What is truth?

[Dubious]

The dialectic of truth requires that it be forever incomplete considering that truth may be a kind of genetic entity which generates survivable variations of its own class. Therefore it can be 'spoken of' but never as something consummated or perfect.

It's the kind of entity which requires infection to become active. Truth depends on catalysts of impurity. I can never imagine as it as a crystallized "Ding an sich".

[Hobbes' Choice]

I'm not arguing about dogs and cats. Set out the category error you think/believe I'm making.

Work it out for yourself.

[creativesoul]

I'm not arguing about dogs and cats. Set out the category error you think/believe I'm making.

Work it out for yourself.

It's never a good sign when one refuses to justify their claims while expecting another to do that work for them...

[creativesoul]

The dialectic of truth requires that it be forever incomplete considering that truth may be a kind of genetic entity which generates survivable variations of its own class. Therefore it can be 'spoken of' but never as something consummated or perfect.

Can't make much sense of this. Being dialectic and being genetic are mutually exclusive states of affairs. Talk of truth is talk of something or another, according to how the term is most commonly used. There are many different acceptable uses. Each with a distinct definition. Some uses of the term lead to and/or creates what the term refers to. Other uses identify that which clearly exists and existed long before identification methods arose. The term "truth" is unnecessary for the existence of true belief. A thought's being true doesn't require it's being taken account of. The term "correspondence" identifies the relationship that makes thought/belief and statements thereof true. The relationship requires only thought/belief formation, not it's being talked about, or even the ability to talk about it.

I rustle a cat treat bag, and my cat will immediately come at stand in front of her treat bowl. The cat has drawn mental correlations between the sound and getting treats. She comes with precisely those expectations, as is clearly shown by all of the different nuance within her behaviours. She hears the bag, draws the correlation between the sound and getting treats, and in doing so forms a meaningful belief about the near future.

It's the kind of entity which requires infection to become active. Truth depends on catalysts of impurity. I can never imagine as it as a crystallized "Ding an sich".

I may agree with the general thrust of this. I would say something like...

Our becoming aware of truth(correspondence) and the role that it plays in all thought/belief and statements requires the recognition of our own fallibility. That is, our awareness of truth is contingent upon our awareness of falsehood.

[Hobbes' Choice]

I'm not arguing about dogs and cats. Set out the category error you think/believe I'm making.

Work it out for yourself.

It's never a good sign when one refuses to justify their claims while expecting another to do that work for them...

Exactly why you need to think about it.

[Londoner]

To understand what I'm saying requires first arriving at what ought be obvious to us all. Do you acknowledge that thought/belief is not the same thing as thinking about thought/belief? It's not that difficult to understand, on my view. It's more like simple common sense. Thinking about thought/belief is existentially contingent upon thought/belief... necessarily so. There are no exceptions. Put a bit differently, each and every case of thinking about thought/belief requires pre-existing thought/belief. So, thought/belief is prior to thinking about thought/belief.

I'd say it depends on what is meant by 'the same thing'. Any thought is different to another thought, but it is alike in that they are both thoughts.

Nor can I see that we can really disentangle thought, and thinking about thought. If I describe my thought; 'I am imagining an apple' then by using the word 'imagining' I am also saying something about that the nature of my thought. One doesn't always bother to use such a word, but it is always implied by the context. And if it isn't clear, if somebody was to say (apropos of nothing) 'An apple', we would simply ask 'What do you mean?' They are unlikely to reply; 'I don't know what I mean until I have had a chance to think about my thought'.

Thought/belief is true(or not) prior to and regardless of whether or not we check. From that it is obvious that our checking does not make thought/belief and statements true.

That is to distinguish the 'thought/belief' from a statement of that 'thought/belief'. That first we have a 'true thought/belief', then we put that 'true thought/belief' into a statement, then we see if the two match. So what form is that 'thought/belief' prior to being a statement?

If it is out there in the world, then it cannot be as a thought/belief, because those words describe things in our minds. It would have to be a 'state of affairs'. But how can we become conscious of that state of affairs except by turning it into a thought/belief?

So, in order to check truth, we are stuck with checking our thought/belief against our thought/belief. Thought/belief is all we ever have.

We cannot check for correspondence without a conception of "truth". So, verification/falsification methods require conceptions of truth. However, thought/belief and statements thereof are true(or not) regardless of whether or not we check.

You say that working out whether something is true must involve applying some concept - but how would we know whether we have the right concept? Surely all claims that something is true must then carry the provision '...assuming my concept is correct'.

So, it might be that there is some meta-truth out there, but if we were to seek it we would have to do so by applying a concept that was not a concept, i.e something that was an indubitable truth. I do not know what that is. Pending its discovery, we just have a tautology; 'true things would be things that were definitely true'. Now that is true...but unhelpful!

[Cuthbert]

The common sense understanding of truth is the correspondence theory of truth. From now on referred to as CTT.
If the CTT is true,what does it refer to? Another CTT? Depending on your perspective that is a tautology or an infinite regress. So what is truth?
PS;The CTT is the theory that a proposition is true if it corresponds to a fact.

I think it's too easy to skim read Aristotle's account, which I find common-sensical

"Truth is to say...."

Truth is a property of statements and language; not a property of, for example, states of affairs.

"....of what is the case...."

Truth can be a property of statements about what is the case. Note: nothing about 'correspondence' here.

"...that it is the case;...."

This distinguishes truth from non-truth in the instance of statements about what is the case. To say of what is the case that it is not the case is not to speak truth. Note: no 'correspondence' raising its ugly head in the definition so far.

".....and of what is not the case...."

So truth can be a property also of statements about what is not the case. This is an important point. Parmenides argued that truth can only be about what exist and what is the case and that to say of a thing that it is not is necessarily to speak falsely. This argument caused a lot of bother for Plato. Aristotle is here cutting through the Parmenidean knot with a single beautiful slice.

"... that it is not the case."

This again distinguishes truth from non-truth, this time in the instance of statements about what is not the case.

In the whole of Aristotle's definition nothing is claimed to correspond to anything else. Truth is a property of statements. It is not, for example, a relation of correspondence between statements and states of affairs. We can contrive such a correspondence. For example, I could arrange every sentence in Shakespeare to correspond to a different member of the English football league. This would be correspondence. It would have nothing to do with truth.

[creativesoul]

To understand what I'm saying requires first arriving at what ought be obvious to us all. Do you acknowledge that thought/belief is not the same thing as thinking about thought/belief? It's not that difficult to understand, on my view. It's more like simple common sense. Thinking about thought/belief is existentially contingent upon thought/belief... necessarily so. There are no exceptions. Put a bit differently, each and every case of thinking about thought/belief requires pre-existing thought/belief. So, thought/belief is prior to thinking about thought/belief.

I'd say it depends on what is meant by 'the same thing'. Any thought is different to another thought, but it is alike in that they are both thoughts.

What is meant by 'the same thing' ought not be an issue. Normal everyday usage works just fine. That focus is rather inconsequential to the argument.

Nor can I see that we can really disentangle thought, and thinking about thought.

Indeed. That is not an easy task, and successfully doing it requires the right methodological approach and very strong justification involving what both consist in/of, so as to be able to perform comparison/contrast between the two. Logically speaking, if there is such a thing as thinking about thought/belief(and there most certainly is), then it only follows that thought/belief is prior. That's a basic start.

If I describe my thought; 'I am imagining an apple' then by using the word 'imagining' I am also saying something about that the nature of my thought. One doesn't always bother to use such a word, but it is always implied by the context. And if it isn't clear, if somebody was to say (apropos of nothing) 'An apple', we would simply ask 'What do you mean?' They are unlikely to reply; 'I don't know what I mean until I have had a chance to think about my thought'.

There are better methods.

What is required for the task at hand is becoming aware of what all thought/belief consists in/of. In order to be able to compare/contrast two different kinds of thought/belief, we must first be aware of what each consists in/of. In this case, we're talking about thought/belief as compared/contrasted to thinking about thought/belief. Obviously the latter has as it's target/subject... the former. That is not possible without first having mental ongoings, becoming aware that we have mental ongoings, and naming those mental ongoings. We have used all sorts of different namesakes; "thought", "belief", "imagining", "envisioning", "dreaming", "hallucinating", "emotion", etc. All of these things and more symbolize mental ongoings. The point being made here is that thinking about thought/belief requires complex language. It quite simply does not follow from any of that that all thought/belief does.

Thought/belief is true(or not) prior to and regardless of whether or not we check. From that it is obvious that our checking does not make thought/belief and statements true.

That is to distinguish the 'thought/belief' from a statement of that 'thought/belief'.

Not on target. Actually, while distinguishing between thought/belief and statements thereof is important, that was not what was being pointed out. That bit of mine that you quoted was part of a logical refutation of Hobbes' claims.

That we first we have a 'true thought/belief', then we put that 'true thought/belief' into a statement, then we see if the two match...

I have no idea what you're trying to say here. Considerations vital to understanding are left untouched, completely missing

So what form is that 'thought/belief' prior to being a statement?

Good question. This aims in the appropriate general direction. Statements of thought/belief are thought/belief in statement form. It would make little to no sense whatsoever for one to claim that prior to being stated 'X' could be in any other form other than the same one it's in when being stated. Making sense here requires a mindfully consistent and thus strict usage of the term "form". In order to assess whether or not it makes sense to say that thought/belief can be in any other form rather than a statement, we must first look at what all statements of thought/belief consist in/of. I mean, what is it exactly that is in statement form?

If it is out there in the world, then it cannot be as a thought/belief, because those words describe things in our minds. It would have to be a 'state of affairs'. But how can we become conscious of that state of affairs except by turning it into a thought/belief? So, in order to check truth, we are stuck with checking our thought/belief against our thought/belief. Thought/belief is all we ever have.

There's quite a bit of confusion wrapped up in that. Seems to me that there's conflation between thought/belief, fact/reality, and correspondence. It's really rather simple to understand if and when one uses the necessary terms sensibly and coherently. Simply...

Thought/belief can be true/false. True thought/belief corresponds to fact/reality; states of affairs; current ongoings; past events; the case at hand; the way things are; etc. False belief does not. We can often check things in order to see.

When we check to see if a statement is true, we look at fact/reality; we take account of what's going on; we check our records of what has went on; we check the claim against our knowledge base, etc. In other words, verification/falsification works solely by virtue of checking to see if the claim corresponds to fact/reality; states of affairs; current ongoings; past events; the case at hand; the way things are; etc.

Truth is correspondence. Correspondence is presupposed within all thought/belief and statements thereof. Correspondence is the presupposed relationship operative in each and every known example of thought/belief and statements thereof. The extent of the operations are relative to the complexity of the candidate. All of this is complex to understand if and only if one doesn't talk about things in the appropriate manner.

Some earlier philosophers have laid some good groundwork. For example, Tarski's T-schema is a wonderfully simple demonstration of correspondence. Those with the belief that approach helps matters out. The redundancy theorists. The speech act theorists. Frege. Witt. The positivists. Russel. All of these folk and many more have laid an appropriate groundwork in order to become aware of the role that correspondence has in every thought/belief.

The sheer scope of consequence can be daunting for the faint of heart.

You say that working out whether something is true must involve applying some concept...

No I didn't. You're responding to your own imagination.

...how would we know whether we have the right concept?

What would make one concept 'right'? 'Right' as compared/contrasted to not 'right'?

Surely all claims that something is true must then carry the provision '...assuming my concept is correct'.

Talking like that is superfluous and/or redundant. "I believe" as a prefix to 'X' is redundant, as is "is true" added to 'X'. The reasons for that need not be gotten into atm. All you've done here is highlight the fact that thought/belief and statements thereof presuppose truth(as correspondence). That's not a problem. It's a feature of the operative structure of all thought/belief and statements. It could be construed as a non(pre)-linguistic 'form'(scarequotes intentional).

I do understand the general idea you're skirting around. It's difficult to compare and contrast the different conceptions of "truth". Claiming and/or assuming that one's concept is true is to misunderstand concepts and neglect to keep in mind the presupposition of truth. Concepts offer structural support for thought/belief. They are akin to scaffolding and/or a skeleton. It's a framework.

[Londoner]

What is meant by 'the same thing' ought not be an issue. Normal everyday usage works just fine. That focus is rather inconsequential to the argument.

I disagree; if you think about it, there is no single 'normal everyday usage' because 'the same thing' is never meant literally. If I said two things, X and Y, were 'the same thing' and meant it literally then I would be saying there are not two things. So what we mean when we say two things are the same thing, or are not the same thing, will be understood in context. So when you start off your argument by asking us to acknowledge that thought/belief are 'not the same thing' as thinking about thought/belief, as if this was the only possible way of looking at it, it rather begs the question.

Me: Nor can I see that we can really disentangle thought, and thinking about thought.

Indeed. That is not an easy task, and successfully doing it requires the right methodological approach and very strong justification involving what both consist in/of, so as to be able to perform comparison/contrast between the two. Logically speaking, if there is such a thing as thinking about thought/belief(and there most certainly is), then it only follows that thought/belief is prior. That's a basic start.

I do not think we can launch into the logic based on that 'there most certainly is'. I am not at all certain of it.

There are better methods.

What is required for the task at hand is becoming aware of what all thought/belief consists in/of. In order to be able to compare/contrast two different kinds of thought/belief, we must first be aware of what each consists in/of. In this case, we're talking about thought/belief as compared/contrasted to thinking about thought/belief. Obviously the latter has as it's target/subject... the former. That is not possible without first having mental ongoings, becoming aware that we have mental ongoings, and naming those mental ongoings. We have used all sorts of different namesakes; "thought", "belief", "imagining", "envisioning", "dreaming", "hallucinating", "emotion", etc. All of these things and more symbolize mental ongoings. The point being made here is that thinking about thought/belief requires complex language. It quite simply does not follow from any of that that all thought/belief does.

Again, I'm not sure that the distinction really exists. We now add 'mental ongoings' to 'thought/belief'. You say we first have 'mental ongoings' and then become aware of the 'mental ongoings'. In what sense could I have them without being aware of them? I think this is one of those areas where it looks obvious that we can make distinctions, yet when we try to clarify what the differences are they prove elusive.

Thought/belief is true(or not) prior to and regardless of whether or not we check. From that it is obvious that our checking does not make thought/belief and statements true.

Me: That is to distinguish the 'thought/belief' from a statement of that 'thought/belief'....


Not on target....I have no idea what you're trying to say here. Considerations vital to understanding are left untouched, completely missing

You write: Thought/belief is true(or not) prior to and regardless of whether or not we check. I think this begs the question we are discussing, of what makes thoughts/beliefs true. Whatever we criteria we choose to adopt, we will check the statement against that criteria, to find out its truth and falsity. So, it is our checking that establishes this.

To say that its truth or falsity was there before we checked, such that we only discover it, is to suggest that 'checking for truth' can be done without adopting criteria about what constitutes 'truth', that we can check in a neutral manner. I do not see how that is possible.

There's quite a bit of confusion wrapped up in that. Seems to me that there's conflation between thought/belief, fact/reality, and correspondence. It's really rather simple to understand if and when one uses the necessary terms sensibly and coherently. Simply...

Thought/belief can be true/false. True thought/belief corresponds to fact/reality; states of affairs; current ongoings; past events; the case at hand; the way things are; etc. False belief does not. We can often check things in order to see.

When we check to see if a statement is true, we look at fact/reality; we take account of what's going on; we check our records of what has went on; we check the claim against our knowledge base, etc. In other words, verification/falsification works solely by virtue of checking to see if the claim corresponds to fact/reality; states of affairs; current ongoings; past events; the case at hand; the way things are; etc.

This all seems circular. What is true? Facts. What are facts? True depictions of states of affairs. What are 'states of affairs? 'The way things are', What is the way things are? Reality What is reality?....and so on.

You mention 'verification'. To 'verify' something is to apply a rule. We aren't checking if the thing is real; rather we are setting a rule for what we are going to call 'real'. If our rule was 'seeing is believing', then things we can see would be 'real'. Why are they real? Because by 'real' we mean 'things we can see'. Which is fine, but we cannot show it is better than any other rule.

Truth is correspondence. Correspondence is presupposed within all thought/belief and statements thereof. Correspondence is the presupposed relationship operative in each and every known example of thought/belief and statements thereof. The extent of the operations are relative to the complexity of the candidate. All of this is complex to understand if and only if one doesn't talk about things in the appropriate manner.

Correspondence with what? Above, 'truth' seemed to about a correspondence with the world 'out there'. But in the paragraph above, it suggests truth is about a correspondence within ourselves, in the sense of a corresponding with all the other thoughts/beliefs we have classed as true. That is a different idea. I'm not clear which one is yours.

Some earlier philosophers have laid some good groundwork. For example, Tarski's T-schema is a wonderfully simple demonstration of correspondence. Those with the belief that approach helps matters out. The redundancy theorists. The speech act theorists. Frege. Witt. The positivists. Russel. All of these folk and many more have laid an appropriate groundwork in order to become aware of the role that correspondence has in every thought/belief.

The sheer scope of consequence can be daunting for the faint of heart.

So are we discussing a semantic theory of truth? Or truth in logic? Or some sort of positivism? Indeed, all these philosophers and more discuss what we might mean by 'truth' or how we use the word 'truth', but they are not all talking about the same notion of truth, in the sense of The (one and only) Truth.

Me: You say that working out whether something is true must involve applying some concept...

No I didn't. You're responding to your own imagination.

Really? Then I must have misunderstood this sentence:

We cannot check for correspondence without a conception of "truth". So, verification/falsification methods require conceptions of truth(Thu Oct 06, 2016 2:46 am, last paragraph)

.

In which case I have no idea what was meant!

Me: Surely all claims that something is true must then carry the provision '...assuming my concept is correct'.

Talking like that is superfluous and/or redundant. "I believe" as a prefix to 'X' is redundant, as is "is true" added to 'X'. The reasons for that need not be gotten into atm. All you've done here is highlight the fact that thought/belief and statements thereof presuppose truth(as correspondence). That's not a problem. It's a feature of the operative structure of all thought/belief and statements. It could be construed as a non(pre)-linguistic 'form'(scarequotes intentional).

I do understand the general idea you're skirting around. It's difficult to compare and contrast the different conceptions of "truth". Claiming and/or assuming that one's concept is true is to misunderstand concepts and neglect to keep in mind the presupposition of truth. Concepts offer structural support for thought/belief. They are akin to scaffolding and/or a skeleton. It's a framework.

I cannot work out what framework you are using; I'm really not clear about what your concept of 'truth' is.

[raw_thought]

The common sense understanding of truth is the correspondence theory of truth. From now on referred to as CTT.
If the CTT is true,what does it refer to? Another CTT? Depending on your perspective that is a tautology or an infinite regress. So what is truth?
PS;The CTT is the theory that a proposition is true if it corresponds to a fact.

I think it's too easy to skim read Aristotle's account, which I find common-sensical

"Truth is to say...."

Truth is a property of statements and language; not a property of, for example, states of affairs.

"....of what is the case...."

Truth can be a property of statements about what is the case. Note: nothing about 'correspondence' here.

"...that it is the case;...."

This distinguishes truth from non-truth in the instance of statements about what is the case. To say of what is the case that it is not the case is not to speak truth. Note: no 'correspondence' raising its ugly head in the definition so far.

".....and of what is not the case...."

So truth can be a property also of statements about what is not the case. This is an important point. Parmenides argued that truth can only be about what exist and what is the case and that to say of a thing that it is not is necessarily to speak falsely. This argument caused a lot of bother for Plato. Aristotle is here cutting through the Parmenidean knot with a single beautiful slice.

"... that it is not the case."

This again distinguishes truth from non-truth, this time in the instance of statements about what is not the case.

In the whole of Aristotle's definition nothing is claimed to correspond to anything else. Truth is a property of statements. It is not, for example, a relation of correspondence between statements and states of affairs. We can contrive such a correspondence. For example, I could arrange every sentence in Shakespeare to correspond to a different member of the English football league. This would be correspondence. It would have nothing to do with truth.

So you are saying that the correspondence theory of truth is rubbish?

[Terrapin Station]

The common sense understanding of truth is the correspondence theory of truth. From now on referred to as CTT.
If the CTT is true,what does it refer to?

It's not that theories of truth a la correspondence versus coherence versus consensus etc. are true or false. I don't think that I've ever seen anyone claim that "No matter what you say you're doing, regardless of the fact that you say you're using the consensus theory of truth, for example, you're really using correspondence."

Truth theories are simply the relations that people choose to engage to bestow truth values on propositions.

What I call my truth theory is unusual in that it's basically a meta theory, where the approach is descriptive about what people are doing when they ascribe truth, regardless of the relation they emply a la correspondence, coherence, etc.

[raw_thought]

But if we have no idea of what truth is ( a theory at least ), how can we identify truth when we experience it?

[Terrapin Station]

But if we have no idea of what truth is ( a theory at least ), how can we identify truth when we experience it?

If you use correspondence, then you recognize it because you're applying a correspondence relation to propositions and states of affairs (for example).

[raw_thought]

In my humble opinion, a meta theory of truth has problems like all the other theories. At what level does it terminate? If it doesn't terminate , that's an infinite regress.* If it does terminate, that ultimate foundation has no foundation!
* Suppose I say that an elephant supports the earth. Another elephant supports that elephant... ad infinitum. That does not explain why they are elephants and not lets say huge rocks.

[raw_thought]

How does the ink pattern ( dog) correspond ( resemble) the concept dog. And how does the concept "dog" resemble an actual dog. Similarly, the concept "book" lacks a particular size, mass, color, language, title... Nothing resembles that!