I think most correspondence theorists (and others) understand the RHS to be a fact, too. When understood in this way, the truth bearer on the LHS of the T-sentence corresponds to the fact on the RHS of the T-sentence, or vice versa. In order to avoid correspondence, it seems necessary to argue either that the LHS and RHS are both sentences or are both boiling kettles. — Luke

Maybe a way to think on this is to say that there isn't always some material component to facts.

The abstractions are like this -- logical rules, arithmetic.

After all, you'd likely agree that "A or not-A" is true iff A or not-A, where A is a proposition. There are times where this rule is put to question, but generally speaking people see the sense of the proposition -- it's a tautology.

There's nothing material that corresponds to a tautology, though. And there's even possibly an infinite number of tautologies (depending on what the space of abstractions is -- something real or not).

As I see it, the deflationist is allowing for a wider interpretation of truth than the correspondence theorist, and it allows for things like abstractions to be true or propositions with empty-names to be true (or false) without the possible mystification/temptation of non-entity-entities.

And, in a way, you can just interpret the T-sentence as analytically spelling out what correspondence consists of -- I don't think these things are in opposition, per se, only that they can be read that way. In answer to your conclusion of your paragraph here, I'd say that the RHS is both a sentence and a kettle, and the LHS is a sentence.

You ALSO can't reasonably conclude that Jesus DID NOT say X, Y, or Z. — ThinkOfOne

Sure I can. A few pages later he comes back from the dead. Hardly seems a credible book to take literally -- so it's reasonable to conclude Jesus didn't say anything, given that it's a fantastical text written by fervent people and pasted together as a political convenience.

Where to say "p is true" is simply to assert p? — Isaac

Yup! The only thing I've asserted against the redundancy theory is the liar's paradox, since it gives the value false in addition to true -- and noted that while it's an interesting paradox, I don't think it counts against redundancy since it counts against every theory of truth: it's basically a wash, in terms of which theory to believe, since they all have answers to the liar's paradox -- and furthermore I think it's a bit of a feature of language more than something substantively interesting. But, still, good to note that particular riddle.

As for Ramsey, I can't claim to have read him. But encounters with the people on this forum and thinking through their thoughts have shifted my beliefs.

Yes, if they're told well. Philosophical positions are like pieces of music. Worth curating, but you have to be in the right mood to listen to each one. — Isaac

True. Or, have the mental energy for it.

Though these days I think I'm more partisan than a curator would be. Curating is important, but eventually one has to commit.

You'll have to just lay out the difference between the two, I'm not sure I'd be using the same distinction as you. — Isaac

Small-t truth I've been reserving for the truth we attribute to sentences, which is shown by the T-sentence -- the truth predicate can be dropped when using a sentence, and is added to a sentence under consideration. We come to understand small-t truth by learning the language in which said predicate is a part of.

Big-T truth I've been reserving for the substantive theories of truth, or even bigger picture notions that are sometimes equated with Truth -- such as the story of Jesus this thread began with.

I think in philosophy there's simply too little at stake in terms of outcome (allowing any small perceived inconsistency to be exploited), but too much at stake in terms of personal narratives to want to give much leeway. — Isaac

At our worst, yes.

Especially among us amateurs and enthusiasts.

The only "carrot" in the conversation, as far as I can see, is being able to expand one's own thoughts by hearing others. But we all have something invested in these stories so it can be easy to forget that.

That's a good summation.

It's the extent of the finding, rather than the finding itself, that might be a little surprising, but there you go. It is what it is. — Srap Tasmaner

Fair. I think I added to the confusion by stating my terms so starkly. As @Isaac noted:

In that sense, I like your notion that some concept of how the memory actually works, constrains the range of folk-theories sufficiently to make you a little leery of those which treat it as a bookshelf. "A little leery" is about as far as the justification from neuroscience takes us. — Isaac

I'm good enough with "A little leery" -- consider my thought amended from refusal to accept a bookshelf to being leery and wanting to modify that picture a bit. On the other side of what I'm saying, we do frequently recall things just fine. It's not some titanic struggle at all times. We know things, as persons, not only as institutions.

So where you say

I don't know how we could understand chess performance without it. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree here. I've fallen into the philosopher's trap of overgeneralizing to take care of a conceptual bump. There is institutional knowledge, which I think fits the notion of correspondence, but then there's what we actually do and what we learn when learning how to do, which I'm less inclined to believe fits correspondence, but which I don't want to deny either.

So I don't think I could entirely get rid of the category of knowledge as applied to persons, now that you mention that as a possible consequence of my own thoughts. That's definitely worth avoiding if we can.

But, to go for the Hail Mary of all Hail Mary's, in order to spell out an understanding of said knowledge I bet we'd need our sentences to be able to be true. :D

I think this is very perceptive, observations, introspection on experience, scientific data and what makes sense to believe is common knowledge seem quite like tent pins for the discussion here. We've got all these concepts flying about in the wind, and very little fixity to them. Attributing these commonalities small t-truth seems a necessary part of progression; like you can't sensibly doubt your instrument at the same time as calibrating something to its output. — fdrake

Thanks :). I'm glad to hear so. I'm not sure how to proceed without sentences that are true (or are truth-apt, at least). I'm fine with not specifying what that means (or, as I see the T-sentence, allowing the utterances we're considering to define the meaning of truth rather than having a big-picture theory of truth), but at least they should be capable of being true or false regardless of the picture we use in understanding truth, and we seem to be quite capable of using true sentences even while having no clear understanding of truth itself.

Seems ironic theres over 60 pages of statements about the truth of statements and the truth about them is still in question. — introbert

Isn't it great? :D

To be even more pedantic, we all seem fine with some true sentences, and even agree upon some of which of those sentences count as true. We just disagree on what we mean when we agree that they're true! :D Or something like that.

I see. So you might say "that's not how memory works" and some of that discomfort is because what's being proposed doesn't cohere with what you've learned from the people you trust. That makes sense (if I've understood it right?) — Isaac

Bingo!

I mean, sure, introspection is a part of my thinking (in the sense that we probably can't help but to introspect when thinking about the mind), but I agree that introspection is notoriously faulty in determining the truth about ourselves, and especially faulty in determining any general feature about the mind rather than some specific feature of my mind. And, yes, the discomfort is one of not-cohering with what I've gleaned about how the mind works so far. But I don't have a deep rational argument for these things as much as I'm sharing impressions and looking for where we disagree with the eventual hope of building conceptual bridges.

After all, since we're not experts, what even is the level of description? It's big-picture, it's folk, and it's impressionistic even as we think on and reference properly scientific descriptions -- even if you are a cognitive scientist, the audience (including myself, I'm a chemist) of our conversation makes it so that this isn't a scientific conversation since we all have such a wide array of backgrounds, and we're not united in some institution trying to generate knowledge. That's just the sort of conceptual muck that philosophy is perfectly suited for untangling (or, at least, demonstrating an inability to untangle).

I'm not an expert on memory, so don't trust me over your other trusted sources. Like most academics I know my specialism and any matters which touch it and then I'm probably about 30 years behind in anything else! But yes, as far as my understanding goes, memories are not stored like data files, they're more like rehearsals for some behaviour that might be required later. We might experience 'searching' for where I put my keys, but in the brain it's more like rehearsing doing so again. There's not a 'fact' of where I put my keys encoded somewhere which we retrieve. — Isaac

Cool.

To get us back on track to truth --

While belief falls into that quagmire, I think small-t truth escapes it, where big-T truth doesn't -- and I've been attempting, at least, to reduce substantive theories of truth to big-T stories about truth: a kind of Fictionalism about substantive theories of truth, while maintaining the truth-aptness of utterances.

Given that we're in the wild-wild west of concepts, small-t truth and some charity might be the only thing holding our conversation together, especially when it comes to something as amorphous and difficult to describe as the mind, in general.

Did I switch from knowing Tim was going to Josh's, maybe for a few hours, to not knowing for a moment or two, and then to knowing it again? I don't think so. — Srap Tasmaner

This is interesting, and getting closer to our disagreement. I think I could go along with this and your grocery list example with the understanding that the "objects" (the list, the propositions, the beliefs) can change when we're not authoring them, and we are free from following them when they are cued (but generally it's habit which forces us to continue using the script -- it's just easier than to continually scrutinize every belief I might have).

Yes, I'd say I think that we still know that Tim was going to Josh, and we know our list. Our immediate expressions or experiences of ourselves aren't the arbiter of our habits. Perhaps, depending upon how we want to construe belief, we could say that we stopped believing Tim was going to Josh's because we couldn't remember, but upon remembering (recalling the script, the line, due to whatever it is that made us believe that) we do believe that -- while we knew it the entire time (there has to be some way we have a memory, after all -- I don't want to deny memory, only modify the picture we're using a bit).

I think that with our respective metaphors, the thing I'd modify in using yours is that there are Gremlins in our library of knowledge which rewrite our scripts from time to time when we're not looking, or burn them, or whatever it is that makes them change. Also, I'd say there's some kind of veil involved -- we don't always immediately know what we know, we aren't transparent to ourselves. We have to figure it out along the way (and re-figure it out along the way). And, for some of us, the Gremlins do more than rewrite or blot out scripts -- some of them rebuild the entire house that is our metaphor for our mind.

***

Another way to think of this -- I have a handful of books that I've read more than once. They are the sort of books which retain their value regardless of my current circumstances. When I read them it's as if there's more or something else there than was there the first time about, though the strings certainly haven't changed. It's like every reading is itself a writing, is how I've explained that before. Though perhaps we could say that the words simply faded and I'm putting the words back into my box of propositions I call "the world" or "the book", a copy of the book. (going back to Galileo's metaphor for the mind here :D )

I'm not sure if this is all making sense or not -- it seems to me that the one thing I'd find difficult to let go of, in our conversation, is that our memories, our beliefs, morph or dissipate. And that our environments change so much that we really do have to be able to let go of beliefs, even if there are a handful of beliefs we repeat to ourselves and keep.


So, at least, we agree with these sorts of phenomena. Our general pictures we're using wouldn't count against one another here, I don't think. Let's see if what I've laid out above helps or hurts chances of understanding between ourselves.

Though, now thinking -- I should be explicit @Isaac and say I'm fine with, in the end, the mind being inconsistent too. So, yes, it's quite possible for @Srap Tasmaner 's impressions to be true at the same time as mine, even though I'm expressing discomfort at that particular notion. But I don't mean to preclude that ahead of time.

Is it that you are a little sure of what kind of entity the mind is? Something in the ballpark of the sort of thing unlike ducks, but perhaps no more specific than that? — Isaac

I'm saying I don't even know if the mind is an entity. Whether the mind is a real thing or not isn't determined by myself.

I would, but I'm more interested in why you feel that discomfort. Is it, like fdrake, that it's not how it feels to you? If so, then why would you be uncomfortable with other people describing it that way. Is there something pushing you to think that we ought not have differences in how we feel our mind works (or our brain, if you want a more concrete entity). If we're talking about how the memory actually, works, then we'd need a textbook summarising the hundreds of experiments which have sought to discover just that. If, on the other hand, we're talking about how it seems to us our memories work, then would we expect any coherence? Is there some reason we'd be uncomfortable with completely inconsistent models? — Isaac

I'd say that the reason for the discomfort isn't so thorough or rationalistic as what you're proposing. I've read some books -- indeed, I've even browsed Wikipedia on my time on the internets :D -- and gone through some classes. I've talked with some people who I respect and follow their lead.

I trust others. It's not a belief derived from rationalistic impulses to prove myself the one who knew about the mind.

Hence the importance of my approach. If you agree with me, then that's enough. After all, you know more about the studies on memory, right? So in our little discussion group, if others see that as relevant, then we could move forward with that belief regardless of its truth-value.

I'm just wondering what kind of entity this is, for you. What sort of thing it is you're speculating about the function of. — Isaac

I'm going to be real and say I have no idea what kind of entity the mind is. Is it even an entity at all? We have brains, sure. But the mind isn't something I feel confident in saying I know what the entity is. The mind is not exactly like ducks, as in your example. There's no method attached to resolving disputes about it, whereas with ducks you have "go take a look" -- and indeed if you saw black ducks you'd be justified in responding "the ducks are black", or in re-interpreting your partner as meaning the ducks are black. That is, the method could break down, depending upon the parties involved.

For now I'm just expressing discomfort, at least, with the notion of a modular memory akin to a hard drive or a book case -- which I believe is leading to support the notion of the correspondence theory of truth, something I've been arguing against.

Would you feel the same, or naw?

It's that last bit that's the most important to my general approach.

(as for whether I'm a realist or anti-realist, I find myself flipping back and forth on that all the time. I just try not to pre-figure the answer, given that's a normal point of dispute. i.e. it's thought-terminating, given there being no method for determining what one ought to believe there)

I find this exchange baffling and I wonder if you'd each indulge me in explaining a couple of the presuppositions you're working from.

You seem to be working from the principle that there's a right answer to the question of 'how the mind works' in this regard - I gather that from the fact that you're critiquing each others' models, not just curating them.

You seem to be working with a presumption that how your mind works is not radically different from how my mind works or each other's minds work - I'm getting this, again from the fact that you're critiquing rather than curating, so each of you is capable of making a wrong statement about how minds work.

Then you seem to be working toward this shared notion of how minds work by thinking about it, not by examining some quantity of actual minds, removing variables, examining differences etc.

I can't seem to reconcile the two sides.

Surely if two of you (assuming even one of you is right) can be wrong about how minds work as a result of their introspection of their own mind, then introspection delivers both wrong as well as right impressions of how your own mind works, about two thirds of the time, at least? (the only other options being 'everyone's mind works differently', or 'there's no right answer to how the mind works')

So if introspection delivers both correct and incorrect answers as to how the mind works, what motivates the methodology here? By what means do you propose the results of introspection are tested to see which are right and which are wrong? More introspection? That's just going to deliver about the same proportions of right and wrong answers.

I guess what I'm missing, fascinating though your personal accounts are, is what you're each looking for in the others' accounts to say "that doesn't sound right". All you seem to have is three conflicting accounts (which together tell us nothing other than that introspection is not a reliable means of determining how minds work, at least 2 out of 3 times it's wrong), and no means of choosing between them. — Isaac

:D

I'd say that all methodologies give both right and wrong answers -- what makes them methodologies is that they resolve disputes, not that they deliver right or wrong answer.

Here we're at an interesting intersection because of how little we share, in terms of a background of beliefs. There's no methodology in place. It's anarchy. Even our basic beliefs about how minds work can be at odds with one another. (in fact, one might say that if we fail here, it's due to a difference in conceptual schemes about conceptual schemes, thereby undermining Davidson. the anti-realist's best move is quietism, because then Davidson has nothing to point to to say we have a shared scheme -- nothing to radically interpret back to himself)

I agree with @fdrake that we're not necessarily at odds -- but by stating our positions and starting to pick at them, that's how one begins to build a network of background beliefs from which one can then create methodologies. So obviously, yes, I have an opinion here, but I'm attempting to maneuver in such a way that leaves it open to be added to or changed or taken away as seen fit by those so interested. And my main point of contention here is with the notion of a model that we update within our memory -- so it's more how we're picturing memory here than how The Mind works, if that makes sense.

I think I misread Moliere actually, am I right in thinking that your account places less stress on beliefs being mental states, and more on the process of recreating a competence? It doesn't matter so much if beliefs are "mental furniture", it just matters that some process recreates them. If someone has the capacity to recreate a competence, or a tendency to behave/process as if a given thing is true, then they can be said to believe it. Does that sound about right? — fdrake

At bottom I've said belief is a habit -- so it could be a mental habit, it could be a physical habit -- so yes I think that sounds right. Though I don't know if I'd say competence as much as pattern or habit. We have cues and scripts which we've memorized through repetition, so they take on a kind of form (seem like we have a cabinet we put our knowledge into and pull it out), but the form isn't like a storage device where the model sits and we can pull it out at some other time. The script can be rewritten when we're not looking, and even improvised when we are looking.

I think primarily I'm pushing against the metaphysics of memory as a model which we update. In an institution I think you can get something like that. But for our beliefs that aren't put through an institutional system of scrutiny? Those just don't have that same stability, in my experience. "Today is Tuesday" is already a belief I've let go of several times yesterday, and now let go of entirely. I didn't put that belief in my modular closet or a book or a paper or something.

I'd say most of our beliefs fall into that class. The beliefs that appear like correspondence are the sorts we find in academies and such -- but that process of knowledge is too high a standard for our everyday. It would be impossible to function like that.

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?

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.

I say have at it, keep going, and all that. "Model" was the word I was focusing on in my thoughts, so I might be one of the ones who dislikes that. :D But without more I can't judge.

I definitely agree that truth is linguistic, and thus embedded in our forms of life. — Sam26

Cool. I guess my thought at the moment is with respect to this actuality stuff and its relationship to facts. Facts are the stuff of science. But they are created -- rather than lying there for us to discover, we invent a lot to make them useful for ourselves. Actuality doesn't change with the facts -- facts are generated by our interaction with actuality, though.

So it related to my notion that facts just are true sentences -- so maybe not a disagreement on truth, on our part, but maybe on facts? Though I could just be mixing up your and @Luke 's view too.

Yeh, a bit an an aside, I'll admit.

Though only a bit. One of the reasons I've adopted my stance on truth is because of stuff like that -- the things we usually take to be exact (sciences) are exact, but only in their own way and with qualifications and all that. Science produces truths -- but those truths are linguistic and embedded within a network of practices and beliefs. (and, given my usual feelings on science, that translates to other fact-invested ways of producing knowledge)

whether we are talking about a scientific measurement using lasers or a measurement using a ruler. — Sam26

Interestingly, the use of a laser will carry with it more uncertainty because interpreting the results of a laser requires more theoretical baggage than a ruler. Frequently measurements taken by laser are reported in statistical terms, so that their exactness is specified in a mathematical way, but it's actually a measure of in-exactness.

Basically you'd have to accept a lot more scientific propositions for the laser to work as a tool for measuring than you do for the ruler, which pretty straightforwardly demonstrates length in relation to itself and our basic experience. I accept these propositions, but it's true that the ruler is in ways more exact than the laser because of this.

In other words the world is not an object of perception but a complex conceptual schema. — Janus

This approach has the advantage of at least spelling out correspondence, I'd say. The world is, indeed, English-shaped (or concept-shaped, I suspect) so matching is a matter of equality (or perhaps another specifiable relation?) between the concept believed and the world.

A much better explication than my objection about "the world" being "english shaped"

Wouldn't've studied him if you weren't a fan! — fdrake

Same.

But we must, yes?

I don't believe in universal tonics.

Some of what you list have political solutions, but those are anxiety producing because we, as individuals, don't have control over politics -- given that political acts are collective, we very literally have no control over them.

But, in order to address those, we must be able to "go on" -- not in listing the problems of course, but in addressing them or confronting them, to the degree we are able. We must feel better -- or, at least, feel better about the agony we're feeling. Or we won't go on at all.

We don't have to wallow in them -- we can instead reflect upon translucent thoughts our minds do comprehend. Which, on the whole, tends to make the opaque ones easier for me. Wallowing, though at times I need that indulgence, has a way of getting away with itself -- it is its own motivational feedback loop.

But, as I said, I don't believe in universal tonics. I'm only sharing what I think.

Well, that's unexpected. ;)

As it relates to reality: I believe that reality is fundamentally ironic as consciousness and the world it perceives are united as one materially, but there is a deficit between the idea that consciousness produces and the world. Because of this circumstance people live in a constant state of irony, perhaps not on the surface of every single perception, but on the level of the moment by moment constant revolutions of reality unfolding against consciousness that has limited powers of expectation. — introbert

I think I'd say that reality is fundamentally absurd, but for different reasons. Even so, I think I feel what you're saying here in an opaque way.

The major addendum I'd add is "some" -- so "some people live in a constant state of irony"

But only because of the feelings that the word "irony" evokes. There's a sense in which everyday, even when it goes according to plan, is totally unexpected. So I think I'd agree with that. But I think there's also being-in-the-world and everydayness -- habit and repetition.

And yet, the son will find, that the real lesson is: "Don't trust your father" because we live on trust. No one is an island. We are all vulnerable, whether we like it or not, whether we tell ourselves that we're strong or not, whether we have power or not. It's a defining feature of our species that individually we are pathetic. Only together are we strong -- and to be together takes trust.

For myself, at least, this is what iteration was supposed to address (and answer in the affirmative) -- by iterating actual sentences we can come to understand meta-lingual predicates through the comparisons of those sentences.

Truth takes on a meaning, then, but only through our using a natural language to analyze itself -- through our shared, in this case English, language. (and the sentences we choose to compare)

EDIT: Iteration not in some abstract space of reasoning, but rather, the iteration takes place dialogically. Just to be clear on that.

I suppose it's that it seems like it means something, but the attempts as specifying a meaning are not universal to the use of "... is true", and the correspondence theory creates unnecessary entities (facts in addition to true sentences, and the problem of non-referring names though I think that's been adequately answered by Luke for me for now), and even if we were to grant facts the division of which fact is important cannot be specified. The number of facts in the world are innumerable, like sentences. So, without an ability to spell out correspondence, we could substitute one fact for another and still claim truth.

Those have been the three arguments I've offered against correspondence so far.

but that kind of experience clarifies the distinction between your ignorance, before you saw the truth, however much evidence you may have had for your beliefs, and your knowledge, once you have. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree with this. There's a reason the myth of the cave has appeal -- it captures the feeling of discovery very well.

Heh. I'm still working through my views, as always. But good call -- I'll "stake out" my position as I understand it right now.

I have said before that truth is a property of utterances, but I'm less certain of that now. If "facts" are suspect, then "properties" are too -- abstract place-holders without concrete predicates. But I still know what a true sentence is, and while I disagree with the assertion I believe I understand when people say "the Truth will set you free". The meaning is clear.

So there's small-t truth, as the truth of true sentences, and then there's the Truth, or The True. Often times we slip between both claims in talking about Truth, though if we focus we can realize there's a big difference between what Plato means by The True, and what I mean by "I'm telling the truth"

And when it comes to that kind of truth, I've been attempting to work out a reduction of Truth to fiction. Because if small-truth is embedded in language, as I still suspect, then there shouldn't even be any properties of Truth. It's a category for sentences, and "property" usually refers to some aspect of a real thing -- and truth doesn't appear to be real. Or, maybe, it's just as real as language, but that's the place where ontology gets funny (and "property" is probably a misleading term, at least)

I did. I figured when you said

The only one applicable to language less creatures' belief is correspondence. — creativesoul

That your example was meant to convey something about someone without language using correspondence, so I thought it important to say that language is part of your example.

But I missed the last sentence. OK, this is a contrast case, not an example. My bad. I was reading it as the example.

Sure, I agree that with a language less creature that they do not speak about truth or falsity or anything like that. Say a wild bird -- they communicate, but it's not with language. Or, perhaps we could say, it's a proto-language, prior to having the ability to represent its own sentences.

But then, doesn't it bare to reason that if our imaginations cannot image particle-wave duality, yet particle-wave duality is true, that logic isn't based on images? That these are more like heuristic arguments?

Maybe Kant was wrong? But, eh, like I said I'll have to read more before really pursuing this thought. I mostly just wanted to say that the relationship between time and logic isn't some kind of obvious done-deal -- it's not obvious that we should think of time and space as our imaginations depict them.

My twenty-seven-month-old granddaughter knew that "there's nothing in there" was not true, despite her not having a linguistic notion of truth, because she knew what the utterance meant, and knew that there were things in there(the fridge). — creativesoul

Now, these examples are close to home, so I feel a bit unfair criticizing them. But I'd say that there's a difference between knowing and being able to explicate a concept, and that twenty seven months is more than enough time to no longer count as "language-less" -- after all, she knew the words and what they meant and what truth and falsity were, what a participant in a conversation is, identities of participants including her own -- so much already there in the game of truth-telling, and --

"There's nothing in there" is true iff there's nothing in there.

Both are false, and so the "iff" is true. So the T-schema works for your example.

we cannot imagine an object without spatial dimensions, or without persistence in time, or without form, or without constitution, and so on, — Janus

Why not? Aren't we doing so right now, through the power of language?

The imagination is the sort of thing that changes -- and so it's not a basis for understanding logic, given that logic is more stable than the imagination.

I'd have said some things once unimaginable are imaginable to me now. For instance, I thought classical and quantum mechanics conflicted at one point. I couldn't imagine that these could both be true! It was impossible!

Now, I'd say, I can imagine that. And I can tell persons who can't imagine it what finally clicked for me.

So I'd say that what you're calling "logic", I'd call "giving reasons to appeal to reason", or something like that. These arguments are important. I still reference Kant and Aristotle and all them. But there are times when what appears to be contradictory states of affairs to our imagination turns out to be an inability to imagine the right way of connecting what at first appeared contradictory.

Hence why imagination, though it is the capacity we use in thinking about logic, isn't the same as logic.

I think, Moliere, this is the point you are making — Banno

Yup!

EDIT:

Accidentally cut off the link to the post in my reply.

So, I believe that what seems self-evident in logic is so because of what we perceive and what we can imagine perceiving, and what we can consequently imagine being the case. To my way of thinking this is the essence of modal logic; what is impossible in all worlds just is what we find impossible to imagine, and I think what we can imagine is constrained by the general characteristics we are able to identify in what we perceive. If we perceived very different images of the world with very different characteristics, then we would be able to imagine what for us, as we are, is unimaginable, and our logics would be correspondingly different

The problem with using the imagination as a basis for logic is that people have different capacities for imagining -- so a logic, then, would only be understandable insofar that we have the imaginative capacity. If our imaginations are a bit dim, then our logic will also be a bit dim, and if our imaginations are incredibly active, then our logic will be incredibly active.

But logics don't have that variability to them. That's precisely what's interesting -- we already know that more clever persons will be more clever. But logic, in general, is nothing more than how we make inferences whether we are clever or dim or not. All we need to do is check the validity of the argument using rules that can be taught. No need to rely upon our imaginative powers to define a logic.

After all, even though I think I have a notion of what it means to imagine possibilities, to take a similar tactic as I did with @creativesoul -- we'd have to understand linguistic truth first to be able to share those imagined possibilities.

Basically it's easier to talk about linguistic truth than it is to talk about the possible limits of our imaginations, especially since our imaginations seem to morph over time depending upon how much we might use them (or not).

Sheet-as-sheet to me indicates naming and descriptive practices accompanying the seeing. This eliminates language less seeing of the sheet, which - of course - is a problem. — creativesoul

Is it?

If truth is linguistic, and animals don't speak, then those animal behaviors won't tell us about truth.

Perhaps a better tact, though: if truth is more general than linguistic -- say it is a correspondence between some animal belief and facts or reality, construing belief broadly to indicate that it could be linguistic or not so as to make explicit that we're interested in this -- then we are the types of creatures that rely upon linguistic truth, and only by understanding this kind of truth would we even be able to make statements more general about this bigger-picture truth.

Where does mention or use come into it? — Luke

From the examples that we'd be looking at, as persons interested in some meta-lingual predicate, like truth. The example sentences aren't going to be used by us, but they will serve as examples for clarifying, between us, what is meant by the meta-lingual predicate.

So on the left-hand side you have what is mentioned by us (converted into a name for the calculus), and on the right-hand side you have what is used by whoever or whatever our source is.

If deflationism is no more than endorsing a sentence that one believes to be true, then there is no place for correspondence, verification, "finding out" whether or not a proposition is true, truthmakers, or facts. There is nothing more to truth than endorsement and, therefore, no way of determining or discovering the truth of a given proposition. According to deflationism, looking for plums in the freezer has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of the proposition about plums in the freezer. There is then nothing "outside" the proposition that counts for or against the truth of a given proposition. A T- sentence is then no more than an abstract equation with absolutely no relation or reference to reality, as several here have noted already. — Luke

I think what I'd say is that it just leaves those questions open. In the context of the plums, the method for verifying, finding out, and such wouldn't be pre-specified by deflationary accounts. So one could, for instance, go check for themselves. Or they could ask their friend who just came back from the fridge if there are any left. The method of justification is left open with respect to deflationary accounts -- not denied. Clearly for someone to say they believe such-and-such, we'd have to do something to provide a justification in the game of reasons. The deflationary account is just attempting to put that game of reasons to the side of an understanding of the concept of truth -- so that the two are distinct.

So when you say:

According to the correspondence theory, the truth of a proposition is determined by whether or not a proposition corresponds to the empirical facts of the world. On the other hand, the deflationary claim made by Pie and @Banno(?) is that true propositions are identical with the empirical facts of the world. Opposing this deflationary claim, I argued that language and the empirical facts of the world are distinct. — Luke

I don't think I'd say that true propositions are identical to the *empirical* facts. I'd say that true propositions and facts are one and the same, but that doesn't mean I'd discount reality. Reality just isn't the totality of facts, in that case -- as you note, they're just true propositions, so I certainly wouldn't want to reduce the entirety of reality to them. I don't think either @Banno or @Pie have said they'd do the same, either.

Why would I make a distinction between facts and reality? Well, because we cannot count how many facts there are. There could, after all, just be one fact -- the fact of reality itself. All of existence is what makes our sentences true or false. That Mars is the fourth planet in our solar system is related to the empty fridge and so makes "there are no plums in the ice box" true, being the one big fact that's there.

After all, it's not like reality is divided up into English sentences, right? As you say, language and the world are distinct. So we have access to the world on one side, and language on the other, and we match them up. But the world isn't made up of linguistic constructs, so it leads me to ask "what is this matching? What matches what? Where does the fact end and the language begin?" It seems like I'd have to be able to specify what facts are distinct from language to hold up this claim, but I am unable to do so -- as you noted:

It is difficult to try and draw this distinction without attempting to use language to gesture at the existence or instantiation of things in the world other than language. — Luke

I agree! :D I suppose I think the correspondence theory sits on "this side" of language -- that it doesn't say anything about reality, but rather about how we think about reality, because I am completely unable to specify the difference between a fact and a true sentence in speech. But I don't deny reality: just this one way of talking about reality, through correspondence, since we are unable to specify the difference between true sentences and facts.

What's the difference between seeing the sheet and seeing the sheet-as-sheet? — creativesoul

I was going to say no difference, other than some extra accounting being redundantly performed, but I think I like this answer too:

Sheet-as-sheet is stronger :strong: — magritte

:D