In other words the world is not an object of perception but a complex conceptual schema. — Janus

This approach has the advantage of at least spelling out correspondence, I'd say. The world is, indeed, English-shaped (or concept-shaped, I suspect) so matching is a matter of equality (or perhaps another specifiable relation?) between the concept believed and the world.

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. — Janus

Then the world is something like a set rather than a place. It's the set of things that are taken to be facts?

The RHS is an element of this set?

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. — Janus

Well said. The subtleties can be finessed.....but generally, well said.

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

This a "No uninterpreted reality" thingybob? — fdrake

What exactly are you saying there, @Banno?

All I did was stipulate a name for something that may not have had a name.

Surely there are objects in the world besides words and sentences. That's as much as I meant by "non-linguistic". Your kettle is not identical to the phrase "Banno's kettle" and is not a token of the word "kettle", it's a kettle, a non-linguistic object. No?

Was it "state of affairs" that you objected to?

I think I probably gave mine earlier, but...

I don't see any mechanism by which we could possibly investigate (or draw conclusions about) what 'truth' is other than by looking at the ways the word is used.

Clearly, a pure redundancy is untenable. People use the word in some cases and not in others so unless they do so at random, we ought conclude that something separates the times when they do from the times when they don't.

When do people use 'true'?

To add emphasis to a statement of belief. To convey certainty. To convey trust. To add social weight to their opinion. As a stick to beat their opponents...

Therein, I'd say, are the meanings of 'true' and there's nothing more to truth than what the word means.

People are sensitive about 'truth' entirely because of that last use. They don't want their stick taken away.

When do people use 'true'?

To add emphasis to a statement of belief. To convey certainty. To convey trust. To add social weight to their opinion. As a stick to beat their opponents... — Isaac

Marvin tells the king the barbarians are within the walls.

The king asks Jack if that's true.

To me, the simplest way to understand that is that the king is asking, not about Marvin's words, but about what Marvin's words are about, the non-linguistic (gonna use this as often as possible now) barbarians inside our non-linguistic walls wielding genuine non-linguistic axes and other tools of mayhem.

You might prefer to say the king is asking Jack if he agrees. Or, asking if Jack's model agrees with Marvin's to the extent of making similar predictions. Sure. Jack is not a divine oracle, just a guy. But what are these predictions about? You'll want to say it's future states of the model -- that the king is at risk of expecting great loss of blood from the perceived axe in his face, and having that expectation confirmed, just as his model stops running and updating.

I don't really want to hop off @Banno's hobby horse just to hop onto yours, midstream no less, but to my mind that misses the whole point of the word "model," a thing that changes in a way appropriate to it when the thing it's a model of changes in the way appropriate to it. We don't have models, not in science, not in our heads, only to make predictions about what our models will do, but to make predictions about what what we're modeling will do.

Sorry -- I shouldn't be lecturing you right off the bat (maybe later) -- consider it an extended "hello".

But here's a question. is this adaptive-predictive-model sort of view (which is in a poor neighborhood of the city where your actual views live) automatically incompatible with the usual understanding of truth and knowledge, or must something be added to it?

Suppose I collect marbles in a big jar and have fashioned a clicker so that each time a marble is dropped in the jar a counter advances. I have a very simple model of my marble collection that captures only the total quantity. But it does actually capture that, doesn't it? So long as the clicker is properly designed and works as designed, and there are no confounding factors like a hole in the bottom of the jar, my model faithfully represents my collection with respect to quantity. That it is a model, that it substitutes one medium for another, that it is representational, doesn't automatically mean that words like "truth" and "knowledge" are only expressions of confidence does it?

So what gets you from, ahem, the model of predictive modeling to everything being a matter of confidence, narrative, and so on? I honestly don't know what you can say here except that it's your knowledge of how our clickers work, and that they're known to be less accurate and less precise than my marble counter.

Here are two versions of an argument that rather than undermining the traditional understanding of knowledge and truth, partial belief accounts rely on them.

If I'm presented with an urn containing 9 black marbles and 1 white, and asked to reach in and grab one, without looking, then, if I'm rational, my degree of confidence that the marble I pick will be black is 0.9. What is the content of the belief I hold with a confidence of 0.9? That the marble is, in fact, black. I don't know any other way of expressing partial belief except as partial belief about what is in fact the case. In this case, I hold that my confidence should be 0.9 because I know, for a fact, how many marbles are black and how many are white. If I don't know that, upon what would I base my partial belief? If I don't have knowledge but only estimates, those are estimates of how many there actually are, and estimates are better or worse depending on how close they are to being the actual number.

When Frank Ramsey ingeniously measures his confidence that he knows the way to town by wondering how far into a field he'd be willing to walk to ask for directions -- the mother of all "put a number on it"s --to make any use of that, he has to know the result of his imaginary experiment. How far, even roughly, would he walk? There has to be a truth of the matter, even if it comes with error bars, for him to refer back to, or the experiment is a waste of time. In addition to the issue of measuring, there's the issue, as above, of what he's measuring, his confidence that the town is this way; what he's uncertain about is whether he knows which way it is.

We can't conceivably begin to talk about theories or predictions or models if we're unwilling to call anything data.

My guess is that Tarski is basing his theory on false premises. For example, the liars paradox.
— Sam26
Odd, since it's clear he explicitly deals with the liar by introducing levels of language. It's certainly not a premise in his argument, obviously. — Banno

My point is simply that he feels he needs to address the liar paradox, viz., that our everyday language is insufficient.

I'm asking because there is a substantive body of work, by the strongest logicians of the last hundred years, that depends on t-sentences. It would be odd if that were irrelevant. Worse if they were wrong. — Banno

They're irrelevant to our social uses of propositions as they correspond to facts. We don't need to understand Tarski to understand the relationship between propositions and the world. It would be odd if we did. I can see the attraction to 'p' is true, IFF p, but, again, I don't see a need for it.

Although, I do feel the need for speed. :gasp:

To me, the simplest way to understand that is that the king is asking, not about Marvin's words, but about what Marvin's words are about — Srap Tasmaner

...then why ask Marvin? Surely he knows that in doing so he can only be asking Marvin's opinion about the barbarians... which Marvin has already given. 'True' here might mean {'Are you sure?'}, or maybe to re-emphasise {'You're gonna get it in the neck if you're wrong!'}, or even {'You're joking, right?'}.

I don't see how anyone aware of how perception works could think that adding a word magically causes Marvin to directly relate the actual position of the actual barbarians in a way that just asking wouldn't have done.

I can see what you mean about the straightforward appeal of saying that when we ask 'Is it true?' we're asking if the world is indeed that way. But what then do we make of asking 'Is the cat on the mat?' Is that not asking how the world is? and if so, then what additionally is 'Is it true?' asking.

If anything, I can see more of a case for 'Is the cat on the mat?' being about the world and 'Is "the cat is on the mat" true?' being about confidence, certainty, or trust.

We don't have models, not in science, not in our heads, only to make predictions about what our models will do, but to make predictions about what what we're modeling will do. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree. We model the world and the subject of our sentences is the world (not the model). So when I ask 'Is the cat on the mat?' I'm asking about both cat and mat in the actual world, the one which I'm modelling. But I'm not sure how this translates to asking 'Is "the cat is on the mat" true?

The question at hand is not, for me, 'is there an actual cat and an actual mat?' I'm quite sure there is an actual world we're modelling (though we may be wrong about it, of course), but the question is 'what does the word 'true' do in the sentences in which we use it?' Does it somehow tie the sentence to the world any more than the unadorned sentence? I don't think it does. Does it add emphasis? It seems to.

So yes, there's an actual world that is the object of our models, but is that what we mean by 'true' and 'truth'? I don't think so.

Suppose I collect marbles in a big jar and have fashioned a clicker so that each time a marble is dropped in the jar a counter advances. I have a very simple model of my marble collection that captures only the total quantity. But it does actually capture that, doesn't it? So long as the clicker is properly designed and works as designed, and there are no confounding factors like a hole in the bottom of the jar, my model faithfully represents my collection with respect to quantity. That it is a model, that it substitutes one medium for another, that it is representational, doesn't automatically mean that words like "truth" and "knowledge" are only expressions of confidence does it? — Srap Tasmaner

Well...depends how far you want to get into the constructed reality stuff. I'm not as far gone as some. But by and large, you have a model of how your clicker works. It coheres with your model of your marbles in their jar. In what way is the clicker (and your model of how it counts marbles) any better a measure than the other way round? If you were sure your jar contained 60 marbles, but your clicker has it at 59 is the model of the jar wrong, or the model of how the clicker works?

So what gets you from, ahem, the model of predictive modeling to everything being a matter of confidence, narrative, and so on? I honestly don't know what you can say here except that it's your knowledge of how our clickers work, and that they're known to be less accurate and less precise than my marble counter. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. If you and I, and a dozen others, were trying to 'mind-read' how many marbles there were in the jar in the next room, we don't need to actually know how many marbles there 'really' are to know that we cannot 'mind-read'. All we need is for you to say '59', me say '27', and everyone else some other number. It become apparent that we cannot mind-read the contents of the jar. We can know this without ever checking what's in the jar.

So, likewise, we only need look at how perception works (specifically the differences between people) to have a good idea that the world we're trying to model is something other than we model it to be (unless by luck, one of us is spot on).

What is the content of the belief I hold with a confidence of 0.9? That the marble is, in fact, black. — Srap Tasmaner

That proceeding under a policy of assuming it's black will yield fewer surprises.

I hold that my confidence should be 0.9 because I know, for a fact, how many marbles are black and how many are white. If I don't know that, upon what would I base my partial belief? — Srap Tasmaner

Your prior model. You base your belief on your priors. So if your prior model had a 90% confidence that working under a policy of assuming the marble is black will yiedl fewest surprises, then, unless updated by some actual surprise, that's the policy you'll proceed under.

I don't have knowledge but only estimates, those are estimates of how many there actually are, and estimates are better or worse depending on how close they are to being the actual number. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, I think that's right. The constraints the world places on our options are revealed in the surprise (or lack of it) resulting from proceeding under a policy of assuming the world is that way.

One difference here from the direct realist is that the world only constrains our options. Nothing prevents two models from both being good if neither are constrained by the world such as to yield surprising outcomes when followed.

to make any use of that, he has to know the result of his imaginary experiment. — Srap Tasmaner

Does he? Or does he only need move on to the next experiment - an experiment about how confident he is regarding what the results of the previous experiment was.

I don't see any requirement fo this so terminate in anything more concrete than the beliefs are in the first place. Quinean webs of belief (as I'm sure you're familiar with). Why must one of them be the actual data?

proceeding under a policy of assuming it's black will yield fewer surprises. — Isaac

Under a policy of assuming what? That it is black. You're saying the same thing I did but in language that sounds more scrupulous.

Surely he knows that in doing so he can only be asking Marvin's opinion about the barbarians... which Marvin has already given. — Isaac

FWIW, I had the king asking Jack if what Marvin said was true. I did not have the king thinking that

adding a word magically causes Marvin to directly relate the actual position of the actual barbarians — Isaac

You base your belief on your priors. So if your prior model had a 90% confidence that working under a policy of assuming the marble is black will yiedl fewest surprises, then, unless updated by some actual surprise, that's the policy you'll proceed under. — Isaac

And here again, you have actual priors right? Was it really 90% or was it, like maybe any other number at all? And what is the content of that prior? That the actual marble is black. And your beliefs have to be updated by actual surprise? Or is that only what you, perhaps erroneously, modeled as surprise? Shouldn't you be consulting your model of your model? Is there ever any actual input? Or is it an infinite tower of models?

*

Honestly, though, I need to have a think about what this argument is even supposed to show. Is it the "conceptual priority" of knowledge to belief? Am I claiming that no position claiming to cash out everything in terms of beliefs, with no knowledge claims, is even intelligible? I'd really rather argue something else because we still seem to be locked in this bubble of arguing about concepts and assertibility. I'm pretty tired of those kinds of arguments.

The constraints the world places on our options are revealed in the surprise (or lack of it) resulting from proceeding under a policy of assuming the world is that way.

One difference here from the direct realist is that the world only constrains our options. Nothing prevents two models from both being good if neither are constrained by the world such as to yield surprising outcomes when followed. — Isaac

Do you think the world that constrains our models is separable from the measurement apparatus we use to observe it, and the methods of interpreting those measurements, both of which are products of our models? Do we not erect structures of intelligibility we call ‘the world’ , structures that give us specific ways of knowing our way around? Are cats and mats inside or outside the structures we erect? Does it makes any sense at all to talk about what is outside our structures of intelligibility, which , as contributions to the world , are themselves empirical entities and the only ones we are ever in contact with?
Can we say, then, that e correctness or incorrectness of ‘the cat is on the mat’ only ever makes sense from within a structure of intelligibility rather than as a comparison of that structure with some constraint wholly outside of it?

Can't please anyone round here can I? Too idealist for the hard-nosed realists, too realist for the hard-nosed idealists...

Under a policy of assuming what? That it is black. You're saying the same thing I did but in language that sounds more scrupulous. — Srap Tasmaner

You're giving it's being black a different status to the belief (or so it seemed). Something's 'being black' is just saying that we're proceeding under a policy of treating it as black. There's the policy (the assumption, the behaviour) and there's the cause of that policy. The cause is hidden (necessarily so, otherwise it would be part of 'us' and it's be something outside of that we'd be creating a model of). The policy is not.

We talk about the cause. 'A black marble' is my word for the thing I'm modelling as a black marble, it's not my word for the model. But epistemically, all I have is the model, not the black marble. I act according to the policy, not the actual marble. My actions are constrained by the actual marble, it limits what policy I can act under (regarding it), but being constrained by the marble and being caused by (or otherwise directly connected to) the marble are two different things.

FWIW, I had the king asking Jack if what Marvin said was true. I did not have the king thinking that — Srap Tasmaner

My bad. Same applies, he can only ever be asking for Jack's opinion. He's surely not thinking Jack can somehow provide him with unmediated contact with the location of the barbarians, it must be filtered through Jack's biases, errors, misrememberings... The King knows this. So when he asks 'Is that true?', either he's lost his mind, or he's asking if Jack agrees (with emphasis - he's not asking for a guess).

...Or is it infinite tower of models? — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, basically.

I'd really rather argue something else because we still seem to be locked in this bubble of arguing about concepts and assertibility. I'm pretty tired of those kinds of arguments. — Srap Tasmaner

I think here we can circumvent the usual stuff about models. Here I think the argument about truth stands only on the basis of what people can possibly be using the word for. If they're using the word to get at the 'real world', then why wasn't the original unadorned proposition about that in the first place?

If I ask "is 'the cat is on the mat' true?" why am I only now asking about correspondence in a way I apparently wasn't with "is the cat on the mat?"

Do you think the world that constrains our models is separable from the measurement apparatus we use to observe it, and the methods of interpreting those measurements, both of which are products of our models? — Joshs

No, I don't. But I don't think a theory that the world constrains our models is itself constrained by our lack of ability to measure those constraints outside of our modelling assumptions.

Are cats and mats inside or outside the structures we erect? — Joshs

I think so, yes. 'cats' and 'mats' are just labels, words... we can label things which we can't directly perceive. I can label the planet orbiting Alpha Centuri 'Bob' and we can then talk about the atmosphere of 'Bob'. 'Bob' doesn't even need to exist for such a conversation to be functional. So the fact that I'm modelling a cat (and your model of it might be different), it doesn't prevent us from using a word to refer to {the thing you and I are modelling}, we don't even need to know we're both modelling the same hidden states. As long as the conversation works, that's all that it needs.

Can we say, then, that e correctness or incorrectness of ‘the cat is on the mat’ only ever makes sense from within a structure of intelligibility rather than as a comparison of that structure with some constraint wholly outside of it? — Joshs

Yes, absolutely. The whole game of 'correct' and 'incorrect' is a construction too.

Something's 'being black' is just saying that we're proceeding under a policy of treating it as black. — Isaac

And I'm saying that's incoherent. We can't treat things as black if we don't have the concept of something being black, so there's no way of explaining being as assuming ((clarifying edit)). This is Sellars's argument about "looks" from EPM, and I see no way around it.

That gets me conceptual priority, but I'm not sure that's what I want.

Or is it infinite tower of models?
— Srap Tasmaner

Yes, basically. — Isaac

The horror! The horror!

Here I think the argument about truth stands only on the basis of what people can possibly be using the word for. — Isaac

Not me. I think that's a different subject, interesting in its own right, but not all questions are about how we use words. To hell with that.

By the way, I liked this:

If you were sure your jar contained 60 marbles, but your clicker has it at 59 is the model of the jar wrong, or the model of how the clicker works? — Isaac

That's a really nice question. I'm trying to avoid knee-jerk responses to it, so no answer yet, but it's on my mind.

We can't treat things as black if we don't have the concept of something being black — Srap Tasmaner

Really?

"If a thing is a 'jabberwocky', you ought throw jelly at it."

Don't you now know how to treat something as a jabberwocky? (Ie throw jelly at it)

At no point in that did you need a concept of what a jabberwocky actually is.

Treating something 'as being black'. Is like this. A set of behaviours (including mental ones) - reaching for the word 'black', recalling your recent space voyage, not giving it fair access to the justice system (political!). There's a cluster of behaviours we'd recognise in others as them 'acting as if x was black'. I'm suggesting there's nothing more to a thing being black than us being prepared to act that way, to adopt those policies.

The horror! The horror! — Srap Tasmaner

Entirely appropriate response. Nonetheless...

That's a really nice question. I'm trying to avoid knee-jerk responses to it, so no answer yet — Srap Tasmaner

Thanks. Probably ought to take a leaf from your book regarding the jerking of the knee.

I look forward to your thoughts.

...we never perceive the world at all, but just images of the objects we understand to constitute it... — Janus

If that were the case, then there would be no substantive difference between illusions of trees and perception of trees.

our everyday language is insufficient. — Sam26

Sam, do you think our everyday language is insufficient for explaining the Liar and/or all its permutations?

I don't think @Banno sees it like this, but I think Davidson is quite close to Kant on this 'access to exterior reality' point. Language plays a regulative and limiting role in what can be expressed, and it's also practical and publicly negotiated. It's sort of like a communally constituted, constantly evolving conceptual scheme that 'blocks' intelligible access to a presumably "non-linguistic" shared reality. There's a veil, but it's not a veil of perception on the nature of things, it's a veil shared conduct places on what is intelligible. It smells a lot like transcendental idealism. "There is no uninterpreted reality" is extremely close in spirit to "all experience is governed by a conceptual scheme". There's just one diffuse, distributed, constantly evolving regime of intelligibility which is equivalent to shared patterns of language, and it's linked to the world through truth.

This approach has the advantage of at least spelling out correspondence, I'd say. The world is, indeed, English-shaped (or concept-shaped, I suspect) so matching is a matter of equality (or perhaps another specifiable relation?) between the concept believed and the world. — Moliere

I think this approach is in line with Kant, with Wittgenstein's "the world is the totality of facts..." and with Davidson's proposal to dissolve the distinction between schema and world. It's also always a matter of terminology though; I am not using 'world' to refer to any purported actuality beyond human experience, and I understand that some might use it that way. Using it that way creates the central problem for correspondence theory; if we understand the latter to consist in positing truth as accordance between word and world..

Then the world is something like a set rather than a place. It's the set of things that are taken to be facts?

The RHS is an element of this set? — Tate

The world is understood to be the totality of facts, things and relations. It cannot be a place, because places have locations; where would the world be located? It is not merely a set, because it is understood to be infinitely complex, with parts interrelated. The RHS is a linguistic expression that can be in accordance with, correspond to, this collectively represented world or not.

Well said. The subtleties can be finessed.....but generally, well said. — Mww

Thanks Mww, I'm interested in any "finessing" you may care to offer.

If that were the case, then there would be no substantive difference between illusions of trees and perception of trees. — creativesoul

Not so, if I see what I take to be a tree, all I have to do is go up to it to feel its bark and leaves, and if I have a pen knife carve my initials in its bark or if I have a saw, cut off a branch, or if I am feeling agile I can climb it. If none of these are possible then I know I am confronted with an illusion, not a tree. That said, such a thing has never happened to me, and I have taken plenty of psychedelics. So, this kind of supposed counterexample is really a red herring in my view.

Sam, do you think our everyday language is insufficient for explaining the Liar and/or all its permutations? — creativesoul

I think the problem lies in the vagaries of language, and trying to fit language into a very precise medium, like mathematical logic. Logic is a guide for our reasoning, but it has it's limits. The two mediums of logic and ordinary language are very different, and it's this difference that may contribute to the problem.

"If a thing is a 'jabberwocky', you ought throw jelly at it."

Don't you now know how to treat something as a jabberwocky? (Ie throw jelly at it)

At no point in that did you need a concept of what a jabberwocky actually is. — Isaac

Ick.

First, that's an argument that we don't need concepts at all. What kind of cognitive psychologist are you? Too much Quine and Wittgenstein in your diet.

Second, absent a concept of jabberwocky-hood, I can't treat anything as a jabberwocky, because for all I know it is a jabberwocky. I am, when it comes to jabberwockies, incapable of pretense.

But suppose, perhaps because I was told to, I throw jelly at something, and do so with the understanding that this is how you treat a jabberwocky. I'm still incapable of inferring that I should pelt something with jelly because I believe, even erroneously, that it is a jabberwocky. And I am incapable of having a disposition to treat anything this way, so you can't even say I'm treating the thing you told me to fling jelly at as I would treat a jabberwocky. And what's behaviorism without dispositions? (A new line for Q-Tip!)

A set of behaviours (including mental ones) — Isaac

There ya go. This is really interesting. You're determined to sound like a behaviorist philosopher of fifty years ago or more, but you know that's a non-starter, so you push some of that style of analysis "inside." I'm sure there's a way of construing this that's uncontroversial -- neuroscientists are prone to talk about your brain telling you stories and so on, but of course that's largely picturesque; there's no cocoa or blankets involved. So did you mean the word "behaviour" as literally as I thought you might?

I agree with you about the vagaries of ordinary language, and the limits of logic's capacity to formalize what we do with ordinary language. All our talk is only ever approximation when it is about the world that is collectively conceived out of experienced actuality, and when we try to formalize our talk with logic, it ceases to be about the world, except in the most general structural sense.

I think I probably gave mine earlier, but... — Isaac

Sure. I threw your name in as bait. I wouldn't mind following through on our discussions of the relation between intentional language and neuroscience. One way that might look would be to look at our talk of things being true and the neuroscience of... and here I'm not even sure what to put.

We spoke at one stage of the difference between the sort of non-symbolic modelling that occurs in neural networks, and the ubiquitous, fraught, philosophical notion that our language models the world. The temptation is to simply equate the two, which I think we agree would be a gross oversimplification. I'm well pleased with the argument that when we talk about kettles boiling we are talking about kettles and not neural weightings, and I think you are, too.

Since this thread has frayed into divers and sundry arguments, it's probably not the place. If you are interested, let me know and I will make an attempt to articulate the topic more clearly in a new thread.

All our talk is only ever approximation when it is about the world — Janus

I agree, but I wonder about the above statement. It probably depends on how we're using the concepts approximation and exact, i.e., whether we are talking about a scientific measurement using lasers or a measurement using a ruler. However, even a scientific measurement that's considered exact in one setting, will only be an approximation in another setting.

Language plays a regulative and limiting role in what can be expressed, and it's also practical and publicly negotiated. It's sort of like a communally constituted, constantly evolving conceptual scheme that 'blocks' intelligible access to a presumably "non-linguistic" shared reality. There's a veil, but it's not a veil of perception on the nature of things, it's a veil shared conduct places on what is intelligible. It smells a lot like transcendental idealism. "There is no uninterpreted reality" is extremely close in spirit to "all experience is governed by a conceptual scheme". There's just one diffuse, distributed, constantly evolving regime of intelligibility which is equivalent to shared patterns of language, and it's linked to the world through truth — fdrake

Why not link the linguistic and the pre or non-linguistic, so that we can say it is not language per se that constrains and limits the intelligibility of the world, but each persons’s integrated history of understanding in general that ‘blocks’ some ways of thinking while enabling others? I would argue that the most important superordinate aspects of our ways of understanding the world, those with the greatest potential to limit what is intelligible to us, is often too murky to be linguistically articulated by us, and yet it drives our greatest hopes and fears. I would also add that our discursive schemes are only partially shared, which means that they are contested between us in each usage. Linguistic interchange doesn’t just assume what is at issue, it determines anew what is at issue in the interchange.

They're irrelevant to our social uses of propositions as they correspond to facts. We don't need to understand Tarski to understand the relationship between propositions and the world. It would be odd if we did. I can see the attraction to 'p' is true, IFF p, but, again, I don't see a need for it. — Sam26

Hmm.

Wittgenstein, whom we both admire, took logic as having a crystal clarity, a precision of expression that was not found in ordinary language. Indeed one of the things that separates his approach from the Oxford scholars of the time is that they were more incline to give primacy to the way words are actually used, while Wittgenstein was more inclined to look but then use logic to display any errors in ordinary language. If logic and ordinary language were in conflict, Wittgenstein would presumably take the side of logic.

Of course there are for Wittgenstein truths that are unassailable, for which "if I assume they are false, I must mistrust all my judgements"(Remarks on colour). Their truths are the hinges on which hang our language games.

Now in that quote Wittgenstein is considering truth beyond "our social uses of propositions as they correspond to facts", as you put it.

You do not doubt the truth of T-sentences. I submit that they show the way in which one such hinge swings.

Why not link the linguistic and the pre or non-linguistic, so that we can say it is not language per se that constrains and limits the intelligibility of the world, but each persons’s integrated history of understanding in general that ‘blocks’ some ways of thinking while enabling others? I would argue that the most important superordinate aspects of our ways of understanding the world, those with the greatest potential to limit what is intelligible to us, is often too murky to be linguistically articulated by us, and yet it drives our greatest hopes and fears. I would also add that our discursive schemes are only partially shared, which means that they are contested between us in each usage. — Joshs

Go read "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme" to find out why not!

whether we are talking about a scientific measurement using lasers or a measurement using a ruler. — Sam26

Interestingly, the use of a laser will carry with it more uncertainty because interpreting the results of a laser requires more theoretical baggage than a ruler. Frequently measurements taken by laser are reported in statistical terms, so that their exactness is specified in a mathematical way, but it's actually a measure of in-exactness.

Basically you'd have to accept a lot more scientific propositions for the laser to work as a tool for measuring than you do for the ruler, which pretty straightforwardly demonstrates length in relation to itself and our basic experience. I accept these propositions, but it's true that the ruler is in ways more exact than the laser because of this.

Go read "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme" to find out why not! — fdrake

I read it and think Davidson misses the boat. Sentences don’t link up with perceptual facts in the causal
way that he presumes. Perception is at its core already conceptual through and through , so the perceptual world doesn’t verify word meaning in the grounding way that he thinks it does.

That's pretty plausible, but I wouldn't presume to say what Davidson has chosen not quite to say.

That's pretty plausible, but I wouldn't presume to say what Davidson has chosen not quite to say. — Srap Tasmaner

Makes sense! I took too many liberties there.