As far as I can tell all our "grammar" is realist. — Janus

But you claimed that one cannot associate a truth value with a proposition unless there is a relationship between the saying and seeing/imagining... an apparently antirealist view.

Mostly we care about belief... — Pie

We care about beliefs because they are the things we take to be true.

But you claimed that one cannot associate a truth value with a proposition unless there is a relationship between the saying and seeing/imagining... an apparently antirealist view. — Banno

How would you know what someone meant when they said "the cat is on the mat" if you did not associate those words with the cat being on the mat? How could you know whether "the cat is on the mat" was true, if you could not check to see if the cat was on the mat?

I'm not saying that a claim, say "there are aliens" cannot be true or false, even if we have no possibility of checking, but that the claim would be meaningless if we would not see or fail to see aliens if we could somehow be where they purportedly are. So truth cannot be, in principle, separated from seeing.

We care about beliefs because they are the things we take to be true. — Banno

Or not to be true. We don't care about them if we cannot possibly see whether they are true or not, though, do we?

How would you know... — Janus

That you don't know that it is true does not make it not true...

Or not to be true. — Janus

So you have beliefs you think are not true?

hat you don't know that it is true does not make it not true... — Banno

And I haven't said it would; in fact I have said that it wouldn't. I was talking about the significance of specific claims that cannot possibly be checked; that is that they have no significance, but I have said that the fact that there are unknowable truths is of general significance.

So you have beliefs you think are not true? — Banno

No, do you? But you might have beliefs I don't think are true. Are your own beliefs the only ones you care about?

This discussion might be more interesting if you addressed what I've said and didn't focus on picking me up on trivial points.

This ‘world for us', from one to the other to the other, is constituted within MY(the primal me) subjective process as MY privileged apperception of ‘from one to the other to the other'. — Joshs

Right. But I find this approach to Cartesian. Although we have our own sense organs and nervous systems (which makes this view tempting), I think the 'I' is linguistic and normative and therefore part of the shared tribal software. I guess I side with Heidegger against Husserl here. The 'one' has priority. We are being-in-the-world, being-in-language, being-with-others. We are not I-things that only contingently have a world or a language. I speculate that the 'hard problem' is inspired by wondering at a tautology. It is raining or it is not raining. It's not how the world is but that it is.

We care about beliefs because they are the things we take to be true. — Banno

:up:

Whatever. You appear to be returning to point that have already been addressed rather than progressing the discussion.

You moved back from what is true to what is understood, relevant, known, believed.

Again, they are not the same.

Cheers.

Whatever. You appear to be returning to point that have already been addressed rather than progressing the discussion.

You moved back from what is true to what is understood, relevant, known, believed. — Banno

Well, no, I haven't moved back to anything; I've been saying the same thing all along and only repeating myself to clear up other's misreadings of what I've been saying. But yes, whatever...shall we leave it there?

Are we just not understanding one another ? I admit that I can't grasp what you are saying. I'm trying to experiment with wording to achieve consensus.

'It is true that plums are in the ice box' does basically what 'there are plums in the icebox' does. To call something true is roughly just to endorse it (as if repeating it.) The sting of word 'there are plums in the icebox' means something about the world, something about what's in an icebox. The world just is such truths, already 'mediated' or 'linguistic.' This approach rejects some vague theory of a 'naked' or 'raw' world (things in themselves) as basically empty and useless.

If one assumes P is true, one licenses the inclusion of P as a premise in any inference. This is where 'true' has a useful expressive role that helps us reason about reasoning. I think my position is prosentential.

According to the prosentential theory of truth, whenever a referring expression (for example, a definite description or a quote-name) is joined to the truth predicate, the resulting statement contains no more content than the sentence(s) picked out by the referring expression. To assert that a sentence is true is simply to assert or reassert that sentence; it is not to ascribe the property of truth to that sentence. The prosentential theory is one kind of deflationary theory of truth.

If you know there are plums in the icebox then you've seen them, and in telling me about them when the icebox is closed, you are remembering them being there, which amounts to imagining them. — Janus

I could be trusting the word of another. Knowledge is about warranted assertion. If I turn out to be wrong, I can make a case for my right to have made the incorrect claim. For instance, I trusted a trustworthy person.

The path you seem to be going down is too subjective in my view. You are going 'first-person' and invoking uncheckable private experience. I do think it's reasonable to talk about the creation of beliefs in terms of sense-organs and objects that affect them. But that's third-person.

Belief is one thing, actuality another; which means our beliefs can be wrong. — Janus

:up:

I think the minimal concept of truth is involved in tracking that possibility of error.

My point is only that our being wrong is irrelevant if there is no possibility of seeing that we were wrong. — Janus

:up:

I agree. But I don't think certain pragmatist versions of truth were successful. Warranted does not equal true. What's-most-practical does not equal true. To me this is not so much a metaphysical fact as a fact about grammar. I think we use 'true' in an 'absolute' fashion.

To take P as true is to reason from P as a premise with complete confidence. To take P as true is to forget or rather ignore all doubts about P and explore a possible world. This is one use of 'true' that occurs to me. It could be simplified, as a mathematician might do it, as Assume P.

I guess I side with Heidegger against Husserl here. The 'one' has priority. — Pie

What do you make of the critique leveled against Heidegger that Dasein’s own pragmatic concerns have priority over a robust intersubjectivity?

Critics get that impression based on quotes like these in which Heidegger denigrates the ‘one’ for being an ungenuine, obscuring, closed off mode of discourse.

“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)

I could be trusting the word of another. Knowledge is about warranted assertion. If I turn out to be wrong, I can make a case for my right to have made the incorrect claim. For instance, I trusted a trustworthy person.

The path you seem to be going down is too subjective in my view. You are going 'first-person' and invoking uncheckable private experience. — Pie

If you are trusting the word of another then I would say you believe there are plums in the icebox, not that you know it. Of course it is all relative to some context or other. If the icebox is shut and you are not looking at the plums then you are trusting your memory; how reliable is it? Did you see the plums in there five minutes ago, or a month ago? If you trust another you trust both their word and their memory.

That is one of the problems I have with knowledge as JTB; how do we know when our beliefs are justified? What are the criteria that must be satisfied for a belief to be counted as justified? It cannot be a precise science, and it would seem there must be degrees. Why do we need to speak in terms of "knowing" at all rather than in terms of more or less certainty or doubt?

First person experience is most checkable by the first person: I think that is unarguable. Most checkable is when I am actually looking at the state of affairs my belief is about; I can hardly doubt there are plums in the fridge if I'm looking at them.

But I don't think certain pragmatist versions of truth were successful. — Pie

I agree; I'm not a fan of pragmatism. Ordinary empirical claims are checkable, so they are no problem unless one wants to nitpick subtleties in the weeds. The Peircean idea that the metaphysics arrived at by the "community of enquirers" at the end of enquiry would be the truth is absurd in my view. This seems to be a kind of scientistic hubris to me. They could all be wrong, or metaphysical perspectives in general may be "not even wrong" in that they are inadequate to life itself.

I agree with you that Heidegger's idea of dasein, that it is always "mine", although that is of course a generality not a solipsism, points to the particularity and uniqueness of each individual ( even if only potential). I have a horror of that potential being subsumed by the collective "das Man".

'It is true that plums are in the ice box' does basically what 'there are plums in the icebox' does. — Pie

But not always. "There are plums in the icebox" could also be used as a conjecture, or to deceive, or as a metaphor, or in other ways. It is only if the statement is used as an assertion that "p" and "p is true" have the same meaning. In that case, the statement is used to indicate that the statement is true. However, if it is used as a conjecture instead, then it could be either true or false and we would need to investigate whether the truth conditions for "there are plums in the icebox" are met or not. And I think the latter case tells us something different about the meaning of "true". If we find that it is true, then we will assert "p" to mean "p is true". But what does it mean to find that it is true?

If you are trusting the word of another then I would say you believe there are plums in the icebox, not that you know it. — Janus

I suggest that knowledge is not about certainty but rather about protocols. Do I know that $\sqrt{2}$ is irrational ? Yes. But I can't gaze on it. I just know how to justify that claim.

But let's say that I think I saw them with my own eyes. Perhaps my memory is incorrect. Perhaps I hallucinated. Metaphysical certainty is a dead end. In fact, it only makes sense with the help of an absolute concept of truth. Assume P.

If you trust another you trust both their word and their memory. — Janus

:up:
And their skill with English.

But 'know' is or is better conceived to be about license, I claim, which is typically (only) correlated with likelihood.

That is one of the problems I have with knowledge as JTB; how do we know when our beliefs are justified? What are the criteria that must be satisfied for a belief to be counted as justified? It cannot be a precise science, and it would seem there must be degrees. Why do we need to speak in terms of "knowing" at all rather than in terms of more or less certainty or doubt? — Janus

In my view, this is because our expertise varies and our role in a society matters. A scorekeeping vision of rationality features us all as tracking one another individually for reliability and coherence. Some people are so confused and unreliable that their certainty is no comfort to us. 'The worst are full of passionate intensity.' A psychiatric diagnosis, if legal, creates the truth. A justified belief is the best we can get, so our strongest word 'know' seems appropriate. Why waste it ?

However, if it is used as a conjecture instead, then it could be either true or false and we would need to investigate whether the truth conditions for "there are plums in the icebox" are met or not. — Luke

I agree. I've actually mentioned this use several times so far though.

I read the word 'not' into the above.

To assume P is to no longer be wary of using it as a premise.

It is only if the statement is used as an assertion that "p" and "p is true" have the same meaning. — Luke

Well, yes, of course.

But what does it mean to find that it is true? — Luke

We never find that it is true, in my view. A conjecture becomes a belief.

In my view, truth is absolute.

I can hardly doubt there are plums in the fridge if I'm looking at them. — Janus

Sure, but this is a comment about belief. It's psychology, not grammar.

he Peircean idea that the metaphysics arrived at by the "community of enquirers" at the end of enquiry would be the truth is absurd in my view. This seems to be a kind of scientistic hubris to me. — Janus

It's got that old-fashioned Hegelian optimism that's hard to embrace these days. What I like about it is that it recognizes that reality is intelligible or linguistic. Reality is the meaning of true statements. It's not some raw ineffable hidden stuff. This is like a oversimplified version of Hegel versus Kant. Are we in direct contact with reality or not ? I say yes, though the issue is largely aesthetic rather than practical.

They could all be wrong, or metaphysical perspectives in general may be "not even wrong" in that they are inadequate to life itself. — Janus

:up:

To me this is why truth is absolute. Warranted or justified beliefs can be false. Unwarranted or unjustified beliefs can be true. Justification is normative, cultural. We can be rational and scientific and still get it wrong. Of course we think that being rational and scientific will increase our chances of getting it right.

Critics get that impression based on quotes like these in which Heidegger denigrates the ‘one’ for being an ungenuine, obscuring, closed off mode of discourse. — Joshs

I guess I side with Dreyfus in thinking Heidegger is being self-righteously pejorative, as if he can't help himself, despite in other places insisting on a more 'amoral' perspective.

Of course we pretty much start as one, knowing only what everyone knows. We are waist-deep in the superstitions of our time, the prejudices that Gadamer discusses. Hermeneutics. Endless interpretation.

The prejudicial character of understanding means that, whenever we understand, we are involved in a dialogue that encompasses both our own self-understanding and our understanding of the matter at issue. In the dialogue of understanding our prejudices come to the fore, both inasmuch as they play a crucial role in opening up what is to be understood, and inasmuch as they themselves become evident in that process. As our prejudices thereby become apparent to us, so they can also become the focus of questioning in their own turn.
...
nasmuch as understanding always occurs against the background of our prior involvement, so it always occurs on the basis of our history. Understanding, for Gadamer, is thus always an ‘effect’ of history, while hermeneutical ‘consciousness’ is itself that mode of being that is conscious of its own historical ‘being effected’—it is ‘historically-effected consciousness’ (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein). Awareness of the historically effected character of understanding is, according to Gadamer, identical with an awareness of the hermeneutical situation and he also refers to that situation by means of the phenomenological concept of ‘horizon’ (Horizont)—understanding and interpretation thus always occurs from within a particular ‘horizon’ that is determined by our historically-determined situatedness. Understanding is not, however, imprisoned within the horizon of its situation—indeed, the horizon of understanding is neither static nor unchanging (it is, after all, always subject to the effects of history). Just as our prejudices are themselves brought into question in the process of understanding, so, in the encounter with another, is the horizon of our own understanding susceptible to change.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/#PosPre

In case it's unclear, I stress the primacy of the social as a neutral fact...as a discovery that various thinkers have made which is contrary to a certain encrusted interpretedness that takes the isolated self and its peep show as that which is truly given.

I could and sometimes do stress the anxiety of influence, our horror of being just a copy, a just a second-rate someone else. Creative types experience this the most. I think plenty of less creative types are satisfied being a good electrician, a good dad, a good progressive, a good conservative, a good Baptist, etc. The self-creating artist needs to be a new category altogether. The strong poet or strong philosopher needs to weave himself or herself into the conversation so people can't afford not to talk about them, thereby winning a false immortality.

Accepting the fact that one can never entirely reflect oneself out of tradition does not mean that one cannot change and question one’s tradition. His point is that in as much as tradition serves as the condition of one’s knowledge, the background that instigates all inquiry, one can never start from a tradition-free place. A tradition is what gives one a question or interest to begin with. Second, all successful efforts to enliven a tradition require changing it so as to make it relevant for the current context. To embrace a tradition is to make it one’s own by altering it. A passive acknowledgment of a tradition does not allow one to live within it. One must apply the tradition as one’s own. In other words, the importance of the terms, “prejudice” and “tradition,” for Gadamer’s hermeneutics lies in the way they indicate the active nature of understanding that produces something new. Tradition hands down certain interests, prejudices, questions, and problems, that incite knowledge. Tradition is less a conserving force than a provocative one. Even a revolution, Gadamer notes, is a response to the tradition that nonetheless makes use of that very same tradition. Here we can also perceive the Hegelian influences on Gadamer to the extent that even a rejection of some elements of the tradition relies on the preservation of other elements, which are then understood (that is, taken up) in new ways. Gadamer desires not to affirm a blind and passive imitation of tradition, but to show how making tradition our own means a critical and creative application of it.

Similarly, true authority always requires an active acknowledgment by others. Without such an acknowledgment, one finds not true authority but passive submission resulting in tyranny. For, acknowledgment requires an active implementation of and reflection on the meaning of that authority for oneself—one based in knowledge not ignorance. Hence, understanding always has a built-in possibility for critique as we strive to make something our own and do not simply passively mimic it. Memorizing a text, for example, is no indication that one understands it; one has understood only when one can put the text into one’s own words, enlivening the text and allowing it to speak in new ways.

https://iep.utm.edu/gadamer/#SH3b

We never find that it is true, in my view. A conjecture becomes a belief.

In my view, truth is absolute. — Pie

Then it’s not about our use of the word “true”?

Then it’s not about our use of the word “true”? — Luke

'True' has a use like the twelve on a traditional clockface or North on a compass. Or like the knight on a chessboard. A justified belief may be false. An unjustified belief may be true. We could, no matter how careful and clever, still be wrong.

What is the grammar of being right or wrong ? True or false ? To me it seems absolute. It is not reducible or exchangeable for warrant.

We can always be wrong about the world, because it doesn't make sense to say we could be wrong about being able to be wrong about it. The minimal specification of the world seems to be as that which we can be wrong about. The negation is incoherent. "It is wrong to claim we can we be wrong."

We talk earlier in the thread about truth and time and then off and on about meaning as use. I found these passages illuminating. I'd link it if I had an electronic source. Instead I typed this up myself.

From Brandom's A Spirit of Trust, from pages 448 and 449
///////////////////////
Doing the prospective work of coming up with a new revision [to a set of conceptual commitments] and doing the retrospective work of coming up with a new recollection that exhibits it as the culmination of an expressively progressive process in which what was implicit is made gradually but cumulatively more explicit are two ways of describing one task. Coming up with a "new, true, object," i.e., a candidate referent, involves exhibiting the other endorsed senses as more or less misleading or revelatory appearances of it, better of worse expressions of it. What distinguishes the various prospective alternative possible candidates revisions and repairs of the constellation of senses now revealed as anomalous is just what retrospective stories can be told about each. For it is by offering such an expressively progressive genealogy of it that one justifies the move to a revised scheme.

...
The disparity of the senses (appearances, phenomena, ways things are for consciousness) that is manifest prospectively in the need to revise yet again the contents-and-commitments one currently endorses, and the unity of referents (reality, noumena, ways things are in themselves) that is manifest retrospectively in their gradual emergence into explicitness as revealed by an expressive genealogy of the contents-and-commitments one currently endorses, are two sides of the same coin, each intelligible only in a context that contains the other.
/////////////////////

Brandom invokes T. S. Eliot in the same pages. Sounds like Heidegger...who sounds like Hegel ?

////////////////////////
...if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.
...
...the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.
...
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
...
...what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.
...
In a peculiar sense he [the new poet] will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past.
...
Some one said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.
...
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science.
...
The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69400/tradition-and-the-individual-talent

The T-schema ... formulates the logic of correspondence — Janus

I don't think it does. @bongo fury quoted this earlier which is worth revisiting:

Some of the trouble traces back to Alfred Tarski's unfortunate suggestion that the formula " 'Snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white" commits us to a correspondence theory of truth. Actually it leaves us free to adopt any theory (correspondence, coherence, or other) that gives " 'Snow is white' is true" and "snow is white" the same truth-value. — Goodman, Of Mind and Other Matters

I don't think it does. — Michael

:up:

I don't see that. for me, the words on the right of "iff" in '"Snow is white" is true iff snow is white' point to the grounding fact of snow being white (or not).

To be sure 'snow is white' is a generality, and, in a sense an approximation, since there is no absolute standard of white, but if snow is, generally, white, then it is that actuality that leads us to count '"snow is white" is true', or 'snow is white' as being true.