:up:

You're offering an ostensive definition, and your problem is that when you point to a proposition "the bolded part", I see a sentence. If you think about it, it isn't possible to "bold" a proposition - it's like trying to italicize an apple. Wrong category. — Ludwig V

That's true. A proposition is along the lines of content.

Yes, but to the extent that the two sentences are different, you give me grounds for wondering whether it is the same proposition. I would prefer to stop talking about propositions, but it's too well embedded in philosophical discourse for that to be realistic - it's tilting at windmills. The formula I've offered does avoid some of the worst problems. — Ludwig V

I don't think you have to talk about propositions. It's not a bad idea to know what it is, though.

Things moved on. — Banno

I see. Thanks.

But look at "A nice derangement of epitaphs", were conventions are rejected in favour of interpretation - an active process! And so closer to Dummett's group dynamics, but keeping the primacy of truth. — Banno

Ok. So you could tell Williamson not to hold his breath waiting for more work to be done on the issue because the two sides crashed in the middle.

The core difference is that for Dummett truth concerns verification, but for Davidson truth is a primitive notion. — Banno

The difference between realism and anti-realism comes down to this: how we handle the unknowable. If you think the unknowable is still truth-apt, you're a realist. If you think language doesn't conform to some mind-independent world, but rather aids group dynamics, then you're likely to agree with Dummett, truth is a social fixture.

Davidson, a champion of truth-conditional semantics, is a hero to the realist, because he offers a way to be a realist without propositions. Whether he actually was a realist is another matter. :grin:

Better perhaps to think of Davidson, like Wittgenstein, as rejecting the realism/antirealism dichotomy, than as compatible with either. — Banno

True, but Williamson is holding Davidson up as an example of realist semantics, and he is compatible with both.

I think you might be more at home in an anti-realist place.
— frank

Heaven forbid! :grin: But thanks for the thought. No, my doubts aren't a good fit for anti-realism. And I don't have any stake in convincing you, or anyone else, that the "standard analysis" of truth-makers, truth-bearers, propositions, etc. can perhaps be challenged while still keeping a robust sense of non-language-game truth. I may not be advocating well for my own doubts, and I'm very far from having a worked-out theory of any of this. If you do have a look at either the Kimhi or the Rodl books, you might get a better sense. Though you have me wondering now . . . Rodl styles himself as an "absolute idealist" in the Hegelian tradition. I wonder if he would agree that that makes him an anti-realist. I don't think so -- the opposition here is not the old one between idealism and realism -- but it's an interesting question. — J

In the context of the OP, anti-realism is just the attitude that speech doesn't conform or correspond to states of affairs. Language is first and foremost a mechanism of social dynamics.

By way of Davidson, you can ditch propositions, but at the cost of buying into the notion of identifying truth-conditions. Plus with Davidson, realism is just an add-on. Davidson is compatible with either realism or anti-realism.

I dig Hegel, but I feel a little more resonance with the Neo-platonism that he was working with.

Ukraine: "Send More Weapons."
US. "ok."
Ukraine: "Thank you."

I think you might be more at home in an anti-realist place. Language games. That's anti-realism. Propositions really come from analyzing realism, where we have truthbearers and truthmakers. For the language gamer, truth is not a central issue, in fact there is no one truth.

I don't know. Is a strong will and the range by which we need confirmation from others to define ourselves an inborn trait (natural) or something that is the result of one's upbringing (nurtured)? While I will agree that our upbringing has a large impact on the person we are today, there are some that appear to develop in stark contrast to their upbringing. Maybe they were raised in a home that did neglect them but found a true friend that encouraged and supported them, and it still is the nurturing, I just can't say. We would have to study the details of each case. — Harry Hindu

I agree. But I would say that lacking a clear sense of identity isn't necessarily a bad thing. Yes, it poses an obstacle to self-advocation, but a person like that is basically what a Buddhist is trying to figure out.

The way this plays into identity politics is that a person who only sees negative images of people like themselves (say a black child only sees blackness depicted as being gang related, or enslavement)
— frank
What black child today lives in such informational isolation? — Harry Hindu

I was just giving an example to clarify it.

The question is do we bring down one group to raise another, or simply stop representing one group only in a negative light? — Harry Hindu

I don't know. I was just explaining what recognition has to do with identity politics. Just rambling, really.

The U.S. has evolved since then, but it appears that there are some that want to take us backwards by pushing the pendulum back to the opposite extreme - where another group receives special treatment at the expense of others to make up for the way things were while ignoring how things are now. — Harry Hindu

Again, I don't know. I would say an economic focus is more important that identity politics because to the extent that Hollywood panders to minorities, it's doing that because minorities buy tickets and merch. On the other hand, notice the next time you see a hospital advertisement. If they're depicting one of their awesome doctors, they'll be showing you an old white dude. Possibly Jewish. Why do you think they're doing that?

Um - forgive me. But that's what I call a sentence — Ludwig V

We identify propositions using sentences. For instance, maybe you said "That's on the mat" while you were pointing to the cat. The proposition you expressed by uttering that sentence was that the cat is on the mat.

However, the SEP article seems to want to say that a proposition is what is in common between a number of sentences or statements. That's what I don't get. — Ludwig V

You say, "That's on the mat."
I say, "Yes, Ludwig, the cat is on the mat."

We're expressing the same proposition by way of two utterances and two sentences. If you look back at your own analysis:

How about "collection of sentences that enable us to say that the cat is on the mat in different ways" — Ludwig V

That's exactly the standard analysis. The bolded part that follows the word, "that" is a proposition. Maybe an incentive for understanding it would be this: if you want to be a realist and avoid propositions, your best best is Davidson. It's 10 times more complicated, and will leave you with a different set of mysteries. Take your pick.

I can see that. With recognition theory, we're just saying that if a person doesn't receive recognition, they end up with a frail sense of self. This doesn't mean they're wishy-washy, though. They may be very staunch in their rejection of any kind of identity.

The way this plays into identity politics is that a person who only sees negative images of people like themselves (say a black child only sees blackness depicted as being gang related, or enslavement), then that person is less likely to develop a clear sense of themselves, what they want, and what they advocate. If I'm inferior, or in some way wrong, then I shouldn't engage the world the way the right people do. All of this may be half-conscious.

Identity politics is saying that what the oppressed need is not more money. They usually aren't actually looking for that. What they want is recognition, which is a basic requirement of a psyche that can advocate for itself.

How about "collection of sentences that enable us to say that the cat is on the mat in different ways"
or "collection of ways to say that the cat is on the mat".
Suggestions welcome. — Ludwig V

:up: If you note the part I bolded, that's what we call a proposition.

I repeat - all we need is a collection of sentences that say that the cat is on the mat in different ways. — Ludwig V

This looks like slipping grammar to me. How does a sentence say something? A sentence is just a series of words that form a unit.

Read this.

There will be an essay test after you finish.

I don't follow this. — Astrophel

I thought of doing a thread on the philosophy and psychology of recognition, but then I realized that would be too much effort. :razz:

So, the reason I find political categorical rigidity unable to express the fullness of complex ideas is because.....I was neglected as a child? — Astrophel

No. A person who invests themselves fully in the identity of Democrat or MAGA probably didn't experience neglect, whether they accept that categorization enlarges the pixels is a different matter.

I couldn't make sense of most of your post, sorry.

According to my recent reading on recognition, people who have any kind of non-binariness probably experienced neglect in childhood, so that they never developed a clear sense of self, which requires being recognized by others. So if someone tells you they have no favorite football team, you can ask them if they were neglected. They probably were.

This seems a bit much for me. Consider the most popular variety of ontological realism, physicalism. Is this based wholly on whim and faith? — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is a misunderstanding. Physicalism is not a variety of ontological realism. Ontological realism just says we have the ability to declare what the world is made of, whether physicalism, idealism, or whatever. An ontological antirealist (from soft to hard approaches), says we don't have this ability, for various reasons.

An example of a justification for ontological realism would be that God told us in some book that the world is his mind, so it's idealism. So though we don't have the means to verify that, we believe it because we believe everything in the sacred book by faith.

Physicalism, for obvious reasons, isn't likely to have that kind of justification, but whatever justification a physicalist comes up with, it will come down to faith.

Second, it's not as if anti-realists are free of their own epistemic and metaphysical presuppositions. — Count Timothy von Icarus

No, they are free. A hard ontological antirealist (like me), doesn't believe ontology is anymore than a sort of philosophical game. It has nothing to do with what it purports to be.

However, if the very issues at hand are various forms of anti-realism, e.g. anti-realism re values (i.e. the very idea of anything being better or worse at all), anti-realism re truth (i.e. the very idea of anything ever being truly better or worse), anti-realism re linguistic meaning, etc. it seems to me that it will be impossible to appeal to "better or worse language," without begging the question re anti-realism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is true. A behaviorist, for instance, can't complain much about wording, because no language use is supposed to actually refer, or convey meaning, do ontology, etc.

Just be aware that some anti-realisms exist because of apparently insurmountable problems with the corresponding realism (no pun intended.) If one persists in being a hard ontological realist, for instance, it appears the basis is pure whim... or a kind of faith. There's no power to persuade.

If you were hoping that one day people will occupy Antarctica, probably not. It would take a 5-10 degree global shift upward for 10,000 years. Humans won't be able to accomplish that because the oceans will absorb the CO2 too quickly.

Then how do you explain a football game? — Banno

I don't.

I'd suggest some sort of shared intentionality, social intent, along the lines proffered by Searle. Shared intent as opposed to individual intent. That for a non-extensional account. — Banno

I don't think there's any fact of the matter regarding shared nor individual intentionality. It's all Wittgenstein's Group Dynamics.

Have you read "Thinking and Being" by Irad Kimhi? Or "Self-Consciousness and Objectivity" by Sebastain Rodl? — J

I haven't. They look very much like my cup of tea, though. :up:

If P is not true, then the cat is not on the mat. So if I assert Q -- "I think that the cat is on the mat" -- some would allege that I am mistaken. But what am I mistaken about? Not my own thought, presumably. I must be wrong about the cat. This seems to show that the cat needs to be on the mat in order for me to speak truly when I say 2. — J

P is the proposition that the cat is on the mat.

You asserted that you think P.

If P is false, then you are mistaken about what you thought. You aren't wrong about having thought it.

The cat definitely doesn't have to be on the mat in order for you to truly express what you think about it, either way.

That the use of intentional operators is conventional, and admits of different interpretations, especially around "I think" — J

It's "intensional" with an "s." This is Hesperus/Phosphorus territory. Skim through that article. We've thought a lot about thinking, believing, and knowing. The article on extensional definitions is also interesting.

Or, more interestingly, our entire understanding of what a proposition is supposed to be -- as Ludwig V suggests above -- is in need of revisiting. — J

How would you revisit it?

1), "I assert P", is an assertion about a state of affairs that is independent of me, the speaker.

2), "I assert Q", is, or can be taken as, an assertion about me, the speaker -- specifically, about a thought I have concerning my cat.

But this seems to claim that the truth of 2) isn't dependent on the truth of P. The truth of P -- whether or not the cat is on the mat -- will have no bearing on whether the same speaker had a particular thought. This is a very uncomfortable position to defend. — J

Why would the truth of 2 be dependent on the truth of P?

In philosophy, though, "I think that . . . " is more often supposed to be transparent. It doesn't refer to some particular mental occurrence at all, but instead to a belief or a position about whatever is being thought: "Do you think so?" "Yes, I do." So "X" and "I think that X" are both taken as 3rd person propositions. Can this be right? — J

Think, know, and believe are called intensional operators. They signify what's going on between a person and a proposition. You're adding another layer to this.

I'm not really sure what you're saying though.

I'm talking about the confidence that a person's intention is knowable in principle. I think that's probably a priori.
— frank

Ah, sorry, I was off track. Interesting. I guess I'd respond that we have the same confidence about this re some other person as we have re ourselves. So that leaves a couple of questions: How confident is that? and, Do you mean a priori to the given circumstances, or a priori in some more deeply metaphysical way? I doubt the latter; I think we learn to be confident just as we learn anything else. — J

I think human speech might be similar to bird flight. The potential for it is hardwired, and it becomes actual when circumstances trigger the development. I mean, a gene has been identified that's related to speech, so there's some reason to suspect that it's not something a person learns. It's something that's triggered in the right environment.

OK. Let me rephrase:

Compare
1) I assert, "The cat is on the mat."
2) I assert, "I think that my cat is on the mat."

Would you agree that these two assertions by me assert different things? — J

Maybe. The quoted part looks like an uttered sentence. Strictly speaking, I have to have knowledge of the context of utterance to help me understand what you're saying. In other words, I'd need to make sure you didn't do any nonverbal stuff that signals sarcasm or something like that. I can't just use the sentence. Even Davidson wasn't just using the sentence as a truth bearer, and that's related to his theory of meaning.

If on the other hand, the quoted part is supposed to represent a proposition, then yes, it's definitely two different things. The proposition has all the context of utterance, truth conditions, etc. worked out.

Compare
1) The cat is on the mat.
2) I think that my cat is on the mat.

Would you agree that the two statements assert different things? If so, the problem is how to understand the context of 'The cat is on the mat', and its truth conditions, in some alleged independence of anyone's thought (or statement). — J

I don't think it makes sense to say that a statement makes an assertion. People make assertions. What we're doing is analyzing human communication, "analyzing" in the sense of taking it apart, making flowcharts. For instance:

The professor points to the whiteboard, which has the numeral "2" written on it, and she says, "That's a prime number."

The utterance is the sounds made by the professor. The sentence uttered is: "That is a prime number."

What is the proposition being expressed by the utterance of the sentence? This is something we would discern by observing the whole scene. All sorts of questions would have to be answered, let's say that having answered these questions, we're fairly certain that the professor is expressing the proposition that 2 is a prime number.

This example is straight from Scott Soames' book on truth. It's an explanation that is in line with the way the word "proposition" is used in contemporary AP.

I want to emphasize that the above is in no way controversial. Whether one likes this kind of analysis or not, there's nothing fishy or woo about it. It carries no ontological implications. The folks who are likely to be allergic to the word are usually referring to the same thing but some other wording, it they may be behaviorists.

Some combination of observation and reason. Not a priori. Perhaps especially not in a courtroom, where a hermeneutics of suspicion is appropriate." — J

I'm talking about the confidence that a person's intention is knowable in principle. I think that's probably a priori. I don't of any observation or reason that would serve as justification for that confidence.

Yes, hence the rather mysterious nature of a proposition. We want to imagine a proposition as independent of a context of assertion. That's why 1st- and 2nd-person assertions give so much trouble -- they can't have their indexicals paraphrased away (on some accounts). — J

I don't follow. What's the problem with 1st and 2nd person assertions?

In a court room, the disposition of the defendant may depend on what a witness says, so we're very confident.
— frank

This sounds interesting but I don't quite follow. What is it we're confident about? — J

That the content of an assertion is knowable in principle. I thought you were leaning toward skepticism about determining what a speaker means.

I judge someone to be cold and hand them a blanket, then I am asserting that they are cold; I cannot remove myself from my assertion,
— sime

I agree, but if I also hand the guy a blanket, I'm making the same assertion you are: that he's cold.

My act of asserting can't be your act of asserting, but the proposition we're asserting is the same.
— frank — J

I was responding to sime's statement that he can't remove himself from his assertion. I read that as saying his assertion can't be treated as something hanging in space, separated from him. I agree with that, but I can logically separate him from the proposition he's asserting. This is coming from Soames' argument that shows why eliminating the concept of propositions carries the cost of also eliminating any agreement between people. If we agree, we aren't agreeing on an utterance. We aren't agreeing on a sentence. We're agreeing on a proposition. It's a pretty solid argument which I could dredge up if I had to. :smile:

Hence my question: Are you two really asserting the same proposition? You may be. But the concept of assertion is just too elastic for us to know for certain. — J

That's true. Communication has these underlying presuppositions, like that we can know the content of someone's utterance. In a court room, the disposition of the defendant may depend on what a witness says, so we're very confident. But is this confidence based on observation? On reason? Or is it apriori? How would you answer that?

Maybe. What I was pointing out is that Trump probably wouldn't have made any decision if it weren't for people briefing him on world events like his opinion is supposed to be of consequence. His focus is more domestic. The tariffs may have seemed like a foreign policy, but it wasn't really. It's about his ideas about taking the US back to the 1970s in terms of industrialization.

Right. Can they both frame assertions? I would say so. — J

A. It's true that
B. It's possible that

Some philosophers would say that anytime a person asserts a proposition (P), whether by speech, writing, road sign, stern glare, blanket handing, etc, that "P" means the same thing as "It's true that P." This is redundancy theory, or just redundancy. There are those who deny this. They think there's some subtle difference between the two, although I can't remember what their point is. Scott Soames mentions this in Understanding Truth.

If I assert that it's possible that you're cold, the proposition is that it's possible that you're cold. By redundancy reasoning, this is the same as saying "It's true that it's possible that you're cold."

Are you pointing to the ambiguity that may be there with communication, especially nonverbal? If so, I was just thinking about that yesterday, and by way of meaning as use, this is one of the ways a person can shape a social situation. Let's say you issue an insult in my direction, but it's unclear if you're joking or serious. I can shape things by my reaction. If I laugh and say "That's so true." then the ball is back in your court for what you really meant. You may have been serious, but now you're willing to let it go, so you laugh as well, and it was officially a joke. Wittgenstein's Group Dynamics.

Bottom line, they can’t escape it by burying their heads in the sand. — Christoffer

I've been looking at what the Middle East will be like in 2100. It occurred to me that living underground might be an option, so burying heads in the sand might work. Or maybe become nocturnal. But above ground, the inland areas won't just be uncomfortable, they'll be incompatible with human life.

Digging a little more deeply into that: Does this understanding of assertion commit you to including both "it is true that . . ." and "it seems quite possible that . . ." as assertions? If so, do they assert the same thing? — J

I don't think It's true that and it's possible that have the same meaning.

I like that thought though, at the end of the universe there's a to-do list that will never get done.

I agree, but if I also hand the guy a blanket, I'm making the same assertion you are: that he's cold.

My act of asserting can't be your act of asserting, but the proposition we're asserting is the same. No ontological implications there, it's just how we understand assertions.

I think we're talking past one another. I don't think Trump has any particular policy regarding the middle east.

That Western democracies don't do this and cannot do this perhaps makes him irritated. — ssu

I doubt it. He just does whatever he can get away with, as always.

So what's really the point? — ssu

Trump is having fun. His advisors tell him stuff, he expounds his great wisdom to them. They say, ok. He's the commander in chief. I get that some people expect there to be more to it than that, like grand purposes, grievous failure of some continuous long-term policy. Nothing will convince them otherwise because they have a worldview that says things somehow make sense. There's a plan. There is meaning. It's not wasted breath to vent your hatred of the USA.

By the way, did you see the video I posted in the news thread about Elvira Bary's take on Russia? I guess I knew some of the things she was saying, but I was still a little shocked at the way she put it together. She says there's an underlying current of thought in Russia that says it needs to be an empire in order to survive. It's not just about being big shots, it's that the west will eat them up if they aren't strong enough. It's strange how differently people see things when we're all attached to the same rock flying through space.