Misconceiving Truth

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the Hessian
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Re: Misconceiving Truth

Post by the Hessian »

HexHammer wrote:
the Hessian wrote:Look at the post directly above where you posted this. I'd write it in crayon for you if I could.
If that's u'r best shot, then that is a "rainbow chaser" attempt at best.
It's not a shot. It's a sign of well-deserved exasperation.
HexHammer wrote:Would it show any faults in a calculation, if engineers used the wrong kind of concrete so that the bridge will crumble in 50 years instead of 200 years?
..no?

Would it show if the surgeon has done a 100% flawless job? ..no?

Would it show if person A or person B killed the victim? ..no?

..will it infact show anything? ..no?
I will try (yet) again. It's up to you whether you make an effort to actually try to understand what I am saying before you react. You don't have to agree. But if you disagree, it would be great if you were disagreeing with something I actually said.

1. "Will it *show* anything?" - This question doesn't make any sense to me. The truth is not a thing. It can't "show" something. It is a quality of a proposition about a particular state of affairs in the real. If the proposition describes an actual state of affairs, it can be said to be true. If it describes a possible, but not actual, state of affairs, it can be said to be false. If it attempts to describe an impossible state of affairs, it is nonsense. For example:
  • The keyboard is on the table. True.
  • The keyboard is under the table. False.
  • The keyboard is wrong. Nonsense.
Or..
  • Person A killed the victim. False.
  • Person B killed the victim. True.
  • The surgeon did a 100% flawless job. Nonsense.
Understand that "nonsense" in this context is not perjorative. It simply means that it is not a proposition of fact. It is not something that describes either some actual state of affairs in the real, nor some possible state of affairs in the real. It is not describing something about the real at all. An interpretation, a judgement, an opinion, etc., are not elements of the real. You cannot qualify them as true or false. You might want to try qualifying them as good or bad, wise or silly, sound or unsound, rational or irrational, better or worse, or any number of ways. Just not as true or false. They are two different kinds of propositions entirely.

I don't think any of this is anything terribly original. There is a lot of philosophy about this kind of logic. I'm sure there are others more here more versed in it than I who think I am not being rigorous enough in my examples, but I'm just trying to make it easy.

Honesty, Hex, I don't see the problem you have with this, or why you seem to react so strongly against it.
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HexHammer
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Re: Misconceiving Truth

Post by HexHammer »

the Hessian wrote:•Person A killed the victim. False.
•Person B killed the victim. True.
Everything you have written is grabbed out of thin air, but this solvement of who was the murdere is so farfetched nonsense.

You don't prove anything, any reasonable intelligent person would laugh at how utterly stupid this is. Dude pull your delusional head out of your ass!
the Hessian
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Re: Misconceiving Truth

Post by the Hessian »

Sex
the Hessian
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Re: Misconceiving Truth

Post by the Hessian »

HexHammer wrote: That would suggest that we don't need evidense, lawyers nor jury in a court of law
The example of the court of law is made complicated by the fact that the proposition is describing a past actual state of affairs. It is not something that can be justified by the real through its current state of affairs. Because the proposition is a proposition of what was rather than what is, evidence is needed to help posit what the past state of affairs actually were. Juries are needed to interpret the merit of the evidence. It would take someone smarter than me to say why anyone needs lawyers.
HexHammer wrote:All the books in the world can't fully encompass and define real life, IBM tryed that back in the days with print card, which was soon scrapped because life was too complex and abstract.
Irrelevant. A proposition does not have to say everything that there is to say to be considered true. My wife asks me, "where are the car keys?" I can never give her a true answer?
HexHammer wrote:thats why science doesn't deal in absolute truths, and infact doesn't really labe anything as a truth these days, because they'r been proven wrong over and over.
I've already attempted to define absolute truth, which is something different than truth. I would not say that science doesn't label anything as truth, but I would say that we don't consider any scientific theory as truth. The reason that we don't consider scientific theory as truth is because a scientific theory is itself a proposition that implies a whole bundle of propositions attempting to describe an actual state of affairs about each thing in an entire class of things, and not just one thing in particular. Because an entire class of things includes all of those things regardless of where they are in time or space, it is impossible that we have given the real an opportunity to justify each individual proposition. Therefore it is impossible to qualify the scientific theory as true, because we have not qualified each individual proposition it implies as true.
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HexHammer
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Re: Misconceiving Truth

Post by HexHammer »

the Hessian wrote:
HexHammer wrote: That would suggest that we don't need evidense, lawyers nor jury in a court of law
The example of the court of law is made complicated by the fact that the proposition is describing a past actual state of affairs. It is not something that can be justified by the real through its current state of affairs. Because the proposition is a proposition of what was rather than what is, evidence is needed to help posit what the past state of affairs actually were. Juries are needed to interpret the merit of the evidence. It would take someone smarter than me to say why anyone needs lawyers.
HexHammer wrote:All the books in the world can't fully encompass and define real life, IBM tryed that back in the days with print card, which was soon scrapped because life was too complex and abstract.
Irrelevant. A proposition does not have to say everything that there is to say to be considered true. My wife asks me, "where are the car keys?" I can never give her a true answer?
HexHammer wrote:thats why science doesn't deal in absolute truths, and infact doesn't really labe anything as a truth these days, because they'r been proven wrong over and over.
I've already attempted to define absolute truth, which is something different than truth. I would not say that science doesn't label anything as truth, but I would say that we don't consider any scientific theory as truth. The reason that we don't consider scientific theory as truth is because a scientific theory is itself a proposition that implies a whole bundle of propositions attempting to describe an actual state of affairs about each thing in an entire class of things, and not just one thing in particular. Because an entire class of things includes all of those things regardless of where they are in time or space, it is impossible that we have given the real an opportunity to justify each individual proposition. Therefore it is impossible to qualify the scientific theory as true, because we have not qualified each individual proposition it implies as true.
Dude are you born with brain damage or did you bump your head much through your life?

- shut up, you are speaking pure nonsense!

- you made an inprovised assersion of where the car keys is, can books do that? No?

- dude shut up, you speak pure nonsense as usual!
the Hessian
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Re: Misconceiving Truth

Post by the Hessian »

HexHammer wrote:can books do that? No?

- dude shut up, you speak pure nonsense as usual!
Pulls a random book off the shelf in his office. "Open Business Models" by Henry Chesbrough. Flips to a random page (156). Grabs a random sentence.

"It was funded by the Shanghai city governement with 30 million renminbi and the national government's Ministry of Industry and Information (MII) with 10 million renminbi (this combined funding amounts to about US $5 million)."

*shrugs*

Puts book back on the shelf and goes back to work.
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HexHammer
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Re: Misconceiving Truth

Post by HexHammer »

the Hessian wrote:
HexHammer wrote:can books do that? No?

- dude shut up, you speak pure nonsense as usual!
Pulls a random book off the shelf in his office. "Open Business Models" by Henry Chesbrough. Flips to a random page (156). Grabs a random sentence.

"It was funded by the Shanghai city governement with 30 million renminbi and the national government's Ministry of Industry and Information (MII) with 10 million renminbi (this combined funding amounts to about US $5 million)."

*shrugs*

Puts book back on the shelf and goes back to work.
How can a book improvise? You don't understand the damn word! Only magical fairytale books can do that.
If you can find a magical book that can improvise then you can get filthy ritch!
the Hessian
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Re: Misconceiving Truth

Post by the Hessian »

HexHammer wrote:How can a book improvise? You don't understand the damn word! Only magical fairytale books can do that.
Books don't write themselves. Look, we agree on something. Did figuring that out seem at all "elusive and relative" to you?
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HexHammer
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Re: Misconceiving Truth

Post by HexHammer »

the Hessian wrote:
HexHammer wrote:How can a book improvise? You don't understand the damn word! Only magical fairytale books can do that.
Books don't write themselves. Look, we agree on something. Did figuring that out seem at all "elusive and relative" to you?
The written words are static and doesn't change according to the situation.

You are not very bright, dude just shut up you totally suck at philosophy, you don't have a clue about very very basic definitions.

You have the logic and rationallity of a very small child.

I can't take your prolific brain diariah anymore, I'll just put you on ignore.
the Hessian
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Re: Misconceiving Truth

Post by the Hessian »

HexHammer wrote:The written words are static and doesn't change according to the situation.
.
It is an unreasonable and unnecessary requirement to demand that a proposition express the totality of situations in order to be true. And theoretically, any such statement would be truth derivative of a collection of more basic propositions anyway.

I can make more than one proposition about a given thing, and each one of them can be true independent of any logical relation to the other. The possibility that I can make proposition A about entity X, and that I can make proposition B about entity X, and that A and B are logically independent of each other, does not by necessity render either A or B untrue.

I have two problems with your position:

1. It's not clear what your position actually is. Your approach to discussion seems to be to imitate a random number generator with Turette's Syndrome.

2. More importantly, what I think I understand of your position is not at all coherent with my experience of being in the world. If your philosophy commits you to a constant fog of befuddlement about absolutely everything, then maybe it's time to change philosophies. If you don't commit yourself to a constant state of befuddlement about absolutely everything, then you are just playing with your philosophy, and in that sense, you're a fraud.
Ginkgo
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Re: Misconceiving Truth

Post by Ginkgo »

the Hessian wrote:
HexHammer wrote:
the Hessian wrote:Look at the post directly above where you posted this. I'd write it in crayon for you if I could.
If that's u'r best shot, then that is a "rainbow chaser" attempt at best.
It's not a shot. It's a sign of well-deserved exasperation.
HexHammer wrote:Would it show any faults in a calculation, if engineers used the wrong kind of concrete so that the bridge will crumble in 50 years instead of 200 years?
..no?

Would it show if the surgeon has done a 100% flawless job? ..no?

Would it show if person A or person B killed the victim? ..no?

..will it infact show anything? ..no?
I will try (yet) again. It's up to you whether you make an effort to actually try to understand what I am saying before you react. You don't have to agree. But if you disagree, it would be great if you were disagreeing with something I actually said.

1. "Will it *show* anything?" - This question doesn't make any sense to me. The truth is not a thing. It can't "show" something. It is a quality of a proposition about a particular state of affairs in the real. If the proposition describes an actual state of affairs, it can be said to be true. If it describes a possible, but not actual, state of affairs, it can be said to be false. If it attempts to describe an impossible state of affairs, it is nonsense. For example:
  • The keyboard is on the table. True.
  • The keyboard is under the table. False.
  • The keyboard is wrong. Nonsense.
Or..
  • Person A killed the victim. False.
  • Person B killed the victim. True.
  • The surgeon did a 100% flawless job. Nonsense.
Understand that "nonsense" in this context is not perjorative. It simply means that it is not a proposition of fact. It is not something that describes either some actual state of affairs in the real, nor some possible state of affairs in the real. It is not describing something about the real at all. An interpretation, a judgement, an opinion, etc., are not elements of the real. You cannot qualify them as true or false. You might want to try qualifying them as good or bad, wise or silly, sound or unsound, rational or irrational, better or worse, or any number of ways. Just not as true or false. They are two different kinds of propositions entirely.

I don't think any of this is anything terribly original. There is a lot of philosophy about this kind of logic. I'm sure there are others more here more versed in it than I who think I am not being rigorous enough in my examples, but I'm just trying to make it easy.

Honesty, Hex, I don't see the problem you have with this, or why you seem to react so strongly against it.

The way you use the terms "nonsense" in a theory of descriptions is pretty close to the mark. However, such propositions are generally looked at in terms of being neither true nor false. On the other hand, the idea of predicating unusual properties to such things as keyboards is not a truth function of existence of keyboards containing such properties.

As Russell would say, such propositions are not a function that denotes the truth of the existence of keyboards containing such a property. It seems as though there needs to be a distinction drawn between the logical truth values of propositions and the empirical claims being predicated.
the Hessian
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Re: Misconceiving Truth

Post by the Hessian »

Ginkgo, thanks for stepping in. I appreciate it.
Ginkgo wrote: The way you use the terms "nonsense" in a theory of descriptions is pretty close to the mark. However, such propositions are generally looked at in terms of being neither true nor false.
Totally agree, and hope that's what I've been saying.
Ginkgo wrote:On the other hand, the idea of predicating unusual properties to such things as keyboards is not a truth function of existence of keyboards containing such properties.

As Russell would say, such propositions are not a function that denotes the truth of the existence of keyboards containing such a property.
You may have to help me a bit here. My position was that what you are calling here "unusual properties" are not actually properties at all.
Ginkgo wrote:It seems as though there needs to be a distinction drawn between the logical truth values of propositions and the empirical claims being predicated.
If you feel that it would be helpful, and don't mind spelling it out, then I'm glad to learn something.
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Arising_uk
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Re: Misconceiving Truth

Post by Arising_uk »

clacking wrote:... Anyone ever ask himself that if a boat displaces a pound of water and gains a pound of bouyancy then how is that bouyancy accounted for in the equation from the perspective of the body of water. The water can't get a pound heavier without that pound appearing somewhere. ...
Is volume measured in pounds? I'd say the water raises a 'pound'.
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Arising_uk
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Re: Misconceiving Truth

Post by Arising_uk »

Gee wrote:... No one would vote for a President that was as dumb as a box of rocks. Even though there were clues, people missed the clues, because they assumed otherwise. ...
I thought this was exactly why Americans voted for him and not the overtly intellectual Gore? As there appears to be an anti-intellectual strand running through many Americans, it appears to make them uncomfortable to think there are those smarter than them.
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Arising_uk
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Re: Re:

Post by Arising_uk »

HexHammer wrote:Can a triangle have 3x 90 degree conors? Ordinary people would say no, IDIOT! But they can!
Not if they are on a plane they can't.
Truth is delusive!
No, its exact. So a triangle on a plane is different than a triangle on a sphere. The only common factor is that they have three sides.
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