P might subsequently be determined to be false.
— Tate

How? — Luke

Say a scientist asserts that T. Rex didn't have feathers. Later, it comes to light that they did.

Doesn't that make truth relative to a person or society? — Luke

I wouldn't use the word "relative" because that implies an inflated version of truth. There are different types of deflation, though.

If the world is a collective representation, why can it not be false. Lived experience cannot be false, but anything we say or think about it can be.

Say a scientist asserts that T. Rex didn't have feathers. Later, it comes to light that they did. — Tate

Could you say more about "comes to light"? Is the falsity of T due to a lack of correspondence between T and the world, for example?

Could you say more about "comes to light"? Is the falsity of T due to a lack of correspondence between T and the world, for example? — Luke

With redundancy, "truth" is just a social sign that generally means endorsement. Correspondence isn't involved. Redundancy is basically saying there's no such thing as truth as people usually conceive it.

Where correspondence is involved, that's not deflationary.

If the world is a collective representation, why can it not be false. Lived experience cannot be false, but anything we say or think about it can be. — Janus

Can you rephrase that? I don't understand.

With redundancy, "truth" is just a social sign that generally means endorsement. Correspondence isn't involved. Redundancy is basically saying there's no such thing as truth as people usually conceive it.

Where correspondence is involved, that's not deflationary. — Tate

Right, but then for what reason would scientists - or anyone else - ever change their minds about anything? I don't believe that scientists just decide on a whim that T is false all of a sudden, for no reason.

Can you rephrase that? I don't understand. — Tate

We don't experience the world, we experience images and sensations, and due to pattern, repetition and recognition, and in conjunction with communication with others and received culture, we form a "picture" of the world with all its facts and relations. This static picture is not our lived experience but the idea of what exists in general and in common, and it is to this static factual picture: the world, that all our propositions correspond, or not.

Right, but then for what reason would scientists - or anyone else - ever change their minds about anything? I don't believe that scientists just decide on a whim that T is false all of a sudden, for no reason. — Luke

They found evidence that supports the belief that they had feathers. But say the original scientist isn't buying it and now there's a conflict.

Opposing statements are being endorsed. We non scientists don't know who's right, so we'll have to suspend use of the truth predicate until it's settled.

In all of this, truth is just playing a social role. Nothing more.

I see what you're saying, though. I think there are other kinds of deflation that might be compatible with relativism.

This static picture is not our lived experience but the idea of human experience in general and in common, and it is to his this static factual picture: the world, that all our propositions correspond, or not. — Janus

You're saying the world is an idea. In what sense could it be false?

we know that all our identifications and definitions are static abstractions derived from, filtered from so to speak, our actual experience which is an evershifting succession of images and impressions. Our experience is the territory and the model we have evolved of the world of facts and things is our map, and as the old saw goes 'the map is not the territory'.

The map is tied to the territory by long consideration, historically speaking, of human experience, and conjecture about it, and its meaning, and so forth. But we cannot discursively set the map and territory side by side so to speak to examine the connections, whether purported to be rational or in some sense merely physical, between them.

But we don't need to do that anyway, — Janus

How else can you know that the one is not the other if not by performing a comparison/contrast between the two purportedly distinct things? In order to compare the two things, you have to know what they both are. The problem, of course, is that you've defined the one in such a way as to suggest that it is impossible to know what it is.

The position reminds me of Kant's Noumena, or any other position that denies direct perception.

Earlier you said it was difficult to talk about these things. I found it to be much easier after abandoning those kinds of frameworks.

They found evidence — Tate

If the truth or falsity of T is dependent on the evidence, then it would seem to me that evidence has everything to do with correspondence, because you are talking about a correspondence relationship between a proposition, T, and the way the world is. If a fossil, for example, shows that T Rex had feathers, then what makes the proposition false - the falsemaker - that "T Rex didn't have feathers" is the fossil evidence not corresponding to the proposition.

We non scientists don't know who's right — Tate

What would make any of them "right"? Presumably, that they correctly (correspondingly) describe how the world is, or was.

I think there are other kinds of deflation that might be compatible with relativism. — Tate

What kinds of deflation are incompatible with relativism?

If the truth or falsity of T is dependent on the evidence, — Luke

Redundancy says truth or falseness is a sign of endorsement or rejection. Justification for endorsement is a different issue.

Redundancy says truth or falseness is a sign of endorsement or rejection. Justification for endorsement is a different issue. — Tate

Therefore, evidence and being "right" are irrelevant to truth. So how can truth be anything but relative?

You're saying the world is an idea. In what sense could it be false? — Tate

I'm not saying the world as a whole could be false, but that even some things which are taken to be facts might turn out to be inconsistent with subsequent experience.

How else can you know that the one is not the other if not by performing a comparison/contrast between the two purportedly distinct things? In order to compare the two things, you have to know what they both are. The problem, of course, is that you've defined the one in such a way as to suggest that it is impossible to know.

The position reminds me of Kant's Noumena, or any other position that denies direct perception.

Earlier you said it was difficult to talk about these things. I found it to be much easier after abandoning those kinds of frameworks. — creativesoul

How do I know the world is not my experience? It is self-evident. My experience is a constant succession of ideas, associations, images, sounds, feelings and impressions. The world is a static schema of the totality of facts, things and relations.

Suppose we have a true sentence of the form
S is true IFF p
where S is some sentence and p gives the meaning of S.

What sort of thing is S? well, it's going to be a true proposition (here, continuing the convention adopted from the SEP article on truth of using "proposition" as a carry-all for sentence, statements, utterance, truth-bearer, or whatever one prefers).

And what sort of thing is p? Since the T-sentence is true, it is a state of affairs, a fact. — Banno

Facts give the meaning of true sentences?

I don't see the benefit in what you're doing. Maybe I do not understand.


Getting rid of the distinction between scheme and world sounds right to me, but I suspect for very different reasons than you hold. Belief consists of both external and internal elements. That cannot be made sense of if one divorces belief(scheme) from the world. Belief about trees includes trees. Divorcing the two leads to sense datum and all that sort of garbage instead of keeping us directly connected to the world.

The world is a static idea of the totality of facts, things and relations. — Janus

How can you know that if you cannot access it, if your perception and conceptions cannot have purchase on it?

How can you know that if you cannot access it, if your perception and conceptions cannot have purchase on it? — creativesoul

Our perceptions and conceptions evolve out of experience, individually and collectively. We know that we experience images, we never perceive whole things, and we never perceive the world at all, but just images of the objects we understand to constitute it. We have conceptual purchase on the world just because it is our idea, we certainly don't have experiential purchase on any such totality.

...we never perceive the world... — Janus

I do.

Me, too.

Really? The whole world? What does it look like?

Would like to see a discussion on how the RHS relates to the world — fdrake

Here's a version of Banno's Davidson's Wittgenstein.

Let's say there's a (non-linguistic) state of affairs A that could obtain in the world, and a statement S that describes that state of affairs.

If you want to say that A obtains, how would you say that? You'd use S. Asserting S is exactly how you claim that A obtains in the world. And the statement S is true (asserted or not) if, and only if, the state of affairs A obtains.

What remains is to specify what this "S describes A" business amounts to, beyond saying "S describes what S describes."

Here things get Murky.

One element here is that we must be capable of recognizing that A obtains or doesn't, and, for many sorts of states of affairs, there's no reason to think we humans are uniquely capable of recognizing that such a state of affairs obtains. Lots of creatures know when it's raining; some are more finely attuned to shifts in the microclimate than we are. So this should be an uncontroversial freebie. (Of course it's not actually that simple, because of all the questions of how we conceptualize A, how we take A as something for which S might be appropriate, or the "always already interpreted" business that suggests our access to A is inherently mediated by S's and such. However that works out, you'll still get to say we recognize A's, so that's that.)

But when it comes to the other element, there will be a temptation to reverse the analysis above. Above I said that if we wish to inform someone that A obtains, we will reach for S because S describes A. But it is possible to say that what's really going on is that we reach for some S-like statement in A-like circumstances, period. We might call that S describing A, but if so, all we can mean by that is that when we want to draw attention to an A we utter an S. It's a parsimonious analysis because all you need is the ability to recognize A situations and to utter S's. We've got both of those, so -- done!

Putting all this together, we find that S is true iff we by and large say something S-like when we perceive ourselves to be in an A-like situation. This is why @Luke suspects that this sort of analysis is just relativism about truth. But that's only if you analyze "S describes A" as above.

It is possible there are alternatives to that analysis, besides of course to the other points sketched in above.

I'm not competent to speak to the program of Davidsonian semantics, but I'm not sure it's been much on display here (possibly anywhere, lately) anyway.

It's a parsimonious analysis because all you need is the ability to recognize A situations and to utter S's. We've got both of those, so -- done! — Srap Tasmaner

I'll throw in some non-analytic chit chat.

That sort of analysis ought to look familiar. It's in the shape of the cloud that hangs over pretty much all mid-20th century Anglo-American philosophy of language, the emblematic moment of which is Quine's remark that when it comes to linguistics, you have no choice but to be a behaviorist. The only sort of linguistic research he could imagine looks either like ethnography or like question and answer sessions, which only yield reports from language users.

As things turned out, cognitive science is quite real, and Quine could not have been more completely wrong.

But in the meantime, we have decades of carefully crafted language-centric philosophy that makes all sorts of quasi-behaviorist assumptions, if not always about the facts (about which you can claim to be agnostic), then certainly about methodology. Wittgenstein, Dummett, Quine, Sellars, Davidson, it's everyone. All that work is far from useless, but we have to make an effort to separate their presumptions about what could be said about language and language users from their putting those presumptions to work in creative and illuminating ways.

And the statement S is true (asserted or not) if, and only if, the state of affairs A obtains. — Srap Tasmaner

Is this according to deflationism?

Putting all this together, we find that S is true iff we by and large say something S-like when we perceive ourselves to be in an A-like situation. This is why Luke suspects that this sort of analysis is just relativism about truth. — Srap Tasmaner

Maybe this, but also that deflationism does away with truthmakers. As I understand it, deflationism supposes that there is nothing that informs or justifies our claims to truth except for the claims themselves. And I don’t believe that’s how the word “truth” is typically used.

Here's a version of Banno's Davidson's Wittgenstein. — Srap Tasmaner

Nuh.

Starts out wrong with non-linguistic states of affairs and goes down hill from there.

How else can you know that the one is not the other if not by performing a comparison/contrast between the two purportedly distinct things? In order to compare the two things, you have to know what they both are. The problem, of course, is that you've defined the one in such a way as to suggest that it is impossible to know. — creativesoul

How do I know the world is not my experience? — Janus

You posited an actual world then clearly stipulated a forbidden access/purchase to/upon that actual world. You then posited your experience as another entity completely unto itself as distinct from the aforementioned 'prelinguistic actual world'. If we have no access to that world, if our words cannot gain purchase upon it, then we cannot possibly compare anything to it.

In order to know the difference between the two, we must have access to both. You've already said that we cannot. That is a problem called untenability.

In a T-sentence the true proposition on the left is found to be equivalent to the fact on the right.

This does not mean that they are identical.

Nor does it imply that "language and the empirical facts of the world are distinct"; clearly that the kettle is boiling is not the same as "the kettle is boiling", The first is an empirical fact, the second a piece of language. — Banno

Is an “empirical fact” a linguistic state of affairs?

In line with your earlier distinction here, I believe that what @Srap Tasmaner meant by a “(non-linguistic) state of affairs” is a state of affairs which is not a piece of language, but which is an empirical fact(s).

I insist that what you call prelinguistic truths or beliefs can be put into propositional form. But I'm tiered of that argument, and hope we might leave it as moot. — Banno

I agree that language less belief can be put into propositional form. That's how we present it to one another. Our ability to render language less belief into propositional form says nothing about the meaningful content of the language less belief aside from it is part of our shared world(clearly a plus), and thus we can talk about it. Trees and mice and spatiotemporal relationships are part of the world we share with Jack and Cookie, as are food bowls and food.

No problems with privacy or mental anything.

The whole world? What does it look like? — Janus

Looks a lot like a cool marble from a vantage point far enough away in space. We have pictures. I'm surprised you haven't seen one. Maybe you've forgot? Up close it looks like trees and mice and stuff. We have pictures of that too. Pretty unremarkable really when you think about it.

Starts out wrong with non-linguistic states of affairs and goes down hill from there. — Banno

This a "No uninterpreted reality" thingybob?

In giving up dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside all schemes and science, we do not relinquish the notion of objective truth -quite the contrary.
Given the dogma of a dualism of scheme and reality, we get conceptual relativity, and truth relative to a scheme. Without the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board. Of course truth of sentences remains relative to language, but that is as objective as can be. In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but reestablish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false

From On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.

You posited an actual world then clearly stipulated a forbidden access/purchase to/upon that actual world. You then posited your experience as another entity completely unto itself as distinct from the aforementioned 'prelinguistic actual world'. If we have no access to that world, if our words cannot gain purchase upon it, then we cannot possibly compare anything to it.

In order to know the difference between the two, we must have access to both. You've already said that we cannot. That is a problem called untenability. — creativesoul

I posited an actuality we experience; i didn't say it is an actual world. I said that the world is a collective representation that we do have discursive, but not direct perceptual access, to. In other words the world is not an object of perception but a complex conceptual schema.

LOL, I wasnt talking about the Earth.