Gore Vidal, although not a philosopher, springs to mind. — Tom Storm

:up:

I wonder what a Foucauldian riposte to this would be. Often felt that the postmodern challenge to rationalism and science and progress and its constant urge for reinvention is like a form of Romanticism, but with cynicism and disenchantment where hope and love used to sit. — Tom Storm

I can't ignore the anxiety of influence here. If the trend is anti-systematic, then one might try to be more and/or differently anti-systematic. Yet I can't see any escape from a game that is essentially normative. A philosopher projects/offers/markets a [better] way, even if only implicitly through criticism the [opposite of that better] way. If it's not 'just my opinion,' then it binds 'in the name of' some X. From a structuralist perspective, the names don't matter but only the roles. (In short, 'pomo' types are still in the same game, while pretending, sometimes incoherently, to have escaped it by merely renaming things.)

Where do we need a concept of truth in there? The entire concept seems, dare I say, redundant. — Isaac

Inspired by some of your other posts, I say it can play a useful expressive role. It's the North on our map. Assume P. Now we can conveniently ignore warrant and take P as a premise recklessly yet safely.

Redundancy suggests this: If an entire community passionate believes P, then P functions as a truth for them, as an automatically allowed premise, so long as that shared, strong belief persists.

Nor do I. It's not ineffable; the T-sentence sets it out exactly.... — Banno

What might tempt us toward the ineffable is some darker issue. What is it to assert ? What does it mean for something to be ? This feels Heideggarian, and perhaps there's no light at the end of this tunnel.

Do you now acknowledge that our statements have truthmakers? — Luke

Assume 'statements have truthmakers.' What would a truthmaker for that statement look like ?

What is it to assert ? — Pie

An illocutionary act with the following conditions:

• It has as content some proposition p
• The speaker has evidence for the truth of p
• It is not obvious to both the speaker and the hearer that p
• The speaker believes that p
• Making an assertion counts as an undertaking to the effect that p represents an actual state of affairs.

-Searle, Speech Acts

What does it mean for something to be? — Pie

A theory is committed to those and only those entities to which the bound variables of the theory must be capable of referring in order that the affirmations made in the theory be true. — Quine, “On What There Is”.

No need for Heidi.

Which raises the interesting issue of how Wittgenstein would respond to the misuse of language.

Have you had a look at A nice derangement of epitaphs?

There is no word or construction that cannot be converted to a new use by an ingenious or ignorant speaker...

We should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions.

Conventions are post hoc, and there to be broken. Just as there is a way of understanding a rule that is not found in stating it but in implementing it, there is a way of understanding a rule that is seen in breaking it.

All of which points to the primacy of use. It's what we do.

Do you now acknowledge that our statements have truthmakers? — Luke

From the contents list for the SEP article:

1. What is a Truth-maker?
1.1 Truth-making as Entailment
1.2 Truth-making as Necessitation
1.3 Truth-making as Projection
1.4 Truth-making in terms of Essentialism
1.5 Axiomatic Truth-making
1.6 Truth-Making as Grounding

Which one of these are you proposing? Which is true?

The point, of course, is that since it is far from clear what a truthmaker might be, it is far from clear how they help set out the nature of truth.

So no, I do not acknowledge that statements have truthmakers.

...the question of 'what is truth' cannot be answered without a discussion of belief (which I understand you see as almost unrelated?). — Isaac

I think it rather the reverse, that questions of belief cannot be answered without a discussion of truth.

If one specifies the conditions under which a sentence is true, one specifies the meaning of that sentence. What more could one want? If one specifies what one believes, one specifies what one takes to be true.

There's good reason to take truth as fundamental here. A Tarski-style rendering will be able to take advantage of first-order predicate logic, setting out the truth of any sentence in terms of the extensional, technical notion of satisfaction.

Truth is as foundational a notion as one might come across, immune to analysis, not capable of being explained in other terms, irreducible.

Weren't you at pains recently to explain that neural nets do not have beliefs? I had taken it that we had reached a general agreement that the intentional language of truth, belief and desire was parallel yet independent of the neurological language of empirical priors and suppressing free-energy...?

Surely there are no falsehoods without a conscious entity to make them. I.e. truth is the default state of the universe, those truths might be unrevealed without a conscious entity to discern them but they are still there, simply as properties of the universe. — TheVeryIdea

I think there's a small but major difference between our claims.

It's correct to say that there are no falsehoods without conscious entities, but that also holds for truths. "Truth", as I argue, is completely observer-dependent. It's incorrect to say "truth is the default state of the universe" because without observers, there is no truth. Rather, existence is the default state of the universe, and whether or not the models we construct correspond to that reality determines truth value.

However, there's an elephant in the room with this argument that brought up, which is what exactly does it mean for the model to "correspond" with reality? As Pie says:

Talk of mental models and representation in general seems to want to put two things together side by side, but it seems that only the thing on our side is intelligible. How does 'the sky is blue' match anything ? — Pie

My solution to this, and also to answer Pie's general concern of how truth claims seem redundant, is to say that truth doesn't describe reality per se, but instead are constructible within reality. Consider the proposition "the sky is blue". I think Pie would say that our idea that the sky is blue would be true if, in reality, the sky is blue. This is a correspondence of some sort between our mental model and reality, but it isn't clear why the model must be treated separately from the reality; it seems to be redundant.

However, I propose a radical shift in perspective. That is to say, in reality, there is no sky, and there is no blue. The objects we commonly consider like the sky and the color blue are examples of ways we, as observers, carve reality. But these slices we carve aren't necessary, and may not be true in every sense. For example, consider a table viewed from the perspective of an alien species. An alien species isn't necessarily humanoid, nor has the etiquette to dine on such a surface. To most species, a table would prove rather useless. So I ask, would an alien species even consider the concept of a table? Couldn't they go about their lives, their existence even, across generations, and never want or need to build a table? I think so. So, although we may live in the same reality, one where we build and see tables, an alien, even if they saw a person using a table, I argue, wouldn't carve a table into their reality.

I'd argue we can expand this principle to include almost all human conceptions, and we could also apply it to ourselves to say that there could be ways of viewing reality that we would never even think of. And in this world of arbitrary world-slicing, it seems clear that the objects we hold to be "real" aren't necessarily real to all observers. If something isn't real to all observers, how could it be part of reality?

So now we have a conundrum, which is to say we want a statement like "the sky is blue" to be true, because it seems evidently so, but there is no real sky or real blue. If our mental model doesn't correspond to reality, how can such a statement be true? It's because while I do claim our slices of reality aren't reality proper, they are still constructible from the reality that is there. In fact, I'll cut this short and just get to the thesis: Truth isn't what is real, but rather, what observers can construct from what is real. "The sky is blue" isn't true because the sky is blue in reality, because there is no real sky to be blue, but because we can construct something called the sky from observation and determine its blueness again through observation and other reasoning faculties.

Now, there are further ideas to be discussed, such as what reality really is, if our world-slicing mechanism can't determine real things, or how a world without observers is different from just an "ineffable clump", but that's enough words for one post I'd say.

(In hindsight, I may have been repetitive on a couple points and not explained thoroughly why certain things are true, but I'll let others point out what they are.)

You raise some classic points. I take you to be discussing what Davidson calls conceptual schemes. I also connect this to the position I'm abbreviating as 'Kant.'

I think the rhetorical effect, which is substantial, depends on us pretending to be able to jump in and out of our actual 'carving' (as you would call it.) We write a check that we don't know how to cash. The idea of an alien conceptual scheme is baked it seems from only negation. 'Like ours, but not like ours.' Any actual exploration or description of this scheme would only manifest its inclusion in our scheme.

The other idea (the 'Kantian' idea) is that there is some stuff 'behind' all possible conceptual schemes, which functions as there input. Let's say human cognition is $f$ and alien cognition is $g$, then humans have the world as $f(X)$ and aliens as $g(X)$. So $X$ is the hidden input or deep Reality. Personally I think the idea of a conceptual scheme is powerful and justly central. We model other human beings this way, I think, taking many of our beliefs as ground truths and imagining these as the inputs of their models. Note though that we are using already-been-chewed input here. Is this not true on a tribal level too ? So that the $X$ is questionable ?

Those are reasonable answers, but they don't scratch the itch. I'm sure you've seen this, but ...

The experience that we need in order to understand logic is not that something or other is the state of things, but that something is: that, however, is not experience.

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words.
The riddle does not exist.

If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it.

To say 'I wonder at such and such being the case' has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case. In this sense one can wonder at the existence of, say, a house when one sees it and has not visited it for a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the meantime. But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it's clouded. But that's not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then it's just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.

Seems like Witt and Heidi both stumbled upon something irreducible.

how a world without observers is different from just an "ineffable clump" — Jerry

:up:

Truth isn't what is real, but rather, what observers can construct from what is real. — Jerry

This makes truth (the real) a nonlinguistic and ineffable clump, which I think is subject the Hegelian critique above.

It's correct to say that there are no falsehoods without conscious entities, but that also holds for truths. "Truth", as I argue, is completely observer-dependent. It's incorrect to say "truth is the default state of the universe" because without observers, there is no truth. — Jerry

:up:

To wonder at a tautology...

All at once the veil is torn away, I have understood, I have seen.... The roots of the chestnut tree sank into the ground just beneath my bench. I couldn't remember it was a root anymore. Words had vanished and with them the meaning of things, the ways things are to be used, the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface...

It took my breath away. Never, up until these last few days, had I suspected the meaning of "existence." I was like the others, like the ones walking along the seashore, wearing their spring clothes. I said, like them, "The sea is green; that white speck up there is a seagull," but I didn't feel that it existed or that the seagull was an "existing seagull"; usually existence conceals itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you can't say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it. When I believed I was thinking about it, I was thinking nothing, my head was empty, or there was just one word in my head, the word "being." Or else I was thinking — how can I put it? I was thinking of properties. I was telling myself that the sea belonged to the class of green objects, or that green was one of the qualities of the sea. Even when I looked at things, I was miles from dreaming that they existed: they looked like scenery to me. I picked them up in my hands, they served me as tools, I foresaw their resistance. But that all happened on the surface. If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form added to things from the outside, without changing any thing in their nature. And then all at once, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost harmless look of an abstract category: it was the dough out of which things were made, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the patches of grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous lumps, in disorder — naked, with a frightful and obscene nakedness.
...
Absurdity: another word. I struggle against words; beneath me there I touched the thing. But I wanted to fix the absolute character of this absurdity. A movement, an event in the tiny colored world of men is only relatively absurd — in relation to the accompanying circumstances. A madman's ravings, for example, are absurd in relation to the situation in which he is, but not in relation to his own delirium. But a little while ago I made an experiment with the absolute or the absurd. This root — there was nothing in relation to which it was absurd. How can I pin it down with words? Absurd: in relation to the stones, the tufts of yellow grass, the dry mud, the tree, the sky, the green benches. Absurd, irreducible; nothing — not even a profound, secret delirium of nature could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of the segment of a straight line around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, in contrast, existed in such a way that I could not explain it. Knotty, inert, nameless, it fascinated me, filled my eyes, brought me back unceasingly to its own existence. In vain I repeated, "This is a root" — it didn't take hold any more. I saw clearly that you could not pass from its function as a root, as a suction pump, to that, to that hard and thick skin of a sea lion, to this oily, callous; stubborn look. The function explained nothing: it allowed you to understand in general what a root was, but not at all that one there. That root with its color, shape, its congealed movement, was beneath all explanation.
...
But at the heart of this ecstasy, something new had just appeared; I understood the nausea, I possessed it. To tell the truth, I did not formulate my discoveries to myself. But I think it would be easy for me to put them in words now. The essential point is contingency. I mean that by definition existence is not necessity. To exist is simply ... to be there; existences appear, let themselves be encountered, but you can never deduce them. Some people, I think, have understood this. Only they tried to overcome this contingency by inventing a being that was necessary and self-caused. But no necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not a delusion, an appearance which can be dissipated; it is the absolute, and, therefore, perfectly gratuitous. Everything is gratuitous, this park, this city, and myself. When you realize this, your heart turns over and everything begins to float...
— Sartre

https://twren.sites.luc.edu/phil120/ch10/nausea.htm

So you want to make the questions unanswerable, to make them no longer questions, and yet to still ask them.

I gave you reasonable answers, but what you want is unreasonable ones.

I read Nausea cover to cover a few months back. It wasn't a pleasant task. Roquentin wallows in existential angst. But as he concludes, that's his choice...

The trouble, of course, is that I feel the itch too, at least on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

g(X) is true IFF f(X)...

The alien conceptual scheme can only be recognised as a conceptual scheme if there is an interpretation for in in our conceptual scheme. (Davidson...)

So you want to make the questions unanswerable, to make them no longer questions, and yet to still ask them. — Banno

No. I don't think they are really questions. I think these pseudo-questions are fascinating and perhaps where philosophy bumps into its repressed past.

I gave you reasonable answers, but what you want is unreasonable ones. — Banno

This is where we diverge, I suppose. The 'dark side' of the analytic leaning is a streak of Officer Barbrady. "Nothing to see here." It's not a rule that we have to avoid anything muddy or awkward. As I keep being told, 'reasonable' makes a normative claim here, implicitly excluding whatever its user would like excluded. I think you realize this, so I'm just pushing back. Philosophy that is only fussy language policing is seriously diminished and is even a parasite on that which it rejects (creative risk). I came to this analytic side late because of a mistaken perception that it purchased respectability at the cost of relevance. The cartoon version is a person afraid to talk about anything that matters, but not afraid to try and shame anyone brave or foolish enough to do so. I do not deny that plenty of earnest nonsense gets spewed on the other side. Complementary.

I think it's wrong to take Nausea (title suggested by the crafty publisher, by the way) as a 'wallowing' book, as if Sartre wasn't having fun with us. It'd be like thinking Bleach or In Utero weren't expressions of ecstasy, just because they played with the ugly.

https://vimeo.com/384672843

The alien conceptual scheme can only be recognised as a conceptual scheme if there is an interpretation for in in our conceptual scheme. — Banno

:up:

That seems right. If I am extremely vague about the alien conceptual scheme, it's only a negation of my own and basically ineffable. The more I sketch it out, the more I see that it's part of my own already.

Scratch, scratch. When faced with the existential crisis of German bombing, Witti took a job as a hospital orderly. Otherwise philosophy becomes waiting for Godot, something of which I am intensely susceptible, especially on wet days.

But today it is sunny.

Scratch, scratch. When faced with the existential crisis of German bombing, Witti took a job as a hospital orderly. Otherwise philosophy becomes waiting for Godot, something of which i am intensely susceptible, especially on wet days.

But today it is sunny. — Banno

Hear, hear to this.

If one specifies the conditions under which a sentence is true, one specifies the meaning of that sentence. — Banno

Then you don't get to be deflationary about truth. Which is it?

Disquotationalism.

Weren't you at pains recently to explain that neural nets do not have beliefs? I had taken it that we had reached a general agreement that the intentional language of truth, belief and desire was parallel yet independent of the neurological language of empirical priors and suppressing free-energy...? — Banno

Indeed, but I must a) still do the translations, and b) more importantly, still believe that what we discover about the brain constrains our metaphysical notions. If we have a metaphysical idea about belief, it must be of use to us (the real us in the real world of brains and neural nets).

So I see two possibilities for defining truth (which it seems - in my ignorance perhaps - that your position falls between the cracks of)

1. What does it mean for us to take something to be true? This is a question of psychology. It's about the psychological notion of belief and that some beliefs seem to have this property of almost full certainty. We act as if they're the case without a plan-B. We are inclined to alter some other belief rather than them if our policy under them is unsuccessful...

Here 'true' is about certainty (not 'true' means 'certain').

2. What the word 'true' means. Here we can talk of propositions and logic, but we must also talk of...

If an entire community passionate believes P, then P functions as a truth for them, as an automatically allowed premise, so long as that shared, strong belief persists. — Pie

... and all the other uses I've raised before.

I don't see a good reason for dropping an analysis of 'truth' founded on a study of the ways it is used.

The third way - defining what 'truth' ought to mean because it would be useful if it did - seems less fruitful than either of the others. I can see some value to it in certain branches of philosophy, perhaps, but also more than a little risk of bewitchment therein.

b) more importantly, still believe that what we discover about the brain constrains our metaphysical notions. If we have a metaphysical idea about belief, it must be of use to us (the real us in the real world of brains and neural nets). — Isaac

I don't follow that. But:

1. What does it mean for us to take something to be true? — Isaac

"Take something as" as in decide if it is true or not? That''d be a theory of belief, not truth.

Our deciding if something is true, or not, is irrelevant to it's being true. Hence, our beliefs can be wrong.

and

If an entire community passionate believes P, then P functions as a truth for them... — Pie

Didn't notice that, but clearly it is wrong. If an entire island decides that the way to survive a famine is to erect giant statues...



...truth doesn't care what they believe.

I don't see a good reason for dropping an analysis of 'truth' founded on a study of the ways it is used. — Isaac

Sure, analyse the pragmatics, how the word is used. I encourage an analysis of belief. Just don't mistake it for an analysis of truth.

"Take something as" as in decide if it is true or not? That''d be a theory of belief, not truth.

Our deciding if something is true, or not, is irrelevant to it's being true. — Banno

It seems you're answering the question "What is truth?" from a position of already holding that truth is not analysable. That's the third position I laid out above, to answer the question, not with any level of analysis at all, but to say what 'truth' ought to be. "It is useful for us to consider 'true' to be unanalysable."

You say "Our deciding if something is true, or not, is irrelevant to it's being true", but the question is not "what things are true?", the question is "what is truth?" I think our deciding if something is true, or not, is very relevant to the question of "what is truth?" because it gives us some understanding of the conditions under which we'd be prepared to use the word.

If an entire island decides that the way to survive a famine is to erect giant statues...

...truth doesn't care what they believe. — Banno

But again, the question is not "what things are true?". @Pie's comment was about the conditions under which a community of language users might use the word 'true'. This gives us insight into what we mean by it. It doesn't tell us which things are true. Exactly the same as an analysis of the meaning of the word 'green' doesn't tell me whether your teacup is green or not.

Sure, analyse the pragmatics, how the word is used. I encourage an analysis of belief. — Banno

But an analysis of belief wouldn't tell us much about the way the word 'true' is used. An analysis of truth would.

It seems you're answering the question "What is truth?" from a position of already holding that truth is not analysable. That's the third position I laid out above, to answer the question, not with any level of analysis at all, but to say what 'truth' ought to be. "It is useful for us to consider 'true' to be unanalysable." — Isaac

T-sentences do not set out how "truth" ought be used. They set out the way it does functions in logic. SO no, your third position does not apply to T-sentences.

I was puzzled as to why you included it.

Take the statement "the cat is on the mat".

We all know full well when it's not true, because we also know full well what it means. Because we know what it means, we know what to look for and where to look in order to check and see.

When it comes to whether or not that particular statement is true...

It does not matter whether or not anyone believes that the cat is on the mat. It does not matter whether or not anyone would assent to the statement. It does not matter whether or not anyone has some disposition and/or attitude such that they take it to be the case.

That particular statement is true only if, only when, and only because the cat is on the mat.

Tarski's T sentence illustrates that beautifully.

T-sentences do not set out how "truth" ought be used. They set out the way it does functions in logic. SO no, your third position does not apply to T-sentences. — Banno

That may be the case (I'm not in a position to argue logic with Tarski - though I will say that unless he has universal agreement, then it sets out how Tarski thinks it functions in logic), but saying that how the term functions in logic is how it ought to be used/understood in ordinary use is a normative claim.

If I say to you "It's true that my teacup is on my desk", what am I additionally communicating to you that's not covered by "I really strongly believe my tea cup is on my desk", or "I'm behaving as if my teacup is on my desk and it's working", or "anyone looking at the scene would also believe my teacup is on my desk"?

If it communicates no more information, or serves no distinguishable purpose, then it is interchangeable. If it is interchangeable, then it can be said to mean those things.

We all know full well when it's not true — creativesoul

Nonsense. This would imply that there's never disagreement. It's abundantly clear that in most cases where the word 'true' is used, we do not "all know full well" at all.

That particular statement is true only if, only when, and only because the cat is on the mat.

Tarski's T sentence illustrates that beautifully. — creativesoul

Beautiful it may well be, but it's simply not how the word is used.

On what authority do you define words for a language community which clearly uses them in defiance of your edict?

If I say to you "It's true that my teacup is on my desk", what am I additionally communicating to you that's not covered by "I really strongly believe my tea cup is on my desk", or "I'm behaving as if my teacup is on my desk and it's working", or "anyone looking at the scene would also believe my teacup is on my desk"? — Isaac

Love this.

Nothing.

Of course - that's what the T-sentence says.

"It's true that my teacup is on my desk" IFF my teacup is on my desk.

So not a lot of "normative" value in that, then.

Yep.

Nonsense. This would imply that there's never disagreement. — Isaac

Why?

I think the cat is on the ottoman. It moved there after the sun went off the mat.