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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rejecting bivalence — Banno

Not something we need to address.

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

the final row — Banno

The third and fourth rows.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indeed. But never specific enough — Isaac

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm not getting this at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

how meaning and truth fit together — Banno

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

There's

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

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

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

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

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

What are you implying?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hmmmmmm. Perhaps related to

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

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

Related to

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

Always look on the bright side of it.

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

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

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

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

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

What follows is speculative, but here goes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One down, three to go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

(1) "the kettle" is a a referring expression; and
(2) what "the kettle" refers to, or can be used to refer to, is the kettle; and
(3) "the kettle" is an expression, and is not the same as the concrete object the kettle; and
(4) the kettle is a concrete object, and is not the same as the expression "the kettle".

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

I thought you were done here. — Banno

Just done with my experiment. Still thinking about truth.

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

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

You hush your postmodern mouth!

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

Substitute any sentence you like for P. — Banno

You're right, you're right -- forgot for a moment that this is just a schema, and it includes the quotes to produce a name for the substituted sentence --- since "... is true" needs a referring expression, which P isn't. It's just a place-holder, not a name, not even a variable.

is illformed. — Banno

Oh you're right! Reached for quotes to group, so that it's

P ↔ (P is true)

instead of

(P ↔ P) is true.

But that's not what quotes are for.

Wasn't making a point about the order, duh, but, as I said, about your quotes around P in

P ≡ "P" is true — Banno

That's not what you mean. Here ' "P" ' is a name for ' P ', which is a name for a proposition.

That part you obviously agree with, since you passed over it in silence.

P ≡ "P" is true — Banno

P ↔ "P is true"

You've got your quotes in the wrong place. P is already a name.

P ↔ True(P)

I'm just here to help.

I would say that if I had forgotten my mother's name temporarily, then for that temporal period, I did not know her name, even if I could be said to have the potential to know it, since it would likely come to me soon enough. — Janus

I would call the passage from ignorance to knowledge learning. You learned your mother's name from her or from someone else who knew it. On your usage, by remembering you would learn your mother's name (again) from someone (yourself) who doesn't know it.

I think what you call a "potential to know" is what the rest of us call trying to remember something you do know. The idea that you might be able to remember something you do not know, is puzzling.

Did you come up with this usage of "know" yourself?

I chose the alternate example, whether the fence is wood or brick, as better suited to the task in hand; it's more obviously not just a question of opinion. — Banno

I like that -- especially the word "opinion" there -- but I doubt I'll continue. Far as I can tell, people were only ((or at least mostly)) reading what I wrote to see what conclusion I reached so they could agree or disagree with it. I mean, sure, philosophy traffics in abstractions, but I really hoped I could engage people at the level of a concrete scenario we could look at closely together. But I seem to be the only one interested in such a procedure.

I commend adopting a strategy that shows the public nature of justification. — Banno

I don't share your allergy to all things mental.

Why should possession of knowledge be a static unchanging thing? — Janus

If you mean, why do I think knowledge is, at least relatively, persistent --- I'm not quite sure what to say. I could say (a) it's part of our concept of knowledge for it to be persistent (not my favorite argument) or (b) there's an embarrassment of evidence that knowledge persists, for varying durations, certainly, but it's not ephemeral like perception; and maybe (a) derives from (b).

Are you a citizen only when you're showing your passport? Do you know how to ride a bike only while you're actually on a bike? Do you know your mother's name only when you're using it in a sentence?

In the example I gave -- which of course isn't quite knowledge of where Tim is but knowledge of where he said he was going -- I came to know what he said when I heard him say it; it's least committal I guess to say that I then inferred his intentions, and made further inferences about where he'd be later, and so on. Then I forget. Then I remember. For the latter, I would have to learn what Tim said from my memory of what he said, in order for me to create a new instance of knowing what he said.

Okay, that's interesting, and we could talk about how remembering and hearing in the first place might be compromised in similar or different ways, both episodes being theory-laden, both to some degree confabulations, whatever you'd like to say there.

Except, remember that by stipulation I don't know what he said, so what am I remembering? If I recreate his words from something, what is that something? I don't mean that as question for neuroscientists; it can obviously be that too, but for us, it needs to be something that's capable of engendering knowledge. That's the whole point of this, to say that there are these separate instances of knowledge and I create a new one when I need it. How do I do that?

To my reckoning, neither account treats knowledge as a "first class mental state", it's derivative of belief. — fdrake

Probably so. Honestly, it's like no one is convinced there's any such thing anymore.

For what it's worth, I wasn't thinking about knowledge when I started up my little model; I thought it was going to be more behavioral -- people, things, sentences, but I had been thinking about knowledge a lot, so what seemed natural to me eventually turned out to be more stuff about knowledge.

I'd love to see a similar sort of toy model that's beliefs all the way down, and doesn't include knowledge anywhere. What does that look like?

Perhaps, depending upon how we want to construe belief, we could say that we stopped believing Tim was going to Josh's because we couldn't remember, but upon remembering (recalling the script, the line, due to whatever it is that made us believe that) we do believe that -- while we knew it the entire time (there has to be some way we have a memory, after all -- I don't want to deny memory, only modify the picture we're using a bit). — Moliere

I think this is fine, probably. Maybe we could fill in some details even here, but maybe it's unnecessary. This is close to what I took@fdrake to be saying, that knowledge might have some mechanism that allows recreation of the belief on demand, more or less.

I do want to add that it was not my intention to contest the neuroscience of memory, or the idea that memories are, to some degree, confabulations, recreations, and so on. I assume the research on that is sound, and I think it accords readily with experiences most of us have had. It's the extent of the finding, rather than the finding itself, that might be a little surprising, but there you go. It is what it is.

That does make knowledge -- as distinct from memory -- a little tricky, because knowledge is obviously persistent in some sense, even if that sense is transformed into "presenting consistently" or something. It's not like we only just discovered that we can misremember things we know, so there's reason to think the concept of knowledge ought to be able to survive our improved understanding of memory.

I really had no idea we would end up so focused on memory. Honestly hadn't occurred to me that memory would be taken as a sort of proxy for the persistence of knowledge. So this is really interesting.

On the other hand, I did note along the way that one reason for making a model, like a map, is to improve access to the knowledge you've acquired. You noted something similar in the institutional memory of the sciences and academia at large.

This might also be the place to say that I wondered if my toy model would end up functioning in the Republic’s man-writ-large way. (I didn't explicitly design it for that, but not so that it couldn't be either.)

As I described things, we might make a model in language precisely to improve access to our knowledge, but now it looks like access to the model might be hampered by the very same problem it was designed (hypothetically) to solve: namely, that access to the model is in some sense inherently unreliable because memory, including memory of the model, is unreliable.

That's very nice. It looks like it really undermines the motivation for such linguistic models. As I said, I had no idea we might be headed here, but this is the sort of result I hoped for. (Though I expected it to be less general: if you can't remember what color Pat's house, you can't remember what color your model says it is -- something like that.)

But what if this wrong because overbroad, mainly. Maybe the point of a model is precisely that it involves a type of access that is more reliable? For instance, there's that early work of Herbert Simon and others on the memories of chess players: shown a position with pieces randomly placed, strong players (masters) do no better than anyone else at reconstructing them; shown a position from a real game, they do dramatically better because they break down the position into meaningful chunks and assemble those. The random position is harder to model efficiently, and the position modeling that masters do seems to enhance access (masters remember many, many patterns, and use them in modeling a given position). So the argument might fail if this is another point of modeling, to enhance access and make it more reliable. Both cases of memory, but not the same kind.

Chess masters know a lot, standard development patterns, openings, endgame techniques, middlegame themes, on and on and on. I just can't imagine "giving up" the entire category of knowledge. I don't know how we could understand chess performance without it.

I feel bad now that I took the bait, but in for a penny, in for a pound...

I've almost directly quoted you with the 'just look' aspect and you've at the very least been pointing in the direction of knowledge being obtainable via our empirical investigations. — Isaac

Sure, you're quoting me, but since you don't understand the context of anything I say, what's the point?

The whole point of this exercise was to provide a way of making the differences in approaches precise enough and explicit enough that we could actually discuss those differences, instead of going round and round on the same crap. To get there, I say things that may not represent my position, but are more like bringing out a position that the setup I did, shows is a possible position. The intent, again, was just to be clear enough that problems would be clear or could be made clear. @Banno's not onboard with much that I've said but that's fine; as I told him, if my model has assumptions that suck, we should get to see exactly where and how it fails. That would be a win, in my book.

The same goes for the setup. Tried to make it just explicit enough to criticize. But I have to say something, so I did the best I could to get things started.

I don't think of philosophical discussion as a contest of wills. YMMV.

You were given just such an option with...

Our models are projective, anticipatory. Models change our interactions with our world and thus are thus reciprocally changed by the world they modify.
— Joshs

...that models are anticipatory, not recollective. That models predict and enact those predictions, not collect and curate passive data. You've rejected that approach. — Isaac

Not really.

That's all very 30,000-feet for my purposes. In this context, that's just a lot of handwaving. Show me exactly what that looks like, if not in my toy model then in another. I offered @Joshs the same invitation. (Maybe he answered and I missed it; I'll look again.)

Or don't. If you'd rather argue about whether something is anticipatory or recollective, have at it. Not what I'm after.

Because each of you seem quite strongly realist about worldly objects, no enacted constructions for you guys, if you want to know what colour the house is, you just look. Anyone saying it's blue is wrong because it's white, etc. — Isaac

Okay, now, that's an appalling mischaracterization of what's going on here.

I'm responsible for this current round of the discussion going in the direction it has, and from the beginning I left open the possibility that the explanation for "Pat's house is white" counting as true is just that this is what people by and large say, that there is an implicit convention, no more. "Just look" was offered, by @Banno if memory serves, as another thing people do that has bearing on the question. It hasn't been accepted as some official argument settler, certainly not by me. I have in fact tried to bring the discussion right up to the point where there is such direct disagreement over a purported fact, and I have been reluctant to describe this simplistically as one person saying something true and the other false. I have tried to be scrupulous about this, while still pushing the conversation toward such questions being unavoidable. (If you've given 1000 4-year-olds the wug test, how many of them answered "wugs"? Don't know? Why not? Oh yeah -- the only way to know is to actually go and look at the data.)

I have also described the process of model building as beginning with collecting some data, going and checking the layout of Pat's neighborhood, but only because I don't know how else model building might be done. I have noted that the procedures I described do not guarantee fidelity in the model, and that this could matter when it is put to use. I tried to lay this all out in just enough detail that anyone could find something to criticize. I've been trying not to hide my assumptions, but point them out, even where I can find no option but to rely on them. We are capable of collecting data aren't we? Or should we quit bothering since it's all enactively constructed anyway...

@Srap Tasmaner has Pat's house as white. Let's say it seems green to me, and it seems grey to you. No amount of agreement between us regarding what colour Pat's house seems to us to be is capable (under a hard realist assumption) of yielding facts about what colour Pat's house actually is. It's immune to our agreement about the colour it seems to us to be. — Isaac

Gee, this sounds rather like the scenario I was asking for input about. And you seem to be providing some sort of account here, of roughly the sort I asked for. And you know all this how exactly? Have you done research to determine whether this is so? Did you check wikipedia? Or did you sit in your armchair and reason your way to these conclusions?

In the latter kinds of cases I would say the information is there, but access to it is not, and I would not count such a condition as knowing. To count as knowing, I would say it is necessary to have the appropriate information; in other words to know that you know. — Janus

"Where's Tim?" "Dunno. Wait --- he said he was going over to Josh's."

Did I switch from knowing Tim was going to Josh's, maybe for a few hours, to not knowing for a moment or two, and then to knowing it again? I don't think so.

Knowledge you have no access to whatsoever sounds sketchy, I agree, but according to the movies there's hypnosis and therapy. Not the most important case. Knowledge you have imperfect access to is so common, the examples pile up easily. Keeping a grocery list in your head, you might easily recall all but one of the items you intended to buy, and you have to really think to get the last. Again, I can't see describing that as knowing, then not knowing, and then knowing again. You know the whole time, but have trouble remembering, simple as that. And we do, a great deal of the time, readily recall what we know, as needed.

For real arguments against the requirement that to know you must also know you know, see Williamson, Knowledge and Its Limits (which I've only just started reading).

For me, then, to know is to be certain — Janus

I've just never found this compelling. I always immediately think of cases where people are as confident as they can imagine being, what they would naturally describe as "certain," and they're wrong, or cases where someone nurses unwarranted doubts about knowing what they do indeed know.

It always seems to me that certainty is just a different thing that may or may not accompany knowledge. I suppose we might say that if you know that p, you're entitled to be certain that p, and probably even certain that you know that p, but being entitled to judge or to feel (whichever version we're using) is just not the same as in fact judging or feeling.

I think there are straightforward, persuasive counterexamples to the idea that you can't be certain of anything, but the first ones that leap to mind are backwards. Do you know the population of the county where you live? I don't know mine. In fact, I'm absolutely certain I don't know mine.

Hang your head in shame, Andrew.

It strikes me that these ideas are not in direct conflict. This is because it could be the case that a continual behavioural disposition comes equipped with the ability to recreate the state of mind and action to exhibit what is believed as a transitory state. — fdrake

Even if you want to say, as I've been inclined to lately, that knowledge is not a kind of belief but a "first class" mental state in its own right, distinct from belief -- which is enough to keep our positions from conflicting -- we may still want to say that knowledge entails belief. (I'm undecided, but I see the appeal.) If S knows p, then S believes p -- and that can be true even if you don't analyze knowledge as belief + some other stuff.

Which in terms of psychology might come out as you describe -- and we might experience knowledge roughly this way.

Not that I'm ready to plump for knowledge as a disposition to entertain particular beliefs, but that might be the psychology.

on the whole I think our psychologies are such that we don't hold onto beliefs. We don't check them and put them into our box of knowledge. We let go of beliefs as fast as we hold onto them and upon needing them again we re-create them, and they are re-created in light of us speaking to someone. — Moliere

I think this is exactly where I disagree.

It's become clear to me that the key ingredient in the model is knowledge. Step 1 in building a model is, what do we know?

Knowledge is precisely that belief-like state that persists over time without being recreated, reimagined, or re-experienced. We have imperfect access to the knowledge we possess, and we can lose knowledge, but the knowledge we possess we possess continuously.

it'd be important to make explicit that truth and knowledge are not mental — Moliere

Yeah that's exactly the issue between us. Truth is slightly to one side here, but yes indeed knowledge is a mental state.

That's a big discussion, but I'm happy that we've landed on a very specific point of disagreement. That's just the sort of thing I was hoping for.

Guy gets sent to prison and his first night inside he hears guys up and down the cell-block calling out a number now and then, followed by scattered chuckling from the other cons. He asks his cellmate what's going on.

"Well, some of us have been in here so long, we've heard all of each other's jokes, so we numbered 'em. That's what you're hearing."

Guy says, "That's pretty interesting. Can I try it?" When his cellmate nods, he calls out "47."

Crickets.

"Geez, am I in trouble? Are new guys not allowed?"

"Nah, you told it wrong."

It was a post for my own amusement. — Isaac

Why do I feel like you may have argued somewhere that all off our posts are for our own respective amusement...

Maybe you're about to, and I've time-slipped again. Hmmmm.

Just joining in this new trend of quoting one's self rather than one's actual interlocutors. — Isaac

Don't be so snooty. I did it to show the links between posts that were always intended to be linked.



Wonderful!

I have lots to say about the lots you said, but it'll be a little while.

I'm not sure where we are — Srap Tasmaner

At the very beginning, I compared linguistic models to other sorts. If Pat's house is white, when you build a scale model of Pat's neighborhood, you paint Pat's house white ((that is, the model of Pat's house!)); when you build a linguistic model of Pat's neighborhood, you include in that model the sentence "Pat's house is white."

There, we're talking about decisions the model-builder makes. If you apply a particular color to your scale-model of Pat's house, what justifies your choice is that you know what color Pat's house is; it's the same with including "Pat's house is white" in your linguistic model. If you're not sure, when it comes time to paint or to pick your predicate, you can go and look, or ask someone you believe knows.

If your model, scale or linguistic, is faithful, someone who doesn't know can learn from it. You could show someone your scale model of Pat's neighborhood and point out Pat's house, and they might say, "Oh, I didn't know Pat's house was white." You can infer the state of Pat's house from a faithful model of it. If the model is very accurate, you can infer from it the exact shade of white that Pat's house is. There are probably some natural limits there; I might tell you it's not exactly the shade I used in my model, but it's close, that I couldn't exactly match the shade or didn't even try.

A static model like this is clearly a way of storing knowledge. If I need to know the layout of Pat's neighborhood for some reason, but have trouble remembering it all, I can make a model of it, encoding my knowledge to make it more accessible. I could walk around the neighborhood with pencil and paper and make myself a map, Pat's house there, left of him is so-and-so, and who's up on the corner? is that Joe's house? You needn't, at this point, write "Joe's house" on the map, but can go and check. (No, this is Miriam's house (write it down), so where's Joe's house?) You can, in this way, assemble acquirable-sized chunks of knowledge into a whole that you could not acquire in one go.

It is perhaps notable that even the process of model building is subject to failures of execution. People mistype numbers into spreadsheets with alarming regularity. I might have specifically checked the color of Pat's house, but then painted it the wrong color because the lighting in my model room is weird, or I let too much time pass before painting and got confused about what color I determined on my field trip, and so on. Someone could point out my error to me ("Hey, I thought Pat's house is white") and I could even agree with them before they point out that I painted it light blue. ("Grabbed the wrong bottle, I guess.")

The question would be whether this sort of thing really extends to linguistic models: is it really possible that you could know Cheyenne is the capital of Wyoming but store "Casper is the capital of Wyoming," not just mistakenly retrieve "Casper" or misspeak for some other reason, but store the wrong thing mistakenly. That looks really dubious to me. If your knowledge here is in linguistic form, knowing is exactly a matter of storing the right sentence; you cannot store the wrong one and still be said to know the right one.

Unless it is possible to store both, even though they're inconsistent. And that certainly happens. It's why teachers used to talk about the rule, never write the wrong answer on the blackboard -- students will sometimes remember what they saw on the board but forget that it was an example of what not to do.

So it could be that "Cheyenne is the capital of Wyoming" is what I know, and is stored as such, but "Casper is the capital of Wyoming" is something I heard someone mistakenly say once, and it's also stored as a memory, or maybe I just know that Casper is another town in Wyoming beginning with "C". I can't have stored anything about Casper if I don't know anything about Casper, even if that's only what someone said.

The whole point of a model is that it represents my knowledge; if it doesn't at least do that -- and sometimes models don't -- that's a particular sort of failing. But if your knowledge is linguistic, and your model is linguistic, there is no step of "translation" to screw up; the linguistic object you store is exactly the thing you know. (I'm a little leery of this argument, strong as it is, because we have no grounds to assume further that all knowledge is linguistic and stored in a linguistic model. That's clearly false, since we also know, remember, and recognize images, scents, textures, and so on.)

That may provide support to the no-models view, but as I noted above, we are likely also to have stored or otherwise be able to produce sentences that are inconsistent with our knowledge. And that forces us to confront issues the no-models view wanted to sidestep:

what is "Pat's house is blue"? Is it an object? Does it have, or lack, the property of being part of our model of Pat's house? We can attempt to go around these questions by saying that the users of the model simply agree to say, or not say, the sentence "Pat's house is blue," without talking about the model at all. By saying or not saying a given sentence, users of a model show that the sentence is, or is not, part of their linguistic model, without actually saying that. — Srap Tasmaner

The question is whether a sentence I am familiar with represents something I know -- and that's precisely this second-order issue of whether it's part of my model of the world or not. It is of value to me to be able to store and produce sentences that are not representations of my knowledge: it is how I know what someone else mistakenly believes; it is how I hypothesize in the absence of knowledge, and so on. But that means I may not always be certain whether a sentence I have to hand is part of my total knowledge or not.

The majority of disagreements are not quibbles about the facts, they are quibbles about the lenses through which we view the world. — fdrake

Quickly, this is probably right, but for my purpose here it's facts that matter, if facts are going to be how we talk about truth. As I understand your hierarchy, differences at any of the three levels may present as a disagreement over facts or truth, but the disagreement must be resolved at the level at which it originates, so only disagreements that are simply about facts are resolvable at the level of facts.

That's also plausible, but at this point, I don't even know how best to characterize what a disagreement over facts is, much less resolve it, much less discern its origin. I want to try to stick to my little model a bit longer to force myself to say exactly what's going on if I can, rather than take anything for granted.

On your first post, the first part of an argument against people who disagree each having their own model:

Before we get to that, I want to fill out this:

we may have no choice but to give an account of how (a) the model I use, (b) the sentences I utter, and (c) the occasions upon which I utter them, are related. There are multiple possible explanations for the utterance of a sentence not in the model. — Srap Tasmaner

What I had in mind was this: it is plausible that any individual has only imperfect access to the model of the world they've been working on, and they only imperfectly "translate" it into an utterance. In the case at hand, there are at least these possiblities:

• I may know perfectly well what color Pat's house is, but forgot for the moment, or misremembered;
• I may have only known that Pat's house is the same color as Joe's, which I know to be white, but have failed to make the inference that Pat's is white;
• I may not have recognized that this is an occasion for using my Pat's-house knowledge -- maybe I misheard "Pat's" as "Srap's";
• I may have simply misspoken, perhaps because I was just a moment ago thinking of something black and was primed to say "black" instead of "white".

In addition, if we presume the two speakers share a model, it's reasonable to expect they would actually only be familiar with non-identical proper subsets of the community-wide model. I may know that Pat's house is white, and that his front door is white, and assume that the back door is likewise white, while those that have seen it know it to be grey; I possess slightly less knowledge of Pat's house than some do, but I can readily extend my acquaintance with the shared model by being informed or seeing the back door for myself.

That should add at least one more possibility for those who have a single model disagreeing, that one of them knows and the other assumed or guessed or made a valid but unsound inference, etc., because he wasn't familiar with a part of their model that the other is. (Or maybe neither of them actually know and they're both bullshitting.)

On your account, what people say is presented as a perfect reflection of the model they are using, and that's tantamount to simply identifying the model with what they say.

On my account, differences in what we say are inconclusive evidence that we have different models. There may be other reasons (as above) why on this occasion we didn't end up saying the same thing. And this is so because, differences aside, what any one person says is an imperfect reflection of the model they use.

If that's so, it's hard right off to say whether an occasion of disagreement indicates two models or one in use. You've presented -- at least, along the way somewhere else -- the argument for there being one. That was also more or less @fdrake's reading of Davidson, in part. I'll have to think a while about what, in my test-bed here, multiple models would look like and whether we can tell the difference between that and a single one. --- Should probably say here more clearly: above I suggested there is community-constructed model that it is something like the union of all the models actually in use by individuals, each of whom is familiar with only a proper subset of that union; I'm inclined to consider that another access issue and say individuals familiar with different subsets of a single model share just one, but I'd be open to arguments that these should be considered different, if consistent, models. I'm not sure it much matters what you say here.

And then there's your main point, that the argument for no models runs through a single shared model just being unnecessary, that the only conceivable use for the model talk in the first place was if competing models were in the offing. If we all have the same one, we don't need that one and can just all have the same nothing.

I'm inclined to pause here and wonder whether the model, even if singular, is doing work that just the raw corpus of utterances can't. For instance, I can say that I deviated in speech from my model because of a priming effect, or misremembering, or misunderstanding the context. ("Oh Pat's house. Yeah, it's white.") What does the no-models account say? Most of the time I say one thing, but on this occasion I say something else, and --- and what? Why did I deviate? It seems to me the idea of a model gives you at least a start on dispositions to speak in certain ways, dispositions that are not absolute guarantees. But on the no-models view, I just say stuff, and what I "believe" is represented by whatever I said most recently or whatever I say most commonly, or who knows what.

And perhaps now that I've dropped the B-word, we should look a little again at what the word "model" was doing for me. It is frankly representational -- I don't know how else to take "model." If we do develop such models of the world, and happen to use language as a medium for doing so -- no doubt necause of its considerable efficiency and portability compared to other media -- then, while language is the medium of the model, I need not use it only for producing speech. It can be simply how I store a considerable portion of my knowledge, and my knowledge I can rely on in doing many more things than speaking. I can also use it to store hypotheses, possible but uncertain extensions of my knowledge, which I can act on to confirm or disconfirm, and so on.

If there is no model, but only my speech behavior, then to do any of these things in which I rely on my linguistic knowledge, I must, presumably, speak to myself about them. Now I talk to myself a lot, but I don't have to form the sentence "Cheyenne is the capital of Wyoming," much less speak it, even sotto voce, to remember that it is. Do we perhaps engage in silent and unconscious speech in order to retrieve the facts we know?

That begins to look a bit like a "language of thought," which, oddly, is where my use of language as model medium seems to be headed. It's natural to talk about at least some of our knowledge being stored linguistically only because so much of it is acquired linguistically or is intrinsically linguistic. "Cheyenne" and "Wyoming" are after all names, related in certain ways, which, in this case, are in part purely matters of convention and thus linguistic. My knowledge that Cheyenne is the capital of Wyoming has no option but to be a bit of linguistic knowledge.

But the issue that arises next is obvious: I have considerable knowledge of my native language which I rely on in order to speak it. If that knowledge is not stored linguistically, how can I possibly speak my native language? How could I ever "whisper" to myself, even unconsciously, that Cheyenne is the capital of Wyoming, if I cannot call on my knowledge of English to do that, because I cannot conceivably remind myself linguistically how to speak?

Some of those arguments may not be very good, I dunno. I'm not sure where we are, now, but at least there's now something in the neighborhood of an argument for my initial assumption, that we use language as a medium with which to build a model of the world, which was unargued for to start with.

I hope we're not quite there yet, but if we are at the point where none of the not-really-disagreeing explanations work, then we may be forced to say that one of our two speakers has said something false, although at the moment we don't know which one. There are worse solutions than, as both @Banno and Herodotus said, going and looking for yourself. As things are in my little test-bed, the model is in part a matter of convenience, and I'm still in a position to compare it directly to what it is a model of -- I can test at least some of it in the most direct way imaginable.

This is already covering a lot of ground, so I'll stop, but there ought to be more on what's happened here, whether I had an idiosyncratic and inaccurate model, and so on. But it looks like it's getting much harder here, so I wonder if we can take a step back and simplify things again.