No, you're missing the point. I asked what kind of conceptual work the qualifier 'objective' in 'objective truth' does, and you replied that it means that it must be open to public demonstration. But if that criteria is baked-in to the very idea of truth, then it seems to me you haven't answered my question, and the qualifier 'objective' still doesn't do anything. — StreetlightX

You are being very confrontational given that I was obviously being ironic.

My point was that in being "a public demonstration", this means that even empirically "objective" is really "subjective", the only difference being that the agreement expressed is collective.

This is of course standard pragmatism. But whatever.

So truth may have many modalities or multiple methods of inquiry. Truth really just describes our willingness to ascribe a state of certainty due to an act of interpretation properly carried out. — apokrisis

Yes, this is quite consonant with the pragmatist accounts of truth endorsed by Putnam or Wiggins (See David Wiggins, (2013) Truth, Pragmatism and Morality. Philosophy 88 (3) for a recent statement of this view by way of a commentary on Putnam's account of the objectivity of ethical judgments)

It is important, though, to stress that the concept of truth entails that the act of interpretation has indeed been properly carried out by the judging agent according to a standard that is immanent to the practice of the community of thinkers who share into her practical/rational form of life.

I get that. I was reading some Jung a while back and he was going on and on about some crap. As I read, it occurred to me that he was a product of his times. And then somewhat abruptly, Jung dropped out of his philosophizing and basically stated that he was a product of his times. Holy shit. He knew.

My fascination with culture and history is related to that... wanting to see myself by seeing how I'm a product of my time. Maybe you and I are fundamentally doing the same thing, just in different ways. — Mongrel

I got some mileage out of Jung back in the day. His ambivalent criticism of Ulysses definitely gave me the impression that he was of a different time than mine. I loved "whatever is unconscious is projected." So self-knowledge is a 'harmonic' assimilation of the "shadow" and the "anima," etc. Even alchemy can be read as an unwittingly coded fantasy of the self's drama. Feuerbach and Hegel come to mind. Anyway, I like that Jung confessed that he too sees through borrowed eyes.

I like the idea of looking into how one is a product of one's times. Yes, this and the way we are a product of our direct influences, aesthetic and intellectual. There's also the past personalities we've worn or were and still remember in a sort of Russian-doll gallery. I guess self-enlargement is a goal, too, so that one's history is a story of progress. (I like to study the unstable heroic dramas the self casts itself in, as an inescapable structure or archetype.)

Freudian typo. In the old days some especially wicked nights were lit by red bulbs.

My point was that in being "a public demonstration", this means that even empirically "objective" is really "subjective", the only difference being that the agreement expressed is collective. — apokrisis

I think such pragmatist accounts often encounter much resistance owing to the widespread tendency to understand "subjective" and "objective" to express contrary notions. See also David Wiggins, A Sensible Subjectivism? reprinted in his Needs, Value, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value, Third Edition OUP, 1998, for the argument that those two concepts register independent features of classes of human judgments.

Inasmuch as judgments of truth refer back to intersubjectively shared standards of assessment, and de facto grounds of agreement in human sensibility, they are subjective. Inasmuch as they issue from a fallible capacity to judge, and can be shown to be in error by those very same standards of assessment, they are objective.

I like that story. If he tells others, they might not exactly disbelieve him (though most would). There's also the problem of not being able to make use of it. We primarily want to control or benefit from things. If the hole-in-one cannot be achieved on demand on at least with regularity (every month, say), then it's going to be neglected for other options. It wins us or not as a tool.

Yeah, I'm old enough to remember those... or should I have said "old enough to have experienced and young enough to remember'?

I learned a thing or two then that wasn't on any page. I'm guessing you can relate. Yes, young enough to still remember. Life is more refined and predictable these days, which I suppose I must prefer. A dose of soma and a stop by the feelies would be fun though, once a week.

If only the neurophysiology could still handle it! :’(

I think my system could handle it, but what about this nicely organized life? You get a marriage organized, a career on track, and then the two key features of red nights are threats as much as promises. If I tumble out of grad school, I'm going to find me a red night. But I'd rather not tumble. "Lord, please let me conquer mathematics at the baller level. "

One wonders what kind of conceptual work the qualifier 'objective' in 'objective truth' does. Assuming that any other kind of 'truth' simply would not be truth, why not just... truth? — StreetlightX

Perhaps to distinguish between something like "light is faster than sound" and "liquorice is tasty". The former is said to be objectively true and the latter is said to be subjectively true.

I'm doing some work in philosophy of language so the implications for semantics of what we think about 'truth' have been bothering me. I've been reading some linguistics text-books to get the hang of what practical students of linguistics think. Many of the books are startlingly wedded to 'truth-conditional semantics', i.e. the notion that knowing the meaning of a sentence amounts to knowing its truth-conditions.

It's important to distinguish this from truth-values. We only need to know, on the truth-conditional theory, the conditions under which it would be 'true'.

Nevertheless, to a man (like me) who's spent most of a lifetime writing dialogue and fictional and factual prose, it seems profoundly mistaken. Its examples always stem from some attempted exchange of information, as if this were typical use of language, and whenever difficulties arise they are sloughed off from semantics to (linguistic) pragmatics. It exaggerates written as against spoken language. It lacks a coherent relation to the philosophy of action. It seems as if Wittgenstein and 'use as meaning' had never happened.

(The substantial other options for semantics as I read them are proof-theoretic semantics, i.e. inference as the basis of meaning, championed by Dummett...or to abandon the analytic approach and accept a form of Bakhtinian dialogism, i.e. all is dialogue and 'true' would be just one of many markers that interlocutors would have some sort of agreement or score-keeping about)

Be glad of comments.

I'm a bit of a semanticist, and my take on truth is the following, not representative of anyone else's.

Truth and falsity are just values distinct from one another, that can be represented however you like: classically, 1/0 or T/F. They have no significance beyond the fact that they are distinct from one another. Using this binary distinction, you can build a truth-conditional semantics (bracketing issues of non-classical truth values, truth value gaps, truth value gluts, fuzzy truth values, and so on).

A semantics for a language is just an abstract set of ideal rules that can be mathematically modeled for interpretation, much in the way that an artificial language can be semantically parsed or interpreted. In this state, it has no real-world application, but nevertheless various real world linguistic practices can be seen as implementing this abstract structure for certain ends, just as when one plays a game like chess, one employs a mathematically describable set of rules, but these rules themselves are not tied to the playing of any particular game, or the employment of any particular strategy. (And the semantics of natural language are far, far, far more complicated than any deliberately constructed game, just as a fact of nature and because, well, it's natural, not artificial, and so the rules manifest without stipulation, and so are never completely precise and never set in stone, always eluding complete formulation).

Truth and falsity simply function as binary values within this abstract set of rules. They do not have any pragmatic significance. Where they gain their significance is when you plug them into some linguistic practice that makes use of these binary values for various ends. So, for example, there is a presumption that one tells the truth, and so an assertive speech act in some sense privileges one value of this binary over the other, and makes it the goal of assertion. Within this pragmatic framework, these mere abstract binary values are imbued with useful sense inside of a linguistic community, and we allow ourselves to conduct our behavior meaningfully and systematically in such a way that the 'yes'/'no' difference gets involved in all sorts of intersecting conventional practices.

Semantically, truth is nothing but this binary opposition to falsity; in actual practice, it is nothing but what this binary opposition is put to use for in the employment of the language's abstract mechanics according to a certain way of speaking (just as two people can play chess with the same abstract rule set, but with different meta-game strategies, and even with entirely different goals in mind: one can still be playing a legal game of chess while trying to lose, for example, instead of trying to win; and trying to win is something like trying to tell the truth in this analogy).

In real life the abstract semantic system that governs linguistic usage doesn't float freely of course, but is always embedded in some pragmatic use of language. The point is, though, that any such use emergently manifests a regularity in semantic behavior that is in turn describable by such an abstract set of rules, and in particular making important use of a certain binary attaching to the semantic valuation of a privileged syntactic class of linguistic vehicles used for utterance: sentences. Thus, sentences have a truth value, they are either true or false (or rather, utterances of these given a context and appropriate parameters of evaluation are). And then we can imagine this abstract set of rules being applied to foreign uses, if we please.

Therefore to ask what truth and falsity are is just to ask for a description of the semantics of the language as a whole. When we do the work of semantics, we are already describing truth and falsity in so doing: there is nothing else to do once this work is finished. It is a semantic question, for linguistics, and not for philosophy (although what I have just told you is a philosophical, and not a linguistic, position). So to see how truth and falsity function in a current semantic theory, one need only learn that theory. In classical Montagovian semantics, they act as binary values that exhaust the domain of a fundamental semantic type: so-called type t. And semantically meaningful bits of languages are in turn compounded to create syntactic objects of a certain type, viz. sentences, which in turn have a truth value as their denotation. The theory shows how truth and falsity function, and is implemented once a pragmatics is given. To the extent that such a pragmatics combined with our semantics results in a realistic model of linguistic behavior, we have explained what it is that truth and falsity are.

Hence the charge that the Wittgensteinian maxim is ignored is misplaced: truth-conditional semantics does not in principle divorce meaning from use, in describing meanings as certain mathematical objects, because the whole point is that the use of language can be mathematically described in conjunction with a pragmatics. Semantics should no more be a philosophy of action, or provide one, than a rule book of chess should explain the optimal way for white to open. And to complain that a rule book of chess only mathematically defines well-formed games of chess according to legal moves of pieces, to say that it was inappropriate or mistaken because it did not tell you how the player is to supposed to win, or what strategies people typically use, is equally absurd.

Also, there is definitely, definitely truth in fiction; and aside from that, massive amounts of everyday use do deal with the exchange of information,and to pretend otherwise seems disingenuous. And finally, even where it does not, the purposes of the conversation use truth-conditional vehicles to make their point, and the point they are trying to make would not make sense if this were not so. If I don't understand the conditions under which 'you look nice today' is literally true, I cannot make sense of how a sarcastic utterance of this same sentence intends to subvert those conditions.

(The substantial other options for semantics as I read them are proof-theoretic semantics, i.e. inference as the basis of meaning, championed by Dummett...or to abandon the analytic approach and accept a form of Bakhtinian dialogism, i.e. all is dialogue and 'true' would be just one of many markers that interlocutors would have some sort of agreement or score-keeping about) — mcdoodle

I think truth-conditional semantics exhibit some of the flaws that you notice owing possibly to misguided attempts by their advocates to construe them a means to factor apart purely semantic representational functions from the pragmatic features of language. Truth-conditional theories of meaning need not be construed in this peculiar reductive analytic way, and, I think, some deflationary theories of truth such as the so called identity theory of truth espoused by John McDowell and Jennifer Hornsby, and relied on by Sebastian Rödl (in his Categories of the Temporal: An Inquiry into the Forms of the Finite Intellect) are consistent (as they are intended to be) with Davidson's original programme provided that it is interpreted in a deflationary manner, and also that it is not divorced from Davidson's mature conception of radical interpretation as providing the basis for assignments of meanings to terms of a language used by a community of speakers where the goal of the interpretation is to rationalise their behaviors and not merely to interpret the utterances that they blurt out passively in specific perceptual contexts. (Sorry for the long sentence!) This approach, which relies on the more mature Davidson (who has distanced himself more from Quine), I think, combines artfully Wittgensteinian pragmatism with the theoretical resources that formal semantic theories make available for displaying the generative/combinatorial structure of language from within its embedded functioning in the life of embodied agents.

It is no accident that the three authors mentioned above have worked extensively in the philosophy of action and have been much influenced by Aristotle, Wittgenstein and Anscombe.

(See also Michael Luntley, Contemporary Philosophy of Thought: Truth, World and Context, Blackwell, 1999, for a useful guide to such "embodied" and deflationary approaches to truth-conditional theories of meaning)

It's related to Kants transcendental deduction.
Kant's view is that there are certain processes that need to happen in order to get knowledge of objects.

• We get information from the world. (sensation)
• We sythesize that somehow and get intuitions, which is what we actually see or experience, colour, noises feelings, in space and time. This isn't enough for us to be able to pick out objects.
• We then use concepts to make judgements about objects. Concepts here means a kind of rule for instance, when I see XYZ it is a cat. These concepts don't really have their own existence, rather they are tools that are used to make judgments about the world and objects in it.

There are a bunch of theories about what kind of argument he's actually trying to make in the TD. Whether he's making a regressive argument that if you are having everyday normal experience then the 'categories' must be in place. There is also the progressive argument which reads Kant as saying, since the categories are in place, we can know things a priori about the world.

There are some passages in Kant which state something along the lines of - the categories gives us objective knowledge of the world. This can be read as the categories gives us knowledge which is immune from skepticism, something we can know about the world which doesn't depend on us. Or it can be that the categories give us the ability to pick out objects, so the objective knowledge is literally knowledge of objects.

Maybe, but I'd imagine that 'truth' in that case would be something like "liquorice is tasty to me."

I think that's all it really means to be subjectively true. That it's true for someone. Whereas you wouldn't say "light is faster than sound for me (but not, potentially, for others)". It's not really a substantive distinction.

Would that make subjective truth a subset of objective truth?

I'd say that objective truths are those truths that aren't subjective truths. So, "liquorice is tasty" can be true for some but not for others, and so is a subjective truth, and "light is faster than sound" can't be true for some but not for others, and so is an objective truth.

I suppose another way to look at it is that with a subjective truth the obtaining of the predicate is subject-dependent, whereas with an objective truth the obtaining of the predicate is subject-independent.

Yes but (some ⊆ all) yes?

Yes?

Would that make subjective truth a subset of objective truth?

I don't think so. There's a difference between "X is true (or false) for everyone" and "X can't be true for some and false for others". For example, if there are only two people alive, and both like the taste of liquorice, then "liquorice is tasty" is true for everyone, but because it could be true for one but not for the other it is nonetheless a subjective truth rather than an objective truth. Whereas it can't be that light is faster than sound for one but not for another, and so it is an objective truth.

That's why I think my second formulation is clearer: "with a subjective truth the obtaining of the predicate is subject-dependent, whereas with an objective truth the obtaining of the predicate is subject-independent."

Truth and falsity simply function as binary values within this abstract set of rules. They do not have any pragmatic significance. Where they gain their significance is when you plug them into some linguistic practice that makes use of these binary values for various ends. — The Great Whatever

Being visually inclined, I notice that there's something vaguely circular about this utterance. It's an assertion about the genesis of signficance. You're telling how the significance of "true" emerges from the act of assertion. On the one hand, it appears that you're inviting us to stand and witness the kindling of Pinocchio taking on life, but Pinocchio must already be a real boy before, or at least at in the midst of his transformation.

This is vaguely along the lines of what Frege pointed out about any attempt to tell a story about truth. Frege concluded that truth is an unanalyzable concept. It's too basic to figure as a character in a story. It's part of the very mechanics of story-tellling and rule-making.

It occurs to me that time is the stumbling block about this... that utterances are events that take place in time and space, but the content of an utterance can be about time and space themselves and can have an eternal character. You don't understand P unless you understand that if it's true, it's eternally true. Where this is denied, there's some equivocation going on.

I see it as an either/or. Either we all just have our own opinion about what is the case, OR there really is one objective truth independent of opinion, that describes what is the case.

so reason is necessarily our shared perspectives.
— Cavacava

Yes. Reason is the bones of objectivity.

Thinking more about this. If reason/rationality is a necessary part of "the bones" of what it takes to make a good, charitable, say objective interpretation, I don't think that entails that the perspective itself needs to be rational, good or charitable since I think all perspectives are normative and norms are not necessarily rational, good or charitable. Interpretation is methodological, not epistemic (perhaps).

If 'objectively true' means true without a doubt, then I don't think that anything can be known in its entirety. Change is unavoidable and the number of possible perspectives is not limited. I think the analysis of what is true is based on the presumptions of the perspective(s) that is/are chosen, and how well these perspectives enable meaningful interpenetration of what is being considered.

So perhaps truth is one, but that can't be proven on the basis of multiple perspectives, since while translations between perspectives, may possible, they do may not necessarily convey with the same meaning, since they are interpreted using different presuppositions.

But it is true for everyone that I like liquorice.

I mean, I don't, but y'know.

Also I have nothing at stake here I'm just being a Socratic dick.

But it is true for everyone that I like liquorice. — StreetlightX

Yes, but "I like liquorice" and "liquorice is tasty" are not the same proposition. The former says something about you and the latter says something about liquorice.

So "I like liquorice" is true for everyone (and can't be true for some but not for others) but "liquorice is tasty" can be (and is) true for some but not for others.

But I thought we agreed that "liquorice is tasty" is shorthand for "liquorice is tasty for me"?

I don't think I agreed that. I only responded by saying that the "for me" part is what distinguishes a subjective truth from an objective truth.

If a thing can be true for me but not for you then it is a subjective truth. Liquorice being tasty can be true for me but not for you. Therefore liquorice being tasty is a subjective truth.

If a thing can't be true for me but not for you then it is an objective truth. Light being faster than sound can't be true for me but not for you. Therefore light being faster than sound is an objective truth.