. What is added then, by adding "that", is that "the sky is blue" now signifies a proposition which is designated as true, instead of a state of affairs. So by adding "that" to "knows", such that we say "knows that", we change what follows (the sky is blue), from signifying a state of affairs to signifying a proposition. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah, "that" doesn't do any of that. That's you. (English doesn't care if it's there or not.)

Believe it or not, "S knows that P" is just an ordinary piece of Anglo-American philosophical shop talk. It is not, for instance, itself a theory of knowledge. You seem to be under the impression that it is. You seem to think it amounts to a claim that knowledge is knowledge of propositions being true, or assenting to them, or holding them true, or whatever. This little shorthand is no such theory; if any claim is made in using this schema, it is only that it is reasonable for us to describe some examples of people knowing things in this way. (And that it can be distinguished from things like knowing how to ride a bike, knowing John Kennedy, knowing the way to San José.)

For instance, I could give you a purely causal theory of knowledge, something like "S knows that P if and only if there is a causal chain (of some special sort) connecting the state of affairs said in P to obtain and S." Nowhere in there is it suggested that S would even recognize P if he sat on it, much less that he holds it true or anything else. Doesn't matter. We can describe S as knowing that P, so far as we're concerned who know all about knowledge.

Now if one believed no one can ever properly be described as knowing something in this broadly propositional sense, then certainly one would want to avoid "S knows that P" like the plague.

The world presents itself to us as continually changing through time, with no such thing as "the way that the world is". — Metaphysician Undercover

A leaf twists, turns, and flutters in the wind, showing us now this side, now that, its color shifting as its angle to the sun changes, but the whole time, it's a leaf.

Language is not designed to describe every detail of every moment, and its failure to do so is actually its success at doing something else: language picks our the relatively invariant. Even the process of the leaf's constant movement has some invariance to it that can be picked out, as I did in the first sentence of this post.

(Besides which, it's largely only a practical not a theoretical limitation: a digitally encoded film is in essence the entire contents of a person's visual field turned into language.)

The invariance we pick out with words is actually there. We have words like "leaf" in our language because leaves are relatively persistent. Even in death, they are still leaves for quite a while before they finally decay enough for us to stop calling them leaves. That boundary is vague and nevertheless useful and effective. What leaves never do is spontaneously turn into mushrooms or fruits or rocks.

I would invite you to consider the Toy Story example I presented earlier. Buzz and Woody actually mean exactly the same thing by the word "flying" and falling, with or without style, is excluded from that meaning. Buzz applies the word to events Woody doesn't only because Buzz has a mistaken belief that these are cases of what he and Woody agree is flying.

So it is with your treatment of the word "knowledge."

addressed the problem with this phrase "knows that P" in my last post to Srap. Your use involves a category error. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's not a "category error." (Btw, the phrase you want, the one Ryle coined, is "category mistake.") It's also not a use/mention violation. "S knows that P" is just an informal schema. It is a stand-in for a proposition formed by concatenating the name of a subject, the phrase " knows that " and a proposition. The name substituted for S is to be used in the resulting sentence -- call it S1 -- and thus does not appear in quotes in S1; the proposition substituted for P is to be used in S1 and thus does not appear in quotes in S1.

The schema is informal in the sense that it is not part of any formal system and we are not committed to quantifying over subjects and propositions, although some informal quantifying seems harmless enough. No domain of discourse is being specified. No rules of inference. It's just a notation, a kind of shorthand. The argument is still being conducted in regular English.

"S knows that P" is also informal in the sense that it is designedly neutral on what sorts of things S and P are -- remember, there is no specified domain of discourse -- except that they would be considered appropriate on the LHS and the RHS of " knows that ". As such it is appropriate for broadly propositional accounts and inappropriate for anything else. It is not intended to be useful for discussion of abilities, skills, or any other sort of knowledge-how. Those things don't go on the RHS of " knows that ".

It's unnatural, but you could try to specify what you intend to substitute for S and for P, without actually doing so. (It's simplest just to do so, unless you start working with classes of S's and P's.) In that case, you might say, "S = 'George Washington', and P = 'life is suffering'." "S" and "P" are informally the names of variables; to specify their values, you write an identity between the name of the variable and the name of the value. In this identity, the names are used, not mentioned. Names for what we intend to substitute are formed by enclosing the expressions in quotes.

By the way, the inadequate, preconceived notion of knowledge, which led them astray, was the idea that knowledge had to exclude falsity — Metaphysician Undercover

Therefore if someone knows that P, this does not mean P is true. — Metaphysician Undercover

Do you mean to say that under the same scheme of interpretation, some statement P could be false and someone know that P?

For example, "I am at work today," spoken by me, on this day, is false; it would be true spoken today by my buddy Mike; it would be true spoken by me on some other day.

(Note that under this scheme of interpretation, "I am not at work" is true, and there's no issue about knowing that I am not at work. That's still knowing something that's true.)

Is it possible for someone to know that I am at work today, interpreting "I am at work today" the same way I interpret it -- "I" referring to me, and so on -- an interpretation under which it is false?

The arguments I produced earlier demonstrate that it is necessary for someone to know P, in order for P to be true. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sorry, I can't figure out where you demonstrated this. Would you mind linking the post or posts?

I'm really glad you brought up Gettier -- the more I think about it the more relevant it is to the debate we've been having here.

I have seriously mixed feelings about it.

If you report someone's utterance (or potential utterance) in the exact words they used (or would use), we put those attributed words in quotation marks, just like we were taught in elementary school. But it doesn't look much like a name; it looks like it still has structure. I see a lot of commonality with reports in indirect discourse, so I'm tempted to think of this use of quotation marks not as creating a name but as indicating "null paraphrase," the degenerate case of paraphrase where you have changed no words, just like you learned in school, but otherwise to be treated like any other propositional report, where you typically fiddle with pronouns and indexicals at least.

Not sure either way though.

All good. We are an example to us all.

Just didn't want you to think I had ignored that part of your post, even though I wasn't really going to address it. Maybe my choice of words was poor, but my intention was to be polite. It still is.

Take it easy, man. I'm really not trying to pick a fight with you. I joined in not to bully you but to try to support Michael's point. You disagree. Fine.

BTW, Gettier case number 1 did not involve disjunction -- it's sort of a faulty definite description, sort of. You believe X will get the job (when it's actually you); X you happen to know has 7 coins in his pocket (and so do you but you don't know it), and you are said to believe the guy who got the job has 7 coins in his pocket, which is true, but not what you meant.

It's certainly not standard convention; so you cant' impose it on others. If it was, people would have to always write in scare quotes to signify they are signifying the actual signified. Not only would that be unwieldy, it is not how we write in English. Its' certainly not how we teach people to write in English departments. — Thanatos Sand

Well a convention is not something one imposes -- do as you like. I'm just telling you it's been standard practice in Anglo-American philosophy for more than a few generations now. Indeed, we do always use quotation marks when we want to signify the signifier. You get used to it.

I don't intend to argue Saussure with you.

My cat's name is "Jack". Jack is my cat. "Jack" is not my cat. — creativesoul

One of the things about use/mention I'm ever so slightly uncomfortable about is that in a sense it's a claim that there is nothing but use, and that by enclosing an expression in quotation marks you have created a name for the expression, and it is this name you are using. I get the motivation, and it seems perfectly safe when dealing with simple expressions, but I'm not convinced this is the right view when you have an entire statement enclosed in quotation marks.

This immediately reminded me of Gettier 'problems' with the JTB account. — creativesoul

There is a kind of connection to the argument here. Gettier cases are examples of epistemic luck -- you have a belief, it's true, it's got something that counts as justification, but the proposition believed to be true is true under a different interpretation than the one you intended, and our intuition that these are not examples of knowledge is because the justification you had fit the interpretation under which your sentence was false, not the one under which your sentence was true. (That's probably not all cases -- if it were, I would have just solved the Gettier problem.)

There's another sort of luck that's even easier to get at because there's no question of knowledge at all: that's when you're asked a question on an exam (or a game show, whatever) and you guess -- and your guess is right! If you're asked when the Battle of Hastings was, "1066" is the right answer whether you've ever even heard of the Battle of Hastings or not, because truth is not the same thing as knowledge.

(Not getting into the disjunction thing yet, as I have an argument that uses disjunction still under litigation.)

What you and Michael don't get, and what Saussure demonstrated very well, is that the thing and the things's name can't be separated as long as you are using the same word, quotations or no. — Thanatos Sand

It's been too long since I read Saussure, so I'm not sure what separating involves here and if that's what Michael and I think we're doing.

I might even agree that quotation marks are not the ideal way to do this, but in our circle it's the standard way of talking about a name (I'm speaking loosely here) instead of the name's bearer. Like I said, it's just a convention in our crowd (but evidently not yours) -- we could refer to Michael's name as <Michael> or Michael-name or Name(Michael) or whatever.

Or are you saying there is no way to talk about a thing's name instead of talking about the thing?

These are entirely different dynamics and situations of which I have no interest. But thanks for sharing them. — Thanatos Sand

You might note that I wasn't addressing you here.

We can also say this:
If no one knows n = 0, then n ≠ 0.
If n ≠ 0, then someone knows that n ≠ 0.
Who is this person who knows the cup is not empty?

It's a convention. We can talk about a thing by using its name; if we want to talk about the thing's name instead of the thing itself, we put the name in quotation marks. (Talking about the thing by using its name we call "use"; talking about the thing's name by putting the name in quotation marks, we call "mention.")

Thus Michael's name is "Michael," but Michael is not Michael's name, for the obvious reason that things are not identical with their names.

Quotation marks just have multiple uses, and this is one of them.

If you don't like the convention, you're free to ignore it, but it makes it more difficult to distinguish when you're talking about Michael from when you're talking about his name.

Further, I would say that not all knowledge consists of things which are true (as knowing-how is distinct for example), being true is a special type of knowledge. — Metaphysician Undercover

Absolutely. I wouldn't conflate knowing-how and knowing-that, just assumed we were talking about propositional knowledge.

The argument I produced, if you followed it, demonstrates that P is true if S knows that P is true, and nothing further about being true. have you something to add? — Metaphysician Undercover

Well, sure, "know" is a factive verb. Everyone agrees that if someone knows that P, then P is true. (Someone knowing that P is a sufficient condition for P being true.)

In other words S knows that P is the condition for P being true. — Metaphysician Undercover

But now this is the converse: if P is true, then someone knows that P. (Someone knowing that P is a necessary condition for P being true.) Its contrapositive is that if no one knows that P, then P is false.

Suppose I have a machine like this: there is a button in Room 1, and a cup in Room 2, and when the button in Room 1 is pushed, the machine drops 1 ball or 2 balls into the cup and then shuts off. You can only see the cup if you are in Room 2.

Now suppose I am in Room 1 and I push the button. No one is in Room 2. Let n = the number of balls in the cup after I push the button. If the machine didn't work, n = 0, otherwise n = 1 or n = 2. I know that (n = 0 ∨ n = 1 ∨ n = 2), and it is true that (n = 0 ∨ n = 1 ∨ n = 2). No one knows that n = 0, therefore n ≠ 0; no one knows that n = 1, therefore n ≠ 1; no one knows that n = 2, therefore n ≠ 2. Therefore it is not true that (n = 0 ∨ n = 1 ∨ n = 2). And that is a contradiction.

Therefore it is false that if P is true, someone knows that P.

If I have ~p and ~p -> p then it is impossible that ~p is true and p is true — Pippen

I keep trying to help you but you're not putting the work in, so this is my last time.

It's always already the case that ¬p and p cannot both be true. Seriously, man.

It has nothing at all to do with whatever premises you have.

If you assume ¬p as a premise, you cannot possibly derive p unless your premises are inconsistent.

And guess what? ¬p and ¬p→p as a set of premises IS INCONSISTENT.

As a matter of fact, ¬p→¬(¬p→p) is a tautology.

If this is the case, then could you explain to me how you categorize both knowledge and truth, to maintain this separation which you are inclined to adhere to. — Metaphysician Undercover

Knowledge has this form: For some subject S and some proposition P, S knows that P.
Truth has this form: For some proposition P, P is true.

Sure. But antirealism is the position he gets to, not where he starts. (And it's not necessarily universal.) And the getting to is mainly through his reading of Frege and Wittgenstein, and his own work on language and logic. His lifelong intuitionism is in some ways enthusiastic but in some ways reluctant.

Maybe worth noting here that Frege's original Begriffschrift has an "assertion stroke" and a "judgment stroke" but those fall away eventually.

Right, right. I see I was accidentally dissing McDowell.

I was trying to stay kinda neutral, but back of my mind I was thinking about Dummett's idea that truth has its -- I guess "conceptual" -- origin in the idea of an assertion being objectively right or wrong, and that attempts to graft a richer concept of assertion onto Frege are too little, too late.

I'm pretty conflicted about all of this. Everything I post is an experiment.

Unless you are a disjunctivist. — Fafner

This is the thing about perceptual reports -- "Either I see a truck or I am experiencing an hallucination" -- that sort of thing? Is there another disjunctivism? Care to elaborate?

In this case your argument is really about knowledge and not truth — Fafner

I think this is right and what I have been, too indirectly, trying to suggest. For instance, even if the truth of a sentence is actually the truth of that sentence under a particular interpretation, that interpretation is not subject-relative. Just as whether a sentence is asserted by an individual is irrelevant to its truth, so whether an interpretation is applied to a sentence by an individual is irrelevant to the truth of the sentence under that interpretation. Truth has nothing to do with subjects at all.

But we do want to say that there is an intimate connection between assertion and truth. At the very least, that truth is the goal, or the point, or the intended object, of assertion. The problem here is not just that whatever warrant you have for asserting that P is no guarantee that P is true. We do what we do with an intention or purpose, based on our beliefs and expectations, and truth isn't even in this logical space at all. The connection is clearly through meaning, which is to say meaning has one foot in the space of intention and one in the space of truth.

Here's an example of how this can work. Suppose U assets sentence S, but S is ambiguous; we could use U's intention as a selector: if by S, U meant p, then we give S interpretation A, and treat S as meaning S1; if by S U meant q, then we give S interpretation B and treat S as meaning S2. Now suppose S1, i.e. S under interpretation A, is true, but S2, S under interpretation B, is false. If U meant p, S is true, but it's not true because U meant p; it's true because S is true under interpretation A.

And obviously U can know all of this, and aim at truth by asserting S.

This is because, as Frege already noted, adding 'true' to a sentence doesn't change its meaning, and in fact adds nothing over and above what you get when you simply assert the sentence. — Fafner

1. You can assert the equivalence in truth-value of "P" and "P is true," but if you want to explain meaning in terms of truth conditions, then you cannot treat that equivalence as an account of truth (i.e., the redundancy theory). You just have to be careful here.

2. What I was thinking was something like this: start with a statement S that you treat as purely extensional in the usual way; most ways of making a new sentence S' out of S by prefacing it with something that governs "that S" change the S part of S' from extensional to intensional -- you lose substitution salva veritate. "I think that," "It is known that," "You believe that," and so on, all do this; but "It is true that," and "It is a fact that" don't effect such a change. (Modal operators are also intensional if you don't have possible worlds.)

That suggests that ordinary language treats truth as a purely extensional notion, unlike belief, judgment, etc. There are at least two ways to take that: maybe ordinary language is on the right track, and there is a fundamental difference here; or maybe ordinary language is misleading and that's why it can be so hard to make sense of truth (and facts). (Frege entrenches the extensional view of truth in an obvious way, and it is further entrenched by Tarski, etc.)

Here's one thing that's curious: "true" takes that-clauses like the propositional attitudes, modal operators, all that intensional stuff. But "true" remains transparent in just the way the other that-clause governors don't. Example:

• It's interesting that the number of planets in our solar system is less than 9; there are 8 planets in our solar system; but it is not interesting that 8 is less than 9.
• It's true that the number of planets in our solar system is less than 9; there are 8 planets in our solar system; and it is true that 8 is less than 9.

The only other expression I can think of that takes that-clauses and is transparent is "fact."

I think the question, still, is whether truth is a semantic notion.

But what does it mean for a sentence to have truth conditions? Well it is something that is relative to a language. So in English, the sentence 'cats fly' express one particular set of truth conditions, but it could've been otherwise (if English had a different history, for example if 'cat' meant what 'dog' means in our English, then 'cats fly' would have different truth conditions in that hypothetical English).

So let's imagine a world where 'cats fly' doesn't have any truth conditions, and that would be a world where English doesn't exist, or any other language (suppose that there are no humans in that world). But now, can the sentence 'cats fly' have a truth value in that world? It seems to me that it can. If cats fly in that world, then the sentence is true in that world, and if they don't then it would be false. So here you have a world where a sentence doesn't have truth conditions but has a truth value. So truth values don't depend on truth conditions, and hence they cannot depended on interpretation either — Fafner

This is the part I was looking at.

It looks like you're defining truth as satisfaction: "cats fly" is true in that world iff there is something in that world that is a cat and flies. You're effectively taking triples of <sentence, language, world> as what has truth conditions. It's completely irrelevant whether the language is spoken in the world, or the sentence is ever uttered in the world.

I'll know more soon, as I expect you will too. We'll talk again in a month.

I guess I don't see why one wouldn't say it was just by chance. — Brayarb

We're talking about semantics, so S1 is distinguished from S2 by some proposition P being true in S1 and false in S2, something like that. What make P true is what makes S1 obtain. I guess.

This is all easier for concretists because truth is just satisfaction -- possible worlds are just maximal models. I guess the abstractionist needs a metaphysical account of truth -- truth-makers, that sort of thing. (Again, really not my area, so I could be way wrong.)

Why would you say that S1 obtained over S2? Are you saying that that question doesn't really make sense, or would you say that more information is needed to answer it? — Brayarb

I don't understand why you assume there would be a general answer to that.

The concretists give something that counts as a general answer, but only by definition.

Quine's attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction goes like this: we all agree that what makes a statement true is in part a matter of what the words mean, and in part a matter of the way the world is, so we think we can separate those, but it turns out that's easier said than done. That's the argument anyway.

It seemed to me the point you & @Metaphysician Undercover had reached was related, in trying to link or unlink meaning, interpretation, truth conditions, and truth value. I thought it might be helpful to look at an actual utterance where there is a contrast between two subjects, and then decide whether that contrast turned out to be differences in word usage or something else.

Here's a different example of flying to consider.

In Toy Story, Buzz claims that he can fly, and Woody claims that Buzz cannot. When Buzz performs an action A he believes will count as evidence that indeed he can fly, Woody responds, "That wasn't flying! That was -- falling with style." (Thank you, Joss Whedon.)

Woody's statement could be taken as: That's not what we mean by "flying." As it turns out, although Woody does not yet know this, Buzz and Woody have the same understanding of the word "flying"; neither do they disagree on how to apply the word "flying." That they disagree about whether action A counts as flying is not down to a disagreement in usage; Buzz has a mistaken belief about what action A was. Buzz's epiphany later in the film is not, "I have been misusing the word 'flying,'" even though that is also true: he has been applying it to actions that are not examples of flying. But he has been applying it correctly, and as Woody would, relative to his beliefs; it's his beliefs that were mistaken.

My contention was that it must be chance — Brayarb

I don't see how that can be right.

If you're an abstractionist, you think the concretists have explained away actuality with a semantic trick: "actual" is just an indexical exactly analogous to "here" and "now." That has the, some would say great, advantage of simplifying a lot of semantics. (Everything is done relative to <world, time, place> triples.) But it gives away actuality. Abstractionists want to get the semantic framework without giving up the more or less pre-philosophical sense of "actual." Or so it seems to me.

If you're holding onto that sense of "actual," then my sense is you want to hold onto the ordinary sense of why one thing happens rather than another, why one state-of-affairs obtains rather than another, and so your explanations are the usual ones. You may explain everything by chance, but you needn't. As an abstractionist, you still look at the actual world however you looked at it before, or at least you will try to. For instance, the world that obtains now includes this post. Whatever explanation you like for that is the explanation for why the world is the way it is.

Talk of possible worlds is just a semantic framework, on my understanding. It is not meant to, expected, or perhaps even capable of settling metaphysical issues. It's only meant to clarify them.

I just don't know enough really, but my sense from skimming through SEP was that the answer might be immanent to the actual world. That is, concretists say the world is this one of many in exactly the sense that it's the one I happen to be in; abstractionists say this world is the way it is because of what happens to have happened in this one, i.e., because a particular possible states-of-affairs has been realized.

If it would be legitimate to define a possible state-of-affairs as "everything going on exactly as it is, except I accidentally end this sentence I'm writing with a comma instead of period," then by the time I finish we'll know which possible state-of-affairs has been realized. Now we do. As it happens, I chose to do that, but who knows what might have happened by the time I got there. (Another thing I don't know is whether that's even a legitimate world definition to an abstractionist.)

Does that sound at all right? I'm guessing you know more about this than I do.

follows from — Pippen

You have to learn the basics.

The logic you're using is tenseless. "¬p→p" says tenselessly "If nothing exists, then something exists." It is true if something exists; false if nothing exists.

What you want is to say is more like this:
1. at time t₀ there is nothing
2. at time t₁ there is something
3. t₁ > t₀
I don't know how to represent "comes from," but it seems like this is close enough.

I think the point of the question -- which I'm not competent to answer, so I haven't -- is that "actual" is an indexical to concretists like Lewis, but not for abstractionists. I don't know what they say about the OP's questions.