As for paraphrase, that's an interesting thing. But I was talking about a step before you really get to content. Something like this: Jones said, last Saturday, "I've got it," referring to the money he owed. You can normalize this to: On July 1, 2017, Jones says that Jones has the money Jones owes. That's a kind of paraphrase, but the goal is just to put the sentence into a particular timeless form and remove a certain amount of context dependence. — Srap Tasmaner

OK I see what you mean, but I would assume that if you press most philosophers on this, they would say something like that is not the "strictly correct" use of the term 'proposition' but only a 'loose' one.

What is a brand such that millions can own the same one? Does it have physical wheels? — Mongrel

I'm only pointing out that this is a natural use of "the same". Don't you use and understand sentences such as "me and my brother have the same hair color" (e.g. blonde) outside philosophy? I'm surprised that I even need to explain this.

And the point of type identity is not to refer to a particular car with which the other cars are token identical (as I said it is not the same as numerical identity), but to say that the relevant cars belong to the same group or type of cars (and the type is not a car itself).

OK. I don't know how this fits in to the conversation. Lost track, I guess. — Mongrel

I only answered your original question:

A proposition is semantic content. What do you mean they don't have semantics? — Mongrel

I'm unfamiliar with propositions being spoken of as having semantic content. They are semantic content.

You could just say "content" instead of "proposition" and get along just fine. — Mongrel

Yeah, that's exactly my point. If propositions don't have semantic content then they don't have a semantics period (because this is what "semantics" means - a theory which assigns contents to signs).

I don't think so. You have a car. I have a car. We do not have the same car (type.) We have the same type of transportation. — Mongrel

You have to distinguish between two senses of "the same". On one sense, indeed we don't have the same car (our cars are not numerically or token identical), but on another sense we do - say if our cars are of the same brand and model (they belong to the same type). This distinction should not be very controversial unless you are some sort of extreme nominalist (are you?)

Semantics is the study of meaning. Propositions are all about meaning. — Mongrel

As I said, it's just a matter of terminology. If you don't want to confuse people, then you ought not to talk about the "semantics" or propositions.

What was his main concern when he discussed rule following? — Mongrel

The false things that people say about rules and meaning.

Yeah that has to be right. Sometimes "proposition" gets used to mean something like: the sentence under consideration, disambiguated, indexicals eliminated, ellipses eliminated, whatever is needed from context explicitly added in, and so on. A sentence "normalized" in whatever way is needed. That's a useful thing but I don't know a standard term for it. — Srap Tasmaner

Hmm I don't remember ever seeing such a use of 'proposition', can you give an example?

Maybe you mean when a philosopher just explains the content of a sentence by paraphrasing it with a longer or more detailed sentence?

Another use of 'proposition' can be found in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, where it simply means a sentence which is put to a meaningful use (or in the Tractarian terminology, a sign which is used as a symbol).

I don't see how what you say contradicts what I said about Fodor. Could you explain a bit more?

Another point about propositions: propositions are usually postulated in order to explain the semantic content of sentences. However, if you treat proposition as themselves having semantic content, then the question would arise, what is their semantic content? Another proposition?

You utter sentence A. I utter sentence A. We uttered the same sentence. — Mongrel

Yes, that's what I meant.

If this was a type/token situation, then you uttered your sentence and I uttered mine. We didn't utter the same sentence. Is that what you're arguing? — Mongrel

No, I was argueing the opposite. On the type/token distinction if you say 'cats fly' and I say 'cats fly' then we have uttered the same sentence (type), which is perfectly consistent with saying that sentences are physical entities.

A proposition is semantic content. What do you mean they don't have semantics? — Mongrel

Semantics is concerned with signs and symbolism. Since nobody claims that abstract propositions have symbolic meaning then they don't have a semantics by definition (it is fine to say that they are identical with semantic content, but it is not the same as saying that they have semantic content - it's a rather pedantic point, but this is what philosophers mean by "semantics", so it is better to follow their use in order to avoid confusion and misunderstanding).

Witt agreed that rule-following is a prominent part of communication, didn't he? — Mongrel

I don't know, maybe, but this wasn't his main philosophical concern when he discussed rules.

I'm not quite sure what you had in mind, but what Fodor meant (and many other philosophers) is that you need such rules, that tell you in advance what the truth conditions of each sentence in the language are, because they assume some strong form compositionality in order to account for the productivity of language (they argue that unless you have an algorithm that tells you what "___ is a good X" means independently of what '___' and 'X' mean and the context of their use, then we could never understand new sentences of this form, which is exactly what Travis denies).

Whatever it is, it's not physical sounds or marks. You should be able to get that intuitionally by noticing that you and I can utter the same sentence. Two utterances (physical sounds or marks), one sentence.

There's an argument that buttons it up tight if your intuition fails you :) A sentence is a particular pattern of words. — Mongrel

You are talking here about the distinction between sentence token and sentence type, and I don't see why this should contradict what I said (that they are physical entities). We can after all talk about physical entities as particulars (a cloud) or as being a type/kind to which particulars belong ("being a cloud"). If your argument were right then it would prove that physical objects don't exist...

Definitely. So? — Mongrel

What I wanted to say is that this is not the same as saying that propositions have a semantics like sentences.

If he's laying out rules, then he's not saying something Witt would disagree with, is he? — Mongrel

Witt' would definitely disagree with Fodor more or less on everything... And I don't agree at all that Witt' was "laying out rules" (whatever that means).

A sentence isn't a physical sign. — Mongrel

Then what else could it be...?

A proposition is semantic content. — Mongrel

Fine, but this is not the same as saying that they have a semantics like sentences.

Isn't Fodor talking about rules? — Mongrel

Obviously yes, his whole Language of Thought theory is about syntax.

And by the way, there are even more extreme views than what I've described. There's something called "minimalist semantics" (advocated by Herman Cappelen for example) and on this view, save for a very small number of cases (like indexicals), context has nothing to do with semantics whatsoever. Their idea is that whenever you put together any words to form a sentence (which is 'well formed' by some criteria of grammaticity) then you automatically get a meaningful sentence with a determinate 'literal meaning' that is not open to interpretation.

So they would argue that even Chomsky's famous nonsense sentence "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" says something meaningful, though false. Incidentally, I took a few philosophy classes with someone who subscribes to such view. He argued in class that whenever we say a sentence such as "everybody came to the party" what the sentence itself literally means is that "every entity in the universe came to the party", and therefore it is always false. So yeah...

Putting aside for a moment which philosophers believe that, here you are explicitly using sentences as truth-bearers instead of propositions. Why are you making that choice? — Mongrel

The first reason is that Travis' original argument is concerned with sentences, not propositions, so I couldn't use something else instead when presenting his argument. Secondly and more importantly, it is because we are talking about the semantics of natural language, aren't we? So we are concerned with the meaning of sentence as physical signs, since propositions (on the standard view at least of propositions as abstract entities) don't have any semantics because they are not composed of signs.

That's contrary to common sense, so the philosophers who adhere to that view have some explaining to do. You wouldn't say the majority of philosophers have made this blunder would you? — Mongrel

I can give plenty of examples. Kent Bach is one such philosopher (see for example - userwww.sfsu.edu/kbach/Bach.ContextDependence.pdf). Another example is Jerry Fodor. Here's a random example from one of his paper that I read recently: (from "Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture")

the difference between ‘good book’, ‘good rest’ and ‘good fight’ is probably not meaning shift but syncategorematicity. ‘Good NP’ means something like NP that answers to the relevant interest in NPs: a good book is one that answers to our interest in books (viz. it’s good to read); a good rest is one that answers to our interest in rests (viz. it leaves one refreshed); a good fight is one that answers to our interest in fights (viz. it’s fun to watch or to be in, or it clears the air); and so on. It’s because the meaning of ‘good’ is syncategorematic and has a variable in it for relevant interests, that you can know that a good flurg is a flurg that answers to the relevant interest in flurgs without knowing what flurgs are or what the relevant interest in flurgs is.

(don't ask me what "syncategorematicity" is because I don't know, but from the context it is pretty clear that he means by that something like a variable)

Let me put it this way. From the Travis/Wittgenstein point of view the relevant rule is that the sentence "the leaves are green" apply only whenever the leaves are green (of course you'll have to tell a much more complicated story here, and furthermore there's really no universal rule for 'green' or being a leaf on this account, but this blunt formulation will suffice for my purpose); whereas most philosophers would say that you need an additional rule, for example a rule which specifies for each case (when the leaves are painted, the leaves are glowing in the dark and so on) whether the sentence is true or false in advance. Travis and Wittgenstein would say that there's no such rule, and furthermore that you don't need it in order to understand or apply the sentence "the leaves are green" in new cases.

So the dispute is about whether you can describe language algorithmically, such that the meaning of every expression would completely determine in advance what you should say on each occasion. Travis' and Wittgenstein's view is that the idea of such a "super rule" or algorithem is a confusion, and that rules can never replace human judgment and sensitivity, but essentially depend on them for their application (so it's a pretty deep disagreement about the nature of rules and understanding).

No he doesn't, he just says that rules are not enough for meaning, or better - that applying a rule is always a matter of excising a special sort of capacity which is not itself determined by antecedent rules (which I think is also Wittgenstein's point).

First I think the argument is neutral on the issue of externalism, semantic or otherwise.

And you are correct that the 'traditional' view doesn't completely ignore the role of context in determining meaning, but unlike Travis, most philosophers believe that whenever the meaning of a sentence seem to be context dependent, then that sentence must contain some semantic 'parameter' that fixes in advance how any context of utterance can and cannot contribute to its meaning.

So a paradigmatic example for this is indexicals (like "me" "now" "here" etc.). All philosophers agree that the reference of 'I' in "I'm hungry" for example, changes on most occasions of utterance, depending on the person who utters it. However, many philosophers argue that the pronoun 'I' changes reference because of its meaning, so they regard the the word 'I' as synonymous with something like "the person who uttered the word", and this they claim explains how we can know to whom the word refers on different occasions.

And what is nice about Travis' example is that it appears very implausible that a sentence such as 'the leaves are green' should contain some sort of semantic 'parameter' or indexical that already anticipates what meaning should it have for every conceivable context (after all, neither the meaning of 'green' or 'leaves' contains a disjunction which specifies what you ought to say about any conceivable case, i.e., painted leaves, gloving in the dark leaves, brightly lit leaves; or what about leaves that are 80% green? or leaves that are 53% green? Is it semantically determined for each case when exactly should we stop calling the leaves green?).

There's a neat argument by Charles Travis that I think illustrates quite well what was meant by Wittgenstein when he said "meaning is use", and it also shows that the traditional view of meaning is mistaken (like that a word means that which it stands for or refers to etc.).

Travis gives an example of a sentence that can be used in one context to say something true and in another context to say something false about the very same object. And so if Travis' example is convincing, then it shows that the meaning we associate with each word in a sentence (whatever it is) is not sufficient to determine the meaning or content of the whole sentence on the occasion of utterance (and by 'content' Travis means truth-evaluable content, i.e. that which determines the truth conditions for the sentence).

Suppose we utter the sentence "the leaves are green", and point to a bunch of dead brown leaves that have been painted green. Is the sentence true or false? It depends according to Travis on the purpose for which we use the sentence: if we are interested in the superficial color of the leaves, then we would be saying something true when we use the sentence, whereas if we are, say, interested in botany then we would say that the same sentence is false (or imagine a cease of brown leaves that are lit by intense green light, or leaves that glow green in the dark and so on).

So the moral is this: whatever 'meaning' we associate with the sentence or any of the words of which it is composed, it doesn't determine in advance what the sentence means on a particular occasion of use. Knowing what 'leaves' and 'green' mean doesn't by itself tell you how to use the sentence when you talk about some particular leaves, because you have countless options to choose from. The sentence can have a determined meaning (i.e. to say something concrete about the leaves) only if we have a clear purpose in mind for which we want to use the sentence on a given occasion.

truth is attributed to the meaning of the statement, it is not attributed to the physical words themselves. The meaning must be interpreted before truth can be attributed, and this interpretation is subjective. So truth is attributed to the interpretation, and any interpretation is subjective. It is not the act of attribution which I am claiming is subjective, but the thing, the interpretation, which truth is being attributed to, which I am claiming is subjective. — Metaphysician Undercover

But 'interpretation' is not always a subjective thing, in fact the case of language is precisely where interpretation is not subjective in most cases. If we understand an English sentence such as 'cats fly' as saying that cats fly, then our 'interpretation' of the sentence commits us to an understanding of the sentence as depending on whether a certain truth condition obtains; but this is an objective matter - the question whether cats fly is of course a question about cats, not about us.

Granted, it's an arbitrary fact that the sentence 'cats fly' says what it says in English (because other languages use different signs to say that cats fly), but this by itself doesn't diminish from the fact that it is an objective matter that the sentence is either true or false. So your argument simply begs the question (if it can be called an argument - since you just assert that all interpretation is subjective, but why?)

If one of the standard ways of constraining higher-order logic to retain consistency (eg Russell's theory of Types), is invoked, the paradox disappears because some of the statements in the attempted proof cannot be made - they are syntax errors. — andrewk

But there's no such thing as a theory of types, and there could be no "syntax errors" in a language (because every sentence in language can be potentially made sense of with the right interpretation).

It seems to me like a cheap trick to get out of a paradox by stipulating that you simply cannot say certain sentences. If you cannot put 'know' in front of every sentence then there should be a principled explanation why (because KP seems like a perfectly consistent thing to say, and some people even think that it is true), and so I do think that the paradox can teach us something interesting about knowledge.

Here's the correct formulation of the paradox based on the Stanford article cited by Meta.

Fitch's argument proves that if one assumes that all truths are knowable in principle, then it follows that they must be knowable in actuality (that is, everyone is omniscient) - which is of course an absurdity. Here's how it goes.

First we assume the knowability principle:

KP. For every proposition P, it is possible to know P.

Now let us assume that the following conjunction is true (which by itself is a possible state of affairs):

a. P is true.
b. No one knows that P is true.

Now, according to the knowability principle, it is possible to know every P, so it follows that it is possible to know the conjunction of a. and b.. But it is impossible to know this conjunction: you cannot know that P and also know that nobody knows that P (since you do know it), so it follows that the conjunction of a. and b. is unknowable. But the conjunction says that there is a truth that no one knows, and this seems right, but the argument shows that it is impossible. So it follows that either we are omniscient or that the knowability principle is false.

And the paradox mainly consist in the fact that the knowability principle shouldn't entail such an absurd conclusion by a simple deductive argument (or so it seems - even if one doesn't accept the knowability principle, it still seems strange that it should entail such a conclusion).

We are not on the same page (you don't get my arguments), so let's leave it here.

But you don't have to be a defletionist about truth even if you reject correspondence; one can still maintain that truth is an important and substantive concept, but only reject the idea that it requires some sort of metaphysical explanation.

(there's a wonderful paper by Cora Diamond "Unfolding Truth and Reading Wittgenstein" (-yes she's one of my favorite philosophers) that argues for the possibility of such an intermediary position which is neither deflationist nor metaphysical).

We do want to preserve the intuition that a proposition is true if things are the way it says they are, don't we? — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, but this is not a 'metaphysical' explanation of truth. When you say that proposition P is true iff such and such is the case, then you simply repeat P, and this really doesn't explain why P is true, in the sense in which the correspondence theorist attempts to explain it. He thinks that the thing that we have to mention in the right hand side of "P is true iff X" must be (in some sense) something different from P, but the trouble is (as Ramsey's argument and others show) that if we don't mention P itself in right hand side, then whatever you put there wouldn't explain the truth of P (since it is something different); but if we do mention P then the theory becomes trivial and uninformative. This I think shows that we should abandon all metaphysical ambitions to 'explain' truth (i.e., postulating entities that 'correspond' to sentence and so on).

Sure, but this argument is interesting because it shows that the correspondence theorist gets into trouble even if we grant him that past events can somehow 'correspond' to propositions uttered at the present, so we don't have to make any controversial metaphysical assumptions.

Here's another objection to correspondence, that I read in Frank Ramsey's "Facts and Propositions". The key idea is that mere physical entities in the world (such as objects or events) cannot serve as truth-makers for propositions because they are too "coarse-grained".

Consider the proposition that "Caesar was murdered". What entity makes this proposition true? It seems that it is the event that Caesar was murdered (-"the murder of Caesar"). But what about the proposition "Caesar died in 44 BC"? Since his death was caused by his murder, his death must be the same event as his murder. But if this is so, it means that the same entity (the same event) corresponds to two different propositions (and they are different propositions because they mean different things: not all deaths are the result of a murder). And now this is a problem, because the correspondence theory is supposed to assign a unique truth-maker to each proposition, that explains why the proposition is true under some specific conditions and not some others. And that entails that if two propositions have the same truth conditions (they correspond to the very same entity, if true) then they are the same proposition. But "Caesar was murdered" and "Caesar died in 44 BC" are not the same proposition, so the correspondence theory is inadequate.

That's a good suggestion, but strictly speaking "Trump being the POTUS" is not itself an entity but a fact, i.e., something which depends on a description (Trump being the POTUS is not an intrinsic property of Trump). Because consider that Trump's existence by itself is also compatible with the opposite proposition - viz that Bernie is the president (had Bernie won the presidency, Trump would still exist), so Bernie's not being the president doesn't logically depend on Trump himself. So my point is that the putative truth-maker for "Bernie is not the president" has got somehow to include Bernie himself, because it seems to me that the a truth maker should logically entail the proposition that it makes true; you can't just add to it some other auxiliary descriptions.

But this is not a decisive objection, and I agree that the correspondence theorist has some room to maneuver here.

And what about statements about the past or the future? Can they be true (and so correspond to facts)? If so, then what is a fact? Obviously it can't (always, at least) just be some physical state of affairs, as there is no physical state of affairs which corresponds to the true claim "there was a battle at Hastings in 1066" or to the true claim "the Sun will rise tomorrow". — Michael

You don't really need counterfactuals or statements about the past to demonstrate that the correspondence theory doesn't work (there's a lot of philosophical controversy surrounding them). Just take the simpler case of negative facts (that is, negated propositions that are true). It is a true statement that Bernie Sanders is not the the president of the US, what is the 'corresponding' thing or the entity that makes it true? It is certainly not the existence of Bernie himself with the negation sign attached to him. Or what about the fact that Barack Obama is not (the current) president of the US? Nothing in the world corresponds to either of these statements yet they are true and have furthermore different truth conditions.

Says the guy who can't follow a simple argument.

And...?

How have you experienced every person on the world has a unique DNA fingerprint other than reading that to be the case by in a science journal or something like that? A lot of our knowledge is from reading books or watching documentaries, not by direct experience. Is what we read more wrong than what we subjectively experience and take as truth? — Harry Hindu

The issue of testimony doesn't change my point. Because for me to know (1) there must've been some scientists who did all the right experiments that confirmed it (knowledge doesn't come from nowhere). What's the alternative on your view? Do you want to say that we know all that stuff about DNA apriori and independently of scientific experiments and observations?

Sure, if the meaning of your words is to make me picture Bernie Sanders in the White House, even though he isn't. Your words refer to the image of Bernie being President. — Harry Hindu

Well no, the meaning of the sentence is not a picture - the sentence says that Bernie Sanders is the president (not that his picture exists), and this is what it means. Your view that all false sentences are meaningless is really just incredible. It follows that whenever you understand a sentence then you can know apriori that it is true (so I know what the sentence "I'm a millionaire" means therefore it is a proof that I am a millionaire etc.).

(Also, you describe the picture as a picture of Bernie Sanders being the president, so the picture does after all has meaning despite being false? Or is there another picture which it pictures etc...?)

Synonymy is not sameness of meaning on a view that has meaning as synonymous with causality.

My view isn't that meaning is synonymous with causality. (I explained that at the start of this subdiscussion.) — Terrapin Station

OK - but then, they are synonymous by virtue of which meaning? The meaning that you yourself stipulated for the signs, or the meaning they generally have in the language as it is commonly spoken? Because if it's the former, then the thesis is still trivial and uninformative as I already argued. But if it's the latter then you can't show that they have a certain meaning in the common language just by stipulation, and if this is the case then you couldn't simply disregard what other people think about the concepts.

And you can have a view that A and B are identical as well as a view that they are not. — Terrapin Station

Again, if 'they' are indeed identical then there are not two things here, so there's nothing about which you can affirm what you try to affirm, and so this sentence is just nonsense and not an expression of a fact or a view that someone can agree or disagree about (and equally saying that they are not identical is nonsense).

If "The man we saw from a distance in the train station" is identical to "Jones" then indeed, we're not talking about two things, just one. Otherwise we're talking about two things. — Terrapin Station

This example doesn't help you because the expressions 'Jones' and 'The man we saw from a distance in the train station' are not synonymous, and stating an identity relation between them is not a matter of stipulation, like in the case where you define the word 'meaning' via causality. So there is indeeda sense in which we are talking about two things in your Jones case, even if the identity statement is true (and I maintain that 'identity' in this example is not used the same way as an identity in the original case that we were discussing).

Wrong. We establish causal relations all the time that we never experience, and we make good predictions from this knowledge often. What does a crime scene investigator do if not creating an explanation of causes of the effects of the crime scene - all without having been an eye-witness to the crime itself? This fingerprint along with this DNA means that this person was at the crime scene when it happened. — Harry Hindu

He need not to be a witness to the crime, but he must know that a general rule of the form "if such and such evidence exist in the crime scene then probably a crime of type x took place" is true, and my point is that this principle is something that you do need experience to know it's truth.

Let's take your example of DNA.

1. Every person in the world has a unique DNA fingerprint.
2. The DNA sample collected in the crime scene matches the genetic profile of X.
3. Therefore, X must've been present at the crime scene.

Now, my point is that you can infer (3) from (2) only if you know that (1) is true, but you can't know it apriori since (1) is a hypotheses that could be known only via experience (it could've been false - it is false in the case of some insects for example).

How is "Bernie Sanders is the president of the united states" meaningful, or useful? — Harry Hindu

But it is meaningful. (I rest my case)

That's certainly the case logically once one realizes the identity (or assumes it for the sake of argument or understanding the view). But they're not the same semantically, especially if one has never considered the identity. — Terrapin Station

But you said earlier that synonymy is not sameness of meaning, so you can't appeal to semantics here.

Sure it is. That A and B are identical is a view, just like that they're not is a view. — Terrapin Station

If A and B are identical, it means that there is only one thing and not two - so there is no 'it' that you can ask about whether it is identical or not, and so there's nothing to affirm or deny.

I think it's amusing that if what was meant was that meaning was synonymous with causality (more or less), that you're misunderstanding of that is something you'd parse as the other guys' fault, because he's supposed to cater to what you want him to be doing. Hahaha. — Terrapin Station

There's a thing called 'the principle of charity', which says that you ought to try interpret other people's words in the most plausible or charitable way that you possibly can, before you jump to the conclusion that they must be saying something totally absurd or plainly false (even if they do sometimes say such things).

Right. But in a case like this, it's not the same sign, — Terrapin Station

It doesn't matter if this is not the same sign in this context. If "A=B" means something like "whenever the sign 'A' occurs you can interchange it with the sign 'B'", then "A=B" becomes equivalent to to saying that "A=A".

and you certainly hadn't considered the view of meaning being synonymous with causality before. — Terrapin Station

It's not a 'view' about anything, it's just an arbitrary stipulation which doesn't achieve anything.

Your views will evolve simply by going through the process of trying to explain them to others, by the way. — Terrapin Station

Which is precisely what I said...

Yes as I said - unless you assume in advance that you must be right about everything. Whatever floats your boat.

Right, so it's a trivial thing and it doesn't prove anything. Well, so what? Why would you be taking anyone to be trying to prove anything anyway? — Terrapin Station

Because no one is infallible, and you can learn a great deal by talking and trying to persuade other people. Unless of course you assume in advance that you must be right about everything.

Well, they'd be offering an analysis of the thing per what's correct about it in their view, and cutting off the stuff they think is incorrect. — Terrapin Station

A=A is not a correct analysis of A, because it is not an analysis of anything, but a pointless repetition of the same sign.