That's also plausible, but at this point, I don't even know how best to characterize what a disagreement over facts is, much less resolve it, much less discern its origin. I want to try to stick to my little model a bit longer to force myself to say exactly what's going on if I can, rather than take anything for granted. — Srap Tasmaner

Makes sense. I think that's a worthwhile thing to do Srap. I wanted to put that there largely to muddy the waters, so we don't lose track entirely of the shape of things while pulling on the thread. The "secret motivation" I have for that is I'm suspicious that a sentence+truth based account would break when it starts needing ideas about the other levels.

Right, but q could become an endless string of proposals for the necessary conditions of "truth", as we're already experiencing in this thread anyway. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well that's true of any "X is Y iff Z" so I don't understand that objection.

I just think saying something like "Snow is white" is true iff snow reflects all wavelengths of light is more meaningful than saying something like "Snow is white" is true iff snow is white and so might help us better understand the concept of truth.

Or maybe it will lead us to the redundancy view that truth-predication is vacuous, even if a grammatically useful tool (e.g. so that we can say such things as "what you say is true").

My point is all about bringing logic back into the real world by showing how it is in fact grounded in the brute reality of a pragmatic modelling relation. — apokrisis

We were warned, not to extend logic so far it needs bringing back:

“....Because, however, the mere form of a cognition, accurately as it may accord with logical laws, is insufficient to supply us with material (objective) truth, no one, by means of logic alone, can venture to predicate anything of or decide concerning objects, unless he has obtained, independently of logic, well-grounded information about them, in order afterwards to examine, according to logical laws, into the use and connection, in a cohering whole, of that information, or, what is still better, merely to test it by them.

Now it may be taken as a safe and useful warning, that general logic, (...) teaches us nothing whatever respecting the content of our cognitions, but merely the formal conditions of their accordance with the understanding, (conditions) which do not relate to and are quite indifferent in respect of objects; any attempt to employ it as an instrument in order to extend and enlarge the range of our knowledge must end in mere prating; any one being able to maintain or oppose, with some appearance of truth, any single assertion whatever....” (CPR A61,2/B85,6)

What basis could we have for saying they were both models of the neighbourhood, if they had nothing in common? — Banno

...

It seems, then, that the models must have something in common if they are to be considered models of the neighbourhood — Banno

There's much at issue here, but this first. You've gone from what ought to be the case, to what is the case.

Your claim (correct me if I'm wrong) is that we cannot justifiably claim that the two models are of the same house without there being a completely commensurate 'house'. I don't object to that.

Then you say that because we can't claim this justifiably, there must actually be a shared, or commensurate 'house'.

But why must there? Why not the other option - that we, in fact, cannot justifiably claim both models are of the same house, but that we just do so anyway...justification go hang!

This gives free reign to dishonesty, sophistry, and deception, because when these intentions are the prevailing interest (Trumpism for example), they rule as the truth under this definition. — Metaphysician Undercover

And the problem with that would be...?

I believe there isn't much agreement amongst philosophers on that. — Michael

Yes, that seems to be the case. They are based on fairly technical discussions of what constitutes correspondence, with a good review here (Truth, Correspondence, Models, and Tarski - Panu Raatikainen, 2007).

So it seems to me at least that he doesn't endorse the correspondence theory but does endorse the Aristotelian theory, which he thinks of as different. — Michael

Tarski was certainly critical of modern correspondence formulations, but also said that "One speaks sometimes of the correspondence theory of truth as the theory based on the classical conception.":

The conception of truth that found its expression in the Aristotelian formulation (and in related formulations of more recent origin) is usually referred to as the classical, or semantic conception of truth. By semantics we mean the part of logic that, loosely speaking, discusses the relations between linguistic objects (such as sentences) and what is expressed by these objects. The semantic character of the term "true" is clearly revealed by the explanation offered by Aristotle and by some formulations that will be given later in this article. One speaks sometimes of the correspondence theory of truth as the theory based on the classical conception. — Truth and Proof - Tarski, 1969

Tarski was certainly critical of modern correspondence formulations, but also said that "One speaks sometimes of the correspondence theory of truth as the theory based on the classical conception.": — Andrew M

He also says, preceding that, "Nonetheless, it is my feeling that the new formulations,
when analyzed more closely, prove to be less clear and unequivocal than the one put forward by Aristotle."

I guess this is why nobody can agree on whether he was a correspondence theorist or not. Ironically he's less clear and unequivocal than we'd like.

I thought something like a simple model of language would be more useful than going round and round about what existing idioms mean. — Srap Tasmaner

The objective seems unclear here. What would a model of language be outside of discussion about what idioms (among other expressions) mean?

Earlier you said...

I think that's a different subject, interesting in its own right, but not all questions are about how we use words. To hell with that. — Srap Tasmaner

...You seem to take 'language' and 'what expressions mean' to be two different matters and yet I can't see what you could mean by the former other than the latter.

We've been taking as a starting point "snow is white" is true iff p and then discussing p, whereas I think we should instead take as a starting point snow is white iff q and then discuss q.

Snow is white iff snow appears white, or
Snow is white iff snow reflects all wavelengths of light, or
Snow is white iff snow has a mind-independent sui generis property of whiteness

We can then bring this back to truth-predication by understanding that if "p" is true iff p and if p iff q then "p" is true iff q.

"Snow is white" is true iff snow appears white, or
"Snow is white" is true iff snow reflects all wavelengths of light, or
"Snow is white" is true iff snow has a mind-independent sui generis property of whiteness — Michael

I wonder if this helps us address the redundancy view.

1. "'Snow is white' is true" means "snow is white"
2. "Snow is white" means "snow reflects all wavelengths of light"¹
3. Therefore, "'snow is white' is true" means "snow reflects all wavelengths of light"¹

If (2) is true but (3) is false then (1) is false, and the redundancy view refuted.

Or perhaps (2) is false, and that even if snow is white iff snow reflects all wavelengths of light, "snow is white" doesn't mean "snow reflects all wavelengths of light", in which case there is still the issue of explaining what "is white" means. Although perhaps that's a topic for another discussion.

¹ Replace with whichever "snow is white" means "q" is correct

I'm not sure where we are — Srap Tasmaner

At the very beginning, I compared linguistic models to other sorts. If Pat's house is white, when you build a scale model of Pat's neighborhood, you paint Pat's house white ((that is, the model of Pat's house!)); when you build a linguistic model of Pat's neighborhood, you include in that model the sentence "Pat's house is white."

There, we're talking about decisions the model-builder makes. If you apply a particular color to your scale-model of Pat's house, what justifies your choice is that you know what color Pat's house is; it's the same with including "Pat's house is white" in your linguistic model. If you're not sure, when it comes time to paint or to pick your predicate, you can go and look, or ask someone you believe knows.

If your model, scale or linguistic, is faithful, someone who doesn't know can learn from it. You could show someone your scale model of Pat's neighborhood and point out Pat's house, and they might say, "Oh, I didn't know Pat's house was white." You can infer the state of Pat's house from a faithful model of it. If the model is very accurate, you can infer from it the exact shade of white that Pat's house is. There are probably some natural limits there; I might tell you it's not exactly the shade I used in my model, but it's close, that I couldn't exactly match the shade or didn't even try.

A static model like this is clearly a way of storing knowledge. If I need to know the layout of Pat's neighborhood for some reason, but have trouble remembering it all, I can make a model of it, encoding my knowledge to make it more accessible. I could walk around the neighborhood with pencil and paper and make myself a map, Pat's house there, left of him is so-and-so, and who's up on the corner? is that Joe's house? You needn't, at this point, write "Joe's house" on the map, but can go and check. (No, this is Miriam's house (write it down), so where's Joe's house?) You can, in this way, assemble acquirable-sized chunks of knowledge into a whole that you could not acquire in one go.

It is perhaps notable that even the process of model building is subject to failures of execution. People mistype numbers into spreadsheets with alarming regularity. I might have specifically checked the color of Pat's house, but then painted it the wrong color because the lighting in my model room is weird, or I let too much time pass before painting and got confused about what color I determined on my field trip, and so on. Someone could point out my error to me ("Hey, I thought Pat's house is white") and I could even agree with them before they point out that I painted it light blue. ("Grabbed the wrong bottle, I guess.")

The question would be whether this sort of thing really extends to linguistic models: is it really possible that you could know Cheyenne is the capital of Wyoming but store "Casper is the capital of Wyoming," not just mistakenly retrieve "Casper" or misspeak for some other reason, but store the wrong thing mistakenly. That looks really dubious to me. If your knowledge here is in linguistic form, knowing is exactly a matter of storing the right sentence; you cannot store the wrong one and still be said to know the right one.

Unless it is possible to store both, even though they're inconsistent. And that certainly happens. It's why teachers used to talk about the rule, never write the wrong answer on the blackboard -- students will sometimes remember what they saw on the board but forget that it was an example of what not to do.

So it could be that "Cheyenne is the capital of Wyoming" is what I know, and is stored as such, but "Casper is the capital of Wyoming" is something I heard someone mistakenly say once, and it's also stored as a memory, or maybe I just know that Casper is another town in Wyoming beginning with "C". I can't have stored anything about Casper if I don't know anything about Casper, even if that's only what someone said.

The whole point of a model is that it represents my knowledge; if it doesn't at least do that -- and sometimes models don't -- that's a particular sort of failing. But if your knowledge is linguistic, and your model is linguistic, there is no step of "translation" to screw up; the linguistic object you store is exactly the thing you know. (I'm a little leery of this argument, strong as it is, because we have no grounds to assume further that all knowledge is linguistic and stored in a linguistic model. That's clearly false, since we also know, remember, and recognize images, scents, textures, and so on.)

That may provide support to the no-models view, but as I noted above, we are likely also to have stored or otherwise be able to produce sentences that are inconsistent with our knowledge. And that forces us to confront issues the no-models view wanted to sidestep:

what is "Pat's house is blue"? Is it an object? Does it have, or lack, the property of being part of our model of Pat's house? We can attempt to go around these questions by saying that the users of the model simply agree to say, or not say, the sentence "Pat's house is blue," without talking about the model at all. By saying or not saying a given sentence, users of a model show that the sentence is, or is not, part of their linguistic model, without actually saying that. — Srap Tasmaner

The question is whether a sentence I am familiar with represents something I know -- and that's precisely this second-order issue of whether it's part of my model of the world or not. It is of value to me to be able to store and produce sentences that are not representations of my knowledge: it is how I know what someone else mistakenly believes; it is how I hypothesize in the absence of knowledge, and so on. But that means I may not always be certain whether a sentence I have to hand is part of my total knowledge or not.

Since it is always we who imagine or posit this or that about what we think or imagine animals might experience, can we avoid anthropomorphism? — Janus

I think we can in both principle and practice.

It takes knowledge of what the difference is between language less creatures' belief and language users'. We need a standard for what language less animals can and/or cannot think and/ believe. One thing is certain; language use is the key for establishing what they cannot.

All we have, absent our methodological assumptions, is an unfiltered sea of raw data and noise. — Isaac

Just joining in this new trend of quoting one's self rather than one's actual interlocutors.

Quite satisfying.

Thanks for putting in that effort @Srap Tasmaner --

I think the psychological reality of belief undermines notions of "storage" -- a computer can store information and retrieve it, and we can store ledgers within book cases, but a mind doesn't store memories or models. Memories are re-creations, and they change with the context we find ourselves in, which itself changes drastically from time to time, but is always a re-enactment rather than a retrieval. We inhabit similar patterns, patterns feed into other patterns, and so over time it seems our life can take on a sort of form-through-time. But it moves and changes unexpectedly and even subtly at times, the habits of our life and the environment which influences those habits -- and I'd say belief is nothing more than a habit.

Which means there is no place we hold our models, except perhaps in books -- such as text books that we refer to and utilize pedagogically. We might keep a journal or more formal writings, like philosophers and scientists tend to, but we don't refer to the journal in making decisions or recalling beliefs or in following through on our patterns except in limited circumstances that are related (such as philosophical or scientific circumstances). And so, at least for creatures like ourselves in the day-to-day, there simply is no model of the world. We can repeat to ourselves what the world is like -- such as at a church with fellow believers -- to make it seem like there's something stable there, however I'd contend these are rituals and habits we perform in order to re-conjure feelings. That is, the notion of a "model" is parasitic upon our language-use, and hence, the kind of truth that we utilize when not referring to text books and such -- the kind of truth that's embedded within language, as I've been contending.

I think that the correspondence theorists would have us tell what's on the other side of language, but that's just it -- there's nothing there that's linguistic, therefore nothing there that deals with truth. The reason we say the things we say are bounded to the contexts we're speaking within, and the habit-pattern we re-conjure when talking about truth is the game of truth-telling.

In the game of truth-telling truth and falsity are already understood as linked together as one. In fact, the game relies upon truth before truth-telling. But there's still the speaker (whose statement is to be evaluated), the listener (who has an interest in the truth-value of the speaker's sentence), and a notion of a judge (as a child it was the father/mother, but as we grow up there's usually some judge we can appeal to if we aren't satisfied with the original outcome of the game, except in the horrible circumstances of marriage ;))

I think it's the judge that "grounds" the game -- and the judge can just as easily be a "judge", a knowledge of what your interlocutor would like to hear and what you'd like to get out of the game of truth-telling rather than an actual person in the flesh. What counts as true is what the judge would count as true -- so there are certain things a judge might like to see to evaluate some sentence.And that's where correspondence comes into the game of truth telling, as the abstract story of "going to take a look for oneself" as an impartial judge might.

But sometimes consistency will play a role rather than correspondence ("I have been a life long union member, and you think I would cross a picket line?"), or pragmatics ("I may not know exactly why you need to shake this for 20 seconds before adding, but it works!"). In the case of the game of truth-telling, however, I think the T-sentence lets on what each of these has in common -- that it is an utterance in a context that bears the truth predicate. And, even more, that you can remove the truth-predicate when an utterance is being used rather than evaluated.

Correspondence is a generalized story of one of the instances for evaluating an utterance. It removes the characters and describes the action of going to take a look in an abstract story. So it fits the stories of the form "going to take a look", but it doesn't fit the other stories (and methodologies for justification)


Now, in the sciences especially, we keep a store of propositions which have gone through a more sophisticated version of the game of truth-telling. But I think that truth itself, and knowledge for that matter, has to be simpler than science. The notion of a model fits an institutionalized knowledge-production factory, ala the academies. It doesn't fit "Today is Tuesday" (which I regularly must check my storage devices to get right, and never do I ever keep a belief of which day it is constantly in mind) -- and on the whole I think our psychologies are such that we don't hold onto beliefs. We don't check them and put them into our box of knowledge. We let go of beliefs as fast as we hold onto them and upon needing them again we re-create them, and they are re-created in light of us speaking to someone.

Which, I think for me, gets at why I don't like the talk of models. Models make sense for a community-wide group of scholars who write down and argue over the truth of propositions and have a place where they store true propositions, but not so much for minds and beliefs and such.

Already objecting to my thoughts here, but I'm going to let them sit to see if there's progress here: Though, perhaps, if truth is embedded in language, and meaning "ain't in the head", the psychological reality is off-topic? On the whole I tend to think of knowledge as a social product, so I'm not opposed to that (and "to know", in that case, is to believe the communally baptized set of propositions, separating knowledge from knowing) -- but it'd be important to make explicit that truth and knowledge are not mental, in that case.

Just joining in this new trend of quoting one's self rather than one's actual interlocutors. — Isaac

Don't be so snooty. I did it to show the links between posts that were always intended to be linked.



Wonderful!

I have lots to say about the lots you said, but it'll be a little while.

Don't be so snooty. I did it to show the links between posts that were always intended to be linked. — Srap Tasmaner

Hey, you've no need to explain yourself to me. You crack on in whatever way you see fit. It was a post for my own amusement.

It was a post for my own amusement. — Isaac

Why do I feel like you may have argued somewhere that all off our posts are for our own respective amusement...

Maybe you're about to, and I've time-slipped again. Hmmmm.

Why do I feel like you may have argued somewhere that all off our posts are for our own respective amusement... — Srap Tasmaner

Something like that, I expect. It sounds like the sort of thing I'm prone to saying. I shan't bore everyone with a repeat in that case...

I might start just posting...

"Narratives"

...in response to everything and let people fill in the rest as they see fit.

Guy gets sent to prison and his first night inside he hears guys up and down the cell-block calling out a number now and then, followed by scattered chuckling from the other cons. He asks his cellmate what's going on.

"Well, some of us have been in here so long, we've heard all of each other's jokes, so we numbered 'em. That's what you're hearing."

Guy says, "That's pretty interesting. Can I try it?" When his cellmate nods, he calls out "47."

Crickets.

"Geez, am I in trouble? Are new guys not allowed?"

"Nah, you told it wrong."

Ha! Not heard that one.

I'd be lucky, though, if '47' were one of my options... Might make it to 4.

Why do I feel like you may have argued somewhere that all off our posts are for our own respective amusement... — Srap Tasmaner

I'd be surprised if this wasn't the case for all of us.

on the whole I think our psychologies are such that we don't hold onto beliefs. We don't check them and put them into our box of knowledge. We let go of beliefs as fast as we hold onto them and upon needing them again we re-create them, and they are re-created in light of us speaking to someone. — Moliere

I think this is exactly where I disagree.

It's become clear to me that the key ingredient in the model is knowledge. Step 1 in building a model is, what do we know?

Knowledge is precisely that belief-like state that persists over time without being recreated, reimagined, or re-experienced. We have imperfect access to the knowledge we possess, and we can lose knowledge, but the knowledge we possess we possess continuously.

it'd be important to make explicit that truth and knowledge are not mental — Moliere

Yeah that's exactly the issue between us. Truth is slightly to one side here, but yes indeed knowledge is a mental state.

That's a big discussion, but I'm happy that we've landed on a very specific point of disagreement. That's just the sort of thing I was hoping for.

Cool. :) Finding where disagreement arises counts as progress in my book!

Against my model (of truth), I'd say that knowledge which is not based on correspondence -- the sort of knowledge which uses the cabinet or box metaphor for beliefs -- could very well be mental. There's an interaction between the mental and the material social product I call knowledge (basing it on science), and folk-knowledge is not stored in a filing cabinet anywher. Folk-knowledge is more akin to communal habits and cues and scripts. Collective memory, by my model of memory at least, would require rituals and repetitions and such and would count as mental -- but there'd be no correspondence in this case.

But that would mean we still disagree on psychologies, even when we are talking about the mental -- where basically I think of memory and beliefs-held as a creative process that is re-enacted, you'd say that we can recall the real knowledge we have and that that at least is not a re-creation, but a has-been-created.

Do I have that right?

I don't share your optimism. We know in the sense of being familiar with what pre-linguistic human experience might be like if we pay attention to our own. We can guess that the experience of animals ought to be closer to our own pre-linguistic experience the closer they are, constitutionally, to us. To my way of thinking that's about the extent of it. But (thinking) humans seem to be diverse: we all place our faith in different things, so we shouldn't expect to be able to agree about everything. The best we can hope for is to understand one another.

Knowledge is precisely that belief-like state that persists over time without being recreated, reimagined, or re-experienced. We have imperfect access to the knowledge we possess, and we can lose knowledge, but the knowledge we possess we possess continuously. — Srap Tasmaner

But that would mean we still disagree on psychologies, even when we are talking about the mental -- where basically I think of memory and beliefs-held as a creative process that is re-enacted, you'd say that we can recall the real knowledge we have and that that at least is not a re-creation, but a has-been-created. — Moliere

That's an interesting contrast. It looks to me like @Moliere is construing a belief as an ephemeral mental state, whereas @Srap Tasmaner is construing belief as a continual behavioural disposition. It strikes me that these ideas are not in direct conflict. This is because it could be the case that a continual behavioural disposition comes equipped with the ability to recreate the state of mind and action to exhibit what is believed as a transitory state.

I have some hesitations about calling some items of knowledge purely mental, and some items of knowledge purely behavioural. EG, I can't seem to find the thought of where my e key is when I'm typing, but when I'm programming recreating enough of the state of a script to 'put it in mind' seems to happen when debugging or adding something.

It strikes me that these ideas are not in direct conflict. This is because it could be the case that a continual behavioural disposition comes equipped with the ability to recreate the state of mind and action to exhibit what is believed as a transitory state. — fdrake

Even if you want to say, as I've been inclined to lately, that knowledge is not a kind of belief but a "first class" mental state in its own right, distinct from belief -- which is enough to keep our positions from conflicting -- we may still want to say that knowledge entails belief. (I'm undecided, but I see the appeal.) If S knows p, then S believes p -- and that can be true even if you don't analyze knowledge as belief + some other stuff.

Which in terms of psychology might come out as you describe -- and we might experience knowledge roughly this way.

Not that I'm ready to plump for knowledge as a disposition to entertain particular beliefs, but that might be the psychology.

Even if you want to say, as I've been inclined to lately, that knowledge is not a kind of belief but a "first class" mental state in its own right, distinct from belief -- which is enough to keep our positions from conflicting -- we may still want to say that knowledge entails belief. (I'm undecided, but I see the appeal.) If S knows p, then S believes p -- and that can be true even if you don't analyze knowledge as belief + some other stuff. — Srap Tasmaner

I am mindful that we are talking about ideas in the form of words when we talk about belief or knowledge. We have common usage, to be sure, but just what that is is not so easy to establish. We have all heard these words used many times in many different situations and contexts, and I think we probably all form our own idiosyncratic senses of what they denote.

For me, then, to know is to be certain. I have come to think that knowledge cannot be fallible; if something we think is knowledge turns out to be mistaken, then it either never was knowledge or the conditions have changed such that it no longer qualifies as knowledge. We can feel certain that we know this or that, but can we ever be certain? What could being certain mean? So, if all we can manage is feeling certain, can we ever be said to know anything? I'm inclined to say that all we can be certain of is that what seems to be present right now seems to be present right now. This is not to say anything at all about what that which seems to be present "really" is.

So, our experience moment to moment is absolutely certain; not in the sense that it is definitely this or that, but just in the sense that it is our present awareness or lack of awareness. For the rest we move among our collective representations, claiming this or claiming that, as if anything could ever be definitively established. At least our discourse hangs there long enough for us to be able to play these assertoric and possibilistic games.

I guess this is why nobody can agree on whether he was a correspondence theorist or not. Ironically he's less clear and unequivocal than we'd like. — Michael

Though he was, at least, clear and unequivocal that the sentence, "Tarski is a correspondence theorist" is true iff Tarski is a correspondence theorist. :wink:

Hang your head in shame, Andrew.

For me, then, to know is to be certain — Janus

I've just never found this compelling. I always immediately think of cases where people are as confident as they can imagine being, what they would naturally describe as "certain," and they're wrong, or cases where someone nurses unwarranted doubts about knowing what they do indeed know.

It always seems to me that certainty is just a different thing that may or may not accompany knowledge. I suppose we might say that if you know that p, you're entitled to be certain that p, and probably even certain that you know that p, but being entitled to judge or to feel (whichever version we're using) is just not the same as in fact judging or feeling.

I think there are straightforward, persuasive counterexamples to the idea that you can't be certain of anything, but the first ones that leap to mind are backwards. Do you know the population of the county where you live? I don't know mine. In fact, I'm absolutely certain I don't know mine.

And the problem with that would be...? — Isaac

You see no problem in allowing deception to be truth? Personally, I like to keep my truths free from deception. That is my preference, and I think it's because I have a will of my own. And, I do not like to be taken advantage of. For me, that's where the problem is, if we allow deception to reign as truth, it provides the means for others to take advantage of me.

But if you don't mind your honest beliefs being the product of deception, I really don't mind that. Do you have a free will?