This is an archive of past discussions about Truth. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
I'm moving the suggestion I posted at talk/truth back here. To split the disucssion no longer seems like a good idea. Here is what I propose for sentence number one:
Truth is a word used to describe assertions that are honest or accurate, or to express agreement, affirmation, or assent. Rick Norwood 19:34, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
This is fine; but I feel obliged to say again that an honest assertion is true in a different sense to that in which a sentence is true because it expresses what is the case; also, a true sentence can be inaccurate (This sentence contains about a half dozen words); and finally one can express agreement, affirmation or assent with a false sentence, unwittingly, unwillingly, in error, or by mistake. All these represent some sense of truth, but not the sense about which the bulk of this article speaks.
It may be worth pointing out that when one makes an honest assertion, one is claiming that it is true, even if one is mistaken. Hence my preference for that previous wording. Banno20:00, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
I'm going to take "this is fine" to mean that Banno would be willing to accept this formulation even though he prefers a previous one. The point you make, Banno, is the reason I allowed for five different uses of the word "truth" even though personally I think only "accurate" is correct. The article discusses other "theories of truth", and my understanding was that an introduction that favored the "correspondence theory" would be unacceptable to many. Rick Norwood20:35, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
With some apprehension, yes, this would do, perhaps preceding the present intro. The main benefit it has is that it talks of the use of the word rather than attempting to give a definition, thus circumventing much of the theoretical dispute - philosophers disagree on the meaning of truth, not on its use. Banno21:39, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
How would this go:
Truth is a word used to describe assertions that are honest or accurate, or to express agreement, affirmation, or assent. When one makes an honest assertion, one is claiming that it is true, even if one is mistaken. There is no single definition of truth that is not also...(etc)
This seems a perfectly fine way of starting of the article. Though I wonder if the qualification of an "honest assertion" is really necessary. Ig077423:01, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
Perhaps not, but it is pedantically true that one can dishonestly assert a statement, and that in that case one is making an assertion without claiming it was true. I'll leave it to others to decide if this is too pedantic. Banno00:52, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
And here is my proposal for sentence number two:
Truth is an important concept in philosophy, linguistic, logic, and law. Philosophers down through the ages have developed many different theories about the nature of truth. Rick Norwood13:23, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
Rick (logic dictates that...) before we proceed, you should explain why you "dont think its a good idea." Convenience isnt a substantive reason; we can also put a draft notice on the main article. (I will take care of that.) Organization and separation of precise suggestions from the talk page's diversions into casual philosophicality is IMHO a good reason to separate it. :) -Ste|vertigo15:35, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
Its not a split discussion - its separating comment from actual work toward consensus-finding. I should first-off state that this thread is prejudiced by its title, built into which is the inherent notion that things can go back to "the way things [were]." This is a particularly ragged scholastic philosophy which directly contradicts the dynamic wiki paradigm. This is not to say that dynamism is a virtue, but it is to say that deference to old and static notions of what does or does not constitute a valid process of argument and consensus is certainly not a virtue.
Draft versions are a very agreeable, proper, polite, and tried way to separate the men from the boys in terms of who is willing to actually work on finding line-by-line wordings which are agreeable, from those who 1) like to argue more than work, or 2) have given up completely and think a disclaimer is a sufficient introduction. Given the falseness of 2, we are left with at least a suspicion that 1) is a present phenomenenon that hindering the development of this article into the soaring upper limits for which it is destined. (See m:wikifaith). You can of course request Mediation, but since both the topic and the craft of writing articles which make sense is interesting to me, I have preemptively volunteered. :| -Ste|vertigo22:16, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
As I understand the Wikipedia approach to draft pages, they are mainly used for major article revisions, which this isn't. Attempts that are meant to improve something as small, but as controversial as the introduction really belong on the talk page because it makes it more visible to anyone interested in improving the introduction. The draft tag is unclear as to what, in particular, is on the draft page. BTW, I think the title of this section refers to moving the discussion back to the talk page, not to reverting to an older version of the introduction. Ig077423:01, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
They are also used for moderated or organized revisions - in this case going line by line top to bottom. What could be wrong with that? -Ste|vertigo01:46, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
Moving toward closure
Stevertigo didn't like the old title -- neither did I -- so now we have a new title.
I notice (he said hopefully) that nobody seriously objected to:
Truth is a word used to describe assertions that are honest or accurate, or to express agreement, affirmation, or assent.
"True/Truth is a word to describe assertions that are accurate" while not wrong is not helpful - as the burden of unpacking then goes to "accurate" - and people make claims about the truth of assertions the accuracy of which is quite uncertain - and very inaccurate statements can also be true, eg: "Many editors are not happy"
More headway would be made if definition and synonymity were left for the main article and the intro started with something like
Truth is an important concept in philosophy, logic, mathematics, science, law, religion, and linguistics. It is a topic that poets have often dealt with. Various theories of truth have been proposed, but there is no definition on which all can agree.JimWae20:41, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
Oh, God. Yes, Jim is quite right. Go with his intro. Banno
I like Jim Wae's "version" only as a secondary paragraph. Again, its a disclaimer, only this time qualified as being "an important topic." Start with what it is. We were doing some good work on the Truth/draft page - certainly could be improved if we leave comments out. -Ste|vertigo01:45, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
Except neither we nor scholars can agree on what IT is. Absent objections, I plan to insert my new intro sentences by tomorrow. I think truth is better understood as "those things which are not false". There is more agreement on how to decide if something is false, hence not truthful --JimWae19:29, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
Bacon
I'll give you the first paragraph if you will allow me to quote, in a later paragraph:
"The inquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it; the knowledge of truth, which is the praise of it; and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human natures." --Francis Bacon
(Assuming you are addessing me) If you think the article is ready to handle poetic notions of truth already, it would be better to start with Keats - something that scholars have commented on and with which some even agree ;) --JimWae00:09, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
Interesting, that you classify Bacon, who was writing prose, as a poet. He was serious, though perhaps more fond of metaphore than is the style with modern philosophers. Rick Norwood18:30, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
Update
Well, I've added the new sentences - but also organized the intro a bit to keep similar thoughts together & to more clearly introduce other parts of the main article. Maybe "The Truth" & Aesthetic truth can come someday, somehow, somewhere... --JimWae04:22, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
Strange para
A common requirement for determining the truth, used often in science and in the courts, is that reliable observations be found to establish the facts of the matter.
This is not dealt with in the article; indeed, it appears to be contradicted by the section on true testimony. Perhaps someone would like to add a section on determining empirical truth? Banno21:05, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
How about, A common requirement for determining the truth, especially in science and in the courts, is that statements correspond with facts.
This is, of course, what the article calls the "correspondence theory of truth", that is, a correspondence between symbols, usually words, and the physical universe. Rick Norwood12:46, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
This is correct, and both the Ptolemaic and Copernican theories are true. Science accepts the Copernican theory based not on the criteria of truth, but on "Occam's rasor", since Copernican theory requires fewer entities (conics) than Ptolemaic theory (cycles and epicycles). But scientific truth is the same in any frame of reference. Rick Norwood14:34, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
So it's true the Sun (& the entire universe) orbits the Earth? and it's also true that it does not? (Btw, Ptolemy is not consistent with theory of relativity)--JimWae14:41, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
No, but the error in your statement is the use of the word "orbit". The laws of physics hold in any coordinate system, including one with the (center of the) earth as the origin.
But you do bring up an interesting point, which the article should cover. In science and in the courts the correspondence theory is paramount, but every thinking person realizes that the map is not the country. Thus, there is no absolute truth, only approximations that are better or worse. Copernicus was wrong in thinking planetary orbits were circles. Kepler was more nearly right, but still didn't take reletivity into account. Einstein is most nearly right to date, but no doubt something better will come along. The same is true in law. Suppose John has murdered his wife by shooting her in the eye with a Colt automatic. A witness testifies "I saw John shoot his wife." That's not the whole truth, but it is certainly more true than "I saw a Ralph shoot John's wife. Rick Norwood15:14, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
The only relevance of the history lesson I can see is that it is about "degrees" of truth" (perhaps not too trivial for its own section). Ptolemaic & Copernican theories can be expressed as contradictories - whether using the word orbit or not - and contradictories cannot both be true (yet contradictory statements CAN each correspond with the facts).--JimWae15:56, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
Surely it is not still original research to suggest that ALL the robust theories be part of necessary conditions in "defining" truth & that none are sufficient - nor are they even all taken together always sufficient. Each one outlines a way of establishing what is NOT true. --JimWae15:56, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
Folks, why bother with such a paragraph anyway? is there a crusade of some sort here to have the correspondence theory appear in the introduction? Why is that thought important? It has it's own section int he article, so add any comments about science and correspondence there! But you should also be aware that, especially since Quine and the Churchlands, the coherence theory is at least as prominent in philosophical thinking; and that he pragmatic theory still maintains many adherents in the scientific community! Do you want to go down that path? How will you maintain the NPOV if you do? Banno19:59, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
This is exactly my point. "prominent in philosophical thinking" The point of mentioning the so-called correspondence theory in the introduction is that it is how everybody else uses the word. As it stands, the introduction only gives the POV of philosophers. Rick Norwood13:15, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
Actually, one could see the whole Ptolemaic / Copernican debate thing as an example of pragmatic truth: Copernicus' theory not only requires fewer epicycles, but also allows more accurate mathematical models of planetary motion, allowing astronomers to more accurately predict planetary locations. On the other hand, the introduction and the majority of the article are primarily concerned with philosophical notions of truth, which do tend to see facts as true statements rather than true statements being composed of facts. Ig077401:14, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
Please, let's leave epicycles out of this. If one's stance were Copernican, then epicycles would not exist per se; an epicycle would be an artifact of observation.
The argument using epicycles would be analogous to a plot of a logarithmic curve on a graph with a logarithmic scale: a straight line would result from that exercise.
The same straight line on a graph with a probability scale would depict a gaussian curve.
In both cases, the truth would be the logarithmic or the gaussian curve; a straight line would be merely the representation of said curves; the depiction of the correspondence between values on the graph axes would be only a representation of the functions.
The straight line graph is useful because it is far easier to manipulate, but the truth, in this case, would consist of the 'read-out' of the values on the axes, whether linear, logarithmic or probabilistic scale.
The computer analogy to this 'straight line' depiction would be the act of accepting whatever is displayed on the screen as 'true'; the reader seeking 'the truth' is then hostage to the editor or programmer, the 'man behind the curtain'. --Ancheta Wis07:24, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
The first part is more or less my point. I'm not so sure that the computer analogy is precisely equivalent. Ig077415:57, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
Big changes
In most of the cases I am familiar with, big changes in an article result in both repetition (earth flat mentioned twice) and non sequeturs. Even if some of the changes are improvements, the require others to go back over the entire article and fix it. This is why it is usually better to make a few changes at a time. Rick Norwood20:39, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
Marx and Truth
Why I deleted "Marx's criterium of truth": Marx did not propose that practice is a "check" on truth but, in fact, that "truth" can only be found in the historical, material world. He distinguishes this notion most particularly from legal truth which works from an idea of what is true to the more concrete realization of how the law expresses "Truth".
I am not sure how well Marx's truth would fare as truth in science. There is a correlation between Marxian truth and experimental research (arguably Marxian truth is based on a notion that truth arises through experimental research); however, experimental research is not the only source of scientific truth. Indeed, experimental research often seems to be used for the confirmation of theory (and this begins to sound suspiciously like the sort of things that Marx labelled "Idealism").
Nothing even resembling the notion of truth given in deleted section can be found on Wikitionary (I checked), nor can anything like what I've hinted at above.
Finally, the word you wanted was "Criterion" and not a bike race (its helpful to actually consult a dictionary before writing about their contents). Ig077421:41, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
Deleted paragraph
I have restored the deleted paragraph, since there is nothing in talk refuting it. Without it, the introduction to the article about "truth" says absolutely nothing about "truth" except that it is important but philosophers argue about what it means. That is no way to begin an article.
The Oxford American Dictionary defines "truth" in terms of "true" and defines "true" as "in accordance with fact".
The Random House Dictionary defines "truth" as "true or actual state of the matter".
The Oxford English Dictionary's first definition of "truth" is loyalty, but the second definition is "Conformity with fact, agreement with reality".
Dictionaries HAVE to give a definition - even if it is an inadequate one. Usually they give several definitions for truth. An encyclopedia is not a dictionary & can discuss different definitions. A NPOV encyclopedia cannot choose one definition & make it THE definition.
Further, as already discussed, if "correspondence with fact" is the complete definition of truth, then contradictory theories can both be true - Ptolemy & Copernicus.
Though one might think this is no way to begin an article, there really is no NPOV alternative. The same thing is true in Time & Space - which similarly need claims that there IS a definition in science removed. Science does not define time or space except (perhaps operationally) by defining the measurement units. Science does not define truth either - though it does give methods for determining what is NOT true. --JimWae16:59, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
There are limits to definitions. If you define truth completely in terms of correspondence to facts & correspondence to facts in terms of truth, you have a circular definition. --JimWae17:07, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
I cited three sources. If you think the OED, for example, is wrong, then you need to cite a source saying that the OED is wrong. It is not enough to revert my edit and say that in your unsupported opinion the OED is wrong.
It has been explained to you, in some detail, why neither the Copernican nor the Ptolemaic theory is true, and why they do not contradict each other. If you still do not understand, I'll be glad to go over it again.
The definiton of truth as correspondence to the facts is not circular. To spell it out further, in science and law, at least, truth is a property of a string of symbols, usually a sentence, that corresponds to physical reality. E = mc2 is true. e = mc3 is not true. John Wilkes Booth murdered Abraham Lincoln is true. George W. Bush murdered Abraham Lincoln is not true.
I know that philosophers have a lot more to say on the subject of truth, and I have no problem with philosophers putting their views into the introduction. But introductions are intended for the ordinary reader, and should include what is understood by truth by the ordinary reader in addition to the views of philosophers. Rick Norwood20:46, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
It has been explained to you that people DO commonly call theories false & "correspond to the facts" is an insufficient definition to distinguish which of 2 contradictory theories is not true --JimWae21:19, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
Yes, people do commonly call theories false. For example, many people call the theory of evolution false. Is that where you are coming from? On the other hand, if two theories contradict each other, they cannot both be true (though both can be false).
Truth is a term applied to more than simple "facts". Ignoring that skews any attempt at definition. Some theorists claim simple "facts" are all there is. To take that position in the article is POV --JimWae21:38, 14 April 2006 (UTC).
There's a reason why some dictionary definitions go on & on - that being the term does not have a clear definition. Feeding back to the general public their naive notions of "truth" is not what an encyclopedia is about --JimWae21:42, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
Unfortunately I don't have access to the OED. I have a copy of the Shorter, which gives three senses of truth (the same three that are summarised in the link given above). These are of course in their order of historical appearance.
The first is "The quality of being true (and allied senses)" This is further qualified as "being true to a person"; as equivalent to "troth"; or as a disposition to speak without deceit. This is not the sense of truth with which this article is in the main concerned.
The second sense is sub-divided thrice, the first "Conformity with fact; agreement with reality; Accuracy; correctness (of statement or thought)"; the second "Agreement with a standard or rule" and the third "Genuineness, reality, actual existence".
The third sense is simply "something that is true", with a few variations, including "True statement or account; that which is in accordance with the facts", and "orthodoxy".
The Concise Oxford neatly combines these: "Quality or state of being true or accurate or honest or sincere or loyal or accurately shaped or adjusted". Very clever.
The sentence The Oxford English Dictionary defines "truth" as "loyalty", but gives a second meaning, "Conformity with fact, agreement with reality" seriously misrepresented the subtlety of the definition given in the SOED; I can't imaging that the definition in the OED would be less than that in the SOED.
Rick, your paragraph misrepresents the OED entry. The SOED lists three distinct meanings and more than a dozen senses, not just two. Banno23:56, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
Science and Law
It turns out there are important distinctions between the use of "truth" in science and in law, which is why I reverted the two sentence paragraph throwing law, science and poetry together. Previously, someone had a definition for truth in science in the intro that was fair enough, to the effect that truth is conformity with observable evidence (though even this could be done more informatively with a well-considered brief paragraph, ideally along with a reasonable citation of course). In law, there are at least two basic definitions as I recall, one of which is modified by the concepts of "good faith" and "intent." I don't have time to find specifics and citations for these at the moment, but the statement "truth, whole truth and nothing but the truth" is tautological in the article's intro. I happen to like the Keats rendering for poetry, though it appears a stretch to put it so far up front in the intro, which is badly in need of stable, informative definitions at present...Kenosis15:25, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
The paragraph you reverted did not throw science and law and poetry, but rather contrasted the use of truth in science and law on the one hand with the use of truth in poetry on the other.
Apparently, your objection is that truth has different meanings in science and in law. I will recast the paragraph to omit law until you have time to find the specifics you mention. It seems to me, though, if someone on the witness stand sold an untruth unwittingly, that might be a defense against purgery, but would not make the untruth a truth under the law. Rick Norwood20:51, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
I can tell this article is somewhat dangerous territory, and I've only been watching for a few days. I'm willing to have a hack at seeing if there's anything I can do to assist the other editors with it, with due research and citations to support any proposed changes or additions. One of the problems with an introduction like this is it's a total POV magnet. It seems to me that "seems to me"-based definitions will not likely hold up for long in an article such as this. The Keats quote, on the other hand, seems a useful contribution and I would hope it will find a stable place if organized well enough into the rest of the basic slants on "truth."Kenosis21:12, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
Truth is often spoken of by philsophers of science, but they do not generally attemot to deal with it's nature and meaning (with the occasional expeption such as Popper. but even in that case, he just adopted Tarski's theory and declared that it changed his mind about the existence of objective truth).
In philosophy, truth is generally treated as a part of philosophy of logic and/or philosophy of languge (it is, after all, fundamnetally a semantic notion).
That is the way is should be approached on the article and it is the way that it is apprahced in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Corresponce, coherence, pragmatic, identity, deflationary, etc.. --Lacatosias15:39, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
Obviously "true" what you say. As I see it, the issue would then be how to explain to the preponderance of readers why "science" is reluctant to offer a proposed accounting of what "truth" is, or what might possibly be the "thing" or "quality" being sought. A possible solution to this issue (the fact that it is an issue being evidenced by the repeated insistence on inserting some kind of statement in the intro about what "scientific truth" might be) might conceivably be found in the turn-of-the-20th-Century pragmatists' explications of defining issues. Recall that what was first proposed by the proponents of what was then called "pragmatism" (at least the versions offered by Peirce and James) bears a remarkable resemblance to the most consensused aspects of "scientific method" today. Unfamiliar readers (i.e. much of the audience here) have legitimate questions about this sort of thing-- more so, I would immediately argue, than they have a familiarity with what is meant by a "robust theory". Just trying to challenge a few assumptions here with the goal of a yet more informative and stable article...Kenosis06:00, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: You'll need to look back in Archive 10 for the last time I gave up trying to start with anything so humble as a few dictionary definitions. There is a tide in WikiPedia, and it's a tide of WikiPablum. It's more relentless than Entropy, and when it reaches the shores of any article you care about, then it's time to go care about some other article. As Coriolanus might have said, "There's a wiki elsewhere". Jon Awbrey05:38, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
Subjective/objective
From the second paragraph:
Is objective truth possible, or are we limited to subjective truth?
Not happy. The implication is that we certainly have subjective truths and it is objective truth that is problematic. But there are those who deny the very distinction between subjective and objective. I'm tempted to re-word it as
I was unhappy with it when I used it to substitute for an earlier atrocious version. I also think that subjective/objective is really a subset of relative/absolute - where subjective is relative to self & not one's group. I also preferred the point form for this paragraph, as it allows grouping similar questions & separating dissimilar ones --JimWae20:26, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
Can we at least steal the image [1] from the Icelandic page? There are so few images on philosophy pages, partially accounting for why so few get to feature article status... Banno07:59, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
Nice thought, Ancheta, but I suspect that Lefevbre[2] would attract more attention...
Or we could go for George Joy [3] just to be different... or perhaps "Time saving truth from falsehood and envy"[4]?
What truth is vs. what is true
I've removed the contribution on Buddha’s Four Noble Truths by User:Dhammapal. This is in keeping with other similar edits to contributions from a range of editors. My reason for removing them is that this article is about the nature of truth, not about particular statements that are taken to be true. Banno09:14, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
Dear Banno,
What is true according to Buddhism?
Here is my latest deleted post:
"First, action really is happening -- it's not an illusion.
Second, you really are responsible for your actions. There's no outside force like the stars or some good or evil being acting through you. When you're conscious, you're the one who decides what to do.
Third, your actions have results -- you're not just writing on the water to only have it disappear -- and those results can be good or bad depending on the quality of the intention behind the act." Source by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
dhammapal, Welcome to this article. My point is that we should write here about what truth is, not about what is true. I think your latest addition is about what is true - I may be mistaken. I would welcome a Buddhist perspective on what is truth. I hope this is a bit clearer. Also, I will refrain from further editing of your posts for a while, so that others can express their opinions. Banno11:19, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
Banno, Thanks for replying. Sorry I misunderstood your original statement. When you said “this article” I thought you meant //my post// was about the nature of truth and should be about what is true. I’ll read the whole article more carefully and do some more research about Buddhist perspective on what is truth. Dhammapal11:47, 15 April 2006 (UTC)Dhammapal
No way, I'm not touching this one
I know how these sorts of pages go: 99% of the people involved have taken about three courses in undergrad philosophy and/or have read a couple of articles in the SEP. For some idea of the complex terrain involved only in the deflationary theories, however, I recommend my the one I wrote deflationary theory of truth, which at least clarifies some of the billions of distinctions. Some deflationists do indeed hold that truth is a property, BTW (minimalists). Others holds that it is a useful predicate but not a property (disquotationalism). Redundnay theoriest hold that it is a redundant prediate and not a property. Prosententialists hold that truth is not redundant but neither is it a predicate!!--Lacatosias12:59, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
Veritas is not the same as truth, is it. The Romans had more sense. Perhaps we should better spend our time by attempting to rid the word Truth from the English language, rather than trying to produce an NPOV article on the subject. Banno18:21, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
Well, in Italian it's verità (direct derivation from the Latin) and it is taken as synonymous with truth, both in philosophy and in everyday language so far as I can tell. Howvere, the concept of "verisimilute" (verosomiglianza) makes much more sense in Italian. As far as declaring it a pseudo-problem and getting on with other matter, it seems that I find the logical positivists positions much more appealing than I used to these days. --Lacatosias15:50, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
Ken Wilber...
Why is the person important enough to merit about 60% of the article on truth? I think it's obvious that it is this sort of nonsense which makes a laughingstock of Wikipedia among the vast majority of acedemics. I know: if you can shit on a philosophy article and get away with it, why not just go ahead and do it? I'm cool, once read a book by Ken Wilber, man!! He knows the truth, baby!! Having fun kids,cranks, mathematicians with no other way to spend heir free time and demented vandals? --Lacatosias15:29, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
So why do you delete what the OED says about truth, reinstate elipsis that are clearly out of place, and keep the Ken Wilber section. The mathematician with no other way to spend heir free time didn't write it, so it must have been a kid, crank, or demented vandal. Rick Norwood19:31, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
1) I did NOT add the ellipses. If you look back in the history, you will find that they were already there before my edit. I didn't reinstate them either: I simply left them alone, though I agree they are out of place. I didn't feel like going through and editing the whole article. 2) I was in a hurry and left in the Ken Wilbur section for the same reason. You will notice that I left a rather strongly disapproving comment on the matter above, however. I was about to cut it this morning, if no one had yet gotten around to it. 3) The OED definition, if I remember it correctly, was the one that said something like "truth is the discovery of facts". Two problems: it's fundamentally POV.I'm a deflationist and I obviously do not subscribe to the idea that the truth-predicate necessarily has anything to do with facts in the world. Second problem: what is a fact?etc...--Lacatosias08:12, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Apart from a comment that lacks serious inspection, you might like to consider that according to more than one credible review source, Wilber has been called "the foremost thinker in the field of the evolution of consciousness." According to another credible source he is "the most translated academic author in the United States." Academically, he is competent to comment on "truth". FT2 (Talk) 22:17, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
But why do his views merit special attention? Much of the presentation prematurely anticipates sections in Types of truth--JimWae22:28, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
They form cogent, and coherent, summary of several known forms of "standards of truth". It has the space needed to explain how he analyses "truth" and how these relate. If it anticipates other types, then the question is, how does one include in the article, a model that collates different types which for much of history were seen as separate? Thats a layout issue though. I think the actual viewpoint and description of truth in his observations is notable. Perhaps move it to the end, though, as a sort of recap on the previous sections and tie them together? FT2 (Talk) 22:38, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
Edit: perhaps what this is saying is that the article discusses the wrong things first. Maybe it should look at types of truth, before theories about them? What do you reckon? FT2 (Talk) 22:39, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
Is he referenced by other scholars in the field? Surely he is not the only scholar who thinks that more than one theory is used in judging truth (or more accurately, non-truth)? Introducing the jargon of holons is problematic, as is the first sentence which seem to be about "existence". The table also is of little apparent relevance. There are also relationships to other theories already presented which are ignored, making him appear as an indepepndent. He reiterates the other theories - except not very clearly the coherent theory. If anything, his main contribution is using all the theories - but that is unlikely to be original with him --JimWae22:47, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
Much as I dislike his fluffy thinking, we may need to accommodate him, along with Buddha and Marx - but I suspect such a section would be a flame fest and trolls paradise. The present contribution will no do; it badly mixes truth, knowledge, validity and other epistemic concepts, and adds little to the discussion of the meaning of "truth". Banno01:11, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Yes, he's referenced by others in the field, I can look that up I imagine. His main contribution as I understand it, is to find a structure within which apparently different "truths" show a clear structural relationship to each other. Truth, or "what is true", is (in his view) more than just what is objectively representative, and this (in Wilber's view) is why there has been such trouble studying truth, precisely because it has different related dimensions, identified since antiquity but never really clear if and how they related to each other as measures of "truth". FT2 (Talk) 03:18, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
The question here, I think, is not so much about Wilber's "importance" (that question is really just begging POV arguments). The question is really twofold: 1) does Wilber present a unique theory of truth or a unique notion of truth? and 2) is this theory widely accepted enough among scholars or others involved in the pursuit of truth to warrant the space used (in keeping with Wikipedia's policy not to overemphasize minority viewpoints)? Thus far, the answer to #1 seems to be basically "no". What is presented here is pretty much a table for classifying various dictionary definitions of truth in some categorical list (that is, it tells us nothing new about truth). What is perhaps relevant is the notion that truths can occupy different levels, and that depending on the "level" one adopts different things might be true — however, saying that does not require nearly the space now used. This sort of thing is endemic to Wilber's writing since he aims mainly to integrate, not innovate (or rather any innovation he might make is in the integration). As for #2, Wilber is certainly not regarded as a philosopher of truth, certainly not on the scale of Frege, Kripke or even Habermas — in comparison, "truth" is a very peripheral concept for Wilber's thought; what is more important is "epistemic tolerance" (freely adapted from John Koller on anekantavada — unsurprisingly, this and Nagarjuna's "two truth" theory could be seen as very early attempts at just this integration of various notions of truth). Moreover, citations of Wilber tend to drawn from his circle of "integrative theorist" friends whom he also cites, but not from the academic community at large. Aside from that one kernel that can possibly be drawn from Wilber's thought (which certainly belongs somewhere else in the article (perhaps even under "Types of Truth", or better yet, at the end), there is, I think, no reason to keep this section in the article. Ig077406:21, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
I certainly can't imagine any other source listing Quine, Pierce, Strawson, Ramsey, Davidson, Tarski, Kripke and then Wilber! His work is not in the same league; and it certainly is not about the same subject. I'm removing the material to Ken Wilber. Banno07:37, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Cite sources.
If the OED is an "abomination" and "simply wrong", you should be able to site a published source that confirms this. If not, then your opinion is original research, and not cause to revert.
You keep repeating the fact that I am a mathematician, not a philosopher. Philosophy is not the only discipline that studies "truth", and, in any case, Wikipedia is notoriously egalitarian.
Since Lacatosias promises to come up with a better definition, I will wait until tomorrow before putting a dictionary definition back in the article. However, in the future, please do not revert something that is sourced until you find a better source.
I notice you also keep reverting my correction of the misuses of ellipsis. Is it because you disagree about the way in which the ellipsis is used? I'm going to fix just that, and see what happens. One reference on the use of the ellipsis is "Eats, Shoots & Leaves." I can provide others if necessary. Rick Norwood19:47, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
I haven't touched your sacred ellipses. What the --?? I have made about two edit to this page (all of them yesterday). I say "your sacred ellipses" since I certainly did not introduce them and it seems that you have done the vast majority of the editing on this article.--Lacatosias08:21, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
As I noted above, the problem with dictionary defintions of truth is that they take a position on the question of what truth is. The deflationist view is that truth is simply a linguistic phenomenomen of one or another sort. To state at the outset that truth is correspondence with the facts is to bias the discussion in favor of inflationary theories, in particular correspondence theories. --Lacatosias08:29, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Philosphy IS the only disciple that studies the nature of truth. Which branches of mathematics or sceince studies truth in and of itself? Can you specifically identify them for me? --Lacatosias08:33, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Here is a brief list of published sources who all deny the affimration that truth is what distinguishes facts from other statements (or what have you)
Field, H 1986: ‘The Deflationary Conception of Truth. MacDonald, G and Wright, C. (eds.) Fact, Science and Morality, Oxford, Blackwell.
Field, H. 1994: ‘Deflationist Views of Meaning and Content’, Mind, Vol. 103, No.411.
Grover, D 1992: A Prosentential Theory of Truth, Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press
Grover, D., Camp, J., and Belnap, N. 1975: ‘A Prosentential Theory of Truth’ Philosophical Studies, 27.
Holton, R. 1996: ‘Minimalism and Truth-Value Gaps’. Forthcoming
Horwich, P. 1990: Truth, Oxford, Blackwell.
Horwich, P. 1994: (ed.) Theories of Truth. New York, Dartmouth.
Horwich, P. 1995: ‘Meaning, Use, and Truth’, Min
An excellent reply. Hey, it lasted nearly two hours, that's not bad. My aim was as much to demonstrate the problem than to provide a solution, so thanks. Banno09:33, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
To me it seems compellingly clear and simple (the answer to how to deal with this problem of defintintions, I mean) not the problem of truth itself, of course. First of all, everyone has to recognize that, as you pointed out in an earlier post, this article is about the nature of truth in itself. Not what sorts of stamements, beliefs and theories or even arguments are true, but it is abut the problematic nature of the property or non-property or predicate or prosentence "... is truth". What is this phenomenon? Why do we attach this locution to certain assertions and expressions?
Is it really used to state a correspondence between sentences/proposition and facts or states of affairs in the external world? Or it is used, as in Ramsey's extreme deflationism, totally superflous? Or something else? The status of truth is problematic. Dictionaries must necessarily eliminate the problemaicity of the notion an provide what they take to be a standard common-sense defintion. Hence they will have to take a position with repect to the nature of truth. This purports to be an encylopedia entry. We do not have to eliminate the problemanticity of the notion. Indeed we should emphasize it. Al that should be stated at the beginning is (the obvious fact) that there is no commonly accpetd definition or theory of this conceptr and that this it is precisely the problem
that philosophers attempt to confront by formuakting theories of truth. The common theoris are correspondence, coherence, pragmatic, redunancy, identity, etc.. The article will provide a summary of each of the major positions, but cannot purport to define or determine what truth is without violating NPOV. The idea of multiple dictionary defintions is even less satisfactory, since it would undermined the poit of the article: to provide the various positions which have been taken on the issue by experts who spend their lives studying the question of what truh is by substitung the lazy simlifications of lexigrophers who do not study the nature of truth but the nature of definctions. Why is the this so difficult to get across?--Lacatosias10:50, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Dictionary definitions, question about previous discussions on the talk page
Whoever put my question here and titled this section "On the very idea of a dictionary definition" implicitly misrepresents the tone of my question. Kindly refrain a bit from adding such characterizations to others' questions. My original question was as follows...Kenosis13:49, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
As I haven't followed the talk page for long, may I ask why is it has been determined necssary to avoid using several examples of typical dictionary definitions or resonable composites thereof, either in the intro, or in a brief section immediately following the intro? I see several seemingly generic ones just above, for instance...Kenosis02:08, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
Two people, Banno and JimWay, are totally opposed to offering any explanation of the common meaning of truth. They seem to think the word is too subtle, or maybe too meaningless, to have a common definition. A number of people have tried to argue with them, and given up. I do not intend to give up. My view is that 1) the word "truth" has a common, everyday meaning which people understand perfectly well and 2) the problems that philosophers have with that common meaning is secondary to the way the word is commonly used. In fact, I would say that philosophers know perfectly well the common meaning, and use that common meaning as a starting point to their objections. Therefore, logically, the common meaning should be given before the objections. Just as, in an article on physics, the general idea of a technical term in physics is given above the ToC, while the precise definition (usually involving some mathematics) is given below the ToC, so it should be in philosophical articles.
I've tried to offer a compromise, and put both ideas in the introduction, but that always gets reverted. The introduction must only give the view of philosophers, and no other view, however well documented. And the view of the philosophers is offered with no references at all, and therefore constitutes original research.
If you look, you will see I have several times removed all but the dictionary definitions you've added - and have asked in comment if that was the entire entry - and it seems it was not. Who are any one of us to decide which one of the whole page of dictionary entries to include? --JimWae06:28, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
That is unfair, Rick. Your supposed quote from the OED was just too great an oversimplification, as I explained above; if you think my criticism wrong, then explain why. My other objections have been to obviously POV material. Banno07:20, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Kenosis, from Wikipedia:Guide to writing better articles: If the subject is amenable to definition, the first sentence should give a concise, conceptually sound definition that puts the article in context. Finding such a definition here is the question; because this is a philosophical article about the meaning of "truth", none of the theories that are listed in the article can be given as the meaning of truth without being POV. So we have a few alternatives:
Find a definition that is compatible with all, or even most, of the theories; I've suggested previously Wittgenstein's "the truth is what is the case". Perhaps we could use something like "Truth is what distinguishes facts from other statements".
Discuss the problem of definition in the first paragraph. This is what the present introduction attempts. Incidentally, this is the approach taken in Encarta.
Focus on use instead of meaning. I liked "When someone sincerely agrees with an assertion, he or she is claiming that it is the truth" for this reason.
Thanks Banno. One thing though. I think we will nonetheless find that in the end, some brief offering of several definitions, with appropriate qualifications about how difficult and controversial are the questions involved, will help achieve better informativeness and better stability here. I also do not think that it is, of necessity, solely a philosophical article-- evidence for this position includes the fact that too many people have an implicit warrant to intrude on such a presumption. Examples of who has a warrant to intrude are the hundreds of millions who have been subjected to popular ideas such as "scientific truth", popular ideas of "legal definitions of truth", where in both cases these fields have chosen to largely abdicate the question. To the extent both fields have chosen to abdicate the issue, a brief explanation of that fact is, I think, owed the reader. These issues are all explainable in the article, but depend on the editors' grasp of what those issues are, and on finding a way of stating them that makes enough sense to find a stable place in the article. I trust all this can be done in the end...Kenosis17:22, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
On the proper use of dictionary definitions
JA: Because this seems to be a persistent symptom of WikiParalysis, I am copying a series of remarks that I made about it on the talk pages of several other articles:
JA: I have suggested in these sorts of cases that the minimal information is such as we find in an average dictionary, which gives a descriptive account of how the word is actually used in practice. There will normally be a variety of folk theories of the concept that are implied in some of the sundry uses, but that is simply the way things are. After that, the competing theories among non-folk theorists can be presented in any convenient order, no doubt biased by the current fashions, but intelligent readers do feel free to skip around and pick their own paths to follow. Complex things must be related to simple things — there is no requirement to reduce them thereto. Jon Awbrey 14:45, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
What's a Dictionary, and What'sn't a Dictionary
JA: Lemme splain about dictionaries. Dictionaries are written by lexicographers, the "true" or "genuine" among which are authorities and experts on the usage of words, which authority they garner and which expertise they acquire through disciplined procedures for collecting and collating data about word usage from designated populations of word users. What they document are the empirical facts that the words of their entries are actually used in the contexts and in the connections with other words that are prevalent in that population of users. Contemporary lexicographers no longer see their role as one of prescribing usage, though they do pass on information about usage that sensible folk know is morally equivalent to a prescription by the community. Far less then do they prescribe particular points of view or particular theories about the corresponding concepts, but they simply record the various and sundry connections of words, in which some may of course find "folk", "implicit", or "tacit" theories of those concepts. But the true lexicographer, per se, has no truck with all that. Jon Awbrey 20:34, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: By way of summary: (1) The fact that an encyclopedia article should do more than a dictionary entry does not mean that it shouldn't do at least that much, at least for starters, and this is simply to provide an inclusive synopsis of the variant usages of the word in question. (2) This is not POV — it is sourced research that provides the empirical facts about variant usage as determined by experts who are acknowledged as competent to do just that. (3) Some will read "folk theories" or "implicit theories" into some of the documented dictionary uses, but these interpretations are themselves argumentative and rarely clear cut. For instance, the mere fact that the word "correspondence" arises in the reports of the lexicographer's informants when asked about "truth" does not in itself lend support to a "correspondence theory of truth" in the technical sense, because the informant is using the word "correspondence" in a pre-theoretical sense that is not the same as the technical sense. For another example, the fact that people speak of the "sunrise" does not bear on technical theories of astronomy. Jon Awbrey12:24, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
I appreciate that fascinating lecture about lexicography. Now please take your apparent expertise in this field and go write a dictionary or help out with the entries on lexicography. For the last time, however, the word truth (just like the word existence) does not have a non-controversial definition. It is very similar to the case of "existence". Here is an excerpt from the article on existence in the outstanding peer-reviewed Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I have copied only the first three paras for illustration of how to go about dealing with a topic as similary vague and controversial as the one we are trying to deal with here and because anything more than three would constitute copyvio:
Like many philosophically interesting notions, existence is at once familiar and rather elusive. Although we have no more trouble with using the verb ‘exists’ than with the two-times table, there is more than a little difficulty in saying just what existence is. Existing seems to be at least as mundane as walking or being hungry. Yet, when we say ‘Tom is hungry’ or ‘Tom is walking’, it may be news to those not in Tom's vicinity, whereas ‘Tom exists’ would be news to no one who knew Tom, and merely puzzling to anyone who did not. Again, we know what it is like to be hungry or to walk, but what is it like to exist, what kind of experience is that? Is it perhaps the experience of being oneself, of being identical with oneself? Yet again, we can readily indicate what is meant by Tom's walking, but surely Tom's existing is not something we can indicate to anyone. On the face of it, there would seem to be no way at all in which we can explain what existing is. It may be tempting to think that ‘Tom exists’ means merely ‘Tom is real’. In fact, this could be distinctly appealing, for ‘real’ is what has been called an ‘excluder’ predicate, meaning thereby that it attributes nothing positive to Tom, but operates in a purely negative fashion simply to exclude Tom from being imaginary, mythical, fictional, and the like. To say that ‘exists’ meant ‘is real’ would be to say inter alia that it attributed nothing positive to Tom; and that would do much to relieve our frustration at being so fluent in our use of ‘exists’ despite having no idea of its attributing anything positive to Tom. It would be a relief to discover that ‘exists’ attributes nothing positive to him at all.
Unfortunately, this won't do; for among all the negatives that ‘is real’ might be applying to Tom would be not only ‘not imaginary’, ‘not mythical’, etc., but also ‘not nonexistent’. Now, suppose a seer predicted that in two years that a son would be born to Bill and Mary, and that he would be called ‘Tom’. When the prediction was finally fulfilled, we might imagine the seer announcing triumphantly ‘At last Tom exists, exactly as I predicted he would’. If ‘exists’ were an excluder like ‘is real’, then the seer could only be understood as excluding something from Tom; and in this case it would be non-existence. As said by the seer, therefore, ‘At last Tom exists’ could only mean ‘At last Tom is not-nonexistent’. And if he really were to mean that, we should be entitled to ask him just when Tom could ever have been said to be nonexistent, i.e. never to have existed. In fact, before he existed Tom could never even have been referred to, and hence at that time nothing at all could have been attributed to him, not even the property of being nonexistent. Promising as it may have seemed, therefore, ‘Tom exists’ is not to be understood simply as ‘Tom is real’.
Of course, the failure of attempts to understand ‘exists’ as ‘is real’....
Nowhere is there a single attempt at a definition, much less a compilation of useless definitions from every source imaginable. I realize this is an extremely high standard to compare to the generalized and anarcho-democratic Wikipedia, but it is a good way to measure how far off the current philosophy articles are from what would be needed to attract serious-minded academics and professionals into taking this bizarre project with even a modicum of seriousness. Or do you perhaps believe that the SEP, and similar professional encyclopedias are not taken as seriously as the work we are doing here (interesting and occasionally insightful as it is on spectacularly singular occasions). What is wrong with this entry on existence, which contains NO definitions, in your opinion? --Lacatosias14:48, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: I used to think that the SEOP was moderately competent, despite the endless recycling of the Vienna Circle that goes on in some circles, and of course we've all learned to sleep through that dronedary humphing in the century past, but the article on flatulent theories of truth took it down a peg, and now you've gone and took it down another. Oh well, so it goes. Jon Awbrey14:52, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Dimensions of classification
JA: The dimension of classification according to the arity of the truth predicate stands on generic logical grounds, since we may ask about the arity of any predicate, and it is not really due to Peirce. In fact, the Stoics and Aristotle both used primitive versions of triadic truth predicates. I suggest that we treat the arity factor and the robust/flatulent dimension as independent at first, rather than making periodic tables just yet. Jon Awbrey14:18, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Peirce
Let me guess who it is that is now trying to transform the article on truth into another of the infinite articles on C.S Peirce....hmmm.....it seems that Peirce just pops up even in articles on plumbing lately. Lacatosias. P.S. the edit boxes are not working and Italian keyboards do not have tildes. Therefore I literally cannot sign my posts unless someone types some tildes which I can cut and paste.--Lacatosias 14:50, 17 April 2006 (UTC) Ah ha, 'tis working again. --Lacatosias14:50, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: Your entildement: ~~~~
JA: There will be a place for discussing variations on the pragmatic theory of truth, but this is not about that yet. On perfectly general logical grounds, if we are going to talk about a predicate, then we can ask about the arity of that predicate. We don't always get clear answers, but it does not hurt to ask, and Gaul may get its first break thereby. Jon Awbrey14:40, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
This section is fine with me. Please provide sources
There is now a place for discussing all these. I believe if we take it one sensible step at a time, each camp will get its due, in due course. Hopefully without getting excessively lengthy, since each slant has (or should have) its own article to fill in the details. Incidentally, Lacatosias, you are correct about the "deflationary" v. "robust" distincion--no need to shout. Although, I still think "robust" needs a brief explanation for the previously unfamiliar-- I trust this will happen in due course as well. Also, frankly, I can't find sourcing for the use of "robust" to describe the wide range of theories included under its auspices in the current Wikipedia article on Truth.....Kenosis15:06, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
In the midst of a jungle, one has to SHOUT AS LOUD AS ONE CAN to get any attention at all. Here there are people making edits and couteredits to an article on a very controversial and complex topic as if it were a blog!! I've seen the word "robust" used and I've seen "inflationary " theories used. But these are used mostly by so-called deflationary theorists (of whatever specific coloring) to distinguish themslves from correspondendists, coherentists and so on. That's what it boils down to. The issue can hardly be ignored since the basic idea behind delfationary theories (although the name may be relatively recent) goes back to Gottlob Frege, for heaven's sake. He cleraly rejected both corresponce and coherence theories as self-contradictory (I can find the quotes if necessary), he was anything but a pragmatist and he was probably not a primitivist (like Russell and Moore, both of whom claimed that truth was an a primitibe and indefinable notion). The latter might or might not be a form of deflationism as well. The point is, it had been around for quite some time
I respecttully disagree; because as far as I can tell all current participants in this article are reasonable and more-than-reasonably intelligent persons. We're actually in a position to make some progress here, and I trust this is what will happen. You appear to be somewhat familiar with Strawson et al. I can only imagine this will result in a better article so long as we keep the details relegated to the proper spinoff articles. I have some research to do. Talk with you later...Kenosis15:41, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
If the consensus is to ignore the "flatulent" theories, as one of are more ancient collacorators has termed it, then go right ahead though. If not, I'll try to find a refercne for the term "robust" and so on.--Lacatosias15:32, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
On some really silly neologisms
JA: I've seen enough pop phil fads come and go to know one when I see one. I'm probably more tolerant of neologisms than most folks — I try to make up 6 or 7 before breakfast myself everyday — but not when they start to warp the substance all out of shape. I don't care what's faddish in California this week, a theory of truth does not become "inflationary" just because somebody thought it would be cute a few year back to rename Quine's "disquotational" theory "deflationary". The Laffer curve folks at Stanfrod no doubt think in terms of Boom and Bust, but the true wit is with the middle term, to wit, "stable". Jon Awbrey15:10, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Agreed, this is much like the Mahayana folks imposing the term "Hinayana" (little raft) upon the self-titled Theravada groups. Further clarifications of these terms will, I think, still be necessary to achieve stabiliity. My admittedly quick research had the following result: the prime proponent of the term "robust" as an overarching term here appears to be none other than, you guessed it, Wikipedia. Please direct me to who has defined this group of theories under the auspices of "robust"...Kenosis15:20, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
What's faddish in California this week is some shit called Integral theory. I have deleted it. But, since you are not very fond of analytic philosophy (derived in part from Russel, Moore and other logical positivists), I take it you might appreciate some of the horseshit that passes for philosophy over here on the Continenent since the tragic failure to eliminate metaphysical bullshit from philosophy:
If you review the history, you will see that I am not the editor who re-inserted and placed this section. On the other hand, if Wilber has developed a strong audience, no doubt there is some proper placement for a brief summary of what he's trying to say. If it indeed has the smell of a pile of the physical substance to which you refer, then I imagine that would be for the article's audience to decide based on a reasonable summary of what Wilber is presenting...Kenosis16:37, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
"Indeed dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic reversal--of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean provenance; of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of the will-to-power or some other ideologically and/or psycho-somatically buried source) new and old alike; of the primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistemic fallacy with its ontic dual; of the analytic problematic laid down by Plato, which Hegel served only to replicate in his actualist monovalent analytic reinstatement in transfigurative reconciling dialectical connection, while in his hubristic claims for absolute idealism he inaugurated the Comtean, Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean eclipses of reason, replicating the fundaments of positivism through its transmutation route to the superidealism of a Baudrillard.
Much better than all that shit about causal theories of reference,isn't it??--Lacatosias 16:08, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
I'm not a patient person. You have it all to yourself I'll check back in to see how badly it has deteriorated in a few weeks.--Lacatosias16:08, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Problematic paragraph
JA: I'm having some trouble following the putative logic of the following paragraph:
Some theories hold in common that truth is a robust concept. These theories all hold that the surface grammar of sentences that seem to predicate truth or falsity, such as "Snow is white is true", can provide meaningful insights into the nature of truth itself. Truth is a substantive property, just as red is a substantive property predicated of a barn in the sentence "The barn is red". The task for such theories is to explain the nature of this property. Hence, according to these theories, truth needs explanation and is something about which significant things can be said:
JA: I take this to say that truth is a property of sentences like "Snow is white", and that a sentence like "'Snow is white' is true" predicates truth of the sentence "Snow is white". So far so good. Further along it points to the analogy with a sentence like "The barn is red" that predicates redness of what I assume to be a "specified in context" (SIC) barn. Okay I think.
JA: Now consider the main clause of the first statement:
These theories all hold that the surface grammar of sentences … can provide meaningful insights into the nature of truth itself.
JA: Now, the analogy says:
Sentence : Truth :: Barn : Redness
JA: Truth is a substantive property of the sentence, and redness is substantive property of the barn. Does the structure of the barn provide insight into the nature of redness itself? Something seems to be out of kilter there.
JA: I will not quibble over the classical meaning of "substantive", but "truth being a substantive property of the sentence", like "redness being a substantive property of the barn", seems intended to say that truth is an important property of the sentence, in other words, that it tells us something about the nature of the sentence itself.
JA: Therefore, it seems like the proper statement is:
These theories all hold that the truth of the sentence provides meaningful insights into the nature of the sentence itself".
Important observation. Thank you. It was indeed compeletly meangingless in fact and also failed to capture the essential distiction between the two sides because it retinaed the problematic notion of properties. --Lacatosias18:48, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: So what is the conclusion here? Is the fix I suggested more in line with how you see it, or some third thing? The same problem of course affects the third and fourth sentences of the current introduction. Jon Awbrey12:12, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Robust theories of truth share the claim that assertions that predicate truth of an expression provide substantive information or insight into the nature of truth. Deflationary theories propose that the use of the words "truth" or "true" does not provide any such insight.
Definitional Introduction
JA: Here is one of the definitional introductions that we had back before April Fools' Day. The first paragraph summarized the etymology and the major senses given by M-W. A period of snobbery, arising no doubt from inflammed OEDipus complexes, seems to have had no lasting effect. But I think that this has the advantage of not instituting that X-flationary POV from the get-go. Jon Awbrey17:44, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Truth (oppositefalsity) refers to the property of a proposition or its symbolic expression as having a strong fidelity with reality. A statement that is judged to have the property of truth is said to be true, and may be referred to in substantive terms as "a truth". The abstract object to which all true statements may be taken to refer is also referred to in general terms as "the truth". In rhetorical contexts where obfuscation is a factor, honesty and sincerity may also be considered as aspects of the "truth".
In philosophy, the definition of truth has greater variance, and particular definitions or theories typically require or assert a scope within the human condition upon which to base a wider philosophical framework. For example robust theories of truth treat truth as a property —ie. a human quality. Others, such as the deflationary theories, suggest that "truth" is simply a tool of language with no further meaning. Developments in formal logic have thrown light on the way in which truth is used both in formal systems and in natural languages.
In aesthetics, it is usual to consider a much broader range of symbolic expressions than the ones that are contemplated in logic. Whether such symbols are properly said to be propositional in even the most generalized sense of the word is likely to depend on the theory of aesthetics adopted in a given discussion.
Standing beside these problems are the issues of how know something to be true. The way in which one knows that one has a toothache seems different from the way in which one knows that the Earth is the third planet from the sun; perhaps one is subjective, and determined by introspection, while the other objective, and determined by a combination of shared observation, reason, and calculation. Similarly, some truths seem to be relative to one's position or background, while others appear absolute. Philosophers have diverse opinions on each of these issues.
I don't know how many times I have to repaet this, but I am NOT GOING TO LET IT DROP. 1) Deflationary theories (no matter what you happen to think about them) do not ALL alim that truth is NOT a property. Paul Hotrwich's minimalist theory explicitly states that it is a property (but not a substantive one). Therefore, to state otherwise in the face of this fact, is to perpetuate falshood and misrepsrentation of the views of people you happen to disagree with. If you want to do that, GO ELSEWHERE, This is an encylopedia (purportedly). All of those definctions obviously favor certian theories of truth over others. That is blatant POV-pushing. Period.--Lacatosias17:56, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: I can't figure out what you think I think, so I'll just keep saying what I think until we both know. This particular way of setting up a volleyball net between all the worlds' theories just isn't a universal coordinate system, but arises from a particular "frame of reference" (FOR) and thus a particular POV on what matters and what doesn't in a theory of truth. But many people have long found many other dimensions to be of greater significance than the particular line in the sand that you appear to favor here. There is always a problem about discovering real properties of real things, properties that are not just the artefacts of one FOR or one POV. But that only comes from keeping light on one's feet and trying out several different scenic outlooks on the scene under view. Jon Awbrey18:10, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
The idea of a deflationary theories, by my understanding, arose out of commentary on the ideas of performative and redundancy theory, which are based on an analysis of the use of the word "truth" as a procedural rather than substative application of the word. Somehow I think not contrasting this relatively new classification of truth theories (deflationary theories) against the various "substantive" or "descriptive" theories of truth would be walking on very thin ice. But there's still much work to be done on the "substance" of the article; if it's that much in doubt, one of the editors can remove it for now and address this classification issue again after more of the editors have a chance to become more familiar with the overall discussion...Kenosis18:29, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: The way I remember it, there was a slippery slope descent from Tarksi's mathematically rigorous approach, to Quine's amusing exposition in terms of "disquotation", to this rather uncomprehending generation of "deflationary" talk, but then it's possible I was paying more attention to something else, so correct me if I missed something important. Jon Awbrey18:54, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: P.S. In case it wasn't clear, I made no move to remove the topic, I just don't think that it rates as the first substantive topic to bring up -- and I mean substantive in the nicest possible way. Jon Awbrey18:58, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Modulo fixing obvious typos, the pre-April 1 intro seems fine. It is infinitely better than the current introduction, which says essentially nothing about truth.
Lacatosias will, I assume, be satisfied if you replace "deflationary theories, suggest that "truth" is simply a tool of language with no further meaning." With "deflationary theories suggest that truth is not a substantive property." or something to that effect. I have no dog in that race, so he and the other deflationists can fight it out among themselves.
If we are agreed, please replace the current introduction with the pre-April 1 intro, and allow Lacatosias to fill in what he likes about the deflationary case. Rick Norwood20:31, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
I want to presume that each of the editors will continue to gain a yet firmer grasp of the issues here with further discussion, further thought, and some further research. When enough editors have a firm enough handle on the range of the difficulties, combined with the expected due respect for the "customers" (the readers), it will, I should think, be possible to summarize the issues with more than a question (and it is an extremely good question for now, I think). To illustrate, just days ago, we were arguing about how to present what a legal and scientific "definition" of truth is, when in fact with a bit of research it turns out both of those disciplines have essentially chosen to abdicate the question-- that's something that needs to be said, not replaced with a made-up definition for "science" and "law". (What my brief research found thus far was that, although "science" and "law" use the word truth differently-- in science the issue is how close can we get to truth, and in law, truth is much more attached to presumptions of intent while someone is on the "hot-seat", but both have avoided dealing in definitions of truth. Both disciplines seem to prefer the use of the word "fact" to the use of the word "truth.") With due diligence, this article can end up more informative, so long as we don't feel the compulsion to make things up here just to fulfill the perceived need to fill in the gaps. And I agree with Rick Norwood that some examples of generic definitions may be appropriate (see Talk:Truth#Dictionary definitions, question about previous discussions on the talk page), even as I begin to better understand the reasons these definitions have been avoided. But any such summaries of the definitions must, at least in my estimation, be accompanied by an understanding among the participating editors of what the range of proposed dictionary definitions are, else it is almost certainly doomed from the start. Perhaps we could begin by making a list of various such definitions, and see what, if anything, we actually have to offer readers that might be meaningful...Kenosis21:46, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Excepting the archaic meaning of "loyalty" as in "I plight my troth." "troth" being an older form of "truth", all of the definitions of truth support the correspondence theory. That doesn't mean that the correspondence theory is right, only that correspondence is the starting point for everything else in the article. The other theories of truth either agree with the correspondence theory, deny the correspondence theory, deny that any correspondence is possible, or whatever. But if the correspondence theory were not the common understanding of the word, then everything else in the article would become meaningless, and "truth" would have no more meaning that the barking of a dog.
Without a common understanding of words, communication is impossible. The dictionary definition is not the end of that understanding, but it is the beginning. Some words, "triangle" for example, can be defined so that there is a very close agreement in what people understand the word to mean. Other words, "love" for example, have no defintion about which there can be said to be close agreement, but there is some common ground. Except for a word like "stroumpf", which was created so it could take on any meaning whatsoever, all words have some common, central idea about which understanding clusters. If a string of symbols has two fundamentally different meanings, then it represents two different words, such as "buck" the action of a horse and "buck" a male deer. The article needs to say something about this common understanding, or the article is meaningless and should be abandoned.
In the words of the first dictionary to hand, that common, central idea about truth is "truthfullness, honesty, the real state of things, the body of real events or facts, actuality, a true or accepted statement or position (the truths of science), agreement with reality, correctness". Rick Norwood23:39, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
I am not so sure the implications of the archaic meaning of "loyalty" are as obsolete as we may like to think. Fact is, this issue is one of a number of issues the more recent theorists have come to address more directly, by way of constructivist theories (loyalty to the king or other social structure to which one is aligned or dependent upon) and consensus theories (same thing basically but absent the king). Still I agree some basic definition should ultimately be offered in some form(s), even if it is presented as a series of typicals or a composite, followed by a qualification of where it fits into the theories, if at all. But, the other editors have already learned that this is not a simple proposition of just throwing one or two in there. For instance, I agree that definitions fitting the correspondence theory will be found the most agreeable by most readers, and of course explains the least.. It will be largely agreeable (and a definite POV magnet) because it presents an automatic intuitive graduated scale by which most of us assess degrees of truth as differentiated from degrees of falsehood, possible honest mistake, human error that no one could possibly avoid, etc. etc. And it also does not explain loyalty to the person(s) to whom one makes a statement under the usual presumption that the person speaking is offering some "truth" or other. And such a definition does nothing to explain how, when two persons disagree about a particular matter (such as the truth of the word truth for instance) we end up referring to an authority-based definition, which may be decided by either a "knowledgeable" authority with a hard-fisted boss, or by a consensus of editors in turn accountable to the hierarchy of the publisher and its most likely customers. Or, when in doubt about what the "truth" is in a particular instance, we can resort to learning what is the current "consensus" and ask all our high-school or college friends--of course thirty years hence the same "truth" may not be recognizable as "truth" by either ourselves or the vast majority of our friends. And I'm just very lightly scratching the surface here...Kenosis01:37, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Nietzchian, Rortyian, etc.. view of truth
The problem is not just that any simpklicitiv dictionary defition will inevitably take sides in favor of correspondence versus e.g. deflationat theoried of truth. The fact is it will take sides that truth exists and can be defined. At the turn of the centurty, Russell and Moore both adopted the non-delatonry view that truth is a primitive, indefinable, predicate. Beyond this, since we must necessarily bring in continental and non-analtic view in order to be balanced, it should be remebered that one of the most famous philosphers of modern times Richard Rorty has essentially adopted Nieitche's idea that "there are no truths, only interpreations". Rorty calls them desciptions and redescriptions of the socially contructed world (or something along these lines). I don't think many Rortians or Nietzheanas would be content with saying, at the beginnign of an article on truth, "truth is...." Period. But this is complete nonsense. Why do I even bother? After all, "deflatiomay theories are just another form of robust theories (whatever that is)". Incidnenty, the term "robust" was used by Sir Michael Dummett (damned idiot!!) to refer to his own and similar positions in a paper discussion the deflationary theory of Gottlob Frege (one of his great philosphical inspirations). He took the problem quite seriously, as a deep challenge to his own belif in correspondence.
Dummett, M 1959: ‘Truth’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n.s. 59. Reprinted in Dummett, M 1978 Truth and Other Enigmas, Oxford, Clarendon Press.
JA: Coming down with a cold after all that bouncing around the country, so may be a few days before back in the saddle, but be on guard against jumping to the conclusion that Peirce's use of words like "concordance" or "correspondence" can be modeled by 2-adic relations, as he will also speak of 3-adicsign relations as "triple correspondences". And see the Pragmatic theory of truth article, still a work in progress, for a caution on the distinction between real (good) and nominal (not so good) definitions. Jon Awbrey21:04, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Understood. I would like to see further improvements of that article too, (Pragmatic theory of truth ), so the customer can be referred over as needed. That's about all we had room to say anyway, insufficient as it always seems to be. Hope you feel better quickly...Kenosis21:07, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Logical schema for section on theories of truth
I must protest at the imposition of Charles Peirce's schema in such a dominant position in the analysis of Theories of truth for this article. Peirce has a definite place in the article, which is under Pragmatic theory. This monadic, dyadic, triadic schema might well be determined by a consensus to be a useful schema, along with appropriate references to who developed the schema (which is Peirce, and about possible consensus I have no idea because I can't yet relate this to the article-- what on earth would a "monadic" truth relation be). But I believe it is a definite stretch of OR and possibly POV guidelines to impose his schema on the entire article in this fashion, which now attempts to overarch the work of all the other major philosophers. Again, I believe this should be discussed, explained to the editors, and if determined to be a useful schema for the article, should at minimum be consensused as such. The section currently reads as follows...Kenosis22:50, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Theories of truth
Theories of truth may be described according to several dimensions of description that affect the character of the predicate "true". The truth predicates that are used in different theories may be classified first by their arity and then by any number of more specific characters that various theorists recognize as important.
A monadic truth predicate is one that applies to its main subject — typically a concrete representation or its abstract content — independently of reference to anything else. In this case one can say that a truth bearer is true in and of itself.
A dyadic truth predicate is one that applies to its main subject only in reference to something else, a second subject. Most commonly, the auxiliary subject is either an object, an interpreter, or a language to which the representation bears some relation.
A triadic truth predicate is one that applies to its main subject only in reference to a second and a third subject. For example, in a pragmatic theory of truth, one has to specify both the object of the sign, and either its interpreter or another sign called the interpretant before one can say that the sign is true of its object to its interpreting agent or sign.
Several qualifications must be kept in mind with respect to any such radically simple scheme of clssification, as real practice seldom presents any pure types, and there are settings in which it is useful to speak of a theory of truth that is "almost" k-adic, or that "would be" k-adic if certain details can be abstracted away and neglected in a particular context of discussion. That said, given the generic division of truth predicates according to their arity, further species can be differentiated within each genus according to a number of more refined features. ‹The templateTalkfact is being considered for merging.›[citation needed] 22:50, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
You are a bit late to the party. I criticized the introduction of this section almost immediately after it was introduced. Why didn't you speak up then? Things might go along more smoothly if editors actually bothered to read other editors comments.--Lacatosias08:54, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: I thought I explained this already. This is a generic logical classification. It does not cover all theorists of truth, only those who begin with some kind of "truth predicate" or what is the same thing, who speak of relations between whatever kinds of "truth bearers" they choose to consider and some other kinds of things that they are perfectly free to mention. There is no need to impose any constraints or language here, but it is a matter of fact that most theorists pick words that are near synonyms of each other. I have mentioned most of the major variations that I know, many of them essentially quite different from Peirce's particular schemes. But as soon as you are using the language of logic to speak of predicates and relations, it's the logical next question to ask about the arity of the predicate or the relation. Theorists are perfectly free to reject formal logic if they want at this point, and so I am not talking about them, but a very large number are on record as finding a use for logical categories. One does not have to take arity as the first dimension of description, but it is a rather fundamental one. If someone can argue that some other factor is more fundamental, or even just more convenient, then that would be fine. But this is just plain logic, and all the terms and concepts can be sourced from basic textbook material. Jon Awbrey23:36, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Speaking only for myself, this should, if anywhere, be integrated into Formal definitions, followed by appropriate symbolic examples. The overwhelming majority of readers will get lost in that section anyway, and the symbolic logic afficionados will hopefully find that it explains everything once they parse it. Jon, you will find few more avid fans of Peirce's triad than I am, especially when applied to such events such as accidental and intentional misapplication of (should we call it a "sign" , a "symbol", "refere" "signal" here?) to the object or referent intended to be conveyed to a listener, who must also, even in the most diligent application of good faith, discern what is intended to be conveyed or misrepresented. And it would be extremely nice to somehow be able convey to the reader the various implications of these (at minimum) dual-triadic relations as they relate to the concept of truth. But I do not believe it belongs in such a dominant place in the article, because the very fact of putting forth these relations means we now have, at a minimum, two overarching schemas to deal with, one a logical format which is a derivative of the more basic I/symbol/intended-referent and thou/received-symbol/perceived-referent for even the most basic truth relations...Kenosis00:14, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Another thing, how are we supposed to explain to the reader how to make the jump from the idealized dyadic "truth relation" of the correspondence theory to the others without getting into the distinctions involved in multiple triadic relations, especially for the constructivist and consensus theories and such?. (They are not reducible to a single triad to complete their analyses. Nor is the pragmatic, which depends on multiple persons to complete Peirce's schema, nor even the coherence, which depends on multiple triads to establish coherence, but which can theoretically be done by a solipsist protagonist... This is already a conceptual mess to explain to readers after you get past correspondence theory. For the "substantive theories" section a simple reference to dyadic ought be adequate when explaining the "truth relation" sought by the proponents of "correspondence theory" I should think.)...Kenosis03:25, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
References
I was bold (well, boldish - fixing references isn't usually such a bold thing to do) and went in and made the references consistent. What I found though, is that these references:
Blackburn, Simon; and Keith Simmons (eds.) (1999). Truth, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN0198752504. A good anthology of classic articles, including papers by James, Russell, Ramsey, Tarski and more recent work.
Grover, Dorothy (1992). A Prosentential Theory of Truth, Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN0691073996.
Haack, Susan (1993), Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, UK.
Habermas, Jürgen (2003). Truth and Justification, trans. Barbara Fultner, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ISBN0262083183.
Kirkham, Richard L. (1992). Theories of Truth, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN0262111675. A very good reference book.
Kripke, Saul (1975). "An Outline of a Theory of Truth". Journal of Philosophy 72: 690-716. ISSN 0022-362X.
Nietzsche, Friedrich [1873] (1968). “Uber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinn”, ("On Truth and Lying in an Extra-moral Sense") in Jürgen Habermas (ed.), Erkenntnistheoretische Schriften, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Rescher, Nicholas (1973). The Coherence Theory of Truth, Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN0198244010.
Tarski, Alfred (March 1944). "The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics". Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4 (3): 341-376. ISSN 0031-8205.
Williams, Bernard (2002). Truth & Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy, Princeton University Press: Princeton. ISBN0691102767.
weren't actually in the text (this section was maybe being used as a bibliography?), so I cut and pasted them here. -Smahoney00:10, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Note on formatting: I used the REF tag to do the references, and since its always a gamble who knows it and who doesn't, here's how to do that in the future: just surround the reference in <ref></ref>, so you get something like:
<ref>Author. ''Title''. Publisher, Year.</ref>
where you want the footnote to appear, and it will automatically appear in the end. One advantage of this is that if the text is removed or moved around, noone has to go figure out after the fact if any references pointed to text that had been deleted, since they will be deleted with the deleted text.
You used the ref style and Jon Awbrey hasn't piped up about it yet!! Well, GOOOOOOOLLLYYY!! I had to rewrite the entire empiricism article because he and several other editors found this method of footnoted refercnes terribly "robotic" and "anal-recitative". I will say no more about those god awful "non-robustible, non-maintainable in-line citations of the whole source" in the hopes that someone will get us back to the good sense of simple, academically-approved Harvard style human-readable cites. You know who you are...--Lacatosias08:46, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
The new Theories of Truth section is way too technical, has little relationship to what follows, and introduces truth-bearers before it is explained what they are. The arity jargon is off-putting even to someone like myself who knows a few things about philosophy. I see no reason to keep anything in that section, especially NOT at the beginning of the body of the article --JimWae04:44, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
This whole section does not belong where it currently is, and is also misleadingly labeled. The readership here is not going to consist primarily of professional philosophers or logicians who might happen along say "wow, who wrote that?... it's brilliant". That is not the primary Wikipedia readership for whom this article exists. What we are after in an article with as broad a title as "Truth", at least by my understanding of Wikipedia guidelines, is for a professional philosopher to happen along and think "hmm, maybe i'll try that approach with my adult-education students in my next introduction to philosophy course". After reading the "What Wikipedia is" and "What Wikipedia is not " guidelines, my take is that what we are after is for a reasonably intelligent but previously uninformed reader to be able to digest most of the article in a relatively very short time, and hopefully be able to say (s)he walked away with a better understanding of the problem and a feel for some of the proposed views of the problem...Kenosis12:55, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Far better to be explaining to the "average" reader what a "truth predicate" is. The discussion in the article is currently getting very much out of control. Stratospheric and not even definitively correct...Kenosis13:04, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: I'm not the one who stuffed this article full of all this high-falution' stuff. We can always go back to KW if you prefer. Given the content that those-who-came-before-us thought was appropriate to include in a WP article on Truth, we have these options: (1) Delete all the hard stuff, (2) Leave it in and explain it correctly, (3) Drop a lot of names and buzz words that will let the previously uninformed reader go away with the false impression, the PseudoKnowledge, of thinking that they have learned what it's all about. Choose wisely, Glosshopper. Jon Awbrey13:15, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
The idea here is to begin with least possible technical language (which is what the other editors also chose to do), and allow readers to get a grasp of the issues without suffering near-certain drowning in a mass of highly technical language. The more highly technical explanations can always be prioritized and placed farther down in the body text, allowing less-technically-inclined readers a better opportunity to get some meaningful grasp before (perhaps) choosing to dive into the more highly technical stuff (such as the Formal definitions section for instance). There is a certain benefit to presenting technical concepts in non-technical language, so long as the language is reasonably chosen so that the text "rings true" to both the technical and non-technical reader, and that is always a bit of a challenge. The more knowledgeable reader generally will recognize when we are explaining the material to a non-technical reader effectively and tolerate same, pending (or even excluding) a more technical rendering...Kenosis14:03, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
I want to be sure I understand the point, here. If I understand correctly, the assertion is that the definition "truth is the good of logic" more correctly captures the common meaning of truth than the definition "truth is agreement with reality". Keep in mind that it is standard wikipedia policy to use common language above the ToC, and save the technical language for latter on in the article. So, if I were to ask, say, a hundred people to define truth, their answers would tend to cluster around the idea that "truth is the good of logic" rather than around "truth is agreement with reality".
JA: This is an ancient definition of truth as the aim, concern, end, goal, good, interest, objective, pragma, purpose, telos of logic. Logic is here viewed as one of the three classical normative sciences, along with aesthetics, whose good is beauty, and ethics, whose good is right conduct. Its a classical commonplace that the Summum bonum, the highest good, involves a synthesis of all three. Keats was expressing 2 out 3 sides of this, as was Meat Loaf, I reckon. Jon Awbrey16:38, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
My understanding was that in Meat Loaf's philosophy, the Summum Bonum was sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
However, my question was not what philosophers think truth is all about, since the introduction acknowledges that other fields have an interest in truth, but rather whether this was the what the word "truth" communicates to in the common language which is essential to communication. Evidently you maintain that it is. Rick Norwood18:37, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Rick, you have made a separate point. The discussion in this section had to do, up until this point, solely with the newly inserted "Theories of Truth section and the discussion of monads, dyads and triads along with related technical terminology. It is, under the Wikipedia "make-up-your-own-brand-new-section-as-you-go-even-if-on-the-same-topic" technique for discussion, pretty much a continuation of the second previous thread above regarding "Logical schema for [new] section on theories of truth"..Kenosis16:25, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
This is becoming yet another inappropriate showcase for Charles Peirce
The section on Pragmatic theory of truth is not the appropriate place to showcase Peirce's theory of semiosis, but rather, is properly the place for a brief summary, with a reference or link to the proper article, which is the aticle on pragmatic theory of truth and perhaps to other relevant articles. I severely truncated William James and John Dewey for a reason, which is the same reason that references to Peirce in this article should not be a complete exposition of all the basic components of his semiotic theory...Kenosis16:44, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Jon, all the following material belongs in the article on Pragmatic theory of truth, with at most a one or two sentence summary in its place. The remainder in the section on Pragmatic theory, already a bit long, says enough for an article such as "Truth" on which hundreds of noteworthy philosophers have weighed in, and largely been relegated to a list at the bottom of the article...Kenosis17:16, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Although Peirce occasionally uses words like concordance and correspondence to describe one aspect of the pragmatic sign relation, the meaning-bearing precursor of the pragmatic truth relation, he is also quite explict in saying that definitions of truth based on mere correspondence can be no more than nominal definitions, which he follows long tradition in relegating to a lower status than real definitions.
Now thought is of the nature of a sign. In that case, then, if we can find out the right method of thinking and can follow it out — the right method of transforming signs — then truth can be nothing more nor less than the last result to which the following out of this method would ultimately carry us. In that case, that to which the representation should conform, is itself something in the nature of a representation, or sign — something noumenal, intelligible, conceivable, and utterly unlike a thing-in-itself. (Peirce, CP 5.553, 1906).
This statement tells us that Peirce's theory of truth depends essentially on two other, imtimately related subject matters, namely, his theory of sign relations and his theory of inquiry, inquiry being a species of semiosis, that is, a process that transforms signs in a specific manner. The statement tells us somthing more: Peirce, having started out in accord with Kant, is here giving notice that he's parting ways with the Kantian notion of an unknowable thing-in-itself as the ultimate object of a representation. Peirce would say that the object is known by its representation, however partially, to the extent that it is known at all.
Semiosis is a process that transforms signs into signs while maintaining a given regard to an object, which object may be lodged off the path of signs or else reside at the end of it. To consider a sign to sign transaction involving an object is thus to consider a transaction that involves three parties, or a relationship that involves three roles. In logic, this is called a ternary or triadic relation.17:16, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
I have integrated the first one-sentence quote from Peirce into the paragraph proper to bring the section a bit closer to manageable length given the breadth of the article's topic. I still believe one less quote is the appropriate length for Perice (there are currently three), Peirce being just one of all too many highly notable philosophers who have spoken on this subject of "Truth". I appreciated seeing the section brought somewhat more into manageable length, Jon...Kenosis18:54, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Hmmm...
Hmmmm.. that's an interesting phenomenon. The current section entitled "Theory of truth" seems to have almost no relation to theories of truth of any kind that I have ever encountered in any philosophy texts or articles. However, it did remind me of an altogether different sort of book that I have on my shelf: a textbook on semiotics!! --Lacatosias17:18, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
From the Wikipedia guide to writing better articles and the List of Policies
"An article should begin with a good definition or a clear description of the topic."
"Avoid peacock terms that show off the subject of the article without containing any real imformation."
"State facts which may be obvious to you, but are not necessarily obvious to the reader."
"Using the principle of least astonishment, you should plan your pages and links so that everything appears reasonable and makes sense."
I would like to ask those currently editing this article if they think the article as it stands follows these guidelines? Rick Norwood19:16, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: Rick, perhaps it would prime the pump if you point out loci in the current text that you consider as treading on each of these points, and then we can begin to address them forthwith. Jon Awbrey19:32, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Problematic paragraph
JA: I'm having some trouble following the putative logic of the following paragraph:
Some theories hold in common that truth is a robust concept. These theories all hold that the surface grammar of sentences that seem to predicate truth or falsity, such as "Snow is white is true", can provide meaningful insights into the nature of truth itself. Truth is a substantive property, just as red is a substantive property predicated of a barn in the sentence "The barn is red". The task for such theories is to explain the nature of this property. Hence, according to these theories, truth needs explanation and is something about which significant things can be said:
JA: I take this to say that truth is a property of sentences like "Snow is white", and that a sentence like "'Snow is white' is true" predicates truth of the sentence "Snow is white". So far so good. Further along it points to the analogy with a sentence like "The barn is red" that predicates redness of what I assume to be a "specified in context" (SIC) barn. Okay I think.
JA: Now consider the main clause of the first statement:
These theories all hold that the surface grammar of sentences … can provide meaningful insights into the nature of truth itself.
JA: Now, the analogy says:
Sentence : Truth :: Barn : Redness
JA: Truth is a substantive property of the sentence, and redness is substantive property of the barn. Does the structure of the barn provide insight into the nature of redness itself? Something seems to be out of kilter there.
JA: I will not quibble over the classical meaning of "substantive", but "truth being a substantive property of the sentence", like "redness being a substantive property of the barn", seems intended to say that truth is an important property of the sentence, in other words, that it tells us something about the nature of the sentence itself.
JA: Therefore, it seems like the proper statement is:
These theories all hold that the truth of the sentence provides meaningful insights into the nature of the sentence itself".
Important observation. Thank you. It was indeed compeletly meangingless in fact and also failed to capture the essential distiction between the two sides because it retinaed the problematic notion of properties. --Lacatosias18:48, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: So what is the conclusion here? Is the fix I suggested more in line with how you see it, or some third thing? The same problem of course affects the third and fourth sentences of the current introduction. Jon Awbrey12:12, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Robust theories of truth share the claim that assertions that predicate truth of an expression provide substantive information or insight into the nature of truth. Deflationary theories propose that the use of the words "truth" or "true" does not provide any such insight.
JA: I am moving this query I've asked 3 times now to the end, in case it's been overlooked. Pretty soon I will take a stab (et tu?) at correcting it by my own lights. Gratia in futuro, Jon Awbrey19:26, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Brief passage removed to talk
Removed to talk:
In one classical formulation, truth is defined as the good of logic, where logic is a normative science, that is, an inquiry into a good or a value that seeks knowledge of it and the means to achieve it. In this view, truth cannot be discussed to much effect outside the context of inquiry, knowledge, and logic, all very broadly considered.
Perhaps a re-wording of this might make some sense, but as it stands it is quite unclear; also unsourced; I think it would only add to the common confusion of truth and validity. Banno19:48, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: Some things are so old that it's hard to remember the treetop that you fell out of when you first heard them, but I will go find a reference for those who never heared this stuff before. I think maybe Crispin Wright is getting credit on the Top40 this week for having twanged out a decent cover of the tune. Jon Awbrey12:58, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: The particular way that you express the distinction now called "Truth and Validity" is, on the other hand, a fairly late invention, and it looks a bit orthogonal to the lines of thinking that are the real point of my remark. Jon Awbrey13:00, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Correspondence
God damn it, what happened to the section on the correspondence theory? Turn my back for a day, and the text goes to hell. Look at:
This type of theory, in essence, attempts to posit a relationship (a "truth relation") between "thoughts" or "statements" on the one hand, and "things" or "objects" on the other, as it might theoretically exist independently of the persons involved in the exchange and independently of other issues.
You mean something like: Correspondence theories claim that true sentences correspond to the actual state of affairs.
meaningful on-paragraphy summary section on most of the major theories before you added the stub template and then they began to expand into enormous, bloated post-modernish word-salads. What was that all about? Each one of us I'm sure, if we wanted to, could expand particiualr sections (actally subsections) into tractatuses. For example, there is a section called "Other deflationary theories" which describes the prosentential theory and some others on the space of about two sentences. Obviously, people have written (several) books about prosententialism, social constructivism and so on. But all I derive from this article is that the pragmatic theory (actually theories) and the correspondence theory are the only viable theories of truth and we will thereofre focus 99% of the article on them. NPOV, I guess.--Lacatosias08:37, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
What's with all the quotation marks suddenly appearing in the article? I really don't think 'thoughts', 'statements', 'things', and 'objects' need quotes (and, of course, its not just into this small section that they've sneaked) - generally, they're reserved for when you're talking about a word rather than what it refers to (and then, single quotes are sufficient, ie, 'object'), when a word is used in a way that it isn't normally used (and then, they're really unnecessary, since you can usually tell from context), when someone is being quoted (and then, they need references), or as scare quotes (which are generally frowned upon). Which is the case here? -Smahoney20:34, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
There are more informative, and also slightly more concise, ways of comparing/contrasting traditional correspondence and coherence theories than what is currently in the text, without losing the most important subtleties. I will either report back to you with some sourcing on these, or if seemingly unlikely to be controversial, I will simply go ahead and repair or replace existing material with citation as needed...Kenosis20:51, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Responding to Jon Awbrey's suggestion
"Truth is an important concept in philosophy, logic, mathematics, science, law, religion, and linguistics. Various theories of truth have been proposed, but there is no definition upon which scholars can agree."
"An article should begin with a good definition or a clear description of the topic."
"Robust theories of truth share the claim that assertions that predicate truth of an expression provide substantive information or insight into the nature of truth. Deflationary theories propose that the use of the words "truth" or "true" does not provide any such insight. [1] [2]"
"Avoid peacock terms that show off the subject of the article without containing any real information." and "State facts which may be obvious to you, but are not necessarily obvious to the reader."
And finally, "Using the principle of least astonishment, you should plan your pages and links so that everything appears reasonable and makes sense."
This was in response to the astonishing definition "truth is the good of logic", but even that definition is gone, now.
I keep hoping that the people editing this article will realize how bad the introduction is on their own, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Maybe this will help.
The introduction to an article on a certain subject should say something about that subject, yes? Now, I'm going to copy the first two paragraphs of the introduction, but everywhere the word "truth" appears, I am going to substitute the word "money". The introduction will make just as much or as little sense as before. Thus, we have two paragraphs that say nothing about the subject at hand.
"Money is an important concept in philosophy, logic, mathematics, science, law, religion, and linguistics. Various theories of money have been proposed, but there is no definition upon which scholars can agree.
"Robust theories of money share the claim that assertions that predicate money of an expression provide substantive information or insight into the nature of money. Deflationary theories propose that the use of the words "money" or "wealth" does not provide any such insight.
so far i do not see what you mean. There are five major "substantive" or "robust" theories, and at least three or four "minimalist" or "deflationary" theories. That is the fact, and that's what the intro currently says...Kenosis Perhaps we can begin by experimenting with a composite definition of the "correspondence" theory and see if we can get some agreement?...Kenosis22:44, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
How about Bertrand Russell's definition?, which made the "correspondence theory" widely known as such. Such an introduction to the article might conceivably read as follows:...Kenosis23:01, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
The most common definitions of truth in dictionaries follow what is known as the correspondence theory : "Truth consists in [sic] some form of correspondence between belief and fact." [1] Various other theories of truth have been proposed, but there is no single definition upon which scholars can agree. Robust or substantive theories of truth share the claim that assertions that predicate truth of an expression provide meaningful, substantive information or insight into the nature of truth. [2]Deflationary or minimalist theories propose that the use of the words "truth" or "true" does not provide any such insight. [3][4]
Standing beside the issue of definition are several other issues about which scholars have various views. What sorts of things can properly be called true or false? What tests can establish a claim as being true? How do we know something to be true? Which truths, if any, are subjective, relative, objective, or absolute?
Notes:
1. Russell, Bertrand, The Problems of Philosophy Ch.XII, "Truth and Falsehood" (1912).
2. Blackburn, Simon, et al, ed. Truth (Oxford Readings in Philosophy), 1999.
4. Field, Hartry. Truth and the Absence of Fact. Clarendon Press, 200
I think you and I, at least, are moving toward an agreement. Certainly the paragraph you propose above is infinitely better than the introduction we have now. And, yes, I have no problem with the third paragraph of the current introduction. The important thing, I think, is to at least begin the article with language aimed at the general reader, not the specialist, and to say something about the way the word "truth" is generally understood, before going into the details of philosophy. After all, philosophy are not the only profession with an interest in truth. Rick Norwood00:59, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
I already have said i believe some kind of basic definition(s) seems appropriate, if properly qualified and put into the context of the difficulties with the various questions that quickly attach to such a definition upon further explanation and analysis. The basic "correspondence" version appears to be the most common and striaghtforward, and the most widely understood, within its inherent limits of course....Kenosis01:43, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
I may just go give something like this a try, and I suppose we'll see how quickly it gets knocked out of the water...Kenosis01:50, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
On the other hand, I think I'll wait a bit. Here is a proposal, for evaluation first (footnotes are the same as above):
The most commonly found dictionary definitions of truth follow what is known as the correspondence theory of truth, which can be stated: "Truth consists in some form of correspondence between belief and fact."[1] Although this basic approach is the most common, there is no single definition upon which scholars can agree. Standing beside the issue of definition are a number of other issues about which scholars have various views. What sorts of things can properly be called true or false? What tests can establish a claim as being true? How do we know something to be true? Which truths, if any, are subjective, relative, objective, or absolute?
Various theories of truth have been proposed. Robust or substantive theories of truth share the claim that assertions that predicate truth of an expression can provide meaningful, substantive information or insight into the nature of truth.[2] Deflationary or minimalist theories propose that the use of the words "truth" or "true" does not provide any such insight.[3][4]
RN: I'm going to jump in here ahead of Jon, and say that I like the above a lot. The only change would be to move the paragraph on Robust vs. Deflationary below the ToC, with a heading "Philosophy of Truth" or some such. Rick Norwood21:47, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: None that I haven't had before:
JA: By way of summary: (1) The fact that an encyclopedia article should do more than a dictionary entry does not mean that it shouldn't do at least that much, at least for starters, and this is simply to provide an inclusive synopsis of the variant usages of the word in question. (2) This is not POV — it is sourced research that provides the empirical facts about variant usage as determined by experts who are acknowledged as competent to do just that. (3) Some will read "folk theories" or "implicit theories" into some of the documented dictionary uses, but these interpretations are themselves argumentative and rarely clear cut. For instance, the mere fact that the word "correspondence" arises in the reports of the lexicographer's informants when asked about "truth" does not in itself lend support to a "correspondence theory of truth" in the technical sense, because the informant is using the word "correspondence" in a pre-theoretical sense that is not the same as the technical sense. For another example, the fact that people speak of the "sunrise" does not bear on technical theories of astronomy. Jon Awbrey 12:24, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: The first thing people think of when you say "correspondence" is probably "a letter you get or send". This is actually a superior clue to what truth is all about, as it implies a 2-alogue, a dynamic reciprocity, a back-&-forth feedback process, not the sort of mirror image that's long time passing been lampooned by Rorty as an image of science.
Jon, you are absolutely correct. As a matter of fact, the very word "correspondence" comes into our lexicon because it was brought in from its Latin roots (in part by Aquinas and other scholastics, and later by the Bacon camp and followers) to apply to an interaction of some kind between belief and fact. So it is also quite tautological...Kenosis15:52, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
RN: Jon seems to be on board, and I like his suggestion of leaving "correspondence theory" to below the ToC. If we leave that out, the Kenosis introduction begins, "The most commonly found dictionary definitions of truth can be stated..."
An encyclopedia is not a dictionary. It is a mistake to think, as Jon suggests here that an encyclopedia is an augmented dictionary. But this does not in itself exclude the present suggestion. 203.26.16.6704:23, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
There are two aspects of the suggestion that are problematic; both are perhaps fixable.
The statement "The most commonly found dictionary definitions of truth follow what is known as the correspondence theory of truth," is unsupported; moreover, as it stands, I think it unsupportable. Out of the six dictionaries I have immediate access to, only one contains the mooted definition.
I've given the SOED and COED definitions above. Neither mentions "correspondence". The Oxford Australian Reference dictionary gives "in accordance with the facts". This is of course the second sense given in the SOED; The "Macquarie" gives a similar definition.
Now what I want to point out is that, contrary to what has been suggested this is not an example of correspondence theory; Coherence theory also defines "true" as "in accordance with the facts"; but for coherence theorists facts are sets of statements rather than states of affairs.
The New Hamlyn Encyclopedic Word Dictionary (quite a good one, despite its monstrous name) gives "That which is true;the true or actual reality"; and further gives true as "being in accordance with the actual state of things; conformity with fact..." and 23 other senses. This is the closest to correspondence theory among the dictionaries I consulted.
This difficulty could be fixed by some parallel wording: perhaps "A common dictionary definition of truth is that it consists in some form of accord between belief and fact." This simply avoids reference to coherence or correspondence or pragmatism or construction or even consensus. It is neutral with regard to the robust theories.
But now to the next problem. This sort of definition is quite at odds with the deflationary theories. Nor does the simple sentence at the end of the proposal, "Deflationary or minimalist theories propose that the use of the words "truth" or "true" does not provide any such insight" adequately address this issue.
Perhaps we might settle for something like:
A common dictionary definition of truth is that it consists in some form of accord between belief and fact. Various other theories of truth have been proposed, but there is no single definition upon which scholars can agree. Robust or substantive theories of truth share the claim that truth is a predicate, and vary as to the nature of that predicate. Banno04:24, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
RN: Reply to Banno. I really think we are not that far apart. You point out that according to Coherence Theory, "correspondence" and "accordence" are not the same, but I don't think we really need to get into Coherence Theory above the ToC. If the distinction is important, it can brought in later. Rick Norwood21:47, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
A proper analysis of the actual content will confirm that most dictionary definitions are putting forth some form of correspondence theory, with other theories represented way down on their numbered lists, if at all. To believe otherwise would be to misapprehend what the correspondence theory is . But I'm not going to take the immense time to do a statistical analysis, given the numerous arguments that will inevitably be brought upon this page about whether my methodology and sample size would be adequate. Personally I like Banno's last suggestion. Without doing a complete analysis, it somehow both "rings true" and "hangs together"...Kenosis15:52, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
I just threw some putty against the wall in the intro to see if it has any chance of sticking. I've removed the following sentence on the basis that it lists a bunch of disciplines in need of truth, but for which there is virtually no discussion in the article at present. The removed sentence is: "Truth is an important concept in philosophy, logic, mathematics, science, law, religion, and linguistics."...Kenosis16:16, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
In anticipation of what I see as an inevitable stir about another slant on correspondence theory, I would like to add to the intro sentence the following: "A common dictionary definition of truth is that it consists in some form of accord between belief and fact, or between between statement and fact.....Kenosis16:38, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
I imagine this will likely get beaten to a pulp in due course, but I went ahead and added the second basic criterion for "truth" according to the correspondence versions most commonly seen in dictionaries, stated as follows: "A common dictionary definition of truth is that it consists in some form of accord between belief and fact, as well as an accord between statement and fact." The first criterion I see by sampling just a few dictionaries and extrapolating from other dictionary definitions put forward by editors on the talk page is: (1) "Truth consists in some form of accord between belief and fact." The second common expectation is that when the analysis involves a statement or other representation to another, (2) it must also "consist of some form of accord between statement and fact." Take away the first, and the second falls automatically, so it is not truth, but a good-faith mistake; take away only the second, and it's a lie or misrepresentation. Of course this does not cover all the bases, just the most common colloquial ones. At that point possibly we might have a reasonable starting point to begin discussion of how the issues stand for the summaries of various scholarly discussions...Kenosis16:55, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
Deflationary or minimalist theories deny that "truth" is a predicate. Source?? I can give you about 15,000 counterexamples just from the Interent.--Lacatosias08:53, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
And you're just beginning the deflationary process here... ;-) ... In response to your perception, I was prompted to add the following to the Redundancy subsection: "Proponents of pragmatic, constructivist and consensus theories would differ with this conclusion, and instead assert that the second person making the statement "that's true" is actually paricipating in further verifyiing, constructing and/or achieving consensus on the proposed truth of the matter — in this instance, the statement that "it's raining." Feel free to hack it up if necessary...Kenosis18:11, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: Thanks for the kind review. I wouldn't worry about OR — no, the other OR — as it's been my lifelong experience that all my best ideas were written down 10, 102, 103, … years before me by some other wag or other, usually Peirce, so it's usually just a matter of looking it up somewhere. The prosaic point here is that maybe there really is something to all that classical gas about durability, fidelity, imperishability, unconcealment, unerringness (Greek aletheia, alethes), and so on. If there is a property that non-propositional forms of true blueness and true grittiness have in common with true sentences, then it's not the truth but the sentences that betray a certain detumessence. Jon Awbrey19:16, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
Not OR, POV unless you add sourced objections (of which ther are NONE I suppose in all of philosophy to all of the other theories??). --Lacatosias10:48, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
& Triple Sigh ...
JA: I'm not the one who stuffed this article full of all this high-falution' stuff. We can always go back to KW if you prefer. Given the content that those-who-came-before-us thought was appropriate to include in a WP article on Truth, we have these options: (1) Delete all the hard stuff, (2) Leave it in and explain it correctly, (3) Drop a lot of names and buzz words that will let the previously uninformed reader go away with the false impression, the PseudoKnowledge, of thinking that they have learned what it's all about. Choose wisely, Glosshopper. Jon Awbrey13:15, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: I see that you've chosen Door Number 3. Been there, done that. That kind of 1-liner, 2nd-hand hash is what got the US the gubermint we got. Jon Awbrey22:24, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
None of this is written in stone; it's all written in sand. Just ask the Buddha's representative referenced later in the article...Kenosis22:39, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: Sorry, maybe it's da code in my gnosis talking, but I've seen this all before, and it's just too discouraging. Pragmatic thinking, like other living organa, requires a nutrient broth of a certain richness to survive, and it's not just patched 2-gether like Mambo #5 from a lil bit'a'dis (coherence theory) and lil bit'a'dat (correspondence theory). It just doesn't work that way. James and Dewey were good-hearted folks, and me and my family love 'em dearly, but they did not always get the finer points, which is precisely why Russell, I'm abducing, picked on them instead of on Peirce, who would've clobbered him. Jon Awbrey23:00, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
Knowledgeable philosophers seem to agree that he was responding mainly to James, that man of all seasons; how dare he, when we're supposed to be able to put him in a narrow conceptual box like everyone else. Russell was sometimes an idiot, brilliant as he was. I paraphrase here: Pragmatism is not a theory of truth but rather a form of epistemology--oh, well , excuuuse me! As we know, he did lump all three into many of his criticisms (perhaps some of them valid) a good number of which, upon closer analysis, actually applied to none of the three most visible pragmatists individually. Well, James made his mark, and moved onto other things quickly enough. Dewey wrote Russell an angry letter or three, and proceeded to mark his indellible stamp on academia. And Peirce, as you know, was regarded by Russell as the most intelligent man alive, and the most intelligent American ever. Peirce, other than dying destitute, turns out to have done just fine and still continues to make his mark. In the end, his semiotics work will be known as well over a century ahead of his time. (Rather be "just slightly ahead of our time", like Panasonic used to say.) Personally, my favorite (again paraphrasing here) is Russell's retort to James's statement about the hypothesis of God being true if it works in the broadest sense of the word. Russell (that wonderfully slyest of dogs) said that it is far easier to settle the question whether popes are always infallible, than to answer the question whether thinking them infallible is on the whole good...Kenosis00:42, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: Cf. Tom Burke, Dewey's New Logic: A Reply to Russell, University of Chicago Press, 1994, and also Russell's HOWP, for the (not so) respective amount of coverage accorded to Dewey, James, and Peirce. Jon Awbrey14:44, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
RN: How about door number four: non-technical above the ToC, but a big section on "Truth in Philosophy" below the ToC. There is a lot of interesting stuff here, no need to scare the reader away before he can be hooked.
RN: By the way, the falacy in deflationary theory is easy to demonstrate, but can't be shown here because that would be original research. Maybe someone can suggest a journal that doesn't have too big a backlog?
Rick Norwood23:51, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
There are many infinteely many objections to ALL theories of truth. Just go do a tiny bit of research on the matter, please. Anything you have to say almost certaonly would not be OR, as Jon Awbrey pointed out above. You really shouldnìt flatter yourself into thinking that a non-existent entity such as yourself (or myslef or anyone who contributes to this ridiculous 'pedia) is capable of refuting a theory that has been adopted and defeneded by some of the greates philosophcial logician of the last century (Frege, Ramsey, Ayer, Carnap, Strawson, Hartty Field, Paul Howhich and so on). Please don't imagine also that there are no onjections to correspondence theory (to start with what is a fact or state of affairs? is that the same as Kant's unintelligible moumenon?)) (see Frege 1897) who blew it out of the water for enternity as far as I'm concerned (stupid fellow, that Frege!!, eh, I think Rick Nowrwood is FAR SUPERIOR) and the coherence theory of self-supporting assetiond which reinforce each other in a circualr spiral of never-endign interneal consistency grounded in.....what exactly??
I can document all the objections to correspondence, coherence, pragmatic and defaltionary theories if you like. But I think a more reasobale proposal is to take the POV staments that are lerady there out of the article. Which I will proceed to do.--Lacatosias10:40, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
RN: I have published in refereed journals. Just because I am not Fregé does not mean I have nothing to contribute. My request was a serious one, but off topic, for which I apologize. Rick Norwood17:22, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
This would be useful. I suggest dealing with it one point at a time, taking into consideration that there is a necessary heirarchical order to the article and a need to make it accessible to READERS !. We and a number of other editors did it with some other very difficult articles; with a lot more work, I think it possible it can be done here too. ..Kenosis14:05, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
A new introduction, hooray! — Boo, hiss
I would still rather see the robust/deflationary distinction below the ToC, but the new intro is so much better than the old that this is a mere quibble. Rick Norwood23:54, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
Well, perhaps some ideas should be discussed here, and a list developed for possible alternatives. I can only speak for myself, but I think if the bulk of the article achieves some basic stability, there may even be room perhaps for a bit of fun also, depending on what the editors in general think about it. Take, for instance, this summary from a publisher's review of the recent reprinting of a 1986 article that became the bestselling book On Bullshit.
"Where the liar makes deliberately false claims, the bullshitter is simply uninterested in the truth. Rather, bullshitters aim primarily to impress their audiences. Whereas the liar needs to know the truth the better to conceal it, the bullshitter, interested solely in pretense, has no use for the truth. By virtue of this, Frankfurt claims, "bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."
Now, I'm not necessarily suggesting this particular piece for the article, just pointing out that there are numerous possibilities (one of which, the Keats quote on poetry, you already brought into the mix). Of course, there is also the ever present risk of a flood of POV's with little justification for yanking them. This one I just mentioned, though, is quite citable, as is Keats. Perhaps if a size limit were agreed to by consensus?...Perhaps a list late in the article that is constrained only by Wikipedia size guidelines?. I'm willing to listen. Rick, what would you want said in a section that preceded the philosophy discussion, other than a cluster of other definitions?....Kenosis01:38, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: Right now the introduction is POV, and ignores all my earnest sermons on the uses and abuses of dictionary definitions. I would tag it POV if I thought it would serve any purpose under heaven, but I think it's a better idea to work on creating more real content, and maybe it will eventually become obvious what sort of front-end will fit. But I did want to post fair notice at this point by way of averting any kind of precedent formation, in case to say nothing is taken to say "nothing is wrong", a proquotational fallacy that I may have more to say on later. Jon Awbrey11:56, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
RN: In answer to Kenosis, I think the main thing the intro needs now is for anything that is a technical or specialized topic to be moved below the ToC. In answer to Jon, we are not ignoring your dislike of dictionary definitions, we are respectfully disagreeing with your objection to dictionary definitions. The concept "truth" does not belong exclusively to philosophy; it is also a common word with a common meaning which everyone understands. We are following the Wikipedia policy, which I quoted above, to keep technical discussions and peacock words out of the introduction. Rick Norwood17:13, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Positions, Objections, Replies, ...
JA: If there's a perceived lack of criticism of all available positions, then the proper way to handle that is to add more critique to the underserved positions, not to delete the critical reflections that we have. Jon Awbrey11:44, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
RN: There is a place for that, but not in the introduction, which should be short and to the point. Short and to the point means it cannot possibly include criticism of all available positions. Even the article as a whole is too short for that. Life's too short. Rick Norwood17:17, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Robust
JA: The word "robust" does not makes a lot of sense, either in the vernacular sense, or in its other technical senses. If someone can cite an example of early primary literature sources using this term to describe their own position, rather than applying it to other people, then that might legitimate it. Till then, "standard", "substantive", or "traditional" seem more apt. Jon Awbrey14:30, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
I could not agree more vigorously Jon. We can cite to it, but it's meaningless for this article. Please let's all settle this issue and use "substantive" and whatever other qualifiers we can find and cite to. These all used to be called simply "theories of truth" until a barrage of new academic commentators began to make new classifications-- and they are by no means settled either. Arnold Schwarzenegger is robust, wines can be robust, but theories--we're just following a modern trendy term that essentially means "hey, my theory's stable, bulky, not a 95 pound weakling, throw anything you want at it and it keeps on ticking". In this sense of the word "robust" the performative and redundancy theories are quite robust too. So therefore I'll immediately support any outright deletion which leaves only "substantive" and/or replaces it with a more suitable characterization, ideally citable to a reputable modern commentator. I'll immediately drop any advocacy of the use of "robust" based on the Oxford readings synopsis of the issue. Incidentally the Oxford readings book I earlier cited to also uses the word "substantive" as a classification for the five theories presented under this basic classification, as do other resources. Possibly Lacatosias has something to add here amidst his wealth of resources?...Kenosis14:39, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Important distinction between epistemology and truth? or not?
One of the things I believe should be clarified for the reader at the outset, and early in the article, is where lies the demarcation line of discussions about theories of "truth" as distinguished (possibly) from theories of "knowledge". Are they, at the end of the day, one and the same? Is this article an article about everything we humans know?, or believe we know?, how we know it or think we know it?, and when do we know it?, and hence to some extent an article about a theory of everything? If the latter, maybe we're compelled to introduce our friend Immanuel Kant to the readership too? and all of the derivative problems leading up to the late 19th and early 20th Century discussions? The demarcation, if there is one, between "truth" and "knowledge" is not a new problem (Russell and the Pragmatists got severely crossed on the issue, for instance). It is an issue that I think should be settled to the satisfaction of the preponderance of editors, documented, and set forth in the article itself so the reader is aware of the sometimes very subtle distinctions between discussions about "concordance of belief and fact" and discussions about "concordance of statement and fact" along with the myriad other uses of "truth"....Kenosis14:39, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: This is usually discussed as the distinction between ontology and epistemology — what is versus how we come to know what is. The distinction is such standard furniture for some people that they can't imagine that there would be people of sound mind and valid body who have actually thought through the distinction and yet still reject it, at least, in any ontological as opposed to heuristic forms. But I think it's best to keep it on the back burner, as we have enough on our plates right now, and the discussion would ramify into the articles on reality, belief, knowledge, inquiry, not to mention process versus product thinking, and so on. Jon Awbrey15:00, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Absolutely right Jon. And this truth article gets stuck smack dab in the middle of the question, because the trend has been to erase these traditional distinctions when discussing truth, to wit, Haack's work, constructivism that warrants sociology's involvement, similarly with consensus theory. Russell, I now realize, was arguing to keep "truth" inquiries within bounds (of his preference of course) that ultimately were breached nonetheless...Kenosis15:47, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Pages, not dates
JA: Sorry if that was unclear, but I was requesting page numbers for the remarks. Dates are not needed if there's only one work by a given author. Just referring to a whole work and letting the reader go fish, is considered improper citation, not to mention a nuisance. Also, I modified the statements there, because the previous ones were illogical, so I prefixed a "cf" as if to say that the, er, concordance of the new version with what the source is saying needs to be checked. Usually best to go with a direct quote in these kinds of cases. Jon Awbrey15:14, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: I did not understand the edit line about not giving page numbers for specific assertions. The fact that an encyclopedia article is not a research article does not mean that it escapes the requirements of sourced research, as it says on every wall of this city. It is valid, er, okay to refer to a whole work if you are only using it as an example of the fact that some people are writing about a particular subject, say, as I did with Haack, but when you give the impression of summing up a specific statement, then it needs specific pages.
JA: As far as the general style of sourcing proper to encyclopedia articles, I think it should be done in a way that does not press needles into ones eyes. Jon Awbrey18:52, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Coherence ≠ Consistency
JA: Probably advisable in this context not to use "consistency" in anything other than its strict logical sense. Jon Awbrey16:20, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Good point. I think this is a bit of a tough one, because my research indicates that coherence finds its most comfortable home in the a priori world(s). Let me go see how the pros have grappled with this. But I think that explanation was confusing and substantially incorrect before (due to multiple editors' incompletely superimposed edits I imagine). So I put something in there for now that was consistent with the Encyc. Phil. article on the subject. The author of that article does not grapple with the great solipsist systems at all, so there's still some more research to be done there...Kenosis16:45, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: On consistency and consistency proofs. Just off the cuff, I don't think all coherence theories require strict logical consistency, as that would be a rather stringent condition, even aside from all the problematics of proving consistency. When it comes to complex mathematical systems, people usually say something like "no obvious contradictions", and then they go looking for a semantic model. But coherence theory denies itself the convenience of using semantic models to prove consistency, and insists on trying to do everything purely syntactically, as it were. But many coherence apologists are even looser than that, and don't insist on freedom from contradiction —, they usually quote Walt Whitman at about this point. Jon Awbrey18:36, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
this is true Jon. But I needed to start somewhere there; and to go farther would immediately have led to excessive length because of the analysis of where coherentists stray when arguing the merits of how the theory can be applied to real life-- in the end, they end up relying on another theory to apply it to the real world in any way, etc., etc.. But, the previous reduction to "if a biffle is a boffle..." was just too much of a dismissal of the merits of this theory. If that were it, it would never have become among the classic traditionals. And you could tell someone didn't understand this by what the following sentences said, which were non-explanatory and left all the issues hanging in mid-air...Kenosis18:57, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Moved rapidly expanding material pending weigh-in of Banno, JimWae, Rick Norwood and others
There was too much technical material for the intro, which increasingly short circuited JimWae's fine contribution in the form of what are the questions about truth that scholars ask; tentatively put into an introductory section to substantive and minimalist theories, all pending other editors' views on it...Kenosis17:34, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
I think we have now reached an ideal introduction, and should move on to the rest of the article.
I think it would help us to move toward a consensus if you would pick out one statement in the article you think is POV. I realize that you may think that there are many such statements, but we can't discuss them all at the same time, so let's start with one. Rick Norwood17:48, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
POV tag.
The POV tag is not supposed to be removed until the person who placed it there is satisified that the bias in the article has been properly remedied. For example, The POV tag has reamined untouched on the fascism page for about the last two years or so. The problem is clear: someone has decided to introduce criticism (original or unoriginal is not the matter) to only one theory in the article wwith which they disagree. The same has not been done for the theories whcih are overwehlgingly preferred by other editors: pragmatic theory (no one dare touch the godly Pierce on this 'pedia), correspondence or what have you. This is rather blatant bias.
Incidentally to Rick Ficklewood (or whatvere his name is?), you can try publishing you refutation of deflationary theories in the "Jounral of Philosohical Logic", "the Journal of Symnbolic Logic" , etc. etc...
What are you waiting for? The world is just waiting for youre revolutionary work to appear and proclaim the most extraordinary prodigy since Saul Kripke ( a deflationist, BTW). --Lacatosias18:07, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
My question was about backlogs. Also, I don't think the two journals you suggest are appropriate; certainly the second of the two is not. What I would be looking for, assuming I decide my idea is good enough for the months of research required, is a journal that has published papers both agreeing with and disagreeing with deflationary theories of truth. Rick Norwood20:33, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
What the hell? How am I supposed to get anything published without a pH.D, for example? Why do you even waste your time on this nonsense...agrguing abuut the the first three sentences in a philosophy article which serious scholars will never read anyway? And, even if they DO, you wonìt get any credit for it? What's the point? Why should I contribute to this madness in the first place? I suppose you have not noticed that there are an overehwlming number of cranks, pseudoscientists, vandals, teenagers and so on who mess up 99&% of the articles on here either, eh? Go try to save the conscsiouness article, for example!! What the hell is the point? --Lacatosias10:00, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
Let me see Rick Norwood. Hmmm.. you don't even have an entry in Wikipedia. I once added an article for Sungsu Kim, who at least gets about 8,000 hits on Google. It was deleted becasue he was just a another run-of-the-mill academic. Yes, the bile is starting to pour out of me now. I've spent 70% of my fucking like ltying in bed unable to move. I haven't even had the chance to finish my ph.D....I am convinced that there are extraordinary problems with all of the traditonal theories and that deflationary theories of truth are in the right track. I don't need a bunch of Wackipedians ridiculing something that.........Look at all of the funckign contributuions I've made to this sshitpedia-....LOOOK AT THEM ALLL: fo CHRSIT'S SAKE!!!!!!!! That's it. I will not revert them all and say goodbye.--Lacatosias18:07, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Criticisms and/or authors of criticisms have already been included, at least in part, in the current sections the correspondence theory, coherence theory, pragmatic theory, and consensus theory. Correspondence theory criticisms and limitations takes a whole paragraph, fully half of the section. In the pragmatic theory section, the note about Russell's criticism (sans analysis of his criticisms for purpose of simplicity and extreme brevity there), was deleted in context of an extended argument about length of that section. We haven't yet gotten started on the contra end of the constructivist theory, and the editors may still have some things to add there as well, because there are plenty, depending on which constructivist version you pick. The sum of all this is neither POV nor unfair on the article editors' part, at least thus far. There is a place for brief reasoned summaries of these contra issues in every section, including the one about which you are objecting, though it should in each case be done in the necessary context of what has already been introduced in the article, lest we get too far ahead of the reader. That is what was done, however imperfectly for now, in the section on Redundancy and other minimalist theories...Kenosis13:58, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
Sentence removed from Correspondence theory for further discussion and citation(s)
I have removed the following sentence from Correspondence theory for further discussion and citation(s)...Kenosis18:27, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
"A correspondence theory of truth represents a rejection of any sort of relativism about truth that extends further than the "truth relation" of interest."18:27, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Suggestion for removal and briefer replacement of Peirce quote
In partial response to Lakatosias' complaints, upon further review of the present material, I believe this following blockquote is too much for the Truth article, when a link is provided, inter alia, to Pragmatic theory of truth, to semiosis and to Charles Peirce:
Now thought is of the nature of a sign. In that case, then, if we can find out the right method of thinking and can follow it out — the right method of transforming signs — then truth can be nothing more nor less than the last result to which the following out of this method would ultimately carry us. In that case, that to which the representation should conform, is itself something in the nature of a representation, or sign — something noumenal, intelligible, conceivable, and utterly unlike a thing-in-itself. (Peirce, CP 5.553, 1906)
Peirce is merely differentiating between signifier (truth-bearer) and signified (whatever object is involved) One sentence should be quite sufficient in place of this. Truncate this, and I can easily chop a sentence or two from the James summary as a gesture of comeraderie without sacrificing the basic thrust there.....Kenosis 18:50, 20 April 2006 (UTC) On the other hand, I just checked again, and James is short enough, the most prominent slants included but no more. If I needed to remove anything, it would be the Russell comment, which was added to put the then-contemprorary debate in some perspective and add a note of interest about who made the correspondence theory known as such...Kenosis19:04, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: The article is only 34 kb in size, schockingly small for such a complex subject. I think that we should keep it, er, robust, and stop chopping the life out of it just because certain people don't like to think about certain issues. Jon Awbrey19:12, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
That's a red link there. Jon, encyclopedia writers are forced to do this all the time. But I will not fight you too much on this, as I know better by now. And there's still plenty else to be done here. This is a tough subject, and when all the participating editors adequately understand this tough subject which has bloated into another name for epistemology, then it will all fall together, and in the end should hang together too. So, NP buddy. But I still think you don't need the whole blockquote there to make the point...Kenosis19:09, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: If you have a question about why something is important, you have only to ask. If I thought I could say what the essential point is here, I would try — oh wait, I already did that in the pragmatic theory of truth article. But say it in fewer words? — no, and why bother, when a primary source has already said it quite eptly. Jon Awbrey19:20, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
But I do understand Peirce's point quite well as goes basic semiotics. So he is arguing to those of his day (and our day too) that the sign has an interactive influence on us and can even dominate us and get in the way of our perception of a proposed truth relation, and that it is inherently triadic from the getgo--sorry, try all you like; can't reduce it any further-- which is something almost no one understood in his day. Even today people regularly confuse sign and signified all the time, and end up seeking to impose their signs on the signified for who-only-knows-what-associations-or-motivations-they-may-have, along with numerous other gaffes that come out of being excessively attached to one's semantics. But the Peirce quote doesn't explain squat to such people...Kenosis20:12, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
The pragmatism section should definitely be cut down in size. There is certainly no (legitimate) reason for it to be twice as long as the other sections. — goetheanॐ19:31, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: That's an exaggeration. The redundancy section is almost the same size. The article overall is not that big and could still tolerate some expansion in various areas. But I will look at it again. It's hard for me to even read the footnoted sections because of all the jagged lines and angle brackets twitching my eyes. Jon Awbrey19:51, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Now that you have removed the sentence about Russell, the pragmatism section contains 544 words. The coherence section contains 229 words. The correspondence section is 255 words. This gives pragmatism undue weight. — goetheanॐ19:59, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: This is becoming the bean-counting theory of truth. I'm looking at their size on the screen. It's not fair to count the words in all those verbose, byte-wasting in-text footnotes, but I'm about to work on that. Don't you have anything positive to contribute? Jon Awbrey20:22, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
That wasn't counting the footnotes. Don't trim the footnotes. A good idea would be to put your large Peirce quotation in a footnote, and replace it with a sentence in the text. — goetheanॐ20:31, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
I've got an idea. Let's subdivide the Pragmatism section into "Peirce" and "James" subsections. That would make even more clear how unbalanced the article is. The large Peirce quotation should go. — goetheanॐ20:18, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
I agree this is not an exact balancing test. And I think the other sections will rightly expand a bit in due course, especially the stubs after pragmatic theory, which both require far better explanations than are currently contained. The main problem I have with the Peirce quote is that it really doesn't explain anything that can't also be said in a sentence or two integrated into the existing paragraph-- and the right way of saying it could be far more explanatory for most readers. ("something noumenal...utterly unlike a thing-in-itself" means nothing to most readers here, unless they happen to be Immanuel Kant afficionados)...Kenosis20:32, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Moreover, I'm reminded now that Peirce is here rearranging and re-inventing Kant's schema, which is all fine, except far too obscure and obtuse for an article such as this...Kenosis22:27, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Subject matter of the truth predicate
JA: As I tried to do once before, I think that it would be handy to introduce earllier than presently a generic name for the subject matter to which the term "true" applies, some word like "truth-bearer", "potentially meaningful or significant element", whatever. But it would help to avoid the many awkward circumlocutions that I find myself forced to do each time I try to make a paragraph make any kind of sense. So vote for your favorite candidate. Jon Awbrey19:38, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: The other problem I now see is that substantive theories are not exactly the same thing as essentialist theories, even though there may be some overlap. But some of our current phrasing tends to conflate the two stripes. Jon Awbrey19:38, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
I just noticed that the introduction, in the process of simplification, lost essential footnotes, especially the reference to Russell. Those need to be restored, to avoid the accusation that the ideas are undocumented. Rick Norwood20:40, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Moving right along
The overarching structure of the article, as it stands, assumes that this is an article about the philosophy of truth. The other sections, Truth in mathematics, Truth in law, Truth in religion, are now just asides from the (supposedly) mainstream Truth in philosophy.
I think a better organization would be a section on Truth in philosopy, which can come first, since most of the people working on the article currently seem to be philosophers, followed by much shorter sections on Truth in mathematics (an undefined constant), Truth in science (deniability), Truth in law (good faith), Truth in religion (God's truth, double truth, Pilate), and Truth in art (Keats).
I'm not proposing another major rewrite. Just a new heading, right under the ToC, Truth in philosophy, followed by subheadings, followed by other major headings as suggested above, with those paragraphs pulled out of the philosophy section. This organization would also allow the first part of the Truth in philosophy section to contain definitions of important terms, such as "truth-bearer", "Robust (or whatever)", "deflationary", etc. Then the rest of the philosophy section could use those terms with conficence.
Rick, this is not an article about truth in philosophy, but rather about philosophy of truth. Maybe you have the solution here, which might ultimately to split off an article on Philosophy of Truth, with a separate article about Truth, and let all the various common slants finally have their day. I really don't know for sure, but I don't think the effort should be abandoned quite yet...Kenosis21:04, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
RN: Whatever you want to call it, I don't think Philosophy of truth needs to split off from Truth, at least not yet. What I propose is splitting off uses of truth outside philosophy from the big philosophy section. In law, for example, imagine the fantastic scene if the opposing lawyers started arguing about the meaning of truth every time a witness took the stand. Monty Python could do a sketch. "Honorable sirs, the witness for the prosecution has just sworn to tell the truth. But we, as learned men, must ask is this truth according to some Robust theory of truth? Or is mearly truth according to some deflationary theory of truth. What then, I ask you, gentlemen of the jury, what then? Has he really sworn to tell the truth, or has he only sworn to tell." Rick Norwood22:34, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Citation format
What's going on with the footnotes now????? This is an encyclopedia with links that can be put into [1] this space, not an academic paper!! The links go right to footnotes, no need to scroll to the end of a chaper or book; that's what notes are for in an encyclopedia. Gee whiz here....Kenosis21:00, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: Here is the comment that I posted on the Footnotes talk page:
Putting roller skates on the horse
That's not how the Automobile got invented. The way I see it, a lot of time and ingenuity is being wasted on a system of citation that experienced scholars just plain don't use anymore, and never will again, for all sorts of reasons that would be immediately obvious here if WikiPedians had a longer history of actually sourcing their contributions in any routine and systematic way. Here are some of things that normally become obvious when you do this all the time.
Once you get more than a dozen or so items in your list of references and/or bibliography, then it's time to use an alphabetized list for both.
The list of references needs to be in one place, not scattered throughout the text. This allows for (1) easy error correction and omission checking, by virtue of the parallel comparison of literature entries that it facilitates, (2) extracting the references whole hog from an article, as scholars already familiar with a topic often find that the literature section is the only thing of real interest, for instance, if it cites sources that they haven't seen before. Further, this practice helps to prevent the erosion of accurate citations that inevitably occurs as editors will tend to use more and more abbreviated reference entries as time goes on.
JA: I'll add some more items as they occur to me. Jon Awbrey 12:26, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: This is still sourced research. If that is done badly, then it's a bad thing for WP. It is even more necessary in WP than a printed encyclopedia to be careful about this sort of thing, as there is no list of repsonsible editors supplied with WP. It's a thin line between pseudo-nyms and pseudo-legitimacy.
JA: Aside from all that there is the human factors <angle>. Maybe your eyes are in better shape than mine, but it just plain hurts to read this <angular> formatting and superscripted up-arrows, plus the unevenness of line spacing that is due to superscripted[notes] in the text. Jon Awbrey21:18, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Jon, then tell me where to lodge a most vociferous complaint in Wikipedia. I could not agree more that this footnote format is a pain in the A&%$# to edit. But it works, however clumsily. Turning our style into that of an academic paper is not going to change this, but rather, detracts severely from the readability of these already difficult articles, and forces the reader not only to have to parse past the additional distractions, but also forces the reader interested in the notes to familiarize themselves with the references and scroll to the bottom of the page!! rather than to just link to fn and quickly backpage if they're interested!! This is not right, this academic style--it's for our temporary convenience only....Kenosis21:49, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Sentence removed from Bearers of truth section
Removed and place here for futher discussion:
So plausibly sentences of different languages, such as the (English) The sky is blue and the (German) Der Himmel ist blau express the same proposition.
This kind of comparison has the potential to make a good point with minor adjustment, particularly if integrated with an example or two of how an inexact translation or impossible translation confounds idealized conceptions of truth bearers. Perhaps an example such as "geist"? Is it mind, or spirit? maybe it's "intelligent design"?. I suspect someone has a yet better example for possible use to illustrate the point effectively....Kenosis23:55, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
beliefs & statements
Do we have a dictionary to quote from that says:
"some form of accord between belief and fact"
or "an accord between statement and fact"?
Aside from the renewed emphasis on "fact", few I've seen focus on beliefs or statements - they are very vague about "what" is supposed to be in accord with "facts" IT does not seem to be a "common" definition --JimWae21:07, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Exactly, which is avoidance of a vague, sensitive, very difficult set of issues that lead right to the questions you entered into the introduction...Kenosis21:13, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Nice edit Jim. If the intro is now considered stable by the proponderance of editors, in light of the many difficult questions that immediately attach to the word "truth", I humbly suggest that the preponderance of editors who have diligently consensused this intro should back it up with a rotating watch schedule, and revert arbitrary additions with an iron fist, so to speak, absent any compelling, well-considered arguments to change it. It states the facts as they are, and then moves onto the article proper. Thank you, Sir ....Kenosis21:58, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Assuming the intro hasn't changed drastically since I last looked, I'll take the 3 PM to 7 PM watch, Eastern Standard Time.
The first sentence in the introduction is a quote from Bertrand Russell, if I remember correctly, but the footnote got lost. Rick Norwood22:38, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
I put the Russell back in, because a) it says exactly the same thing as the definition we've got and b) it is verified. I was tempted to take out the first sentence, which the Russell definition essentially repeats, but decided in favor of small, cautious moves. Rick Norwood22:49, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Another possibility just occurred to me. We revert back to the exact intro we had before I put the Russell quote in, but add a footnote to the Russell quote, as the requested verification. What do you all think? Rick Norwood23:15, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
The request for verification runs through the whole article, not the intro. There should not be any further need to cite from the intro, or at least that's what I thought...Kenosis23:18, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Still, it's better to have a reference than not. The main reason article do not make the cut as "good articles" is lack of references. The question is, how shall we arrange it? Rick Norwood23:23, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Rick, I just noticed your addition, and I'm not going so far as to revert it. I guess other editors will weigh in in due course. I have no real preference as long as it makes sense and quickly gets to the business of stating the problem, which is that there is no clear and widespread agreement among scholars on what truth is, except everyone seems to think they know what it is, and it's not always the same thing. ..Kenosis23:40, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Am I correct in my interpretation that the guy who was objecting to philosophers taking over the article is now inserting Bertrand Russell as the author of the dictionary definition of truth? ;=()--JimWae00:00, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
even as a footnote, the Russell quote is inappropriate (besides inserting correspondence bias, he did not write any dictionariesw that I am aware of). I do not think it necessary to give a source that dictionaries frequently include the word fact in their "definition" of truth. --JimWae01:28, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
First, I suppose I'm the "guy" that JimWae refers to. I never objected to philosophers "taking over" the article. I only pointed out the Wiki policy of keeping technical details below the ToC and of having a common explanation above the ToC. The philosophy part of the article needs some work, but is very interesting. But is isn't the only point of view. The Russell quote is not one that I came up with, but references are good. Note that the Russell quote does not say that the correspondence theory is correct. He only says that that is what dictionaries say. JimWae, are you really objecting that "accord" is ok but "correspond" is not? Rick Norwood14:21, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
So give a link to a dictionary definition that includes facts - "beliefs & statements" is not needed, nor is "correspondence" (which is somewhat prejudicial, anyway). I do not think anyone is going to dispute that dictioinaries commonly include fact in their definition of truth. Are you saying that besides your previous selective quoting of dictionaries, the only dictionary source for the previous "accord between belief and fact, ... and statements..." was Russell? Russell wrote the dictionaries?--JimWae16:01, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
I don't understand your objections. It seems to me the Russell quote adds something to the introduction. But the new intro is so much better than the old that it isn't worth fighting over. Maybe the Russell quote will fit somewhere else in the article. Rick Norwood17:39, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
working toward a stable article
Two suggestions are hanging fire. There's my suggestion about breaking the article up into subtopics: philosophy, mathematics, law, science, religion, etc. Nobody really seemed to object, but nobody was terribly enthusiastic either. I'd like to attempt it, but I don't want to start another revert war.
The second, and more important suggestion was about moving the definitions about truth in philosophy higher up. Right now, the article plunges into undefined technical language pretty quickly.
I like your idea, but it will be a lot of work to totally rewrite the article. "truth in art" comes to mind... Your second point lost me. It seems like you meant to say "lower down" rather than "higher up". — goetheanॐ20:55, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
No, higher up is what I intended. For example, the definition of "truth bearer" is now in the first paragraph after the ToC. Rick Norwood23:28, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
Irony
Sorry that this comment is not contributing to the article, but I find it very ironic that this page should be tagged as "not verified". And, in another way, it's almost a good demonstration of the principle. --Bdoserror19:58, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
Not verified? Well, it just shows that all the editors unconsciously subcribe to the verificationist theory of truth or anti-realism: there are no verification-transcendent truth conditions.--Lacatosias14:48, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
"For example, propositions are often thought to be the only things that are literally true."
"not verified" tag removed from intro
I have removed the not-verified tag from the article proper. The basis for this is that the article is getting much closer to verified in general. Without offering specific evidence on this, I vaguely imagine it should now be tagged by section as needed. The tag itself is defined within the editing code as "not verified" set within template markers, and can apply to either article or section depending on placement. ...Kenosis02:08, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
POV tag removed from section on Redundancy theories
I've removed this tag for lack of further justification by the editor who placed it. The rest of the relevant discussion is here: [5] ....Kenosis02:19, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
Standards Of Scholarship (SOS)
They didn't want 'em good —
They wanted 'em Tuesday!
— Ronald Reagan, Apologia pro cinema sua
JA: This is an important article, and it deserves a higher standard of scholarship than it currently exhibits. Aside from the POV issues, which I will discuss separately, it has the following problems:
Improper citations. There are many places where a string of statements in the text is followed by a long string of citations and/or footnotes, given without page references. This is highly improper. A generic citation after a generic statement says that the whole work cited is an instance of the generic statement in question. A citation placed after a specific quotation or putative paraphrase of a source says that an equivalent thought can be found in the source cited at the place cited. It is not acceptable to send the reader off on a fishing expedition to see if something like the statements in the text are found somewhere in the long list of whole works cited.
Low quality citations. Primary source citations are preferable to secondary source and tertiary source citations. This is necessary to preserve accuracy as well as to prevent biased distortions from creeping in, as anybody who has played the "Whispering Game" in grade school should well comprehend. We shoud do better than merely recycling the contents of other encyclopedias.
JA: It's no excuse to say "we're only writing an encyclopedia here" — there is no Tuesday deadline, and the limits on space are nowhere near so severe as some people are pretending they are, mostly resorting to that excuse for lack of any substantive arguments. There is no excuse for not holding to a higher standard of accuracy, completeness, fairness, and quality. Period. Jon Awbrey13:14, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: The article is currently POV, and more than one editor says so, even editors who disagree on many other points. Nobody pretends that achieving balance is an easy thing, especially in an area where many POV's are obviously present, but here are some general considerations that I see as being pertinent:
Use and misuse of dictionary definitions. Dictionary definitions can be useful in getting off square one in a controversial article, and getting on to the meat of the controversy. But they can also be misused, as they are being misused now, to slant the article in a particular direction. The nice thing about a full dictionary entry is its inclusiveness, the fact that it must cover, in a logically disjunctive way, something approaching the full diversity of usages that are prevalent in a given linguistic community. Reasonable summaries of this variety can be made in a shorter space. But selecting your favorite definition from this array amounts to a distortion of the facts of usage. Furthermore, dictionary entries provide nothing more than the "customary connections" (Hume) of words — no theoretical conclusions can be drawn from this. The problem of what "truth" means is not reduced to the problem of what "correspondence" means by the fact that one of many dictionary definitions mentions them together. In the first place, it is implausible that dictionary informants are using the word "correspondence" in the technical sense of "correspondence theories of truth". In the second place, it is hardly clear that the notion of correspondence is simpler than the notion of truth. In the third place, no analysis of correspendence is being supplied. Jon Awbrey14:25, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
POV-independent terms of engagement. Another thing that is difficult to do in a disputed area, especially when the disagreements are about very basic questions, is to find terms for describing the dispute that do not themselves bias the entire discussion of different POV's. For one thing, framing the whole discussion in the terms that are favored by one POV is easily recognized to slant the whole playing field. For another thing, there may be many other parties concerned with the subject matter who simply do not care about the "tempest in the teapot" that two other parties are engaged in. For an object example, the current article treats the "flationary axis" — a dimension that becomes salient only within a peculiar "linguistic twist" on truth, as the principal axis of the entire article, and in so doing it commits both of the above types of distortion. Jon Awbrey15:06, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
RN: Every article in Wikipedia contains words. Words are only useful if the person writing them and the person reading them are as close to agreement as possible on what those words mean. That is why dictionaries are important, and why there is a Wikipedia policy to begin with the common definition of a word, and discuss more specialized meanings later in the article. Most people do not consider "truth" to be a difficult word. People use it frequently and the person using the word and the person hearing or reading the word usually understand the same meaning. "Jane told the truth. John lied." Philosophers have looked into the various meanings and uses of the word more carefully, and that investigation forms the body of this article. But if we did not begin with the common meaning of truth, then the article could just as well be about "bark" as about "truth". Words have no meaning apart from meanings people agree on.
RN: On to your second point. It seems to me that several contributers to this article may have written papers on some special area of "truth", or be specialists in that area, and so naturally the write about what they know. As you say, the unbalances the article, and subjects such as "flationary axis" should be, at most, links. Rick Norwood23:43, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
Theories of truth — Deleted Material
THIS TALK-SECTION PLACED HERE APRIL 22, BY Jon Awbrey, It includes earler discussion following removal by Banno of THEORIES OF TRUTH section, with Jon responding by categorical issue...Kenosis21:24, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
)
Beginning April 18
)
I have removed this stuff to talk, as well.
The general style of this section is wordy and difficult. Look at the first sentence of the second para to see what I mean - no less than five clauses! Just about every sentence has two or more clauses.
truth bearers are dealt with elsewhere in the article - so the first para is repetitious
Despite having couple of degrees, one in philosophy, I can't make sense of most of what is written here. The author might think that good thing; I don't.
Despite the difficulties with the introduction, I think that this article was quite good before the introduction of this material. I invite the author to re-write this stuff and place it back into the article.
I am compelled to agree with this removal. This discussion belongs, possibly in a more concise form, after the already existing introduction of "Bearers of truth", with appropriate references to any theories previously introduced...Kenosis20:17, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
I accept responsibility for being the editor who added the parenthetical explanation of "truth bearer" and "truth predicate" which, lacking a complete deletion or relocation of this section, appeared necessary in light of the material that was being introduced by another editor--since rendered a moot issue for the present, I would guess...Kenosis21:03, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: Response to criticisms. Point 1. First off, stylistic problems are trivial, and easily fixed by any editor — how hard is it really to split a long sentence into two or three pieces?. Problems like that do not justify mass deletion, but are commonly raised by critics who have no substantive arguments.
Theories of truth
Most inquiries into the character of truth begin with a notion of an informative, meaningful, or significant element, the truth of whose information, meaning, or significance may be put into question and needs to be evaluated. Depending on the context, this element might be called an artefact, expression, image, impression, lyric, mark, performance, picture, sentence, sign, string, symbol, text, thought, token, utterance, word, work, and so on. Whatver the case, one has the task of judging whether the bearers of information, meaning, or signficance are indeed truth-bearers. This judgment is typically expressed in the form of a specific truth predicate, whose positive application to a sign, or so on, asserts that the sign is true.
JA: Point 2. Now that the wisdom of introducing truth-bearers early on is generally acknowledged, which was part of the purpose of the above paragraph, perhaps we can discuss some of the other terms of discussion that are necessary to raise before rushing into the emboilments of this or that teapot.
The term "truth-bearer" begs the question at times. It would be better to introduce a concept of a "meaning-bearer", since a thing has to be meaningful before it can be true or false. The concept of a "semantics-bearing token" is often used in mathematical pedagogy and the philosophy of mathematics, but I did not want to trouble the reader with that. The phrase that I used, "an informative, meaningful, or significant element", covers most of the descriptions that I know of in a large mumber of different fields.
Once some notion of a sematically significant element is in place, it becomes possible to discuss the problem of evaluating its information, meaning, or significance with regard to the criterion of truth.
I have used these more inclusive terms at the outset precisely to avoid restricting the rest of the discussion to the teapot of the purely linguistic turn. There are notions of truth, as several have noted, that are not adequately treated in terms of purely syntactic analysis of purely linguistic material.
I had not realized when I wrote the above that the mere use of the word "predicate" was quite so problematic to some people. The verb phrase "— is true" is however standardly referred to as a linguistic predicate, so it should be okay to call it that from the outset, and then mention the problem of how much that means at the appropriate point.
JA: In this way we will have introduced fairly neutral subject and predicate terms for continuing discussion. Jon Awbrey17:12, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
Considered within the broadest horizon, there is little reason to imagine that the process of judging a work, that leads to a predication of false or true, is necessarily amenable to formalization, and it may always remain what is commonly called a judgment call. But there are indeed many well-circumscribed domains where it is useful to consider disciplined forms of evaluation, and the observation of these limits allows for the institution of what is called a method of judging truth and falsity.
One of the first questions that can be asked in this setting is about the relationship between the significant performance and its reflective critique. If one expresses oneself in a particular fashion, and someone says "that's true", is there anything useful at all that can be said in general terms about the relationship between these two acts? For instance, does the critique add value to the expression criticized, does it say something signficant in its own right, or is it just an insubstantial echo of the original sign?
Theories of truth may be described according to several dimensions of description that affect the character of the predicate "true". The truth predicates that are used in different theories may be classified by the number of things that have to be mentioned in order to assess the truth of a sign, counting the sign itself as the first thing. In formal logic, this number is called the arity of the predicate. The kinds of truth predicates may then be subdivided according to any number of more specific characters that various theorists recognize as important.
A monadic truth predicate is one that applies to its main subject — typically a concrete representation or its abstract content — independently of reference to anything else. In this case one can say that a truth bearer is true in and of itself.
A dyadic truth predicate is one that applies to its main subject only in reference to something else, a second subject. Most commonly, the auxiliary subject is either an object, an interpreter, or a language to which the representation bears some relation.
A triadic truth predicate is one that applies to its main subject only in reference to a second and a third subject. For example, in a pragmatic theory of truth, one has to specify both the object of the sign, and either its interpreter or another sign called the interpretant before one can say that the sign is true of its object to its interpreting agent or sign.
Several qualifications must be kept in mind with respect to any such radically simple scheme of classification, as real practice seldom presents any pure types, and there are settings in which it is useful to speak of a theory of truth that is "almost" k-adic, or that "would be" k-adic if certain details can be abstracted away and neglected in a particular context of discussion. That said, given the generic division of truth predicates according to their arity, further species can be differentiated within each genus according to a number of more refined features. ‹The templateTalkfact is being considered for merging.›[citation needed]
IG:Stylistic considerations are actually quite important to the consideration of text within this encyclopedia if the "erudition" of the text impairs the comprehension (note the Latin root — "grasp together") of the subject matter at hand (the previous sentence is, in my opinion, an example of language that is just too complex). This article could use a careful review of Wikipedia:Guide_to_writing_better_articles#Think_of_the_reader. The problem with the majority of the text is that, although it makes (a kind of) sense, it uses extraneous bombastic circumlocutions that are likely to drive away the reader who is not already familiar with the topic and terminology at hand. This complaint has been raised many times by other editors on this page. Put simply, this passage requires a massive rewrite and not just stylistic nit-picking. Let's start:
Most inquiries into the character of truth begin with a notion of an informative, meaningful, or significant element, the truth of whose information, meaning, or significance may be put into question and needs to be evaluated. Depending on the context, this element might be called an artefact, expression, image, impression, lyric, mark, performance, picture, sentence, sign, string, symbol, text, thought, token, utterance, word, work, and so on. Whatver the case, one has the task of judging whether the bearers of information, meaning, or signficance are indeed truth-bearers. This judgment is typically expressed in the form of a specific truth predicate, whose positive application to a sign, or so on, asserts that the sign is true.
IG:Seriously now. There is a sense to this paragraph but it seems to trip over itself and get lost in the wonderful world of words. Words are useful tools used properly but "Most inquires into the character of truth begin with a notion... the truth of whose [blah blah blah]... needs to be evaluated". Wait. Did that qualification at the end say something new? We're making an inquiry into truth so we need to "evaluate" the truth of something. Circular, isn't it? And then there is that (useless) long list of various "meaning bearers". The third sentence then repeats, much more concisely, though in undefined jargon, the basic thrust of the first. Finally we have this mysterious "truth predicate" "whose positive application to a sign, or so on, asserts that the sign is true". Woowhee! I feel enlightened now! "Positive application"? "Truth predicate"? Jargonism. Perhaps instead:
Most inquiries into the nature of truth begin by examining the grounds on which an idea can be said to be true. These ideas can be expressed in forms such as an lyric, a picture, a sentence or a sign, etc. The judgement of the truth or falsity of a certain idea is expressed in the form of a "truth predicate" [insert appropriate notion of "truth predicate" here].
IG:Not perfect, but a lot clearer and, I think, more meaningful (e.g. drawing a distinction between "truth" and "true" rather than the confusing attempt between "truth" and "truth"). Of course the use of the word "idea" is itself question-begging, but then again, I am trying to communicate an idea, or at least so it seems to me, not an "informative, meaningful, or significant element". "Element of what?" we might ask... And, of course, I left in "truth predicate" but the only complaint here is that it is nowhere defined in the article.
IG:I'm not even arguing this (rewritten) text should be included. Most of the information in that passage seems "common sense" (like the above paragraph) — maybe I shouldn't bring any notion of "common sense" into Wackipedia... — or too technical to warrant its original early placement. All this talk about arity, for example, which, while a useful concept for analyzing theories of truth, does not seem to have much place in the actual formulation of them, except such definitions as belong under the heading "formal definitions of truth". Ig077418:32, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: I was only making the simple point that most folks write badly on the first dozen drafts or so, but those are things that all of us know how to work on.
JA: The reason for including disjunctive lists of terms was to cover the variety of terms that I have seen in actual use, and that I know some people can be very insistent about. No doubt it could be compressed with further thought. In your abridgement, you have reduced them all to "idea", which is a very problematic reduction, in that it already imposes a particular theory of truth-bearers on the rest of the article. Jon Awbrey18:45, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: The need to introduce a term like "meaning-bearer" became evident to me as I tried to straighten out some of the circumlocutions already in the text, where I kept having to say things like "if the truth-bearer really is a truth-bearer" ... If you seek a vicious circularity, go root out those. Jon Awbrey19:12, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: The definition of a truth predicate, at least, in linguistic theories of truth, is this: It's a verb phrase like one of the following:
"__is true",
"__is true of__",
or "__is true of__to__",
where the first blank is filled by a sentential clause like "Snow is white". This only covers the linguistic theories of truth, of course, but I'm guessing previous editors just assumed everybody knew this. Their oversight is easy enough to fix. Jon Awbrey19:32, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
Thank you for taking that in stride. I didn't mean that to be an attack — I do understand that it takes time to get the wording quite right, but it might best to do so on a draft page. I also understand the desire to be comprehensive, but the list itself is a bit unwieldy. In this case using a term like "meaning bearer" can help avoid the extra words. After all, this list doesn't really aid the comprehension of what various theorists have claimed truth is. Of course, there is a need to point out that "meaning bearers" can be more than simply sentences, but this can be done briefly e.g. "Meaning bearers" include such things as statements, works of art, music, etc. Just enough for people to get the basic idea. The "truth bearer" difficulty, however, could be solved by paying attention to what the article says "a truth bearer is something... that can be readily subjected to an analysis of whether it is true (or not)", hence, one might use the phrase "if the truth bearer is true" (which seems to be an accepted usage). And, as an aside, I'd really like to avoid vicious circularity, though I think that means I should probably stop keeping tabs on this article. :-) Ig077419:28, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: Criticism is not a new experience to me. You could hardly do worse than some of my previous co-authors, and last time I checked we were all still friends. Hiding in your sandbox till that castle's perfect, though, that's the real sandtrap. Things always move faster, if rougher, if you take a few risks. Jon Awbrey19:50, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
Personally I'd sign off on reintroducing some version or other of the deleted first paragraph of the section, perhaps in shortened form in the current "Introduction to the theories of truth" section. That paragraph read as follows when it was deleted along with the whole kit-and-kaboodle:Kenosis 21:14, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
"Most inquiries into the character of truth begin with a notion of an informative, meaningful, or significant element, the truth of whose information, meaning, or significance may be put into question and needs to be evaluated. Depending on the context, this element might be called an artefact, expression, image, impression, lyric, mark, performance, picture, sentence, sign, string, symbol, text, thought, token, utterance, word, work, and so on. Whatver the case, one has the task of judging whether the bearers of information, meaning, or signficance are indeed truth-bearers. This judgment is typically expressed in the form of a specific truth predicate, whose positive application to a sign, or so on, asserts that the sign is true. "
But the rest of the above discussion is fundamentally a conceptual mess (not because of Jon, but because of the philosophical discussion in the world) that should actually be discussed farther down in the article, if at all. The fact is that so many schemas have been proposed that even philosophers (including semioticists and linguists here), who know the issues better than other disciplines, are only marginally more in touch with human consciousness than the average Joe (my apology to all Joes in the world). And the philosophical discussion reflects this. Please: Proceed with caution . Peirce's schema should involve not more than a brief paragraph at most, with a link to other relevant articles--remember, other philosophers (the ones who manage to make a living at it somehow) are avoiding imposing Peirce's schema because mere expansion of the reduction from dyads to triads doesn't solve the problems. The two main contenders for repacement of "truth bearer," among many others, are battling out whether belief is the locus, or whether statements or words are the locus, with no end in sight — and that battle will not ever get settled in my judgment, because the answer is neither, or both. ...Kenosis21:14, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
I think truth-predicate should perhaps be introduced somewhere early, integrated into existing text, at the assumed risk of paving the way for all kinds of semantic-logic formulations cluttering the synopsis-of-theories sections that follow (According to X, the truth predicate Y is nothing but Z, while according to A, the truth predicate B is actually a second derivative of the proper use of "truth bearer", etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc ad infinitum). It should take one sentence, two brief ones at most...Kenosis21:14, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
RN: Reply to JA. "First off, stylistic problems are trivial ... do not justify mass deletion."
I strongly disagree. I have encountered other editors of Wikipedia who think that it is up to others to fix problems with their style. Sentences with too many clauses show a lack of thought and planning. Rick Norwood23:49, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
Re: Kenosis' suggestions: Seems reasonable enough. That was part of what I was actually trying to urge. Let's hope that they can be implemented concisely...
Re: Draft. I don't usually recommend 'em cause they're counter-productive. On the other hand, it beats using the main page as a sandbox when it renders it a mess. Ig077400:00, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
Style vs. Substance
JA: I'll insert a new section marker here because the previous section is becoming too long to edit easily, and this issue seems like a side-bar, requiring the repetition of many obvious procedural points that ought to be common sense by now. Jon Awbrey10:48, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
Kripke's theory of truth
This seems to be exactly what Bertrand Russell suggested, and which is now done more generally in predicate logic. A first order predicate cannot itself contain a predicate. A second order predicate can contain a first order predicate, but not a second order predicate, and so on. Thus, self reference is avoided not only in the case of "This sentence is false," but also in other cases, such as "This set does not contain itself." Rick Norwood00:17, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
I've shortened the wordy section on "truth bearers". In particular, I've cut out several uses of footnotes for parenthetical remarks. Footnotes should be used for references. What this section needs most is at least one reference to a standard work that uses the expression "truth bearer". Rick Norwood00:43, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: I see that there is some effort to come up with a more neutral frame of reference for the discussion, but it's clear that we still have a way to go. I've really done my own level best to avoid adding neologisms, that is, words that I haven't seen someone else using somewhere else before. But sometimes it's considered a neologism to introduce a term like "truth-bearer" into a context where other terms have been more usual. What can ya do? And I think you will find that the general idea of a "truth-bearer" has historically been used to include persons and gods (notably Hermes, for one) — indeed, some hermeneuticians consider the linguistic sense to be a pale shadow of the personal sense. Just something to think about. Jon Awbrey11:26, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
All I'm asking for is one solid reference. If, in fact, the term has been invented for this article, then it is original research. Also, you and others who use the term need to decide whether the term is hyphenated or not. Rick Norwood14:10, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: Don't look at me, I was only trying to be polite in using other folks language, and that's what I get for that. For my part, the 4-letter "sign" is vulgate enough. Jon Awbrey
"Truth-bearer" is not a neologism as such, but is used at least within the analytical tradition to talk about theories of truth just as its used in the paper. I don't have the time to look up any paper references, but it is mentioned on the Stanford Encyclopedia [6][7] and also in this paper, which will form a chapter in a forthcoming book on the philosophy of logic (this article was also cited by someone above). It seems to be hyphenated most commonly. I'm pretty sure this concept is not generally intended to link up with a notion of the divine, at least when used in reference to people like Russell, but it certainly works with others... Ig077420:09, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
I'm glad to see the article moving forward. Does anyone know what to do about Kripke? He seems to be a major philosopher, but if his work is based on Russell and Whitehead, that should be mentioned, and his theory of truth (basically hierarchical) should be together with similar theories (Robust? Or have we abandoned that word?). Rick Norwood14:12, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: Here's the section intro as I last left it:
Philosophy of truth
Philosophical discussions of truth can be sorted according to what they take as their subject matter and what they regard as legitimate to say about their subject matter. The two kinds of terms involved in this may be called the subjects and the predicates of the discussion, respectively. It is conventional to refer to a distinctive philosophical treatment of a particular subject matter as a theory, whether or not it ever becomes a theory in the logical sense. The body of this article bows to that convention, right up until the point where it becomes necessary to take up more precisely logical treatments of truth.
JA: I know that it's probably a waste of time and energy working on a weekend, as sheer novelty impacting on Monday-morning-moodiness is likely to get 3 days' work reverted without a second's consideration, but let me try to explain anyway some of the outstanding problems in the article that the above wedge is intended to ease the way toward alleviating.
JA: Yes, it was deliberately written to be as logically generic as possible. But it did introduce the general idea of a "subject matter", allowing for later speciation according to each theory's taste, and it did sneak in, with an informal definition in passing, the dread word "predicate", in a way that is natural enough in everyday discourse. Maybe that seems trivial, but we've been stuck on that kind of trivial for quite some time, and this move at least hops past it a step. Jon Awbrey14:42, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: Another serious problem with the article, for those that have been trying to read past the introduction, is the two ways that the word "theory" is used: (1) its informal use to indicate any distinctive philosophical attitude, doctrine, perspective, or position, (2) its more sacrosanct usage by log, math, and model theory communities. It's not worth the bother right now, but I'll eventually have to differ with Kenosis about how many theorists post-Tarski really are theorists in the more holy sense of the word. At any rate, it's a good idea to try and forestall the eventual confusion that is bound to arise. Jon Awbrey15:00, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
RN: Let's see if we can spend the weekend finding a compromise, then, since I assume most people only Wiki while goofing off from work. : )
JA: On another note, my section introduction is not intended as a mere segue to the flationary dispute, as that is hardly the only thing worth talking about when it comes to truth, but is when viewed in a broader perspective but a mere sideshow of late 20th century linguistic-analytic approaches to a certain sector of the subject. It reflects an extremely parochial and peculiar POV to suggest that this quidditch-quibble is the only game in town. Jon Awbrey15:45, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
RN: I think quidditch-quibble is a good description of the whole flationary argument. My change in the paragraph in question was based on style, not substance. Do you think it is worth working toward a compromise? Rick Norwood16:09, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: My efforts here are precisely directed toward working out a compromise with the large number of established stakeholders to the same territory. If you are interested in that sort of compromise, then we already have a common charge. My first try at a compromise generated an inclusive list of subject matter terms that I know various stakeholders to use. That was quite understandably judged unwieldy, so my next attempt at conciliating the various participants, living and dead, was to introduce the generic term "subject matter" to cover them all. Given that start, it will now be easier to add more specific terms in their proper contexts, with the benefit of a covering generalization. Likewise for the variety of truth predicates. So that's my plan for a compromise. Jon Awbrey16:22, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: Philosophical discussions of truth can be sorted according to what they take as their subject matter and what they regard as legitimate to say about their subject matter. The two kinds of terms involved in this may be called the subjects and the predicates of the discussion, respectively. It is conventional to refer to a distinctive philosophical treatment of a particular subject matter as a theory, whether or not it ever becomes a theory in the logical sense. The section of this article devoted to the major theories of truth bows to that convention; more specific logical treatments of truth are summarized farther below in the section on "Deflationary" threories and in the section on Formal definitions.
RN: Many philosophers, from Plato to Popper, have written on the nature of truth. Modern theories tend to fall into one of two categories, substantive theories and deflationary theories.
I found the JA version used a lot of words without saying a lot, and so I attempted to shorten it. JA reverted. Comments from others would be appreciated.
Aside to JA: there are rules for the use of capital letters and quotation marks. A poet may just toss them in for seasoning, but a non-fiction writer should use them with reason and moderation. Unless you are George Herriman, you shouldn't put words in quotation marks to indicate ambiguity or uncertainty, and unless you are e. e. cummings (a fan of George Herriman) you shouldn't use the presence or absence of capital letters for emphasis. Rick Norwood14:33, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: We already have an article introduction that's a mix of POV and sheer vapidity. I don't see the need to recap that here. What I wrote is not intended to fill the space between two heads with as few words as possible — it was intended to prepare the grounds for a fruitful harvest down the line. Jon Awbrey15:08, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
The section now titled definitions was a nice editing job, Rick, and I supported it initially. But, there are not that many definitions to be introduced prior to summarizing the major theories. As it stands now, the "definitions" section is solely about truth bearers in modern philosophical usage, with a brief sentence explaining "propositions". When I expanded on the earlier editors' cue here, I used their presentation format as an opportunity to do some explaining to the reader, something you have advocated here. The slightly lengthy third paragraph was intended to expain where truth, lies, misunderstandings, etc. fit into the scheme here, and also was an opportunity to pave the way for an intuitive understanding of triads (which take on a number of forms depending on how one approaches the issues). Understanding that there are numerous ways of presenting this stuff, I want to recommend that we get back about the job of actually explaining this stuff to the reader again. Truth bearers needs explaining, propositions needs explaining, and truth predicate needs explaining, and all of it can readily be woven into the earlier editors' plan to introduce truth bearers.
I'd like to start with some version of the previous explanation we gave, which appears to have assisted you in understanding this concept and thereby allowed you to truncate it to its present form. I think we should afford other non-technical readers a similar opportunity, per the Wikipedia recommendations you mentioned earlier. I will proceed to begin to do that now.. Almost certainly other editors will peck away at it, or even replace it outright, but whatever it is replaced with should explain things to the reader that do not require knowledge of the theories that the article then proceeds to introduce...Kenosis17:58, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
RN: I agree that as it stands now your title is better. I assumed that other definitions would be added as time goes by. The next paragraph certainly jumps into some highly technical language. Rick Norwood18:11, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
I know better than to mess with Jon unless it's absolutely necessary. I should tell you he does a fantastic job with articles that allow for more detailed technically and logically specific explanations (see, for example, his recent work on the Pragmatic theory of truth article). I have an obligation to attend to this afternoon; I'll read your exchange with Jon later and think about it...Kenosis18:44, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
Proposition, Statement, Sentence, Inscription
JA: Usage note. Considered across the spectra of their usage, all of these terms are shifty with respect to the line between the abstract pole and the concrete pole. But as a general rule, "proposition" is most often used for the abstractest thing and terms like "inscription", "token sentence", or "utterance" are most often used for the concretest things. "Statement" is often convenient when you wish to remain deliberately flexible about the level of abstraction intended. Jon Awbrey19:26, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
RN: I have a question about the truth predicate "is true to ____," for which I can see two possible meanings. First, "My name name is Chuck," is true to Chuck but not to Bob. Second, "The earth is flat," is true to Chuck because Chuck believes the earth to be flat." The way I read your recent addition, the second is the meaning rather than the first, which puts this concept in the camp of "consensus truth", yes? No? Rick Norwood20:24, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: It's a hokey example, of course, and I'm still working on a better one, as there's a specific point about converting between truth predicates of different types that it would be good to illustrate early on. No, there's no fixed meaning to what comes after the preposition "to", which is why the parenthetical clause suggests the intended interpretation. Jon Awbrey20:32, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: It's not about consensus. It'a about indexicality. In using pronouns you are using variables, which means that the same sentence-as-string-of-letters makes a different proposition depending on who emits it. P.S. You shouldn't assume that everything idiosyntactic is written by me. Jon Awbrey20:52, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
For a more complex example, the sentence "Woodchucks chuck wood is true for Chuck", intended to say that Chuck believes that woodchucks chuck wood, is formed by applying the two-place truth predicate "__ is true for __" to the same sentential subject and the interpretive agent "Chuck", respectively.
This is the kind of semantic maneuvering I think should be avoided in this article. I personally appreciate this kind of deftness of the language, but for the average reader it quickly becomes deafness. I recall from law school years ago that these sorts of things were thrown at us to intentionally try to confuse us and force us to hone our analytical skills. That's not the objective in this article. Here, the extra Chuck is confusing, and should be replaced (at least in my judgment) with something like "Rick" or "Jon" or Banno...Kenosis00:46, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
Predicates
In predicate logic, a predicate is just a sentence which contains a free variable. For example, "He is a woodchuck," is a predicate, because it contains the variable "he". Is the use in philosophy similar? That is, is "This sentence is the truth," a predicate because it contains the variable "this sentence"? Rick Norwood21:10, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
Makes sense to offer a separate brief section for predicates.. And thanks for yanking my hasty offering before. ..Kenosis21:22, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
Philosophy of truth paragraph
Current version: Philosophical discussions of truth can be sorted according to what they take as their subject matter and what they regard as legitimate to say about their subject matter. The two kinds of terms involved in this may be called the subjects and the predicates of the discussion, respectively. It is conventional to refer to a distinctive philosophical treatment of a particular subject matter as a theory, whether or not it ever becomes a theory in the logical sense. The section of this article devoted to the major theories of truth bows to that convention; more specific logical treatments of truth are summarized farther below in the section on deflationary threories and in the section on formal definitions.
Let's take it sentence by sentence. I think we all agree that the first sentence is content free. For example, Automobile manuals can be sorted according to wht they take as their subject matter and what they regard as legitimate to say about their subject matter. If I remember correctly, JA wanted something bland and inclusive, but why say something that does not provide any information? The second sentence introduces subjects and predicates, so I would expect the third sentence to define those terms, but it moves on. So, how about combining the first two sentences, trimming the first and expanding the second. Thus:
Suggested replacement for sentences one and two: Philosophical discussions of truth make a distinction between the subject of the discussion, the sign, symbol, or idea to which the term “truth” may be applied, and the predicate, which is the application of some truth value to that subject.
Incidentally, my comment on the non sequitur was supposed to apply to this sentence: "Truthbearer, in the context of modern philosophical discussion, is not applied to a person or group of persons." and only because there seems to be no reason for this confusion to arise in the mind of the reader (in fact, "a person" is not even on the list of potential truthbearers). This sentence reads a bit like an artifact from a previous edit. Ig077422:27, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
Indeed, it is. But this confusion has arisen in the past; there was once a brief edit war in which some twerp wanted to state that Jesus Christ was the only legitimate truth bearer. Such is the nature of the Wiki. Banno22:37, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
Banno, duly noted, though we may have that covered this time by reference to modern philosophical discussion. I noticed lg0774's edit and decided to clarify it without reference to a "god". lg0774 has since clarified it further yet...Kenosis01:07, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
Displaced Proposition
This sentence:
A proposition is the abstract entity expressed by a sentence, held in a belief, or affirmed in an assertion or judgment.
Originally appeared between the first two paragraphs of "bearers of truth". It seems that its a relevant sort of definition for this topic, it just doesn't seem to belong there. Anyone have any suggestions as to where this would fit better? Ig077422:34, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
Predicates of truth subsection
I am putting this subsection here until it can be sorted out and reasonably completed, because a major part of the issue here is left out, perhaps the most major part. Truth predicate, depending on which theorist you talk to, does not necessarily require the addition of the words "is true" or their equivalent. This is what the whole flap is about with redundancy theory, Kripke's theory and the like. No doubt this all can be better explained to the reader once it's parsed properly, and effectively placed back in the article so it's helpful. Maybe it can be done in its original placement (in Bearers of truth section) or maybe it should be done after the major theories-- don't know for sure. Thanks to Jon Aubrey for getting the writing started for us. Here's the subsection as I just found it...Kenosis23:49, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
===Predicates of truth===
The things that can be said about truthbearers are said by means of truth predicates, which come in several varieties, depending on the theory of truth in question.
For example, if the sentence "Woodchucks chuck wood" is regarded as a truthbearer, then the sentence "Woodchucks chuck wood is true" is formed by applying the truth predicate "__ is true" to the sentential subject "Woodchucks chuck wood".
Some theories allow non-propositional entities like words and pictures to be truthbearers. For instance, it might be said that thorniness is true of most roses, or that a portrait is true of its subject. In these settings there is a truth predicate of the form "__ is true of __" that takes an adjective phrase and a noun phrase, in that order, to fill its slots. ...23:49, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: By a familiar expository convention, the words "for example" are intended to prepare the reader for something that ain't necessarily universally so, but is illustrative, by ostension as it were, of the matter at hand.
JA: As I've said several times, the term "truth predicate", regarded merely as a linguistic species, is perfectly innocent of theoretical baggage and is admitted by all sensible observers. The dispute arises only with regard to the logical significance of various truth predicates, whether certain forms of truth predicates are otiose given the operation of assertion. There is no way to discuss this issue intelligently without using the standard terminology. Jon Awbrey00:12, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
In other words, when I say "that's true" or "yadayada is true." theorists appear to have no dispute about what I mean. Gimmeabreak already, that is what the whole dispute is about among philosophers (cf: So what's going on when i don't use the words ::that's true" or some variant thereof?)....and this is not even counting what the pragmatic, constructivist and consensus advocates would hold, which is that the extra words "I agree that...", "it's true that..." etc, etc is part of the process of ascertaining what we might agree is truth...Kenosis02:02, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
On Definition, On Dancer, On Donner und Blitzen
JA: In case you didn't know this, definitions are content-free. But they do serve the purpose of introducing a handy term of art for a mass of unwieldy periphrastics. That is precisely the point, whether its done with a formal Def *.1, or with a more gentle definition in passing, of handy terms like subject and predicate, and so on. The longer you put it off, the more words you waste with no corresponding benefit of clarity. And nobody's for that, now are they? Jon Awbrey23:52, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
I kind of agree. Could you kindly put your sharp analytical skill to our aid and install a definition in the Formal definitions section for now? one which factors in Kripke, the redundantists, and the earlier traditional expectation that you gotta use the actual word "true" for it to be a truth predicate (though without having researched this, I doubt there was ever a day when every theorist bought into the idea that "truth predicate" should only be used in the formal logic analysis). Thanks Jon...Kenosis00:02, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: Moreover, a lot of the rambling periphrastics in the section on Bearers of truth really belongs in the Once and Future section on Predicates of truth, but it was all just too incoherent for me to dare to touch it. Jon Awbrey23:58, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
Please don't forget we're not talking to scientists and philosophers in this article--it's just too broad a topic. That's why there is currently placed in the article some attempt to say this stuff in a way that the reader can actually read a bit and walk away with a bit of something instead of drowning. Put these formal definitions up front? and the article will make little sense to most average readers....Kenosis00:05, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: That is precisely why I introduced informal explanations of the as-needed terminology, in perfectly ordinary language terms, right up front. Subject terms = what you are talking about. Predicate terms = what you can say about it. Do ordinary people say of sentences that they are true? Well then, ordinary people make use of truth predicates, no matter what this or that cult of ascetic philosophers may deny themselves. That seems fairly common sensical to me. Jon Awbrey00:22, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
That's not what the removed subsection currently says. I trust the editors will get it working right in the end...Kenosis00:25, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: That is precisely what the previously removed section, together with this removed section, did say. No only that, they were designed to set up a transition to the flationary isssue, with some motivation of why that might actually come up in a natural way, instead of out of left field. Jon Awbrey00:30, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: I pointed out previously that treating the flationary frame of reference as the only game in town is totally POV and a rather narrow POV at that. There's a whole world of discussion of truth — yea, and philosophical discussion, too —that is not trapped in this particular linguistic-turning-in-on-itself gravitational singularity. In order to discuss this wider warp and woof, and the place of the linguistic navel within it, it is necessary to introduce a more articulate terminology for the "admissible predicates" that various theorists admit. All that is required of us here, since it's not our job to elect the Elect, is to describe each cult of ascetics and party of epicures, noting that some have taken a vow of POVerty with respect to the predicates that others revel in. That seems fairly fair to me. Jon Awbrey02:48, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: I know not what course others may take, etc., but what I will focus on this week is replacing some of the secondhand gistitude with primary source material, sufficient in length to follow the actual arguments, and maybe decide what the devil these devils were really trying to say. Jon Awbrey15:04, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: I really have tried for days now to get through this mish-mash. There are just too many basic confusions of use-mention, category confusions, etc. Because the problems actually start earlier, I have included the run up to the most problematic section. Jon Awbrey03:15, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
Context of deletion:
Bearers of truth
Truthbearer is used by some writers to refer to any entity that can be judged true or false. The term "truthbearer" may be applied to propositions, sentences, statements, ideas, beliefs, and judgments. Some writers exclude one or more of these categories, or argue that some of them are true (or false) only in a derivative sense. <ref name=SCT>''See, e.g.,'' http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-correspondence/#2</ref> Other writers may add additional entities to the list. Truthbearer, in the context of modern philosophical discussion, is not applied to a person or group of persons; instead, the term is applied to entities that are specific enough that they can reasonably be subjected to analysis of whether or not they are true.
Truthbearers typically have two possible values, true or false. Fictional forms of expression are usually regarded as false if interpreted literally, but may be said to bear a species of truth if interpreted suitably. Still other truthbearers may be judged true or false to a greater or lesser degree.
Deleted material
Because truthbearers can be of different types, the analysis of them may be complex. To illustrate, if truth is said to consist in an accord between belief and fact,[5] as well as to consist in an accord between statement and fact, there must at an absolute minimum be an additional accord between two truthbearers, the belief and the statement. This comes into the analysis of such things as honest mistakes and intentional misrepresentations. If a person intentionally makes a statement that does not accord with her or his own belief, it is called a lie or misrepresentation. The judgment whether it is a lie is yet another truthbearer, which could be true or false, or it could be partially true if other entities (additional factors or additional truthbearers) are involved. If one's belief does not accord with fact, one would appear to lack the ability to make a true statement, in which case a statement based on such a belief may be termed an honest mistake or good-faith error.[6] Additionally, even in a single very basic language transaction the person receiving a truth bearer (e.g., hearing or reading the statement) must make a similar accord on the receiving end — this may involve such things as misreading, mishearing or misunderstanding.
JA: General comment. In the spirit of incremental improvement, I tried to work with the term "truthbearer" as a stopgap at least, but it's clear now that its specific symptomania, namely, that of being a subject term that anticipates its judgement in a predicate, is contagious, and begins to affect every other piece of terminology. Thus nobody seems to have noticed that in speaking of some of the different "types" of truthbearers that they discuss, they are already speaking of different types of truth predicates, because they have absorbed the predicates into the subjects themselves, but of course, like the "truth" in "truth"bearer, in a deniable or removable way. This sort of practice is just bound to generate ever more confusion. So let me recommend once more that we separate out the category confusion betweeen subjects and predicates. Jon Awbrey03:26, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: Comments on this sentence:
The term "truthbearer" may be applied to propositions, sentences, statements, ideas, beliefs, and judgments.
JA: Too many different categories or logical levels of things are lumped together in this statement about truthbearers. This is far worse than a mere list of things at the same logical level, or nearby levels of abstraction. Some words, like "ideas", are just two ambiguous to begin with here. I personally doubt that the term was meant to apply to judgments and beliefs, unless you just mean the propositional contents thereof. If you have a source that says that, try to keep it a secret, as I will just consider that source seriously confused. BR & LW, of course, say all sorts of non-sense about facts, but until you have a sentence-independent way of saying what a fact is, you might well just stick to the sentence. So I would recommend starting with concrete syntactic things like sentences, and terms if you admit them, and mentioning their abstract contents as a persistent afterthought. Jon Awbrey03:56, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: It's amazing to me that folks who would object to a standard concept of logic and a simple clarifying measure like arity, used for sorting out the complexities of different predicates, would tolerate that jungle of distinctions without a difference in the above "illustration" of beliefs, facts, and statements. If you generate some concrete examples, you will see that you are always saying "belief that S", "fact that T", "statement that U", where S, T, U are just sentences, and so all you are really doing is comparing different sentences, or the corresponding propositions. Jon Awbrey04:39, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
Easy now, please. Previous editors had a reasonable plan. We tried to work with it and thus discovered the following. Few writers have had enough courage to step forward and clearly identify how many published philosophers seem to prefer a display of linguistic deftness to a straightforward explanation of how confused the philosophers themselves are about this most difficult of topics (though somewhat ahead of most other folks). Now that we know somewhat better, we're in a better position to write a more informative article...Kenosis15:40, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
Having stated that, please use caution with a word like "sentence", because they're actually specific statements or clauses or propositional phrases. I can see the potential mess here already without even applying a full analysis. Selected history to identify where the main problems are appears to make good sense, and we know from other difficult articles this approach can work if appropriately explanatory material and wording is used. Kudos on the possible breakthrough here, at least for now..,.Kenosis15:40, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
RN: I think one problem with the article is that it begins with modern philosophy. There is a play in London called -- The History (something) -- (memory fails), about working class students preping for admission to Oxbridge. They are told something to the effect that success in a history paper depends only on originality, not on reason. In fact, the more preposterous the ideas in the paper, the more apt it is to meet with approval. It seems to me that something similar may be happening in modern philosophy, and the article would do better to go back to Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Bacon, and Spinoza than to go on about truthbearers and substantive vs. deflationary theories of truth. On the other hand, maybe it is just that I know more about the early philosophers than I do about the more modern ones, and the old guys are really passé. Comments? Rick Norwood13:06, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
JA: In an informal context I use "sentence" — yes, teacher says that it has to end in a period to be a sentence, but I did say "informal". In formal context I say "sentential clause" (SC), on a par with NPs and VPs and all that. Nobody ever knows what you mean by "statement": the abstract content? the syntactic thingamajig? the actual assertion? — I've seen it used frequently for all three of these, so it's best to lose that one unless you really want to be tribiguous. Jon Awbrey16:42, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
RN: Interesting. In propositional logic, a statement is a sentence that is either true or false. And, yes, statements always begin with a capital letter and end with a period. I wonder why logic and philosophy have diverged in their vocabulary. Maybe we have too many alpha males who refuse to use the same vocabulary as another alpha male. Rick Norwood18:35, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
^ Russell, Bertrand, The Problems of Philosophy CHAPTER XII. "Truth and Falsehood" (1912).
^ Blackburn, Simon, et al, ed. Truth (Oxford Readings in Philosophy), 1999.
^Field, Hartry. Truth and the Absence of Fact. Clarendon Press, 2001
^Russell, Bertrand, The Problems of Philosophy , Ch. XII, "Truth and Falsehood" (1912). ("Truth consists in some form of correspondence between belief and fact.")
^ With judgments such as whether there is "honest mistake" or "unintentional error," at least two additional truth bearers become involved, the judgment about whether the statement is a mistake or error, and the further judgment about whether the error is unintentional. Both judgments can be true, false, or partially true if there are yet further multiple components to the analysis.
