It's also evolutionary beneficial if people influence each other by communicating and so the personal morality of a human can be influenced socially, which is indirectly evolutionary.

Human babies are relatively uncapable in comparison to other animals and they learn important skills by copying. It's like IKEA furniture that is easier to produce and ship, because there is still some assembly required.

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I was always a fan of seeing the truth pretty much as just this function that we attribute to our sentences.

Let's say I have a box with a window and I see a red ball in it.

I also have a second box without a window. Would you say it's even wrong to say: "There could be a ball in this box or maybe there is no ball in this box."?

I'm kind of proposing a fact that I can't check.

If there was a ball in the box, it would be a fact that there is a ball in the box. Then there would be a fact about something that I don't know anything about. The same holds if there is no ball in the box.

If we assume there is no truth without knowledge, then the box can neither have a ball or not have a ball inside it.

If I understand correctly, you and /u/LifeOfAPancake would say that this neither-true-or-false state only occurs when no conscious being knows about it. So if I put a ball in the box without you watching, it would still be true that it's in there. But if I throw a dice in a cup and then I shake the cup again, then the dice has no true number on the upper side, because noone can check it afterwards.

This also leaves the question open whether it can be true that someone or something is conscious. If an AI is conscious and nobody besides itself knows about it, it is obviously true that it is conscious - in your and my opinion.

But as an outsider, I couldn't even entertain the possibility that it's conscious, because in case it's unconscious, nobody knows that it's unconscious and you say that it's not allowed to entertain the thought that propositions are true or false, when nobody knows about them. (I could have misunderstood you.)

In my intuition things can happen without anyone watching, even indirectly. Isn't that more "parsimonous"? It's more mentally efficient to assume the world exists without anyone watching. I have no better argument than that.

Well, maybe you could also say that a truth without knowledge is thinkable and as words are all about thinking, the word "truth" should be independent of the concept of "knowledge".

Schrödinger's cat experiment is often misunderstood to mean that just because we don't know whether the cat is dead or alive, it is actually half-dead and half-alive.

This has nothing to do with quants though. The same could be said about the shell game: I don't know whether there is a pearl under this shell or not, so it's half-there.

The point of Schrödinger's cat is to connect the actual half-facts (according to popular interpretation) of the quantum world to the macro world.

So, what is my opinion on the shell game? I'd say there is an actual reality independent of my knowledge. I can look under the shell afterwards and learn whether there was a pearl even before I looked. I mean - that's certainly the most popular, "naive" interpretation of reality, isn't it?

Would you say that "the universe" has no opinion about whether there is a pearl under a shell, or about how many fingers I'm holding behind by back, as long as you don't know anything about it?

I admit, it wouldn't cause any problems. It's unfalsifiable whether things really happen that nobody will know about or whether only things happen that people directly or indirectly observe.

Another game: In Germany it's called "Topfschlagen" - "pot hitting". One person gets blindfolded and the other people have to guide them to a pot by shouting "hot" and "cold". The blindfolded person doesn't know where the goal is (if we assume that the others don't help them). I think that means that at least things can exist when one person doesn't know about them - because other people still do. It could theoretically be the case that the pot stops existing once everybody puts on blindfolds.

Perhaps try thinking about it more in terms of inaccessibility rather than unknowability, because the latter might be creating some recursive confusion here.

> A truth that can never be known, though, is an assumption.

The real assumption, then, is correspondence. For example, it's not assumptive for me to discard a theory of fnördianism (where fnörd is a property of claims). That is because fnörd would something incomprehensible and I have no reason to believe that some creature out there comprehends fnörd. Why would I?

This example aligns more with arguments on correspondence being incoherent. If we wanted this example to get closer to deflationism, we'd associate fnörd one-to-one with some other property. Argument remains.

> I think dismissing the value of truth “because we cannot know it”

Then what is the value of a metaphysical correspondent truth, if we cannot speak of it meaningfully?

Good explanation, I agree.

If you were to switch out correspondence with deflationism, OP's comment on "conflation of a claim’s between being true and being known to be true" would become more accurate. And a criticism of correspondence is the beginning of getting to deflationatism, and is the path that Blackburn takes. Though of course you could instead also reach some epistemic theory of truth.

Ain't that the truth

There are some truths that are inaccessible. I referenced Kant and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem for that reason. How did the universe start? Do I have free will? Is there a God? What is Beauty? What is my purpose? These are not Truths that some other human (nor any other creature, unless they are God) will be able to stumble across, they are fundamentally unknowable.

I’m just saying that humans can’t have a corporeal form alive in the medical sense over 2000 years later. A different state of existence isn’t “Alive”. I’m saying alive with a body and a heartbeat.

So don’t ignore my example. Objective truth: The sun can melt an ice cube if it gets close enough, yea?

A truth that can never be known, though, is an assumption. The inability of you or me to know something to be true does not mean that another human, or another creature of a different kind, cannot know it. I think dismissing the value of truth “because we cannot know it”, and presuming it inaccessible, is kind of a reach.

If there is no way to differentiate the two, then no meaningful distinction can be expressed. Your comment provides no response to this and continues off the challenged premises.

You wanting a term is not an argument in this context. There is a difference between simple practical speech and philosophical terminology dealing with concepts such as truth. So much recognizes Blackburn himself.

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From reading the comments: isn't science a form of truth? The idea of a systematic process of evaluating facts that are measurable with a high degree of accuracy is a process where the limit approaches some truthiness. What's fascinating is that quantum mechanics, the edge of our measurable abilities, is governed by probability. Is truth, at its most accurate form, inexact because of this process governed by probability?

No, I don't see his rejection of the correspondence theory having anything to do with a conflation between something being true, and our knowing something is true.

I think he's just endorsing the standard objection to correspondence theory, which doesn't really have much to do with how we know something is true, it is more about what constitutes a good theory (of truth or of anything else).

So if your theory of truth is something like "X is true if X corresponds to reality", the objection is that "corresponds to reality" is something like a synonym for truth rather than a theory of truth. It doesn't give us the sort of insight into truth we'd want for something to be rightfully deemed a theory of truth.

This is a little bit of a stretched analogy but I don't mean it to be exact, just to roughly get the idea across: If I offered a "cougar theory of mountain lions" that was like "X is a mountain lion if X is a cougar", that wouldn't be much of a theory. I'm just substituting two terms that refer to the same animal. A theory of mountain lions might be something like "X is a mountain lion if X is a large predatory cat species native to America.... etc etc." The objection to the correspondence theory of truth is that it is something like my "cougar theory of mountain lions".

So while it is true that cougars are mountain lions, that's not a good theory of mountain lions. Similarly, in the beginning of the video Blackburn says that while its perfectly correct to say that "x is true if x corresponds to reality", that is insufficient for a theory of truth.

One of the things I'm hearing from this guy that I don't like is this notion that truth only exissts and is true when it's discovered. He appears to axiomatically reject the idea of absolute truth, despite the fact that it's at the core of science, engineering, art, music, all philosophical and intellectual pursuits really.

Here's the question: Is a thing true whether or not we know, and can relate to, the truth of the thing? Plato sure as hell thought so. This guy is muddying these waters in a way I find borderline dishonest. Knowledge and truth are two UTTERLY different things and he's conflating the two rather badly.

This conflation is a problem because he's mixing up the theory of truth and the theory of knowledge. Knowledge is not known until it is known, that's an axiom, but one of the axioms of truth is that truth is true whether it's known nor not.

Knowledge, or lack of knowledge, of a truth does not alter the truth in any way. Looking at the fridge will not put butter there, or take it away it was either already there or it already wasn't, the only thing that changed is our knowledge of the truth about fridge butter. His argument, insofar as I can follow it (no genius here) is fudging that boundary in an unpleasant way.

The only thing that can alter the truth is action. If I take all the butter out of the fridge, it renders the entire earlier question a matter of historic truth rather than existential truth. It invalidates no part of past fridge butter. Present truth is what it is, there is no butter. Historical truth is what it is, there was butter.. Again, this is something this fellow is playing fast and loose with in an unpleasant way.

If the goal of the pursuit of knowledge is to obtain the truth, which I believe it is, then we need to separate the theory of truth from the theory of knowledge, which this dude appears not to be doing.

In fact, I believe "the truth is what exists, or existed in a given timeframe, regardless of whether it is known" is pretty much axiomatic, and blows this guy's sophistries out of the water.

Care to comment on the actual post?

Not necessarily. Some simply act for the sake of Aristotelian virtue.

> But it seems like we have a sense that moral activism would-have-been-right so many times, and times when it is not the sociocultural norm.

Where here or in his written work does Blackburn imply otherwise?

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according to deflationary theories of truth, there still is truth, but it’s nothing substantive—it’s nothing more than just asserting the statement its attempting to predicate as true.

I cannot recommend specific works cause most I've read were in not english. Ethology is the field that studies animal behaviour and cognition. I'll brush up on a few thoughts, you can verify them if in doubt/interested. Another comment replied to you with exemples of painful events that can make one suffer badly: having your bodily autonomy violated especially is pretty traumatic whether you have language to rationalize it or not, for humans as for animals. That's because animals do have a sense of self - a lot more than a newborn human. Besides, animals worry for their future and try to prevent bad things from happening to them. There are also universal things that go beyond language, abstract thinking and society - think motherly love - and it can lead to huge amounts of suffering even without complex thoughts around it. Animals grieve, and allegedly may have committed suicide on occasion.

I understand the difference between pain and suffering you're meaning to convey, but animals are not a good exemple here.

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How do you interpret his criticism of the correspondence theory in that video?

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