"How would you say a proposition corresponds to a truthmaker? Where do we look to see this relation?"


"I think you're making things far too complicated. We use speech and writing to talk about/describe the world. If there's nothing mysterious about this then there's nothing mysterious about correspondence."


"It's not me. This is a long standing objection to correspondence: that it lacks analytical clarity."


"We use speech and writing to talk about/describe the world. If there's nothing mysterious about this then there's nothing mysterious about correspondence."


I think sometimes we expect more from certain concepts than they give us, or we over analyze certain concepts in search of a some phantom that will answer our intellectual itch. Philosophers have a tendency to take concepts out of their natural habitat, and place them in an unnatural one.

Good job mate, and a good read. Yes, I read it, including the replies. We have our differences, but I admire the effort.

To answer this specific question, "What Does it Mean, Philosophically, to Argue that God Does or Does Not Exist?" Very basically, it boils down to, does the concept God have an instance in reality? I use the concept reality in a very broad sense.

Another point about the concept God that seems to get lost in many of the discussions, is that you don't need a precise definition to understand the general idea behind the concept, at least in the western world. In fact, even a vague notion of the concept still has its uses. Many of our concepts are like this, but that doesn't mean there is no use for the concept. For example, the use of the concept game, depending on context, has very different properties from one use to another. This is where Wittgenstein's family resemblance comes into play.

That said, even with my belief in metaphysics, such as they are, I see no argument, deductive or inductive that supports the belief in God. That doesn't mean that God doesn't exist, it just means that as far as I can tell, there is no evidence, or there is weak testimonial evidence to support such a belief.

What is truth?

What we mean by our concepts, in this case truth, is a function of how we use concepts in our “forms of life,” that is, it is a linguistic social construct. These linguistic social constructs are governed by implicit and explicit rules (rules of grammar and other socially contrived rules), but these rules are not always hard and fast, they allow for expansion and contraction. However, expand too much, or contract too much, and you are pushing the limits of what can be said, or constricting what can sensibly said.

Our use of the concept truth is a function of statements, more precisely propositions. Propositions are used to express one’s belief or claim within a rule-governed social context. These propositions are for the most part binary in nature, that is, if the claim/belief is true, then the proposition aligns, corresponds, mirrors, correlates, pictures, a fact (state-of-affairs) in reality (reality being anything that can be said to exist, even the abstract, as well as the stories of fiction). If the proposition misses the mark, or does not accomplish its goal, as a picture or a correlate of reality, then it is false.

The ontology of facts is quite broad in its depth, as I have already hinted. We can speak of facts in objective reality, for example, “The Earth has one moon.” We can speak of the facts of logic and mathematics, which are governed by the rules of these particular languages. We can also speak of subjective facts, for example, “Sam likes apples.” There are even facts of fiction, which have no objective instance in reality, other than the story itself, and the expanded use of concepts within that story. The relation of our claims to truth (statements/propositional claims), or our denial of said claims, namely, our beliefs that such and such is the case, is a relation between our statements/propositions within our “forms of life,” and what we believe are the actual facts of reality.

That's pretty close to what I've written, but haven't posted. I guess I should just post and get it over with.

The invitation is open, especially to those who participated in the discussion, and even those who didn't participate. It's a wide open invitation. Like the World Open chess tournament. :wink:

Anyone who wants to reply.

I'll wait until everyone gives their version before I reply. Some of you participated in the discussion much more than I did, so I'll wait to see if anyone else replies.

Why doesn't everyone just sum up their views of truth in roughly two to three paragraphs. No responses to the summation, just your particular point of view. At least no responses until the summaries are complete.

Okay, thanks for the discussion.

Fred's belief is different to what is true. — Banno

What does this difference amount to? How is Fred's false belief different from someone's true belief, other than one propositional statement is true and the other is false, which amounts to a difference about the facts. Also, I do believe truth and falsity are properties of propositions.

For me, the content of a belief is expressed as statements/propositions. Moreover, I don't see how Searle can get away from the idea that there is a relationship between what Fred believes and his statement that he believes it. As if there is some mistake here to be avoided. The only mistake is adding in these extraneous notions. I don't see any of these theories adding anything important to the idea of truth. I think Wittgenstein had a point about these kinds of theories, which is why he tried avoiding them.

You don't see the difference between what I wrote and what you wrote? Are you suggesting that what you said is the same as what I said? I see a difference.

We can perhaps see the difference most clearly if we look to the use of each rather than meaning. Let's look at an example in which it might make sense to separate truth from belief.

There's a tree over the road. Suppose Fred believes the tree is an English Oak. But it is a Cork Oak.

We might write, in order to show the bivalency of the belief:

Believes ( Fred, The tree over the road is an English Oak)
And
True (The tree over the road is a Cork Oak). — Banno

"There's an English Oak over the road." This is Fred's belief. So, instead of it being the English Oak, it's a Cork Oak. So, Fred's belief is false, it doesn't match the facts. So, Fred believes one thing, but the fact is, "The tree over the road is a Cork Oak." It's not, as I see it, a difference between a belief and true, it's a difference between what he believes is true, and the fact of the matter, viz., "The tree over the road is a Cork Oak."

I don't' think your explanation is clear at all. It seems confusing to me. Okay, let's drill further down on this part.

And the difference can be best seen in that truth ranges over propositions, while belief relates a proposition to a person. — Banno

Let's stay with this for a moment.

I don't see how a proposition that's true, has meaning apart from what one believes to be true. What I'm saying is that it doesn't seem to make sense to separate propositional truth from beliefs. It's as if true propositions exist in some metaphysical reality, apart from beliefs. I'm assuming that what you mean by "truth ranging over propositions," is that propositional truth can stand on it's own apart from belief. What does it mean for a proposition to be true apart from someone's belief that it's true?

The point, so far as there was one, to this discussion is to find a grammar for our notion of truth that holds together in a more or less consistent way. — Banno

That's basically what I've been saying, but in terms of use within our forms of life. So, I think the best way to look at the concept truth is in a Wittgensteinian way, i.e., via the PI and OC.

The core of that consistent grammar is, roughly:
Truth is different to belief, justification, agreement, and so on.
Truth ranges over propositions and such.
"p" is true IFF p, where p is the meaning of "p". — Banno

I'm not inclined to separate true and false from belief. What we believe to be true and/or false is where these concepts get their life. Moreover, why would we need another meta-language to explain what we mean in our everyday language? And, how many other meta-languages do we need to explain our other concepts? I find this problematic to say the least. In other words, to explain "p" is true IFF p you have to go back to our everyday speech (give e.g's), otherwise it has no meaning apart from our everyday uses. I don't believe "p" is true IFF p adds anything significant to the discussion of truth, if anything at all.

I agree with this. Philosophy is useless, after all. — Moliere

Philosophy isn't useless, that's not what I'm saying, some philosophy maybe useless, but to lump it all together as useless is to not understand the nature of philosophy. For example, you're putting forth a philosophy when you respond to what's been said. If you have a set of beliefs about life, science, morality, truth, etc., and you're using reasoning to explain your arguments, then you're doing philosophy. It's just a matter of doing philosophy well, using well reasoned or well grounded arguments. Everyone does philosophy in some sense. Especially if you think about life.

We understand the animals, being animals ourselves, and we're speaking of their psychological states through the folk concept of "belief" -- and I say "folk" non-pejoratively, because I think the folk concept of belief -- and truth, for that matter -- is actually better than a lot of philosopher or scientific inventions. Just not as precise as philosophers or scientists like, as Sam26 said, since they really really like being right about things in lots of circumstances, when folk-notions simply don't work that way. — Moliere

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

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

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

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

The only thing odd, is that you didn't see the connection between my reply and your response.

So even as it seems to apply to linguistic artifacts, True is a somewhat odd duck. Not alone, though. Many such usages come to mind, especially 'modal' adjectives like ” probable", " likely", "impossible", and so on. — Srap Tasmaner

That's why we should look at the meanings of these concepts in terms of use (social linguistic constructs), and in terms of Wittgenstein's family resemblance idea. It gives us a much better picture of what meaning amounts to.

We could all use some caution in our views, especially since we're at the edge of what we can claim to know. Moreover, it's very difficult to know at times where Wittgenstein went wrong, since much of his philosophy is novel and prone to misinterpretation. Not all of my views align with his, and I'm sure not all of yours do either.

I'm a bit surprised to see you entertaining the notion of concepts. In. Wittgensteinian terms they are rather fraught. For some folk they consist in private mental furniture, so that they end up saying things like that my concept cannot be the same as yours, and so on; stuff with which neither of us would agree. But if a concept is instead conceived of as a public item, then is it anything more or less than the use to which a term is put? — Banno

I don't believe my views expressed with Creative leads to this conclusion. What in particular leads you to think this? I think you've expressed this before, but I think it's a misinterpretation of what I'm saying.

Notions/concepts of "tree" are existentially dependent upon language. What we pick out with those notions/concepts is not. Trees are not existentially dependent upon language. Much the same holds good for the notions of "true" and "false"... — creativesoul

I would word it slightly different, the concept tree, includes the notion of something existentially separate from language. Whereas the notion of true and false seems dependent on linguistic content in an important sense. In other words, I can imagine a dog seeing a tree apart from language, but not a dog observing true and false apart from the application of these concepts within our linguistic framework. This can be a bit confusing, because when we talk about true and false, we often refer to objects (i.e., facts) that we observe, although not always (referring to facts as abstract objects).

There is definitely much more to say, and I'm sure we're not going to see eye to eye on some of this.

Sorry I didn't respond to all of your posts. I have a difficult time sitting for hours responding. So, I tend to take long breaks (sometime hours, days, weeks at a time). I find that social media can be a bit taxing, and in some ways unhealthy.

What I'm unsure about is the implication that concepts don't have to do with the brain's relationship, as you put it, to objects. I mean, sure, "mind" is probably a much better starting point, but you went with brain, so brain it is. Is that not more or less exactly where we expect to find concepts? — Srap Tasmaner

I'm speaking about linguistic concepts, but you seem to be suggesting a broader sense (thoughts, ideas, etc, - I'm just guessing, since you didn't say). Concepts like true and false, and what we mean by true and false, develop in social contexts, not in isolation. The relationship between language and the mind/brain is something we don't fully understand. We obviously have our intuitions and opinions, but that's as far as it goes. I would say, as per the context of this thread, that true and false are necessarily not part of the conceptual framework of non-linguistic animals.

But then are we going to say that societies have concepts but individuals, even individual members of societies, don't? That sounds terribly odd. So if the social demands to be brought in, how exactly? And is the social, shall we say, aspect entirely linguistic? — Srap Tasmaner

I wouldn't say, "societies have concepts but individuals, even individual members of societies, don't?" - I would say individuals learn to use linguistic concepts in social contexts, so individuals have linguistic concepts only in so far as they acquire them socially. This gets back to the private language argument.

Well, this was part of my question, whether experiments were relevant to your position, or whether you understood concepts to be inherently linguistic phenomena in some sense. So are you saying that this is an empirical question after all? — Srap Tasmaner

I'm saying that there maybe some experiment that shows what part of the brain lights up while using linguistic concepts, as opposed to what happens when being shown objects apart from a linguistic context. These kinds of experiments aren't going to answer the question of what we mean by concepts like true and false. So, in the context of what I'm referring to, some experiment, at least as far as I understand, isn't going to answer a question of meaning and use. Of course it depends on what you're looking for.

Maybe you could have an experiment where you see how the brain lights up when using a concept like toy, as opposed to how the brain light up without a linguistic background. It's complicated for sure.

I'll give an example. Infants, I understand, have a sense of object permanence before they have a sense of object identity. If a toy is moved across their field of vision, passes behind a screen, and comes out as something else, that doesn't bother baby. If it doesn't come out at all, that does.

There's something in the ballpark of the conceptual going on there, I'd say, but what exactly, it's complicated. — Srap Tasmaner

How would this be about concepts, as opposed to their brain's relationship to a moving object?

But I'm a little surprised to see you say, quite definitely, no concepts here, no conceptual framework whatsoever. It sounds like you take this to be true by definition and I wonder why. Is it all about language? Or about what enables language? What's the story here? — Srap Tasmaner

First, I take it that concepts, are necessarily linguistic, unless you can demonstrate how they're not. Maybe you can have a wider definition of concept, such that it doesn't include language, but if you did that it would just be a matter of what kinds of concepts we're referring to in each of the arguments.

:up: :cool:

My post prior to this one begins to address how true and false belief could exist in their entirety prior to the concepts of "true" and "false". I'm curious to get your take on that. — creativesoul

Part of the problem is in separating those concepts that have an ontology that is separate from language, and yet part of language; and, those concepts that have an ontology that are strictly linguistic, viz., concepts like true and false. So, concepts like belief, moon, tree, etc., have an ontology that involves extra-linguistic things, but other concepts are strictly linguistic. Part of the problem is placing strictly linguistic concepts in a non-linguistic environment. I think this would be an interesting study.

In this world before humans, if it is possible for a mouse to be behind a tree, and it is possible for a language less creature to believe that a mouse is behind a tree, then it is possible for a language less creature to have true belief(assuming the mouse is behind the tree) and/or false belief(assuming the mouse is not). — creativesoul

The mouse is in a particular state-of-mind, but it's not equivalent to our linguistic states, in particular, our beliefs as statements. So, the mouse is not believing that there is a mouse behind the tree, as you and I might believe. How could it do that without a linguistic framework to work with. It has no concept tree and mouse. If it did, well, maybe we could also infer the concepts true and false to the mouse also. You seem to be imposing linguistic concepts where there are none.

When I refer to beliefs (pre-linguistic beliefs in animals or humans), it's completely devoid of any conceptual framework for them, but not for us, as linguistic users. So, it seems that the tendency is to impose our conceptual framework onto them.

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

Saying that talk about true and false amounts to talk about what people believe, is not the same as saying that all belief "amounts to an attitude towards a proposition which represents that belief." As you know, I do believe, along with you, that beliefs in themselves, are not necessarily linguistic. For example, if we are referring to beliefs that dogs have, those beliefs are only true and false for us, not for them. They have no concepts of true and false, their beliefs are completely devoid of propositional content.

Do you deny and/or reject language less true/false belief? — creativesoul

Yes, I do deny it. I don't see how you can have true and false apart from propositional content, which is necessarily linguistic.

When we talk about truth, we are talking about what people believe, or what they believe to be true.
— Sam26

What are we doing when we talk about belief if not referring to what people believe(to be true)?
— creativesoul — creativesoul

So, what I posted didn't clear it up for you?

When we talk about truth, we're referring to what people believe.
— Sam26

That surprises me coming from you.

What are we doing when we talk about belief if not referring to what people believe?

Seems to me that people can believe things that are not true and/or clearly and demonstrably false. Truth cannot be not true and/or demonstrably false. What people believe can. Thus, truth is not equivalent to what people believe. — creativesoul

Where did I say, "...truth is equivalent to what people believe[?]" When we talk about truth, we are talking about what people believe, or what they believe to be true. Just because someone believes something is true, doesn't make it true. It, obviously, can turn out to be false. So, what I'm saying is that you can't separate true and false from people, and their linguistic forms of life.

Hopefully, this makes it clearer.

For me to give a decent response I'd have to do a lot more reading, and give it a lot more thought. At this point though, I'm inclined to be more Wittgensteinian in my view.

Ya, I definitely find it problematic that we need some metalanguage to define truth, because of the paradoxes that arise in our everyday language.

I didn't want to reply in your thread, since it's an exegesis, so I replied here.

Banno said the following:

"Tarski took that notion and applied it to truth, and showed that, just as there are always theorems that cannot be proved, there cannot be a definition of truth within that language. Another language is needed, or at least an extension of the language.

The proof takes a first-order language with "+" and "=", and assigns a Gödel number to every deduction, as in the incompleteness proofs. It then finds a Gödel number for a definition of truth, and shows that it is not amongst the list of Gödel numbers of the deductions. Hence, that definition is not amongst the deductions of the language.

In plain language, an arithmetic system cannot define arithmetic truth, for itself.

Hence it was apparent to Tarski that in order to talk about truth, one needed an object language and a metalanguage. This is what he developed in his definition of truth."

There seems to be something amiss here, viz., applying Gödel's incompleteness theory to the definition of truth. Tarski thinks that since there are theorems that cannot be proven within a system, that he can use this idea to create a meta-language, and thereby create a definition of truth outside our ordinary language (be it English, Italian, Spanish, etc). However, the question is, is this a misunderstanding of Gödel's theory. Gödel's theories apply to statements about number theory, so any mathematical theory that doesn't include statements about number theory are excluded from Godel's theories. So, there are limits to what Gödel is proposing. It seems a bit of a stretch, to say the least, to think Gödel incompleteness theory can be applied to the meaning of truth. I think that Tarski is stretching Godel a bit too far.

You may be right, I just thought that her belief that stuff was in the fridge was well grounded, true, and required no further subsequent justification method. — creativesoul

It is well grounded. What more of a grounding does one need in this situation?

As I've said in many posts, there are different ways of justifying a belief (different uses), and her grounding or justification is a sensory one. She's not giving reasons (using logic), but using her sensory experiences to show or demonstrate what she believes. It's most appropriate for her age.

I don't think this is about hinge's, at least not how I interpret hinge's. However, it's a good example of justification, sensory justification. Look and see, and you too will know.

I've been reading this thread all along, so yes, I did see that. She knows.