My claim is only that a) truth and falsity are properties of truth-bearers, that b) truth-bearers are propositions, sentences, utterances, beliefs, etc., and that c) propositions, sentences, utterances, beliefs, etc. are not language-independent. This then entails that d) a world without language is a world without truth-bearers is a world without truths and falsehoods.

It's unclear to me which of a), b), c) , or d) you disagree with.

If you accept a), b), and c) but reject d) then you are clearly equivocating, introducing some new meaning to the terms "truth" and "falsehood" distinct from that referenced in a). — Michael

To say that truth and falsity are properties of sentences, utterances, beliefs, etc seems fine to me. To say they are only properties of those seems overly restrictive. 'Truth' like 'existence' is a word that refers to a concept. Concepts are mind-dependent, but what they conceive is not necessarily.

Do you think animals that lack language have beliefs? If so, do you think those beliefs can be true or false?

How do you know that a duck is not a social construction? — Leontiskos

If you're asking me how I'd approach the question IRL, I'd just say things like "it's a wild animal", "it's not something like a society or a contract", "it doesn't care about human social life" etc. I think I've got the same recourse here. When you say something is a duck, in all but the most obscure circumstances, that comes along with what I've just said. Which serve as reasons for excluding ducks from being social constructions.

You could reason that I've dodged the question, and substituted a particular case of counting as for the general case - but I don't know why this wouldn't be an available move to me? I've given good reasons for why ducks aren't social constructions. I think it's evident that counting as a duck isn't the same as being a duck, too. Like a picture of a duck isn't a duck, it's a picture of a duck. But you might still say "that's a duck" on the picture.

Moreover, ducks would exist without us. Perhaps that would be a cuter world.

The moral of the story, I think, is that counting as a duck is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a duck. Being a duck is also not a necessary or sufficient condition for counting as a duck. But if something quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, smells like a duck... it probably is a duck. And I imagine it counts as one too.

In my opinion this is a highly controversial claim. I’d say that when a child points to the fire and says, “Fire!,” she is not saying, “This counts as fire,” but rather, “This is fire.” Or rather, whatever she is doing is much closer to the latter than the former. — Leontiskos

I agree with you about fire, but see the above example about "that's a duck" regarding a picture of a duck. Hence things about pomo and pipes.

For me the conceptual priority question is something like this. Suppose you are training a novice in the CIA to root out foreign spies. Are you going to teach them what counts as a spy? Or are you going to teach them how to identify a spy? I think they are quite different. And if—contrary to natural language use—all we mean by “counting as” is “correctly identifying,” then we are really talking about identifying spies. — Leontiskos

Yeah. I think this is quite similar to what I was talking about with @Srap Tasmaner earlier. You can read the above as introducing a much higher, much more precise, much more contextually astute, standard for counting someone as a spy. You want a checklist that lets you correctly assert someone is a spy - identifying them right. And in those conditions someone should definitely say "that's a spy".

At this stage I’m primarily interested in whether you only mean “counting as” as “identifying” or “correctly identifying.” — Leontiskos

I don't fully embrace the distinction in the way you're framed it, I think. If you satisfy the appropriate standard, I think you can correctly claim that something is the case. Even if later evidence comes to light that one was wrong. That may seem absurd, but I think it's comparable to the death by precision that I mentioned earlier regarding having only a very exacting standard for truth. Is the ruler 30cm long? Obviously, it's a 30cm ruler. Turns out it's 30.0005cm long. Dang it. I'd want to side with someone who said it was 30cm long, and say they spoke the truth.

What I'm interested in with that is how truth as a concept behaves. I've long given up hope that something as bizarre as a sentence can state facts as plainly as we need to believe they are stated. But nevertheless, we need to believe they are stated plainly, so the truth will have to do in its own stead.

“If we define a triangle as thus-and-such, then it counts as a triangle. If we define it in a different way then it may not.” — Leontiskos

I didn't mean it like that.

I explained it quite clearly in my last post here which you opted not to address. — Michael

Indeed, I did not address it, becasue I had done so previously. The repetition is tiresome.

Perhaps there's an oddity to do with the way folk think of "mind-dependent", such that they are thinking of individual minds, or their own mind. It might be better to say "minds -dependent".

is that counting as a duck is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a duck — fdrake

I realise this could have been unclear earlier. Ordinarily the conditions under which someone correctly identifies X as a duck immediately count X as a duck too. I see that {and I think Sellars sees that} as a behavioural connection rather than a logical one. If something is identified as X, it counts as X. If something counts as X - there's definitely a thingy which counts as X and a counting as.

The tension which I think you're picking up on is the weirdness that comes with treating counting-as as distinct from identity, even though identifying correctly is norm and theory ladened, involving standards of correctness for counting-as.

I agree that this is weird. But I also think it's a good description of how that works. We treat the world as if some things depend on us and some don't. Like the desk I'm sitting at isn't dependent upon my mind for its existence - it really is hard, I don't just think it's hard. But it's still dependent upon human existence in some sense, since it was manufactured by us. Now if you deleted all the humans and left nothing unchanged, the table would not stop existing. Though something like dancing would disappear. along with us.

So there are standards and norms that concern correctly asserting that something is independent from us. We're usually right about that - but we could be wrong.

It's a giant hall of mirrors. Every time someone is going to say "true", I'm going to replace it with a behavioural concept that's jury rigged to fit just how we use the word. And then I'm going to argue that the jury rigging is also in the territory. Irritatingly for everyone involved, self included, the jury rigging will actually tend to be there, and that can restart our conflict.

You could reason that I've dodged the question, and substituted a particular case of counting as for the general case - but I don't know why this wouldn't be an available move to me? — fdrake

No, that’s fine. I am not critiquing you on this basis. In fact I went back and reread the first few posts you wrote after I had asked you to give your own position, and I think I have a better idea of how I am misunderstanding you. The difficulty is that with each post you tend to throw at least one wrench into the equation. This is the most recent wrench:

It's a giant hall of mirrors. Every time someone is going to say "true", I'm going to replace it with a behavioural concept that's jury rigged to fit just how we use the word. And then I'm going to argue that the jury rigging is also in the territory. Irritatingly for everyone involved, self included, the jury rigging will actually tend to be there, and that can restart our conflict. — fdrake

I guess my contention is that replacing “true” with jury rigged behavioral concepts is never ultimately going to cut it.

Further, I don’t see any significant difference between, “This is a duck,” and, “It is true that this is a duck.” So when <I asked> whether you recognized the difference between, “The duck is a duck,” and, “The duck counts as a duck,” I was comparing the truth claim to the behavioral-concept claim. I don’t see how we can have behavioral concept claims “all the way down.”

The moral of the story, I think, is that counting as a duck is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a duck. Being a duck is also not a necessary or sufficient condition for counting as a duck. But if something quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, smells like a duck... it probably is a duck. And I imagine it counts as one too. — fdrake

Then it would seem that “counting as” isn’t all that important or central to the question of truth, no? And clearly I’ve been overestimating its centrality for you.

I realise this could have been unclear earlier. Ordinarily the conditions under which someone correctly identifies X as a duck immediately count X as a duck too. I see that {and I think Sellars sees that} as a behavioural connection rather than a logical one. If something is identified as X, it counts as X. — fdrake

Okay, but then it looks like being a duck (or being identified as a duck) is a sufficient condition for counting as a duck.

The tension which I think you're picking up on is the weirdness that comes with treating counting-as as distinct from identity, even though identifying correctly is norm and theory ladened, involving standards of correctness for counting-as. I agree that this is weird. — fdrake

Right.

I would say that everything is embedded in contextual and social norms, and yet those norms do not exhaust the content that flows through them. It then follows that studying the norms is not enough.

For example, the English language is a kind of social norm. But it does not follow that the content I receive through the English language is unable to transcend the English language. In fact it does, because the language is not an object so much as a medium. Of course this too does not mean that the medium does not involve objective limitations and constraints, which affect the shape of the content.

So we here have two aspects of the English language: its norm-determinedness, and its nature as a medium. There is a balance between the two. Someone like myself emphasizes the latter along with the truth that language can mediate. Someone like yourself emphasizes the former and the fact that the language is always operating through contextual norms. I want to say that clinging to either extreme too baldly is the most significant error.

But if that’s right, then your insistence that you will “replace [‘true’] with a behavioural concept that's jury rigged to fit just how we use the word” “every time,” looks like one of the two extremes. To do that every time would apparently be to renege on the idea that humans really can do “truth stuff.” Truth stuff requires a relatively contextless and normless intention, insofar as one is dispensing with overbearing qualification. That is why this “truth stuff” has such a remarkable capacity to transcend individual and cultural contexts. Mathematics, for example, is not limited to the regions of the world where the English language is spoken, or where Anglo-Saxon culture thrives. Truth is supposed to require less jury rigging than practical realities. It can fight its own fights, so to speak, because its clout is universally recognized.

Okay, but then it looks like being a duck (or being identified as a duck) is a sufficient condition for counting as a duck. — Leontiskos

I think being successfully identified as a duck counts whatever is identified as a duck. I think a correct identification would let someone correctly assert "that's a duck!" and have it be true. Regardless of whether it really is a duck. I'm putting it this way because I'm stressing that identification is an act, whereas being a duck is not one. You can correctly assert "that's a duck!" on the basis of some {nebulous} standards. But you can't correctly assert the duck being a duck. Because that's just what it is.

Further, I don’t see any significant difference between, “This is a duck,” and, “It is true that this is a duck.” So when <I asked> whether you recognized the difference between, “The duck is a duck,” and, “The duck counts as a duck,” I was comparing the truth claim to the behavioral-concept claim. I don’t see how we can have behavioral concept claims “all the way down.” — Leontiskos

As a summary before I respond in detail: the world isn't true or false, it's just the world. Which means that true or false concerns our statements about it, and the world. Claiming that something is true correctly is just to correctly claim that something is true. That's about how I see it.

So in detail. I think we're construing the scope of behavioural concepts a bit differently still. I'm including statements like {"this is a duck"} and concepts/norms/behaviours like {what makes "this is a duck" correctly assertible} as part of the same idea. They're functions of a linguistic community and its environment {yes I am that debased, seeing language as functional}. And part of those norms is, somewhat paradoxically, the necessary consideration that what is true of holds true in spite or apart from all norms. Since that's how truth works.

We're in a really odd position with the truth, since lots of statements admit of pernickity countermodels - rendering them false. Like the ruler example. But most statements people are committed to do tend to be true in the sense we care about. Like I could state various perceptually derived/implicated beliefs I have about my house, and they'd be true. And that's normal.

This isn't saying it's language all the way down either, because you can say what you like, part of the norms of correct assertion regards justification, evidence, reasoning, experiment etc... none of which just correspond to an individual saying stuff, they correspond to the person embodying {weasel world} collective standards of behaviour in their acts.

The weird rub is that the former paragraphs show that the truth of a matter needs to be seen as independent of norms despite being governed by norms of correct assertion. But it can't be reducible to norms of language, since those are mutable. Nor can it be reducible to the state of the world, as that's neither true or false, nor an item of knowledge. The state of the world itself isn't people-y, the world itself isn't wholly a collaboration with agents. Even the people stuff, like the fact that I bought my desk at IKEA, holds true regardless of the event's involvement of society and social constructs.

I claim that this is only a puzzle if you come at it from the perspective that people cannot and do not assess mind-independence as part of what we do. But we do that all the time. The acts of assertion and assessment which are implicated in the norms of correct assertion don't change the state of the world, and the knowledge that it doesn't - and that we treat the world as if it doesn't - is leveraged in the execution of those norms. Correctness leverages mind independence and intersubjectivity as concepts, and it does those things because the state of things and the community at large do not depend upon any individuals' views of it. And the norms do not depend decisively upon any individuals use or views of them.

Edit: just to contextualise, "counts as" as a concept lives in the latter register, what we'd normally consider philosophy-wise as the interstice between mind-language-thought and world. I'm contextualising "counts as" as a coordination of acts and events, and there's no barrier between acts+events and the world, since acts elicit events and events elicit acts. Acts also are a type of event, and we understand them as such - as something which happens in a social context.

I think a weakness in my view above concerns the content of acts of language. Because I've spent a long time talking about norms and correct assertion without engaging in a perhaps necessary metaphysical task. Trying to account for the commonality in our truth-speaking practices, and indeed in our acts. People eat. People entering a home agree upon object locations and object boundaries. There's a stability of content in the world itself which is somehow aperspectival. People can only disagree so much when we inhabit the same system of norms and environments - things fall down when dropped.

Everything I've said raises a puzzle about how that content comes about in a positive sense.

In a negative sense, I've already spoken about the world and our acts together constraining practices through the norms of correct assertion, and correct assertion coordinating with event sequences. But I've not explained or even attempted to explain commonalities in event sequences or the content of the coordinating mechanisms. People tend to say things fall down when dropped because things fall down when dropped, how? How do environmental developments place constraints on norms of language use? I think the only answer I've got available for that is that event sequences can already be patterns. But that doesn't specify the relationship of pattern content with coordinating norms regarding that pattern.

Maybe it's possible to construe that as a deflationary solution to the issue - we've already got that event sequences are or are not patterned, what more would we want than a structural symmetry between patterns and our acts? I'm not sure how to answer that question. But I do suspect that there's a ghost of the structure of things haunting my perspective.

And I'm not sure what to do about that. Other than talk about specific pattern contents and appeal to norms of correct assertion regarding statements about pattern contents. Like I set up with my toy example with sequences - I got to set up the underlying pattern because it was just maths. The world's far more unwieldy.

As a summary before I respond in detail: the world isn't true or false, it's just the world. Which means that true or false concerns our statements about it, and the world. Claiming that something is true correctly is just to correctly claim that something is true. That's about how I see it. — fdrake

Sure, I agree.

We're in a really odd position with the truth... — fdrake

Right, I agree.

I claim that this is only a puzzle if you come at it from the perspective that people cannot and do not assess mind-independence as part of what we do. But we do that all the time. The acts of assertion and assessment which are implicated in the norms of correct assertion don't change the state of the world, and the knowledge that it doesn't - and that we treat the world as if it doesn't - is leveraged in the execution of those norms. Correctness leverages mind independence and intersubjectivity as concepts, and it does those things because the state of things and the community at large do not depend upon any individuals' views of it. And the norms do not depend decisively upon any individuals use or views of them. — fdrake

This is where I disagree. There is a very important sense in which mind-independence is not part of what we do. Your picture is very activistic, in that it is all about humans doing things, acting, constructing or following social norms, etc. But activity is only half the picture. The other half is receptivity and recognition of what goes before us.

Edit: I now see that I am oversimplifying your position a bit, but even the phrase that "Correctness leverages," strikes me as overly activistic in a metaphorical sense. To say that we leverage mind independence feels strange to me. Or is it "correctness" that leverages it? Either way, to recognize, accept, or receive the fact of mind independence is different than leveraging. It can be leveraged, but that is only one approach.

Recall Srap's paragraph about dining:

When I was a kid, we used to set the table for dinner, always the same way: on the left, fork, sitting on a paper napkin, on the right, knife and spoon, in that order, dinner plate in between, and all on a placemat. That was our custom. There's logic to it, but it could clearly be done other ways, and was done differently in other homes. There's also a more general norm here, of which we had a specific version, of having silverware for everyone on the table. That too has a logic to it, but needn't be done, much less done this way.

And we could keep going, with more and more general norms that underlie specific ones. But is eating -- rather than eating specific things in specific ways at specific times of day -- is that "just" a norm? — Srap Tasmaner

Let's look more closely at the dining custom. "Knife left of spoon" - that's a fairly arbitrary social norm, much like driving on the right side of the road. It is "active" in the sense that depends entirely on human decisions about how it should be or will be. "Silverware on the left and right of the plate" - this is less arbitrary, given the spatial arrangement of human arms and hands. We are receptive before the fact that we have two arms and two hands on either side of our body. Our norms and customs are simply required to accommodate this fact if they are to be worthwhile. "Plate/food is placed along the edge of the table, close to the one who will eat" - this is even more 'receptive' and transcending of norms, as it will apply to cultures without silverware and even in a modified sense to most all mammals, given the fact that eating requires physical appropriation of food, which requires spatial juxtaposition. We are receptive to the fact that we are mammals and mammals eat. Our norms and customs must again accommodate this fact, rather than generate it.

I would say that all of the norms and customs that you are so interested in are at bottom grounded in these sorts of receptive facts (and because of this when we go "all the way down" we find something wholly different from a social construction). It is not quite right to say that these receptive facts are "something that we do." They are part of our life, but they are not something that we do. That things fall when dropped, or that mammals eat, are not things that we do. They are things that we recognize. They are truths that we recognize. Language and norms aid us in recognizing them, but the recognition is only an action in part. For it is also a passion in part (i.e. something that happens to us, or something that we yield before). Perhaps the grand-daddy of receptive facts is death, and the grand-daddy of activistic resistance to this fact which must be received is Kubler-Ross' stage of "denial" and distraction. The resolution stage is "acceptance," which is not accurately described as a form of doing.

-

I think a weakness in my view above concerns the content of acts of language. Because I've spent a long time talking about norms and correct assertion without engaging in a perhaps necessary metaphysical task. Trying to account for the commonality in our truth-speaking practices, and indeed in our acts. People eat. People entering a home agree upon object locations and object boundaries. There's a stability of content in the world itself which is somehow aperspectival. People can only disagree so much when we inhabit the same system of norms and environments - things fall down when dropped. — fdrake

Right.

How do environmental developments place constraints on norms of language use? I think the only answer I've got available for that is that event sequences can already be patterns. But that doesn't specify the relationship of pattern content with coordinating norms regarding that pattern. — fdrake

Freewheeling a bit, my hunch is that part of the move to linguistic philosophy was an attempt to simplify the object of study, and to get away from theories of mind or soul or whatnot. It's desirable to get away from those theories because the human is such a strange creature, such a strange mixture of mind and matter, of spiritual and earthly, of activity and passivity/receptivity. But the most characteristically human acts and artifacts inevitably share the same paradoxes of their source. Human languages, art, relationships, communities, etc., all contain those same paradoxes. And language along with the norms inherent therein are both active and receptive in the same way that humans are active and receptive. Language is not only imposed and created, it is also received, and part of that reception involves natural constraints and receptive facts, such as the fact that things fall when dropped. We could make a language that takes no account of that fact, but it would be inferior to one that does take account of it. In this way the social norms can be better or worse, insofar as they better reflect/mediate/receive reality. Thus it will be easier to tell the truth with certain languages and social norms.

I got to set up the underlying pattern because it was just maths. The world's far more unwieldy. — fdrake

Right. I don't know how closely related it is to all of this, but I want to read a bit on Sellars' attack on the "myth of the given."

Edit:

I claim that this is only a puzzle if you come at it from the perspective that people cannot and do not assess mind-independence as part of what we do. — fdrake

Simplifying this a bit, if I do X then I can choose to not-do X. So if mind-independence or truth or the constraints on norms are things we do, then they should be things we can choose to not-do. Are they?

When I complain about anthropocentric philosophies or ontologies, this is largely what I am thinking of. Such philosophies don't seem to give proper due to the finitude, limitations, passivity, and receptivity of human life. If we talk about everything that exists as "things we do" (even in the sense of perceiving or knowing), then a collective solipsism is just around the corner.