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True statements

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True statements

ragus
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Posted 04/24/09 - 04:16 AM:	#291
Banno wrote Evidence comes in to the question of how you know something, but as argued elsewhere, not every true belief need s to be justified. Yes. Knowing needs evidence. Why have you muddied the waters with "true belief"? Are you now asking whether statements are true, known to be true, believed to be true, truelly believed or, as in the case of your statement about Vegemite, impossible, to believe? Random wrote Would you then assert that unicorns exist? Would you expect that if someone punched you firmly on the nose that it would hurt. Would the feeling exist for you? Could it be described as a painful feeling or as an illusion (or maybe an hallucination) of a painful feeling?
"A word in your ear is like an untethered goat in a field" Wittigenstein

Banno
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Posted 04/24/09 - 05:06 AM:	#292
ragus wrote: Banno wrote Yes. Knowing needs evidence. Why have you muddied the waters with "true belief"? Are you now asking whether statements are true, known to be true, believed to be true, truelly believed or, as in the case of your statement about Vegemite, impossible, to believe? Muddied? My view is the only one hat makes sense! That brings clarity to the whole association of knowledge, truth and belief! Not only do I believe I have a pain in my foot, but it is also true that I have such a pain. Yet it is nonsense to ask for a justification for my belief, or for my stating that it is true. It follows that despite having a true belief, I do not know that I have that pain. Don't dis the mite, bro.
Davidson: We make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimizes agreement. Russel Morris: There's a meaning there, but the meaning there doesn't really mean a thing... Ned: Such is life

Cuthbert
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Posted 04/24/09 - 05:30 AM:	#293
Only perhaps it's clearer to say that it's not the case that you know and it's also not the case that you don't know. Knowledge and ignorance don't apply. 'I don't know that I have a pain' is a different kind of 'I don't know' from 'I don't know that I'll win the lottery.'

sensabile
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Posted 04/24/09 - 05:48 AM:	#294
ragus wrote: sensabile. How about this : evidence is implicit because a perfectly reasonable response to my assertion about the cat might be "how do you know?" and any confirmation of the truth of the statement has to rely on evidence but it's not the case that someone has to seek out the evidence unless they doubt the truth of the statement. What does "confirmation of the truth of the statement" entail? In my example it might meant that "B" now says "the cat is on the mat". To get to this point he went and looked for himself. I want to be more careful of saying things like "verifying" or "confirming" truth. Is that really what is happening? It's not so obvious. Consider the situation where B doesn't find the cat on the mat. B would say "the cat is not on the mat". There would be the implication that A's statement was false. And this would generate a response. But when B confirms A's statement there is the implicit agreement that A's statement was true and no more need be said. Asymmetry. I don't follow. How someone responds to statements (regardless of agreement) is dependent on context. Consider that if "A" had earlier told "B" to clean the cat, then the appropriate response to the statement "the cat is on the mat" would be something more like "I'll go and clean it now". If "A" was known to be completely mad then "B" might just as well have responded "Be quiet you loon". In both cases "B" would respond in the same way. In the first case, if the cat really was on the mat, then it would get cleaned and vice versa; in the second case, either way, the cat is going to be left alone if its on the mat or not. False. That's not all it meant. It also meant that B found A's statement to be true. How B delivers this to A is not an issue as long as A receives confirmation of the claim made. What it means for B to "find A's statement true" is that he says "the cat is on the mat". Perhaps. Although, what it means to "find" a statement to be true I'm not quite sure. Do you simply mean that they agreed? The bottom line is that if B agrees with A's statement then that's what it would mean for A to have made a true statement in your scenario. You're trying too hard to evaluate A's statement on its own and asking "what would it mean for it to be true?". This isn't helpful. It must be evaluated in terms of the whole dialogue and the actions taken. Don't think of A "making" a true statement, but as simply asserting that the cat is on the mat. If "A" were to say "it's true, the cat is on the mat", he probably wants you to say the same thing; when "B" responds "it's true!", he is saying, "I too will say that the cat is on the mat". I don't want to reduce truth to agreement even here because that sounds far too much like a theory to me. The interesting issue is why B agrees with the statement. Edited by sensabile on 04/24/09 - 05:57 AM
For the winner there was a big three-legged cauldron to stand over a fire - it was worth a dozen oxen by the Greek's reckoning - and for the loser he brought forward a woman thoroughly trained in domestic work whom they valued at four oxen. -Homer's The Illiad Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can you make it salty again? -Mark 9:50

poiko
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Posted 04/24/09 - 12:52 PM:	#295
Banno wrote: What is it for a statement to be true? In danger of repeating someone (I didn't read all 30 pages of comments...) I believe a statement is true if it corresponds to a fact. And by fact, this is either a tautology or something empirically observable to be true. As a side note, I would have also voted for asserting statements being the same as saying it was true, but I was only given one option. "The sky is blue" is the same as saying "it is true that the sky is blue". If one is false then the other is false, and so on.

Banno
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Posted 04/24/09 - 03:35 PM:	#296
Ragus, isn't a statement true regardless of whether or not it's truth has been confirmed?
Davidson: We make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimizes agreement. Russel Morris: There's a meaning there, but the meaning there doesn't really mean a thing... Ned: Such is life

sensabile
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Posted 04/24/09 - 04:55 PM:	#297
Banno wrote: Ragus, isn't a statement true regardless of whether or not it's truth has been confirmed? Good question. Am I being silly or is it rhetorical?! I'm interested in the idea that how you talk about truth (amongst other things in philosophy) should be guided, at least in part, by how it is verified or confirmed. Although I'm not entirely sure what it might mean to "verify truth". We can verify a statement by checking its accuracy (i.e. looking to see if the cat is on the mat) and confirm this process by saying "the cat is on the mat" or "it's true/you're right etc.". As a side-note, I find that people who adhere to correspondence theories of truth are more prone here to saying some more like "looking to see if the cat is actually on the mat"; as if actually looking at a cat was more meaningful than looking at a cat. Edited by sensabile on 04/24/09 - 05:02 PM
For the winner there was a big three-legged cauldron to stand over a fire - it was worth a dozen oxen by the Greek's reckoning - and for the loser he brought forward a woman thoroughly trained in domestic work whom they valued at four oxen. -Homer's The Illiad Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can you make it salty again? -Mark 9:50

Banno
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Posted 04/24/09 - 05:05 PM:	#298
Indeed, Sensabile. I would have taken it as a truism ( ) that the truth of any statement is independent of our confirming that truth. But Ragus' appears to think otherwise. Perhaps he wishes to advocate some form of idealism, in which only known truths are really true ( ). Awaiting an answer from R. * as a side note, I actually looked at the cat just then, to be sure. He is.
Davidson: We make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimizes agreement. Russel Morris: There's a meaning there, but the meaning there doesn't really mean a thing... Ned: Such is life

sensabile
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Posted 04/24/09 - 05:06 PM:	#299
poiko wrote: In danger of repeating someone (I didn't read all 30 pages of comments...) I believe a statement is true if it corresponds to a fact. And by fact, this is either a tautology or something empirically observable to be true. As a side note, I would have also voted for asserting statements being the same as saying it was true, but I was only given one option. "The sky is blue" is the same as saying "it is true that the sky is blue". If one is false then the other is false, and so on. I don't see how one can reconcile a correspondence theory of truth with an assertion-type theory.
For the winner there was a big three-legged cauldron to stand over a fire - it was worth a dozen oxen by the Greek's reckoning - and for the loser he brought forward a woman thoroughly trained in domestic work whom they valued at four oxen. -Homer's The Illiad Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can you make it salty again? -Mark 9:50

Banno
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Posted 04/24/09 - 05:09 PM:	#300
sensabile wrote: I don't see how one can reconcile a correspondence theory of truth with an assertion-type theory. I agree; but one might be able to make a case for correspondence as a way of justifying a belief. Thinking on that again, it seems odd to try to justify a truth - can one justify a truth? One can justify a belief, of course, but a truth? That doesn't sound right.
Davidson: We make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimizes agreement. Russel Morris: There's a meaning there, but the meaning there doesn't really mean a thing... Ned: Such is life

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