Is the boiling kettle true, or is the statement about the boiling kettle true? — Luke

The statement. The boiling kettle can't be 'true' since there are no matters, outside of language, which could make it so.

what is the difference between the correspondence theory and a redundancy that doesn't reject realism? — Luke

I tried to explain that within my response that you quoted. The fact that some 'real' hidden states might constrain our neural models doesn't have any mechanism by which it can make sentences true or not. A sentence cannot 'correspond' to something other than by definition, and definition is not specific enough to hook into whatever hidden states we might theorise constrain it.

Again, you failed to respond to the argument that sentences are not kettles and that using sentences does not boil water. You want to collapse the distinction between the facts and language use, but you offer no response to this. — Luke

I used Ramsey's arguments against Russell in my response to @Michael (or at least, my interpretation of it). It answers the same question you're asking here. If something 'outside' of language constitutes the 'kettle' regarding which we're assessing the truth of some property, then what is it?

You might say "it's that collection of molecules" or something, but I could disagree and say that it properly includes some additional molecules nearby, or historically attached. No fact of the world could resolve that disagreement. Even 'molecules' can be disputed. Is "boiling" exactly at gaseous states, or is it when the water visibly bubbles, or is that just 'simmering'? Does 'boiling' require a lot more bubbles? How much of the water in the kettle has to be gaseous for it to be "boiling"? And so on...

We don't seem to have a connection between the causes of our language use and the language itself which are specific enough to act as truth-makers for any language use. So the truth of "the kettle is boiling" cannot go any further than that the kettle is boiling, without disintegrating.

I would agree, and you might too, if he instead said "some feature of the world satisfies that definition", dropping the confusion of "non-linguistic". It's the boiling kettle. — Banno

Absolutely. It's what I've tried to get at in my response above.

it is still the case that a sentence’s truth value also depends on something which isn’t that, or another, sentence. — Michael

Then how? You say that the truth of "the kettle is black " depends on both that the kettle is black and that some hidden value is in such and such a state, but then you say absolutely any state will do, so long as it's referred to by the expression "the kettle is black". So the state of that hidden value drops out of the picture, since it can be in absolutely any state so long as that state is described by the expression "the kettle is black". Hence "the kettle is black" is true if the kettle is black.

Redundancy doesn't reject realism, nor need it be relativistic. You might say, as I do, that some hidden state constrains our neural models of it. You might also say, as I would, that we have an interest in those neural models being at least similar in function so that we can cooperate over manipulating those hidden states. You might also say that language is used (among other things) as a tool to this end. But since all of this goes on subconsciously, most of the time, and, most importantly, those putative 'hidden states' are simply hypothetical matters used in a scientific model of how brains work, there's simply not a mechanism by which they can act as truth-makers for sentence in English, without being entirely subsumed by simply 'the kettle is black'.

some non-linguistic feature of the world satisfies that definition. — Michael

Any nonlinguistic feature? Does that include the screw in the drawer or not? Because without determining that, we can't say if the expression is true or not (using this method). We can't check if 'the kettle' is black if we don't know what, of all we see, is 'the kettle'.

We can't check if what we see is 'black' if we don't know how dark a shade constitutes 'black'.

So what about if I dispute your claim by saying that the silver coloured screw in my kitchen drawer is still part of 'the kettle' even though it fell off years ago. You say it isn't.What fact of the world could resolve that for us?

Or if I say that your 'very, very dark gray' is sufficiently dark to qualify as 'black', but you disagree. What fact of the world could resolve that for us?

It seems the truth of "the kettle is black" is entirely dependent on the meaning of 'kettle' and 'black'. All about language.

Have I just chosen a bad example where there's a rare amount of ambiguity?

That last sentence often refers to some non-linguistic thing in the world. — Michael

So if a sentence is "the kettle is black", then presumably there's some nonlinguistic element which can render it true. If you say "the kettle is black" and I say "the kettle is not black" the truth of the matter is determined, not by language, but by the actual kettle and its actual colour? Is that what you mean?

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

Well worth a read. Apparently Davidson (much quoted here) used to have a term 'Ramsey Effect' for the revelation that one's new philosophical insight had actually already been discovered by Ramsey!

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

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

Thanks. So, small-t might fit with the sort of use that amounts to statements about the world, Ramsey-like redundancy. Where to say "p is true" is simply to assert p?

Your big-t truth might more like Ramsey's 'problems in the vicinity'. More about the nature of belief than truth as a predicate?

The only "carrot" in the conversation, as far as I can see, is being able to expand one's own thoughts by hearing others. — Moliere

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

I don't see any sense in your proposal, to separate "honest" from "honourable" — Metaphysician Undercover

Not any proposal I've made, that.

Do you know the type of dishonesty I'm talking about? If someone shows you a bad habit of yours, which has a bad effect in the work place for example, and you rationalize the bad effect as the result of someone else's actions rather than as the effect of your own bad habit, in an attempt to avoid addressing your own bad habit. — Metaphysician Undercover

Are you having problems at work? If you need to talk to someone...

The existence of dishonesty demonstrates very conclusively that "the tendency to act as if X", cannot be correlated directly with "has a belief that X". — Metaphysician Undercover

Why's that?

If we look at numerous people who know how to ride a bike, we really cannot make any conclusions about any particular "beliefs" which are involved with this activity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Really? Not the belief that bikes are for riding? The belief that one sits on the saddle and pushes the pedals? That the brakes are for stopping? ... We've no idea at all what beliefs people might have?

Now, someone like Creative would state that a child will not touch a fire, so this behaviour demonstrates a certain "belief". But this is just a reflection of how we generalize similar behaviours. We observe human beings behaving in similar ways, so we posit a common "belief" which is responsible for such similar behaviour. But that's really just a naive over simplification. — Metaphysician Undercover

Why? Not all Oak trees are the same, that doesn't suddenly raise problems with us deciding that some trees are more similar to each other and calling that group 'Oaks'. But knowing you I expect you've got some problem with that too.

it can be true that two people have the same belief, but this does not necessitate that they have the same mental activity associated with that belief. — Metaphysician Undercover

Who said anything about it 'necessitating' it? It's not necessary to call some trees Oaks, we just do.

Music to mine ears. — Banno

Bit boring for everyone else when we agree though!

In the past I've gone further and argued that concepts are things we do, not mental furniture. — Banno

Yes, that works as far as my model (scientific model - going to start specifying from now on) of cognition goes. A concept might be recognised by the repeated pattern of behaviours. Like all the apples on the table are real, but the set {all the apples on the table} isn't an additional thing in the room. It's a façon de parler.

There are, interestingly, a lot of quite strong correlations between identifiable areas of the brain (even down to specific neurons) and certain concepts, but I still agree that it's not right to talk of them as somehow containing or representing those concepts because alone they don't cause anything we'd recognise as such. It's more that they're consistently involved in producing that behaviour. That makes them super useful for us studying that behaviour, but not particularly important when it comes to understanding the social psychology of it where the other bits of the brain involved are far more enlightening. Like "oh look, the language centres are lighting up every time he tries to solve this maths puzzle" is far more enlightening than "oh look, the 'democracy' neuron fires every time he thinks of democracy" which is almost just tautological once you've accepted the idea of such neurons.

What such 'grandmother neurons' might show is that we internally cluster several otherwise distinct behavioural patterns, but again, these clusters can only ever loosely correlate with public notions such as 'democracy' because a private concept makes no sense.

First, we are taught that truthfulness is a good and honourable thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well there's our first mistake then. 'Honesty' is the good and honourable thing. 'Truthfulness' is a game used to convince people your beliefs are better than theirs. Often honourable, often not.

The point is not that the networks are similar, but that their output - in this case, the behaviour of dealing with kettles - meshes. — Banno

Yes, that's exactly it. My bad expression to blame for the lack of clarity there.

And this fits in with the mention of knowledge, in my reply to Srap Tasmaner, above. You and I both know how to ride a bike, but the proof of this has nothing to do with our having similar neural paths in our brains, and everything to do with not falling off. We also both know that eight is four time two, and again this is to do with our capacity to count eggs and buttons and to share pizza slices and not with our having the same patterns of firing neurones.

Which is not to say that there may not indeed be patterns in that firing. This is the "anomalous" bit in anomalous monism. — Banno

Yep, absolutely. Knowing things is a social game of comparisons in our shared world, we don't look into each other's brains to find out, not even by proxy, as you say, we might well find nothing whatsoever similar. Just to add even more grist to that mill. The bit of our brain that some might claim 'knows' how to ride a bike today might well not even be the same bit that 'knows' it tomorrow. Most neural nets have a lot of redundancy and carry out multiple functions. Hence my focus on behaviour, rather than concepts. I rather see concepts as post hoc. Something we use after the event to help us understand why that situation just lead to that behaviour. But that may be too behaviourist for most tastes.

You've gone from what ought to be the case, to what is the case. — Isaac

I'm not seeing that. — Banno

Ah, maybe I'm mistaken then. It seems that you say on the one hand that we'd have no basis for our agreement that the models were both 'of the neighbourhood' without a shared model, and then say that because of this we actually do have a shared model. We could, could we not, simply proceed without having any justification? We don't have to have a shared model, just because without one we'd be unable to justify our agreement that the conflicting models are both 'of the neighbourhood. We could just agree they are anyway?

What I have in mind is more that the house is a construct of our interaction. — Banno

Ah! I should have read on. That makes much more sense to me. Still, I'll leave the above by way of explanation.

This is not to say that we do not have a model of the house in terms of some weighting of neural patterns. Perhaps we do; while a very interesting issue in its own right, that is secondary in this context. — Banno

Yes. I think we (or maybe just I) need to start talking in terms of neural-models and social-models. The two are quite distinct. Neither are much like a model as in 'a model car'.

I see the social model as a set of agreements which constitute 'the world'. That this is a kettle, that is a table...and so on. In neural terms, we're agreeing on what it is we're neural-modelling.

We do so to minimise surprise, so we can have reliable expectations of how other people will behave. The link then between our neural models and our social model is that the latter is an attempt to maintain some intersocial reliability in our use of the former, but in doing this trick, we turn our neural models into a radically different type of thing. Not to mention the fact that I don't think we do any of this consciously...

It's simply advantageous if your neural-model of the kettle is the same as mine. Then we can make tea together. So I take your actions toward the kettle as information updating my priors about it (and vice versa). Again, all subconscious. Our language about kettles, I think, is just an efficient way of achieving the same task.

I think Davidson's argument against conceptual schema is in line with the private language argument. After all if there are no private languages there are also no private models. — Banno

Yeah. So this idea of a private model would be the equivalent of creating the social-type model, but keeping it to yourself. Yet the only purpose of the social-type model is intersocial cooperation. So what would be the point? All one would be doing, I think, is taking a social model and playing 'what if...?' with it.

it'd be a bloody miracle that any sort of triangulation could happen at all if there wasn't something "truthy" or representative about semantic content, and of necessity that has to be sufficiently shareable to count as such. — fdrake

Indeed. If one looks at groups which cohere and those which don't, a shared common goal is often cited as a feature of those that do. The obvious reason being that members then have to weigh up the cost of their dispute against the cost of the goal being frustrated and limit it only to that which seriously risks missing that goal. I think in philosophy there's simply too little at stake in terms of outcome (allowing any small perceived inconsistency to be exploited), but too much at stake in terms of personal narratives to want to give much leeway. These matters ('truth' perhaps being one of the biggest in this sense) are like the themes of the book we are the heroes in. They frame the plot and the characters and so can change a lot about our storylines in one go. But being our stories, there's no need to get it done which outweighs the need to get it just so. It's not like we're building a house.

There's way more politics in philosophy than anyone cares to admit.

How many layers of metaphilosophy are we on now? — fdrake

Ha! I make it at least six. If we get to ten we get a prize.

If you want to know what is expressed, look at the behavioural commitments it imbues in someone.

Whether someone needs to actually do a behavioural (including cognitive) commitment of a belief to count as believing that belief (eg, whether the tendency to act as if ever actually needs to be enacted...) seems a different issue; and maybe there's where statements, as a model, come into it. It's a very clear cut case that someone will believe something if they are willing to assert it. — fdrake

I brought this up earlier. I think we need to consider the functionality of expressions more than their content. We can understand others even when they mess up their words, we almost know what they mean to say, and I think this is because their expressions have a purpose, which we can intuit from the circumstances. That all being just a set-up to say that asserting something is a behaviour. I think even deliberate mental acts can be construed as behaviours in some contexts. Imagine someone who believes in telepathy. How would they act on that belief? They'd really really concentrate on the message they want to send. Funny thing is though, I bet they'd scrunch their eyes up too. Even the telepathic it seems can't escape the behavioural nature of communication!

In that regard two more definite paths have been fleshed out here, I think, one is the broadly idealist (transcendetal though) Kantian move Isaac makes where it's beliefs all the way down and modelling reality is the same thing as putting a filter on it; everything we know and experience lives on "our side" of the filter. The other is a mirror image; Davidson's actually quite similar to this, only the filter is ever expanding and has a tendency toward monopoly over all expression and interpretation (@Banno), which means there's no point of talking about the other side of the filter, so what's the point in even having a filter as an object? I believe the former finds a lack of access to un-modelled reality a necessary consequence of the existence of a filter due to how interpretation works. The latter finds direct access to modelled reality a necessary consequence of the mutuality of the filter, and thus finds no better account of the filter than the variations of a shared environment. Despite being very opposite positions, both can make the move that any other position is speaking about things which are unintelligible, due to placing different conditions for the possibility of interpretation on the filter! — fdrake

...and also

I like this. I always think that @Banno and I are saying much the same thing but from a different perspective. The thing we agree on is the lack of anything Cartesian-theatre-like. We can either remove that by focussing on the the shared world and 'black-box' -ing the mechanisms, or we can do that by showing how the mechanisms fully encompass the variability people are tempted to explain by Cartesian-like moves such as 'viewing' models, or saying that all we ever 'see' are representations. I think the only difference is that in the former case, the hidden states which are modelled (neural models), simply drop out of the conversation, as being unnecessary. In the latter case, they are needed, but only as part of the meta-model of the mechanism.

Perhaps some way forward would be to place accuracy, truth, correctness and so on in whatever process generates belief as a mediating factor. For example recognising a falsehood (you then know not-X is true), or learning you are able to pick up something you could not. Neither of those things speak about knowledge being something which lasts, however. — fdrake

I think one of the problems with 'knowledge' is that is has no neural correlate, so it doesn't really have a place in the second model (the one which uses the whole mechanisms of perception and beliefs).

I don't have any trouble with a neural correlate for beliefs - "tendency to act as if", seems to work. If your neural network has a tendency to act as if X then we can say it has a belief that X. It's a bit of a bastardisation, but I think it's not too unfair to the proper meaning.

But 'knowledge' and 'truth'...? I think if I was forced to put it somewhere, I might distinguish declarative memory from other sorts and say that we could attach the term to those, but, to be honest, that's a cop out because the only reason that works is because declarative memory is the kind of thing we can declare, still thinking of the social function of the term. 'Truth' probably fits best as a kind of Peircean pragmatism, but I'm not really happy with that and would far rather say that it has no neural correlate at all.

So yeah, I have a hard time seeing knowledge, truth and correctness as having any role at all internally. I think they play social roles. We use the terms in social interactions to refer to verbal expressions of belief (of the neural sort), for various functions - mostly getting other people to do stuff they wouldn't otherwise do without the persuasive force of 'truth', or 'knowledge'.

in for a penny, in for a pound... — Srap Tasmaner

That's the spirit!

since you don't understand the context of anything I say, what's the point? — Srap Tasmaner

See above ^. Did you read my mind? I'd not finished writing my post about how the critiqued are always going to assume a lack of charity from the critics more than vice versa, and here you supply just such an example. Do I not understand the context, or do you fail to specify it sufficiently? Do those professing an understanding have just that, or are they just more willing than I am to offer that 'charity', assume that your implied context is, in fact, the coherent context they think it is, and not the opaque one I get from reading what you've written?

Is there a pattern here, do we randomly assign charity or not, do I misunderstand you and you fail to see the relevance of my posts by chance? Or does the known antagonism between our respective world views bias that sense.

It's been something I've been thinking about a lot recently. How philosophy, particularly, simply cannot proceed discursively without this charity. It's hard enough to interpret a clear instruction from a mechanic or engineer. Even these are sometimes taken wrongly. So how far could we ever hope to get expressing the vaguest of notions such as philosophy without interlocutors who are prepared to come along with us?

The intent, again, was just to be clear enough that problems would be clear or could be made clear. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. An my point was the way such a setup is already so massively theory-laden as to act to dismiss several possible answers right of the bat. It's an act of clarity by virtue only of the fact that where you see mud, others see the makings of pottery. even to lay things out thus is to render some matters not as problems, but as incoherent within the framework, like choosing a coding language and then asking for people to debug your code. "You should have used Ruby" ceases to become a coherent answer.

In this context, that's just a lot of handwaving. — Srap Tasmaner

Exactly. Set the context such that some positions become 30,000-feet handwaiving. Was it an accident that the positions thus rendered irrelevant were the one's you'd earlier found yourself mired in? Of course not. You clarify the terms of engagement to filter out the answers you're uncomfortable with. We all do it, it's not just you. But the reasons for your discomfort interest me. The reasons for mine, unfortunately, elude me.

what do you do when you know all the tools are biased through what context they ascribe the information, and even what entities are in play in the discussion bring their own theory-ladened framing devices? You try and explore the landscape and learn to find your way about. — fdrake

Absolutely. That, and abandon any sense of the 'throw everything in a bucket' type of empiricism that seems at times to be popular among the lay philosophy community. abandon the idea that we can derive the 'true' model by gathering all the data together and having a 'really good look at it'. The data is already theory-laden, as is the gathering bucket and the act of looking.

As for us talking about what we find in the bucket... Well...it's hard to see we have a hope in hell.

Davidson claims that the way to achieve this is through the application of the so-called ‘principle of charity’ (Davidson has also referred to it as the principle of ‘rational accommodation’) a version of which is also to be found in Quine. In Davidson’s work this principle, which admits of various formulations and cannot be rendered in any completely precise form, often appears in terms of the injunction to optimise agreement between ourselves and those we interpret, that is, it counsels us to interpret speakers as holding true beliefs (true by our lights at least) wherever it is plausible to do (see ‘Radical Interpretation’ [1973]). In fact the principle can be seen as combining two notions: a holistic assumption of rationality in belief (‘coherence’) and an assumption of causal relatedness between beliefs – especially perceptual beliefs

A good idea in principle, but (and we all knew this would come) the idea of 'charity' here itself just acts as box in which to hide all the assumptions which are going to filter the kinds of answers we're going accept. Imagine we pick any two posts here, on this thread, and solicit from the poster and the responder a view about whether the response exhibited this charity. Now heaven forfend that I would bias a potential experiment with a prediction, but in lieu of the actual work, I'd bet my hat the posters would more often than not feel their critics had not exhibited such charity whilst the critics would, more often than not feel they had. Would there be any way to adjudicate? Would there heck.

I don't have a deep rational argument for these things as much as I'm sharing impressions and looking for where we disagree with the eventual hope of building conceptual bridges. — Moliere

Cool. I think that's the only sensible way to go here. a lack of rational argument is good. I don't think this sort of thing is particularly amenable to rational argument. It's more, for me, about the ways in which what we know constrains further folk-theories, than any idea that we can derive then from what we know. In that sense, I like your notion that some concept of how the memory actually works, constrains the range of folk-theories sufficiently to make you a little leery of those which treat it as a bookshelf. "A little leery" is about as far as the justification from neuroscience takes us.

That's just the sort of conceptual muck that philosophy is perfectly suited for untangling (or, at least, demonstrating an inability to untangle). — Moliere

Yeah, I can see that, but therein would have to lie some early commitments to the sort of data those sciences can give us laymen, no? We can, for example, take data from neuroscience as constraining, or we can commit ourselves to a notion that minds are unconstrained by brains. We can (as I offered earlier) say that something like Psychology produces constraints on our folk-theories of how our minds work by offering us a much wider sample size than we could ever glean ourselves, or we could reject that constraint by saying that all minds are different and so the averaging of Psychology is always only an artefact.

The point is that these commitments recede our lay understanding of the science and also precede our decisions about the form of any investigation (including things like the utility of rational methods, the value of introspection etc).

I think small-t truth escapes it, where big-T truth doesn't — Moliere

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

Being able to puzzle out commitments and background assumptions is what, I believe, this kind of discussion is particularly good at. Please forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe you are having a discussion of the same character by trying to tease out the other discussants background discussions while holding what they (we) believe as an object of (noncommital) scrutiny. By the looks of it, it's the same device. — fdrake

I don't doubt that, but there's categories and approaches.

You'd find it weird if we all, as car drivers, tried to puzzle out our commitments and background assumptions about our folk theories regarding how cars work, no? We could. I suspect most drivers, even those unfamiliar with the mechanics, have some kind of intuition, if pushed, about what exactly the gearstick does, how the engine works...and all of those things would have background assumptions and would entail commitments. They certainly all have an 'experience' of pushing the pedal, feeling the car respond, etc. But a discussion about it would be super weird. If we want to know how cars work we just consult our Haynes manuals. We still have those folk theories, but we don't expect fruit from a discussion of them, beyond simple curation of how people feel.

At the other end of the scale, if we were discussing the ethics of abortion, it's all commitments and assumptions. There's nothing but folk theories. We'd have to expect fruit from a discussion of that nature because we haven't found any equivalent of "just look" to discover something non-folk.

Many things fall somewhere in between, but still on the scale. So I don't think it's ever sufficient to say "you carry out this kind of investigation with X so it must be understandable that others do with Y".

There remains the question of why the participants have treated it as 'abortion-style' investigation, as opposed to a 'car-style' investigation - which is all I was asking.

if you want to know what colour the house is, you just look. Anyone saying it's blue is wrong because it's white, etc. — Isaac


Okay, now, that's an appalling mischaracterization of what's going on here. — Srap Tasmaner

You said...

what justifies your choice is that you know what color Pat's house is; it's the same with including "Pat's house is white" in your linguistic model. If you're not sure, when it comes time to paint or to pick your predicate, you can go and look, or ask someone you believe knows. — Srap Tasmaner

...and also...

those that have seen it know it to be grey; I possess slightly less knowledge of Pat's house than some do, but I can readily extend my acquaintance with the shared model by being informed or seeing the back door for myself. — Srap Tasmaner

None of which is to contradict the fact that my representation is a mischaracterisation (only you can know that), but it is to contradict the idea that it's 'appalling'. I've almost directly quoted you with the 'just look' aspect and you've at the very least been pointing in the direction of knowledge being obtainable via our empirical investigations.

Moving on though...

I have also described the process of model building as beginning with collecting some data, going and checking the layout of Pat's neighborhood, but only because I don't know how else model building might be done. — Srap Tasmaner

You were given just such an option with...

Our models are projective, anticipatory. Models change our interactions with our world and thus are thus reciprocally changed by the world they modify. — Joshs

...that models are anticipatory, not recollective. That models predict and enact those predictions, not collect and curate passive data. You've rejected that approach. You're not obliged to follow it, of course, but you can't play the card of "I don't know where this might go, just laying out some questions" at the same time as dismissing some of those answers out of the box.

If you want to build a model of the way model-building works (with regards to the role of language) but you want to do so only from a particular set of presuppositions, then I think it's not an unreasonable question for someone to ask "why those ones?" - which is all I'm doing here.

if you want to know what colour the house is, you just look. Anyone saying it's blue is wrong because it's white, etc. — Isaac


Okay, now, that's an appalling mischaracterization of what's going on here. — Srap Tasmaner

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

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

you know more about the studies on memory, right? — Moliere

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

I'm fine with, in the end, the mind being inconsistent too. So, yes, it's quite possible for Srap Tasmaner 's impressions to be true at the same time as mine, even though I'm expressing discomfort at that particular notion. — Moliere

That's very similar to the way I feel about it. I can't see any reason why our folk understandings of how our minds work would be consistent, I can even think of a reason why they ought to be.

Ooooo....you sneaky devil, you. — Mww

Aren't I just.

Everyone has his own presuppositions, and your chosen field of expertise aims to reduce them all to something by which they are all explained.

Even if you’re right, and all presuppositions can be explained, we’re still left with the “horse....water” conundrum. — Mww

There's more to an explanation than a kind of sub-level of more foundational grounds.

I agree with your complaint about reducing presuppositions, and would rebuke any colleagues in my field to no less a degree than you are here.

But, as I say, more foundational grounds doesn't exhaust the sort of thing an 'explanation' might be.

"It just feels that way" is such an answer, for example.

I'm going to be real and say I have no idea what kind of entity the mind is. — Moliere

...seems at odds with...

The mind is not exactly like ducks — Moliere

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

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

Would you feel the same, or naw? — Moliere

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

Through deception a person can make me think that they are helping me to achieve my goals, and get me to do things I wouldn't otherwise do. Then it will turn out that the person had no real intention of helping me achieve any of my goals, and those things I have done for that person will prove to have been a waste of time and money, and this is actually detrimental to achieving my own goals, counterproductive. That's how deception provides the means for one to take advantage of me. — Metaphysician Undercover

Uh huh. The question was why associating the meaning of the word 'truth' with a pragmatic concept of utility caused this increase in deception. What difference does the meaning of the word make. Are people more able to deceive you because they can use the word 'truth' to describe their most pragmatic models. If we banned them from using the word that way, would they somehow be shackled in their deception?

Through introspection a person can determine whether one holds contradictory beliefs — Metaphysician Undercover

How?

in the same manner that "cognition" and "aroused state" have observable analogues but there's a whole, underdetermined, theory linking physiological and behavioural observations to those constructs. If you wanted to critique an experiment into cognition or aroused states, one way of showing a flaw in it would be a tenuous relationship of the theorised construct to the observations — fdrake

I understand that, but why would mere observations even need to cohere? There's no less a gap between, say, my experience of time passing and the actual time passing. The former we might discuss as you are here, the latter we measure with a clock. But there's be no purpose to trying to resolve the difference between a day that I thought dragged on a bit and a day that you thought went by in a flash. You and I can experience different, observational accounts of how quickly time seemed to pass. talking about then would be nothing more than curation ("Oh, that's interesting"), there's be no purpose, nor logic behind reconciling the two accounts, the actual amount of time that passed was measured by the clock and that's our only shared account.

So whilst I completely agree about the gap between phenomena and recorded mental events, I can't see that it explains the analysis of phenomena as if it were amenable to rational argument. Is there a reason your lived experience ought to cohere rationally with Srap's and Moliere's? Is it a puzzle to be resolved if it doesn't?

Would you be similarly baffled by people talking about a society and saying it works partly through norms of conduct? — fdrake

Yes.

If I were to wonder about how a car worked, my first port of call would be Wikipedia. I wouldn't speculate about how I thought a car might work and then compare notes with others similarly speculating. A car (and its workings) are just not that kind of thing.

Likewise with society. A little more complicated, but if I really was wondering if society worked partly through norms of conduct, I'd hop straight onto Wikipedia and look up what people who'd had a chance to really dig into societies have found. Again, like the car, I believe 'societies' are just that kind of entity. The sort that there are facts of the matter about and those facts amenable to investigation.

So with something like...

I have some hesitations about calling some items of knowledge purely mental, and some items of knowledge purely behavioural. EG, I can't seem to find the thought of where my e key is when I'm typing, but when I'm programming recreating enough of the state of a script to 'put it in mind' seems to happen when debugging or adding something. — fdrake

Seems to me, like the car, like 'societies', to be best answered by hopping on to Wikipedia and seeing if anyone has checked. I mean, it's quite a simple experiment, we have markers of behavioural preparation, markers of conceptual imaging, we even (with a little trial and error) could probably find the 'e key' neuron (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmother_cell)! Then we'd know if you do or don't use your mental map of where the e key is every time, or not.

If we're talking about your experience of what it feels like to seek the e key, then that's not amenable to hopping on to Wikipedia. But then it's not amenable to gradual correction by rational enquiry either.

Thanks. I know people are concerned about this derailing the thread, so I'll be brief, but wanted to at least respond.

The question I really wanted answered (which I maintain is pertinent to the question about truth, but if not could hopefully be answered very briefly to assist my following your process here) was... What kind of entity do you see the mind being such that it is

a) real

...but...

b) possessed of properties which are determinable by agreement among introspecting parties.


If I looked at my duck pond and said "ducks are white", we have two approaches to critiquing the claim.

We could take a radically relativist approach and say, "yeah, ducks are white, for you, that's part of what the word 'duck' means in your language game and if it functions, then OK"

Or we could say "ducks are part of the world and they're either white or not, we'd have to check"

The latter I take to be the realist case you seem to espouse.

Yet such a check cannot then consist of one looking at one's own duck pond and saying "nah, ducks are black". That's just exactly the same type of claim we just rejected as ignoring the shared world of ducks.

Replace duck pond with mind. You get the picture.

@Srap Tasmaner has Pat's house as white. Let's say it seems green to me, and it seems grey to you. No amount of agreement between us regarding what colour Pat's house seems to us to be is capable (under a hard realist assumption) of yielding facts about what colour Pat's house actually is. It's immune to our agreement about the colour it seems to us to be.

Yet you're treating the mind as both real, but unlike Pat's house, with properties that are discernible (or at least investigable) by agreement between parties as to the way it merely seems to them to be.

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

I think going into this would derail the thread. — fdrake

Then we'll leave it there. Thanks anyway for the reply.

I wonder if you'd each indulge me in explaining a couple of the presuppositions you're working from. — Isaac

Oh, and one last thing. About the status of 'the mind' in the world. Real entity or not?

Because each of you seem quite strongly realist about worldly objects, no enacted constructions for you guys, if you want to know what colour the house is, you just look. Anyone saying it's blue is wrong because it's white, etc.

So am I right in assuming that for you, 'the mind' is not a real entity? After all, none of you are proposing we 'just look' to find out how it works (unless you think your sample of three is statistically significant, or, as ruled out before, you think everyone's mind works differently and there's no right or wrong answer)

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

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

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

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

I can't seem to reconcile the two sides.

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

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

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

You see no problem in allowing deception to be truth? — Metaphysician Undercover

It wasn't a rhetorical question.

I do not like to be taken advantage of. For me, that's where the problem is, if we allow deception to reign as truth, it provides the means for others to take advantage of me. — Metaphysician Undercover

How so?

Ha! Not heard that one.

I'd be lucky, though, if '47' were one of my options... Might make it to 4.

Why do I feel like you may have argued somewhere that all off our posts are for our own respective amusement... — Srap Tasmaner

Something like that, I expect. It sounds like the sort of thing I'm prone to saying. I shan't bore everyone with a repeat in that case...

I might start just posting...

"Narratives"

...in response to everything and let people fill in the rest as they see fit.

Don't be so snooty. I did it to show the links between posts that were always intended to be linked. — Srap Tasmaner

Hey, you've no need to explain yourself to me. You crack on in whatever way you see fit. It was a post for my own amusement.

All we have, absent our methodological assumptions, is an unfiltered sea of raw data and noise. — Isaac

Just joining in this new trend of quoting one's self rather than one's actual interlocutors.

Quite satisfying.

I thought something like a simple model of language would be more useful than going round and round about what existing idioms mean. — Srap Tasmaner

The objective seems unclear here. What would a model of language be outside of discussion about what idioms (among other expressions) mean?

Earlier you said...

I think that's a different subject, interesting in its own right, but not all questions are about how we use words. To hell with that. — Srap Tasmaner

...You seem to take 'language' and 'what expressions mean' to be two different matters and yet I can't see what you could mean by the former other than the latter.

This gives free reign to dishonesty, sophistry, and deception, because when these intentions are the prevailing interest (Trumpism for example), they rule as the truth under this definition. — Metaphysician Undercover

And the problem with that would be...?

What basis could we have for saying they were both models of the neighbourhood, if they had nothing in common? — Banno

...

It seems, then, that the models must have something in common if they are to be considered models of the neighbourhood — Banno

There's much at issue here, but this first. You've gone from what ought to be the case, to what is the case.

Your claim (correct me if I'm wrong) is that we cannot justifiably claim that the two models are of the same house without there being a completely commensurate 'house'. I don't object to that.

Then you say that because we can't claim this justifiably, there must actually be a shared, or commensurate 'house'.

But why must there? Why not the other option - that we, in fact, cannot justifiably claim both models are of the same house, but that we just do so anyway...justification go hang!

What the fuck?? — _db

...is, I think the only appropriate response!

But maybe I'm just getting old and curmudgeonly. I eagerly await the new era of social justice heralded in by some half-grown twenty somethings doing a dance... If only Martin Luther King had got a bit of a shuffle on, popped a few disco moves, who knows where we'd be...

Now to think how your attitude that you outline above would fare in such real world situations. Both of them are middle class ladies in their fifties. You think calling them morons would somehow be helpful?

I actually doubt that there exist studies on this particular topic. But if I remember correctly, there are those studies where people were being insulted prior to taking an IQ test and the people did worse on those tests. This certainly speaks against your attitude.

...

The supremacist attitude that some environmental activists have certainly isn't getting through to such people, and if anything, it's only making them dig their heels in even more. — baker

It's not about 'getting through' to people. People rarely modify their behaviour based on rational argument. If they're going to dig their heels in, then something already exists which makes them feel more comfortable with their current beliefs and all the while that exists no amount of rational argument is going to persuade them otherwise. Rational argument just isn't the iron fist people seem to think it is, it presents options is all, if people don't want to take the option you offer, they won't.

The point about excluding people from discussion who haven't done their due diligence, who haven't earned the right to be taken seriously, is not about magically persuading them of your opinion by such action, it's about allocating your limited reserves of bandwidth to more productive activities than pretending to have a rational argument with people who don't even share your criteria for argumentative power. It's like trying to play chess against someone who disagrees with you about what the rules of chess are.

Insults serve a purpose in social relations, they didn't develop for no reason. They're about ostracising people. Making it clear that people do not meet the criteria for membership of you group. If people are upset about being ostracised thus, then they need to question why they wanted to be a member of that group in the first place.

In my experience, most people who are annoyed about being ostracised from more serious, academic, style discussion want to be a member of that group, want to be allowed into that debate, for the very reasons they are being ostracised (it has a certain kudos because the people involved have done a lot of due diligence), they just ant to shortcut the hard work and be allowed in anyway. There's nothing noble about laziness.

it goes both ways. The environmental activists need to earn their right to be taken seriously as well. — baker

Absolutely. I have very little truck with the modern environmental campaign groups either. It's little more than a social event, with a greater concern for their Facebook profile than for the issue over which they're chanting their vacuous platitudes.

How precisely does a person earn the right to be taken seriously? — yebiga

As I said in my earlier response to you...

They could educate themselves, do their due diligence with regards to sources, do the work required to join the discussion in question. — Isaac