Heh. I'm still working through my views, as always. But good call -- I'll "stake out" my position as I understand it right now.

I have said before that truth is a property of utterances, but I'm less certain of that now. If "facts" are suspect, then "properties" are too -- abstract place-holders without concrete predicates. But I still know what a true sentence is, and while I disagree with the assertion I believe I understand when people say "the Truth will set you free". The meaning is clear.

So there's small-t truth, as the truth of true sentences, and then there's the Truth, or The True. Often times we slip between both claims in talking about Truth, though if we focus we can realize there's a big difference between what Plato means by The True, and what I mean by "I'm telling the truth"

And when it comes to that kind of truth, I've been attempting to work out a reduction of Truth to fiction. Because if small-truth is embedded in language, as I still suspect, then there shouldn't even be any properties of Truth. It's a category for sentences, and "property" usually refers to some aspect of a real thing -- and truth doesn't appear to be real. Or, maybe, it's just as real as language, but that's the place where ontology gets funny (and "property" is probably a misleading term, at least)

True is what we call sentences which prevail: those whose tokens replicate successfully as free-standing (e.g. un-negated) assertions within the language.

What do you mean? — Bartricks

"True" is what we call sentence tokens that bear repeating on their own terms, which is to say, without contextualising in the manner of "... is untrue because..." or "... would be the case if not for..." etc.

Such contexts are potential predators, and must be fought off and dominated.

Or we could do each other's views, but randomly selected, like a secret Santa. ;-)

Anyhow, I can try to summarize where I am at the moment, still in progress.

It seems plain to me that truth is not a property of a sentence, like being in English or in the passive voice or contradictory. It's at least a relation between a sentence and something else; that is, it's the status of that relation that makes a sentence true or false. We use "true" as a 1-place predicate only because the value of the other parameter (or parameters, if we need more) is held fixed, or assumed, or implicated, something like that.

Convention T and other versions of the equivalence thesis may count as adequate descriptions of how we use the word "true," or at least adequate descriptions of a way of using the word common among philosophers, but are only descriptive and offer no explanation for why the LHS tracks the truth-value of the RHS, where all the action is. It notes the material equivalence, and stops. As such, this equivalence should be a consequence of a genuine theory of truth, if such a thing is possible. It may well be that truth has to be taken as a primitive, but I don't think the equivalence thesis either shows that or blocks it.

As for what a theory of truth that goes beyond the equivalence should look like, and whether it's possible, I don't know. Material equivalence is a slightly odd, slightly old-fashioned mechanism to play such a central role in our understanding of the central concept of philosophy. What if, instead, we had all learned in school that if "The kettle is boiling" is true, it's true because the kettle is boiling, and if the kettle weren't boiling, it wouldn't be true. That's a whole different ballpark, logically speaking. I think the natural place to look for why a sentence is true or false is what the sentence is about, and maybe -- this is hard to say without circularity -- what's relevant to its truth or falsehood. The sort of thing you might push over to the epistemic side -- what would enable you to come to know something is the case -- what goes there is the sort of thing that makes the sentence true.

TLDR: if I go on with this, I'll probably be reading up on truth-makers.

I'll wait until everyone gives their version before I reply. Some of you participated in the discussion much more than I did, so I'll wait to see if anyone else replies.

Why doesn't everyone just sum up their views of truth in roughly two to three paragraphs. No responses to the summation, just your particular point of view. At least no responses until the summaries are complete. — Sam26

It's too basic to analyze. Apparently we don't learn it, since it can't be taught. Maybe it's part of the structure of mind and thought.

Why doesn't everyone just sum up their views of truth in roughly two to three paragraphs — Sam26

Two or three paragraphs is not needed for me. To express your honest belief, to the best of your ability, is to tell the truth.

If you want to discuss what honest means, that would take more than two or three paragraphs.

Why doesn't everyone just sum up their views of truth in roughly two to three paragraphs. — Sam26

Excellent proposal.

Truth is different to belief, justification, agreement, and so on, in being unary. Statements of truth have only one place, taken by a proposition, conceived broadly as statements, utterances, facts, and so on. Beliefs have two places, one propositional, the other nominating the believer.

Statements of truth have an illocutionary force that implies authority.

Statements of truth have minimal logical structure, presented in T-sentences. The T-sentence displays an equivalence between meaning and truth. T-sentences can be understood as either using truth to show meaning, or using meaning to show truth.

So if the t-sentence "S is true iff p" is true, then we can either see p as giving the meaning of S; or we can see S and p as giving the meaning of "...is true iff...".

This is a stark, minimal view of truth that does not seek to sort out which statements are true and which are false. I do not think that a general theory of that sort is possible; correspondence, coherence, fallibilism and so on each tell part of that story, but none are sufficient to tell the whole story. They are better thought of as theories about why we might accept or believe this or that statement, theories of justification. rather than theories about the nature of truth.

But then, doesn't it bare to reason that if our imaginations cannot image particle-wave duality, yet particle-wave duality is true, that logic isn't based on images? That these are more like heuristic arguments? — Moliere

Leaving aside the possibility that our notions of particles and waves, derived as they are from our experience, are not applicable at all in the quantum context, in other words if that unimaginable synthesis of particle and wave is the actuality (whatever that might even mean), then it isn't logic at all, and it isn't something we can directly perceive or, hence, imagine. That's my take anyway.

The numbers are usually shown to correspond with objects, like five fingers, ten fingers, two eyes and so on.

No. — Tate

Que?

I'll wait until everyone gives their version before I reply. — Sam26

Fair. But who else are you waiting for replies from?

Anyone who wants to reply.

Very noncommittal.

Mind if I invite @Janus, @creativesoul, @Michael, @Luke, @Pie, @Agent Smith, and @Isaac?


Folks,

Why doesn't everyone just sum up their views of truth in roughly two to three paragraphs. No responses to the summation, just your particular point of view. At least no responses until the summaries are complete. — Sam26

The invitation is open, especially to those who participated in the discussion, and even those who didn't participate. It's a wide open invitation. Like the World Open chess tournament. :wink:

I'm a serial maker of muddy water, so I shall provide a perspective I don't believe anyone who has been tagged would provide, and perhaps would derail the thread if pursued.

There is an adage that truth is about the relationship of statements to the world. A statement will be true if its meaning is connected to the world in the right way; be that because what it means for a statement to be true is equivalent to a state of the world or alternatively a picture of it. Both of these set up a symbolic-linguistic relationship between language and world. Which is all well and good. But it isn't the start of the story. Why? It takes interpretation for granted.

In either case of construing truth as a symbolic-linguistic relationship of a statement to the world, there is a "word to world fit", how does it fit? Identity or a pictorial relationship. But what is it about statements that makes them able to have either an identity or pictorial relationship with states of affairs? Ultimately, a practical, perceptual engagement with the world which is reciprocal between utterer and world. Statements have a pictorial or identity relationship with states of affairs because they are designed to do so through how we inhabit our environments. That how is what embodies the fit of "word to world", and that how is us using our minds and bodies.

Ultimately then, what it means for a statement to be true is a derivative case of what it means for a relationship between a human and their environment to be in a certain way. Truth is produced through a way of engaging faithfully and perspicuously with the world and your own place in it, and in a reciprocal, adaptive and transformative manner. That production is also an interpretation of its environment; a symbolic-perceptual-linguistic one. It fits and makes fit language to world and world to language.

A statement will then count as true if its interpretation matches up with the world. Truth itself is in the non-linguistic (or only partially linguistic) relation of statement and world, not its relata. Thus it is something we do together.

That's pretty close to what I've written, but haven't posted. I guess I should just post and get it over with.

Bloody typical eh. Another Wittgenstein-Heidegger correspondence. : D

What is truth?

What we mean by our concepts, in this case truth, is a function of how we use concepts in our “forms of life,” that is, it is a linguistic social construct. These linguistic social constructs are governed by implicit and explicit rules (rules of grammar and other socially contrived rules), but these rules are not always hard and fast, they allow for expansion and contraction. However, expand too much, or contract too much, and you are pushing the limits of what can be said, or constricting what can sensibly said.

Our use of the concept truth is a function of statements, more precisely propositions. Propositions are used to express one’s belief or claim within a rule-governed social context. These propositions are for the most part binary in nature, that is, if the claim/belief is true, then the proposition aligns, corresponds, mirrors, correlates, pictures, a fact (state-of-affairs) in reality (reality being anything that can be said to exist, even the abstract, as well as the stories of fiction). If the proposition misses the mark, or does not accomplish its goal, as a picture or a correlate of reality, then it is false.

The ontology of facts is quite broad in its depth, as I have already hinted. We can speak of facts in objective reality, for example, “The Earth has one moon.” We can speak of the facts of logic and mathematics, which are governed by the rules of these particular languages. We can also speak of subjective facts, for example, “Sam likes apples.” There are even facts of fiction, which have no objective instance in reality, other than the story itself, and the expanded use of concepts within that story. The relation of our claims to truth (statements/propositional claims), or our denial of said claims, namely, our beliefs that such and such is the case, is a relation between our statements/propositions within our “forms of life,” and what we believe are the actual facts of reality.

The idea of truth is always and only the idea of an isomorphic relation of 'fit' between what is said and what is perceived or conceived to be the case.

We experience a constant succession of images and impressions that, due to repetition. similarity and invariance across time for the individual perceiver, and intersubjective agreement about what is experienced between individual perceivers, leads to a linguistically generated "shared" world of fixed objects and facts about those objects and this factual world is an inference to the best explanation for that commonality of experience, and is also pragmatically necessary for communication.

The actual is never contained in this perceptual/conceptual picture of a world of fixed entities and facts, and cannot be "captured" conceptually, even though we all, via our embodied experience, apprehend and understand it directly as a constantly changing heraclitean "flux".

So, in this sense that the world of objects and facts is a collective, pragmatic, conventional fiction; it becomes clear that it is only within this shared ambit that truth finds its meaning. On account of this I say that the logic of truth is simple correspondence between what is said and what is seen, or imagined to be.

It is just an extension of the necessary (to this social game of communication) general correspondence between what is experienced and what is said about that experience that we call 'meaning'. The mistakes in meaningful statements that render them false do not render them meaningless, which shows that interpretations of events must be accurate, in the sense of hitting the mark, in order to be true as distinct form being merely meaningful confabulations.

As poorly expressed as it is, that is my attempt to explain my understanding of truth.

The numbers are usually shown to correspond with objects, like five fingers, ten fingers, two eyes and so on. — Janus

In my experience, the numbers were shown to correspond with quantities, only after the numbers were learns. That's the point, we learn the numbers (words) first, then we learn the correspondence. We counted to ten, then twenty, then learned how to get to one hundred. Fingers were not involved. Learning the concept of "quantity" came after learning how to count. Maybe we should ask a grade school teacher about this, for confirmation. Or, try some Google research:

1. Stable Order
The first principle of counting involves the student using a list of words to count in a repeatable order. This ordered or “stable” list of counting words must be at least as long as the number of items to be counted. — https://makemathmoments.com/counting-principles/

We are going to have to agree to disagree. In my view the meaning of the words must be learnt by reference to numbers of objects. How would you explain what "two" means without showing two whatevers?

In my view the meaning of the words must be learnt by reference to numbers of objects. How would you explain what "two" means without showing two whatevers? — Janus

Two is after one, plain and simple, it's the number after one, that's the meaning we were taught. That's how we learned it, as an order, one, then two, then three, then four, ... "to infinity and beyond! ".

Two being after one means nothing without a notion of quantity.

A few minutes in a classroom will quickly show that there is no one right way to teach counting. Its a far more complex task than it appears to a competent adult. It should be apparent that the background and capacity of each child must be accounted for.

It's not learning a language game, but a variety of games: counting, chanting, sharing, pattern recognition... Success is measured by the capacity to enter into existing and novel uses.

The temptation is always to oversimplify the task of teaching.

Two being after one means nothing without a notion of quantity. — Janus

You haven't learned about "order" yet? Do you read left to right? Take a look at a number line. There's no quantities on that line.

Sure, I'm not trying to establish a theory of teaching numbers, but counting is not counting without things to be counted. The notion of quantity is essential, and that's often shown in teaching contexts by presenting children with objects to be counted that's all I've been saying. Counting was no doubt done prior to the invention of numerals, and calculation used to be done on an abacus.

Sure, I'm not trying to establish a theory of teaching numbers, but counting is not counting without things to be counted. — Janus

What I said in the first post on this subject, is that what is said to be counted, is the number itself. That's why our methods of learning lend themselves very well to Platonic realism.

Sure, counting is embedded in the things around us. It has that in common with all language games. Any view that suggests otherwise would be bonkers.

Of course there are:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8......at each point in that series represented by a different numeral, the number of numerals, including the one selected and all those to the left of the one selected, is equal to the number represented by the numeral at the point selected.

:up:

What I said in the first post on this subject, is that what is said to be counted, is the number itself. That's why our methods of learning lend themselves very well to Platonic realism. — Metaphysician Undercover

I have no idea what that means.

Sure, counting is embedded in the things around us. It has that in common with all language games. Any view that suggests otherwise would be bonkers. — Banno

It was embedded before humans started counting? That's interesting.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8......at each point in that series represented by a different numeral, the number of numerals, including the one selected and all those to the left of the one selected, is equal to the number represented by the numeral at the point selected. — Janus

No, the numerals on a number line do not represent the number of numerals, because there is zero, and negatives.