Peter Holmes wrote: ↑June 27th, 2022, 10:12 am
Gertie wrote: ↑June 27th, 2022, 7:53 am
Consul wrote: ↑June 27th, 2022, 2:01 am
Astro Cat wrote: ↑June 23rd, 2022, 1:59 amIn the same sense, I'm fond of correspondence theory and think it's important we be able to define or give some idea of what is going on when we say something is "true."
QUOTE>
"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 truth
maker). The Truthmaker Principle is intended to capture this fact. It is not meant to suggest that things in the world actually make truths as fire makes heat; it is not the ‘make’ of the sort in which they (in and of themselves) cause things called ‘truths’ to come into existence. A world in which there were no representations (i.e. no truth bearers) would be a world in which there were no truths."
(Martin, C. B.
The Mind in Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. pp. 24-5)
<QUOTE
If the "Truthmaker Principle" is the principle that
all truths have truthmakers (aka
truthmaker maximalism), then there are philosophers who reject it.
See:
Truthmakers:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truthmakers/
I agree it's not at heart a linguistic issue about propositions. It's an issue of inter-subjective falsifiability.
Each human creates a personal experiential representation (model) of the world as we interact with it. That interaction manifests in subjects on-the-hoof, as conscious experience. When we compare notes we create a shared model of our shared world. Physical things like white snow are third person falsifiable via observation and measurement. I point at the snow, and as a fellow human with similar sensory and cognitive systems your experiential interaction with the snow is presumably much like mine, and we agree the snow is white. Language is how we symbolically represent our experience, which adds extra room for error and a layer of abstraction, but that's not the underlying issue. The under-lying issue for justifying our inter-subjective agreement that snow is white, is that we are flawed and limited observers and thinkers. So while our experiential models of the world might tally, that doesn't mean they are accurate and complete.
- Each experiencing subject has a flawed and limited first person pov
- We can compare notes on things like lumps on the bed which are physical (observable and measurable) and can agree we both see a lump on the bed (we can't see through the blankets, hence the error), to create an inter-subjective model of our shared physical world. This is third person pov falsifiability.
- But we don't know how close our inter-subjective models correspond with ontological reality, because we are flawed and limited observers and thinkers. We don't have a god's-eye pov.
Our common or shared experience of reality - for example, of that stuff we call snow - isn't the issue. Correspondence or truth-maker/truth-bearer theories are theories about
truth, which (like falsehood) is an attribute of some factual assertions - typically linguistic expressions - not of features of reality or our experiences of them.
The claim that 'snow is white' is true
because snow is white is patently tautological - a purely linguistic matter. It doesn't take us outside language, because a use of language can't do that. And there is, in fact, no correspondence whatsover between the linguistic expression and the feature of reality it describes.
Well yes the assigned agreed word for what we experience as cold white wet stuff is ''snow'' , so the proposition that ''snow'' is that cold, white wet stuff is tautological. That's just word games, but we expect more from the concept of truth. We can agree how to define a unicorn, but if I say I have one in my attic you'd want to see it with your own eyes.
The truth-bearer/truth-maker framing is a way of saying that it's experiencing subjects who create knowledge via our experiential interaction with the world. But we can't know that knowledge corresponds to ontological reality if we are flawed and limited observers and thinkers. So correspondence is a form of inter-subjective falsifiability which can eliminate anomalies in how humans subjectively experience eg snow.
Language is an abstract symbolic encoding of our actual conscious experience (thoughts, sensory perceptions, sensations, imaginings, memories, etc) which enables us to communicate our private, first person experience and compare notes.
The linguistic symbol isn't the experience, and the experience isn't the thing being experienced.
So what's actually going on, what are we talking about here, how do we decide what propositions to call ''true'' -
I think what we do is each create first person experiential models of the world via interacting with it, then inter-subjectively compare notes via language and other synbols (because our experience is private), and note similarities and differences which we categorise in different ways. Some of those categories we agree to categories as , ''objective'', ''factual'' and corresponding to the real ontological world we experience/interact with. Propositions linguistically representing these agreed ''facts'' we call ''true''. Physical stuff which is third person observable/measurable we can inter-subjectively agree on/falsify - using our evolved-for-utility (not complete accuracy) sensory and cognitive experiential toolkit.
But the only directly known truth is in the form of our own experience. So I point at what I experience as white snow and ask you if you see/feel it too. You agree. We can't know each other's private experience (see eg the prob of inverted qualia), but our language works reliably enough for us to eventually come up with a shared physical (observable/measurable) model of our world reducible to particle physics.
Abstract, conceptual agreed ''truths'' like reason, logic, cause and effect, theorising from observing predictable patterns - like our physicalist model these are all ultimately rooted in our (designed-for-utility) experience of the world and how it works. And if we're flawed and limited observers and thinkers, they carry that caveat too as regards how accurate/true they are.