Necessary Truths Exist

[MindForgedManacle]

I posted common uses of the word. if truth is contingent upon minds, then it is also controlled by minds. if it is controlled by minds, then it is not objective. most people would disagree if you told them truth is subjective.

Okay? We're discussing the philosophical side of it, not the 'common' usage (which when probed leads to equivocations.

Some concept being contingent on something else doesn't mean it's controlled by it. Truth in the context of philosophy has very explicit meanings, and in this case you would have to be saying that we control what the facts are in order for your response to make sense.

that's why I said *assuming a realist position. truth is used as a word representing an objective reality assuming one exists.

In the part I was responding to, you seemed to say truth assumes a realist position, so my mistake.

would you stay on task... i'm making an inside argument making an "even if you're right" point. stop bringing up old posts.

Old posts, as in just 2 back? Wow, okay. You're 'even if you're right' argument doesn't work either, as I'll sho in a moment.

no... i'm not saying "the proposition 'the sun exists'..." i'm saying "the thing known as the sun exists..." learn the difference between a reference to things and a reference to sentences.

If you're not talking about propositions, you're not talking about truth in philosophy. Again, conflating truth and facts leads to nonsensical equivocations.

the two are equivocal and often interchangeable as shown evident by the replacement of every word "truth" with the word "real" I did in the argument. I can say "i'm telling the truth" and "i'm speaking facts" and they both mean exactly the same thing. the only difference is semantics.

They're not equivocal as you yourself have already admitted. And I demonstrated in my explanation involving circles that replacing all instances of 'real' with 'true' leads to antinomies. Things that exist are 'real'. Statements affirming that 'X exists' are true. Reversing that makes no sense, and doesn't even apply any philosophical notion of true correctly, as my earlier circle examples demonstrated.

Further, hand-waivingly saying that I'm just playing with semantics is not a valid criticism, especially since the distinction is important and what is making you run into errors.

as I said, the two words are most often equivocal. the theories of truth are to support post modernism philosophy, which is a step backwards in philosophy.

You're equivocating on them, but they are not equivocal, as my earlier unpacking (again, the circles example) demonstrated.

Post modernist philosophy, are you kidding me? This is the last-ditch attempt of your to save yourself the embarrassment of a bad argument. Contemporary philosophy is very advanced and developed, with epistemology being a real standout. The correspondence theory of truth alone is THOUSANDS of years old, going back at least to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
The reason why there are theories of truth is because in Epistemology, knowledge is typically defined as a true belief, with some third element. But the question becomes, "what do you mean by 'true'?", so any accompanying unpacking of the concept of truth is required, just as the other aspects of knowledge have in epistemology.

you took the skeptical position of "we can't know if anything is behind those experiences." this is what they would call a skeptical solipsist view, that it is plausible our experiences are mere illusion but equally plausible they aren't.

It's a skeptical view, but it's not solipsistic. For example, indirect realists like me don't think we experience reality itself, but a mental reproduction of it via sense data, all the while not claiming to actually know that we do. After all, pretty much all positions here are just assumptions, thanks to the Kantian distinction, which can be summed up as "We only have access, necessarily, to our PERCEPTION of reality, not reality itself, so we can't our perceptions necessarily map to twhatever might be behind those perceptions".

do you even know what you're responding to? I was not saying you took that position but simply responded to this question you asked me:

Even if everything was just an illusion in my mind and solipsism were true, are you saying that the illusion doesn't exist?

Do YOU even know what you said? You said this to me in response:

no, I would be saying it doesn't have an independent existence. it would exist, but only in your mind. it would not exist if your mind doesn't exist. realists don't have this view of reality.

What you seemed to be impying (perhaps accidentally) at one point is that if solipsism were true, the illusion didn't exist. My only points on idealism and realism is that they are not provable, hence why I brought up Kant's distinction.

no, the facts of the proposition refer to a specific place and time, and the truth of the proposition only changes if the context of the sentence is removed forcing you to impose your own. to say at this point in time "Obama is the president" is equivalent to "in 2013 Obama is the president." the word "is" is referring to the president time and the truth of that sentence doesn't change over time because it has a specific context and reference.

You actually altered the statement to support your view. The proposition obviously has a context in the sense of when it's made, but whether or not something is actually true changes depending on what is factual.

maybe I should be a little more clear. facts change over time, but facts referenced by propositions don't change since the proposition always references the place and time either specifically or generally. if I say "Obama is the president" I am correct, and I am not incorrect because 10 years go by, because when I said "is" I was talking about this time in 2013. my reference doesn't change unless someone removes it.

And this doesn't work, because I can just as easily say 'Ted Cruz is the president' and clearly that is false NOW, but if it happens in 2016 (God help us if it does...), then that statement is then true. The fact to which that proposition referred changed, because reality changed.

yes, but if that were stated when he was president, that person wouldn't be incorrect. nor would his sentence change from true to false simply with passage of time, because the person was referencing that point and time, not a future time.

They wouldn't be correct anymore, so the proposition has to be retroactively appended to retain its truth value.

Jupiter being larger than other planets is a fact. i'm sorry, but it seems that you have the impression that it is impossible to reference a fact. Jupiter's existence is a fact. Jupiter's size is a fact. Jupiter's size being larger than all planets in this solar system is a fact.

I said that Jupiter being the largest planet is a fact. I didn't say it was impossible to reference a fact (there's that straw man again), I said in a possible world without minds and thus without propositions, "Jupiter is the largest planet" would neither be true nor false, because that proposition can't even be made in that scenario, and only propositions (not reality itself) have the properties of truthyness and falsity.
So, I have agreed that it's a fact (and never denied it was), but in a possible world without minds there is no truth and falsity in regards to this, because there aren't any propositions.

so Jupiter is in fact not larger than the other planets of the solar system?

I've constantly said it's a fact, but in a possible world without minds, there is no truth value related to it because there are no propositions.

again, quit bringing up the ancient past and respond to what I say now. I realize you have a problem with the semantics so I've shifted the focus of my argument to the fact that Jupiter is large, not the truth.

'Ancient past', as in like 2 or 3 posts ago where you made a ridiculous error? Regardless, I HAVE moved on and demonstrated that you're STILL trying to assume truth and fact are the same thing. So, more hand-waiving claims of semantics is irrelevant. I've already said it would be a fact, but without minds existing truth is an inapplicable concept here.

haha, you think that's not what I was trying to argue from the start? lets take a trip back to post #4.

I can name you 3 necessary truths. the law if identity, the law of non-contradiction, and the law of exclusive middle

it's pretty much exactly what you said except I called them laws instead of facts.

Sorry about that. As I said on page 2 or 3, there's a YT video called the 'Leibnizian Cosmplogical argument' that features a similar argument trying to establish God's existence as a necessary truth.

The reason I used 'fact' there is because those laws refer to facts, namely that things are themselves and aren't not themselves.

really? that's what you thought I was trying to do? no no no no no. lets take a trip back to post #1.

it is an argument of my own design, and rather than a religious argument it's purely philosophical.

Conclusion: necessary transcendent truths [not beings] exist.

Read the above.

However, I also noted a couple of posts back that even the Laws of identity and non-contradiction aren't above criticism of their applicability, even if I disagree. After all, paraconsistent logic is able to deny non-contradiction, and I think there is a logical system or two that treats even identity as contingent. So while there might be truths that are necessary, even philosophers can't exactly agree which ones are it.

as I said from the beginning, this argument is only to debunk the philosophical position of logical fictionalism, the position that logic is something that is made up by us or derived from speech rather than necessarily part of reality.

The problem is that to do that, you'd have to, among other things, void the paraconsistent logical framework.

oh, I see what you're complaining about now. sorry, I messed up the semantics. what I meant to say was: "what I have disagreed with is you stating the fact that Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system, wouldn't be real without minds to say so." there, all better?

Another straw man; how surprising. Without minds, there arw no propositions. Truth and falsity are ONLY applicable to propositions. Hence, a possible world without minds has no truth or falsity in it. Facts would remain (Jupiter being the largest planet), but truth would not (the proposition "Jupiter is the largest planet" has no truth value in such a possible world.).

So again:

The circle is true (incoherent)

The circle is real (fact)

The statement "the circle is true" is real (incoherent)

The statement "the circle is real" is true (proposition corresponding to a fact)