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

Yes, I'll not pursue that thread further in this thread. Good point.

On topic: I think that you and I agree on those three things, thus far.

Heh, I suppose I'm being a bit tongue-in-cheek. In that sense, yes, philosophy is clearly useful, but useful-for. When I say philosophy is useless, I actually want it to be useless. It only sounds harsh because we equate use-ability with value. But there is so much more to value than useful things.

Basically that philosophy is useless is a feature, to me, rather than a bug. Though I agree, if pressed, that the kind of philosophy which deals with one's particular life circumstances and feelings -- the stuff that the general philosophy often attempts to grasp in a more general way -- is useful-for, but it's only useful-for-me. The useless stuff attempts -- and seems to fail -- at a more general aim.

So the uselessness of the dialogue on truth isn't something that counts against it, in my opinion. It's a wonderful waste of time (and then, once in a blue moon, someone is clever enough to turn a waste of time into something useful)

Came across this quote in reviewing what I've read today, and it was germane to the conversations I've been participating in:

Finally, we may turn to a problem of more general concern, not restricted
therefore to Buber's particular philosophy. It is one which confronts any
epistemology which bases truth on a non-theoretical activity or on existence.
And it places in question the existence of epistemology itself for it concerns
'the truth about the truth' , i.e. , it asks about the nature of the knowledge
epistemology itself claims to have when it communicates the truth . It is here
that the theoretical nature of philosophy becomes evident. But perhaps this
is due only to the practical exigencies of teaching, and merely corresponds
to the return of the philosopher to the Cave where he is compelled to
employ the language of enchained slaves? If this is the case, then to
philosophize is to live in a certain manner and, according to Buber, to
practice to a greater extent than the others , in one's capacity of artist, friend
or believer, the dialogue with the real . Is not philosophy then , an attitude
distinct from all others is not philo sophari essentially different from
vivere? If this is so, then perhaps theory of knowledge is not based on any
dialogical step that we need take. The truth is rather obtainable in a wholly
different kind of dialogue which does not manifest its concern for Relation
so much as it does a desire to assure to the I its independence, even if this
independence is only possible in a union ( Verbunden) . Philosophy, then , is
definable in terms of a rupture of the individual with the whole, and it is for
this reason that it is abstract or critical in nature and implies a full possession
of oneself. We need not insist at this point on Buber's indifference to
the approximations of scientific knowledge which are hastily classified with
our visual observations of reality, without his offering any explanation for
the scope of our physico-mathematical knowledge. Although Buber has
penetratingly described the Relation and the act of distancing, he has not
taken separation seriously enough. Man is not merely identifiable with the
category of distance and meeting, he is a being sui generis, and it is impossible
for him to ignore or forget his avatar of subjectivity. He realizes his own
separateness in a process of subjectification which is not explicable in terms
of a recoil from the Thou. Buber does not explain that act, distinct from
both distancing and relating, in which the I realizes itself without recourse
to the other. — Levinas, From existence to ethics

I think I'd just include the middle classes with the gullible poors in your schema.

The silver-souled persons see themselves as above the bronze-souled persons because the gold-souled persons told them they were special for their knowledge. But the gold-souled people know they just need to motivate the silver-souled people to do their job which requires a bit of thought, but that their motivations are more or less the same as the bronze-souled people -- enflamed by passion, hope, and the will to power.

In fact, the gold-souled people aren't much different from that either, they just see that in themselves and act accordingly. At least so I say -- that these differences in souls don't amount to much, politically.

I'd say that your primer relies upon notions of belief, knowledge, character, and so forth -- basically it's an idealist politics. Hence my usage of the terminology of souls.

But the real difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich are rich and the poor are poor. And creating a third class in-between the two is just the way the so-called gold-souled people continue to rule -- by dividing people with material interests that are similar through talking of how valuable their souls are, and giving them a little bit more than the rest.

This seems consistent with indirect realism, idealism, and similar frameworks which work from the same fundamental mistake. Namely, that we have no direct access to the sheet(in this case), so we're not seeing the sheet, but rather only our perception, conception, sense datum, etc. thereof. I reject that view because it is based upon invalid and/or untenable reasoning(argument from illusion, etc.). — creativesoul

Well, hold on a second there. Suppose the case of seeing the sheet-as-sheet. Then we'd have direct access to the sheet. It's just that it is also possible for us to see what we have direct access to as something else we have direct access to. (whatever "direct" is doing now... without indirect-realism/idealism to define "direct", it seems superfluous)

"as" is a linguistic expression of a phenomology of perceiving entities as particular entities. So with the usual Gestalt phenomena we'd say that we see the ink-as-old-woman or the ink-as-young-woman, or the ink-as-duck or ink-as-rabbit. That is, the question of "access" or realism/anti-realism is set aside for now.

What that would mean is that individual perception is not some means for seeing knowledge, or something. But I'm fine with that. Knowledge is socially created and accepted before a community of knowledge-producers, rather than epistemic Robinson Crusoe's seeing authentic truths that they write down.

lol
Is that what I said, that philosophers and scientists really really like being right. I cracked up when I read this. Although the latter part of that sentence, viz., everyday speech doesn't work that way, is something I would say. I think I may know where this comes from, but it's the way it's worded that I thought was really really funny. — Sam26

Well, I extrapolated, I'll admit. :D - glad to amuse, though.

I do think this whole notion of looking for a precise definition of truth is just a waste of time. It's like trying to find a precise definition of the concept game, or, trying to find a precise definition of pornography. There are just to many uses with too many variables. Do I know all the variations of the use of the word game? No. Do I understand what a game is when I see it, most likely. Is the word useless without a precise definition, obviously not. A vague use might just be what we need in many social interactions. — Sam26

I agree with this. Philosophy is useless, after all. (at least, it should be ;) ) -- one might reframe the question, then. Without a definition being able to be supplied, what could we ask of a theory of truth? What is it we're asking after in the first place? Definitions cannot be pinned down, and you and I, at least, agree that truth is the sort of thing without a precise definition -- in fact, if we were tempted to define truth based on our philosophical practices, we might say that truth morphs itself with context -- that which theory we use is context-dependent. Or, if we're error-theorists, then we'd just say there is no such thing as truth itself, and its more like a character in a story about our sentences.

I like the notion of correspondence, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to try to come up with a theory that explains every use of truth as correspondence. I like that it generally works. Probably in most or many cases we can see what corresponds, like how a painting of Joe's farm corresponds to the arrangement of the house, the barn, the pig pen, etc., at Joe's farm. Is this how every use of the concept truth works? No. Does this mean that I don't know what truth is? No.

There are just too many lines of thought, distorted by hundreds of different uses of concepts. It's like trying to find the best move in chess, sometimes you can, but often you make the best move based on a variety of factors. Again, there are just too many variables. — Sam26

This is interesting, and takes my mind in yet another direction -- another possibility, or fair inference from what we've said so far about truth, is that it's simply not definable nor morphable. In some sense we might say that truth is transcendental to all conversation, in the sense that it is the necessary belief for all statement-making speech to be possible at all. In which case it's a bit like defining the noumena -- it's a place-holder in conversation for something bigger than what we can comprehend.

That depends on whether you count it raining and not raining at different times at the same place or at different places at the same time as counterexamples to "it's raining or it's not raining". It's a matter of interpretation; is its both raining and not raining a counter-example under your interpretation? If not, then what do you take the formula to mean? — Janus

And here I am again at a loss to say what that correspondence amounts to. "it is raining or it is not raining" does not seem to mean "anywhere". — Banno

It corresponds to the fact that it is always either raining or not raining at any place and time; shortening that to just "anywhere" which says nothing about time or raining is misleading. — Janus

Another thought in the back of my mind, though to develop it more I'll have to look at temporal logics now --

But this exchange reminds me of Kant's distinction between logic as such, and transcendental logic -- the primary difference being one abstracts from spatio-temporal relations, and the other does not. If you'll allow the indulgence, I believe it goes back to Aristotle's definition of non-contradiction which you are mirroring here, @Janus --

link

“It is impossible for the same thing to belong and not to belong at the same time to the same thing and in the same respect” (with the appropriate qualifications) (Metaph IV 3 1005b19–20). — Aristotle in the SEP on Logic

Still, worth highlighting that the relationship between time and logic is thorny. In a sense logic should be timeless. Yet we live in time. What to do with that?

Hodge-podgy reply

Okay. That's the conventional view when it comes to belief as propositional attitude. I agree that propositional content is necessarily linguistic, but I see no reason to agree that all our belief amounts to an attitude towards a proposition which represents that belief such that we take the proposition to be true.

For example, if one believes that a sheet is a sheep(a common cottage industry Gettier example), they do not have an attitude towards the proposition "a sheet is a sheep" such that they take it to be true, but they most certainly believe that that sheet is a sheep. — creativesoul

Also @Luke, from the exchange about named entities being true.

I think I'd say the above is not a belief, but a belief-mediated perception. We see the sheet-as-sheep. We might hold beliefs about sheet-as-sheep -- but note how this strays from logic, and is clearly phenomenology, complete with dashy-portmanteaus :D

Maybe unpalatable to some, but to answer:

How could a language less creature believe that a mouse is behind a tree if it has no linguistic concepts? — creativesoul

I'd say perception is linguistically mediated in us, but that perception simpliciter, in all species, does not require language. When we talk of beliefs in animals we're speaking in folk psychology. We understand the animals, being animals ourselves, and we're speaking of their psychological states through the folk concept of "belief" -- and I say "folk" non-pejoratively, because I think the folk concept of belief -- and truth, for that matter -- is actually better than a lot of philosopher or scientific inventions. Just not as precise as philosophers or scientists like, as @Sam26 said, since they really really like being right about things in lots of circumstances, when folk-notions simply don't work that way.

Also feel like noting that all of us have already undergone that transition, having started without language but then, through exposure to the language-using social world, we learned it through our social practices. (and hasn't anyone noticed how dogs, and our fellow apes, learn bits of language with training? That is, if the Lion spoke to me, I'd know what the Lion said -- at least as I think of things)

If the existence of a river accounts for the truth of a proposition (e.g. “this river contains many fish”), then it is a fact.

Just as the existence of snow accounts for the truth of “snow is white”.

Is a river an individual? If the existence of a river makes a proposition true or accounts for the truth of a proposition, then it is a fact - at least, according to one view of facts. — Luke

I think the best way to define the "mention operator" as I called it, and had yet to be able to answer your question, is to say what it does is it converts a natural-language string into a name for that said string using the same alphanumeric characters, but changing its function from a proposition to a name.

One thing I'm noticing here, in your examples, is you like to treat existence like a predicate. So the existence of things gives propositions used their truth-value.

"This river contains many fish" is true iff there exists a river, and the river contains, and the object contained by the river are fish, and the relationship of said fish to the numerical predicates in the context its within is such that speakers would say "many".

You agree with this:

So non-existent rivers are not facts? I might agree with you there. — Luke

On your account of correspondence, how is it that "There is no river on this dusty plane" true? The fact is the dusty plane, rather than the no-river. But the proposition is about the no-river. Or, the classic "The present king of France is bald". There is nothing to which this proposition refers as we speak it today. So you'd likely say something like the proposition is either obviously false, given there is no fact to the matter, or does not have a truth-value, or something like that. But that's something I liked about the plums example -- here was something that would matter, and is a lot more natural to our way of thinking. When you open up the fridge and see nothing in it, the no-plums have an effect on your state, at least. The nothing has an effect on us. And especially the no-plums, if we wanted plums. The no-plums have a relationship to the believed proposition. The fact is the empty fridge, and yet the sentence is "There aren't any plums in the ice box", and it's true. (or, perhaps you could say the fact is the imagined plums, but then we'd have facts-about-imaginations which doesn't work quite the same as facts-in-the-world, hence our confusions)

Given that true propositions about what is not there are many, and we are saying that truth is correspondence to facts, there must be non-entities to which said propositions correspond to -- unless you have some kind of translation you always perform on statements which use names referencing nothing, like "When non-referring names are used, the right-hand side of the T-sentence will be translated into names which refer to be understood" -- something I'd say looks ad hoc, on its face, though perhaps there's another motivation to speak like this.

Fair, I'm distracting you. :)

I think, for me at least, the next step would be -- if you accept that a natural language can be a meta-language -- to actually say that that's the end of the infinite regress.


The object-language kind of does function along the lines of conversations about objects. We just accept the object language as its being used, and even if people are actually using English they do use it in such a way that "passes over" the liar's paradox

could time be dependent on the quantity of things? ... if things are because of the relations in which they participate, could the number of relations things are part of determine the rate at which they change and thus determine the way in which they experience time? — Daniel

It could! but you'd have to be more specific, I think, to convince anyone.

Seems like an interesting thought, but anyone would have to know more about why you think it to agree.

Yep, because the object languagecan talk about Adam and Bob, but can't talk about itself, however the metalanguage can talk about Adam and Bob, and about the sentences of the object language.

So we have Adam, Bob, Carol,...

And in the object language we can write about them: (Adam is English).

And in the metalanguage we can write about them : (Adam is English), and add sentences from the object language: ("Adam is English" is true) — Banno

OK, that helps me understand "object language" a lot better. It's a literal moniker - a language for objects and objects only, and especially not its own sentences.

So a thought -- I balked at the meta-language because of its artificiality, however this makes me wonder -- could the meta-language just be a natural language? Like, the meta-language is for our object language, but it can have other functions too. So really it's just its role and relationship to the object language that makes it the meta-language.

Or no?

My question is: is it possible to bypass that unpleasant feeling without some kind of spiritual theory that gives life a meaning? Like getting closure with the fact that life doesn't have meaning, that there is probably nothing in the afterlife, etc, and not feel bad about it, not lose motivation to live another day. (Whether there is something or not in the afterlife is not what I want to talk about, I'm just wondering if we could deal with the fact that there is nothing, and be happy about it). — Skalidris

Yes. Though I say the following without prescription, only description. I don't know what would work for you.

Mortality is scary. "Death is nothing to us" is a mantra, not a description. A mantra that may or may not work for you, depending on . . . .

Well, what precisely is the dissatisfaction? To be attached to life is natural. But to be absorbed by death is an absurdity. Yet we do it.

I believe that this is a kind of desire that "runs away with itself" -- we like life, but its only upon reflection upon its end that we become sad. How unfair, to be granted a gift only to have it taken away! Yet, we never experience our death. Our death is always outside of us. So it's the sort of thing one can fear without experience, fear without evidence to ground the fear -- so the fear grows.

The mantra "Death is nothing to us" helps me to remember that it's me that's the root of this fear, my own little thoughts, and not death.

When we talk about truth, we're referring to what people believe. Some theories provide a better answer to the question of truth than other theories. I happen to think the correspondence theory works well.

Usually when people agree that a particular statement is true, they agree on some fact of the matter. In some cases we're just speculating about the truth, or we are just giving an opinion about what we think is true. In still more cases we may express a theory that X is true, as Einstein did with the general theory of relativity. It wasn't until Eddington verified Einstein's theory that we knew the truth of the matter. Here of course truth is connected with knowledge, not just an opinion or speculation.

If you want to learn what truth is, then study how the concept is used in a wide variety of situations, i.e., in our forms of life. Think about people disagreeing about political or economic views, they're disagreeing about the facts associated with these views. Most don't know enough to recognize what facts make their belief true or false, so their disagreeing over opinions, and some are willing to kill over their opinions, but I digress.

What's true can also refer to possible worlds, and to works of fiction. So, there can be facts associated with things that aren't even real. Anything we do is associated with some fact, and as such it can be associated with what we believe.

There is definitely the concept of truth, so it's not as though the concept doesn't exist, or that it doesn't have a place within our various linguistic contexts.

Insight is gained by looking carefully at the various uses of these concepts. The problem is that many people want exactness where there is none, at least not in some absolute across the board sense. There are some absolutes when it comes to truth, but those absolutes are relative to a particular context. — Sam26

I agree with your method, but I think it takes me elsewhere. I like where you start:

"When we talk about truth, we're referring to what people believe. "

But then I have to say that "better" or "well" looks too close to "true" :D -- As in, correspondence itself is also a fact, and our statements about correspondence are true due to that fact. That's consistent at least! But if it's not that, I wonder what value that isn't truth decides between the theories for yourself?

I think people agree to a fact, but I've been saying there's not much of a difference between a fact and a true statement -- that they are one and the same, and the story of correspondence is what creates a picture of some fact corresponding to the meaning of a statement believed. In the same way that we can say true things about Harry Potter, so we can say true things about truth.

Sometimes a person might be suspicious and go test a claim -- are the plums in the icebox after all? Here the method is "look in the icebox", and depending upon what you see you'll ascertain whether the person spoke truly or falsely. The meaning of true or false doesn't change because that's been well-entrenched by several hundred years of use. There's a definite history to the predicate "...is true". But our belief about the sentence "There are plums in the icebox" will change depending upon what we see. We will evaluate it to be true or false.

Was it true or false beforehand? Yes. That's exactly how we use the words "...is true" and "...is false". In the game of truth-telling, it's understood that the person can lie -- that what they say could turn out to not be the case if we go and check somehow. So we apply that game to individual statements and invent a metaphysics around it. But it started out as a social practice. It started with others, before myself.

Something not quite right there. Did you mean (the Goldbach conjecture is) true XOR false? Any proposition is either true or false (principle of bivalence). — Agent Smith

Accepting a third truth value basically rejects the principle of bivalence.

A good read @Banno - you simplified it enough that I think I followed along :)

Something I'm not following -- if we designate our meta-language to refer to the same objects, does it still, at the same time, function as a meta-language? Sort of like having L1 and L2, with the same strings, but slightly different meanings?

I have a hard time thinking in terms of a meta-language. Like, clearly formal and defined -- but I'm not sure I understand how the meta-language performs both the meta-language's function of talking about L1 and the function of the object language which talks about the objects. At this part:

Suppose we restrict the object language to being about a group of people, Adam, Bob and Carol...

And in the metalanguage we can have a definition of "designates":

A name n designates an object o if and only if (( n = "Adam" and o = Adam) or ( n = "Bob" and o = Bob) or( n = "Carol" and o = Carol)...

Doubtless this looks cumbersome, despite my having skipped several steps, but it gives us
a metalanguage and and object language both talking about the same objects, Adam, Bob and Carol..., and a way to use the same name in both languages. — Banno

I might just have to crack open the paper again to follow these steps, and that's fine, but I thought I'd note something I'm not following.

Heh. Well, I have more reading assignments then.

One advantage of excluding temporality is that we can then discuss what we mean by temporality. If the logic we employ uses temporality, then there are views that are likely to be ignored, given that people think of that differently.

It is a kind of game. But, then, I am saying logic is a kind of game, more or less.

Ah, OK. I misread.

"this sentence" is not well formed. It does not fit the form of a proposition. It is only a subject, and contains no predicate.

Yeh, an unsatisfactory result, though. A kind of anti-realism that no one would really want.

I entertain dialethism, but actually the liar's paradox is one of the things I think I've come around on in saying it's not dialethic. Or, it can be, but that depends on the rules of logic we're willing to allow.

Not like that's a definite belief, as @Sam26 pointed out. Still thinking through that one.

But unsurprisingly, I'm not opposed to dialethism.

To that I'd say that logic excludes temporality. Not that it should do so -- but that's the idea. Temporality is introduced through the power of English semantics. (We get the liar's paradox as well, with that)

Right.

And that's somewhat a whole other subset of thoughts on truth -- how to resolve the liars paradox.

I'd say that's an answer, but I didn't want to go with it because it leads into a whole other topic unto itself. As in, various theories of truth resolve the liars paradox in their own ways. It's not something unique to the formula.

But with the caveat of the liars paradox, right? I said it just because it seemed like the most obvious thing that would break the logic.

You succeeded in derailing my thoughts to Davidson, now. :D I have the book on my table to read A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs.

We'll see which one gets priority in my too-hard-for-me-now-matrix -- Levinas or Davidson.