The Correspondence Theory of Truth

[@jontedeakin1986]

As a mathematically trained person who is interested in logic, but has always been curious about the pholosophy of the subject. This series is so exciting!

[@tedyplay4745]

Please read Arnold Zuboff's Work on the sleeping beauty problem

[@jontedeakin1986]

@@tedyplay4745 what does this have anything to do with theories of truth?

[@edcify8241]

Was ages scrolling through the search results for truth, seeing mostly sensationalist videos, with little to interest in truth. Thank God I've found your channel.

[@caulds989]

These vids are so good. You deserve way more followers

[@IntegralDeLinha]

Very cool this slingshot argument! Never heard about it.

[@xifize]

The slingshot argument seems to me characteristic of classical logic which only has two possible denotations of propositions: true and false. I think the second argument even explicitly invokes the law of excluded middle. Makes sense because LEM is a realist principle. However in non-Boolean topoi, the subobject classifier can be more complicated.

[@bigol7169]

This is fantastic Kane. And that is true !

[@GeorgMayer]

Thanks for this - years ago I learned most of these things, and I am glad to see that my brain still can grasp (or maybe better: give me the illusion it would grasp) these strings of thoughts. I really like your channel and I think it would be helpful for the understanding if you give your views on the theories you present - I mean in a more overall picture. For example, to make the case with my view, I think the complications that occur with any theory of truth are a pointer towards the possibility, that truth doesn't really exist in the way we "think" of it (though obviously we don't even know how we technically think about it, as we have competing theories about it). In that sense, the correspondence theory is an excellent example. It starts from a very simple connection between facts and logic and soon drifts this way and that due to problems with logic (all true statements in a calculus practically are identical) and the inability to define facts (take the capital of Germany - it is Berlin today, it was Bonn 25 years back - so do we need to put time & location coordinates to every true statement? Also, you use expressions like "fewer than a hundred chairs" - that introduces (as truly existing objects) numbers and the fewer relation ... which I doubt most people would agree to if they have a thought about it). I just want to emphasize again: the video is great. I just think a bit more of you personally would be great to give the viewers an additional door into the subject.

[@xiutecuhtli15]

I have been very curious and uncertain and interested in this topic so this is great

[@rebeccar25]

Cashing us out at the concept bank.

[@attackdog6824]

Thanks for the vid- just started to read on this topic.

[@KaneB]

Hope it's helpful!

[@realSAPERE_AUDE]

I’m going to have to go over that slingshot argument a lot more to understand it.

[@justus4684]

OMG YES Much love dawg!

[@KaneB]

Thanks dawg!

[@mark110292]

To the first criticism raised against the correspondence theory as it's being presented, am I mistaken or didn't Berkeley argue that an idea can be like nothing except another idea? I lifted this from one of Millican's lectures.

[@KaneB]

Yep, Berkeley made the same point, though in a different context.

[@brandonsaffell4100]

That part we overlooked is the pernicious part though. Getting those first principles to work from seems to be out of our reach. Our theories of truth can be no better than our facts. Good series though, hopefully we'll come back to those facts someday as well.

[@cloudoftime]

Put another way, an approximate truth would require a distinct proposition: specifically, that x is approximately true because of y (y being a more specific factor). To say that something is partially true, is just to imply the referent proposition containing greater specificity.

[@realSAPERE_AUDE]

Kane, which of these objections do you take to be the most convincing? It seems to me that the many relations problem is the strongest but maybe that’s because I don’t understand some of them that well.

[@ericb9804]

CTT is obvious and useful enough for a colloquial "definition" of "truth." And yet, in doing so, if we can't identify this truth by way of justification, then we can't identify it at all. And justification is a human endeavor, which is why we can focus our efforts there and safely ignore CTT. Because we can't find a vocabulary that "best describes reality," but we can put some vocabularies to better use than others in helping us reach our goals. And defending those goals by way of justification is the only sense in which "truth" has any practical application. Epistemology is a subset of ethics is a subset of politics. - Richard Rorty (paraphrased). CTT is not "false," but simply useless.

[@justus4684]

29:29 Couldn't we employ glut theory here?

[@KaneB]

Could you elaborate on how you think this would solve the problem? Suppose I say that P is both true and false. Well, either we're merely dealing with approximations -- in which case, we might worry that it's not a genuine glut, since we'd only have: P is approximately true and false, i.e. P is strictly speaking false and false. Or we're claiming that the "true" in "true and false" is intended to mean strictly speaking true -- in which case, we're back into Frege's dilemma.

[@justus4684]

@@KaneB I was kind of thinking out loud here My thought was that we could maybe have our cake and eat it too by saying that p, tho stricly speaking false, is also approximately true But I share your worry that this might just not be a genuie glut

[@MindForgedManacle]

I think the problem of logical laws (or mathematical theories in general) are what give me the most pause about Correspondence theories. Especially if you think of "truth" in the picturing-sense you mentioned. After all, one might say Euclidean Geometry is not true because our universe is not Euclidean. But that should imply that Euclidean Geometry is false. But surely a mathematical theory is only false when it contains a false postulates or a false derivation is made? It's not like one has to appeal to the outside world to validate basic arithmetic as true (though it is useful). In which case, Euclidean Geometry should be deemed true. But this seems like a contradiction. It seems like the notion of truth in these formal domains is entirely internal, relating to what can be derived and with no appeal to an outside world. It can't be correspondence, because it *is* correct to say "Euclidean geometry does not correspond to our universe's structure" but it seems ridiculous to just say EC is not true. One has to be switching between 2 different notions of truth on pain of making an argument one cannot justify.

[@squatch545]

Hi Kane, another great video. After watching this, it occurred to me, I was wondering if you would consider doing a video on experimental philosophy (X-Phi)? Outlining the pros and cons? Thanks.

[@KaneB]

I started writing a video on that years ago... At some point, I'll probably get around to finishing it...

[@Altitudes]

​@@KaneBI thought experimental philosophy was what the red button videos were.

[@squatch545]

@@KaneB Awesome. I hope you get around to it soon. Thanks.

[@josebolivar4364]

Is it possible to say that the correspondence theory of true only applies to observable phenomena?

[@KaneB]

Yes, in principle you could hold that different theories of truth are correct within different domains. This approach is known as truth pluralism if you're interested in reading more about it (I intend to a video on it at some point, but only after I've introduced the other theories).

[@deadman746]

Minor and arguable correction: They don't have the same meaning. At best, they have indistinguishable _semantic_ meanings. They don't have the same _pragmatic_ meaning.

[@yusucc]

Descriptivist theory of reference against slingshot arguments seems to work

[@omarelric]

Hood classic

[@justus4684]

Certified hood classic more specially

[@omarelric]

@@justus4684 oh right that's what I meant 😂😂😂. Uhm, professor Daniel Bonevac has a series of Cool videos on this on his YT channel.

[@KaneB]

Thanks!

[@GodisgudAQW]

Knowledge is true belief (does not need to be justified). Justification is not needed for knowledge, because justification is just an external verification method, a method of persuasion for other minds. As for my mind, I know CTT is true. The objections presented here merely show the difficulty in justifying CTT. I trust CTT more than I trust principle B in the slingshot objection. And even if the slingshot is correct, perhaps there is indeed one necessary truth in the world, say God, that makes all facts true.

[@Izerion]

I don't think it makes sense to discard justification as basis for knowledge. Let's take the example from the video "there is life in the Andromeda galaxy". Then I ask two people to flip a coin and one of them will have to believe that there is life, and the other one has to believe there isn't life. By necessity one of them is correct. But it does not make sense to say either of them is "more knowledgeable" of the existence of life in the Andromeda galaxy. It was just a coinflip that happened to decide which one of them had a true belief and which one had a false belief. Or would you say that the coin had knowledge about the existence of life in the Andromeda galaxy?

[@GodisgudAQW]

@Izerion I recommend Kane B's video on Gettier cases, as that is what inspired me to start seeing justification as merely a persuasive tool rather than a standard for knowledge. Anyway, I don't think anyone can form beliefs from coin flipping as belief isn't really a simple choice. If I told you heads="God exists" and tails="God does not exist" and you flipped a coin, all you would be able to do is change what you claim to believe, not what you actually believe. But, in the spirit of your hypothetical, let's suppose that those two people could not substantiate their beliefs in a convincing way. Perhaps their internal justifications are insufficient in persuading someone else with different inclinations. The one who has knowledge is the one who is correct, whether they can prove it or not. If you, as a third-party observer, were faced with the lack of justification from either party, all you would be able to conclude is that one of them is correct, but you wouldn't be justified on this basis on knowing exactly who. If you happened to believe one of them in particular anyway, whether you have knowledge would hinge on whether you are correct. Now, let's add justification back to the picture. Usually, Gettier cases are used to show that justification has to be of the right kind. Gettier cases show that justifications can often be fallible but lead to the correct conclusion. Using possible worlds language, what seems to bother people about Gettier cases is that they pose scenarios where there is a possible world where some justifications lead to the incorrect conclusions, but they nonetheless lead to the correct conclusion in the actual world. My sense is that philosophers who are sufficiently motivated by Gettier cases to impose even stronger justification requirements are essentially trying to ensure that the justifications necessarily lead to the correct conclusion in all possible worlds. That's a really tough bar to pass. So tough, in fact, that I don't think anyone could clear it. Here's a simple possible world that would undermine a lot of our beliefs if we took justification into account: a possible world where God actively uses his power at all moments in time to make the physical world behave as if it follows physical laws, when in reality, the electrons and particles we observe are just red herrings and would have behaved how God wanted them to even if they had completely different physical properties. This simple possible world undermines our ability to be necessarily justified. But let's say you somehow managed to have infallible, necessarily correct justification anyway. In that case, the knowledge you had to have in order to even get this level of justification would entail knowledge about any fact that it could justify. So, once again, whether you have knowledge hinges on whether you are correct anyway, so why not cut the middle man of justification out? I think justification simply helps us not only persuade others that we are correct, but also ourselves. We use justifications to have some degree of assurance that we are actually correct. But, at the heart of it, knowledge is about actually being correct, and justification isn't necessary if we already are correct, nor is it sufficient if we aren't correct.

[@Izerion]

@@GodisgudAQW Thank you for the detailed reply. It took me some time to process. I watched mr. Kane's video on Gettier cases as well and it helped me see the position more clearly. If I can summarize my understanding of the video, he explained that the existence of Gettier cases is not a strong argument against the use of the Justified True Belief definition of knowledge, because while they do expose some unintuitive consequences due to the Justification issue, any possible attempt to amend the Justified True Belief standard to account for these consequences will itself have other unintuitive consequences. That is, you can always generate a situation where the belief someone holds is true merely by luck, independent of Justification or any other similar requirement. So if you are 'stuck with' unintuitive consequences anyway, you may as well just hold to the traditional Justified True Belief standard and ignore the Gettier cases. But that does raise the question of "if the Justification requirement is what is leading to unintuitive consequences no matter what you do, then why not get rid of it in the first place?". My first instinct is to question whether it is even possible to hold a belief without *any* sort of justification. If we take the belief in God as an example, people have many and varied reasons for believing in the existence of God. It could be a personal religious experience, or being convinced by logical arguments in favor of God's existence, it could be a subconscious 'gut feeling', or simply that they grew up with a religious upbringing and never saw reason to doubt. But I do not think that there are people who believe in God and yet do so with zero reasons for doing so. In other words, I am convinced that, if you dig deep enough, you will find some reason for that person's belief. The coin flip hypothetical is essentially the closest I can think of to a completely non-justified belief, but even then it is possible to argue that the person had some justification for their belief about life in the Andromeda galaxy (as, in the end, the belief was still based on *something*, even if that *something* is completely arbitrary/random). But I realize that this is a bit of a cop-out answer. If I simply assume a priori that having a belief requires justification, no matter how insignificant, then I have assumed that which I set out to prove. And if I am satisfied with arbitrarily small justifications I may as well agree that justification is irrelevant. So instead I will try to approach it from a different angle. Assuming that the existence Gettier cases proves that using the Justified True Belief definition leads to undesirable consequences, and this cannot be avoided as long as you hold the True Belief + X pattern, and given that our aim is to find a definition of knowledge that does not lead to unintuitive consequences, I will argue that it makes more sense to discard the True condition rather than the Justification condition. First of all, pragmatically speaking, in common language people use the word 'knowledge' in a less strict/rigorous manner. If we go to the example of the 17th century astronomers that mr. Kane brought up in the Gettier cases video, I think it is not unreasonable for people to conclude that Kepler and Newton "had knowledge about the movement of the planets". That is, Kepler and Newton had Justified (but ultimately false) Beliefs that their respective laws were sufficient to describe the motion of the planets. This was enough to cross the bar of 'knowledge', at least for the people at the time if not for the people looking back from today. If we contrast this to another hypothetical luck-based scenario. Assume that in the 17th century, there was a hermit in the woods who used rabbit entrails to predict the motions of the planet. If he was, by pure coincidence, correct about his guesses every time, with perfect accuracy. He would have True Beliefs about the motions of the planets, even though we would now say that his Justifications were false. That is, even though this person would have True Beliefs, I would not say that he was 'knowledgeable' about the motions of the planets in the colloquial use of the word. One possible implication is that the common definition of 'knowledge' is more of a sliding scale rather than a binary/absolute. That is, Kepler/Newton were 'more knowledgeable' about the motions of the planets than the hermit because their laws were 'on average in closer agreement with reality' than the method used by the hermit, who only happened to be correct by chance. In other words, if you repeat their respective methods many many times, then Kepler's/Newton's predictions would be a closer match to reality than the hermit's. But Truth is not a sliding scale - something is either true or it is not true. Likewise, you either have a belief or you do not, whether something counts as knowledge or not cannot depend on how strongly one believes in it. This leaves Justification as the only analog/non-binary criterion that can create this sliding scale 'more justified / more correct' => 'more knowledgeable'. It is entirely possible to have different levels of justification for the same belief. It can be argued that all this is only true in the informal/colloquial use of the word 'knowledgeable', and not necessarily the strict philosophical/epistemological use of the word. Clearly, how a term is used in philosophy does not have to have a 1:1 correspondence with how it is used 'in everyday life'. But in this case the definition of the word is exactly the source of the dispute, and perhaps it makes more sense to approach the problem from a linguistics point of view "what do people actually mean when they use the word 'knowledge' ". Mr. Kane made a similar argument at the end of the Gettier case video, that the practical/pragmatic concept of what the word 'knowledge' refers to is possibly more important than the semantic arguments about its exact definition. Secondly and I think more importantly, the standard of capital T Truth is, in itself, difficult. In a metaphysical sense, how do you know what the Truth is? You mentioned (and I agree) that a standard of Justification which necessarily and unequivocally leads to only True beliefs would be a very tough bar to pass, and is possibly not even passable even in principle. But without this, by what measure are we able to tell what is a True belief and what is a False belief? Someone like Descartes would argue that all our senses and observations could, in principle, be caused by a malicious demon trying to mislead us. Someone like Nietzsche would argue that the capital T Truth does not exist at all, there are only interpretations and perspectives on an otherwise fundamentally unknowable 'reality'. For example, we could be living in a simulation, or we could be a brain in a vat or a temporary Boltzmann brain merely thinking that we are living in the universe. Are our current scientific theories the Truth? That is what Newton and Kepler thought and they were wrong then, too. Ultimately, knowing with perfect accuracy what the Truth is may itself be an impossible challenge. We may simply not have access to the information required to narrow all possibilities down to one single 'world'. In this case, it would not be possible to call *anything* knowledge, because every 'knowledge' ultimately relies on the Truth which we cannot know. Thus, we again end up with a pragmatic solution: we call something 'the truth' when it matches with our observations and agrees with our collective consciousness. For example: is the sky blue? The sky may not exist if I am a brain in a vat. But when I have the experience of walking outside and looking up, what we humans collectively defined as 'the sky' has the property that we collectively named 'blue'. Nobody would argue with me if I said "it is true that the sky is blue", but it is not completely beyond doubt. What happened here is that the Truth went from being an objective, undeniable, physical reality to something that is created through consensus and observations, and that it is itself based on Justifications. In this sense, what define as 'the Truth' is nothing but a shorthand for "something we have very strong Justifications for, to the point that it is beyond any reasonable doubt". The sky may not exist at all, but we have strong justification to believe that the sky exists and is, indeed, blue. However, if what we call 'the Truth' relies on Justification, even if it requires a very high standard of Justification, we may as well cut out the middle man, and directly conclude that Justification is the most fundamental criterion for knowledge in a general sense. If we go back to the examples, I think relying on just the Justified Belief as standard sidesteps the Gettier cases entirely. If we accept that someone can have knowledge and still be wrong, then any example where someone is Justified in a Belief which just happened to be True by chance does not invalidate their knowledge. One of the participants in the coin flip game is necessarily correct in their belief about life in Andromeda, but I would argue that neither is *knowledgeable* about the existence of life in Andromeda, because neither has a strong justification for their belief. Conversely, Kepler and Newton had knowledge about the movement of the planets, despite that their beliefs were ultimately false. I hope it made sense and wasn't too ramble-y :)

[@GodisgudAQW]

​@@Izerion Wow, I'm not done reading and processing your comment (yet), but just wanted to quickly say that this is the first time I had someone actually take the time to chew through one of my longer replies, actually understand it, and then offer a unique, well-reasoned perspective. The best types of replies I've gotten before this on any topic would've essentially stopped at assuming what they are trying to prove without explanation, but you actually thought this through to provide a non-circular argument, and I'm thoroughly enjoying the read as you analyze the need for truth in knowledge (which I always took for granted). I'll for sure reply when I can contribute to the discussion, but I wanted to shout the praises I would inevitably feel compelled to shout anyway here first so that my response can be more targeted

[@GodisgudAQW]

​@@Izerion So I read through the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on The Analysis of Knowledge and was pretty surprised that it doesn't mention a single proponent who shirks the truth condition, and barely mentions doing away with the justification condition. It looks like we're in slightly uncharted territory here. I'm just going to mention some of the counterintuitive implications of your account: two people with different levels of information can believe the same proposition, and yet one can have knowledge while the other doesn't. For instance, a scientist in today's age, who has been made aware of counterexamples to Newtonian mechanics, would arguably not pass the bar of sufficient justification to merit knowledge, whereas Newton and his contemporaries would have been sufficiently justified and thus had knowledge. Following from this, the more information you have, the smaller the set of propositions that can be constituted as knowledge becomes. Therefore, someone who is ultimately ignorant would have more "knowledge" than someone who has a lot of evidence and has not fully worked out the implications of their background knowledge. It would be strange to say that a lay person who has never studied a topic knows more than someone who is well studied on the topic. To avoid this counterintuitive conclusion, you could strengthen the justification condition to include a non-apathy clause. For instance, you could say that being justified requires sufficiently seeking out the information. That way, apathy cannot generate knowledge. Another point I'd like to add is that Gettier cases seem, in some sense, to be more unlikely to disconfirm the traditional JTB (justified *true* belief) account of knowledge than the "justified belief" account that was proposed. After all, Gettier cases take scenarios where the justification is likely to produce a false belief, but, by chance, happens to produce a true belief. To produce a Gettier-like case for your JB account, there is no need to accidentally turn the hypothetical into an accidental truth; all we need is justified false belief, rather than unreliably justified true belief. However, I will once again defend your view here and say that we can simply tune the strength of the justification condition to match an arbitrary level of certainty. The last two paragraphs were a bit abstract, so to drive the point home, let's think of a (modified) alarm clock Gettier case: you wake up and see the clock says 7 AM, but little did you know, it was stopped at 7 AM 24 hours ago. We could additionally stipulate that you did not look at the clock in the past 24 hours, and so could not have noticed that it has been stopped. And, to fulfill the non-apathy clause, we could stipulate that you did not have the opportunity to look at the clock in the past 24 hours; perhaps you had been traveling, and you were carried to bed while asleep. My original concern is that to generate a true Gettier case with the alarm clock scenario, it would have to be 7 AM by chance, whereas to counter the simple "justified belief" account, it would suffice for the person to be justified in believing that it is 7 AM, but it is in fact any other time other than 7 AM. Thus, in some sense, countering the traditional JTB account is much more unlikely that countering the JB account. However, we could strengthen the justification condition by saying that you needed to look at a number of independent clocks. There exists some number *n* of independent alarm clocks such that the joint probability of all of them being stopped at the same time is smaller than the probability of a broken alarm clock being correct. Still, though, given equally strong justification conditions, scenarios that counter the JTB account are less likely than scenarios that counter the JB account. But I don't see this as a fatal objection since you could arbitrarily strengthen the J condition to whatever probability of certainty you desire. It's just an interesting observation. Another thing to note with the JB account is that knowledge is not directly transferrable from one person to another. If one person "knows" (under the JB account) a proposition, you still have to verify that knowledge with your own background evidence and meet sufficient levels of justification for the same proposition to be considered knowledge. Mostly, my biggest question here is, why take away the truth condition? I think the answer is that it is a pragmatic issue: it's hard/impossible to know what the truth is with 100% certainty. Using the JB account directly implies fallibilism, and pretty directly leads to a theory where verification is baked into what counts as knowledge. I'm quite warming up to your view. I think your view works best on a pragmatic level, whereas my TB (true belief) account works best on a theoretical level. I could say that knowledge requires truth, but practically, we replace truth for justification. JTB accounts simply conflate the epistemology of truth with truth itself, merging our two theories into a mess.

[@clarabe9329]

Great. Thank you so much.🤩

[@italogiardina8183]

Correspondence theory in general seems to function as a good approximate for survival strategy a hominid brain that gave competitive advantage over a lot larger predators that also had a theory of mind but human theory of mind had an advantage of constructing complex truth conditional correspondence to objects like if I through a sharp stick at a lion it corresponds with it getting confused upon which I can flee under a tree which corresponds with being able to stand off more branches for self defence, etcetera. However as humans gained control over populations of non humans the truth making tool used in the savannah could also be deployed for wealth creation and deception as cited through the objections which requires more computer power for greater degrees of truth that now are in the realm of statistical significance given the illusive nature of absolute truth in the age of quantum computation. However I find correspond theory is one that works really good when travelling to new locales for it gives one a sense of place that is invigorating and feels like I am still a hunter gather thrown into the urban jungle with predators like crazy drivers and people hustling for cash as an approximation with the monkeys trying to raid my camp for fruit.

[@Debord1]

About the Slingshot argument; what if zero truth value is always false (do not corespond to any fact).

[@Ffkslawlnkn]

This has always seemed quite nonsensical to me. 'London is north of madrid' is true if it corresponds to a fact? To what fact? To the fact that london is north of madrid. So 'london is north of madrid' is true if london is north of madrid.

[@legron121]

A statement is not true if it "corresponds to" a fact (whatever that might mean), but if it _states_ a fact. For example, "London is north of Madrid" states a fact about the geography of London.

[@Ffkslawlnkn]

@@legron121 Of course it states a fact. The fact that london is north of madrid. That's what it says.

[@RestIsPhilosophy]

Why did you pick Yves Tanguy as the thumbnail

[@paulodetarso6252]

Let me ask you a thing, it is a sophism, but a new one: I can project my soul out of my body, as some other people are able too, as well. So we can verify if it object is there, in reality, outside of our minds, to us there is no such thing as "the thing in itself". I suppose you can't prove that my statement is false, so the theory of correspondence finally, could be considered verified and true. What a glorious day for mankind!, ops, humanity.

[@dennisfrancisblewett6480]

Objection: You failed to touch upon metaphysical indeterminism before asserting that something must be true as per the principle of bivalence. I have come to learn about metaphysical indeterminism from studying "legal indeterminism." The literature on metaphysical indeterminism is scant, though.

[@yassirel653]

What is truth umm that's a good question

[@OBGynKenobi]

Have you done a vid on Absurdism? You should.

[@KaneB]

Nope... I've not read much about that view.

[@OBGynKenobi]

@@KaneB in general it's about the meaning of existence, or the lack of meaning.

[@whycantiremainanonymous8091]

Those analytic philosophers who don't know theirAristotle are bound to repeat him. Here's how the Stagyrite formulated the correspondence theory of truth in the first place: * Things in the world have a material and multiple forms. * The forms (not the material) are impressed on the human mind like seals in wax to form ideas. * Words name those ideas in the mind. * When words are predicated of one another in a sentence and the forms their ideas are copies of are indeed predicated of one another in the world, the sentence is true. You see? This solved most of the problems raised here more than two millennia before they were raised, and all for the low low introductory fee of buying into Aristotle's metaphysics. Seriously, if you take Aristotelian metaphysics for granted, a lot of received philosophical wisdom suddenly looks like it makes sense. That's no coincidence.

[@KaneB]

>> You see? This solved most of the problems raised here Not really. It seems to me that all these problems either challenge Aristotle's approach as they are, or they can be slightly altered so as to challenge Aristotle's approach. For example, the concern that there are domains where there are truths without facts that make them true straightforwardly challenges to Aristotle's theory - or at least, if this a problem for modern correspondence theory, it's a problem for Aristotle. Or take the Slingshot. It's not too difficult to restate principles A and B in the terms of Aristotle's theory: A*: The form that impresses itself on the mind to form the idea referred to by "P" is the form that impresses itself on the mind to form the idea referred to by any proposition logically equivalent to "P". B*: The form that impresses itself on the mind to form the idea referred to by "P" is the form that impresses itself on the mind to form the idea referred to by any proposition that is derived from "P" by substituting co-referring singular terms. Now, I would grant that A* and B* do not seem, at first sight, as plausible as A and B. So perhaps a Slingshot against Aristotle would be based on less intuitively compelling premises, and for that reason we might think Aristotle is in a stronger position. However, I think the only reason why A* and B* feel less plausible is precisely because they are stated in terms of Aristotle's theory: all the stuff about forms impressing themselves on the mind sounds pretty suspicious to our modern analytic ears, whereas A and B's "truth-makers for propositions" is bog standard. I suspect that for a person inculcated into the Aristotelian tradition, A* and B* would feel more intuitive than A and B.

[@whycantiremainanonymous8091]

I was particularly thinking of the group of objections around the relation between proposition and fact. These *are* settled in an Aristotelian framework. And I think the slingshot won't work either. Say, a substitution of a proposition about physical objects in the world with a proposition about numbers won't work, because these are evidently different forms. Aristotle thought of logical equivalence as a stable relation between sentences, but not in terms of substitution. The objections to the generality of such a theory of truth would, of course, work against Aristotle too (maybe because there is in fact no such thing as "truth in general"). That's why I wrote "most objections", not "all objections". And, to be clear, I'm not writing all of this as a supporter of Aristotelianism. I'm a staunch opponent. But I find a lot of analytic philosophy mindlessly repeats Aristotelian ideas in a degraded form, without any awareness of where they came from. Later, other analytic philosophers _think_ they are rejecting erstwhile dominant theories (of truth, language, mind, etc.) when in fact they continue operating within the same broadly Aristotelian framework, never challenging the root assumptions that underlie the theories they argue against.

[@willthecat3861]

"You can't handle the truth." Sorry couldn't resist the Jack N. quote.

[@Allofyoush]

This gets freaky when it gets to Truth only manifesting once observation and interaction brings it into being based on a combination of existing Truths. But Truth can also shift over time

[@jaca2899]

Is this video true?

[@marsglorious]

Didn't even start with "What's up dogs". Disappointing.😢

[@plastic2666]

HYPE

[@InventiveHarvest]

Does truth even matter? Let's say snow was actually blue, but we all perceived it and its effects to be whiteness. What difference would the fact of the matter even make? Maybe reality is an illusion, but I have no way of peeling back the curtain. As such, truth is not a requirement for knowledge - only justification and belief are required.

[@Opposite271]

But without any theory of truth it seems like you would need to redefine „Belief“ since Belief is usually defined as holding something to be true.

[@GeorgMayer]

There is a difference between truth and reality. We cannot conceive reality ("the-thing-in-itself" as Kant coined it), as we are always distanced from it by the filter and limitations of our senses and the interpretation of the sense data in our brain. I think there cannot be any doubt about it (scientifically and also in modern philosophy) that reality is inaccessible and any form of truth builds on second-hand data which is filtered and pre-processed by our brain, an entity we can practically not control. Still, there is the magic of being effective. We can look at what we perceive as true (let's say a stone) and can roughly predict what will happen if we put it up and throw it. Our predictions, resting on the "illusion" that truth gives us about reality, are extremely effective, it's practically a miracle that this limited and corrupted amount of data we gain about the world lets us interact with it that way. So truth is an illusion - but one that is highly beneficial to us. It is a tool we yield permanently, and it gives us fantastic results. Nevertheless - I doubt that truth can be defined in a way as it is shown, e.g. in this video. The concept is far too blurry. But still, it is fascinating to try it and to find out how far we can get.

[@InventiveHarvest]

@@Opposite271 yes, but one can use any theory of truth to form a belief. For example, some people believe in the correspondence theory of truth and some do not.

[@Opposite271]

@@InventiveHarvest But another theory of truth may introduce a third factor besides justification and belief. But I must say that no theory of truth which I have encountered so far really convinces me.

[@InventiveHarvest]

@@Opposite271 justification and belief are not factors of truth, they are factors of knowledge l.