The RHS is a linguistic expression that can be in accordance with, correspond to, this collectively represented world or not. — Janus

Remember the RHS is not to be thought of in this context as a linguistic expression,. — Janus

You can't seem to make up your mind.

Arguably, since they are directly about sentences and not about kettles, 3 and 5 might be called linguistic facts. But on that criteria, 1 is directly about kettles, not sentences. — Banno

Quoting myself.

One issue here is what a "linguistic fact" is, so that we can understand what a "nonlinguistic fact" is.

It seems to me that it doesn't make sense to say that (1) is a linguistic fact. If someone thingks it does, then it is up tot hem to provide some account.

Is it? So what is a proposition? Fill out your point. — Banno

I had no point other than that the part the follows "that" is a proposition.

You don't know what a proposition is?

I use the term as a loose collective for utterances, sentences, statements, truth bearers, truth bears and such. Ok, it's a proposition.

So what does the proposition say? Why, it says that the kettle is boiling...

But that bit in bold is a proposition...

SO how can it be that: "(1) isn't the fact that the kettle is boiling". — Banno

Because (1) is a sentence and the fact that the kettle is boiling isn't a sentence. Therefore, (1) isn't the fact that the kettle is boiling.

You seem to be unable to separate use from mention. Here's another example that should make it clearer:

1. The kettle is boiling
2. (1) is true

The correct translation of (2) is "the kettle is boiling" is true. The incorrect translation of (2) is the kettle is boiling is true.

You seem to be unable to separate use from mention. — Michael

On the contrary, that is exactly what I am pointing to.

The correct translation of (2) is "the kettle is boiling" is true. The incorrect translation of (2) is the kettle is boiling is true. — Michael

Yes, that is what I have been at pains to point out.

On the contrary, that is exactly what I am pointing to. — Banno

And yet you are conflating them when you say that (1) is the fact that the kettle is boiling. It isn't. (1) is a sentence.

And yet you are conflating them when you say that (1) is the fact that the kettle is boiling. It isn't. (1) is a sentence. — Michael

So, what is the fact to which your sentence "The kettle is boiling" points? In your own words. Take your time.

So, what is the fact to which your sentence "The kettle is boiling" points? In your own words. Take your time. — Banno

The fact that the kettle is boiling.

That's the bit directly above that seems to be untenable in the same way that Kant's Noumena is. — creativesoul

I don't have anything like Kant's noumena in mind, so it seems that you are not understanding what I;m saying. The "pre-linguistic actuality" I have in mind is our basic experience of images, smells, sensations and impressions as well as recognition of repetition and pattern. I'm saying we can gain no conceptual purchase on that basic experience because to do so would change it into something else; something schematic and conceptual. Nevertheless it is the primordial stuff out of which we have woven our ideas of a world of entities and relations and the totality of facts about them

You can't seem to make up your mind. — Tate

I'd say it's more that you can't seem to get the distinction.

But on that criteria, 1 is directly about kettles, not sentences.

There are, it seems, folk who think that we need an item 0 in this list, a state of affairs or an exterior thing in itself, outside of language or perception or belief or some other; and that it is this item 0 that is the fact, which is represented (or some such...) in item 1.

And when you ask them what item 0 is, the answer is something like that it is the kettle boiling.

But that's item 1. — Banno

You start out by saying that the sentence is about the boiling kettle, but then end up saying that the sentence is the boiling kettle.

Pointing to a kettle doesn’t make one a kettle.

The fact that the kettle is boiling. — Michael

Ah, that fact. The kettle is boiling.

But you said that was a sentence...

This bit:

1. The kettle is boiling — Banno

(1) is a sentence — Michael

Is it both a sentence and a fact?

...but then end up saying that the sentence is the boiling kettle. — Luke

Nuh.

Nuh — Banno

Oh? Let me quote it again for you:

And when you ask them what item 0 is, the answer is something like that it is the kettle boiling.

But that's item 1. — Banno

This says that Item 1 (a sentence) is the kettle boiling.

Sentences are not kettles.

Read it again.

So what does the proposition say? Why, it says that the kettle is boiling...

But that bit in bold is a proposition... — Banno

Correct. It's content. That's just how English works.

Al said that he was tired.

We don't know exactly what words he uttered, but we know what he said, that is, we know the content: that he was tired.

I'd say it's more that you can't seem to get the distinction. — Janus

If you tried making sense, maybe I'd understand you a little better.

Truth is pain(ful). If it were not, we should be happy as happy can be.

Read which part again? Show me where I’ve misread.

If you tried making sense, maybe I'd under you a little better. — Tate

What I said is in line with the well-worn use/ mention distinction which you apparently don't understand.

What I said is in line with the well-worn use/ mention distinction which you apparently don't understand. — Janus

I'm quite familiar with use/mention. Your account of the t-sentence is garbled.

(1) says "The kettle is boiling" and (2) says "La bouilloire est en ébullition". — Michael

:up:

If it points to anything, it points to itself. — Banno

So we go down and down, diligently following all the little arrows pointing to our supposed destination, to arrive at the final arrow ... that points at itself.

No wonder folk feel short-changed by this kind of shenanigans.

Semiotics fixes that for you. It formalises the necessary connection between model and world by saying one eventually arrives at a mechanical switch. You have a bit that can be physically flipped. You have some informational state that also does some useful real world work.

Logic can be treated as some kind of Platonic abstraction. But that is why it encounters its Godelian limits. Pointers that don't point at anything but themselves.

Logic makes better sense when it is seen as an exercise in semiotics – an organism's efforts to gain regulatory control over its entropic environment.

Truth is pragmatic. It is all about a bunch of switches being flipped in a manner that itself sustains the whole enterprise that is about intelligent habits or routines of switch flipping.

So logic is the construction of a selfhood that can live in its world. It is not about mathematical abstraction, except in the service of entropy regulation. And so it is pointers all the way down to the pointer that must be physically flipped in a way that then recursively sustains the entire edifice of pointing.

See kettle. Want boil. Flip switch. Make tea. Realise this is useful. Repeat ad infinitum until the pragmatic connection between the model and the world – between the rate independent information and rate dependent dynamics, as Pattee puts its – breaks in some way.

But there really are the two different worlds on either side of the same "ultimate pointer" – the mechanical switch that mediates semiotically between the information and the dynamics.

So the kettle is either on or off. Boiling or not boiling. Human intelligence has contrived a world where life has the purest semiotic logic. We can regulate the flow of entropy at the press of a button. The pointer at the end of the line is the pointer that points the material world in the way that best fits our desires.

And in enforcing that system of mechanism on the world, we in fact create a world that is now inanimate – over-ruled in terms of having is own desires – along with the inner self that is now defined in terms of all the power it has accumulated in its button-pressing fingertips.

No wonder the situation seems a little Cartesian, setting up the eternal duel between baffled idealist and naive realist.

But semiotics is the theory of truth that properly connects the self and its world by understanding there has to be the "epistemic cut" in the form of the canonical switch – the "sign" or "pointer" that is the bridge because it is equally much part of the ideal realm as the material realm. It stands with its feet in both camps in being the intentional opening and shutting of the unintentioned entropic flows which pass through it.

This is all a lot easier to understand when dealing with biosemiosis – the action down at the level of enzymes and other molecular machinery.

But even at the level of linguistic and logical semiosis, it is easy to see that utterances are meant to regulate habits of action. Words and numbers are used by the human social organism as a system of switches to keep folk collective pointed in an entropically self-sustaining state of organisation.

The laws of thought only ever arose in the search to view nature as "switchable". And we by consequence became creatures who were all about the act of hitting those damn switches.

A system of logical switches became all that we could see. But does it actually make sense that following the hierarchy of pointing down to its roots and you should expect the final pointer to point to itself?

Nope. The job of the pointer is to point at its intended real effect. And at the level of some actual switch, it gets to produce that effect as a direction physically imposed on an entropic flow.

That the kettle is boiling is a statement about the world being neutered of its intentionality and it having been pointed physically in the direction we desired.

This would be why Kant talked about the thing-in-itself as if nature might have its own intentions in play. Idealism then says these desires must be properly organismic. Realists reply instead that facts are facts – entirely inanimate.

Pragmatism and semiotics then slips in between these two eternally raging camps to point out that nature's "desires" are fairly minimal and not organismic. But start sticking in the right regulatory machinery – the semiosis of codes or informational switches – and you do get the new thing of the organism. You get dissipative structure that has innate intelligence and self-organisation.

The "price" is that its truths are pragmatic. They are neither subjective, nor objective. Instead this distinction between a self and its world is what emerges from the useful action of seeking to make the world as one would wish it to be. Truth is an effective setting of the switches. The construction of an Umwelt, or a view of the world as it is with ourselves fully embedded in its reality.

I'm quite familiar with use/mention. Your account of the t-sentence is garbled. — Tate

So, tell us what your understanding is and just how you think my account is garbled, just what errors you think I have made in that account. If you can't do that your unargued comments are pointless.

You made the mistake of asserting that the world can somehow be false. By definition, it can't.

It went down hill from there.

You made the mistake of asserting that the world can somehow be false. By definition, it can't.

It went down hill from there. — Tate

No I never asserted that the world can be false. Perhaps you could quote where I've said that. The RHS expresses a state of affairs, which may or may not obtain; if it fails to obtain the the LHS is false.

I'll comment further on this:

The RHS is a linguistic expression that can be in accordance with, correspond to, this collectively represented world or not. — Janus




Remember the RHS is not to be thought of in this context as a linguistic expression,. — Janus


You can't seem to make up your mind. — Tate

I'll try one more time, since I can see the possibility of perceived ambiguity lurking in the quoted statements above. The RHS is a linguistic statement describing some state of affairs, could be real or imagined. It is a linguistic usage. The LHS is a quotation (mention) of that linguistic statement, which refers to the statement itself, rather than the state of affairs the statement refers to. This stuff is not easy to talk about to be sure, but I think we all know every well what "X is y" is true iff X is y, since it just shows the logic of correspondence which is common in everyday use. We understand ourselves to be able to talk about a shared world and say things both true and false about it.

If the world is a collective representation, why can it not be false. — Janus

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

This, my friend, is garbled. I think we're done here.

If the world is a collective representation, why can it not be false. — Janus


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 — Tate

This, my friend, is garbled. I think we're done here. — Tate

The second statement quoted there explains the first. So, why bring it up again? In ancient times the collective representation of the world said the Earth was flat; this turned out to be inconsistent with subsequent experience.

Leaving aside that I may have expressed myself poorly or ambiguously, what is it exactly you want to disagree with? On the other hand if you're done you're done, and I don't care; but in that case you have shown yourself to be uncharitable and unwilling to address what I am actually trying to say.

See the post below, which is saying the same as I have been, probably more clearly than I have been,

Yes, I see. And that is the objection I've had to Pie's position from the outset - that the truth bearer, P, is not identical to the fact that P describes. So P is not identical with the world, otherwise we are still talking about a sentence. But if we maintain the distinction between sentence and world, and if P is equivalent to the world, then I don't see how that's different to correspondence.
— Luke

I see what you mean I think! Would like to see a discussion on how the RHS relates to the world, and how it differs to correspondence. — fdrake

Per the RHS sentence, we can either use it (to express something about the world) or mention it (in order to express something about the sentence itself). The following passage explains Tarski's view on this (bold mine).

Correspondence and disquotation

Some philosophers regard semantic notions as disquotational notions: a sentence enclosed in quotation marks has the property of being true iff this sentence, its quotation marks removed, holds (Ramsey 1927). Tarski, however, views the two analyses as equivalent:

"A characteristic feature of the semantical concepts is that they give expression to certain relations between the expressions of language and the objects about which these expressions speak, or that by means of such relations they characterize certain classes of expressions or other objects. We could also say (making use of the suppositio materialis) that these concepts serve to set up the correlation between the names of expressions and the expressions themselves." (Tarski 1933: 252)

We can explain Tarski's view as follows: There are two modes of speech, an objectual mode and a linguistic mode ('material' mode, in Medieval terminology). The correspondence idea can be expressed in both modes. It is expressed by:

'Snow is white' is true iff snow is white

as well as by:

' "Snow is white" is true' is equivalent to 'Snow is white.'

In the objectual mode we say that a sentence attributing the (physical) property of whiteness to the (physical) stuff snow is true iff the (physical) stuff snow has the (physical) property of whiteness; in the linguistic mode we say that a sentence attributing (the semantic property of) truth to a sentence attributing whiteness to snow is equivalent to a sentence attributing whiteness to snow. — Truth, The Liar, and Tarski's Semantics - Gila Sher (from Blackwell's A Companion to Philosophical Logic)

Obviously linguistics played a part in the stove's creation, but the fact that stove exists, is just like any other fact of existence for the cat, and the cat's belief. What if we removed all humans from existence, but there still existed stoves, would there still be an overlap between the cat's belief and language? What if someone created a stove, ceased to exist, then cats came into existence later, would you still say that the cat's belief overlapped language? I don't see any reason to think that the cat's belief has a linguistic component simply because some language user created the stove. The stove is just another fact of reality, like a tree or the moon... — Sam26

Hey Sam, sorry about the delay. Doctor visit.

I think we agree much more than the above seems to suggest. Could you re-read that post and tell me at what point exactly you begin to disagree?

1. The kettle is boiling
2. "The kettle is boiling"
3. "The kettle is boiling" is true
4. '"The kettle is boiling" is true'
5. '"The kettle is boiling is true' is true

Previously I've felt obliged to explain that 1, 3 and 5 in this list are facts.

Arguably, since they are directly about sentences and not about kettles, 3 and 5 might be called linguistic facts. But on that criteria, 1 is directly about kettles, not sentences. — Banno

Makes sense to me thus far...

There are, it seems, folk who think that we need an item 0 in this list, a state of affairs or an exterior thing in itself, outside of language or perception or belief or some other; and that it is this item 0 that is the fact, which is represented (or some such...) in item 1.

The tree is outside of language, perception, and belief is it not?

A kettle? Not so much.