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

The ethical concerns regarding proper treatment of others in discourse aside, I spelled out a similar distaste for the idea to @Banno earlier in the thread. I think the author's onto something, but I think it's an insufficiently procedural description to actually get at how people can triangulate to a common understanding, or at least refine an area of disagreement, through reference to shared phenomena (interpreted under theory ladened aspect and spoken about in a theory ladened language with different emphasis on terms between people). I don't generally like this argument pattern, but I will use it here; it'd be a bloody miracle that any sort of triangulation could happen at all if there wasn't something "truthy" or representative about semantic content, and of necessity that has to be sufficiently shareable to count as such.

This is probably another thread to pull on separate from the more concrete analysis Srap and Moliere are doing. How many layers of metaphilosophy are we on now?

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

I don't think it fits neatly into either. You can't do an experiment to see what interpretive frame is appropriate for a task. There's no manual for resolving differences of this sort. I think all you can hope for is that there's some reference to small t truths where appropriate, when you're trying to jostle worldviews about.

There's also probably a relevant side discussion we could have about how it can be possible that I'm in a house when in some sense the house is made mostly of the void between atom parts, but it's another of those side discussions. I tried to allude to this with the scientific vs manifest image reference; if all we're doing is exposing hooks in the manifest image (folk theory, how discourse structures thought about stuff) for better theory, among the discussants, and learning our way about the shared space of concepts, that's good enough for me.

Given that we're in the wild-wild west of concepts, small-t truth and some charity might be the only thing holding our conversation together, especially when it comes to something as amorphous and difficult to describe as the mind, in general. — Moliere

I think this is very perceptive, observations, introspection on experience, scientific data and what makes sense to believe is common knowledge seem quite like tent pins for the discussion here. We've got all these concepts flying about in the wind, and very little fixity to them. Attributing these commonalities small t-truth seems a necessary part of progression; like you can't sensibly doubt your instrument at the same time as calibrating something to its output.

I think that is also something quite close to Davidson's thesis of 'radical interpretation'.

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

Assuming you are still baffled and this isn't a rhetorical gesture. A common reference point would probably be the idea that perceptions are cognitive endeavours, are linguistically mediated in a delayed fashion, and are definitely theory ladened. So's the more general (though perhaps physiologically derivative) category of interpretation. Being able to puzzle out commitments and background assumptions is what, I believe, this kind of discussion is particularly good at. Please forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe you are promoting a discussion of the same character by trying to tease out the other discussants background assumptions while holding what they (we) believe as an object of (noncommital) scrutiny. By the looks of it, it's the same device.

If it's genuine bafflement, and not a rhetorical strategy, I don't think I can help you understand the discussion more than that.

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

I think you're construing the discussion as introspecting about the nature of mental states, whereas (if I'm following), when it relies on introspection about mental states or behaviours, it's relies on them as observations in a context. It isn't as if we're doing the whole Cartesian thing of solipsistically examining the preconditions of our thoughts, it's that we've got a partially shared but conflicted mutual understanding of an issue. Is this the kind of issue which even is amenable to direct answer by experiment? I doubt it, in the same manner that "cognition" and "aroused state" have observable analogues but there's a whole, underdetermined, theory linking physiological and behavioural observations to those constructs. If you wanted to critique an experiment into cognition or aroused states, one way of showing a flaw in it would be a tenuous relationship of the theorised construct to the observations; and that's a matter of relevance and interpretation as well as observation.

Would you be similarly baffled by people talking about a society and saying it works partly through norms of conduct? "But the norms are observable", "Yes, and you need to tell me what kind of entity they are before any of this makes any sense whatsoever!"

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

No worries, if you feel like making a thread about it, it would be a good discussion. Isaac vs the very idea of analysing concepts in philosophy!

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

I think going into this would derail the thread. If you want an answer to it, I'd gesture towards that analysing concepts and comparing intuitions doesn't need you to do experiments. If you genuinely are confused by it, you seemed to understand the methodology behind some Dennett vs Chalmers arguments people've had on the forum. It's the same thing, only we're worse at it.

If you want more of a theoretical gloss on it, I think discussions like this are useful from the perspective of building a bridge between manifest and scientific images. Will quote at length from SEP below, from the article on Sellars. tl;dr for the quote, it's still worthwhile examining concepts and intuitions because doing so also influences how folk metaphysics places constraints on experiments you'd do later - the metaphysical imagination suffusing folk and non-folk theories alike.

That's an interesting contrast. It looks to me like Moliere is construing a belief as an ephemeral mental state, whereas @Srap Tasmaner is construing belief as a continual behavioural disposition. It strikes me that these ideas are not in direct conflict. This is because it could be the case that a continual behavioural disposition comes equipped with the ability to recreate the state of mind and action to exhibit what is believed as a transitory state. — fdrake

I think I misread @Moliere actually, am I right in thinking that your account places less stress on beliefs being mental states, and more on the process of recreating a competence? It doesn't matter so much if beliefs are "mental furniture", it just matters that some process recreates them. If someone has the capacity to recreate a competence, or a tendency to behave/process as if a given thing is true, then they can be said to believe it. Does that sound about right?

Knowledge is precisely that belief-like state that persists over time without being recreated, reimagined, or re-experienced. We have imperfect access to the knowledge we possess, and we can lose knowledge, but the knowledge we possess we possess continuously. — Srap Tasmaner

But that would mean we still disagree on psychologies, even when we are talking about the mental -- where basically I think of memory and beliefs-held as a creative process that is re-enacted, you'd say that we can recall the real knowledge we have and that that at least is not a re-creation, but a has-been-created. — Moliere

That's an interesting contrast. It looks to me like @Moliere is construing a belief as an ephemeral mental state, whereas @Srap Tasmaner is construing belief as a continual behavioural disposition. It strikes me that these ideas are not in direct conflict. This is because it could be the case that a continual behavioural disposition comes equipped with the ability to recreate the state of mind and action to exhibit what is believed as a transitory state.

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

That's also plausible, but at this point, I don't even know how best to characterize what a disagreement over facts is, much less resolve it, much less discern its origin. I want to try to stick to my little model a bit longer to force myself to say exactly what's going on if I can, rather than take anything for granted. — Srap Tasmaner

Makes sense. I think that's a worthwhile thing to do Srap. I wanted to put that there largely to muddy the waters, so we don't lose track entirely of the shape of things while pulling on the thread. The "secret motivation" I have for that is I'm suspicious that a sentence+truth based account would break when it starts needing ideas about the other levels.

The man's a philostudpher.

Also, thanks for the "nice". : D

We make the most of one another's posts by interpreting them in ways which maximise agreement... — Banno

Yes, and often the best way to maximise agreement is to gently focus on vital contrasts.

Like relevance and intelligibility being cognitive, conceptual, bodily and perceptual categories which impact interpretation of scenarios, whereas quibbles of fact tend to concern things which are easy to model as attitudes towards statements. Relevance impacts the assignment pattern of attitudes to statements of an individual or group, intelligibility impacts the assignment of an interpretive context itself to the scenario in which patterns of attitudes and fact like beliefs are formed.

I think @apokrisis is decently close to this as well - if you focus on what makes a context able to express stuff, you end up studying how lifeworlds/forms of life end up with stable patterns in them... Like norms of language itself. In some respect relevance and intelligibility are broader semiotic categories than those involved in the semantics of sentences.

and others are thinking about -- and maybe even posting! -- their own accounts of disagreement? — Srap Tasmaner

I don't really have an account of disagreement. Just some remarks. Probably somewhat close to @Joshs here.

If people can disagree on whether something is true or false, they've already gone most of the way toward agreement. The majority of disagreements are not quibbles about the facts, they are quibbles about the lenses through which we view the world. The majority of those quibbles about the lenses through which we view the world are also not about whether their constituents are true, or more often true, the majority of the time they are instead about whether they are appropriate, relevant, fit for task, permissible, understandable, intelligible, aesthetically pleasing, shite, exemplary or worth noting at all.

Some of those differences are much more fundamental than the others; disagreeing on whether something is permissible is quite different from disagreeing on whether something is intelligible. The former is a case like truth, in which most things are already fixed, the latter is not. So there are at least two types.

As a rough guide, it might be worthwhile partitioning disagreements into quibbles of fact, quibbles of relevance and quibbles of intelligibility. A quibble of fact will be when two people disagree on the truth of a claim, the accuracy of an approach, or whether something is fit for purpose. The distinguishing feature of a quibble of fact is that all quibbling parties are highly attuned to the same context, have the same vantage point on that context, and disagree about which one of a series of options obtains within that vantage. Black or white or blue, right or wrong, accurate or inaccurate.

Two paradigmatic example of a quibble of fact may be when a couple is having an earnest dispute over whether they can afford to eat at a restaurant one evening. Another example would be whether it's right to eat meat. The defining feature of the quibble isn't whether it's to do with truth or falsity or norms, it's about the background of the disagreement being fixed and two people having contrary takes on the same matter; fact value + subjective objective distinctions be damned.

A quibble of relevance is when two parties disagree more fundamentally than a quibble of fact, as they bring different vantage points to an issue which is the root of the conflict. A quibble of relevance is a conflict of broader conceptual frameworks and patterns of association that link individuals' worldviews together. The conflict arises from people systematising the world sufficiently differently in a scenario that they no longer can come to a quibble of fact about related issues without substantial exploratory work and the willingness to foster mutual understanding. A sign of a quibble of relevance is when quibblers bring much different facts, with much different styles of linkage between them, yet each appears to be directed towards the same issue. This is a disagreement within the same context.

Two paradigmatic examples of a quibble of relevance may be when a couple are having what feels like an earnest dispute over whether they can afford eating at a restaurant one evening; in this case however, this is really a dispute arising from one quibbler's simultaneous inability to be arsed to go out that evening and dislike of disappointing their partner through such a request; it must then be articulated through an impersonal, objective standard. Another example of this would be whether culturing individual and communal conduct is an essential part of the rules of ethical decision making; you will see it as necessarily relevant if you're into virtue ethics, but contingently so if you're a hedonist.
People will often behave as if they are in a quibble of fact, whereas they are actually in a quibble of relevance. It can be difficult to tell as misfiring connections between ideas, which people treat as if they are shared, tend to resist probing as they form part of the vantage by which probing is done. This is a disagreement on which context people operate within.

The final and most fundamental type of disagreement is a quibble of intelligibility. This is a case where two people's views on a scenario diverge so much that it would be almost impossible for one to understand the other. At least without living differently, or having had a different set of experiences. A common source of quibbles of intelligibility is when quibblers have much different embodied standpoints or life experiences. For example, a doting single parent of 5 and a widower antinatalist in a discussion of love for their children. While work can be done to commensurate their experiences, little can be done to address the fundamental difference in generative+maintenance mechanisms for quibblers' perspectives once one has developed. It takes work to establish any momentary bridge between these quibblers in any scenario related to their quibbling. A philosophical example may be (hopefully it doesn't derail the thread) those who easily intuit their experiences as qualia and those who do not. This is less of an individual disagreement, and more a fundamental difference in quibblers which tends to make them assign different contexts to the same information.

These types of quibbles form a hierarchy of constraints. Quibbles of intelligibility > quibble of relevance > quibble of fact. Currently having one in the list prevents the quibblers from having the quibbles higher up.

I believe any theory about recognising whether something is wrong from a disagreement could be done in one of two ways; you build up or you build down. Building up from fact to relevance to intelligibility, or going down from intelligibility to fact.

To my understanding, Davidson's procedure is bottom up; building the world iteratively through expressions linking to truth conditions through their meaning, and meaning (of sentences) being the agent of truth. The idea is to show that there are stable networks of facts, which allow productive disagreements and evaluation of relevance, that block the most severe quibbles of intelligibility from happening.

Building down is a more Heideggerian angle on it; quibbles of intelligibility happen, if they didn't there'd be no chance of having quibbles of relevance, quibbles of relevance happen, if they didn't there'd be no chance of having quibbles of fact, facts happen, so we can quibble about them. Intelligibility and perspective holding are also highlighted in this account.

A "model" in each case is a context of interpretation. Quibbles of fact have the same model shared between involved parties, quibbles of relevance have different models between involved parties, quibbles of intelligibility have different model generating mechanisms as well as different models between involved parties.

Any strenuous objections so far? — Srap Tasmaner

Seems like a good angle of approach to me. I think it's a good way into the role truth - or like concepts such as accuracy and felicity - might play in explaining how language touches the world.

Per the RHS sentence, we can either use it (to express something about the world) or mention it (in order to express something about the sentence itself). The following passage explains Tarski's view on this (bold mine). — Andrew M

Makes sense, cheers. Question though. The source uses the word "correspondence" in the context of mapping expressions of language and concerned objects, is that meant as fleshing out a correspondence theory, or is it meant in an informal sense of "an explanatory relation of equivalence"

@Srap Tasmaner

If there's confusion about what I meant with "exterior" in the scare quotes, what I meant was the usual 'things are they are in themselves' in contrast to 'things as they are for us'. This was intended to resonate with the non-linguistic ('things as they are in themselves') vs linguistic ('things as they are for us') distinction in context.

I don't disagree, but it's just so poorly expressed... which I would put down to your trying to make use of the nonsense of "external reality". — Banno

I'm glad you knew what I meant!

That's pretty plausible, but I wouldn't presume to say what Davidson has chosen not quite to say. — Srap Tasmaner

Makes sense! I took too many liberties there.

Why not link the linguistic and the pre or non-linguistic, so that we can say it is not language per se that constrains and limits the intelligibility of the world, but each persons’s integrated history of understanding in general that ‘blocks’ some ways of thinking while enabling others? I would argue that the most important superordinate aspects of our ways of understanding the world, those with the greatest potential to limit what is intelligible to us, is often too murky to be linguistically articulated by us, and yet it drives our greatest hopes and fears. I would also add that our discursive schemes are only partially shared, which means that they are contested between us in each usage. — Joshs

Go read "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme" to find out why not!

I don't think @Banno sees it like this, but I think Davidson is quite close to Kant on this 'access to exterior reality' point. Language plays a regulative and limiting role in what can be expressed, and it's also practical and publicly negotiated. It's sort of like a communally constituted, constantly evolving conceptual scheme that 'blocks' intelligible access to a presumably "non-linguistic" shared reality. There's a veil, but it's not a veil of perception on the nature of things, it's a veil shared conduct places on what is intelligible. It smells a lot like transcendental idealism. "There is no uninterpreted reality" is extremely close in spirit to "all experience is governed by a conceptual scheme". There's just one diffuse, distributed, constantly evolving regime of intelligibility which is equivalent to shared patterns of language, and it's linked to the world through truth.

Starts out wrong with non-linguistic states of affairs and goes down hill from there. — Banno

This a "No uninterpreted reality" thingybob?

In giving up dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside all schemes and science, we do not relinquish the notion of objective truth -quite the contrary.
Given the dogma of a dualism of scheme and reality, we get conceptual relativity, and truth relative to a scheme. Without the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board. Of course truth of sentences remains relative to language, but that is as objective as can be. In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but reestablish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false

From On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.

Yes, I see. And that is the objection I've had to Pie's position from the outset - that the truth bearer, P, is not identical to the fact that P describes. So P is not identical with the world, otherwise we are still talking about a sentence. But if we maintain the distinction between sentence and world, and if P is equivalent to the world, then I don't see how that's different to correspondence. — Luke

I see what you mean I think! Would like to see a discussion on how the RHS relates to the world, and how it differs to correspondence.

↪fdrake Perhaps an understanding of the right hand side is not something to be set out in a bunch of rules, bit demonstrated by pouring the water into the teapot. — Banno

Eh, an understanding that the RHS of the T-sentence is identical to the world is a metaphysical position, it would be demonstrated by an argument in philosophy. I'm fairly sure people have been quibbling about whether Davidson is an anti-realist or a realist or whether he breaks the distinction for years for this reason!

I think there's a difference, or at least a reason to be suspicious of one. When you disquote a sentence, you still end up with a sentence. But when you go and do stuff, you can't grab a sentence. "fdrake boiled the kettle" is true iff fdrake boiled the kettle. Is the RHS identical with my boiling of the kettle or is it equivalent to it? To put it another way, is the RHS of the statement there ""fdrake boiled the kettle" is true iff fdrake boiled a kettle"" literally identical to my boiling of the kettle? And if it is, why haven't I made my bedtime tea yet?

This describes is the relationship between the left- and right-hand sides of a T sentence, not the relationship between the right-hand side and the world. — Luke

Absolutely. And it's the identity of the right hand side and the world which is at stake.

Is there a difference between a proposition being identical to a fact and being equivalent to a fact? — Luke

I think so. Imagine that "x" is true iff P and "y" is true iff P, then "x" and "y" are truth functionally equivalent but not necessarily identical. Another analogy, if you relabelled all the integers by writing them upside down, but kept the laws of arithmetic the same, that structure would be equivalent to the standard integers with arithmetic, but not identical because the set of symbols differ. Equivalence is weaker than identity.

Another example, "corresponds to the same fact" would be an equivalence relation on statements which could correspond to facts, but they wouldn't have to be the same statement. Like "water is H2O" and "water is dihydrogen oxide". : D

To make a proposition identical to a worldly item or event is a much harder endeavour than to say it's somehow equivalent to one.

And the Lagomorpha Oryctolagus cuniculus is a Anatidae. — Banno

There's a whole theory about the relationship of the RHS to the world which needs to be exposited for that demonstration to go through!

The bolded bit doesn't correspond to a fact, it is a fact. — Banno

Quibbling on it, is it identical to a fact or is it equivalent to one? Given that we already know the RHS is not the world, it's a proposition.

Indeed. In other words, on the assumption that what can be said, can be said. — Banno

Semantics for sentence fragments, imperatives, tones, wails, murmurs. SEP notes about formal approaches to semantics(specifically Montague's):

To implement his objective, Montague applied the method which is standard for logical languages: model theoretic semantics. This means that, using constructions from set theory, a model is defined, and that natural language expressions are interpreted as elements (or sets, or functions) in this universe. Such a model should not be conceived of as a model of reality. On the one hand, the model gives more than reality: natural language does not only speak about past, present and future of the real world, but also about situations that might be the case, or are imaginary, or cannot be the case at all. On the other hand, however, the model offers less: it merely specifies reality as conceived by language. An example: we speak about mass nouns such as water as if every part of water is water again, as if it has no minimal parts, which physically is not correct. For more information on natural language metaphysics, see Bach 1986b.

At most you get a construction which tells you lists of sentences equivalent to a given sentence. It will tell you nothing about the world or why things are in the place they are in. It will tell you nothing about why norms of language use imbue the use of language with expressive regularities, what it means for a statement describing an observation to be true in a social sense and true in a scientific one. That list is not exhaustive. If this doesn't already show you there's more to be said, I don't think you want to see it (for the purposes of the argument anyway).

Indeed. In other words, on the assumption that what can be said, can be said. — Banno

Set out "Your partner's love"'s meaning with a t-sentence then! I've answered your challenge, only fair you do the same... Or explain coherently why you cannot.

That's a neat potted summation of that part of Davidson's early work. Well done and thank you. It's gratifying to be talking to someone with a bit of background. — Banno

Also thanks. Over the years we've read and annotated decent chunk of Davidson in threads like this one. Wouldn't've studied him if you weren't a fan!

I get caught by a question from my old lecturer, something like "You are looking for the meaning of some utterance. If you have set out an extensional equivalence that shows exactly what is needed for the utterance to be true, what more could you need?" — Banno

Knowing how to map the extensional equivalence itself to an intended interpretation. When a given person writes a correct extensional equivalence, they've provided evidence that they understand how to form them. An account which sets out how to form such equivalences; namely, which language elements are in which sets; would be an account which sets out the meaning of language items. What it's actually doing is leveraging already known language items to form extensional equivalences without telling you the mechanism that maps the already known language items to the extensional equivalence classes. Only fleshing out the latter is a theory of meaning of natural language sentences.

At best, then, the T-sentence construction places a constraint on the space of possible semantics for (declarative) sentences of natural language. Rather than any particular semantic account.

I get caught by a question from my old lecturer, something like "You are looking for the meaning of some utterance. If you have set out an extensional equivalence that shows exactly what is needed for the utterance to be true, what more could you need?" — Banno

Lol. By the looks of it you've been inflicting that rhetorical gesture on people you've been debating with ever since! If you want to challenge it, recognise it for the rhetorical gesture that it is, and reframe the discussion. It's asking someone to go on a hunt for a "never before seen creature", whenever you come back with a creature, you just add it to the list of seen creatures and send them back out.

IE you challenge it by demanding a positive argument for why a theory which, it is imagined provides an extensional equivalence for every true statement specifies a pragmatic mechanism by which sentences obtain their meanings. What more could you want? A specification of the mapping of natural language statements to extensional equivalence classes; that would at least explain something.

The result seems to be that whatever is missing from the analysis performed by the T-sentence is stuff that cannot be said. — Banno

On the assumption that the meaning of an arbitrary sentence can be set out by the collection of other sentences which are true when it is.

There is also an issue of natural language not consisting entirely, or even mostly, of declarative sentences. Like "Your partner's love" - a perfectly valid fragment of language, you know exactly what it means, it inspires feeling, memory etc.

"Your partner's love" is true if and only if... Not even the poets could answer that one.

And, as I've mention before, this highlights the fact that Tarski didn't offer the T-schema as a definition of truth, but as a consequence of a correct definition. As I mentioned here, we still need an actual definition of "true". — Michael

Makes sense! Thank you for the clarification.

It was Piero Sraffa, and it's almost certainly true. He was a very original thinker. (I read his book a lifetime ago.) They were friends at Cambridge. — Srap Tasmaner

Very cool. Thank you!

That kettle is boiling isn't a model of how things are, but just how things are. "The kettle is boiling" might be considered a model. — Banno

I getcha. I was focussing too much on the theory terminating through deflation (no more needs be said), rather than (no more needs be said (because the language terminates in the world). See my response to @Sam26 above if you want to see why that rubs me wrong!

Think it's Davidson rather than Tarski. Tarski's work came out of considerations for formal languages right, in that setting I'd guess they're okay (not a logician, don't know). That's a setting where the whole language turns on propositions with fixed and known rules of association, with an associated meta-language that models them. You conjure up a language and a meta-language and relate them. You can just do that in maths and logic.

That's never struck me as a good way of going about setting up a conception of meaning; in Tarski the metalanguage is a language, in Davidson the metalanguage is a (realist, radically interpreted) language which also stands in for states of affairs. It forces the world into a sentential form by having to flow through the convention. Nevertheless, the world isn't a language and doesn't behave like sentence entailments - instead it behaves like the meanings of sentence entailments sometimes. Davidson has an answer there, because the meaning of a sentence is just set out in its t-sentence; still circumscribing the nature of the world to the constraints of a sentential form, when we already know even most acts of language don't care about sentence structure or even just the words in them (like the famous possibly apocryphal example of someone flipping off Wittgenstein, "What is the logical structure of this gesture?").

You've also got the weirdness that comes from convention T working for factual, declarative language and using it to, generically, set out the meaning of non-factual, non-declarative language through how the sentence somehow 'pictures' the relevant state of affairs. EG, like you can elucidate the speech act of flipping someone off through ""fdrake flipped someone off" is true if and only if fdrake flipped someone off". It strikes me as a philosophical magic trick, you conjure up everything which a reader will be familiar with and throw it in their face with the different parts of the T sentence - nothing more needs to be said because of the sheer act of imagination needed to treat the T sentence sides as setting out the meaning embedding everything to someone who already knows the meaning, but nothing at all to those who don't.

Davidson in particular, in this case, and leading to the quite different conclusion by ridding us of the model. — Banno

Would be interested in seeing how you'd flesh out the model disappearing. Is it because sentential truth sets out meaning and is primitive + sentential truth says no more than to assert the statement? To me that looks like setting up a model, destroying it, then claiming there was never a model because you've put the toys back in the box.

Like with @Sam26 (I imagine), a theoretical emphasis on pragmatics and a central role for T-sentences in that theory are strange bedfellows.

The basic problem that radical interpretation must address is that one cannot assign meanings to a speaker’s utterances without knowing what the speaker believes, while one cannot identify beliefs without knowing what the speaker’s utterances mean. It seems that we must provide both a theory of belief and a theory of meaning at one and the same time. Davidson claims that the way to achieve this is through the application of the so-called ‘principle of charity’... In Davidson’s work this principle, which admits of various formulations and cannot be rendered in any completely precise form, often appears in terms of the injunction to optimise agreement between ourselves and those we interpret, that is, it counsels us to interpret speakers as holding true beliefs (true by our lights at least) wherever it is plausible to do (see ‘Radical Interpretation’ [1973]). In fact the principle can be seen as combining two notions: a holistic assumption of rationality in belief (‘coherence’) and an assumption of causal relatedness between beliefs – especially perceptual beliefs – and the objects of belief. — Banno

There's much to like in it! It's very language and statement focussed though. I think we've been through this difference in intuitions regarding perceptual belief formation a lot of times over the years, don't think we have to go through it again here.

From the Heidegger angle I've been taking in this thread though, T-sentences, causal relatedness and belief networks are all methods of statement adequation, by which a statement is assigned a place in a web of other statements through causal relationships and conditions of satisfaction. That takes the web as a given. In the same way that I've been harping on about treating an interpretation as a statement being in the wrong frame of mind to get at truth, I'd say exactly the same thing about basing an account of truth of statements as if it could stand by itself. It needs a joint account of how meaning is tied up with a sense of connection to the world; some of that is perceptual, some of that is conceptual, and some of that is practical. You'd doubtless agree to those things regarding the use of language, Heidegger points out that it applies to the connections themselves between statements; they've got their sense fleshed out by something much different.

It reads like the philosopher of language trope where they talk about statements and truth as a way of getting at our connection to the world, without thinking about how the focus on statements and their truth is a distorted picture. What Wittgenstein criticised about the pictorial theory of meaning (statement -> logical facts) also applies to a sentential one (sentence -> world); making a model of the world and forgetting it's a model.

I think we've had that discussion before too though. The years are long.

talks of the relation between truth and meaning: "It fits and makes fit language to world and world to language." Interestingly he introduces interpretation, Of course the rhs of a true T-sentence is an interpretation of the sentence mentioned on the left, after Davidson. The holism is there, with the addition of an aspect of truth as public, shared or communal, somethign that might be worth further work. — Banno

I'd imagined an interpretation as a relation, rather than as the RHS ralata. It's what maps the LHS to the RHS rather than the RHS; the arrow itself, not its point. To speak of 'an interpretation' and make it the RHS of a T-sentence very narrowly circumscribes the notion of interpretation and gets you in the wrong frame of mind for tackling interpretation as a topic close to truth IMO. Can elaborate more on the relationship of interpretation to truth from that perspective if required.

Edit: agree with the rest of what you said though.

That's a fair question. Some of this is a little odd. If the kettle here hasn't quite come to boil yet, but might have, there is a nearby world where it has. In our world, "The kettle is boiling" is a falsehood, but not so far away it is a truth. Because these come in pairs, you get to say that "The kettle is not boiling" is a truth here. — Srap Tasmaner

@Michael - isn't this reasonably straightforward? You can say a counterfactual is about world x if it is evaluated in world x. For example, so "Hitler would have been executed if he had not committed suicide" consists of a comparison of two worlds, this one (in which Hitler committed suicide) and a 'nearest possible' one y in which Hitler had not committed suicide. We find that "Hitler has been executed" is true in y, so the counterfactual evaluates as true in x.