Fair enough. I've been pinned to the matt on that one. — Moliere

:up:

How do you feel about ↪Arcane Sandwich 's term? — Moliere

Sure, particularly if you're speaking of a religion that uses that phrase.

'Sky Daddy" is complementary to an "earth mother". "Sky Father" is a direct translation of the Vedic Dyaus Pita, etymologically descended from the same Proto-Indo-European deity name as the Greek Zeûs Pater and Roman Jupiter, all of which are reflexes of the same Proto-Indo-European deity's name, *Dyēus Phtḗr. — Google's AI

But yes, I did intend it as a pejorative. Your triggers are not my responsibility?

Ah, I see you made the same point.

I did intend it as a slur. — Banno

Of course you did. Because it's a slur.

And again to my original point: you resort to that sort of thing because you're too dumb to square off with rationality and argument.

Yep. The pages of analysis on your other thread amount to nothing, for you.

Well, I mean, I can see where is coming from. Calling the Sky Father a Sky "Daddy" is like saying that it's a Sugar Daddy but in the sky, so it's understandable that people might take exception at that term.

Calling the Sky Father a Sky "Daddy" is like saying that it's a Sugar Daddy but in the sky — Arcane Sandwich

Yes, and I am heartened to know that even someone who speaks Spanish as their first language sees this. Of course, Banno's "Google AI" is not a source at all for this sort of matter.

Yeah I don't put much stock in AI to begin with.

I'm glad we've all agreed that "sky daddy" is a slur, but the point here is that sophistical dismissals and emotional mis-readings are not a great look for those who want to claim the intellectual high ground.

If someone like Banno is willing to put in the time to understand and then critique an argument in fairness, then they should do that. If they are not willing to put in that time, then they should hold their tongue rather than try to "win" with slurs and aspersions. Time and again we have seen Banno unwilling to put in the time and effort for a fair assessment, but nevertheless running his tongue with slurs and aspersions.

(This is my, "This is why I'm putting Banno back on ignore" speech.)

Well, yes. That was the joke, for @Moliere's appreciation, but also to see who bites... It worked better than was expected.

The forums periodically suffer a rash of god bothering. We are in the middle of one at the moment.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sky_daddy, if preferred.

(This is my, "This is why I'm putting Banno back on ignore" speech.) — Leontiskos

Thank Christ!

but also to see who bites... — Banno

A troll trolling.

The forums periodically suffer a rash of god bothering. — Banno

The troll's emotional needs require excising the forum of any talk of God, and his tools are misrepresentation and slurs. Argument and philosophy are beyond his pay grade.

Maybe we need more plumbers:

You say it yourself. You've got old. Brittle and senescent, to use the technical terms. That you would have Genesis on the turntable, rather than Black Midi or Connan Mockasin, speaks to your reduced capacity to deal with environmental novelty (even if you have the other side of the trade-off in the conviction of your certainties, the wisdom of a lifetime of evermore entrenched habit.) — apokrisis

Yeah, but it's like, would you call the Rainbow Serpent a Sky Daddy? If yes, then can you really blame Aboriginal Australians if they take exception to that?

Or here's another example, maybe closer to home. Would you call Henry Lawson a Bush Daddy?

So let's make this thread about me, too. What fun.

...would you call the Rainbow Serpent a Sky Daddy? — Arcane Sandwich

Well no, becasue the Rainbow Serpent is guardian of waterholes and community, a far more earthy deity, worthy of respect.

And Lawson was a city boy.

Too far off topic. I've flagged this conversation for mod consideration.

And Lawson was a city boy. — Banno

A City Daddy then. Maybe Banjo Paterson would be the Bush Daddy then. I'm not trying to be offensive, nor am I trying to go off topic, I'm just curious to understand how your mind works.

So let's make this thread about me, too. What fun. — Banno

Fun indeed. You derail all the threads you participate in to be about you, because you can't engage OPs and topics on their own terms. This has been going on for some time.

Good thing you'd never engage in anything so rude, then. — Banno

Slurs against an entire class of people in order to "cleanse" the forum of their participation and ethos? Nope, I haven't. Digital eugenics isn't my thing. And I'm not seeing what digital eugenicists like yourself add to the forum (apart from the ongoing suppression of philosophical discourse).

You derail all the threads you participate in to be about you, — Leontiskos

Well, no. I've no need to, since you do it for me. You are the one who is posting about me.

Didn't you put me on your "ignore" list?

Enough.

You are the one who is posting about me. — Banno

Many others point out the same sorts of problems:

It might help if you would sketch the argument that you take McDowell to be misapprehending. — Pierre-Normand

While I appreciate many of your observations, the arrogance of this remark is not a benefit. — Paine

How about we start by analyzing these completely irrational themes that underlie these sorts of discussions, instead of digging our heels and just blurting out nonsensical accusations such as "You don't really understand Quine's point." — Arcane Sandwich

Treat this as an invitation to engage with the thread topic on its own terms...
If you want to use this style of analysis, and see the thread through its terms entirely, you're going to remain confused. — fdrake

Of course you are not displeased that your trolling has garnered traffick. — Lionino

If you are only interested in arguing that Austin (or Wittgenstein, or anyone else) never advanced this theory, I have already accepted as much. I just want to discuss the theory as it has been described. — cherryorchard

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sky_daddy, if preferred. — Banno

Another failure to read, for your own source testifies against you:

Noun
1. (slang) A god, especially (derogatory, offensive) God the Father.
Synonyms: sky fairy; — Wiktionary

Do you believe in God?

By way of returning to the topic,

I agree with you here. I often struggle in making a distinction between human beings and our close cousins, but it really still seems to me that language is what differentiates us from those species. — Moliere

Davidson took language perhaps too seriously, holding that a dog for example could not believe that there was food in its bowl becasue it could not form the sentence "There is food in my bowl".

For my part, I have argued that the dog does not need to form the sentence, but that we can form the sentence may be sufficient for us to ascribe the belief to the dog.

And further, the belief is not a thing in the mind of the dog, but is attributed to the dog by those with language. And in the case of human belief, one is able to attribute belief to oneself. Attributing a belief to itself is not something a dog can do.

Now most of what I say hereabouts is by way of interpreting and explaining others, and this has been the case especially in this thread. But this line of thinking, ill formed and incomplete as it is, I will claim for my own. This by way of displaying a bit of vulnerability for the benefit of my detractors.

This is i think the interesting part of the line of thinking in this and other threads.

So if you would stand by this claim, which at best could only be a misunderstanding, point to the post in which I supposedly argued such a nonsense.

My post:

On deflationary accounts, “all that can be significantly said about truth is exhausted by an account of the role of the expression ‘true’... in our [speech] or thought,” and we might add formal systems here. Thus, notions of truth are neither “metaphysically substantive nor explanatory.”

To which you replied:

So what's the problem? It's not as if deflationary accounts say that there are not truths.

Adding later:

For my part, talking off the top of my head, I agree with it, and add that deflation is pretty much the only description of truth generally, inflationary accounts only be of use in somewhat special cases

It's debatable if deflationary theories of truth "do not say there are no truths." They say that truth is just how we use the token "true" in speech and thought, as the post you quoted points out, so it was clear what was being discussed. And if one affirms that one selects logics and "ways of speaking" based on what is useful, it follows that truth will determined by usefulness.

Particularly, if we follow your stated approach, that there are no correct or incorrect logics, but rather they are selected for by usefulness alone. I asked in virtue of what would a logic be "useful." Your response was "whenever it had a use" and that anyone setting out a logic has a use for it. But this is obviously extremely permissive.

Now, I suppose that if one is committed to such a view "follows from" doesn't really carry much weight, but it does follow from this that truth depends on usefulness.

Hence, in your own words:

Now what this shows is that truth-preservation is a function of the interpretation. So yes, in your rough terms, truth and validity do depend on the system being used, since that system includes the interpretation...

If you generalize this to natural language scenarios then yes, I agree, there is no fact of the matter as to whether individual animals exist outside the context of human language. Like you say:

We can juxtapose two views, that either the dog is an whole regardless of language, or it is a whole in virtue of language. Then we can pretend that the one must be true, at the expense of the other...

Sheep are an "organic whole" only until they reach the abattoir. What counts as a whole depends on what you are doing.

This is your basic Latin Averroism redux: different fields have different, perhaps contradictory truths, or what is true (or affirmed true by "pretending") depends on what you are doing and what your goals are.

But you're not even consistent on this. If we are narrow-minded fundamentalists, we can at best "pretend" that individual insects exist as a fact of nature/biology, as opposed to being the result of what humans choose to "count" as an insect, yet we can also advance this position and claim "of course it is true that insects existed before humans." Well, is the contrary also equally true depending on what you are doing? It seems so.

Apparently, multiple contradictory statements can be affirmed as true, it just depends on what is useful. However, "truth does not depend on what is useful, who would argue that?" I suppose such a claim is also true whenever it is useful to affirm it.

Questions of mereology, mereological nihilism, ordinary/extraordinary objects, etc. are difficult. I suppose, "we can assert or deny any part/whole relation as true of false, or contradict ourselves, based on what is useful," is an approach, but it's hardly a serious one.

It's also pretty obvious how disastrous this is for moral reasoning.

Let's have no more use of "sky daddy," "Allah snackbar," and the like. These will be subject to moderation. Aside from being derogatory, I somehow doubt they have ever been employed in an intellectually substantive post.

The comparison to the term "Sky Father," for example as used to describe Indo-Aryan religions, is facile. This is like claiming that "tranny" is not a slur because it is based on, and morphologically similar to "trans person." Likewise for calling people "homos." It's obvious any of these terms would not be appropriate for even a high school level paper (precisely because they are slurs).

I disagree with this. We're all adults here. Let's learn to roll with the punches.

I disagree with this. We're all adults here. Let's learn to roll with the punches. — frank

Should this forum allow the use of the N-word then, in your view?

It's debatable if deflationary theories of truth "do not say there are no truths." They say that truth is just how we use the token "true" in speech and thought, as the post you quoted points out, so it was clear what was being discussed. And if one affirms that one selects logics and "ways of speaking" based on what is useful, it follows that truth will determined by usefulness. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think it's determined by the individual's whim more than even usefulness.

The thing is, we like truth. It's something we seek for its own sake. But a theory of truth cannot tell us what is true, except perhaps for what is true about truth.

I prefer deflationary theories of truth if we have to say anything about truth at all, but usually I think it's best to understand truth as something very simple, which is part of why it escapes our theorizing. The deflationary theory is there to try and escape some of the criticisms of the substantive theories of truth, but for the most part I take it that truth is embedded in language -- it's a meta-lingual predicate which talks about sentences and the properties we attribute to sentences. Our changing a theory of truth won't change truth, but it's really only because we like truth -- attribute truth to sentences -- that we wonder about and theorize about truth.

But the theory of truth is not the phenomena, truth.

And I think we can separate out theories of truth from theories of reference -- one does not decide the other.

Davidson took language perhaps too seriously, holding that a dog for example could not believe that there was food in its bowl becasue it could not form the sentence "There is food in my bowl".

For my part, I have argued that the dog does not need to form the sentence, but that we can form the sentence may be sufficient for us to ascribe the belief to the dog.

And further, the belief is not a thing in the mind of the dog, but is attributed to the dog by those with language. And in the case of human belief, one is able to attribute belief to oneself. Attributing a belief to itself is not something a dog can do. — Banno

That's pretty close to how I think of language -- the dog has a kind of animla-belief, but doesn't believe the English sentence "The kibble is in my bowl"

A dog will mark its territory and defend it, but it won't appeal to a bigger dog to enforce some agreed upon social rules. It may try to get friends, but it won't make an appeal to a law.

the dog has a kind of animla-belief — Moliere

We can't tell what is actually happening in another person's head, or our own head, when we are believing or are knowing. Why would we think invoking dog-beliefs would help clarify anything?

The dog senses food. The dog may not believe or know or think anything at all. It might be carried by circumstances to sense food just as it is carried by circumstances to find it and eat it. Does the dog who steps on a hot coal, yelps and leaps away, have to think at all to yelp and leap? Maybe, or maybe not (we are not dogs, so who knows, and dogs aren't talking about their inner lives). But if you can imagine a dog does not need to think to yelp and leap from being burnt, why can't we imagine the dog is behaving according to the exact same impulses in everything the dog does? Like a plant cell photosynthesizing - wherefore belief as a component of these motions?

For my part, humans personify everything we touch. We even personify ourselves. We alone use words to refer to other words and concepts - no animals bother to do so. Because, for my part, animals don't believe, or know, or think. They are better than all of that (or less than all that, if you want to feel special about the act of personification).

I think it's determined by the individual's whim more than even usefulness.

Truth is determined by whims? Am I reading that right? But surely someone can decide that it is "true" that their flying machine will work, "on a whim," and then be corrected when it slams into the ground. Truth asserts itself. People can claim that pigs and goats are the same species all they like, "on a whim," but if they try to feed their family by mating the two they will starve. They will be forced to assent to the truth.

I prefer deflationary theories of truth if we have to say anything about truth at all, but usually I think it's best to understand truth as something very simple, which is part of why it escapes our theorizing. The deflationary theory is there to try and escape some of the criticisms of the substantive theories of truth, but for the most part I take it that truth is embedded in language -- it's a meta-lingual predicate which talks about sentences and the properties we attribute to sentences. Our changing a theory of truth won't change truth, but it's really only because we like truth -- attribute truth to sentences -- that we wonder about and theorize about truth.

I would disagree. For one, animals don't use language, but they certainly seem to have beliefs and to get flustered when what they believed to be the case turns out not to be. Likewise, human who are non-verbal do not seem incapable of being perturbed by illusions, knowing they have been deceived, etc.

I would put it this way: "truth is the adequacy of thought to being." That sentences can be true or false is parasitic on the fact that language is a product of the intellect. Language thus functions as a sign of truth in the intellect. "True" is predicated of speech acts and text analogically, they are signs of truth in the same way that a healthy complexion is a sign of health (but complexions do not possess truth fully themselves). The focus on formal logic to the exclusion of material logic (form in the absence of content) occludes this fact. Yet a non-verbal person, or the victim of aphasia, clearly seems capable of having beliefs that are either true or false, even if they are not expressed in language.

Many philosophers also admit of a distinction between ontological truth, the truth of things, and truth as the conformity of language to things. We can also see how this works in terms of lying. When we lie, our words are not signs of our beliefs (although a lie may be, by coincidence, a true statement, and it may reveal something about our true beliefs).

I think part of the motivation for deflation arises from the position that truth applies only to sentences. Such a position seems to lead down that path. Perhaps the idea that knowledge is just belief that happens to be justified and true also leads down this way. Earlier eras distinguished between many types of knowledge. Continental philosophy also tends to be more likely to differentiate many types of knowledge. Plato had four, Aristotle five (and arguably more). "Knowing how to ride a bike," sense knowledge, noeisis, etc. However, if knowledge, the grasp of truth, is always propositional, then it makes more sense for sentences to be the primary bearers of truth, and also for what is "known" or "true" to vary by language game.

Anyhow, an interesting consequence of sentences being true "of themselves" without relation to the intellect is that a random text generator "contains" all truths. There is some interesting stuff to unpack there. From an information theoretic perspective, a random text generator only provides information about its randomization process, the semantic meaning of any output being accidental (and highly unlikely).

Truth is determined by whims? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Pretty much.

We desire to know the truth for -- what reason?

Some people desire to know the truth so that they might be able to predict the future.

Some people desire to know the truth so that they know where they came from.

Sometimes it's out of curiosity. Sometimes out of wonder. Sometimes out of love. Sometimes out of hate.

The number of desires which lead a person to desire truth is myriad. And desires are what drive us to seek out truth. We want to be able to say "Thought conforms to being" -- but couldn't say that without language, or even think it without language.

But sometimes we want to be able to say "My perception corresponds to an object" -- here pointing out that we can us "...is true" for more than sentences, albeit still being a meta-lingual predicate. Why would we do such a thing?

Because we like truth. We want to be certain. We want the airplane to fly or to know what is good.

What doesn't matter is how we theorize truth -- we'll still want it to do pretty much what it's been doing the entire time. It's just gets complicated when we try to theorize it, and generally it's easier to say "I know you know what truth is, and we don't need to define it at all if we want to seek it out"

Note how the T-Sentence has a similar form to your notion of truth, it's just using a smaller vocabulary.

"P" is true if and only if P. So we have language, or thought, on the left hand side and the sentence which is being used in a context on the right-hand side -- or Being.

The same form as you have is there, it's just trying to assume less about truth.

And it's worth noting that truth and reference are separate topics. At least to my mind -- I don't see the relationship between truth and reference until we're talking about whole sentences, at least.

Mostly to help us make sense of the Dog, I think. We are so accustomed to thinking in terms of belief that we have to interpret the dog as having them in order to understand their behavior, much as we do with other people.

And, us being animals, we really have some things in common with them -- like what mentions in this post: Frustration, confusion, error, correction all seem to happen.

But since they're not doing math or using money or making laws we can tell they're different.