I believe that I am writing this sentence. I don’t need to invoke this weird sign “truth.”
That’s trivially circular.
To say we believe that p is to set out our attitude towards the sentence “p”. That is about our attitude towards the truth value of the sentence, which is quite distinct from the truth value of the sentence.
I set out a series of arguments that show that denying a difference between “p is true” and “We believe that p” very quickly leads to incoherence. They deserve a reply. Simply reasserting your theroy, even if you now include god, will not suffice.
Of course we update our beliefs. Nothing I’ve said here denies that.
And further, we are able to update our beliefs exactly because there is a difference between what we believe and what is true. We sometimes find that there is a mismatch between the two; and that is why we update our beliefs.
Now if what you have posited were so, so that what we believe is exactly the same as what is true, there could never be any reason to update our beliefs. Our beliefs could never be found to mismatch with something other than themselves.
Your view leads to our never being wrong.
You fret too much about truth. You are reading this, now. And so it is true that you are reading this, now. And that is all there is to say about truth. All those theories of coherence and correspondence and pragmatics are nonsense.
Your belief that you are reading this, just is that you believe that it is true that you are reading this.
Nothing I’ve said about truth relies on notions of objective reality, whatever that is. All we need is: “p” is true if and only if p
The statement “p” is not proscribed; it could be anything.
We are surprised. We comport ourselves believingly until the car won’t start. Inquiry settles belief. We need not invoke truth. People do. People will. But so far you are just presenting what so many take for granted, namely that “truth” means something.
We aren’t bloodless computers trying to mirror reality for the hell of it. We are apes in an environment, trying to get what we need. Sometimes we approach a situation in what we come to call the “wrong” way, because we didn’t get what we wanted.
Revision of belief suffices. More economical. That a perception surprises me and “forces” a revision on me needs not invocation of “truth.” Seeing is believing. The perceptual is primary. The temptation toward truth as correspondence is understandable in terms of imagination versus perception. I was told there was a plum in the fridge. I believed it. I picture myself opening the fridge and grabbing it. But then I went to the fridge to get the plum and it wasn’t there. So now I believe that there’s no plum in the fridge. I may say that it is “true” that there’s no plum in the fridge, but this adds nothing.
To make more of truth is to pretend one is God and not just another believer.
The tendency to inflate truth seems to go with the tacit projection of a God’s POV on reality. So the truth is what God believes. And the “true” past is whatever God as historian claims it was. Residue of monotheism, fumes from the seminary.
So let’s not inflate truth; but let’s not forget it!
Our words are about stuff. There is more to “the cat is on the mat” than “the cat is on the mat” - at the least, it also involves cats and mats! There is a difference between “the cat is on the mat” and “the cat is not on the mat” that is other than verbal, other than what you or I believe. Our language is used to do more than just say things. Our language games involve not just words, but blocks and slabs and apples and bags.
In short, some utterances are true, some not. Some beliefs are true, some not.
To deny this is to debar yourself from the world.
So sure, set aside all that stuff about correspondence and coherence and other inflated views of truth. But there remains a difference to be had between a statement’s being true, and its being false.
So @j_j wrote the OP. And it is true that @j_j wrote the OP. And that @j_j wrote the OP happened in the past. And it is true that in the past, @j_j wrote the OP.
And we believe that @j_j wrote the OP in the past, and we believe that it is true that @j_j wrote the OP in the past.
I hope none of this is controversial.
Now, as the OP explains, certain pragmatic considerations have led folk to suppose that what is important is what we can do next. They conclude that the past is only important in regard to what we can do with it in the future.
That might well be the case—I’ll not express an opinion. Sticking to our example, it might well be that “@j_j wrote the OP in the past” is only of significance insofar as it impacts what we might do in the future.
But that has no impact—none whatsoever—on the truth of “@j_j wrote the OP in the past”.
The plain fact is that pragmatism fails as a theory of truth. It might be a decent method for enquiry, or a good way to think about significance, or even a half-decent theory of meaning; but not a theory of truth. This is so because the truth of almost all statements is independent of their utility.
This approach unravels the whole of this thread.
Added: And yes, it also undermines the view in Pragmatism and truth , that “the only truth, or the only truth that matters, is that which shows the way to action”.
I haven’t been participating in this thread, but I’ll respond to this post.
In a sense, I agree with Banno. To address his concerns, I’ll reformulate the quote used in the previous post. Truth doesn’t matter. What does matter is the effects of a claim on an action.
That’s all I’ll have to say on the matter.
Well, I might disagree with that first bit - but not substantively. The second - look to use, not to meaning, so ok. Cheers.
Pragmatism can lead to skepticism about the past, due to interpreting the truthmakers of past-contigent propositions as being empirically reducible to the evidential criteria that are used to evaluate them.
Consider for instance the game Cluedo (or “Clue”). Traditionally, three unknown cards denoting a killer, a murder weapon and a place of murder are placed in a black envelope before the game starts. Then the game proceeds through several rounds of questions and answers in which players reveal cards in their possession, so as to indirectly infer the identity of the unknown cards in the envelope through a process of elimination.
But notice that the process of elimination is exhuastive, such that the black envelope plays no actual role in the game. Therefore a murder isn’t necessary before the game proceeds! Instead, we can interpret the players as “constructing” the past through a future accumulation of information.
The myth of a preexistent past is analogous to the black envelope in Cleudo.
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Ah, well I take strong belief to “articulate perception.” I “live in” my strong belief.
Now if you want to take belief in purely verbal terms, as a string of words, then I hear you. And I sometimes go back and forth, depending on the moment of conversation.
I prefer to talk about comportment or enactment. When I reach to a pet a large dog on its head, I don’t expect it to chomp on my hand.
Note that I’ve been stressing the primacy of the perception. Seeing is believing. Now you might want to call perception truth, but then you sound like Heidegger. I try to avoid the extra complexity by just avoiding the word “truth.”
There remains a difference between me perceiving a plum in the fridge and me not perceiving a plum in the fridge. To me that’s enough. I really don’t see what “truth” adds to this. I can “put my perception” into words and call those words “true.” But this is just expressing situated (owned, my own) belief.
Yet you know that it is.
Now if we all believe that I wrote the OP, then we might say that it is “true” that I wrote the OP. My claim is that this addition of “truth” adds nothing. I can understand why people might think it does. I suspect it’s because they understand belief differently than I do.
But try to play the pieces from the other side of the board. How would others try to make do with just the single concept of belief ?. That’s probably the best way to understand me.
I agree with you, and that’s why I reject the attempt to bother with any theory of truth as fundamentally misguided. No need to define such a phantom. Rorty flirts with minimalism, but the spirit of his anti-representationalism is basically post-truth, and that’s a good thing.
It’s precisely my frustration with all theories of truth, including the pragmatic theory (via James or even Sellars sort of ) that led me to consider/notice the vacuity of the concept.
For science we only need relatively warranted beliefs. Science makes sense as the pursuit of better beliefs in the “style” described by Popper in Conjectures and Refutations, basically as a second-order tradition for managing first-order beliefs.
Am I presenting my claims here as true ? No. That misses the point. Speech acts need not be taken as attempts to mirror non-linguistic reality. Sentences may get mis-classified as “assertions,” and this “mis” is not “false” but “bad.” Bad from the perspective of someone and not of “God.”
No need to ground the “betterness” of beliefs in some version of “God,” (some automation of universal logic or whatever) because this just repeats the bogus leap out of situated judgment. That’s the point here — that “truth” speaks for “God.” But I just hear particular human beings sharing how things are according to them. They will tell me “but it’s true !” As if this adds something. Likewise y’all don’t believe what I say just because I tell you it “really is true.”
Your revision of belief here supposes exactly what you are trying to eliminate. You believed there was a plum in the fridge, but your belief was not true. Without a belief’s not being true, there is no reason to revise the belief.
Yes, in a way there is no difference between “There is a plum in the fridge” and “It is true that there is a plum in the fridge”. But there is a difference between “there is a plum in the fridge” and “there is not a plum in the fridge”. And it is more than a difference in what you believe. It’s a difference captured by the one’s being true, the other false.
…and there is a difference between there being a plum in the fridge, and there not being a plum in the fridge, quite apart from your perception. So sure, you might believe that the plum is in the fridge because you perceive that the plum is in the fridge; this has nothing to do with it being true or false that the plum is in the fridge.
I disagree. I wanted a plum and didn’t get one. I stop trying to find a plum in the fridge. I give up. That not finding the plum is a for-me perceptual “experience.”
“Truth” tends to invoke some God’s POV. It’s not God’s perception but my own that convinces me to give up. Seeing is believing.
There ain’t no plum in there damn it. What do you think “truth” adds to this updated belief ? My sense of the world and my comportment within it is modified. God is nowhere to be found.
Are you sure you aren’t just projecting your own attachment to belief as “taking to be true” on me ? One might say that we live in our own beliefs “like the truth.” But this just mistakes the redundancy for something deep.
Not truth but belief is fundamental. And belief is most strongly “controlled by” perception, at least in practical matters. Things aren’t for my eyes as they were for my hopeful imagination. The world “for my eyes” is not God’s True World but the world as it shows itself to me in that moment.
Sure. “jj wrote the OP” and “it is true that jj wrote the OP” have the very smae truth value.
It is important to note that “jj wrote the OP” rules out “it is false that jj wrote the OP”. And that is not nothing.
Throw out all the inflationary theories of belief! But even so, there is something left, and it is what makes our language work.
Then you are wrong. 
You keep talking about god. I have no need of that hypothesis…
“There ain’t no plum in there damn it.” Yep. Hence it is true that “There ain’t no plum in there”. That’s all. Belief, belief that… is dependent on truth.
You don’t hear the theology in that ? Maybe Joe believes differently. He insists that there is indeed a plum in there. He tells me “dude there Really Is a plum in there.” Redundant. Thanks Joe for your report from the front.
But I tend to believe my eyes and hands rather than yours, Joe.
Or is your “God” here just the community consensus ? Tell me (I ask kindly) who has these True Reality Goggles to escape their own perspectival access to the situation ? Who is it that speaks more than their own belief ? Is the “truth” in the scrolling green source code ? The last refuge of metaphysics perhaps is this “objective reality” or dehydrated water. Because “objective” isn’t just “unbiased” here but a magical concept, a “theological” concept.
I’m trying to point at this pretense to sit next to God. Your “truth” is just belief from over here. Unless I share it, then maybe we open a Sunday School.
I know. So I am annoying you with theological metaphors to try to point at the assumption of an “aperspectival reality,” an “objective reality.” Without that, “truth” is just what I call my own situated belief.
There is none. And no god’s eye view, no objective reality. Just grammar.
- “p” is true IFF p
- To believe that p is to believe that p is true.
Ah, and what is this “grammar” ? Who is it that owns the language ? Who pronounces on its “truth” ?
“Analytic statements” in the ears of God. “Nonsense” in the ears of God. Vague gesturing (not by you but generally) at “the way things are done around here.”
And of course I know that many people reiterate that “belief is taking to be true.” They “define” a relatively concrete and secure concept in terms of a phantom. There’s no practical negative feedback because it’s just language on a holy day.
In life beneath the billboards, we do not believe one another, do not agree on what is “true.” But many philosophers do assume that something is “True.” They speak for God, if only in the belated form of Grammar. This “normative imposition,” this disowned claim on others, is what I’m trying to point out.
—This ain’t just my belief, kid, it’s True.
—Well is there anything you believe that isn’t True ?
—Oh look at the time !
Look at this again:
“p” is true IFF p
Who asserts p here ? The “emptiness” of “truth” is “loud” precisely here in this empty “iff.” Belief without a believer.