Fine, but it’s not much of a theory of truth if it doesn’t offer an account of what makes a statement true. — Luke

The broader idea is that we can say much more about warrant and belief than truth. We can talk endlessly about what causes beliefs and what beliefs cause. But truth? We know that warranted statements can be false and that unwarranted statements can be true. The utility of 'true' may depend on the 'absoluteness' of its grammar. If 'is true' adds nothing (essential) as a suffix to 'P', then what you really need an account of is earnest assertions.

Because yours don’t seem like the sort of reasons we would use to decide whether “there are plums in the icebox” is true or false.

Because yours don’t seem like the sort of reasons we would use to decide whether “there are plums in the icebox” is true or false. — Luke

Reasons we'd use to decide?

Look in the fridge?

Ask someone we trust?

Which of those had anything to to with your reasons ...

for our saying e.g. that “snow is white” is true, or that “there are plums in the icebox” is false. — Luke

Why the insult? — Fooloso4

I'm just getting rowdy, mirroring you. I'm happy to tone it down. We all know that there's stuff in the world that's not language. That's common sense, yes? So obviously the issue is not so simple. As I see it, the tricky part is making sense of truth-makers...or rooting them out as nonsense.

This much is agreed: “x makes it true that p” is a construction that signifies, if it signifies anything at all, a relation borne to a truth-bearer by something else, a truth-maker. But it isn’t generally agreed what that something else might be, or what truth-bearers are, or what the character might be of the relationship that holds, if it does, between them, or even whether such a relationship ever does hold.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truthmakers/

The broader idea is that we can say much more about warrant than truth. We know that warranted statements can be false and that unwarranted statements can be true. The utility of 'true' may depend on the absoluteness of its grammar. — Pie

Is this in reference to Gettier examples? There is still some reason why we would ultimately say that the statements are true or false, and it still looks correspondence-y to me.

Reasons we'd use to decide?

Look in the fridge? — Isaac

Yes, look in the fridge and see if the statement about the plums corresponds with what we find in there.

Ask someone we trust? — Isaac

I don’t recall that being a reason you gave…

I'm hoping the picture will help us agree whether your P is truth bearer or truth maker or both or neither? — bongo fury

I currently don't find the idea of a truth-maker very useful or intelligible. Obviously we can talk about reasons people believe P. That's different, in my view.

Truth-bearer seems closer, but there's already talk of an entity that can be true or false and nothing else. A bit rigid !

Claims can be true, false, ambiguous, or incoherent...Am I leaving something out?

What are the odds, I wonder... — bongo fury

Given that we're all pretty clever, I think it's largely a matter of clarifying what we even mean. Correspondence theory seems close to the redundancy theory. Is the world fundamentally significant or meaningful ?

Some are tempted to think of a layer of meaning that humans lay down and then postulate some X beneath this layer without being able to say anything about it. The view I'm naming is 'Hegel' is anti-idealist in its rejection of this dualism. It's like 'no-longer-naive realism.' 'The cat is on the mat' is 'made true' by the cat being on the mat, which is redundant. It might help to put it this way:

' 'P' is true ' means roughly the same as ' P '. (I added quotes that were implicit before.)

An important question for AI, but I would say that the ability of an animal to distinguish between two colors is a form of knowledge, even though it may be excluded by a favored theory of knowledge. — Fooloso4

Do the thermostat or the electron have knowledge ? Is a differential response sufficient ?

Isn't proposing and criticizing and defending theories of knowledge part of the game ?

To be sure, (non-human) animal cognition is worth looking into, but I hardly think it's strange for a philosopher to focus on human (linguistic) claims.

We all know that there's stuff in the world that's not language. — Pie

Your responses seem to indicate otherwise, but I am not going to rehash this. Time for me to move on.

I don’t recall that being a reason you gave… — Luke

That's because I was giving reasons why we might say "“there are plums in the icebox” is false".

You then asked for reasons we'd use to decide whether there's plums in the icebox. I took that to mean strategies we'd use (since we can't 'use' reasons, we 'give' reasons).

Two different questions.

As to the first. For what reason might we say "“there are plums in the icebox” is false"... I can't see how a lack of plums in the icebox even reaches the top ten. It would be a rubbish reason.

If I said "“there are plums in the icebox” is false" and you said "why did you say that?" I guarantee in most cases "because there's no plums in the icebox" will not be considered sufficient reason...

The follow-up question will be "that's as may be, but why did you say it in that weird way?"

.

That begs the question. You're assuming anything does. — Isaac

:up: :up: :up:

Phlogiston.

“There are plums in the icebox” is false because I looked in there and found none — Luke

This is certainly a intuitive approach, but it's caught up in the first-person ghost story. One can't make inferences using spectral entities like 'private experience.' We can use "@Luke said the ice box was empty" in an inference, along perhaps with "@Luke is a reliable detector of plums" and so on. No one needs to deny some weird entity like what-it's-like-to-see-no-plums, but this is just some beetle in a box, not clearly any more useful than phlogiston or the waving ether.

Is this in reference to Gettier examples? — Luke

No.

There is still some reason why we would ultimately say that the statements are true or false, and it still looks correspondence-y to me. — Luke

I agree that we that have reasons for making claims. Perhaps our sense organs are battered by the environment and we've been trained to make reliable non-inferential reports. Perhaps we apply inferential norms to beliefs we hold and derive a new belief.

You could also check the icebox for plums. I later started speaking about ‘our’ reasons for saying that a statement is true or false.

You could also check the icebox for plums. I later started speaking about ‘our’ reasons for saying that a statement is true or false. — Luke

Sure. 'Twenty different people agreed that the icebox was empty' might figure in an inference.

The issue is (trying to say) what you saw in that icebox. Was it not that there were no plums in it ? Which is to say already conceptual ?

To be sure, (non-human) animal cognition is worth looking into, but I hardly think it's strange for a philosopher to focus on human (linguistic) claims. — Pie

It is not a matter of it being strange but of looking at questions of knowledge, language, and thinking by defining them in terms of what humans do. It is as if we were to claim that only humans can walk because what we do is what walking is and this is not what other animals do.

I would argue that a self-driving car knows how to drive. It is evident from the fact that it can drive. In some ways it already drives better than a human. Further, to drive requires an awareness of the surroundings, and so, it has awareness. I think it is a mistake to think that we have fixed concepts of such things as knowledge and awareness and if what a self-driving car does does not not match these concepts then it cannot have knowledge or awareness.

Do I want to say, then, that certain facts are favorable to the formation of certain concepts; or again unfavorable? And does experience teach us this? It is a fact of experience that human beings alter their concepts, exchange them for others when they learn new facts; when in this way what was formerly important to them becomes unimportant, and vice versa. (It is discovered e.g. that what formerly counted as a difference in kind, is really only a difference in degree. [Wittgenstein, Zettel, 352]

I don’t deny that it’s already conceptual. I just don’t see how it follows that there are no truthmakers or that the correspondence theory of truth is defeated.

She showed him that what he said about the contents of the fridge did not correspond to the contents of the fridge. In her doing so, she shows us that we need not be able to use the terms so often used in philosophical and normal everyday discourse in order to intuitively know that 1.)some meaningful statements are false, 2.)what makes them so, 3.)how to check and see for ourselves, or 4.)how to show someone else. — creativesoul

I agree that correspondence is common sense and that to bother with the redundancy theory that I'm defending is fussy. Indeed, the redundancy theory might only have a bite in the first place in the context of other 'sophisticated' theories. A 'veil-of-ideas' philosopher is a natural target here, for whom the sight of the plums would themselves be 'phenomenon' or 'appearance.' I take Hegel (who I include in my camp) to have been frustrated by all the Kantian machinery that was supposed to be between us and reality.

Fair enough. But what's a truthmaker for 'there are plums in the icebox'? Are you tempted to say something like...there being plums in the icebox?

I would argue that a self-driving car knows how to drive. It is evident from the fact that it can drive. — Fooloso4

That's nonstandard usage of 'know' and seems to imply that thermostats also have knowledge. You are of course free to develop a theory in that direction, but it doesn't seem relevant to the thread. If you start your own on that issue, I'd be glad to participate.

I think it is a mistake to think that we have fixed concepts of such things as knowledge and awareness — Fooloso4

Of course. But no one says we do. Indeed, we are precisely trying to clarify and elaborate and even modify concepts here and in general. On the other hand, some relatively stable concepts are always in play, else we'd be (completely) unintelligible to each other.

Your responses seem to indicate otherwise, but I am not going to rehash this. Time for me to move on. — Fooloso4

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

You are of course free to develop a theory in that direction, but it doesn't seem relevant to the thread. — Pie

You asked:

Does a thermostat know when it's hotter than 68 degrees ? — Pie

And prior to that you quoted Sellars claim that knowledge requires concepts.

What if someone were to ask if it is true that a self-driving car knows how to drive? Does your interest in truth makers and truth bearers help in answering this question?

I agree that:

Clearly this hinges on how we understand what it is to know.

Is it sufficient to say that it is true that a car knows how to drive itself iff a car can drive itself? Or can we dispense with this and simply say that there are cars that drive themselves? Of course for those who want to preserve a particular concept of knowledge, this leaves open the question of the truth of whether or not they know how to do what they do

The common feature of antirealism is not attributing a truth value to unknowns. So a realist will say that "there is a teapot in orbit around Jupiter" is false, an antirealist will say it has no truth value.

Hegel's idealism is not antirealism. Hegel's absolute idealism holds that the real is the ideal and the ideal is the real. All differences and distinctions are understood within the unity of the whole of Absolute Spirit, which plays out dialectically in time as history. This includes the inorganic as well as the organic, thinking and being, realism and idealism. — Fooloso4

That tells me nothing about Hegel's attitude towards the truth value of "there is a teapot in orbit around Jupiter".

So long, and thanks for all the fish. — Pie

"Give a man a fish ..."

I think a large part of the problem is that we have different ideas of what philosophy is about. I hold to the ancient idea of philosophy as a way of life. This does not mean making, defending, and attacking arguments, although that is a part of it.

I don't see how. If I say "Rory Gallagher is the best guitarist ever, it's true" do you really think the meaning of 'it's true' there relies on any kind of logic? I'm just emphasising my belief. — Isaac

...and your belief is that you hold "Rory Gallagher is the best guitarist ever, it's true" to be true...

You're assuming we're all playing a certain type of game, but I don't see any reason why we must be, and most times seems to me we aren't. — Isaac

Indeed, you are making an assertion, and making an assertion is attaching a truth value to a statement. You can't make an assertion without asserting that some statement is true. That's what the game of making an assertion involves. Hence the T-sentence.

"p" is true iff p

Is it sufficient to say that it is true that a car knows how to drive itself iff a car can drive itself? Or can we dispense with this and simply say that there are cars that drive themselves? — Fooloso4

I'm sure we agree that meaning is contextual. We want to think with the learned and have no choice but to speak with the vulgar, for we ourselves are vulgar most of the time. I mean 'vulgar' non-pejoratively.

I'm a big fan of Wittgenstein, but I like 'positive' theorists who build on the rubble that destructive theorists leave behind. Wittgenstein obliterated various 'Cartesian' confusions, for those who can bear or manage to understand him. As I see, I'm taking the same kind of anti-Cartesian position here. Intuitively (vulgarly) it's the sight of the plums in the icebox that's a truthmaker for 'there are plums in the ice box.' For ordinary purposes this is fine. For 'me' personally it's fine. But reasoning and meaning are essentially public. It's cleaner to talk in terms of claims, since the point is allowing or disallowing inferences. 'Tim said there were no plums in the icebox.' And we trust Tim's comforming to our tribal conceptual norms.

That tells me nothing about Hegel's attitude towards the truth value of "there is a teapot in orbit around Jupiter". — Banno

Hegel's concept of truth is not to be found in truth values:

From the preface to the Phenomenology:

5. The true shape in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of that truth.

6. ... truth has the element of its existence solely in concepts.

18. Furthermore, the living substance is the being that is in truth subject, or, what amounts to the same thing, it is in truth actual only insofar as it is the movement of self-positing, or, that it is the mediation of itself and its becoming-other-to-itself.

There's more to Philosophy than Wittgenstein. Davidson seems to take much of the Investigations as read, and then to ask "where now?"

Davidson is a son of Quine, hence his ideas flow parallel with Wittgenstein's, not against them.

And like Wittgenstein, Davidson's view changed over the course of his life, from a need to understand language in quite formal terms (Truth and Meaning) to a recognition of the indefinite flexibility of our utterances (A nice derangement of epitaphs)

The book The Essential Davidson collects the pivotal essays in one small volume, and while it won't be an easy read, it is a good starting point.

A thread on Davidson would be as absurd as a single thread on Wittgenstein. But it might be interesting to start a thread on one of his essays - say Truth and Meaning, since it sets out his early views.