Hmm. Things are not the same since you dropped The Guardian for The Spectator.

It's not as if our theologically inclined brethren have a monopoly on metaphor and allegory, and certainly not on wisdom. Interestingly it was Grayling who pointed out that Christianity is not Christianity but borrowed Greek philosophy.

:up: .

Ok, then, let's cut to the chase. You can't have a cure for something that is not an illness.

This is getting into irrelevant details. — Darkneos

Well, then, pass it by.

But it seems to me that what's missed is a structure within which to articulate the issue at hand. Looking for a cure is normative, it's based on the pretence that there is such a thing as 'normal", together with the misguided view that folk ought attempt to reach that standard. The Capacities approach changes the focus from social expectation to individual ability and desire. The language of Neurodiversity is in contrast about recognising and honouring the differences between minds.

At stake is the goal of whatever intervention one is considering. A "cure" looks for normalisation, whereas it may be preferable to maintain diversity while identifying and removing impediments to growth and happiness.

The argument is that a net negative life experience is caused by autism, and the conclusion is that curing the autism will result in a positive life experience. It's a rendering of the medical model of disability.

There's an extensive philosophical literature on disability. The social model of disability has a prime place, for both political and historical reasons, and is well worth researching. However there is also a body of criticism of that model, and recent work has moved to Nussbaum's articulation of a capacities approach, or the analysis of power and social interaction, after Hanna Arendt.

The interesting point here is how these models of disability can be put to work in the case of autism. An introductory analysis can be found at Patrick Dwyer's web site. see for example
What Is The Neurodiversity Paradigm?
The Social Model And Neurodiversity
The other articles thereabouts might be of interest.

Good topic.

@Jamal, you've now got five threads fixed at the top of the main page. That's a lot of screen space. Perhaps it would be worth consolidating the Joining, Guidelines and Subscribe threads into one - an "About Us" thread or some such.

Something is true, if you believe it to be true. — A Realist

Socrates in Disneyland...

An odd implication of holding that there are no unproven truths is that we know everything. How? Well, anything that is unproven is by that fact untrue - the proven facts are all the facts there are.

Fitch’s Paradox of Knowability

Yes, been there before, but it is relevant here.

You don't think there can be unproven truths?

And you don't want any critique of your views?

Ok, Alkis. That's one way to for you to have certainty.

"I believe in God" is different than "I assert that God exists". — Alkis Piskas

Seems to me that both of these express a belief - a relation between a person and a proposition. If someone asserts that god exists, and yet there is no god, then their belief was wrong.

Truth, on the other hand, need not be a relation between a person and a proposition. "God exists" says nothing about what me or you or anyone else think.

Truth has to be proven. — Alkis Piskas

Why? What do you mean by this? Seems to me that there can be unproven truths.

That's addressed in the correlations section further down.

They are interesting results.

All I am using them for here is to show that, in contrast to the contention of the article mentioned in the OP, there is not a consensus in philosophy that favours antirealism. It takes Goodman and Rorty as exemplars of analytic philosophy, which is misleading.

Where is there a realist and metaphysical Theory of Truth that is capable of defining the truth of a statement ? — RussellA

Supposing that one could provide a definition of truth is supposing that somehow truth is analysable, that it has components that might be identified. I think that rather, truth is something that has to be taken as granted in order for such analysis to occur. If you like, being true is what we do with felicitous statements; or "P" is true IFF P. There is more that can be said, and has been by Kripke and Tarski and Davidson and many others, discussions that are closed off if one simply drops truth in favour of communal belief.

:roll:

Not seeing it. My conclusion is that you have misunderstood something in the notion of antirealism.

Can you explain to me how "ontological antirealism" differs from what you think I am talking about. I'm not seeing it.

Sure, there are various positions. The issue here is that Sartwell would have us think that antirealism is a consensus in analytic philosophy. It isn't; quite the opposite.

I've settled on the use of realism for views that hold there to be things that are true and yet unknown. This is both an ontological view and a choice of language use. Making a clear distinction between belief and truth strikes me as the better way to talk. Antirealism does not make this distinction clear.

It's come up in several places just recently. In Statements are true? a few folk are advocating a pragmatic antirealism; in Do people value truth? the issue is making the distinction between truth and belief clear.

It's pretty common. — frank

Can you offer any support for this?

My critique is of Sartwell, not of you.

All 3 cases described in the page of the mentioned link refer to beliefs — Alkis Piskas

The objections refer to beliefs, and not to truths? Then can you give an account, in your pragmatic terms, of the difference between something's being true, and something's being only believed true? It seems that pragmatism ignores truth in favour of collective belief.

I'm glad you understand that. Sartwell, in presenting such a sweeping history in a few hundred words, does not make such distinctions.

Contrary to the thrust of Sartwell's essay, Antirealism is not typical of recent philosophy.

So analytic method is different to linguistic method?

If you like. There's distinctions between anaytic, linguistic and ordinary language philosophy that remain unconsidered. But your approach would also fit 's love-hate relationship with analytic approaches. It remains that the Sartwell article erroneously suggests that analytic philosophy is somehow antirealist.

, :

Three Classic Objections and Responses

reality would be strange if reality relied on human statements and equations. — Andrew4Handel

But - to a large extent it does; property and mortgages and promises all rely on language, and are real. So some things are true in virtue of language, other things not so much.

Truth is complicated. It would be odd if we could set out in a sentence a method or algorithm that could distinguish all true sentences from false sentences. Examples that claim to do this - coherence and correspondence and pragmatics - all have counter instances.

Another thing folk miss is the difference between a list of things that are true and an explanation of truth, between what is true and what being "true" is. I think you and I do understand what it is for a sentence to be true. So I don't think a definition of truth is needed. I think were we differ is in which sentences we think are true. Some sentences you think are true, other folk think are false.

And this is why we need to clearly differentiate between a sentence's being true and its being believed true.

And keep in mind that you do know at least some things, and further that you need not rely on things to be beyond doubt before you believe them.

Philosophical thinking can attract folk to extreme views.

Some old notes...
______________

Statements are combinations of nouns and verbs and such like; Some statements are either true or false, and we can call these propositions. So, "The present king of France is bald" is a statement, but not a proposition.

Beliefs range over propositions.

(Arguably, they might be made to range over statements: Fred believes the present king of France is bald. Some rendition of the possible worlds definition of a proposition is needed.)

“Jeff believes in democracy” looks like a counter example to beliefs ranging over propositions, but the superficial structure hides the proposition: “Jeff believes governments ought be democratic” or some such

Beliefs are stated as a relation between an agent and a proposition. This superficial structure serves to show that a belief is always both about a proposition and about some agent. It might be misleading as the proposition is not the object of the belief but constitutes the belief.

This relation is such that if the agent acts in some way then there is a belief and a desire that together are sufficient to explain the agent's action. Banno wants water; he believes he can pour a glass from the tap; so he goes to the tap to pour a glass of water.

The logical problem here, the philosophical interesting side issue, is that beliefs overdetermine our actions. There are other beliefs and desires that could explain my going to the tap.
______________

We know some statement when at the least we believe it, it fits in with our other beliefs, and when it is true.

The "fits in with other beliefs" is a first approximation for a justification. Something stronger is needed, but material implication will not do.

It does not make sense to ask if we know X to be true; that's exactly the same as asking if we know X. The "we only know it if it is true" bit is only there because we can't know things that are false.

If you cannot provide a justification, that is, if you cannot provide other beliefs with which a given statement coheres, then you cannot be said to know it.

A belief that is not subject to doubt is a certainty.

Without a difference between belief and truth, we can't be wrong; if we can't be wrong, we can't fix our mistakes; without being able to fix our mistakes, we can't make things better.

I am saying that it is the belief that is true or false not that they are the same thing. — Andrew4Handel

And not sentences? I don't see how that could work.

A statement only seems to be true after it has been understood and in a context. — Andrew4Handel

Of course.

I don't see how a written sentence can convey anything without a mind — Andrew4Handel

Sure.

But I think the actual nature of reality cannot depend on notions like truth or falsity but just is. — Andrew4Handel

If you mean that all facts are true - well, yes.

It seems to me like conscious states provide us with detailed information that can be translated into ideas that don't need to have truth value but some times accurately map onto a state of the world. — Andrew4Handel

"Map onto a state of the world". So the world has states, that can be stated... in statements.

Did you think something here would be in disagreement with what I said? What?

We know that folk sometimes believe stuff that is false. And folk sometimes disbelieve stuff that is false, in which case they have a true belief...

Sure, truth and meaning are closely involved with each other. Still, it is statements that are true or false, and belief is quite different from truth, for the reasons given.

A note on method. One approach to philosophical issues involves asking a complex problem and breaking it down into it's component parts, seeking to understand each of those and then putting the pieces back together to solve the bigger problem. It was perhaps first explicated by Descartes.

So here that approach would involve seeing what we can work out about truth, belief and meaning, including their parts and how they relate to each other, and then trying to put them together in a larger explanation.

The alternative might be trying to understand the whole problem in total, without separating the various parts. That approach is fraught with circular arguments and misguided assumption.

I am finding it hard to say where truth resides. — Andrew4Handel

See if this helps.

It's statements that are true or false.

Being true is what statements are used for, in the main. We understand what it is for a statement to be true by making use of statements.

The difference between belief and truth might be made apparent by considering an example. "The cat is on the mat" will be true only if the cat is on the mat. It is in this case irrelevant who is aware that the cat is or isn't on the mat. The cat is either on the mat or not, regardless of the attitudes that any particular person has towards the cat and the mat. So that someone, anyone, knows that the cat is on the mat does not change the truth of "The cat is on the mat". The cat might be on the mat without anyone knowing. Same goes for believing, disbelieving, accepting, learning, rejecting doubting or wondering if, the cat is on the mat. These are examples of attitudes one might have towards the cat's being on the mat.

The difference can be set out by giving some consideration to the logical structures involved. Truth relates to a sentence:

It is true that: the cat is on the mat

No person is mentioned here. But for attitudes, one includes who it is that has the attitude:

Ann believes that: the cat is on the mat
Ben knows that: the cat is on the mat
Cam doubts that: the cat is on the mat

While truth relates only to a sentence, these examples relate a sentence to persons. They are commonly called proposition attitudes, since they set out the attitude of a person towards a sentence.

Truth is not a propositional attitude. Truth resides in statements, not in minds.

There's a bunch of confusions, that other folk will express, that appear to go against this view, leaning towards idealism or antirealism. Discussing those could easily get your thread another twenty pages. But what I've set out above is far and away the better account, and is pretty well accepted outside forums such as this.

One notable instance of this expression can be found in the works of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre used the phrase "always already" to describe the idea that certain aspects of our existence, such as our facticity (our given circumstances and conditions) and our fundamental freedom, are inherent and preexisting. He argued that these aspects of our being are not products of our conscious choices but are thrust upon us, shaping our existence. — Wayfarer

See this sentence?

Is it right?

If you ask ChatGPT, it will not go and check against Sartre's corpus. It will simply choose likely next words and string them along.

It might by chance find a correct reference. But Equally it might make up a new reference.

, , this should bother you.

Thanks for your very clear exposition of the logic. — unenlightened

Shame they've been banned these last three years.

Then it is a disparity that, on the increasingly rare occasions of your putting together an argument, your predominant method is analytic.

Concludes that the linguistic turn might have had its day. — Wayfarer

If so, then only because it is by now ubiquitous.

By finishing his account of analytic philosophy on Rorty and Goodman, Sartwell leans overly towards an antirealism that is only a minority view. The notion captured in the opening quote "There is nothing outside the text", is not representative of analytic philosophy.

Yeah, I have some difficulty in understanding an account that has all social institutions tending towards oligarchy while denying that there are any social institutions. But that seems to be what @NOS4A2 has in mind.

, Neither of you gave reasons for your view. SO here are a few of the argument sot be found in Popper, applied to the case in hand.

The supposition that democratic institutions will become oligarchies gives no time frame. Suppose a given institution remains democratic after a year, is that a falsification of the "Law"? Perhaps we shoudl wait ten years? If an institution remains democratic after a hundred years, do we consider the law falsified? Any institution that remains democratic is not a falsification, since it can be claimed that it still will become an oligarchy. Hence the supposed law is inherently unfalsifiable.

While studies of the history of such institutions might reveal a trend, there is no reason to suppose that such trends are inevitable. Trends can only tell us what happened in the past, not what will happen in the future. This is a result of the problem of induction, addressed by Popper in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and resolved by fablsificationism. Inductions of the form that are used to justify the supposed "iron law" are logical invalid. Even in physical sciences, the statements sometimes called "Laws" are for fablsificationism only as-yet unfalsified generalisations, to be further tested. Historicism will oft mistake such a trend for a supposed universal law.

Social laws are not causal, and future human and social consequences are not necessitated by the past. At the extreme, humans can choose to act in opposition to such predictions. It is logically impossible to know what someone will do in the future, since even given that they know, it remains that they might do otherwise. I can predict that you stop reading this post here, but it remains that you may choose to read on.

Individual human actions cannot be predicted with certainty, and certainly not by institutions. This of course is Nos' individualist thesis, which must be set aside if this supposed "iron law" were true. The vagaries of individual actions themselves render such social ultimatums as the "law" inoperable.

What constitutes an oligarchy is left ambiguous by the Law. As a result the supposed trend towards oligarchy is left to interpretation, so any mooted historian may find or falsify the trend as they see fit - based on their ideology, as it where. Ideology is written into the very structure of the "Law". Hence it is disingenuous to insist that responses avoid ideology. A better response would be to openly admit the ideologic base of both the supposed "Law" and the responses.

So putting it simply, even if we accept that there is a trend in democratic institutions towards centralisation of power, humans can choose to work against that trend.

You'll find in in various archives. Crib notes at Wired.com:

https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2018/02/poppers-poverty-historicism

So what I'm getting from this thread is that few have read The Poverty of Historicism.

It's a worry.

Oh, indeed, just so. But he may not have been au fait with the young wiper-snappers and their fancy scribbles.

Kripke was 8.

First, thank you for addressing the article. Much appreciated.

Thomas Diefenbach here uses frequently conditinionals — ssu

Indeed, but I read this as a result of ambiguities in the formulation of the supposed "iron rule". The objection is methodological; it is that the notion of oligarchy is insufficiently clear to enable an empirical investigation. The supposed law is an example of Popper's poor historicism, and falls subject to tht criticism - as is pointed out very clearly in the introduction.

So those conditionals are not down to Diefenbach's criticism, but the inevitable result of equivocation in Michels’ thesis.

But I will go one strep further and point out that Michels’ work is inherently ideological. This article is part of the ideological foundations of Italian Fascism. To leave it to be so grounded and yet ask that critics not adopt ideological stances is to adopt an asymmetrical position.

Since the view espoused is not amenable to empirical test, it can only to be understood ideologically.