Here's one thing that's curious: "true" takes that-clauses like the propositional attitudes, modal operators, all that intensional stuff. But "true" remains transparent in just the way the other that-clause governors don't. Example:

• It's interesting that the number of planets in our solar system is less than 9; there are 8 planets in our solar system; but it is not interesting that 8 is less than 9.
• It's true that the number of planets in our solar system is less than 9; there are 8 planets in our solar system; and it is true that 8 is less than 9.

The only other expression I can think of that takes that-clauses and is transparent is "fact."

I think the question, still, is whether truth is a semantic notion.

But what does it mean for a sentence to have truth conditions? Well it is something that is relative to a language. So in English, the sentence 'cats fly' express one particular set of truth conditions, but it could've been otherwise (if English had a different history, for example if 'cat' meant what 'dog' means in our English, then 'cats fly' would have different truth conditions in that hypothetical English).

So let's imagine a world where 'cats fly' doesn't have any truth conditions, and that would be a world where English doesn't exist, or any other language (suppose that there are no humans in that world). But now, can the sentence 'cats fly' have a truth value in that world? It seems to me that it can. If cats fly in that world, then the sentence is true in that world, and if they don't then it would be false. So here you have a world where a sentence doesn't have truth conditions but has a truth value. So truth values don't depend on truth conditions, and hence they cannot depended on interpretation either — Fafner

This is the part I was looking at.

It looks like you're defining truth as satisfaction: "cats fly" is true in that world iff there is something in that world that is a cat and flies. You're effectively taking triples of <sentence, language, world> as what has truth conditions. It's completely irrelevant whether the language is spoken in the world, or the sentence is ever uttered in the world.

I'll know more soon, as I expect you will too. We'll talk again in a month.

I guess I don't see why one wouldn't say it was just by chance. — Brayarb

We're talking about semantics, so S1 is distinguished from S2 by some proposition P being true in S1 and false in S2, something like that. What make P true is what makes S1 obtain. I guess.

This is all easier for concretists because truth is just satisfaction -- possible worlds are just maximal models. I guess the abstractionist needs a metaphysical account of truth -- truth-makers, that sort of thing. (Again, really not my area, so I could be way wrong.)

Why would you say that S1 obtained over S2? Are you saying that that question doesn't really make sense, or would you say that more information is needed to answer it? — Brayarb

I don't understand why you assume there would be a general answer to that.

The concretists give something that counts as a general answer, but only by definition.

Quine's attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction goes like this: we all agree that what makes a statement true is in part a matter of what the words mean, and in part a matter of the way the world is, so we think we can separate those, but it turns out that's easier said than done. That's the argument anyway.

It seemed to me the point you & @Metaphysician Undercover had reached was related, in trying to link or unlink meaning, interpretation, truth conditions, and truth value. I thought it might be helpful to look at an actual utterance where there is a contrast between two subjects, and then decide whether that contrast turned out to be differences in word usage or something else.

Here's a different example of flying to consider.

In Toy Story, Buzz claims that he can fly, and Woody claims that Buzz cannot. When Buzz performs an action A he believes will count as evidence that indeed he can fly, Woody responds, "That wasn't flying! That was -- falling with style." (Thank you, Joss Whedon.)

Woody's statement could be taken as: That's not what we mean by "flying." As it turns out, although Woody does not yet know this, Buzz and Woody have the same understanding of the word "flying"; neither do they disagree on how to apply the word "flying." That they disagree about whether action A counts as flying is not down to a disagreement in usage; Buzz has a mistaken belief about what action A was. Buzz's epiphany later in the film is not, "I have been misusing the word 'flying,'" even though that is also true: he has been applying it to actions that are not examples of flying. But he has been applying it correctly, and as Woody would, relative to his beliefs; it's his beliefs that were mistaken.

My contention was that it must be chance — Brayarb

I don't see how that can be right.

If you're an abstractionist, you think the concretists have explained away actuality with a semantic trick: "actual" is just an indexical exactly analogous to "here" and "now." That has the, some would say great, advantage of simplifying a lot of semantics. (Everything is done relative to <world, time, place> triples.) But it gives away actuality. Abstractionists want to get the semantic framework without giving up the more or less pre-philosophical sense of "actual." Or so it seems to me.

If you're holding onto that sense of "actual," then my sense is you want to hold onto the ordinary sense of why one thing happens rather than another, why one state-of-affairs obtains rather than another, and so your explanations are the usual ones. You may explain everything by chance, but you needn't. As an abstractionist, you still look at the actual world however you looked at it before, or at least you will try to. For instance, the world that obtains now includes this post. Whatever explanation you like for that is the explanation for why the world is the way it is.

Talk of possible worlds is just a semantic framework, on my understanding. It is not meant to, expected, or perhaps even capable of settling metaphysical issues. It's only meant to clarify them.

I just don't know enough really, but my sense from skimming through SEP was that the answer might be immanent to the actual world. That is, concretists say the world is this one of many in exactly the sense that it's the one I happen to be in; abstractionists say this world is the way it is because of what happens to have happened in this one, i.e., because a particular possible states-of-affairs has been realized.

If it would be legitimate to define a possible state-of-affairs as "everything going on exactly as it is, except I accidentally end this sentence I'm writing with a comma instead of period," then by the time I finish we'll know which possible state-of-affairs has been realized. Now we do. As it happens, I chose to do that, but who knows what might have happened by the time I got there. (Another thing I don't know is whether that's even a legitimate world definition to an abstractionist.)

Does that sound at all right? I'm guessing you know more about this than I do.

follows from — Pippen

You have to learn the basics.

The logic you're using is tenseless. "¬p→p" says tenselessly "If nothing exists, then something exists." It is true if something exists; false if nothing exists.

What you want is to say is more like this:
1. at time t₀ there is nothing
2. at time t₁ there is something
3. t₁ > t₀
I don't know how to represent "comes from," but it seems like this is close enough.

I think the point of the question -- which I'm not competent to answer, so I haven't -- is that "actual" is an indexical to concretists like Lewis, but not for abstractionists. I don't know what they say about the OP's questions.

I would say one difference between my hypothesis and yours is that mine is motivated. I don't have a definition of "motivated" handy, but at least the conditional I've tacked on repeats a claim I've established by induction.

My conditional has a contrapositive, the conclusion of which I believe has been shown to be false: if it matters whether a human makes the observation, then it matters which human. Now that could still be false, if its antecedent is true. I can't test that. But at least I'm still talking about the same thing as when I was showing inductively that for some things, it doesn't matter who makes the observation.

And I think we want to keep the distinction between observations that depend on the observer in a way we can understand (can find mechanisms to explain) and observations that don't seem to be observer-sensitive.

Suppose you did an experiment in which people answered questions about the colors they see. You'll probably find there are differences among your subjects, and you could say color is observer-dependent in that sense.

Now do an experiment where you put some keys in a box and ask your subjects if the keys are in the box. Let's imagine they all assent. Then we describe keys being in boxes as not observer-dependent.

But wait -- what about non-human observers? Don't know how to test them, so we'll be content to say the result only applies to human observers -- if you're human, we predict you'll agree the keys are in the box.

What about when there's no observer at all? Tricky to test, but maybe we can at least form an hypothesis: if it doesn't matter which human makes the observation, then it doesn't matter whether any human actually does. We might feel bad about forming an hypothesis that's unfalsifiable, but then all hypotheses that exclude observation probably are. At least this one feels like a natural inductive step from our observations.

Just thinking out loud. We entertained the possibility that there was a general pattern of forced theory refinement, and that there's a kind of refinement congenial to a theory and a kind not -- the kind that might make you start looking for a new theory -- so it seemed natural to wonder if the uncongenial kind could be reliably forced.

I'm wondering now if every theory can be forced into an ad hoc refinement.

And I'm wrong to say it's always the amount. A piece of the true cross counts no matter how small.

Actually that last bit -- it's still a bag of flour -- is curious because it's literally true but cancels the implicature that it's a full bag of flour, or the usual bag of flour, etc.

On issue with blobs, heaps and chunks is that they are modifiers that turn mass nouns into count nouns. A bag of flour isn't quite the same as the flour that's in the bag. — Pierre-Normand

But my suspicion is that this is just not true, that it's always the amount of flour we're interested in and the bag is just the obvious way of referring to how much. If bags of flour did not have weights printed on them, a grocer who emptied some of the flour from each bag would still be a cheat. "It's still a bag of flour" wouldn't be much of a defense.

I had this same thought because our example is a statue and one of the most famous statues of all time is missing her arms. (Great song by Television.)

I suppose there's sorites on the one hand, and the ship of Theseus on the other; you can ask if you still have a heap after taking away a grain, and if you still have the same heap. (People's intuition about the latter might very dramatically.) An external constraint -- this blob is the bronze, meaning all of it, that used to be the statue -- blocks the latter but not the former. If you've lost any, you have to say this is some of the bronze.

(I feel like I'm making less sense with each post -- maybe because I'm at work now.)

Are you asking under what conditions some bit of material becomes an independent object? — Fafner

The sorites arises when you try to treat a mass noun collection as an object in its own right. You can say that makes it a vaguely defined object or you could just not think of it as an object at all.

I'm thinking that for a given theory, some ways of refining or extending it will be natural and some will be ad hoc. So naturalness is also theory-relative.

I guess there's a difference between talking about the bronze a statue is made of and the particular collection of bronze bits it's made of. The first is just the mass noun "bronze" and it's the status of the latter that's confusing. (Mass nouns just don't always come to you in discrete hunks. Air doesn't, for instance.)

So the question really is how do mass nouns behave when you qualify them in some way -- the bronze this statue is made of, the snow in the mountains, the water in that glass. Does such a qualifier make an object?

So we're abolishing any distinction between natural and ad hoc sortals. — Srap Tasmaner

Actually I think that would be a measure of how the theory refinement is done, not that it has been refined.

I guess I'm just still unclear what we're supposed to have learned about "meaning."

So we're abolishing any distinction between natural and ad hoc sortals.

I'm not getting this.

If I refer to some stuff by referring to its current configuration as an object, I'm still referring to the stuff.

I guess we're thinking of stuff as a bunch of objects, water molecules, say. I could, in principle, name each water molecule, couldn't I? Even though I don't and it's impractical. In fact, not naming those bits is what makes water, for my present purposes, stuff rather than an object. Stuff is a collection of unnamed and interchangeable objects.

the particles must form some sort of unity — Fafner

Why isn't set membership enough?

Yes, I think that's the sort of thing I'm saying. We could say that dummyness is theory-relative, and that Travis's argument is that there is no final theory possible, in which all dummyness has been eliminated. But there is the built-in corollary that we can always eliminate dummyness by a refinement of our theory, so I'm still unclear on what conclusion is to be drawn.

So the point is that I have to define my set by reference to the statue? Must I have an independent way of referring to it? What about before it was a statue, when it was a pallet of bronze?

Btw, I liked snow because it's more comical, but the point I was reaching for -- that it's generally clear whether we're referring to an object or some stuff -- is more clearly made with water: moving the water from a glass to a bowl means destroying the object that is a cylinder of water.

To complement Pierre-Normand's answer: if you take a slightly different example, that of a clay sculpture, I think it becomes more intuitive to think that if you crush the sculpture then what reminds is a lump of clay that was identical (in some sense) to the original sculpture that has been destroyed. — Fafner

I think the sense of identity here is more or less just set membership though: all the bits of stuff that the statue was made of are still here.

With some materials, we imagine the material itself by imagining objects (blocks, lumps, piles, slabs, hunks) made out of that stuff, but that could be a hindrance not a help.

I went for snow to fight the intuition of cohesion: imagine taking the instruction to clear the walk as meaning I should recreate the configuration of the stuff that was on the walk somewhere else.

According to Simons, ship is something of a dummy sortal since some people may be interested in Theseus' ship qua historical artifact, or buy it in order to make use of it as a fishing boat. — Pierre-Normand

Yet again it is a question of interest and purpose. Are we sure there will turn out to be sortals that are never dummy sortals?

(I'm reminded of the exchange from Local Hero: "You wish to buy my church?" "Well, not as a going concern.")

It's not perfectly clear that what you call here the "lump of bronze" that constitutes the statue is an object at all. It feels more like a mereological sum of bronze bits. Your question might still be ambiguous, but not between two further determinations of a generic sortal, but between the object and the stuff it's made of (which is not an object).

If I tell you to move the statue, I'll expect you to keep it in intact. If I tell to clear the snow from the front walk of our museum, it's okay for you to change the configurations of the bits of snow, let some of them melt, etc. Swapping object and stuff in those examples would have dramatic and peculiar consequences.

If you find logic interesting, you should really take some time and study it.

This convention* is not of the nature of a promise: For even promises themselves, as we shall see afterwards, arise from human conventions. It is only a general sense of
common interest; which sense all the members of the society express to one another, and which induces them to regulate their conduct by certain rules. I observe, that it will be for my interest to leave another in the possession of his goods, provided he will act in the same manner with regard to me. He is sensible of a like interest in the regulation of his conduct. When this common sense of interest is mutually express’d, and is known to both, it produces a suitable resolution and behaviour. And this may properly enough be call’d a convention or agreement betwixt us, tho’ without the interposition of a promise; since the actions of each of us have a reference to those of the other, and are perform’d upon the supposition, that something is to be perform’d on the other part. Two men, who pull the oars of a boat, do it by an agreement or convention, tho’ they have never given promises to each other. Nor is the rule concerning the stability of possession the less deriv’d from human conventions, that it arises gradually, and acquires force by a slow progression, and by our repeated experience of the inconveniences of transgressing it. On the contrary, this experience assures us still more, that the sense of interest has become common to all our fellows, and gives us a confidence of the future regularity of their conduct: And ’tis only on the expectation of this, that our moderation and abstinence are founded. In like manner are languages gradually establish’d by human conventions without any promise. In like manner do gold and silver become the common measures of exchange, and are esteem’d sufficient payment for what is of a hundred times their value. — Hume, Treatise 3.2.2

* He's been talking about property.

Understanding a sentence in which a novel use of a word is made is just a special case of understanding a sentence in which use is made of a word you don't know.

Making a novel use of word in a sentence may or may not increase the risk that your sentence will not be understood -- contextual definitions aren't all that risky -- but there can be good reasons for taking that risk.

Why yes, in a thread discussing Wittgenstein's conception of meaning, I am speaking about conventional meanings. I hope the shock of this revelation doesn't incapacitate you. — StreetlightX

Was the rewrite intended to be more snippy or less?

Wittgenstein is here by implication, but his name appears not in the thread title, and the thread itself has ranged over far more topics than just Wittgenstein's views.

Neither does the word "word" or "meaning" appear in the title of the thread but "language."

Neither does the phrase "meaning of a word" occur here:

I'm not sure how I gave the impression I wasn't. What else would already-established uses/conventional uses of language refer to? — StreetlightX

Now, for my part, I consider the tantrum exchange complete, and I'm good with moving on.

You're talking about the conventional meaning of a word, how a word is generally used within a speech community, how a word is most often used within a language, that sort of thing.

That's important, of course, but the meanings of words are far from being the only conventions of a language or of its use, or, I would like to say, of language as such or the use of language as such.

• There are vague, abstract conventions about communicating in certain ways (rhetoric, Grice's maxims).
• (There's probably a truth-telling convention, but that one's hard to formulate well.)
• There are conventional things to say in particular situations in each language (manners).
• There are conventional ways of talking that are context-dependent (formal and informal, preaching and sportscasting, political speeches and domestic disturbances).
• There are performative conventions like the words spoken in wedding ceremonies.
• There are conventions of grammar ranging from abstract classifications (pre- and post-position for adjectives modifying nouns) and more specifics within each language.
• There are conventions of what Fowler would have called English usage.
• There are conventions of word-formation.
• There are conventions of spelling.
• There are conventions of pronunciation that vary by region and dialect.
• There are conventions for what phonemes we use, with some variation, and conventions for how we use them (some sequences of sounds that English-speakers do make are not English).
• My use of English rather than some other language is down to English being the language conventionally spoken within the speech community I was born into.
• My use of spoken language rather than gestural or something else, likewise.
• My use of language at all, I think likewise.
  
  (And what goes for me, goes for everyone in the appropriate way.)

That's off the top of my head. It's turtles all the way down.

When we assume that facts exist, we are implicitly committing ourselves to a form of nominalism as opposed to viewing things as mutually dependent and holistic. When we assert the ontology of the universe as facts and not things, we seem to be saying that objects are nominalist, but, as opposed to what? — Question

?

You should take another shot at that paragraph.