Clutch

Franc, you're missing the point. What does confirming a proposition have to do with its truth? If I say "A meteor the size of a baseball hit the nearest asteroid to Alpha Centauri", then it doesn't matter whether I say this as a guess, as a joke, in my sleep, because Cleo the Psychic told me, or because I have a really fabulous telescope in my backyard. The linguistic item I utter is true just in case a meteor the size of a baseball hit the nearest asteroid to Alpha Centauri. Whether I know it, or suspect it, fear it, or just don't care, is completely irrelevant. Period.

Indeed, your insistence on relevance and applicability is just a recapitulation of the reasons why truth was never taken as sufficient for knowledge. That's why justification is a condition too, and why getting the justification conditions right is so important. Which, in turn, is why people take Russell-Gettier counterexamples seriously -- because they force us to reconsider in what justification could consist (eg, a causal criterion, counterfactual "tracking", or what have you). Which, in turn, is why these counterexamples are not just a case of farting about with words.

[ January 31, 2002: Message edited by: Clutch ]</p>

Francois Tremblay

I don't see why sentences taken out of context ("there is a cardinal in the tree" vs "there is a blue jay in the tree") are supposed to be significant. Perhaps they do challenge a simplistic "naive", "transcendent" view of truth, but my reply was precisely in opposition to that.

Likewise your post reflects a "transcendent" view of truth, but I've already said why I don't agree with such a view. To me the notion itself of truth reflects the objective nature of reality, not a real, existing proposition that we can compare other propositions to.

[ January 31, 2002: Message edited by: Franc28 ]</p>

Adrian Selby

"To me the notion itself of truth reflects the objective nature of reality"

Agreed, but looking at that example about the asteroid, to claim the meteor hit it is a statement, but if the objective nature of reality included the asteroid being hit by a meteor, then the statement, by your above quote, is true, because it reflects that reality. But did the person know it was true, in this case not, it was a lucky guess. The statement's truth depends on the event occurring, one might not know whether the event has occurred, but it doesn't matter, the statement is true if it reflects reality in that one instant. All we can say is we can't know it to be true.

Adrian