I accept all of those. It’s to the consequence that misrepresentation reduces to misuse and that inquiry no longer answers to anything beyond its own norms. — Esse Quam Videri

Of course that doesn't follow. Our language games are embedded in the world, not determinate of it.

Your proposal is something like, reality → judgment. I'm not proposing judgment→ reality, so much as judgment ↔︎ reality. This mutual dependence does not collapse misrepresentation into misuse

It’s about whether truth is exhausted by practice or essentially involves answerability to how things are. I don’t really see a neutral way to adjudicate that any further. — Esse Quam Videri

I think we can proceed by looking at the best theories we have of truth. And that's Tarski. We know that the semantic theory of truth is coherent. It also holds for any of the other more substantive theories. '"p" is true IFF p' is pretty much undeniable without a loss of coherence.

So the question is, is it complete?

And now our differences centre on, "does truth require more than what our best semantic theories already provide?"

Now this was Davidson's program, half a century ago; and it gave way to various forms of deflation concerning truth, together with what have been called "pragmatic" views, although they differ greatly from the substantive views of the early pragmatists.

For the purposes of this thread, what we might reject is a recourse to the necessity of judgements matching reality. That Great Juxtaposition of how things are against how we say they are has been shown wanting.

Your proposal is something like, reality → judgment. I'm not proposing judgment→ reality, so much as judgment ↔︎ reality. This mutual dependence does not collapse misrepresentation into misuse — Banno

I agree that our practices are world-embedded and constrained by reality. My worry isn’t about whether reality plays a role, but about how. On your picture, reality constrains judgment only through the evolution of norms internal to practice. On mine, judgment is essentially answerable to how things are in a way that allows us to say that a practice-embedded, norm-governed belief nevertheless misrepresented reality. That’s the asymmetry I’m trying to preserve. If one accepts mutual dependence, that asymmetry disappears, and with it the distinction between being wrong about the world and merely revising our norms. At that point, the disagreement really is about whether truth outruns even world-embedded practice.

I think we can proceed by looking at the best theories we have of truth. And that's Tarski. We know that the semantic theory of truth is coherent. It also holds for any of the other more substantive theories. '"p" is true IFF p' is pretty much undeniable without a loss of coherence. — Banno

I don’t disagree about Tarski or Davidson. The semantic theory of truth is indispensable and coherent, but it answers a different question than the one I’m raising. Tarski tells us how “true” functions in a language, but he does not explain what it is for a judgment to misrepresent the world rather than merely fall out of favor within a practice. If I recall correctly, even Davidson explicitly acknowledged this gap: semantic theories of truth explain meaning, not epistemic success.

Rejecting a heavyweight correspondence theory doesn’t eliminate answerability; it only eliminates a particular metaphysical picture of it. My concern isn’t with “matching” reality as an external comparison, but with preserving the asymmetry that makes shared error intelligible. That judgments answer to how things are in a way that practices themselves do not exhaust. If that asymmetry is rejected, then error collapses into norm change. If it’s preserved, then truth outruns practice. That’s the divide I’ve been pointing to.

This discussion reminds me what Wittgenstein said in On Certainty 505, “It is always by favour of Nature that one knows something.”

That's a nice reference. Perhaps we could say the debate here turns on how one interprets the role of the "favour of Nature" within regard to knowing.

That said, in light of some recent exchanges elsewhere, I suspect that @Banno and I may be closer in substance than it initially appeared, even if our vocabularies and points of emphasis differ. Terminology is always a challenge, and I’ve spent most of the last few years working in a more Continental register, which no doubt shows. I’m trying to correct for that in recent posts.

On mine, judgment is essentially answerable to how things are in a way that allows us to say that a practice-embedded, norm-governed belief nevertheless misrepresented reality. — Esse Quam Videri

We might sort all this by introducing triangulation, alla Davidson.

In that framing, I interpret your beliefs not just in relation to my own, but on the presumption that your beliefs are pretty much the same as my own - the Principle of Charity. So my interpretation is triangulated with your utterances, and my beliefs as to how things are in the world.

Are you familiar with it?