since reference to such arcana aren't necessary to behavioral modeling, on this view. — J

Yeah. There's relevant questions about what counts as a behaviour, in what contexts. I enjoy that degree of recursion in a functionalist approach, but I don't know if that move would be available to our deflationist stereotypes. There's probably some logical workaround to it that lets you construe such questions as a modelling in the sense I put it, but I don't know how to do it without reducing the concept to be just our behaviour. Which isn't quite the same thing. We'd be talking about how we talk about stuff, rather than about stuff. Even if the stuff we're talking about is how we talk about stuff.

Can you say more about this? I want to read you as saying that the deflationist doesn't countenance any abstract structural modeling but I'm not sure that's what you mean. — J

What I meant is that the deflationist who is a functionalist refuses all questions which do not take the form of that modelling exercise about a prespecified entity. More general structural principles about connections between {roughly} being ( B ) and thought ( B' ) aren't even to be entertained. And moreover, that the only way of approaching specific instances of that connection is with these behavioural trappings.

My non-deflationist functionalist would approach specific instances of modelling like I specified, as a schema, but also be willing to entertain questions about the schema connecting objects to concepts through modelling - and how that connection relates to thought, being, and thought and being's interrelation.

The deflationist stops at the schema structure, it's a barrier to all further inquiry.

There are lots of ways this discussion could go. I'm just going to call someone who does metaphysics in the modelling approach a "functionalist", so that I've got one word for it. This choice of words corresponds to Sellars' philosophy of language being called functionalist, and also references old discussions on the site about related issues with @Isaac.

That is, whether there is any reason, in principle, not to expect that the models can be kept in synch.

For the moment, I'm inclined to assume that there is not. And if not, it's not clear in what sense we would distinguish the model duck from a duck. — Srap Tasmaner

I think there are a few readings of:

That is, whether there is any reason, in principle, not to expect that the models can be kept in synch.

I'll set up a bunch of symbols for stuff. The modelled entity, your duck, will be X. Its true set of behaviours will be B. The set of behaviours the model has accounted for will be B'. For now, I'll just assume that "accounting for" a behaviour is a very weak condition. The weak condition being that some subset of true behaviours b in B will be accounted for if they are mapped to some subset b' in B'. Roughly saying "this bunch of stuff the entity does in reality corresponds to that bunch of stuff in my model". That isn't saying anything about accuracy or internal coherence, just about correspondence.

Keeping in synch would be whenever some collection of behaviours b in B is discovered, then some corresponding set of behaviours b' in B' could be added.

With this really weak idea of correspondence, I agree with you that one should expect the models can in principle be kept in synch. Because any description of some behaviours b in B can be added as a b' in B'. It makes it hard, if not impossible, to find a counterexample in the functionalist approach's own terms. Which means the only way around that is a table flip - reframe the discussion.

And that's why I'm posting. Much as I've enjoyed building models over the years, I'm a little uncomfortable that the approach I'm describing has a sort of blindness. Whenever a question is raised about what something is, it is immediately rewritten as a question about how that thing behaves, so that we can get started modelling that bundle of behavior. — Srap Tasmaner

I think this impulse is the one that I have, yes. But I think that you can study mappings from B to B' for their own sake, which are metaphysical questions and epistemological ones. Those strands of questions, if I can be ridiculously presumptuous, might be corralled into the themes:

Metaphysics: what is it about the objects that allows them to be conceptualised as they are?
Epistemology: what is it about our concepts that makes them adequate to their objects?

And abstract answers in those domains of inquiry seem intelligible. Like general principles "a being is what it does", or "if two people's concepts of the same objects have inequivalent representative quantities, they instead have different concepts".

I think where a deflationist who also enjoys the functionalist paradigm above would disagree with a functionalist simpliciter is whether metaphysical {and maybe even epistemological} questions can only concern specific instances of the mapping between true behaviours and our descriptions. In effect, they disagree on whether the only salient questions about objects and concepts are of the modelling form. Which is roughly describing how things work, or describing {how describing things work} works.

There's more I want to say, but I'll need to figure out how to say it first.

@Srap Tasmaner

I have a lot I want to say, but I will need to take some time to respond.

Thank you for your service.

I suppose the question is whether every language is equally attentive. For example, pre-Newtonian language will represent gravity differently than post-Newtonian language, and that difference will increase the further we move from Newton in either direction. The broad idea here is that languages (and customs) can be better or worse for truth talk. — Leontiskos

Oh yes absolutely. I think the perspective I'm advocating accommodates this: the conditions of correct assertibility are historically fungible without being arbitrary, our connection to patterns of events can be revised - tightened or loosened as needed. Sellars draws a distinction between two flavours of discourse, scientific and manifest images. A scientific image is the norms. interpretive devices and posited entities of a scientific discourse, a manifest image is the norms, interpretive devices and posited entities of an everyday discourse. The two overlap and borrow from each other, also contradict along their interstices. They can disagree without one image preferable over the other.

It's correct to say that my table is a wave function. It's also absolutely insane to do so in public.

I would say that both perception and knowledge involve crucially passive aspects. For example, Aristotle thought that there was an active part of the intellect and a passive part of the intellect, and that knowledge requires both. Push and pull. — Leontiskos

I think this is something we'd need to get into with a hypothetical myth of the given thread.

When I complain about anthropocentric philosophies or ontologies, this is largely what I am thinking of. Such philosophies don't seem to give proper due to the finitude, limitations, passivity, and receptivity of human life. If we talk about everything that exists as "things we do" (even in the sense of perceiving or knowing), then a collective solipsism is just around the corner. — Leontiskos

I think I avoided this. I claimed that we assess mind independence - it is something we can establish. Like we'd establish that there are eggs in my supermarket. I'm claiming it's the same flavour of fact as the others. You can tell if something will be there when humanity won't be, or alternatively when its nature is not exhausted by our collective norms.

Freewheeling a bit, my hunch is that part of the move to linguistic philosophy was an attempt to simplify the object of study, and to get away from theories of mind or soul or whatnot. It's desirable to get away from those theories because the human is such a strange creature, such a strange mixture of mind and matter, of spiritual and earthly, of activity and passivity/receptivity. But the most characteristically human acts and artifacts inevitably share the same paradoxes of their source. Human languages, art, relationships, communities, etc., all contain those same paradoxes. And language along with the norms inherent therein are both active and receptive in the same way that humans are active and receptive. Language is not only imposed and created, it is also received, and part of that reception involves natural constraints and receptive facts, such as the fact that things fall when dropped. We could make a language that takes no account of that fact, but it would be inferior to one that does take account of it. In this way the social norms can be better or worse, insofar as they better reflect/mediate/receive reality. Thus it will be easier to tell the truth with certain languages and social norms. — Leontiskos

I agree with this. I dislike phrasing things in terms of language alone, I much prefer including perception vocabulary. Though language and perception clearly relate - seeing a duck as a duck is a way of counting that as a duck. And moreover you can't set up speech norms without hearing - coordinating sound pulses with events inferentially/perceptually.

I would say that all of the norms and customs that you are so interested in are at bottom grounded in these sorts of receptive facts (and because of this when we go "all the way down" we find something wholly different from a social construction). It is not quite right to say that these receptive facts are "something that we do." They are part of our life, but they are not something that we do. That things fall when dropped, or that mammals eat, are not things that we do. They are things that we recognize. They are truths that we recognize. Language and norms aid us in recognizing them, but the recognition is only an action in part. For it is also a passion in part (i.e. something that happens to us, or something that we yield before). Perhaps the grand-daddy of receptive facts is death, and the grand-daddy of activistic resistance to this fact which must be received is Kubler-Ross' stage of "denial" and distraction. The resolution stage is "acceptance," which is not accurately described as a form of doing. — Leontiskos

So I actually agree with this. But in a manner where I think perception is implicated in custom and vice versa.

"Plate/food is placed along the edge of the table, close to the one who will eat" - this is even more 'receptive' and transcending of norms, as it will apply to cultures without silverware and even in a modified sense to most all mammals, given the fact that eating requires physical appropriation of food, which requires spatial juxtaposition. — Leontiskos

I agree with this, but:

We could make a language that takes no account of that fact, but it would be inferior to one that does take account of it. In this way the social norms can be better or worse, insofar as they better reflect/mediate/receive reality. Thus it will be easier to tell the truth with certain languages and social norms. — Leontiskos

I don't quite agree with this. Because I don't think any of the languages we care about and use are inattentive to perception and the nature of the world. And that's because perception's a required mechanism in setting up coordinations between patterns and sequences of our acts, as well as source of patterns in itself. Like you need to perceive your partner in a dance to lead or follow, and they need to perceive your acts of perception and movements to coordinate with them and thus you. My student needed to perceive the words coming out of my mouth, as well as relate my inferences of whether they were correct or not to their inferences of the sequence pattern.

If you're interested in the myth of the given, it's a notoriously difficult argument, and would probably be worth its own thread. I think the above reference to inferential patterns being "baked into" perception and norms gestures in the direction of the concepts involved. Perception's a constructive endeavour, so's language use, and "giving and receiving" {if I've read you right} get their distinction undermined. Like in the dance example, every giving is a receiving and vice versa, and "what is given" and "what is received" are the same flavour of thing. Acts and events. Pulling with one's hands, going up on tiptoes, coming in for an embrace. Whose content is set up through inferential and practical relations as well as the event+act sequences themselves. It's a big recursive clusterfuck.

I think a weakness in my view above concerns the content of acts of language. Because I've spent a long time talking about norms and correct assertion without engaging in a perhaps necessary metaphysical task. Trying to account for the commonality in our truth-speaking practices, and indeed in our acts. People eat. People entering a home agree upon object locations and object boundaries. There's a stability of content in the world itself which is somehow aperspectival. People can only disagree so much when we inhabit the same system of norms and environments - things fall down when dropped.

Everything I've said raises a puzzle about how that content comes about in a positive sense.

In a negative sense, I've already spoken about the world and our acts together constraining practices through the norms of correct assertion, and correct assertion coordinating with event sequences. But I've not explained or even attempted to explain commonalities in event sequences or the content of the coordinating mechanisms. People tend to say things fall down when dropped because things fall down when dropped, how? How do environmental developments place constraints on norms of language use? I think the only answer I've got available for that is that event sequences can already be patterns. But that doesn't specify the relationship of pattern content with coordinating norms regarding that pattern.

Maybe it's possible to construe that as a deflationary solution to the issue - we've already got that event sequences are or are not patterned, what more would we want than a structural symmetry between patterns and our acts? I'm not sure how to answer that question. But I do suspect that there's a ghost of the structure of things haunting my perspective.

And I'm not sure what to do about that. Other than talk about specific pattern contents and appeal to norms of correct assertion regarding statements about pattern contents. Like I set up with my toy example with sequences - I got to set up the underlying pattern because it was just maths. The world's far more unwieldy.

Okay, but then it looks like being a duck (or being identified as a duck) is a sufficient condition for counting as a duck. — Leontiskos

I think being successfully identified as a duck counts whatever is identified as a duck. I think a correct identification would let someone correctly assert "that's a duck!" and have it be true. Regardless of whether it really is a duck. I'm putting it this way because I'm stressing that identification is an act, whereas being a duck is not one. You can correctly assert "that's a duck!" on the basis of some {nebulous} standards. But you can't correctly assert the duck being a duck. Because that's just what it is.

Further, I don’t see any significant difference between, “This is a duck,” and, “It is true that this is a duck.” So when <I asked> whether you recognized the difference between, “The duck is a duck,” and, “The duck counts as a duck,” I was comparing the truth claim to the behavioral-concept claim. I don’t see how we can have behavioral concept claims “all the way down.” — Leontiskos

As a summary before I respond in detail: the world isn't true or false, it's just the world. Which means that true or false concerns our statements about it, and the world. Claiming that something is true correctly is just to correctly claim that something is true. That's about how I see it.

So in detail. I think we're construing the scope of behavioural concepts a bit differently still. I'm including statements like {"this is a duck"} and concepts/norms/behaviours like {what makes "this is a duck" correctly assertible} as part of the same idea. They're functions of a linguistic community and its environment {yes I am that debased, seeing language as functional}. And part of those norms is, somewhat paradoxically, the necessary consideration that what is true of holds true in spite or apart from all norms. Since that's how truth works.

We're in a really odd position with the truth, since lots of statements admit of pernickity countermodels - rendering them false. Like the ruler example. But most statements people are committed to do tend to be true in the sense we care about. Like I could state various perceptually derived/implicated beliefs I have about my house, and they'd be true. And that's normal.

This isn't saying it's language all the way down either, because you can say what you like, part of the norms of correct assertion regards justification, evidence, reasoning, experiment etc... none of which just correspond to an individual saying stuff, they correspond to the person embodying {weasel world} collective standards of behaviour in their acts.

The weird rub is that the former paragraphs show that the truth of a matter needs to be seen as independent of norms despite being governed by norms of correct assertion. But it can't be reducible to norms of language, since those are mutable. Nor can it be reducible to the state of the world, as that's neither true or false, nor an item of knowledge. The state of the world itself isn't people-y, the world itself isn't wholly a collaboration with agents. Even the people stuff, like the fact that I bought my desk at IKEA, holds true regardless of the event's involvement of society and social constructs.

I claim that this is only a puzzle if you come at it from the perspective that people cannot and do not assess mind-independence as part of what we do. But we do that all the time. The acts of assertion and assessment which are implicated in the norms of correct assertion don't change the state of the world, and the knowledge that it doesn't - and that we treat the world as if it doesn't - is leveraged in the execution of those norms. Correctness leverages mind independence and intersubjectivity as concepts, and it does those things because the state of things and the community at large do not depend upon any individuals' views of it. And the norms do not depend decisively upon any individuals use or views of them.

Edit: just to contextualise, "counts as" as a concept lives in the latter register, what we'd normally consider philosophy-wise as the interstice between mind-language-thought and world. I'm contextualising "counts as" as a coordination of acts and events, and there's no barrier between acts+events and the world, since acts elicit events and events elicit acts. Acts also are a type of event, and we understand them as such - as something which happens in a social context.

is that counting as a duck is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a duck — fdrake

I realise this could have been unclear earlier. Ordinarily the conditions under which someone correctly identifies X as a duck immediately count X as a duck too. I see that {and I think Sellars sees that} as a behavioural connection rather than a logical one. If something is identified as X, it counts as X. If something counts as X - there's definitely a thingy which counts as X and a counting as.

The tension which I think you're picking up on is the weirdness that comes with treating counting-as as distinct from identity, even though identifying correctly is norm and theory ladened, involving standards of correctness for counting-as.

I agree that this is weird. But I also think it's a good description of how that works. We treat the world as if some things depend on us and some don't. Like the desk I'm sitting at isn't dependent upon my mind for its existence - it really is hard, I don't just think it's hard. But it's still dependent upon human existence in some sense, since it was manufactured by us. Now if you deleted all the humans and left nothing unchanged, the table would not stop existing. Though something like dancing would disappear. along with us.

So there are standards and norms that concern correctly asserting that something is independent from us. We're usually right about that - but we could be wrong.

It's a giant hall of mirrors. Every time someone is going to say "true", I'm going to replace it with a behavioural concept that's jury rigged to fit just how we use the word. And then I'm going to argue that the jury rigging is also in the territory. Irritatingly for everyone involved, self included, the jury rigging will actually tend to be there, and that can restart our conflict.

How do you know that a duck is not a social construction? — Leontiskos

If you're asking me how I'd approach the question IRL, I'd just say things like "it's a wild animal", "it's not something like a society or a contract", "it doesn't care about human social life" etc. I think I've got the same recourse here. When you say something is a duck, in all but the most obscure circumstances, that comes along with what I've just said. Which serve as reasons for excluding ducks from being social constructions.

You could reason that I've dodged the question, and substituted a particular case of counting as for the general case - but I don't know why this wouldn't be an available move to me? I've given good reasons for why ducks aren't social constructions. I think it's evident that counting as a duck isn't the same as being a duck, too. Like a picture of a duck isn't a duck, it's a picture of a duck. But you might still say "that's a duck" on the picture.

Moreover, ducks would exist without us. Perhaps that would be a cuter world.

The moral of the story, I think, is that counting as a duck is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a duck. Being a duck is also not a necessary or sufficient condition for counting as a duck. But if something quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, smells like a duck... it probably is a duck. And I imagine it counts as one too.

In my opinion this is a highly controversial claim. I’d say that when a child points to the fire and says, “Fire!,” she is not saying, “This counts as fire,” but rather, “This is fire.” Or rather, whatever she is doing is much closer to the latter than the former. — Leontiskos

I agree with you about fire, but see the above example about "that's a duck" regarding a picture of a duck. Hence things about pomo and pipes.

For me the conceptual priority question is something like this. Suppose you are training a novice in the CIA to root out foreign spies. Are you going to teach them what counts as a spy? Or are you going to teach them how to identify a spy? I think they are quite different. And if—contrary to natural language use—all we mean by “counting as” is “correctly identifying,” then we are really talking about identifying spies. — Leontiskos

Yeah. I think this is quite similar to what I was talking about with @Srap Tasmaner earlier. You can read the above as introducing a much higher, much more precise, much more contextually astute, standard for counting someone as a spy. You want a checklist that lets you correctly assert someone is a spy - identifying them right. And in those conditions someone should definitely say "that's a spy".

At this stage I’m primarily interested in whether you only mean “counting as” as “identifying” or “correctly identifying.” — Leontiskos

I don't fully embrace the distinction in the way you're framed it, I think. If you satisfy the appropriate standard, I think you can correctly claim that something is the case. Even if later evidence comes to light that one was wrong. That may seem absurd, but I think it's comparable to the death by precision that I mentioned earlier regarding having only a very exacting standard for truth. Is the ruler 30cm long? Obviously, it's a 30cm ruler. Turns out it's 30.0005cm long. Dang it. I'd want to side with someone who said it was 30cm long, and say they spoke the truth.

What I'm interested in with that is how truth as a concept behaves. I've long given up hope that something as bizarre as a sentence can state facts as plainly as we need to believe they are stated. But nevertheless, we need to believe they are stated plainly, so the truth will have to do in its own stead.

“If we define a triangle as thus-and-such, then it counts as a triangle. If we define it in a different way then it may not.” — Leontiskos

I didn't mean it like that.

So if a pragmatist wants to say that it’s just “counts as” all the way down, this is presumably because their philosophical anthropology precludes any other options. “All humans are doing is trying to survive,” or, “All humans are is a product of genetic-evolutionary factors,” or, “All humans are doing is aiming at different pragmatic goals.” If that’s “all humans are doing,” then they aren’t doing any truth stuff. At least not really or primarily. Hence while it is possible to separate mind from the world and create an unbridgeable gulf, there is also an opposite error where there is not a sufficient distinction between the mind and the world for knowledge and truth to even exist in their robust form. — Leontiskos

It might surprise you, but I agree with this and find it a bad trend. I see all of those as irritating reductionisms. I'm equally irritated by a reduction of our being to ideas/thoughts.

Though I imagine I fall into your condemnation bucket here, since I definitely don't see humans as doing "truth stuff" primarily, we do however do it. I'm of the opinion that a commitment to understanding stuff leads to seeing humans without prioritising our agency {as normally intuited} ontologically though.

Fire is hot. It doesn’t merely count as hot. — Leontiskos

Aye. I agree with that, in the sense you're meaning "count as" anyway.

Do you admit any knowledge which is not reducible to a social construction, custom, or convention? Or is it “counts as” all the way down? — Leontiskos

Put slightly differently, if counting as a duck is a social construction, and a duck counts as a duck, then a duck is a social construction (contrary to what you say here). — Leontiskos

I don't think that follows. Can you show me how it does? I'm suspicious because the premises are "if counting as a duck...", and "the duck counts as as a duck". I'm also thinking that you think of a social construction quite differently than what I do - I see it more as a verb than as a noun.

Maybe this is different, but you have to wonder: does it make sense to talk about something counting as a duck, if you don't know what it means for something to be a duck? — Srap Tasmaner

That's his Kantian move. It's about conceptual priority. — Srap Tasmaner

I think it does make sense to talk like that. You need to learn what "is" means. Which doesn't mean that "counts as" is prior to "is" in all senses of priority. There are two senses of priority in Sellars I believe. And I think they are helpful. There's an order of being, which concerns what is, and an order of knowing, which concerns our learning. "counts as" is prior to "is" in the order of knowing, but "is" is prior to "counts as" in the order of being.

That's to say that recognising a duck requires there to be a duck and recognitions. The duck would've been there regardless. The process of recognition would've been there regardless. But you can't think about recognising a duck without there being recognition of ducks. Or ducks.

Having one sense of priority - equating between the order of being and the order of knowing - is in my opinion the engine of interminable debate in this thread. People fundamentally understand that in order for there to be recognition of ducks, there needs to be recognition, and ducks. And then ask which comes first. The answer is neither and both. Neither in the sense that ducks and recognition have anything to do with each other insofar as they exist, both in the sense that no one would recognise a duck if there were no ducks and no one would recognise a duck if there were no recognitions.

It's conceptual priority again. It's not obvious that our concepts can be "counts as" all the way down. As a general matter, taking x as y requires that you know what y is, else the gesture is empty. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. And we need to simultaneously grapple with the fact that we learn to tell what is from what isn't. I guess we should make a distinction between counting as as a concept and counting as as a practice, too. People count stuff as stuff all the time, and that's a practice. And kids do it before they learn what "is" means. But we adults are going to know that counting as as a concept depends upon what is in some sense. I think Brassier put it something like: "in order to know what "is" means, we need to know what "means" is".

So with regard to "all the way down" - that's an intuition based on there being one hierarchy of concepts. Some things are prior to other things. And "prior" in the former sentence means one thing. That thing is: X is unthinkable without Y. Such a hierarchy has an air of applying to everything, but that makes it very bloated. You end up needing to ask whether cheese is prior to geese. Which doesn't make much sense, as cheese has nothing to do with geese. So priority must be restricted.

I'd suggest that this conceptual hierarchy concerns what is thinkable, rather than what is. I'm not going to make an argument for why that is unless demanded to though - I'm just going to look at some examples and describe a pattern.

Cheese and geese have nothing to do with each other. So it seems odd for that reason. I think that can be relaxed a bit: "human settlements would not be thinkable without agriculture" - human settlements have rather a lot to do with agriculture, but we know that there were settlements without agriculture. "history would not be thinkable without time" - you could read that substantively or conceptually, there would've been no human history without time. But also you could read it as claiming the concept of history makes no sense without the concept of time. The last one seems to be closest to the domain where the question crops up.

"Cheese is unthinkable without geese" makes no sense because the two have nothing to do with each other - the two terms in unthinkability need to be relevant to each other, and not just independent entities or types of entities.

"human settlements would not be thinkable without agriculture" - this makes sense, but is false, as there is a substantive counterexample. People did think of one + once you "see" the example, you think of it.

"history would not be thinkable without time" - this makes sense, you can't {easily?} form a counterexample, and it concerns two very abstract flavours of thing which share lots of aspects.

The first two agree with you, the answers depend upon what is. They also agree with you that unthinkability as a concept piggybacks on "is" as a concept. The latter's a different flavour of question since you can't look for examples, even though it shares the same words.

Let's go through the claims again looking at how "counts as" works in them.

"Cheese is unthinkable without geese" - there's absolutely nothing about cheese which impacts what is recognisable as a goose. So the two have nothing to do with each other in terms of "counts as"

"human settelements would not be thinkable without agriculture" - this turned out to be false because there was a human settlement without agriculture. Notably, something counted as a human settlement without agriculture, so it was a counterexample.

"history would not be thinkable without time" - could something be counted as a concept of history without counting as a concept of time? Yeah, mathematised time doesn't count as narrative history. But maybe that's missing the thrust of the question. The idea would be something about... conceptual implication or conceptual involvement, that there could be nothing which counts as a history without implying some involvement of the concept of time in the counting act.

I want to suggest that because the thinkability question makes sense without needing to be able to find an example even in principle, but examples can be relevant, that "is" is involved conceptually in counting as. And isn't thus conceptually dependent upon counting as. And we even understand it as such.

But "is" as a concept does seem to be dependent upon counting as in terms of how it is assessed, learned etc. Learning to tell what is from what isn't. What is... is posited as, and behaves as, independent of the specifics of what we think, and even whether we think at all. And that's it working as intended.

One of my first lessons in philosophy to my children was the old joke: how many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg? And the answer is: four, because calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg. — Srap Tasmaner

I like it.

The duck is a duck," is not the same as, "The duck counts as a duck" — Leontiskos

Eating is not something we make up. It is not something we ratify. — Leontiskos

Yes! We agree. I think the "the duck is a duck" is a form of the duck counting as a duck. But it's a form of a duck counting as a duck which has very strict standards. This isn't to say that a duck is a social construction, even though counting as a duck is. I'd also want to stress that social constructions are real too - if you marry someone, you really are married to them.

I should admit that I don't really recognize your "counts as" idea: — Leontiskos

It's butchered from Sellars. He has a unique combination of nominalism and naturalism, which I really like.

Brandom sees something in him, I don't know what, but I trust his eyes.

But folk will use that to go all Hegelian. — Banno

Yeah it's a quagmire. But Big Mad H might've been on to something.

Counting as... has a world-to-word direction of fit; the world is changed so that the crate becomes a calf raise platform. (I had to look that up. Though at first it had something to do with animal husbandry.) — Banno

Yes. Though I don't enjoy limiting it to words, or cleaving language from world as if there could be a single direction of fit between the two. My visual impression of a duck counts as a duck. The duck counts as a duck. "the duck" counts as a duck.

I put it back in the lounge since it's a popular internet troll question.

I take that as a psychological or neurological question. Arguably neural nets are built in order to continue in some pattern - to "predict" is how it is usually phrase. — Banno

I suppose we could quibble about the boundary between philosophy, psychology and neurology. I suspect there isn't too much of one. Considering the degree of interdisciplinary collaborations involving the disciplines.

My calculator is a phone. Puzzling. — Banno

Hah.

So aren't pretending and imagining different to "counting as..."? When we count as, we "carry on" in the same way. We say this paper counts as money, and use it for transactions in an ongoing fashion. But pretend money or imaginary money - say a toy dollar note or a dream of a lottery win - can't do this. — Banno

I think they're species of counting as.

Your paper money counts as money in its ordinary social role. You could use it in its traditional business role as a straw. Or as tinder for a fire. It really does count as paper money in its ordinary social role. But the paper money isn't necessarily counting as money when it's tinder, or a straw. Part of what makes the paper money money is its ongoing use as money (including what it looks like, who created it etc).

You wouldn't refer to it as a straw or as tinder though, as the object isn't baptised that way. Things tend to keep their name from their primary context of use in the broader society - like my plastic crate keeps being called my plastic crate despite its primary use in my home being as a calf raise platform. Which it absolutely counts as for appropriate exercises.

It's what we do, a habit, and needs no further explanation. — Banno

Even to learn that the practice of "counting as"? I can certainly set it up like: let's pretend that this calculator is a phone... And it's not just an analogy for counting as, it'a a learnable instance. My suspicion is that because it's learnable, and can even be conceptualised abstractly like we're doing now, there's enough there to make it possible to give an account of it. Because there's clear learnable instances which can coordinate with - and maybe modify! - instances of the concept.

Like if instead of pretending my calculator was a phone, my student instead imagined the calculator was a phone. They'd be counting-as differently, even if they're they're counting-as the same thingy. I'd be able to correct them perhaps - if you sit there doing nothing, you're just imagining rather than pretending. They would have understood a context of treating the calculator as if it were something else regardless.

If my student pointed out to me that they were visualising ringing me with the calculator? They'd correct my correction... correctly.

Another toy example, rather than an argument.

"Counts as..." underpins language. — Banno

Yes! Though I think how "counts as" works can be shifted, intentionally or unintentionally. Like your "I'll eat my hat" example. You can say that it works as an expression of incredulity because a hat doesn't count as something which would be eaten - it's more than that of course, but it's part of it. A particularly strong and striking violation of expected word use in one context... becomes an expected word use in another. This isn't quite right. But I think it illustrates the point.

Edit: more vague words - we might disagree about whether "counts as" has a mere functional priority in language, or whether it has a transcendental priority. As in, whether "counts as" is another role of language, behaviour, coordinating norms, or whether it acts as a precondition. Perhaps even an unanalyzable term. I'd side with the former. I think norms modify themselves enough to remove any "a priori" flavour thing from them.

It treats the universe as sort of flat and so it tells a story that is sort of flat. — Srap Tasmaner

I have a guess at what you mean. One way into that flatness is that I've used "count as" in a single sense in the post, whereas there's so many ways for people to mean things. And it seems more multifaceted than x counts as y in context z. There'll always be a problem of individuating and binding into contexts too. Individuation - what generates the tokens in one context? And binding - is a context demarcated from others? The way I've set up coordinating norms takes a binding for granted - a context of mutual articulation of event sequences to coordinate. And also individuation for granted - that the tokens involved in the coordination are generable as distinct.

The relationship between individuation and binding is, I think, implicated in setting up a coordinating norm as well, because someone can posit an association and run with it, or note a correlation and study it.

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...}.

There are an infinite number of quoted mathematical equations that we could write out inside the World A circle, — Michael

That was the point from before though, switching from asserted to assertible, or stated to statable, changes lots of things. There's an infinite number of quotable mathematical equations that you could write, but only a finite numbed of quoted mathematical equations which have been written. You can prove that there's an infinity of true equations like this:

The equation n+(n+1)=2n+1 is an equation, left hand side is right hand side, so " n+(n+1)=2n+1 " is true. But the set of all such equations bijects with the input set - every input has a unique output. In particular it's true for all the natural numbers, so that's an infinity of true equations. All but finitely many have never been written.

But you know they're all true. Even the unwritten ones. Since they satisfy the equation n+(n+1)=2n+1.

But I was saying something stronger: we don't so much tell the truth as reveal it, or at least do our part in revealing it. Here's that metaphor taken literally: there is a curtain hiding the facts; I pull it back on my side so that you can begin to see what's behind it, and if you pull the rest on your side, things as they are stand revealed. ― Now, maybe it's best to admit we never quite get the curtain pulled all the way clear, maybe in fact all we get are glimpses now and then when we manage a gap in the curtains, but those glimpses are real and what we see and understand is reality to that degree revealed. — Srap Tasmaner

Alright, I'm beating this to death, which is too bad because I think there are limitations to the seeing business, and very often what we really need and share with each other is narrative, — Srap Tasmaner

I see what you mean about the seeing. 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. I think what draws me to Sellars on the matter is that utterances are of the same ontological order as literally pulling back curtains. The coupling occurs not because there's one ontological regime over here (language) and one over there (world), there was only ever "world and world", but bubbling up representationally through coordinating behaviours.

but it truth is never truth only from a particular perspective. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. I agree. When someone makes an assertion which claims something is true explicitly, rather than taking it for granted, that deposits what is purported into a crucible of collective behaviour and all the stuff that happens. The claim counting as true in other circumstances is quite different from it being true when it gets deposited in the crucible.

We have an incredible ability to coordinate our behaviour in a manner that depends upon no one in particular (intersubjectivity) but also based upon what no one's done yet (like your maths examples), and through the latter it becomes possible (maybe even correct) to treat truth as mind independent - as it won't matter who says what when, even before humans existed. Because gold existed in the time before humans. That ability to defer to the coordinating norms makes language work well in excess of our current and past enactment of it - as every norm is an expectation, and expectations concern arbitrary states of affairs.

This is a tangent on your tangent, my impression is that philosophical discussions rarely give more than lipservice to the distinction between different uses of truth, or people's behaviour when we claim something is true vs when we claim something. Counting as true and being true get equated, despite being quite different in terms of norms - something can count as true just when it's assumed, believed, intended, hoped for, posited... whatevs. Something counts as being true when... well when it really is the case. Which, as far as language use goes, is when it's correct to assert - and the correctness conditions include the ability to reference all the events and stuff which might "reveal" the truth, as you say.

I think even if sentences don't carry truth like a payload, they still ought to be truth-directed and truth-directing. — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah I agree with that. Truth (as a concept) definitely seems to play a privileged coordinating role, even if you grant that it's all coordinating norms. There's a fixity to it there isn't to justification. If something counts as true, it counts as something that can be posited without evidence - accepted for what it is. But then you can have a discussion about whether something is true, which seems to be a discussion which leverages the relevant coordinating norms regarding it particularly intensely - it examines them, and enacts what it means to be a coordinating norm to begin with. So when you say:

I keep finding myself thinking that the great value of saying something true to someone else is helping them see it ― like when you point out to someone that a photo of the faculty of your department has no women in it. — Srap Tasmaner

I think that's very true, when you say something is true, it's a kind of... commitment... but it's not just a personal pledge. It's a pledge you make on behalf of the relevant norms, "see, this is part of that, look at its state". And then you either accept or reject the claim.

I think even if sentences don't carry truth like a payload, they still ought to be truth-directed and truth-directing. — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah. Truth as a process. It's quite Peircian! Infinitism type stuff.

Does that really address any of the issues? — Leontiskos

I doubt it does.

For example, how is the question about the metaphysical status of truth the same as the debates of representationalism?

It isn't generically. It's effectively the same in this thread. You've got a sentence content, you've got a fact, there's a bridge, and the fact and the sentence content are somehow the same thing when the sentence is true. The correspondence mechanism ( or merely incidental matching ) works a bit like a mirror, so the bridge is a mirror. If you'll let me put it briefly with an analogy, we're arguing over whether the mirror has one side or two.

When you move to a world where there are no humans, the bridge breaks.

Someone might claim that there is no mirror, and that the sentence content just somehow "is" the fact, or that the truth is an unanalyzable primitive and we're just talking shite doing all this. Nevertheless in all the cases the world resembles the sentences said about it in a manner that the world will be different if a sentence turns out to be true or false, and in a "precise" manner.

Again with the analogy, the mirror makes that precision exact - the picture is perfect both ways.

What makes me think of it like representation is that you've got the same separation/binding dichotomy working between X and what counts as X, being the fact and the true sentence or the represented and its representation in both cases.

And I don't see anyone disputing the idea that "there are mutual constraints of world and word." — Leontiskos

No, no one is disputing it directly. If I parse the issue like I do above, the correspondence mechanism works like a preservation of content between sentence and fact, they're somehow equivalent. Like if I say "my bottle is 1m along and 30cm forward on my table", that's... where the bottle is. The sentence is true. But it's not quite right, the bottle's an extended object with an ill defined centre, I eyeballed the distances, the table's a shitty IKEA one with a little bend in it... The richness of the world exceeds what you'd expect of if it was exact match, nevertheless the sentence says something right about the table and the bottle

So I don't think that {"my bottle is 1m along and 30cm forward on my table" is true} corresponds to anything, or "displays" a unique matter of fact at all, I think there's a fairly nebulous range of stuff that makes that sentence count as true. But given that you know the sentence is true, it tells you something about the contours of ambiguity. Like the bottle can't be on my ceiling or my lap. But it might be 30.005cm forward.

Which then raises a lot of questions about how a connection like that between the truth of the sentence and the bottle's weird position can be negotiated - and I honestly don't know the details. My intuitions are Sellarsian, and I enjoy Dennett's view of coordinating perceptions with utterances which is pretty similar. Suffice to say I think that the connection is norm mediated, and "is true" means something similar to "is correctly assertible".

With the above account (sketch), the thing which makes me believe it renders our discussion a pseudoproblem is that the interstice between sentences and facts is entirely conventional and doesn't "preserve" anything. We just make conventions of descriptions that try to ensure when people say stuff is blah the stuff counts as blah. That "counts as blah" is the important thing.

Because I believe it's correctly assertible that there were, say, dinosaurs in the world before there were humans. Or if humans never evolved in some world, that world would still have had dinosaurs, all else being equal to ours. And that doesn't bottom out in correspondence to some underlying reality, it bottoms out in something like: "radiocarbon dating has shown dinosaurs existed long before humans" and "the ice age could easily have killed us all" - good reasons for accepting it. Even if those things turn out false, it's still more reasons. But reasons about what is {or what counts as what is :D}.

So roughly, I don't think sentences "bear" truth in the sense required for this debate. It's the norms of use, and we coordinate those by using them in circumstances, and they leave a lot imprecise and unsaid.

Just to be clear, Banno says that you can go either way, saying that the tree makes a noise and dealing with the consequences, or saying that it doesn't, and dealing with a different set of consequences. — Banno

Oh. Sorry for putting the wrong words in your mouth.

You pointed it up in Michael quite well, but to be complete you should also be willing to give your own view. — Leontiskos

Largely pointless pseudoproblem conjured by insisting upon the meaning of sentences being separate from but mirroring the world they engage with. It's ye olde how does the representation correspond to the represented but with sentences. IMO there isn't a correspondence or symmetry of content, there's mutual constraints of word and world, so I don't care much.

Perhaps the word "it" refers to the fact that 799168003115 + 193637359638 = 992805362753? I don't think that facts are the sort of thing that can be true or false, i.e. it's a category error to say that the fact that 1 + 1 = 2 is true. And what if I were to assert the false sentence "1 + 1 = 3"? Was it false before I said it? But the word "it" here can't refer to the fact that 1 + 1 = 3 because 1 + 1 does not equal 3. — Michael

It would be worthwhile discussing whether there is anything more to the fact that 799168003115 + 193637359638 = 992805362753 than how the sentence "99168003115 + 193637359638 = 992805362753" ought be interpreted. Because it seems such a thing takes a particular expressible form. If that form precedes the utterance, all uttering a sentence whose content was that form would do is state what was true anyway on that basis.

Which isn't quite the same thing as "platonism", because there's no mention of mind independence in it: the form's partly determined by the mind, but not totally, and it seems how things are suffices for whether the utterance is true or not. The sufficiency of how things are in determining whether utterances are true or false speaks to that bizarre form of priority - implication is an ordering. And it's certainly not necessary that everything we say is true. So in some sense "how things are" is strictly prior to statements of fact in the order of things.

Which is rather odd, as the order of things resembles the true statements made about it to a large degree.

And what if I were to assert the false sentence "1 + 1 = 3"? Was it false before I said it? But the word "it" here can't refer to the fact that 1 + 1 = 3 because 1 + 1 does not equal 3. — Michael

I think this introduces the additional assumption that a sentence must refer to an extant state of affairs, rather than corresponding to it.

There's a real puzzle in trying to say what more is there to the fact that 1+1=2 than the truth of the sentence "1+1=2". Which you can grapple from either side of that purported equivalence. If you take the quoted side as primary, you find it odd that the state of things can determine what would be truly assertible of it regardless of whether there are speakers, since the interpretation of a sentence depends upon their existence. Conversely, if you take the unquoted side as primary, you might find it odd that true shape of things resembles how we interpret sentences., since the state of things determines whether the sentence is true or not regardless of the equivalence between the fact and the sentential content.

Those two issues are the same thing viewed from two perspectives, and taking either for granted advances nothing in the debate (also @Banno).

Cheers, ↪fdrake. Thanks for chiming in. — Banno

I be trying. Thank you for your thanks.

The alternative I offered, a few pages back, is that there are indeed propositions floating around, but that they are harmless. Extensionally, all we have are individuals, a,b,c... These we name, "a", "b","c"... Then we group them: {a,c}, {b}. Then we name the groups: f={a,c}. Then we form propositions, f(a), f(b). Here, some folk, perhaps Michael, think that we have introduced a new thing into the world — the proposition f(a) — and so need the paraphernalia of "in a world" and "at a world" in order to avoid invoking Platonic forms. — Banno

I think that dodges the issue as stated in thread but not the spirit of the challenge it poses. I don't exactly believe what I'm writing below, I'm just trying to make the discussion productive by providing a bridge.

You've got "we" group them there, which ultimately comes down to why "we" get to form propositions like f( a ) to begin with, right? What the algebra is doing is modelling sentences like "there are rocks" by associating that with a sentence in the logic like "there is at least one x such that x is in R", and R is just a list of rocks. Even if we say God invented the constant symbols we still have to make the predicates.

What that does, if you don't grant the existence of "truthbearers" in a world to begin with, is stop you from forming sentences like "there are rocks" using that algebra in that world. In that world the predicate "is a rock" isn't an empty predicate - it's also not truth-apt as it's missing an argument. The quantified expression "there are rocks" is, however, blocked from being formed. Why? Because what's at stake is whether it makes sense to be able to form it in that world.

What about "outside" that world? @Michael and I got into that a bit. Because there's definitely resources to define sentences independently of worlds, and if you took a world without humans but which had rocks, "there are rocks" somehow makes sense for it (truth@ but not truth-in), even though truthbearers don't... exist... in the same way for that world as they seem to when humans are about. We're still working on that I think.

An yet {a} is still a member of {a,c}, even if there is no one in the world to say it. — Banno

That would be true@. Or T_@ as I called it in a prior post. As in "there is an x such that x is a" is true when quantified over that domain. Which @Michael seems to accept as a cromulent thing. For you that seems to be the only way to talk about true and false, which I called T_R in my attempt at clarification. T_@ looks to be your "true". But truth-in works more like {"there is x" is T_I with regard to W} iff {x in W & a truthbearer for "there is x" is in W}, which is T_@ for x and also T_@ but applied to sentences.

Hence the confusion in thread IMO. You end up having the ability to form sentences being some weird transworldly thing, because it still makes sense if you stipulated a whole bunch of possible worlds with no truthbearers in them. Which is odd when the logic is supposed to describe how sentences work. It'd be like saying recipes exist without food.

Which chimes with:

The platonist places true and false propositions inside the World B circle even though there's nobody in World B to say those things, and I don't think that makes any sense. — Michael

I don't care too much about which account is true, they both seem like cromulent ways of doing business. It's just two ways of answering "If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it does it make a sound...", Michael says no or "mu" or "cannot compute", @Banno says yes, in ye olde page 2-10 @Leontiskos sort of says "yes, because God hears it" and @Wayfarer sort of says "no, because what it means to be a sound is to be heard".

You're in a similar position to saying that "2+2=4" isn't true on the domain {1,3}, because there's no symbol for "2+2=4". Which isn't to say that it's false, it's to say that it's not there.

"There is gold" is true in A. "There is gold" doesn't exist in A-H. — Michael

Aye! That makes the interpretation function partial. Because it doesn't exist. Or you assign the result of the interpretation to "mu" or something. Or you keep it as false and a total function with bivalence.

You're doing it right now. — Michael

I was doing it right before, under the assumption that the interpretation had to be bivalent and not partial. But it's at least not one of them, so you're in a totally different land truth value wise to what it appeared for the rest of the thread. True, false, "unassigned" - that's you!

I don't understand this. T — Michael

Here's a worked example.

This is our actual world, A.
There is possible world connected to ours with no humans, as if we were all instantly deleted. Call it A-H.

Just assume that a world with humans has all the truthbearers you'd wish.

There's gold in A. There's gold in A-H. Gold is an entity in both of their domains.
"There is gold" is true at A, "There is gold" is true at A-H.
"There is gold" is true in A. "There is gold" is false in A-H.

Make sense so far?

Alright, so there's this whole logic surrounding all of this. There's a bunch of possible worlds, the actual world... And in that whole system, it turns out to be the case that:

A) "There is gold" is true at A, "There is gold" is true at A-H.
B) "There is gold" is true in A. "There is gold" is false in A-H.

I've bolded "this case". It's a sense of satisfaction, truth, whatevs. That's something which is the case about... a system of possible worlds. Which isn't a possible world, it's a set of them... it has different semantics. So there's a sense of satisfaction, truth, blah which isn't true@... But it's true of the whole system of worlds. If you took the list of all possible worlds in your system of possible worlds, that system of possible worlds would satisfy {"There is gold" is true at A-H}, now is that satisfaction a satisfaction of truth@ or truth-in? It's neither, because it doesn't concern a world. But it concerns all the worlds... So it's transworld in some sense.

In addition, imagine who could possibly make the speech act that "There is gold" is true at A-H. No one could, there's no one with language in A-H. Which means there's a sense of truth which applies of entities in worlds with no humans. A mind independent truth. And it's truth@.

Which thus means that there's two forms of not mind dependent truth if you retain both truth@ and truth-in as part of your account of truth - you've got truth@ from the latter, and some broader metalogical sense of satisfaction regarding systems of possible worlds which you use to set up truth@ and truth-in in the first place.

Then let's assume you're an anti-platonist, that means you jettison truth@ entirely because of the above mind independence. Which means there's only truth-in. When then means it's either false or incoherent to say it's true that there's gold when there's no humans. Or you take another bull's horn and do something fancy with partial functions and a third truth value.

Maybe the issue is that you and I have very different interpretations of the difference between truth in a world and truth at a world.

All I mean is to make this distinction:

1. Something true can be said about a world without language (truth at a world)
2. Nothing true can be said in a world without language (truth in a world)

And if platonism is incorrect then saying something true or false is all there is to truth and falsity – there are no mind-independent abstract truth-bearers. — Michael

Yeah the distinction makes sense. In the context of the thread, though, it interacts very oddly with lots of things. Truth at a world is something that can obtain of a world without there being truthbearers in it, which would be odd if there were no sense of truth which applied to a world with no truthbearers. In essence, p1 to 20ish of that discussion took to quantifying over truthbearers within a world and saying if no truthbearers, no truths in any sense. Now there are truths in some sense which concern a world and its entities, without necessarily being true in it.

Moreover, your opponents are arguing that to be true is to be true in a world - I think that's what you see it as anyway. And you say that this entails a platonism, like it's a bad thing? But truth at a world has the same trans-world property that made truth in a world incoherent, for you, with regard to truths. So in some sense the following is the case: {that "there is gold" is true at a world}, and that is a fact about a system of possible worlds. And the sense of truth, and the statement {that "there is gold" is true at a world} is something which is transworld, mind-independent, and doesn't care if there are people there or not. If that is stipulated to be a bad thing, making the distinction between truth at and truth in while keeping both in your model of truth concerning possible worlds keeps the bad thing.

Whereas in p1 to 20ish of the thread, the "bad thing" was blocked, because people were explicitly focussing on, and advancing, the (alleged) incoherence of there being truths with no truthbearers. Now it's not incoherent, it's simply platonist. And your interlocutor which keeps true@ and true-in in their account also has one "platonist" account of propositions, true-@. Which isn't really "platonist", it's just transworld, metalogical, whatever. Unless a sense of truth which concerns a world or its elements is platonist when and only when there are no truthbearers in that world but there are truths which concern it or its entities.

C'mooon!

All I'm saying is the usual thing in a discussion like this. That your stated position entails things you are claiming to disagree with. Which is what counts as a criticism or refutation attempt. That's been the crux of the thread. I've spelled out what that meant. Your T_@ behaves the same as their T_R, so your T_@ entails their T_R - that implication doesn't really follow, but everyone is behaving as if it does.

And people are behaving as if it does because no one's arguing about what the appropriate truth concept is for possible worlds directly, only appealing to common sense about it.

C'mooon man, you know as well as I do that repeatedly shifting the frame of the discussion away from how people are disagreeing with you stops people from having a productive discussion. Can we not have another 32 pages of it. I've provided you a very, very thorough breakdown here. It's your choice whether you want to engage with it or not.

I'm simply not saying either.

With what? The problem as I see it as that you and others think I'm saying something I'm not and now you're criticising me for not defending what I'm not saying. — Michael

I am not simply saying that you're simply saying something that you're not saying, I'm saying that what you're not saying simply is part of what you're simply saying, even if you think you've simply said nothing of the sort.

I am simply saying that you are simply refusing to play ball.