So how would you describe the famous fake barn facades case? You are standing in front of a real barn, and therefore you are directly aware of the barn, and so it seems that your are maximally warranted to believe that there's a barn in front of you; but you don't know that there's a barn in front of you (since it is the only real barn in that place, and you found it by mere chance). It seems to me that the disjunctivist would also have to admit that it's a case of a true justified believe that isn't knowledge.

And the reason that I think this case is particularly problematic for the disjunctivist because in this case your evidence consists in precisely the fact itself that you believe to be true, so we are not assuming here the 'highest common factor' view of evidence, or anything of this kind.

Forget what I say, now on second thought I don't think that disjunctivism can actually solve the Gettier problem. Never mind.

This immediately reminded me of Gettier 'problems' with the JTB account. The sleight of hand regarding not taking account of the difference between the candidates' actual belief and Gettier's report upon that. One cannot believe both 'X' and not 'X'. Thus, disjunction does not warrant/justify belief in both. — creativesoul

If anything, disjunctivism can handle the Gettier cases better than other accounts of justification (if they can handle them at all). Because according to disjunctivism, Gettier cases are not instances of a justified belief in the first place (because all of them are build on the assumption that evidence is not factive) and so the problem simply doesn't arise for this view.

Fafner, we've been through this already, it took us days to get agreement. Have you lost your memory? Are we back to square one? I addressed your example, "extraterrestrial life" requires interpretation, and this requires a subject. It cannot be true without anyone knowing it. — Metaphysician Undercover

We have only agreed that the truth of sentences depends (in some sense) on subjects and the world, but this doesn't entail anything about knowledge per-se. The sentence "extraterrestrial life exist" is true (if it is true) because a) in English the sentence means what it means (this is the part concerning subjects) and b) there is extraterrestrial life (this is how the world itself is). So it is perfectly possible that a sentence is true without anyone knowing it, because it is plain that many sentences that we don't know their truth still make sense, meaning that we already understand what would it take for them to be either true or false without knowing what is actually case.

And we've been through this. "Known fact" (objective knowledge), is what is justified, agreed upon by many subjects. Known fact is not necessarily true. When there is agreement (correspondence) between what the subject believes, and known fact (what is justified or agreed upon by the multitudes), this does not necessitate that what the subject knows is true. — Metaphysician Undercover

Of course you are free to define knowledge your way (e.g. that you can know falsehoods), but this is not my definition of knowledge (where knowing that P logically entails the truth of P), and nothing that you say shows that there is no knowledge in my sense of the term.

There are many examples of when "known fact" gets proven wrong. — Metaphysician Undercover

This only shows that the 'known fact' wasn't really a known fact, but was merely believed to be a known fact. These are two different things on my understanding of knowledge.

If this is the case, then could you explain to me how you categorize both knowledge and truth, to maintain this separation which you are inclined to adhere to. — Metaphysician Undercover

I already explained this. Something can be true without anyone knowing it (e.g., my example of extraterrestrial life), so plainly true and knowledge are not the same thing.

Knowledge is the property of the thinking subject. — Metaphysician Undercover

No it isn't. Knowledge is a relation between a subject and the known fact. It's not merely a state or a property of a subject taken by itself. If you know that P, then P must be true.

I was trying to stay kinda neutral, but back of my mind I was thinking about Dummett's idea that truth has its -- I guess "conceptual" -- origin in the idea of an assertion being objectively right or wrong — Srap Tasmaner

It's more than that; Dummett's idea was that there's nothing more to truth than what you can justifiably assert. He was an anti-realist like our friend MU.

Right. The main idea is that unless we understand sense experience as factive (e.g., you can see that P only if P is the case), then it's hard to see how the warrant or justification provided by experience can amount to knowledge. If seeing that P can give you any reason to believe that P, surely it can only because P itself is part of your experience (otherwise, if your experience falls short of being confronted with P itself, then what it has to do with P in the first place?).

This is at any rate McDowell's view of the matter, which I'm quite sympathetic with.

The problem here is not just that whatever warrant you have for asserting that P is no guarantee that P is true. — Srap Tasmaner

Unless you are a disjunctivist.

In this case your argument is really about knowledge and not truth (which are different topics), so it was false advertisement all along.

And also, your argument doesn't really prove that we don't know the objective reality either. You cannot derive this conclusion just from the premise that we somehow 'interpret' reality (and I'm not really sure what you mean by this claim anyway - it is ambiguous between a semantic and epistemic sense of 'interpretation').

1. You can assert the equivalence in truth-value of "P" and "P is true," but if you want to explain meaning in terms of truth conditions, then you cannot treat that equivalence as an account of truth (i.e., the redundancy theory). You just have to be careful here. — Srap Tasmaner

What I said doesn't amount to a redundancy theory though. I was just repeating something that Frege himself said, and surely Frege wasn't a 'redundancy' theorist (or deflationist, or however you call it).

And btw, you don't have to use the predicate 'true' to talk about truth conditions either.

most ways of making a new sentence S' out of S by prefacing it with something that governs "that S" change the S part of S' from extensional to intensional -- you lose substitution salva veritate. — Srap Tasmaner

It is more complicated than this (because you also have de-dicto and de-re interpretations etc.).

or maybe ordinary language is misleading and that's why it can be so hard to make sense of truth (and facts). — Srap Tasmaner

I'm not quite sure what you have in mind here, because it doesn't really makes sense to speak about truth intensionally (if by 'intensional' you mean expressions not being substitutable salva veritate). After all substitution salva veritate simply means the preservation of truth (literally), and of course the prefix 'true' is going to preserve truth no matter what. If 'P' is true then obviously 'it is true that P' must be true as well - it is a kind of a tautology really.

Do "it is true that snow is white" and "'snow is white' is true" mean the same thing? — Michael

As far as their truth conditions are concerned, yes. The two sentence are true or false in exactly the same circumstances, so therefore they assert the very same thing about the world.

Here's one thing that's curious: "true" takes that-clauses like the propositional attitudes, modal operators, all that intensional stuff. But "true" remains transparent in just the way the other that-clause governors don't. — Srap Tasmaner

This is because, as Frege already noted, adding 'true' to a sentence doesn't change its meaning, and in fact adds nothing over and above what you get when you simply assert the sentence. "Snow is white" and "it is true that snow is white" mean exactly the same thing.

When a sentence is said to be "objectively true", the interpretation of the sentence is judged as corresponding with the interpretation of the objective reality (how the objective reality appears to us). So we cannot say that the sentence is "objectively true", in the sense of implying that the meaning of the sentence actually corresponds with the assumed objective reality, but that it corresponds with how the objective reality appears to us, our interpretation of it. — Metaphysician Undercover

I have a lot to say about this, but it will suffice for now just to note that nothing in what you said (in this quote or in the rest of your post) proves that our 'interpretations' of reality (whatever that means) don't actually correspond with the reality which they interpret. The most that it can show is that we do not know whether out interpretations correspond with reality, but it doesn't prove that they in fact do not.

This means that if our 'interpretations' of reality happen to be the correct ones, and they 'correspond' to our interpretations of sentences, then it is perfectly possible that our sentences are objectively true (correctly represent reality). And nothing that you said proves that this is not the case.

Compare this with the case of believing something you don't know. I believe that somewhere in the universe there's intelligent extraterrestrial life. Now, I do not know whether it exists, but it doesn't prove that if I say "intelligent extraterrestrial life exist" that I said something false, because it might very well be true for all that I know. Ignorance doesn't prove anything about the objectivity of what you are ignorant about.

I think the question, still, is whether truth is a semantic notion. — Srap Tasmaner

Hmmmmm....

This is a good question. In some sense yes, if you analyze the meaning of sentences via truth (that is, truth conditions). But there's a sense in which it isn't, but I find it difficult to spell this out. I'll have to think this over.

I've changed my mind about some things that I said in my latest reply to you. I want to argue instead for something simpler.

I'm ready to grant you your main claim, viz. that truth (in the sense of sentences having a truth value) is dependent on subjects in your sense. However, I want to reiterate something I already said, and that your argument doesn't prove a lot, because of the way that you've defined subjectivity. After all, your argument only proves that truth is dependent on subjects, but it doesn't prove that truth is dependent only on subjects. It is still possible that truth is dependent both on subjects and the objective reality, in which case sentences would be objectively true despite the dependence of this fact itself on subjective interpretation (and in my sense "objectively true" means dependent on the subject-independent reality).

In other words, proving that truth depends on subjects is not the same as proving that there's no objective truth. And this is for the simple reason that something can both depend on subjects and depend on the objective world (there's no logical inconsistency in this). So even if your argument is sound (and I grant you that), you still need to work harder to prove what you want to prove (that sentences cannot be objectively true).

Now I have some doubts about this response for various reasons...

And I didn't mean that a triplet of <sentence, language, world> has truth conditions, because it only makes sense to speak about truth conditions of sentences.

It doesn't, it is just to give a name to something, so that anyone could immediately understand what exactly is being discussed (because as I said, just talking abut 'truth' is ambiguous, and sometimes there's a need for more precise distinctions).

I thought it might be helpful to look at an actual utterance where there is a contrast between two subjects, and then decide whether that contrast turned out to be differences in word usage or something else. — Srap Tasmaner

I prefer to deal with the easy cases first...

I agree. If we take Quine's argument seriously, it does complicate the story considerably. In particular, Quine would reject the idea that we can just fix the meaning of a sentence in isolation, because he thought that meaning only applies to large networks of sentences or theories (this is the meaning holism part).

But I think I can allow myself to ignore this for the purpose of my argument with MU (and anyway, I think that truth conditional semantics is consistent with meaning holism - after all, this was the view of his greatest student Davidson).

I am quite curious to see an example of a valid conclusion that is either inconsistent or incoherent. Likewise, I am also quite curious to see an example of an invalid conclusion that is either coherent or consistent. — creativesoul

Granted, coherency is usually defined through consistency, but it doesn't show that they are the same thing. It is just a terminological point about common philosophical usage, you are free of course to use "coherency" as equivalent with "consistency".

Though I would insist that validity and consistency mean different things in logic. Validity only applies to arguments, while consistency (or inconsistency) applies to any arbitrary bunch of sentences. Not everything that is consistent is valid (but the converse is true).

1. Cats fly.
2. Therefore, today is Sunday.

The two propositions are consistent (they don't contradict each other), but they don't form a valid argument together.

Someone can say that "X" is true when it is not. Being called "true" does not make something so. — creativesoul

Ok, maybe 'assignment' was a misleading choice of words. I didn't mean to say that sentences are made true by calling them so. I simply meant that a sentence has the truth value "true" simply if it is true (and "false" if false).

In logic of course you can assign truth values when you are dealing with P's and Q's etc.

There's a difference between being true/false and being called so. — creativesoul

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this.

Anyway, you are free to define truth in your own way. I don't claim that my definition is the only 'right' one, only that it suits my particular purpose.

The rules of correct inference. Consistency. Coherency. Validity. — creativesoul

Consistency, Coherency and Validity are three different things. Logic indeed deals with consistency and validity, but coherency is an epistemic term, so it is unrelated to logic (unless of course you use it to mean "consistency"). But anyway, truth values are not defined either through coherency or consistency.

In any case, in logic (and philosophy of language in general), a truth value is simply an assignment of "true" or "false" to a sentence. So "Trump is the president of the US" has the truth value "true" while "Obama is the president" has the truth value "false". So talk about truth values simply means that sentences can be either true or false.

Logic has nothing to do with coherency either (though I'm not really sure what you even mean by that term - it can mean different things in philosophy).

I don't see what truth values have to do with coherency.

Truth value is not truth. Truth conditions are not truth. The conclusion introduces new terms, and as such it is invalid. — creativesoul

I introduced these terms because the word 'truth' itself is ambiguous (for example, it is not clear to what things it applies). So talking about truth in terms of truth values of sentences instead (and defining their meaning in term of truth conditions) gives us something more concrete to discuss.

I don't quite understand what your example is supposed to show. 'Cats fly' was just a stupid random sentence that I chose for no particular reason, and therefore I don't pretend to have a complete analysis of the concept 'fly' (or anything of that sort) to be able to handle every possible sort of example.

Yes, you could explicitly define "the actual world" as "this particular possibility-world." In fact, how I mean "actual" when I say that this world is actual to us because we're in it. And so that is a tautology when I say it. — Michael Ossipoff

So if it is a tautology, then there's nothing to explain, and that means that OP's question is confused.

The truth value of the sentence (A), is dependent on the truth conditions of the statement (B) — Metaphysician Undercover

Actually no, I don't think this is true, and it doesn't follow from my definition of 'truth' (or of truth conditions). Let me explain.

Recall that I defined 'truth' as the obtaining of a truth condition (e.g. 'cats fly' is true (=has the truth value of "true") just in case its truth conditions obtain). So this means that for a sentence to have a truth value (like "true") all you need is for some truth condition to obtain.

But what does it mean for a sentence to have truth conditions? Well it is something that is relative to a language. So in English, the sentence 'cats fly' express one particular set of truth conditions, but it could've been otherwise (if English had a different history, for example if 'cat' meant what 'dog' means in our English, then 'cats fly' would have different truth conditions in that hypothetical English).

So let's imagine a world where 'cats fly' doesn't have any truth conditions, and that would be a world where English doesn't exist, or any other language (suppose that there are no humans in that world). But now, can the sentence 'cats fly' have a truth value in that world? It seems to me that it can. If cats fly in that world, then the sentence is true in that world, and if they don't then it would be false. So here you have a world where a sentence doesn't have truth conditions but has a truth value. So truth values don't depend on truth conditions, and hence they cannot depended on interpretation either, as you claimed (I take it that if A can exist without B, then it proves that A is not dependent on B (at least logically), and I hope that you would agree).

Did you read the part of my last post addressed to creativesoul? — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes I did, but I didn't find it very convincing. You wrote:

To be "wrong" is to be discordant in relation to some principle, rule, or law. That something is in disagreement with such a principle, requires a comparison of the thing with the principle, and a judgement. — Metaphysician Undercover

You've defined here "wrong" as something requiring judgment, but this simply begs the question against someone who doesn't hold your view. If you have a rule that specifies that such and such application of the rule will count as correct, then the application is going to be correct only if it is in fact correct, and that has nothing to do with judgment. You cannot just by stipulation rule out an objective understanding of rules. That's not an argument.

Now you are talking about "truth value" which you have yet to define, so you have effectively changed the goal posts, but I have no idea what you mean by "truth value". — Metaphysician Undercover

A truth value is simply the truth or falsehood of a given sentence (the truth value (in the present) of "Trump is the president" is "true", and the truth value of "Obama is the president" is "false"). A truth condition on the other hand, is the situation on which the sentence is true when it obtains (and if it doesn't then the sentence is false). So the truth conditions of "cats fly" is that it is true just in case that cats fly, and false if they don't; whereas its truth value happen to be "false" because cats as a matter of fact don't fly, at least in the sense of having wings like birds.

It is also crucial to note that truth conditions by themselves don't determine the actual truth value of a sentence (except in the limiting case of logical tautologies). Because just by knowing what 'cats fly' mean (knowing its truth conditions), you cannot know whether cats actually fly (which truth condition obtains in the world). And this is where the problem with your argument lies, because you start from the premise that truth conditions of sentences depend on interpretation (which I accept), but your conclusion says that it follows that sentences having the truth value that it does is also dependent on interpretation (a claim that I reject), and this is an equivocation because having truth conditions and having a particular truth value are two different things.

I hope that you can see now why all your objections to my post mentioning that "truth is dependent on interpretation" are ambiguous between 'truth' in the sense of truth conditions and the sense of having a truth value. I claimed only that the former is dependent on interpretation but not the letter

(and I actually did define truth in terms of truth values (because a truth value is simply a truth condition that obtains - so it was already implicit in the definition), but I didn't mention this term by name, hoping that you would yourself understand the difference between the two on an intuitive level).

If this is what you mean by "truth value", then truth value is dependent on a judgement. A judgement, as well as a truth condition, is dependent on a thinking subject. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'd like to see the argument for this claim. Because judging that 'cats fly' is true, is not the same as 'cats fly' itself being true.

But there is a sense in which a sentence such as "this world is the actual world" expresses a tautology, since you would be saying something true by that sentence no matter what world you are in.

And yes I know, "this world" is an idexical expression, and perhaps it could be used to pick out just one unique world, but it is not clear to me how exactly you are supposed to do that.

Because (to paraphrase Sidney Morgenbesser), even if our world weren't the actual world, you'd still be complaining.

(what I mean is that the question doesn't make sense)

And just to clarify a little ambiguity in my formulation. I wrote:

the truth of 'cats fly' is dependent on whether cats fly [...] and not on the meaning of the sentence.

and now I think that you can object here that the truth (in the sense of the truth value) of 'cats fly' is in fact dependent on the meaning of the sentence, and I agree that this is true, but only in one sense and not in another, because what I say in the quote is ambiguous between:

a. 'cats fly' having a truth value at all is dependent on its meaning.
b. Which truth value ('true' or 'false') 'cats fly' in fact has, is not dependent on its meaning, but only on whether cats actually fly.

(a) and (b) are mutually consistent, because (a) actually means the same as saying that 'cats fly' has truth conditions, but as I explained already, having truth conditions is not the same as having a (particular) truth value of either 'true' or 'false'.

Let me try again to explain myself. You wrote:

The proper conclusion in your example, should be "therefore cows cannot exist in a world without grass". Just like my conclusion is that truth cannot exist in a world without subjects. — Metaphysician Undercover

But it all depends on what you mean by 'truth' here. Are we talking about truth conditions or truth values? Because indeed sentences having truth conditions is dependent on subjects (i.e., that sentences mean something that can be either true or false), but it is not the case that it depends on subjects whether a sentence itself is true or false.

Here's my old example again:

1. That the sentence 'cats fly' in English means that cats fly (= a truth condition), depends on the existence of subjects.
2. The truth of 'cats fly' doesn't depend on the existence of subjects, but on whether cats fly.

So you cannot argue that the negation of (2) follows from (1), because (1) talks about the meaning of the sentence, while (2) about its truth. To show that (2) is false, it is not enough to appeal to the subject-dependence of interpretation, because truth in the sense of (2) has nothing to do with interpretation (as it is defined) but with what the world itself is like objectively.

Now, you made this argument from transitivity that purported to show that the negation of (2) does follow from (1). I agree that the form of the argument is valid: if A is dependent on B, and B is depend on C, then indeed it follows that A is dependent on C. However this argument is not applicable here. Here's how I understand your argument (based on your latest post):

1'. The meaning of sentence S ('cats fly') is dependent on the existence of subjects.
2'. The truth of S is dependent on the meaning of S.
3'. Therefore, the truth of S is dependent on the existence subjects.

Now the problem here is that the second premise (2') is ambiguous between 'truth' in the sense of having truth conditions (like in (1) - which I accept) and having a truth value (in which case I would reject the premise). But since the conclusion (3') talks about a truth value (you've claimed that the truth of 'cats fly' is dependent on subjects and not the world), then for the argument to be valid 'truth' in (2') must mean the same thing as in (3'). But on this reading of (2'), it is false on my view, because the truth of 'cats fly' is dependent on whether cats fly (according to my understanding of 'truth'), and not on the meaning of the sentence. So you need a different argument to show that (2') is true on this reading.

You have also said that you deny the existence of an objective reality, and therefore no sentence can be objectively true on your view. This however, would be an entirely different argument, since it need not mention anything about 'interpretation', because the conclusion already follows from the premise: if there's no objective reality, then trivially, no sentence is objectively true.

(actually it is not quite true because "no sentence can be objectively true" doesn't follow from "no sentence is objectively true", since form "P is false" (contingently) it doesn't follow that "P is necessarily false". So even if you are correct that there's not objective reality, it doesn't prove that our sentences can't be objectively true. It only proves they happen to be (as a matter of contingency and not necessity) false. And this argument would also prove (ironically) that there are at least subject independent falsehoods. Of course this is itself an incoherent claim (because a falsehood is logically equivalent to a true negation), but I'll let it pass for now)

So it is not clear to me what your original argument concerning 'interpretation' supposed to do, since it neither shows that no sentences are objectively true (or can be objectively true), nor that there's no objective reality. To argue for either of these two claims you need a different argument (which you haven't provided).

And just to remind you why your argument is logically invalid. Your argument goes like this:

1. Truth depends on interpretation
2. Interpretation is subjective,
3. Therefore truth is subjective.

Here's a parallel example that shows why this argument is invalid:

1. Cows depend on grass
2. Grass is green,
3. Therefore, cows are green.

Do you see the problem? the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises, even if the premises are true.

What lacks interest to you, may be interesting to me, that's just human nature. — Metaphysician Undercover

As I already explained, it is uninteresting because your definition of subjectivity ("involving subjects") is perfectly compatible with the possibility of objective truth, so therefore your argument doesn't prove anything. And the reason that you don't see this is because you are constantly sliding back and forth between different senses of "subjective" without noticing.

And secondly, I also showed you that your argument is logically fallacious anyway, so it doesn't even matter how you define "subjectivity". And I have seen no response from you concerning this point.

Your definition is unacceptable because the way you defined "objective truth" ensures that it is necessarily subjective. If this fact is uninteresting to you, then so be it. — Metaphysician Undercover

Two days ago I wrote a very detailed post explaining to you where exactly your arguments go wrong, but you have completely ignored most of the points that I made. Why do I even bother.

Here's one way to illustrate what's wrong with your account of intention.

Your basic idea seems to be that the relation between the intention and the resulting action is causal (e.g., your talk about influencing our actions and so on), but here's why it can't be causal. Causality is a relation between events that we discover aposteriori through experience. As Hume has taught us, there's no way to deduce apriori the effects from their causes, but you have to observe causes and effects and see if they come in constant conjunctions etc.

But now, do we learn by experience that every time when we have a certain sort of intention, we always find ourselves behaving in some corresponding way? Imagine that you have the intention to go outside for a walk. Can you imagine the possibility that while you are having this intention (you are about to go outside), your body suddenly 'decides' to do something else entirely? Of course all things can happen: your body may become paralyzed, you can change your mind in the meantime etc. But whatever happens, you are not going to say to yourself "I was wrong, it wasn't an intention to go for a walk after all, but something else". Or suppose that you have intended to go for a walk, but suddenly a burglar appears and at gun point forces you to hand him all your money. Would you say that you were wrong about your intention, that you really didn't intend to go for walk, but actually to hand all your money to a burglar? (or does this possibility even make sense?) After all, how did you know that you had the intention to go outside, if something totally else happened to your body as a result?

All this shows that you can always recognize in the intention itself what sort of action is the 'correct' or the 'corresponding' action that would count as the realization of that intention. And this is not a prophecy about the future (since you can intend something, while you fail to realize it for all sorts of reasons - you cannot predict the feature in some extraordinary sense just based on your intentions), but rather it is a logical connection that we draw between intentions and the actions that realize them. And so it is wrong to try and explain this relation by postulating the existence of some hidden psychological mechanism where intentions simply cause actions as a matter of contingent psychological fact.

What actually happens -- and this is how we come to have the concepts of intention and free actions -- is that we simply, as a matter of fact, are not being constantly surprised by what our bodies do. We don't first recognize in ourselves a distinct psychological state of 'intention' and then wonder or try to guess what kind of behavior it is going to cause; rather we just act as a matter of course, and make the distinction between voluntary actions and other sorts of unintentional or forced behavior on the basis of this fact. So when we explain our actions by citing our intentions, we are not giving a causal explanation that involves two distinct entities that always coincide for some reason, but we are simply making a logical distinction between two different sorts of behavior: behaviors that we control as agents, and the behaviors that we don't.

Of course it is a matter of experience what sorts of behaviors are and aren't under our control; but the crucial point is that you don't infer that you did something intentionally on the basis of first recognizing that an intention has preceded it, and then conclude for this reason that it must've been you that caused your behavior and not someone else. And compare this to a case of some unknown mechanism in which you try to identify which part causes some other part to move. Here it makes sense to form hypothesis about what causes what, but not in the case of inferring which of our behaviors are voluntary.

Translation of literary works is a somewhat different topic than translating between languages, let's say for purposes of simple conversation. What I had in mind is simple cases such as the word 'cat' being translatable into 'katze' in German, since in most cases English and German speakers use the two words in similar ways to talk about the same kind of animal. Also it seems natural to talk about expressions in different languages as capable of expressing the very same thoughts/ideas/propositions. And so for example if I interpret a German speaker that says "es regnet" as meaning that it is raining, then I will be getting his thought or belief right.

Of course things become way more complicated when it comes to translating literature, but this doesn't show that for most intents and purposes you can find very close correlations in meaning between words of different languages. It also partly depends on what one means by "translation", because we can adopt different criteria for "correctness" of translation - say 'literal' as opposed to 'free' etc.

Yes, why not? Otherwise bilingual dictionaries would be useless.