Rex Kerr
1 min readJan 5, 2024

--

This isn't what anyone colloquially means by "true", and it's not what most philosophers mean, either (certainly not Russell, and probably not Quine, though that's more arguable).

If you call puppies "knives" and call tails "sky" and wagging "beguiling", then you might stop saying "puppies wag their tails" and start saying "knives beguile their skies" in order to convey the same model of what is happening.

But "puppies wag their tails" doesn't stop being true! Forgetting how to interpret the language that was used to encode a statement is your problem*; it doesn't do anything to reality**. And it is that correspondence between statement and reality that is captured by the meaning of the word true.

(* In more philosophical language, one might say that the validity of disquotation presupposes the constancy of meaning between the quoted and unquoted statements. With the advent of LLMs, this statement can now be made deterministic and quantitatively precise.)

(** I do not mean "reality" in the realist sense, only in that we identify consistency in our own experiences of things that appear to be non-self. It is not our experience that all experience is subsumed by language.)

I'm not sure whether this is simply poor phrasing on your part, or whether it reflects a conceptual error, but since this is one of the areas where philosophy most commonly mucks up, it's worth taking the care to get it less wrong than this.

--

--

Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

Responses (1)