I put it back in the lounge since it's a popular internet troll question.

I take that as a psychological or neurological question. Arguably neural nets are built in order to continue in some pattern - to "predict" is how it is usually phrase. — Banno

I suppose we could quibble about the boundary between philosophy, psychology and neurology. I suspect there isn't too much of one. Considering the degree of interdisciplinary collaborations involving the disciplines.

My calculator is a phone. Puzzling. — Banno

Hah.

So aren't pretending and imagining different to "counting as..."? When we count as, we "carry on" in the same way. We say this paper counts as money, and use it for transactions in an ongoing fashion. But pretend money or imaginary money - say a toy dollar note or a dream of a lottery win - can't do this. — Banno

I think they're species of counting as.

Your paper money counts as money in its ordinary social role. You could use it in its traditional business role as a straw. Or as tinder for a fire. It really does count as paper money in its ordinary social role. But the paper money isn't necessarily counting as money when it's tinder, or a straw. Part of what makes the paper money money is its ongoing use as money (including what it looks like, who created it etc).

You wouldn't refer to it as a straw or as tinder though, as the object isn't baptised that way. Things tend to keep their name from their primary context of use in the broader society - like my plastic crate keeps being called my plastic crate despite its primary use in my home being as a calf raise platform. Which it absolutely counts as for appropriate exercises.

It's what we do, a habit, and needs no further explanation. — Banno

Even to learn that the practice of "counting as"? I can certainly set it up like: let's pretend that this calculator is a phone... And it's not just an analogy for counting as, it'a a learnable instance. My suspicion is that because it's learnable, and can even be conceptualised abstractly like we're doing now, there's enough there to make it possible to give an account of it. Because there's clear learnable instances which can coordinate with - and maybe modify! - instances of the concept.

Like if instead of pretending my calculator was a phone, my student instead imagined the calculator was a phone. They'd be counting-as differently, even if they're they're counting-as the same thingy. I'd be able to correct them perhaps - if you sit there doing nothing, you're just imagining rather than pretending. They would have understood a context of treating the calculator as if it were something else regardless.

If my student pointed out to me that they were visualising ringing me with the calculator? They'd correct my correction... correctly.

Another toy example, rather than an argument.

"Counts as..." underpins language. — Banno

Yes! Though I think how "counts as" works can be shifted, intentionally or unintentionally. Like your "I'll eat my hat" example. You can say that it works as an expression of incredulity because a hat doesn't count as something which would be eaten - it's more than that of course, but it's part of it. A particularly strong and striking violation of expected word use in one context... becomes an expected word use in another. This isn't quite right. But I think it illustrates the point.

Edit: more vague words - we might disagree about whether "counts as" has a mere functional priority in language, or whether it has a transcendental priority. As in, whether "counts as" is another role of language, behaviour, coordinating norms, or whether it acts as a precondition. Perhaps even an unanalyzable term. I'd side with the former. I think norms modify themselves enough to remove any "a priori" flavour thing from them.

It treats the universe as sort of flat and so it tells a story that is sort of flat. — Srap Tasmaner

I have a guess at what you mean. One way into that flatness is that I've used "count as" in a single sense in the post, whereas there's so many ways for people to mean things. And it seems more multifaceted than x counts as y in context z. There'll always be a problem of individuating and binding into contexts too. Individuation - what generates the tokens in one context? And binding - is a context demarcated from others? The way I've set up coordinating norms takes a binding for granted - a context of mutual articulation of event sequences to coordinate. And also individuation for granted - that the tokens involved in the coordination are generable as distinct.

The relationship between individuation and binding is, I think, implicated in setting up a coordinating norm as well, because someone can posit an association and run with it, or note a correlation and study it.

When I was a kid, we used to set the table for dinner, always the same way: on the left, fork, sitting on a paper napkin, on the right, knife and spoon, in that order, dinner plate in between, and all on a placemat. That was our custom. There's logic to it, but it could clearly be done other ways, and was done differently in other homes. There's also a more general norm here, of which we had a specific version, of having silverware for everyone on the table. That too has a logic to it, but needn't be done, much less done this way.

And we could keep going, with more and more general norms that underlie specific ones. But is eating -- rather than eating specific things in specific ways at specific times of day -- is that "just" a norm?

You could say yes if you intend to sweep in everything a human attaches value to; you could make eating a biological norm, so to speak. But we're no longer talking about custom or convention. There is nothing arbitrary about eating. (But it is "optional" if you value something else more highly than your own life, so still arguably a "norm" in some broad sense.) — Srap Tasmaner

I think we've had this discussion before. But we might as well have it again to see if we end up somewhere else than last time. It's an enjoyable one to have with you though. I am going to make liberal use of scarequotes so that I can highlight placeholders and weasel words.

I'm tempted to bite the bullet and say yes, eating is "just" a norm, but in a qualified sense. Human behaviour regarding eating is incredibly flexible in a way the necessary and sufficient conditions for counting as eating aren't. I don't really want to say "necessary and sufficient conditions", but let's just leave it there for now. Eating is "the ingestion of food". So if something counts as the ingestion of food, it counts as eating. But that's not quite all there is to the story, is it? Because that might appear to make eating "about" our words for it. Whereas we use the word eating because things in fact do eat.

What I want to say is that things eat in the same sense as they walk, run, dance, skip, speak, interpret... All of those things. There's different degrees of ambiguity in the coordinating norms for what counts as each, which "couple" with different ranges of stuff in the "corresponding" category. Dancing events count as dancing. Eating events count as eating.

But we're no longer talking about custom or convention. There is nothing arbitrary about eating.

So yes, I agree with this, we're no longer "just" talking about custom or convention. But I want to stress that I never was just talking about them, and I don't think custom or convention are "just" custom or convention either. As in, if you join the Masons, you really have joined the masons. "fdrake joined the Masons" would be true or false.

Where I think we differ, at least in respect to your above post, is that you construe custom and convention as a different type of thing than eating, whereas I see them as the same type - flavours of event that have repeating patterns. If we think about coordination as having a "map" and a "territory" as we'd ordinarily expect a representation to behave like, the representation being the map and the represented being the territory - there's no neat correspondence between those in how I see it. The "map" is event sequences of human behaviour, and the "territory" is event sequences of arbitrary types of thing. And then you've got to ask where the types come from in both, right?

I do think "where the types come from in nature and norm" is a very different question than "under what conditions are sentences true", and a slightly different question from "where does the correlation between nature types and norm types come in". I hope that I can talk about the latter without talking about the former two at this point. That is, take that there are such patterns in nature and norms for granted, and wonder how they might come to couple.

I only have toy examples about this, they're from maths rather than nature, but I hope they are illustrative. I was teaching division by 2, with remainder. I got my student to divide the following numbers by 2:

{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10}

and record the quotient and remainder

remainders={1,0,1,0,1,0,1,0,1,0}
quotients={0,1,1,2,2,3,3,4,4,5}

I then asked the student to say the sequence of remainders aloud, after I'd said the number. So:

fdrake: 1, student: 1
fdrake: 2, student: 0
fdrake:3, student 1
...

and so on.

I then asked the student to consider how the sequence might go on. They grokked that it would be alternating 0s and 1s. So they inferred the rule:

"if fdrake just said n, and I said 0 for n-1, say 1. If fdrake just said n, and I said 1 for n-1, say 0", and they could do this arbitrarily.

That's then a particular function which maps natural numbers to their remainder when divided by 2. But it's recited as a sequence of pairs by the student and I, in which I say a number and the student follows the rule.

What we'd thus done is constructed something that counts as the mapping of naturals to their remainders when divided by 2, and what counted as that mapping was our sequence of pairs of vocalisations.

What inculcated the norm in my student was asking them how the sequence might go on, which set up an expectation for what they should do given what I do. They thus could interpret my vocalisations as an imperative for them to utter the next number in the pattern. They would not have experienced them as an imperative without my role as their tutor (giving me some kind of legislative power over their behaviour), or me asking them to continue the pattern. Which they could then do as a distinct idea afterwards. They experienced the "should" I created as a mapping between two things.

I think that smells a lot of an expectation in a probability sense, the student had figured out that they'd get the answer right if they alternated, so they'd been given an imperative to minimise deviation from the expectation I provided with corrections or encouragement... Which starts looking a lot like a probabilistic inference procedure with entropy minimisation. Which is something we know human bodies do all the time.

So I would be really surprised if our bodies abilities to do our homeostatic minimisation of variation wasn't leveraged like hell in our ability to coordinate behaviour and create norms. Since, as I claimed earlier, norms behave a lot like expectations. And correlations are another type of expectation.

That's about how I see it. We end up having coordinating norms through our ability to arbitrarily contextualise things, but then constrain that arbitrariness with expectations. Then we can learn how those constraints work by minimising deviations from token examples which are "generic" in some sense . Which comes with a considerable degree of flexibility of rules you can learn from a given pattern, but it's no longer arbitrary, since we've put some tokens into the type creating engine that it must include and create a function for.

And that function is a recipe for recognising tokens and mapping them to other tokens - which we then enact to varying degrees of success {we do stuff which counts as an attempt to follow the pattern}. If the degree of success of the enactment is sufficiently high, that means counting as doing the thing which counts as the generating pattern. Which sets up the correspondence between our behaviour and the generating pattern as a type of association. Which is then the appropriate type in context.

In the above case, the student had learned the alternating pattern because they said the right things. Where "right things" is what is expected given the pattern and the imperative to reproduce it.

So how does this relate to truthbearers? Well it's not like a sentence in this view even has propositional content in the sense we'd ordinarily consider - it has conditions under which it is correctly assertible, which is already some normy thing. And a "model" where the sentence is true in the extensional semantics sense is more like a context - of stuff, norms, events, blah - in which it is correctly assertible.

I would like to have my cake and it it too, and claim that those contexts can be very object oriented and have exact constraints in them - like the maths example above. The student could say things which were true or false strictly, rather than stuff which counts as true or false for some purpose {like just a posit or a belief or a framing assumption}. And by "strictly" there I mean there being a unique "right" answer {any exemplar of a set of equivalent answers which count as that unique answer...}.

There are an infinite number of quoted mathematical equations that we could write out inside the World A circle, — Michael

That was the point from before though, switching from asserted to assertible, or stated to statable, changes lots of things. There's an infinite number of quotable mathematical equations that you could write, but only a finite numbed of quoted mathematical equations which have been written. You can prove that there's an infinity of true equations like this:

The equation n+(n+1)=2n+1 is an equation, left hand side is right hand side, so " n+(n+1)=2n+1 " is true. But the set of all such equations bijects with the input set - every input has a unique output. In particular it's true for all the natural numbers, so that's an infinity of true equations. All but finitely many have never been written.

But you know they're all true. Even the unwritten ones. Since they satisfy the equation n+(n+1)=2n+1.

But I was saying something stronger: we don't so much tell the truth as reveal it, or at least do our part in revealing it. Here's that metaphor taken literally: there is a curtain hiding the facts; I pull it back on my side so that you can begin to see what's behind it, and if you pull the rest on your side, things as they are stand revealed. ― Now, maybe it's best to admit we never quite get the curtain pulled all the way clear, maybe in fact all we get are glimpses now and then when we manage a gap in the curtains, but those glimpses are real and what we see and understand is reality to that degree revealed. — Srap Tasmaner

Alright, I'm beating this to death, which is too bad because I think there are limitations to the seeing business, and very often what we really need and share with each other is narrative, — Srap Tasmaner

I see what you mean about the seeing. It's something like a stratum of human behaviour which does the revealing, isn't it? And it's inflected by norms but not totally determined by them. I think what draws me to Sellars on the matter is that utterances are of the same ontological order as literally pulling back curtains. The coupling occurs not because there's one ontological regime over here (language) and one over there (world), there was only ever "world and world", but bubbling up representationally through coordinating behaviours.

but it truth is never truth only from a particular perspective. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. I agree. When someone makes an assertion which claims something is true explicitly, rather than taking it for granted, that deposits what is purported into a crucible of collective behaviour and all the stuff that happens. The claim counting as true in other circumstances is quite different from it being true when it gets deposited in the crucible.

We have an incredible ability to coordinate our behaviour in a manner that depends upon no one in particular (intersubjectivity) but also based upon what no one's done yet (like your maths examples), and through the latter it becomes possible (maybe even correct) to treat truth as mind independent - as it won't matter who says what when, even before humans existed. Because gold existed in the time before humans. That ability to defer to the coordinating norms makes language work well in excess of our current and past enactment of it - as every norm is an expectation, and expectations concern arbitrary states of affairs.

This is a tangent on your tangent, my impression is that philosophical discussions rarely give more than lipservice to the distinction between different uses of truth, or people's behaviour when we claim something is true vs when we claim something. Counting as true and being true get equated, despite being quite different in terms of norms - something can count as true just when it's assumed, believed, intended, hoped for, posited... whatevs. Something counts as being true when... well when it really is the case. Which, as far as language use goes, is when it's correct to assert - and the correctness conditions include the ability to reference all the events and stuff which might "reveal" the truth, as you say.

I think even if sentences don't carry truth like a payload, they still ought to be truth-directed and truth-directing. — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah I agree with that. Truth (as a concept) definitely seems to play a privileged coordinating role, even if you grant that it's all coordinating norms. There's a fixity to it there isn't to justification. If something counts as true, it counts as something that can be posited without evidence - accepted for what it is. But then you can have a discussion about whether something is true, which seems to be a discussion which leverages the relevant coordinating norms regarding it particularly intensely - it examines them, and enacts what it means to be a coordinating norm to begin with. So when you say:

I keep finding myself thinking that the great value of saying something true to someone else is helping them see it ― like when you point out to someone that a photo of the faculty of your department has no women in it. — Srap Tasmaner

I think that's very true, when you say something is true, it's a kind of... commitment... but it's not just a personal pledge. It's a pledge you make on behalf of the relevant norms, "see, this is part of that, look at its state". And then you either accept or reject the claim.

I think even if sentences don't carry truth like a payload, they still ought to be truth-directed and truth-directing. — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah. Truth as a process. It's quite Peircian! Infinitism type stuff.

Does that really address any of the issues? — Leontiskos

I doubt it does.

For example, how is the question about the metaphysical status of truth the same as the debates of representationalism?

It isn't generically. It's effectively the same in this thread. You've got a sentence content, you've got a fact, there's a bridge, and the fact and the sentence content are somehow the same thing when the sentence is true. The correspondence mechanism ( or merely incidental matching ) works a bit like a mirror, so the bridge is a mirror. If you'll let me put it briefly with an analogy, we're arguing over whether the mirror has one side or two.

When you move to a world where there are no humans, the bridge breaks.

Someone might claim that there is no mirror, and that the sentence content just somehow "is" the fact, or that the truth is an unanalyzable primitive and we're just talking shite doing all this. Nevertheless in all the cases the world resembles the sentences said about it in a manner that the world will be different if a sentence turns out to be true or false, and in a "precise" manner.

Again with the analogy, the mirror makes that precision exact - the picture is perfect both ways.

What makes me think of it like representation is that you've got the same separation/binding dichotomy working between X and what counts as X, being the fact and the true sentence or the represented and its representation in both cases.

And I don't see anyone disputing the idea that "there are mutual constraints of world and word." — Leontiskos

No, no one is disputing it directly. If I parse the issue like I do above, the correspondence mechanism works like a preservation of content between sentence and fact, they're somehow equivalent. Like if I say "my bottle is 1m along and 30cm forward on my table", that's... where the bottle is. The sentence is true. But it's not quite right, the bottle's an extended object with an ill defined centre, I eyeballed the distances, the table's a shitty IKEA one with a little bend in it... The richness of the world exceeds what you'd expect of if it was exact match, nevertheless the sentence says something right about the table and the bottle

So I don't think that {"my bottle is 1m along and 30cm forward on my table" is true} corresponds to anything, or "displays" a unique matter of fact at all, I think there's a fairly nebulous range of stuff that makes that sentence count as true. But given that you know the sentence is true, it tells you something about the contours of ambiguity. Like the bottle can't be on my ceiling or my lap. But it might be 30.005cm forward.

Which then raises a lot of questions about how a connection like that between the truth of the sentence and the bottle's weird position can be negotiated - and I honestly don't know the details. My intuitions are Sellarsian, and I enjoy Dennett's view of coordinating perceptions with utterances which is pretty similar. Suffice to say I think that the connection is norm mediated, and "is true" means something similar to "is correctly assertible".

With the above account (sketch), the thing which makes me believe it renders our discussion a pseudoproblem is that the interstice between sentences and facts is entirely conventional and doesn't "preserve" anything. We just make conventions of descriptions that try to ensure when people say stuff is blah the stuff counts as blah. That "counts as blah" is the important thing.

Because I believe it's correctly assertible that there were, say, dinosaurs in the world before there were humans. Or if humans never evolved in some world, that world would still have had dinosaurs, all else being equal to ours. And that doesn't bottom out in correspondence to some underlying reality, it bottoms out in something like: "radiocarbon dating has shown dinosaurs existed long before humans" and "the ice age could easily have killed us all" - good reasons for accepting it. Even if those things turn out false, it's still more reasons. But reasons about what is {or what counts as what is :D}.

So roughly, I don't think sentences "bear" truth in the sense required for this debate. It's the norms of use, and we coordinate those by using them in circumstances, and they leave a lot imprecise and unsaid.

Just to be clear, Banno says that you can go either way, saying that the tree makes a noise and dealing with the consequences, or saying that it doesn't, and dealing with a different set of consequences. — Banno

Oh. Sorry for putting the wrong words in your mouth.

You pointed it up in Michael quite well, but to be complete you should also be willing to give your own view. — Leontiskos

Largely pointless pseudoproblem conjured by insisting upon the meaning of sentences being separate from but mirroring the world they engage with. It's ye olde how does the representation correspond to the represented but with sentences. IMO there isn't a correspondence or symmetry of content, there's mutual constraints of word and world, so I don't care much.

Perhaps the word "it" refers to the fact that 799168003115 + 193637359638 = 992805362753? I don't think that facts are the sort of thing that can be true or false, i.e. it's a category error to say that the fact that 1 + 1 = 2 is true. And what if I were to assert the false sentence "1 + 1 = 3"? Was it false before I said it? But the word "it" here can't refer to the fact that 1 + 1 = 3 because 1 + 1 does not equal 3. — Michael

It would be worthwhile discussing whether there is anything more to the fact that 799168003115 + 193637359638 = 992805362753 than how the sentence "99168003115 + 193637359638 = 992805362753" ought be interpreted. Because it seems such a thing takes a particular expressible form. If that form precedes the utterance, all uttering a sentence whose content was that form would do is state what was true anyway on that basis.

Which isn't quite the same thing as "platonism", because there's no mention of mind independence in it: the form's partly determined by the mind, but not totally, and it seems how things are suffices for whether the utterance is true or not. The sufficiency of how things are in determining whether utterances are true or false speaks to that bizarre form of priority - implication is an ordering. And it's certainly not necessary that everything we say is true. So in some sense "how things are" is strictly prior to statements of fact in the order of things.

Which is rather odd, as the order of things resembles the true statements made about it to a large degree.

And what if I were to assert the false sentence "1 + 1 = 3"? Was it false before I said it? But the word "it" here can't refer to the fact that 1 + 1 = 3 because 1 + 1 does not equal 3. — Michael

I think this introduces the additional assumption that a sentence must refer to an extant state of affairs, rather than corresponding to it.

There's a real puzzle in trying to say what more is there to the fact that 1+1=2 than the truth of the sentence "1+1=2". Which you can grapple from either side of that purported equivalence. If you take the quoted side as primary, you find it odd that the state of things can determine what would be truly assertible of it regardless of whether there are speakers, since the interpretation of a sentence depends upon their existence. Conversely, if you take the unquoted side as primary, you might find it odd that true shape of things resembles how we interpret sentences., since the state of things determines whether the sentence is true or not regardless of the equivalence between the fact and the sentential content.

Those two issues are the same thing viewed from two perspectives, and taking either for granted advances nothing in the debate (also @Banno).

Cheers, ↪fdrake. Thanks for chiming in. — Banno

I be trying. Thank you for your thanks.

The alternative I offered, a few pages back, is that there are indeed propositions floating around, but that they are harmless. Extensionally, all we have are individuals, a,b,c... These we name, "a", "b","c"... Then we group them: {a,c}, {b}. Then we name the groups: f={a,c}. Then we form propositions, f(a), f(b). Here, some folk, perhaps Michael, think that we have introduced a new thing into the world — the proposition f(a) — and so need the paraphernalia of "in a world" and "at a world" in order to avoid invoking Platonic forms. — Banno

I think that dodges the issue as stated in thread but not the spirit of the challenge it poses. I don't exactly believe what I'm writing below, I'm just trying to make the discussion productive by providing a bridge.

You've got "we" group them there, which ultimately comes down to why "we" get to form propositions like f( a ) to begin with, right? What the algebra is doing is modelling sentences like "there are rocks" by associating that with a sentence in the logic like "there is at least one x such that x is in R", and R is just a list of rocks. Even if we say God invented the constant symbols we still have to make the predicates.

What that does, if you don't grant the existence of "truthbearers" in a world to begin with, is stop you from forming sentences like "there are rocks" using that algebra in that world. In that world the predicate "is a rock" isn't an empty predicate - it's also not truth-apt as it's missing an argument. The quantified expression "there are rocks" is, however, blocked from being formed. Why? Because what's at stake is whether it makes sense to be able to form it in that world.

What about "outside" that world? @Michael and I got into that a bit. Because there's definitely resources to define sentences independently of worlds, and if you took a world without humans but which had rocks, "there are rocks" somehow makes sense for it (truth@ but not truth-in), even though truthbearers don't... exist... in the same way for that world as they seem to when humans are about. We're still working on that I think.

An yet {a} is still a member of {a,c}, even if there is no one in the world to say it. — Banno

That would be true@. Or T_@ as I called it in a prior post. As in "there is an x such that x is a" is true when quantified over that domain. Which @Michael seems to accept as a cromulent thing. For you that seems to be the only way to talk about true and false, which I called T_R in my attempt at clarification. T_@ looks to be your "true". But truth-in works more like {"there is x" is T_I with regard to W} iff {x in W & a truthbearer for "there is x" is in W}, which is T_@ for x and also T_@ but applied to sentences.

Hence the confusion in thread IMO. You end up having the ability to form sentences being some weird transworldly thing, because it still makes sense if you stipulated a whole bunch of possible worlds with no truthbearers in them. Which is odd when the logic is supposed to describe how sentences work. It'd be like saying recipes exist without food.

Which chimes with:

The platonist places true and false propositions inside the World B circle even though there's nobody in World B to say those things, and I don't think that makes any sense. — Michael

I don't care too much about which account is true, they both seem like cromulent ways of doing business. It's just two ways of answering "If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it does it make a sound...", Michael says no or "mu" or "cannot compute", @Banno says yes, in ye olde page 2-10 @Leontiskos sort of says "yes, because God hears it" and @Wayfarer sort of says "no, because what it means to be a sound is to be heard".

You're in a similar position to saying that "2+2=4" isn't true on the domain {1,3}, because there's no symbol for "2+2=4". Which isn't to say that it's false, it's to say that it's not there.

"There is gold" is true in A. "There is gold" doesn't exist in A-H. — Michael

Aye! That makes the interpretation function partial. Because it doesn't exist. Or you assign the result of the interpretation to "mu" or something. Or you keep it as false and a total function with bivalence.

You're doing it right now. — Michael

I was doing it right before, under the assumption that the interpretation had to be bivalent and not partial. But it's at least not one of them, so you're in a totally different land truth value wise to what it appeared for the rest of the thread. True, false, "unassigned" - that's you!

I don't understand this. T — Michael

Here's a worked example.

This is our actual world, A.
There is possible world connected to ours with no humans, as if we were all instantly deleted. Call it A-H.

Just assume that a world with humans has all the truthbearers you'd wish.

There's gold in A. There's gold in A-H. Gold is an entity in both of their domains.
"There is gold" is true at A, "There is gold" is true at A-H.
"There is gold" is true in A. "There is gold" is false in A-H.

Make sense so far?

Alright, so there's this whole logic surrounding all of this. There's a bunch of possible worlds, the actual world... And in that whole system, it turns out to be the case that:

A) "There is gold" is true at A, "There is gold" is true at A-H.
B) "There is gold" is true in A. "There is gold" is false in A-H.

I've bolded "this case". It's a sense of satisfaction, truth, whatevs. That's something which is the case about... a system of possible worlds. Which isn't a possible world, it's a set of them... it has different semantics. So there's a sense of satisfaction, truth, blah which isn't true@... But it's true of the whole system of worlds. If you took the list of all possible worlds in your system of possible worlds, that system of possible worlds would satisfy {"There is gold" is true at A-H}, now is that satisfaction a satisfaction of truth@ or truth-in? It's neither, because it doesn't concern a world. But it concerns all the worlds... So it's transworld in some sense.

In addition, imagine who could possibly make the speech act that "There is gold" is true at A-H. No one could, there's no one with language in A-H. Which means there's a sense of truth which applies of entities in worlds with no humans. A mind independent truth. And it's truth@.

Which thus means that there's two forms of not mind dependent truth if you retain both truth@ and truth-in as part of your account of truth - you've got truth@ from the latter, and some broader metalogical sense of satisfaction regarding systems of possible worlds which you use to set up truth@ and truth-in in the first place.

Then let's assume you're an anti-platonist, that means you jettison truth@ entirely because of the above mind independence. Which means there's only truth-in. When then means it's either false or incoherent to say it's true that there's gold when there's no humans. Or you take another bull's horn and do something fancy with partial functions and a third truth value.

Maybe the issue is that you and I have very different interpretations of the difference between truth in a world and truth at a world.

All I mean is to make this distinction:

1. Something true can be said about a world without language (truth at a world)
2. Nothing true can be said in a world without language (truth in a world)

And if platonism is incorrect then saying something true or false is all there is to truth and falsity – there are no mind-independent abstract truth-bearers. — Michael

Yeah the distinction makes sense. In the context of the thread, though, it interacts very oddly with lots of things. Truth at a world is something that can obtain of a world without there being truthbearers in it, which would be odd if there were no sense of truth which applied to a world with no truthbearers. In essence, p1 to 20ish of that discussion took to quantifying over truthbearers within a world and saying if no truthbearers, no truths in any sense. Now there are truths in some sense which concern a world and its entities, without necessarily being true in it.

Moreover, your opponents are arguing that to be true is to be true in a world - I think that's what you see it as anyway. And you say that this entails a platonism, like it's a bad thing? But truth at a world has the same trans-world property that made truth in a world incoherent, for you, with regard to truths. So in some sense the following is the case: {that "there is gold" is true at a world}, and that is a fact about a system of possible worlds. And the sense of truth, and the statement {that "there is gold" is true at a world} is something which is transworld, mind-independent, and doesn't care if there are people there or not. If that is stipulated to be a bad thing, making the distinction between truth at and truth in while keeping both in your model of truth concerning possible worlds keeps the bad thing.

Whereas in p1 to 20ish of the thread, the "bad thing" was blocked, because people were explicitly focussing on, and advancing, the (alleged) incoherence of there being truths with no truthbearers. Now it's not incoherent, it's simply platonist. And your interlocutor which keeps true@ and true-in in their account also has one "platonist" account of propositions, true-@. Which isn't really "platonist", it's just transworld, metalogical, whatever. Unless a sense of truth which concerns a world or its elements is platonist when and only when there are no truthbearers in that world but there are truths which concern it or its entities.

C'mooon!

All I'm saying is the usual thing in a discussion like this. That your stated position entails things you are claiming to disagree with. Which is what counts as a criticism or refutation attempt. That's been the crux of the thread. I've spelled out what that meant. Your T_@ behaves the same as their T_R, so your T_@ entails their T_R - that implication doesn't really follow, but everyone is behaving as if it does.

And people are behaving as if it does because no one's arguing about what the appropriate truth concept is for possible worlds directly, only appealing to common sense about it.

C'mooon man, you know as well as I do that repeatedly shifting the frame of the discussion away from how people are disagreeing with you stops people from having a productive discussion. Can we not have another 32 pages of it. I've provided you a very, very thorough breakdown here. It's your choice whether you want to engage with it or not.

I'm simply not saying either.

With what? The problem as I see it as that you and others think I'm saying something I'm not and now you're criticising me for not defending what I'm not saying. — Michael

I am not simply saying that you're simply saying something that you're not saying, I'm saying that what you're not saying simply is part of what you're simply saying, even if you think you've simply said nothing of the sort.

I am simply saying that you are simply refusing to play ball.

That is all. — Michael

You're a philosopher, you can't say just what you've said. That's not how it works. You say all the things you might be committed to under some utterly insane interpretation, which also happens to be your own when held up to the light in the court of reason.

I don't think there's anything absurd or counterintuitive about us using the English language to describe possible (non-actual) or counterfactuals worlds. — Michael

The absurd and counterintuitive things occur because you have a contestable interpretation of how that works, just like your debate partners do!

If you're referring to C2 and C3 here, I do explain how we avoid them. The issue isn't with anything I have been saying but with the T-schema being imprecise (or misinterpreted). — Michael

I'm not. Nothing in what you've written seems relevant to the T-schema at all, you've got two different senses of interpretation, both of which could be analysed in terms of a T schema. "X" is true iff X. Your use of "true at" is making a different kind of model of the system of possible worlds the "right" kind of model for this scenario than "true in" would, and both senses of "true" could be T-schema'd.

I don't think there's anything absurd or counterintuitive about us using the English language to describe possible (non-actual) or counterfactuals worlds. — Michael

Which is what makes the above a bit tendentious. Because this discussion is bottoming out in the appropriate way to think of modelling networks of possible worlds. Which, honestly, is not the kind of thing everyday language settles at all.

You've shifted the debate terrain to a distinction between "true at" and "true in", but "true at" behaves exactly the same as your opponents' "true". If you call your opponents truth concept T_R, True at T_@ and true in T_I. Pick an element w of a world W, and call the sentence "there is w" S( w ) then the following have been stipulated to hold of existence claims:

A) S( w ) is T_R at W iff S( w ) is T_@ at W.
B) S( w ) is T_R at W iff w is in W.
C) S( w ) is T_I at W iff {w is in W & S ( w ) is in W}
D) S( w ) is T_R at W iff w is in W

T-sentences could be constructed for any sense of truth. The work they're doing is just by saying there's one sense of "true" without arguing about how the interpretation function should work with possible worlds - as if that interpretation function is innate in language. What you wrote above commits the same "appeal to intuition" which has been the unproductive engine of this entire thread.

My reading of what's gone on so far is the following clusterfuck:

A) S( w ) Is T_R at W iff S( w ) is T_@ at W
+
C) S( w ) is T_I at W iff {w is in W & S ( w ) is in W}

Gives you:
D) S( w ) is T_I at W iff {S( w ) is T_R at W & S ( w ) is in W)
which gives you:
E) S( w ) is T_I at W implies S( w ) is T_R at W
by taking one conjunct of the biconditonal then taking a conjunct of its right hand side through conditional proof.

In effect the conjunction doesn't save T_I and T_R from equivocating at W, you need an implication or another contraption. As in you somehow need T_I to only evaluate S ( w ) as true in worlds where S( w ) is and w is - a restriction on appropriate interpretations of possible worlds, rather than of their domains. Or alternatively something like {w in W implies S( w ) is T_I}, which is what it was supposed to inhibit, and its contrapositive makes existence depend upon the existence of sentences.

It could be that you pick something not bivalent for the assignment function, or make it a partial function somehow, which would mean that worlds which have w in them but not an S( w ) simply don't assign any truth value for S( w ), or assign S( w ) a third truth value "mu" in a world where w is but S( w ) is not.

You'll probably claim that it's your opponents who are equivocating T_I with T_R, your opponents will claim you're equivocating T_R with T_I, and IMO everyone's right, but no one's actually arguing about what they disagree about.

Which is this:

In effect the conjunction doesn't save T_I and T_R from equivocating at W, you need an implication or another contraption. As in you somehow need T_I to only evaluate S ( w ) as true in worlds where S( w ) is and w is - a restriction on appropriate interpretations of possible worlds, rather than of their domains. Or alternatively something like {w in W implies S( w ) is T_@}, which is what it was supposed to inhibit.

Equivocating between the two can take the form "regardless of the status of language in the world, S ( w ) is true or false based on the entities in it" - which as I understand it is what you're picking a fight with, and are interpreting your opponents as saying. Or it can take the form "regardless of the status of language in the world, w in W implies S( w ) is true", in the latter case that true is a T_R... but it implies a T_I and a T_@, and it isn't T_I if there's no S( w )!

In terms of this:

A) S( w ) is T_R at W iff S( w ) is T_@ at W.
B) S( w ) is T_R at W iff w is in W.
C) S( w ) is T_I at W iff {w is in W & S ( w ) is in W}
D) S( w ) is T_R at W iff w is in W

Your opponents are hesitant to allow S( w ) to be a domain element, which means they might doubt C. You're not going to accept B, since you don't have a T_R, you have a T_I and a T_@. Your opponents and you believe in D, but you parse D as a definition of T_@ and they parse it as the definition of T_R - and you're both right.

and so therefore nothing that exists in a world without language has the property of being either true or false. — Michael

Entities aren't true or false though? Unless they're sentences. "there is a rock" is true or false. The rock isn't true or false. This might be a pedantic point but I don't know.

I don't think that this is anything controversial (unless you agree with platonism) or substantial, and so I don't understand the resistance I'm facing. I can only assume that people are thinking I'm saying something I'm not. — Michael

It's presumably because the things you're saying appear to entail lots of absurd and counterintuitive things. Much like the idea that propositions are somehow trans-world and nevertheless language items, which you're criticising.

Mostly as @Srap Tasmaner said earlier. It's quite silly to have a discussion where everyone's appealing to uncontroversial common sense.

I know. — Michael

It would just be that "this world has objects in it" isn't true when you deprive a world of of language. But if you can somehow speak "about" the world, like "at" the world, I have honestly no idea what the point of this discussion is. If we were trying to avoid speaking about worlds when they have no truthbearers why are we suddenly allowed to have an entire new modality associated with the ability to speak about worlds that have no truthbearers in them? The "true at" concept is free floating - interworldly, doesn't care about whether speakers exist in this or that world - in precisely the same manner as the one being criticised.

The conceptualist may claim that propositions can be true at worlds without being true in them, by analogy with the examples from Pollock and Buridan. A proposition like <there are no propositions> is true at certain possible worlds but true in none. — Michael

The world isn't empty without language in it though. There'll still be rocks and gold. Which will mean statements like "this is gold" evaluates to true in that world, not just at it.

A world absent propositions in such a logic would be quite different again, since propositions aren't world objects. As in, "there is gold in this world or there is not gold in this world" is a statement true even of an empty world (with an appropriate logic) since it's a tautology of that logic, but there is no gold.

Treating propositions as world objects also commits an odd kind of syntax error. An example, saying "there is gold", would mean that world has gold as an element in it. The presence of the propositional symbol "{the sentence "there is gold}" doesn't entail anything about whether gold is in that world. So in that world "there is gold" is true even though {the sentence "there is gold"} isn't a domain element.

In effect you've stipulated a flavour of logic by specifying an interpretation mechanism for worlds - every interpretation of worlds which interprets "there is gold" as true must have a domain element {the sentence "there is gold"}.

This isn't to say that the distinction you've used between truth in and truth at a world is a bad one, it's just that it behaves more like a stipulation about modality which should be defended on its own terms. How you're using it would have to defend that a world which has a set of entities T but no corresponding "there is..." sentences would have the same theorems about it as an empty world - even though gold could be an element of the first world and not in the second.

In terms of the metalogic, that makes the truth of the matter whether there is gold in the world depend upon whether there is a person there to see it. But in a vacuous sense, since there are no descriptions to be true or false.

Irrelevant, for reasons I already mentioned. There is no real need to be concerned over what happens to others if one is dead. All that stuff vanishes so why should it matter if other people hurt? — Darkneos

One is not dead when one is deciding whether one should be dead. What you just wrote frames the debate as if someone who is already dead is trying to decide if they should kill themselves. Usually someone is in the former case and not the latter.

To make a case against it you'd have to engage with why living would be preferable when it's not a requirement to be alive. — Darkneos

I suppose if you contrast a life which stops now, and a life which stops in the future, if you believed the life which stops now accumulates less net suffering (what's good - what's bad) than the life which stops later, that would be a "good reason" to end it.

Where other people come in is that there's a presumption in your posts so far that the person considering suicide's suffering is more important than the suffering of those they leave behind. It's a big gamble there, as a sudden death is the kind of thing that can ruin loved ones' lives. NB it does not matter if the person who wants to commit suicide loves them back, those who loves' wounds matter equally. Well not necessarily, but it's a good principle to believe that every person's suffering is of equal note all else held equal. Though perhaps that is obviated if our hypothetical person who wishes to die has people who love them.

Yes, I am saying it can be more moral to trap yourself in a cage of others' love than to end it. Even if your life is so worthless that it might as well not have been, for you, that does not mean others share that valuation. A person ending themselves in that instance deprives others of something they cherish: them.

Oh I know this doesn’t work because I’ve done this most of my life and it’s just as hollow and empty as the pleasure of the self you seem to place less importance on. — Darkneos

Is there a way you'd prefer people to respond to you in the thread?

@Darkneos The following is your post:

___

I didn't appreciate the last thread being closed as I asked a serious question about the worth of life and was proven right about what I said about the value of said life and the bias that we have towards it. Society won't ever really advice if people are too scared to talk about why one should persist instead of end it when there isn't any compulsion to keep going.

People there said this isn't the place for it or to seek professional help, which just highlights the problem. That this can't be talked about without suggesting something is wrong with the person, so long as people have that "sweeping it under the rug" mentality we aren't ever going to get an answer to the question. The fear of talking about life being worth living implies a fear of the answers.

It's easier to label such people sick or mentally unwell because that way we don't have to deal with the discussion. I mean...they have to be sick or something to not want to live anymore right? There can't be good reasons for it right? To me that just sounds like people are afraid of the answers and how someone can be lucid and still want it.

The answers in the last thread that I got like love don't really answer the question and I explained why with my first post. Such things only carry weight if one must live or is not able to die.

Stuff like this:

This is the first and last question that philosophy must answer - 'What's the point?' The answer is "love". If you wonder what love is, I can only tell you that it is what you lack, whenever you ask this question. Suicide makes sense if there is no love, but only self. We are not here to be satisfied, but to become satisfactory.

Just dodges the question. Therapists can't help with the question because their assumption is that something is wrong with the person for questioning the notion of going further, which assumes the conclusion. They are biased like everyone else and don't have answers to the question. People just assume it's self evident because of survival drive but if that was the case a lot of people likely wouldn't consider it an option.

And this:

Sure, it's a good question. The average person, no matter if they "came" from wealth or poverty, sometimes wonders, if they died right now, who would miss them? Why and for what? At the end of the day every person that lives and walks was brought into their circumstance outside of their will and simply tumbled out of a womb. Why do we value one over another? Because of the perceived power they have. That's all. Your depression is an absolute lie. And I could prove it, easily. If I haven't had my eye set on much higher sights. Perhaps you should just refocus your own. Given the fact you've been given everything.

Is an utter non answer. Never mind that depression isn't a lie, but that's not what's happening here and I think that also just sweeps it under the rug to avoid a serious talk on the question. Though it does beg the question that if someone is "Given everything" and still wants to opt out then why?

I also find hind sight bias plays a big role in people saying life is worth it. Just because your life worked out doesn't mean others would and wanting them to stick around for your sake and sanity in the rightness of your choice is selfish. People have to stop being so scared to talk about death and the value of life.

So yeah, I'll restate my last argument in the previous thread I made, please don't close this one. I feel like it does a disservice to philosophy to dodge difficult questions.

__

If you feel like rewriting it as a response in this thread, do so.

(Bolds added. Moderator: I am cognizant of the prohibition against using ChatGPT to generate posts, but here the point is rhetorical and the usage openly acknowledged.) — Wayfarer

You've made two responses in a single post, the top seems to be your original work and the bottom is entirely chatGPT. I believe this is against the spirit of the prohibition while satisfying its letter.

Holy necro batman, I'm closing it.

Folks in this thread see mind as accidental to truth. They seem to think that the world is a database of Platonic truths, and when a mind comes on the scene it can begin to download those truths. — Leontiskos

I see what you mean. The world is seen as a database of propositional forms, if you'll pardon the pun. But criticising that is another thread.

That's just a matter of tense. — Michael

I'll make one more remark on the matter. Just to highlight the possibility of the debate, rather than to actually have it with you - I've no interest in that. If you assert "there are dinosaurs at t", where t is a time when there are dinosaurs... It's true. But "there are dinosaurs at t" cannot be true at t, since there were no truthbearers at t.

I don't see why that's a complication? — Michael

Because it quantifies into a context in which there are no truthbearers. In that condition no one could assert that there were dinosaurs, so "there are dinosaurs" isn't true at that point in time. Even though there were dinosaurs at that point in time... now.

Which I thought I made very clear here, but I guess not. — Michael

It's complicated by the fact that any theory of truth worth its salt should evaluate "There were rocks before the advent of humans" as true. Since there were. But the context of evaluation is somehow here and now - which allows some conditioning operation by a mind or language, and somehow back then - which means thinking about evaluation as inherently counterfactual.

24 pages on we've got people arguing over which flavour of language dependence dinosaurs had when they existed, I mean when "dinosaurs existed" was true, through the medium of the equivalence between the latter and the former which a successful theory of truth must provide.

His "modal context" workaround is apparently to say that it is not true that gold exists, but it would be true were there a mind. And there's no dinking around with the incoherent, "Gold exists but it's not true that gold exists." Such is a classical answer. — Leontiskos

Yeah. Can there be truth without a truthbearer? Seems to me a different question to whether there can be rocks on earth without humans. People treating language as a required interface between mind and world, as if they were apart from each other.

So the claim is that when all life dies out there will be gold in Boorara but no truths or falsehoods because there will be no propositions. — Michael

Question asked out of curiosity. In your view, if you imagined a hypothetical completely fictional observer of Boorara, and you imagined them as having a fully formed grasp of the English language and the cultural contexts required for its use... If they then said, "There is gold in Boorara", it would be true?

So I'm asking:
1 ) Take the world without humans.
2 ) Imagine that nevertheless one human existed.
3 ) Get that human to look at Boorara.
4 ) Imagine that human asserts "There is gold in Boorara".

The assertion in ( 4 ) would then be a true assertion, right? But there were no asserters in ( 1 ), so no assertions, so no true assertions. But that process still gives you a roundabout way of mapping a state of affairs (the gold being in Boorara) to an assertion ("There is gold in Boorara"), albeit now through modal contexts.

Not defending "mind independent" truth here. just asking.

:up: