It is if you think it is truly a view from no perspective at all, but when you realize it is actually a view from no particular perspective, which means from every perspective, then it becomes apparent that it is not incoherent and is, at least in principle, attainable, even if not absolutely attainable (whatever that could mean). — Janus

Yep. It is an interesting exercise to imagine seeing any object from every perspective possible. So Ayers Rock from the inside, from every distance outside, then over all timescales as well. Any notion of its substantial being would become dissolved in some truly panscopic view that built in no preference.

And then contrast that with the kind of scientific view we aim for where we instead see Ayers Rock in terms of natural laws and initial conditions. More like a wire frame computer simulation.

Choose any point you like as the origin, choose any units you like. They can be translated into metric or imperial or cubits or whatever. — Banno

Sure. If you have a theory of abstract reference frames then you can add the further constraint that it’s distances are ruled off in terms of some arbitrary unit. But so far you haven’t shown how that mental construct relates to someone’s world as a useful fact.

As I say, the aboriginal form of life is said to want to think about spatial distance in terms of duration of effort. The Aussie education system is suppose to recognise that cultural difference in its attempts to teach basic mathematical concepts in a way that don’t continue to favour the later white settlers.

So is a reply not in metres, or any equivalent notion of counting a unit of distance, going to get marked wrong by you? Does everyone have to conform to your Cartesian conception of reality?

Speak clearly now. You have probably used up your last chance.

So tell us in your own words what "height" should mean within the language game of a first Australian form of life.

For a start there is the distinction between generating an hypothesis and justifying that hypothesis. If you want to call generating an hypothesis abduction, well and good. But I think that more is needed to justify the hypothesis. Induction and abduction are insufficient to justify a claim. — Banno

More weirdness. Banno is told how it works. Inductive thought is about the creative leap from the particular instance to the general rule. Peirce then came along to argue that the scientific method - which had by then proven itself pretty successful - was in fact based on a three-step process of reasoning.

Rather than a dyadic opposition of induction and deduction - which of course wasn't really working out - Peirce made it explicit that "truth" is arrived at via a three step logic.

It starts with abduction - the leap from some particular surprising fact to some guess about a general rule. So this is broadly an inductive step in going from the particular to the general.

Then the next step would - quite logically - be to use the generality to make particular predictions. If the hypothetical rule were true, consequences could be safely deduced. Particular facts could be derived with syntactical certainty. They couldn't be logically wrong - given the truth of the general premiss.

Banno likes the sound of "valid" as the description of a deductive inference of this sort. It somehow suggests that induction is the faulty and shameful part of the deal if you are new to the game of critical thinking. It's a neat rhetorical strategy.

Then third we get the inductive confirmation to close the loop. Deduction gives us a prediction about particular observable facts. The presence of those observables then allow a second completing move from the particular back to the general. The general is shown to be true in the light of the available evidence.

So induction - going from the particular to the general.

Deduction - going from the general to the particular.

Put the two together in the right logical order and you have a holistic relation that can be used in recursive fashion to approach the natural limits on rational inquiry.

Actually, f you measure it in situ you will get about 348 m. I couldn't believe it was 863 m high, so I looked it up. 863 m is its height above sea level — Janus

LOL. But Banno covered that already.... "How we measure that, from base or sea level or your nose or whatever - is up to us."

So apparently the number of metres in question is both utterly arbitrary - choose any reference point - and also a physical, mind-independent, fact.

Live with the contradiction!

The issue is that for your Pragmatism there is only the measurement. — Banno

Why mention the three things of the world, the sign and the interpretant then?

Is this why you don't get triadic ontologies? You struggle with the counting?

But Uluru will be 863m, whether you measure it or not. — Banno

Oh dear. White man speaks patronisingly again. Cartesian co-ordinates exist whether that is a theory by which you make useful sense of your world or not.

How we measure that, from base or sea level or your nose or whatever - is up to us. — Banno

And now throw in some slap-dash relativism to show reality in fact has no preferred co-ordinate frame.

Height may be what you measure as a vertical distance from the ground ... until you throw in the next metaphysical twist of the co-ordinate frame tale. Keeping up wee black fella at the back of the class?

Your criticism is no more than saying that we can't talk (and that includes measuring) without the social constructs of language. Sure. But our social conventions have no influence on the height of Uluru. — Banno

They are what make the notion of "a height" meaningful - a proposition that would be truth-apt within a certain form of life.

You are wanting to talk about some notion of height that is "mind-independent true" - not grounded in a form of life. I am pointing out that all such truth talk is dependent on some communal, language encoded, point of view.

You are welcome to try to justify your leap from the pragmatic view to an epistemology of naive realism. But so far you haven't done that.

Again, address the specific question I put to you.

Tell us in your own words what "height" should mean within the language game of a first Australian form of life.

In order to name something, there must be something to name. — Banno

You mean like the way God has a name? Or unicorns? Or Hesperus and Phosphorus?

I really think something must be broke about the way you reason. Some kind of agnosia going on.

I am a mere mosquito. Bzzz bzzz. — Banno

Squish, squish. ;)

n the sense that Uluru has a certain height, regardless of our measuring it. But that your Pragmatism cannot admit this; and so is fraught with anti-realism. — Banno

Rather than just answer with the same repeated misrepresentation, answer the question as it was posed. Or show where the literature of Pragmatism supports your contention of it being anti-realism as such.

So again. How is height "real" in your book. How is "height" to be understood when you are not imposing a concept involving Cartesian co-ordinates - and one presuming the Earth to be the Copernican centre of that inertial reference frame? What should "height" mean within the language game of a first Australian form of life?

Drop the evasions and misrepresenations. Just try to answer my questions honestly and directly.

To say it is true that the Eiffel Tower has a height, and that the height is 324m, is already admitting that "height" is a theoretical construct. An answer in metres - above some "foundation-line" - is only "true" because we agree that it would be a suitable response in terms of some ontological story we share through a common language, a common form of life.

Why are you not prepared to admit to this obvious epistemic fact?

So yes, we could then go on from there to discuss in what sense a model of reality based on Cartesian co-ordinates might be better than an aboriginal model that treats distances more in terms of notions of the duration of an effort.

Rather than being racist, a Pragmatic view says we can at least ask this question because "truth" in the pragmatic conception is what reason will arrive at in the fulness of time. It is what Nozick called the invariant view. We can see that some views are more subjective or observer-dependent than others. And so epistemically, we can have the goal of arriving at the view with is the most objective, or least observer-dependent as possible. Enter the justification or the scientific method.

So Pragmatism can both speak to the right of folk to construct the view of the world that they find most useful, and also still hold out the goal of moving towards a view of the world that is the most mind-independent or ontically abstracted. You can recover the Cartesian co-ordinates that you seem so attached to in the long run perhaps.

But now, once again, I'm answering my own questions, showing where there could be some agreement with your half-baked naive realism that poses as some kind of philosophical quietism.

A good student needs to have a go at giving an answer himself. So forget what I just said. Tell us in your own words what "height" should mean within the language game of a first Australian form of life - given that we are not talking about idealism but the indirect realism of pragmatism.

You mean like the way I keep going on about "Form of Life"? — Banno

Hmm. Maybe you really do have a problem that I haven't picked up on?

I'm going to lunch. When I get back, I expect a post that is something worth a response.

In what sense is "height" real?

Sure there is a world out there - even if just noumenal. So this is not about idealism. It is about epistemology in the light of the practicalities of being in a modelling relation with that world.

In that light then, in what sense is "height" real?

Use the example you suggested and which I am happy to run with. We have aborigines and their relation to landcape features like Uluru. We have white europeans and their relation to feats of engineering like the Eiffel Tower.

Compare and contrast what "real" means in such differing "forms of life".

No, no. Finish what you started. Don't just keep deflecting.

Rhetorical strategies - you overuse this one, the pretence that you have already answered the question when you haven't. — Banno

Quote my reply and show how it didn't answer the question you posed.

So where are we with the debate? — Banno

Well I made my arguments. I also commented on what you had to say about yours, even though I had to pull it in from elsewhere. You have said nothing substantive against my position as far as I can tell. Now I'm commenting on your rhetorical strategy and the reasons behind it.

We agreed that your Pragmatic doctrine suffers an extreme anti-realism, to the extent that it can only talk about measurements, and certainly not rocks or towers or such. — Banno

No. That is your construction. And it is a deliberately obtuse one for rhetorical effect.

You already have all my arguments concerning why that is a misrepresentation of my position - if you want to actually engage in a debate and not merely a pissing game.

We agreed that I was making it up as I went along, while you believe you have all the answers. — Banno

More dog whistling.

Look at poor Banno. One of us. Look at nasty apo. One of them. Boo, hiss. Etc.

A neat sift. As if form of life had only one meaning.

Directing us away from the debate. — Banno

But it was you who made a fuss about my use of "form of life". You asked - confusingly - whether that was an insult (to aborigines?) or gratuitous (so in what possible sense gratuitious?).

For once take some responsibility. You directed the conversation to this new focus. But nicely, it reveals the essential problem I have with your standard "othering" rhetorical strategy. You simply try to bully people into submission by constructing an in-group/out-group dynamic.

You will go on and on about apo - some mythical apo - who is an engineer with no philosophical background, who is "religious" about some mystic figure whom you distain to actually read, who seems to have too much time on his hands to have a worthwhile life.

I'm not objecting to this game playing. I really enjoy it from an anthropological point of view. It is very revealing about the exact issue we are discussing.

But I will still point out that you do use the rhetorical strategies that are basic to colonialist and racist attitudes. Your form of life might be that of a white middle-class Aussie liberal, but here in this thread you are choosing to employ a different language game.

I just gave you the chance to explain yourself - to backtrack on your dog whistle appeals to rally against the "alien" in the group. It is interesting that you now very swiftly want to move away.

And of course that is how the net functions. You can rely on the fact people have forgotten anything posted three or four posts after it was said. When in trouble - instantly re-direct. It looks like you are engaged in a debate when really your only interest is in establishing who is in, who is out, in your little circle of friends.

Gratuitous? That I used the appropriate Wittgensteinian terminology?

You really need to make up your mind. Either I'm guilty of being dogmatically Peircean or I in fact acknowledge where the later Witti recapitulates the essential epistemology of Peirce.

As you know, aborigines had a very different relation to their landscape than the one you are insisting upon as the rightful and uncontradictable ground of signification. They didn't look and see objects they needed to measure with rulers so they could give legitimate answers to questions about "height".

Sure they lived in the same world as us. But they had their form of life, and we have ours. And why would we insist in some crude fashion that ours is the correct conception of the world.

It might certainly be the appropriate one for a modern western way of life dominated by engineering of course. Engineers are meant to be able to be measure the world with your unambiguous Cartesian certainty. :)

In the end, you can attempt to justify your white man/Cartesian rationalist language game in terms of its "scientific objectivity". But as I keep reminding you, that very objectivity derives from an epistemic cut that makes a break between "the mind" and "the world" - ie: the observer and the observable - in dualistic fashion. You are relying on the very Cartesianism that you claim to have put behind you.

And that is what we keep seeing in all your posts on the issue. You keep trying to trap people into speaking with white man/Cartesian rationalism. You point at the Eiffel Tower - an engineered object being obviously your best example - and demand I acknowledge it has "a height". Either I play your elitist language game, share your cultural form of life - conform to your "wisdom" - or else I "other" myself, demonstrate that I won't play that game and so can be treated as some crazy dark-skinned sub-human pagan outsider. A Peircean worshipper, in your words. ;)

It is this attitude of yours that I find (amusingly) offensive. By claiming that language games/forms of life are essentially unanalysable truths, you then assert a hegemonic right to have yours treated as the correct cultural representation of reality.

If someone won't simply just answer the question in the form in which you present it - say it is true that some edifice or other "has a height", as the height is a notion that has been "actually measured" - then they are part of the out-group, not part of your in-group, and rightfully get everything they deserve for that.

Is it not at all disturbing that you failed to acknowledge the semiotic right of first Australians to their own authentic form of life when given the opportunity? For some reason, you think that to be a "gratuitous" point?

The best way to deal with someone who thinks there are no rocks might be to stone him until he is more agreeable. — Banno

So you are a pain realist? It exists in the physical world? Throw the rock at a wall and pain is also going to occur as a consequence?

Not a lot of thought goes into your posts.

Was the term "An aboriginal form of life" meant to be insulting? or just gratuitous? — Banno

What are you talking about? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_of_life_(philosophy)

Hah. Your replies so fail to engage with my argument that it ain’t worth a response.

Read what I actually wrote and try again.

So again, for you a mountain does not have a height until it is measured. — Banno

Again, the difference is that my approach speaks about "the world that has us in it". It makes it explicit that "truth" applies to a modelling relation.

So for example, did Uluru have a "height" for the Anangu people before the white fella arrived with his Cartesian notion of a co-ordinate space?

An aboriginal form of life would measure Uluru in terms of the time it would take to scale it. Within that culture, what makes obvious sense is to speak about a degree of personal effort.

This keeps the two sides of the modelling relation front of mind. There is of course a big fat rock with a waterhole on top that is a significant landmark. But if you showed up back then, belligerently demanding of everyone you met, "deny that it is true that Uluru has a height of 863m", then you can appreciate what a crass move that might be.

Any notion of a measurement has to be motivated by a reason, a point of view. Measurements are not an objective feature of the world. They are a theory about the world that can be used to form statements which we can then confirm or challenge by some suitable act of observation. We can imagine the world in terms of a systems of signs - like a metre ruler, a ticking clock, an ergometer - and then read off a number that tells us about the quantity of some quality.

So in pressing me to confess that some tower or mountain has some measured height - in the naively realistic sense that height is an actual property of the world rather than a property of a modelling relation with the world - you are just making the same kind of cultural faux pas.

You are belligerently demanding that I bow to your ingrained white man Cartesian rationalism, saying that I have no right to the view that these kinds of "truths" are all relative to some purpose, some point of view.

Now of course, not just a couple of posts backs, you were trying to argue for that kind of socially constructed or PoMo notion of truth. You wanted to say that music, love and breakfast are so tied up with values that measuring them is more art than science.

Again, I can't make excuses for your inconsistencies. You lurch from one side of the debate to the other because you just haven't succeeded in thinking things through in a unified way.

But eventually you may start to see the point of actually having a modelling relations approach to epistemology. You will see that naive realism fails utterly. Just as does dyadic representationalism. You have no real choice except to up your game and understand "truth" as an irreducibly triadic epistemic relation with the world.

Your account fails to be about the world. — Banno

It's more subtle than that. Or at least you find this surprisingly difficult to understand.

What we are trying to arrive at is not a re-presentation of the world - the noumenal view - but instead a world, an umwelt, that is the world as it is useful for us to understand it. That is, the phenomenal view.

So if it is useful to see a tower in terms of height, then that is how we learn to see towers. And clearly, for white men with a grand project to rule the world, understanding reality in terms of Cartesian co-ordinates was a real plus.

But would you deny the Anangu chap his truth when he puffs out his cheeks and replies he doesn't know about your metres of elevation, but the Eiffel Tower looks a bloody effort to climb. Better start now before the day gets too long.

Again, that is not to say that science can't have the goal of a rigorously objective epistemology. There is a world out there, as well as whatever theoretical image we form of it.

Despite your attempts to make that the issue, a modelling relations approach is quite explicit that it believes there is a world - the Kantian thing-in-itself - to be modelled.

However then what is justified, what is believed, what is certain, what is true, is the image we form - the image that is the "world with us in it". Between the interpretance and the world stands the sign - the umwelt. And it connects both sides of the deal in fixing the idea of the "observing self" along with the "observable world".

The world may be recalcitrant. But it "has" that property only in the light of the fact that it refuses "our wishes". And in your naive realism, your white man cultural supremacism, you are failing to acknowledge that knowledge of the world is grounded in the third thing of the umwelt, the system of sign, that arises in the middle to fix some particular "truth" relation.

Epistemology must always recognise that fact

It is great to have the goal of complete scientific objectivity - or alternatively, to want to have the complete subjectivity of the poet, gourmet or lover. However to justify belief properly, we have to understand why complete objectivity and complete subjectivity are themselves impossible. They are the limiting extremes of a common mediating relation.

Get that straight and all the naive epistemic nonsense and inconsistency will just melt away.

No. That's again Straw Banno. — Banno

Straw is all there is. You described you own profile statement as straw Banno. Lordy.

So the anatomy of the black bird was sufficiently similar to the white bird called "swan" for that word to be used in the new case. Those similarities in anatomy are real, if not decisive. — Banno

Sufficiently similar for whom?

Again, the world does not arbitrate in the absolute way you want to suggest. There has to a self with a purpose at the other end of the semantic relationship. And that is the holistic deal that a "theory of truth" needs to deal with.

So again, you point at the world in a bid to deflect attention from the other half of this story. Someone had to make a judgement about "yes, similar enough vs no, much too different". And epistemically, that judgement would have to be secured by being able to point at a reason - a general intention - that was served in this particular instance.

If you like, we can take the foundations into account in our measurement. And sure, the units we use are conventional. We can set up conventions for the measurement of the height of the tower. HTe conventions are part of our language, not part of the tower.

What Apo's position leads to, although he will not say it, is the conclusion that the tower has no height apart from the measurement.

I don't agree with that. The tower has a specifiable height. To say otherwise is to fail to have language engage with the world. — Banno

Keep misrepresenting. My position is that "height" is a theoretical quality or generality that we can then quantify or measure in particular instances.

So going around measuring heights is a simple everyday pragmatic affair. Peirce's job as a scientist was doing just this at the level of international bureau of standards work. He was responsible for creating practical definitions for your standardised ruler or clock.

A mountain doesn't "have" a height. Height is an abstract or theoretical notion that we can go out and measure for a reason.

Jeez, you rail often enough against metaphysical realism - the existence of universals - and yet you talk way more realist than me. :)

So yes, I will always make the distinction that height is a theoretical construct when you come lumberingly along, talking naive realism about these things.

Again, the issue is that your probabilistic, limited definition of truth is not what we mean by truth. It does not apply to our relationships with our partners and friends; to the rules of the road; to art; to music. — Banno

Continuing the effort to flush out the contrasting epistemic positions here - not being one to bottle a debate - we can see that Banno is channeling the metaphysics of Wittgenstein circa the Tractatus here.

So there is the reasonable belief that: “The great problem round which everything I write turns is: Is there an order in the world a priori, and if so what does it consist in?”.

Inductively, we can sense that reality does have a deep pattern. There is a rational, logical or mathematical structure at the heart of existence. And so "a theory of truth" becomes philosophically fundamental. It is not merely an epistemic issue. It is potentially ontological. Understanding rationality is understanding nature.

Wittgenstein famously came up with his own metaphysical position on truth. As a property, it belongs to the class of statements that are either tautological or empirical. The logical positivists loved that bit. But then Wittgenstein added there are also all the unspeakable truths that "manifest" as life's "mysteries".

Some folk feel that was a brilliant insight. It gave philosophy a reason to continue to be, safely separate from the utilitarian concerns of science. Philosophy could be the study of ineffable values. It could become a democratic and pluralistic exercise in which everyone could have their own truth systems, even pretty irrational ones.

Other folk might instead think that this was a gigantic cop-out. Natural philosophers for instance. Rather than truth being cosmopolitan and PoMo, or Biblical and "obvious" (Banno's version), truth would be still unifiable under a common metaphysics.

Natural philosophy would take the view that all Wittgenstein's dichotomy was doing was enshrining the distinction between the observer and the observables - the truth-teller and the truths told. And this is the motif that runs through all Banno's replies. The observer can be taken dualistically for granted. Banno doesn't even want to deal with the difference between the objective and the subject. He doesn't want to deal with the way purposes must shape inquiries and therefore what can count for the answering "facts". By dividing truth in terms of the empirical vs the axiological, value judgements are made safely transcendental and disconnected from the natural world.

Science is tied to the world by the strictness of a method. But then "philosophers" are free to just get on with being naive realists, simply assert their beliefs about what is real and certain as far as they are personally concerned, without needing to defend whatever opinion just came to mind. When pressed for justification, they can hang up a notice on the door - "out to lunch".

Anyway, my natural philosophy approach - the systems science or holistic approach that traces back to Aristotelean four causes metaphysics - is different in an important way. Apart from it just presuming the unity of nature.

The problem for a logicist's approach to metaphysics is that it presumes that reality is a structure. The hidden order of reality is some closed, eternal, fixed sort of pattern. It exists.

By contrast, a metaphysics that arises out of the natural view is that of emergent process. Things develop. They begin vague, formless, chaotic. But regularity or habit emerges to reduce this initial boundless variety. Reality becomes structured with time. It settles into a coherent and rational pattern.

As said, this is induction in a nutshell. A chaos of the particular becomes formed into definite and regular being via its own emergent self-regulation. Generality emerges to turn the particular into local actions that serve an ongoing weaving of a pattern. Constraints create reality as an average of what was possible.

So induction - in that general sense of being how probability works - is metaphysically basic. And deduction - as the mechanical story of classically absolute constraint - is then how the process of self-organising development looks once it has become so highly developed that it is almost completely formed by its general laws or habits.

At the end of time, a process manifests a mathematical-strength structure. Logical necessity finally appears to rule. And we can measure that in the lack of spontaneity or surprise to be found in the system. By the last stage, reality might as well be deductive or computational as any continuing action in the system has been ruled random, meaningless or entropic by the principle of indifference. All that remains once a system hits equilibrium are differences not making a difference.

So what we have here is a clear clash of ontologies. It is a metaphysics of existence or being against a metaphysics of development or becoming.

And Peircean semiotics then slots in as the holistic view of logic as a general semiotic mechanism - the trick by which development and the emergence of regular habits could even take place.

That process view is then logically robust enough - in terms of being a "theory of truth" - to unify the empirical and the axiological. We don't have to tolerate the debate-avoidance tactic of those who want to say there is scientific truth but then also - just as ontically - whatever is my own personally obvious subjective truth. The one that is unspeakable and manifests in private revelation. Often when I'm out to lunch and doing some serious unbottling.

It's not a method; its not algorithmic. It's just seeing the pattern. — Banno

Yep. And thank goodness our brains can work like that. There is a natural way to reason, as evolution shows.

The question is why for a minute would you expect actual humans to be algorithmic?

Again you are showing that there is just no joined-up, consistent position you are defending in this thread.

One minute, you are all about the absolute certainty of grammars, heights and the rules of chess. The next you are all about the mysterious truths of love, art and breakfast. You claim you yearn for the discipline of a formal debate and yet call even your own profile post a "straw man".

You chop and change for rhetorical purposes and oddly expect no-one to notice. Curious.

Again, the issue is that your probabilistic, limited definition of truth is not what we mean by truth. It does not apply to our relationships with our partners and friends; to the rules of the road; to art; to music. — Banno

C'mon Banno. This is laughably awful.

Remember, it is me who is putting forward a "theory of truth" that explains why language games have this kind of pragmatic looseness. I am arguing against strict definitions on the semiotic grounds that words can only constrain semantics in useful, purpose-serving fashion. There is always then a creatively open freedom when it comes to interpretation, coupled to the principle of indifference that allows us to limit the interpretive freedom on the grounds that it ain't being helpful.

So you are trying to hide behind precisely the thing that my semiotic approach explains.

LOL. Love it when you resort to explaining how low we are in your list of priorities. Gotta keep a grip on the situation, heh?

Oh how I wept with laughter at such wit.

The real joke is instead how you keep claiming to want a debate before bottling it yet again.

...bear in mind that you seem to be sometimes adding the clause "give or take a bit", and so making a probabilistic statement about the Eiffel Tower. Your claims about there being "a truth" are couched in the language of an inductive inference.

So again, there is an internal inconsistency you need to address.

If you are happy with the fundamentally probabilistic metaphysics of pragmatism, then you ought to come clean and say so. A degree of ambiguity or uncertainty is part and parcel of any constraints-based ontology. It is not a problem for my approach, and indeed its an epistemic advantage.

Among other things, it gives an even deeper justification for induction as a method. We have no choice but to talk about the generality of an average, a mean, that is our reasonable leap beyond any available evidence.

We never see "the average" in observing a probabilistic world. We only see a variety of particular instances when we get out and measure. And yet we happily treat the average as the reality, the truth. You are doing that too - and perhaps you have dropped mention of the "give or take a bit" for that reason?

It reveals that scratch a nominalist and you find a realist. Generality is not just an idea, an arbitrary product of inductive argument, but a real fact of the world. Apparently. :)

You, I and whoever else is reading this are most probably competent users of English. As such we show that we can use "...is true" correctly. Now providing a definition is providing synonyms, and hence leads to circularity - words defining more words. — Banno

So I have to provide definitions and you get to hide behind commonsense usage?

Seems legit. :)

It follows that pragmatism is not a theory of truth, although of course it re-defines the word "truth" to its own ends. — Banno

Again, how could that be the case in your world of no definitions?

Some modicum of consistency please. If it works for pragmatists to have adopted their behaviouristic "redefinition" as a community, then it works for them. You yourself have taken away your own grounds to criticise.

Sometimes I really can't believe your apparent lack of embarrassment as you loudly scrape the bottoms of those barrels.

Well, no, it isn't. Truth is quite distinct from belief. Pragmatism leaves truth unaddressed. — Banno

It treats it as the limit of inquiry. That might be a different answer to the one you have in mind - not that you could have a definition in mind! - but it is still the issue being addressed.

Justification leads to belief, not to truth. — Banno

As you seemed to want to believe, justified belief leads to a generalised coherence. Things become "true" as they become so fundamental in that fashion.

This is the difficulty of arguing against you. You do a better job of constantly contradicting yourself. You are revealing what happens when you eschew the goal of a unitary metaphysics (well, at least a unitary view that is slightly more complex than naive realism). You praise generalised coherence. But your epistemology sadly lacks that very advantage.

Pragmatism, together with other substantive theories such as coherence and foundationalism, offer neat ways of justifying our beliefs. But they do not explain what truth is. That's right - I am saying that pragmatism is a good thing. But not as an explanation of truth. — Banno

So again, what is this "truth" you keep referring to? Apart from a naive realism about the world being a collection of facts.

Sure, you will say it is something unanalysably fundamental. And why it is sayable - you keep mentioning it - it is also to be consigned to the metaphysically unspeakable. You mustn't explain it.

But bullshit is a pretty obvious thing to. It's obvious when someone is bullshitting their way through a discussion.

The issue here is that despite rejecting the notion of truth, you continue to speak of objective truth. — Banno

I can't both redefine truth and reject truth. Especially when you are saying truth is undefinable. So you are both misrepresenting me and also talking illogical bollocks again.

I can speak of objective truth as a limit. And that is what I did.

If you have a counter argument, great, that is what you then tap out into a wee post in reply. But if your only defence is to lie about things I've just said, that makes your position truly hopeless.

What would be wrong would be to assert that there is only one method that can be used to decide. As if the way one decided the height of the Eiffel Tower were the same as the way one decides the declaration of human rights or that one loves one's partner. Pragmatism does not answer all such questions. — Banno

Again, pragmatism can still have the aim of covering all the epistemic ground between the opposing limits of the objective and the subjective.

So it starts with rejecting both naive realism and idealism. But then accepts that knowledge is indeed framed by those two complementary epistemic limits.

And it is engaged with the challenge of finding an epistemic method which does span the whole gamut.

So while you may take a view that it fails in its goals (having told me you have deliberately read no Peirce at all), at least there is nothing wrong in the way it sets out its grand metaphysical project.

I mean what do you think "a theory of truth" would be? A whole bunch of different theories, depending on whether we are talking of towers, politics or partners?

While you are carefully avoiding the challenge of defining truth, you certainly seem to be claiming that there is some unified theory of truth to be had.

So once again, your story is full of holes and self-contradictions. A very poor effort when all is said and done.

Avoid Banno's posts by setting up a straw Banno. — Banno

???

Straw Banno writes your profile?

The Eiffel Tower
Still unanswered. Is the tower 324m tall, give or take a bit?

I say that it is, and further that it is true that the tower is 324m tall.

But you can't. All you can do is say that you believe that it is 324m tall.

It's a failure to commit on your part. — Banno

Again, what do you mean by "true"? You want to make a naive realist point without having to defend doing that. So that is the dodge I always pull you up on.

I am happy to commit to the justification of belief in pragmatic fashion. Truth is just another way of saying I can show I have no good reason to doubt.

If you want to defend your own naive realist framing, get on with it. Quit bottling the challenge. :)

But for fun, do you believe the tower is 324m tall yourself? Just tell me yes or no! And how.

And when during the day is it so exactly 324m tall? Are we now talking about the hot Eiffel tower that is 15cm taller in the heat of the midday sun, or the one that is 15cm shorter when night falls and its cools down?

Do we in fact now have two Eiffel towers. Or a vast ensemble - one for every nanometre of variation.

Oh goodness, how do we measure the height as it expands/contracts unevenly as the sun hits only one side. It can bend 18cm away from the sun. So which is its true height now - the actual distance to the ground or the full distance if it were standing up straight?

Of course, Banno the tourist guide doesn't need to care. He just reads his facts off Wiki. But Banno the scientist might want to rely on some more careful process of inquiry. A hand-waving approach always makes for poor philosophy.

For fun, as you won't ever set out a counter position when making your scoffing noises about mine, let's take this profile statement you make.

Statements are combinations of nouns and verbs and such like; Some statements are either true or false, and we can call these propositions. So, "The present king of France is bald" is a statement, but not a proposition.

Beliefs range over propositions. (arguably, they might be made to range over statements: Fred believes the present king of France is bald.)

Beliefs set out a relation of a particular sort between an agent and a proposition.

This relation is such that if the agent acts in some way then there is a belief and a desire that together are sufficient to explain the agent's action. Banno wants water; he believes he can pour a glass from the tap; so he goes to the tap to pour a glass of water.

The logical problem here, the philosophical interesting side issue, is that beliefs overdetermine our actions. There are other beliefs and desires that could explain my going to the tap.
______________

We know some statement when at the least we believe it, it fits in with our other beliefs, and when it is true.

The "fits in with other beliefs" is a first approximation for a justification. Something stronger is needed, but material implication will not do.

Discard Gettier. The definition is not hard-and-fast.

It does not make sense to ask if we know X to be true; that's exactly the same as asking if we know X. The "we only know it if it is true" bit is only there because we can't know things that are false.

If you cannot provide a justification, that is, if you cannot provide other beliefs with which a given statement coheres, then you cannot be said to know it.

A belief that is not subject to doubt is a certainty.

Now let's analyse and see how different it really is from what I would say.

Statements are combinations of nouns and verbs and such like; Some statements are either true or false, and we can call these propositions. So, "The present king of France is bald" is a statement, but not a proposition.

As I understand the distinction you want to make, it seems to be that only a statement that is both crisply definite and an actual possibility is a truth-apt proposition. The semantics have to have a real world basis. There must be here an actual present king of France, and baldness must be an actual state a head could have.

I guess my question is then whether you are making this distinction simply in the spirit of "good practice", or whether you think it is a black and white distinction with no pragmatic wiggle room.

For instance, I would claim that there is always irreducible ambiguity or vagueness in any such proposition. How do we define "bald". That in itself is a standard Sorites paradox example.

And how do you handle fictional or modal possibilities. There are books or logical worlds where there are French kings that are variously bald or hirsute in ways that give propositional meaning to the statement.

So I can go along with this distinction as a target if what you are stressing is that a well-formed logical assertion is about some actually possible state of the world - because "truth" only really applies to the relation that we pragmatically have with a world. It becomes silly to even talk about truth or falsity except in a context where there is a world to determine that truth or falsity to the propositioner floating the proposition.

Beliefs range over propositions. (arguably, they might be made to range over statements: Fred believes the present king of France is bald.)

Beliefs set out a relation of a particular sort between an agent and a proposition.

This relation is such that if the agent acts in some way then there is a belief and a desire that together are sufficient to explain the agent's action. Banno wants water; he believes he can pour a glass from the tap; so he goes to the tap to pour a glass of water.

OK. The idea of beliefs now brings that pragmatic relation between a self and its world into focus. It highlights that there is the larger thing of a relation. There has to be a causal coupling such that beliefs drive actions, and then those actions feed back to impact the beliefs.

This stresses the embedded and ecological nature of the reasoning relation we have with the world against other possible approaches to truth. Understood this way, it just is pragmatism. Where it might fall short is that it doesn't seem to continue on to the semiotic consequences of a modelling relations view of the mind and what it can know of the world.

The semiotic view of course adds that the "mind" in fact only deals in signs of the world. The psychological goal is construct a self separate from the world. And so the world - as some set of physical energies - must be filtered in a way that transforms it into an Umwelt. It must be experienced in terms of a set of signs that are readable at the level of automatic habit. We don't have to think about an apple being red - even though redness is already a qualitative interpretation by the brain. We just "see" the apple as red. That is the Umwelt we experience - our map by which we navigate the territory.

Of course, this triadic semiotic view of our relation to the world is more complex. The usual way to frame things is dyadic and representational. There is just us (with our experiences) and the world that our sense-data are representing. However - for a theory of truth that aims to be realistic in terms of the actual psychological structure of human conception - we do need to follow through from simply asserting a practical embeddedness in the world to an understanding of the relation that is fully (bio)semiotic.

But in general, I take this to state that - contra to idealist theories which might want to found themselves on impractical doubts about the world even being there - you are asserting that theories of truth start with the world already being in play. So hard dualism is out. Some kind of physicalism is the case. A psychological machinery of some kind is assumed to be involved in the whole affair.

I of course agree with that basic pragmatic stance. In the end, it is silly to doubt there is the world out there - in some sense. And so epistemology's job is to understand the more fundamental thing of the "modelling relation" that connects "minds" and "worlds".

However, the semiotic view says it would then be dangerously like naive realism to take the "agent" for granted in some fashion as a "real thing" - a fundamental and unanalysable bit of ontological furniture. The semiotic view is that the self emerges from the modelling as well - as the necessary distinction that is producing the counter-concept of "the world".

So Banno might want his drink of water. And his actions might achieve that as the drink is really there to be had. But a truly rigorous semiotic analysis would have a lot of questions about this reified "Banno". As well as about the "world" that this Banno reifies as some set of interpretable signage.

The logical problem here, the philosophical interesting side issue, is that beliefs overdetermine our actions. There are other beliefs and desires that could explain my going to the tap.

Hmm. Do you mean we put a narrative spin on the actions we find ourselves involved with? We can concoct any number of "reasonable" stories for why A led to B?

I think this again is just getting into the real world mechanics of cognition. The self that concocts such explanations is just that part of "us" that has the learnt and cultural skill of inductively framing hypotheses that are concrete in ways that make them testable. And then the actual holistic nature of forming intentions and making decisions defies complete capture by simple reductionist causal statements.

We want to say that A led to B as that is the "proper form" for analytic thinking. But the brain operates in a fashion that is more like Bayseian induction - holistically constraints-based processing. It doesn't have to do the one right thing. It just has to eliminate as many of the things that might go wrong as possible. So I can want to hit the tennis ball cleanly out of the centre of the racket to hit a spot two inches from the line. But all I can really do is limit the amount of miss-hit to an acceptable degree so that the ball winds up near enough to an aiming point to do the damage.

The shot is overdetermined in the sense that there is some general envelope of miss-hits that still do the job. And it is not a logical problem as a constraints-based logic says all you can aspire to do is limit the uncertainty of our actions in the world. Pragmatically, we show we already believe that to be the case by building in an error margin by aiming just inside the line rather than right at it.

And the same ought to be the case with any theory of propositional truths. A statement can't point straight at the facts. It can only constrain matters so that we minimise our uncertainty that "the truth" lies within the bounds we have picked out by our assertion. And it is not a problem as we can always tighten up the constraints if the accuracy seems an issue. We can measure things more closely and report on the results of that.

We know some statement when at the least we believe it, it fits in with our other beliefs, and when it is true.

The "fits in with other beliefs" is a first approximation for a justification. Something stronger is needed, but material implication will not do.

Right. So now we want a version of JTB. And the justification bit ought to involve generalised conceptual coherence, not just a representational correspondence based on particulars matched to particulars.

That is certainly my view, if so. That is holism at work. That is how a self or agent would emerge to be the stable centre of things. As Peirce said, you can doubt anything, but not everything at once. There is that backdrop ground of belief - those "propositional hinges" we've been talking about - which is necessary to the whole business.

But again, justified beliefs seem enough for a theory of truth. Truth - as some absolute transcendent reality - drops out of the picture because there is only, in the end, the relativity of a modelling relation. Absolute truth is replaced by minimal reason to be uncertain.

And semiotics would make an even stronger statement. Our experience of the world couldn't even be noumenal as that runs counter to the very logic of a modelling relation. A map mustn't be the territory - as how the hell are we going to fold up a landscape of mountains and rivers so that it fits neatly into our back pocket? We want to reduce our knowledge of the actual world to a system of easily navigated signs. And this crucially changes the very notion of what "truth" aspires to be about.

It does not make sense to ask if we know X to be true; that's exactly the same as asking if we know X. The "we only know it if it is true" bit is only there because we can't know things that are false.

This is where you are guilty of sleight of tongue I would say. You use "to know" in a naive realist sense that presumes the world to be some "state of affairs". The facts are just the facts. But they can never be that as to be meaningful, they must become interpreted signs. They are only facts in the sense of being already part of an ongoing habit of interpretance.

So yes, when we assert we know, we mean that our belief is really justified. The true bit does drop out as what we are speaking about is our confident certainty.

And your own earlier stab at coherence or holism seems to argue against you here. That says we can't "know things that are false" - but on the grounds of conceivability. Your over-determinism accepts we could have understood the world in many lights - depending on our intentions, even if those intentions were constrained by the "facts of the world" to which they then were exposed by acts of inquiry.

You can't have it both ways. If all we ever know is the result of pragmatic inquiry, then falsehood and truth both drop out due to generalised coherence - until there is some reason that we find our backgrounding state of belief to be inadequate for some reason and set about inquiring further.

There is no point talking about the truth of the thing-in-itself as truth, as a property, is a property of the modelling relation and not of the "world" - the world being just that aspect of the relation which we know in a background interpretive way, just as we also know about the "we" that is meant to be the agent, the self, that is the stable centre of all this knowledge business.

Externalism doesn't fly. Epistemology has to find its rigour in developing an internalist discourse that does the best possible job.

A belief that is not subject to doubt is a certainty.

Or near enough.

Well, summing up, I see a lot of pragmatism in your counter to idealism. Truth-telling doesn't even make sense without some world out there anchoring things.

Yet then this fails to continue on. Recognising that there is a modelling relation brings up the reality of the self that anchors the other side of the equation. And also, if there is a real world out there, it is not even in our interests to see it nakedly for what it is. We need to be able to look and see a world that has us in it. We need a world that is already transformed into a system of signs, an umwelt. Our perceiving of the world has to include the division that produces us as the "self" doing the perceiving. And that degree of meaning has to be built into the "simple facts" - like that the apple is "red".

So in my approach, a theory of truth has to fit with the facts of psychology. And if the psychological story is pretty complex, new and unfamilar, that's just how it is. It is still the foundation.

But your approach does still seem mired in a naive realism. It starts to make the pragmatic case against idealism. But then reverts to a naive realism framing just as soon as it has put a little distance from the foe. The world is some set of actual and definite facts. The mind just reflects that facticity in direct fashion - re-presenting the external in some internal theatre of private experience.

And then some kind of behaviourist epistemology becomes the "rigorous" way to deal with private experiences at a communal or philosophy of language level. We can speak objectively about how people act. We can assert propositions and use behaviour as evidence that there is generalised coherent agreement among a community about the way the world truly is. Or at least the degree to which a belief is not being doubted.

So yeah, I'm still feeling your account falls way short because it targets a level of objectivity that is not just functionally impossible, but not even in fact functional. It is an account that by-passes the central psychological realisation that we don't even want to see the world as it really is, but the world that has us in it, and so the world that is already transformed into a "private"* set of meanings.

* The meanings aren't literally private of course as they are going to be biologically shared across a species with a common neuro-evolutionary heritage, as well as being shared across humans by a culture of linguistically structured conception. So we don't wind up back in solipsistic territory. As said, the "self" is also recognised as part of the "truth-producing" business here.

So we are agreed that you are not offering a theory of truth. — Banno

That could depend on how you are defining truth, Banno. So how are you defining truth?

I'm not too sure what objective truth is. Are there subjective truths, to oppose them? And if so, are they amenable to the same pragmatic analysis? Or are there subjective truths but no objective truths? — Banno

If you think I am not offering a theory of truth, how could I possibly answer that? So evidently - despite what you just said - you agree that I'm offering a theory of truth.

You again didn't directly address the question of the height of the Eiffel Tower. Is it 324 metres, give or take a bit? — Banno

Ohh. Suddenly it's "give or take a bit". Is that the bit that doesn't matter - a difference that doesn't make a difference?

So is this question now still the same as your earlier version? Or has the ground shifted?

While you are at it, how does your theory of truth deal with the issue. From what you said in this thread, your theory is....

"P" is true IFF P.

That's as close as can be got, and I have said it to the point of tedium. — Banno

So we have: "The Eiffel Tower is 324 metres high, give or take a bit" is true IFF The Eiffel Tower is 324 metres high, give or take a bit.

Fine. But how do we get from that truth condition to a belief that is in fact justified and therefore true? What is the reasonable thing to do to validate the proposition? How do we establish the truth or falsity of this statement in practice?

I shouldn't have to ask really. But you always go oddly silent when called on to explain the grounds why one would assent to such a statement as if there were an unassailable fact.

I'm sure that is because you would have to sound pretty Peircean in your answer. But surprise me.

I don't accept that there are two types of truth - subjective and objective. — Banno

Those would be the complementary limits on pragmatically justified belief. So all actual belief would lie within those opposing extremes.

Thus you could say all belief is just belief. And yet also there is the standard distinction between belief that is at one extreme, just an individual's idiosyncratic view - their personal truth - and at the other end, the kind of truth that aims to be as impersonal as possible.

What there isn't is your naive realist truth - a truth in which no person is involved as a believer with a purpose giving shape to that truth.

The naive realist is a representationalist. S/he looks at the world and sees facts. A Peircean realist looks at the world and see signs. The facts are already part of a semantic structure. That is how we can know anything. We are looking at meaning from the get go.

That explains why the naive realist feels both so convinced by the transparent simplicity with which they just look and "see the world", and why naive realism is so wrong as an epistemology.

I think it best to take the notion of truth as unanalysable, as fundamental. — Banno

So you are banging on about something you can't even bang on about in your own admission?

Unanalysable! Give me a break. You are just making excuses for why you haven't got a theory yourself. What a cop out.

Let's go over validity and induction again, and let me know if we agree. — Banno

Where have I claimed that abduction or inductive confirmation are "valid"? Why do you harp on about something which is not an issue anyone is disputing?

Hanover put it very neatly. But in typical fashion, you just blanked his inconvenient truth.

Deduction may be valid but it produces no new knowledge. It is syntactically closed and, by design, can't. And that is why the species of induction are so much more important in the end - if you actually want to create new knowledge. You have to be able to go beyond the known to improve on what you've got. Scientific reasoning then ensures that error-minimising feedback is built into that loop of thought.

Induction is why deduction even has a job.

You confuse truth and belief. Yep, I've pointed that out before. You do not have a theory of truth, you have a theory of belief. — Banno

Not a problem. That's what I say. Pragmatism is a theory of justified belief - as well as a theory of how the notion of objective truth is a naive realist pipedream.

Now maybe you want to define truth as tautological truth. But I just call that a theory of tautology. If you have a syntax closed in a way that prevents any possible semantic leakage, then sure, it is "truth preserving" in its grammar.

But only logic wonks would call syntactical water-tightness "truth". It's not what we really mean by truth, is it?

So, then, what is the height of the Eiffel tower? Is it 324 metres? When I ask you questions like this you seem to need to add some sort of explanation when a simple yes or no would suffice. Why the added complexity? — Banno

Well given that I like to be as careful as possible about epistemology, then of course I can't just accept the idiotic simplicities of a naive realist answer.

So if you don't like "complicated" answers, that's your tough shit. Don't pretend to be an epistemologist.

An oddly eccentric view of logic - since it has been shown here that induction and abduction are invalid. — Banno

Wow really! >:O

I'd be interested to see you come clean about things like your inability to state a truth or give an accurate measurement and your rejection of logic and the concealed scientism that underpins your views. — Banno

Those are just your misreprentations of what I have said. And I’ve corrected you on them often enough.

Truth is what we believe in the long run following a process of reasoned inquiry.

Acts of measurement are informal and so always reflect the embeddness, the intentionality, of the person(s) seeking the answers. Accuracy is a pragmatic thing, not an absolute one.

I don’t reject predicate logic or deductive syntax. I place them within a more holistic view of logic that is triadic.

My scientism is hardly concealed. Nor the fact that I am a holist or systems scientist rather than a reductionist or atomistic scientist.

So your complaints are just bullshit. You’ve heard me say these exact same things many times. It is not me who bottles it when the discussion gets detailed and your general lack of a choherent position is exposed.

If you want a debate, you’ve got one right here. But you don’t really want a debate where you have to give a position and then a proper defence. We’ve all seen that time and again.

No worries. I knew you would bottle it.

This thread has served to reinforce my rejection of induction as a rational process, recognising the ad lib nature of scientific enquiry. Belief, conviction, certainty and so on are best understood as decisions rather than the forced result of some algorithmic scientific process. — Banno

So if it ain't inductive and it ain't deductive, then how is the decision "rational"? Surely the whole bleeding point of epistemology - a theory of truth - is to have some actual theory about the best process for arriving at that destination?

What does a no-process system of belief look like, anyone?

Odd. First you promise that you will be getting back to me with a proper reply and then you edit your message to tell me to look up transcendental arguments.

Are you now telling me that you are not a Peircean because you prefer to be a Kantian? :D

well the basic logical issue in you argument is that it’s structure is that of a transcendental. Argument; that there is only one solution, pragmtism. — Banno

It's hard to be sure how to interpret this bizzarely incoherent sentence. But how would it be a problem if there were some transcendental argument in play, and what are you saying that argument is?

My post was about the irreducible ambiguity of speech acts and how that is indeed exactly what we would expect of a constraints-based view of logic. In the end, it is up to us - in informal fashion - to decide what counts as the "truth" in terms of some act of measurement or observation.

You seem to be talking about something else now. But then you don't even seem to be talking English anymore. And is that a half-empty bottle of red I spy on your kitchen counter?

So even if one entertains your view of ambiguity, pragmatism is one possibility among many. — Banno

So what is the alternative that you are championing here? And what flaw is there in Pragmatism. Be as precise as you like.

There is here a failure on your part to commit. Do you have a partner? Is your affection for them only probable? Is your respect for rationality based on certainty or just what suits your purpose? Do you have hands or are you only partially confident In hand utility? — Banno

Again you are choosing to talk past the case I've already made. Not very charitable, hey?

I've said Pragmatism is making the choice to believe. Indeed, the choice to ignore exceptions to the rule is part of the constraints-based deal. Uncertainty is irreducible. But also, we can find reasons for thinking that after a certain point - one defined in terms of our interests or purposes - any further differences fail to make a real difference.

So goose, swan or duck? Sometimes it doesn't matter. And sometimes it might.

There are always going to be differences. Is the three-legged rabbit still a rabbit? If Bonzo the dog's arse is a hair off the mat, is Bonzo still sat on the mat? But to the degree our semantics are aligned - and the semantics include our intentions - then we can all draw a line across reality with enough agreement to make translation second-nature rather than an arduous process of exegesis.

You keep relying on this easy translatability to speak like a naive realist. Who can deny the Cygnus atratus is a black swan? Who can deny the dog is on the mat? Who can deny your first sentence was in English? But as I am saying, you are relying on a principle of indifference to dismiss any skepticism. You are making a choice in terms of some concept of a self with its intentions. And that is not a formal thing. But Pragmatism gets us as close to formalising this epistemic state of affairs as epistemology can get. Hence science is pragmatism in practice. The proof is in the application.

I note that you try to divert the conversation to the red herring that pragmatism = Jamesian utility. And this is after I've already cited Russell's rightful dismissal of James ... and quiet praise for Peirce.

Just another example of how dismally you argue your case. Every time you get caught out, just pretend it never happened.

To remind you, here was a fulsome reply. Now rather than doing your usual of pretending it wasn’t said, then coming in later with claims of a refusal to reply, let’s see you respond with a counter argument.

Do you dispute the correctness of what I say here? If so, make a case.

But your spoken truths always rely on unspoken ambiguities.

Are we talking about adult black swans or their fluffy white goslings? Are we talking about "swans" as being generically Cygnus atratus, or Cygnus olor and Cygnus cygnus? Are we talking about black swans that include albino Cygnus atratus?

So we can resolve some of these ambiguities with more careful speech. We can say that is a member of the genus Cygnus. It is black.

Yet ambiguity is in principle irreducible in speech acts. We can only hope to constrain it. Which is where pragmatism comes in as it then only make sense to put so much effort into constraining the semantics of our utterances. The truths we tell turn out to have as least as much to do with our intentions as they do with "the facts of the world". — apokrisis

I prefer to read the papers. Now in your own words...