29 ideas
| 19108 | Truth is proper assertion, but that has varying standards [Misak] |
| Full Idea: The pragmatist will say that truth is proper assertion, but different discourses have different standards for proper assertion. | |
| From: Cheryl Misak (Pragmatism and Deflationism [2007], 4) | |
| A reaction: This remark shows that there is a pragmatic attitude towards truth behind most attempts to analyse the concept of assertion. When and why is assertion legitimate, and what motivates it? |
| 19094 | For pragmatists the loftiest idea of truth is just a feature of what remains forever assertible [Misak] |
| Full Idea: For pragmatists there is an unseverable connection between making an assertion and claiming that it is true. ...Were we to get to a belief that is forever assertible...then we would have a true belief. There is nothing higher or better we could ask of it. | |
| From: Cheryl Misak (Pragmatism and Deflationism [2007], 1) | |
| A reaction: She is particularly drawing on Peirce. She says his 'ideal end of enquiry' idea is a small aspect of his view of truth, which is mainly given here. I had taken the pragmatic view of truth to be silly, but I may rethink. |
| 19105 | Truth isn't a grand elusive property, if it is just the aim of our assertions and inquiries [Misak] |
| Full Idea: If truth is what satisfies our aims in first-order assertion and inquiry (as the pragmatist says), then there is no search for an elusive property, or a metaphysical property, or a property which we cannot grasp. | |
| From: Cheryl Misak (Pragmatism and Deflationism [2007], 3) | |
| A reaction: This pragmatic approach is much more persuasive than the usual caricature of pragmatic truth (Idea 19097), but I'm beginning to wonder how you distinguish an 'inquiry' (or 'assertion') from other modes of thought. Do I smell a circularity? |
| 19100 | Truth makes disagreements matter, or worth settling [Misak] |
| Full Idea: The role of truth is to make disagreements matter, or to make sense of wanting to resolve disagreements. | |
| From: Cheryl Misak (Pragmatism and Deflationism [2007], 2) | |
| A reaction: [She cites Huw Price 2003] This suggests that the most important use of 'truth' is forensic. It is hard to make any sense of a law court without a robust sense of truth. Trial by jury, rather than some great personage, shows this value. |
| 19099 | 'True' is used for emphasis, clarity, assertion, comparison, objectivity, meaning, negation, consequence... [Misak] |
| Full Idea: 'P is true' is used to emphasise p, and avoid logic problems. The pragmatists says there are plenty of other uses: the aim of assertion or deliberation, the improvement of our views, distinguishing objectivity, explaining meaning, negation, consequence... | |
| From: Cheryl Misak (Pragmatism and Deflationism [2007], 2) | |
| A reaction: Pragmatism seems to break 'true' down into its many uses, rather than having a specific theory of truth. This might be where ordinary language philosophy (how is the word 'true' used) meets pragmatism (how is the concept [true] used). |
| 19103 | 'That's true' doesn't just refer back to a sentence, but implies sustained evidence for it [Misak] |
| Full Idea: The pragmatist says 'That's so' or 'that's true' are not just 'pro-sentential', but carry with them the thought that evidence does currently speak in favour of the statement asserted, and the prediction that it will continue to speak in favour. | |
| From: Cheryl Misak (Pragmatism and Deflationism [2007], 3) | |
| A reaction: This is a very nice point made by a pragmatist against the flimsy view of truth held by various deflationary views. You ought to believe what is true, and stand by what you hold to be true. |
| 19101 | Disquotation is bivalent [Misak] |
| Full Idea: The disquotational schema entails bivalence. | |
| From: Cheryl Misak (Pragmatism and Deflationism [2007], 2 n10) | |
| A reaction: A simple but interesting observation. Critics of Tarski observe that he depends on a bivalent logic. |
| 19096 | Disquotationalism resembles a telephone directory [Misak] |
| Full Idea: Disquotationalism is more like a telephone directory than a theory. | |
| From: Cheryl Misak (Pragmatism and Deflationism [2007], 2 n7) | |
| A reaction: [She cites Wilfred Sellars 1962:33] The idea is that there is a schema - 'p' is true iff p - and that all the acceptable sentences of a language can be expressed in this way, making a vast but finite list. It seems to replace 'theories'. |
| 19106 | Disquotations says truth is assertion, and assertion proclaims truth - but what is 'assertion'? [Misak] |
| Full Idea: The point of the disquotational schema is that to say that a sentence is true is to assert it, and to assert a sentence is to say that it is true. We must then ask what it is to assert or endorse a proposition. | |
| From: Cheryl Misak (Pragmatism and Deflationism [2007], 4) | |
| A reaction: [She is referring to the views of Crispin Wright] Most people would say that we assert something because we think it is true, and truth is obviously prior. Clearly if it has been asserted, that was because someone thought it was true. |
| 19098 | Deflating the correspondence theory doesn't entail deflating all the other theories [Misak] |
| Full Idea: We must not move seamlessly from the thought that the correspondence theory must be deflated to the thought that any theory of truth must be deflated. | |
| From: Cheryl Misak (Pragmatism and Deflationism [2007], 2) | |
| A reaction: This rather good essay offers the idea that Peircean pragmatic approaches to truth can meet the deflationary desires of the opponents of correspondence, without jettisoning all the crucial naturalistic connections with reality. Interesting. |
| 19104 | Deflationism isn't a theory of truth, but an account of its role in natural language [Misak] |
| Full Idea: Deflationist theories are not theories of truth, or theories of what truth is. ...They are theories which try to explain the role that 'true' plays in natural languages. | |
| From: Cheryl Misak (Pragmatism and Deflationism [2007], 3) | |
| A reaction: [She cites Dorothy Grover 2001,2002] If so, then the modern axiomatic theory of truth sounds appealing, because it tries to give a fuller and more precise account than a mere list is disquotations could possibly give. |
| 19109 | The anti-realism debate concerns whether indefeasibility is a plausible aim of inquiry [Misak] |
| Full Idea: If indefeasibility turns out to be something we can't sensibly aim at in a kind of inquiry, then the judgements that arise from that kind of 'inquiry' are not truth-apt. It is here that the realism/anti-realism debate resides. | |
| From: Cheryl Misak (Pragmatism and Deflationism [2007], 4) | |
| A reaction: A very interesting way of presenting the issue, one that makes the debate sound (to me) considerably more interesting than hitherto. I may start using the word 'indefeasible' rather a lot, in my chats with the anti-realist philosophical multitude. |
| 6871 | We can't only believe things if we are currently conscious of their justification - there are too many [Goldman] |
| Full Idea: Strong internalism says only current conscious states can justify beliefs, but this has the problem of Stored Beliefs, that most of our beliefs are stored in memory, and one's conscious state includes nothing that justifies them. | |
| From: Alvin I. Goldman (Internalism Exposed [1999], §2) | |
| A reaction: This point seems obviously correct, but one could still have a 'fairly strong' version, which required that you could always call into consciousness the justificiation for any belief that you happened to remember. |
| 6872 | Internalism must cover Forgotten Evidence, which is no longer retrievable from memory [Goldman] |
| Full Idea: Even weak internalism has the problem of Forgotten Evidence; the agent once had adequate evidence that she subsequently forgot; at the time of epistemic appraisal, she no longer has adequate evidence that is retrievable from memory. | |
| From: Alvin I. Goldman (Internalism Exposed [1999], §3) | |
| A reaction: This is certainly a basic problem for any account of justification. It will rule out any strict requirement that there be actual mental states available to support a belief. Internalism may be pushed to include non-conscious parts of the mind. |
| 6874 | Internal justification needs both mental stability and time to compute coherence [Goldman] |
| Full Idea: The problem for internalists of Doxastic Decision Interval says internal justification must avoid mental change to preserve the justification status, but must also allow enough time to compute the formal relations between beliefs. | |
| From: Alvin I. Goldman (Internalism Exposed [1999], §4) | |
| A reaction: The word 'compute' implies a rather odd model of assessing coherence, which seems instantaneous for most of us where everyday beliefs are concerned. In real mental life this does not strike me as a problem. |
| 6873 | Coherent justification seems to require retrieving all our beliefs simultaneously [Goldman] |
| Full Idea: The problem of Concurrent Retrieval is a problem for internalism, notably coherentism, because an agent could ascertain coherence of her entire corpus only by concurrently retrieving all of her stored beliefs. | |
| From: Alvin I. Goldman (Internalism Exposed [1999], §3) | |
| A reaction: Sounds neat, but not very convincing. Goldman is relying on scepticism about short-term memory, but all belief and knowledge will collapse if we go down that road. We couldn't do simple arithmetic if Goldman's point were right. |
| 6875 | Reliability involves truth, and truth is external [Goldman] |
| Full Idea: Reliability involves truth, and truth (on the usual assumption) is external. | |
| From: Alvin I. Goldman (Internalism Exposed [1999], §6) | |
| A reaction: As an argument for externalism this seems bogus. I am not sure that truth is either 'internal' or 'external'. How could the truth of 3+2=5 be external? Facts are mostly external, but I take truth to be a relation between internal and external. |
| 23805 | Some explanations offer to explain a mystery by a greater mystery [Schulte] |
| Full Idea: An 'obscurum per obscurius' explanation is explaining something mysterious by something even more mysterious, | |
| From: Peter Schulte (Mental Content [2023], 6) | |
| A reaction: Schulte's example is trying to explain mental content in terms of phenomenal experience. That is, roughly, explaining content by qualia, when the latter is the 'hard problem'. |
| 23806 | Naturalist accounts of representation must match the views of cognitive science [Schulte] |
| Full Idea: Recent naturalisation of content now also has to offer a matching account of representational explanations in cognitive science. | |
| From: Peter Schulte (Mental Content [2023], 08.1) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Cummins, Neander and Shea] This is in addition to the 'status' and 'content' questions of Idea 23796. This seems to be an interesting shift to philosophers working backwards from the theories of empirical science. Few are qualified for this job! |
| 23793 | On the whole, referential content is seen as broad, and sense content as narrow [Schulte] |
| Full Idea: We can say that non-Fregean content [reference] is (virtually) always contrued as broad, while Fregean content [sense] is usually contrued as narrow. | |
| From: Peter Schulte (Mental Content [2023], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: I can't make sense of mental content actually being outside the mind, so I see all content as narrow - but that doesn't mean that externals are irrelevant to it. If I think that is an oak, and it's an elm, the content is oak. |
| 23796 | Naturalists must explain both representation, and what is represented [Schulte] |
| Full Idea: Naturalistic accounts of content ask 1) what makes a state qualify as a representational state?, and 2) what makes a representational state have one specific content rather than another? | |
| From: Peter Schulte (Mental Content [2023], 4) | |
| A reaction: [As often in this collection, the author uses algebraic letters, but I prefer plain English] I would say that the first question looks more amenable to an answer than the second. Do we know the neuronal difference between seeing red and blue? |
| 23792 | Phenomenal and representational character may have links, or even be united [Schulte] |
| Full Idea: Some theorists maintain that all states with representational content or intentionality must have phenomenal character …and we can also ask whether all states with phenomenal character also have representional content. | |
| From: Peter Schulte (Mental Content [2023], 2.4) | |
| A reaction: He mentions that beliefs could involve inner speech. And pains and moods may be phenomenal but lack content. He also asks which determines which. |
| 23795 | Naturalistic accounts of content cannot rely on primitive mental or normative notions [Schulte] |
| Full Idea: A 'naturalistic' explanation of content excludes primitive mental or normative notions, but allows causation, counterfactual dependence, probabilistic dependence or structural similarity. | |
| From: Peter Schulte (Mental Content [2023], 4) | |
| A reaction: Apart from causation, what is permissible to naturalists (like me) all sounds rather superficial (and thus not very explanatory). I'm sure we can do better than this. How about using non-primitive mental notions? |
| 23804 | Maybe we can explain mental content in terms of phenomenal properties [Schulte] |
| Full Idea: The phenomenal intentionality approach says that the content properties of mental states can be explained in terms of the phenomenal properties of mental states. | |
| From: Peter Schulte (Mental Content [2023], 6) | |
| A reaction: [Searle and Loar are cited] Tends to be 'non-naturalistic'. We might decide that content derives from the phenomenal, but still without saying anything interesting about content. Mathematical content? Universally generalised content? |
| 23802 | Conceptual role semantics says content is determined by cognitive role [Schulte] |
| Full Idea: Conceptual role semantics says the content of a representation is determined by the cognitive role it plays with a system. | |
| From: Peter Schulte (Mental Content [2023], 4.5) | |
| A reaction: Obvious problem: if 'swordfish' is the password, its role is quite different from its content. I've never thought that the role of something tells you anything about what it is. Hearts pump blood, but how do they fulfil that role? |
| 23797 | Cause won't explain content, because one cause can produce several contents [Schulte] |
| Full Idea: A simple causal theory of content has the 'content indeterminacy' problem - that the presence of a cow causes 'a cow is present', but also 'an animal is present' and 'a biological organism is present'. | |
| From: Peter Schulte (Mental Content [2023], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: That only rules out the 'simple' version. We just need to add that the cause (cow experience) is shaped by current knowledge and interests. Someone buying cows and someone terrified of them thereby produce different concepts. |
| 23799 | Teleosemantics explains content in terms of successful and unsuccessful functioning [Schulte] |
| Full Idea: The core idea of teleosemantics is that we need to explain how content can be accurate or inaccurate, true or false, realised or unrealised …which must appeal to the distinction between proper functioning and malfunctioning. | |
| From: Peter Schulte (Mental Content [2023], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: My immediate reaction to this is that you don't learn about content by assessing its success. Surely (as with eyesight) you first need to understand what it does, and only then judge its success. …Though success and failure are implicit in function. |
| 23800 | Teleosemantic explanations say content is the causal result of naturally selected functions [Schulte] |
| Full Idea: Teleosemantic theories usually give a causal account of mental functions …where some trait has a particular function if it was selected for that function by a process of natural selection. | |
| From: Peter Schulte (Mental Content [2023], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: This is an idea I like - that something has a specific function if without that function it wouldn't have come into existence (eyes, for example). But presumably the function of a mind is to collect content - which does nothing to explain content! |
| 23798 | Information theories say content is information, such as smoke making fire probable [Schulte] |
| Full Idea: Information theories of content [usually assume that] a column of smoke over there carries the information that fire is over there because it raises the probability of fire being over there. | |
| From: Peter Schulte (Mental Content [2023], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: Theorists usually add further conditions to this basic one. Fred Dretske is the source of this approach. Not promising, in my opinion. Surely the content is just smoke, and fire is one of dozens of possible inferences from it? |