It misleads Michael to think that truths only exist when sentences exist. — Banno

I don't think there's anything misleading about this:

1. Truth and falsity are properties of truth-bearers
2. Truth-bearers are features of language, not mind-independent abstract objects

The straightforward conclusion is that if a language does not exist then nothing else that exists has the property of being true or false, much like nothing else that exists has the property of being semantically meaningful.

Note that I'm not saying that if a language does not exist then nothing else exists.

As I mentioned before to frank, I think you're equivocating on the term "truth". When you talk about there being truths in (not at) a world without language you are not using the word "truth" to refer to the property that truth-bearers have, but something else.

As in, you draw a distinction between these two claims:

1. There are truths
2. There are true truth-bearers

Such that "there are truths in a world without language" is true but that "there are true truth-bearers in a world without language" is false.

But compare with drawing a distinction between these two claims:

1. There are falsehoods
2. There are false truth-bearers

Such that "there are falsehoods in a world without language" is true but that "there are false truth-bearers in a world without language" is false.

I don't think that this latter distinction makes any sense, and so I question the sense of the former distinction. If you're not saying that a truth-bearer is true then I don't know what you mean by saying that there is a truth.

Do they exist if language doesn't? This is the core of the issue. If sentences are features of language then even if sentences are abstract my point still stands: if there is no language then nothing has the property of being true or false, much like if there is no language then nothing has the property of being semantically meaningful. — Michael

I understand what you're saying. You're saying truth is a concept that couldn't have been meaningful 50 million years ago because there was no one to recognize any kind of concept. From our point of view, there were rocks and clouds, but those concepts didn't exist then, which means there was no one to observe that they existed.

But even in the absence of an observer, you're saying the rocks and clouds were there, doing what rocks and clouds do.

There's no need to resort to Platonism. — Michael

I think you've already accepted the existence of sentences, so you've accepted a kind of Platonism. Note that this "Platonism" is a term from phil of math. It's not about Plato.

I understand what you're saying. You're saying truth is a concept that couldn't have been meaningful 50 million years ago because there was no one to recognize any kind of concept. From our point of view, there were rocks and clouds, but those concepts didn't exist then, which means there was no one to observe that they existed. — frank

I'm saying that a truth is something like a correct description, that a falsehood is something like "an incorrect description", that descriptions didn't exist 50 million years ago, and so that neither truths nor falsehoods existed 50 million years ago.

Even if you want to claim that descriptions are abstract and not utterances, they still depend on the existence of utterances. Perhaps we might think of them as emergent abstractions.

I'm saying that a truth is something like a correct description, and that descriptions (whether correct or incorrect) didn't exist 50 million years ago. — Michael

Do you have to have those descriptions in hand in order for there to be truth? Where no description is available (say about something across the galaxy), would you say there is no truth?

Do you have to have those descriptions in hand in order for there to be truth? Where no description is available (say about something across the galaxy), would you say there is no truth? — frank

You are asking this question:

Do you have to have those descriptions in hand in order for there to be true descriptions? Where no description is available (say about something across the galaxy), would you say there is no true description?

I don't even understand how to answer such a question. It seems inherently confused.

You are asking this question:

Do you have to have those descriptions in hand in order for there to be true descriptions? Where no description is available (say about something across the galaxy), would you say there is no true description?

I don't even understand how to answer such a question. It's inherently confused. — Michael

There is some state of affairs even when there is no one to describe it, right?

There is some state of affairs even when there is no one to describe it, right? — frank

What do you mean by a state of affairs?

If you're asking if planets exist that haven't been described, then yes. I have explicitly said this many times.

But planets aren't truths and nor is truth a property of planets. Truth (and falsity) is a property of the sentences that describe a planet (or try to).

If you're asking if planets exist that haven't been described, then yes. — Michael

The existence of a planet is a state of affairs. So you accept that there are states of affairs that have not been described.

The existence of a planet is a state of affairs. So you accept that there are states of affairs that have not been described. — frank

Here's a post of mine from six days ago:

And the existence of gold does not depend on us saying "gold exists". — Michael

Here's a post of mine from six days ago:

And the existence of gold does not depend on us saying "gold exists".
— Michael — Michael

Ok. So you accept that some state of affairs obtains in the absence of anyone to describe it. I don't really know what the practical implications of your view are.

I don't really know what the practical implications of your view are. — frank

There aren't any. This was never meant as some deep, substantive philosophical point. I was simply explaining the ordinary grammar of the word "true". Which is why I don't understand why I have faced such fervent opposition.

It's almost as if you and other think I'm saying something I'm not.

I really think that this post (also from six days ago) is pretty clear.

The traditional view is that there are truth-makers and truth-bearers. Truth and falsehood are properties of truth-bearers, not properties of truth-makers, and not the truth-makers themselves.

If the appropriate truth-maker exists/occurs then the truth-bearer is true, otherwise the truth-bearer is false.

A truth-maker can exist even if a truth-bearer doesn't, but if a truth-bearer doesn't exist then nothing exists that has the property of being either true (correct/accurate) or false (incorrect/inaccurate). — Michael

I was simply explaining the ordinary grammar of the word "true". — Michael

Maybe that's how you use the word, but to my ears, if you say nothing was true 60 million years ago, it sounds like an anti-realist stance. If there were obtaining states of affairs back then, then you're picturing that world as if a human actually was observing it, dividing it up the way humans do, although I'm sure you'd disagree with this?

Anyway, I was just trying to categorize your view. I don't object unless I see a contradiction. I don't think there is one, you're just insisting on a certain usage of "true." :up:

I'd say the problem is that you want to put truth on one side and actuality on the other, but they are so closely related that in the Tractatus Wittgenstein treats them as different words for the same thing: the possibility of the book being on the table can be expressed in words, in a picture, in a model, or in the physical fact of the book being on the table.

It is because these are different modalities of expressing the same thing that one can be a picture of another. Going the other way, it's also the reason you can build the building depicted in a drawing.

Truth and being cannot be separated as you want.

You talked before about truth being a relation between a sentence and something else in the world. Well, there is only a relation between a sentence and something else in the world if there is a sentence.

All I am explaining is that truths-without-sentences doesn’t make sense (much like truths-without-other-things-in-the-world doesn’t make sense).

You talked before about truth being a relation between a sentence and something else in the world. — Michael

And I don't think that's a terrible first thing to say, but then you have to think about what that relation is and what grounds it. Wittgenstein shows one way of doing that, but of course it's not the only way.

It's the same with all dualisms: having put language here and the world there, you have to put them back together somehow. The usual word for when they do fit together is "truth", because truth is showing things as they are.

In your telling, truth is external to being, a sort of optional add-on. Things are the way they are, and sometimes people say that they are, and sometimes they don't. There's at least a sense here in which things being as they are is embedded in saying that they are, but it's not clear this is enough to get you truth; if language is just a sort of wrapping paper, or labels we stick on things, what would allow you to distinguish one way of wrapping from another? We would still have things over there, and things we say over here, and truth would just be a preference for one design of paper over another.

As if things only exist once named.

...you are not using the word "truth" to refer to the property that truth-bearers have, but something else. — Michael

Yep. The gold and the hills and such.

That was the bit from my last few posts about the difference between a quantificational and a substitutional interpretation, and about sentences being of a different logical order to the individuals in the domain:

All three of the following have the very same truth value:
"There is gold in those hills" has the property of "truth"
"There is gold in those hills" is true
There is gold in those hills — Banno

Perhaps we should revisit, and be explicit, as to what is being claimed. I take it we agree that there are not sentences without language. Are you also claiming that there is no gold without language? I think there is gold without language.

It can be the case that there is gold in those hills and yet not be any sentences that say "There is gold in those hills" or that '"There is gold in those hills" has the property of "truth"'.

I understand you to be claiming that this is not so.

Have I understood you correctly?

Edit:

I'm saying that a truth is something like a correct description, that a falsehood is something like "an incorrect description", that descriptions didn't exist 50 million years ago, and so that neither truths nor falsehoods existed 50 million years ago. — Michael

Ok. But were there things that were true? Was there gold in those hills?

Most gold deposits in Australia formed around 400 million years ago. (Is that, for you, a truth? or is it just true, without being a truth? Or is it that there was gold in those hills 50 million years ago, but it's not true that there was gold in those hills 50 million years ago?)

- Good posts. :up:

What you are saying seems to amount to saying that in the absence of minds such as ours no truth claims can be made. When humanity is gone there will still be gold, but there will not be any claim that there is gold.

The question then seems to be will there be a truth that there is gold in the absence of the possibility of any truth claims? If you want to answer 'yes' then you must think that truth is something more than merely the property of true sentences.

If you think truth is dependent on minds rather than sentences, that is on judgements rather than just propositions, then in the absence of human minds some other mind must be posited. God, for example. I think this is what @Leontiskos thinks. But what if there is no God?

:up:

This is the classical problem of "realism," namely the debate between those espousing some account of universals and those espousing nominalism. Usually on TPF we read about a philosophical issue on SEP like someone who reads about the wetness of water. The benefit of real argument, such as this thread represents, is the same as the benefit of familiarity with water itself, as opposed to encyclopedia descriptions.

This is tangential, but I sometimes think the most fundamental position a person takes -- the one that most shapes his or her worldview -- is whether the world is to be trusted or not. Is the world a good place?

For the skeptic, truth is defined as what eludes us. Nature seems to exist only to mock man's presumption.

Yes, that is an interesting idea. It also seems to me that there's a kind of pre-reflexive movement—something like faith or trust—that determines the outcome in a curious way. If you trust him then he turns out to be trustworthy, and if you don't trust him then he turns out to be untrustworthy, and there is no middle ground.

I see this a lot in the analytical stance of trying to achieve that neutral middle ground, a stance which carries within itself commitments that are unseen.

In a way, if you put human intellect or human speech on one side and the world on the other, that's an expression of alienation. And there's a long tradition there, this view that because of our intellects and apparently unique cognitive abilities, we stand tragically apart from the world in the way that other animals don't.

And then truth is unattainable because, reach out as we might in language, we can never quite reach the world ― and it is a matter of reaching it, because there is a chasm between us and it. Language is artificial, a kludge. It doesn't belong to the world, anymore than we do.

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

Yes, I saw you nudging in that direction. I don't know. I think things get tricky once we realize how important the predispositions of philosophical inquiry are, and then try to manage them. It is there, in the heart of the jungle, where you encounter the most danger and require the most care, and yet after the long and taxing journey care and attention is often lacking when it is most needed. A text like Przywara's Analogia Entis is an attempt to plumb those depths, and the success is always only partial.

Traditionally the difficult question and the cleft/alienation doesn't appear with truth, but rather with falsity and error (and the threads on Kimhi danced around this). We can debate the relation between truth and falsity, but it looks to me that in the long history of epistemology the conundrum is, "What is falsity?" "What is error?" And if the false cannot be known then how can the ship be righted?

(Michael was poking around in this when he earlier said that realism inevitably courts skepticism. The problem is that his idiosyncratically defined "anti-realism" doesn't seem to offer a substantive alternative. The problems posed by skepticism aren't so easily evaded, at least at the theoretical level.)

@Banno, @Janus, @Srap Tasmaner

A painting of a mountain is accurate or inaccurate (allowing for degree). A description of a mountain is true or false (allowing for degree).

If there are no paintings then there is no X such that X is accurate/inaccurate (it makes no sense to say that the mountain is accurate). If there are no descriptions then there is no X such that X is true/false (it makes no sense to say that the mountain is true). But the mountain still exists even if it isn't painted or described.

This is all I am saying.

Just to be pedantic, it's really the act of assertion that magically creates meaning. The painting is only truth apt if someone is asserting it. So it's not really the absence of truthbearers so much as an absence of people that renders the world of 60 million years ago meaningless.

Michael was poking around in this when he earlier said that realism inevitably courts skepticism. — Leontiskos

I didn't say it. I just quoted the IEP article on brains in a vat:

One proposal is to construe metaphysical realism as the position that there are no a priori epistemically derived constraints on reality (Gaifman, 1993). By stating the thesis negatively, the realist sidesteps the thorny problems concerning correspondence or a “ready made” world, and shifts the burden of proof on the challenger to refute the thesis. One virtue of this construal is that it defines metaphysical realism at a sufficient level of generality to apply to all philosophers who currently espouse metaphysical realism. For Putnam’s metaphysical realist will also agree that truth and reality cannot be subject to “epistemically derived constraints.” This general characterization of metaphysical realism is enough to provide a target for the Brains in a Vat argument. For there is a good argument to the effect that if metaphysical realism is true, then global skepticism is also true, that is, it is possible that all of our referential beliefs about the world are false. As Thomas Nagel puts it, “realism makes skepticism intelligible,” (1986, 73) because once we open the gap between truth and epistemology, we must countenance the possibility that all of our beliefs, no matter how well justified, nevertheless fail to accurately depict the world as it really is. [See Fallibilism.] Donald Davidson also emphasizes this aspect of metaphysical realism: “metaphysical realism is skepticism in one of its traditional garbs. It asks: why couldn’t all my beliefs hang together and yet be comprehensively false about the actual world?” (1986, 309)

The Brain in a Vat scenario is just an illustration of this kind of global skepticism: it depicts a situation where all our beliefs about the world would presumably be false, even though they are well justified. Thus if one can prove that we cannot be brains in a vat, by modus tollens one can prove that metaphysical realism is false. Or, to put it in more schematic form:

If metaphysical realism is true, then global skepticism is possible
If global skepticism is possible, then we can be brains in a vat
But we cannot be brains in a vat
Thus, metaphysical realism is false (1,2,3)

The problem is that his idiosyncratically defined "anti-realism" doesn't seem to offer a substantive alternative. — Leontiskos

It's not my "idiosyncratically defined" anti-realism. It just is what anti-realism is according to Michael Dummett, the man who coined the term "anti-realism":

For Dummett, realism is best understood as semantic realism, i.e. the view that every declarative sentence in one's language is bivalent (determinately true or false) and evidence-transcendent (independent of our means of coming to know which), while anti-realism rejects this view in favour of a concept of knowable (or assertible) truth. Historically, these debates had been understood as disagreements about whether a certain type of entity objectively exists or not. Thus we may speak of realism or anti-realism with respect to other minds, the past, the future, universals, mathematical entities (such as natural numbers), moral categories, the material world, or even thought. The novelty of Dummett's approach consisted in seeing these disputes as at base analogous to the dispute between intuitionism and Platonism in the philosophy of mathematics.