What's not mind-dependent is whether a proposition is true. That's just to say it's not mind-dependent whether something is so or not, unless that thing has specifically to do with minds.

But what's probably mind-dependent is whether something is a sentence, or whether a sentence expresses a certain proposition. So, if you were to define a notion of sentence truth, it would be mind-dependent whether a sentence is true, in virtue of its being mind-dependent what proposition it expressed.

Consider the following situation: it's 4 million years ago, so there aren't any sentences. Yet at that time, the Earth existed, so was true that the Earth existed (that proposition was true). — The Great Whatever

It's not that it was true that the Earth existed; it's that it is true that the Earth existed. To say that it was true that the Earth existed is to say that "the Earth existed" was true, but as you say, the sentence "the Earth existed" wasn't there 4 million years ago.

Since one can be true while the other is false, they can't be synonymous.

Consider the following:

1. The cup is red.
2. The above is true.

According you, it's possible for one to be true but the other to be false, because the first is about a cup but the second is about a sentence. But this is wrong. If the first is true then ipso facto the second is true and vice versa, and if the first is false then ipso facto the second is false and vice versa.

Otherwise you can end up in the absurd situation where you say that the cup is red and then I respond by saying that the cup is red but that what you said was false. That's a straightforward contradiction.

Which is why iff the cup is red then "the cup is red" is true.

Just to drive this home, let p = "the Earth exists."

1. It was true that the Earth existed.
2. The Earth existed. The previous sentence was true.
3. "The Earth existed" was true.

Notice that 3 doesn't follow, since ex hypothesi there was no such sentence, so a fortiori it wasn't true. This is because the second sentence in 2) is clearly false, and doesn't follow from the fact that the Earth existed.

Because 3. is false, 1. and 2. are false. It should be:

1. It is true that the Earth existed.
2. The Earth existed. The previous sentence is true.
3. "The Earth existed" is true.

Let's try this again.

You are asserting the following biconditional:

(For any p, in all situations), p iff "p" is true.

Substituting "the Earth exists" for p, we get the following:

(In all situations), The Earth exists iff "the Earth exists" is true.

From this it follows that (for all situations), if the Earth exists, then "the Earth exists" is true.

So, if one counterexample can be shown to this conditional, it follows that the instance of the biconditional schema is false, and therefore so is the whole schema stated as a universal.

So, it must be, for your claim to be correct, that there is no possible situation in which the Earth exists, but "the Earth exists" is not true.

Now, "the Earth exists" is a sentence. It follows that if there are no sentences, it cannot be true. So to find a situation in which it's not true, we suppose that the planet in this situaiton is as it was before the advent of language. Since there are no languages, there are no sentences, and a fortiori no true sentences. So, in this situation, "the Earth exists" is not true.

Yet ex hypothesi the Earth exists in this situation.

So, there is a situation in which the Earth exists, but "the Earth exists" is not true, viz. the situation I just presented to you.

So, your claim is false.

With regards to the last part, I simply ask: why would there need to be a mind to assume that something was meant? Either it would or would not be the case that something was meant. — Sapientia

Maybe something was meant, or maybe there wasn't something meant. But if we assume that something was meant (and that requires this assumption I referred to), we still do not have the means to say that what was meant at that time, exists as meaning today.

It meant something then, and unless that meaning has somehow changed, it would mean the same thing now. — Sapientia

Here's your mistake. The author meant something, not "it meant something". You've somehow transferred what the author meant, into the words, to say that the words meant something, and therefore still mean something.

It depends what is meant by having a meaning. I think it makes sense to say that it has a meaning, and that this is what the author meant. — Sapientia

I already went through this. The author meant to write down the words. The author also meant for those words to signify something. These are two distinct intentions of the author. They must be distinct so that we can account for the existence of misleading, and deception. The intention of the author is within the mind of the author at the time of the writing. How do you propose that the author's intention gets into the written words, to exist there as what the author meant, or meaning?

Did the kid speak? Does that count as speaking? What does the rulebook say? That is what matters, not what you or I think. If the kid spoke, then the rule was broken. — Sapientia

Exactly, these questions need to be answered before there's any truth about whether or not the kid broke the rule. Who's going to answer those questions? If they are unanswerable, there is no truth. If there is no mind, they are unanswerable. Therefore without a mind there is no truth.

the Earth exists in this situation — The Great Whatever

How do I respond to this? By saying that the Earth exists in this situation or by saying that what you say is true? Can I say that the Earth exists in this situation but that what you say is false or that the Earth doesn't exist in this situation but that what you say is true? No, I can't.

Iff the Earth exists in this situation then the above sentence ("the Earth exists in this situation") is true. That's the biconditional.

What you've done is addressed this fallacious biconditional:

The Earth exists in this situation iff "the Earth exists" is true in this situation.

The way I see it, the mind is like a car you need to get from A to B. You need it to start the journey, but you don't depend upon it. You could get out and walk the rest of the way. The map is language, the territory is the world, and when the former rightly depicts the latter, then they correspond. And that correspondence is between statement and fact. That correspondence is what entails truth.

Interpretation isn't necessary. Interpretation won't determine whether the map rightly or wrongly depicts the territory. Interpretation is just what we do to try to figure things out, and the world doesn't care whether or not we figure things out. The world is unaffected. We care whether or not we figure things out.

Truth doesn't "become" an interpretation. The interpretation is what we judge to be true or false, what we categorise as such. Truth is distinguishable from interpretation, and transcends it.

Yes, we do deal with what we think exists, or is true, or is the case... but so what? What we think can be right or wrong. If what we think is right, and we express it as a statement, then it is true - even if nobody knows it to be true. Does there need to be a mind there, once it has been expressed as a statement, and is either true or false? No. It is like the car. It was needed to enable the thought and the expression of the thought in language, which therefore enables truth, but it is no longer needed. The one is independent from the other. We don't need to drive the rest of the way. Likewise with the mind.

A bunch of symbols on a piece of paper don't need an inherent interpretation, so whether they have one or not is beside the point. An inherent interpretation strikes me as an oxymoron, anyway. They just need to be such that if there were an interpretation, then it could be correct or incorrect.

But then - if we stop to think about it more carefully - all we really "know" is that these are the signs we interpret in such and such a way. So we can ascribe truth to that habit of interpretation. We can point to the robustness of a relation. But the territory itself stands beyond the map. And we might not really "know" it at all. It is only our particular habit of relation that is ever actually tested, and so has its "truth" demonstrated, by some act of interpretation. — apokrisis

No, we know that the author meant something with the symbols. That is at least possible, so, as a thought experiment, that's what we're assuming. That being the case, it wouldn't matter whether the meaning, i.e. what the author meant, is known. Nor would it matter whether or how they are interpreted.

Ascribing truth doesn't matter either, I'm afraid. Not in the context of this discussion. Ascribing truth doesn't entail truth. It entails nothing other than that truth has been ascribed. Correspondence between statement and reality entails truth. Ascribing it is just what we do when we think that something is true. You aren't talking about truth, you're talking about ascribing truth. You can conflate the two, but they're distinct.

So, there is a situation in which the Earth exists, but "the Earth exists" is not true, viz. the situation I just presented to you. — The Great Whatever

As Michael explained, the proper way to phrase this is that the statement today, "the Earth existed at that time", is true. But at that time, millions of years ago, the statement "the Earth exists" did not exist. So at that time, it was not the case that "the Earth exists" was not true, nor was it true, "the Earth exists" did not itself exist. So to speculate about whether or not "the Earth exists" was true at that time, is nonsense, because there was no such thing as "the Earth exists" at that time.

What you've done is addressed this fallacious biconditional: — Michael

A biconditional can't be fallacious.

The Earth exists in this situation iff "the Earth exists" is true in this situation. — Michael

But that is what the biconditional requires. Your 'iff' formula does not offer a material equivalence, but must be universally quantified to all possible situations, or else it has no force. To see why, note that the following biconditional, construed as a mere material equivalence:

Trump wins the 2016 election iff America exists

is true, since both sides of it are true. As a universally quantified statement, however, it's false, since we can conceive of a situation in which the truth values of the two arguments don't match.

So, in order for your claim to hold weight, it must be that in any situation, it must be that in that situation the Earth exists iff "the Earth exists" is true. Since as you admit, in the situation I outlined, the Earth exists, yet "the Earth exists" is not true, this falsifies your biconditional by showing a situation in which it doesn't hold.

Iff the Earth exists in this situation then that sentence of yours ("the Earth exists in this situation") is true. The biconditional is there. — Michael

But notice that wasn't what you were asked. It's true that "The Earth exists in this situation" is true and the Earth exists in this situation: but the question is not whether "The Earth exists in this situation" is true, but whether "the Earth exists" is true in this situation. Since there are no sentences in this situation, a fortiori it isn't.

In the situation I presented:

1) The Earth exists

2) It's not the case that "the Earth exists" is true, since there aren't any sentences.

Is it a mind dependent truth that truth is mind dependent? Say there were no minds, would truth therefore be mind-independent instead, or truth just wouldn't exist at all? If it didn't exist at all, wouldn't that therefore be a mind-independent truth ("truth does not exist at all", is true).

Anyway, what confuses me is that the "world-state/state-of-affairs" is itself linguistic. As in,

("The earth existed 1083987 years ago", is a statement. The earth existing 1083987 years ago is not a statement it's a state of affairs, but everything within these brackets is language).

Propositions are either true or false depending on whether they 'express' the state of affairs correctly. But what's actually being expressed? It seems like the state of affairs is just the proposition without quote marks. "Donald Trump is the president elect of USA" is a true statement. Why is it true? Because Donald Trump is the president elect of USA. The state of affairs here is just the propisition but without quote marks.

So what's going on here? Truth is when the quote marks around a proposition can be removed and nobody objects to the state of affairs being expressed that way? I say "expressed" because we express propisitions sure, but the state of affairs is also expressed, it's still linguistic, but it's being expressed in a way that doesn't bring attention to that it itself being expressed (whereas a proposition does). It's an expression which doesn't indicate it's own nature as an expression.

The state of affairs is just a particular way of speaking?

You might object that the expression of the state of affairs (Donald Trump being president elect, without quotes) matches up to something beyond language, it isn't literally the world being expressed. But that would make it a propisition. Donald Trump being president elect is not a propisition. The state of affairs doesn't correspond with anything, it is itself that which our propositions correspond to.

Now, "the Earth exists" is a sentence. It follows that if there are no sentences, it cannot be true. So to find a situation in which it's not true, we suppose that the planet in this situaiton is as it was before thre advent of language. Since there are no languages, there are no sentences, and a fortiori no true sentences. So, in this situation, "the Earth exists" is not true. — The Great Whatever

I don't think it would be correct to say "the earth exists" is not true. Because a non existent proposition can't have a truth value. It's more like, "so, in this situation, "the earth exists" doesn't exist." There can't be a world with no propositions and also false propositions.

I see what you're saying, but the sentence not existing isn't crucial to the example. If we need to complicate it we can to make the same point, but where the sentence exists but is false (in virtue of meaning in that situation the opposite of what it means here). We can go there if needed, but Michael is disagreeing on a far more fundamental point, so I'd like to see what he has to say about that first.

But what's probably mind-dependent is whether something is a sentence, or whether a sentence expresses a certain proposition. So, if you were to define a notion of sentence truth, it would be mind-dependent whether a sentence is true, in virtue of its being mind-dependent what proposition it expressed. — The Great Whatever

Yea. But there's another category of objects: abstract ones. Numbers are abstract objects, not mental objects. That distinction is supposed to express the otherness of such entities. But maybe the assumption is that minds reside in skulls. My mind is separate from yours, so the number seven transcends both our skulls.

A proposition, being an abstract object, doesn't need to be expressed.

We can't transcend our epistemic conditions to inspect the world as it actually is. — apokrisis

We wouldn't need to.

I transcended your epistemic conditions, Sapientia. I discovered that you're a lot better off than you think you are.

What I am saying is that whether something is a sentence, and whether it expresses a proposition, and if so what proposition it expresses, are dependent on linguistic systems which in turn probably can't be maintained absent minds, at least as things stand now, and so they are in that sense mind-dependent. Propositions themselves, as I said, are not.

I agree.

Don't you think that we mostly assume that there is some kind of "truth" which is beyond our interpretations? So despite the way we interpret things, we assume that there is a truth of the matter, which our interpretations cannot grasp the entirety of. And as much as we might use 'truth" to refer to consistency in our interpretations, between multiple individuals, we still assume a 'truth' which is beyond this, standing in relation to the territory itself. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well, I for one, do. (If that wasn't already as clear as day). And I think that most others do as well. It's only when these philosophers come along that things get twisted and warped out of proportion.

I transcended your epistemic conditions, Sapientia. I discovered that you're a lot better off than you think you are. — Mongrel

Sweet. 8-)

Yet we don't just invent things to say, out of nowhere, for maintaining them in a linguistic system. We also discover reasons to invent and say them. Perhaps in some sense statements exist as reasons to say them, regardless of whether they are ever said or maintained by minds. Likewise their truths might exist as certain relations to what they refer to, regardless of whether minds discover them.

I'll explain it in more detail if you need me to but the nutshell version is that truth is a judgment that individuals make about the relationship between a proposition and other things (such as states of affairs if the individual is using correspondence theory). — Terrapin Station

There's nothing stopping you from defining it that way, but that isn't what is typically meant.

Truth isn't a judgement, it's a property. We judge propositions as either having or not having this property. The judgement is just that: a judgement.

Yes I'd agree that calling DNA a "language" is a more of metaphorical projection than anything else.

The map is language, the territory is the world, and when the former rightly depicts the latter, then they correspond. — Sapientia

You are asserting naive realism and ignoring the subtleties of my actual argument. But never mind.

Interpretation won't determine whether the map rightly or wrongly depicts the territory. — Sapientia

It doesn't need to. In the semiotic model of truth, a habit of interpretance is concerned with establishing a reliable system of signs. So I can look at a thermometer and see that it reads 14 degrees C. That is a measurement which tells me "the truth" of "the weather".

So as I say, it is about the wholeness of a triadic relation. You can't make sense of any one part in isolation.

The usual approaches to truth are dydaic or dualistic. That is why they founder. There is the mind and there is the world. Somehow they seem to connect, but no one can explain the mystery of how.

Semiotics replaces that mind~world dualism with a symbol~world relation. And the sign is what mediates in being Janus faced. It can have a foot in both camps in being both physical and mental, syntactical and semantic.

That's the point about sentences expressing propositions.

One could take the view that p is true even if p is never said (or is even unsayable?). Semantics can be taken to have its own mentalistic, reified, Platonic existence that transcends any actual saying and acting upon a belief. But that kind of dualistic divide offers no way of then reconnecting meaning to the world.

Yet it is just as much a problem to say some physical pattern carries its meaning or interpretation inherently. We can imagine the infinite number of randomly typing monkeys who cannot help but bash out every possible true statement without ever a hint of understanding. So siding with the physicality of the signs cannot help either.

That is why you have to understand what is going on as a complete relation. And a counter-intuitive outcome of that is that efficient mapping is deliberately unrealistic. The system of signs that makes a habit of interpretance most effective is the one that reduces the physical "truth" of the world to the barest play of symbols. A good map is flat and uncluttered with just a few sharp indicative marks. It leaves out everything that can be left out. It is meaningful to the degree that it suppresses information about reality - the degree to which it filters signal from noise.

That is why propositions have the binary form of being true/false. Give the relevant box a tick or a cross.

Naive realism expects the opposite. The map corresponds to the world as indeed a "mapping" - a re-presentation of what actually exists out there.

But maps are a reduction of reality to what is understood as meaningful in terms of certain expectable signs. So truth judgments track measurements, not existence. The less we actually need to concern ourselves with the messy actuality, the "truthier" our conceptions become.

Again that is why binary tick-box propositional logic is so highly valued. It stands as the ultimate limit of this desire to detach from the physics and live in a self-made realm of sign. We are telling the world, just nod yes or no to our question, we can take it from there.

If what we think is right, and we express it as a statement, then it is true - even if nobody knows it to be true. — Sapientia

Yep. The infinite typing monkeys theory of truth. It sounds kind of plausible until you really start to think about it.

A bunch of symbols on a piece of paper don't need an inherent interpretation, so whether they have one or not is beside the point. An inherent interpretation strikes me as an oxymoron, anyway. They just need to be such that if there were an interpretation, then it could be correct or incorrect. — Sapientia

Yes. But in the usual course of things (barring these rogue monkey infinite typing pools), a bunch of symbols only appears in the physical world when there is someone with an intent to state something meaningful.

Again, one could imagine that occasionally a rock face would wear in such a way that some moving poem or grave epitaph might just appear. But really, the infinite unlikelihood of such a physical act is evidence that all such physical manifestations are the product of some mind (or system of interpretance that employs signs).

No, we know that the author meant something with the symbols. That is at least possible, so, as a thought experiment, that's what we're assuming. That being the case, it wouldn't matter whether the meaning, i.e. what the author meant, is known. Nor would it matter whether or how they are interpreted. — Sapientia

What do you mean? The author at least has to "know" what he meant. He would have to understand himself. And it is he who can't in fact transcend what is only a reasonable-seeming structure of belief.

So you are focusing again on transmissible signs - words that get spoken or written. But words are still signs when they are thought.

Ascribing truth doesn't entail truth. — Sapientia

But that is merely to re-assert naive realism. You are claiming there is the claim, and then the proof of the claim, and then beyond that, the claim's truth. You want to put truth out there in the world with all the physics.

That doesn't work, which is why naive realists usually wind up talking Platonically about p being true as if propositions exist as abstract objects.

So again, the pragmatic/semiotic approach to truth instead proceeds by making reasonable hypotheses and then testing them in terms of acts of measurement. We form signs of what to expect if some idea is indeed "true".

And that approach to truth then understands that the ascriptions are essentially self-interested. Propositions are intrinsically an expression of some grounding purpose. And that also means an indifference to "physical reality" gets built in. It is a feature rather than a bug.

Success is always being able to filter signal from noise in terms of selfish interest.

Is the state of affairs anything other than the sum total of all the propositions the linguistic community hold to be true?

What actuay is the "state-of-affairs" that our propositions correspond with? Does correspondence even make sense? As if our propositions fly out of our mouths into the world and try and match themselves to how the world is, and get imbued with the property of truth if they match the world correctly, or false if they don't?

The proposition doesn't actually do this, I mean the whole notion of reference is kind of nonsensical. Like our mouth is a bow which fires out words like arrows which fly around the world and hit things. "Eiffel Tower" refers to the Eiffel Tower in France, but my words don't fly there and highlight the tower in order to gain it's meaning.

I think what's happening with propositions is they don't *themsves* correspond with the world/state-of-affairs. Rather it's us humans which decide that the proposition is a correct way of "expressing the world." A community of language users come together and form a consensus of the state of affairs, eg that the Eiffel Tower is in France. The proposition that, "the Eiffel Tower is in France" is then judged to be correct/true because when the quotes are removed it becomes the state of affairs which the community of language users have agreed upon (the Eiffel Tower is in France). When the quotes around "the Eiffel Tower is in Antarctica" is removed, this state of affairs is not something which the language community has agreed upon so it's then deemed to be false.

If we understand truth to work like this then we don't need to think of reference as our words matching themselves in some unexplained manner with the external world, like arrows hitting heir targets.

One other thought. My case has already been tested and demonstrated in the field.

Back in the 1970s, computer scientists hope to build intelligent machines using symbol processing. Recreate the syntax and the semantics would surely follow. We know what a dismal dualistic failure that exercise was.

But these days any realistic approach to machine intelligence - such as forward modelling or Baysesian neural nets - is an attempt to replicate a semiotic modelling relation.

So a particular theory of truth has been tried and tested. We are going with the one that works.

But whereas a statement is what it is in virtue of expressing a propositional content which, in turn, is what it is in virtue of being inferentially related to other such contents, DNA is not. — Theorem

But the information content of DNA can't be anything other than a proposition, whose truth content in objectively measured by comparison with variants of that proposition.

And all this without a mind.

The property only obtains as a judgment.

If we understand truth to work like this then we don't need to think of reference as our words matching themselves in some unexplained manner with the external world, like arrows hitting heir targets. — Dukkha

Right! That is roughly the difference between 'coherence' and 'correspondence' in respect of truth-values.

Correspondence sounds like common sense, until you ask the question, what corresponds to what? How do words 'correspond' with 'states'? And also, how could you validate such correspondence?

According to this theory (correspondence), truth consists in the agreement of our thought with reality. This view ... seems to conform rather closely to our ordinary common sense usage when we speak of truth. The flaws in the definition arise when we ask what is meant by "agreement" or "correspondence" of ideas and objects, beliefs and facts, thought and reality. In order to test the truth of an idea or belief we must presumably compare it with the reality in some sense.
1- In order to make the comparison, we must know what it is that we are comparing, namely, the belief on the one hand and the reality on the other. But if we already know the reality, why do we need to make a comparison? And if we don't know the reality, how can we make a comparison?

2- The making of the comparison is itself a fact about which we have a belief. We have to believe that the belief about the comparison is true. How do we know that our belief in this agreement is "true"? This leads to an infinite regress, leaving us with no assurance of true belief.

Randall, J. & Buchler, J.; Philosophy: An Introduction. p133

But notice that wasn't what you were asked. It's true that "The Earth exists in this situation" is true and the Earth exists in this situation: but the question is not whether "The Earth exists in this situation" is true, but whether "the Earth exists" is true in this situation. Since there are no sentences in this situation, a fortiori it isn't.

In the situation I presented:

1) The Earth exists

2) It's not the case that "the Earth exists" is true, since there aren't any sentences. — The Great Whatever

I'm not saying that the Earth exists in this situation iff "the Earth exists" is true in this situation. That's a fallacious bi-conditional, as I said. What I'm saying is that the Earth exists in this situation iff "the Earth exists in this situation" is true.

So it doesn't matter if you say that the Earth exists in this situation or if you say that it is true that the Earth exists in this situation or if I say that it is true that the Earth exists in this situation and you say that what I'm saying is true or if you say that "the Earth exists in this situation" is true. It's all the same thing.

And you still haven't clarified how I'm to respond to you. Do I have to say that the Earth exists in this situation or do I have to say that your claim is true? Can I do one but not the other?

Your reply doesn't make sense to me. There's no such thing as a fallacious biconditional. Your proposed biconditional truth is also not what's at issue, as I explained.