A post-representational neo-pragmatism might discuss “belief-conditioners.” To assume “truthmakers” is to cede the issue, you might say.
Perhaps Joe refers Larry to a historical source, book in the library that Larry hasn’t read. Even here, Larry’s future reading of this persuasive source is encouraged. "If you read X, then ( perhaps) you will adopt my belief on issue Y. Indeed you ought to do so. "
Whom ever you like, and despite the gesticulation.
Not withstanding the various and popular literary conjectures and fulminations, some of our statements do indeed manage to be true.
Well perhaps we can both agree that we aren’t deciding the fate of the world here. But, in the interest in continuing the game.
So if John Q Public says P if and only if P is true ?
It’d be nice if you would at least admit the tacit invocation of “objective reality” here.
(I believe) that we have to share most of our beliefs, to put it crudely, to understand one another. Of course I have the usual strong beliefs about the usual stuff. I might even call those beliefs “true” in ordinary conversation.
IMV, the culture war rhetoric doesn’t make your case but mine. The conceptual labor is set aside for identity stuff. But there’s a duality in the scientific pose. One face is critical and demystifying, pointing out empty pieties, while the other echoes the theology it replaces, offering “objective reality” as if this is more than curated belief.
There isn’t one. The T-sentence applies to any statement: objective, subjective, mathematical, French, true or false.
Yep. Charity.
In that case, though, you might as well be defending “on” as a contrast to “off.” It’s just formal thing, which is presumably relevant to non-formal life as “my” beliefs as user of the formalism are painted as “true.”
If I believe P and I believe that P \implies Q then I “ought” to believe Q. That’s what P \implies Q means, more or less. I could add “so I believe,” but my point is that this is implicit in every earnest claim.
A few passages from Brandom, if you haven’t seen them already.
The claim is not that knowledge is not important. Since Plato we have been told that knowledge is not just belief, but belief that can be justified; and not just justified belief, but true justified belief. And that is a perfectly good way of picking out a centrally important cognitive status. But I think it is a fundamental mistake to think that what is important is the possession by beliefs of a certain metaphysically weighty property: being true. I think the beginning of wisdom in assessing the significance of the justified true belief analysis of knowledge is to think about what one is doing when one attributes knowledge to another, or assesses the credentials of another as a knower. For me to take you to know, for instance, that the Washington Monument is 555 feet tall, I must do three things. First, I must attribute to you a belief that the Washington Monument is 555 feet tall. You can’t know what you don’t believe. (Notice that we could say “believe to be true,” but that doing so adds nothing.) Second, I must take it that you are entitled to that belief or commitment, that you have reasons for it, that you can justify it. An accidentally acquired belief is not yet knowledge. If you just picked some number out of the air, even if your lucky guess was right, you don’t know that it is. Third, I must myself endorse the belief, that is, believe that the Washington Monument is 555 feet tall. That is, besides attributing to you both a commitment (corresponding to the belief condition), and an entitlement to that commitment (corresponding to the justification condition), I must myself undertake the corresponding commitment. That is what corresponds to the truth condition on knowledge. But all that condition is doing is marking the coincidence of belief across social perspectives: I only count as knowledge beliefs that I share.
…
Assigning some belief the honorific status of knowledge is important, because in doing that I am classifying it as being of the kind that I think everyone should employ as premises in their own inferences, should appeal to in their own reasoning. These are the beliefs that I take to be eligible to serve as reasons on the basis of which to form further beliefs. For I take it both that any good inference in which they figure as premises is one whose conclusions I should endorse, and I take it that good reasons can be given to believe them, in turn. Thus, these are the beliefs that I take it deserve to spread.
…The expression “…is true” looks like a predicate that ascribes a property. If it were, it would be a very special kind of immediately and unconditionally normatively significant property: a kind of “to-be-believed-ness” property. No wonder metaphysicians, ethicists, and especially epistemologists have regarded it with fascination. Nor is its normative weight exclusively of an abstract, disinterested, ethical sort—a high ideal that is a suitable object of selfless commitment by those of good character, lofty aspiration, and sufficient leisure. For, we are assured by the philosophical tradition, the truth of our beliefs is the touchstone and sole possible guarantor of the success of our practical endeavors—including the lowest and most narrowly self-interested. Having beliefs with the special, desirable property of being true is the only reliable way to get what you want—to imbue your desires with the most important and desirable property they can aspire to: being satisfied. So truth is of supreme practical importance.
…
But I think it is deeply confused and almost totally wrong. Consider to begin with the idea that truth is the property of beliefs that conduces to the success of practical projects based on those beliefs. This thought is so deeply entrenched that some pragmatists have even sought to define truth as the success-producing property of beliefs. But even those not inclined to endorse such an order of definition have felt free to appeal to the intimate connection between the truth of beliefs and the satisfaction of desires for other philosophical projects—for instance when scientific realists argue that the at least approximate truth of our scientific theories is the only possible explanation for the practical success of our technologies: the extent to which they provide powerful instruments for getting what we want (at least, for some kinds of things we want).
I like his critique of the realist “approximation” argument. “My beliefs must be almost true because they work.” Say what ? You probably continue to hold (or rather enact) such beliefs because they work. There was a guy who believed he had no food allergies, prided himself on it even, but then he ate shrimp for the first time. He now believes that he has at least one food allergy.
You repeatedly address something quite other than has been set before you.
Should we go over it again?
Maybe tomorrow. 
The past is personal – i.e. it pertains to the system (the microcosm). The past is embedded in the state of the system as memories – as the conditions that serve as a kind of basis vector set upon which decisions are based.
Decisions are about the future.
The future is personal – i.e. it pertains to the system (the microcosm). The future is the ability of the system to generate stories about the various ways that the system may change, and to act in a manner that favors a preferred direction of change.
The equations of physics are time-symmetric, with the exception of the law of entropy. It is entropy that gives change an associated direction, and thereby creates these personal ideas of past and future. So time is a consequence of thermodynamics placing constraints on change.
“Presence” (the microcosm) is not “in time.” Rather temporal flow is what it consists of whilst as long as it is constrained by thermodynamics – i.e. constrained by the perspectival nature of its constituents that create for it an impression of “being in the world.”
I know this view raises a lot of questions… How do microcosms seem to see a shared world?.. Where do the constraints of thermodynamics come from?.. If entropy is constantly increasing then how is its initial low value to be accounted for?
These are questions that are presently engaging theoretical physicists, so I’m just presenting this view as an insight into a different way of looking. One that interests me enough to want to pursue it.
Is there something about the nature of physics or science in general that would incline you to to prefer to look for an explanation of temporal concepts like ‘past’ in that domain of thinking rather than in philosophy?
Hi Joshs and thanks for your interest.
My background is science and it was encountering the work of physicists like Wheeler, Griffiths, and Rovelli that sparked my interest in these developments. Wheeler and Rovelli seem philosophically literate so at this point I’m having trouble considering their views as non-philosophy.
My attempts to read philosophers in their own words haven’t come to much, but the plain speaking of physicists engages me and gives me a way in. Because of Chris Fuchs’s interest in William James I have read some of James’s work and find it reasonably accessible.
This part is exciting to me. I think this connects to what you mentioned in Whitehead and what I called “object splintered ontology.” The microcosm is a flow of “moments” or "from-a-point-view-latent aspects/fragments of things. Together they “provide” or “imply” the experiential character of the flow/stream/microcosm. The subject is “dissolved” into “historically charged pieces” that carry a cumulative (“sedimenting”) meaning.
I’d enjoy your thoughts on this. Our approaches are similar enough, I think, that the differences become worth mapping.
Could not agree more on the general point that physics, like any discipline, becomes “philosophy” as it thinks seriously about its own approach to its object.
Mach is a better philosopher than plenty of philosophers proper, IMV. His honesty style is a primary virtue. But I want to be fair and say that I find the difficult jargon of some philosophers to be justified in the long run.
I think we just aren’t hearing one another properly.
I will try to summarize.
Defining belief in terms of truth is like defining horses in terms of unicorns.
In “strong” uses of “truth,” a God’s POV ( an omniscient narrator) is tacitly invoked.
The argument I have presented has several parts, so it might be worth brining them together in a summary.
Where others have accepted the framing of the opening post, and argued about presentism, eternalism, memory traces, causal inheritance, the block universe and so on, I want to question that framing, and I hope, dissolve it - to show a way out.
The first step was to show that the past is poorly treated, if it is understood as something to be quantified. Looking at formal treatments of temporal logic shows that the question “does the past exist” is malformed; it’s a grammatical act that gives the illusion of there being a something - like the little man who wasn’t there.
Next, we can see how this might be used to reframe Peirce’s claims. He puts his account in terms of truth, when they might better and less controversially be put in terms of belief; he talks in terms of ontology when the issue is epistemic. The usefulness of past-tense statements might well be addressed in terms of their future utility; but their usefulness is a very different issue to their truth.
The third point: the root error here is one of equating belief and truth; of thinking that all there is to the truth of a statement is an attitude towards that statement. But the truth of a statement is a different kind of thing to the attitude we adopt towards it, that being believing it, knowing it, asserting it, doubting it, or whatever.
The final part of the argument is the observation that the T-sentence, “p” is true ≡ p, provides a minimal account of what it is for a statement to be true, without introducing ontological implications. The ontological implications might well be there, but they enter via “p”, not via the T-sentence.
Now this argument has the result of dissolving most of the context of the thread, but leaves us with most of Peirce’s conclusion intact. What folk believe about the past will drive what they do in the future. But it remains that those beliefs can be false.
A unicorn is a horse with a single horn on its forehead.
To believe that p is to believe that “p” is true.
Ok.
Imagine you and the other dude are standing in front of the fridge, and you say “there is not a plum in the fridge” and the other dude says “there is a plum in the fridge”.
One of you must be right, right?
The easy way to find out if there is a plum in the fridge is to open it and see. One of you will then, absent some form of mental illness, be forced to admit they were wrong.
Still, the plum being in the fridge, or not, is not dependent on you opening it to see, although of course both of you coming to know the truth is. For me that’s what it means to say that it is true or false that there is a plum in the fridge.
I think it has nothing at all to do with theology.
Oh it’s minimal all right. Your “truth” is precisely the man who isn’t there. I can only experience your position on this issue as dissonant relative to your other positions.
For clarity’s sake, I will be blunt, but I don’t mean to be rude.
As I see it, your own statement demonstrates a tone-deaf reading, an indulgent deafness to context, as if conversation were a variant of Chess with Eternal Essences that you access with your Third Eye. This makes the conversation a performance for an absent God.
For me this is just more negative theology.
Despite our disagreement on this issue, I don’t mean to give offense. We need foils, rival poets.
You can believe the Earth is flat. That has absolutely nothing to do with the actual truthness of the Earth actually being flat.
One is a mental state, the other is a reality.
The “theology” metaphor is risky, but I maintain that the monological and the monotheistic background are connected here.
Why must one of us be right ?
What does this rightness mean ?
In other words, seeing is believing. This is “the primacy of the perceptual.” And yet perception is situated, perspectival.
Someone being “really and truly” right seems to invoke an ideal perspective, the world as “god” sees it.
I’ve argued elsewhere that this ideal omniscient narrator is so tempting because we vaguely imagine positioning our individual selves as a perceiver in a sequence of ideal locations.
For instance, the suspect must “actually” be guilty or innocent. Why ? Because I can imagine myself as a ghost hovering over the scenes of crucial incidents. Certainly my own doubt would be settled.
But we already have conflicting eye-witness accounts. I would just be one more eyewitness insisting on my own articulated perceptions against those of others.
This is only a theoretical problem, of course. But it emphasizes the difference between ontological perspectivism and indirect (metaphysical) realism.
I also speculate that the coherence norm imposed on individuals by one another is “projected” on the world itself. The world itself “must” be coherent “because” I need a coherent narrative.
I think it just means that in that fridge, in fact in any fridge whatsoever, there is either a plum or there is not. So, speaking of any particular fridge the claim “there is a plum in that fridge” must be either true or false. I cannot see a way out of that conclusion.
I do think the suspect must be guilty or innocent of whatever act is being alleged, leaving aside any interpretive ambiguities as to motivational intent (and perhaps even then), but this is quite different than the “plum in the fridge” example, because in the latter case we can open the fridge to determine the truth, whereas in many if not most cases, the suspect cannot simply be proven to be innocent or guilty, but is rather judged to be one or the other if there is determined to be “no reasonable doubt” as to which.
The underlying presumption, though, is the same; that there must be a fact of the matter as to the accused guilt or innocence, even if only the accused can be absolutely certain as to what that is.
https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/how-does-the-past-exist-does-the-past-exist/1159/177
No offence taken, and none intended… but what could all that mean.
T-sentences are the basis for model theory, and not just a bit of nonsense I dreamed up. They are used by Tarski, Davidson, and various others. They are offered here as a bare minimum for what it is for a sentence to be true - a replacement for a definition of truth by showing how truth can be used to construct sentences.
And to believe something just is to believe that it is true. Belief requires truth. Consider the performative absurdity of “I believe there is a fly on the wall, but it is not true that, there is a fly on the wall”.
There’s no theology here. There simply some logic, generalised as bits of grammar.
And you appear not to be addressing these two very simply points at all.
“The” past is a gramatical illusion, dissolved by temporal logic. Peirce’s insights are epistemic, not ontological. Truth and belief are independent. T-sentences provide a minimal account of how to use “…is true”. Belief requires truth.
Welcome to analytic philosophy.