• Janus
    16.5k
    My claim is only that a) truth and falsity are properties of truth-bearers, that b) truth-bearers are propositions, sentences, utterances, beliefs, etc., and that c) propositions, sentences, utterances, beliefs, etc. are not language-independent. This then entails that d) a world without language is a world without truth-bearers is a world without truths and falsehoods.

    It's unclear to me which of a), b), c) , or d) you disagree with.

    If you accept a), b), and c) but reject d) then you are clearly equivocating, introducing some new meaning to the terms "truth" and "falsehood" distinct from that referenced in a).
    Michael

    To say that truth and falsity are properties of sentences, utterances, beliefs, etc seems fine to me. To say they are only properties of those seems overly restrictive. 'Truth' like 'existence' is a word that refers to a concept. Concepts are mind-dependent, but what they conceive is not necessarily.

    Do you think animals that lack language have beliefs? If so, do you think those beliefs can be true or false?
  • fdrake
    6.7k
    How do you know that a duck is not a social construction?Leontiskos

    If you're asking me how I'd approach the question IRL, I'd just say things like "it's a wild animal", "it's not something like a society or a contract", "it doesn't care about human social life" etc. I think I've got the same recourse here. When you say something is a duck, in all but the most obscure circumstances, that comes along with what I've just said. Which serve as reasons for excluding ducks from being social constructions.

    You could reason that I've dodged the question, and substituted a particular case of counting as for the general case - but I don't know why this wouldn't be an available move to me? I've given good reasons for why ducks aren't social constructions. I think it's evident that counting as a duck isn't the same as being a duck, too. Like a picture of a duck isn't a duck, it's a picture of a duck. But you might still say "that's a duck" on the picture.

    Moreover, ducks would exist without us. Perhaps that would be a cuter world.

    The moral of the story, I think, is that counting as a duck is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a duck. Being a duck is also not a necessary or sufficient condition for counting as a duck. But if something quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, smells like a duck... it probably is a duck. And I imagine it counts as one too.

    In my opinion this is a highly controversial claim. I’d say that when a child points to the fire and says, “Fire!,” she is not saying, “This counts as fire,” but rather, “This is fire.” Or rather, whatever she is doing is much closer to the latter than the former.Leontiskos

    I agree with you about fire, but see the above example about "that's a duck" regarding a picture of a duck. Hence things about pomo and pipes.

    For me the conceptual priority question is something like this. Suppose you are training a novice in the CIA to root out foreign spies. Are you going to teach them what counts as a spy? Or are you going to teach them how to identify a spy? I think they are quite different. And if—contrary to natural language use—all we mean by “counting as” is “correctly identifying,” then we are really talking about identifying spies.Leontiskos

    Yeah. I think this is quite similar to what I was talking about with @Srap Tasmaner earlier. You can read the above as introducing a much higher, much more precise, much more contextually astute, standard for counting someone as a spy. You want a checklist that lets you correctly assert someone is a spy - identifying them right. And in those conditions someone should definitely say "that's a spy".

    At this stage I’m primarily interested in whether you only mean “counting as” as “identifying” or “correctly identifying.”Leontiskos

    I don't fully embrace the distinction in the way you're framed it, I think. If you satisfy the appropriate standard, I think you can correctly claim that something is the case. Even if later evidence comes to light that one was wrong. That may seem absurd, but I think it's comparable to the death by precision that I mentioned earlier regarding having only a very exacting standard for truth. Is the ruler 30cm long? Obviously, it's a 30cm ruler. Turns out it's 30.0005cm long. Dang it. I'd want to side with someone who said it was 30cm long, and say they spoke the truth.

    What I'm interested in with that is how truth as a concept behaves. I've long given up hope that something as bizarre as a sentence can state facts as plainly as we need to believe they are stated. But nevertheless, we need to believe they are stated plainly, so the truth will have to do in its own stead.

    “If we define a triangle as thus-and-such, then it counts as a triangle. If we define it in a different way then it may not.”Leontiskos

    I didn't mean it like that.
  • Banno
    25.3k
    I explained it quite clearly in my last post here which you opted not to address.Michael
    Indeed, I did not address it, becasue I had done so previously. The repetition is tiresome.
  • Banno
    25.3k
    Perhaps there's an oddity to do with the way folk think of "mind-dependent", such that they are thinking of individual minds, or their own mind. It might be better to say "minds -dependent".
  • fdrake
    6.7k
    is that counting as a duck is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a duckfdrake

    I realise this could have been unclear earlier. Ordinarily the conditions under which someone correctly identifies X as a duck immediately count X as a duck too. I see that {and I think Sellars sees that} as a behavioural connection rather than a logical one. If something is identified as X, it counts as X. If something counts as X - there's definitely a thingy which counts as X and a counting as.

    The tension which I think you're picking up on is the weirdness that comes with treating counting-as as distinct from identity, even though identifying correctly is norm and theory ladened, involving standards of correctness for counting-as.

    I agree that this is weird. But I also think it's a good description of how that works. We treat the world as if some things depend on us and some don't. Like the desk I'm sitting at isn't dependent upon my mind for its existence - it really is hard, I don't just think it's hard. But it's still dependent upon human existence in some sense, since it was manufactured by us. Now if you deleted all the humans and left nothing unchanged, the table would not stop existing. Though something like dancing would disappear. along with us.

    So there are standards and norms that concern correctly asserting that something is independent from us. We're usually right about that - but we could be wrong.

    It's a giant hall of mirrors. Every time someone is going to say "true", I'm going to replace it with a behavioural concept that's jury rigged to fit just how we use the word. And then I'm going to argue that the jury rigging is also in the territory. Irritatingly for everyone involved, self included, the jury rigging will actually tend to be there, and that can restart our conflict.
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