The meanings of true assertions just are the world. — Pie

I disagree. If "the meaning of a word is its use in the language" for a large class of cases, then the same or similar can probably be said for the meaning of a sentence. I note that there are many parts of the world that cannot be used in the language, and that language typically involves the use mostly of words and gestures, and not things like asteroids, chairs or lakes. Sticks and stones may break my bones...

Why wouldn't 'snow' refer that way ? Isn't what you say about snow true ? — Pie

Yes, it's true that snow is white for the correspondence theorist due to the facts of the world. I'm not sure for what reason a deflationist would say that "snow is white" is true; it's not because of any facts of the matter. As I have repeatedly asked: what would make that statement true? Or, how would the truth conditions for that statement be met? According to the SEP article, truth is independent of the meaning of the statement and "deflationists cannot really hold a truth-conditional view of content at all."

Why? To me all it entails or suggests is that for every actuality a true corresponding proposition can be formulated. — Janus

I showed why in that post.

q ≔ the proposition that p
T(q) ≔ q is true

1. T(q) ↔ p
2. T(q) → ∃x(x=q)
3. p → ∃x(x=q)
4. ¬T(q) ↔ ¬p
5. ¬T(q) → ∃x(x=q)
6. ¬p → ∃x(x=q)
7. ∃x(x=q)

In ordinary English:

1. the proposition that p is true if and only if p
2. if the proposition that p is true then the proposition that p exists
3. if p then the proposition that p exists (from 1 and 2)
4. the proposition that p is false if and only if not p (from 1)
5. if the proposition that p is false then the proposition that p exists
6. if not p then the proposition that p exists (from 4 and 5)
7. the proposition that p exists (from 3 and 6)

If that's a problem then we can simply rephrase the T-schema as saying something like if the proposition "p" exists then "p" is true iff p, and so the T-schema will say nothing about states of affairs that aren't talked about.

according to the deflationary theory, the content of a truth bearer is unrelated to truth conditions; that is, the left hand side of a T sentence is unrelated to the right hand side. Or, in other words, the meaning of a sentence is unrelated to the facts of the world. — Luke

To expand further on this, the deflationary theory says that the meaning of a true sentence is just a fact of the world. Or, as @Pie says:

The meanings of true assertions just are the world. — Pie

If so, then no distinction can be drawn between the two sides of a deflationist's T sentence. Hence:

1. A statement ("p") is true iff a statement ("p"); or

2. A fact of the world (p) is true iff a fact of the world (p).

These both mean the same thing according to the deflationary theory, as it draws no distinction between statements (or their meanings) and facts of the world. The problem with this is:

1 is unrelated to the world, provides no information about the world, and has no truth conditions; and
2 is non-linguistic, is not a truth bearer (e.g. a proposition), and does not have a truth value.

The deflationist cannot have statements/beliefs on one side as distinct from the world on the other side without committing themselves to a non-deflationary theory of truth.

...deflationists cannot really hold a truth-conditional view of content at all. If they do, then they inter alia have a non-deflationary theory of truth, simply by linking truth value to truth conditions through the above biconditional. — SEP article on Truth

For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case.

The facts in logical space are the world.


Beliefs articulate the world's possibilities.

True beliefs are the world's actuality.

Much of our language has developed so that we can talk about things like beliefs and logic and truth — Pie

What do you surmise the Wittgenstein of PI was trying to get away from with regard to concepts like belief, truth and logic as he is using them in the Tractatus? I suggest he was not merely showing how instances of the use of these concepts reveal unique senses of meaning within the categories of truth and belief. Rather, he was trying to get us to see that the general categories that would be called ‘truth’ and ‘belief’ are not themselves stably fixed by their relation to the facts of an empirical world. If there are no independent facts of the world to fix our concepts to, them concepts liken pragmatic relevance, consistency, anticipatory compatibility and coherence replace true and false belief as expressions of how we cope with our world. This is self-creation rather than a fitting of language with fact.

Sticks and stones may break my bones... — Luke

Is that a fact about the world ? But it's 'just' concepts right ?

Note that there's a difference between the string-of-letters 'stone' and the concept of a stone (the meaning of 'stone'.)

I'm not sure for what reason a deflationist would say that "snow is white" is true; it's not because of any facts of the matter. — Luke

A deflationist would talk about beliefs. A history of the development of the concepts and snow could be presented. What kinds of light/objects tends to get called 'white' could be discussed. From a deflationist point of view, your are dragging in way too much metaphysical baggage. 'True' has a use in the language. It's expressive. To take an assertion for true is, among other things, to allow it as the premise in any inference whatsoever. I think this is in implicit in if P then Q. 'If P is true, then we can be sure that Q is true.'

The deflationist cannot have statements/beliefs on one side as distinct from the world on the other side without committing themselves to a non-deflationary theory of truth. — Luke

To me the terminology is not that important. I would like us to do more with less, so I am defending an approach that uses the string-of-words (signifier) on one side and the worldly meaning (signified object-concept) of that string on the other. I imagine that other tempting choice would use three parts, like the signifier, the signified-as-concept, and the signified-as-worldly-object.
This would be 'snow is white,' the concept of the whiteness of snow, and the 'actual' (visual?) whiteness of snow.

If "the meaning of a word is its use in the language" for a large class of cases, then the same or similar can probably be said for the meaning of a sentence. — Luke

I think Robert Brandom does a good job of adding meat to the bones of 'meaning is use.' We perform concepts. Rather than concepts gripping the world directly, an inferentialist (following Kant) takes judgments to be the minimal units that individuals can be responsible for. "I took off my boots in the snow because I like my toes warm" does not make sense. "He had a bad teeth,so he ate lots of sugary food." Again, confusion, lack of skill with English. Their norms that govern intelligibly. These aren't the kind that get you shamed if broken but just misunderstood. On top of these norms (one kind fading into another) we have those for coherence and relevance, etc. Meaning is tribal property, but it's constantly being tweaked by individual invention that catches on.

My apologies. — Banno

:up:

If there are no independent facts of the world to fix our concepts to, them concepts liken pragmatic relevance, consistency, anticipatory compatibility and coherence replace true and false belief as expressions of how we cope with our world. This is self-creation rather than a fitting of language with fact. — Joshs

Does it make sense to take as a fact that there are no independent facts of the world to fix our concepts to ? Seemingly not, right ? And this approach itself would have to be established and defended in terms of the very pragmatic relevance it would institute as a replacement for truth.

the general categories that would be called ‘truth’ and ‘belief’ are not themselves stably fixed by their relation to the facts of an empirical world. — Joshs

Wittgenstein's intentions aside, I'm skeptical myself about the 'empirical' world stabilizing metacognitive concepts like 'belief' and 'truth.' I suggest that 'true' plays a role like 0 or 1 or North. 'Belief' looks intimately related to the 'seems' operator. I doubt humans will stop needing 'seems', 'believe', 'supposed', and synonyms to make sense of one another.

I don't think we can peel language off the world to see it 'naked.' This is the classic uncashable check, cousin of the idea of an alien conceptual scheme that's utterly difference than ours.

If there are no independent facts of the world to fix our concepts to, them concepts liken pragmatic relevance, consistency, anticipatory compatibility and coherence replace true and false belief as expressions of how we cope with our world. This is self-creation rather than a fitting of language with fact. — Joshs

Wittgenstein on the relation between facts and concepts:

From PI II (PPF)

366. I am not saying: if such-and-such facts of nature were different, people would have different concepts (in the sense of a hypothesis). Rather: if anyone believes that certain concepts are absolutely the correct ones, and that having different ones would mean not realizing something that we realize - then let him imagine certain very general facts of nature to be different from what we are used to, and the formation of concepts different from the usual ones will become intelligible to him.

From Zettel :

(352) Do I want to say, then, that certain facts are favorable to the formation of certain concepts; or again unfavorable? And does experience teach us this? It is a fact of experience that human beings alter their concepts, exchange them for others when they learn new facts; when in this way what was formerly important to them becomes unimportant, and vice versa. (It is discovered e.g. that what formerly counted as a difference in kind, is really only a difference in degree.

From On Certainty:

558. We say we know that water boils and does not freeze under such-and-such circumstances. Is it conceivable that we are wrong? Wouldn't a mistake topple all judgment with it? More: what could stand if that were to fall? Might someone discover something that made us say "It was a mistake"?
Whatever may happen in the future, however water may behave in the future, - we know that up to now it has behaved thus in innumerable instances.
This fact is fused into the foundations of our language-game.

Does it make sense to take as a fact that there are no independent facts of the world to fix our concepts to ? Seemingly not, right ? And this approach itself would have to be established and defended in terms of the very pragmatic relevance it would institute as a replacement for truth. — Pie

If we took such a thought as a fact , that is , as an identically reproducible idea, then it would merely be a shift from the realist to the idealist side of a metaphysical trope. If instead of a formal fact , we were to take ‘no independent facts of the world’ as a performative act arising from within the midst of contextual sense-making, obliged to re-validate itself the same differently in each new contextual instantiation of its use, then we would have a way of thinking and talking about what happens to notions like truth and belief when they are examined from a radically contextual vantage.

I doubt humans will stop needing 'seems', 'believe', 'supposed', and synonyms to make sense of one another. — Pie

Husserl argued that there is no veil between subject and world. What appears to us, in the mode that it appears to us, is not a proxy or representation of something independent of what directly appears, but is the thing in itself ( whether imagined, perceived, remembered). From this vantage, what ‘seems’ to be, what we ‘believe’ or ‘suppose’ , is just one way of talking about different sorts of direct experiences.

If we abandoned the assumptions of correspondence or coherence with a real outside in favor of notions of enaction and construction of a world , would we change our vocabulary? I think so. It is already happening in certain quarters of philosophy , where truth and belief are no longer considered particularly interesting or significant aspects of how humans interact.

If instead of a formal fact , we were to take ‘no independent facts of the world’ as a performative act arising from within the midst of contextual sense-making, obliged to re-validate itself the same differently in each new contextual instantiation of its use, then we would have a way of thinking and talking about what happens to notions like truth and belief when they are examined from a radically contextual vantage. — Joshs

I can relate to the ideas like the coherent version relativism, which might be described as absolute pragmatism. It's all 'just' speech acts, suggestions, co-creation rather than co-discovery. The only deep problem with this that I can make out is its utter lack of authority. As soon as one wants to bind others in terms of what they ought to believe, one is in a normative space. From a structuralist perspective, something is going to play the role of [what's-better-to-believe] and something else is going to name [the-reason-why-it's-better.] This role is more important in my view that all the different names we might have for it. This is Stirner's implicitly structuralist X (the 'holy' or the 'sacred.')

'It's just my opinion that everything is just our opinion.'
'Good for you! Next, please.'

'We don't discover but make reality together.'
'Well...I don't want to make that version of reality with you, the version where we make rather than find it. Next, please.'

Husserl argued that there is no veil between subject and world. What appears to us, in the mode that it appears to us, is not a proxy or representation of something independent of what directly appears, but is the thing in itself ( whether imagined, perceived, remembered). — Joshs

Husserl has its virtues, but my non-Husserl-expert impression is that he's too Cartesian.

--God is real. He talked to me last night.
--No, he didn't. Take these pills, sir.

Is it not safely taken for granted that individual humans have incompatible beliefs? So that not all of them can be right ?

Husserl asserts there is no veil between subject and world.
Duffenhaur asserts clearly there is such a veil.
By Husserl's light, Duffenhaur must be right, so that Husserl must be wrong, so that maybe Duffenhauer is not right after all, so that maybe Husserl is right after all, and so on.

The minimal concept of the world is something we can be wrong about.
Or am I wrong to say so ?

Why? To me all it entails or suggests is that for every actuality a true corresponding proposition can be formulated. — Janus

That actuality in its 'nudity' is hard to make sense of. The actuality of the cat being on the mat is that the cat is on the mat. Redundant, it seems to me.

Folks might use their visual imagination and 'see' the cat on the mat as the 'real thing.' But this makes the truthmaker inaccesibly private and implicitly visual.

It's all 'just' speech acts, suggestions, co-creation rather than co-discovery. The only deep problem with this that I can make out is its utter lack of authority. As soon as one wants to bind others in terms of what they ought to believe, one is in a normative space. From a structuralist perspective, something is going to play the role of [what's-better-to-believe] and something else is going to name [the-reason-why-it's-better.] — Pie

What one creates or co-creates in language implicates and is reciprocally dependent on material changes in one’s world. The feedback from those material
changes produces new discovery in language. Invention and discovery are two sides of the same coin, since we construct the world that talks back to us , and offers constrains and affordances in accord with how we construct it. We co-inhabit the partially shared construction we call a space of reasons, within which we invent, discover, agree and disagree.

Found a thread-relevant quote in a strange source.

You have spirit, for you have thoughts. What are your thoughts? "Spiritual entities." Not things, then? "No, but the spirit of things, the main point in all things, the inmost in them, their—idea." Consequently what you think is not only your thought?[Pg 45] "On the contrary, it is that in the world which is most real, that which is properly to be called true; it is the truth itself; if I only think truly, I think the truth. I may, to be sure, err with regard to the truth, and fail to recognize it; but, if I recognize truly, the object of my cognition is the truth." — Stirner

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34580/34580-h/34580-h.htm#Page_3

Stirner is absurd in many ways, but his work excavates, more of less explicitly, the minimal normative X...that in which one agent can claim precedence or authority over another.

Sacred, then, is the highest essence and everything in which this highest essence reveals or will reveal itself; but hallowed are they who recognize this highest essence together with its own, i. e. together with its revelations. The sacred hallows in turn its reverer, who by his worship becomes himself a saint, as likewise what he does is saintly, a saintly walk, saintly thoughts and actions, imaginations and aspirations, etc.

It is easily understood that the conflict over what is revered as the highest essence can be significant only so long as even the most embittered opponents concede to each other the main point,—that there is a highest essence to which worship or service is due. If one should smile compassionately at the whole struggle over a highest essence, as a Christian might at the war of words between a Shiite and a Sunnite or between a Brahman and a Buddhist, then the hypothesis of a highest essence would be null in his eyes, and the conflict on this basis an idle play. Whether then the one God or the three in one, whether the Lutheran God or the être suprême or not God at all, but "Man," may[Pg 50] represent the highest essence, that makes no difference at all for him who denies the highest essence itself, for in his eyes those servants of a highest essence are one and all—pious people, the most raging atheist not less than the most faith-filled Christian.

In the foremost place of the sacred,[26] then, stands the highest essence and the faith in this essence, our "holy[27] faith."

As Marx and even Hegel point out, Stirner's ego is itself a spook. But understanding Stirner's ego as the group ego is one way to understand objective idealism. There's nothing outside or above us. Our beliefs just are (the intelligible structure of) reality for us, while we hold them. We are godless or just gods to ourselves. We reject the irrational as unreal, and we beat the real into rational shape. This is according to rationality as we know it so far, for rationality is part of the world that it updates and controls. (In fact, though, many humans evade this terrible freedom and cling to notions of a skydaddy.)

What one creates or co-creates in language implicates and is reciprocally dependent on material changes in one’s world. — Joshs

So do you believe in a thing-in-itself (atoms and void) or just a relatively 'material' side of a continuum ?

We co-inhabit the partially shared construction we call a space of reasons, within which we invent, discover, agree and disagree. — Joshs

We co-inhabit (only) the shared part. But I think that's what you meant. It's that unshared part that makes the seems operator useful. We are constantly developing the shared part, working towards consensus.

Husserl has its virtues, but my non-Husserl-expert impression is that he's too Cartesian.

--God is real. He talked to me last night.
--No, he didn't. Take these pills, sir. — Pie

Is Heidegger also too Cartesian? He rejected truth as correctness in favor of truth as whatever discloses itself to Dasein.

Is it not safely taken for granted that individual humans have incompatible beliefs? So that not all of them can be right ? — Pie

Why do beliefs have to be right or wrong? Why can’t different ways of making sense of one’s world be valid and useful in different ways, as different sorts of niches?
Much of the progress of science consists not in correcting ‘wrong’ theories from the past , but in producing concepts in areas where they were no concept
at all . Perhaps one can find ones way through supposedly incompatible beliefs by further articulating one’s own approach such that it is capable of subsuming alternative beliefs?

So do you believe in a thing-in-itself (atoms and void) or just a relatively 'material' side of a continuum ? — Pie

I am attracted to naturalistic models that don’t cut corners , either by reifying materiality through reductive physicalism , or by making the manifest image of conceptualization unaccountable to the empirical world.
This is a naturalism in which normativity plays an essential role even outside of its connection to a human subject.

I am attracted to naturalistic models that don’t cut corners , either by reifying materiality through reductive physicalism , or by making the manifest image of conceptualization unaccountable to the empirical world. — Joshs

:up:

Me too.

Is Heidegger also too Cartesian? He rejected truth as correctness in favor of truth as whatever discloses itself to Dasein. — Joshs

How's this ? What we believe just is reality for us,... and what you believe just is reality for you. We construct what we believe from sifting and rejecting or assimilating individual's claims.

To me Husserl seems too individualistic. His later stuff seems to react to Heidegger's critique and give sociality its due.

In whatever way we may be conscious of the world as universal horizon, as coherent universe of existing objects, we, each "I-the-man" and all of us together, belong to the world as living with one another in the world; and the world is our world, valid for our consciousness as existing precisely through this 'living together.' We, as living in wakeful world-consciousness, are constantly active on the basis of our passive having of the world... Obviously this is true not only for me, the individual ego; rather we, in living together, have the world pre-given in this together, belong, the world as world for all, pre-given with this ontic meaning... The we-subjectivity... is constantly functioning. — Husserl

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeworld

Husserl seems to be gesturing at the same 'pregiven' shared situation or primordial we-world that I'm calling the minimally specified world.

The T-schema is a generality, and it applies to our talking and what we talk about; it formulates the logic of correspondence, which is the common and unproblematic understanding of truth. It is trivial in the sense that it expresses what everyone already knows, before they twist themselves in pointless analytical knots trying to penetrate to something "deeper", or "more certain". There is no other coherent understanding of truth, so why seek to search for something further?

That actuality in its 'nudity' is hard to make sense of. The actuality of the cat being on the mat is that the cat is on the mat. Redundant, it seems to me.

Folks might use their visual imagination and 'see' the cat on the mat as the 'real thing.' But this makes the truthmaker inaccesibly private and implicitly visual. — Pie

The actuality that corresponds to "the cat is on the mat" is the cat being on the mat. This is exactly the logic of the T-sentence. Or Aristotle's formulation: “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true”.

Both express the logic of correspondence, the logic of common usage; it is basic, what more do we need? There is no need to complicate matters, when it comes to something even children easily understand, it seems to me.

Is Heidegger also too Cartesian? He rejected truth as correctness in favor of truth as whatever discloses itself to Dasein. — Joshs

I believe that Heidegger accepted the correspondence account, only he didn't understand it as being primary insofar as it only comes into play after the truth as disclosure has done its work. I see truth as disclosure as actuality, that is as what acts (on us). I think Heidegger rejected the idea that correspondence could be theory in any metaphysical sense, and acknowledged it as being merely an account of the common understanding of propositional truth. But this is from long memory of having studied Heidegger about 15 years ago, and I don't have a ready reference for it.

The actuality that corresponds to "the cat is on the mat" is the cat being on the mat. This is exactly the logic of the T-sentence. Or Aristotle's formulation: “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true”.

Both express the logic of correspondence, the logic of common usage; it is basic, what more do we need? There is no need to complicate matters, when it comes to something even children easily understand, it seems to me. — Janus

To me that's just the redundancy theory, which I embrace. I attribute this to Aristotle, or I think his formulation works with the redundancy approach just fine. My motive is also the same. Keep it clean and simple. The meaning of a true assertion just is (a part of) the world.

I take the CT, rightly or wrongly, to postulate something that 'makes' the meaning of the assertion true, something that the meaning 'gets right.' In other words, I take the CT to postulate some nonsemantic stuff that 'agrees' with the semantic payload.

Note that we don't want a string of words to correspond to cat-on-the-mat-ness. So even 'correspond' is too much machinery here and only makes a mess.

The meaning of 'P' is P. If 'P' is true, then P is the case, and P is a piece of the world.

Tarski is not a deflationist — Luke

Sure.

As I understand it, nothing in the deflationist's theory of truth "hits the bitumen of the world". — Luke

Sure, on that account the meaningfulness of truth-bearers has nothing to do with truth. As I have said several times, T-sentences allow us to either assume meaning and explain truth, or to assume truth and explain meaning.

So of course it is assumed that ("p" is true) means the same as (p).

I take this to mean that, according to the deflationary theory, the content of a truth bearer is unrelated to truth conditions; that is, the left hand side of a T sentence is unrelated to the right hand side. Or, in other words, the meaning of a sentence is unrelated to the facts of the world. — Luke

What an odd conclusion. The relation between them is truth-functional equivalence: ≡

The article is just making the point that is would be circular for deflationary theories to use T-sentences to both define truth and to define meaning.

Or in other words, deflation cannot make use of truth conditions to define truth.

The right hand side of the t-sentence is being used, not talked about. It shows what makes the left side true.

See 4.9.

Perhaps it would be most accurate to say that deflationary theories remain incomplete, but offer a better account that any other theories.

Much of the progress of science consists not in correcting ‘wrong’ theories from the past , but in producing concepts in areas where they were no concept
at all . — Joshs

:up:

I agree, and I value Popper for emphasizing this. Creativity is central. We grow our shared beliefs, our best guess at the truth.