Being able to puzzle out commitments and background assumptions is what, I believe, this kind of discussion is particularly good at. Please forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe you are having a discussion of the same character by trying to tease out the other discussants background discussions while holding what they (we) believe as an object of (noncommital) scrutiny. By the looks of it, it's the same device. — fdrake

I don't doubt that, but there's categories and approaches.

You'd find it weird if we all, as car drivers, tried to puzzle out our commitments and background assumptions about our folk theories regarding how cars work, no? We could. I suspect most drivers, even those unfamiliar with the mechanics, have some kind of intuition, if pushed, about what exactly the gearstick does, how the engine works...and all of those things would have background assumptions and would entail commitments. They certainly all have an 'experience' of pushing the pedal, feeling the car respond, etc. But a discussion about it would be super weird. If we want to know how cars work we just consult our Haynes manuals. We still have those folk theories, but we don't expect fruit from a discussion of them, beyond simple curation of how people feel.

At the other end of the scale, if we were discussing the ethics of abortion, it's all commitments and assumptions. There's nothing but folk theories. We'd have to expect fruit from a discussion of that nature because we haven't found any equivalent of "just look" to discover something non-folk.

Many things fall somewhere in between, but still on the scale. So I don't think it's ever sufficient to say "you carry out this kind of investigation with X so it must be understandable that others do with Y".

There remains the question of why the participants have treated it as 'abortion-style' investigation, as opposed to a 'car-style' investigation - which is all I was asking.

Given that we're in the wild-wild west of concepts, small-t truth and some charity might be the only thing holding our conversation together, especially when it comes to something as amorphous and difficult to describe as the mind, in general. — Moliere

I think this is very perceptive, observations, introspection on experience, scientific data and what makes sense to believe is common knowledge seem quite like tent pins for the discussion here. We've got all these concepts flying about in the wind, and very little fixity to them. Attributing these commonalities small t-truth seems a necessary part of progression; like you can't sensibly doubt your instrument at the same time as calibrating something to its output.

I think that is also something quite close to Davidson's thesis of 'radical interpretation'.

There remains the question of why the participants have treated it as 'abortion-style' investigation, as opposed to a 'car-style' investigation - which is all I was asking. — Isaac

I don't think it fits neatly into either. You can't do an experiment to see what interpretive frame is appropriate for a task. There's no manual for resolving differences of this sort. I think all you can hope for is that there's some reference to small t truths where appropriate, when you're trying to jostle worldviews about.

There's also probably a relevant side discussion we could have about how it can be possible that I'm in a house when in some sense the house is made mostly of the void between atom parts, but it's another of those side discussions. I tried to allude to this with the scientific vs manifest image reference; if all we're doing is exposing hooks in the manifest image (folk theory, how discourse structures thought about stuff) for better theory, among the discussants, and learning our way about the shared space of concepts, that's good enough for me.

I don't have a deep rational argument for these things as much as I'm sharing impressions and looking for where we disagree with the eventual hope of building conceptual bridges. — Moliere

Cool. I think that's the only sensible way to go here. a lack of rational argument is good. I don't think this sort of thing is particularly amenable to rational argument. It's more, for me, about the ways in which what we know constrains further folk-theories, than any idea that we can derive then from what we know. In that sense, I like your notion that some concept of how the memory actually works, constrains the range of folk-theories sufficiently to make you a little leery of those which treat it as a bookshelf. "A little leery" is about as far as the justification from neuroscience takes us.

That's just the sort of conceptual muck that philosophy is perfectly suited for untangling (or, at least, demonstrating an inability to untangle). — Moliere

Yeah, I can see that, but therein would have to lie some early commitments to the sort of data those sciences can give us laymen, no? We can, for example, take data from neuroscience as constraining, or we can commit ourselves to a notion that minds are unconstrained by brains. We can (as I offered earlier) say that something like Psychology produces constraints on our folk-theories of how our minds work by offering us a much wider sample size than we could ever glean ourselves, or we could reject that constraint by saying that all minds are different and so the averaging of Psychology is always only an artefact.

The point is that these commitments recede our lay understanding of the science and also precede our decisions about the form of any investigation (including things like the utility of rational methods, the value of introspection etc).

I think small-t truth escapes it, where big-T truth doesn't — Moliere

You'll have to just lay out the difference between the two, I'm not sure I'd be using the same distinction as you.

Seems ironic theres over 60 pages of statements about the truth of statements and the truth about them is still in question.

I feel bad now that I took the bait, but in for a penny, in for a pound...

I've almost directly quoted you with the 'just look' aspect and you've at the very least been pointing in the direction of knowledge being obtainable via our empirical investigations. — Isaac

Sure, you're quoting me, but since you don't understand the context of anything I say, what's the point?

The whole point of this exercise was to provide a way of making the differences in approaches precise enough and explicit enough that we could actually discuss those differences, instead of going round and round on the same crap. To get there, I say things that may not represent my position, but are more like bringing out a position that the setup I did, shows is a possible position. The intent, again, was just to be clear enough that problems would be clear or could be made clear. @Banno's not onboard with much that I've said but that's fine; as I told him, if my model has assumptions that suck, we should get to see exactly where and how it fails. That would be a win, in my book.

The same goes for the setup. Tried to make it just explicit enough to criticize. But I have to say something, so I did the best I could to get things started.

I don't think of philosophical discussion as a contest of wills. YMMV.

You were given just such an option with...

Our models are projective, anticipatory. Models change our interactions with our world and thus are thus reciprocally changed by the world they modify.
— Joshs

...that models are anticipatory, not recollective. That models predict and enact those predictions, not collect and curate passive data. You've rejected that approach. — Isaac

Not really.

That's all very 30,000-feet for my purposes. In this context, that's just a lot of handwaving. Show me exactly what that looks like, if not in my toy model then in another. I offered @Joshs the same invitation. (Maybe he answered and I missed it; I'll look again.)

Or don't. If you'd rather argue about whether something is anticipatory or recollective, have at it. Not what I'm after.

what do you do when you know all the tools are biased through what context they ascribe the information, and even what entities are in play in the discussion bring their own theory-ladened framing devices? You try and explore the landscape and learn to find your way about. — fdrake

Absolutely. That, and abandon any sense of the 'throw everything in a bucket' type of empiricism that seems at times to be popular among the lay philosophy community. abandon the idea that we can derive the 'true' model by gathering all the data together and having a 'really good look at it'. The data is already theory-laden, as is the gathering bucket and the act of looking.

As for us talking about what we find in the bucket... Well...it's hard to see we have a hope in hell.

Davidson claims that the way to achieve this is through the application of the so-called ‘principle of charity’ (Davidson has also referred to it as the principle of ‘rational accommodation’) a version of which is also to be found in Quine. In Davidson’s work this principle, which admits of various formulations and cannot be rendered in any completely precise form, often appears in terms of the injunction to optimise agreement between ourselves and those we interpret, that is, it counsels us to interpret speakers as holding true beliefs (true by our lights at least) wherever it is plausible to do (see ‘Radical Interpretation’ [1973]). In fact the principle can be seen as combining two notions: a holistic assumption of rationality in belief (‘coherence’) and an assumption of causal relatedness between beliefs – especially perceptual beliefs

A good idea in principle, but (and we all knew this would come) the idea of 'charity' here itself just acts as box in which to hide all the assumptions which are going to filter the kinds of answers we're going accept. Imagine we pick any two posts here, on this thread, and solicit from the poster and the responder a view about whether the response exhibited this charity. Now heaven forfend that I would bias a potential experiment with a prediction, but in lieu of the actual work, I'd bet my hat the posters would more often than not feel their critics had not exhibited such charity whilst the critics would, more often than not feel they had. Would there be any way to adjudicate? Would there heck.

Seems ironic theres over 60 pages of statements about the truth of statements and the truth about them is still in question. — introbert

Isn't it great? :D

To be even more pedantic, we all seem fine with some true sentences, and even agree upon some of which of those sentences count as true. We just disagree on what we mean when we agree that they're true! :D Or something like that.

in for a penny, in for a pound... — Srap Tasmaner

That's the spirit!

since you don't understand the context of anything I say, what's the point? — Srap Tasmaner

See above ^. Did you read my mind? I'd not finished writing my post about how the critiqued are always going to assume a lack of charity from the critics more than vice versa, and here you supply just such an example. Do I not understand the context, or do you fail to specify it sufficiently? Do those professing an understanding have just that, or are they just more willing than I am to offer that 'charity', assume that your implied context is, in fact, the coherent context they think it is, and not the opaque one I get from reading what you've written?

Is there a pattern here, do we randomly assign charity or not, do I misunderstand you and you fail to see the relevance of my posts by chance? Or does the known antagonism between our respective world views bias that sense.

It's been something I've been thinking about a lot recently. How philosophy, particularly, simply cannot proceed discursively without this charity. It's hard enough to interpret a clear instruction from a mechanic or engineer. Even these are sometimes taken wrongly. So how far could we ever hope to get expressing the vaguest of notions such as philosophy without interlocutors who are prepared to come along with us?

The intent, again, was just to be clear enough that problems would be clear or could be made clear. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. An my point was the way such a setup is already so massively theory-laden as to act to dismiss several possible answers right of the bat. It's an act of clarity by virtue only of the fact that where you see mud, others see the makings of pottery. even to lay things out thus is to render some matters not as problems, but as incoherent within the framework, like choosing a coding language and then asking for people to debug your code. "You should have used Ruby" ceases to become a coherent answer.

In this context, that's just a lot of handwaving. — Srap Tasmaner

Exactly. Set the context such that some positions become 30,000-feet handwaiving. Was it an accident that the positions thus rendered irrelevant were the one's you'd earlier found yourself mired in? Of course not. You clarify the terms of engagement to filter out the answers you're uncomfortable with. We all do it, it's not just you. But the reasons for your discomfort interest me. The reasons for mine, unfortunately, elude me.

I think this is very perceptive, observations, introspection on experience, scientific data and what makes sense to believe is common knowledge seem quite like tent pins for the discussion here. We've got all these concepts flying about in the wind, and very little fixity to them. Attributing these commonalities small t-truth seems a necessary part of progression; like you can't sensibly doubt your instrument at the same time as calibrating something to its output. — fdrake

Thanks :). I'm glad to hear so. I'm not sure how to proceed without sentences that are true (or are truth-apt, at least). I'm fine with not specifying what that means (or, as I see the T-sentence, allowing the utterances we're considering to define the meaning of truth rather than having a big-picture theory of truth), but at least they should be capable of being true or false regardless of the picture we use in understanding truth, and we seem to be quite capable of using true sentences even while having no clear understanding of truth itself.

Perhaps, depending upon how we want to construe belief, we could say that we stopped believing Tim was going to Josh's because we couldn't remember, but upon remembering (recalling the script, the line, due to whatever it is that made us believe that) we do believe that -- while we knew it the entire time (there has to be some way we have a memory, after all -- I don't want to deny memory, only modify the picture we're using a bit). — Moliere

I think this is fine, probably. Maybe we could fill in some details even here, but maybe it's unnecessary. This is close to what I took@fdrake to be saying, that knowledge might have some mechanism that allows recreation of the belief on demand, more or less.

I do want to add that it was not my intention to contest the neuroscience of memory, or the idea that memories are, to some degree, confabulations, recreations, and so on. I assume the research on that is sound, and I think it accords readily with experiences most of us have had. It's the extent of the finding, rather than the finding itself, that might be a little surprising, but there you go. It is what it is.

That does make knowledge -- as distinct from memory -- a little tricky, because knowledge is obviously persistent in some sense, even if that sense is transformed into "presenting consistently" or something. It's not like we only just discovered that we can misremember things we know, so there's reason to think the concept of knowledge ought to be able to survive our improved understanding of memory.

I really had no idea we would end up so focused on memory. Honestly hadn't occurred to me that memory would be taken as a sort of proxy for the persistence of knowledge. So this is really interesting.

On the other hand, I did note along the way that one reason for making a model, like a map, is to improve access to the knowledge you've acquired. You noted something similar in the institutional memory of the sciences and academia at large.

This might also be the place to say that I wondered if my toy model would end up functioning in the Republic’s man-writ-large way. (I didn't explicitly design it for that, but not so that it couldn't be either.)

As I described things, we might make a model in language precisely to improve access to our knowledge, but now it looks like access to the model might be hampered by the very same problem it was designed (hypothetically) to solve: namely, that access to the model is in some sense inherently unreliable because memory, including memory of the model, is unreliable.

That's very nice. It looks like it really undermines the motivation for such linguistic models. As I said, I had no idea we might be headed here, but this is the sort of result I hoped for. (Though I expected it to be less general: if you can't remember what color Pat's house, you can't remember what color your model says it is -- something like that.)

But what if this wrong because overbroad, mainly. Maybe the point of a model is precisely that it involves a type of access that is more reliable? For instance, there's that early work of Herbert Simon and others on the memories of chess players: shown a position with pieces randomly placed, strong players (masters) do no better than anyone else at reconstructing them; shown a position from a real game, they do dramatically better because they break down the position into meaningful chunks and assemble those. The random position is harder to model efficiently, and the position modeling that masters do seems to enhance access (masters remember many, many patterns, and use them in modeling a given position). So the argument might fail if this is another point of modeling, to enhance access and make it more reliable. Both cases of memory, but not the same kind.

Chess masters know a lot, standard development patterns, openings, endgame techniques, middlegame themes, on and on and on. I just can't imagine "giving up" the entire category of knowledge. I don't know how we could understand chess performance without it.

It's the extent of the finding, rather than the finding itself, that might be a little surprising, but there you go. It is what it is. — Srap Tasmaner

Fair. I think I added to the confusion by stating my terms so starkly. As @Isaac noted:

In that sense, I like your notion that some concept of how the memory actually works, constrains the range of folk-theories sufficiently to make you a little leery of those which treat it as a bookshelf. "A little leery" is about as far as the justification from neuroscience takes us. — Isaac

I'm good enough with "A little leery" -- consider my thought amended from refusal to accept a bookshelf to being leery and wanting to modify that picture a bit. On the other side of what I'm saying, we do frequently recall things just fine. It's not some titanic struggle at all times. We know things, as persons, not only as institutions.

So where you say

I don't know how we could understand chess performance without it. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree here. I've fallen into the philosopher's trap of overgeneralizing to take care of a conceptual bump. There is institutional knowledge, which I think fits the notion of correspondence, but then there's what we actually do and what we learn when learning how to do, which I'm less inclined to believe fits correspondence, but which I don't want to deny either.

So I don't think I could entirely get rid of the category of knowledge as applied to persons, now that you mention that as a possible consequence of my own thoughts. That's definitely worth avoiding if we can.

But, to go for the Hail Mary of all Hail Mary's, in order to spell out an understanding of said knowledge I bet we'd need our sentences to be able to be true. :D

A good idea in principle, but (and we all knew this would come) the idea of 'charity' here itself just acts as box in which to hide all the assumptions which are going to filter the kinds of answers we're going accept. Imagine we pick any two posts here, on this thread, and solicit from the poster and the responder a view about whether the response exhibited this charity. Now heaven forfend that I would bias a potential experiment with a prediction, but in lieu of the actual work, I'd bet my hat the posters would more often than not feel their critics had not exhibited such charity whilst the critics would, more often than not feel they had. Would there be any way to adjudicate? Would there heck. — Isaac

The ethical concerns regarding proper treatment of others in discourse aside, I spelled out a similar distaste for the idea to @Banno earlier in the thread. I think the author's onto something, but I think it's an insufficiently procedural description to actually get at how people can triangulate to a common understanding, or at least refine an area of disagreement, through reference to shared phenomena (interpreted under theory ladened aspect and spoken about in a theory ladened language with different emphasis on terms between people). I don't generally like this argument pattern, but I will use it here; it'd be a bloody miracle that any sort of triangulation could happen at all if there wasn't something "truthy" or representative about semantic content, and of necessity that has to be sufficiently shareable to count as such.

This is probably another thread to pull on separate from the more concrete analysis Srap and Moliere are doing. How many layers of metaphilosophy are we on now?

I really had no idea we would end up so focused on memory. Honestly hadn't occurred to me that memory would be taken as a sort of proxy for the persistence of knowledge. So this is really interesting. — Srap Tasmaner

So I don't think I could entirely get rid of the category of knowledge as applied to persons, now that you mention that as a possible consequence of my own thoughts. That's definitely worth avoiding if we can. — Moliere

Another spitball from the side, maybe memory is a central concept because it taps into a bodily process which imbues agents with repeatable dispositions toward things. There's a resonance with an analysis of belief which treats it as a "tendency to act as if" (@Isaac), which (very broad strokes) is a pragmatic stance on the connection between what is expressed and what the expression concerns. If you want to know what is expressed, look at the behavioural commitments it imbues in someone.

Whether someone needs to actually do a behavioural (including cognitive) commitment of a belief to count as believing that belief (eg, whether the tendency to act as if ever actually needs to be enacted...) seems a different issue; and maybe there's where statements, as a model, come into it. It's a very clear cut case that someone will believe something if they are willing to assert it.

But, and this is a big but, the focus on belief has a solipsistic connotation I feel in this context. The majority of our beliefs tend to be approximately correct, and in that regard somehow count as knowledge of the real world.

In that regard two more definite paths have been fleshed out here, I think, one is the broadly idealist (transcendetal though) Kantian move @Isaac makes where it's beliefs all the way down and modelling reality is the same thing as putting a filter on it; everything we know and experience lives on "our side" of the filter. The other is a mirror image; Davidson's actually quite similar to this, only the filter is ever expanding and has a tendency toward monopoly over all expression and interpretation (@Banno), which means there's no point of talking about the other side of the filter, so what's the point in even having a filter as an object? I believe the former finds a lack of access to un-modelled reality a necessary consequence of the existence of a filter due to how interpretation works. The latter finds direct access to modelled reality a necessary consequence of the mutuality of the filter, and thus finds no better account of the filter than the variations of a shared environment. Despite being very opposite positions, both can make the move that any other position is speaking about things which are unintelligible, due to placing different conditions for the possibility of interpretation on the filter!

To my reckoning, neither account treats knowledge as a "first class mental state", it's derivative of belief. Perhaps some way forward would be to place accuracy, truth, correctness and so on in whatever process generates belief as a mediating factor. For example recognising a falsehood (you then know not-X is true), or learning you are able to pick up something you could not. Neither of those things speak about knowledge being something which lasts, however.

The idea of switching from knowing where Tim was going to not knowing and back to knowing again does not seem problematic to me. Why should possession of knowledge be a static unchanging thing?

I suppose it could be said that the body knows constantly in those kinds of cases, and the knowing being conscious comes and goes. That would be one kind of way to characterize knowing that you know. So, then whether one would be said to know or not during the times when access to the information is not operative would become merely a matter of definition of the term 'know' and one's preference as to which definition to adopt.

Cheers for the Williamson book recommendation; I'll take a look if I can find the time.

To my reckoning, neither account treats knowledge as a "first class mental state", it's derivative of belief. — fdrake

Probably so. Honestly, it's like no one is convinced there's any such thing anymore.

For what it's worth, I wasn't thinking about knowledge when I started up my little model; I thought it was going to be more behavioral -- people, things, sentences, but I had been thinking about knowledge a lot, so what seemed natural to me eventually turned out to be more stuff about knowledge.

I'd love to see a similar sort of toy model that's beliefs all the way down, and doesn't include knowledge anywhere. What does that look like?

Doesn’t this imply that we have different models — Luke

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? — Luke

If the argument is that models don't work, then we have agreement.

Are you thinking of knowing how or knowing that or both. And then what about knowing with: the knowing of familiarity? It seems to me all of these are distinct and yet obviously related too.

In that regard there are two choices I think, one is the broadly Kantian move Isaac makes where it's beliefs all the way down and modelling reality is the same thing as putting a filter on it; everything we know and experience lives on "our side" of the filter. I think Davidson's actually quite similar to this, only the filter is ever expanding and has a tendency toward monopoly over all all expression and interpretation (@Banno), which means there's no point of talking about the other side of the filter, so what's the point in even having a filter as an object? I believe the former finds a lack of access to un-modelled reality a necessary consequence of the existence of a filter due to how interpretation works. The latter finds direct access to modelled reality a necessary consequence of the mutuality of the filter, and thus finds no better account of the filter than the variations of a shared environment. — fdrake

Which of these is the “no models” view?

@Isaac I haven't read the whole of the last few days posts, which I gather went off on a bit of a tangent.

But seeing as how you have taken an interest here again, I'll throw in a quick link back to some of our other conversations.

It seems to me that the models being discussed here are not the models being discussed when talking about neural networks.

Specifically, the models here are symbolic, while the models of neural networks aren't.

Now I think that you will pretty much agree, and agree that the discussion that should be taking place is how symbolic representations emerge from neural networks.

But this is not understood by others, and without that common ground the conversation moves to accusations of insincerity.

My own approach is that truth belongs in the domain of intentional behaviour, of beliefs and attitudes, and has no direct analogue in the neural world, onto which it can be mapped. Something along the lines of Davidson's anomalism of the mental.

The theme that the same thing can have more than one description has arisen already in this thread, in the muddled attitude folk adopt to deciding if the kettle boiling is a fact or a sentence. The answer is "yes".

But the considerations are minute, and the circumstances for their consideration here not ideal.

Anyway...

Which of these is the “no models” view? — Luke

The latter, there's no model in the sense that there's no mediation of contact between word and world via a "conceptual scheme", which is a system of organising experience that is specific to an individual and not parsable in terms of anything communal. I don't think people mean the same thing by "model" in this thread!

The latter, — fdrake

Despite the fact that you say:

The latter finds direct access to modelled reality a necessary consequence of the mutuality of the filter, and thus finds no better account of the filter than the variations of a shared environment. — fdrake

?

Why should possession of knowledge be a static unchanging thing? — Janus

If you mean, why do I think knowledge is, at least relatively, persistent --- I'm not quite sure what to say. I could say (a) it's part of our concept of knowledge for it to be persistent (not my favorite argument) or (b) there's an embarrassment of evidence that knowledge persists, for varying durations, certainly, but it's not ephemeral like perception; and maybe (a) derives from (b).

Are you a citizen only when you're showing your passport? Do you know how to ride a bike only while you're actually on a bike? Do you know your mother's name only when you're using it in a sentence?

In the example I gave -- which of course isn't quite knowledge of where Tim is but knowledge of where he said he was going -- I came to know what he said when I heard him say it; it's least committal I guess to say that I then inferred his intentions, and made further inferences about where he'd be later, and so on. Then I forget. Then I remember. For the latter, I would have to learn what Tim said from my memory of what he said, in order for me to create a new instance of knowing what he said.

Okay, that's interesting, and we could talk about how remembering and hearing in the first place might be compromised in similar or different ways, both episodes being theory-laden, both to some degree confabulations, whatever you'd like to say there.

Except, remember that by stipulation I don't know what he said, so what am I remembering? If I recreate his words from something, what is that something? I don't mean that as question for neuroscientists; it can obviously be that too, but for us, it needs to be something that's capable of engendering knowledge. That's the whole point of this, to say that there are these separate instances of knowledge and I create a new one when I need it. How do I do that?

You've gone from what ought to be the case, to what is the case. — Isaac

You've gone from what ought to be the case, to what is the case. — Isaac

I'm not seeing that.

...we cannot justifiably claim that the two models are of the same house without there being a completely commensurate 'house'... Then you say that because we can't claim this justifiably, there must actually be a shared, or commensurate 'house'. — Isaac

What I have in mind is more that the house is a construct of our interaction.

My objection is to the theory that we each have a private, intentional model of the house, which we set out in words and then verbalise. That objection is the common one found in Wittgenstein's private language argument (@Sam26).

This is not to say that we do not have a model of the house in terms of some weighting of neural patterns. Perhaps we do; while a very interesting issue in its own right, that is secondary in this context.

I think Davidson's argument against conceptual schema is in line with the private language argument. After all if there are no private languages there are also no private models.

But a better way of expressing this is to say that there are no models at all, just the publicly constructed world in which our forms of life occur.

All of which should not suggest that we cannot publicly construct models. We do so, in some of the language games within our form of life.

And all of this appears to be at a symbolic level sitting somewhere on top of our various neural networks.

Searle goes a long way towards explaining how this comes about, using iterations of "X counts as Y in Z", in which social institutions are seen as language constructs.

There's an outline; there is much to discuss in the detail.

Yes. I appreciate that was badly written. There's a model in the sense that there are individual interpretations of a single in principle shareable reality, there aren't models in that account in the sense that models are needed to interface with the world.

I think it's a different sense of model from what Isaac meant, from what Banno's using, from that the RHS of the T-sentence is, from the sense that Srap's comments feature a toy model and so on. There are a lot of model words with different meanings flying around the thread.

"Pat's house is white" — Srap Tasmaner

I think the continued use of a visual example is misleading. It unwittingly authorises the myth of subjective interpretation.

I chose the alternate example, whether the fence is wood or brick, as better suited to the task in hand; it's more obviously not just a question of opinion.

It's easy to say that the door's being white or green is a question of mere opinion; but harder to do that with the fence.

I suggest re-working your examples with fences instead of colours, to see how it makes a difference.

If you mean, why do I think knowledge is, at least relatively, persistent --- I'm not quite sure what to say. — Srap Tasmaner

My suspicion is that @Janus, and @Luke, see knowledge as a private construct. I commend adopting a strategy that shows the public nature of justification.

The temptation will be for folk to confuse justification with truth, again. There's a good chance of the thread going off in another circle.

There's a story that the Columbia Pictures was going to hype up the release of a sequel to Groundhog Day, then just present the original, again.

So it goes.

There's a model in the sense that there are individual interpretations of a single in principle shareable reality, there aren't models in that account in the sense that models are needed to interface with the world. — fdrake

What you’ve presented as Davidson’s view above strikes me as our shared language being the model of reality. I thought that was why you intentionally referred to a “modelled reality”, rather than it being poorly expressed. I still would not consider this as a “no models” view. There remains a reality independent of our linguistic “model” which could resist and not conform to our model in some ways.

I commend adopting a strategy that shows the public nature of justification. — Banno

I don't share your allergy to all things mental.

Dragging the topic back to truth - Remember truth? This is a thread about truth (Arlo Guthrie reference, too obscure for anyone under 60).

The Revision theory, discussed in some other posts, appears to offer a way to map out the circularity of the T-sentence definition of Truth. Rather than reject notions of truth as circular, Hans Herzberger and Anil Gupta develop formal methods of dealing with circularity that show where it becomes pathological, and where it doesn't. So the Liar is found to be pathological, while the T-sentence is consistent.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4545102?seq=1

@Michael - you may find this interesting.