Every truth must be true

I thought it might be something Guigus was working towards.

We have discussed the circular nature of the correspondence theory previously. However I won't persist with that here, the conversation has taken a different tack.

guigus wrote:

You and I are not exactly the same persons we were yesterday.

I'm the same person I was! I'm a day older today than I was yesterday, just as my car is a day older today than it was yesterday, but both I am my car are exactly who and what we were yesterday. There may be things about me that is different today than yesterday, just as there are things different about a river today than it was yesterday, but we should not think that all these things are not the very exact same things they were yesterday just because things about them are different today.

hence the inevitable circularity of the correspondence theory of truth, would you say?

I once went to my bank to try to clear up what I thought was discrepancy between what I thought was my account balance, and what the bank reported was my balance. And as the bank official was trying to show me I was wrong by adding up my deposits and subtracting my withdrawals, I said to him, "Well, putting things in this way, figuring out my balance by using arithmetic, you will never understand why I am saying that I have more money in my account than you think I have".

But, on the contrary, I do understand what you think. You think that every truth is a necessary truth.

guigus wrote:

If you believe you can define something so well so as to eliminate all ambiguity of it, then you are just dreaming, no matter how pleasing is your dream.

Things are not defined. Words are defined. Things are not ambiguous. Words are ambiguous.

That was only the peace prize which in recent years has been bogus anyway, since it has been completely politically motivated by ultra-liberals. Even Obama was a little embarrassed by it, and everyone knows what his opinion is of himself, so it takes a lot to embarrass him.

fast wrote:

guigus wrote:

If you believe you can define something so well so as to eliminate all ambiguity of it, then you are just dreaming, no matter how pleasing is your dream.

Things are not defined. Words are defined. Things are not ambiguous. Words are ambiguous.

Take light. It is a wave and it is a particle. Isn't that ambiguous? Or take two photons emitted at once by a calcium atom: they share the same existence (the same wave function). Isn't that ambiguous? You are the same you were yesterday, and yet you are different. Isn't that ambiguous?

kennethamy wrote:

But, on the contrary, I do understand what you think. You think that every truth is a necessary truth.

No, I think that every truth necessarily has a truth. You still do not understand what I think.

Utter confusion, so far as I can make it out. For he is certainly contradicting himself when he asserts that all truths are necessary, and yet is he not saying that no truths are contingent. The only way I can explain it is that he does not know what necessary and contingent truths are.

I certainly do not, because I don't have any understanding of what it might mean for a truth to have a truth.

If I change from a young boy to an old man, does that make me ambiguous?

I certainly do not, because I don't have any understanding of what it might mean for a truth to have a truth. The question is whether you understand what it means, since it is certainly not English. Truths cannot have truths, but women can have babies. Is that what you mean? Even in philosophy, you cannot make up a sentence that has no meaning, and then simply say that it is true. For in order for a sentence to be true, it has to have a meaning in the first place, and so far as I know, the sentence, truth has a truth does not mean anything. And that you imply it means something is not enough for it to mean something. What does it mean for a truth to have a truth? As the physicist Von Paul said when someone uttered a meaningless sentence like the one you uttered: "It is not only not true, it is not even false!". You cannot utter meaningless sentences, and expect that they will somehow acquire meaning by the mere fact of your uttering them. A meaningless sentence, like "truth has a truth" remains meaningless even after you have uttered (or written) it.

kennethamy wrote:

Utter confusion, so far as I can make it out. For he is certainly contradicting himself when he asserts that all truths are necessary, and yet is he not saying that no truths are contingent. The only way I can explain it is that he does not know what necessary and contingent truths are.

Let me try something different. It is obvious that your way of reading my words is by translating them into a symbolic formalism, so for you "every truth must be true" becomes "if p then necessarily p." So let me assume your point of view. Take the expression "if p then necessarily p," which you correctly repute as false. Since, in that expression, "p" means "whatever is either true or false," we would read it as, "if whatever is either true or false is true, then it is necessarily true." Of course that assertion is false, but why? Because the contingency of being true cannot itself make anything necessarily true. You keep repeating that from the very beginning of this discussion, in which you are correct. As you also keep assuming from that very beginning that I do not understand you, in which you are incorrect. Now that I took your point of view, please retribute the favor and take mine: what if "p" could mean a truth in itself, its "truthness," rather than whatever is true? Then we would have a slightly different statement, one by which "the truth of whatever is either true or false is necessarily true." Now it is no longer "whatever is either true or false" that, once true, is necessarily true, but rather its quality of being true. Instead of the object of truth, it is truth itself that is necessarily true. Such is the meaning of "every truth must be true." It goes from us (every truth) to the world (must be true). It is like saying that for the statement "water is liquid" to be true water must be liquid, and unlike simply saying that "water must be liquid" (unfortunately, there is no way of expressing this by means of symbolic logic, which, by definition, makes no distinction between a truth and whatever is true).

No, only terms are ambiguous, as fast said. If I am sometimes kind, and sometimes unkind, that does not make me ambiguous. It means I change my moods. If it is true that light is sometimes one thing and sometimes another, that does not make light ambiguous. It makes light changeable. Things can change. That doesn't mean that they are ambiguous.

kennethamy wrote:

No, only terms are ambiguous, as fast said. If I am sometimes kind, and sometimes unkind, that does not make me ambiguous. It means I change my moods. If it is true that light is sometimes one thing and sometimes another, that does not make light ambiguous. It makes light changeable. Things can change. That doesn't mean that they are ambiguous.

The cells in your body today are different from the cells in your body yesterday, but you are still you. There is hence an ambiguity in the term "you," which comes not from the term itself, but from the relation between the term and your body, since the term remains the same and still represents your body although that body has changed since yesterday. Regarding light, it is a wave if not measured and a particle if measured. Light itself does not "change" between a wave and a particle "out there," in the world. What changes is how it appears to us whether it is measured or not. Even worse: these two appearances contradict each other.

But what does it mean for truth to be true, let alone necessarily true? It can mean only (if it means anything at all) that necessarily, if p is true, then p is true. And I have already agreed with that. So we seem to have gone around in a circle. It must be that every truth is true. That is a truth. But it is a falsity that every truth is necessarily true. What you seem to be insisting on is that since it is necessarily true that all truths are true (which I agree it is) then it is also necessarily truth that all truths are necessarily true (which it is not). Again, you are confusing two different sentences. If you are not making this confusion I have just described, then I do not understand what you are saying, so you are in the unpleasant position of not being confused at the price of not saying anything meaningful, or you are saying something meaningful, but you are committing a fallacy. Thus, either you are not saying anything meaningful, or you are saying something meaningful, but fallacious. You choose.

But that does not make me ambiguous. It only makes me different in respect to the change in my cells. To be different is not to be ambiguous. Just because I have gained a pound this week, does not make be ambiguous. That is not how the word "ambiguous" is used in English.