No I'm not arguing with myself. I'm telling you that you should be able to conceptualize your model of truth whether it is man-made or not.



We can indeed conceptualize things that are not man-made.



We can indeed conceptualize things that are not man-made.

We can conceptualize a dog even though we have not created it as a pure concept from scratch in our own imagination.




You are totally missing the point here.

We can indeed form concepts about things that are not man-made, (such as the concept of a dog). A dog is not man-made.

Therefore your excuse that you cannot conceptualize your idea of truth simply because you claim that the idea it itself not 'man-made' is baloney.

If you can't conceptualize it (i.e. put it into the form of a meaningful idea for the purpose of describing it), then you clearly have no clue what truth is.

If you have no conceptualization of the truth in your own mind then you most certainly can't discuss it in a meaningful way with another person.

~~~~~~~

For someone who claims to be into philosophy you sure have extreme difficulty comprehending the simplest of ideas.

If you can't describe what you mean by truth (i.e. if you can't even conceptualize it in your own mind), then you certainly have no hope of being able to explain it to someone else.

No.

That is proof of invalid reasoning. It's wrong.



A false belief in your mind does not equal a goal in mine.





Rhetoric.

Now, you believe that I'm somehow creating things that are going through your mind and coming out of your hands? That's too funny.



The 'phantom philosophical unicorn' is an object of your thought. It is but a mere distraction from the meat of the conversation. It does not make up for the logical absurdity/circularity that your position depends upon, and ends in.





More and more rhetoric.



It does not follow from the fact that you have not, or cannot find flaw in the argument being put forth that it is meaningless. It does not follow from the fact - if it is one - that you do understand the position I'm arguing that it is not comprehensible. It does not follow from the fact that you say that I cannot conceptualize truth, that truth need conceptualization within the mind to understand how it works.

I understand how belief works. I understand how thought works. I understand how language works. I understand how verification works. I understand how falsification works. I understand that truth is central to all of these things. I suppose we could call that a conceptualization. It does not follow that truth is a concept.



That's the point.

Personally I'm not convinced that you understand anything at all.

You certainly haven't explained what you mean by 'truth'.

All that you have done is express your totally ungrounded belief that truth is some sort mystical philosophical unicorn that underlies everything, and cannot be conceptualized.

Sounds like a description of God to me.

No. Why do you insist upon "the" correspondence, and "a" correspondence, and "the" truth, etc. Truth is not objective. All of those things objectify truth. Your not even being coherent here. You contradicting yourself. Your arguing, or at least you claimed to be arguing, subjective truth, yet you're constantly objectifying it.

Incoherent.

Correspondence is connective. Truth is correspondence. Truth is connective. Truth is not an object. It an odd sense, as I said on page one of the original thread, truth is relative.



Confusing the language for what it is describing. So are you saying that truth is objective?





Wrong again. For truth claims(claims about the way things are), but not for all claims. Not all claims are truth claims. Truth/reality correspondence plays a role in all claims.



Repeating the same mistake, over and over...

We do not correspond it(claims) with the way things are. They either correspond or they don't. We check. There is a big difference.



No difficulty here. I understand all too well. For instance, I understand that that is not a fact that matters much here. It is a fact that some people conflate verified claims with truth. It is a fact that some people confuse themselves by calling verified claims "truth". It is also a fact that the above quote is setting truth out in the wrong way, yet again, as will be explained below.



If correspondence is truth, it cannot become "a truth" unless one calls a verified claim "a truth". Verified claims can be false.

Truth cannot possibly be false. Correspondence cannot possibly be false. Verified claims can. Therefore, it is a mistake in thought - it is a conflation - to call a verified claim anything other than "true". "True" in this case means verified to the best of our ability, and therefore worthy of being called "true".

A claim cannot correspond between itself and fact/reality. Therefore a claim cannot be truth.



It makes perfect sense. You just fail to grasp it.



Yes, if we remove the. Verification is the act for checking whether or not a claim corresponds to fact/reality. It does not follow that we are determining whether "truth exists". That sets things out in the wrong way. Truth/reality presupposition existed in thought/belief long before verification methods.



That is precisely where you go wrong by...

1. calling a verified claim "a truth". A verified claim can still be false. Truth cannot.

2. with the "correct correspondence" verbage. That is redundant. Incorrect correspondence cannot exist. That would be to say that there is incorrect truth.

This is the kind of nonsense that results from setting truth out in the wrong way.

Apparently I understand enough.



Are we reading the same thread?



What's to explain? Truth is correspondence to fact/reality. Period. That suffices, as this entire thread has clearly shown.



That belief is yours, and it is false.





Coming from a true believer with a clear lack of understanding what has transpired in this thread.

No, you're missing the point. If your claims are true, then it only follows that truth is man-made. The facts support otherwise.



What on earth on you talking about? This alleged 'excuse' exists in your mind. I've no need to offer excuses, nor have I.



Well, seeing how I've put it to use throughout this thread including, but not limited to, showing the logical absurdity and circularity stemming from the position that you're arguing for, I'd say that these concerns are ill-conceived and illusory figments of your imagination.





Yeah, that's what it is. This is too rich.

You're confusing Zen Truth (the actual experience of a state of affairs) with Analytical Truth (our attempt to analyze a state of affairs and convert it into terms of a meaningful description)

It's no wonder that you can't understand what I'm saying.

You'll never understand what I'm saying until you recognize these totally different perspectives of truth, and how they differ from each other.

One is the mere experience of reality.

The other is a man-made attempt to describe reality in terms of descriptions that we can intellectually comprehend.

What facts support otherwise?

Give a specific example.

Prelinguistic children learn prior to language.

Done.

I understand exactly what you're saying. I understand that it sets truth out in the wrong way. I have shown this more times than I care to count.

Impossible.

If they are 'learning' something then clearly they are already developing a symbolic logical analysis within their own mind.

Just because it's not fully-developed "English" or something of that magnitude, doesn't mean anything.

If they are performing logical analysis, then clearly they are using some form of symbolic logic within their own mind.

So your fixation with trying to draw an absolute concrete line between "prelinguistic" and "postlinquistic" is a fabrication of your own making.

Done.

With all due respect Michael, until you can show a clear, comprehensible concept of truth, that you can communicate and define in a meaningful way that can have some sort of actual practical use, then what is your point?

All you seem to be doing is constantly complaining that everyone else has set truth out all wrong, but you haven't been able to offer any better way of setting it out that has any practical value.

You haven't produce a single solitary practical example of how people should go about determining truth that is in any way different from the status quo.

Do you have anything to offer that is actually USEFUL?

Or are you stuck in the psychological paralysis that Dr. Richard Feynman spoke of?

All I ever see coming from you is precisely what Dr. Feyman spoke of.

What do you mean by truth? What do you mean by description? What do you mean by corrspondence? What do you mean by language? What do you mean by know? What do you mean by you? And so on, ENDLESSLY!

It's philosophical paralysis that has absolute no meaningful value.

Maybe that that's what philosophers like to wallow in. Maybe that's what philosophy is? Nothing more than a club of people who like to wallow in philosophical paralysis.

Even Dr. Feynman recognized this nonsense.

It doesn't get any more absurd than to deny that pre-linguistic children learn things without having language.



Now we are supposed to believe that remedial thought is equal to language, and babies who learn that a bottle has food are performing a logical analysis in their minds replete with symbolic logic?





I am imagining that children live before learning language?

--

The further away from truth we get, the more ridiculous the claims. The lengths that some will go in order to hold onto their unjustifiable and false belief.

I think this thread is finished... at least for me, for now... definitely.

May it wander on as a zombie...

It's your absurdity to assume that these young minds represent a state of being pre-linguistic.



Babies will instinctively suck on anything you hand them.



You create your own artificial boundaries between things such as pre-lingual and post-lingual.

A human baby's brain is already wired to perform rudimentary logical functions before they even come out of the womb.

This is the product of millions of years of evolution.

For you to assume that it shouldn't already be wired to perform rudimentary logical functions is a totally ungrounded and irrational assumption.

You are creating your own false boundaries and lines between things and acting like as if everyone else should recognize these as having some obvious merit.

I don't recognize your artificial line-drawing as having any merit art all.

Those are your own personal fabrications.

~~~~~

Besides, baby monkeys do many of the same things that human babies do, and they never reach a state of linguistic capability that we assign to human beings.

Yet, even monkeys perform logical analysis on these rudimentary levels. And they have no language at all, in terms of what we consider to be language.

~~~~~

Finally the your fixation on language belongs to you.

I'm not trouble by that at all.

Clearly the sophistication of our linguistic abilities allows us to delve into extremely complex levels of logic, and thus define extremely complex correspondences between various idea and what we perceive to be the state of affairs around us.

Obviously, our language is indeed involved heavily in those more complex descriptions of reality, and thus we are indeed creating those descriptions.

Thus we create what we call 'truths'.

Logic presupposes truth.

This thread is just creative being logical and concise, and Abra making up his own definitions for words, it even seems for the explicit purpose of being able to disagree.

A danger to an unknowing society.

And here I thought you supported science and mathematics.

But here you are supporting Creative's illusive ill-defined philosophical unicorn of truth and his ranting that the way scientists and mathematicians define truth is all wrong.

I support the status quo of what scientists and mathematicians mean when they say that something is true.

At least I know what they mean within the context of the premises, axiom, and domains of applicability that they formally lay out.

Creative proclaims that this method of defining what is meant by truth is all wrong. And instead he is in search of an ill-defined illusive pure philosophical concept of an idealized 'Analytical Truth" that can never be had. Just like a unicorn.

Analytical Truth is necessarily the product of analysis. It can never be anything more than that. That's just the practical fact of the matter.

The actual of a state of affairs is indeed Zen Truth. It's the truth of experience. That's as close as anyone can ever get to knowing a state of affairs.

So if you support Creative's philosophical unicorn of ill-defined truth then, you too, must reject scientific truths as having been arrived at via a totally wrong approach to 'truth'.

This is necessarily the state of affairs since you are in agreement with Creative, and Creative is in disagreement with the methods used by science and mathematics to define and ascertain what they mean by 'truth'. He has proclaimed that their approach is all wrong and it's the Church's fault.

And you support his presentation as being "logical".

I wonder if you truly have bothered to actually read what he's been saying.

Have look Abra, this is old news. Davidson, Tarski, Popper, etc. have obliterated the Humean/Lockean notions that you're misconstruing to begin with...

Two Dogmas of Empiricism

I just put it use.



I haven't argue against scientists, I've argued against someone who claims to be one, using real scientist's approach, if by "real" I mean those who understand the logic that they are working with.