So you're saying that these are equivalent?

1. "p" is true iff p
2. "'p' is true" means "p" — Michael

If you take take means as has the same extension as, then yes. Otherwise, no, or depends.

Are these equivalent?

1. "p" is true iff p
2. "p" is a true sentence iff p
3. "p" is a sentence iff p — Michael

They can't all be true at the same time, because the use of "sentence" in (2) conflicts with its use in (3), doesn't it?

My point was that any function that assigns to every sentence the same truth-value it has already, is equivalent to what we've been writing as "is true," and there can only be one such function. Am I missing something?

Is "p" is foo iff p the semantics of "is foo"? — Michael

You just read the Tarski, right? I haven't done that in years, so you're better placed than I.

I think, yes, that is the semantics of "is foo." It says, in plain English, that whatever the truth conditions of p are, those are the truth conditions of 'p' is foo, and vice versa. And it's also obvious that any such predicate "is foo" is equivalent to "is true," that there is a unique identity function on truth-values, and thus a unique identity function on truth conditions.

Honestly, though, I'm out of my depth here. I know little formal semantics.

if you did state those premises, "if you know it then it is true" — Metaphysician Undercover

You mean if I wrote something like this?

$\ \ \ \ \ Kp\ \vdash\ p$

Like stating that kind of premise? Or would you prefer something like this?

$\ \ \ \ \ \forall p(\exists x Kxp\ \to\ p)$

But then, honestly, I'm not sure what there is to talk about if your position is that one can know things that are not so, see things that are not there, remember things that did not happen, and regret doing things you did not do.

I'll let you have the last word.

I lean toward (2), but I just don't know enough to say.

I keep thinking there's something of interest there in truth as a sort of identity function. Have you noticed that it works for anything you might count as a truth-value? It works for "unknown," it works for "likely" or "probably," even for numerical probabilities. Whatever you plug in for the truth-value of p, that's the truth-value of p is true. If you think of logic as a sort of algebra, that makes the is-true operator (rather than predicate) kind of interesting.

The conclusion, that today is Joe's birthday does not follow necessarily from the premise "I remember that today is Joe's birthday", because there is no premise to relate "I remember", to what "is" — Metaphysician Undercover

But the connection is right there: the conclusion is the object of the propositional attitude.

You cannot know what is not so. You cannot see what is not there. You cannot remember what did not happen. You cannot regret doing what you did not do.

Every failure you imagine of claims like these are cases where you are simply wrong -- you think it's so but it isn't, you think it's there but it isn't, you think it happened but it didn't, you think you did but you didn't. When you're right, what you are right about is a fact.

My saying that I know, or that you know, or that someone else knows, is of course no guarantee. So what? Logic doesn't guarantee the truth of what you say, but connects one truth to another.

That's all we're doing here. There's nothing particularly subtle about it.

The proposition "I remember that today is Joe's birthday", does not necessitate the conclusion that today is Joe's birthday, without the added premise that my memory is infallible. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes it does. No claim that someone's memory is infallible is needed to support the claim that, in this case, it is accurate. Neither does modus ponens require p to be a necessary truth. (Which would just make the exercise pointless.)

Holism in some form follows if one accepts the Tarski's idea that a theory of truth must generate a sentence of the form "S" is true IFF X for every sentence of the object language. — Banno

I'm not following this. I think of holism as indicating that the members of the set are not independent in some respect, in this case truth. Isn't the construction of T-sentences a one-by-one affair?

if you understand how to construct a T-sentences of any sentence in the language, then you understand that language. — Banno

Gotcha. I can never remember quite how he puts this. But this is quite mechanical isn't it? I could construct T-sentences for any collection of sentences of whatever language, whether I understand it or them or not. What am I missing?

I think I agree, though I'm slightly unclear on what the first part of your post is saying. (The explanation of T-sentences in English.)

I think there are three possible answers:
(1) Semantics in terms of truth conditions, and no analysis of "is true" is possible because of circularity.
(2) Semantics in terms of truth conditions, and the T-schema is the semantics of "is true". That's it; that's all it can be.
(3) Something besides truth conditions.

natural language semantics — Moliere

And what would those be?

"Forms of life" is a phrase I try not to use because I don't feel like I really understand it too well — Moliere

You can hardly be faulted for that. It's a linguistic gesture that seems to have no propositional content.

Would it help if I called gesture linguistic in a broad sense, whereas "kettle" is linguistic in a narrow sense? — Moliere

Probably a bad idea. Language is a real thing, a specific thing. Not every form of communication, for instance, is language. Neither is every form of intentional or referential action linguistic.

Gesture, for instance may in some cases be propositional without being linguistic. That's messy, but I don't have anything riding on it. What does matter is that there is a well-known linguistic use of gesture in sign language. If you just define all gesture up front as linguistic, you miss what distinguishes sign language from pointing or waving.

me picking up the kettle is also already linguistic. — Moliere

That just strikes me as clearly false. I understand the point you're making, but lately on this forum people making that point use the phrase "forms of life" more often than they use "language-games" to try to mitigate its implausibility.

Language is embedded in the body; gesture is often as important as the written word in determining the meaning of a sentence. — Moliere

Language, in obvious ways, supervenes on the body and on gesture. No fine motor control, no speech, no writing. Can you say the same thing the other way? Obviously not.

"In the beginning was the word" is false.

It's not the case that we just define every sentence in our language and the truth of every sentence follows from those definitions, so it must be that something which isn't our language plays an essential role. — Michael

A side note, possibly off track.

One way I've seen Davidson's program described is that he aims at explaining not what a given sentence means or what makes it true, but more fundamentally at speaker's competence; hence the claim that if you understand all the T-sentences of a language, then you understand that language. (That set of T-sentences is a theory of meaning for that language. Wittgenstein makes similarly holistic noises, but the point here is vaguely against compositionality, I think.)

But here's a question people might be inclined to answer very differently: if you understand all the T-sentences of a language, do you also understand a world? Or maybe even the world? Either answer is interesting.

Maybe Davidson alludes to this somewhere, I wouldn't know.

In what way 'successful'? — Isaac

I don't think this thread can or should accommodate a digression on names (though maybe we're going to end up there anyway).

I will, though, point you back to Oliver Sacks's dad and the glass on the table. The essence of that joke is the conflict between dad's descriptivist theory of his reference to the glass,** and little Oliver's more causal, externalist theory of his dad's reference. That should clarify the difference at least. Is it a coincidence that Oliver is capable of retrieving the intended glass but not even Zeus could act on Oliver's dad's theory?

(I'm cheating a little, but in a way warranted by our examples, because definite descriptions are ambiguous between picking out an unknown object that uniquely answers to the description, and picking out a known object by what amounts to the construction of a nonce name. Here, I'm relying on the latter in treating "the kettle" and "the glass on the table" as essentially names. It may well be I have forgotten too much about this and am passing over some important distinction there.)

** Or, I should probably say, his pretense of holding such a view.

And it is true that ordinarily English speakers don't have the material conditional in mind. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Oh I'd have to go look, but, if memory serves, Grice defended material implication as a faithful representation of conditional reasoning in natural languages and did not join any campaign (not even Strawson's) either to reform logic or to abandon natural language for more precise pastures. And in my view, if it was Grice's view, it deserves deep consideration.

If we have no way of knowing for sure whether what we honestly believe "is true" or not, then what good is the "propositional attitude"? It cannot be an acceptable logical principle, to allow us to draw any valid conclusions. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well, I mean, it's exactly that, and nothing else.

The inference rule

$\ \ \ \ \ Kp\ \vdash\ p$

Allows you to conclude p from Kp, but doesn't tell you whether Kp is true. It is indeed just a logical principle along the lines of modus ponens, which also can't tell you that your premises are true. Does that make modus ponens useless?

I'm not seeing the link to it being sufficient for the analysis of truth. — Isaac

Wasn't meant to be. This round of the conversation was my attempt to clarify the merry-go-round several of you were on that seemed to me to come down to a problem about reference rather than a problem about truth. I still think that. The endless back and forth was about whether the kettle is a linguistic object.

Speaking of truth:

in order to check the truth of "the kettle is boiling" — Isaac

we cannot asses the truth value of any statement about it by correspondence. — Isaac

I suppose I could be wrong, but this is not how I understand things.

A substantive theory of truth would be a metaphysical theory that explains why true statements are true and false statements are not true. It's an account of what constitutes the truth of a proposition. Or maybe what makes a proposition true. Or in virtue of what a proposition is true. And so on.

It doesn't tell you how to check whether a statement is true; it doesn't tell you how to assess the truth-value of a statement, so perforce not even a correspondence theory, if anyone has one of those, would tell you that you assess the truth-value of a statement by checking to see if it corresponds to something or other. What a correspondence theory would say is that if a proposition is true, it is true because it corresponds to 'the facts' or whatever.

I would be wary of thinking that the book suggests that natural languages lie down so easily that we can just read off its sentences always unambiguously into formal sentences. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Absolutely.

For example, I would be surprised if the authors held that "if then" is always in English the material conditional. — TonesInDeepFreeze

I don't happen to remember, but I would presume there's a way around needing to make such a claim. You can stipulate that your account applies to one way of using a word or a phrase, though there may be others, and still claim to have given an account of a subset of English usage, even if that subset doesn't take words as the joints it's carving at.

I agree that the book is very careful indeed in how it states things and formulates things. I always recommend the book. — TonesInDeepFreeze

I found it really fascinating.

I originally taught myself logic out of Quine's Methods of Logic, maybe the 3rd or 4th edition, and though he's meticulous, it's meant to be more accessible than the mathematical logic book. He has that breezy style and a lingering sort of logical positivist disdain for the unscientific, which English certainly is, so you're made to feel you're learning how to think more scientifically.

Kalish and Montague doesn't feel like that at all. It's a theory of what you were actually doing some of the time. There are very precise rules about what English words go where in the schemata, because it's intended to apply to, not replace English. So my memory of it is, anyway.

Is my remembering it the criterion for saying that I knew it all along? — Janus

Yes.

What if I never remember something I once knew, but have forgotten, is it then the case that I nonetheless know it? — Janus

Who can say? We do of course lose knowledge.

And look none of this is transparent to us. You can rack your brains trying to remember something, conclude that you've well and truly forgotten, and then an hour and half later it pops into your head. So it goes.

So, you seem to be saying that if I remember or regret something, then that something is a fact, and that even though it seems like I might remember or regret something, if that thing is not a fact, then I am not remembering or regretting it, but merely think I am remembering or regretting? — Janus

Yes, and I think obviously so, if you just think about what you're saying.

"Steve can see that Mark is uncomfortable," if true, entails that Mark is uncomfortable. If it's false, we've got nothing: maybe Mark is uncomfortable, maybe not. But it can't be true without Mark in fact being uncomfortable.

If it can truly be said of me that I remembered that you don't like strawberries, then it must be the case that you don't like strawberries, There are multiple ways for this to go wrong. I could be thinking of someone else, so it's false that I'm remembering something about you; I could be lying, claiming to remember this when I'm just guessing, so false again; and of course if you do like strawberries then there's no way I could remember that you don't -- I can only be under the mistaken impression that you don't, so again no true memory.

First, I can't speak to the later revision.

I've tried reading Montague, but it's pretty demanding, so he's still an aspiration for me. I do know a little about his views, in a general way, and his place in the history of logic and formal semantics. So I worked through a good chunk of the logic book, to see how he (and Kalish) handled classical logic, and there's a very different vibe to it from many logic textbooks.

Now I could be wrong, but this was my impression. Most logic textbooks go something like this: hey, you youngsters reason, everybody does, but I can show you a better way to do that, one that isn't hampered by the messiness and ambiguity of a language like English; we're going to show you a kind of language made just for reasoning; you'll recognize some of it from what you've been trying to do in English, and we'll show you how to take those groping attempts at reasoning in a medium not really suited for it, and instead do it in our nice clean system. (This is a vaguely Fregean conception, I guess.)

That is not what Montague seems to be up to at all. He and Kalish are obsessively precise about how the familiar English form relates to their notation -- something many logic textbooks swish by with some inadequate handwaving. (If memory serves, this is one of the things that Peter King will pillory a book for, playing it too loose with what exactly logical schemata are supposed to be, etc.)

And I think that's so because Kalish and Montague are not offering an alternative to reasoning in English -- a formal language you would translate some English into -- but an account of how the logical constants and quantifiers in English actually work. To put it plainly, I think this book presents something a lot more like a formal semantics of the logical constants and quantifiers. The result may look similar to what other textbooks are up to, because there is a formalism, but the relation of the formalism to the natural language English is quite different, and I think you can tell that it's different in the way the book is written.

So that's what I meant by "they weren't kidding." This book is not about a formal system someone invented that you might find a useful alternative to English; this book is a formal account of a subset of English, the words we use in connection with reasoning.

Does that make sense? Am I way off base?

What about all the times you end up being wrong? I remember that today is Joe's birthday, but that turns out to be wrong. — Metaphysician Undercover

Then you didn't. Nobody's talking about infallibility here. You thought you did, you could've sworn it was today, whatever. But "I remember that I put my keys on the table," if true, entails that I did. No more than any other sort of statement, propositional attitude reports cannot vouch for their own truth.

Could I be said to have known it all along? — Janus

Yes.

The main thing is to recognize when propositional attitude verbs are factive. If I remember that today is Joe's birthday, then today is Joe's birthday. When I see that a package has been delivered, a package has in fact been delivered. If I regret leaving my car window down, it's down.

I liked the word "informal" in your previous post, it's just that propositional calculus is a formal system. It's a branch of mathematics.

If you want to raise the logical literacy of the forum, perhaps it would be better to aim at that dialect called "philosophical English," a dialect spoken by people familiar with formal systems. The traditional early chapters of a logic textbook try to show how the logical constants capture some of what we mean by familiar idioms. (The exception might be Kalish and Montague, because they're not kidding.) They give students exercises in "translating" English into the symbolism that's been defined.

But many philosophers today write in a style that's more like translated and then translated back. The style most of the SEP is written in, if it's not clear what I mean. So we're not quite talking about informal reasoning here, which is interesting in its own right but different. We're talking about a kind of semi-formal style, which aims at precision and explicitness.

In this case, the exercises would be a matter of making what you say more precise and more explicit, though still English. A guide to this style could embed a certain amount of the classical logic in everyday use in philosophy, but in English, not in mathematical notation.

Your quibbles are doubtless correct. But not helpful. — Banno

I wouldn't call the points @TonesInDeepFreeze has made "quibbles" but I would call them "helpful". On the other hand, I wonder how accessible any of this is to someone who has no background at all in logic.

Ah, I see you've reached the same conclusion.

Rejecting bivalence — Banno

Not something we need to address.

I suppose I should have put my point this way: short-circuiting is, here anyway, an unofficial procedure. If the truth table is our definition of implication, then there is no option not to consider the truth-value of the consequent, even though it's unnecessary. (We can short-circuit.) So it's almost worth pointing out that every consequent gets you to row 3 or to row 4 because no third is given.

the final row — Banno

The third and fourth rows.

I suppose it's additionally a consequence of bivalence, since every consequent must land you on row 3 or row 4 and nowhere else.

Has anyone mentioned that there's a name for this -- the principle of explosion -- and that it is a direct consequence of how the material conditional is defined? Every material conditional with a false antecedent is true, whatever the consequent. (I think the terminology I've always heard used for cases like this is that these conditionals are "vacuously true", which would also apply to the equivalent disjunction.)

Some nonstandard logics are motivated precisely by the wish to avoid the principle of explosion by defining implication otherwise.

His own disagreement with Freud was also relevant in the context of the friction between Jews and Germans. — Jack Cummins

But you're not saying Jung was antisemitic and that's why he and Freud had a falling out, right? Because that's the sort of thing one ought to have considerable evidence for.

We must be making progress because I have something to say in response to almost every sentence here.

Given that the target of all this is 'truth', though, and 'truth' being traditionally a component of knowledge. I might say, for clarity, that neither I not you need to 'know' any of this. It's sufficient that we believe it. — Isaac

There is too much to say here, so this is a placeholder for an entire discussion, which doesn't really belong in this thread, despite its wanderings.

I'll say this much: this is exactly what you should say because despite being an externalist about semantics ((I think, kinda)), you're still an internalist about propositional attitudes and thus mental states; of course you have no use for knowledge as a category, because for you knowledge has parts and the only part that matters -- that drives action -- is belief. But all that's wrong: knowledge doesn't have parts, not truth, not belief, despite entailing both truth and belief; and the explanation of action solely in terms of narrow conditions, as the internalist would have it, is weaker than the explanation of action in terms of wide conditions, as the externalist would.

the fact that there are multiple options doesn't mean you didn't have something specific in mind
— Srap Tasmaner

Indeed. But never specific enough — Isaac

Show me that with the given example. You know about the missing screw; does it matter enough that you consider it when referring to the kettle? ((Never mind, I'm just about to do it for you.))

The object that I'm referring to when I say "put the kettle on" may or may not have the errant screw. I may not care. my picture of it may simply not be in sufficient detail to even decide if it has the screw or not. — Isaac

Of course your picture doesn't have every physical detail of the kettle; that's the nature of pictures.

Suppose it doesn't matter whether the screw is restored, and your picture (here a stand-in for your intention) doesn't show that it has or hasn't been. Then your picture is indeed specific enough, contra your general claim above.

Suppose it does matter whether the screw is restored, and your picture shows the kettle with the screw it lacks. Your picture is inaccurate in a salient way, and that will make a difference in actions you or I undertake relying on it.

Suppose it does matter whether the screw is restored, and your picture correctly shows the kettle missing that screw, then your action will be more effective, as will mine if you tell me there's a screw missing, if you share this crucial knowledge with me.

The most interesting case -- because it looks like it's the hardest for me -- is this one: suppose it doesn't matter whether the screw is restored, and your picture shows (correctly) that it hasn't or (incorrectly) that it has. It seems that actions taken under the false belief will come off just as well as actions taken under the true one,** because the belief concerns a detail that is irrelevant. This is not much different from making tea thinking it's Tuesday when it's actually Wednesday, but different for us because we might be tempted to say that in one case that you have an intention toward the actual (unrepaired) object in the kitchen, while in the other you have an intention toward an object, the kettle repaired, that doesn't exist. You might even use the kettle for weeks thinking you had fixed it at some point, only to discover that you never did and it made no difference.

But this is a known, and settled, issue: descriptivist accounts of names are just wrong. (You can successfully refer to George Washington even if everything you think you know about him is false.) The upshot here is that you successfully refer to the kettle in the kitchen despite possibly holding a false belief about it, perhaps many (what brand is it? when did you get it? didn't you have to replace it and this is the new one, or was that a different kettle?) and your intention should be taken, in proper externalist fashion, to be toward the actual object, not toward your possibly mistaken idea of the object.

(I probably have some cleaning up to do, but I only owe an account of the efficaciousness of knowledge in intentional action, not of the non-efficaciousness of non-knowledge in intentional action, if you see what I mean. And that's a side issue here.)

And I think this is because the "kettle" bit of the sentence doesn't refer to an object by material composition, it refers to an object by function. What I'm referring to with "kettle" there is 'whatever it is that boils the water', not 'that collection of fundamental particles there.

...but then, that referent is awfully hard to use as an object of correspondence, since lots of potential states answer to it. — Isaac

I've never found any of this sort of thing -- reducing objects to collections of fundamental particles -- at all attractive, but your alternative here is a non-starter isn't it? The kettle is not just any vessel for boiling water, but the one in the kitchen, the one you mean, the one you have an intention toward. This is easy peasy if you allow the object to be partially constitutive of your mental state, instead of assuming you need this go-between that is your idea of the object. You don't have intentions toward any such idea -- that's the lesson above -- but toward what you have ideas about.

** Note added:
This is poorly worded because knowledge is not just true belief. The assumption here is that the kettle is just fine without the screw. Suppose I believe that the kettle has been fixed because I believe I finally remembered to fix it last week -- and I nearly did, but then didn't; and suppose you, unknown to me, did actually fix the kettle. I don't know the kettle has been fixed, though I have a true belief that it has been fixed. That's epistemic luck. I handle the kettle as if it's been fixed and have no trouble; I might even attribute my successful endeavors with the kettle to my having fixed it, even though our assumption here is that it would have made no difference if the kettle had still been unfixed. There's another kind of luck there.

So, in this thread I am asking about how this area is important in evaluating philosophies and philosophical ideas? It is a different way of thinking about truth' from the quest for validity and accuracy of knowledge — Jack Cummins

I'm not getting this at all.

On the one hand, elsewhere in your OP you seem to raise the spectre of ideas that are dangerous (Nazi ideas). (Also: ideas that wish to appear to be dangerous, i.e., Crowley.)

Can ideas be dangerous? Maybe. I'd rather think it's the people who have bad ideas that are dangerous, but there's just so much evidence that many people are susceptible to ideas that would make them dangerous. I'd rather they weren't. I'd rather people pass by some of the crap out there that passes for thought, but they don't. But the idea of protecting people from ideas, that's kinda sickening, no matter what the idea.

But now here you're talking about knowledge, and saying what? Are you suggesting there is knowledge that is dangerous? That there are some things we aren't meant to know? Like that?

No. Absolutely not. The dangerous ideas contemplated above are no kind of knowledge. They're pretty uniformly bullshit, purpose-built bullshit.

There is no case against knowledge. It was the Frankfurt school, right, that started this thing of treating the Nazis as some sort of apotheosis of the Enlightenment, because they made genocide efficient and mechanical. That's bullshit. The race thinking, the occult, the mysticism, all that's true, and none of it has anything to do with being too rational.

And there are always people who will blame what we're doing to the planet on science -- that we're in this sorcerer's apprentice scenario, wielding knowledge we were not meant to have to terrible effect. That's also bullshit. For a shocking amount of what's wrong with the world, the explanation is just base venality, greed, selfishness, indifference. It is never that someone knows something humans are not meant to. The lesson of the sorcerer's apprentice was already captured by Pope: "A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring." If we knew more, sooner, all of us, we might not be in this mess, though it would still have been an uphill battle because venality.

But I digress. Your interest is psychological. You're worried that knowledge might hurt you? Make you sad? Yes, probably. There are generally, for almost any person, things that if they knew them it would make them sad. Not many of those things are philosophy. (The suffering of others should make you sad if you know about it, but in some cases it should also make you angry, and in some cases it should make you appreciate the fleeting joys of life as well. It's a package deal. This world is a vale of soul-making.) Nihilism might count as philosophy, but I don't think it counts as something you can know. It's an idea. Well, it's more like a quarter of an idea. Maybe a third.

It's a good idea, as implied above, not to be susceptible to bad ideas. And not to be susceptible to bullshit. Knowledge of various sorts is often helpful in defending yourself against the tide of crap. I finally read the Analects a few years ago, and Confucius is always talking up tradition, fidelity, fortitude, the sort of stuff you'd expect, but always also learning. No fool.

how meaning and truth fit together — Banno

"Meaning" and "mean" are really extraordinary words.

There's

$\ \ \ \ \ \$(1) What do you think it means?

That is, what does it indicate, point at metaphorically?

$\ \ \ \ \ \$(2) What does that mean?

Said of a bit of language, generally a request for different words amounting to the same thing, but more readily understood by the audience. Sometimes an alternative to

$\ \ \ \ \ \$(3) What is that supposed to mean?

What are you implying?

$\ \ \ \ \ \$(4) What is the meaning of this?

Astonishment. As if to suggest that a situation is senseless, inexplicable, absurd.

$\ \ \ \ \ \$(5) I mean it.

I am resolved, and what I said was said in all seriousness. Closely related to

$\ \ \ \ \ \$(6a) He didn't mean it.
$\ \ \ \ \ \$(6b) You don't mean that.

Speech that should not be taken at face-value, as serious and honest, and suggesting it was said with some other purpose than honest expression. Also a wish that this is the case.

$\ \ \ \ \ \$(7) That's not what I meant.

(i) I spoke with one meaning in mind, but you interpreted my words as having another. (ii) I spoke with a particular intention, but you took me to have another. Occasionally part of an acknowledgement that my speech was ambiguous.

$\ \ \ \ \ \$(8a) I meant to ...
$\ \ \ \ \ \$(8b) I didn't mean to.
$\ \ \ \ \ \$(8c) I meant to do that.

(a) I intended to ..., but I haven't.
(b) I didn't intend to. Very close to claiming exemption from blame.
(c) Said of something done unintentionally, a claim to have done it intentionally often to escape embarrassment or take credit for an accidental achievement. Never convincing.

$\ \ \ \ \ \$(9) We had the experience but missed the meaning.

Hmmmmmm. Perhaps related to

$\ \ \ \ \ \$(10) What does it all mean?

What is the purpose or the point of it all? Possibly provides an alternative reading of (4): what is the point or the purpose of what I am witnessing (suggesting that it has none, or none readily apparent)?

Related to

$\ \ \ \ \ \$(11) What is the meaning of life?

Always look on the bright side of it.

I vote not to get into the slingshot unless we really have to, but if we do I'll take the opportunity to wade into it and see if I like it any more this time.

Are we at a point now that it's the most important thing on the table?

“Clark Kent” refers to Superman but it doesn’t follow from this that if Lois Lane knows that Clark Kent is Clark Kent that she knows that Clark Kent is Superman. Davidson is wrong in asserting that co-referring terms are logically equivalent. — Michael

Whether one co-referring term can be substituted for another is the canonical way of distinguishing extensional from intensional contexts. You can substitute salva veritate in extensional contexts but not in intensional ones.

Does this have anything at all to do with the slingshot? (Been a while since I thought about it.)

What follows is speculative, but here goes.

( 1 ) A total determination of the referent of "the kettle" by the underlying collective standards of interpretation.
( 2 ) A partial determination of the referent of "the kettle" by those same standards.
( 3 ) No dependence of the referent of "the kettle" by those same standards. — fdrake

Certainly that's the discussion that's been going on here, but it's not necessarily the right discussion.

Why language? I mean, yes, we are talking about how to understand using a phrase like "the kettle" or a sentence like "The kettle is boiling," yes. But think about this example. A kettle is an artifact, one of the oldest sorts of human artifacts, a vessel for cooking. What goes into the design and fashioning of a kettle is dependent on the needs and wishes of creatures like us, our specific, limited capacity for making things out of stuff, what stuff is available to us for making things, and so on.

I don't intend that list to be taken as endorsing a "forms of life" account. Rather, I want to say that the artifact here, the kettle, in some sense embeds an awful lot of referential understandings and gestures, almost none of which are linguistic. We wish to handle water in a certain way and craft vessels for doing so. There's reference there. How we fashion those vessels reflects, embeds, our understanding of the available materials in our environment -- more reference -- and our ability to work those materials into artifacts, and so on. The point being that in perceiving the kettle, we perceive a certain amount of the human history embedded in it, because by its nature it presents several ways in which creatures like us interact with the sorts of things we find, or choose to find, in the sorts of environments we live in. There is, in the kettle itself, evidence of reference to objects and materials in our environment.

On our side, to perceive a kettle also has a referential aspect to it. To see that the kettle is on the kitchen table involves content in a propositional form, content that I have here expressed in English, but that young Wittgenstein might say is also expressed by the arrangement of the kettle and the table. I perceive the kettle and the table, objects, but I also perceive how they are arranged and that they are so arranged without putting that into language.

My complaint then would be that language is far from the only medium in which human beings express intentionality, and to chase our interaction with objects in our environment back to language alone is a mistake. Perception matters, knowledge matters, manipulation matters, and so on, and all of these bear on issues of reference because they are all inherently referential activities. The idea that a kettle is only a way we talk is patently ridiculous; to think that it is not entirely but primarily, or even largely a matter of how we talk is scarcely less so.

Again, the idea here is not to smear everything together as "our forms of life," but to note that there are different modalities of reference and there is reason to think they are not entirely independent. We do not agree on how to carve up the world with words arbitrarily, but in, shall we say, consultation with how we perceive the objects and materials in our environment, how we manipulate them, what we know about them from our individual and collective histories. Language is only one of a battery of intentional behaviors that make reference to our environment or are dependent upon such reference. To understand how reference works in language specifically, we probably ought to give some thought to the other modalities as well.

@fdrake, if you meant 'interpretation' somewhat broadly, there you go.

Sufficient to get a job done though. If I say "put the kettle on" I don't need you to know if that includes the screw in the drawer. I assume you gather my intent. I could probably have just said "tea time!" — Isaac

Oliver Sacks tells a story -- his father, he said, was the sort of man who would say to him, "Bring me that glass there on the table," and when young Oliver returned with the glass, his father would say, "Why did you bring me this? I asked for the one on the table." I don't know if that means his father had an odd sense of humor, or his father was abusive and enjoyed putting little Oliver in a double-bind...

Now in our case, you know about the screw in the drawer. Do I? Do you know whether I know?

I think we are forced to ask because what you know about the kettle will inform your intent, and it's your intent I am supposed to grasp, and you and I will both be relying on my knowledge of the kettle for me to grasp your intent.

If, for instance, that screw holds one end of the handle in place, you know whether and how the handle can be used. It will be important for me to have that knowledge too in order to put the kettle on. (I have a dozen or so possible scenarios in my head now, but I assume you don't need any of those spelled out.)

If, on the other hand, that screw was just one of six holding the base on, and the base is perfectly secure with the remaining five, then you could count your knowledge of the missing screw irrelevant. The kettle with five screws is sufficiently intact for making tea, and it is this technically partial kettle, in its current state, that you intend me to put on. You might even be annoyed if I somehow notice the missing screw and go rummaging around for it, since me repairing the kettle was not part of your intent. Or you might be pleased I'm fixing your kettle, but that still wasn't part of your intent.

I'm not saying we can't have vague intentions like "Stand roughly there," but the fact that there are multiple options doesn't mean you didn't have something specific in mind -- which might even be an impossible thing, as with Oliver's dad. Your intention likely includes a 'picture' of 'what success looks like', and that picture can be taken as a paradigm that allows a certain amount of deviation, but not an infinite amount. ("Stand roughly there" doesn't mean stand anywhere at all.)

And vagueness is itself a very specific sort of issue (!), and it's not clear it arises here. Maybe, but not automatically, not in every case.

If we want an ephemeral, relativist 'truth', then sure we could compare the 'kettle' of any given conversation to the 'black' in that same conversation. — Isaac

I don't think there's anything wrong with relying on features of the occasion of utterance. I think it's perfectly routine that we do so. If I ask for the black screwdriver from my toolbox, you might complain that you wouldn't really call that handle 'black', but more of a 'charcoal grey'. But evidently in doing so you know which one I meant. (I might even agree with you.) Again, we're dealing with vagueness in the extension of 'black' at large, but not in these specific circumstances. My intent concerns a quite specific object, and my language is specific enough, given the circumstances, to allow you to determine the object my expression referred to. Of course such a description can refer to other objects, or even fail to pick out this one, given other circumstances, but that's a feature not a bug of language.

(And here I'll add that objections that you might have meant something else, or that we could have chosen a different interpretation, and so on, don't change the fact you didn't and we didn't. You cannot force on us a standard of necessary, eternal meaning that we must admit failing to meet.)

But if we want a 'truth' that gets outside of these conversations... Which use are we going to pick? — Isaac

But I hope you can see how each conversation is successful at getting outside itself, in this sense: it is those concrete objects, the kettle and the screwdriver, we were interested in, and which our intentions concerned; the conversation needs only to fix those as the objects to which we are referring. If every object we were concerned with carried a UUID, and we could keep track of those, we could use those to end up in the same place.

I think the world consists of those objects we, collectively, identify with our forms of life (our language, for modern humans). So the kettle is definitely an object in the world, in that sense. But that's not this world-outside-language that Luke and @Michael seem to be reaching for. — Isaac

Getting ahead of ourselves here, but I'll say this much: the kettle is literally "outside language" in just the sense that it is not itself the expression "the kettle" or any other expression; but it is also not, shall we say, 'untouched' by language, if you are correct that it is only an object insofar as it is collectively identified by use of the expression "the kettle". But if it is so identified, identified by the use of language, and by our forms of life more broadly, as the man said, then it is the thing in that sense identified by our use of the expression "the kettle". If it's not, then there has been no collective identifying of something by use of the expression "the kettle".

I agree with that. My recent comments are a response to @Tate saying that "truth is a matter of comparing a statement to another statement". — Michael

One down, three to go.

Or shall we make it four? What about it, @Tate? Does "the kettle" refer to the kettle, or, if you prefer, can it be used in a sentence to refer to the kettle?

The kettle itself; not merely talk about a kettle. — Luke

The truth of "the kettle is black" depends on both the meaning of the sentence "the kettle is black" and on the kettle being black, the latter being a non-linguistic, material feature of the world (assuming materialism for the sake of argument). — Michael

I don't think the disagreement between @Luke and @Michael, on the one hand, and @Banno and @Isaac, on the other, is primarily about truth or facts, but about reference.

Michael and Luke take "the kettle" as a referring expression, which means there is something that it refers to, and that something is not itself, but a concrete object. Then Isaac and Banno point out that what "the kettle" (here, an expression is being mentioned) refers to is simply the kettle (and here it is being used).

There are further arguments, but first it would be nice to see the four of you agree

(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".

If there's not agreement on this much, we need a different conversation.

I thought you were done here. — Banno

Just done with my experiment. Still thinking about truth.

I remember learning that one way to think about T-sentences is that a sentence is used on the right but mentioned on the left. Which would be helpful if using were anywhere near as clear as mentioning.

I'm interested in the idea of dropping the will to truth — Tate

You hush your postmodern mouth!

And give me ten push-ups, or ten Our Fathers, whichever you like.