Sure. But I'm a golden dye-job with dirty continental roots.

I've tended to read the analytical blokes who've integrated the continentals. To me it's mostly different styles, different background lingo...but similar points.

I think this was Hegel's point.

...a correspondence theory of truth must inevitably lead into skepticism about the external world, because the required correspondence between our thoughts and reality is not ascertainable. Ever since Berkeley’s attack on the representational theory of the mind, objections of this sort have enjoyed considerable popularity. It is typically pointed out that we cannot step outside our own minds to compare our thoughts with mind-independent reality. Yet—so the objection continues—on the correspondence theory of truth, this is precisely what we would have to do to gain knowledge. We would have to access reality as it is in itself, independently of our cognition, and determine whether our thoughts correspond to it. Since this is impossible, since all our access to the world is mediated by our cognition, the correspondence theory makes knowledge impossible (cf. Kant 1800, intro vii). Assuming that the resulting skepticism is unacceptable, the correspondence theory has to be rejected, and some other account of truth, an epistemic (anti-realist) account of some sort, has to be put in its place (cf., e.g., Blanshard 1941.)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-correspondence/

The idea of unmediated reality..of some external 'nonlinguistic' world behind any claims we can make about the world we live in...is itself the problem.

More especially it takes for granted that the Absolute stands on one side, and that knowledge on the other side, by itself and cut off from the Absolute, is still something real; in other words, that knowledge, which, by being outside the Absolute, is certainly also outside truth, is nevertheless true — a position which, while calling itself fear of error, makes itself known rather as fear of the truth.

This conclusion comes from the fact that the Absolute alone is true or that the True is alone absolute, It may be set aside by making the distinction that a know ledge which does not indeed know the Absolute as science wants to do, is none the less true too; and that knowledge in general, though it may possibly be incapable of grasping the Absolute, can still be capable of truth of another kind. But we shall see as we proceed that random talk like this leads in the long run to a confused distinction between the absolute truth and a truth of some other sort, and that “absolute”, “knowledge”, and so on, are words which presuppose a meaning that has first to be got at.

With suchlike useless ideas and expressions about knowledge, as an instrument to take hold of the Absolute, or as a medium through which we have a glimpse of truth, and so on (relations to which all these ideas of a knowledge which is divided from the Absolute and an Absolute divided from knowledge in the last resort lead), we need not concern ourselves. Nor need we trouble about the evasive pretexts which create the incapacity of science out of the presupposition of such relations, in order at once to be rid of the toil of science, and to assume the air of serious and zealous effort about it. Instead of being troubled with giving answers to all these, they may be straightway rejected as adventitious and arbitrary ideas; and the use which is here made of words like “absolute”,"knowledge”, as also “objective” and “subjective”, and innumerable others, whose meaning is assumed to be familiar to everyone, might well be regarded as so much deception. For to give out that their significance is universally familiar and that everyone indeed possesses their notion, rather looks like an attempt to dispense with the only important matter, which is just to give this notion. With better right, on the contrary, we might spare ourselves the trouble of talking any notice at all of such ideas and ways of talking which would have the effect of warding off science altogether; for they make a mere empty show of knowledge which at once vanishes when science comes on the scene. — Hegel

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phintro.htm

A little more on the proposed us-language-world fusion (which maybe only I care about...we shall see.) We see and touch objects of course without talking about them. Our lives are not just language. You tell me you have not eaten all the plums in the icebox, but I go to get one and there are none. What you said does not correspond to what I see. But this seeing and feeling the empty ice box can play no role in reasoning. Sensations are not the inputs (or outputs) of inferences. It's the desire to drag in the ineffable or not-yet-effed ghost that causes us so much trouble.

You imply there are plums in the icebox.
I report that there are not.
I conclude and claim that something is rotten in Denmark, that you probably lied.

I don't suggest we deny the realm of the ghost. There's just not much to do with it. It reminds me of Popper. Where scientific hypotheses come from doesn't matter, doesn't give them their status or lack thereof as scientific hypotheses.

If I may wax phenomenological again, here's a different approach to the same insight into the centrality of language for us as our rational selves, not only sentient but sapient. I take the following to gesture toward the 'field of meaning' which we share as our essentially familiar and intelligible world, that thing that we can be right or wrong about, because it transcends each of us individually, encompassing us, our source and our future grave. (Ha ha !)

Language is not merely a tool which man possesses alongside many others; language first grants the possibility of standing in the midst of the openness of beings. Only where there is language, is there world, that is, the constantly changing cycle of decision and work, of action and responsibility, but also of arbitrariness and turmoil, decay and confusion.
...
The one as that which forms everyday being-with-one-another...constitutes what we call the public in the strict sense of the word. It implies that the world is always already primarily given as the common world. It is not the case on the one hand there are first individual subjects which at any given time have their own world; and that the task would then arise of putting together, by virtue of some sort of arrangement, the various particular worlds of individuals and of agreeing how one would have a common world. This is how philosophers imagine these things when they ask about the constitution of the inter-subjective world. We say instead that the first thing that is given is the common world -- the one.
...
Being-there as being-in-the-world is primarily governed by logos…Coming into the world, one grows into a determinate tradition of speaking, seeing, interpreting. Being-in-the-world is an already-having-the-world-thus-and-so. This peculiar fact, that the world into which I enter, in which I awaken, is there for me in a determinate interpretedness, I designate terminologically as fore-having.

Dasein is history.
...
Dasein, whiling away its own time in each case, is at the same time always a generation. So a specific interpretedness precedes every Dasein in the shape of the generation itself. What is preserved in the generation is itself the outcome of earlier views and disputes, earlier interpretations and past concerns.
...
The wellspring of such persistent elements lies in the past, but they continue to have such an impact in the present that their dominance is taken for granted and their development forgotten. Such a forgotten past is inherent in the prevailing interpretedness of being-together-with-one-another. To the extent that Dasein lives from (cares about) this past, it is this past itself.
...
The world with which we are concerned and being-in itself are both interpreted within the parameters of a particular framework of intelligibility.
...
One has a timeworn conceptuality at one's disposal. It provides the fore-concept for the interpretation. The interpretedness of a 'time' is strictly determined by these structural factors and the variable forms of their realization. And it is precisely the unobtrusiveness of these factors --the fact that one is not aware of them -- which gives public interpretedness its taken-for-granted character. However, the 'fore'-character in the structure of interpretedness shows us that it is none other than what has already been that jumps ahead, as it were, of a present time pervaded by interpretedness. Guided by its interpretedness, expectant concern lives its own past. — Heidegger

I'm far the first to gripe about the mysteries of the correspondence theory of truth. I'm just asking how you navigate or tolerate them (the traditional criticisms, and the one in particular that I tried to articulate.) — Pie

I don't see a viable alternative to the correspondance theory of truth, and never managed to understand any of its critiques.

I don't see a viable alternative to the correspondance theory of truth, and never managed to understand any of its critiques. — Olivier5

:up:

This is just about it, the fusion of word and world, inasmuch as we can know it.

At the heart of the linguistic process lay an in-built mechanism, a feedback loop, that accounted for language’s ability to regenerate itself. This consisted in the continuous interplay between an external sound-form and an inner conceptual form, and their “mutual interpenetration constitute the individual form of language.” The dynamic and self-generating aspects of language are therefore inscribed in its very core...

In spite of Humboldt’s attempt to salvage universalism for knowledge, his view of language inevitably ushered in an epistemological relativism, with each language yielding a peculiar way of seeing the world. For “man [lives] with the objects… exclusively in the way that they are conveyed to him by language” with language “placing definite boundaries upon the spirits of those who speak it.” In this light, language was construed as a ‘contingent absolute’ as German philosopher Jürgen Habermas later put it. Crucially, this radical relativism seemed to blur the distinction between mere knowledge and reality itself. Indeed, within such relativism, language seemed to embody reality itself...

In keeping with his predecessors, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) starkly opposed any passive, instrumental understanding of language. ...Language could only be grasped on its own terms, as a force of its own, intimately bound to Being , whose voice it conveys to man. It was “neither expression nor a matter of human manipulation” but merely “spoke.” ...

According to this idea, human consciousness’s very access to entities was predicated on language. Simply put, there was no being, no prior distinct existence, from which any essence for anything could be understood, without a linguistic understanding of it. In the words of the German poet Stefan George, “there is no thing where the word is lacking” (from ‘The Word’, 1928). Heidegger expanded on this ‘ontological’ nature of language in his essay ‘On The Way To Language’: “The thing is a thing only where the word is found for the thing… The word alone supplies being to the thing, [for] something only is, where the appropriate word names something as existing and in this way institutes the particular entity as such… The being of that which is resides in the word. For this reason, the following phrase holds good: language is the house of being” (On the Way to Language, 1959). Within this framework, language is world-instituting, since it brings about a ‘happening of being’ in which man is thrown and through which a world appears.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/108/Herder_Humboldt_Heidegger_Language_As_World-Disclosure

If we jettison apparent nonsense like the world-in-itself...the world is just that which is the case. To me this is not correspondence. There's just use/mention. 'P' is a string of letters. P is piece of a world, a truth (or an attempted truthery.) — Pie

Well said. I'm not surprised that it's @bongo fury who has you pointing this out. I've tried to make the same point to Bongo a few times.

↪bongo fury I don't see a point to what you said more than:

That the dog has fleas is a fact.
"The dog has fleas" is a sentence.
That "The dog has fleas" is true is a fact.
"'The dog has fleas' is true" is a sentence.
That "'The dog has fleas' is true" is true is a fact.
""'The dog has fleas' is true" is true" is a sentence...

...and so on. — Banno

to which he replied with a quote from Sam:

True propositions mirror or picture facts, they are not facts in themselves. This is explained in W. picture theory of meaning. — Sam26

So it seems that somehow for Bongo, that the cat is on the mat is not a fact, but a sentence.

Now that might be what Wittgenstein (at least in the Tractatus) is claiming, but Davidson seems to suggest otherwise:

In giving up dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside all schemes and science, we do not
relinquish the notion of objective truth -quite the contrary. Given the dogma of a dualism of scheme and reality, we get con- ceptual relativity, and truth relative to a scheme. Without the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board. Of course truth ot sentences remains relative to language, but that is as objective as can be. In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but reestablish unmediated touch with the tfamiliarobjects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false. — On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme

That the cat is on the mat is a fact, not a sentence.

I'm not even sure what Davidson is saying, it seems a bit confusing to me. I'm pretty sure I understand what Wittgenstein is saying, at least in terms of the picture theory. A proposition, whether true or false presents a picture of reality. So, if a proposition gives us a picture of a cat on the mat, then that pictorial form either matches reality or it doesn't. If it does, then it's true, if it doesn't, then it's false. W. didn't give up the picture theory (i.e., some propositions are a kind of picture of reality), he just gave us a much broader conception of language based on how we use the concepts.

Well said. I'm not surprised that it's bongo fury who has you pointing this out. I've tried to make the same point to Bongo a few times. — Banno

It's good to hear I'm not crazy. I thought that was how others were taking Wittgenstein in that context (who seems to echo Hegel.)

In giving up dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside all schemes and science, we do not relinquish the notion of objective truth -quite the contrary. Given the dogma of a dualism of scheme and reality, we get con- ceptual relativity, and truth relative to a scheme. Without the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board. Of course truth ot sentences remains relative to language, but that is as objective as can be. In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but reestablish unmediated touch with the tfamiliarobjects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false. — On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme


That the cat is on the mat is a fact, not a sentence. — Banno

Excellent quote ! I think our views are pretty damned close on this issue. A rare pleasure.

I'm not even sure what Davidson is saying, it seems a bit confusing to me. — Sam26

I think the point is that reality, the one we (can) talk about, is 'already' linguistic...and not something 'subintelligble' that words can somehow picture, as if holding up concepts to judge against something real-but-non-conceptual. The 'picture,' if true, is the world.

In giving up dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside all schemes and science, we do not relinquish the notion of objective truth -quite the contrary. Given the dogma of a dualism of scheme and reality, we get conceptual relativity, and truth relative to a scheme. Without the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board. — Banno

This sounds like Hegel, big time.

...reality... is 'already' linguistic... — Pie

Yes; it's in a sense the elimination of the picture giving the meaning in favour of the use replacing the meaning in an expression. That the cat is on the mat is not a picture of the world, it is the world.

The exegetic question might be how the picture theory changed between the Tactatus and the Investigations, and so whether it is compatible with the demise of conceptual schema.

This sounds like Hegel, big time. — Pie

But without the idealism. That is, maintaining a bivalent logic in the face of unknown (empirical?) truths.

Yes; it's in a sense the elimination of the picture giving the meaning in favour of the use replacing the meaning in an expression. That the cat is on the mat is not a picture of the world, it is the world. — Banno

I continue to think that we agree.

Do we agree that there is no point in making promises or bananas less real than protons ?

But without the idealism. That is, maintaining a bivalent logic in the face of unknown truths. — Banno

Care to say more ? I don't know if I ever paid much attention to that theme in Hegel.

Well the logic of promises the grammar - differs from that of bananas and neutrinos. Promises have a basis in institutional facts - the utterance of a promise counts as placing oneself under an obligation. Bananas and neutrinos tend to do what they like regardless of our institutions.

I think the point is that reality, the one we (can) talk about, is 'already' linguistic...and not something 'subintelligble' that words can somehow picture, as if holding up concepts to judge against something real-but-non-conceptual. The 'picture,' if true, is the world. — Pie

If that's what Davidson is saying, then I disagree. Reality isn't, in my view "already linguistic." We use language (propositions) to describe reality, propositions are separate from the facts of reality.

If that's what Davidson is saying, then I disagree. — Sam26

I suspected you disagreed, actually, from what you said before.

Care to say more ? — Pie

Not about Hegel. Not an area I'll claim to understand.

But idealism is tied to antirealism, and hence assumes a grammar in which some statements have no truth value. I suppose that if Hegel is an idealist, as is commonly supposed, then he drops bivalent logic somewhere...?

We use language (propositions) to describe reality, propositions are separate from the facts of reality. — Sam26

My concern with this approach is that it's not clear what the pictures are picturing. How does language function as an image for what you insist is not already linguistic ? We don't hold up propositions to promises or electrons.

I suppose that if Hegel is an idealist, as is commonly supposed, then he drops bivalent logic somewhere...? — Banno

I can look into that. I have Braver's book, A Thing of This World, which approaches the great antirealists in analytic terms (including explicitly bivalence.)

I think Hegel is an idealist in the way that Davidson is, which might be to say misunderstood as one. (Do folks accuse Davidson of that? I only know him via Rorty, really.)

Yes; it's in a sense the elimination of the picture giving the meaning in favour of the use replacing the meaning in an expression. That the cat is on the mat is not a picture of the world, it is the world. — Banno

He didn't eliminate the idea that propositions can picture. He just expanded the idea. Some propositions are a kind of picture. Propositions can be a model of reality, and that model either agrees with reality or it doesn't. Even Einstein's theories were models that were confirmed, i.e., it agreed or it didn't. When the experiments confirmed the model, then the model was accepted as a fact of reality.

My concern with this approach is that it's not clear what the pictures are picturing. How does language function as an image for what you insist is not already linguistic ? — Pie

So, if I describe a picture to you, you wouldn't be clear what the picture is picturing. Now I'm not saying that all propositions fit this approach, but I am saying that some propositional uses do fit this approach.

I think Hegel is an idealist in the way that Davidson is, which might be to say misunderstood as one. — Pie

:grin: You are brave, saying that out loud...

But it should get your thread a dozen more pages.

At least a dozen more. :yikes:

You are brave, saying that out loud... — Banno

The part about Hegel ? Or about Davidson ? (I'm guessing Hegel.)

Propositions can be a model of reality — Sam26

So here's the issue, since Davidson shows the notion of differing conceptual schemes to lack coherence. If we are to say that these pictures or models are conceptual schemes, then Davidson's criticism of conceptual schemes becomes a critique of the picture theory.

If propositions are a model of reality, which is the model of reality - that the cat is on the mat, or "the cat is on the mat"? The use or the mention?

If the picture is that the cat is on the mat, then Davidson's criticism applies. If the picture is "the cat is on the mat", then it doesn't.

Hegel.

I'll here make an invocation prayer to @Tobias, who knows such things. Tobi, is Hegel really an idealist? What is idealism, for Hegel?

Propositions can be a model of reality, — Sam26

I think in the Tractacus he's presenting that as the way we normally imagine things: propositions corresponding to the world the same way a photograph corresponds to a scene.

But the picture can never be in the picture. When we present a theory of propositions, we've strayed beyond what language good for, into nonsense. We're just so enthralled by the theory that we don't realize this. We've forgotten that some things can't be explained. We should pass over them in silence.