Let's say that we are each put in a shared simulation that may or may not represent the world outside the simulation. We assume that the simulation is an accurate representation of the outside world, and so assume that when we talk about it raining when it rains in the simulation we are talking about it raining outside the simulation, and that our claim is true if it is raining outside the simulation and false if it isn't. — Michael

My Wittgensteinian claim is that 'it's raining' and 'it isn't raining' do not exhaust the possibilities. I live in the Pennines, where yesterday it was neither raining nor not-raining. That's just the way it is here: perhaps we can rename ourselves ExcludedMiddlesex.

To talk about the law of the excluded middle is to talk about a formal language, not about natural language. Natural language accepts excluded middles and enjoys contradictions all the time.

You wrote:

...making the distinction between believing a proposition is true from it actually being true. For all else, redundancy in truth value or meaning.

I don't follow this. Could you elucidate?

I like to use Godel's incompleteness theorem to elucidate the matter. There are some propositions in any formal language that can be true; but, can't be proven to be true from with in the same formal language.

yep.

Isn't that about definitions/axioms/premisses? I'm not seeing the relevance to "for all else... redundancy..."

What part are you agreeing with Banno? Just curious.

Dummett conflates the two. — creativesoul

Dummett's argument concludes that the principle of bivalence be rejected because we cannot always recognize whether or not a statement is true/false. The principle of bivalence only says that all statements are determinately true/false, not that we can recognize them as such. The criterion for being determinately true/false is remarkably different than being recognized as true/false. Dummett conflates the two. I see no reason to think/believe that Witt's writing leads to that or suffers from the same. — creativesoul

That's not what he's doing at all. From this summary, "any truth-apt statement has to meet the condition that its truth-value can be specified in terms of some available proof-procedure or method of verification".

He isn't saying that a sentence is only true if we verify it. He's saying that verification must be conceivable for the statement to mean something. The principle of bivalence, however, entails that a sentence can be true even if verification is inconceivable. Therefore, the principle of bivalence is wrong.

He's saying that verification must be conceivable for the statement to mean something. — Michael

In our discussion here, this always turned into the possibility of knowing that a statement is true. Is that the same thing?

Something else: we talked a lot about being able to recognize (or not) that a statement's truth conditions are satisfied; does that presume that we know what the truth conditions of the statement are? You made the point several times, Michael, that the issue is whether there can be a meaningful statement such that we could not recognize whether its truth conditions are satisfied; would that be a statement that we know the meaning of but do not know the truth conditions of? What it would be like to know what the truth conditions of a sentence are but not how you could recognize whether they are satisfied or not, or whether you could recognize whether they are so satisfied?

I, for one, am still not clear on how the meaning of a statement, its truth conditions, and the recognizability of those conditions being satisfied are all related.

Unknowability just doesn't look like a big deal in this context. People act on what they believe to be true, or even believe to be probable, and either is rational. You could even know, for a fact, that a proposition has arbitrarily high probability of being true without knowing that it is true; that's surely rational grounds to act on. — Srap Tasmaner

Pragmatism would flip this on its head by saying everything is probabilistic. Reality is not deterministic - in the fashion conventional thinking about true facts or states of affairs presumes - but is instead only a constraint on indeterminism.

That means there is an element of chance or creativity in every act of "verification". We can frame a proposition as a deterministic choice - the principle of bivalence - yet then the measurement process itself can only be informal in the end, as on the fine-grain, nature can still fool us, as Gettier cases illustrate.

So the job of proposition verification is not to establish deterministic certainty - that is impossible. But what we can demonstrate transparently is a reduction in uncertainty. We can aim to reduce indeterminism to the level of what we deem mere probabilistic noise.

In asserting a truth, it is a practical fact that there is a level of error that matters (because we are asserting with some purpose in mind) and then a level of error where we are no longer bothered any more, so it makes no difference whether the facts are either "true" or "false". Or determinate vs random.

Take the height of Mt Everest. As a mountain climber, it doesn't really matter if it is X metres high, give or take another minute or two of climbing. At some level of truth-telling, our interest fuzzes out. The pull of the moon might have some measurable effect on Mt Everest so its "true height" changes by nanometres constantly all day. But this becomes noise - unless we establish some purpose that makes a more exact measurement seem reasonable.

And then doing that is probably going to change the very assertion anyway. I may have to concede Mt Everest doesn't "have a height" in the simple fashioned sense I was trying to posit. At the nanometre scale, it all becomes relative or vague as reality doesn't come with that kind of fixed measurement baseline.

So the point is that AP agonises about truth because it embeds a certain metaphysics. Pragmatism rebuilt theories of truth by advancing a quite different metaphysics. One worries about arriving at certainty. The other concerns itself with the regulation of uncertainty. Pragmatism accepts verification is a practical affair closely tied to interests. So that justifies acts of verification petering out in vagueness or noise - whether or not that is due to ontic or epistemic reasons.

It could be that we just don't care beyond a certain level of fine-grain detail. Or it might be that there just isn't any fine-grain detail to be had - as quantum indeterminism suggests. Either way, pragmatism works.

But what we can demonstrate transparently is a reduction in uncertainty. — apokrisis

Can you expand on this?

Would you also describe this as the process of becoming "less and less wrong"? Is there a succinct way to describe that without presupposing a bivalence of right and wrong?

Dummett's argument concludes that the principle of bivalence be rejected because we cannot always recognize whether or not a statement is true/false. The principle of bivalence only says that all statements are determinately true/false, not that we can recognize them as such. The criterion for being determinately true/false is remarkably different than being recognized as true/false. Dummett conflates the two. I see no reason to think/believe that Witt's writing leads to that or suffers from the same. — creativesoul

[agrees] — Banno

I was going to ignore this, but seriously Banno?

Rather than play Dummett, I'll just ask both of you for a citation. Since I haven't read nearly everything he published, not by a long shot, perhaps I haven't seen the passage where he does this conflating you speak of. Show me.

Would you also describe this as the process of becoming "less and less wrong"? Is there a succinct way to describe that without presupposing a bivalence of right and wrong? — Srap Tasmaner

It is scientific reasoning. So I guess bivalence might be replaced by the null hypothesis. We propose that X is a hypothetical cause of an observable. Then we presume the existence of measurement error. And so we compare X to the null hypothesis - the counterfactual that the observable is caused only by randomness in the system in question. There is always going to be false positives due to irreducible chance or indeterminism (in the world, or in our acts of measurement).

But bivalence is not wrong as a tool of inquiry. We can't test anything unless we frame the alternatives crisply. We have to formalise a claim in terms of a definite yes or no question.

However then, we should recognise this is a necessary quality of our epistemic tool and not of the world. The world itself could be vague foundationally. So bivalence is simply a way of formalising a definite hypothesis. And (following Robert Rosen) our acts of measurement are then the informal part of the business. What counts as an acceptable degree of measurement becomes bound up by the purposes we might have in mounting an enquiry after truth, and so how easily we might feel satisfied. It is tacit knowledge - what counts as good enough - that AP theories of truth don't really appear to recognise.

Scientific reasoning instead actually does pay close attention to the business of making measurements. It has well developed probability theory (which Peirce pioneered) to make measurement as "formalised" as possible, despite the fact that a hypothesis is forever going to be a guess that suggests its own "sign" or answering measurement.

Guesses embed their preconceptions in a way that can't ultimately be avoided. So pragmatism would be about controlling the consequences of that situation.

So when it comes to bivalence, note that Peirce was explicit on how to handle it as part of his work on logic.

Vagueness is that to which the principle of contradiction fails to apply. Ultimately crisp bivalence fails as states of affairs are simply vague or indeterminate.

And then generality is that to which the law of the excluded middle fails to apply. Again, ultimately bivalence ceases to make sense once there is no longer any particularity to speak of.

So bivalence is great and effective in positing a world of crisp particulars - a state of affairs in which things are are the case, or are not the case. And that metaphysics can take us almost everywhere we seem to what to go. We don't have to worry about the limits of knowledge as so much can be logically inquired into using this tool.

But once we get down to theories of truth, we are talking about the limits of a bivalent framing. And Peirce says flip it around. Accept that fundamentally things will be vague. Uncertainty rules at ground level - and it doesn't matter because our own purposes place epistemic limits on how much we even could care. Let's not pretend to worry about things that don't in practice worry us.

But bivalence is not wrong as a tool of inquiry. We can't test anything unless we frame the alternatives crisply. We have to formalise a claim in terms of a definite yes or no question. — apokrisis

That's helpful. And we do this even if we don't expect to get "yes" or "no", but closer to "yes" or closer to "no", right?

AP theories of truth — apokrisis

"AP"?

And we do this even if we don't expect to get "yes" or "no", but closer to "yes" or closer to "no", right? — Srap Tasmaner

I would put it the other way round. We know that to dichotomise strongly is the way to be sure that any answer is going to fall within the bounds of the possible. So the concern is about asking the question in the logically broadest sense so to ensure we encompass the whole range of any resulting answer.

We can't reliably get closer to either limit - yes vs no - unless we are secure about the fact that the limits actually limit. So bivalence is part of that effort of framing questions in ways that answers at least land inside their counterfactual bounds.

I could say that thing over there is either a gnat or a 7. You can see how hard it would be to assign a truth value to statements that don't properly suggest actual bounds on our uncertainty.

"AP"? — Srap Tasmaner

Analytic philosophy.

It's in the OP Srap...

Here it is again, for your convenience...

...The principal connection with metaphysics is via the notion of bivalence—the semantic principle that every statement is determinately true or false. If the truth of our statements depended on the obtaining of a worldy state of affairs (as the realist maintains), then our statements would have to be determinately true or false, according to whether or not that state of affairs obtained. However, given that we cannot guarantee that every statement is recognisable as true or recognisable as false, we are only entitled to this principle if our notion of truth is recognition-transcendent. By the above argument, it is not, and hence bivalence must be rejected and metaphysical anti-realism follows (Dummett 1963).

I stand by my earlier reply, which is a re-iteration of my first analysis of the above paragraph. Here it is again...

Dummett's argument concludes that the principle of bivalence be rejected because we cannot always recognize whether or not a statement is true/false. The principle of bivalence only says that all statements are determinately true/false, not that we can recognize them as such. The criterion for being determinately true/false is remarkably different than being recognized as true/false. Dummett conflates the two. I see no reason to think/believe that Witt's writing leads to that or suffers from the same.

Moreover, as my initial reply to this thread asserts. There is a conflation of truth and meaning at hand as well, but that's another matter altogether and it is quite nuanced. Very.

No.

There may be a simple misunderstanding here: that's not a quote from Michael Dummett. It's a summary of a position he argued for off & on in various ways over several decades, and includes a reference, to the 1963 article on "Realism", iirc.

Dummett's argument concludes that the principle of bivalence be rejected because we cannot always recognize whether or not a statement is true/false. — creativesoul

That's just false, and not even what the summary presented says.

Dummett conflates the two. — creativesoul

Dummett would be "conflating" if he did not notice the distinction between a proposition's being true and its being recognizable as being true, or didn't consistently preserve the distinction throughout his argument. I see no evidence for this at all.

I'll give you a comparison: the general knock on OLP is that it conflates conditions of assertibility for truth conditions. Sellars argues, in "Presupposing", that Strawson does something like this in "On Referring".* It is a common argument against Austin. For instance, suppose Austin argues (this is hypothetical) that because we wouldn't in ordinary circumstances say "He sat in the chair voluntarily" or "He sat in the chair involuntarily" -- normally "voluntarily" and "involuntarily" imply something unusual about the situation of his sitting that we address with those words -- there's no reason to feel we have to say "He sat in the chair voluntarily" is necessarily true or false. You could respond that he's conflating whether it's appropriate to say such a thing with whether it's true.

Dummett does nothing like this. He doesn't miss the distinction; he makes an argument about the place of this distinction in a theory of meaning.

* Sellars's article includes this memorable footnote: "In short our hearts beat (believe) with Russell even when our tongue wags (asserts) with Strawson."

You made the point several times, Michael, that the issue is whether there can be a meaningful statement such that we could not recognize whether its truth conditions are satisfied; — Srap Tasmaner

Poor wording on my parts, perhaps. What I meant to say is that if the truth condition of some statement X is Y and if we were to recognise that Y obtains but not then realise that X is true then we can't be said to know what X means. So it's not that we must be able to recognise that its truth conditions obtain but that we must be able to recognise its truth conditions as being its truth conditions.

As an example, if we were to take Mary out of her room and show her a red apple, if she doesn't then recognise this as verifying the sentence "this apple is red" then she doesn't know what "red" means.

This post might explain it better, where it offers this example (from Wright):

For example, in the case of a simple language consisting of demonstratives and taste predicates (such as "bitter" and "sweet"), applied to foodstuffs within reach of the speaker, a speaker's understanding consists in his ability to determine whether "this is bitter" is true, by putting the relevant foodstuff in his mouth and tasting it (Wright 1993).

Ok Srap. Point taken. I mean, I very well may have clearly attributed words to Dummett that were not his. I'll grant that much. The author, to me, doesn't matter at all. I'm less interested in who says what, and much more interested in what's being said. For all intents and purposes, it seemed as though the part I'm objecting to was being attributed to Dummett. I remedied this below.

I wrote:

...the argument concludes that the principle of bivalence be rejected because we cannot always recognize whether or not a statement is true/false. The principle of bivalence only says that all statements are determinately true/false, not that we can recognize them as such. The criterion for being determinately true/false is remarkably different than being recognized as true/false. The author conflates the two. I see no reason to think/believe that Witt's writing leads to that or suffers from the same.

You objected:

That's just false, and not even what the summary presented says.

the author would be "conflating" if he did not notice the distinction between a proposition's being true and its being recognizable as being true, or didn't consistently preserve the distinction throughout his argument. I see no evidence for this at all.

Well, no. It's not false. The author(whomever it was) did conclude that the principle of bivalence be rejected because we cannot always recognize whether or not a statement is true or false. Here it is again...

...The principal connection with metaphysics is via the notion of bivalence—the semantic principle that every statement is determinately true or false. If the truth of our statements depended on the obtaining of a worldy state of affairs (as the realist maintains), then our statements would have to be determinately true or false, according to whether or not that state of affairs obtained.

HOWEVER, given that we cannot guarantee that every statement is recognisable as true or recognisable as false, we are only entitled to this principle if our notion of truth is recognition-transcendent.

FULL STOP.

That conflates the two criterion...

There are other issues as well. I earlier mentioned the conflation of truth and meaning. Here it is...

An author has claimed that Wittgenstein's Investigations view of the linguistic sign is incompatible with a recognition-transcendent notion of truth, which in turn rules out realist metaphysics.

In regard to the linguistic sign, the author's argument is, in outline, that recognition-transcendent truth-conditions could attach to our statements only if such conditions could play an active role in language use.

The key Wittgensteinian thought that drives the argument is the idea that if we did suppose ourselves to be able to grasp a particular meaning for our words that attached to a recognition-transcendent condition then the whole practice of language use would go on the same even if we had got it wrong. But this, the argument goes, is to posit a difference that makes no difference. Consequently, it drops out of consideration as irrelevant (Dummett 1993, pp.312-14).

The thought above that is labeled as "The key Wittgensteinian thought" is about meaning, not truth. The thought above earlier labeled "Dummett's argument" and now labeled the author's argument is about truth, not meaning.

said — Michael

you attempt to use philosophical bivalence as an argument point, but I believe that it is currently irrelevant to the current conversation as said that was trying to remove the fact of bivalence from the discussion as it would perpetrate a right or wrong opinion.

Well I guess it depends on how you mean "always recognize". My understanding of Dummett is that he takes assertion to drag along with it some idea of how what is asserted could be demonstrated, either by an effective procedure (for mathematics) or the usual empirical methods of evidence and inference. The idea here is not that anyone has actually done this, or even that as a practical matter it could be done, only that we have a sense of what it would be like to do it. This is being summarized as the truth conditions of an assertoric utterance being recognizable, but there's no reliance on actual acts of recognizing. It's not some sort of argument from ignorance. It's supposed to be about the nature of assertion and what conception of truth that implies. At least that's my understanding of how Dummett ends up here. And that's why what matters for the realism bit is propositions that we haven't the faintest idea what verifying them would even be like. Dummett is not willing to extend the principle of bivalence to such propositions.

Mathematics is an interesting case. Fermat's last theorem didn't count as true until there was a proof. That's how math works. But there was always wide, if evolving, agreement on what would count as proof, and thus Fermat's last theorem was a meaningful assertion long before it was proved.

(The realism stuff is actually pretty straightforward: Dummett's suggestion is that the domain of propositions to which you apply the principle of bivalence is the domain you are a realist about. Thus Quine, being pretty nearly an anti-realist about meaning, famously says "there is no fact of the matter" about a translation being right or wrong.)

As for conflating truth and meaning, just read almost anything he ever published. It's not there. He was pretty much obsessed with understanding how they were related, rather than conflating them. (For what it's worth, I also think he was constitutionally unable to conflate anything, to ignore any distinction. Again, read almost anything he ever wrote, he is almost cripplingly careful.)

I've tried a few different ways of going on from here, but I just don't have it in me right now.

One thing that's a little haywire about this whole conversation: we've been talking about "meaning" when we might have considered talking about "sense" and "reference", Dummett being much more Fregean than LW was, for instance. The major challenge to Dummett's approach comes from a purely referential semantics, in which the meaning of a word like "gold" is the stuff gold, what it refers to. If you don't allow sense to play a role, you've basically tied one of Dummett's arms behind his back.

Nice context Srap. I'll take your word for who holds/says what. As I said earlier, I'm interested in what's being said. I'll talk in general terms...

My understanding of Dummett is that he takes assertion to drag along with it some idea of how what is asserted could be demonstrated, either by an effective procedure (for mathematics) or the usual empirical methods of evidence and inference. The idea here is not that anyone has actually done this, or even that as a practical matter it could be done, only that we have a sense of what it would be like to do it. This is being summarized as the truth conditions of an assertoric utterance being recognizable, but there's no reliance on actual acts of recognizing. It's not some sort of argument from ignorance. It's supposed to be about the nature of assertion and what conception of truth that implies. At least that's my understanding of how Dummett ends up here. And that's why what matters for the realism bit is propositions that we haven't the faintest idea what verifying them would even be like. Dummett is not willing to extend the principle of bivalence to such propositions.

One who holds that making an assertion/statement drags along with it some idea of how it could be demonstrated is working from a notion of what it takes to make a statement that is unsatisfied by many folk who make them regularly. So, either those folk aren't making assertions/statements or the idea that assertions drag along with them some idea of how what is asserted could be demonstrated is ill-conceived. I'd go with the latter. I mean, every language speaker - without exception - learns how to talk about the world prior to learning about truth conditions and/or verification/falsification methods.

This looks to me like yet another consequence stemming from the historical mistake of conflating thought/belief with thinking about thought/belief. Assertion requires only the former. Having some idea of how what is asserted could be demonstrated requires the latter.

If the consideration is the nature of assertion and what conception of truth it implies, then I would strongly argue that the aforementioned distinction be drawn and maintained by virtue of using it when and where applicable. Doing so adds clarity. The nature of verification is much different than the nature of assertion. If what you claim about Dummett is accurate, he seems to have not drawn a distinction between what statements/assertions require and what verification/falsification requires. That is a consequence of not having drawn and maintained the crucial distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief.

Everything ever thought/believed, spoken and/or written presupposes correspondence to fact/reality. Both, thought/belief formation and the attribution of meaning, require it. Arriving at that requires knowing what thought/belief consist of. Knowing that requires drawing the aforementioned distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief.

I cannot think of a meaningful statement that we haven't the faintest idea what verification/falsification would take, or what verifying them would 'be like'. That is not to say that all statements are verifiable/falsifiable. It is to say that all verifiable statements are meaningful. All statements are meaningful, and as such are either determinately true or false, despite whether or not they are verifiable/falsifiable.

If one does not know what it would take for his/her assertions/statements to be true, then s/he does not know what they're talking about. If one does not know how to verify/falsify an assertion/statement, then s/he does not know what it would take for them to be true. Knowing what a statement means doesn't necessarily require knowing what it would take in order for it to be true, or knowing how to check to see if it is.

(The realism stuff is actually pretty straightforward: Dummett's suggestion is that the domain of propositions to which you apply the principle of bivalence is the domain you are a realist about. Thus Quine, being pretty nearly an anti-realist about meaning, famously says "there is no fact of the matter" about a translation being right or wrong.)

Domains of propositions... I take that to be the kind of proposition?

I like Quine, particularly the insight within Ontological Relativity. I think that was the name of it, but I could be wrong. It's been a number of years ago since reading it. Sheds light upon the arbitrary nature of name choice, and/or what people build a worldview upon.

That said, he is wrong regarding there is no fact of the matter regarding a translation being right or wrong. I mean, translations can most certainly be wrong. So, on second thought, given what little I remember of Quine, I am probably misunderstanding what he meant. Surely he acknowledged that people misunderstand one another by virtue of mistranslation.

We translate pre-existing meaning. We attribute meaning. The former requires the latter. We can be wrong in both cases. Though being wrong in the latter can be much different than being wrong in the former. We're wrong in the former when our translation misattributes meaning. We can be wrong in the latter, aside from misunderstanding/mistranslating pre-existing meaning, when we talk about things that are not existentially contingent upon language. It is here that we can do both, correctly and incorrectly conceive. That's yet another affront to current convention.

And yet again, setting out that which is not existentially contingent upon language requires drawing and maintaining the distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief.