Guy calls me up, says....dude, guess what? The cat’s on the mat. What else could I say but....wonderful. Glad to hear it. There’s no way possible for me to grant the truth of the proposition, because I have no means to eliminate it’s negation. The most reductive judgement I’m allowed is granting that it is certainly possible the cat is indeed on the mat, because it is conceivable that he is, in turn because I have extant intuitions of cats and mats and no experience of them ever being mutually exclusive. Conversely, I am also not rightly allowed to judge that the cat is not on the mat.
This is why care needs be taken to understand just what is corresponding to what. The correspondence theory of truth says a proposition is true if it matches a state of affairs, but one still is absolutely required to know with apodeictic certainty what that state is, if he is to cognize a truth about it by means of a subject/object proposition. This is why logicians say P is true IFF it is the case P. If follows that the empirical condition must be antecedent to the proposition itself, anything else warrants merely a possible truth. And.....er......truth be told, the proposition actually presupposes the state of affairs to which it’s asked to correspond.
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Addendum the first:
If the example proposition doesn’t correspond to the state of affairs unless I judge it to, on what basis am I making that judgment in the first place? — AJJ
Herein lay the problem with the correspondence theory of truth understood in this manner. If the proposition does not correspond to the state of affairs to which it is asked to assign a truth value, it’s
because a judgement has been made by which the subject of the proposition does not belong to the predicate, state of affairs be what it may. One does not judge whether the proposition corresponds, but whether the subject and object correspond, or not, from which the truth is cognized, or not, with respect to a certain empirical condition. This is a lot easier to grasp if it be granted that any truth is thought long before it is ever put in propositional form, and the only reason to put any thought at all in propositional form is to communicate it.
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Addendum the second:
It seems, so long as you lock truth within the mind, you get an explanatory regress. — AJJ
I would rather say, not so much an explanatory regress, but a tentative quality of knowledge, and by association, of truth itself. I shy away from explanatory regress because there are theoretical predicates for the human rational system, logically consistent and governed by the principles of universality and necessity. In other words, laws. But then, no matter what anybody says about it, somebody else can say something else, so.......so much for laws. That being said, experience informs us empirical knowledge is never static, even if pure a priori knowledge most certainly is.
I think we say we lock truth with the mind because that’s the only way we can, being the kind of agency we are. It’s why fundamental dualism is impossible to refute. And also why, even if we are not entitled to our own facts, we are sometimes entitled to our own truths.