You say that propositions are constructed by us doing things using words but then say that there are true propositions even if we're not doing things using words. Make up your mind. — Michael

Where in any of this are we not doing things with words?

The mooted "world without anyone in it" is itself a bunch of words.

One of your mistakes here is to think that one can only write in the circles. — Banno

It's something like a stratum of human behaviour which does the revealing, isn't it? And it's inflected by norms but not totally determined by them. — fdrake

When I was a kid, we used to set the table for dinner, always the same way: on the left, fork, sitting on a paper napkin, on the right, knife and spoon, in that order, dinner plate in between, and all on a placemat. That was our custom. There's logic to it, but it could clearly be done other ways, and was done differently in other homes. There's also a more general norm here, of which we had a specific version, of having silverware for everyone on the table. That too has a logic to it, but needn't be done, much less done this way.

And we could keep going, with more and more general norms that underlie specific ones. But is eating -- rather than eating specific things in specific ways at specific times of day -- is that "just" a norm?

You could say yes if you intend to sweep in everything a human attaches value to; you could make eating a biological norm, so to speak. But we're no longer talking about custom or convention. There is nothing arbitrary about eating. (But it is "optional" if you value something else more highly than your own life, so still arguably a "norm" in some broad sense.)

So I'm just a little leery of a story that's "norms all the way down." The argument that we just happen to say "red" instead of "rouge" for "merely" historical reasons, how well does that extend to eating? If your history takes in the rise of multicellular organisms, which happen to be things that eat, maybe. But to make sense of that, we'd have to look at norms of conversation.

Now what about truth? There are old arguments for and against "truth by convention" that I don't want to rehash. Nor do I want to talk about what people think truth is; for one thing, it's part of the idea of truth that what people think isn't necessarily it. But I do think there's room to talk about the experience of truth, so that's what I've been trying to make a start on here.

Where in any of this are we not doing things with words? — Banno

We're asking about a hypothetical world in which there are no people doing things with words. This is where the distinction between "truth at" and "truth in" is important.

Obviously we are using the English language to describe this hypothetical world but then also obviously there is no English language in this hypothetical world. You seem unwilling to make this same distinction when discussing propositions and truth, as if somehow they're special entities very unlike the English language.

Sure, there is no English in that hypothetical world. But there is gold. That's the way it is set up, in the wording 'and nothing else changes". The alternative is to deny transworld identity, which is an option open to you. You would have few companions if you did so.

Sure, there is no English in that hypothetical world. But there is gold [in that hypothetical world]. — Banno

And I have never disagreed with this.

I have only ever claimed that because there is no language in that hypothetical world there are no propositions in that hypothetical world and so no true propositions (truths) in that hypothetical world.

The fact that we are using the English language and its propositions to truthfully talk about that hypothetical world is irrelevant.

~~

I have only ever claimed that because there is no language in that hypothetical world there are no propositions in that hypothetical world and so no true propositions (truths) in[/i] that hypothetical world. — Michael

This is your mote-and-bailey fallback.

You want to say that there is no truth to there being gold in that world, but are stuck.

You want to say that there is no truth to there being gold in that world — Banno

No I don't.

I'm only saying what I am literally saying, which is that there is no language in that hypothetical world and so no propositions in that hypothetical world and so no true propositions (truths) in that hypothetical world.

I have repeatedly said that there is gold in that world.

If you are reading something into my words that isn't there then that's on you.

No I don't. — Michael

For twenty pages.

I'm only saying that truth is a property of propositions and that there are no true propositions (truths) in a world without language (i.e inside the World B circle). There are also no false propositions (falsehoods) in a world without language. — Michael

You want to say that there are no true propositions in a world without language. Hence you want to say that "there is gold in those hills" is not true in a world in which there is gold in those hills, but no one to say it. Waht I and others here have done is to show that this approach is incoherent.

There is a difference between an utterance and a proposition, hence there is a difference between a world in which there are no utterances and one in which there are no propositions.

But this is going over things that have already been said to you, more than once.

There is a difference between an utterance and a proposition, hence there is a difference between a world in which there are no utterances and one in which there are no propositions. — Banno

And now you're back to contradicting what you said earlier when you said that propositions are constructed by us using words.

If propositions are constructed by language users using words then if there is no language use in a world then there are no propositions in that world.

You really can't make up your mind.

When I was a kid, we used to set the table for dinner, always the same way: on the left, fork, sitting on a paper napkin, on the right, knife and spoon, in that order, dinner plate in between, and all on a placemat. That was our custom. There's logic to it, but it could clearly be done other ways, and was done differently in other homes. There's also a more general norm here, of which we had a specific version, of having silverware for everyone on the table. That too has a logic to it, but needn't be done, much less done this way.

And we could keep going, with more and more general norms that underlie specific ones. But is eating -- rather than eating specific things in specific ways at specific times of day -- is that "just" a norm?

You could say yes if you intend to sweep in everything a human attaches value to; you could make eating a biological norm, so to speak. But we're no longer talking about custom or convention. There is nothing arbitrary about eating. (But it is "optional" if you value something else more highly than your own life, so still arguably a "norm" in some broad sense.) — Srap Tasmaner

I think we've had this discussion before. But we might as well have it again to see if we end up somewhere else than last time. It's an enjoyable one to have with you though. I am going to make liberal use of scarequotes so that I can highlight placeholders and weasel words.

I'm tempted to bite the bullet and say yes, eating is "just" a norm, but in a qualified sense. Human behaviour regarding eating is incredibly flexible in a way the necessary and sufficient conditions for counting as eating aren't. I don't really want to say "necessary and sufficient conditions", but let's just leave it there for now. Eating is "the ingestion of food". So if something counts as the ingestion of food, it counts as eating. But that's not quite all there is to the story, is it? Because that might appear to make eating "about" our words for it. Whereas we use the word eating because things in fact do eat.

What I want to say is that things eat in the same sense as they walk, run, dance, skip, speak, interpret... All of those things. There's different degrees of ambiguity in the coordinating norms for what counts as each, which "couple" with different ranges of stuff in the "corresponding" category. Dancing events count as dancing. Eating events count as eating.

But we're no longer talking about custom or convention. There is nothing arbitrary about eating.

So yes, I agree with this, we're no longer "just" talking about custom or convention. But I want to stress that I never was just talking about them, and I don't think custom or convention are "just" custom or convention either. As in, if you join the Masons, you really have joined the masons. "fdrake joined the Masons" would be true or false.

Where I think we differ, at least in respect to your above post, is that you construe custom and convention as a different type of thing than eating, whereas I see them as the same type - flavours of event that have repeating patterns. If we think about coordination as having a "map" and a "territory" as we'd ordinarily expect a representation to behave like, the representation being the map and the represented being the territory - there's no neat correspondence between those in how I see it. The "map" is event sequences of human behaviour, and the "territory" is event sequences of arbitrary types of thing. And then you've got to ask where the types come from in both, right?

I do think "where the types come from in nature and norm" is a very different question than "under what conditions are sentences true", and a slightly different question from "where does the correlation between nature types and norm types come in". I hope that I can talk about the latter without talking about the former two at this point. That is, take that there are such patterns in nature and norms for granted, and wonder how they might come to couple.

I only have toy examples about this, they're from maths rather than nature, but I hope they are illustrative. I was teaching division by 2, with remainder. I got my student to divide the following numbers by 2:

{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10}

and record the quotient and remainder

remainders={1,0,1,0,1,0,1,0,1,0}
quotients={0,1,1,2,2,3,3,4,4,5}

I then asked the student to say the sequence of remainders aloud, after I'd said the number. So:

fdrake: 1, student: 1
fdrake: 2, student: 0
fdrake:3, student 1
...

and so on.

I then asked the student to consider how the sequence might go on. They grokked that it would be alternating 0s and 1s. So they inferred the rule:

"if fdrake just said n, and I said 0 for n-1, say 1. If fdrake just said n, and I said 1 for n-1, say 0", and they could do this arbitrarily.

That's then a particular function which maps natural numbers to their remainder when divided by 2. But it's recited as a sequence of pairs by the student and I, in which I say a number and the student follows the rule.

What we'd thus done is constructed something that counts as the mapping of naturals to their remainders when divided by 2, and what counted as that mapping was our sequence of pairs of vocalisations.

What inculcated the norm in my student was asking them how the sequence might go on, which set up an expectation for what they should do given what I do. They thus could interpret my vocalisations as an imperative for them to utter the next number in the pattern. They would not have experienced them as an imperative without my role as their tutor (giving me some kind of legislative power over their behaviour), or me asking them to continue the pattern. Which they could then do as a distinct idea afterwards. They experienced the "should" I created as a mapping between two things.

I think that smells a lot of an expectation in a probability sense, the student had figured out that they'd get the answer right if they alternated, so they'd been given an imperative to minimise deviation from the expectation I provided with corrections or encouragement... Which starts looking a lot like a probabilistic inference procedure with entropy minimisation. Which is something we know human bodies do all the time.

So I would be really surprised if our bodies abilities to do our homeostatic minimisation of variation wasn't leveraged like hell in our ability to coordinate behaviour and create norms. Since, as I claimed earlier, norms behave a lot like expectations. And correlations are another type of expectation.

That's about how I see it. We end up having coordinating norms through our ability to arbitrarily contextualise things, but then constrain that arbitrariness with expectations. Then we can learn how those constraints work by minimising deviations from token examples which are "generic" in some sense . Which comes with a considerable degree of flexibility of rules you can learn from a given pattern, but it's no longer arbitrary, since we've put some tokens into the type creating engine that it must include and create a function for.

And that function is a recipe for recognising tokens and mapping them to other tokens - which we then enact to varying degrees of success {we do stuff which counts as an attempt to follow the pattern}. If the degree of success of the enactment is sufficiently high, that means counting as doing the thing which counts as the generating pattern. Which sets up the correspondence between our behaviour and the generating pattern as a type of association. Which is then the appropriate type in context.

In the above case, the student had learned the alternating pattern because they said the right things. Where "right things" is what is expected given the pattern and the imperative to reproduce it.

So how does this relate to truthbearers? Well it's not like a sentence in this view even has propositional content in the sense we'd ordinarily consider - it has conditions under which it is correctly assertible, which is already some normy thing. And a "model" where the sentence is true in the extensional semantics sense is more like a context - of stuff, norms, events, blah - in which it is correctly assertible.

I would like to have my cake and it it too, and claim that those contexts can be very object oriented and have exact constraints in them - like the maths example above. The student could say things which were true or false strictly, rather than stuff which counts as true or false for some purpose {like just a posit or a belief or a framing assumption}. And by "strictly" there I mean there being a unique "right" answer {any exemplar of a set of equivalent answers which count as that unique answer...}.

And now you're back to contradicting what you said earlier when you said that propositions are constructed by us using words. — Michael

It's not, and I'm sorry you can't see the difference between an utterance and a proposition. Chess is constructed by us using words and wood. When you look at a chess board, do you only see the wood? or can you also see Alekhine's Defence? In a world without wood, can there be no chess? But this has already been addressed; as it stands we are simply rehashing stuff that has already been dismissed.

This, I believe, is your original claim, a response to a post of mine.

So the claim is that when all life dies out there will be gold in Boorara but no truths or falsehoods because there will be no propositions. — Michael

The consequence of what you have said here is that there is gold in Boorara and yet it is not true that "There is gold in Boorara". This is at odds with [there is gold in Borrara ≡ "There is gold in Boorara" is true]. Perhaps the error is to think that all there is to a proposition is an utterance. But we dealt with that earlier. I'll repeat that 1+1=2, giving a new utterance of the very same assertion as was used earlier. There is something different about this utterance, but there is also something that is the same.

Or is it that the antecedent "there are no propositions" is a misconstruel? It is clear that there are propositions, including those that set up the world in question.

Again, a rehash of stuff already considered.

In a world without wood, can there be no chess? — Banno

There might be something else that is used other than wood but so far you haven't offered any replacement for language that allows for propositions in that world.

At the moment your position is akin to saying that there is chess in a barren world, and I'm the one saying that there isn't – that there is chess in a world only if there are people (or computers) in that world playing chess.

It is clear that there are propositions, including those that set up the world in question. — Banno

We are using language and propositions to talk about that world, but there are no languages or propositions in that world.

You continue to equivocate.

Try reading the section on Truth in a World vs. Truth at a World again. As a very explicit example it offers:

A proposition like <there are no propositions> is true at certain possible worlds but true in none.

If "there are no propositions" is true at World X then there are no propositions in World X, just as if "there is no English language" is true at World X then there is no English language in World X.

If "there are no propositions" is true at World X then there are no propositions in World X. — Michael

Doesn't that mean World X is empty? A world is basically a set of propositions.

Doesn't that mean World X is empty? A world is basically a set of propositions. — frank

No, a world can be a set of physical objects situated in spacetime.

As I said many pages and weeks ago, the existence of gold does not depend on the existence of the proposition "gold exists".

No, a world can be a set of physical objects situated in spacetime. — Michael

So what's the ontology of World X? Is it in another dimension?

So what's the ontology of World X? Is it in another dimension? — frank

That depends on whether or not there is an (infinite) multiverse. If there is then there is likely some universe in which there is gold but no people playing chess or using language (and so no propositions). If there isn't then World X is just a fiction.

That depends on whether or not there is an (infinite) multiverse. If there is then there is likely some universe in which there is gold but no people playing chess or using language (and so no propositions). If there isn't then World X is just a fiction. — Michael

If World X is just a fiction, then it wouldn't be a set of physical objects in spacetime, would it?

If World X is just a fiction, then it wouldn't be a set of physical objects in spacetime, would it? — frank

It's a fictional world in which planets and stars exist but people and propositions don't, just as the Lord of the Rings universe is a fictional world in which orcs exist but computers don't.

Like Banno you're equivocating. The fact that we use language and propositions to talk about a fictional world does not entail that there are languages and propositions in this fictional world.

A world without language is, by definition, a world without language and so a world without propositions.

If you want to claim that a world without propositions is incoherent/empty then you must claim that a world without language is incoherent/empty, but that's a strong form of anti-realism, and presumably not something that you (or Banno) are willing to endorse.

It's a fictional world in which planets and stars exist but people and propositions don't, just as the Lord of the Rings universe is a fictional world in which orcs exists but computers don't.

Like Banno you're equivocating. The fact that we use language and propositions to talk about a fictional world does not entail that there are languages and propositions in this fictional world. — Michael

You keep misunderstanding me. I'm not on a mission to blow up your viewpoint. I'm just exploring the ideas associated with it. You brought up possible worlds and the in/at distinction. Then you said possible worlds can be sets of physical objects in spacetime. Do you want to back out of that now? Because Frodo definitely isn't a physical object in spacetime. He's just an idea. Do you want to continue talking about possible worlds or just drop that notion?

Because Frodo definitely isn't a physical object in spacetime. — frank

Again, you're equivocating.

When we talk about a fictional world in which there is gold but no people we are not talking about a fictional world in which there is imaginary gold but no people; we're talking about a fictional world in which there is actual, real, physical gold but no people.

Even if this fictional world is imaginary.

we're talking about a fictional world in which there is actual, real, physical gold but no people. — Michael

How can you have actual, real, physical gold in a fictional world? That's like if I dream of a cat, I have an actual, real, physical cat in my dream. How can that be?

A world with planets and stars but no people is not an empty world; it's a world with planets and stars.

A world with planets and stars but no languages is not an empty world; it's a world with planets and stars.

A world with planets and stars but no propositions is not an empty world; it's a world with planets and stars.

The fact that these are imaginary worlds and that we are people using language and propositions to talk about them is irrelevant.

A world with planets and stars but no people is not an empty world; it's a world with planets and stars. — Michael

Real planets and stars? Or fictional ones?

By the way, I was going to buy one of David Lewis' books one time, but it was three figures, so I decided to wait until the price comes down. We should go in on a purchase.

Real planets and stars? Or fictional ones? — frank

Do you understand the difference between these two fictions?

1. A world in which magic exists and Santa is a fiction
2. A world in which magic exists and Santa is real

Something can be real within a fiction without being real in the real world.

Do you understand the difference between these two fictions?

1. A world in which magic exists but Santa is a fiction
2. A world in which magic exists and Santa is real

Something can be real within a fiction without being real within the real world. — Michael

My question is about the ontology of the world where magic exists and Santa is real. That whole thing is just a set of ideas, right?

My question is about the ontology of the world where magic exists and Santa is real. That whole thing is just a set of ideas, right? — frank

Yes, and completely unrelated to anything I am saying.

Here are two more fictions:

1. A world in which vibranium, people, and languages exist
2. A world in which vibranium exists but people and languages don't

And two more fictions:

3. A world in which vibranium, languages, and propositions exist
4. A world in which vibranium exists but languages and propositions don't

You claimed earlier that a world without propositions is an empty world, and you are wrong. (2) and (4) are worlds without propositions but they are not empty; they contain vibranium.

(2) is a world without propositions but it's not empty; it's a world with vibranium. — Michael

Let's call this world wV.

1. wV is a fictional world.
2. everything in wV is fictional.
3. fictional things are ideas
4. fictional vibranium is an idea
5. wV contains fictional vibranium

Conclusion: wV contains an idea.

Correct?

Conclusion: wV contains an idea.

Correct? — frank

No.

Again, there are fictional worlds in which Santa is an idea (e.g. Breaking Bad) and there are fictional worlds in which Santa is a living, breathing person (The Santa Claus).

But again, this is unrelated to anything I am saying.

No. — Michael

Which part of the argument is wrong?

The entire argument equivocates, as I explained earlier.

That we are using language to talk about a world without language does not entail that language exists in this world – by definition, it doesn't.

That we are using propositions to talk about a world without propositions does not entail that propositions exist in this world – by definition, they don't.

And a world without language is a world without propositions.