And in both of Gettier's original cases he is explicit that his mark sees the entailment and makes the deduction, precisely because you can't assume that he did, even if it's the rational thing to do.

And the argument can always be retooled so that Smith fits whatever description you deem to safely refer only to Jones.

Gettier's sleight of hand is made when he introduces the notion of entailment, by which he combines the two beliefs into one. But "he" is Gettier, not Smith. — creativesoul

Not quite. Gettier is explicit:

Let us suppose that Smith sees the entailment from (d) to (e), and accepts (e)
on the grounds of (d), for which he has strong evidence.

Your argument has been made before -- maybe by Donnellan, I forget. It's that there are two different sorts of definite descriptions, and that in some cases such a description is used to refer, that it is in essence a name.

The thing is, logic is useful. We want to be able to manipulate linguistic tokens liberated from the circumstances of their utterance, to make inferences of the sort Gettier attributes to Smith. But logic has to be informed by linguistics. Ever since logic was formalized and logicians began applying it to natural language, there's been a recognition that an utterance doesn't always wear its logical form on its sleeve.

So there are two ways to take this: that you're right because Gettier is getting the linguistics wrong, or, more precisely, he's exploiting an ambiguity; or that you're wrong because you have no principled way of blocking the ambiguity Gettier relies on. It might even be a problem if you could.

We wouldn't see anything odd about a scenario in which Smith knows nothing about what Jones has got in its pocketses, but is asked to guess and guesses right. The sense in which "ten" is right -- with no justification at all -- is all logic cares about, and the source of logic's usefulness. Why that should be so, I can't say, except that abstraction rulez.

I would say we want to find linguistic grounds for blocking the ambiguity that Gettier exploits without blocking the use of logic entirely. I agree with you, by "the man with ten coins in his pocket" Smith means Jones. But how do we justify our preference for this interpretation? If it's by appeal to something that will nullify logical analysis, then that's a problem.

Sorry -- rambling, repetitive response. I agree that what's weird here is the entailment. I also think that means the stakes here are the nature of logic.

And so while powerlaw behaviour seems weird and exceptional, it is really the more generic case in nature — apokrisis

Even the Wikipedia's article is staggering in the number and range of examples.

A non-growth system would be characterised by approaching the Gaussian limit of a precisely specified mean. A free-growth system does the opposite. — apokrisis

So for instance when mass communication was limited to a small number of broadcast media, TV, local radio, local newspapers, then you expect a Gaussian distribution in people's knowledge of current events, sports, entertainment: most would have moderate levels of knowledge, and very few little or lots. Right so far?

Once communication channels start proliferating, we see power-law distributions instead, right? In the past, lots of people knew at least a little about the Brooklyn Dodgers, few knew nothing, and few knew a lot. Nowadays, there could be some artist that a small number of people know tons about, but almost everyone knows almost nothing.

Am I getting this right?

But then the paradigm shift is seeing that it is a natural, probabilistic and self-organising thing. — apokrisis

Yes, that's where I'm headed.

(BTW, I'm reading Life's Ratchet now on your recommendation. Good stuff.)

This particular game was just a jumping off point, and I don't expect to draw any conclusions from it.

This is interesting:

There just is no organisation unless it has a self-perpetuating balance of competition vs cooperation. — apokrisis

But your small sample size means that the distance between chasing fairly and chasing unfairly doesn't offer much room except to completely flip state from cooperative to competitive mode. — apokrisis

I wondered about this, but my guess was what mattered was the percentage. 25% is clearly enough, but my guess is that a much smaller percentage of the population could effect this kind of change. They wouldn't even need to conspire if there was an objective way the choose a target.

Not being you, I hadn't thought in terms of constraint and freedom, though it makes obvious sense.

Yet another thought: I'm torn between the idea that cooperation might not be emergent and needs to be a first-class goal alongside competition, and the idea that market theory could be right. It's not hard to imagine cooperative behavior derailing science, for instance. Maybe some theory that should be overthrown is allowed to linger too long. In such a story, our player 2 would not be a bully but an iconoclastic hero, the one who says the emperor has no clothes. Does this make any sense?

One more thought: the idea of science as a self-correcting enterprise amounts to a claim that in this case competition IS cooperation.

This is what I had in mind: there are theories that expect cooperation to be emergent from competition.

Lots of good points here, and thanks to @Galuchat for the research summary.

As I tried to emphasize, what really jumped out at me was how the choices of a minority change the game for everyone. There are various ways they can respond, but now we're talking about something else. The game doesn't perfectly absorb their different approaches. -- In a sense it does, and they can go on playing obliviously, but the percentage each boy is It shifts noticeably. -- That made me wonder about social theories that ignore not just the different strategies participants might adopt, but the effect this can have on the game as a whole. If a minority can force a game to be one thing rather than another, that's an issue in a lot of areas.

For instance, I think I have a sort of Rortian faith in democratic practice being conducive to finding truth, in the perhaps very long run, in everything from Science to internet fora. I recently found myself saying, elsewhere on this forum, that we need to be mindful both of the philosophical import of our words and their effect on the health of the forum. I think I have some idea why now.

I should really do some research I guess, but it also seems likely to me that the issue is really whether the strategies participants in the game adopt are in sync to some degree. As I said, someone not even trying to win can also ruin a game. The best result would seem to come from everyone having a similar mix of competition and cooperation in their choices.

I've tried a few different ways of going on from here, but I just don't have it in me right now.

One thing that's a little haywire about this whole conversation: we've been talking about "meaning" when we might have considered talking about "sense" and "reference", Dummett being much more Fregean than LW was, for instance. The major challenge to Dummett's approach comes from a purely referential semantics, in which the meaning of a word like "gold" is the stuff gold, what it refers to. If you don't allow sense to play a role, you've basically tied one of Dummett's arms behind his back.

Well I guess it depends on how you mean "always recognize". My understanding of Dummett is that he takes assertion to drag along with it some idea of how what is asserted could be demonstrated, either by an effective procedure (for mathematics) or the usual empirical methods of evidence and inference. The idea here is not that anyone has actually done this, or even that as a practical matter it could be done, only that we have a sense of what it would be like to do it. This is being summarized as the truth conditions of an assertoric utterance being recognizable, but there's no reliance on actual acts of recognizing. It's not some sort of argument from ignorance. It's supposed to be about the nature of assertion and what conception of truth that implies. At least that's my understanding of how Dummett ends up here. And that's why what matters for the realism bit is propositions that we haven't the faintest idea what verifying them would even be like. Dummett is not willing to extend the principle of bivalence to such propositions.

Mathematics is an interesting case. Fermat's last theorem didn't count as true until there was a proof. That's how math works. But there was always wide, if evolving, agreement on what would count as proof, and thus Fermat's last theorem was a meaningful assertion long before it was proved.

(The realism stuff is actually pretty straightforward: Dummett's suggestion is that the domain of propositions to which you apply the principle of bivalence is the domain you are a realist about. Thus Quine, being pretty nearly an anti-realist about meaning, famously says "there is no fact of the matter" about a translation being right or wrong.)

As for conflating truth and meaning, just read almost anything he ever published. It's not there. He was pretty much obsessed with understanding how they were related, rather than conflating them. (For what it's worth, I also think he was constitutionally unable to conflate anything, to ignore any distinction. Again, read almost anything he ever wrote, he is almost cripplingly careful.)

No.

There may be a simple misunderstanding here: that's not a quote from Michael Dummett. It's a summary of a position he argued for off & on in various ways over several decades, and includes a reference, to the 1963 article on "Realism", iirc.

Dummett's argument concludes that the principle of bivalence be rejected because we cannot always recognize whether or not a statement is true/false. — creativesoul

That's just false, and not even what the summary presented says.

Dummett conflates the two. — creativesoul

Dummett would be "conflating" if he did not notice the distinction between a proposition's being true and its being recognizable as being true, or didn't consistently preserve the distinction throughout his argument. I see no evidence for this at all.

I'll give you a comparison: the general knock on OLP is that it conflates conditions of assertibility for truth conditions. Sellars argues, in "Presupposing", that Strawson does something like this in "On Referring".* It is a common argument against Austin. For instance, suppose Austin argues (this is hypothetical) that because we wouldn't in ordinary circumstances say "He sat in the chair voluntarily" or "He sat in the chair involuntarily" -- normally "voluntarily" and "involuntarily" imply something unusual about the situation of his sitting that we address with those words -- there's no reason to feel we have to say "He sat in the chair voluntarily" is necessarily true or false. You could respond that he's conflating whether it's appropriate to say such a thing with whether it's true.

Dummett does nothing like this. He doesn't miss the distinction; he makes an argument about the place of this distinction in a theory of meaning.

* Sellars's article includes this memorable footnote: "In short our hearts beat (believe) with Russell even when our tongue wags (asserts) with Strawson."

But bivalence is not wrong as a tool of inquiry. We can't test anything unless we frame the alternatives crisply. We have to formalise a claim in terms of a definite yes or no question. — apokrisis

That's helpful. And we do this even if we don't expect to get "yes" or "no", but closer to "yes" or closer to "no", right?

AP theories of truth — apokrisis

"AP"?

Dummett's argument concludes that the principle of bivalence be rejected because we cannot always recognize whether or not a statement is true/false. The principle of bivalence only says that all statements are determinately true/false, not that we can recognize them as such. The criterion for being determinately true/false is remarkably different than being recognized as true/false. Dummett conflates the two. I see no reason to think/believe that Witt's writing leads to that or suffers from the same. — creativesoul

[agrees] — Banno

I was going to ignore this, but seriously Banno?

Rather than play Dummett, I'll just ask both of you for a citation. Since I haven't read nearly everything he published, not by a long shot, perhaps I haven't seen the passage where he does this conflating you speak of. Show me.

But what we can demonstrate transparently is a reduction in uncertainty. — apokrisis

Can you expand on this?

Would you also describe this as the process of becoming "less and less wrong"? Is there a succinct way to describe that without presupposing a bivalence of right and wrong?

Here's another stab at this ...

I would assume 2's behavior would be different if he saw it as group fooling-around, an activity better the more everyone's involved, rather than as a competition. — Srap Tasmaner

There are games of coordination (the sort of thing that Lewis takes as the basis of convention) and games of competition, and a game can be purely one or the other or mixed, as in the prisoner's dilemma.

everyone competing, everyone trying to win, and that evening out in such a way that everyone's playing and having fun — Srap Tasmaner

I might be way off here, but it seemed to me that democracy and free markets are sometimes viewed as systems of competition that somehow provide a solution to the coordination problem of living together as a society.

My example doesn't address that directly -- here, I think most of the boys treat the game as mixed, both coordination and competition. What's curious is that the one who treats the game as pure competition changes the game for everyone.

Presumably the same would be true for someone who treated it as pure coordination. I guess he would let himself be tagged rather than running? If you're playing a game with someone who isn't even trying to win, that ruins the game too.

If anything, my perhaps faulty memory of playing tag as a kid (described in the second quote) supports the market idea, that somehow competition can solve a coordination problem. But I don't have a clear view of the mechanism there. I wonder too if, in those games of tag I played as a kid, we didn't treat them as mixed rather than purely competitive, at least by avoiding the singling-out behavior in my example. I think my friends and I would have disapproved of someone going after the slowest kid in class every time he was "it".

He's saying that verification must be conceivable for the statement to mean something. — Michael

In our discussion here, this always turned into the possibility of knowing that a statement is true. Is that the same thing?

Something else: we talked a lot about being able to recognize (or not) that a statement's truth conditions are satisfied; does that presume that we know what the truth conditions of the statement are? You made the point several times, Michael, that the issue is whether there can be a meaningful statement such that we could not recognize whether its truth conditions are satisfied; would that be a statement that we know the meaning of but do not know the truth conditions of? What it would be like to know what the truth conditions of a sentence are but not how you could recognize whether they are satisfied or not, or whether you could recognize whether they are so satisfied?

I, for one, am still not clear on how the meaning of a statement, its truth conditions, and the recognizability of those conditions being satisfied are all related.

It doesn't seem that Wittgenstein was ready to accept pragmatism on the whole of it — Posty McPostface

It's a good question, and the article @apokrisis linked has some interesting quotes.

There are two questions here, really: why, as a matter of history, did LW not follow Ramsey into pragmatism? I doubt there's enough evidence to answer that question directly, so we'd have to look at LW's post-1929 work and see what in there is incompatible with Ramsey's take on pragmatism -- for which we also sadly have little to work with.

For instance, Ramsey describes inference as a habit. (Shades of Hume, I'd say.) I could see LW's extended discussion of rule-following as his response.

He liked to work through issues relating to psychology by taking passages from James as his text, and he and whoever had crammed themselves into his rooms would talk about them.

I think there's a quote somewhere to the effect that James was nearly right about a lot of things, and of course it's that little gap LW spends about 15 years in.

LW also used James's Principles of Psychology as a text for his "classes".

BTW, I just finished Nate Silver's book, in which power-law distributions play a leading role. I'll check out Ball, and thanks for the reference!

What particularly interested me here was how this intransigent behavior changed the game for everyone. We've all had experiences like this, I should think, an argument someone is unwilling to let go spoiling a conversation among friends, that sort of thing.

You could describe this as one game being turned into another by the choices and actions of one participant. What's curious is what happens if that actor is intransigent: if the original game requires, or at least if it was intended to involve, everyone, including this actor, that's off the table; other options are playing a similar game that doesn't involve him (just expel or confine this actor and carry on) or agreeing to play by this one actor's rules.

So it is with the RPI simulation of a social network's marketplace of ideas -- a small group that never adjusts gets its way.

I also found it suggestive that the specific mechanism in this case was one minority, not to put too fine a point on it, singling out a more vulnerable minority. The others respond by watching from the sidelines or trying to coach or coax the one changing the game to quit it. But their options are severely constrained; the game has changed.

Yes. It seems to have something to do with this 10% finding referenced in Wikipedia's article about tipping points.

People tend to double-down on their commitments rather than admit to being wrong. They're so invested that they're incapable of changing their mind. Probably an ego thing. — Michael

There's no doubt some truth to that, but if you're thinking specifically of the "backfire effect", it's worth checking out this interview: "After new research, however, it seems that the backfire effect might not be as strong as once thought."

Yes. And in fact Dummett was a devout Roman Catholic, iirc.

I was aiming for, let's say, "strategic overstatement", but I think I wound up with bollocks instead.

Unknowability just doesn't look like a big deal in this context. People act on what they believe to be true, or even believe to be probable, and either is rational. You could even know, for a fact, that a proposition has arbitrarily high probability of being true without knowing that it is true; that's surely rational grounds to act on.

I'm still thinking about other ways to approach the OP, but this doesn't look like one ...

Why isn't this a topic about pragmatism and the latter Wittgenstein? — Posty McPostface

Let's.

Let's say something can be true whether you know it or not, whether you even can know it or not, either in principle or just as a matter of fact.

So what? If it's something we can't know, who cares? Now let's grant @The Great Whatever's claim that something can affect you even if you cannot possibly know it does.

What we can still say is this: if there is something, which we cannot know, that affects us, and we cannot know this, we cannot act in response, not in any rational way I can think of.

Even if you happened to enunciate that such a state of affairs holds, through sheer luck, you couldn't know that you had, you couldn't convince others, you couldn't learn more, form a plan of action, nothing.

Such a truth would be a truth we cannot rationally act on.

The Dredd Scott decision — Rich

Hmmmmmm.

whether someone says something true is of course dependent on the language, because what someone says is a matter of linguistic convention. but whether this latter thing is so is not — The Great Whatever

Okay, yes. Of course.

(Been at work for 11 hours now and should probably quit trying to do philosophy at the same time.)

I'm good with pretty much all of this, or something close to it. But this is the hard part.

Allowing truth to attach to sentence tokens allows a cleaner treatment of indexicals -- I think -- but then you have to make truth dependent on a language+interpretation as well as on how the world is, which I take it you're not inclined to do.

I am persuaded that the sort of equivalence you describe in your first paragraph means there must be some way of dealing with the theoretical entity issue you allude to in the second. Also hard, though.

I have been tempted to see if I can have my cake and eat it too by having equivalence classes of sentences as truth-bearers, but I have no idea if that can be made to work. Yet.

ADDED: Ignore the indexicals comment. You don't have issues with indexicals or ambiguity or ellipsis, etc., if truth-bearers just aren't linguistic at all.

gold melting at a certain pt. is also not a matter of convention; — The Great Whatever

Yes.

hence what's expressed by a sentence claiming that gold can't ever melt isn't true or false as a matter of convention / use either. — The Great Whatever

But here I'd like to slow down. Did you say "what's expressed by a sentence" rather than just "a sentence" for a reason? Is it the sentence that's true or false, or is it what's expressed by the sentence? If it's the latter, what sort of thing is that?

I think the next simple, common sense step is to say that a population using the word "gold" to refer to gold is a convention, but there being such a thing as gold is not.

And then maybe we're ready to get back to melting points and such ...

But you don't want to say that to know a word refers to gold, you have to know what gold is?

I think you're just saying this: attributing to someone knowledge of what the word for gold is, presupposes that they know what gold is.

And that seems pretty straightforward.

Maybe it's simpler to look at adults who already have a full complement of concepts and empirical abilities but are learning a new language.

we don't judge whether someone knows what 'gold' means by how good of a prospector they are. — The Great Whatever

Well I'm certainly not suggesting that. After all, we already agreed you can be competent using a word without knowing everything there is to know about either the referent or further uses of the word.

But when you teach a child "moon" they call everything in the sky "moon" and gradually zero in on restricting their utterances of "moon" to when the Moon is up there. That's when we'll start attributing competence, isn't it?

For example can I not competently say "Gold used to be found in those hills", even if I am not someone who can tell real gold from fool's gold? — Janus

That looks like a nice example. If you pushed it farther, say gold has long since disappeared, you might say things like "They used to find something here they called 'gold'." But even if you're using the word they used, doesn't this seem like, I don't know, a lesser competence than they had, who actually knew what gold was?

There's a distinction there, yes, and someone whose linguistic competence includes using the word "gold" properly, in whatever sense, may occasionally fail, but that failure we wouldn't usually describe as not knowing which word to use (though that happens too) but as not knowing whether the word applies in the case at hand.

But we immediately face an issue I'm not sure how to handle: competence using the word "gold" does require competence in recognizing gold. Neither needs to be perfect, but pretty reliable. We don't expect the congenitally blind to be able to acquire competence in using color words, for instance. And the only way we have to judge another's linguistic competence is by observing how consistently they link occasion features we recognize to words we expect. I don't want to leap to the conclusion that this is what competence consists of, but it is the criteria by which we judge it. (Just as there are criteria by which we pick out gold.)

And honestly the ideal would be high empirical competence coupled with high linguistic competence. Failure of either sort degrades the effectiveness of communication, right?

i just don't see what observations have to do with anything. — The Great Whatever

a way of mapping words to their extensions via appropriate criteria. — The Great Whatever

That's the sort of thing I mean. I just mean "observation" in the sense that, presented with a sample of gold, you would assent to "That's gold." Nothing more subtle than that.

Very roughly, you could imagine recognizing gold, looking up gold in your lexicon, and finding it maps to the word "gold", so you say "That's gold." It's simplistic, but kind of what we want, right?