I wrote a thread on that somewhere...


Ah, here it is!

But what if all they are doing is playing instrumental music? Base riffs an lead solos. A language without truth. — Banno

"all they are doing"? As if we oldies do not provide an eloquent wordless accompaniment to our every movement. A language of groans is all truth. Well perhaps not all, because we all know the difference between performance tears and real distress.

"Arrrgh" is true IFF bloody arthritis.

disagree. Can you see why, after reading this thread? — Banno

In the story one human learns the alien language, but it remains untranslatable into any human language. The learner gains a new ability related to temporal perception. It's a great movie.

This isnt the kind of conceptual difference Davidson is disputing.

It's dealt with in the part of the article where Davidson talks about the transitivity of English.

It's dealt with in the part of the article where Davidson talks about the transitivity of English. — Banno

I don't see how that section applies to the story.

How can you tell that the protagonist has understood the alien language?

Let's be honest, people get bullied to death on Facebook/4chan/Reddit/God knows where, on the internets. We seem to bat a blind eye to the distress of the young until it's too late (school shootings, something going on in our great USA).

I don't see how the Sapir-Whorf hypothesi isn't factually relevant to the discussion.

How can you tell that the protagonist has understood the alien language? — Banno

The author said so.

I don't see how the Sapir-Whorf hypothesi isn't factually relevant to the discussion. — Wallows

Then the task for you might be to show how it is relevant. Set it out.

But then, even if relevant, is it right?

Yep. It's fiction.

Yep. It's fiction. — Banno

The author has a transcendent vantage point. We don't.

Then the task for you might be to show how it is relevant. — Banno

Psychology...Talk therapy? CBT? I think you get the point.

Yep. So what is the lesson? What does your story tell us about conceptual schema?

Yep. So what is the lesson? What does your story tell us about conceptual schema? — Banno

That people who propose them are assuming a vantage point that their own reasoning says they can't have.

Seems so.

When Wittgenstein talked about forms of life, did he mean conceptual schemes?

Here's a whole other thread.

Some folk think so; I don't.

Some folk think he meant forms of life to be incommensurable. But I don't see how that could be maintained.

See PI 241.

"So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?" -- It is what human beings say that is true and false, and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.

Have a read of thereabouts. Lots of parallels.

But in the end i think he just meant "form of life" as some sort of collection of language games together with what we do with them.

I have a vague recollection of Feyerabend talking as if language games were incommensurable. If he did, I think he was wrong. Chess 960 is still chess.

@Sam26?

I have a vague recollection of Feyerabend talking as if language games were incommensurable. If he did, I think he was wrong. Chess 960 is still chess. — Banno

Me too. But it's been awhile. Even visiting this paper has been awhile. I remember getting the gist of it and thinking it a strong argument, but getting caught up in understanding Tarski.

Been enjoying the recap.

Cheers.

Digging through some of my notes on this --

https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.4057

is a paper that argues in favor of your notion of translatability from the historical perspective while using one of the classic examples Kuhn liked -- from Aristotle to Newton.

My take-away from this was that we can translate one project into another. But I wonder, along the way, what is lost from Aristotle in the translation? What motivates Kuhn to talk of paradigms, where Rovelli wishes to demonstrate harmony between supposedly different worldviews?

And it was probably around this time that I began to have a shift in interests with respect to philosophy that took me down just entirely different paths than science and its history. Hence why I'm still just right here on the issue. :D I just thought you might enjoy the paper.

Sweet article. I like the point that Aristotle was dealing with objects in a fluid - One of those things that is obvious, once someone else points it out to you.

It is curious to read everywhere “Why didn’t Aristotle do the actual experiment?”. I would retort: “Those writing this, why don’t they do the actual experiment?”. They would find Aristotle right.

:up:

Looking forward to sifting through all of this tomorrow.

It's a very smart paper that caters to my approach, and which drew my interest because -- which may be predictable -- I meant to disagree with it. :)

Though perhaps less so now.

I've finished reading The Very Idea... again.

Going back to this here: -- I think I see why I got stuck on Tarski. For one he's dense as all living hell. But also Tarski kind of seems to play the lynch-pin in the argument. I'm not grasping coming from the generalized form that Davidson cites

"S is true iff P"

to the conclusion that we could not make sense of a simultaneously true and untranslatable "x" -- I'm not grasping why truth is so important to translation. Or to quote Davidson -

...there does not seem to be much hope for a test that a conceptual scheme is radically different from ours if that test depends on the assumption that we can divorce the notion of truth from that of translation.

Perhaps not an assumption. It should be argued for. But I first needed to understand just why truth is so important to translation. It seems that Davidson believes this to be so because without taking such and such a person's beliefs to be true we would be unable to communicate at all -- that there is a kind of kernel of truth (edit: too poetic -- that we must hold beliefs true for another in order to translate?) to making sense of one another. And it seems we do this all the time.

But to list where my suspicion is coming from -- not to persuade -- I think of the opposite also happening; a kind of phenomenological argument. There are times when there's a bed of agreement upon which meaningful disagreement takes place, and there are times when I don't know what another person means and feel this exact sort of disconnect. Which doesn't preclude a bridge, of course, but it seems to me that we encounter what Davidson lays out as an incoherent idea. But this is definitely not the sort of approach which would convince an advocate of Davidson, I'd think, because it is phenomenological and drawing from influence of existential authors.


So onto persuasion, or perhaps a deeper understanding. What's the deal with truth in Tarski? Is it not possible for there to be two languages (reading with Davidson that this is closely analogous to conceptual schemes) with some sentences that are true and are not translatable into one another? I mean I guess in the silly case we could say "The snow is white" is true iff Der Ozean ist Wasser. But that's not what's meant, I think. Would the argument for incommensurability be required to supply two such sentences? And, if we ramp up the charity, couldn't we show how such an example is actually translatable?

if your scheme is not intended to be true but merely predictive, then it's not a conceptual scheme of the sort being discussed here, and is irrelevant. — Banno

Maybe so, but if that's the case then the comment which drew me to this discussion in the first place is off mark. You claimed that "The idea of models is fraught, and ultimately fails, for reasons outlined by Davidson", so really I was looking, in this discussion, for some justification for that. The possibility that I'm talking about a type of model outside of the scope of Davidson's critique doesn't really tally with a claim that all talk of models ultimately fails. Is there some further discussion in some of Davidson's other works you can direct me to that covers the types of model I might be using?

Presuming for now the second of your options

if your scheme divides the world into stuff and what we do with it then it is based on a false premise. — Banno

Incommensurable and 'not translatable' are two different claims. If you follow a concept-scheme divide where content is the states of affairs in the world, then yes, it's difficult to see how incommensurable schemes could exist if translatable (the objects of reference being understood). But that only seems to work under that assumption. If, like Kuhn, we see the world as inaccessible directly, then the content of the schemes are perception related to (but not identical to) the actual states of the world. Thus, there'd be every reason to think translatability might be possible, but still have an incommensurable organisation of the sensory perceptions those schemes allow.

It is not that case that a scheme fitting a hidden state is that same as a scheme being 'true' in a Tarskian sense because truth in a Tarskian sense is not about correspondence (nor should it be - I'm quite happy with Tarski's definition). Truth, from a Tarskian perspective would be about translatability between experience and schema which would fall foul of Davidson's criticism and therefore lead to the a conclusion that the distinction must be discarded. But the sorts of models I'm talking about (and to be honest I think the one's Kuhn was talking about too, but I'm no expert on him), suffer no such problem, because the correspondence has nothing to do with truth of propositions, it has to do with behaviour - beliefs, dispositions to act.

See PI 241.

"So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?" -- It is what human beings say that is true and false, and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.

Have a read of thereabouts. Lots of parallels. — Banno

I was trying to go without ever actually reading Wittgenstein. :shade:

I was trying to go without ever actually reading Wittgenstein. :shade: — frank

Why cut yourself off? He's as interesting as any other philosopher.

Why cut yourself off? He's as interesting as any other philosopher. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I only got interested in analytic philosophy because I wondered how they answered the problem of induction. I read about Wittgenstein, but didn't see his contributions as being particularly interesting, and probably on the mystical side. What do you like about him?

I'm really not competent to talk about him but I read his two books six or seven years ago and they were interesting enough.

What, then, can we say about being true?

T-sentences present a bare minimum It's pretty much undeniable that: "p" is true if and only if p.

Of course, plenty will deny it, especially in an on-line philosophy forum where denying stuff is what we do. From what I've seen over time, those who deny T-sentences simple have not understood them.

I just deleted a detailed account of the bits of a T-sentence, because on thinking about it its probably better to keep it simple. Folk over-think them far too much.

Yet the totality of such English sentences uniquely determines the extension of the concept of truth for English.

So here we have the whole of the truth.

Who'd have thought it could be so simple.

What we must agree on is that any theory of truth that does not stand in good stead with convention T can be rejected out of hand.

We ought also note Tarski's generalisation.

s is true IFF p
in which "s" is some statement and "p" is a translation of that statement. — Banno

All of this is clear and non-problematic. It seems silly to split hairs over the T-sentence.