JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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Razblo wrote:
Peter Holmes wrote:The Gettier problem is that some cases of justified true belief don't amount to knowledge, so the JTB definition is inadequate. But I suggest that Gettier-cases really demonstrate the muddle caused by the myth of propositions. (Propositions are factual assertions about features of reality.)

A Gettier-case is a story with dramatic irony. We know the complete situation, but the protagonist doesn't. But there is nothing propositional about the story. The individual's mistaken belief doesn't come from a false premise. And the belief itself is not propositional. Propositional belief is as muddled an idea as propositional knowledge. There are just beliefs and knowledge-claims expressed by means of propositions.

We want to say the individual's belief is true, but that is the myth of propositions at work. What the individual believes is a feature of reality, not a proposition. When we believe or know a feature of reality is the case, we don't believe a proposition. So we don't believe something that is true or false. A feature of reality has no truth value.
What an individual believes is a feature of reality? I can't see how. I see that the existence of a belief is a feature but not what is believed.

Also, a proposition, merely for being proposed, does not make a proposition factual.
Can somebody tell me what JTB stand for? Everyone seems to know it effortlessly, and I can't make A or B of it.

So far I tried to substitute the following to make sense of it:

Jewish Tabernacle Brotherhood
Jackson-Turner-Bachman
Jugular Transference Bigotry
Jamming Toward Bellini
Jaguar-Trained Bobcats
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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Sorry. JTB is short for justified true belief. Knowledge has been defined as justified true belief, so that someone knows something if it is true, they believe it, and their believing it is justified. Truth, belief and justification are supposed to be the three necessary and jointly sufficient 'conditions' for knowledge. Edmund Gettier argued that some cases of justified true belief don't amount to knowledge, and 'Gettier-cases' are stories or scenarios that supposedly show that. There's some useful stuff online if you google it.
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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Thanks for explaining, Peter.

I don't believe justified true belief exists or is possible to exist in our minds. No knowledge is truly (without an ability to doubt it) extant to us that pertains to the empirical world, other than the knowledge that the self exists.

It is so because when we sense reality, we have no working test developed to see if the reality we see is in fact reality or a figment of our minds. Our minds may direct us to see things that are not there, and it is conceivable that it is not even a function of our will.

So JTB is a false proposition other than "cogito ergo sum". Claiming anything else about the empirical world has just as much chance to be true as to be false. Therefore the "true" is never attainable in the JTB.

Now, if you want to talk about GLTB, that's a different thing. Or about BLT (as in sammiches).
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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Just to say, I've set out a full discussion of the epistemology underpinning my OP at:

http://www.simplesite.com/builder/pages ... stats.aspx
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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I think I posted the wrong link for a full discussion of my OP. It's called 'Justified true belief - knowledge and the myth of propositions'.

http://www.peasum.co.uk/435531068
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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As a follow-up to my OP about the JTB definition of knowledge, and Gettier's criticism, I thought it worth posting here a related contribution I made to a discussion elsewhere about facts, categories and correspondence theories.

I'm pointing out that the way philosophers use the word 'fact' to mean 'feature of reality' is deeply confusing. Facts use categories, and there are no categories inherent in reality, but only things that can be categorised. You and I aren't facts - we're human beings.

Correspondence theories rest on the strange idea that features of reality 'correspond' to our ways of talking about them, as though the relationship is two-way. But it isn't, which is why for any one feature of reality, there is an infinitely flexible number of ways of talking about it - of 'facts' about it - according to what we want to say.

A radical distinction between what we say and what say it about is what I'm advocating, because the failure to make that distinction has befuddled philosophers for at least two and a half millennia.

And the myth of propositions has played a large part in that confusion. For example, the first JTB condition is: S knows that p iff p is true. What has knowing a feature of reality is the case anything to do with the truth of a proposition? That's completely back to front.

In the condition, the two 'p's have radically different functions: the second is a linguistic expression - so what is the first? - it's the same proposition. And that's the myth of propositions at work: mistaking what we say for the way things are.
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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Peter Holmes wrote: June 18th, 2019, 7:01 amI'm pointing out that the way philosophers use the word 'fact' to mean 'feature of reality' is deeply confusing. Facts use categories, and there are no categories inherent in reality, but only things that can be categorised. You and I aren't facts - we're human beings.
"A system of categories is a complete list of highest kinds or genera."

Categories: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/categories/

This definition is an expression of categorial realism, according to which kinds (genera, species) are "out there" and not concepts in our minds.

"Metaphysics, in its minimal form, is the activity of categorial description. Its subject matter is the most fundamental aspects of the way we think about and talk about reality, the most fundamental features of reality as it presents itself to us. We divide the world into horses and trains, people and mountains, battles and towns, and a whole complex structure of different things; our language is the repository of this enormously rich furnishing of the world. But we can discern within this richness some overall divisions, between things and their properties, for example, or between events and the times and places in which they happen, and it is with the overall pattern of our categorising of elements of the world that metaphysics concerns itself. The basic divisions which our thought and talk about reality entail are the quarry of categorial describers."
(p. 2)

"[T]he important thing for us now is to stress that Kant is not going beyond thought to reality to find his categories. They are the fundamental forms of thought, embedded in the forms of judgement. This puts Kant in stark opposition to Aristotle, for whom the categories, however identified, were natural, real divisions among things in the world. I will put this opposition by saying that Aristotle was a categorial realist whereas Kant was a categorial conceptualist. A categorial realist is someone who takes the categories, which he seeks to describe, as marking real kinds to be found in the things which collectively make up reality, and so takes categorial description as indistinguishable from (or at least an important part of) the grand traditional task of metaphysics. For the categorial conceptualist, the task is to describe the fundamental features of our conceptual scheme, of our thought and talk about reality, with no assumption made about the way reality exists independently of that manner of thinking and talking."
(p. 6)

(Carr, Brian. Metaphysics: An Introduction. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1987.)

Furthermore, there's Husserl's useful distinction between categories of meanings and categories of objects:

"Edmund Husserl introduced two sorts of innovation to the study of categories. First, while Aristotle used language as a clue to ontological categories, and Kant treated concepts as the route to categories of objects of possible cognition, Husserl explicitly distinguished categories of meanings from categories of objects, and attempted to draw out the law-like correlations between categories of each sort (…). Secondly, whereas Aristotle and Kant each lay out a single system of categories, Husserl distinguishes two ways of arriving at top-level ontological classifications: by formalization and by generalization, yielding two separate, orthogonal, systems of categories, in two different dimensions (…).

Husserl is careful to distinguish categories of meanings (by way of which we can think about the highest kinds or ‘essences’ of objects) from the categories meant – the latter are the categories of objects, or ontological categories, considered as the highest essences that entities might have: “by ‘categories’ we can understand, on the one hand, concepts in the sense of meanings, but on the other also, and to better effect, the formal essences themselves which find their expression in these meanings” (1913 [1962], 61–2). But although the two sorts of categories must be distinguished, according to Husserl categories of the two sorts are essentially correlated (see below), so we can learn about one by way of the other."


https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/categories/#HusDes

Concepts and propositions are categories of meaning; so if facts are true propositions, they are a category of meaning too. But if facts are actual, obtaining states of affairs composed of things and properties or relations, they are a category of objects. (*
Facts qua category of meaning are about or represent facts qua category of objects, and the latter are truthmakers of the former.

(* Husserl doesn't use "object" in the narrow ontological sense in which it is more or less synonymous with "substance", but in its broadest ontological sense in which it is synonymous with "entity".)
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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Consul wrote: June 18th, 2019, 9:42 pm
Peter Holmes wrote: June 18th, 2019, 7:01 amI'm pointing out that the way philosophers use the word 'fact' to mean 'feature of reality' is deeply confusing. Facts use categories, and there are no categories inherent in reality, but only things that can be categorised. You and I aren't facts - we're human beings.
"A system of categories is a complete list of highest kinds or genera."

Categories: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/categories/

This definition is an expression of categorial realism, according to which kinds (genera, species) are "out there" and not concepts in our minds.

"Metaphysics, in its minimal form, is the activity of categorial description. Its subject matter is the most fundamental aspects of the way we think about and talk about reality, the most fundamental features of reality as it presents itself to us. We divide the world into horses and trains, people and mountains, battles and towns, and a whole complex structure of different things; our language is the repository of this enormously rich furnishing of the world. But we can discern within this richness some overall divisions, between things and their properties, for example, or between events and the times and places in which they happen, and it is with the overall pattern of our categorising of elements of the world that metaphysics concerns itself. The basic divisions which our thought and talk about reality entail are the quarry of categorial describers."
(p. 2)

"[T]he important thing for us now is to stress that Kant is not going beyond thought to reality to find his categories. They are the fundamental forms of thought, embedded in the forms of judgement. This puts Kant in stark opposition to Aristotle, for whom the categories, however identified, were natural, real divisions among things in the world. I will put this opposition by saying that Aristotle was a categorial realist whereas Kant was a categorial conceptualist. A categorial realist is someone who takes the categories, which he seeks to describe, as marking real kinds to be found in the things which collectively make up reality, and so takes categorial description as indistinguishable from (or at least an important part of) the grand traditional task of metaphysics. For the categorial conceptualist, the task is to describe the fundamental features of our conceptual scheme, of our thought and talk about reality, with no assumption made about the way reality exists independently of that manner of thinking and talking."
(p. 6)

(Carr, Brian. Metaphysics: An Introduction. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1987.)

Furthermore, there's Husserl's useful distinction between categories of meanings and categories of objects:

"Edmund Husserl introduced two sorts of innovation to the study of categories. First, while Aristotle used language as a clue to ontological categories, and Kant treated concepts as the route to categories of objects of possible cognition, Husserl explicitly distinguished categories of meanings from categories of objects, and attempted to draw out the law-like correlations between categories of each sort (…). Secondly, whereas Aristotle and Kant each lay out a single system of categories, Husserl distinguishes two ways of arriving at top-level ontological classifications: by formalization and by generalization, yielding two separate, orthogonal, systems of categories, in two different dimensions (…).

Husserl is careful to distinguish categories of meanings (by way of which we can think about the highest kinds or ‘essences’ of objects) from the categories meant – the latter are the categories of objects, or ontological categories, considered as the highest essences that entities might have: “by ‘categories’ we can understand, on the one hand, concepts in the sense of meanings, but on the other also, and to better effect, the formal essences themselves which find their expression in these meanings” (1913 [1962], 61–2). But although the two sorts of categories must be distinguished, according to Husserl categories of the two sorts are essentially correlated (see below), so we can learn about one by way of the other."


https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/categories/#HusDes

Concepts and propositions are categories of meaning; so if facts are true propositions, they are a category of meaning too. But if facts are actual, obtaining states of affairs composed of things and properties or relations, they are a category of objects. (*
Facts qua category of meaning are about or represent facts qua category of objects, and the latter are truthmakers of the former.

(* Husserl doesn't use "object" in the narrow ontological sense in which it is more or less synonymous with "substance", but in its broadest ontological sense in which it is synonymous with "entity".)
There's a great deal to address here. If you could boil it down to your main claims, it would be easier to address them.

But in general, I think what you say demonstrates the point I'm making about mistaking what we say for the way things are. From Aristotle, via Kant to Husserl, the fundamental mistake is the delusion that we can, as it were, look through or beyond our ways of describing reality, to grasp reality itself and compare it with our ways of describing it.

Talk of concepts, propositions, objects, entities, substances and essences maintains the delusion. We fantasize that logic deals with reality or thought, where all it deals with is language. We've been so dazzled for so long that we imagine reality consists of subjects and predicates, which are no more than linguistic functions. Reality doesn't categorise or describe itself. We do that when we talk about it.
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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Peter Holmes wrote: June 22nd, 2019, 5:04 am From Aristotle, via Kant to Husserl, the fundamental mistake is the delusion that we can, as it were, look through or beyond our ways of describing reality, to grasp reality itself and compare it with our ways of describing it.

Talk of concepts, propositions, objects, entities, substances and essences maintains the delusion. We fantasize that logic deals with reality or thought, where all it deals with is language. We've been so dazzled for so long that we imagine reality consists of subjects and predicates, which are no more than linguistic functions. Reality doesn't categorise or describe itself. We do that when we talk about it.
Hi Peter,

Plato introduced JTB as possibly the strongest argument in favor of knowledge of the sensible reality. Then Plato raised objections that almost completely dismissed the theory.

The point of the Theaetetus discussion was to demonstrate why empirical knowledge of what might be termed as underlying reality, whether arising from direct personal or public observation, is impossible!

Gettier implicitly drew on this cardinal Platonic dogma to point out that JTB as formulated by modern linguistic philosophy can only be understood as a formalism!

Only if we introduce formal axiomatic terms, such as the ones you mention, can a logical relation hold between them. The extra-philosophical world, as we see it, is not subject to Parmenidean logic, if to any logic.
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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Peter Holmes wrote: June 22nd, 2019, 5:04 amBut in general, I think what you say demonstrates the point I'm making about mistaking what we say for the way things are. From Aristotle, via Kant to Husserl, the fundamental mistake is the delusion that we can, as it were, look through or beyond our ways of describing reality, to grasp reality itself and compare it with our ways of describing it.
True representations are our epistemic window to reality, and we don't discover truths by comparing representations with realities. (Truths don't look like their truthmakers.)

"Not all the ways the world can be represented are ways the world is, so a particular species of creature found it necessary to employ the following convention to distinguish representations from misrepresentations. Representations that indicate the way the world actually is they called 'true', and representations that failed to do so they called 'false'.
Truth is a relation between two things—a representation (the truth bearer) and the world or some part of it (the truthmaker)."


(Martin, C. B. The Mind in Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. p. 24)
Peter Holmes wrote: June 22nd, 2019, 5:04 amTalk of concepts, propositions, objects, entities, substances and essences maintains the delusion.
Since nothing can be nothing/everything must be something, all entities or realities must have some nature (Sosein in German) or other, and belong to some kind(s) of entities/realities or other, including highest ones as represented by ontological categories.

Whether we can know (and if yes, how) what the true (correct/accurate) categorial description or model of Being is is another question (in the epistemology of ontology).
Peter Holmes wrote: June 22nd, 2019, 5:04 amWe fantasize that logic deals with reality or thought, where all it deals with is language.
Metaphysics or ontology is neither logic nor (meta-)linguistics! It certainly uses language, but it isn't about language or grammar as its subject matter.
Peter Holmes wrote: June 22nd, 2019, 5:04 amWe've been so dazzled for so long that we imagine reality consists of subjects and predicates, which are no more than linguistic functions.
You're begging the question against substance(substrate)/attribute or object/property ontology, because the grammatical categories <subject> and <predicate> may well represent real ontological kinds of entities. And even if there are languages lacking a subject-predicate structure, there can still be substances and attributes, objects and properties, since Being is independent of language.

"There is an argument against substrata that Locke did not anticipate that deserves brief consideration. The argument is that we come to believe in the need for substrata simply because it is suggested by the subject-predicate form of our language (and also, presumably, by the (Ex) of quantification in logic). Then it is argued that some languages (and also, presumably, some logics) don't have this subject-predicate form. So, the conclusion seems to be that the notion of, and supposed need for, substrata is due only to, and suggested by, a local, parochial linguistic form.
It is very difficult to see the force of this argument. First, the claim that some languages lack anything like a subject-predicate form is not the proven linguistic fact that it is argued to be. However, the argument cannot be at all conclusive, even if this claim were true. Because, secondly, if some languages suggest a substratum and some do not, the question should still arise 'Which are right?' Then the argument for substrata, and against alternative theories, would have to be considered."


(Martin, C. B. "Substance Substantiated." 1980. Reprinted in Particulars, Actuality, and Identity over Time, edited by Michael Tooley, 37-44. New York: Garland, 1999. pp. 42-3)
Peter Holmes wrote: June 22nd, 2019, 5:04 amReality doesn't categorise or describe itself. We do that when we talk about it.
This is trivially true, but it doesn't follow that the real world is in itself an undifferentiated and unstructured, homogeneous or uniform blob. In fact, it is not! It does have some inherent existential form and structure that is independent of and undetermined by human representations (concepts).

"The principal task of ontology is the provision of a Kategorienlehre. As long as analytic philosophy was beholden to the forms of predicate logic and its semantic partner set theory, the notion of category and the theory of categories languished. The assumption, whether implicit (in most cases) or explicit (in the case of Wittgenstein), of a thoroughgoing harmony or categorial and structural match between the forms of language and the forms of objects, left no room for consideration whether a system of classification of objects, including in its most general levels a system of categories, was anything other than something one could read off logical semantics, or in the case of ordinary-language philosophy, the meaning and use of vernacular expressions. Along with a select handful of others, including John Anderson, Roderick Chisholm, David Armstrong, and Reinhardt Grossmann, Jonathan recognized that in the absence of a methodological handrail from logic and linguistics, ontology needed to be more specific and deliberate about its selection, articulation, and justification of categories."

(Simons, Peter. "Lowe, the Primacy of Metaphysics, and the Basis." In Ontology, Modality, and Mind: Themes from the Metaphysics of E. J. Lowe, edited by Alexander Carruth, Sophie Gibb, and John Heil, 37-47. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. p. 39)
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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Peter Holmes: "We fantasize that logic deals with reality or thought, where all it deals with is language."

If that were true, our attempts at using the language of mathematics to model material reality would fail miserably and the computer and internet by which you've broadcast your manifesto would not even exist. So for a fantasy it's been very worthwhile.
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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Peter Holmes wrote: June 22nd, 2019, 5:04 am But in general, I think what you say demonstrates the point I'm making about mistaking what we say for the way things are. From Aristotle, via Kant to Husserl, the fundamental mistake is the delusion that we can, as it were, look through or beyond our ways of describing reality, to grasp reality itself and compare it with our ways of describing it.
How could you have drawn this conclusion without basing it, implicitly, on descriptions of reality. For example, I would think there would have to be as premises for this conclusion, your believe in descriptions of perception, perhaps based on neuroscience, the relationship between subject and object, the distortions we know about given what are sense are and their filters...iow whatevery philosophy you have based on your knowledge of us and the world and the interface between them. This doesn't mean you're wrong, but then, the above citation constitutes someone asserting that reality is a certain way, in words.
Talk of concepts, propositions, objects, entities, substances and essences maintains the delusion. We fantasize that logic deals with reality or thought, where all it deals with is language. We've been so dazzled for so long that we imagine reality consists of subjects and predicates, which are no more than linguistic functions. Reality doesn't categorise or describe itself. We do that when we talk about it.
And here again. You just presented 'descriptions of reality.'
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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Peter Holmes wrote: July 19th, 2017, 9:10 amWe want to say the individual's belief is true, but that is the myth of propositions at work. What the individual believes is a feature of reality, not a proposition. When we believe or know a feature of reality is the case, we don't believe a proposition. So we don't believe something that is true or false. A feature of reality has no truth value.
There's a relevant distinction between believing that something is true, i.e. believing in the truth of a proposition/statement/sentence, and believing that something is the case (or is so), i.e. believing in the actuality of a state of affairs. Arguably, belief in the truth of a proposition/statement/sentence presupposes the concept of truth, which nonhuman animals don't possess. So if the having of beliefs or knowledge requires having the concept of truth, nonhuman animals cannot have any beliefs or knowledge. But, arguably, a zebra can believe that there is a lion behind a bush without believing that the proposition <there is a lion behind a bush> is true.

As for propositions as such, they are usually regarded as a kind of abstract objects, as abstract meanings of declarative sentences that don't depend on any particular language. If one disbelieves in the existence of these abstract objects, then one cannot regard them as the primary bearers of truth-values.

Note that (nonlinguistic, language-independent) propositions aren't the only kind of abstract objects in this context, because (linguistic, language-dependent) sentences qua sentence-types are abstract objects too (as opposed to concrete sentence-tokens). So if you generally believe that there are no abstract objects, you cannot consistently reject propositions and accept sentence-types instead (as the primary bearers of truth-values).

"Believing something to be so and believing something to be true.
One must be careful not to jump to the conclusion that believing something to be so is the same as believing something to be true. What one believes when one believes that something is so is precisely that things are so. What one believes when one believes something to be true is a proposition, statement, assertion, declaration, allegation or announcement to the effect that things are so. For it is propositions, statements, assertions, declarations, allegations and announcements that are true or false. These can be believed or disbelieved. But what is believed when it is believed that things are so is not what is believed when the statement, assertion, allegation or proposition that things are so is believed to be true. While one can disbelieve, misunderstand or mistrust the statement, declaration or allegation that things are so, one cannot disbelieve, misunderstand or mistrust that things are so. Belief is first and foremost directed at what is so, and only secondarily at what is true (i.e. at a proposition asserted, a statement, assertion or declaration made in saying that things are so). What is so is what is the case. What is true is the statement, assertion, declaration, etc. made in stating, asserting or declaring that such-and-such is the case. ‘Is that true?’ is a query about a statement; ‘Is that so?’ is a question about how things are. ‘That is so’, like ‘That is already the case’ or ‘That is indeed a fact’, confirms that things are so. ‘That is true’ confirms the statement that things are so. Similarly, ‘I fear (suspect, hope, expect) that things are so’ does not mean the same as ‘I fear (suspect, hope, expect) that it is true that things are so’. The latter is appropriate only if it has been (or is envisaged as being) stated or mooted that things are so, and consequently alludes to how things have been (or might be) said to be."


(Hacker, P. M. S. The Intellectual Powers: A Study of Human Nature. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. pp. 205-6)
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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Consul wrote: June 26th, 2019, 4:11 pmNote that (nonlinguistic, language-independent) propositions aren't the only kind of abstract objects in this context, because (linguistic, language-dependent) sentences qua sentence-types are abstract objects too (as opposed to concrete sentence-tokens). So if you generally believe that there are no abstract objects, you cannot consistently reject propositions and accept sentence-types instead (as the primary bearers of truth-values).
Also note that some philosophers regard states of affairs as abstract objects too; but this shouldn't be done, because they then become ontologically indistinguishable from propositions.

"States of affairs are here understood as abstract entities which exist necessarily and which are such that some but not all of them occur, take place or obtain. …States of affairs, as they are considered here, are in no way dependent for their being upon the being of concrete, individual things. Even if there were no concrete, individual things, there would be indefinitely many states of affairs. States of affairs, so conceived, resemble what have traditionally been called propositions…."

(Chisholm, Roderick. Person and Object. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1976. p. 114)

For the ontology of states of affairs, see these two different SEP entries:

* https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fal ... f-affairs/

* https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/states-of-affairs/
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

Post by Peter Holmes »

Consul wrote: June 25th, 2019, 9:01 pm
Peter Holmes wrote: June 22nd, 2019, 5:04 amBut in general, I think what you say demonstrates the point I'm making about mistaking what we say for the way things are. From Aristotle, via Kant to Husserl, the fundamental mistake is the delusion that we can, as it were, look through or beyond our ways of describing reality, to grasp reality itself and compare it with our ways of describing it.
True representations are our epistemic window to reality, and we don't discover truths by comparing representations with realities. (Truths don't look like their truthmakers.)
Why do we have to use 'true representations' in order to know things? Can we not or never know them directly? The JTB truth condition is: S knows that p iff p is true. But why should knowing that something is the case have anything to do with a proposition, let alone a true one?


"Not all the ways the world can be represented are ways the world is, so a particular species of creature found it necessary to employ the following convention to distinguish representations from misrepresentations. Representations that indicate the way the world actually is they called 'true', and representations that failed to do so they called 'false'.
Truth is a relation between two things—a representation (the truth bearer) and the world or some part of it (the truthmaker)."


(Martin, C. B. The Mind in Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. p. 24)
As I'm sure you're aware, the truth-maker/truth-bearer theory is by no means a settled matter - mainly, I think, because correspondence theories fail to account for the nature of the supposed correspondence.
Peter Holmes wrote: June 22nd, 2019, 5:04 amTalk of concepts, propositions, objects, entities, substances and essences maintains the delusion.
Since nothing can be nothing/everything must be something, all entities or realities must have some nature (Sosein in German) or other, and belong to some kind(s) of entities/realities or other, including highest ones as represented by ontological categories.
This is to say a thing is a thing of some kind or other, which is true. I'm saying there are no categories in reality, but only things that can be categorised.

Whether we can know (and if yes, how) what the true (correct/accurate) categorial description or model of Being is is another question (in the epistemology of ontology).
And here is the delusion at work. The idea of a true, correct or accurate categorial description or model of anything is a fantasy. Any thing can be categorised and described in different ways - and there's no limit to how many ways - according to the purpose of the description.
Peter Holmes wrote: June 22nd, 2019, 5:04 amWe fantasize that logic deals with reality or thought, where all it deals with is language.
Metaphysics or ontology is neither logic nor (meta-)linguistics! It certainly uses language, but it isn't about language or grammar as its subject matter.
I think your misunderstanding of what I wrote here is very revealing. I'm talking about what logic deals with - which is language - and you assume I'm talking about what metaphysics or ontology deal with - which (supposedly) is reality.
Peter Holmes wrote: June 22nd, 2019, 5:04 amWe've been so dazzled for so long that we imagine reality consists of subjects and predicates, which are no more than linguistic functions.
You're begging the question against substance(substrate)/attribute or object/property ontology, because the grammatical categories <subject> and <predicate> may well represent real ontological kinds of entities. And even if there are languages lacking a subject-predicate structure, there can still be substances and attributes, objects and properties, since Being is independent of language.
Of course, reality is independent of what can be said about it. And I'm advocating a radical distinction between the way things are and what we say about them. (To my knowledge, there's no evidence for the existence of subjects and predicates outside linguistic expressions. The absence of evidence may not mean they don't exist, but it does mean that to believe they do exist is irrational.)

"There is an argument against substrata that Locke did not anticipate that deserves brief consideration. The argument is that we come to believe in the need for substrata simply because it is suggested by the subject-predicate form of our language (and also, presumably, by the (Ex) of quantification in logic). Then it is argued that some languages (and also, presumably, some logics) don't have this subject-predicate form. So, the conclusion seems to be that the notion of, and supposed need for, substrata is due only to, and suggested by, a local, parochial linguistic form.
It is very difficult to see the force of this argument. First, the claim that some languages lack anything like a subject-predicate form is not the proven linguistic fact that it is argued to be. However, the argument cannot be at all conclusive, even if this claim were true. Because, secondly, if some languages suggest a substratum and some do not, the question should still arise 'Which are right?' Then the argument for substrata, and against alternative theories, would have to be considered."


(Martin, C. B. "Substance Substantiated." 1980. Reprinted in Particulars, Actuality, and Identity over Time, edited by Michael Tooley, 37-44. New York: Garland, 1999. pp. 42-3)
I'm afraid I find your quotations unhelpful. It's tedious to have to address and perhaps refute someone else's argument.
Peter Holmes wrote: June 22nd, 2019, 5:04 amReality doesn't categorise or describe itself. We do that when we talk about it.
This is trivially true, but it doesn't follow that the real world is in itself an undifferentiated and unstructured, homogeneous or uniform blob. In fact, it is not! It does have some inherent existential form and structure that is independent of and undetermined by human representations (concepts).
Straw man. Reality consists of real things that can be categorised in different ways - no disagreement there. (Btw, calling human representations 'concepts' opens a whole nother can of worms.)

"The principal task of ontology is the provision of a Kategorienlehre. As long as analytic philosophy was beholden to the forms of predicate logic and its semantic partner set theory, the notion of category and the theory of categories languished. The assumption, whether implicit (in most cases) or explicit (in the case of Wittgenstein), of a thoroughgoing harmony or categorial and structural match between the forms of language and the forms of objects, left no room for consideration whether a system of classification of objects, including in its most general levels a system of categories, was anything other than something one could read off logical semantics, or in the case of ordinary-language philosophy, the meaning and use of vernacular expressions. Along with a select handful of others, including John Anderson, Roderick Chisholm, David Armstrong, and Reinhardt Grossmann, Jonathan recognized that in the absence of a methodological handrail from logic and linguistics, ontology needed to be more specific and deliberate about its selection, articulation, and justification of categories."

(Simons, Peter. "Lowe, the Primacy of Metaphysics, and the Basis." In Ontology, Modality, and Mind: Themes from the Metaphysics of E. J. Lowe, edited by Alexander Carruth, Sophie Gibb, and John Heil, 37-47. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. p. 39)
Out of context, I'm not sure I understand Simons' point here. I assume the reference is to the earlier Wittgenstein - but I'm not sure - and the conclusion seems to point in the direction of my argument.
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