But P talks about truth, as well. — bongo fury

Earlier I contemplated < <P is true> is true > is true>. I believe idempotent is the technical term. It seems to work in this simple case at least.

all the more so when such metaphysics and its motivators remain unconscious to us, outside any possible examination, while framing all our thoughts. — Olivier5

:up:

That reminds me of what I'd call a 'deep metaphor' theory, and which I'd associate with Wittgenstein and Heidegger. The stuff that binds all of us is just clear water (for us.) But the stuff that binds most of us is, I claim, what the greats, among other things, make explicit and therefore optional. (That which is closest is hardest to see, like forgetting your glasses are on your nose.)

I am not totally convinced that the approach would work any better than 'combativeness' in a philosophic debate. — Olivier5

I think we pretty much agree. The desire to humiliate I mentioned may actually be good for us. We punish one another for dishonesty or irrelevance or incoherence. We simultaneously enforce tribal norms and attempt installing new ones.

I actually think some authors are trying to trick their readers, even beyond death! — Olivier5

I'll grant you that. But I don't think it hurts our feelings the same way.

Nabokov wrote that the real conflict was always between the author and the reader. In our late age of Netflix and having seen it all, this seems especially true. 'Surprise me or fuck off.'

And, "true" denotes "snow is white" iff "white" denotes snow. — bongo fury

Is this a Fregean idea ?

It jars my intuition, but I'm willing to hear the case.

For are we not all...akin to polyphonic novels, speaking in multiple voices, reflecting multiple traditions? — Joshs

:up:

So what's your preferred understanding of truth ?

Could you elaborate ? I tend to model the situation in terms of the social as the bottom most layer. I am fundamentally one of or a piece of us. The tribal language and form of life is my operating system, deeper than the performance of individuality that it makes possible. (Descartes was a shallow thinker from this perspective, taking the top layer for granted, ignoring that it's language that cannot be doubted intelligibly, not some mere ideological product thereof like the self. — Pie

I’m going to be lazy and quite the last 4 pages of my paper:

If Dasein's being-in-the -world is always structured as an intimate, pragmatic self-belongingness, how does Heidegger explain the basis of apparently normatively driven intersubjective ‘we' contexts? Heidegger's most systematic treatment of Dasein's role in a linguistic community appears in his discussion of average everydayness and das man in Being and Time.

Zahavi is among those thinkers who interpret Heidegger's ‘we-self' of every day das man as taking precedence over his authentic self of ‘ownmost' possibilities. As das man , Zahavi claims

“group belongingness, rather than being founded upon an other-experience, preceded any such experience.”

“...an everyday being-with-one-another characterized by anonymity and substitutability, where others are those from whom “one mostly does not distinguish oneself” (Heidegger 1996: 11)

He surmises that Heidegger would approve of Schmid's(2005) assertion that “...the we, the “sense of us” or “plural self-awareness,” precedes the distinction between yours and mine, is prior to any form of intersubjectivity or mutual recognition, and is itself the irreducible basis for joint action and communication.”

Zahavi is far from alone in interpreting Heidegger's discussions of the discursive practices of Das man as assuming an introjection of norms by a socially created self or a socially conditioned self-affecting subjectivity. Heidegger's critique of Husserl's model of empathy was taken by many interpreters as evidence that the primacy of being-with for Dasein functions as the conditioning of a self by an outside.

For instance, Rousse(2014) says

“...the particular way I ‘carry out' my being and relate to myself is unavoidably susceptible to the pressures of the others' normative expectations.””... inauthenticity is a matter of a person having his practical orientation dominated by ‘outside forces',...the tacitly operative normative expectations about how one ought properly and normally to behave.” “ Dasein, as essentially ‘being-with', initially ‘gets' its existential answerability by being socialized into the shared behavioral norms of the One. In turn, this enables, even encourages, Dasein to act in accordance with them and to avoid taking its own (‘existentiell') answerability for how it comports and understands itself. To be responsible, then, is to be the kind of agent who has the possibility to take responsibility for the socially normative determinants of identity.”

By taking for granted the notion of normativity as a shared understanding, Rousse exemplifies the kind of thinking that Heidegger says disguises, covers over, conceals and obscures a genuine understanding. Das man isn't a matter of simply acting in accordance with norms that are communally understood but a way of thinking that pre-supposes and takes for granted that the self can internalize and introject meanings from others. Public interpretedness is not about behaving in accordance with culturally assimilated norms but believing that norms exist as the sharing of unambiguously intelligible meanings in the first place.

Rousse misreads authenticity as a self-reflexive self's becoming aware of what it has introjected, ‘taken in' from culture and its attempt to take responsibility for, or embrace its own alternative to, those norms. But for Heidegger what the self discloses to itself in average everydayness is not introjected meanings from a community. The self never simply introjects from an outside to an inside. The radically temporal structuration of Dasein makes such introjection impossible.

Heidegger's(2010) task is to explain how a Dasein which always understands others in relation to its very own pragmatic totality of relevance ends up believing in a cultural world of linguistic practices that appear to be the same for all. “...what purports to be an opening up of the world is in fact its concealment: by appealing to public opinion and tradition, idle talk creates in Dasein the belief that it possesses universally acknowledged and thus genuine truths.”

Heidegger chooses words like average, vague, flattened , confused, uprooted state of suspension, and ambiguous to describe Dasein's being as Das Man, to indicate that the heedfulness of Care is still primordially and implicitly operative even when it is explicitly concealed and suppressed . Average everyday discourse has to be vague, approximate, superficial and ambiguous enough to conceal, disguise, cover over, miss, obscure, suppress the fact that the meaning of what is shared is never interpreted identically for each dasein.

“What is talked about is understood only approximately and superficially. One means the same thing because it is in the same averageness that we have a common understanding of what is said.” “Publicness ” does not get to "the heart of the matter," because it is insensitive to every difference of level and genuineness.”

“Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without any previous appropriation of the matter. Idle talk, which everyone can snatch up, not only divests us of the task of genuine understanding, but develops an indifferent intelligibility for which nothing is closed off any longer. Discourse, which belongs to the essential constitution of being of Dasein, and also constitutes its disclosedness, has the possibility of becoming idle talk, and as such of not really keeping being-in-the-world open in an articulated understanding, but of closing it off and covering over inner worldly beings. “ “ Ontologically, this means that when Da-sein maintains itself in idle talk, it is-as being-in-the-world-cut off from the primary and primordially genuine relations of being toward the world, toward Mitda-sein, toward being-in itself.”

“Idle talk conceals simply because of its characteristic failure to address things in an originary way [urspriinglichen Ansprechens]. It obscures the true appearance of the world and the events in it by instituting a dominant view [herrschende Ansicht].”“Usually and for the most part the ontic mode of being-in (discoverture) is concealment [Verdeckung]. Interpretedness, which is speech encrusted by idle talk, draws any given Dasein into 'one's' way of being. But existence in the 'one' now entails the concealment and marginalization of the genuine self [eigentlichen Selbst]. Not only has each particular given itself over to 'one', 'one' blocks Dasein's access to the state it finds itself in [Befindlichkeit].”(Heidegger 2011)

What is this genuine self, this genuine understanding, this originary and primordial way of appropriating the matter, this “getting to the heart of the matter”, these primordially genuine relations of being toward the world, toward Mitda-sein, toward being-in itself, that idle talk conceals?

To say that in the mode of average everydayness Dasein disguises, covers over, conceals, obscures its genuine self, a genuine understanding, an originary and primordial way of appropriating the matter, “getting to the heart of the matter,” primordially genuine relations of being toward the world, toward Mit-dasein, toward being-in itself, is to say that Dasein explicitly experiences itself as a constituted self, introjecting norms from other selves , but this awareness pre-supposes and is grounded in an implicit mineness.

Average everydayness of Das man and idle talk shares with what Heidegger calls the ‘present to hand‘ the features of being derivative modes of the ‘as' structure of heedful circumspective significance, functioning as a contextually rich totality of relevance. They also share the feature of being a ‘dwindling down' of that wider experience.

Even as Zahavi mistakenly critiques Heidegger for giving precedence to “plural self-awareness,” over the distinction between yours and mine, Zahavi's I-Thou model of sociality falls under the scope of Heidegger's formulation of Das Man.

Zahavi(2012) says “The I and the you are prior to the we”. The I-you relation “is a reciprocal exchange of address and response that affects and transforms the self experience of the participating individuals... we take over from others (and make our own) a language, roles, attitudes and norms”.

This makes individual behavior in social situations the product of narrative norms, reciprocities, shared practices and social constraints. The presupposition here is that my own subjectivity always functions as a harbor in the reception of social signs . Intersubjectivity is characterized by a reciprocal cobbling and co-ordination between personal history and cultural signs in which the ‘joints' of such interactive bodily-mental and social practices are simultaneously within my own subjectivity and common to other participants in my community. Zahavi assumes these culturally normed practices that we internalize represent forms of meaning no less robust in significance and relevance to our lives than those which we generate.

In contrast, for Heidegger the social norms and practices that Dasein takes in are specific modifications of meaning on the order of a diminution of significance. The publicness of Das Man and the present to handness of things are modes of Dasein representing a deprivation and trivialization of intelligibility, significance and relevance, and thus a reduction of meaningfulness. Dasein becomes alienated from itself not by being taken over by, introjecting and internalizing an outside but by encountering itself (its ownmost world of possibilities) as almost devoid of sense. This is self-alienation as senselessness rather than internalization of an other.

“However, alienation cannot mean that Da-sein is factically torn away from itself....this alienation, which closes off to Da-sein its authenticity and possibility, even if only that of genuinely getting stranded, still does not surrender it to beings which it itself is not, but forces it into its inauthenticity, into a possible kind of being of itself.”(Heidegger 2010)

Zahavi's belief that socialization is a direct introjection and internalization from an outside marks it from Heidegger's vantage as an inauthentic and confused self-understanding, even if we assume with Zahavi that the subject is an active participant in what it takes in from others( I-Thou).

World-understanding as Dasein-understanding is self-understanding. Self and world belong together in the single entity, the Dasein. Self and world are not two beings, like subject and object, or like I and thou, but self and world are the basic determination of the Dasein itself in the unity of the structure of being-in-the-world. (Heidegger 1982)

We saw earlier how for Husserl the alterity and foreignness of other egos is constituted as a variation of my own thematics, via aperceptive transfer. Heidegger understands thematic mineness through the Care structure. Heidegger says average everydayness alienates Dasein from itself, but without Dasein's therefore being merely conditioned by others.

My being-with-others originates primordially as ‘my ownmost' being-with , relative to my significant aims and goals, to what matters to me. As the inauthentic mode of average everydayness communication become flattened, leveled down into the vagueness of a ‘we' understanding, but this average everydayness does not eliminate but only covers over the originary ‘mineness' of the Care structure of primordial temporality.

The ‘solitude' of the mineness of the self of Dasein is disclosed most fundamentally for Heidegger in the authentic mood of angst. Angst individualizes and thus discloses Da-sein as "solus ipse." This existential "solipsism," however, is so far from transposing an isolated subject-thing into the harmless vacuum of a worldless occurrence that it brings Da-sein in an extreme sense precisely before its world as world, and thus itself before itself as being-in-the-world.“ "Together with the sober Angst that brings us before our individualized potentiality-of-being, goes the unshakable joy in this possibility.”

As much as it is the case that Heidegger's being-with-others is not the precedence of anonymous plural self-awareness over Dasein's ownness, it is equally true that Dasein's self-belonging is not a retreat from the immediate contingency of world-exposure, not the choosing of an idealist self-actualization at the expense of robust being with others. Gallagher and Gadamer's readings of Heidegger appear to fall prey to such a solipsist interpretation.

Gallagher(2010) says: “In Heidegger, and in thinkers who follow his line of thought, we find the idea that a relatively complete account of our embodied, expert, enactive, pragmatic engagements with the world can be given prior to or without reference to intersubjectivity.”

Gadamer(2006) writes:

“Mit-sein, for Heidegger, was a concession that he had to make, but one that he never really got behind. Indeed, even as he was developing the idea, he wasn't really talking about the other at all. Mit-sein is, as it were, an assertion about Dasein, which must naturally take Mit-sein for granted..."Care" [die Sorge] is always a concernfulness [ein Besorgtsein] about one's own being, and Mit-sein is, in truth, a very weak idea of the other, more a "letting the other be" than an authentic "being-interested-in-him."”

Zahavi, Gallagher and Gadamer are right and wrong in their readings of Heidegger. Gallagher and Gadamer are right that Heidegger makes their notion of primary intersubjectivity a derivative modification of the primary self-understanding of Dasein. But they are wrong to interpret Dasein's self-understanding as prior to sociality. Being-with is instead the very site of sociality as a referential differential inside-outside. Zahavi is right that Heidegger places being-with as prior to Zahavi's model of pre-reflective self-awareness, but Zahavi is wrong in treating Das Man as an anonymous plural self. As a referential differential it is a more intimate notion of self- relation than Zahavi's present-to-hand oppositional subject-object structure.

Heidegger's ‘ownmost' shows that a profound irreducible intimacy of relation between self and world reveals itself once idealized binaries like inside-outside, internal-external, the meeting of an in-itself and a for-itself have been deconstructed. A central implication of this thinking for the understanding of intersubjectivity is that while our experience as individuals is characterized by stable relations of relative belonging or alienation with respect to other individuals and groups, the site of this interactivity, whether we find ourselves in greater or lesser agreement with a world within which we are enmeshed, has a character of peculiar self-belonging and ownership. It also has a character of relentless creative activity that undermines and overflows attempts to understand human action based on between-person reciprocities. We may identify to a greater or lesser extent with various larger paradigmatic communities, delicately united by intertwining values. But the contribution of each member of a community to the whole would not originate at the level of spoken or bodily language interchange among voices; such constructs repress as much as they reveal. Even in a community of five individuals in a room, I, as participant, can perceive a locus of integrity undergirding the participation of each of the others to the responsive conversation. In my dealings with other persons, I would be able to discern a thread of continuity organizing their participation in dialogue with me, dictating the manner and extent to which I can be said to influence their thinking and they mine. My thinking can not properly be seen as `determined' by his response, and his ideas are not simply `shaped' by my contribution to our correspondence.

I can only shape my actions to fit socially legitimate goals or permitted institutionalized grammatical forms to the extent that those goals or forms can be understood by me as relevant to my ongoing experience. Even then, what is understood by me is not `the' social forms, but aspects hidden within these so-called forms which are unique to the totality of relevance of my perspective; what I perceive as socially `permitted' rhetorical argumentation is already tylistically distinctive in relation to what other participants perceive as permitted. Each individual who feels belonging to an extent in a larger ethico-political collectivity perceives that collectivity's functions in a unique, but peculiarly coherent way relative to their own history, even when they believe that in moving forward in life their strategic language moves are guided by the constraints imposed by essentially the `same' discursive conventions as the others in their speech community.

Is this a Fregean idea ? — Pie

Not that I recall.

I'm not sure it's unobjectionable.

I remember thinking something like it when trying to grasp Tarski's expositions. So if it's not badly wrong it'll be from there.

If it seems alien, I can get supporting sentiments from Goodman and Quine, I think.

Woodger's term, p.17, is 'shared name'. Martin, in Truth and Denotation, Ch. IV, speaks of divided reference as multiple denotation. I applaud that use of 'denote', having so used the word myself until deflected to 'true of' by readers' misunderstanding; and Martin's 'multiple' obviates the misunderstanding. — Quine: Word and Object, p 90n.

Ah and this is what reminded me:

Truth for singular sentences, consisting of a name and an arbitrarily complex predicate, is defined thus: A singular sentence is true iff the object denoted by the name satisfies the predicate. Logical machinery provided by Tarski (1935) can be used to turn this simplified sketch into a more general definition of truth—a definition that handles sentences containing relational predicates and quantifiers and covers molecular sentences as well. Whether Tarski’s own definition of truth can be regarded as a correspondence definition, even in this modified sense, is under debate (cf. Popper 1972; Field 1972, 1986; Kirkham 1992, chaps. 5-6; Soames 1999; Künne 2003, chap. 4; Patterson 2008.) — SEP

Dasein's self-belonging is not a retreat from the immediate contingency of world-exposure, not the choosing of an idealist self-actualization at the expense of robust being with others. — Joshs

:up:

:up:

what I perceive as socially `permitted' rhetorical argumentation is already stylistically distinctive in relation to what other participants perceive as permitted. Each individual who feels belonging to an extent in a larger ethico-political collectivity perceives that collectivity's functions in a unique, but peculiarly coherent way relative to their own history, even when they believe that in moving forward in life their strategic language moves are guided by the constraints imposed by essentially the `same' discursive conventions as the others in their speech community. — Joshs

:up:

I liked this closing especially. Relevant to us here, yes? We don't see the norms the same way, correct ? We can even pretend they are clearer than they are while trying to establish them. I'd say that we update our sense of the norms in play constantly. Each move in the game and its result is a fresh clue about what is acceptable and charming and what is the opposite. Complete conformity is bland mediocrity. In our individualistic culture, the right kind of sin is virtue itself, or the glamorous kind at least. In a less narcissistic key, the deepest and most joyful sociality lives in dancing on the edges, in a play that is not quote innocent and anything but rote. It is two children running off into the woods on the edge of the village. Or more than two perhaps. Groups of musicians (an experimental rock band maybe) who are also close friends...also go there. The edge is made possible by that which is taken for granted. In the same way, poetry builds a metrical expectation in order to violate it skillfully.


Maybe we agree: the self is not 'injected' with norms. (This metaphor might work for the body. ) The performance of the responsible self is 'itself' normal. What 'I' am or include is not given beforehand but itself at stake. Small wonder that Nietzsche contemplated will to power and expansion and a 'false' making-equal as its tool.

I never studied Frege closely, but I thought he cast the meaning or reference (or something) of propositions as True or False. Maybe someone can chime in.

And, "true" denotes "snow is white" iff "white" denotes snow. — bongo fury

My intuition would be that 'true' would merely describe and not denote in that case. Could be a terminological difference/preference.

Me neither, but I gather he invented sense vs reference, with the latter pointing to true or false as you describe. So?

I guess I wouldn't say that white denotes snow.

I'd just say that "snow is white" is true if snow is white.

My intuition would be that 'true' would merely describe and not denote in that case. — Pie

Same difference. In Quine (see above), Goodman, Elgin.

Denotes, describes, applies to, refers to, points to, ...

Same difference. In Quine, Goodman, Elgin. — bongo fury

OK, so it was just terminological habit/expectation.

I'd just say that "snow is white" is true if snow is white. — Pie

Yes, which is deflationary, and what could possibly be wrong with that! Well, it's a bit smug, if there's stuff to say about how a sentence refers to other stuff. And mystical, if we end up equivocating between truth-bearing sentence and truth-making state. Which I'm quite sure none of us ever would...

Yeah it could be smug or mystical. But it's basically Hegel, so...no surprise ? Is it a bug or a feature ?

Bug.

Which I'm quite sure none of us ever would... — bongo fury

To me the alternative is an indeterminate X for everything that exists non-linguistically.

So it's 'Hegel' or 'Kant,' which may be like choosing a red tie or a blue tie. (I never wear ties, so wtf?)

A bit like the 'ghost' at the heard of the hard problem. It's there, I guess, maybe, but there's nothing to be said about it. It's the hole in a doughnut, getting its sense in the first place from that which is public and articulated surrounding it.

The 'Kant' approach is truer to our total cognition and common sense. Granted. But the 'Hegel' approach is purer, focused on what we can and actually do work with. Claims.

I'm offering denotation (of sentence-parts) as a better way (to examine how language relates or corresponds with bits of reality) than truth of whole sentences.

That helps. Brandom claims that the original pre-Kantian approach was in terms of parts rather than whole sentences, and that Kant's achievement was recognizing that we can only take responsibility for assertions, complete sentences, and not their parts (individual concepts). To be sure, responsibility and the normative are not the only way in. But I do confess my infatuation with inferentialism at the moment.

On the other hand, my training is in math, so I can relate to caring about the meaning of parts and building from there.

Let's see. So you want to link nouns to objects maybe ? Independently of the claims they appear in?

And, "true" denotes "snow is white" iff "white" denotes snow. — bongo fury

Is this a Fregean idea ? — Pie

Not that I recall. — bongo fury

Looks to be an extensional interpretation...

The extension of a predicate – a truth-valued function – is the set of tuples of values that, used as arguments, satisfy the predicate. Such a set of tuples is a relation.

For example, the statement "d2 is the weekday following d1" can be seen as a truth function associating to each tuple (d2, d1) the value true or false. The extension of this truth function is, by convention, the set of all such tuples associated with the value true, i.e.

{(Monday, Sunday),
(Tuesday, Monday),
(Wednesday, Tuesday),
(Thursday, Wednesday),
(Friday, Thursday),
(Saturday, Friday),
(Sunday, Saturday)}

By examining this extension we can conclude that "Tuesday is the weekday following Saturday" (for example) is false. — Wiki:Extension (predicate logic)

Such interpretations are easy to work with, but lack nuance. Intensional logics allow terms to designate different things under different conditions, and different terms to designate the same thing - "the morning star" and "the evening star", as in possible world semantics.

Or something like that. the salient point here is that a purely extensional interpretation has its limits.

So you want to link nouns to objects maybe ? — Pie

Of course. And variables to their values (which are things out there, not more language).

And so on.

extensional — Banno

Yes, or even nominalist ("hyper-extensionalist" in Goodman's rhetoric).

I feel a diagram coming on, tomorrow.

I think we use 'true' and 'truth' to carry an awful lot more meaning that T-sentences encompass. — Isaac

Oh, sure. I left the pragmatics as obvious, since we are focusing here on truth vales.

It's used to persuade, not identify. — Isaac

Of course it is, as the pomos will and ought tell us. But equally, it only has this power of persuasion because of it's logical implications. So getting those right is where one might best start.

I've a keen interest in reconciling Wittgenstein and Davidson. Been at it since I were a lad. In a way Davidson's semantic theory might be a more recent and sophisticated version of the formalisation of language found in the Tractatus, an attempt to explicate what is important in our natural languages by setting out the conditions under which our utterances are true.

Jeff Malpas's Stanford article is a good place to start. See the section on Meaning and Truth.

Of course. And variables to values (which are things out there, not more language).

And so on. — bongo fury

It's my understanding that Carnap was wild about this stuff and that he worked out complex systems.

While I appreciate your efforts, I'm too far removed from Hegel to see the relevance of your explication. You've lost me.

And so on. — bongo fury

It definitely has its place.

I think maybe the same criticism applies to it though. The noun 'is' the object as intelligible. Folks like to say that the map is not the territory. I understand what they mean well enough. But from my 'Hegelian' position we just have in that aphorism a reminder than or beliefs might not be true.

In other words, maps are beliefs and the territory is all that is the case or just the facts. (From this POV, the maps 'are' sometimes the territory, but we can't be sure...there is no non-mappy territory.) (I think you already understand this position.)

what is needed is an account of falsehood, which is parasitic on a community of truth tellers. — unenlightened

I like this notion.

But is it not also possible to wesponise the value of truth to no less a degree?

Your talk of eagles and snakes is spot on. If I say "we've run out of cake" just to keep more for myself I'm being 'parasitic' on the generally truth-telling community.

But most claims we could attach to this social necessity to are not of that nature.

We're rarely talking to each other about hidden cakes. Mostly we're exchanging beliefs about way more complex propositions. Russia, Covid, Trump, Brexit, Global Warming...
Here we're clearly not using 'true' the same way. We're using it closer to the lying monkey. We really, really want others to adhere to our solutions.

The simple (eagles and snakes) version of 'truth' is secondary because we don't believe what we believe about those matters because we've done the equivalent of looking in the fridge, we do so because of who we trust, our faith in statistics, beliefs about the intentions of institutions...

So whilst I agree with you, I'm not sure how far it applies socially. Lying is parasitic on truth, that's for sure, but for me to get to the idea that lying is...

destructive of meaning of society and of our world. — unenlightened

...I'd have to see a stronger argument that matters of eagles and snakes, of cake in the fridge, actually impact all that much on meaning on society, because it seems to me at first glance, that the vast majority of societal functions and meanings depend overwhelmingly on concepts and belief so complex that 'truth' and 'lie' just don't really apply.