And at no time has what is true changed, but only what we believe to be true. Although it could also happen that the number of chromosomes might change.

By all means let us be open to revision and reversal of what we believe according to what we later learn to be true, but not according to what we later find to be convenient — unenlightened

Just not clear to me what the word "true" is doing in this story.

If a belief is true, there can be no evidence that it's false, so you'll never need to revise your belief. If such evidence does turn up, in addition to revising your belief, you also remove the "true" sticker from it. So what? What was the sticker doing anyway?

Now when we accuse someone of holding a belief because it's convenient for them, I think often we're talking about something they're not aware they're doing. What we perceive is that holding such a belief serves some need of theirs, again probably something they're not aware of.

And basically that's true for all of us, so far as I can tell.

And basically that's true for all of us, so far as I can tell. — Srap Tasmaner

"Just not clear to me what the word "true" is doing in this story. "

If a belief is true, there can be no evidence that it's false, so you'll never need to revise your belief. If such evidence does turn up, in addition to revising your belief, you also remove the "true" sticker from it. So what? What was the sticker doing anyway? — Srap Tasmaner

The sticker was misapplied, so it is removed. what would you rather say?

Now when we accuse someone of holding a belief because it's convenient for them, I think often we're talking about something they're not aware they're doing. What we perceive is that holding such a belief serves some need of theirs, again probably something they're not aware of. — Srap Tasmaner

Indeed. anything one thinks is true ,one is reluctant to change ones' mind about; because it is inconvenient to change one's mind and change one's habits and rethink everything. One needs to think one believes things that are true most of the time, or thought itself would be useless. Fortunately, up to now the world has proved fairly stable; the key I put in my pocket remains there until I take it out to open my front door which it still unlocks and which is also just where I left it. Losing or finding a few chromosomes for 30 years is far less important. But if one comes home one day, and the house has vanished and there is just a pile of bricks, it is traumatic and one's whole life is changed.

I think we all know what true and false mean, as applied to statements or extended to friends. A false friend is one who pretends to have your interests at heart, in pursuit of his own interests - a deceiver.

I think when you say, "Just not clear to me what the word "true" is doing in this story. ", you are deceiving yourself, and saying something that is not true. I believe it is true that my key will open the front door, and if it should turn out not to be true because the lock is broken, or my wife has changed the lock or someone has blown the bloody door off, or the god of locks is angry with me, then I will have to admit I was wrong.

I believe it is true that my key will open the front door — unenlightened

Which is different, how, to "I believe that my key will open the front door"?

What's '... it is true that... ' doing in that sentence? The sentence seems to have an identical meaning without it.

It does; that phrase is redundant. However, '...it is false that...' would not be redundant. Language presumes truth.

that phrase is redundant — unenlightened

I'm curious then how you square that with...

I defend the meaning of the word against the destruction of its meaning with some vigor, because if the truth becomes a matter of choice, or convenience, then language itself loses its value, and we become as dumb beasts, because meaning depends on truth. Unless we can trust in the truth of language, we must dismiss its meaning entirely. Chaos will reign, but no one will listen to its proclamations. — unenlightened

...?

That's one hell of an impassioned plea for the sanctity of a term which can, it turns out, be completely dropped from the sorts of sentences it's used in without the slightest impact.

Language presumes truth, because if it is not presumably true it has no presumable meaning, I like to communicate, and therefore I like truth. When I have to deal with liars, as politicians and advertisers tend to be sometimes, I become angry and cynical because their deceit undermines the very fabric of society. Signposts are useful if they are nearly all true, but if half of them point the wrong way, then none of them are any use. They become signs that do not signify and are best ignored.

Language presumes truth, because if it is not presumably true it has no presumable meaning — unenlightened

I don't see how. If I say something to you like "the pub is at the end of the road", you'll be able to do anything with that exactly and only to the extent that you trust me. It seems trust, not truth here is doing the work. You're not expecting me to be 100% right, you're expecting that I'm not deliberately trying to get you to the end of the road for nefarious purposes. It my intentions that matter, not my unfailing accuracy.

When politicians lie, it's usually not a clash of beliefs, it's a clash of intention. They don't even believe what they're saying. Their intention is to sound electable. You (presumably disliking their policies) don't want that.

If a politician genuinely believed what they say, then what possible grounds could you have for anger? Must everyone only speak when guaranteed to pass all accuracy tests in perpetuity?

It seems there are three categories of speech act that @unenlightened might vent anger at on the grounds of not 'telling the truth'

1. People who say things they do not believe for nefarious purposes.

Fair to be angry at these people. Their purposes are nefarious after all. But it's nothing to do with truth. It's to do with intent to harm.

2. People who say things they believe to be true but later turn out to fail accuracy tests.

What grounds do we have to be angry at these people. Surely we can't be expected to only say that which is infallible.

3. People who say things they believe to be true but @unenlightened believes they didn't ought to believe.

Here I think is where we actually get to the crux of the matter. People arriving at beliefs by methods we don't agree with, usually by trusting authorities we think they didn't ought to trust, or not trusting authorities we think they ought.

Hence back to where we started on truth several weeks ago. It's political. It's about gaining (or losing) a cudgel. We say 'truth' is a beacon of sanctity, we raise it above petty disputes, but all we're really talking about is which institutions we trust, which methods we approve of.

I don't see how. If I say something to you like "the pub is at the end of the road", you'll be able to do anything with that exactly and only to the extent that you trust me. It seems trust, not truth here is doing the work. You're not expecting me to be 100% right, you're expecting that I'm not deliberately trying to get you to the end of the road for nefarious purposes. It my intentions that matter, not my unfailing accuracy. — Isaac

Who said anything about unfailing accuracy, not I? I trust the stranger I ask directions of because I trust that most people most of the time are honestly helpful. Just as i trust that most sign posts have not got twisted around. I trust you will say "I don't know" if you don't know where the pub is. I trust that you intend to tell the truth as you know it. If half the people on the street have nefarious purposes, I will not be asking anyone anything.

Must everyone only speak when guaranteed to pass all accuracy tests in perpetuity? — Isaac

No. Why would you imagine my thinking that? I trust your directions to be true, and my trust is based on my experience that people usually tell the truth about such matters. I wouldn't ask Boris Johnson because his words mean nothing to me, based on my experience that he does not try to tell the truth.

But Now i see that you are making up what I say and are not honestly engaging, so I will stop responding. Our conversation has no meaning.

i see that you are making up what I say and are not honestly engaging — unenlightened

Fucksake, not this shite again. Must every challenge be 'dishonest' these days, every disagreement 'disinformation', every ideological difference 'bigotry'....

When did we forget how to disagree?

If you haven't the stomach for engaging with those who see things differently to you (yes, including the meaning of what you write which, it may surprise you to hear, is not as transparent as you might like to think), then I can't think what you even post here for. Were you expecting a coterie?

Fucksake, not this shite again. Must every challenge be 'dishonest' these days, every disagreement 'disinformation', every ideological difference 'bigotry'.... — Isaac

No, not every challenge, it's entirely personal: your engagement with me. you see you make a big thing about my admitted anger, but here is yours for all to see. I quite like some of your posts directed at others, and am tempted to engage with them, but i mainly do not, for just the reason that you play this silly game of universalising the opposition in an attempt to humiliate and silence. Thus: If I say your challenge is dishonest I "must" mean that every challenge is dishonest.

you play this silly game of universalising the opposition in an attempt to humiliate and silence. — unenlightened

Uh huh...

I don't see it that way. I think it just means that truth is a secondary principle. — T Clark


Bullshit on, dude. See what you want to see, no worries. — unenlightened

I suppose that quip was meant to hearten and encourage further discussion of T Clark's considered position?

Uh huh. I'm willing to discuss my anger with someone prepared to admit to their own.

I'm willing to discuss my anger with someone prepared to admit to their own. — unenlightened

Sure, go for it. I'm angry at the world's decent into tribalistic lunacy where the value of a person's contribution to discussion is based, not on their expertise or their intellect, but on whether they hold a handful of key opinions which act as stigmata for the sanctified.

So what gets your goat?

And basically that's true for all of us, so far as I can tell. — Srap Tasmaner

"Just not clear to me what the word "true" is doing in this story. " — unenlightened

It's doing what the word "true" is actually useful for, which is allowing me to endorse by reference the account denoted by "that".

There's a very good reason "It's true that Billy ate all the cupcakes" is equivalent to "Billy ate all the cupcakes" and to "'Billy ate all the cupcakes' is true": it's because we want to be able to express agreement without repeating everything, so we have "That's true" (and "That's not true" and so on) as a construction where "that" refers to something someone has already said.

There are some complication but I think such a prosentential theory of truth is fundamentally on the right track.

I think when you say, "Just not clear to me what the word "true" is doing in this story. ", you are deceiving yourself, and saying something that is not true. I believe it is true that my key will open the front door, and if it should turn out not to be true because the lock is broken, or my wife has changed the lock or someone has blown the bloody door off, or the god of locks is angry with me, then I will have to admit I was wrong. — unenlightened

There's the past tense again, just like with Painter and the chromosomes.

Let's go with that. The examples we come up with always have to do with someone turning out to have been wrong in the past. That suggests that there is an "accounting" use for words like "true" and "false" in judging past performance. If we want to make good predictions, we need some way of judging the past performance of an inference engine, so we regularly look back and tally up the successful and the unsuccessful predictions. We do the same thing at the macro scale when we have a new theory or forecasting model: we try retrodicting the events already in the books and see how well we do.

It would be nice if we really could "check" a previous prediction against "what actually happened", but I just don't see how we would do that. All we have is our current understanding based on the evidence we have, and we can say the prediction squares with the evidence or doesn't, but all of this is (a) a lot squishier than it sounds, because we mostly deal in probabilities and (b) all of the accounting we're talking about is handled by inferential mechanisms in our minds the workings of which we are not aware of and do not control. We're accustomed to giving reconstructions of the reasoning process we "must have gone through" to reach conclusions, but the truth (!) is that our beliefs arrive in our awareness as finished products. You don't consciously "work out" your beliefs as the rational consequences of your other beliefs much at all, if at all.

None of which is to say that some beliefs aren't more defensible than others, of course they are. I don't doubt that the very stable genius you mentioned has defective belief formation equipment, but the real problem is that his behavior is dishonest. We expect people to aim at saying things that square with the evidence and are defensible, but he aims at saying things that will materially benefit him. We don't have the option of only speaking the truth; if we had some way of just knowing how things really stand, it wouldn't take so much work to find out. But we do have the option of only saying what we do in fact believe, and what we believe aligns with the available evidence, and what we believe we can give good reasons for that others should find convincing.

Yes. Deflation is the best account of truth; every statement asserts itself, and assert's its own truth, or as I put it above, "language presumes truth". Evidence and reason and openness to new experience and revision of beliefs and what ought to be convincing to us are important to discuss, in order that we can have as much truth as possible in our talk, as is honesty.

We don't have the option of only speaking the truth; if we had some way of just knowing how things really stand, it wouldn't take so much work to find out. But we do have the option of only saying what we do in fact believe, and what we believe aligns with the available evidence, and what we believe we can give good reasons for that others should find convincing. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes indeed, and I am not asking for more. But I do point out that that option that we do have, that you outline, is a moral imperative arising from the social nature of language, that it is shared. As we are seeing, a medium that is filled with too much dishonest communication, like the boy who cried wolf, ceases to communicate at all - and this has implications for freedom of speech - that the freedom to speak honestly the truth as best one can, should absolutely be defended, but the freedom to lie, deceive and mislead should be curtailed as strongly as possible while allowing for our fallibility and stupidity.

Of course I must remember that there are other things we do with language too - naming, constructing, playing, patterning, and so on where truth or honesty are not issues.

But I do point out that that option that we do have, that you outline, is a moral imperative arising from the social nature of language, that it is shared. — unenlightened

We're on the same page here. Humans have always lived in cooperative groups, and language is a cooperative enterprise in furtherance of other sorts of cooperation. Dishonesty violates the social contract, more or less -- except when being a little dishonest upholds it. Someone like Trump thumbs his nose at the idea he is under any sort of social obligation, and that extends to his use of language. But that potential is built in: one of the selling points of language is that utterance is, for the individual, inexpensive, but that also means that talk is cheap.

Upholding the cooperative use of language is upholding the cooperative basis for society per se. If you want to describe that as an obligation to mostly "tell the truth," I won't complain. The way we talk about truth serves our social needs, but I think it's a mistake to construct a theory out of that talk.

— The central defining tenet of chaos magic is arguably the idea that belief is a tool for achieving effects. — HarryHarry

I'm not familiar with the principles of Huna, or with the notion of Chaos Magic. But, I long ago, realized that one feature common to all forms of magic --- Taro cards, divination, astrology, incantations, alchemy, sorcery, spirit mediation --- is dependence on confusing the rational mind with chaos, or misdirection, of some kind.

For example, those who read tea leaves or animal entrails are seeing random/chaotic patterns, which allow the imagination to create its own designs. The freedom from structure allows the mind to rearrange old beliefs to suit new or future situations. Magical interpretations are usually expressed in the vocabulary of commonly held beliefs/superstitions, such as ghosts & fates. :smile:


Chaos magic teaches that the essence of magic is that perceptions are conditioned by beliefs, and that the world as we perceive it can be changed by deliberately changing those beliefs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_magic

I am not asking for more. But I do point out that that option that we do have, that you outline, is a moral imperative arising from the social nature of language, that it is shared. As we are seeing, a medium that is filled with too much dishonest communication, like the boy who cried wolf, ceases to communicate at all - and this has implications for freedom of speech - that the freedom to speak honestly the truth as best one can, should absolutely be defended, but the freedom to lie, deceive and mislead should be curtailed as strongly as possible while allowing for our fallibility and stupidity. — unenlightened

But none of this seems related to your signposts example. The utility of a signpost is not its honest intention to point you in the direction of it's named location, it's whether it actually does. A 'dishonest' sign post which just so happens to point the right way anyway (dishonest and stupid) is more useful than an honest one which points the wrong way out of error.

So I'm not seeing how honesty is serving the purpose you've assigned it (making communication functional). If I ask you where the train station is, I'm far less interested in your honesty than I am in where the actual train station actually is. I want you to be right, not honest.

Or, to put it in the terms you and @Srap Tasmaner were discussing, in what way would an honest (but massively deluded) Trump be better than a dishonest one? If Trump incited Jan 6 because he was insane enough to actually believe there was a conspiracy against him, would the end result have been different to the world where he knows there isn't, but lied about it?

It seems either way there's an insurrection and a group of people who now have less faith in the democratic system.

Would dishonesty over delusion have made a difference?

So I'm not seeing how honesty is serving the purpose you've assigned it (making communication functional). If I ask you where the train station is, I'm far less interested in your honesty than I am in where the actual train station actually is. I want you to be right, not honest. — Isaac

(Btw, there's a game-theory based argument for truthfulness and trust in David Lewis's Convention, the details of which are not leaping to mind.)

It's an interesting question. Obviously in the short term sense, misinformation and disinformation will have the same effect, and the cause of the inaccuracy is irrelevant, assuming you rely on the 'information' to the same extent.

Over the longer term, you're of course also assessing the quality and reliability of the source. I think we do distinguish between sources that are untrustworthy because they're regularly mistaken and sources that are regularly deceitful. The question would be, how do we that and why is it worth the trouble?

One thing that comes to mind is that you get very different results for predicting the source's behavior: mistaken guy can be expected to act on his mistaken belief, but deceitful guy we would expect to act on his genuine belief. Hence "actions speak louder than words" is the corrective heuristic for "talk is cheap."

(Btw, there's a game-theory based argument for truthfulness and trust in David Lewis's Convention, the details of which are not leaping to mind.) — Srap Tasmaner

Is that the conformity to regularity stuff? If so, it's crossed my path on social conformity issues - I'd like to claim this as proof that psychologists do listen to philosophers sometimes, but that would require that I clearly recall any of it... yet I don't.

mistaken guy can be expected to act on his mistaken belief, but deceitful guy we would expect to act on his genuine belief. — Srap Tasmaner

I think that's good. I was also reminded of what you said over in the Ukraine thread about agency. The deceitful person is taking agency away from us by attempting to supplant our intention to get to the train station with his intention to send us awry. The mistaken person has no affect on our agency, only our ability (in that we now lack the data we need). As such we don't quite mind the mistake so much since they're not now appearing as risk to the otherwise carefully crafted plot to our story.

I wondered how we would be able to talk about the 'behavior' of things like signposts, and I'm sure we could come up with something, but it could also be that we inevitably face problems with artifacts like this.

I'm reminded of a very clever check fraud scheme I heard about once. Guy had gotten hold of the magnetic ink that's used to print routing and account numbers on checks so they can be read by a machine. He made some fake checks that had one bank's routing number encoded but another bank's name actually printed in English on the checks. When these checks went to the merchant's bank, they would sort them first through the machine and the ones that kicked out would then be sorted by the bank they went to. Then a loop would start, where one bank's machine would reject an account number and it would land on the trouble desk, someone would glance at the bank name on the check and say, oh that's not us, then send it to the other bank, whose machine would say, wrong bank, and then it would go right back. These checks would loop back and forth for months until some human finally noticed.

I wondered how we would be able to talk about the 'behavior' of things like signposts, and I'm sure we could come up with something, but it could also be that we inevitably face problems with artifacts like this. — Srap Tasmaner

Perhaps one of the problems with the analogy, yes. Humans are, of course, not mere repositories of information which we pass on either faithfully or not, and so unlike the signpost, we're more interested in the other person's intent than we are in the data they have.

And this is the problem with this whole 'truth' nonsense. It's already subsumed into the social interaction it is trying to take the 'God's eye view' of. Those advocating it already have a view of, not only what the truth is in certain key matters, but, more importantly, how is is arrived at and tested. So advocacy for 'truthfulness' is not philosophical advocacy for a modus of discourse, it's political advocacy for a method, and more insidiously, a set of authorised institutions.

Talk of 'mis/dis-information' invariably has nothing to do with post hoc checks (the only way to assess the truthiness of a claim, but rather are just political claims about which institutions ought have authority over what.

Not that I'm in disagreement with all such claims, I just dislike the dishonesty in pretending they're something they're not.

The signpost is better treated as the source than the messenger here. A demand for 'truthsaying' disguises itself as talk about the utility of signposts, but is in reality always talk about the authority of that exact signpost to back claims about the location of the village in question.

I wondered how we would be able to talk about the 'behavior' of things like signposts, and I'm sure we could come up with something, but it could also be that we inevitably face problems with artifacts like this. — Srap Tasmaner

Signposts are just like forum posts except their author is not pseudonamed. We don't need to talk about the behaviour of forum posts or sign posts, just the intentions of posters. There is an unconfirmed by me story, that during WW2, when invasion of the UK was expected, sign posts were turned around to 'confuse the enemy'. Checks can be fraudulent and so can sign posts.