I'm looking for something simpler. — TheMadFool

Then admittedly I'm not your guy.

Works for me, though. I enjoyed the analysis and it's something I had never thought about. I fully expect to use it again on something else.

Yeah that's Russell's solution, to take the name as an abbreviated description.

I think we also want a way to talk about fiction (hypothesis, supposition, etc) "in world." So there are two answers, say, to "Does Santa fly in a helicopter?" One is "No, because he doesn't exist," but another is "No, it's a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer." Both have their use.

Vulcan rotates.
Pegasus flies.
Santa wears a red suit.
Etc. are false WFF where the subject terms do not exist. — Owen

Not helpful.

Russell would take all of these as false, but not as predicating anything of Vulcan or Pegasus or Santa.

How do you predicate, truly or falsely, of an object that does not exist in your domain of discourse?

Pegasus exists, is a sensible wff that is false. — Owen

And its logical form is what?

There are no true propositions that have non-referring names or non-referring descriptions as their subject. — Owen

But on your view, "Pegasus does not exist" should be true, shouldn't it?

For "Ga" to be a wff, doesn't a have to be an object in your domain of discourse?

What sense can be made of asserting "Ga" if you don't already know that a exists?

I don't know about the insult business, but I think you do have a kind of point here.

There's an implicit comparison between two groups.

Let's say all Americans are fools. It could also be that all non-Americans are fools too, in which case neither group is less foolish. People do often respond to attacks in just this way. If it's unlikely that all people, American or not, are fools, then it is likely that Americans are the more foolish group, maybe very likely, but that's all, and it could be that nearly all non-Americans are fools, and thus Americans are only barely more foolish.

Now let's say all fools are Americans. Then we would have to say there are no fools in the class of non-Americans, and therefore the non-Americans are a less foolish group.¹ But it's true even if there's only one American fool (I don't see why we should name him), so again maybe Americans are only barely more foolish. Not that it seems likely there's only one fool, so it's also likely that Americans are more than barely more foolish.

(1) leads to squabbling over how many non-American fools there are; (2) leads to squabbling over how many (American) fools there are. Both can result in comparisons that fall on a gradient, including near parity of the two groups, but both making it likely that Americans are noticeably the more foolish group, I think.

(2) sets a maximum to how much of humanity can be foolish; if it's thought that many people are fools, (2) is strengthened. (1) sets a minimum; the bigger the proportion of fools, the weaker (1) gets.

I think which is the more damning claim would have to depend on where you estimate the proportion of fools to fall.


1. To make that really work, you must also assume that there are fools, and therefore foolish Americans, but that's not much a stretch. And in real life the universal carries existential import anyway.

There does not exist a predicate (x) in language (S) which has the meaning, 'exists' (φ). — unenlightened

I think that may be the wrong approach. It's a little like saying, "There does not exist a predicate (x) in language (S) which has the meaning, 'and' (φ)."

Existence is not a predicate because it is something else, namely a quantifier. It's just a matter of getting it in the right logical bucket.

[retracted]

Hmmm. To me science makes more sense the other way around, where you have some idea what your domain is -- and you might get that wrong and have to change it -- and the question is either "What in my domain has the properties my effect needs it to?" or "Does anything in my domain have such-and-such a property?"

The formalism was developed for mathematics, where you always specify the domain. Science has no choice but to follow suit. What are you going to do? look everywhere? at everything?

if knowledge consisted of absolute certainty, which it does not — Metaphysician Undercover

... because certainty is a different issue entirely from knowledge ...

It is quite evident that when we say "X is true" we do not have absolute certainty, and some times the belief which was said to be true turns out to be false. — Metaphysician Undercover

... and from truth.

The Lucky Schoolboy is our two-for-one special today: Your teacher asks you when the Battle of Hastings was fought. You haven't done the reading, know nothing about the Battle of Hastings, and for all you know this is a trick question and there is no such "Battle of Hastings." You take a wild guess and answer, "The Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066."

What you say is true, even though you don't know it. What you say is true, despite your complete lack of certainty or confidence that it is true.

The Lazy Schoolboy gets us the rest: In this case, you've skimmed the book, and when asked, a bunch of dates swim through your head, you nearly give half a dozen different answers, but something just seems right about "1066?"

In this case, you arguably do know the right answer -- you got "1066" from reading the book after all -- but you have almost no certainty to go with your knowledge. A rising inflection when you answer is appropriate.

It is quite evident that when we say "X is true" we do not have absolute certainty, and some times the belief which was said to be true turns out to be false. — Metaphysician Undercover

You really don't need all this business about changing the meanings of "truth" and "knowledge." That horse has lost before it even gets out of the starting gate.

There's still time to change the road you're on, and I see at least two paths you can go by:

(1) Stop talking about knowledge and truth at all, and instead talk about rational belief. If you do that, everything you want to say about conviction and degrees of certainty finds a home. You could even be a Bayesian if you're so inclined.

(2) Just assert the argument from error: we have been mistaken before, and there is no criterion we can find that enables us to know that our current beliefs will not turn out to be false ... (some intervening proofy steps) ... Therefore knowledge is impossible. The defense usually plays with the definition of "knowledge" to defeat this attack. It is a serious challenge, but leads to the dark heart of scepticism.

It is not perfectly clear that you can start at (2) and claw your way back to (1), but of course you can just leave (2) alone and plump for (1) immediately. You can even secretly believe (2) if you want.

I think that "true" refers to an attitude which we have toward expressing our beliefs to others, such that we are open and honest in our communications. It is closely related to sincerity. A true belief is one which is expressed openly and honestly, not held in secret for the purpose of deception. When you express your beliefs in the way that you really believe them to be, you are expressing true beliefs. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's candor, not truth.

I have only responded to how "S knows that P" has been used in this thread. It is quite clear that P stands for a proposition. If your claim is that "S knows that P" may be used in many different ways from this, that fact is irrelevant, because you are just taking "S knows that P" out of the context from which it was used here, then basing your defence in this unrelated usage. — Metaphysician Undercover

Read again what I said. We may, as theorists, describe something using propositions, without claiming that what we so describe has propositional form. It's practically the point of indicative speech.

For instance, when early Wittgenstein made the additional claim that reality has something like proposition form, most demured, but went on describing reality using propositions. Simply saying "S knows that P" doesn't commit you to thinking S herself entertains the proposition P.

I don't quite understand this example. It is clear to me that Buzz and Woody don't mean the same thing with the word "flying". On what basis do you assume that they do? — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't know how you could think that if you've seen the movie.

No.

When we say "Bob knows the sky is blue", what is meant is "Bob knows that the sky is blue", — Metaphysician Undercover

Hmmmmm.

not "Bob knows this proposition "the sky is blue'". If we add "that", to say "Bob knows that the sky is blue", what we are saying is Bob knows the proposition "the sky is blue", as true. What is added then, by adding "that", is that "the sky is blue" now signifies a proposition which is designated as true, instead of a state of affairs. So by adding "that" to "knows", such that we say "knows that", we change what follows (the sky is blue), from signifying a state of affairs to signifying a proposition. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah, "that" doesn't do any of that. That's you. (English doesn't care if it's there or not.)

Believe it or not, "S knows that P" is just an ordinary piece of Anglo-American philosophical shop talk. It is not, for instance, itself a theory of knowledge. You seem to be under the impression that it is. You seem to think it amounts to a claim that knowledge is knowledge of propositions being true, or assenting to them, or holding them true, or whatever. This little shorthand is no such theory; if any claim is made in using this schema, it is only that it is reasonable for us to describe some examples of people knowing things in this way. (And that it can be distinguished from things like knowing how to ride a bike, knowing John Kennedy, knowing the way to San José.)

For instance, I could give you a purely causal theory of knowledge, something like "S knows that P if and only if there is a causal chain (of some special sort) connecting the state of affairs said in P to obtain and S." Nowhere in there is it suggested that S would even recognize P if he sat on it, much less that he holds it true or anything else. Doesn't matter. We can describe S as knowing that P, so far as we're concerned who know all about knowledge.

Now if one believed no one can ever properly be described as knowing something in this broadly propositional sense, then certainly one would want to avoid "S knows that P" like the plague.

The world presents itself to us as continually changing through time, with no such thing as "the way that the world is". — Metaphysician Undercover

A leaf twists, turns, and flutters in the wind, showing us now this side, now that, its color shifting as its angle to the sun changes, but the whole time, it's a leaf.

Language is not designed to describe every detail of every moment, and its failure to do so is actually its success at doing something else: language picks our the relatively invariant. Even the process of the leaf's constant movement has some invariance to it that can be picked out, as I did in the first sentence of this post.

(Besides which, it's largely only a practical not a theoretical limitation: a digitally encoded film is in essence the entire contents of a person's visual field turned into language.)

The invariance we pick out with words is actually there. We have words like "leaf" in our language because leaves are relatively persistent. Even in death, they are still leaves for quite a while before they finally decay enough for us to stop calling them leaves. That boundary is vague and nevertheless useful and effective. What leaves never do is spontaneously turn into mushrooms or fruits or rocks.

I would invite you to consider the Toy Story example I presented earlier. Buzz and Woody actually mean exactly the same thing by the word "flying" and falling, with or without style, is excluded from that meaning. Buzz applies the word to events Woody doesn't only because Buzz has a mistaken belief that these are cases of what he and Woody agree is flying.

So it is with your treatment of the word "knowledge."

addressed the problem with this phrase "knows that P" in my last post to Srap. Your use involves a category error. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's not a "category error." (Btw, the phrase you want, the one Ryle coined, is "category mistake.") It's also not a use/mention violation. "S knows that P" is just an informal schema. It is a stand-in for a proposition formed by concatenating the name of a subject, the phrase " knows that " and a proposition. The name substituted for S is to be used in the resulting sentence -- call it S1 -- and thus does not appear in quotes in S1; the proposition substituted for P is to be used in S1 and thus does not appear in quotes in S1.

The schema is informal in the sense that it is not part of any formal system and we are not committed to quantifying over subjects and propositions, although some informal quantifying seems harmless enough. No domain of discourse is being specified. No rules of inference. It's just a notation, a kind of shorthand. The argument is still being conducted in regular English.

"S knows that P" is also informal in the sense that it is designedly neutral on what sorts of things S and P are -- remember, there is no specified domain of discourse -- except that they would be considered appropriate on the LHS and the RHS of " knows that ". As such it is appropriate for broadly propositional accounts and inappropriate for anything else. It is not intended to be useful for discussion of abilities, skills, or any other sort of knowledge-how. Those things don't go on the RHS of " knows that ".

It's unnatural, but you could try to specify what you intend to substitute for S and for P, without actually doing so. (It's simplest just to do so, unless you start working with classes of S's and P's.) In that case, you might say, "S = 'George Washington', and P = 'life is suffering'." "S" and "P" are informally the names of variables; to specify their values, you write an identity between the name of the variable and the name of the value. In this identity, the names are used, not mentioned. Names for what we intend to substitute are formed by enclosing the expressions in quotes.

By the way, the inadequate, preconceived notion of knowledge, which led them astray, was the idea that knowledge had to exclude falsity — Metaphysician Undercover

Therefore if someone knows that P, this does not mean P is true. — Metaphysician Undercover

Do you mean to say that under the same scheme of interpretation, some statement P could be false and someone know that P?

For example, "I am at work today," spoken by me, on this day, is false; it would be true spoken today by my buddy Mike; it would be true spoken by me on some other day.

(Note that under this scheme of interpretation, "I am not at work" is true, and there's no issue about knowing that I am not at work. That's still knowing something that's true.)

Is it possible for someone to know that I am at work today, interpreting "I am at work today" the same way I interpret it -- "I" referring to me, and so on -- an interpretation under which it is false?

The arguments I produced earlier demonstrate that it is necessary for someone to know P, in order for P to be true. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sorry, I can't figure out where you demonstrated this. Would you mind linking the post or posts?

I'm really glad you brought up Gettier -- the more I think about it the more relevant it is to the debate we've been having here.

I have seriously mixed feelings about it.

If you report someone's utterance (or potential utterance) in the exact words they used (or would use), we put those attributed words in quotation marks, just like we were taught in elementary school. But it doesn't look much like a name; it looks like it still has structure. I see a lot of commonality with reports in indirect discourse, so I'm tempted to think of this use of quotation marks not as creating a name but as indicating "null paraphrase," the degenerate case of paraphrase where you have changed no words, just like you learned in school, but otherwise to be treated like any other propositional report, where you typically fiddle with pronouns and indexicals at least.

Not sure either way though.

All good. We are an example to us all.

Just didn't want you to think I had ignored that part of your post, even though I wasn't really going to address it. Maybe my choice of words was poor, but my intention was to be polite. It still is.

Take it easy, man. I'm really not trying to pick a fight with you. I joined in not to bully you but to try to support Michael's point. You disagree. Fine.

BTW, Gettier case number 1 did not involve disjunction -- it's sort of a faulty definite description, sort of. You believe X will get the job (when it's actually you); X you happen to know has 7 coins in his pocket (and so do you but you don't know it), and you are said to believe the guy who got the job has 7 coins in his pocket, which is true, but not what you meant.

It's certainly not standard convention; so you cant' impose it on others. If it was, people would have to always write in scare quotes to signify they are signifying the actual signified. Not only would that be unwieldy, it is not how we write in English. Its' certainly not how we teach people to write in English departments. — Thanatos Sand

Well a convention is not something one imposes -- do as you like. I'm just telling you it's been standard practice in Anglo-American philosophy for more than a few generations now. Indeed, we do always use quotation marks when we want to signify the signifier. You get used to it.

I don't intend to argue Saussure with you.

My cat's name is "Jack". Jack is my cat. "Jack" is not my cat. — creativesoul

One of the things about use/mention I'm ever so slightly uncomfortable about is that in a sense it's a claim that there is nothing but use, and that by enclosing an expression in quotation marks you have created a name for the expression, and it is this name you are using. I get the motivation, and it seems perfectly safe when dealing with simple expressions, but I'm not convinced this is the right view when you have an entire statement enclosed in quotation marks.

This immediately reminded me of Gettier 'problems' with the JTB account. — creativesoul

There is a kind of connection to the argument here. Gettier cases are examples of epistemic luck -- you have a belief, it's true, it's got something that counts as justification, but the proposition believed to be true is true under a different interpretation than the one you intended, and our intuition that these are not examples of knowledge is because the justification you had fit the interpretation under which your sentence was false, not the one under which your sentence was true. (That's probably not all cases -- if it were, I would have just solved the Gettier problem.)

There's another sort of luck that's even easier to get at because there's no question of knowledge at all: that's when you're asked a question on an exam (or a game show, whatever) and you guess -- and your guess is right! If you're asked when the Battle of Hastings was, "1066" is the right answer whether you've ever even heard of the Battle of Hastings or not, because truth is not the same thing as knowledge.

(Not getting into the disjunction thing yet, as I have an argument that uses disjunction still under litigation.)

What you and Michael don't get, and what Saussure demonstrated very well, is that the thing and the things's name can't be separated as long as you are using the same word, quotations or no. — Thanatos Sand

It's been too long since I read Saussure, so I'm not sure what separating involves here and if that's what Michael and I think we're doing.

I might even agree that quotation marks are not the ideal way to do this, but in our circle it's the standard way of talking about a name (I'm speaking loosely here) instead of the name's bearer. Like I said, it's just a convention in our crowd (but evidently not yours) -- we could refer to Michael's name as <Michael> or Michael-name or Name(Michael) or whatever.

Or are you saying there is no way to talk about a thing's name instead of talking about the thing?

These are entirely different dynamics and situations of which I have no interest. But thanks for sharing them. — Thanatos Sand

You might note that I wasn't addressing you here.

We can also say this:
If no one knows n = 0, then n ≠ 0.
If n ≠ 0, then someone knows that n ≠ 0.
Who is this person who knows the cup is not empty?

It's a convention. We can talk about a thing by using its name; if we want to talk about the thing's name instead of the thing itself, we put the name in quotation marks. (Talking about the thing by using its name we call "use"; talking about the thing's name by putting the name in quotation marks, we call "mention.")

Thus Michael's name is "Michael," but Michael is not Michael's name, for the obvious reason that things are not identical with their names.

Quotation marks just have multiple uses, and this is one of them.

If you don't like the convention, you're free to ignore it, but it makes it more difficult to distinguish when you're talking about Michael from when you're talking about his name.

Further, I would say that not all knowledge consists of things which are true (as knowing-how is distinct for example), being true is a special type of knowledge. — Metaphysician Undercover

Absolutely. I wouldn't conflate knowing-how and knowing-that, just assumed we were talking about propositional knowledge.

The argument I produced, if you followed it, demonstrates that P is true if S knows that P is true, and nothing further about being true. have you something to add? — Metaphysician Undercover

Well, sure, "know" is a factive verb. Everyone agrees that if someone knows that P, then P is true. (Someone knowing that P is a sufficient condition for P being true.)

In other words S knows that P is the condition for P being true. — Metaphysician Undercover

But now this is the converse: if P is true, then someone knows that P. (Someone knowing that P is a necessary condition for P being true.) Its contrapositive is that if no one knows that P, then P is false.

Suppose I have a machine like this: there is a button in Room 1, and a cup in Room 2, and when the button in Room 1 is pushed, the machine drops 1 ball or 2 balls into the cup and then shuts off. You can only see the cup if you are in Room 2.

Now suppose I am in Room 1 and I push the button. No one is in Room 2. Let n = the number of balls in the cup after I push the button. If the machine didn't work, n = 0, otherwise n = 1 or n = 2. I know that (n = 0 ∨ n = 1 ∨ n = 2), and it is true that (n = 0 ∨ n = 1 ∨ n = 2). No one knows that n = 0, therefore n ≠ 0; no one knows that n = 1, therefore n ≠ 1; no one knows that n = 2, therefore n ≠ 2. Therefore it is not true that (n = 0 ∨ n = 1 ∨ n = 2). And that is a contradiction.

Therefore it is false that if P is true, someone knows that P.

If I have ~p and ~p -> p then it is impossible that ~p is true and p is true — Pippen

I keep trying to help you but you're not putting the work in, so this is my last time.

It's always already the case that ¬p and p cannot both be true. Seriously, man.

It has nothing at all to do with whatever premises you have.

If you assume ¬p as a premise, you cannot possibly derive p unless your premises are inconsistent.

And guess what? ¬p and ¬p→p as a set of premises IS INCONSISTENT.

As a matter of fact, ¬p→¬(¬p→p) is a tautology.

If this is the case, then could you explain to me how you categorize both knowledge and truth, to maintain this separation which you are inclined to adhere to. — Metaphysician Undercover

Knowledge has this form: For some subject S and some proposition P, S knows that P.
Truth has this form: For some proposition P, P is true.

Sure. But antirealism is the position he gets to, not where he starts. (And it's not necessarily universal.) And the getting to is mainly through his reading of Frege and Wittgenstein, and his own work on language and logic. His lifelong intuitionism is in some ways enthusiastic but in some ways reluctant.

Maybe worth noting here that Frege's original Begriffschrift has an "assertion stroke" and a "judgment stroke" but those fall away eventually.

Right, right. I see I was accidentally dissing McDowell.

I was trying to stay kinda neutral, but back of my mind I was thinking about Dummett's idea that truth has its -- I guess "conceptual" -- origin in the idea of an assertion being objectively right or wrong, and that attempts to graft a richer concept of assertion onto Frege are too little, too late.

I'm pretty conflicted about all of this. Everything I post is an experiment.

Unless you are a disjunctivist. — Fafner

This is the thing about perceptual reports -- "Either I see a truck or I am experiencing an hallucination" -- that sort of thing? Is there another disjunctivism? Care to elaborate?

In this case your argument is really about knowledge and not truth — Fafner

I think this is right and what I have been, too indirectly, trying to suggest. For instance, even if the truth of a sentence is actually the truth of that sentence under a particular interpretation, that interpretation is not subject-relative. Just as whether a sentence is asserted by an individual is irrelevant to its truth, so whether an interpretation is applied to a sentence by an individual is irrelevant to the truth of the sentence under that interpretation. Truth has nothing to do with subjects at all.

But we do want to say that there is an intimate connection between assertion and truth. At the very least, that truth is the goal, or the point, or the intended object, of assertion. The problem here is not just that whatever warrant you have for asserting that P is no guarantee that P is true. We do what we do with an intention or purpose, based on our beliefs and expectations, and truth isn't even in this logical space at all. The connection is clearly through meaning, which is to say meaning has one foot in the space of intention and one in the space of truth.

Here's an example of how this can work. Suppose U assets sentence S, but S is ambiguous; we could use U's intention as a selector: if by S, U meant p, then we give S interpretation A, and treat S as meaning S1; if by S U meant q, then we give S interpretation B and treat S as meaning S2. Now suppose S1, i.e. S under interpretation A, is true, but S2, S under interpretation B, is false. If U meant p, S is true, but it's not true because U meant p; it's true because S is true under interpretation A.

And obviously U can know all of this, and aim at truth by asserting S.

This is because, as Frege already noted, adding 'true' to a sentence doesn't change its meaning, and in fact adds nothing over and above what you get when you simply assert the sentence. — Fafner

1. You can assert the equivalence in truth-value of "P" and "P is true," but if you want to explain meaning in terms of truth conditions, then you cannot treat that equivalence as an account of truth (i.e., the redundancy theory). You just have to be careful here.

2. What I was thinking was something like this: start with a statement S that you treat as purely extensional in the usual way; most ways of making a new sentence S' out of S by prefacing it with something that governs "that S" change the S part of S' from extensional to intensional -- you lose substitution salva veritate. "I think that," "It is known that," "You believe that," and so on, all do this; but "It is true that," and "It is a fact that" don't effect such a change. (Modal operators are also intensional if you don't have possible worlds.)

That suggests that ordinary language treats truth as a purely extensional notion, unlike belief, judgment, etc. There are at least two ways to take that: maybe ordinary language is on the right track, and there is a fundamental difference here; or maybe ordinary language is misleading and that's why it can be so hard to make sense of truth (and facts). (Frege entrenches the extensional view of truth in an obvious way, and it is further entrenched by Tarski, etc.)