'X' doesn't refer at all, it's a type of action that gets a job done — Isaac

Here's a link to a post of mine about this. If you clink on that link, it takes you right to what I said. In this context, we could say it refers to what I said. Following that link is how you get the job done of finding out what I said.

If you take take means as has the same extension as, then yes. Otherwise, no, or depends. — Srap Tasmaner

A fitting quote from Haack's Philosophy of logics:

Tarski emphasises that the (T) schema is not a definition of truth – though in spite of his insistence he has been misunderstood on this point. It is a material adequacy condition: all instances of it must be entailed by any definition of truth which is to count as 'materially adequate'. The point of the (T) schema is that, if it is accepted, it fixes not the intension or meaning but the extension of the term 'true' [my emphasis].

Yes, that's how I'm looking at it. And not only does it fix the extension of true, there is no other conceivable way to do so. That's why it must be a consequence of any substantive theory of truth.

For us, a lot of the interesting stuff is on the intensional side, modal contexts, propositional attitudes, all that business.

And there is still plenty of room for a metaphysical theory of what makes true sentences true, because this is not such a theory but only a semantics of true -- and the semantics of true is, for model-theoretic truth-conditional Montague-style semantics, trivial.

This is from page 4 of a classic textbook on formal semantics:

1. Truth-Conditional Semantics

A truth-conditional theory of semantics is one which adheres to the following dictum: To know the meaning of a (declarative) sentence is to know what the world would have to be like for the sentence to be true. Put another way, to give the meaning of a sentence is to specify its truth conditions, i.e., to give necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of that sentence. (Note, by the way, that we are using "true" to indicate something like "corresponding to the way the world is." We are thus implicitly adopting a correspondence theory of truth.) — Dowty, Wall, and Peters (italics in original)

And that's the difference between doing philosophy and doing linguistics, I guess.

That's why it must be a consequence of any substantive theory of truth. — Srap Tasmaner

Haack has an interesting comment on this point from that same book.

But exactly what kinds of definition will the material adequacy condition rule out? In answering this question I shall use a weakened version of the criterion: not that all instances of the (T) schema be deducible from any acceptable truth definition (Tarski's version), but that the truth of all instances of the (T) schema be consistent with any acceptable truth-definition. The reason for this modification is simply that the weakened adequacy condition is much more readily applicable to non-formal definitions of truth. Now it is to be hoped - and perhaps even expected - that it will allow the sorts of definition which have been seriously proposed, and disallow what one might call' bizarre' theories. But matters turn out rather oddly. Consider the following definition of truth, which seems to me definitely bizarre: a sentence is true iff it is asserted in the Bible. Now it might be supposed that this definition (I shall call it 'D_B' for short) does not entail all instances of the (T) schema, not, for instance:

'Warsaw was bombed in World War II' is true_B iff Warsaw was bombed in World War II.

Now it is indeed the case that someone who did not accept D_B might deny:

'Warsaw was bombed in World War II' is asserted in the Bible iff Warsaw was bombed in World War II.

But further reflection makes it clear that a proponent of D_B could perfectly well maintain that his definition does entail all instances of (T); he may allow that 'Warsaw was bombed in World War II' is true, but insist that it is asserted in the Bible (in an obscure passage in Revelation, perhaps), or if he agrees that 'Warsaw was bombed in World War II' is not asserted in the Bible, he will also, if he is wise, maintain the falsity of the right-hand side of the above instance of the schema. So, rather surprisingly, Tarski's material adequacy condition cannot be relied upon to be especially effective in ruling out bizarre truth-definitions.

The things that you're liable
To read in the Bible
It ain't necessarily so

'Warsaw was bombed in World War II' is asserted in the Bible iff Warsaw was bombed in World War II.

I really expected something like this:

'Warsaw was bombed in World War II' is true iff 'Warsaw was bombed in World War II' is asserted in the Bible.

Now I feel like I've misunderstood something.

I'm also no longer sure what I had mind when I wrote this:

there is no other conceivable way to do so — Srap Tasmaner

What she is saying is that these positions are consistent:

1. 'Warsaw was bombed in World War II' is true iff Warsaw was bombed in World War II

2. 'Warsaw was bombed in World War II' is true iff the Bible asserts this

One just then has to accept that:

3. Warsaw was bombed in World War II iff the Bible asserts this

The T-schema is silent on the truth of (3), and so the T-schema isn’t always the right tool to refute a substantial theory of truth. Some bizarre theories can be consistent with the T-schema.

Right, right. I forgot she added a step.

So I think, yes, this is all about our shared would, but I don't think the co-operation this is all here to allow requires an actual set of word>reference facts that are external to our intentions. It simply requires that we're similar enough in intentions and co-operative enough in policy that we can see evidence, in another's behaviour, of what we need to do to bring about the state of the world which includes helping the other. — Isaac

This is still on the denotation side of things, it gestures toward what truth might mean with a successful denotation and explores some issues regarding denotation and function.

Yeah I getcha. I'd agree with that. I think that's part of what makes semantic content work through; it holds environmental objects equivalent through how we access them, how they function, and how we expect them to respond to manipulation. It's informational. The object plays an active role in all of these; by having a location + weight + geometry, by having its own propensities that enable developmental trajectories (eg, the speed the kettle boils a cup at), and by how our actions interact with those developmental trajectories. In that regard, the objects themselves and their properties take part in our comportment toward them. For semantic content be informative about an object's state, there must be an association between that object's state and the language about the object.

This includes how we categorise, refer, and carve up the world. In broad strokes, speech acts symbolise or engender these developmental trajectories, properties which imbue these propensities for development and so on. When you say "I will boil the kettle" or "Can you boil the kettle?" or "The kettle is boiling"... I view what's going on there as pattern of linguistic behaviour tracking developmental capacities of the kettle which are individuated into functional roles. Understanding those functional roles is accurate when it mirrors the developmental trajectories of the kettle, so when someone says "the kettle is boiling", it's true to say that when the kettle is boiling... Because the switch was flipped and the water was boiling etc... Something happened to make it true in context, and the pattern of language tracks the properties through shared expectations of environmental development. The association becomes a causal history of interacting environmental events and language.

Rather than the semantic content of the phrase "The kettle is boiling" being embedded in the phrase through the words and sentence parts mapping directly onto developmental trajectory properties - like a descriptive theory - sentence properties and environmental properties are enmeshed through causal relationships of succession; when someone says "the kettle is boiling", it will occur in a context in which the kettle is individuated from its environment as a distinct site of developmental trajectories, and "boiling" will be inferred from the kettle's current state and developmental trajectory. The former individuation resembles denotation, the latter individuation resembles predication ("... is boiling"). Coupling the association of words with perceptually+pragmatically individuated or demarcated environmental trajectories allows environmental events to be a truth maker for sentences without the former being wholly determined by the latter. The causal history; making event-patterns of language co-occur with event-patterns of environments; means both reciprocally inform, and in many use cases reciprocally co-determine - we make our environments navigable and manipulable.

Word structure is sensitised to environmental structure because we've collectively made it so; and the environment is gonna do what it do whether we've perceptually demarcated its objects and developmental trajectories or not. Semantic content is then a historically informed behavioural expectation of the environment, whose developmental trajectories are demarcated through current and prior expectations of development. The causes in the present in both language and the world resemble the causes in the past - the former is a criterion of iterability (like the private language argument against privation), the latter is a criterion of publicisability (like the private language argument against the beetle's wiggling being determinative of sense).

Expectations of development also tend to become shared, as environmental patterns become embedded in a language which is sensitised to environmental development. The causal patterns of language use grow to resemble the environment modulo perceptual individuation. Feedback lets the former and the latter have reciprocal impact; so much so that in many circumstances we can append "I think" to to a phrase, like "I think the kettle is boiling" and convey the same behavioural expectation of the environment but indexed to an agent. But the distinction between the two is precisely useful because the environment's patterns are shared. The causal histories differ, so the behavioural expectations in the environment and in language differ, so the meanings differ. One is true when you think it, one is true when the kettle boils.

The mirroring+coupling of causal patterns of language use and environmental comportment/expectations of development is what sets up the remarkable agreement obtained on whether the kettle is boiling... When it is in fact boiling or not. The causal history of language and environment over time, through constant work and tailoring, becomes discriminative on both environment and language.

As a reference for something similar, I think Evans in "Varieties of Reference" takes up the task of such a causal approach to denotation; there's a causal history of reference which sets up relations between properties of what is referred to and the object itself. The causal history of language use carries with it discriminative information regarding the environments ("forms of life") it constrains and develops within.

You mean if I wrote something like this?

     Kp ⊢ p     Kp ⊢ p

Like stating that kind of premise? Or would you prefer something like this?

     ∀p(∃xKxp → p) — Srap Tasmaner

Sorry, I don't understand the language. Try English, please.

But then, honestly, I'm not sure what there is to talk about if your position is that one can know things that are not so, see things that are not there, remember things that did not happen, and regret doing things you did not do. — Srap Tasmaner

It's very common, I claim to know, see, remember, or regret something, which turns out not to be so. Remember, logic deals with propositions, and a proposition is what is claimed, it is not what is so. And you agreed that human beings are fallible. So the proposition "I know X" does not mean that X is the case. "Jack knows X. Therefore X is what is the case." Wait, something is missing. Can't you see that we are missing a premise, the one which says "if someone knows something then it is what is the case"? And as I said, you might state such, as a proposition, or premise, but it would be rejected as false, because of that fallibility; especially with the other terms, see, remember, and regret.

It's only sophistry, your claim that knowing something, seeing something, remembering something, or regretting something, implies that what is known, seen, remembered, or regretted is what is the case. Just like in my examples of feeling something, or intuiting something, these do not imply that what is intuited or felt, is the case. Since you still don't seem to get it, let me add "imagining something". Does "imagining something" imply that the imagined thing is what is the case? How does "knowing something" elevate itself to a higher level than "imagining something", without the required premise, or definition?

I'm not sure what there is to talk about if your position is that one can know things that are not so — Srap Tasmaner

Srap is talking about knowing something that is not the case.

It's very common, I claim to know, see, remember, or regret something, which turns out not to be so. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are talking about not knowing something that is the case.

You are attacking a straw man.

I thought we were discussing what "is true" does, not what "X" (or "the kettle" or "the kettle is boiling") does. — Luke

The argument is that the predicate '...is true' cannot be analytical of X by correspondence if X has no fixed extension. Hence the discussion about X's extension.

Here's a link to a post of mine about this. If you clink on that link, it takes you right to what I said. In this context, we could say it refers to what I said. Following that link is how you get the job done of finding out what I said. — Srap Tasmaner

Very nice. But you didn't construct the link in order to get me to find out what you said. You don't care if I know what you said. You care what I do next. The expression was designed to convince me of an argument. I'm not going to go into the psychological theories about why we do such things, suffice to say the end goal isn't just that I know what you said. So the link may refer, but the words don't, they effect. It's the effect you're interested in, the effect which is the reason you choose them.

If words worked like your computer links, then I think you could claims that they have the effect they do because they refer. But that's the very argument Ramsey is making. That words (or propositions, rather) don't refer like computer links. there's no UUID, they're never specific enough to meet Russell's criteria for meaning 'there is such a thing X and it has property Y'.

I think that's part of what makes semantic content work through; it holds environmental objects equivalent through how we access them, how they function, and how we expect them to respond to manipulation. — fdrake

Roughly. By which I mean that the importance of recognising the functional role of this semantics is that it only need identify a similar enough environmental object to get the job done. we don't need to know if we're including the errant screw to get the expression "put the kettle on!" to work. It'll do it's job even if I'm not sure if 'the kettle' even exists. Even if I've never seen 'the kettle', but merely assume there is one in the kitchen. In this latter case, by 'the kettle' I simply mean 'whatever it is in your kitchen you use to boil water'. I'm not (yet) seeing how such vague and ephemeral environmental objects can be amenable to analysis of their properties to make "the kettle is black" something which can be eternally, objectively 'true', outside of the language game in which it was used. Something like a pragmatic view of truth is the closest here, I think, I can see a possible route to such an approach.

For semantic content be informative about an object's state, there must be an association between that object's state and the language about the object. — fdrake

As with "put the kettle on" above, semantic content doesn't seem to always need to be informative about an object's state. I might not even know of the existence of an object in that expression, so I can't see how my use of the term 'the kettle' could carry information about it's state?

Understanding those functional roles is accurate when it mirrors the developmental trajectories of the kettle, so when someone says "the kettle is boiling", it's true to say that when the kettle is boiling... Because the switch was flipped and the water was boiling etc... Something happened to make it true in context, and the pattern of language tracks the properties through shared expectations of environmental development. The association becomes a causal history of interacting environmental events and language. — fdrake

This makes a lot of sense. It does point, though, to something more of a pragmatic view of truth, rather than a correspondence view. True here being contextual, being about a model of events which works as an explanation. I have some sympathy for that position, but my quibble is that we simply don't always use the word that way.

The causal history; making event-patterns of language co-occur with event-patterns of environments; means both reciprocally inform, and in many use cases reciprocally co-determine - we make our environments navigable and manipulable. — fdrake

Again, I think this approach is attractive in that it gives some explanation of why an expression might work, why that particular collection of words might get a job done that some other collection would not have. Because it's tracked the shared pattern of events. I can communicate remarkably effectively with someone whom I've never met an share no common language with. The can 'see' what I'm trying to get them to do, and vice versa. I could get a villager in Morocco to put the kettle on despite having no shared language and never having met. I can do this because that villager can make good predictions about what my behaviour indicates simply by virtue of their brain having made similar predictions about their own body (but this is all an aside). The point being that our shared history of interacting with the environment creates similar models of it which we can then use to infer intent in others. Language merely expediting that process.

Semantic content is then a historically informed behavioural expectation of the environment, whose developmental trajectories are demarcated through current and prior expectations of development. The causes in the present in both language and the world resemble the causes in the past - the former is a criterion of iterability (like the private language argument against privation), the latter is a criterion of publicisability (like the private language argument against the beetle's wiggling being determinative of sense). — fdrake

Yes, I really like this. Linguistic acts used to denote, and keep consistent, shared expectations, and do so by repeated successful use. Definitely moving toward pragmatism though, if we're wanting this to end up with a definition of 'truth'. We spoke before, I think, about the idea of my wanting my model of what a kettle is to be similar to yours in order to reduce surprise when interacting with you. The way I can use things like ostension and language. I think what you're saying here ties into that nicely. The barrier still in place against correspondence, though, is the lack of specificity. I only need 'the kettle' to be sufficiently similar in our shared expectations about it to maximally reduce surprise. Too specific a object won't do that, it actually needs to be vague to have a chance of my having unsurprising expectations of it.

The causal patterns of language use grow to resemble the environment modulo perceptual individuation. Feedback lets the former and the latter have reciprocal impact; so much so that in many circumstances we can append "I think" to to a phrase, like "I think the kettle is boiling" and convey the same behavioural expectation of the environment but indexed to an agent. But the distinction between the two is precisely useful because the environment's patterns are shared. The causal histories differ, so the behavioural expectations in the environment and in language differ, so the meanings differ. One is true when you think it, one is true when the kettle boils.

The mirroring+coupling of causal patterns of language use and environmental comportment/expectations of development is what sets up the remarkable agreement obtained on whether the kettle is boiling... When it is in fact boiling or not. The causal history of language and environment over time, through constant work and tailoring, becomes discriminative on both environment and language. — fdrake

If I've understood you correctly here, this is similar to what I was saying earlier about the environment constraining what can be said. It sets limits on what will work because regardless of out models of it, it is set out in such and such a way and it's not a homogenous soup which we can make of what we will. There may be a wide range of values which will make "the kettle is boiling" true (in that sense), but they will not be infinite. "the kettle is boiling" won't work given certain environmental constraints. Again, pointing to a rough correspondence, but one insufficiently specific to be amenable to the sorts of truth analysis direct correspondence would seem to need.

As with "put the kettle on" above, semantic content doesn't seem to always need to be informative about an object's state. I might not even know of the existence of an object in that expression, so I can't see how my use of the term 'the kettle' could carry information about it's state? — Isaac

I think some of them carry behavioural expectations as norms (prosaically "I expect this to be done") and some of them carry them as predictions ("If I flip the switch, the kettle will boil")

. I'm not (yet) seeing how such vague and ephemeral environmental objects can be amenable to analysis of their properties to make "the kettle is black" something which can be eternally, objectively 'true', outside of the language game in which it was used. — Isaac

I guess I'm not trying to say it needs to be "eternally" true. Though I think it may be "eternally" true to say "I boiled the kettle on the 3rd of March 2022", since I did indeed boil the kettle on that day. That happened, if people forget it doesn't change it. A more striking example may be "my shower broke on October 3rd 2021" - that event had an enduring presence, and it would not have fixed itself.
Declarative statements about past events which contain an indexical of occurrence time maybe do behave like that. They at least seem to behave like that in the "language game" of recording events.

The barrier still in place against correspondence, though, is the lack of specificity. I only need 'the kettle' to be sufficiently similar in our shared expectations about it to maximally reduce surprise. Too specific a object won't do that, it actually needs to be vague to have a chance of my having unsurprising expectations of it. — Isaac

I think that is an issue with the account, but I don't think it's irresolvable. Functions also summarise processes. Like when you flip the switch on a kettle, that will impact the inner circuitry, the plug, the atoms in the element, your electricity bill etc, but that's a set of ambiguously but sometimes required entailments (expectations!) around flipping the switch to boil the kettle. When you flip the switch to boil the kettle, it's expected to set up a relatively complicated environmental process - which is engendered by the semantic content of statements about it.

EG it's really weird to make statements like "The kettle boiled and I poured cold water from it immediately"/ "The kettle boiled and the water stayed still". You convey an expectation of behaviour and then negate it; the meaning of the sentence part "the kettle boiled" is in conflict with the second bit precisely because the first bit doesn't necessarily fix all the events around it, or which can be embedded in relevant descriptions of causal chains involving it, but nevertheless constrains expectations of other sentence parts. The overall sentence "The kettle boiled and I poured cold water from it immediately" doesn't make much sense, despite being grammatical, because the expected behaviour of the environment (the truthmakers of each conjunct) are in a conflict of behavioural expectation.

I think that illustrates the functional roles are also "modulo" perceptual demarcation or other environmental parsing, just like the words about them. Nevertheless, they are in something like a representational relationship with environmental subprocesses - like what is entailed by successfully flipping the switch on a kettle to boil it.

So when someone says "the kettle is boiling", its semantic content reaches out into the world as it's parsed, and its truth presents an match between the parsing of environmental objects and what (parsed) subprocesses those objects bear. It's nevertheless an expectation of the real kettle's behaviour, a parsing of its subprocesses into boiling, which we state with "the kettle is boiling".

I do agree that how a relatively un-detailed statement like "the kettle is boiling" can be made true by the behaviour of a concrete particular is something that needs an account though. I've tried to gesture towards how I think about that account with subprocesses and perceptual demarcation of environmental flows into functional summaries.

As a rough summary by example, ""the kettle is boiling" is true" makes sense at its level of descriptive granularity because: ( 1 ) the definite article "the" picks out a specific kettle in the environment ( 2 ) that kettle is individuated from its environment by parsing it into salient objects with distinct patterns of behaviour ( 3 ) "is boiling" states a type of environmental pattern the kettle partakes in ( 4 ) under our level of demarcation, it's "only" the kettle that could boil, not the electrical currents or the plug socket despite both partaking in the boiling process ( 5 ) the kettle exhibits the parsed expectations which constitute (somewhat fuzzily!) boiling ( 6 ) that makes "the kettle is boiling" true.

As for how that sentence works in the context of a philosophical discussion, it seems to implicitly quantify over environments in which to evaluate kettle boiling - a summary of scenarios in which someone would evaluate the claim. If you zoom in on a context I claim it behaves as above.

Though someone would rarely need to state ""the kettle is boiling" is true", they'd simply say "the kettle is boiling".

If I've understood you correctly here, this is similar to what I was saying earlier about the environment constraining what can be said. It sets limits on what will work because regardless of out models of it, it is set out in such and such a way and it's not a homogenous soup which we can make of what we will. There may be a wide range of values which will make "the kettle is boiling" true (in that sense), but they will not be infinite. "the kettle is boiling" won't work given certain environmental constraints. Again, pointing to a rough correspondence, but one insufficiently specific to be amenable to the sorts of truth analysis direct correspondence would seem to need. — Isaac

I think that's true, and there's a need to account for how general descriptive terms are in declarative statements vs how specific the behaviour of the concrete particulars denoted in those declarative statements are. There's got to be some means of summary and parsing that contextualises the generality of "boiling" into the context of the kettle.

I also want to stress that behavioural expectations conveyed in a phrase also have positive content even if they don't fully specify the behaviour of some concrete particular. If you say "the kettle is boiling" you expect bubbles of some sort and hot water, even if bubbles and hot water are being treated more like placeholders for fuzzy but satisfiable classes of environmental states rather than as stand ins for the specific behaviour of that kettle at the time. Bubbles, not "these bubbles", hot water, not "these water molecules". If statements needed to do the latter to be true, they'd lose their iterability - you can never boil the same kettle twice.

I think correspondence is one way of looking at it; it really can be that a statement is true because it corresponds to the facts. But I think that for a deflationist this simultaneously says too much and too little. Too much because it doesn't necessarily reflect the T-sentence (can you have a correspondence without a truth? A representational relationships truth preserving? That kind of thing) and too little because it confines the enmeshment of world and declarative language to a particular mode (correspondence). — fdrake

I agree. My effort to try and argue for a deficiency in deflationism's account of truth may have made it seem as though I was arguing wholly in favour of correspondence, but I am aware that correspondence has its own problems. The deficiency of deflationism - that I only had a vague sense of - is probably best captured by the appreciably more articulate account you gave here:

...when someone says "the kettle is boiling", it will occur in a context in which the kettle is individuated from its environment as a distinct site of developmental trajectories, and "boiling" will be inferred from the kettle's current state and developmental trajectory. The former individuation resembles denotation, the latter individuation resembles predication ("... is boiling"). Coupling the association of words with perceptually+pragmatically individuated or demarcated environmental trajectories allows environmental events to be a truth maker for sentences without the former being wholly determined by the latter. — fdrake

The deflationary equivalence of environmental events to sentences omits something from the account of truth, or the common use of "is true", in at least some cases. I take this omission to be our evidence-based consent/satisfaction that the sentences are true because they accurately describe the environmental events (where empirical matters are concerned). This is where truthmakers and/or truth conditions are relevant. In many case we can satisfy ourselves that a sentence is true or not by seeing the environmental events for ourselves directly. And I think that some other uses of "is true" may be parasitic on this one, where we say "is true" because we believe that if we could have seen it for ourselves (e.g. historical events), then we would be satisfied in the same way - because the environmental events really were as described. Of course, this is all constrained by the deflationary "collectively enacted meaning"(s) of our language - as you put it earlier.

I also find the deflationary account of truth lacking in a more basic sense. It may be so that "p is true" means no more than "p", but that's only if "p" is true. I find this account of truth lacking because it doesn't tell us what makes "p" true, why we might say "p" is true, or why we use "is true" in the way(s) we do.

Srap is talking about knowing something that is not the case. — Luke

No, Srap is claiming that if someone "knows" something, "remembers" something, "sees" something, or "regrets" something, then without a formal definition of these words, it is logically implied that what the person knows, remembers, sees, or regrets, is necessarily the case. Of course this is clearly invalid logic. We cannot produce any deductive conclusions from a word or symbol without any defining propositions.

@Srap Tasmaner -- I keep thinking it through-- since this is a thread on truth, it doesn't make sense to assume truth to explain meaning, thus denying (2) even though it's what makes the most sense. Which leaves me with (3) if I don't want to beg the question --

What does it really mean to "assume meaning"? In the broadest sense, a poem has meaning. And really I'd want to include that sort of thing in any understanding of meaning, which has nothing to do with truth. "assuming meaning" gives us more powers than truth-telling. Natural languages are absurdly powerful in terms of what they can do with meaning, to the point of creating new words wholesale, it can be tooled into scientific disciplines or epic poems or rarified philosophical thoughts or recipes or the fleeting thoughts of our everyday life.

But, really, that's just asking my conversation partner if they'd like to beg the question on truth with me without specifying that we're begging the question on truth to see if there's some other way to put the matter.

EDIT: More or less I think I'm starting to see my own dead-end, but I'm not sure which turn along the way got me here. The opposite of aporia -- constipated confusion :D

First: utmost respect; interesting and informative dialectic.
Second: how, in the answer to “what is truth”, should that general dialectic by conditioned by at least an unstated presupposition, or at most, a particular falsehood?
Case in point: the conclusion you can never boil the same kettle twice is justified, but only insofar as to state a kettle boils even once, while not impossible, is nonetheless contrary to experience and diminishes the power of the affirmation for what truth is. Kettles don’t boil, even though that is the linguistic and therefore logical construct presented in the dialectic, which necessitates the unstated presupposition in order to validate the argument. In effect, what is true is being conditioned by a mere presupposition, such that an example of what is a truth, but absolutely nothing is accomplished by it, with respect to what truth is.

As states, in an apparently Hume-ian fashion, re: “constant conjunction”, if you say the kettle is boiling, you expect bubbles, which would be the case, for this is at root an analytic judgement. But the tacit understanding the bubbles expected are given by the content of the kettle and not the boiling kettle, immediately makes the statement itself no longer analytic, and thus becomes the source of an illogical inference, and....as we all know....needs awaken one from his “dogmatic slumber”.

Now I’ll rejoin that rather minuscule human demographic of the overly-critical, or, if preferred, the more general group of those hopelessly under-informed, but perhaps you’d agree with me that the initial metaphysical question cannot be answered with empirical examples.

Before the truth value of any proposition is known, metaphysical or otherwise, the meaning of the words must be known. For example, is the proposition "mbeya majipu" true or false ?

First, do the words have a meaning in the first place, and if they do, who or what determined their meaning ? And if their meaning has been determined, where is this meaning to be found ?

IE, the truth value of a synthetic proposition cannot be known empirically until the meaning of the words within it are known analytically.

As ↪fdrake states, in an apparently Hume-ian fashion, re: “constant conjunction”, if you say the kettle is boiling, you expect bubbles, which would be the case, for this is at root an analytic judgement. But the tacit understanding the bubbles expected are given by the content of the kettle and not the boiling kettle, immediately makes the statement itself no longer analytic, and thus becomes the source of an illogical inference, and....as we all know....needs awaken one from his “dogmatic slumber”. — Mww

I'm trying not to come at this from a Humean "mere custom and habit" angle of causal succession, I'm trying to come at it from the perspective that patterns of association in language mirror patterns of association in environments; the histories of the two get intertwined through the mirroring relationship. I take this to be closer to Dennett - some sort of realist by my reading - rather than Hume - some sort of anti-realist by my reading. The passage in this paper beginning "To the Left" with the black and white pixillated pictures of elephants.

I realise there's a lot of work left to be done in fleshing out my perspective.

the initial metaphysical question cannot be answered with empirical examples. — Mww

This is a thing.

patterns of association in language mirror patterns of association in environments; the histories of the two get intertwined through the mirroring relationship. — fdrake

And I almost asked if you felt a little queasy when you reached for words like "tracking" and "mirroring," but it turns out you had something quite specific in mind.

I found your post really interesting but couldn't help feeling -- sorry -- that it was old wine in a new bottle. That is, same problem in new language that doesn't have the apparent baggage of the old, but must if it's to do what we want -- so if universally accepted among philosophers, would lead to sixty years of debate about what mirroring is and whether it's a real thing, as a sequel to the debate over reference. That's not a substantive reply so I didn't -- though now I have!

I think @Mww had a gut reaction near mine, that this is just not what a solution to the question at hand must look like, and that's why I felt it must be a restatement of the problem instead of a solution.

Issues I am alive to in what I'm writing:

(1) Not all questions get answers. Some questions are ill-conceived and attempts to answer them, no matter how circumspect, are doomed to fail. (So, above, "what we want" might be something we shouldn't want, or we only think that's what we want but it isn't, etc.)

(2) There is a difference between a problem-and-proposed-solutions approach, and a model-building approach. Model-builders claim, in part, that the problem can only be a problem within a given -- which may mean, presumed -- model.

(3) One can claim, not quite to the converse, that a model is a framework for presenting and clarifying a problem; problem first, then model. That's one, more or less happy, way of taking "within."

But there are two sides here, and while they agree that a problem can only be presented within a framework, the other side -- model first -- has the option of claiming that a problem "within" a model (or framework) can also be taken as a problem for the model, an indication there is something wrong with it. In that case, the solution is always a new model, even if that model is merely an extension or outgrowth of the old one. Correct models -- Zeus's models -- do not have problems.

This is kinda what the progress of science looks like sometimes, this iterative (and cumulative, ratcheting) re-modeling structured around eliminating each generation's problems in the next generation. (Eliminating in a way consistent with the evidence, not just defining away. Why are these variable related but not those? --- Oh my god! If you rotate the axes, you can see that ..., and that must mean we were actually measuring ..., and so on.)

(4) And that question, of the fidelity and effectiveness of a model, looks shockingly like the substantive issue under discussion. Enter @Mww with his (?) reminder that there are metaphysical stakes here.

(5) Minor issue. There are differences in intellectual temperament that make your posts difficult for me sometimes. ("You" = @fdrake.) You're more "synthetical" and speculative; I'm more "analytical" and -- what's an opposite for "speculative"? Evidence-focused rather than theory-focused? Even with a post like this, I can't help including a folksy example. (Thought maybe I hadn't, but nope, it's right there, end of (3).) Apo said once that I was "too concrete." Analytical me can't ever use words like "enmeshed" or "intertwined" without feeling like I'm cheating. "Enmeshed," to me, is a weasel word -- but it's a perfectly legitimate placeholder when you're model-building! ("These are intimately related, I just can't specify how yet.")

*

That's enough. I really want to start all over with this reference and truth stuff, but we'll see. Nothing I've posted so far has gone anywhere.

patterns of association in language mirror patterns of association in environments; the histories of the two get intertwined through the mirroring relationship. — fdrake

Would you say something similar about the relation between perception and an environment? Something like the following?
‘perception is fundamentally the truthful reconstruction of a portion of the physical world through a registering of existing environmental information.’

from the perspective that patterns of association in language mirror patterns of association in environments — fdrake

Understood, and agreed, in principle. My language would be......errrr, shall I say, older?.....different, but the idea behind it would be congruent. My reluctant quibble would be, then, from whence comes the mirror, and what form does the mirror require in order for the associations to work.
————-

the initial metaphysical question cannot be answered with empirical examples.
— Mww

This is a thing. — Srap Tasmaner

....and from this well-worn and exceedingly comfortable armchair, a very big thing it is. The solution seems to have become the disregard of metaphysical questions, or at the very least turn them into anthropological/psychological questions. Which is, I must say, “...beneath the dignity of philosophy...”.

Nothing I've posted so far has gone anywhere. — Srap Tasmaner

HA!!! My post on pg 45 didn’t even get a response, even though it contained a distinct and irreducible answer to the question. Might not be correct, and is certainly open to disagreement, but at least it was there.

(1) Semantics in terms of truth conditions, and no analysis of "is true" is possible because of circularity. — Srap Tasmaner

The Revision theory has an interesting take on this, giving an analysis of circular definitions that shows their pathology, where it is present. The conclusion is that T-sentences are definitions that are not pathological.

And I almost asked if you felt a little queasy when you reached for words like "tracking" and "mirroring," but it turns out you had something quite specific in mind. — Srap Tasmaner

I still do, even though I had something specific in mind. What I'm gesturing towards is quite mechanical sounding but there isn't a specified mechanism. I have in mind something like "custom and habit" of language use (word successions and contextual dependences) coming to summarise, mirror and enact what the language is used for because of a shared causal history and informational links. Both those notions need a lot of fleshing out, and I don't have the chops for it honestly.

Regardless, I think the central issues are: how does semantic content relate to the world and if it does, does it relate proximally to the world or to people or both (in the right ways)?. Those two things are still Kant flavour questions. So I think I get where you and @Mww are coming from. I think @Isaac's criticisms are also of the same flavour (from my perspective), since the "hidden states" which nevertheless have informational impact on "internal states" through content forming constraint seems like another way of having a debate about schemes and content (content informed by scheme = content is proximally scheme flavour, not world flavour) intersecting with the externalism vs internalism (and compromises) of semantic content debate.

In some respect I'm definitely astroturfing old ground.

about — Srap Tasmaner

‘perception is fundamentally the truthful reconstruction of a portion of the physical world through a registering of existing environmental information.’ — Joshs

Not exactly! I don't think it's right (even scientifically) to say that perception always and only aims at accurate representation. That's part of what it does, it has other goals. It is also difficult to distinguish what is accurate from what is useful I think. It'd be a bit shit if we couldn't accurately discern how stuff in the environment behaved - doubt we'd be able to do much, but I don't think that's what perception's "for".

....and from this well-worn and exceedingly comfortable armchair, a very big thing it is. The solution seems to have become the disregard of metaphysical questions, or at the very least turn them into anthropological/psychological questions. Which is, I must say, “...beneath the dignity of philosophy...”. — Mww

Probably not surprising @Srap Tasmaner, I agree with you that it's a metaphysical issue, I'd just frame it that anthropology and psychology are already metaphysical. They're both ways of understanding our understanding of the world and the world itself, they posit entities, have ontological commitments, people quibble over which entities exist, which framework should the entities be interpreted in and so on.

(5) Minor issue. There are differences in intellectual temperament that make your posts difficult for me sometimes. ("You" = fdrake.) You're more "synthetical" and speculative; I'm more "analytical" and -- what's an opposite for "speculative"? Evidence-focused rather than theory-focused? Even with a post like this, I can't help including a folksy example. (Thought maybe I hadn't, but nope, it's right there, end of (3).) Apo said once that I was "too concrete." Analytical me can't ever use words like "enmeshed" or "intertwined" without feeling like I'm cheating. "Enmeshed," to me, is a weasel word -- but it's a perfectly legitimate placeholder when you're model-building! ("These are intimately related, I just can't specify how yet.") — Srap Tasmaner

I do feel uncomfortable with using them, yeah. I'd feel more uncomfortable if I felt I'd done more than gesture towards a mechanism, or a space in which one might be conceptualised at least. I do feel however that terms in philosophy tend to be vague on the mechanisms of how they might work (like how do categories constraint perceptions, tell me in terms of my body plx - how does a denoting expression come to stably denote, give me the history of the word and a theory of language propagation please).

That's enough. I really want to start all over with this reference and truth stuff, but we'll see. Nothing I've posted so far has gone anywhere. — Srap Tasmaner

I disagree! I think we've come to a better understanding of the discussants' perspectives. Wouldn't've happened without you facilitating it.

I disagree! I think we've come to a better understanding of the discussants' perspectives. Wouldn't've happened without you facilitating it. — fdrake

I second this! You were a great aid in spurring on thoughts which I hadn't had before this! And while I didn't reply to everything, I did actually read everything -- and really enjoyed picking through people's thoughts and references (Got to page 4 of A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs today -- it just takes me time to read things)

‘perception is fundamentally the truthful reconstruction of a portion of the physical world through a registering of existing environmental information.’
— Joshs

Not exactly! I don't think it's right (even scientifically) to say that perception always and only aims at accurate representation. That's part of what it does, it has other goals. It is also difficult to distinguish what is accurate from what is useful I think. It'd be a bit shit if we couldn't accurately discern how stuff in the environment behaved - doubt we'd be able to do much, but I don't think that's what perception's "for". — fdrake

I got that quote from Francisco Varela’s ‘Ethical Knowhow’. He is contrasting the old representational rationalist realist model of perception with the enactivist approach, in which perceiving is not representing but acting.

“According to the enactive approach, however,
the point of departure for understanding perception is the study of how the perceiver guides his actions in local situations. Since these local situations
constantly change as a result of the perceiver’s activity, the reference point for understanding perception is no longer a pre-given, perceiver-independent world,
but rather the sensorimotor structure of the cognitive agent, the way in which the nervous system links sensory and motor surfaces. It is this structure – the
manner in which the perceiver is embodied – and not some pre-given world, that determines how the perceiver can act and be modulated by environmental events. Thus
the overall concern of an enactive approach to perception is not to determine how some perceiver-independent world is to be recovered; it is, rather, to determine
the common principles or lawful linkages between sensory and motor systems that explain how action can be perceptually guided in a perceiver-dependent world.
In the enactive approach reality is not a given: it is perceiver­ dependent, not because the perceiver “constructs” it as he or she pleases, but because what counts as a relevant world is inseparable from the structure of the perceiver.”

The enactivist rejection of representationalism applies to conceptualization as well as perception , sine the latter is built from the former. Thinking of linguistic conceptualization as acting upon a responsively changing environment rather than mirroring a pre-existing environment impacts on the understanding of truth.

That's enough. I really want to start all over with this reference and truth stuff, but we'll see. Nothing I've posted so far has gone anywhere. — Srap Tasmaner

I think we've come to a better understanding of the discussants' perspectives. — fdrake

These are not mutually incompatible...

For my part I remain at the point of departure, where truth is not definable beyond the functionality found in T-sentences. A combination of @"Srap's (1) and (2), but without truth conditions...

I think it may be "eternally" true to say "I boiled the kettle on the 3rd of March 2022", since I did indeed boil the kettle on that day. — fdrake

Did 'boiling' involve getting all the water to 100C, a rolling boil, the first bubbles, too hot to touch ("that's boiling!")... I don't see how we can establish the truth of such a vague and contextualised notion as 'boiling', even if we pin the event right down to the millisecond.

We could say that it's true that you did something which matches the description. But that just gets us back to where I started (or was it another thread?), where the truth of "I boiled the kettle" amounts to little more than whether you've used the words correctly in your language. "I boiled the kettle" is true because the thing you did is one of the things the expression could rightly be used to describe.

it's really weird to make statements like "The kettle boiled and I poured cold water from it immediately"/ "The kettle boiled and the water stayed still". You convey an expectation of behaviour and then negate it; the meaning of the sentence part "the kettle boiled" is in conflict with the second bit precisely because the first bit doesn't necessarily fix all the events around it, or which can be embedded in relevant descriptions of causal chains involving it, but nevertheless constrains expectations of other sentence parts. — fdrake

Yes, I think this is right, it's (for me) an example of the way that hidden states constrain our models of them. We can have a range if modelled expectations for the entailments of 'boiling a kettle', but none of them can have cold water come out. None of them can result in ice. The hidden states we're trying to reduce surprise in are real and so have constraints. What I'm arguing here (though mostly paraphrasing Ramsey) is that because hidden states are not themselves models, nor bounded in any way, no 'natural kinds', there's no right model. There's only wrong ones. Truth (as correspondence) seems to need a right model.

As a rough summary by example, ""the kettle is boiling" is true" makes sense at its level of descriptive granularity because: ( 1 ) the definite article "the" picks out a specific kettle in the environment ( 2 ) that kettle is individuated from its environment by parsing it into salient objects with distinct patterns of behaviour ( 3 ) "is boiling" states a type of environmental pattern the kettle partakes in ( 4 ) under our level of demarcation, it's "only" the kettle that could boil, not the electrical currents or the plug socket despite both partaking in the boiling process ( 5 ) the kettle exhibits the parsed expectations which constitute (somewhat fuzzily!) boiling ( 6 ) that makes "the kettle is boiling" true. — fdrake

This is a good framework from which to progress, it gives us something to work with. The quibbles...
In (1) the definite article acts as an agreement that we will treat a part of the environment as a kettle it doesn't need us to treat exactly the same part of the environment that way, only similar enough that I'm not going to surprise you and vice versa, which constrains the choices to one which is going to respond roughly the same way. So (2) I have little trouble with except to add that we enact those objects, we can create as well as curate, but that still probably gets us to the same place. (3)and (4) I have no issue with. At (5) I think we miss a step. So at (1) we agree to treat a part of the environment as a kettle, at (3) we do the same for 'boiling', but the theory that the kettle at (1) is exhibiting the pattern at (3) is still, like any theory, subject to underdetermination. Something as simple as 'the kettle is boiling' admits of very little wiggle room for such, but still an important point with regards to 'truth' because it means that even the process-derived truth at (6) remains somewhat agreed on. We don't escape the need for us to socially agree in order for something the have a truth value by this means, it's just that we're constrained in what we could ever possibly socially agree to and still function.