Justified True Belief: can anyone tell which beliefs are true?

Metaphysics & Epistemology
201

If I can jump in from an intermediate position:

“True” as deep property is the essence of indirect realism. Precisely because I don’t envision us as in caves, I also reject the “T.”

I can describe my former approach as “false” or “bad.” No problem. That approach didn’t work out. Typically perception shatters or confirm belief. So expectation collides with perception. Expectation is modified. We don’t need “truth” here. We need expectation and perception. More exactly we need “good feels” versus “bad feels.” I eat sweet berries, enacting a belief that they are food. But they make me sick — I vomit all night — so I remember and don’t eat them again. I grant that we tend to generalize. We project a “law.” Others will also get sick. But then Larry eats them and is not negatively affected. My belief is modified yet again.

If we understand belief viscerally, which is to say primarily in terms of non-verbal conduct, the issue becomes easier. We aren’t fundamentally floating pairs of eyes. We don’t draw treasure maps for the hell of it. The map is a tool we expect to work. But expectations are fundamentally risky. Such is life.

202

I am certain that it is true that there is a difference. Give Guess a break, he lives in a black and silent cave. He misses all sorts of things.

I think it is necessary to specify what it is that one claims to be true or certain. I am certain that my wife in sitting in the room with me and that it true. I am not certain about the origin of the universe and can’t determine what the truth of the matter is.

It may be true that there is life on other planets. I think it is highly likely but I am not certain there is.

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203

The old question is what it means for that to be “true.”

To me it’s easier to talk of unsettled belief ( you don’t expect anything specific or intensely) versus settled belief. You start calling the belief “true” when you ( to oversimplify) intensify count on conditional perceptions, etc.

IMV, we need some pragmatism here. A typical use of “true” ( the full force use ) vaguely pretends/assumes that reality is “one” and the future is not really the future but “actually” already here, etc.

204

It’s pretty amazing to me–that you are still unable to understand my OP.

Pretty amazing.

205

If you had said instead that we don’t need a theory of truth here, we’d have no disagreement.

The berry story makes use of the assertoric attitude throughout, and as such completes the performative contradiction. Indeed, the whole story depends on the difference between your belief that the berries were food and the truth that they make you ill. One of the things apes do with words is to discuss what happens, so they can contrast it with what they believe, hope, or doubt happens, so as to learn not to eat the berries. The berry story makes no sense without “Berries are food”, in some form, being false.

The assertoric attitude remains even if the word “true” is removed; it’s hidden, not deleted.

206

Well, happily I don’t have to go on very far. I’ve written a whole OP about it (top of thread). Here’s how it ends. Maybe you’ll address it:

Anyway, it is my considered opinion that while a human might own the T in JTB now and again, we cannot tell which one owns it.

Because of the cave setup and all.

I’m curious if anyone disagrees.

Can a human ever know that he owns the T in JTB?

To the question, “Is it possible that…?”, can we ever answer with a definitive No?

207

Not so long as you stay to mangle and misrepresent my thought, no.

Yeah, most of Oliver Sacks’ patients were doing that all the time, often with 10-foot rabbits in the other chair. No one could talk them out of those rabbits, in many cases.

I just told you what a fact is. And yet you replied that I was wrong, without examining the evidence at all, yes?

And you refuse to answer difficult questions about your own beliefs.

I can only bring it to the table. I can’t force you to examine it.

208

If only you could argue for such a position, we might get somewhere.

A thing is true if an ape sees it as true.

We don’t have any legitimate prophets, in my opinion, to stamp the true things.

209

Apparently there are many apes who want the coffee to be shit in the Opinion of God. That seems to be the problem, at least from where I sit.

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210

Ok, I’m going to contend that this post is in English. And, since this post is in English, I’ll contend that “This post is in English” is true. And, by existential generalisation, that something is true; hence, since this post is in English, there are truths.

And I think that you will agree that this post is in English. You will perhaps demonstrate this by replying.

Now it’s unclear to me what “own” is doing, but it seems we agree that this post is in English. In at least that sense, we both own the truth that this post is in English.

But further, the ongoing discourse here displays something that is not simply ad hoc or ad lib, in the way of mere expediency, but which abides.

So you and I, and those reading this post, own that truth.

This by way of a counterexample to your suggestion.

211

I have, pretty consistently over many years, in this and previous fora. Explicitly: “Being certain and feeling certain are the very same thing. Being true and being certain are not” (#708839). Certainty, on this view, collapses into a psychological state — it just is feeling certain — whereas truth is not reducible to any state of a subject.

The point recurs across threads. Knowledge claims trade on exactly this gap: “The difference between believing that X and knowing that X is that if you know X then X is true” (#686344) — belief/certainty can be wrong, truth cannot. Likewise against JTB-style accounts: “there is a difference between P being true and it being established that P is true” (#1014679), and more generally “There is a difference between being true and being known or believed true. Hinge propositions can then be true yet unjustified” (#652749). The same move appears against anti-realist readings of consciousness: ignoring “the difference between somethings being true and being known to be true” is flagged as “a common bit of antirealist rhetoric” (#1011221).

So the distinction isn’t between two kinds of certainty (a “being certain” versus “feeling certain” split, which I argued is a confused, invented category conflating certainty with truth — #709001, #709034, #706324) but between certainty (a state someone is in) and truth (a property of what’s stated, independent of anyone’s state). Janus’s attempt to smuggle truth into “being certain” was exactly the error I was pushing back on: “what you call ‘being certain’ is just what the rest of us would call feeling or being certain of something that is indeed true” (#709001) — i.e., certainty plus truth, not a third thing called “being certain” distinct from feeling certain.

So to directly answer: correct, there is a difference between being certain and being true, and it’s the same difference that runs through truth vs. justification, truth vs. knowledge, and truth vs. belief throughout these threads (#708839, #686344, #652749, #1014679, #1011221).

That’s a brief survey. Let me know if you want more.

212

Yes. That’s basically it. “But this isn’t just my belief, it is…Troo !!!”

--So you don’t believe in God’s POV ?

--No. Sounds like mystified rubbish to me.

--But that’s just your take.

--Obviously. That’s my point. I believe that I am an ape among apes, that I see the world through my eyes and approach it in my way and not yours. I also see other apes that way. So to me the word “truth” is basically empty, beyond its trivial use as a way of indicating belief.

--Why should I care then ?

--I don’t care if you care. Of course it’s nice to find others who get it, and it’s nice if one’s signs are of use to a few others who happen to be in a position to make use of them. But I don’t speak for God, and no one’s soul will be saved by a dry (anti-)theoretical innovation. Most people don’t read my influences. Why should they care about what I write ? On the flip side, I can’t care much about talk of “God” and “Truth” and “completed infinities” or whatever else you got in that line.

213

I don’t understand this idea that a sentence’s being true requires god-like certainty. Why should it?

There’s all sorts of simple everyday things that are true.

214

You are missing something that should be easy here. My approach to the berries can change yet again. I am genuinely surprised that this is such a stumbling block. It’s my own perception, my own discomfort, that readjusts my policy. My policy — my expectant visceral tendency — will be adjusted again. You seem to think that we have a “falsehood” that is replaced by “truth.” To oversimplify, either your “truth maker” is empirical and perspectival, or its the usual mystical omniscient narrator. If the first, the “seeing is believing” summarizes what we all tacitly and shrewdly believe already. If the second, then that’s just the “God’s POV” that I have been pointing out as a residue of monotheism. A final flicker, an otherwise useless word that has not quite lost its numinous glow.

From over here, it’s as if truthers are entrenched in a static spatial metaphor. Like I said : dualism. You accept the cave metaphor also, implicitly. Between me and the “truth” there is a “seems.” This “seems” is “true or false” in terms of God-knows-what. The “immaterial meaning” of signs somehow mirrors the “deep meaning-like structure” of “true reality.” Or something fuzzy like that. You less consistently switch from dualism and back, however. Because the “seems” is transformed into “truth” now and then. The OP seems to cling to truth in a way that I don’t, but the cave/internal metaphor is applied consistently with respect to this issue. And pragmatically ( perhaps the strongest and simplest approach ), the “truth for God” plays no practical role save its obvious rhetorical use in the mouths of the credulous, the fanatical, and the cynically manipulative, etc. Even putting my theoretical reasons aside, the mere uselessness cries out. “It’s not just my opinion, what I “merely” believe. It is MORE, much MORE. It is…The Truth.” Drunks in a bar, trying to get a finger in your buttonhole.

For @BestGuessYet , the Seems ( view-from-the-cave) is transformed. Whether it matches “true reality” doesn’t matter because “true reality” is inaccessible by definition. I think the cave metaphor should be replaced by “point of view.” We no longer need a “hidden true reality” at all. It suffices that the future can surprise us in ways that transform the expectation that we primarily enact non-verbally at great risk rather than merely verbalize in a “battle” that is no more genuine than leaning over a Chess board, while sipping tea.

I see your own clinging to “truth” as plausibly related to an attachment to formalisms. Hovering over a map encourages a sense that one is a god. The scientistic version of this is the interpretation of models of the empirical world as “peeks beyond the veil.”

I’ve never seem a version of dualism without a gaping plot hole. I resolved the cognitive dissonance by dropping the problematic assumption. Not by dropping only a piece of the ghost story. The alternative only works if the entire ghost story is dropped. The last piece of this ghost story that I jettisoned happened to be the assumption that “true” had a Deep Meaning Somehow.

I reject the internal/external framework completely as inherited theoretical hogwash. Descartes is a great mathematician but ridiculous as a philosopher. Others can believe if they want in “truth-making trans-empirical states of affairs.” They can insist on an omniscient narrator who insures their risky expectation. They can echo the shitty philosophy of Lenin in his diatribe against Mach. They can afford to, precisely because such theory-flattering theory is divorced from the rest of life in the world. My project is theoretical also, but it’s a theoretical critique of the divorce of theory from praxis. It’s a bit like trying to plug a device back in to the outlet.

--I may not know if my belief is “true,” but ain’t it nice that “true” has a “deep meaning” that allows for a deep super-science from the comfort of my armchair. And ain’t it nice that the important thing is words. The important thing is mirroring, so the most important thing must be a mirroring of mirroring.

Ye olde “appearance/reality” distinction ! Fine in its deflated pragmatic variant, but inflated by theoretical types into an ultimate kosmic principle. This is just one “face” of the dualism industrial complex. Rorty was limpwristed on this particular issue. Minimialism is unitarianism for those afraid to confess their atheism, perhaps even to themselves. Brandom gets it said, but so very politely, because his circle is dominated by earnest theoretical types. Some of them probably get red in the face at the whisper of certain French or German names. To me the whole culture war stuff is The View for nerds, way too emotional and moist. I don’t trust soul-savers and culture-war politicians on what I approach as an engineering issue.

215

This does not address what I’ve argued - yet again. The truth of your own discomfort changes you policy… I don’t make use of the term “truthmaker”… I don’t need an"omniscient narrator"… We are not on the same page.

:roll_eyes:

So back to basics. Are there any true sentence?

216

I just call “true” verbalizations of my own belief. There is nothing to explain or define. When I was a kid, we had a flag on the mailbox for the mailman. If mail was being sent out, the mailman would stop to pick it up, even if he had nothing to drop off.

For me, this is not some weighty issue about justification or certainty. I’m just pointing out what I see as the mystification of a banal sign. It echos the semantic critique of “God.” And all the other roasted chestnuts of the metaphysicians, who all agree on demoting perception and perspective in the name of this or that puff of smoke.

I think Ayer’s LTL is pretty great. But the tool — logical positivism — can be sharpened. He was wobbly on this issue. He didn’t see then that verity or truth was/is a metaphysical concept in the pejorative sense. Non-empirical, like Newton’s absolute space and time. He and his crew were also still insufficiently empirical about language. They didn’t clearly grasp that signs are empirical objects. To do so cut against the grand role they wanted to reserve for themselves. The hard part is giving up the pretense of a perch above one’s own dying self. The “logical” in “logical positivism” was latently theo-logical. But I don’t expect just anyone to notice this, especially if they are invested in the role and its attendant prejudices that are subjected to criticism here.

217

Then there are true sentences. Fine. Would that you had said this, instead of

Nor for me. Now I phrased this as more like that there are sentences that are true yet unjustified and uncertain.

Will you go that far?

I think it pretty dreadful. Austin took it to pieces in the right way. Do we need this tangent?

218

IN my shallow opinion, theory often does more to obfuscate than clarify.

And sometimes it is the other way around.

219

I think that belief and truth are two separate things. Belief does not require truth and truth does not depend on belief. Of course, many think that what they believe is true, but to regard something as true and not believe it seems wrong.

220

You have made my point for me. Some of his patients suffered from encephalitis lethargica. Others from other neurological disorders such as visual agnosia or other disorders of the brain.

I don’t know what fact you are referring to. How can we examine the evidence if the assumption is that it may be only apparent?