You quoted Aristotle.

The point at hand is the definition of truth. Please, I invite you to define it. Is it anything more than justified belief? If so, how? And in relation to what?

I think his definition is pretty useless for 2009.

I think you have failed to explain how truth is any different from justified belief. I feel like you are dodging the issue. But I don't blame you for that.

"Objective truth" functions like a religious myth. Perhaps you pride yourself on a connection to this o"bjective truth" (convenient fiction). Perhaps you identify with logic as an initiation into a sort of superior knowledge.

This is not meant as an attack. It's part of my psychological epistemology. We are persuaded quite often for "non-logical" reasons. We are mythological status-seeking apes.

From my point of view you have utterly failed to understand what my objections are. You have not answered them because (it seems) you have not processed them.

If A is true, then B is true. If B is true, then C is true. If A is true, then C is true.

The above is NOT LIKE LIFE. The deeper question is: what makes A true?

The trueness of A is not a one/zero situation. In real life, including philosophical conversation, there is no perfect certainty. There is persuasion and consensus. But it's difficult to persuade those who cannot and those who will not understand.



---------- Post added 12-02-2009 at 03:51 AM ----------

Who decides if "snow" is "white"? .

No one decides it, so far as I can tell. We simply discover that snow is white. It might not have been, of course. What make you think that whether snow is white is a product of a decision? Sounds a bit like religion to me. Of course, there are causes of snow's color. Is that what you have in mind?

The above is NOT LIKE LIFE. The deeper question is: what makes A true?

Who decides if "snow" is "white"? That's the crux. The meaning (signified) of "snow" (the signifier) is derived from consensus/persuasion.

The trueness of A is not a one/zero situation. In real life, including philosophical conversation, there is no perfect certainty.

Persuasion is what makes statements "true."

If A is true, then B is true. If B is true, then C is true. If A is true, then C is true.

Isn't "snow is white" a kind of short-hand recognition, as opposed to belief, knowledge or truth? Snow has white in it, but any glossy surface does. Snow reflects the light around it, it has shadows throughout. If you were to paint a scene with snow and just put a bunch of white paint where the snow is, it would look cartoonish... that would reveal more about what color snow really is. There would be a revelation of truth... in the Heidegger sort of way, that snow isn't any one color, not that white is offically a color anyway.

Reconstructo,





Persuasion does not make anything true. Things are true, or false, regardless of persuasion.



Do you think you just made "If A is true, then C is true" true with persuasion? Or did you discover it was true with inference?

Of course persuasion may make people believe that some proposition is true. That must be what he means.

That's not what he means. He means that truth is dependent on persuasion entirely. That is, truth doesn't exist without persuasion. At least, what how I took it. And I think the rest of what he writes supports my interpretation.

Are you saying that new fallen snow is not white? It is hard to tell just what you are saying.

It has white in it. It reflects the colors around it. If the sky is red, the snow will look pink. When we say snow is white, we're accessing a kind of catalog of simplifications. I saw this Charlie Rose show where experts were talking about vision. One was an Indian who was removing cataracts from the eyes of children. The panel discussed the revelation of his work: that the ability to decipher visual stimulus can develop later than infancy, as long as the patient had some visual stimulus.

I understood this from my experience with drawing and painting, which I've done since I could hold a pencil. Teaching adults to draw has this challenge: that we think we know what the world looks like. We don't realize that we're operating from a catalog of symbols until we start trying to draw. What keeps a person from drawing well, isn't the hand or the eye: it's that they have to let go of what they think things look like. The Indian children had to go the opposite way: they needed to develop this catalog in order to use visual stimulus. Teaching adults to draw demonstrates this point: most of the time, people are processing visual information with a coordinating pattern to organize it.

One of the really mind-blowing parts of the show was that there are two locations in the brain that derive "place." A guy with a rare condition where both these areas were damaged has the problem of being able to see the world around him, but he never knows "where" he is.

To paint snow with any degree of trueness, you'd have to let go of the idea that it's white. You could take a picture of it and blow it up on your computer and see what I mean.

To paint snow with any degree of trueness, you'd have to let go of the idea that it's white. You could take a picture of it and blow it up on your computer and see what I mean.

Why do you think that what we call white, is not white, truly? Why would we have to let go of the idea of white, to know truly that snow is white?

Do you believe snow is white? Do you think it's by chance that most people agree that snow is white? Why do you think they agree on such a thing? One possibility is that it is true that snow is white. What do you think?

Why do you think that what we call white, is not white, truly? Why would we have to let go of the idea of white, to know truly that snow is white?

Do you believe snow is white? Do you think it's by chance that most people agree that snow is white? Why do you think they agree on such a thing? One possibility is that it is true that snow is white. What do you think?

So, new fallen snow is not white? Then what color do you believe it is? If I were to paint a picture of a roof with new fallen snow on it, I would certainly paint it white. And when I have looked at roofs covered with new fallen snow, they are certainly white- well, white as snow!

There are situations where snow on a roof is purely white... if it's noon on a sunny day, so the snow is reflecting the sun... no shadows, only light... which is what white is: all light. So sometimes snow is white. Snow on a roof on a sunny day: that would be an interesting picture... very stark.

It's fascinating that people agree that snow is white. Like if you take a hundred people at random and tell them to draw a human, you'd end up with page after page of the same figure: a circle for the head, and straight lines indicating trunk and limbs: a stick man. If you went to a crowded place and started drawing humans, you'd see that the stick man is a symbol... our hundred people are drawing an internal image that underlies their visual information about what humans look like. The fact that most of them draw the same image is something I can't explain.

There are situations where snow on a roof is purely white... if it's noon on a sunny day, so the snow is reflecting the sun... no shadows, only light... which is what white is: all light. So sometimes snow is white. Snow on a roof on a sunny day: that would be an interesting picture... very stark.

Of course. Dirty snow is not white either. So what? Snow is white means just that snow is white under normal conditions for seeing snow. After it rains, snow turns a slushy gray. Does that mean the snow is not white? No, it does not. But you seemed to mean something quite different when you denied that snow is white. You seemed to deny that even in normal conditions of observation, that snow is not white. That would be startling, but false. What you now seem to mean is mundane, but true.

Are you saying that snow is white even if it's grey?