Yet you denied the possibility of his existence. I take it you are now reconsidering that assertion.
You believed you could see the clear meaning, but you missed it terribly. No one else here misunderstood my OP as you did. As I say, it’s why I suspected you might not be a native English speaker.
Tsk. Tsk.
If you need help with philosophical matters, I will be happy to answer any questions. No need to feel wobbled. It’s just words, you know.
Sow confusion? You think that helping people see more clearly is “sowing confusion”? I’m sorry, but that just seems weird to me.
If you want to allow the local preacher to believe he holds God’s Warrant to do as he pleases—without questioning his warrant—then that’s what you want.
If you want the local warlord to assume he marches for God—without questioning that assumption—then that is what you want.
Personally, I prefer to try and do some good in the world.
So you accuse me of dishonesty—without offering any examples—and then go about shaming my dishonesty.
That gives you joy, to behave that way?
Maybe you should question your motivations here? Just saying.
If you think it is dishonesty to try and help humanity, I don’t know how to react to that.
But we could try. Rather than raw accusation, maybe you’d be willing to present examples of my ‘dishonesty’ and we could discuss?
How about it? Are you willing to offer any details to support your accusations?
I bring to your attention your earlier assertion and admission. I’m not trying to shame you in anyway, just to gauge under what pretence or motivation you’d sow confusion that’s all.
Socrates did something similar, and if he’s your role model then that’s fine.
Then I am at the next level: I want to sew a seed of doubt in your doubt. 
Because I’ll maintain, along with Wittgenstein and others, that doubt and scepticism require and takes place against a background of certainty. That in order to doubt that this sentence is in English, you needsmust take this as being a sentence; that in order to sew the seeds of doubt, you have to grant that there are seeds.
It’s not that you have no choice but to own truth, but that truth doesn’t care if you own it or not.
I don’t know why you keep substituting the word “confusion” for the word “uncertainty”.
Do you assume that the uncertain are confused, maybe?
In my experience, the uncertain tend to be the sharpest tacks in the drawer.
Well then, what’s the difference to you between causing confusion and causing uncertainty? I’d like to hear it because I don’t think that there is one.
Sure ambiguity is a nice place to live in but one must make choices and we do that based on info which is not the same as knowledge. Knowledge is how you make that info useful so that you may act on it.
It’s been done to death. “You are certain about uncertainty!” seems such a luscious formulation that no one can apparently resist it.
Against a background of the BGY. I don’t understand why that is hard to grasp. I can reason quite well from my BGYs… as well as the next guy can reason from his certain truth.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘truth’ here. The bus?
The best guess yet presumes one doing the guessing, a guess, a continuum, and worse, something against which to evaluate best.
I see much more confusion caused by certainty than by uncertainty. When we embrace our epistemic humility, things make better sense. When we join a tribe, for example, and become certain, bad things tend to happen to human thought. In my experience.
And yet I function quite well in the world without thinking myself in possession of the truth. I live by the best guess yet. In my humble view, it makes for cleaner thought.
Knowledge is just a word. It is no different from my best guess yet, except that I will admit that my BGY is only that–it is not necessarily God’s Own Opinion.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. My guesses are made against previous guesses–against failure or success of those, if I’m understanding your point.
Mostly that you were never on your own in a cave. You took us in there with you, but only after being told that there was a cave.
Well, okay. But I have no idea why you felt the need to make that point. For the record, though, I would like to testify that I have never thought myself to have poofed into existence of a sudden.
I agree. Wittgenstein, like Socrates, often leaves us puzzled. But this is never where they intend to leave us. It is, rather, a necessary part of an ongoing dialogical journey.
Plato puts trust (Greek pistis) on the bottom half of the divided line, at the top part of the visible realm. He is clear that this does not mean we should take everything we see as true, but trust in necessary if we are not to get lost.
Plato examines whether knowledge is perception or perhaps, perception plus logos (justification). Both possibilities are rejected. More importantly for this topic, both perception and logos are to be trusted. Not trusting them leads a destructive nihilism skepticism.
I think that a main reason why we find so many different interpretations of Wittgenstein is because he is deliberate in not giving clear answers and solutions. The reader is led to think along with and against what is said.
Neither Socrates nor Wittgenstein is a solitary thinker, although the early Wittgenstein did accept a version of solipsism. He was cured of this temptation when he came to a better understanding of language as a social practice, and not, as some would have it, just words.
@BestGuessYet Just a note to say I’ve re-titled this topic. Its original title was too obscure.
Responding to the new title:
The word “true” is best understood as a sign for indicating belief. Done. Stop there. The rest is wasted motion, mystification, confusion.
“True” as “deep property” is not an empirical concept. It is not an operational concept.
Here is a pragmatic alternative to title: “can a particular organism act without risk in the world ?”
I’d say of course not.
Act without risk. To obsess over verbal belief as an attempt to “mirror” the “true world” is “theoretical” in the bad sense.
“Words are wise men’s counters but the money of fools.”
The deep/earnest use of “true” tends to be at least as naive as working within an assumption of absolute space. Leave it to metaphysicians to favor concepts all the more the less they are operational, the less they are exposed to life below the mouth.
I can say that Joe is “wrong” or “mistaken.” Unless I am “God,” this is trivially an expression of my own contrary belief. “I don’t just disagree with you, you are Wrong.”
I agree with the spirit of @BestGuessYet on this issue. I disagree with the cave metaphor. The empirical world is shared. We enact our belief that it is shared merely by earnestly conversing with one another. On the other hand, the empirical world — the world of “experience” — is “for Joe” or “for Sally,” etc.
It’s not that we speak from a “cave” and that our access to “objective reality” is blocked. Rather “objective reality” is a nonsense phrase like “absolute space.” I express a personal judgement in this use of “nonsense.” I mean that I find the phrase semantically deficient.
We don’t need a theory of truth, not even a “minimal” truth that clings to the basic mystification. The “minimal” approach is just a distillation of the mystification. At least correspondence can be traced back as an inflation of “seeing is believing.” “Minimalism” is admirably light, but it is also a bag of air. Just throw the bag away too, as Diogenes threw away his cup.
Well, OK then. I’m not much interested in studying the Great Minds myself, but each to his own.
Not so much in my experience, for I have debated politics and religion.
To me, there seems much more disagreement in human belief than agreement.
Regarding the lion at the tree, we might get close to 100% agreement, but the vast body of human knowledge is not a matter of immediate senses. It’s a matter of particular propositions, worded in ways so specific that half will drop away at the lack of a comma and the other half will abandon the thing if you put the comma back.
Or a superpower. Maybe they can see that the color is not actually white. It has spectral differences that others can’t see.
I don’t care about saying he’s wrong. I’m more interested in checking his argument and evidence. In the end, I’ll say that my BGY is quite high that he’s mistaken.
THE QUESTION: If I say a thing is true and you say it is false, who is the ultimate judge of the truth of it?
If we can answer this one question, maybe we can make more progress.
Will do.
In most cases, yes. But I have met many more minds who can leap directly to true, without evidence, than careful minds who go about it methodically and honestly.
I tend to agree, but I think some philosophers like to do math with language. I can’t say they should stop. I don’t know enough about their business.
And I find this world to be filled with apes who go around insisting that their beliefs are true. It seems to have some danger in it—such thinking—and so I like to push back a bit.
Also, I wonder what you think about religion. At its root, most religionists seem to cling to Truth as if a life preserver. We were put in this place without any sort of manual. I can understand the terror which pushes them to embrace a truth and live their lives by it.
I agree. But I find that most apes don’t at all agree. That is the problem that I’m trying to address.
It startles me a little when you say that. I’m talking about the brain in a skull, receiving signals and trying to put together an understanding of whatever is out there. I’m not sure why you’d disagree with that quasi-metaphor.
Yes. It’s why debate attracts me so. I have years of experience with it. But I would say that “earnestly” is a rare quality in the debate I’ve witnessed.
I call it apparent reality, and it’s hard for me to understand your objection. To me, there appears to be something out there. Virtually all apes (and the squirrels) step aside when an apparent bus approaches. That doesn’t push you to conclude that something is likely out there? Something has to be reacted to—else we won’t make it to the next apparent something.
Basically indirect realism tends to make the brain its own product. The empirical brain ( the brains that we can see and investigate) is perceptual. So it would be, for the indirect realist, a mere image in the cave. But then the cave is inside an image inside the cave.
I think empiriocriticism ( Ernst Mach especially) manages to acknowledge the intense importance of the brain without the dualism of indirect realism.
My view is in the other direction. There is nothing in here. Reality is immediately “shared reality.” There are many ways to express this. I reject consciousness as inside stuff. But I grant that subjectivity goes all the way down. Perspective need not be understood to imply “internal stuff” versus “external stuff.”
The world can be shared without our postulating a “true reality.” This approach isn’t my invention. Crucial influences include Heidegger, J.S. Mill, Leibniz, W. Fasching, W. James, C. S. Peirce, and quite a few others. It might be called ontological perspectivism.
Basically we switch from a spatial metaphor ( inside/outside) to a temporal metaphor ( present expectation/ oncoming future). I can be “mistaken” because my approach to a situation doesn’t work out. So I revise my approach, not only verbally but with my arms and legs.
Belief is the specificity of an animal’s comportment. We don’t need “truth.” It suffices to consider the transformation of comportment in response to environmental feedback. This view does not present itself as “truth,” or as “the truth about truth.” It is itself a comportment toward traditional philosophical issues that tries to circumvent dualistic assumptions as limiting and tending to lead to cognitive dissonance.
Right. We might call it logocentrism. I’m a huge fan of logical positivism, but the “logical” is often tacitly theo-logical. A non-empirical metaphysical theory of meaning as “immaterial universal essence” is taken for granted. Basically they sometimes pretended to have access to God’s dictionary. The work of Bakhtin is great on this, so I call my attempt to update this movement dialogical positivism. Basically apes trade signs in their shared environment, and these signs ( spoken words and written symbols) are empirical objects that play conventional roles.
Different apes react to the same empirical object differently. So there is no “true meaning” of a noise or a mark. But there is an “average” response, and we do mostly understand one another in the practical realm. We’d be dead otherwise. So our sign system is subject to evolutionary pressure too, like a communal organism ( a meme system.)
If this interests you, perhaps you will contribute to this topic: Cry me an eagle
I’d put it this way. Animals always always always believe. To go north rather than south is to enact non-verbal belief. To hiss rather than purr. Any specified reaction of strategy is visceral belief.
Epistemic humility among humans can be understood as a readiness to modify comportment. We often understand this in verbal terms. Popper is great on this. “We let our theories do our dying for us.” We don’t identify with first-order verbal beliefs. We identify with a second-order belief about how first order beliefs should be managed. So the scientific mind is relatively detached from its first order beliefs.
“If you are wrong, then you were right.” Basically you can only be wrong if the mistaken belief was “rightly” empirical to begin with.
So we have phrases like “not even wrong.” Because a “not even wrong” belief is insufficiently empirical and definite to be subject to embarrassment by experience.
I love Popper, but I don’t like the term “falsification.” This is too metaphysical, too dualistic and theological. But it is easily fixed. A scientific personality adapts quickly. If the environment ( which is perspectival and perceptual) gives me an unpleasant surprise, then I change my approach.
We don’t need “truth” at all. My updated beliefs are just as tentative and fragile as those they replaced. The future can always surprise me. Indeed, I expect it to surprise me, but I don’t know exactly how it will surprise. I don’t know which beliefs I will need to modify, but I have learned that life involves endless learning. Even this is not a “truth” but a strong belief that is almost definitive of rationality. The person “who knows the absolute truth already” looks to the scientific person like a fool.
As far as religion goes, I’m an atheist. But I can respect some manifestations of religion. I tend to prefer deeds over words. The metaphysical version of religion comes off as a kind of confused pseudo-physics that has little to do with wisdom, love, a sense of “grace.” I prefer the “theism” in the music of J. S. Bach to the theism of metaphysicians, who are basically just building out another metaphysical system, another castle of words.
I’m a huge fan of pragmatism. And for me it is not a useless theory of truth. Instead it “grounds talk” in non-verbal conduct. I need to figure out what I, as an animal, am going to do next. Life is not fundamentally a game of “picturing with words.” The treasure map ( the model ) is a tool. The point is the treasure I hope it will help me grab. Words are tools, but some philosopher think that they are only good for “mirrors.”
So science is (mis)understand as the pursuit of “truth” instead of as a set of techniques for thriving in the environment. I’m saying that science is the search for better ways of doing things. “Pure seeing” is prioritized over a more general sense of success in the world. Basically the theorist is biased toward theory, and they approach human existence as if we were floating pairs of eyes with a mouth attached — as if the whole game is nothing but “math with words.” These words are “vessels” of “universal immaterial meaning stuff.” Basically the religion of this kind of theorist is mathematical platonism. A magical immaterial “truthy meaning stuff.” To me this is totally divorced from non-theoretical life. A fetish. A ghost story.
As I think I said earlier, you and I seem very similar in our thought, but we use vastly different languages. I don’t know what indirect realism is, much less the dualism of indirect realism. Nor empiriocriticism. Nor have I ever met Ernst Mach, even on the page.
I am only a lowly prophet of uncertainty, seeing if there’s anything I can do to save the ape from himself, while continuing to chase the horizon.
I’m certainly not making any sort of judgment. Just saying… different languages.