I can tell you what it would take in order for it to be true. Things would have to be different than they are. They're not. Therefore, it's not. — creativesoul
Clearly you have never owned a pet. Or if you did you paid no attention to it. My experience is just ordinary cats and dogs, but they figure things out, sometimes difficult things, sometimes quickly! As to logic, what logic? Aristotelian categorical logic, with syllogisms? Mathematical logic? Rhetorical logic? So many kinds. Maybe they use animal logic. And how do you think if you don't use some sort of logic?
Or maybe you just mean they do not reason as people do. That seems intuitively reasonably, but maybe it isn't. At some level, I think all reasoning must be essentially the same, if not at the same level or degree. — tim wood
I think you're on to something, here. In your sentence you attribute something; the word you use for what is attributed is truth. What, exactly, is that? What do you mean? How can truth be attributed if it's what you say above? I recognize this is just ordinary usage, but the whole point of this thread is to examine these ideas, to part the curtains of ordinary usage, to see if there's anything behind them. — tim wood
Really? All the books in the world contain zero truth? All the speeches, before they're spoken? And as well my thoughts, and everyone else's, barren of truth? You're stuck on truth as a speech phenomenon, and that sounds like a bespoke definition for sure - a perfectly god one, as far as it goes. But tell me how it's not begging the question in this discussion. — tim wood
But what you do hint at is the aura that goes with, "That person speaks the truth!" This is exactly not simply agreement that P is true. Indeed it does not even say it! For brevity's sake I'll just refer again to Gurugeorge's post. There's an element of revealing/"unconcealing." And this leads to Heidegger, which path I'm content to gesture to, but am not especially eager to travel. — tim wood
Let's try this. I concede the accuracy of all your points, so far as they go. If you say truth goes no further, then I disagree. On the other hand, if you catch a glimpse of the possibility of there being more to truth than just the several trueness of some spoken propositions, then we can continue. But near as I can tell, you have defined us into a dead end. — tim wood
Truth is correspondence with/to fact/reality. — creativesoul
Counterfactuals aren't true because they cannot possibly be so... by definition. — creativesoul
Statements about past events can be.
Statements about future events cannot be.
No problem.
You don't really need counterfactuals or statements about the past to demonstrate that the correspondence theory doesn't work (there's a lot of philosophical controversy surrounding them). Just take the simpler case of negative facts (that is, negated propositions that are true). It is a true statement that Bernie Sanders is not the the president of the US, what is the 'corresponding' thing or the entity that makes it true? It is certainly not the existence of Bernie himself with the negation sign attached to him. Or what about the fact that Barack Obama is not (the current) president of the US? Nothing in the world corresponds to either of these statements yet they are true and have furthermore different truth conditions.And what about statements about the past or the future? Can they be true (and so correspond to facts)? If so, then what is a fact? Obviously it can't (always, at least) just be some physical state of affairs, as there is no physical state of affairs which corresponds to the true claim "there was a battle at Hastings in 1066" or to the true claim "the Sun will rise tomorrow". — Michael
You wrote:
No, they're not defined as not being possibly true. They're defined as having a dependent clause that isn't the case.
I wrote:
Statements about past events can be(true/false).
How? What is the nature of the facts that they correspond to? Obviously they're not some physical state of affairs as there is no physical state of affairs that is the battle of Hastings having happened in 1066.
Statements about future events cannot be(true/false).
Seems perfectly true to say that "the Sun will rise tomorrow" is true.
I'd say it is a problem. Counterfactuals and claims about the future can be true, yet this isn't allowed by your theory on truth – and depending on how you answer the above, it may be that your theory doesn't allow for true statements about the past, either. Therefore, your theory of truth fails.
That is precisely what's at issue. That needs argued for. I've done that. You've yet to. — creativesoul
That is not a flaw of my position. It is a consequence thereof.
What entity makes this proposition true? It seems that it is the event that Caesar was murdered (-"the murder of Caesar"). — Fafner
What makes a counterfactual true? — creativesoul
Yes, but this is not a 'metaphysical' explanation of truth. When you say that proposition P is true iff such and such is the case, then you simply repeat P, and this really doesn't explain why P is true, in the sense in which the correspondence theorist attempts to explain it. He thinks that the thing that we have to mention in the right hand side of "P is true iff X" must be (in some sense) something different from P, but the trouble is (as Ramsey's argument and others show) that if we don't mention P itself in right hand side, then whatever you put there wouldn't explain the truth of P (since it is something different); but if we do mention P then the theory becomes trivial and uninformative. This I think shows that we should abandon all metaphysical ambitions to 'explain' truth (i.e., postulating entities that 'correspond' to sentence and so on).We do want to preserve the intuition that a proposition is true if things are the way it says they are, don't we? — Srap Tasmaner
I feel very sympathetic to the correspondence theory of truth tonight. It seems so basic and yet feels so right.
My coffee cup has coffee in it right now. This is a fact (although give me a few more minutes and it won't be a fact anymore). The proposition that I put forth in a sentence before, that my coffee cup has coffee in it right now, is true because it corresponds to the fact that my coffee cup does indeed have coffee in it right now. (actually it's decaf, which some people may reject as real coffee, but nevertheless...) — Brian
It's not that I think truth goes no further than the spoken word. I think that truth is an ideal, and all ideals go further than the spoken word, because words are just representations of ideas. But I think that if we want to delve further into the nature of truth, I will only proceed if I think we are heading in the right direction. Therefore we must determine the true nature of an "ideal", before we proceed.
Do you agree that an ideal, is something which has no real existence, but it exists within the mind, as an aim, a goal, something which we desire to bring about, and "truth" is of this nature? So if we look back in time, toward a "primordial truth", it is as you would say, "dodgy", very vague, ambiguous, without clearly defined terms, and therefore 'truth" in this time was extremely limited. But if we look ahead, toward the future, we can envision a highly progressive "truth", based in clear and precise definitions, and infallible forms of logic. Would you agree, that "truth" is something which is becoming, it is coming into existence, from non-existence in the distant past, evolving out of many degrees of privation, towards a perfection in the future? — MU
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