JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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

Post by Peter Holmes »

Consul wrote: June 28th, 2022, 1:41 pm
Peter Holmes wrote: June 28th, 2022, 5:12 am
Consul wrote: June 27th, 2022, 4:52 pm"A logical combination of sentences that is always true, regardless of the truth or falsity of the constituent sentences, is known as a 'tautology'."

(Rucker, Rudy. Mind Tools: The Five Levels of Mathematical Reality. London: Penguin, 1988. p. 211)

Thus defined, T<p> <—> p is a logical tautology, because every sentential substitution for p results in a true biconditional, no matter whether p is true or false. For example, it is false that Joe Biden is the president of Canada; but it is still true that the sentence "Joe Biden is the president of Canada" is true if and only if Joe Biden is the president of Canada.

Despite being tautological, the right side of T<p> <—> p is world-involving, which means that truth depends or supervenes on how the world is or isn't.
Good grief. This is to rehash Saussure's mistake - sign = signifier + (magically) signified - and its absurd but inevitable consequences, in Derrida and others.

There's nothing canine about the word dog, or the word canine. Who could think there is? Ah - a correspondence theorist.

Let's see. The assertion 'snow is white' is true iff snow is white. 'Despite being tautological' (saying the same thing twice), this 'is world-involving'. Let's just keep on mistaking what we say about things for the way things are. Swot we've always done.
You're not using "tautology" in the logical sense (as defined above), in which it doesn't mean "the repetition (esp. in the immediate context) of the same word or phrase, or of the same idea or statement in other words" (OED). In "Snow is white" is true iff snow is white we have a metalinguistic sentence about the sentence "Snow is white" on the left side and an object-linguistic sentence about the worldly state of affairs of snow's being white, which is the truth-condition of the sentence "Snow is white".
Thanks. I understand the logical sense of 'tautology'. And my point stands. The metalinguistic sentence is just a sentence, and its truth-predicate does nothing to disguise the fact that it's the same sentence either side of the biconditional, cited on the left and simply asserted on the right.

The idea that we can use language to get outside language is a delusion. And logic deals with language, not the reality outside language. This is why I think we have to make a sharp distinction between features of reality and what we say about them. Muddling them up has led and leads to no end of philosophical confusion - witness correspondence and truth-maker/bearer theories.
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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Peter Holmes wrote: June 28th, 2022, 3:28 pmThanks. I understand the logical sense of 'tautology'. And my point stands. The metalinguistic sentence is just a sentence, and its truth-predicate does nothing to disguise the fact that it's the same sentence either side of the biconditional, cited on the left and simply asserted on the right.
Yes, in "Snow is white" is true iff snow is white we have sentence-tokens of the same sentence-type on the left and on the right—so what? There is still a translinguistic reference on the right. Non-metalinguistic reference isn't a word-word relation but a word-world relation.
Peter Holmes wrote: June 28th, 2022, 3:28 pmThe idea that we can use language to get outside language is a delusion. And logic deals with language, not the reality outside language. This is why I think we have to make a sharp distinction between features of reality and what we say about them. Muddling them up has led and leads to no end of philosophical confusion - witness correspondence and truth-maker/bearer theories.
Truth does deal with "the reality outside language"; and we can and do use linguistic entities to represent and refer to nonlinguistic entities.

Of course, there is a distinction between properties of (linguistic or nonlinguistic) representations and properties of what they represent. Snow is cold, the adjective "cold" isn't.
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
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Consul
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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Consul wrote: June 28th, 2022, 8:13 pmTruth does deal with "the reality outside language"; and we can and do use linguistic entities to represent and refer to nonlinguistic entities.
Truth is what brings us into cognitive touch with reality.
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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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 truthmaker). 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 with everything that you've said here, but I'm not sure why you've said it: just that there are some philosophers that reject the truthmaker principle?
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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Astro Cat wrote: June 28th, 2022, 9:17 pmI agree with everything that you've said here, but I'm not sure why you've said it: just that there are some philosophers that reject the truthmaker principle?
I too think that it is not the case that all truths have (direct) truthmakers. For example, particular negative truths of the form "a is not F" / "not(a is F)" haven't.
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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Consul wrote: June 28th, 2022, 9:39 pmI too think that it is not the case that all truths have (direct) truthmakers. For example, particular negative truths of the form "a is not F" / "not(a is F)" haven't.
If ~p is true, then it is not true by virtue of having a negative truthmaker (such as a negative state of affairs), but by virtue of its negation ~~p = p lacking a positive truthmaker, such that p is false; and if p is false, then ~p is true, because the falsity of p logically entails the truth of ~p.
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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Consul wrote: June 28th, 2022, 9:39 pm
Astro Cat wrote: June 28th, 2022, 9:17 pmI agree with everything that you've said here, but I'm not sure why you've said it: just that there are some philosophers that reject the truthmaker principle?
I too think that it is not the case that all truths have (direct) truthmakers. For example, particular negative truths of the form "a is not F" / "not(a is F)" haven't.
I've actually spent a lot of time thinking about whether there can be privative properties. I'm really fascinated by how we think that a towel can be dry, for instance (which is clearly an example of "a is not F"). I don't know if I've come to any final conclusions about this or anything, just noting this is something I think about surprisingly a lot.
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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Astro Cat wrote: June 28th, 2022, 9:51 pmI've actually spent a lot of time thinking about whether there can be privative properties. I'm really fascinated by how we think that a towel can be dry, for instance (which is clearly an example of "a is not F"). I don't know if I've come to any final conclusions about this or anything, just noting this is something I think about surprisingly a lot.
I'm convinced that there are no negative or "privative" entities of any ontological kind: Existence is positive!
Absences, lacks, and omissions aren't entities.

Someone might object: Wait a minute! Can't an absence or lack of oxygen kill me? If it can, it must be something rather than nothing, since nonentities cannot cause anything.
Well, although a person's death can depend counterfactually on an absence of oxygen—in the sense that the person wouldn't have died if oxygen hadn't been absent—, there is no efficient causation by the absent oxygen in terms of chemical/physical force or energy. For what causes your death in the event of an absence of oxygen is not the absent oxygen (as a negative entity) but the collapse of your life-sustaining functions which depend physiologically on oxygen.
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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Consul wrote: June 28th, 2022, 11:51 pm
Astro Cat wrote: June 28th, 2022, 9:51 pmI've actually spent a lot of time thinking about whether there can be privative properties. I'm really fascinated by how we think that a towel can be dry, for instance (which is clearly an example of "a is not F"). I don't know if I've come to any final conclusions about this or anything, just noting this is something I think about surprisingly a lot.
I'm convinced that there are no negative or "privative" entities of any ontological kind: Existence is positive!
Absences, lacks, and omissions aren't entities.

Someone might object: Wait a minute! Can't an absence or lack of oxygen kill me? If it can, it must be something rather than nothing, since nonentities cannot cause anything.
Well, although a person's death can depend counterfactually on an absence of oxygen—in the sense that the person wouldn't have died if oxygen hadn't been absent—, there is no efficient causation by the absent oxygen in terms of chemical/physical force or energy. For what causes your death in the event of an absence of oxygen is not the absent oxygen (as a negative entity) but the collapse of your life-sustaining functions which depend physiologically on oxygen.
On your view, then, when I say that the towel is dry, is that not true?
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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Astro Cat wrote: June 29th, 2022, 12:01 amOn your view, then, when I say that the towel is dry, is that not true?
Yes, it is; but it is not made true by the negative fact that the towel is not wet, which I think doesn't exist.
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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Consul wrote: June 29th, 2022, 12:45 am
Astro Cat wrote: June 29th, 2022, 12:01 amOn your view, then, when I say that the towel is dry, is that not true?
Yes, it is; but it is not made true by the negative fact that the towel is not wet, which I think doesn't exist.
Hmm, so how do we sort this out then? If statements like "the towel is dry" and "the room is dark" are propositional and can be true, what corresponds to reality about them if not privative properties?

Isn't "the towel is dry" exactly equal to "the towel is not wet," and isn't "the room is dark" exactly equal to "the room is not illuminated?"
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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Astro Cat wrote: June 29th, 2022, 12:48 am
Consul wrote: June 29th, 2022, 12:45 am Yes, it is; but it is not made true by the negative fact that the towel is not wet, which I think doesn't exist.
Hmm, so how do we sort this out then? If statements like "the towel is dry" and "the room is dark" are propositional and can be true, what corresponds to reality about them if not privative properties?

Isn't "the towel is dry" exactly equal to "the towel is not wet," and isn't "the room is dark" exactly equal to "the room is not illuminated?".
The "not" belongs to the copula: "is-not wet" rather than "is not-wet", "is-not illuminated" rather than "is not-illuminated"
That is to say, not to have a positive property is not to have a negative property. I am a nonsmoker by virtue of lacking the positive property of being a smoker, and not by virtue of having the negative property of being a nonsmoker.
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

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This reminds me of the via negativa where some people tried to describe God by what He is not, only to discover that it's indistinguishable from describing nothingness unless some positive properties were given as well. I need to chew on this one.
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

Post by Astro Cat »

Consul

I guess what I'm wondering is that normally when we make statements like "a is F," we're observing a property and reporting it. When I touch a towel I report that it's not wet, I don't know how to ask this, but why does this seem like I'm doing the same thing that I would do when I touch the towel and report that it's soft?
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Re: JTB: the myth of propositions and the Gettier problem

Post by Astro Cat »

Maybe Leontiskos would appreciate this towel-dryness thing as an example of people speaking perfectly normally without realizing they're actually doing something weird.
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