I can be more specific.

Can you offer a no-models account of disagreement, while I'm working (you know, for money) and mulling over what to say next, and others are thinking about -- and maybe even posting! -- their own accounts of disagreement?

Oh good lord no!

I mean, suit yourself, if you just want to see how it plays out.

But I wasn't planning on doing it all myself. I'm not dribbling out something I've already got all of. I just wanted to do some setup people might agree to so disagreements could be clearer and a way to resolve them might be possible. Was hoping others would be pitching in once I got that out of the way.

I'm wondering if instead you might address the limits of the notion of language as a model. — Banno

Yes and no.

No, in the sense that I'm not trying to build a complete model of language use, just enough to clarify questions about truth.

Yes, in that, if there are problems with such a partial model of language, we should land clearly and unambiguously right on top of them.

The question stays, what is the nature of such a disagreement? About what do these two people disagree? — Srap Tasmaner

Actually thinking now I shouldn't have thrown in the second question. We don't absolutely need it yet -- that is, we don't need to pose this as a question these two people might be expected to answer. This way of posing the question is ambiguous between our description of what's going on and what they might think is going on. The latter is interesting, but I think we can wait.

We have one person saying "Pat's house is white," and the other saying, "Pat's house is black." (Definitive colors.) What are we to make of that?

I said we know immediately that at least one of them is wrong. Why? Presumably because we have accepted the limitation on models that they be consistent, which here means that there can be no model they might rely on that includes both "Pat's house is white" and "Pat's house is black."

Is that reasonable? If it is, we may have no choice but to give an account of how (a) the model I use, (b) the sentences I utter, and (c) the occasions upon which I utter them, are related. There are multiple possible explanations for the utterance of a sentence not in the model.

The issue here is not, how do we flesh out our account of language, because this isn't intended to be a complete account. It's that the only definite path toward truth we have found so far is an account of being wrong (which we hope will be useful). So far we've only established that one of these guys is wrong, but we don't know what that really means. For instance, it needn't mean diverging from the previously accepted model; it could be the divergent sentence is a correction, and wrong is staying with the given model.

I get that you would prefer another approach. Maybe I would too -- I'm undecided.

But this thread has overwhelmingly been about redundancy and T-sentences. All I've done is provide a sort of test-bed that I hope will clarify that conversation. I have already indirectly described both, and I believe most readers here recognize that.

I get that you think this entire approach, and most of this thread is wrong-headed. I hoped one of the virtues of my presentation would be that it is explicit enough, without becoming pedantic, that disagreement with the model could be tied to something I said explicitly. Not just, "here you shouldn't do that but this other thing," but "if you do that, here's the problem you won't be able to solve."

Can you point to something like that? These posts have a very specific purpose, and it's not to provide evidence of whether I think something you approve of.

If I say "Pat's house is green," and you say, "Pat's house is aqua," can we still be considered users of the same model? Do we have different models, or do we disagree about which sentence is part of the model? — Srap Tasmaner

I think disagreement is a natural way into the question of truth; maybe neither of us is right but at least one of us is wrong. (Those colors don't contrast so clearly as I wanted, sorry.)

Is that enough, to get at what being wrong is, and being right is not that? We're accustomed to doing this the other way because of the asymmetry: there's one way to be right but an infinite number of ways to be wrong.

This is an odd case, because it's clearly true (if I had picked better colors) that we can't both be right, even before we give any more substance to what being right is. Without disagreement, you're forced to give an account of being right directly, I think.

Do we need an account of how disagreement is possible? I'd like to assume, to begin with, that we don't, and that even a very minimal sort of disagreement, like one of us misspeaking, will be good enough. We'll find out.

So I'm going to proceed from a scenario like this, to start with, and nothing else, however this situation arose. The question stays, what is the nature of such a disagreement? About what do these two people disagree?

utterly sterile and un-insightful in grappling with why and how humans actually use language. — Joshs

Probably. The principal assumption here (since we're headed for truth) is that language can be used as a medium for making models of the world; if model making is interesting, that would make language interesting.

There are no words or sentences outside o f their actual context use — Joshs

That's literally false, for obvious reasons.

and in their use a word does not point at an object, it creates the object in that it produces a new sense of meaning. — Joshs

Not sure how producing a sense creates an object, but whatever that means it is far more controversial than I was going for.

If you think there is no sense whatsoever in which language can be used as a medium for modeling the world, I won't be saying much that makes sense to you.

But without more I can't judge. — Moliere

What me? I just assumed someone else would pick it up from here...

a good way into the role truth - or like concepts such as accuracy and felicity — fdrake

Yeah that's all I'm going for. Language is other things too, but I'm waiting to see if anything else makes a difference to this discussion.

Back in a little while.

I think that's just about enough setup to begin talking about truth.

I thought something like a simple model of language would be more useful than going round and round about what existing idioms mean. It was intended to be uncontroversial, which turns out to be as much as is uncontroversial of something you might call a kind of functionalism. I'm letting the word "model" do a lot of the work, which some people may not like. I haven't, for instance, tied linguistic behavior to anything more, occasions of utterance, what utterance might imply, anything like that.

Any strenuous objections so far?

the only account we have so far of whether "Pat's house is blue" is part of the model, is precisely the users of the model agreeing to say it. — Srap Tasmaner

Which raises new questions.

(1) Are we really either entitled or required to say there is a model here at all, or are we really only talking about what people agree to say and not say?

If you argue first that being a user of a model just is saying certain things not others, and nothing else, you can quickly reach the conclusion that the model itself is unnecessary.

(2) So what does being a user of the model amount to? If I say "Pat's house is green," and you say, "Pat's house is aqua," can we still be considered users of the same model? Do we have different models, or do we disagree about which sentence is part of the model?

The no-models account seems to have nothing to say here at all: we just say different things; if there are reasons for that, they will come from elsewhere (perhaps even a causal account).

But what would make "My house is blue" part of a model of my house? How can we decide that? Is "My house is green" also part of such a model? Why not? What about "Joe's house is blue"? Is that also part of a model of my house? What about "Joe's car is green"? — Srap Tasmaner

There are two natural options here.

One is a matter of agreement, among the users of the linguistic model, to say "Pat's house is blue" is part of our shared model of Pat's house, or to say it isn't. But we've slipped in new problems and possibly new assumptions: what is "Pat's house is blue"? Is it an object? Does it have, or lack, the property of being part of our model of Pat's house? We can attempt to go around these questions by saying that the users of the model simply agree to say, or not say, the sentence "Pat's house is blue," without talking about the model at all. By saying or not saying a given sentence, users of a model show that the sentence is, or is not, part of their linguistic model, without actually saying that. The latter is still implied, though, and this fact makes certain sorts of sentences ridiculous or puzzling.

The other option is to focus on the model, rather than our use of the model, to devise a systematic way of relating sentences like "Pat's house is blue" and "Joe's car is green." We want to have the kind of model that, by including a sentence like "Pat's house is blue," excludes sentences like "Pat's house is green," "Pat's house is chartreuse," and so on. We also haven't given up entirely on properties, but we want to put aside the question of whether they are objects with names. We still want to say that "Pat's house is blue" means that Pat's house has the property of being blue, and that "Joe's house is blue" means it has that same property, in some sense or other.

There is some motivation for using both approaches. We would like the users of a model, who have agreed to say "Pat's house is blue," also to agree not to say "Pat's house is vermilion," but agreement by itself provides no obvious guarantee that they will do so. On the other hand, the only account we have so far of whether "Pat's house is blue" is part of the model, is precisely the users of the model agreeing to say it. The model can allow only one of "Pat's house is blue" and "Pat's house is cornflower," without telling you which one.

Objects can have names. The name of an object is a linguistic object, which can be used as a representative, a stand-in, for the object (which may or may not be itself linguistic) in linguistic contexts. If you build a small model of your neighborhood, the model of the house in which you live is not a name for your house, though it functions in this context similarly to how a name functions in a linguistic context.

To say something of the state or circumstances of an object, we need more than just names of objects in our language, just as to show the color of your house, you paint the model the same color, to show its doors and windows, you make small versions of those in the, ahem, corresponding places on the model, and to show where your house is in relation to streets, trees, and other houses, you place models of those in the appropriate places.

How we do that in language is controversial. We could say -- in some sense, following Plato -- that there are also objects that are properties of objects, and these sorts of objects can also have names, and so we can conjoin the name of an object and the name of a property, perhaps in a special way, to show that the object has that property, to say that it does. You paint the model of your house blue to show that your house is blue; you say "My house is blue" to show, in language, that it is blue, to model in language its state of possessing the property of being blue.

There are objections to treating properties as themselves objects, objections very important to some philosophers. Does it make any difference? You could still model your house in language by saying things like "My house is blue" even without considering "blue" a name of anything. But what justifies the "is blue" part of the sentence? The presence of "my house" is justified by being a name for my house. If "blue" is not a name for anything, what justifies including it in a sentence which is part of a linguistic model of your house? If your house possesses a certain property, and a name for that property is "blue", we are justified; but if not?

At this point, for some philosophers, suspicion begins to fall on the dominant role of naming here: what we are about here is modeling things in language, and naming is a part of that, but only a part; it's not "in charge", and perhaps shouldn't even be treated as the paradigmatic case of linguistic modeling. The first question, they say, should be whether "My house is blue" is part of a linguistic model of my house, not whether "blue" is a name of anything, not even whether "my house" is a name of anything.

But what would make "My house is blue" part of a model of my house? How can we decide that? Is "My house is green" also part of such a model? Why not? What about "Joe's house is blue"? Is that also part of a model of my house? What about "Joe's car is green"?

[ Off to work. ]

You'll have to join the dots. — Isaac

Nothing complicated or subtle. I assumed concepts include at the barest minimum class membership and exclusion: if I have a concept of jabberwocky, then I'm in a position to say, rightly or wrongly, something is or isn't a jabberwocky. Then I can behave toward it in the way I believe appropriate to jabberwockies. I have to have criteria I rely on to reach a decision regarding an entity about whether it's a jabberwocky or not. Those criteria might be characteristics of the thing, but might be as simple as me believing that you possess such criteria even though I don't, and just asking you and trusting your judgment. But that's pretty weak, and doesn't allow me to have my own jabberwocky-specific dispositions.

That all sounds very old-fashioned. I'm sure there are problems there that need fixing. But it's a starting point, and I think something a lot like that should be a consequence of a better theory of concepts.

So described, concepts sound like predicates, and for some cases that's right. But for a long time I've been uncomfortable with the way classical logic is constructed, which treats all sorts of classification as predication of a completely generic x. I think quantification in natural languages is almost always implicitly restricted, so the logical form of "My dog is barking" is not "There is something such that it is a dog and it is mine and it is barking," but, for a start at least, "There is a member of the class my dogs such that, it is barking." I think we handle sortals quite differently from predicates. An entity that is barking might not be. Some entities that are mine might not be. An entity that is a dog is always a dog, and couldn't be, for instance, a lamp of mine that is now on or off.

(Note that's not a defense of ordinary usage against logic, but a claim that classical logic worked fine for mathematics where quantification is usually restricted but has always been an uncomfortable fit for natural languages where the restrictions on quantification tend to be implicit. Modal logics might get me a lot of what I want, dunno.)

That's my beef with classical logic, and it turns out to be relevant here, not just because jabberwocky is a sortal rather than a predicate, but because you're also erasing all the different ways we might reach for to describe entities and calling them all behaviours, and then even identifying the entity itself as a bundle of behaviours. It's behaviours all the way down, with no agents anywhere.

Which means all we ever do now is describe behaviours, and bundles of behaviours, and that makes them the new entities of unrestricted quantification. Which, you know, fine, but I'm going to be uncomfortable.

What we're talking about, at root, is what it is to be an entity at all. — Isaac

Well, it's not like philosophy has never been here before. I just find this

Not only are we nothing but soup without behaviour, but behaving (acting against the gradient of entropy) is what we are. We are units of anti-entropic behaviour. — Isaac

a bit of an odd halfway house between ontology and physics. I can totally see the appeal, in a unity-of-science way, of something like this, but you're starting with a lot of conceptual apparatus about entropy and the laws of thermodynamics and all that, and then using that to explain the being of entities. Even @apokrisis (who has a related big story) doesn't try to do that, but starts from a more fundamental metaphysics and then gets the physics out of that, eventuating in the universe of medium sized dry goods.

This is the same conversation we were having about truth. In essence, my claim is that you're cheating, but you don't know it. I'm not convinced there is a coherent account of belief that doesn't rely on knowledge as a separate category, and that implies a genuine category of truth distinct from people's opinions. Since you want to deny just that, you have to smuggle it in. Same sort of thing here: you want to explain being in terms of physics, but that's backwards, so you'll have to smuggle in all sorts of stuff physics needs and not acknowledge it.

One issue that's come up recently in this thread is the extent to which we might project the structure of our thought, particularly its linguistic structure, onto reality. I don't want to get into that here, but note that this is an odd area for scientists, because in everyday work they take an instrumental view -- we've got our models, we don't pretend reality is actually like the model, that's not even the point, the only question is how well the model works, we're pragmatists, and if we think about it at all what we think is that we should be self-consciously agnostic about what's really out there, it doesn't change the work anyway. That position only becomes untenable when working in really fundamental areas. (There's a similar situation in mathematics, where people not working in fundamentals take a whole lot of stuff for granted. Fundamentals is almost a separate field.) It gets harder to take the instrumental view, model over here, thing modeled over there. It gets harder to know what even counts as justification or evidence anymore if you're not even sure what the nature of your model is. (There are physicists who believe fundamental physics has been wandering off course for a while now, but even if they're wrong, that's a genuine possibility.) ----- Point being, you come along, a methodological behaviourist, and tell me, in essence, that it turns out your methodology is literal fact, that it's not just a matter of modeling entities in terms of their behaviour, but that entities just literally are their behavior. Now maybe you're right, and you were terribly lucky to have chosen a methodology that turns out not to be a research strategy but a factual description of the universe -- or maybe, just maybe, you're projecting the structure of your thought onto reality.

Well them, I might be wrong... — Banno

Heh. Saw what you did there.

So I don't understand the question. — Banno

I was just hoping you would be more precise. As it stands, your position is that everything we do and say kinda goes together, and I don't know what use that's supposed to be. Not that I would claim it doesn't all kinda go together, but maybe there is something specific we can say now & then.

I'm not sure we are not saying the same thing, but arguing the expressions used. — Banno

I don't have any statistics on this, but I think a safer bet would be that I disagree with everything you say.

I only asked about what you said. Thinking about it on the way home from work, I think I have some idea what you meant, but I'm not going to guess. If you don't want to clarify what you meant, I will live with the disappointment.

I'd still be happy to have some answers about talk of kettles.

I've no idea - that's your phrasing.


Your asking me to explain your own terminology, a terminology I think doesn't work. — Banno

What?

The exchange is right there. None of this my phrasing.

There's nothing in reality that is internal nor external; there's just the stuff we talk about. — Banno

@fdrake mentioned "'access to exterior reality'," and he put scare quotes on it.

I know roughly what he was trying to get at it, but I'm not pressing him for details because it was a broad, speculative post. You seemed to be making a specific point but I don't know what it is.

There's nothing in reality that is internal nor external; there's just the stuff we talk about.
— Banno

What kind of opposition is that?
— Srap Tasmaner

I choose not to talk about the stuff we can't talk about... — Banno

Good for you. What does that have to do with whether anything is internal or external?

There's nothing in reality that is internal nor external; there's just the stuff we talk about. — Banno

What kind of opposition is that?

You could have finished "there's just the stuff that is," or "there's just the stuff we say is inside or outside," but you end up here: x isn't internal or external; x is something we talk about. How is that not just a non sequitur?

a form of life in which both kettles and "kettles" participate — Banno

I'm going to give you a hard time about this, not because I care about you attributing agency to non-persons for purposes of rhetorical grace, but because I want to know what locution you avoided using there.

the one making no sense without the other, — Banno

And now we're back to them being non-persons -- I think. But you could here mean, as you said, that they wouldn't make sense, or you could mean that their behavior wouldn't make sense. The difference matters because one of those things is a word and one of them isn't. If you want to erase the distinction, do that, but do it explicitly.

Talk of kettles makes sense only in making tea, lighting fires, pouring water, seeing steam. — Banno

Okay now a kettle is something we talk about, and it's our talk that may or may not make sense. Above you included both kettles and "kettles" -- or they included themselves -- but here, even as you describe activities that involve kettles, you reach for "talk of kettles." Why? Following all those steps to make tea is not "talk of kettles." But somehow even that seems like "kettles" business to you. What happened to the kettles? Can't how someone uses a kettle also make sense or not? Is that the same kind of sense that talk of kettles makes?

I'm not faulting you. Davidson is slippery, and it's hard not to think this is deliberate. Williamson refers to his "elliptical and somewhat evasive style." He's like the Steven Moffat or J. J. Abrams of philosophy, always hinting at a payoff that's never going to come. What we get instead, what you can actually get your hands on, I always end up finding pretty shallow. He's just not my guy, and I'm less happy every time I try going back to him, which I surely will again. Maybe next time I'll think he's brilliant.

That's pretty plausible, but I wouldn't presume to say what Davidson has chosen not quite to say.

"If a thing is a 'jabberwocky', you ought throw jelly at it."

Don't you now know how to treat something as a jabberwocky? (Ie throw jelly at it)

At no point in that did you need a concept of what a jabberwocky actually is. — Isaac

Ick.

First, that's an argument that we don't need concepts at all. What kind of cognitive psychologist are you? Too much Quine and Wittgenstein in your diet.

Second, absent a concept of jabberwocky-hood, I can't treat anything as a jabberwocky, because for all I know it is a jabberwocky. I am, when it comes to jabberwockies, incapable of pretense.

But suppose, perhaps because I was told to, I throw jelly at something, and do so with the understanding that this is how you treat a jabberwocky. I'm still incapable of inferring that I should pelt something with jelly because I believe, even erroneously, that it is a jabberwocky. And I am incapable of having a disposition to treat anything this way, so you can't even say I'm treating the thing you told me to fling jelly at as I would treat a jabberwocky. And what's behaviorism without dispositions? (A new line for Q-Tip!)

A set of behaviours (including mental ones) — Isaac

There ya go. This is really interesting. You're determined to sound like a behaviorist philosopher of fifty years ago or more, but you know that's a non-starter, so you push some of that style of analysis "inside." I'm sure there's a way of construing this that's uncontroversial -- neuroscientists are prone to talk about your brain telling you stories and so on, but of course that's largely picturesque; there's no cocoa or blankets involved. So did you mean the word "behaviour" as literally as I thought you might?

Something's 'being black' is just saying that we're proceeding under a policy of treating it as black. — Isaac

And I'm saying that's incoherent. We can't treat things as black if we don't have the concept of something being black, so there's no way of explaining being as assuming ((clarifying edit)). This is Sellars's argument about "looks" from EPM, and I see no way around it.

That gets me conceptual priority, but I'm not sure that's what I want.

Or is it infinite tower of models?
— Srap Tasmaner

Yes, basically. — Isaac

The horror! The horror!

Here I think the argument about truth stands only on the basis of what people can possibly be using the word for. — Isaac

Not me. I think that's a different subject, interesting in its own right, but not all questions are about how we use words. To hell with that.

By the way, I liked this:

If you were sure your jar contained 60 marbles, but your clicker has it at 59 is the model of the jar wrong, or the model of how the clicker works? — Isaac

That's a really nice question. I'm trying to avoid knee-jerk responses to it, so no answer yet, but it's on my mind.

proceeding under a policy of assuming it's black will yield fewer surprises. — Isaac

Under a policy of assuming what? That it is black. You're saying the same thing I did but in language that sounds more scrupulous.

Surely he knows that in doing so he can only be asking Marvin's opinion about the barbarians... which Marvin has already given. — Isaac

FWIW, I had the king asking Jack if what Marvin said was true. I did not have the king thinking that

adding a word magically causes Marvin to directly relate the actual position of the actual barbarians — Isaac

You base your belief on your priors. So if your prior model had a 90% confidence that working under a policy of assuming the marble is black will yiedl fewest surprises, then, unless updated by some actual surprise, that's the policy you'll proceed under. — Isaac

And here again, you have actual priors right? Was it really 90% or was it, like maybe any other number at all? And what is the content of that prior? That the actual marble is black. And your beliefs have to be updated by actual surprise? Or is that only what you, perhaps erroneously, modeled as surprise? Shouldn't you be consulting your model of your model? Is there ever any actual input? Or is it an infinite tower of models?

*

Honestly, though, I need to have a think about what this argument is even supposed to show. Is it the "conceptual priority" of knowledge to belief? Am I claiming that no position claiming to cash out everything in terms of beliefs, with no knowledge claims, is even intelligible? I'd really rather argue something else because we still seem to be locked in this bubble of arguing about concepts and assertibility. I'm pretty tired of those kinds of arguments.

Here are two versions of an argument that rather than undermining the traditional understanding of knowledge and truth, partial belief accounts rely on them.

If I'm presented with an urn containing 9 black marbles and 1 white, and asked to reach in and grab one, without looking, then, if I'm rational, my degree of confidence that the marble I pick will be black is 0.9. What is the content of the belief I hold with a confidence of 0.9? That the marble is, in fact, black. I don't know any other way of expressing partial belief except as partial belief about what is in fact the case. In this case, I hold that my confidence should be 0.9 because I know, for a fact, how many marbles are black and how many are white. If I don't know that, upon what would I base my partial belief? If I don't have knowledge but only estimates, those are estimates of how many there actually are, and estimates are better or worse depending on how close they are to being the actual number.

When Frank Ramsey ingeniously measures his confidence that he knows the way to town by wondering how far into a field he'd be willing to walk to ask for directions -- the mother of all "put a number on it"s --to make any use of that, he has to know the result of his imaginary experiment. How far, even roughly, would he walk? There has to be a truth of the matter, even if it comes with error bars, for him to refer back to, or the experiment is a waste of time. In addition to the issue of measuring, there's the issue, as above, of what he's measuring, his confidence that the town is this way; what he's uncertain about is whether he knows which way it is.

We can't conceivably begin to talk about theories or predictions or models if we're unwilling to call anything data.

When do people use 'true'?

To add emphasis to a statement of belief. To convey certainty. To convey trust. To add social weight to their opinion. As a stick to beat their opponents... — Isaac

Marvin tells the king the barbarians are within the walls.

The king asks Jack if that's true.

To me, the simplest way to understand that is that the king is asking, not about Marvin's words, but about what Marvin's words are about, the non-linguistic (gonna use this as often as possible now) barbarians inside our non-linguistic walls wielding genuine non-linguistic axes and other tools of mayhem.

You might prefer to say the king is asking Jack if he agrees. Or, asking if Jack's model agrees with Marvin's to the extent of making similar predictions. Sure. Jack is not a divine oracle, just a guy. But what are these predictions about? You'll want to say it's future states of the model -- that the king is at risk of expecting great loss of blood from the perceived axe in his face, and having that expectation confirmed, just as his model stops running and updating.

I don't really want to hop off @Banno's hobby horse just to hop onto yours, midstream no less, but to my mind that misses the whole point of the word "model," a thing that changes in a way appropriate to it when the thing it's a model of changes in the way appropriate to it. We don't have models, not in science, not in our heads, only to make predictions about what our models will do, but to make predictions about what what we're modeling will do.

Sorry -- I shouldn't be lecturing you right off the bat (maybe later) -- consider it an extended "hello".

But here's a question. is this adaptive-predictive-model sort of view (which is in a poor neighborhood of the city where your actual views live) automatically incompatible with the usual understanding of truth and knowledge, or must something be added to it?

Suppose I collect marbles in a big jar and have fashioned a clicker so that each time a marble is dropped in the jar a counter advances. I have a very simple model of my marble collection that captures only the total quantity. But it does actually capture that, doesn't it? So long as the clicker is properly designed and works as designed, and there are no confounding factors like a hole in the bottom of the jar, my model faithfully represents my collection with respect to quantity. That it is a model, that it substitutes one medium for another, that it is representational, doesn't automatically mean that words like "truth" and "knowledge" are only expressions of confidence does it?

So what gets you from, ahem, the model of predictive modeling to everything being a matter of confidence, narrative, and so on? I honestly don't know what you can say here except that it's your knowledge of how our clickers work, and that they're known to be less accurate and less precise than my marble counter.

Starts out wrong with non-linguistic states of affairs and goes down hill from there. — Banno

This a "No uninterpreted reality" thingybob? — fdrake

What exactly are you saying there, @Banno?

All I did was stipulate a name for something that may not have had a name.

Surely there are objects in the world besides words and sentences. That's as much as I meant by "non-linguistic". Your kettle is not identical to the phrase "Banno's kettle" and is not a token of the word "kettle", it's a kettle, a non-linguistic object. No?

Was it "state of affairs" that you objected to?

It's a parsimonious analysis because all you need is the ability to recognize A situations and to utter S's. We've got both of those, so -- done! — Srap Tasmaner

I'll throw in some non-analytic chit chat.

That sort of analysis ought to look familiar. It's in the shape of the cloud that hangs over pretty much all mid-20th century Anglo-American philosophy of language, the emblematic moment of which is Quine's remark that when it comes to linguistics, you have no choice but to be a behaviorist. The only sort of linguistic research he could imagine looks either like ethnography or like question and answer sessions, which only yield reports from language users.

As things turned out, cognitive science is quite real, and Quine could not have been more completely wrong.

But in the meantime, we have decades of carefully crafted language-centric philosophy that makes all sorts of quasi-behaviorist assumptions, if not always about the facts (about which you can claim to be agnostic), then certainly about methodology. Wittgenstein, Dummett, Quine, Sellars, Davidson, it's everyone. All that work is far from useless, but we have to make an effort to separate their presumptions about what could be said about language and language users from their putting those presumptions to work in creative and illuminating ways.

Would like to see a discussion on how the RHS relates to the world — fdrake

Here's a version of Banno's Davidson's Wittgenstein.

Let's say there's a (non-linguistic) state of affairs A that could obtain in the world, and a statement S that describes that state of affairs.

If you want to say that A obtains, how would you say that? You'd use S. Asserting S is exactly how you claim that A obtains in the world. And the statement S is true (asserted or not) if, and only if, the state of affairs A obtains.

What remains is to specify what this "S describes A" business amounts to, beyond saying "S describes what S describes."

Here things get Murky.

One element here is that we must be capable of recognizing that A obtains or doesn't, and, for many sorts of states of affairs, there's no reason to think we humans are uniquely capable of recognizing that such a state of affairs obtains. Lots of creatures know when it's raining; some are more finely attuned to shifts in the microclimate than we are. So this should be an uncontroversial freebie. (Of course it's not actually that simple, because of all the questions of how we conceptualize A, how we take A as something for which S might be appropriate, or the "always already interpreted" business that suggests our access to A is inherently mediated by S's and such. However that works out, you'll still get to say we recognize A's, so that's that.)

But when it comes to the other element, there will be a temptation to reverse the analysis above. Above I said that if we wish to inform someone that A obtains, we will reach for S because S describes A. But it is possible to say that what's really going on is that we reach for some S-like statement in A-like circumstances, period. We might call that S describing A, but if so, all we can mean by that is that when we want to draw attention to an A we utter an S. It's a parsimonious analysis because all you need is the ability to recognize A situations and to utter S's. We've got both of those, so -- done!

Putting all this together, we find that S is true iff we by and large say something S-like when we perceive ourselves to be in an A-like situation. This is why @Luke suspects that this sort of analysis is just relativism about truth. But that's only if you analyze "S describes A" as above.

It is possible there are alternatives to that analysis, besides of course to the other points sketched in above.

I'm not competent to speak to the program of Davidsonian semantics, but I'm not sure it's been much on display here (possibly anywhere, lately) anyway.

Suppose you have a list of colors {red, blue, green, ...}, and a function that maps an object to a color.

For any color, you could define a predicate based on the function that assigns colors. For example

x is red iff color(x) = red

Is that a definition of red? It is if you mean, narrowly, explaining the use of red as a predicate, given only the use of it as a value. It is a method for turning nouns into adjectives, certainly.

It is not a definition of red that would have been of any use in constructing the color() function. You have to be able to assign color values already. This just shows you how to express your assignment of a color value as predicating.

It's a change in notation. The predicative version is syntactic sugar for the value-assigning version.

And all of this could go the other way, if you start with predicates. You can turn adjectives into nouns by the same method.

If you have neither in hand, this method is no use at all.

the famous possibly apocryphal example of someone flipping off Wittgenstein, "What is the logical structure of this gesture?" — fdrake

It was Piero Sraffa, and it's almost certainly true. He was a very original thinker. (I read his book a lifetime ago.) They were friends at Cambridge.

Did you mean to quote stuff about Hitler instead of the kettle?

We find that "Hitler has been executed" is true in y, so the counterfactual evaluates as true in x. — fdrake

This is more or less the standard view right? But I have to say, "We find that ..." sure looks odd to me.

I guess if I'm going to keep wading into these waters, I'll have to study up some. Presumably you can proceed by defining worlds in which the Allies did and worlds in which they didn't execute Hitler, and then you'll have to defend some way of determining how far each sort is from us, which might be closest, which is close enough, and so on. I'll do my homework.

I didn't know anyone was researching that. — Tate

I was thinking back ages ago, Barwise and Perry, situation semantics.

Enough for the proposition to be understood, I would think. It would be difficult to understand a proposition without any context. — Luke

Indeed, the point should have been made already that the only reason to go questing after non-circular criteria for the "saturation" of a statement is so you can formalize it properly. You have the option of fiddling with logic to do some of that, but if your target is classical logic, that's tenseless and contextless, which means all the statements have to be too.

A simplistic analogy for coders: if you write in a standard imperative style where there's state laying around all over the place, your functions may only need to take an argument or two and pull everything else they need from whatever's in scope; if you write in a functional style -- or, next door, Prolog -- then your functions might have to take a zillion arguments, or one or two plus a big fat one bundling a bunch of others together, because you have to carry the state around with you.

Real life is like the imperative example -- state is laying around and accessible, more state is implicated by your utterance, so you do understand things without maybe even knowing quite how you do, though you might be able to work out a lot of it. Logic isn't like that. Formal semantics isn't like that. If it's not explicit somewhere, it's no help at all.

So yeah in real life, it should be said again, we either don't face these problems or resolve them easily. Disambiguation, for instance, is the easiest thing in the world. This stuff is only challenging when you try to formalize it.

And that's not truth apt. — Tate

So you're using "proposition" to mean something like, fully saturated -- I'm thinking of the way Frege calls predicates "incomplete symbols" or something. "... is red" is a function, and needs a name there or a bound variable to be complete. But it turns out completeness in that sense only works for formal languages, and in everyday usage of natural languages you might need to disambiguate, you might need a certain amount of context or background knowledge, all manner of things before your statement is, as I was putting it, "fully saturated" and ready to be true or false.

I find that general approach reasonable, but how do you deal with the circularity? What I mean is, if asked how much context we need to pull in before a statement is truth-apt, the answer is something like "enough for it to be truth-apt." The initial answer anyway. I guess I'm asking for reams a theory, because I have dim memories of work on this problem. Just wondering if you have any sense of how such a project is faring.

It seems to me that the counterfactual says something about some other possible world. — Michael

Sure, by way of distinguishing it from ours. "If Hitler had not committed suicide, ..." says right up front that in fact he did. You can't be a counterfactual if you don't start with a fact you're countering. And I don't know how else to take "then he would have been executed by the Allies" except as a statement about what the Allies were like, what sort of action they were likely to take. How is any of this not also about our world?

What would it mean for the truth to not be about our world? — Michael

That's a fair question. Some of this is a little odd. If the kettle here hasn't quite come to boil yet, but might have, there is a nearby world where it has. In our world, "The kettle is boiling" is a falsehood, but not so far away it is a truth. Because these come in pairs, you get to say that "The kettle is not boiling" is a truth here. Every falsehood is also "about" our world in this degenerate sense, that its negation is a truth about our world. But this pairing business has another consequence, that you aren't compelled to go theorizing about negative facts and absent truthmakers and such; you only need the positives, because across all possible worlds you have all the positives instantiated -- somewhere. The negatives only duplicate (and then some!) what we already have. Instead of saying there's no truthmaker here for some sentence, you get to say a given sentence does have a truthmaker, it's just that it's somewhere else.

And if you take this positives-only approach, then the question is precisely whether that truthmaker is here, whether it's ours, whether it belongs to this world or another, because it does belong to some world somewhere.

At least we've drawn the scope of our analysis to our experience, as opposed to trying to tie it to something metaphysical. — Tate

If that's what we've done, then I was way off. Wouldn't be the first time.

But my thought was exactly that they go together. The sort of thing you can come to know is the sort of thing that makes our sentences true. If the kettle is not boiling, I can't know that it is, and "The kettle is boiling" remains, let's say, unfulfilled.

Yeah, I'm afraid so. I am thinking it all comes back to being, but I'm in no hurry to get there.

I would quibble a little with the word "evidence," which is appropriate for reasonable belief in the absence of knowledge.

For instance, much of a typical chess game can be played heuristically, with little calculation, but there are times when you need to know the truth of the position. When you see it, it's like finding a really good proof in mathematics (yes, there are good proofs and bad proofs); the whole position sort of lights up and you see the truth in perfect clarity, and everything else you were thinking about blows away like so much smoke. Secrets are revealed, indeed. I'm not saying truth is always like that, of course, but that kind of experience clarifies the distinction between your ignorance, before you had seen the truth, however much evidence you may have had for your beliefs, and your knowledge, once you had.

What about counterfactuals? Are they false (or not truth-apt)? — Michael

In addition to my reply to Tate above, counterfactuals also imply, right up front, something that is the case, and try to show how that matters, in this world, by imagining that it's not. Anyway, why would the counterfactual as a whole just be false? (Whether they're truth-apt at all has in the past been controversial but not so much anymore I think.)

Hypotheticals are also truth apt. "If the volcano blows, a cooling trend will begin.". This isn't specifically about us, and it isn't here. — Tate

Maybe, but even if you're not stating a fact ("The volcano is erupting") you're saying something about how our world works, aren't you? That our world is such that this event would lead to this other event. The place we belong works this way, not some other way, and surely that matters to who we are.

Anyway, this is more hunch than thought right now. Might be nothing to it.

Here are some thoughts on truth I can't figure out how to use. (Possibly in the next neighborhood over from yours @fdrake.)

In thinking about how truth does seem comfortable playing with the other alethic modalities, and still in a possible worlds mood, I was thinking about how truth has to be about our world, about where we live, and is thereby also about us, every time, whether it seems to be or not, because every truth says something about what kind of world we live in and that says something about us as its residents, as part of it. (This is a sort of positive spin on Davidson's Big Fact argument.)

It has to be our kettle boiling, here in this world, for "The kettle is boiling" to be true. There is a sense in which, if our kettle is not boiling, even if it's boiling in many nearby worlds, the sentence "The kettle is boiling" doesn't belong here. (I was tempted to say that a falsehood is like taking a piece from a another puzzle and trying to force it in -- and it's true, falsehoods are an affront, but the puzzle thing ended up sounding more like coherentism, so I've let it go.)

Another way to put it is that truth is when what we say and where we live harmonize. Falsehoods are discordant.

I don't know what to do with any of that, but I do want to understand why truth matters. It does matter, and not only for practical reasons, and I think the answer might be around here. Somehow truth is the speech that is properly of here and properly of us.