And the final step is to say that the shared model we each access just is the neighbourhood. — Banno

So, the big question. Isn't this Platonism, plain and simple? The entire universe is just a a model, a collection of ideas.

~~

Banno would argue that a vantage point implies a common coordinate system, but common is norm the same thing as identical. — Joshs

Something like that. And Banno would agree that common is not the same as identical. We agree more than we differ.

We agree more than we differ. — Banno

What does it mean to agree? What is the object of agreement? A sentence?

and others are thinking about -- and maybe even posting! -- their own accounts of disagreement? — Srap Tasmaner

I don't really have an account of disagreement. Just some remarks. Probably somewhat close to @Joshs here.

If people can disagree on whether something is true or false, they've already gone most of the way toward agreement. The majority of disagreements are not quibbles about the facts, they are quibbles about the lenses through which we view the world. The majority of those quibbles about the lenses through which we view the world are also not about whether their constituents are true, or more often true, the majority of the time they are instead about whether they are appropriate, relevant, fit for task, permissible, understandable, intelligible, aesthetically pleasing, shite, exemplary or worth noting at all.

Some of those differences are much more fundamental than the others; disagreeing on whether something is permissible is quite different from disagreeing on whether something is intelligible. The former is a case like truth, in which most things are already fixed, the latter is not. So there are at least two types.

As a rough guide, it might be worthwhile partitioning disagreements into quibbles of fact, quibbles of relevance and quibbles of intelligibility. A quibble of fact will be when two people disagree on the truth of a claim, the accuracy of an approach, or whether something is fit for purpose. The distinguishing feature of a quibble of fact is that all quibbling parties are highly attuned to the same context, have the same vantage point on that context, and disagree about which one of a series of options obtains within that vantage. Black or white or blue, right or wrong, accurate or inaccurate.

Two paradigmatic example of a quibble of fact may be when a couple is having an earnest dispute over whether they can afford to eat at a restaurant one evening. Another example would be whether it's right to eat meat. The defining feature of the quibble isn't whether it's to do with truth or falsity or norms, it's about the background of the disagreement being fixed and two people having contrary takes on the same matter; fact value + subjective objective distinctions be damned.

A quibble of relevance is when two parties disagree more fundamentally than a quibble of fact, as they bring different vantage points to an issue which is the root of the conflict. A quibble of relevance is a conflict of broader conceptual frameworks and patterns of association that link individuals' worldviews together. The conflict arises from people systematising the world sufficiently differently in a scenario that they no longer can come to a quibble of fact about related issues without substantial exploratory work and the willingness to foster mutual understanding. A sign of a quibble of relevance is when quibblers bring much different facts, with much different styles of linkage between them, yet each appears to be directed towards the same issue. This is a disagreement within the same context.

Two paradigmatic examples of a quibble of relevance may be when a couple are having what feels like an earnest dispute over whether they can afford eating at a restaurant one evening; in this case however, this is really a dispute arising from one quibbler's simultaneous inability to be arsed to go out that evening and dislike of disappointing their partner through such a request; it must then be articulated through an impersonal, objective standard. Another example of this would be whether culturing individual and communal conduct is an essential part of the rules of ethical decision making; you will see it as necessarily relevant if you're into virtue ethics, but contingently so if you're a hedonist.
People will often behave as if they are in a quibble of fact, whereas they are actually in a quibble of relevance. It can be difficult to tell as misfiring connections between ideas, which people treat as if they are shared, tend to resist probing as they form part of the vantage by which probing is done. This is a disagreement on which context people operate within.

The final and most fundamental type of disagreement is a quibble of intelligibility. This is a case where two people's views on a scenario diverge so much that it would be almost impossible for one to understand the other. At least without living differently, or having had a different set of experiences. A common source of quibbles of intelligibility is when quibblers have much different embodied standpoints or life experiences. For example, a doting single parent of 5 and a widower antinatalist in a discussion of love for their children. While work can be done to commensurate their experiences, little can be done to address the fundamental difference in generative+maintenance mechanisms for quibblers' perspectives once one has developed. It takes work to establish any momentary bridge between these quibblers in any scenario related to their quibbling. A philosophical example may be (hopefully it doesn't derail the thread) those who easily intuit their experiences as qualia and those who do not. This is less of an individual disagreement, and more a fundamental difference in quibblers which tends to make them assign different contexts to the same information.

These types of quibbles form a hierarchy of constraints. Quibbles of intelligibility > quibble of relevance > quibble of fact. Currently having one in the list prevents the quibblers from having the quibbles higher up.

I believe any theory about recognising whether something is wrong from a disagreement could be done in one of two ways; you build up or you build down. Building up from fact to relevance to intelligibility, or going down from intelligibility to fact.

To my understanding, Davidson's procedure is bottom up; building the world iteratively through expressions linking to truth conditions through their meaning, and meaning (of sentences) being the agent of truth. The idea is to show that there are stable networks of facts, which allow productive disagreements and evaluation of relevance, that block the most severe quibbles of intelligibility from happening.

Building down is a more Heideggerian angle on it; quibbles of intelligibility happen, if they didn't there'd be no chance of having quibbles of relevance, quibbles of relevance happen, if they didn't there'd be no chance of having quibbles of fact, facts happen, so we can quibble about them. Intelligibility and perspective holding are also highlighted in this account.

A "model" in each case is a context of interpretation. Quibbles of fact have the same model shared between involved parties, quibbles of relevance have different models between involved parties, quibbles of intelligibility have different model generating mechanisms as well as different models between involved parties.

Nice. Interesting how much this coheres with what I wrote above, and Davidson's principle of Charity, from where I stole it.

We make the most of one another's posts by interpreting them in ways which maximise agreement...

We make the most of one another's posts by interpreting them in ways which maximise agreement... — Banno

Yes, and often the best way to maximise agreement is to gently focus on vital contrasts.

Like relevance and intelligibility being cognitive, conceptual, bodily and perceptual categories which impact interpretation of scenarios, whereas quibbles of fact tend to concern things which are easy to model as attitudes towards statements. Relevance impacts the assignment pattern of attitudes to statements of an individual or group, intelligibility impacts the assignment of an interpretive context itself to the scenario in which patterns of attitudes and fact like beliefs are formed.

I think @apokrisis is decently close to this as well - if you focus on what makes a context able to express stuff, you end up studying how lifeworlds/forms of life end up with stable patterns in them... Like norms of language itself. In some respect relevance and intelligibility are broader semiotic categories than those involved in the semantics of sentences.

Also, thanks for the "nice". : D

It looks like you're going beyond phenomenology to system building — Tate

I’m agreeing with you that the ego's vantage point won't allow one to say that model and world are one.

Consider neighbourhood relativism. Suppose we do not have access to the neighbourhood, but instead only to the models of the neighbourhood.

…you say the fence between our properties is brick, and I say it is wood…

And the final step, back in line, is to point out that the shared model we each access just is the neighbourhood. — Banno

If the shared model we each access just is the neighbourhood, then how does this account for the disagreement over the fence being brick or wood?

Is there any way this disagreement can be settled according to the “no models” view, without (re)introducing a model/neighbourhood distinction?

...gently... — fdrake

Not my forte, unfortunately.

The man's a philostudpher.

but because the inseparability of model and world means that there are as many empirical worlds as there are models. — Joshs

Yes, that's it precisely!

Suppose we do not have access to the neighbourhood, but instead only to the models of the neighbourhood. — Banno

We have experiential access to what gives rise to the models we call "the neighbourhood"; the neighbourhood itself is never an object of perception, but only ever concept or model. That experiential access allows us to check if details of any model accord with what is to be seen.

I’m agreeing with you that the ego's vantage point won't allow one to say that model and world are one. — Joshs

Oh. :up:

If the shared model we each access just is the neighbourhood, then how does this account for the disagreement over the fence being brick or wood? — Luke

Are you asking how to solve disagreements, or whence disagreement?

If solve, then rationality and force both will work, or even

Edit: I might also simply decide that you use the word "brick" in the way I use the word "wood", that they have the same use. — Banno

If you are asking how they arise, the sources of disagreement are many and various.

Balls like watermelons.

If you are asking how they arise, the sources of disagreement are many and various. — Banno

I fail to see how any disagreement is possible regarding the material of the fence if we all share the same model, which just is the neighbourhood. And, on that basis, how can any disagreement be resolved?

Edit: I might also simply decide that you use the word "brick" in the way I use the word "wood", that they have the same use. — Banno

Doesn’t this imply that we have different models, instead of sharing the same model which just is the neighbourhood?

Better still, doesn’t this imply that there is something independent of our models by which it doesn’t matter what it is called according to either model, it is the same thing?

think apokrisis is decently close to this as well — fdrake

Thanks. :up:

My point is all about bringing logic back into the real world by showing how it is in fact grounded in the brute reality of a pragmatic modelling relation.

The mystery of logic, truth, intentionality, etc, are that they are clearly in one sense free inventions of the human mind. They transcend the physical reality they then control. This is a puzzle that leads to idealism - including the idealising of logic as "just a free mathematical construction, which also seems to have a Platonic necessity about its axiomatic basis".

But semiotics makes it clear that this idealistic freedom is the result of the "epistemic cut" in which a code – some vocabulary of symbols that can be ordered by syntatic rules – is then able to "speak about reality" from outside that reality.

The word "possum" could mean anything. As physics – a sound wave, a reverberation, emitted by a vocal tract – it is just a meaningless noise. And a noise that is costless to produce. Or at least the metabolic cost is the same as what any other noise of a few syllables might cost us.

The physics of the world thus does not constrain the noises we make in any way. And that is why these noises can come to have their own idealistic world of meaning attached to them. We are free to do what the heck we like with these noises. We can create systems of rules – grammars and syntax – that formalise them into structures that bear meaning only for "us".

So idealism is made to be something that actually exists in the physical world because this world can't prevent costless noise patterns being assigned reality-independent meaning. Noise can be turned into information and there ain't a damn thing the world can do about that transcendent act of rebellion against its relentless entropy.

But then humans have to still live in the world and do enough to cover the actual small cost of speaking about the world in the free way that they do.

So the freedom of truth-making is in fact yoked to the profit that can be turned on being a speaking creature. It all has to reconnect to the physics. And of course, as human history shows, being speaking creatures living in shared communities of thought, in fact can repay an enormous negentropic dividend.

To the extent our model of the world is "true" – pragmatically useful – we gain power over the entropy flows of our environments and can bend them to our collective will.

The problem in the discussions here are that logic gets treated as something actually transcendent of this rooted, enactive, organismic reality of ours. But even logic – and information in general – is finding itself becoming properly reconnected in physics.

Turing invents universal computation? Computer science eventually matches that by showing reality has its fundamental computational limits. The holographic principle tells us any computation does have some Planck scale cost – a cost which is small, but not actually zero. And so try to build a computer with enough complexity to tackle really intensive problems and it would shrivel up into a black hole under its own gravity.

Information theory puts computing back firmly in the world it thought it had transcended.

And the same ought to be happening for logic.

Which is where semiotics comes in. It defines the line between rate independent information and rate dependent dynamics in a way that is biological rather than merely computational.

Logic as maths led to computers as logic engines. Blind hardware enslaved by blind software, with the human element – the intentionality and truth-making – once more floating off above the heads of all the physical action in some idealist heaven.

Semiotic approaches to truth-making discovers logic to lie in the way that the connection between models and their realities is reliant on the device of the mechanical switch. This is the fundamental grain of action because it is where the effort of executing an intent becomes symmetric with halting that intent. And so that intent becomes a free choice.

You can flick the light on or off. You can push the nuclear doomsday button or leave it alone. The greatest asymmetry between a choice and its result can be imposed on nature by making the metabolic cost of choosing option A over option B as entropically symmetric as possible.

To me, putting this modelling relation front and centre of the philosophy of logic would clear up the old truth-maker chestnuts forever. We could move on to more interesting things.

Mechanistic logic has confused people's metaphysics for quite a long time now. Roll on organismic logic. Let's reconnect to the systems view of reality that has been chuntering along in the background ever since Anaximander. Let's finally understand what Peirce was on about as he laid its general foundation.

On your first post, the first part of an argument against people who disagree each having their own model:

Before we get to that, I want to fill out this:

we may have no choice but to give an account of how (a) the model I use, (b) the sentences I utter, and (c) the occasions upon which I utter them, are related. There are multiple possible explanations for the utterance of a sentence not in the model. — Srap Tasmaner

What I had in mind was this: it is plausible that any individual has only imperfect access to the model of the world they've been working on, and they only imperfectly "translate" it into an utterance. In the case at hand, there are at least these possiblities:

• I may know perfectly well what color Pat's house is, but forgot for the moment, or misremembered;
• I may have only known that Pat's house is the same color as Joe's, which I know to be white, but have failed to make the inference that Pat's is white;
• I may not have recognized that this is an occasion for using my Pat's-house knowledge -- maybe I misheard "Pat's" as "Srap's";
• I may have simply misspoken, perhaps because I was just a moment ago thinking of something black and was primed to say "black" instead of "white".

In addition, if we presume the two speakers share a model, it's reasonable to expect they would actually only be familiar with non-identical proper subsets of the community-wide model. I may know that Pat's house is white, and that his front door is white, and assume that the back door is likewise white, while those that have seen it know it to be grey; I possess slightly less knowledge of Pat's house than some do, but I can readily extend my acquaintance with the shared model by being informed or seeing the back door for myself.

That should add at least one more possibility for those who have a single model disagreeing, that one of them knows and the other assumed or guessed or made a valid but unsound inference, etc., because he wasn't familiar with a part of their model that the other is. (Or maybe neither of them actually know and they're both bullshitting.)

On your account, what people say is presented as a perfect reflection of the model they are using, and that's tantamount to simply identifying the model with what they say.

On my account, differences in what we say are inconclusive evidence that we have different models. There may be other reasons (as above) why on this occasion we didn't end up saying the same thing. And this is so because, differences aside, what any one person says is an imperfect reflection of the model they use.

If that's so, it's hard right off to say whether an occasion of disagreement indicates two models or one in use. You've presented -- at least, along the way somewhere else -- the argument for there being one. That was also more or less @fdrake's reading of Davidson, in part. I'll have to think a while about what, in my test-bed here, multiple models would look like and whether we can tell the difference between that and a single one. --- Should probably say here more clearly: above I suggested there is community-constructed model that it is something like the union of all the models actually in use by individuals, each of whom is familiar with only a proper subset of that union; I'm inclined to consider that another access issue and say individuals familiar with different subsets of a single model share just one, but I'd be open to arguments that these should be considered different, if consistent, models. I'm not sure it much matters what you say here.

And then there's your main point, that the argument for no models runs through a single shared model just being unnecessary, that the only conceivable use for the model talk in the first place was if competing models were in the offing. If we all have the same one, we don't need that one and can just all have the same nothing.

I'm inclined to pause here and wonder whether the model, even if singular, is doing work that just the raw corpus of utterances can't. For instance, I can say that I deviated in speech from my model because of a priming effect, or misremembering, or misunderstanding the context. ("Oh Pat's house. Yeah, it's white.") What does the no-models account say? Most of the time I say one thing, but on this occasion I say something else, and --- and what? Why did I deviate? It seems to me the idea of a model gives you at least a start on dispositions to speak in certain ways, dispositions that are not absolute guarantees. But on the no-models view, I just say stuff, and what I "believe" is represented by whatever I said most recently or whatever I say most commonly, or who knows what.

And perhaps now that I've dropped the B-word, we should look a little again at what the word "model" was doing for me. It is frankly representational -- I don't know how else to take "model." If we do develop such models of the world, and happen to use language as a medium for doing so -- no doubt necause of its considerable efficiency and portability compared to other media -- then, while language is the medium of the model, I need not use it only for producing speech. It can be simply how I store a considerable portion of my knowledge, and my knowledge I can rely on in doing many more things than speaking. I can also use it to store hypotheses, possible but uncertain extensions of my knowledge, which I can act on to confirm or disconfirm, and so on.

If there is no model, but only my speech behavior, then to do any of these things in which I rely on my linguistic knowledge, I must, presumably, speak to myself about them. Now I talk to myself a lot, but I don't have to form the sentence "Cheyenne is the capital of Wyoming," much less speak it, even sotto voce, to remember that it is. Do we perhaps engage in silent and unconscious speech in order to retrieve the facts we know?

That begins to look a bit like a "language of thought," which, oddly, is where my use of language as model medium seems to be headed. It's natural to talk about at least some of our knowledge being stored linguistically only because so much of it is acquired linguistically or is intrinsically linguistic. "Cheyenne" and "Wyoming" are after all names, related in certain ways, which, in this case, are in part purely matters of convention and thus linguistic. My knowledge that Cheyenne is the capital of Wyoming has no option but to be a bit of linguistic knowledge.

But the issue that arises next is obvious: I have considerable knowledge of my native language which I rely on in order to speak it. If that knowledge is not stored linguistically, how can I possibly speak my native language? How could I ever "whisper" to myself, even unconsciously, that Cheyenne is the capital of Wyoming, if I cannot call on my knowledge of English to do that, because I cannot conceivably remind myself linguistically how to speak?

Some of those arguments may not be very good, I dunno. I'm not sure where we are, now, but at least there's now something in the neighborhood of an argument for my initial assumption, that we use language as a medium with which to build a model of the world, which was unargued for to start with.

I hope we're not quite there yet, but if we are at the point where none of the not-really-disagreeing explanations work, then we may be forced to say that one of our two speakers has said something false, although at the moment we don't know which one. There are worse solutions than, as both @Banno and Herodotus said, going and looking for yourself. As things are in my little test-bed, the model is in part a matter of convenience, and I'm still in a position to compare it directly to what it is a model of -- I can test at least some of it in the most direct way imaginable.

This is already covering a lot of ground, so I'll stop, but there ought to be more on what's happened here, whether I had an idiosyncratic and inaccurate model, and so on. But it looks like it's getting much harder here, so I wonder if we can take a step back and simplify things again.

The majority of disagreements are not quibbles about the facts, they are quibbles about the lenses through which we view the world. — fdrake

Quickly, this is probably right, but for my purpose here it's facts that matter, if facts are going to be how we talk about truth. As I understand your hierarchy, differences at any of the three levels may present as a disagreement over facts or truth, but the disagreement must be resolved at the level at which it originates, so only disagreements that are simply about facts are resolvable at the level of facts.

That's also plausible, but at this point, I don't even know how best to characterize what a disagreement over facts is, much less resolve it, much less discern its origin. I want to try to stick to my little model a bit longer to force myself to say exactly what's going on if I can, rather than take anything for granted.

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.'
— Andrew M

I don't know if Blackwell got this right. — Michael

The sentences are equivalent in the sense that they are satisfied by the same object(s). Whereas redundancy is a philosophical view about usage.

So he seems quite opposed to the redundancy view. — Michael

Yes, Tarski endorsed the correspondence theory of truth. Sher notes this at the beginning of the chapter where she says:

Tarski's philosophical goal was to provide a definition of the ordinary notion of truth, that is the notion of truth commonly used in science, mathematics, and everyday discourse. Tarski identified this notion with the classical, correspondence notion of truth, according to which the truth of a sentence consists in its correspondence with reality. Taking Aristotle's formulation as his starting point - "To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true." (Aristotle: 1011b25) - Tarski sought to construct a definition of truth that would capture, and give precise content to, Aristotle's conception. — Truth, The Liar, and Tarski's Semantics - Gila Sher (from Blackwell's A Companion to Philosophical Logic)

--

Makes sense, cheers. Question though. The source uses the word "correspondence" in the context of mapping expressions of language and concerned objects, is that meant as fleshing out a correspondence theory, or is it meant in an informal sense of "an explanatory relation of equivalence" — fdrake

Yes, it's meant as fleshing out a correspondence theory - see the above quote. But that wasn't Tarski's only goal. As Sher goes on to say:

Tarski’s second goal had to do with logical methodology or, as it was called at the time, metamathematics. Metamathematics is the discipline which investigates the formal properties of theories (especially mathematical theories) formulated within the framework of modern logic (first- and higher-order mathematical logic) as well as properties of the logical framework itself. Today we commonly call this discipline ‘meta-logic.’ The notion of truth plays a crucial. if implicit, role in metalogic (e.g. in Gödel's completeness and incompleteness theorems), yet this notion was known to have generated paradox. Tarski's second goal was to demonstrate that ‘truth’ could be used in metalogic in a consistent manner (see Vaught 1974). — Truth, The Liar, and Tarski's Semantics - Gila Sher (from Blackwell's A Companion to Philosophical Logic)

Yes, Tarski endorsed the correspondence theory of truth. — Andrew M

I believe there isn't much agreement amongst philosophers on that. Tarski himself says in The Semantic Conception of Truth:

We should like our definition to do justice to the intuitions which adhere to the classical Aristotelian conception of truth-intuitions which find their expression in the well-known words of Aristotle's Metaphysics:

To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true.

If we wished to adapt ourselves to modern philosophical terminology, we could perhaps express this conception by means of the familiar formula:

The truth of a sentence consists in its agreement with (or correspondence to) reality.

(For a theory of truth which is to be based upon the latter formulation the term "correspondence theory" has been suggested.)

If, on the other hand, we should decide to extend the popular usage of the term "designate" by applying it not only to names, but also to sentences, and if we agreed to speak of the designate of sentences as "states of affairs," we could possibly use for the same purpose the following phrase:

A sentence is true if it designates an existing state of affairs.

However, all these formulations can lead to various misunderstandings, for none of them is sufficiently precise and clear (though this applies much less to the original Aristotelian formulation than to either of the others); at any rate, none of them can be considered a satisfactory definition of truth. It is up to us to look for a more precise expression of our intuitions.

...

As far as my own opinion is concerned, I do not have any doubts that our formulation does conform to the intuitive content of that of Aristotle. I am less certain regarding the later formulations of the classical conception, for they are very vague indeed.

So it seems to me at least that he doesn't endorse the correspondence theory but does endorse the Aristotelian theory, which he thinks of as different.

We've been taking as a starting point "snow is white" is true iff p and then discussing p, whereas I think we should instead take as a starting point snow is white iff q and then discuss q.

Snow is white iff snow appears white, or
Snow is white iff snow reflects all wavelengths of light, or
Snow is white iff snow has a mind-independent sui generis property of whiteness, etc.

We can then bring this back to truth-predication by understanding that if "p" is true iff p and if p iff q then "p" is true iff q.

"Snow is white" is true iff snow appears white, or
"Snow is white" is true iff snow reflects all wavelengths of light, or
"Snow is white" is true iff snow has a mind-independent sui generis property of whiteness, etc.

and we have a more substantial account of truth. — Michael

How isn't it just a more substantial account of p?

How isn't it just a more substantial account of p? — bongo fury

Because "p" is true iff p. Therefore a substantial account of p is a substantial account of "p" is true.

Deflation, or inflation?

I don't think it makes a difference.

To the extent our model of the world is "true" – pragmatically useful – we gain power over the entropy flows of our environments and can bend them to our collective will. — apokrisis

Oh my God! "True" is being defined as "pragmatically useful" now. This gives free reign to dishonesty, sophistry, and deception, because when these intentions are the prevailing interest (Trumpism for example), they rule as the truth under this definition.

So it seems to me at least that he doesn't endorse the correspondence theory but does endorse the Aristotelian theory, which he thinks of as different. — Michael

This description of the Aristotelian theory of truth does not delve deep enough to reveal the serious problem which Aristotle exposed.

"Truth" speaks of "states of affairs", as you say, "what is", and "what is not", being and not being. But reality has many examples of becoming, change. And what Aristotle demonstrated is that becoming is fundamentally incompatible with the descriptive principles of "what is", and "what is not". This results in the need to relinquish the law of excluded middle, allowing change, or "becoming" to occupy that place where this law is violated, the place of "neither is nor is not". The inclination to enforce the law of excluded middle, without exception, allows sophists to produce all sorts of absurd conclusions about what is real.

The demonstration provided by Aristotle goes something like this. If state of affairs A changes, and becomes state of affairs B, then we need to propose something intermediate between A and B which would refer to the change itself. If this were another state of affairs, we could describe it as C. And C would be the state which exists between A and B as the change from one to the other. But then we would need to propose states between A and C, and between C and B, to account for the change from state A to state C, and from state C to state B. Then we'd need to place other states between A and C, etc.. As you can see, this need to place another state between the two described states, to account for the change from one state to another, would proceed infinitely, and we would never actually be describing "the change" from one state to another, we'd only be describing a progression of states.

The conclusion is that change, or becoming, is fundamentally different from "states of affairs" and cannot be properly described in terms of "what is", and "what is not". This exposes the need for a dualism, and Aristotle's proposal of hylomorphism, in which "form" is the category for states of affairs, and "matter" is the category for becoming, or change.

Considering everything that's been discussed, I think the focus on truth is a red herring. We take as a starting point "snow is white" is true iff p and then argue over p. I think we should instead take as a starting point snow is white iff q and then argue over q. — Michael

Sure, but if we remove "true" from the equation, then we are off topic of the thread, which is a discussion of truth.

Sure, but if we remove "true" from the equation, then we are off topic of the thread, which is a discussion of truth. — Metaphysician Undercover

Refresh the page, I’ve made an edit.

Right, but q could become an endless string of proposals for the necessary conditions of "truth", as we're already experiencing in this thread anyway.