brainpharte wrote:
Look, I already agreed that people often use knowledge and true without confusion (when, as I noted, the epistemic criteria are tacitly understood and agreed with--as is common within certain groups.) But this is not what the two and a half millennia philosophical tail chasing involving JTB and what "knowledge" and "true" really mean has been--and continues to be--about.

brainpharte wrote:
The construal of knowledge and true to be nothing more than stamps of approval certifying that the claim at issue has met whatever particular epistemic criteria the speaker has deemed necessary and sufficient for that claim would end the two and a half millennia philosophical tail chasing about what knowledge and true really mean.

brainpharte wrote:
Thus knowledge and true have no impenetrable or mystifying philosophical import. (And there certainly is no need for anything remotely resembling Platonic Forms of Knowledge and Truth, or muddled quests for the mystified eternally elusive holy grail of real Truth and Knowledge.)

brainpharte wrote:
If anyone insists that there is something more to Real "truth" and "knowledge" than that the claim at issue has met whatever epistemic criteria they've deemed necessary and sufficient for that claim, then they need to explain what this more consists in and how it is possible to determine whether or not it Really obtains.

brainpharte wrote:

I've been arguing that when we solicit explanations of what people mean when they've said that some claim is "true" all they actually can show the rest of us is that the claim has met whatever particular epistemic criteria they've deemed appropriate for that claim. Although most people either explicitly say--or at least imply--that there's more to it than that, what exactly this "more" consists in seems to escape everyone.

Also, whenever someone disputes an assertion that a claim is true, the dispute inevitably centers on the epistemic criteria--on whether or not it has actually been met, or on whether or not the criteria used is appropriate or adequate for that claim.


Any "Philosophical" issue about what 'true' means is due to self-inflicted confusion involving whether or not the world really is the way the claim at issue says it is. The assertion here is that in those cases in which the world really is the way a claim says it is, then that claim is true, else false.

But those who make such assertions can show us no way even in principle to determine whether or not the world really is the way a claim says it is. All they actually can show to be the case is whether or not the claim can meet certain epistemic criteria.

The history of human beliefs, including in the sciences, is replete with instances in which claims that were alleged to be true because the world really was the way the claim said it was, are later found to be false.

People can and regularly do insist that their claim is true because the world really is the way their claim says it is, but all they actually can show us is that the claim meets their criteria. The "true" and "really is" are noise.

brainpharte wrote:
Thus, logically rigorous, empirically corroborated, reliable predictors seems the very best we can do. Which is great, but does not entail that the world "really is" the way such claims say it is.

brainpharte wrote:
Agreed.

What I have been presenting is a counterargument to realism and the correspondence theory of truth, in which I argue that those who assert such a theory can show us nothing more about claims they insist to be "true" than that those claims meet certain epistemic criteria.

brainpharte wrote:
BTW, I know that they're called "theories of truth" but I find this somewhat misleading, and a concession to the correspondence theory and realism. To call them "theories of truth" seems to imply that there Really Is something called truth, and that the task for any theory of truth is to get it right.

I think rather that what we have are different definitions or stipulations or explanations of what can be meant when we speak of something as being 'true' or 'truth'.
Agreed. "Explanations" seems (to me) to be a better expression.

Since there is no way to judge whether or not any of these definitions is the way truth "really is", all we can do is analyze the different definitions and determine whether or not they are coherent, or add to our understanding, or are useful, or entail certain consequences, etc.