Sorry, it's really not clear to me what you're saying.

OK, but unless you identify the bits that you find unclear and require explanation I can't be of much help.

Try this: do you agree that variously thinking of experience as 'mental states' (or 'activities') rather than, say, as 'the contents of mental states' or as 'bodily states' (or 'activities'), or the constituents of bodily states (or activities) is already to have accepted, and be employing, certain presuppositions?

Try this: do you agree that variously thinking of experience as 'mental states' (or 'activities') rather than, say, as 'the contents of mental states' or as 'bodily states' (or 'activities'), or the constituents of bodily states (or activities) is already to have accepted, and be employing, certain presuppositions? — John

Probably. ?

Well, do you think that all those ways of thinking about experience, particularly in the context of the case in question of wanting to eat an apple (which is wanting an experience), entail metaphysical realism?

Although that issue seems resolved now, it is important when discussing about language and meaning to always be very clear on the use/mention distinction. Michael was right to correct you on that. Nagase would have scolded you too. Quoted expressions function as names for those expressions (i.e. they are linguistic devices used to refer to the expressions themselves rather than use them to make claims. That is, 'snow is white' is the name of the English sentence used to state that snow is white. In the previous sentence, the sentence 'snow is white' was first mentioned (as it is now) and then used. It was mentioned by its name: 'snow is white'. This is why it's ungrammatical to state that 'P' iff P. You need propositions on both sided of the 'iff' logical connective for such a claim to make sense.

Yes, I see that now; thanks for your further clarification Pierre.

Well, do you think that all those ways of thinking about experience, particularly in the context of the case in question of wanting to eat an apple (which is wanting an experience), entail metaphysical realism? — John

We usually distinguish the apple from the experience of the apple for obvious reasons.

Speech can be useful for conveying experience. It's notorious for failing to do so, however... thus a picture is worth a thousand words.

Perhaps you could drop the use of "correspondence" which is already loaded with implications you reject and say that speech conveys or expresses experience.

True, we do usually distinguish between those things, but in the context we are considering, the apple is part of the experience of eating it, and is thus still distinguishable from the experience as a whole, as well as from other parts of the experience. There is also picking the apple up, seeing it, tasting it, biting it and so on and all those are also distinguishable from one another; but none of them seem to necessitate that there be any experience-independent existence of anything.

If I were to speak instead of speech conveying or expressing experience it wouldn't seem to capture the quality of correspondence between the parts of what is said and the parts of experience. Would it make sense to say that 'apple' conveys or expresses apple, or 'biting' conveys or expresses biting; are 'convey' and 'express' in this context equivalent to 'correspond', or are they adequate substitutes for it. I am not sure; I'll need to think more on it...

True, we do usually distinguish between those things, but in the context we are considering, the apple is part of the experience of eating it, and is thus still distinguishable from the experience as a whole, as well as from other parts of the experience. There is also picking the apple up, seeing it, tasting it, biting it and so on and all those are also distinguishable from one another; but none of them seem to necessitate that there be any experience-independent existence of anything. — John

Five people look at an apple. Each has a different experience. It's the same apple.

Either the apple is experience-independent or solipsism.

Actually I don't think of experiences as 'mental states'. In the Hornsby paper linked by Pierre there is an interesting distinction between 'thought' differently considered as 'acts of thinking' and as 'the content of acts of thinking'; and that reminds of the distinction I make between 'experience' as 'acts of experiencing' and 'experience' as 'the content of those acts'. Interestingly neither of those seem to be neatly characterizeable as 'mental states'. What if say that I want to experience eating an apple. By, and in, itself that would not seem to entail that there be any mind-independent apple to be eaten. — John

True, but what is at issue in discussions about truth, meaning, knowledge and correspondance aren't the qualitative feels of the experiences (i.e. what it is like to have those experiences) so much as as their conceptual/propositional contents. The latter is what Hornsby settles on calling 'thinkables' in her paper. What you may be thinking of as the content of an experience may be the highest common factor between a true thinkable and a false one. That is, what is naturally conceived to be common to the case of someone having the perceptual experience that P, and someone's merely seeming to have the experience that P (while it isn't the case that P). So far so good. That wouldn't involve anything contentious. What is common to both cases is the same thinkable being entertained as the way the world is.

Representationalists further claim that what is common to both of those cases is a common 'representation' that the subject is directly acquainted with in both cases. To be acquainted with this 'representation' (i.e. having the 'experience' (so called) that P) doesn't indeed entail that there is a mind independent reality that is experienced since the representation could fail to fit (correspond to) the way the world is. Correspondentism and representationalism are indeed good buddies.

The alternative put forth by McDowell, Hornsby and others is disjuctivism about experience. This is the thesis that what is experienced when the experience isn't misleading, confused, or hallucinatory, etc, is the world itself. And just in case the content of the experience isn't thus veridical (or, more generally, doesn't procure knowledge of the world -- because of the occurrence of Gettier-like cases) then the subject is simply, well, misled.

It seems to me that what you are harking for (is 'harking' the correct word here?) with your attachment to the idea of the logical primacy of the notion of correspondance might be something akin to the idea of object dependent singular senses. It has long been thought by many analytic philosophers that the Fregean senses (Sinn(e)) of singular referring expressions, (as distinguished from their references (Bedeutung(en)), can be expressed with general descriptions. Gareth Evans and John McDowell have disputed this possibility. Evans has argued (in The Varieties of Reference) that for one to think that x is F, then one must know which x it is one is thinking about. And this only is possible if x exists. This prerequisite knowledge of an individual is akin to Russell's knowledge by acquaintance (i.e. knowledge of a particular rather than knowledge of the truth of a proposition). This notion had been in disrepute for some time because it was tied up in Russell's thinking with his old fashioned epistemology and the idea that one only is acquainted with sense data and with oneself (one's own 'I'). However, disentangling it from those positivist strictures, Evans advocated what he called Russell's principle as a precondition for one to be able to so much as have definite thoughts about the world (i.e. entertain definite 'thinkables').

I won't detail anymore for now (though I would need to say much more) the accounts by Evans and McDowell of the idea of object dependent singular senses. I just bring this idea up because it dovetails with the idea that the mind can be directly in touch with the world (paradigmatically, when one know that P because one sees that P, and what one then sees, and knows, is what is the case), while allowing us to dispense with the idea that thoughts and facts can be externally related to one another (the idea of correspondence).

I should say a bit more about that in another post, but you may have reached the part in Hornsby's paper where she discusses Frege's objections to correspondence, and, in particular, the troublesome issue about the specific respects in which thoughts, or claims, might at most be intelligibly claimed to correspond to facts. There is a nice regress argument here. Very similar arguments are found in Wittgenstein regarding interpretation, representations and meaning.

Thanks for providing all that interesting and instructive detail, Pierre. I need to finish reading that Hornsby paper (and the Neuroscience and Philosophy book) and then probably reread the Hornsby. I'm not all that familiar with the analytic approach yet, but there seems to be more drawing me in that direction than ever before.

Unfortunately I'm very pressed for time right now.

This is all going to be a bit off-topic, but what the hell?

I agree that it's reasonable to think that some processive structures (which includes the kinds of processive structures we refer to as 'apples', 'bodies' and 'brains') give rise to situations such as five people responding in kind when they all perceive the presence of an 'apple' type of processive structure, such that they will refer to it as 'the apple'; which reflects the fact that for the perceivers the apple is both 'as subjectively perceived' and is additionally a formal or logical intersubjective identity. It seems obvious there is no intersubjective perception of anything going on (except in the different sense that subjective perception in general is to some degree intersubjectively conditioned).

I think Kant's question about what the apple is in itself apart from the five perceptions of it is still relevant. Whatever the apple is, it is plausibly the same thing we are responding to; I certainly agree with that. But the point is that the knowable (perceptible) being of the apple consists in its being perceived. In addition there is an inferential or formal (in the logical not the physical sense) being of the apple that consists in the intersubjective discourse about it and that is also based on previous discourse that has historically been built up around objects of its kind and objects in general.

Didn't you say that utterances correspond to experience?

Five people look at an apple. The biologist sees a phase in the reproduction of apple trees. The baker sees that it's a Fuji and not a Granny Smith. The Preacher sees the Fall of Man. The toddler sees something red and shiny.

How would the baker's comments correspond with his experience?

I'd say his comments may or may not convey his experience, which as you point out, are bound by the poles of sensation and concept.

Beyond all of this and simultaneously intimate to each observer is the apple noumenon, which is a facet of the world diamond. The observers know they share the same world. They take it that the apple is a feature of that shared world.

Anyway... if you're a Kantian, then your doorway to AP is Carnap.

I need to finish reading that Hornsby paper (and the Neuroscience and Philosophy book) and then probably reread the Hornsby. — John

Don't sweat it, though. I've just finished re-reading it. It's much more difficult than I remembered it to be. It is likely that I had earlier read an abridged version published in The Nature of Truth, and anthology volume published by Michel P. Lynch -- and forgotten how difficult even that abridged version was. Although the paper contains many insights and pearls of wisdom that I can appreciate, many of the finer points it makes are incredibly subtle, and/or crucially depend on the reader's being fairly well acquainted with the relevant literature (much more than I am).

A paper that I would unreservedly recommend, and that much less depends on prior acquaintance with the vast literature on 'truth theories', is Truth and Rule Following, by John Haugeland. (It was published as the last chapter of his Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind). Maybe you would enjoy that more, rather than coming back to Hornsby's paper right away (when you're finished with Bennett and Hacker!) It makes most of the anti-representationalist points that are relevant to criticizing correspondence theories, and also has acknowledged Heideggerian roots that you will likely appreciate.

By the way, Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind and Language (Bennett, Hacker, Dennett, Searle and Robinson) is a book that was published after Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Bennet and Hacker), which I had mentioned. In Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, there were two appendixes (likely entirely written by Hacker) devoted to criticizing the philosophies of mind of Dennett and Searle. Those criticisms were extremely severe (many deservedly so, in my view, though Hacker's excessively harsh tone was quite unwarranted). The other volume records the contributions to a colloquium where Dennett and Searle were afforded an opportunity to respond to those criticisms. Robinson acted as some kind of a moderator/referee, I believe, and also contributed a very nice introduction to the volume. I would still recommend reading Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience before reading Neuroscience and Philosophy, ideally!

I'd say the trick is that the experience of speaking is separate to that of observing. For many people "correspondence" really means "talks about." That's why people are often so vehement in their defence of correspondence, whether it be in reference to an earlier experience of some objects they were aware of. For many people, to deny "correspondence" is to argue language cannot talk about existing things.

I agree.

People who deny correspondence don't claim that we can't talk about things, or that none of the things we talk about exist.

The issue, as I see it, is this renders the whole controversy over "correspondence" to nothing more than a confusion of speaking in different languages.

There is no "how" to "correspondence" because all it doing is point out language which talks about the world. How does language work? There no such reason. Language just talks about stuff by its definition. The supposed "gap" in correspondence isn't there. Its proponents haven't suggested there is any sort of "how" to correspondence. The objection to correspondence on the basis it hasn't detailed what correspondence means outside language is a strawman. For what correspondence means in these instances, no such meaning was suggested for it. It was always the mere pointing out that our language talks about existing things which are not our language.

In the language of those who understand "correspondence" to mean "talks about an existing state" it does. For this language, "correspondence" means "instance of language which talks about the world."

If you are to insist, referring to this use of language, as your objection purports, and say "correspondence" is incoherent, you are literally saying talking about existing things is impossible.

This thread didn't end up being about the Correspondence Theory of Truth or about realism.

The OP had something else in mind.

I'd say it all about (perceived) Correspondence Theory of Truth and realism. In the OP, they are defending correspondence as instances where language talks about some other existing state (including our experiences).

They are arguing there is a "match" between what we talk about and what exists, a difference between a state of language and things in the world which language might talk about, that objects are given in themselves rather than by our language which talks about them: realism. The OP is attacking the strawman objections to "correspondence" which lead to a denial of realism.

Thanks for the "Haugeland" recommendation; I have been meaning to read him for some time. In particular I have been wanting to read Dasein Disclosed but I will search for a PDF of 'Truth and Rule Following' as an entree.

Thoughts about something that struck me when reading the Hornsby:

• If I understood correctly, Frege's argument as presented denies the correspondence theory of truth on the grounds that correspondence would have to be perfect or complete (I can't remember the exact term used, but if I am paraphrasing I think it is equivalent) for truth to be perfect or complete, and anything less than perfect or complete truth cannot be truth at all. Hornsby suggests that the identity theory really is equivalent to a position of perfect correspondence; i.e. "thinkables" are the very same as the facts.

• What is said about any thing, event or situation could never correspond completely to the thing, event or situation, and this is Frege's point, I think, but what is said about the particular facts or attributes of whatever thing, event or situation we are talking about, that are highlighted in the saying could correspond to these particular fact or attributes, in fact it logically must in order that it be just those facts or attributes that are being highlighted.

• Frege's argument is meant to refute the possibility of a correspondence theory of truth not to refute the possibility of a correspondence account of meaning ( or perhaps even a correspondence account of truth). An account is merely an explication of the implicit logic of our practices; not a purported metaphysical theory about a mysterious connection, causal or otherwise, between what is said and the things sayings are about. An account is more modest, more along the lines of the minimalism (and perhaps deflationism, I am not sure on this point as deflationism usually tends to be aligned with anti-realism and not with common sense realism) that is compatible with Hornsby's Identity Theory (perhaps it should be called an Identity Account?).

You've earned the cigar Willow 8-)

If you are to insist, referring to this use of language, as your objection purports, and say "correspondence" is incoherent, you are literally saying talking about existing things is impossible. — TheWillowOfDarkness

What? I didn't insist that correspondence – in the sense you described – is incoherent. I said that those who deny correspondence don't claim that we can't talk about things, or that none of the things we talk about exist.

The OP is attacking the strawman objections to "correspondence" which lead to a denial of realism.

Correspondence – in the sense you described – doesn't lead to realism. Correspondence – in the sense you described – has nothing to do with metaphysics.

Almost everyone says that we can talk about things and almost everyone says that some of the things we talk about exist. But not everyone is a realist and not everyone accepts the correspondence theory of truth. Therefore realism and the correspondence theory of truth aren't simply the positions that claim that we can talk about things and that some of the things we talk about exist.

You accuse others of using straw men to attack your position but then use red herrings to defend it.

Frege's argument is meant to refute the possibility of a correspondence theory of truth not to refute the possibility of a correspondence account of meaning ( or perhaps even a correspondence account of truth). — John

No. Frege's argument that truth is unanalyzable rules out Correspondence as a definition. It rules out any definition. Period. The fact that there is no account of how a truth-bearer "corresponds" to a truth-maker is for all practical purposes a side issue.

And if there is a correspondence theory of meaning, could you lay it out?

Did you read the Hornsby paper? There may be other Frege arguments about correspondence, just as you say, but I was specifically referring to this particular passage from Frege, as Hornsby cited it in her paper:

"A correspondence... can only be perfect if the corresponding things coincide and so just are not different things at all... If the first did correspond perfectly with the second, they would coincide. But this is not at all what people intend when they define truth as the correspondence of an idea with something real. For in this case it is essential precisely that the reality shall be distinct from the idea. But then there can be no complete correspondence, no complete truth. So nothing at all would be true; for what is only half true is untrue."

As I have already said I think correspondence is unanalyzable, just as truth is, so no, I do not think there can be a coherent correspondence theory of meaning, but I do think there can be coherent correspondence accounts of both truth and meaning.

Right. Frege did point out that there's a problem with picturing how a statement might correspond with the world. The real defeat of Correspondence Theory is his proof that truth can't be defined.

Correspondence is not unanalyzable. We can break it down into smaller concepts. It means that one thing is similar to another. As one thing changes, the other will change... and so forth.

So the more basic concepts are:
one
thing
another
similar
change

Truth isn't like that. It doesn't break down into smaller concepts. That's what Frege proves if we assume that truth is a property of statements.

How does an account differ from a definition?

If there is a correspondence theory of meaning, what is it?

Correspondence is not unanalyzable. We can break it down into smaller concepts. It means that one thing is similar to another. — Mongrel

This is not a theory of correspondence but a definition or an account. Similarly, I can say of truth that it means that one thing (a statement or a picture, for example) accurately represents another (a situation or an event ) ; we all know perfectly well what it means to say that, but it is not a theory of truth.

As you can see I have not said that accounts are radically different from definitions. The two terms are not absolutely synonymous, either; they are used differently in various contexts.

To say of truth or correspondence (or anything at all I guess) that it is unanalyzable is to say that it cannot be comprehensively explained in terms of some more primary constituent elements.

Cool. Thanks!

The real defeat of Correspondence Theory is his proof that truth can't be defined. — Mongrel

Again, I think you may be conflating defining something with analyzing or theorizing about it. 'Truth' is defined in any dictionary. Perhaps it could be said that defining some term consists in analyzing its usage; but this is not the same thing as to analyze what the term is referring to.