I found Putnam's view less that convincing. But I enjoyed that Manzotti read. Yes, that's where my thoughts are leading. It idea that mind is an interaction with the world appears not unreasonable.

In the context of this thread, having such-and-such a belief becomes having such-and-such an approach to the world. In philosophical jargon, beliefs are doxastic shorthand to explain actions.

A work in progress, of course.

It could be better put into this simpler form:

If it is a consequence of natural law that all swans must be white, then all observed swans will be white. — Janus


But all this is deduction, not induction, as I was trying to point out. — charleton

That's just what induction is though; the assumption that things will be as they have been observed to be, and the underlying assumption is that there is a lawlike regularity in nature that determines that such invariances will obtain. Laws could be deterministic or statistically probablistic; it doesn't matter, the point is that invariance is assured if there are such laws; and if we don't presume such laws, then we have no principle to guide our investigations.

How do I define truth. That you still ask that question is curious.

You, I and whoever else is reading this are most probably competent users of English. As such we show that we can use "...is true" correctly. Now providing a definition is providing synonyms, and hence leads to circularity - words defining more words.

You might recall Wittgenstein mentioning that the meaning of a term is its use?

Pragmatism is a theory of justified belief — apokrisis

It follows that pragmatism is not a theory of truth, although of course it re-defines the word "truth" to its own ends. Not being a theory of truth, it is also not a theory of justified true belief - not a theory of knowledge. Hence your

Truth is what we believe in the long run following a process of reasoned inquiry. — apokrisis

Well, no, it isn't. Truth is quite distinct from belief. Pragmatism leaves truth unaddressed.

But how do we get from that truth condition to a belief that is in fact justified and therefore true? — apokrisis

Being justified does not make a proposition true. This is a fine example of the sort of confusion that enters into the discussion when you change the meaning of the word "true". Justification leads to belief, not to truth.

Pragmatism, together with other substantive theories such as coherence and foundationalism, offer neat ways of justifying our beliefs. But they do not explain what truth is. That's right - I am saying that pragmatism is a good thing. But not as an explanation of truth.

Subject/object

I'm not too sure what objective truth is. Are there subjective truths, to oppose them? And if so, are they amenable to the same pragmatic analysis? Or are there subjective truths but no objective truths? — Banno

If you think I am not offering a theory of truth, how could I possibly answer that? So evidently - despite what you just said - you agree that I'm offering a theory of truth. — apokrisis

There is also the possibility that the distinction between objective and subjective, and pragmatism, are incoherent. The issue here is that despite rejecting the notion of truth, you continue to speak of objective truth.

Grounds for belief

...explain the grounds why one would assent to such a statement as if there were an unassailable fact. — apokrisis

One can assent to whatever one likes. The question is how reasonable that assent is.

What would be wrong would be to assert that there is only one method that can be used to decide. As if the way one decided the height of the Eiffel Tower were the same as the way one decides the declaration of human rights or that one loves one's partner. Pragmatism does not answer all such questions.

The Eiffel Tower
Still unanswered. Is the tower 324m tall, give or take a bit?

I say that it is, and further that it is true that the tower is 324m tall.

But you can't. All you can do is say that you believe that it is 324m tall.

It's a failure to commit on your part.

For fun, as you won't ever set out a counter position when making your scoffing noises about mine, let's take this profile statement you make.

Statements are combinations of nouns and verbs and such like; Some statements are either true or false, and we can call these propositions. So, "The present king of France is bald" is a statement, but not a proposition.

Beliefs range over propositions. (arguably, they might be made to range over statements: Fred believes the present king of France is bald.)

Beliefs set out a relation of a particular sort between an agent and a proposition.

This relation is such that if the agent acts in some way then there is a belief and a desire that together are sufficient to explain the agent's action. Banno wants water; he believes he can pour a glass from the tap; so he goes to the tap to pour a glass of water.

The logical problem here, the philosophical interesting side issue, is that beliefs overdetermine our actions. There are other beliefs and desires that could explain my going to the tap.
______________

We know some statement when at the least we believe it, it fits in with our other beliefs, and when it is true.

The "fits in with other beliefs" is a first approximation for a justification. Something stronger is needed, but material implication will not do.

Discard Gettier. The definition is not hard-and-fast.

It does not make sense to ask if we know X to be true; that's exactly the same as asking if we know X. The "we only know it if it is true" bit is only there because we can't know things that are false.

If you cannot provide a justification, that is, if you cannot provide other beliefs with which a given statement coheres, then you cannot be said to know it.

A belief that is not subject to doubt is a certainty.

Now let's analyse and see how different it really is from what I would say.

Statements are combinations of nouns and verbs and such like; Some statements are either true or false, and we can call these propositions. So, "The present king of France is bald" is a statement, but not a proposition.

As I understand the distinction you want to make, it seems to be that only a statement that is both crisply definite and an actual possibility is a truth-apt proposition. The semantics have to have a real world basis. There must be here an actual present king of France, and baldness must be an actual state a head could have.

I guess my question is then whether you are making this distinction simply in the spirit of "good practice", or whether you think it is a black and white distinction with no pragmatic wiggle room.

For instance, I would claim that there is always irreducible ambiguity or vagueness in any such proposition. How do we define "bald". That in itself is a standard Sorites paradox example.

And how do you handle fictional or modal possibilities. There are books or logical worlds where there are French kings that are variously bald or hirsute in ways that give propositional meaning to the statement.

So I can go along with this distinction as a target if what you are stressing is that a well-formed logical assertion is about some actually possible state of the world - because "truth" only really applies to the relation that we pragmatically have with a world. It becomes silly to even talk about truth or falsity except in a context where there is a world to determine that truth or falsity to the propositioner floating the proposition.

Beliefs range over propositions. (arguably, they might be made to range over statements: Fred believes the present king of France is bald.)

Beliefs set out a relation of a particular sort between an agent and a proposition.

This relation is such that if the agent acts in some way then there is a belief and a desire that together are sufficient to explain the agent's action. Banno wants water; he believes he can pour a glass from the tap; so he goes to the tap to pour a glass of water.

OK. The idea of beliefs now brings that pragmatic relation between a self and its world into focus. It highlights that there is the larger thing of a relation. There has to be a causal coupling such that beliefs drive actions, and then those actions feed back to impact the beliefs.

This stresses the embedded and ecological nature of the reasoning relation we have with the world against other possible approaches to truth. Understood this way, it just is pragmatism. Where it might fall short is that it doesn't seem to continue on to the semiotic consequences of a modelling relations view of the mind and what it can know of the world.

The semiotic view of course adds that the "mind" in fact only deals in signs of the world. The psychological goal is construct a self separate from the world. And so the world - as some set of physical energies - must be filtered in a way that transforms it into an Umwelt. It must be experienced in terms of a set of signs that are readable at the level of automatic habit. We don't have to think about an apple being red - even though redness is already a qualitative interpretation by the brain. We just "see" the apple as red. That is the Umwelt we experience - our map by which we navigate the territory.

Of course, this triadic semiotic view of our relation to the world is more complex. The usual way to frame things is dyadic and representational. There is just us (with our experiences) and the world that our sense-data are representing. However - for a theory of truth that aims to be realistic in terms of the actual psychological structure of human conception - we do need to follow through from simply asserting a practical embeddedness in the world to an understanding of the relation that is fully (bio)semiotic.

But in general, I take this to state that - contra to idealist theories which might want to found themselves on impractical doubts about the world even being there - you are asserting that theories of truth start with the world already being in play. So hard dualism is out. Some kind of physicalism is the case. A psychological machinery of some kind is assumed to be involved in the whole affair.

I of course agree with that basic pragmatic stance. In the end, it is silly to doubt there is the world out there - in some sense. And so epistemology's job is to understand the more fundamental thing of the "modelling relation" that connects "minds" and "worlds".

However, the semiotic view says it would then be dangerously like naive realism to take the "agent" for granted in some fashion as a "real thing" - a fundamental and unanalysable bit of ontological furniture. The semiotic view is that the self emerges from the modelling as well - as the necessary distinction that is producing the counter-concept of "the world".

So Banno might want his drink of water. And his actions might achieve that as the drink is really there to be had. But a truly rigorous semiotic analysis would have a lot of questions about this reified "Banno". As well as about the "world" that this Banno reifies as some set of interpretable signage.

The logical problem here, the philosophical interesting side issue, is that beliefs overdetermine our actions. There are other beliefs and desires that could explain my going to the tap.

Hmm. Do you mean we put a narrative spin on the actions we find ourselves involved with? We can concoct any number of "reasonable" stories for why A led to B?

I think this again is just getting into the real world mechanics of cognition. The self that concocts such explanations is just that part of "us" that has the learnt and cultural skill of inductively framing hypotheses that are concrete in ways that make them testable. And then the actual holistic nature of forming intentions and making decisions defies complete capture by simple reductionist causal statements.

We want to say that A led to B as that is the "proper form" for analytic thinking. But the brain operates in a fashion that is more like Bayseian induction - holistically constraints-based processing. It doesn't have to do the one right thing. It just has to eliminate as many of the things that might go wrong as possible. So I can want to hit the tennis ball cleanly out of the centre of the racket to hit a spot two inches from the line. But all I can really do is limit the amount of miss-hit to an acceptable degree so that the ball winds up near enough to an aiming point to do the damage.

The shot is overdetermined in the sense that there is some general envelope of miss-hits that still do the job. And it is not a logical problem as a constraints-based logic says all you can aspire to do is limit the uncertainty of our actions in the world. Pragmatically, we show we already believe that to be the case by building in an error margin by aiming just inside the line rather than right at it.

And the same ought to be the case with any theory of propositional truths. A statement can't point straight at the facts. It can only constrain matters so that we minimise our uncertainty that "the truth" lies within the bounds we have picked out by our assertion. And it is not a problem as we can always tighten up the constraints if the accuracy seems an issue. We can measure things more closely and report on the results of that.

We know some statement when at the least we believe it, it fits in with our other beliefs, and when it is true.

The "fits in with other beliefs" is a first approximation for a justification. Something stronger is needed, but material implication will not do.

Right. So now we want a version of JTB. And the justification bit ought to involve generalised conceptual coherence, not just a representational correspondence based on particulars matched to particulars.

That is certainly my view, if so. That is holism at work. That is how a self or agent would emerge to be the stable centre of things. As Peirce said, you can doubt anything, but not everything at once. There is that backdrop ground of belief - those "propositional hinges" we've been talking about - which is necessary to the whole business.

But again, justified beliefs seem enough for a theory of truth. Truth - as some absolute transcendent reality - drops out of the picture because there is only, in the end, the relativity of a modelling relation. Absolute truth is replaced by minimal reason to be uncertain.

And semiotics would make an even stronger statement. Our experience of the world couldn't even be noumenal as that runs counter to the very logic of a modelling relation. A map mustn't be the territory - as how the hell are we going to fold up a landscape of mountains and rivers so that it fits neatly into our back pocket? We want to reduce our knowledge of the actual world to a system of easily navigated signs. And this crucially changes the very notion of what "truth" aspires to be about.

It does not make sense to ask if we know X to be true; that's exactly the same as asking if we know X. The "we only know it if it is true" bit is only there because we can't know things that are false.

This is where you are guilty of sleight of tongue I would say. You use "to know" in a naive realist sense that presumes the world to be some "state of affairs". The facts are just the facts. But they can never be that as to be meaningful, they must become interpreted signs. They are only facts in the sense of being already part of an ongoing habit of interpretance.

So yes, when we assert we know, we mean that our belief is really justified. The true bit does drop out as what we are speaking about is our confident certainty.

And your own earlier stab at coherence or holism seems to argue against you here. That says we can't "know things that are false" - but on the grounds of conceivability. Your over-determinism accepts we could have understood the world in many lights - depending on our intentions, even if those intentions were constrained by the "facts of the world" to which they then were exposed by acts of inquiry.

You can't have it both ways. If all we ever know is the result of pragmatic inquiry, then falsehood and truth both drop out due to generalised coherence - until there is some reason that we find our backgrounding state of belief to be inadequate for some reason and set about inquiring further.

There is no point talking about the truth of the thing-in-itself as truth, as a property, is a property of the modelling relation and not of the "world" - the world being just that aspect of the relation which we know in a background interpretive way, just as we also know about the "we" that is meant to be the agent, the self, that is the stable centre of all this knowledge business.

Externalism doesn't fly. Epistemology has to find its rigour in developing an internalist discourse that does the best possible job.

A belief that is not subject to doubt is a certainty.

Or near enough.

Well, summing up, I see a lot of pragmatism in your counter to idealism. Truth-telling doesn't even make sense without some world out there anchoring things.

Yet then this fails to continue on. Recognising that there is a modelling relation brings up the reality of the self that anchors the other side of the equation. And also, if there is a real world out there, it is not even in our interests to see it nakedly for what it is. We need to be able to look and see a world that has us in it. We need a world that is already transformed into a system of signs, an umwelt. Our perceiving of the world has to include the division that produces us as the "self" doing the perceiving. And that degree of meaning has to be built into the "simple facts" - like that the apple is "red".

So in my approach, a theory of truth has to fit with the facts of psychology. And if the psychological story is pretty complex, new and unfamilar, that's just how it is. It is still the foundation.

But your approach does still seem mired in a naive realism. It starts to make the pragmatic case against idealism. But then reverts to a naive realism framing just as soon as it has put a little distance from the foe. The world is some set of actual and definite facts. The mind just reflects that facticity in direct fashion - re-presenting the external in some internal theatre of private experience.

And then some kind of behaviourist epistemology becomes the "rigorous" way to deal with private experiences at a communal or philosophy of language level. We can speak objectively about how people act. We can assert propositions and use behaviour as evidence that there is generalised coherent agreement among a community about the way the world truly is. Or at least the degree to which a belief is not being doubted.

So yeah, I'm still feeling your account falls way short because it targets a level of objectivity that is not just functionally impossible, but not even in fact functional. It is an account that by-passes the central psychological realisation that we don't even want to see the world as it really is, but the world that has us in it, and so the world that is already transformed into a "private"* set of meanings.

* The meanings aren't literally private of course as they are going to be biologically shared across a species with a common neuro-evolutionary heritage, as well as being shared across humans by a culture of linguistically structured conception. So we don't wind up back in solipsistic territory. As said, the "self" is also recognised as part of the "truth-producing" business here.

Ah. Avoid Banno's posts by setting up a straw Banno.

That's just what induction is though; the assumption that things will be as they have been observed to be, and the underlying assumption is that there is a lawlike regularity in nature that determines that such invariances will obtain. — Janus

I don't so much disagree with this as find it off target.

Seeing the world as consistent already requires a certain selectiveness; an awareness of the consistencies and a blindness to the inconsistencies. the world changes from day to day, but we choose certain patterns out of the chaos.

My position is that we do not believe that there are patterns in reality because we apply an inductive method.

But rather that we see and become certain of the patterns themselves.

And induction was made up by philosophers as an excuse for that certainty, but that it doesn't really work.

The Eiffel Tower
Still unanswered. Is the tower 324m tall, give or take a bit?

I say that it is, and further that it is true that the tower is 324m tall.

But you can't. All you can do is say that you believe that it is 324m tall.

It's a failure to commit on your part. — Banno

Again, what do you mean by "true"? You want to make a naive realist point without having to defend doing that. So that is the dodge I always pull you up on.

I am happy to commit to the justification of belief in pragmatic fashion. Truth is just another way of saying I can show I have no good reason to doubt.

If you want to defend your own naive realist framing, get on with it. Quit bottling the challenge. :)

But for fun, do you believe the tower is 324m tall yourself? Just tell me yes or no! And how.

And when during the day is it so exactly 324m tall? Are we now talking about the hot Eiffel tower that is 15cm taller in the heat of the midday sun, or the one that is 15cm shorter when night falls and its cools down?

Do we in fact now have two Eiffel towers. Or a vast ensemble - one for every nanometre of variation.

Oh goodness, how do we measure the height as it expands/contracts unevenly as the sun hits only one side. It can bend 18cm away from the sun. So which is its true height now - the actual distance to the ground or the full distance if it were standing up straight?

Of course, Banno the tourist guide doesn't need to care. He just reads his facts off Wiki. But Banno the scientist might want to rely on some more careful process of inquiry. A hand-waving approach always makes for poor philosophy.

Avoid Banno's posts by setting up a straw Banno. — Banno

???

Straw Banno writes your profile?

You, I and whoever else is reading this are most probably competent users of English. As such we show that we can use "...is true" correctly. Now providing a definition is providing synonyms, and hence leads to circularity - words defining more words. — Banno

So I have to provide definitions and you get to hide behind commonsense usage?

Seems legit. :)

It follows that pragmatism is not a theory of truth, although of course it re-defines the word "truth" to its own ends. — Banno

Again, how could that be the case in your world of no definitions?

Some modicum of consistency please. If it works for pragmatists to have adopted their behaviouristic "redefinition" as a community, then it works for them. You yourself have taken away your own grounds to criticise.

Sometimes I really can't believe your apparent lack of embarrassment as you loudly scrape the bottoms of those barrels.

Well, no, it isn't. Truth is quite distinct from belief. Pragmatism leaves truth unaddressed. — Banno

It treats it as the limit of inquiry. That might be a different answer to the one you have in mind - not that you could have a definition in mind! - but it is still the issue being addressed.

Justification leads to belief, not to truth. — Banno

As you seemed to want to believe, justified belief leads to a generalised coherence. Things become "true" as they become so fundamental in that fashion.

This is the difficulty of arguing against you. You do a better job of constantly contradicting yourself. You are revealing what happens when you eschew the goal of a unitary metaphysics (well, at least a unitary view that is slightly more complex than naive realism). You praise generalised coherence. But your epistemology sadly lacks that very advantage.

Pragmatism, together with other substantive theories such as coherence and foundationalism, offer neat ways of justifying our beliefs. But they do not explain what truth is. That's right - I am saying that pragmatism is a good thing. But not as an explanation of truth. — Banno

So again, what is this "truth" you keep referring to? Apart from a naive realism about the world being a collection of facts.

Sure, you will say it is something unanalysably fundamental. And why it is sayable - you keep mentioning it - it is also to be consigned to the metaphysically unspeakable. You mustn't explain it.

But bullshit is a pretty obvious thing to. It's obvious when someone is bullshitting their way through a discussion.

The issue here is that despite rejecting the notion of truth, you continue to speak of objective truth. — Banno

I can't both redefine truth and reject truth. Especially when you are saying truth is undefinable. So you are both misrepresenting me and also talking illogical bollocks again.

I can speak of objective truth as a limit. And that is what I did.

If you have a counter argument, great, that is what you then tap out into a wee post in reply. But if your only defence is to lie about things I've just said, that makes your position truly hopeless.

What would be wrong would be to assert that there is only one method that can be used to decide. As if the way one decided the height of the Eiffel Tower were the same as the way one decides the declaration of human rights or that one loves one's partner. Pragmatism does not answer all such questions. — Banno

Again, pragmatism can still have the aim of covering all the epistemic ground between the opposing limits of the objective and the subjective.

So it starts with rejecting both naive realism and idealism. But then accepts that knowledge is indeed framed by those two complementary epistemic limits.

And it is engaged with the challenge of finding an epistemic method which does span the whole gamut.

So while you may take a view that it fails in its goals (having told me you have deliberately read no Peirce at all), at least there is nothing wrong in the way it sets out its grand metaphysical project.

I mean what do you think "a theory of truth" would be? A whole bunch of different theories, depending on whether we are talking of towers, politics or partners?

While you are carefully avoiding the challenge of defining truth, you certainly seem to be claiming that there is some unified theory of truth to be had.

So once again, your story is full of holes and self-contradictions. A very poor effort when all is said and done.

...bear in mind that you seem to be sometimes adding the clause "give or take a bit", and so making a probabilistic statement about the Eiffel Tower. Your claims about there being "a truth" are couched in the language of an inductive inference.

So again, there is an internal inconsistency you need to address.

If you are happy with the fundamentally probabilistic metaphysics of pragmatism, then you ought to come clean and say so. A degree of ambiguity or uncertainty is part and parcel of any constraints-based ontology. It is not a problem for my approach, and indeed its an epistemic advantage.

Among other things, it gives an even deeper justification for induction as a method. We have no choice but to talk about the generality of an average, a mean, that is our reasonable leap beyond any available evidence.

We never see "the average" in observing a probabilistic world. We only see a variety of particular instances when we get out and measure. And yet we happily treat the average as the reality, the truth. You are doing that too - and perhaps you have dropped mention of the "give or take a bit" for that reason?

It reveals that scratch a nominalist and you find a realist. Generality is not just an idea, an arbitrary product of inductive argument, but a real fact of the world. Apparently. :)

Just reading your post. Saw this:

So I have to provide definitions and you get to hide behind commonsense usage? — apokrisis

X-)

No, you re most welcome to use common sense too, if you like.

Oh how I wept with laughter at such wit.

The real joke is instead how you keep claiming to want a debate before bottling it yet again.

I’m having lunch with the love of My life at a little Italian place down the road. Sausages and trimmings. Yum.


I will get back to your bottle later.

LOL. Love it when you resort to explaining how low we are in your list of priorities. Gotta keep a grip on the situation, heh?

Well, you did say I needed to get a life. So, did you do anything interesting today?

Again, what do you mean by "true"? — apokrisis

That you still ask that question is curious.

You, I and whoever else is reading this are most probably competent users of English. As such we show that we can use "...is true" correctly. Now providing a definition is providing synonyms, and hence leads to circularity - words defining more words.

You might recall Wittgenstein mentioning that the meaning of a term is its use? — Banno

do you believe the tower is 324m tall yourself? — apokrisis

Yes; let's say, for the sake of argument, 324m plus or minus a metre. That ought to account for the possible errors you mention.

And I will add: it is true that the Eiffel Tower is 324m tall, give or take a metre.

So, can we agree on this?

No, because you can say it is 324m tall, but weirdly not that it is true that it is 324m tall.

Again, how could that be the case in your world of no definitions? — apokrisis

A world without definitions is not a world without meaning.

Your pragmatism changes the meaning of "...is true" to suit itself. A fair move, so long as you recognise that you are no longer talking about what other folk mean by "...is true".

As you seemed to want to believe, justified belief leads to a generalised coherence. Things become "true" as they become so fundamental in that fashion. — apokrisis

No; although they might be justified.

Again, the issue is that your probabilistic, limited definition of truth is not what we mean by truth. It does not apply to our relationships with our partners and friends; to the rules of the road; to art; to music.

My position is that we do not believe that there are patterns in reality because we apply an inductive method.

But rather that we see and become certain of the patterns themselves. — Banno

That's right; we see the patterns and make the abductive/ inductive inferences to laws and forces that explain the patterns. 'Abduction' and 'induction' are just names for two discernibly different kinds of thinking that we do. It is the system of abductively and inductively inferred different forces and laws, and the way they cohere that constitutes the body of discourse and discipline we call science.

I can't both redefine truth and reject truth. — apokrisis

Yes, you can - and do. You reject the common notion of truth, and re-define the word "truth".

And them you fail to acknowledge the obvious consequences.

we see the patterns and make the abductive/ inductive inferences to laws — Janus

And that is what I am objecting to - the notion that there is something called 'induction" that is the same in all cases.

It's not a method; its not algorithmic. It's just seeing the pattern.

It's just seeing the pattern. — Banno

I think it's more than that. It is seeing the patterns and inferring their relations to other patterns in terms of universally active laws (laws which may be thought to be either deterministic or probabilistic; supernatural or natural, transcendental or immanent; it doesn't matter in regard to the genesis of abductive and inductive thinking).

But for fun, do you believe the tower is 324m tall yourself? Just tell me yes or no! And how.

And when during the day is it so exactly 324m tall? Are we now talking about the hot Eiffel tower that is 15cm taller in the heat of the midday sun, or the one that is 15cm shorter when night falls and its cools down?

Do we in fact now have two Eiffel towers. Or a vast ensemble - one for every nanometre of variation.

Oh goodness, how do we measure the height as it expands/contracts unevenly as the sun hits only one side. It can bend 18cm away from the sun. So which is its true height now - the actual distance to the ground or the full distance if it were standing up straight?

Of course, Banno the tourist guide doesn't need to care. He just reads his facts off Wiki. But Banno the scientist might want to rely on some more careful process of inquiry. A hand-waving approach always makes for poor philosophy. — apokrisis

Apo's having a field day with Banno. Made me giggle.

It's not a method; its not algorithmic. It's just seeing the pattern. — Banno

What you're saying, probably without realizing it, is that pattern recognition is an entirely random process.

My position is that we do not believe that there are patterns in reality because we apply an inductive method.

But rather that we see and become certain of the patterns themselves. — Banno

So we see, or we used to see, a pattern of birds of a feather - a white feather - with long necks, webbed feet and quite big, and come up with a word 'swan'. I suppose the word might have an ostensive definition in the first instance(s), "a bird like that one", but pedantic classificationists eventually come up with a specification of 'likeness' that constitutes the natural kind -'swan', a definition.

"A (adult) swan is a big white bird with a long neck."

From which we can deduce, 'All (adult) swans are white'. And that is a necessary truth, according to the definition.

Then captain Cook, or whoever it was, rocks up with stories about big black birds with long necks that look remarkably similar to swans, except for the colour. And it seems to me we have a choice; either we can invent a new word, 'naws', to signify these strange colour-inverted creatures, or we can change (widen) the definition to include them as swans.

But if this is a true account of how it goes, then on the one side the claim that all swans are white is not an induction, but says nothing about what Captain Cook might or might not find on his travels, and on the other, neither is it an empirical fact that what he found were black swans. The truth of the matter depends on how we choose to use words. We decided to call them swans, and changed the meaning of the word. The decision confers certainty either (contradictory) way, and the facts (of there being long-necked black birds) are not decisive after all.

And does the Eiffel tower not have foundations, too?

Again, the issue is that your probabilistic, limited definition of truth is not what we mean by truth. It does not apply to our relationships with our partners and friends; to the rules of the road; to art; to music. — Banno

C'mon Banno. This is laughably awful.

Remember, it is me who is putting forward a "theory of truth" that explains why language games have this kind of pragmatic looseness. I am arguing against strict definitions on the semiotic grounds that words can only constrain semantics in useful, purpose-serving fashion. There is always then a creatively open freedom when it comes to interpretation, coupled to the principle of indifference that allows us to limit the interpretive freedom on the grounds that it ain't being helpful.

So you are trying to hide behind precisely the thing that my semiotic approach explains.

It's not a method; its not algorithmic. It's just seeing the pattern. — Banno

Yep. And thank goodness our brains can work like that. There is a natural way to reason, as evolution shows.

The question is why for a minute would you expect actual humans to be algorithmic?

Again you are showing that there is just no joined-up, consistent position you are defending in this thread.

One minute, you are all about the absolute certainty of grammars, heights and the rules of chess. The next you are all about the mysterious truths of love, art and breakfast. You claim you yearn for the discipline of a formal debate and yet call even your own profile post a "straw man".

You chop and change for rhetorical purposes and oddly expect no-one to notice. Curious.

I am arguing against strict definitions on the semiotic grounds that words can only constrain semantics in useful, purpose-serving fashion. — apokrisis

Here is part of your writing that makes sense; although written it in such a constipated fashion. Yes, we need only define words so far as is needed for the task at hand.

One does not need to take on the whole pragmatic doctrine for this.

The truth of the matter depends on how we choose to use words. — unenlightened

Yes - exactly right. So the anatomy of the black bird was sufficiently similar to the white bird called "swan" for that word to be used in the new case. Those similarities in anatomy are real, if not decisive.

If you like, we can take the foundations into account in our measurement. And sure, the units we use are conventional. We can set up conventions for the measurement of the height of the tower. HTe conventions are part of our language, not part of the tower.

What Apo's position leads to, although he will not say it, is the conclusion that the tower has no height apart from the measurement.

I don't agree with that. The tower has a specifiable height. To say otherwise is to fail to have language engage with the world.

OK, so Newton saw the patterns of apples falling and of planetary motion, and brought the two together in one set of equations. Wonderful stuff.

But that process did not involve induction.

Newton saw the patterns of apples falling and of planetary motion, and brought the two together in one set of equations. But that process did not involve induction. — Banno

Of course it did. The imaginative hypothesis that the two patterns are related by an unseen structuring principle or force (law or force of gravity) is abductive reasoning, and the thought that if this is true then the same invariant patterns will always be observed is inductive reasoning. According to inductive reasoning apples will always fall, and the motions of the planets will be predictable as long as the current balance of natural laws and forces holds..