I have more reading assignments then. — Moliere

Indeed. This stuff is complex.

Ah, playing with the T-schema.

You also find this in the Gettier examples... — Sam26

Accounting malpractices of human belief. That's what they all amount to.

If anything they show what JTB is not.

This stuff is complex. — Banno

Ought it be?

My twenty-seven-month-old granddaughter understood just fine when she heard someone say something about the fridge that was not true. Her behaviour showed that beyond a reasonable doubt. The interesting aspect of that was that at the time she was barely capable of stringing two or three words together, but she knew right away that "there's nothing in there" was false when an adult said that talking about the fridge.

"The man with ten coins in his pocket" refers to Smith and Smith alone, because it is Smith who is doing the thinking. Smith's belief is true only if, only when, and only because Smith gets the job. Smith did not believe anyone but himself would get the job. Gettier's accounting malpractice would like us to believe otherwise.

In the second case, Smith believed Jones owned a Ford. He did not believe that Brown was in Barcelona. It is only as a result of believing that Jones owned a Ford that he would believe "Either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona". He believed "either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona" was true because Jones owned a Ford. Gettier leaves out the last bit, which is the most important bit of Smith's belief in the second case.

Again, an accounting malpractice of Smith's beliefs. Smith's belief was justified false belief in both cases. False belief is not a problem for JTB.

To be clear, it's not a charge against Gettier so much as it is a charge against the convention he used. He followed the rules. The rules allowed the accounting malpractice.

Using truth is not hard. But giving an account is.

Using IS giving an account of it, don't you think?

I could not have imagined or wished for such a great real life example. I laughed so hard as a result of her opening the door to show that stuff was in there... The way she uttered "ders dat, nnn dat, nnn dat, nnn dat.... She was so emphatically serious.

:lol:

Did you miss the anecdote about my granddaughter? You may appreciate it greatly.

I've been reading this thread all along, so yes, I did see that. She knows.

With regard to Witt's notion of hinge propositions, does her knowledge require any more subsequent justification?

There's some sort of bedrock there, I would think.

Perhaps just knowing what the words mean is enough.

I don't think this is about hinge's, at least not how I interpret hinge's. However, it's a good example of justification, sensory justification. Look and see, and you too will know.

Cute. You have used it once or twice, proud grandad...:wink:

I think that that real life example tells us quite a bit about how we autonomously 'employ' correspondence long before ever being able to talk about it. It may tell us something about unreflective thought and belief and the presupposition of correspondence within it.

Correspondence is primary.

justification, sensory justification. — Sam26

If being justified means being well grounded, then sure. If it means providing reasons to support a knowledge claim, then no.

I tend towards justification as being well grounded, which does not necessarily require language use.

I don't think this is about hinge's, at least not how I interpret hinge's — Sam26

You may be right, I just thought that her belief that stuff was in the fridge was well grounded, true, and required no further subsequent justification method.

As I've said in many posts, there are different ways of justifying a belief (different uses), and her grounding or justification is a sensory one. She's not giving reasons (using logic), but using her sensory experiences to show or demonstrate what she believes. It's most appropriate for her age.

Another interesting bit of etymology concerns the notion of "false" which came about as a means to denote anything contrary to Christian doctrine, after the Church absconded with the notion of truth. Interesting that subsequent generations of speakers retained the notion of "false" as being contrary with/to truth even if and when they were secular.

That came long after the first known uses of "true" and "truth"...

You may be right, I just thought that her belief that stuff was in the fridge was well grounded, true, and required no further subsequent justification method. — creativesoul

It is well grounded. What more of a grounding does one need in this situation?

Exactly. Sounds like there's quite a bit of overlap in our positions regarding that.

We like to imagine animal signals as, in essence, caused by the occurrence of particular features within the animal's environment. — Srap Tasmaner

I think that is wrong. Animal signals are caused by the animal itself, not the animal's environment. The human being acts by free will for example, not "caused" by one's environment, and the actions of other living things are created in a similar manner. The living being's actions are influenced by, and affected by it's environment, but not caused by its environment.

When we demand (or command, or request, etc.) that someone tell the truth, we are demanding that they behave in a certain way. It would be a senseless demand of an animal that has no choice in the matter. But at the same time, we are demanding that the speaker relinquish their freedom to say whatever they like and instead be bound by the truth. — Srap Tasmaner

This paragraph is consistent with what I said, but it is inconsistent with what you said, about animal signals being caused by the animal's environment. Here, you imply that the human being is free to choose, to either tell the truth or not. If a human being chooses not to tell the truth, how can this act be construed as having been caused by one's environment.

In a sense, this is all counterfactual business: you can ask someone to speak as if this situation now were the one they were in yesterday. And, further, if the link between your experience and what you say is not so snug as it is for non-linguistic creatures, we can ask you to behave as if it were. That is, we can ask you to say what you would, if you were in some particular situation, and if you had no choice about what to say.

On such an account, bizarre and cartoonish though it may be, honesty is a matter of the connection between a, possibly hypothetical or counterfactual, situation and what you would say in that situation. You can interpose beliefs here if you like, but the content of such beliefs goes back to situations. (For it to matter to your speech that you think, correctly or not, this is a snake-situation, you have to know how to speak in snake-situations.) — Srap Tasmaner

This type of speculation is all pointless, because the person can choose to be dishonest. You cannot base your speculation about what "honesty" is by assuming that a person will act in an honest way when asked to, because this ignores the reality that a person may just as likely choose to act dishonestly.

What does telling the truth consist in if not giving an honest and accurate account. What does giving an honest and accurate account consist in if not a correspondence of the the account with whatever it is (purporting to be) an account of? — Janus

The point is that there is no necessary relation between giving an honest and accurate account, and the account corresponding to to whatever it is purported to be an account of. Therefore, giving an honest and accurate account is not the same thing as providing an account which corresponds with the thing given an account of. The necessity required, to say what you say here, is not there.

In relation to "truth" then, if to tell the truth is to give an honest and accurate account, then there is no necessity that "the truth" which is spoken, actually corresponds with the reality of the thing which the spoken truth has given an account of.

There is a trend in epistemology to give "truth" some kind of unreal, divine definition which would have "truth" be a type of exact account of the reality of the thing given an account of, or even some form of precise replication of the thing using words, ("snow is white" is true iff snow is white, for example), but this is a completely mistaken idea of what we ought to think "truth" really is. Human beings are incapable of providing such precise, exact replications of reality through the use of words, so we ought to allow that if they provide to us, a replication of what they truly believe, to the best of their ability, they are speaking "the truth".

This type of speculation is all pointless — Metaphysician Undercover

Gosh, my bad.

I'll try to do better.

The living being's actions are influenced by, and affected by... — Metaphysician Undercover

Therefore... they are not free...

The point is that there is no necessary relation between giving an honest and accurate account, and the account corresponding to to whatever it is purported to be an account of. — Metaphysician Undercover

What do you mean by asking for a "necessary relation"? Aren't all relations contingent...on context? The contingent relation would be one of correlation; we can see that the description is an accurate portrayal of what is described, can't we? At least we feel convinced that we can, and felling convinced is just that: a feeling; If we feel convinced, then what more can be said? Unless someone were to come up with a an argument powerful enough to unseat that feeling. How often have you seen that happening?

Two very different questions that keep being mixed up:

What is "true"?
What sentences are true?

T-sentences answer the first. — Banno

Not exactly. I mentioned before that in The Semantic Conception of Truth (1944) Tarski only said that the T-schema must be implied by the definition of truth, and that he offered something else as the definition ("a sentence is true if it is satisfied by all objects, and false otherwise").

But also in Truth and Proof (1969), where he explains that the T-schema is only a partial definition:

(1) “snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white.
(1’) “snow is white” is false if and only if snow is not white.

Thus (1) and (1’) provide satisfactory explanations of the meaning of the terms “true” and “false” when these terms are referred to the sentence “snow is white”. We can regard (1) and (1’) as partial definitions of the terms “true” and “false”, in fact, as definitions of these terms with respect to a particular sentence.

...

Partial definitions of truth analogous to (1) (or (2)) can be constructed for other sentences as well. Each of these definitions has the form:

(3) “p” is true if and only if p,

where “p” is to be replaced on both sides of (3) by the sentence for which the definition is constructed.

...

The problem will be solved completely if we manage to construct a general definition of truth that will be adequate in the sense that it will carry with it as logical consequences all the equivalences of form (3).

...

First, prepare a complete list of all sentences in L; suppose, for example, that there are exactly 1,000 sentences in L, and agree to use the symbols “s₁”, “s₂”, . . . , “s_1,000” as abbreviations for consecutive sentences on the list.

...

(5) For every sentence x (in the language L), x is true if and only if either
s₁, and x is identical to “s₁”,
or
s₂, and x is identical to “s₂”,
. . .
or finally,
s_1,000, and x is identical to “s_1,000”.

We have thus arrived at a statement which can indeed be accepted as the desired general definition of truth: it is formally correct and is adequate in the sense that it implies all the equivalences of the form (3) in which “p” has been replaced by any sentence of the language L.

But, again, my example of "this sentence has thirty one letters" seems to be an exception to the partial definition given by (3) and the general definition given by (5). It doesn't seem that either (3) or (5) can fully account for self-referential sentences.

Also, I should add, even his 1933 paper explains that the T-schema is not a general definition of truth:

(5) for all p, 'p' is a true sentence if and only if p.

But the above sentence could not serve as a general definition of the expression 'x is a true sentence' because the totality of possible substitutions for the symbol 'x' is here restricted to quotation-mark names.

Therefore... they are not free... — creativesoul

What kind of conclusion is that? Do you think "free" means incapable of considering the environmental circumstances when choosing one's actions? That would be more like "random" wouldn't it?

What do you mean by asking for a "necessary relation"? Aren't all relations contingent...on context? The contingent relation would be one of correlation; we can see that the description is an accurate portrayal of what is described, can't we? — Janus

I don't quite understand your use of "contingent" here. If you ask someone to tell the truth about something that happened, and the person gives you an honest reply, there is no necessity which would allow you to conclude that the person's reply is an accurate portrayal of what happened. The person might have a faulty memory, as we all do to some extent. This produces the need to allow for all sorts of varying degrees of what you call accuracy, depending on what features of the particular occurrence you are asking the person to describe.

I do not see where any sense of "contingency" is relevant here. The person's reply is not contingent on any specific feature of the occurrence, and might actually recount something totally irrelevant to what is asked for. So we can validly conclude that it is not contingent on any form of "correlation" at all. And, I do not even understand your sense of "correlation" here either. That word implies an interdependence, a mutual relation between things. How would the context, in any way, depend on the description, unless the context was totally fictional, being created by the description? But if that were the case, then there is really no context at all to be involved in such a correlation.

Although there may be times, like with (a), where the consequent is a fact, — Michael

Oh gawd, now you're doing it.

I don't think it correct to say that the proposition is the fact. — Michael

Which one, then? Please choose, and not equivocate. E.g.

So, "p" is true iff p. What sort of thing is p? — Michael

p the truth-bearing sentence/proposition/consequent, or p some corresponding, truth-making non-word-string?

Truth is relative. There is no absolute truth. — RussellA

An interesting puzzle, though, is how, relative to a language game, truth can be absolute as well as relative.

"Snow is white" is not a fact, because facts are things in the world, and so while "snow is white" represents a fact, it is not a fact. — Banno

So this is what you now say.

"The cat is on the mat" is true ≡ The cat is on the mat

The thing on the right is a fact. — Banno

In light of your new reflections, then, do you endorse the following clarification?

"The cat is on the mat" is true ≡ The cat is on the mat

The thing represented by the sentence on the right is a fact.

Which one, then? — bongo fury

I'm unsure.

Snow being green isn't a sentence, so what is it?

I'm unsure.

Snow being green isn't a sentence, so what is it? — Michael

Do you mean the word-string "snow being green" or something else? Are you unsure about that?