:up:

The statements that are true are the true ones. "p" is true iff p. That's pretty much all there is to say about them. — Banno

Here's what puzzles me about your approach here. You've taken a somewhat Wittgensteinian approach to language in many other thread (maybe I'm wrong about this, that could explain a lot), and you already seem to be happy with the notion that 'true' is a property of propositions. 'Blue' is a property of objects. Those objects which are 'blue' are those which match the use of the word 'blue' in the context of a particular language game. So if I said "pass me the 'blue' bricks", you'd select all the one which matched, in colour, with other items you'd been told were 'blue'.. If I said "play me a 'blue' song" you select a song which matched a tempo and subject matter of other songs you've learnt are 'blue'. I kind of got the feel the you and I perhaps agreed that this is how language works.

Then with 'true' you seem to want to change approach. No longer is the meaning of the word 'true' judged by examining it's use in various language games. For some reason 'true' has this platonic meaning that language users a right or wrong about. True statements are those that are true, all other identifying characteristics of the use of the word are discarded as being somehow noise in the data. The fact that people use the word 'true' to mean 'something I strongly believe', or 'something with which most epistemic peers would agree' is discarded as not getting at the real meaning.

Why the different approach with the word 'true'? Why is it singled out for special treatment when writing about its meaning?

Good question. In a word, expediency.

An account should indeed include all the various illocutionary forces associated with the use of the word. But in cleaning up philosophical knots, it's not a bad idea to set aside such uses in order to draw useful distinctions, In this case there is a distinction that can be made between a statement's being true, and it's being believed. Justifications relate to beliefs, not to truth.

It's setting up the pieces of the game. Outside the game we can stack the rooks one on top of the other. But if you want to play, then best not to.

More autobiographically, I studied Davidson &c. in detail before detailed study of Wittgenstein. I tend to drop back on that model of truth. Sorting out the various discrepancies and crossovers between the two is an ongoing project.

And I'm not disincline to give a special place to "...is true", anyway. Seems to me that it does have a somewhat singular role. Somewhat like the role of hinge propositions...

Yours is a good point, and I'm all ears if you have more to say on it.

it's not a bad idea to set aside such uses in order to draw useful distinctions, — Banno

I thought this might be one the main motivations. So I suppose the first question is what you see the utility being here, and I mean that in the most pragmatic sense - like day-to-day. Or is the utility only philosophical taxonomy (which would be fine, of course - I don't mean 'only' in a pejorative sense).

In a similar autobiographical sense, the reason this interests me is that I spent a considerable part of my career studying belief formation, and here the role of 'truth' seemed more about the assertion that an epistemic peer would agree than anything like hinge propositions. I think that may be because no one would (in day-today speech) use '...is true' of a genuine hinge proposition because there would be no coherent way of doubting it and so the qualifier wouldn't even make sense.

I guess what you're trying to do is come up with a proper technical definition of truth for a field of philosophy, rather than impose a definition on day-to-day use, would that be right?

Or is the utility only philosophical taxonomy (which would be fine, of course - I don't mean 'only' in a pejorative sense). — Isaac

Not "...only..."! It's by way of showing how we can construct a clean taxonomy if we understand the terms used in this way. It serves the purpose here of supporting the contention that the word subjective and objective are ill-applied to truth.

the role of 'truth' seemed more about the assertion that an epistemic peer would agree — Isaac

Indeed, part of this analysis would be to ensure that we can track when we are talking about a statement being a shared belief and when we are talking about it being true per se.

part of this analysis would be to ensure that we can track when we are talking about a statement being a shared belief and when we are talking about it being true per se. — Banno

OK, but I'm not sure I see how the definition you're providing here helps do that. In order to do this 'tracking' we need an algorithm of some sort, after all 'tracking' is an activity, something we do. So we'd take a proposition (or even just some speech in general) and we'd like to 'track' whether it's a shared belief or true. What do we do to it to achieve this categorisation, what's our first step?

Take an example (a feel free to change examples if this one doesn't capture the distinction you're wanting to make) "The leaf is green". We' want to categorise this statement. Is it 'true' or is it merely something with which epistemic peers would agree. You say the "The leaf is green" is true iff the leaf is green, but this is just another proposition in the form of a description of some state of affairs (of the form "X is the case"). If we're carrying out some process - tracking or categorising is a process, an activity - then we need a statement of the form "if X=y then TRUE, if X!=y then FALSE" where y is some other perceived state of affairs with which we compare X. Otherwise categorising X doesn't seem to be a possible task.

It seems, at times, like you're suggesting that y in this case is ineffible, but that it is necessarily so to capture what 'true' is best off meaning. You don't want to say that the y to which we compare X is {the leaf seeming to us to be green}, because that allows illusions to be true. You don't want to say y is {what my epistemic peers would say} because that admits a kind of truth by consensus you'd like to avoid. So y is {the leaf just being green}, but we can never know this (or do we know it indubitably?), but that doesn't matter because that's an epistemic problem, not a taxonomic one. Is that close?

The tracking I was talking about was in keeping clear what we were doing with words. Such as

I have a question, how would we classify a belief, or any belief at all to be true? — IP060903

Are you asking how we justify our beliefs? — Banno

I have a question, how would we classify a belief, or any belief at all to be true? — IP060903

Are you asking how we justify our beliefs? — Banno

Yes, that is indeed what I am asking. — IP060903

Notice that how we justify our beliefs is a different question to which statements are true? — Banno

In this example IP starts by asking a question that is apparently about what sorts of things are true, but on analysis it turns out to be ambiguous, having two answers.

Is the leaf green? If it is then "the leaf is green" is true. Here's the leaf - I show it to you. Yes, that bit is perhaps ineffable in that there is no rule here, nothing to be said appart from my showing you the leaf and your using the word "green" for it. Sometimes being true is not following some rule.

Here's the leaf - I show it to you. Yes, that bit is perhaps ineffable in that there is no rule here, nothing to be said appart from my showing you the leaf and your using the word "green" for it. — Banno

So - obvious question - what happens if I use the word 'spiky' for it because I'm a synaesthete and for me green is spikiness (the leaf, to all others is perfectly smooth). Is it 'true' that the leaf is spiky? How does your approach deal with situations like this (clourblindness, mass-delusion...) where there's a dispute over the word used but one side wants to claim their view is 'true'? Do they have any recourse at all to demonstrate the 'truth' of their propositions to another unwilling to just see it on first presentation?

I'm thinking of our standard practices in these situations. I present you a leaf and say "the leaf is green", you say "that's not 'true', it's yellow". I'd take it into better light, ask others, put it in a spectrometer, compare it to a green swatch... and say "no, look at this evidence I've gathered, it really is green, it's 'true'". Are you wanting to discard these practices in favour of a more ineffable 'gut feeling'? If not, it seem you'd have to consider justification to be at least a part of the definition - otherwise we're in this odd realm where meaning is use for all words, except for the word 'true' for which meaning is some platonic form of the concept.

I'm sure I'm missing something. To me 'true' seems to be a category of propositions - as if we could take all propositions and sort them into two bins - 'true' and 'untrue'. The process by which we sort them is the same as the one we'd use to sort all objects into 'blue' and 'not blue', we compare each to the objects already in the bins and judge the similarity (family resemblance).

With colour, we can (although normal people do not need this assistance) be more scientific about what we're doing in that judgement - we're detecting wavelengths, converting them to beliefs about colour, triggering memories associated with those beliefs and looking for similar memories in the objects we're comparing.

My understanding about truth comes from the same analysis - what it is we're doing when we compare the proposition in question with other propositions in the bin marked 'true propositions', we're recalling the set of properties those propositions had in common. That's how we learnt to use the word 'true' in the first place. My claim is that those properties consist of things like, justification, agreement of epistemic peers, agreement with experience (but only in the absence of reason to believe one's experiences are themselves widely agreed upon)...

I sense you're not looking at the definition of 'true' this way at all, but I'm not really seeing the alternative, nor (more importantly) why you'd want to claim we're not carrying out the above algorithm when it comes to assigning 'true' to propositions.

So you set out your statements and your two bins, and you look a the first statement "this leaf is green".

Which bin do you put it in? Why?

I'm thinking that you put the statement in the "true" bin if and only if the leaf is green. But further, that no other reason will suffice.

I'm thinking of our standard practices in these situations. I present you a leaf and say "the leaf is green", you say "that's not 'true', it's yellow". I'd take it into better light, ask others, put it in a spectrometer, compare it to a green swatch... and say "no, look at this evidence I've gathered, it really is green, it's 'true'". — Isaac

Sure, we can have discussions about differences of opinion. We talk about how we justify our beliefs. There's even cases were we might not be able to reach a conclusion. It remains true that the leaf will be green only if the leaf is green.

The hardest part here is realising how little is being said.

My understanding about truth comes from the same analysis - what it is we're doing when we compare the proposition in question with other propositions in the bin marked 'true propositions', we're recalling the set of properties those propositions had in common. — Isaac

...and all they have in common is that they are true and nothing more.

I'm thinking that you put the statement in the "true" bin if and only if the leaf is green. — Banno

Well, that cannot be the case on the face of it because we never know whether the leaf is green, we only ever have that it seems green and yet we very much do assign propositions to one bin or another. We are all well aware of differences in opinion and none of us so hubristic as to hold our judgements to be concordant always with what really is. I don't think science, or even basic day-to-day experimentation, could proceed at all if we did not hold generally to a model where our understanding of the world and 'the actual world' were two different things. As such anyone seeing the 'the leaf is green' would only ever hold that understanding contingently (it seems green but there is an external world in which it's colour, or the source of it's colour, is fixed; and the way it seems to me might not match that). And yet...we assign 'true' nonetheless. We put the proposition 'the leaf is green' into the bin marked 'true'. So our actual practices with the word seem to be at odds with how you'd like us to use the word and I'm still not quite getting why you'd like it used that way.

all they have in common is that they are true and nothing more. — Banno

Well then the label becomes arbitrary. If all that the propositions we put into the 'true' bin have in common is that they've all been labelled 'true', then we can make a proposition 'true' simply by labelling it such. Or, if you're trying to get at this ineffable quality of some propositions (something we can neither doubt nor verbalise), then how do you account for how we learnt to use the word in the first place - doesn't it become somewhat like Wittgenstein's beetle?

Yeah, sometimes we think a proposition belongs in the 'true' bin when it doesn't. That is, sometimes our beliefs are wrong. The statement does not go in the "true" bin if we think it true; it goes in if it is indeed true.

Well then the label becomes arbitrary. — Isaac

Green leaves are available for inspection. Boxed beetles, not.

That is, sometimes our beliefs are wrong. — Banno

Yeah. We find that they no longer match the properties of the other statements in the bin (usually they no longer accord with either our experiences or those of our epistemic peers), so neither system fails to account for propositions being mis-filed.

What's missing (or so it seems to me) on your account is any justification for your claim. Why do you say "sometimes our beliefs are wrong", maybe they never are, or maybe they always are. You can't possibly know with your account of what makes a proposition true because all you have access to is our past beliefs and our current beliefs. You can show that the two sets don't match, but you can't say which, if either, are 'true'. Only that you believe them to be. So it seems you yourself are not even using the term how you'd like us to.

The statement does not go in the "true" bin if we think it true; it goes in if it is indeed true. — Banno

You're being evasive. What I'm trying to pin down is what this property 'being true' consists in. If it is an ineffable property, that's fine, but then you're either committed to some form of platonism or some internal sense and so Wittgenstein's beetle. If you're saying that what it consists in is neither platonic form nor private sensation, then I don't see how your account differs from correspondence.

Green leaves are available for inspection. Boxed beetles, not. — Banno

Inspection is not sufficient, we've just been through that. It's not the greenness of the leaves we're trying to establish, it's the 'trueness' of the proposition. To give the full comparison, the proposition "I'm in pain" contains a beetle if my 'pain' is inaccessible to you and vice versa. The proposition "statement X is true" contains the same beetle if my 'true' is some ineffable judgement of it that's inaccessible to you. We can't talk about it, so the word 'true' ceases to be about the beetle but rather used to satisfy some function.

What I'm trying to pin down is what this property 'being true' consists in. — Isaac

Not evasive; the property is hollow.

You keep asking what justifies a belief, but putting it in terms of how to tell if something is true.

You keep asking what justifies a belief, but putting it in terms of how to tell if something is true. — Banno

Yes, I do (according to your terminology). That's because a suitably justified belief is what gets the label 'true' attached to it. You're wanting to claim this is somehow either the 'wrong' way to use the word, or that justification isn't what's really being judged when people correctly use the word (I'm still unclear which).

What I'm really asking is why. Why you want to define 'true' this way. It's very obviously not the way the word is actually used, inventing an ineffable feeling seems unparsimonious where no such feeling is required to explain what we see... I'm genuinely puzzled by what's motivating you to believe this model.

Let's try this.

"X=Y" is true iff X=Y (your proposition), and Y={a, b, c, d}.

It follows therefore "X=Y" is true iff X= {a, b, c, d}, yes?

So translating...

"The leaf is green" is true iff the leaf is green, and the leaf is green if {it seems green, other people say it is green, it shows green in my spectrometer ,...}. That's to say that it's being green is a product of it satisfying certain categories, that's what 'being green' consists in, otherwise all you have is 'having a particular set of quantum properties' (or whatever the fundamental make-up of the universe turns out to be). 'Green' is a human socially created category, so is 'leaf', so whether a bit of reality constitutes either is a human social agreement.

It follows therefore that "The leaf is green" is true iff {it seems green, other people say it is green, it shows green in my spectrometer ,...}.

That the leaf is green is not something we just know, it's something we assure ourselves of by various procedures, so the leaf's being green is equivalent to it's having satisfied those procedures

Thanks for the questions. I've been considering them.

While Wittgenstein urged us to look to ordinary language, he also sort to correct confusion by clearing up definitions. We can find grammars that exhibit deeper logical structure. On Certainty, viewed methodologically, shows the process.

The OP asks:

Is truth objective or subjective? — Maya

Here's how I think we can deal wth this question.

First, keep one eye the way the terms are used in ordinary language. Your analysis of truth, above, is relevant here. The same sort of analysis of subjective and objective would be pertinent. I offered a strt in earlier posts on this thread.

We ought also clear up how truth relates to the concepts around it. I think belief of particular relevance, and offer the following analysis.

"...is true" predicates to statements. And I think undeniably, the statement "p" is true only if p. That is, roughly, the statement will be true only if the thing stated holds.

This is distinct from belief. Belief is a relationship between someone (or some group) and a statement: Anne believes that p.

So we have differentiated two notions, one a predicate to statements, the other a relation. They are linked because if Anne believes that p, it follows that Anne believes that "p" is true.

Nothing obligates our accepting this grammar. It's offered only as a way of viewing the issues we are discussing. If it is useful, then we might use it. We can acknowledge that the words "true" and Believes" are not always used in this way, and in particular we can agree that they are often use interchangeably, while also accepting that perhaps used in this way they can display philosophical knots in ways that help us see how to undo them.

In particular, this analysis shows that we can believe things that are not true. There is no similar error with the T-sentence.

So "the leaf is green" is true only if the leaf is indeed green. That the leaf seems green is not sufficient to conclude "the leaf is green" is true; nor is that other people say it is green, or that it shows green in my spectrometer, or even all of these in combination.

These may however be very convincing reasons for us to believe that "the leaf is green" is true. Note the logical point that all of these things might be true, and yet "the leaf is green" might be false - we are jaundiced, the other people are deceiving us, the spectrometer is faulty... Again, to labour the point, the only thing that makes "the leaf is green" true is that the leaf is green.

It's fine to say that our belief that the leaf is green is a result of it satisfying certain categories. But we should keep in mind that "satisfying some category" is an obtuse way of saying that some word is suitable to use here. Saying that the leaf satisfies the category of being green means exactly that we can use the word "green" in certain ways when we talk about the leaf. Categories are conventions of language. I suspect we agree on this.

That the leaf is green is not something we just know; knowing involves believing, and also invokes the language of justification. "It is true that the leaf is green" does not imply that we know that the leaf is green. There are unknown truths.

Analysed in this way it may be clear that truth is extraordinary in its simplicity, and will not admit to being subjective or objective. That's for beliefs and justifications.

OK, thanks. Let me see if I've understood so far. You think there's utility to separating some property of propositions from some property of a person (an attitude toward a proposition), and so 'truth' and 'belief' can usefully be employed to refer to these two properties?

If that's the case, I have two issues which are, as yet, unresolved by what you've said so far.

Firstly, propositions are not real objects, they are aspects of human minds, as such properties cannot obtain consistently across all instances of a proposition. the proposition "the leaf is green" is a convenient fiction representing the millions of broadly similar propositions within the millions of minds which house them. As such any properties of such useful fictions are themselves useful fictions, drawn from the same source. Since the fiction of the global proposition "the leaf is green" is drawn from the minds of all the people who understand the language sufficiently to form the proposition, any properties of the 'useful fiction' can only be drawn from the same source. But this would imply truth and belief are the same kind of thing (though not, as you point out, exhaustively so).

Secondly, "the leaf is green" can be shown to be a statement (and so have, by your definition, the property 'truth'), but when you describe the proper assignment of that property - iff the leaf is green - that second is also a statement. Simply neglecting to encompass it in quotes isn't an ex nihilo act of creation whereby we've instantiated some part of reality. You've written (or said) the words "the leaf is green" in both cases. Both cases are propositions. I read some Tarski after the last time we discussed this and I gather he was of the opinion that the two were indeed statements, just in two different formal languages, so that didn't help, but I confess I didn't feel I'd understood the whole thing, so I may have missed something.

Essentially, the two issues keep bringing me back to the same problem, which is distinguishing your position from either full-blown redundancy, or correspondence. I'm edging toward the latter. It seems you want to say that there is some fact (the leaf's being green) which is the truth-bearer of the proposition "the leaf is green". I understand, thus far, your reluctance to allow anyone's belief in this 'fact' to be confused for the actual fact itself. The issue I have id that both 'leaf' and 'green' are social constructs, so the 'fact' of the leaf's being green is only that of agreement among a group of language users that 'leaf' and 'green' are appropriate terms to apply. What is outside of human consensus (I believe) is that there exists some break in the otherwise symmetry of reality which we've all latched on to and which explains our astonishing coherence when talking to one another. What I don't believe is that such breaks are non-arbitrarily chosen - but that's another debate.

The point is, all this leaves me with, in trying to fit your distinction into this wider picture, is that the truth of the proposition "the leaf is green" is bourne partly by the existence of some real break in the symmetry of reality for such terms to refer to (correspondence theory), and partly by the consensus of the language users that 'leaf' and 'green' are the appropriate terms with which to refer to this phenomena.

But at the end of the day, I still come back to the fact that all of this judgement is taking place in human minds (I'm a psychologist - so sue me!). As such I'm struggling to divorce the whole issue from belief. It is still some (dynamically updating) belief which will ultimately result in my applying the label 'true' to a proposition and as such, in the real world, its application represents that belief, but I understand that approach is bourne of my particular academic upbringing and this is, after all, a philosophy forum. I'm trying.

Thanks for the input. Though I’m thinking after being on this forum, I am reminded that Philosophy asks questions that other subjects have done away with. And I can think/believe anything I want on these matters, including religion. Because nothing in Philosophy has been proven so there will be pros and cons on any view. Seems like a waste of time. Thanks all.

It's not just in philosophy that you can believe anything you want. Perhaps it's just that philosophers are a bit more explicit about why they believe.

If you can think critically, you don't have a choice about doing philosophy. You'll be back.

Searle (and perhaps others) correctly point out that the ontological structure of truth doesn't quite fit into an objective vs subjective dichotomy. There are certain objective features of the world which are established by prevailing human attitudes and sentiments--subjective human experiences. The value of money is a good example. You can purchase things with money because society has collectively agreed to consider it as a valid medium with which to exchange. This means the value of money is predicated on subjective human experience. However, the value of 10 dollars is not subjectively decided, but rather, the result of a complex negotiation that gives rise to the objective quality of the value; you can't just decide you'd like to buy a Ferrari with 10 dollars.

You think there's utility to separating some property of propositions from some property of a person — Isaac

Well, no. I adopted your talk of properties simply for expediency. The salient feature for you seems to me to be that being true is a property of statements, wile being believed is a relationship between a statement and a person.

To your first point: Describing "the leaf is green" as a useful fiction is deceptive. The leaf is green. Sure, both '"the leaf is green" is true' and 'Fred believes that the leaf is green' have the similarity of being part of our language. That does not make them the same.

To your second point: you already know the difference between use and mention, so I'm puzzled that you haven't applied it here:

"the leaf is green" is true iff the leaf is green

On the left of the "iff" is a statement that is being mentioned. On the right is a statement that is being used.

As to your conclusion... well, that the sentence "the leaf is green" is used to say that the leaf is green is indeed a social convention. But that the leaf is green - not so much. The world is always, inescapably, already interpreted by our language; the world is all that is the case.

But, that does not mean that we can talk about our interpretation without also talking about the world. Remember Stove's gem; that we must interpret the world in order to talk about it does not imply that there is no world, only the interpretation. " The world is all that is the case" does not say that all there is, is statements; it does not replace the world with language.

I don't want to talk about some fact being the truth bearer; I want to avoid such confusion. "fact" is ambiguous, truth bearers more so.

It seems you want something profound that links "what is outside of human consensus " to reality... or some such; but all that amounts to is the very mundane observation that we use "the leaf is green" to talk about green leaves.

Truth is vastly over-rated. the analysis of truth I've given here shows that. Belief is far more interesting.

Truth is vastly over-rated. the analysis of truth I've given here shows that. Belief is far more interesting. — Banno

It's one of the funny things I find about philosophy...

The truth is massively overrated. — Isaac

As you can see, I completely agree with you that truth is vastly overrated, and yet here we are arguing over the exact way in which it is overrated. On the one hand a complete waste of time, on the other still inexplicably addictive and more than a little frustrating trying to see what another person sees in this way...

Anyway, "the game is afoot!".

Describing "the leaf is green" as a useful fiction is deceptive. The leaf is green. Sure, both '"the leaf is green" is true' and 'Fred believes that the leaf is green' have the similarity of being part of our language. That does not make them the same. — Banno

My purpose here wasn't to say the leaf's greeness was a useful fiction, but that imagining propositions to be universals is a useful fiction. They're not (I don't hold with universals at all). The proposition "the leaf is green" can't have any general properties because it is either sound-waves, electrical signal or a sequence of neural states...whatever part of our known world you want to ascribe it to, it certainly doesn't exist in it's own right. all I meant was that ascribing universal properties to it as if it did is useful, but fictional.

To your second point: you already know the difference between use and mention, so I'm puzzled that you haven't applied it here:

"the leaf is green" is true iff the leaf is green

On the left of the "iff" is a statement that is being mentioned. On the right is a statement that is being used. — Banno

Again, I've not explained myself well enough as this is not the point I was trying to make. I get that the one side is a mention, the other a use, but it seemed to me that your account was turning the use into another mention by ignoring is embeddedness in any kind of real social world, the context in which is is a use...

It goes back to my last example, I know it looks pretentious, but I'm going to number them to see if I can pin down what's going wrong.

1. Your account is in the form X is Y iff c is d (where here X is the statement "the leaf is green", Y is the statement's being 'true', c is the leaf and d is the leaf's being green.
2. If "c is d" is to be taken as a use, not another mention, then it is being used to assert or indicate or conclude that c is d.
3. The way we conclude, or assert things like c's being d is by some process usually a collection of processes some arbitrary number of which will satisfy us) - all of which terminate in some perception, or some rule of thought, something like {e,f,g,h} is {J,K,L,M}.
4. So the way in which I see 'truth' being deflated is that X is Y iff c is d (and c is d iff {e,f,g,h} is {J,K,L,M}), then X is Y iff c is {J,K,L,M}.
5. So "the leaf is green" is true iff the leaf satisfies the processes we use to conclude something's greenness...which is the same process we use to 'believe' the leaf is green.

that the sentence "the leaf is green" is used to say that the leaf is green is indeed a social convention. But that the leaf is green - not so much. The world is always, inescapably, already interpreted by our language; the world is all that is the case.

But, that does not mean that we can talk about our interpretation without also talking about the world. Remember Stove's gem; that we must interpret the world in order to talk about it does not imply that there is no world, only the interpretation. " The world is all that is the case" does not say that all there is, is statements; it does not replace the world with language. — Banno

I think this is actually the point of disagreement. I don't hold that Stove's Gem says anything useful. We can know the leaf is made of atoms, just like the air around it, and still have the concept of leaf. It's not impossible, or even difficult for me to hold the idea that 'leaf' is an arbitrary division of matter based on human-specific senses. It's not even that difficult (though harder) for me to hold the idea that atoms themselves are arbitrary units possibly just based on the capabilities of the detection machines we happen to have invented first. Beyond that is ineffable and so, as you so rightly say, we shouldn't try to 'eff' it (a phrase I'm stealing, by the way). The point is, we haven't had to get as far as the ineffible to recognise that both 'leaf' and 'green' are social conventions, we haven't even had to get close. The recognition that the universe is made of atoms is sufficient, and physicists are currently 'eff-ing' much more fundamental dissolutions than that.

To summarise - I think "the leaf is green" is true iff the leaf is green. I also think the leaf's being green is a socially agreed on status - both it's being a 'leaf' and its having the property 'green' are social, conventions, so the leaf's being green is the same thing as that it fits the criteria the society of language users have assigned. Hence the use 'the leaf is green' drops out of the definition, we can directly replace it with something more useful. "The leaf is green" is true if the leaf fits the criteria the society of language users have assigned for 'leafness' and 'greenness'.

The proposition "the leaf is green" can't have any general properties because it is either sound-waves, electrical signal or a sequence of neural states...whatever part of our known world you want to ascribe it to, it certainly doesn't exist in it's own right. — Isaac

I'm confused by this.

The phoneme "the leaf is green" may be a sound wave. But that's not the same as the locution "the leaf is green"; the locution is a sound with the limits imposed by a language. The illocution is the statement that the leaf is green. The proposition... well, that might be an abstraction too far, since it is supposedly what is said by both "the leaf is green" and "la feuille est verte".

4. So the way in which I see 'truth' being deflated is that X is Y iff c is d (and c is d iff {e,f,g,h} is {J,K,L,M}), then X is Y iff c is {J,K,L,M}. — Isaac

Somewhere in this mess you've moved from (c is d) to "Isaac believes that (c is d)".

Here's an invalid inference:

1. A iff B
2 hence, A iff (B and C)

interpreted thus...

1. "The leaf is green" is true iff the leaf is green
2. "The leaf is green" is true iff (the leaf is green and Isaac believes that the leaf is green.)

Here's a valid inference...


1. A iff B
2 hence, (A and C) iff (B and C)

interpreted thus...

1. "The leaf is green" is true iff the leaf is green
2. ("The leaf is green" and Isaac believes that the leaf is green) is true iff (the leaf is green and Isaac believes that the leaf is green.)

The point is, we haven't had to get as far as the ineffible to recognise that both 'leaf' and 'green' are social conventions, we haven't even had to get close. — Isaac

Sure. The ineffable part is... well, here is the leaf. If you don't agree that it is green.. then we can talk about how you and I might differ in how we use the word "green", and maybe come to some compromise; or we might simply agree to disagree. But at some place the conversation ceases; there is a point at which the conversation finishes; there is a way of understanding the rule that is not a statement of the rule but an implementation.

Hence, yes,

"The leaf is green" is true if the leaf fits the criteria the society of language users have assigned for 'leafness' and 'greenness'. — Isaac

But this misses something rather important; not only does it have to be the case that "it fits the criteria the society of language users have assigned for 'leafness' and 'greenness'"; the leaf also has to be green.

Language that is just convention is an engine with the gears disengaged. It has to be implemented.

It seems to me that the difference between our positions has to do with the directness of our realism (possibly exactly the same problem we had with regards to beliefs in another thread). For me, there is no such thing as 'the leaf', or 'greeness' outside of people's beliefs in these things. So when you say "It also has to be green", this has no meaning for me because being green just is all those preceding things, nothing more, (c is d) just is "[people] believes that (c is d)", nothing more.

Language that is just convention is an engine with the gears disengaged. It has to be implemented. — Banno

I agree, but the implementation of language, for me, is about doing, not naming. It's not about 'getting stuff right' it's about 'getting stuff done'. Hence 'truth' really is useless other than as a persuasive tool to rhetorically add the the end of proposition you really, really want people to act as if believe.

I'm sorry that you've had to come such a long route to get here, but I really appreciate your effort to explain your position, it's fascinating, even if I don't hold to it myself.

It seems to me that the difference between our positions has to do with the directness of our realism — Isaac

I agree with this diagnosis.
Here's an extraordinary thing, that it seems to me is not explained if all there is to "the leaf is green" is our agreed belief.

So we use the words "green" and "leaf" in these sorts of circumstances, and indicate their relation using a grammatical structure demonstrating predication, and all of this is relative to our language community and from a wider perspective quite arbitrary, and that being green is what some philosophers call a secondary quality that is not inherent in the object, while others claim it's all secondary qualities and we could equally have agreed that the leaf is "orange" without detracting from the survival value of such things and that similar arguments apply to our using the word "leaf" within certain arbitrary biological constraints that differentiate it imperfectly from the use of "stem" and "flower" and such, and so on. But:

How is it that we agree?

Here's what catches my mind; You show me the leaf and I see that it is indeed green.

That seems, at least to me, to be something more than my agreeing with you that the leaf is green in order to achieve some degree of utility. So while we might agree instead that the leaf is orange, we would be changing the way we use our language, not the leaf. The gears would still mesh. That something more is that the leaf is green.

Another, related but distinct point. Suppose that we were as a species to do as he wishes, follow Trump's advice and stop measuring folk for Covid 19, stop admitting folk to hospitals, indeed, stop all talk of Covid 19 and not report on any cases. Suppose that this had the result that no one believed in Covid 19 anymore. Would that have the effect of stopping the spread of Covid 19? Would folk stop getting sick?

I think not, and I think that this is because sometimes our beliefs are what we in the trade call wrong. Further it will not do to claim that belief in Covid 19 is more useful than disbelief, without also explaining why it is more useful. It's more useful because Covid 19 does not care what we believe; because Covid 19 is what people who do not do philosophy call real. The gears we use to talk about Covid 19 mesh not just with each other, but with Covid 19. We can be wrong about how things are because there is indeed a way that things are.

Hence, being persuaded that something is true will in many cases not suffice. It must also be true.

How is it that we agree? — Banno

1.
We don't. Loads of people disagree about the leaf's being green. The colour-blind, synaesthetes, those with damage to various areas of the brain involved in object recognition. There's widespread agreement, but there's widespread agreement about the rules of chess, that doesn't make chess rules any less a social convention. Being taught something from birth, and having it re-enforced with every single social interaction in your life is incredibly powerful. I'll try to give you an example. Babies have what seems to be an inbuilt understanding of certain laws of physics, they show surprise when an object passes through another, or appears to fit inside one smaller than it. They don't, however, show surprise when objects turn into other objects, even ones bigger or smaller than themselves. Imagine now, just how surprised you'd be if your phone/computer suddenly turned into a pumpkin. The impossibility seems so universal a belief that it's just obvious, impossible to doubt, just like the leaf's greeness. But a baby would be fine with it, right up to around 18 months. That objects don't just change from one thing to another has to learnt. That a leaf is green also has to be learnt. Things which are learnt in very early childhood seem unquestionably real to us.

More importantly...

2.
Objects and their properties are dealt with by a completely separate area of the brain from our sensorimotor interaction with them. I've cut and pasted the following from a PM conversation I had with Fdrake (if you happen to be reading this, sorry for the laziness, but it covers almost exactly the same ground as Banno's question).

Visual perception is split the moment it leaves the retina into two streams, the ventral and the dorsal. Among other things, the ventral goes to areas responsible for object recognition (faces, hands, landscapes - all have their own areas). The dorsal stream goes to the sensorimotor areas to initiate object manipulation. The key point here is that the ventral stream takes the image, the dorsal stream deals with the percept (we know this largely because its what causes differences in the types of hallucinations suffered from). The ventral stream also has a significantly larger number of cortices to traverse (it has more models to be fed through). So the aspect of this that I thought might help explain my position is that the image is what we compare to reference images to facilitate object recognition, the precept is not 'recognised' as such at all. Again, studies in monkeys with their visual streams artificially disrupted can demonstrate this effect (treating an object as one thing physically, but as another socially and emotionally). We see the same in humans in several lesion studies.

The matter which makes the leaf you and I might be looking at, is shared - there's only one copy of the stuff, and if I ask you to move it, only one set of matter is interacted with. Concepts like the number one, the leaf (as a percept), freedom as a concept...there are multiple copies of, one in each brain. A common history, language, culture etc keeps these things very similar, but it doesn't detract from the fundamental difference that there's one copy for each person.

The percept is one of things there's multiple copies of, the percept that you and I might both refer to as 'that leaf' has two copies, one in your brain and one in mine. We keep those two copies very similar by interacting with the aspect of the environment it relates to. When you say "pick that leaf" I interact with the matter that seems to constitute my ~leaf~ in a way that I think will help clarify your ~leaf~ such that our concepts remain similar. Having similar concepts is really useful so they're worth re-enforcing at every opportunity.

So the way in which my ~leaf~(percept) relates to the aspect of the environment it relates to is a social convention. It relates by my guessing what aspect of the environment your ~leaf~ relates to and trying to make them match. Hopefully you'd be trying to do the same (otherwise I'm forever playing catch-up). So it might go like this ([ ] means a single shared portion of matter ~ ~ means one which has a copy in my head and a copy in yours) -

[aspect of environment] > ~tentative percept~ > [speech or action of others in my community indicating their percept] > ~revised percept~ > [judge the response of others to my speech and action indicating my percept] > ~revised percept~ > [speech or action of others in my community indicating their percept]...and so on. As we get older percepts get more fixed and we're more reluctant to update them in the face of people seeming to have differences.

At any point on this chain I can go wrong (depending on my mental health, I could go massively wrong) and end up with a percept that's nothing like the one you get from the same aspect of the environment.

There's much psychological evidence supporting this idea, partly the visual pathways model I explained above, but also the results of surprise analysis on very young (pre-linguistic) children I mentioned. The surprise at objects 'magically' transforming comes round about when they become language users. The use of language seems to set objects as objects, prior to that they're just swirling ever-changing sections of matter which obey certain rules when interacted with. There's only a bit of work been done on monkeys which tentatively shows similar things, but it's very sketchy, my guess though is that it's not uniquely language that performs this object-setting, that's just the way humans mostly to do it.

I hope that makes some sense.

Nuh. On a first read it is actually very disappointing. But I'll come back to it tomorrow.

On a first read it is actually very disappointing. — Banno

I'll show myself out...

I'll come back to it tomorrow. — Banno

As ever, it would be interesting to hear a philosophical take on the psychological models I use, but please don't feel obliged, anytime you feel so inclined, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.