Your two options do not contain the correct choice. What is correct, is that what is at one time called "knowledge", is at another time not allowed to be called knowledge. So the same ideas at one point in time qualify to be called "knowledge", yet at a later time are said not to be knowledge. — Metaphysician Undercover

That was one of my two options: At one time the person claimed to know p, but it turns out later that they did not know p. That is ~Kp.

The person knew proposition p as true, then later decided proposition p is not true. — Metaphysician Undercover

Did they "decide" ~Kp or did they "decide" K~p? And how did they "decide" this?

At one time the person knows "p", and at a later time the person knows "not-p". This demonstrates the need for skepticism. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm skeptical. You said at the start of your post that it's ~Kp, but now you are saying it's K~p.


My understanding on the factivity of "know" is that you cannot know ~p where p is true. For example, you cannot know that "the sky is green" where "the sky is blue" is true, you cannot know that "2+2=5" where "2+2=4" is true, etc. It is simply impossible to know ~p without contradiction.

This is why negative knowledge claims (i.e. ~Kp) are irrelevant. It's about positive knowledge of a falsehood.

But you remain ambiguous on whether you are talking about ~Kp or K~p.

what is the point of testing a theory in science?
— Luke

To get a better theory? — Isaac

My guess is you would say that what makes one theory better than another is that it produces less surprises?

So to what does the semantic content of expressions refer? My answer is that they refer to a collective fiction. an agreed on, shared model. Just like the fact that we all 'know' Aragorn was king of Gondor. We can talk about Aragorn and his goings on and be right/wrong about them. Kettles are like that. A collective story about the causes of the sensations we all experience, kept consistent by repeated joint activity and repeated joint language use. — Isaac

[Language is] a surprise minimisation tool, like any other, it's job is to reduce the surprise other people's behaviour might otherwise exhibit, but it works by us all agreeing, to an extent, on the functions of each expression, the means by which the surprise is reduced. In that sense, language is absolutely going to be bounded by the purposes of the users because we're only going to be able to share models we ourselves have some version of and we don't develop those models in isolation, we often 'pick them off the shelf' of models our society has available for us, most of which are stored and disseminated in the medium of language. — Isaac

If the semantic content of expressions refers to a collective fiction, then how is surprise possible?

It is not possible that Aragorn was not king of Gondor, but it is possible that the kettle is not boiling.

That is, it is not possible that "Aragorn was not king of Gondor" is true, but it is possible that "the kettle is not boiling" is true.

Assuming one is fluent with the language/model, it is no surprise that Aragorn is king of Gondor, but it can be a surprise to find the kettle is not boiling.

If truth is no more than semantic content (i.e. if "p is true" is no more than "p"), then there should be no surprises. Otherwise, it could imply that "p is true" is something more substantive than "p".

And the fact is that people often claim to know things, which turn out to be not the case. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are repeating the same error that I pointed out to you before.

Does it turn out that the person does not know that the proposition, p, is true (i.e. ~Kp), or does it turn out that the person knows that the proposition, p, is not true (i.e. K~p)?

That is, does it turn out that they don’t know p, or that they know not-p?

If the former, then it’s irrelevant to what Srap said. If the latter, then what does it mean that they claim to know p but it turns out they know not-p? How is that possible?

I think correspondence is one way of looking at it; it really can be that a statement is true because it corresponds to the facts. But I think that for a deflationist this simultaneously says too much and too little. Too much because it doesn't necessarily reflect the T-sentence (can you have a correspondence without a truth? A representational relationships truth preserving? That kind of thing) and too little because it confines the enmeshment of world and declarative language to a particular mode (correspondence). — fdrake

I agree. My effort to try and argue for a deficiency in deflationism's account of truth may have made it seem as though I was arguing wholly in favour of correspondence, but I am aware that correspondence has its own problems. The deficiency of deflationism - that I only had a vague sense of - is probably best captured by the appreciably more articulate account you gave here:

...when someone says "the kettle is boiling", it will occur in a context in which the kettle is individuated from its environment as a distinct site of developmental trajectories, and "boiling" will be inferred from the kettle's current state and developmental trajectory. The former individuation resembles denotation, the latter individuation resembles predication ("... is boiling"). Coupling the association of words with perceptually+pragmatically individuated or demarcated environmental trajectories allows environmental events to be a truth maker for sentences without the former being wholly determined by the latter. — fdrake

The deflationary equivalence of environmental events to sentences omits something from the account of truth, or the common use of "is true", in at least some cases. I take this omission to be our evidence-based consent/satisfaction that the sentences are true because they accurately describe the environmental events (where empirical matters are concerned). This is where truthmakers and/or truth conditions are relevant. In many case we can satisfy ourselves that a sentence is true or not by seeing the environmental events for ourselves directly. And I think that some other uses of "is true" may be parasitic on this one, where we say "is true" because we believe that if we could have seen it for ourselves (e.g. historical events), then we would be satisfied in the same way - because the environmental events really were as described. Of course, this is all constrained by the deflationary "collectively enacted meaning"(s) of our language - as you put it earlier.

I also find the deflationary account of truth lacking in a more basic sense. It may be so that "p is true" means no more than "p", but that's only if "p" is true. I find this account of truth lacking because it doesn't tell us what makes "p" true, why we might say "p" is true, or why we use "is true" in the way(s) we do.

I'm not sure what there is to talk about if your position is that one can know things that are not so — Srap Tasmaner

Srap is talking about knowing something that is not the case.

It's very common, I claim to know, see, remember, or regret something, which turns out not to be so. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are talking about not knowing something that is the case.

You are attacking a straw man.

I don't agree that it requires a set of shared 'meanings' which are then reified to some objective status with sufficient specificity to be amenable to truth analysis. We can invent gestures on the hoof and still be understood. If there's a language barrier, certain words are quickly learned (and what is learned, is what the word does). — Isaac

Bring this back to 'Truth', the notion that "X is true" can be checked by examining the properties of X relies on 'X' referring to some fixed set of properties. But 'X' doesn't refer to a fixed set of properties. — Isaac

Is this typically what the word "truth" (or "is true") does?

'X' doesn't refer at all, it's a type of action that gets a job done, it doesn't refer any more than lifting my arm does. — Isaac

I thought we were discussing what "is true" does, not what "X" (or "the kettle" or "the kettle is boiling") does.

Or we could speak of truth conditions instead. If people agree that the truth conditions of “the kettle is boiling” are met, then the statement is true.

It makes clear that the meaning of the sentences that are true or false is up to us. — Banno

Yes, but this discussion is about truth, not meaning. Does the screw example make clear that the truth is up to us?

And I think that you have it wrong. Does the screw example make clear that the truth is up to us?

I think the screw example does not address truth. I've also previously criticised deflation for truth relativity. I didn't think deflationists would embrace truth being relative. Do you? If not, then how do you avoid it? I explained earlier today why I think truth is not relative. What do you think?

Admiration for the screw example. It makes it so clear that what counts as a part of the kettle is up to us. — Banno

The screw example does make clear that what counts as a kettle is up to us. Does it make clear that the truth is up to us?

You can see the expression "the kettle is boiling" both as a string and as what it is used to denote in context. A match between what is referred to, and the properties ascribed to it, and what it denotes in context is a truth, and it says no more to say something is true than this match actually occurring. — fdrake

Nice post. However, a "match" sounds a lot like a correspondence to my ears.

An argument I have been considering lately is the following. If the statements "S is true" and "S" are equivalent in meaning according to deflationists, then this equivalence should be maintained when these statements are converted into the questions "Is S true?" and "Is S?" With a minor grammatical adjustment, the deflationary meaning equivalence in the kettle example becomes:

(1) Is the kettle boiling?
(2) Is "the kettle is boiling" true?

Converting the statements into an interrogative form serves to highlight that there is something that prompts us to answer either affirmatively or negatively, and that is more than mere definition. That is, there is something that makes (2) true - a truthmaker - which is our perception or agreement that the relevant part of the world really is some way; that the statement accords with, or corresponds to, the state of the relevant part of the world.

I am willing to agree that:

The referent of "the kettle [is boiling]" is a collectively enacted categorisation of the environment — fdrake

And we understand the meaning of "the kettle is boiling" in the abstract without regard for its truth value. But, importantly, why we would say that the proposition is true is that it meets the truth conditions in terms of the collectively enacted meaning of "the kettle is boiling". It is not our language that decides whether the proposition is true or false; our language allows for either option. What decides (or what leads us to decide/agree) that it is true or false is how the world is, or how we find it. Are there plums in the icebox? Let's look and find out.

(1) "the kettle" is a a referring expression; and
(2) what "the kettle" refers to, or can be used to refer to, is the kettle; and
(3) "the kettle" is an expression, and is not the same as the concrete object the kettle; and
(4) the kettle is a concrete object, and is not the same as the expression "the kettle". — Srap Tasmaner

Given that most of my posts in this discussion have been spent trying to get deflationists to admit to the distinction between the expression and the concrete object, I obviously agree.

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

Therefore, there are no boiling kettles outside of language, either? There are only statements about kettles but no actual kettles?

If something 'outside' of language constitutes the 'kettle' regarding which we're assessing the truth of some property, then what is it? — Isaac

The kettle itself; not merely talk about a kettle.

You might say "it's that collection of molecules" or something, but I could disagree and say that it properly includes some additional molecules nearby, or historically attached. No fact of the world could resolve that disagreement — Isaac

I don't believe there's much controversy about what a kettle is.

Is "boiling" exactly at gaseous states, or is it when the water visibly bubbles, or is that just 'simmering'? Does 'boiling' require a lot more bubbles? How much of the water in the kettle has to be gaseous for it to be "boiling"? — Isaac

Boiling point

We don't seem to have a connection between the causes of our language use and the language itself which are specific enough to act as truth-makers for any language use. — Isaac

I don't see that specificity matters. Redundancy without realism leads to relativism and a disconnection of language from the facts of the world. If you accept realism, then you also accept some form of facts, correspondence and truthmaking.

A sentence cannot 'correspond' to something other than by definition, and definition is not specific enough to hook into whatever hidden states we might theorise constrain it. — Isaac

Then what is the point of testing a theory in science?

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

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

This is an objection to correspondence. I don't see how that answers my objection to redundancy - that redundancy collapses facts into language use. Is the boiling kettle true, or is the statement about the boiling kettle true? Or both? Is reality true or are statements true?

But my real concern is this:

Redundancy doesn't reject realism, nor need it be relativistic. — Isaac

With respect to truth, what is the difference between the correspondence theory and a redundancy that doesn't reject realism?

The SEP article on the correspondence theory states:

Deflationists maintain that correspondence theories need to be deflated; that their central notions, correspondence and fact (and their relatives), play no legitimate role in an adequate account of truth and can be excised without loss. — SEP article on The Correspondence Theory of Truth

Rather than excising facts, realism (or redundancy-plus-realism) allows facts back in as truthmakers.

How does this differ from the deflationary theory? '"the kettle is boiling" is true' just says that the kettle is boiling. — Banno

I’ve already told you:

Deflationism rejects correspondence - specifically, the correspondence between a truth bearer and the facts - doesn't it? — Luke

You failed to respond.

You've conflated the facts with the use of words here. The use of a sentence does not boil water.
— Luke

Not conflating so much as recognising. — Banno

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

As Meta said, you want to have your cake and eat it too.

It's as if you are of the opinion that a deflationary account does not permit sentences to be about how things are. Hence you think it leads to truth relativism, that sentences are true regardless of how things are, that water doesn't boil at 100℃, and that deflationist amounts to talk unmoored from the facts. — Banno

Yes. Deflationism rejects correspondence - specifically, the correspondence between a truth bearer and the facts - doesn't it?

Deflation does not seek to make kettles and boiling water disappear, or to unmoor the words "kettle" and "boiling" from their use. — Banno

You've conflated the facts with the use of words here. The use of a sentence does not boil water.

It's just about the way the word "true" works. it's the observation that "It is true that the kettle is boiling" is the same, in certain specifiable ways, as "the kettle is boiling". That specification is still that both sentences are true exactly if the kettle is boiling. — Banno

How does this differ from the correspondence theory?

As far as I understand it, the deflationary view is that truth isn't a property, or if it is then it isn't a substantial property. The sentence "'snow is white' is true" is nothing more (or not much more) than the sentence "snow is white".

It doesn't say anything about whether or not snow being white is a material fact. — Michael

Yes, that's my concern and what I'm attempting to argue against.

Whether the kettle is material or ideal "drops out", regardless of the speaker -- the sentence works whether you append the metaphysical belief onto it or not. And, in fact, it'd be more confusing if we appended our metaphysical beliefs to our theories of truth because then we'd just be begging the question in favor of what we already believe (one motivation for developing truth sans-metaphysics is that it might allow us to actually talk metaphysics in a more productive way) — Moliere

You make a great point and you almost had me convinced there. However, my concerns about truth relativism linger. If deflationism is the neutral view of truth "sans-metaphysics", then the facts of reality are irrelevant to truth. If true statements do not correspond to how the world is, then what makes them true? The worry is that we can never be mistaken about what we say is true, because there is no more to truth than our collective say-so.

Maybe a way to think on this is to say that there isn't always some material component to facts. — Moliere

I agree. What I’m arguing against is the deflationary view that there is never any material component to facts; that facts are no more than language use.

In answer to your conclusion of your paragraph here, I'd say that the RHS is both a sentence and a kettle, and the LHS is a sentence. — Moliere

If they’re both sentences, then it is a tautology and tells us nothing. Otherwise, it is a correspondence (if true), is it not?

We might look at an example. I like the kettle.

"The kettle is boiling" is true IFF the kettle is boiling...

Let's take a look at the bolded bit. Some folk look at it and see it as representing or naming a fact... For them the bit in bold models or represents or somehow stands for the fact. They insert an interpretive step between the bolded bit and the boiling kettle.

If you ask them what the fact is, the will say it is something like that the kettle is boiling, apparently oblivious to the redundancy of that expression: the bolded bit stands for the fact that the kettle is boiling...

I don't think that this conjured extra step is needed...

The fact that the kettle is boiling is not distinct from the bolded bit...

The bolded bit is not a scheme that is seperate from the world. — Banno

My interest in this discussion has been whether truth remains recognisable once correspondence is jettisoned in favour of deflationism, and/or whether deflationism without correspondence can make sense of the notion of truth. I have attempted to argue that deflationism-without-correspondence leads to truth relativism. The discussion now appears to have moved on, so I thought I'd try and summarise my concerns.

I have not been alone in arguing against what @Banno presents above. My argument against it is that it collapses the distinction between sentence and world. It follows that there either is no world and propositions are true, or else there are no propositions and the world is true.

However, my concerns are based more in science (or my view of it as a layperson, at least). If the proposition "water boils at 100 degrees celsius" has no correspondence to the world, then it is true only because we (or most of us, or most experts) say that it's true, not because that's how the world is, or how water is. This proposition about the boiling point of water (at sea level) might nowadays be accepted as a kind of analytic truth, given that it is so well established, and therefore is more conducive to the deflationary view of truth. But what about less established truths at the edges of scientific research? What is the point of investigating the truth of the statement "three moons of our solar system contain water" if it's all just talk or opinion unmoored from the facts?

Since Wittgenstein has been mentioned, and the use theory of meaning is seen as being closely associated with deflationism, I find that this quote from PI shows that Wittgenstein may not have been the deflationist he is taken to be:

15. The word “signify” is perhaps most straightforwardly applied when the name is actually a mark on the object signified. Suppose that the tools A uses in building bear certain marks. When A shows his assistant such a mark, the assistant brings the tool that has that mark on it. In this way, and in more or less similar ways, a name signifies a thing, and is given to a thing. — When philosophizing, it will often prove useful to say to ourselves: naming something is rather like attaching a name tag to a thing. — PI

Some have rightly pointed out that not everything is a name and that not all words correspond to things in the world. I'll admit that this makes deflationism seem appealing. What I take issue with is deflationism as a wholesale rejection of correspondence. Maybe I'm alone in (mis)understanding deflationism in this way. I don't know.

Suppose we have a true sentence of the form

S is true IFF p

where S is some sentence and p gives the meaning of S.

What sort of thing is S? well, it's going to be a true proposition (here, continuing the convention adopted from the SEP article on truth of using "proposition" as a carry-all for sentence, statements, utterance, truth-bearer, or whatever one prefers).

And what sort of thing is p? Since the T-sentence is true, it is a state of affairs, a fact. — Banno

I think most correspondence theorists (and others) understand the RHS to be a fact, too. When understood in this way, the truth bearer on the LHS of the T-sentence corresponds to the fact on the RHS of the T-sentence, or vice versa. In order to avoid correspondence, it seems necessary to argue either that the LHS and RHS are both sentences or are both boiling kettles.

There's a model in the sense that there are individual interpretations of a single in principle shareable reality, there aren't models in that account in the sense that models are needed to interface with the world. — fdrake

What you’ve presented as Davidson’s view above strikes me as our shared language being the model of reality. I thought that was why you intentionally referred to a “modelled reality”, rather than it being poorly expressed. I still would not consider this as a “no models” view. There remains a reality independent of our linguistic “model” which could resist and not conform to our model in some ways.

The latter, — fdrake

Despite the fact that you say:

The latter finds direct access to modelled reality a necessary consequence of the mutuality of the filter, and thus finds no better account of the filter than the variations of a shared environment. — fdrake

?

In that regard there are two choices I think, one is the broadly Kantian move Isaac makes where it's beliefs all the way down and modelling reality is the same thing as putting a filter on it; everything we know and experience lives on "our side" of the filter. I think Davidson's actually quite similar to this, only the filter is ever expanding and has a tendency toward monopoly over all all expression and interpretation (@Banno), which means there's no point of talking about the other side of the filter, so what's the point in even having a filter as an object? I believe the former finds a lack of access to un-modelled reality a necessary consequence of the existence of a filter due to how interpretation works. The latter finds direct access to modelled reality a necessary consequence of the mutuality of the filter, and thus finds no better account of the filter than the variations of a shared environment. — fdrake

Which of these is the “no models” view?

Edit: I might also simply decide that you use the word "brick" in the way I use the word "wood", that they have the same use. — Banno

Doesn’t this imply that we have different models, instead of sharing the same model which just is the neighbourhood?

Better still, doesn’t this imply that there is something independent of our models by which it doesn’t matter what it is called according to either model, it is the same thing?

If you are asking how they arise, the sources of disagreement are many and various. — Banno

I fail to see how any disagreement is possible regarding the material of the fence if we all share the same model, which just is the neighbourhood. And, on that basis, how can any disagreement be resolved?

Consider neighbourhood relativism. Suppose we do not have access to the neighbourhood, but instead only to the models of the neighbourhood.

…you say the fence between our properties is brick, and I say it is wood…

And the final step, back in line, is to point out that the shared model we each access just is the neighbourhood. — Banno

If the shared model we each access just is the neighbourhood, then how does this account for the disagreement over the fence being brick or wood?

Is there any way this disagreement can be settled according to the “no models” view, without (re)introducing a model/neighbourhood distinction?

Read which part again? Show me where I’ve misread.

Nuh — Banno

Oh? Let me quote it again for you:

And when you ask them what item 0 is, the answer is something like that it is the kettle boiling.

But that's item 1. — Banno

This says that Item 1 (a sentence) is the kettle boiling.

Sentences are not kettles.

But on that criteria, 1 is directly about kettles, not sentences.

There are, it seems, folk who think that we need an item 0 in this list, a state of affairs or an exterior thing in itself, outside of language or perception or belief or some other; and that it is this item 0 that is the fact, which is represented (or some such...) in item 1.

And when you ask them what item 0 is, the answer is something like that it is the kettle boiling.

But that's item 1. — Banno

You start out by saying that the sentence is about the boiling kettle, but then end up saying that the sentence is the boiling kettle.

Pointing to a kettle doesn’t make one a kettle.

In a T-sentence the true proposition on the left is found to be equivalent to the fact on the right.

This does not mean that they are identical.

Nor does it imply that "language and the empirical facts of the world are distinct"; clearly that the kettle is boiling is not the same as "the kettle is boiling", The first is an empirical fact, the second a piece of language. — Banno

Is an “empirical fact” a linguistic state of affairs?

In line with your earlier distinction here, I believe that what @Srap Tasmaner meant by a “(non-linguistic) state of affairs” is a state of affairs which is not a piece of language, but which is an empirical fact(s).

And the statement S is true (asserted or not) if, and only if, the state of affairs A obtains. — Srap Tasmaner

Is this according to deflationism?

Putting all this together, we find that S is true iff we by and large say something S-like when we perceive ourselves to be in an A-like situation. This is why Luke suspects that this sort of analysis is just relativism about truth. — Srap Tasmaner

Maybe this, but also that deflationism does away with truthmakers. As I understand it, deflationism supposes that there is nothing that informs or justifies our claims to truth except for the claims themselves. And I don’t believe that’s how the word “truth” is typically used.

Redundancy says truth or falseness is a sign of endorsement or rejection. Justification for endorsement is a different issue. — Tate

Therefore, evidence and being "right" are irrelevant to truth. So how can truth be anything but relative?

They found evidence — Tate

If the truth or falsity of T is dependent on the evidence, then it would seem to me that evidence has everything to do with correspondence, because you are talking about a correspondence relationship between a proposition, T, and the way the world is. If a fossil, for example, shows that T Rex had feathers, then what makes the proposition false - the falsemaker - that "T Rex didn't have feathers" is the fossil evidence not corresponding to the proposition.

We non scientists don't know who's right — Tate

What would make any of them "right"? Presumably, that they correctly (correspondingly) describe how the world is, or was.

I think there are other kinds of deflation that might be compatible with relativism. — Tate

What kinds of deflation are incompatible with relativism?

With redundancy, "truth" is just a social sign that generally means endorsement. Correspondence isn't involved. Redundancy is basically saying there's no such thing as truth as people usually conceive it.

Where correspondence is involved, that's not deflationary. — Tate

Right, but then for what reason would scientists - or anyone else - ever change their minds about anything? I don't believe that scientists just decide on a whim that T is false all of a sudden, for no reason.

Say a scientist asserts that T. Rex didn't have feathers. Later, it comes to light that they did. — Tate

Could you say more about "comes to light"? Is the falsity of T due to a lack of correspondence between T and the world, for example?

P might subsequently be determined to be false. — Tate

How?

Redundancy says the truth predicate plays a social role and nothing else. — Tate

Doesn't that make truth relative to a person or society?

How would it imply relativism? I'm not seeing it. — Tate

If the use of "is true" is equivalent to endorsing a statement, or if "p is true" is equivalent to the assertion of "p", then what is true is whatever statement someone asserts or endorses. No?

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 a 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? — fdrake

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.

Right, so there is no difference between the right hand side being identical to a fact of the world or equivalent to one?