Well prove me wrong by actually making an argument and not merely an assertion.

If the difference in tense is crucial, demonstrate what practical difference it could make.

Sigh. The history of what worked up to a nanosecond ago then?

Crucial difference my arse. Pointless pedantry more like.

Experience. A history of what works. Reason seems reasonable as unreason has likewise proved itself as such.

All this talk about truth, knowledge, certainty, belief, doubt. The critical issue seems to be identifying the mind as the part that has some understanding that can’t be wrong. The mind appears to be the part that stands outside a world of facts or events. It has a timeless and displaced appreciation of what is actual in terms of spatiotemporal occurrences.

So we have Descartes. The mind bit of the equation got boiled down to some cognitivising soul. Everything about perception could be doubted. But there was the irreducible fact of the thinker thinking the thoughts, having at least the ideas.

Then Kant came out with a more cognitively elaborate story. The soul constructs a representation that corresponds, more or less, to the world. There was no absolute access to the facts of reality. Indeed, the issue seemed to be that in being mere representation, the goal of actually knowing reality was forever doomed to failure.

Descartes left the mind radically disconnected by doubt. Kant left it radically disconnected by the falsity of a representation. Then of course pragmatism turned things around by creating a more general theory of the mind in terms of a set of developed habits in fruitful interaction with the instabilities or contingencies of the world.

The world is no longer itself viewed as some stable realm of fixed objects or certain facts. It is not even there - present - to be “re-presented”. It is a dynamic flux, a sea of possibility, that can become organised by the imposition of constraints.

So the material world itself is re-imagined as lacking in counterfactual definiteness. It is at base vague or indeterminate. It requires the mind-like thing of developed functional habits to give it definite shape and direction.

This is a metaphysics. It is a new view of how reality is. It is a process philosophy, a self-organising and probabilistic view of nature. And a view conceived before quantum physics and dissipative structure theory arrived to show how true it was.

Anyway. A process ontology justifies a process epistemology. And so the mind’s job becomes not merely to know the world, to be certain of its facts. The mind is now that part of the world that is the source of its stability or regularity. The mind is the part that speaks to its formal and final cause. The mind’s role is not just to sit back in distant fashion and represent. It exists to use that displacement in order to act in a functional fashion. It exists to bring organisation to a world founded in material contingency.

Now the difficulty here is that the mind of which we speak is no longer the consciousness of a human soul. That is an image of mind that comes from a materialist ontology. It is the passive observer without an active role in the creation of “the facts”.

The pragmatist mind is instead the generalisation of reality’s own ontic need for an organisational potential that follows from spatiotemporal displacement - the epistemic cut. So the pragmatist mind is the more general thing of the interpretant, the habits; the information that provides the constraints, that provide the functional structure or limitations on material instability.

We can see the impact this re-conception has on epistemology. The idea of a re-presenting of a fixed world of facts to a perceiving mind just goes right out the window. A notion of truth, belief, knowledge, or whatever, in those terms, is simply redundant.

We are now talking about an interactive modelling relation. And this is an ontic-strength story. It is not merely about how a human mind understands the facts of the world. It is a pan-semiotic story of how a world is even created. Reality itself is some version of this process of instability become regulated by some system of displaced intentionality. Or as Pattee put it, rate independent information acting as the constraint on rate dependent dynamics.

So now this is why Wittgenstein and others would feel so convinced that our certainty, our truths, are expressed in our physical interactions with the world. What counts as true is a demonstration that we can regulate the instability of our environments. If asked, we know how to make the acts of measurement to produce the evidence. The evidence which is now a sign - the timeless information - speaking to our power over a temporal or dynamically unstable material world.

So epistemology is fundamentally entwined with our ontology, our view of nature. And pragmatism is not merely just another epistemology. It is a fundamental revision of ontology. It is the switch from a belief in a world that just statically exists as some mind-independent state of affairs, or collection of facts, or set of atomistic propositions, and the adoption of a process or systems metaphysics where material being is fundamentally contingent or unstable, and thus is in need of a regulating guiding hand.

Moore might have been right to believe that here is one of his hands, now here is the other. But what is being challenged by pragmatism is the whole idea that there is a world that can be known without our having something crucial to do with its making.

And this would be a mystical state of affairs unless we can revise our foundational notions about reality all the way down to a pansemiotic quantum level.

We don’t want to be left with a definition of mind that is still essentially dualistic and spiritual. We want one that cashes out in more psychological, then biological and eventually physical notions, such as habits, limits, information, laws and constraints.

Again, the converse is true. We can see from a history that believing the contrary of the principle of induction would have been as misleading as possible. So to adopt the contrary in regards to the future would be as unreasonable as possible. Hence it is only reasonable to continue to assume the principle.

We are talking about a meta-argument, remember. This is not about some particular belief. This is about the general method of belief. We are no longer talking about just events in the world. We are talking about a habit of mind.

I am not sure how to assess this, since you didn't answer any of my questions — PossibleAaran

LOL.

So, is it true that Paris is the capital of France? — Banno

Mind independently true?

I would assume a constant in the action of water currents upon small particules in relation to geographical features? — Akanthinos

But you mentioned a causal process that generally produces entities. Being particulate doesn’t seem a cause of a beach as such. The generality of currents as a process do.

t's because those processes leads to mass production of similar entities that we are warranted in speaking of category and kinds, not because the world is structured categorically — Akanthinos

So if a general process produces particular entities, then how does this structural fact about nature not justify a categorical representation of the situation in logic? Why would that picture fail?

just like we have no good reason to think it won't reverse — andrewk

But we do. We have inductive evidence that inductive principles have prevailed to date. This view has the weight of historic evidence. It’s abductive guess remains unfalsified. And the opposite guess has an equivalent lengthy history of not being true,

I’m confused. You say generality and particularity are points of view. I agree.

Then you make some further suggestion about individual worldly processes that produce entities en masse.

Apart from coke bottles and model T fords, did you have some natural process in mind here.

What kind of process produces beaches for instance? There are loads of those everywhere.

Do grains of sands run about and gang together at dead of night to build the beach you visit? Or were you thinking of something general like erosion and currents as the processes responsible?

We can know that it worked and so it’s opposite didn’t work.

Inductively, we thus have no good reason to think that the story would reverse itself in the future.

It still might. But we would have no good reason to think it would.

I am aware it is something like that — Banno

Just something?

The trouble is, even after the extensive process proposed, the community might be wrong. — Banno

In what sense is that “trouble”?

Especially given that in the limit, they would have no reason to care? If it makes no odds, it makes no odds.

So you seem to think that a capital called Paris or a language named English somehow creates a dreadful epistemic issue for pragmatism - bad enough that you are now officially a former pragmatist.

But you won’t now explain how proper names are truths of reality and hence something that pragmatism might expect to arrive at as the limit of rational inquiry into the facts of the world.

Well I’m sure you believe you have an argument in there somewhere. Now if only we could flush it out.

No, you gave me a clue, not an answer. — Banno

As I said, in multiple posts I’ve given the answer - truth is the limit of rational inquiry.

So where is the problem with that position exactly?

You got a definition, so what is your point?

I laughed so hard.

There is no such thing as interpretation without something which is doing the interpreting. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sounds legit.

So I gave you your answer on definitions. How does this next deflection relate?

But then why choose that axiom? We could try to say because it has worked well in the past, but that would be circular, as Hume pointed out. — andrewk

Not really. We would choose it because it works. It become safe to think the past predicts the future once you are in that future.

So we know what works vs what doesn’t work. It’s a historical fact. There is inductive confirmation of any abductive leap we might have made.

How do you think I use them?

If you are going to pretend it is a mystery, you will have to tell me in what sense. It’s not as if I haven’t repeated myself on the subject a million times now. So this is simply further evasion.

A clue. In multiple posts I’ve said that truth is the limit of rational inquiry. So it is belief exhausted in that regard for all practical purposes. And the limit is thus defined by the principle of indifference. We have no good reason to worry about the possible remaining differences or exceptions.

So on to your next deflection I guess. Anything to avoid having to make some actual counter argument of any kind.

Agency ought to be attributed to those who use words and language, not to the words and language themselves. — Metaphysician Undercover

According to dualism.

Language does not create speakers, speakers create language — Metaphysician Undercover

The causality is mutual according to my systems account.

No, words cannot function as constraints, the interpreter is free to interpret words in any way one desires, at the risk of misunderstanding what was meant. — Metaphysician Undercover

If interpretation is all there really is - there is no dualistic interpreter that is the soul exerting it’s further point of view - then my account describes the situation.

If you believe in souls, then you insist on a dualistic ontology.

How are you defining those terms exactly?

But if you like, you could explain the belief-truth thing, and explain to people how we do not know how high Mount Everest is. — Banno

Well I was quite happy to talk about the example you raised in this post - the social construction of Uluru as sacred. And that is a good example. There is the phenomenon of people returning sorry stones and a system of fines. Even souveniring sand is verbotten. Taking away the dust on your clothes could be problematic.

So there we had a fair test of truth theories. One that spans the mental and material realms pretty evenly in its truth claims.

You saw where that example of yours had to go and so now want to revert to what feels like safer ground - the height of Mt Everest. You want to argue from an example in which the presumptions are suppressed as a matter of ordinary everyday education. You would be laughed out of class for not assenting to some factual reply from a suitable expert in terms of some number of metres.

Your problem Banno is your rhetorical manoeuvres are transparent. And you simply walk away as fast as your argument starts to burn.

IN any case, when I have attempted any sort of analysis of your claims, you avoid them. — Banno

LOL. Sometimes you must even amaze yourself at your bare faced cheek.

A string of your one-liners have been knocked on their arse just as fast. Every attempt to deflect has failed. Nothing has been avoided, just sent over the boundary for six.

I accepted pragmatism for quite a few years, — Banno

LOL. Some half-arsed AP notion of it?

The substantive theories of truth all fail. Pragmatism included. — Banno

But pragmatism claims truth is only relative. How could that view fail?

We are not obligated to refute every single argument that comes along. — Banno

So after a series of evasive one-liner deflections, the confession of the lack of any reasonable counter.

After the prolonged gurgling, the slow disappearance beneath the waves.

You set up a dualism at the base of your doctrine. If I don't accept your doctrine, I do not need to accept your basic dualism. — Banno

It's a dichotomy. So it is anti-dualistic in being fundamentally triadic.

And I presented an argument. So you are just finding excuses to avoid making a counter-argument.

It is you who have claimed a dogmatism in doctrinal fashion. You are telling me you don't need to change your position as no argument is going to change it. You believe what you want to believe.

Seems really philosophical. Or religious. ;)

A trivial split, as opposed to your world-shattering epistemic cut. — Banno

Hmm. What is it that you don't get about the the cut which is the separation that founds the connection? :)

A Peircean epistemology explains how a self is formed via a capacity to be indifferent to the world. As yet, you have made zero counter-argument. You just make these gurgling drowning noises.

You think this a problem because you split the speaker from the world. I don't. — Banno

But you do. You are a representationalist in saying there is "a world". It's right there in your language.

Since meaning is use, sense is found by using a language. A language that was not about the world could not have a use. Consider propositional logic. Like an engine with the clutch in, it would grind away without engaging.

If epistemology is no more than an engine spinning away without making contact with the world, then why bother. — Banno

Again, your response founders on a failure to recognise that language games must create their speakers along with their worlds. So they are always about more than just the world. And also less about the world in that the "speaking self" is defined in terms of a grounding indifference to "the world".

This is the central cognitive trick that your Kantian representationalism just overlooks time and again.

It is telling that you even use a mechanical metaphor to make your point. You just take the driver for granted. There is a driver wanting to mesh with the world in some way. And so all your attention goes to the linguistic device used to make that connection. A clutch that switches a connection off and on.

This is naive realism. You take the fact of the self and the world for granted where really they are emergent from the linguistic mechanism - the epistemic cut - themselves.

As I say, speakers define themselves in terms of the aspects of the world they can afford to deem themselves indifferent towards. I am me - an autonomous being able to do my own thing - to the degree that I don't need to care about the physical details of the world. To the degree that the world fails to act as a constraint on my intentions.

So Wittgenstein was trying to articulate this ecological or embodied or pragmatic understanding of epistemology. The world is what it is. But the world for us is the world defined in terms of the limit of what we need to care about. And it is that very capacity for a practical indifference that is the making of "us". It is the definition of selfhood as interpretance. We arise along with the umwelt we construct. Our understanding of the world is really our understanding of a world with "us" in it.

So as I say, it is both less and more than your naive realism supposes. There is less of the actual thing in itself. But there is more of this us.

I sense your frustration at being pushed towards this critical realisation. But for too long you have simply wanted some simple theory of truth to come out right.

Epistemology's central problem is how to understand the relation between a thinker and a world. You want to just dismiss the problem as something not in need of an explanation. Which is naive. Pragmatism by contrast solves the riddle left by Descartes and Kant by showing how both self and world are co-constructions. Each arises as a reflection of the other. So it is the relation which creates the "reality".

Now again, you will howl - look around. There is a mind-independent reality exactly as physicalism asserts! I kick this stone, I wave this hand, I measure this mountain, I name this bump in the landscape the sacred rock, Uluru.

But that is a realism which leaves the mind undefined and unexplained. How can you claim this "mind-independence" if your epistemology has stepped all around the issue of what is a mind?

And it is a realism that relies on the objectivity of scientific method, when our best theory of scientific method is ... Peirce's pragmatism.

So at every turn, you are finding you run into the same answer.

Sure, commonsense says we are just a mind, and there just is a world. But this is the commonsense of the naive realist. And here we are talking about the foundations of epistemology. You can't just wish all the problems away.

You have to think about things to make definite choices. So rationality is just about exploring the right way to achieve some goal.

The good and evil are how we tend to describe people's value systems - their general motivations. The goals they would be generally wanting to achieve.

The two come together because we can rationalise about good and evil. We can discuss a choice of views about the status of values.

Are good and evil moral absolutes or essentially meaningless human constructs? Or somewhere inbetween?

Of course, taking a natural philosophy perspective, I would seek the evolutionary optimality of "good vs evil". I would rationalise it as a natural and complementary opposition between competitive and co-operative social behaviour.

So that seems the most rational view of human intentionality in general.

But anyway, your OP confuses these two levels of questioning. Whatever our intentions or goals, it is thinking that fleshes out the possible courses of action. But then, metaphysically, if we want to ask about what are the "right" goals, then the conversation has to turn to what are the choices there, and what choice best fits the available evidence.

It makes no sense to talk about it being just language and not abut the world-in-itself; they are the very same. — Banno

Why does it make no sense exactly? You keep making the assertion. But the argument is missing.

Pragmatically it might be no use - especially in everyday settings where there is nothing philosophical at stake.

But epistemology is a philosophical language game. It talks of stuff like truth, certainty, belief and doubt. It gets silly to pretend that there is nothing being spoken of in terms of that culturally-foundational inquiry.

So of course, truth-telling games are grounded in a principle of indifference. A ground is found not by reaching the bedrock of "undoubtable hinge propositions" but by actively agreeing that further facts don't make an essential difference.

This is what is key. There is no solid ground. But we can construct a ground based on the agreement that there is a generality - a constraint that defines similarity - and then also a limit on the capacity for the particulars or individual differences to make a difference.

This is why truth-telling is considered "a system". The true facts are sandwiched between our pragmatic notions of essence and indifference. They are what arise via this pincer movement. To refer to "a hand" is to bound a state of conception in terms the idea of a hand's essence - whatever it is that makes hands similar - and the idea of what then doesn't matter, or is inessential, to that ideal. Between those two complementary bounds, we find our particular interpretant of the sign.

There is a way of understanding "This is a hand" that is not explained in yet more propositions - "this is this". Understanding is shown by behaving in a way that agrees that this is a hand. The sceptic has not understood how to use the word "hand". — Banno

Yep. What is ostensively demonstrated is is a customary and pragmatic degree of unconcern. Folks, this is where the doubting stops ... so far as this language game about "reality" goes. This is what looks like a "grounding fact" in the world we are collectively imagining.

So a pragmatic approach to truth accepts that there is this kind of semiotic game, this triadic modelling relation, which is itself basic. It stands against Cartesian dualism and Kantian representationalism by speaking to the Peircean triadicism of a sign relation.

Facts are always facts in terms of some language game, some pragmatic modelling relation. They are the acceptable acts of measurement for some game, not some semiosis-independent truth.

In practice, the line between belief and doubt, similarity and difference, generality and particularity, is always fuzzy. Language over-claims when it comes to the supposed atomism, the supposed counterfactual definiteness, of the world it attempts to describe. But pragmatically, it works. And it works because it is always open-ended and imprecise.

That is why language is inherently creative as well as usefully definite. Every interpretation has suppressed freedoms. Talk about a hand can include or exclude flippers or phalanges, depending on the intentional context. So the leash on meaning can be loosened or tightened. If facts were just facts and not states of interpretation bounded by a notion of differences that don't make a difference, then language use would be as uncreative as a computer programme. It would not be the fluid instrument of thought that it is.

There are many reasons (of doubt) for the audience to reject such a proposal as "this is a hand". Principally, the boundaries of exactly what is and is not part of the hand, are not defined. Moore would hold up an entire arm, saying "this is a hand", not indicating whether things like the wrist and the fingers are part of the hand or not. So even ostensive definitions need to be justified, clarified by further descriptions. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. Words can only function as constraints on interpretance. They are irreducibly open ended and thus uncertain. Nothing could be defined exactly, as reality is a continuous whole and words are attempts to name its discrete parts.

So the language game when it comes to ostensive definition has a second aspect. We must learn the communal practice when it comes to the point where we cease to sweat the detail. There will always be fine grain differences that could be used as the seed of doubt. But language use involves knowing when a difference ceases to make a difference.

A hand may include a bit of wrist or not. Where one leaves off and the other begins is vague. Or in other words, it is not a big enough contradiction to get fussed over. To speak, to be certain of what another is saying, we only need to agree on the gist. And that involves both understanding the general ostensive reference and sharing a close enough degree of unconcern about the differences that don’t make a difference.

So pragmatically, there is always doubt as words want to break the thing in itself into a collection of signs, a collection of named parts. But part of the game is then learning when differences don’t matter.

When we point at a part of the world, there is this double pointing. We are saying x is that thing, and also not all those other things. We are thus in fact pointing at our idea of the thing, not the actual thing - as there is no “actual thing” in a continuous world.

It's only a partial failure, which any erudite audience would recognize as such. Mistaking a hand for a flipper is not so bad; I could think of much worse perceptual failures or visual agnosias ("wife for hat"). — Janus

So what does that say? If failure can be partial - and indeed would always be partial under your view, as what would total look like? - then success would also only be partial.

Or in other words, belief and doubt are relative, never absolute. They are opposed limits on certainty.

Which is what I pragmatically argue. As also does Wittgenstein in making certainty the result of a system - events in contexts, acts of measurement within background theories.

It is only Banno who wants facts to be facts regardless of any system of measurement.

It's not based on perceptual experience per se. It's the participation in the shared language game that is pivotal. It's not an induction. — Banno

LOL. That would be why Moore on an LSD trip, shrieking here is one flipper, now here is another, is simply failing to share in a language game with his audience. It wouldn’t be a failure of a perceptual experience game.

t's not propositions all the way down. "Here is a hand" shows the hand. — Banno

You might need to brush up on your reading skills. Demonstrating that your bedrock is your perceptual experience is demonstrating exactly that. Which becomes the problem for your position in which the world is some totality of propositional facts.

Especially once your transcendent world of truths are talked of as if reality were not temporal but an eternal block of events that have “already been actualised”.

You keep going on about truth being cashed out in meaningful actions. Well Peirce made the point that the act of measurement is the primal definition of a meaningful action.

Moore proposes he has hands? Well look. Flap, flap. There’s your inductive confirmation. We can all agree on that as evidence. That sure looks like a meaningful act of measurement.

Truth is not a type of belief. — Banno

Amusing.

To continue, the difference between a Peircean and Wittgensteinian epistemology - or at least Banno's understanding of one - looks to hinge on two key issues.

First, Banno is concerned to make truth a property of propositions. So this is the philosophy of language view that reality is some totality of statements. For all practical purposes - ie: the pragmatism that eschews mysticism and unwarranted skepticism - existence or experience reduces to a collection of all that is stateable or sayable.

This stance in itself conflates all forms of language, confusing the difference between the strict and explicit grammars that constitute "logical speech" with the much looser and socially-oriented language that we use in ordinary, not explicitly metaphysical, everyday speech.

Peirce then makes truth a property of semiosis. This is a general method of reasoning that goes even beyond language. Animal brains and animal bodies reason semiotically - they are in a pragmatic sign relation with their world. Human language - both social and logical - are then merely the same semiotic game being played out at higher levels of development.

So Banno wants to deal with a reality imagined as some totality of true statements. And this seems to be what hinge propositions is about. For the door to swing, it must be anchored to something background that doesn't. To keep the linguistic turn going, that background also needs to be understood as some collection of propositions. It becomes propositions all the way down - even if we understand the practical impossibility of cashing out all that background supposition as confirmed true fact.

Peirce, on the other hand, takes the evolutionary approach as revealed by biological and psychological science. He sees the continuity of semiosis that underlies the development of the mind. If there is a hinge that gets swung on, it is the way that logical claims get hung on the bedrock certainty of our general perceptual living in a world. It is the animal level of cognition, the modelling of a biological self in pragmatic interaction with an environment, that is the anchor of our epistemology. We start from that as our primal facts.

So Banno's Wittgenstein has a problem that there is no proper cut-off. If it is propositions all the way down, then any kind of primal certainty has no starting point. But the Peircean view distinguishes grades of semiosis. So a lower grade can be the bedrock for a higher grade. There is an underlying continuity of course, but also a natural cut-off point. And waving his mitts about, that was what Moore would have been hoping to demonstrate.

Then a second key point of difference is that Peirce introduces a further category of epistemology - the vague.

Banno's Wittgenstein is committed to an epistemology of the statable or sayable. And especially when formulated in the language of logic, this is a presumption that only the crisp or definite - the counterfactual - gains admittance to the party.

Now the demand that statements be crisp is an excellent pragmatic maxim. It is the right goal. It is really useful - if you want to analyse reality into some set of answerable facts - for the laws of thought to apply.

However, it is the ideal. And vagueness is then the more primal or foundational condition. Peircean semiotics recognises and builds on that fact. Banno's Wittgenstein can't admit to it as otherwise the whole pretence of a philosophy of language derived theory of truth falls flat like a house of cards.

So again, with hinge propositions, the actual backdrop of belief to which particular propositions are hinged, is usually unanalysed. It is just a congealed mass of ecologically-valid belief or habit so far as our language use is concerned. It is our biological self - the animal self that knows and believes the ecological truth of its world.

Now we can get stuck into that congealed mass and analyse it propositionally. We can break it down linguistically. But it isn't already a collection of facts just waiting to be found. And being knowledge of a constitutionally vaguer kind, much of what it might have to say is going to elude any saying in being ... essentially vaguer. It will just resist full analysis. Although, again, there is no harm in doing our best.

So we can have truth as a property of logical propositions - certain formulas of words.

We can have truth as the report of commonsense experience - the beliefs that seem rooted in our ecologically-validated perceptions.

Or we can have truth in the Peircean sense as the common limit on a process of rational inquiry. We can have truth as the pragmatic fruit of semiosis - an understanding of epistemic mechanism that spans all the natural levels of "knowing", and also distinguishes these levels in terms of their being rooted in a foundational vagueness, and aspiring to an ideal of generality and counterfactual definiteness.

The basic insight of OC remains valuable: doubt only makes sense agains a background of certainty. — Banno

So what Peirce said over 50 years before. :)

Or to be more precise, we must begin where we first find ourselves - thrust into the middle of rational inquiry with some presumed background of understanding.

Certainty about those background beliefs then achieves the status of truth at the limit of rational inquiry. Truth is about opinion becoming fixed because doubt proves not to make a difference to what we feel most inclined to believe.

This is true anti-foundationalism. Instead of truth being what a mind knows about a world, it is the world as it must, in the limit, become known to the mind by "scientific reason" - a method of abduction, deduction and inductive confirmation. And not just some individual mind, but a collective or communal mind.

The linguistic mind is defined at a socio-cultural level.