Saturday, May 18, 2024

A Scientific Theory of Truth

(This is part 7 of a series about the scientific method.)

The over-arching theme of this series is that science can serve as a complete worldview, that it can answer deep philosophical and existential questions normally associated with philosophy or religion.  I gave a small example of that in the last installment where I showed how the scientific method can be deployed to answer a fun philosophical riddle.  Here I want to show how it can tackle a much deeper question: what is truth?

Note that what I mean by "truth" here in this chapter -- and only this chapter -- is not scientific truth, but philosophical truth.  Remember, I have already disclaimed the idea that science finds philosophical or metaphysical truth.  It doesn't, it finds good explanations that account for observations, which are valuable because one of the properties of a good explanation is that it has predictive power.  But a good explanation is not necessarily true in the philosophical sense.  Newton's theory of gravity, for example, turns out to be completely wrong from a philosophical point of view, but it is still useful because it makes accurate predictions nonetheless.

The word "truth" is sometimes used in science as a shorthand for "theory that is sufficiently well established and makes sufficiently accurate predictions under a sufficiently broad range of circumstances that we proceed as if it were the (philosophical) truth even though we know it's not."  When I want to emphasize that I am referring to philosophical or metaphysical truth I will capitalize it.  Science seeks (and finds!) lower-case-t truth, not upper-case-t Truth.

But this does not mean that (upper-case-t) Truth is beyond the realm of scientific inquiry!  Remember, the scientific method is to find the best explanation that accounts for all of your observations, and one of your observations (if you are a normal human) is a constant stream of overwhelming evidence that there is lower-case-t truth out there, and the obvious explanation for that is that there is upper-case-T Truth out there, and the former is somehow a faithful reflection of the latter.  Furthermore, what we know about lower-case-t truth can put constraints on upper-case-T truth.  Science might not be able to tell us what the Truth is, but it can tell us with very high confidence what it is not.

So how do we use the scientific method to tackle a philosophical problem?  We can't do it directly because "What is Truth?" is not a properly framed scientific question.  Scientific inquiry must begin with a Problem, something we observe that cannot be explained by current theories.  "What is Truth?" is not a valid Problem statement because Truth is not something we observe.  To start a scientific inquiry we have to somehow transform this into a question about something we can observe.

Fortunately, there is a general way of doing this for philosophical questions: we can observe that people wonder about what Truth is!  We can further observe that people have some intuitions about what Truth is (or at least what truth is), and that some of these intuitions are common across a wide swath of humanity, to the point where someone who does not share these intuitions can be considered mentally ill.  For example, here are some things that are widely regarded as true:

All triangles have three sides.

The sun rises in the east.

The sky is blue.

Humans are mortal.
And here are a few examples of statements that are widely regarded to be not true, a.k.a. false:
Some triangles have four sides.

The sun rises in the west.

The sky is green.

Humans are immortal.
We can now advance a some hypotheses to explain these observations:

  1. There is a metaphysical Truth out there, and that out intuitions are somehow in contact with this Truth.
  2. Our intuitions about truth are illusions.  There are no actual truths.  What we call "truth" is nothing more than a social construct into which we are indoctrinated.  (If you think this sounds ridiculous, believe me, I sympathize.  But this is actually a hypothesis that is taken seriously in some academic circles.  It's called post-modernism.)


Before we go on to discuss the relative merits of these hypotheses (though I guess I've already tipped my hand here), let's consider some more examples:

  1. Richard Nixon had eggs for breakfast on the morning of January 1, 1962.
  2. Coffee tastes good.
  3. The United States is a Christian nation.
  4. Gandalf was a wizard.
  5. Love is a many-splendored thing.
  6. Die Erde ist Rund.
  7. This sentence is false.
  8. Given a line and a point not on that line, there is exactly one line passing through the given point parallel to the given line.

Each of these examples is meant to illustrate a different subtlety with the notion of "truth".  The first one is either true of false, i.e. there is an actual fact of the matter regarding whether or not this statement is true, but that fact is almost certainly beyond our reach.  We can know that this statement is either true or it is false, but almost certainly we can't know which.

The second example is completely different.  It is an example of a subjective claim.  There is no "actual fact of the matter" with regards to the taste of coffee.  Some people like it, some don't.  Note that you can transform a subjective claim into an objective one by binding it to a particular person: "Coffee tastes good" is subjective, but "I think coffee tastes good" or "coffee tastes good to me" is objective.

The third example is harder to characterize.  At first glance is might appear to be a subjective claim, a matter of opinion analogous to the flavor of coffee.  But consider "Israel is a Jewish state", or "Saudi Arabia is a Muslim state."  Surely those are objectively true?  Surely there is more truth to them than "Israel is a Muslim state" or "Saudi Arabia is a Jewish state"?  I won't say anything more about this example right now, but keep it in the back of your mind because it will become important later in this series.

The fourth example is actually controversial, at least among philosophers.  If you polled ordinary people on the street you would probably find pretty overwhelming agreement that this statement is true, especially when contrasted with, say, "Gandalf was an orc."  But some philosophers argue that any statement about Gandalf cannot be true because Gandalf doesn't actually exist, and non-existent things can't have properties.  So it cannot be true that Gandalf was a wizard, but neither is it true that he was not a wizard.  He simply wasn't anything.  Personally, I think this is ridiculous, and I would not even mention it but for the fact that this point of view was advanced in all seriousness by someone whose views I otherwise hold in the highest regard.

To me, the answer is pretty obvious: the sentence "Gandalf was a wizard" does not mean that Gandalf was an actual wizard in actual physical reality.  It means that within the context of the fictional world created by J.R.R. Tolkien, Gandalf was a wizard.  Or, if you really want to be strict about it, "J.R.R. Tolkien wrote that Gandalf was a wizard", which is clearly true.

The fifth example appears superficially to be a factual claim, but it isn't.  It's poetry.  I included it to show that there is something about factual claims that transcends mere syntax.

The sixth example is German for "the earth is round."  This example makes a similar point to the one before: the process of deciding whether or not a statement is true, or even of deciding whether or not it even makes sense to say that it is true or false, is not a simple one.  There is no straightforward procedure that you can apply to a string of letters to decide these things.

The seventh example is the famous Liar Paradox.  Superficially it appears that this sentence should be either true or false, but either possibility leads immediately to a contradiction.  Another interesting example, which is not considered nearly as often but which I think is equally interesting, is the opposite: "This sentence is true."  It can be true, or it can be false, and both possibilities are internally consistent.

This is also the case for the last example, which is the famous Euclid's fifth postulate.  Intuitively it seems like it should be true, and it also seems like it should be provable from some simpler assumptions, but humans searched in vain for such a proof for two thousand years before realizing that whether or not to consider this statement true or false is an arbitrary choice, and either choice leads to interesting and useful results.

The main point I'm trying to make here is that truth is complicated.  The road to truth winds through the vagaries of natural language and subjective experience, takes a few twists and turns through prejudice and personal opinion, before finally arriving...well, somewhere.  My personal experience is consistent, at least superficially, with the hypothesis that there is an objective reality "out there" which I share with other conscious beings.  Specifically, I am something called a "human being" living on the surface of something called a "planet" which I share with other human beings who do things like eat and sleep and build computers and write blog posts.  If you don't accept that, then I'd be interested to know how you account for what you are doing right this very moment as you read this.

For now, though, I am just going to assume that this is the case.  This is an example of engaging in Step 2 of the scientific method.  The first step is to identify a Problem.  In this case, the Problem is to account for the fact that humans profess to believe, sometimes vehemently, that certain things are true and other things are false.  It's possible that this is because all humans other than me are NPCs in a simulation, and I'm the only truly conscious being in the universe.  (This is called solipsism.)  It's hard (though not impossible) to refute solipsism, but here I'm not even going to try.  I'm just going to assume it's false, and that all my fellow humans really are what they appear to be.

So here is the actual hypothesis I am willing to defend, my proposed answer to the question of "What is truth?"

Ron's Theory of Truth: Truth is a property of propositions, which are ideas that stand in relation to some circumstance in objective reality (whose existence we have assumed for the sake of argument).  If the circumstance corresponding to that proposition actually pertains, then the proposition is true, otherwise it is false.
Notice that I have introduced two new words here: "proposition" and "idea".  I don't want to get into too much detail about these just now.  My purpose here is not to present an academically rigorous argument, merely to illustrate in broad brushstrokes how the scientific method can be used to attack problems that are often regarded as outside of the scope of scientific inquiry.  I will get much more precise about this later in this series, but for now just assume that "idea" means what it is commonly taken to mean: some vaguely identifiable thing that exists in someone's mind which can be somehow transferred into another person's mind.  This transferability is the defining characteristic of an idea; it is what distinguishes ideas from other things that might exist in someone's mind, like emotions or self-awareness.

Despite the fact that the idea of an idea (!) is pretty common, it is actually very hard to demonstrate.  I can't show you an actual idea.  All I can show you is a rendering or representation of an idea through some physical medium like writing or speech or dance or music.  So, for example, I can write:
The earth is round.
That looks like an idea, but appearances are deceiving.  What you are looking at is not something inside my brain (which is where ideas live) but patterns of light emitted from your computer screen, which, needless to say, is not part of my brain.  The marks you see on the screen get translated by your brain into an idea, but the marks and the idea are not the same thing.  The idea is the thing that ends up in your brain after seeing the marks, which in this case your brain interprets as letters and words.  Compare with:
Die Erde ist Rund.
or
地球は丸い

Those are completely different marks on the page, but they all denote the same idea, namely, that the earth is round.  That idea is a proposition because it maps onto things in objective reality, namely a planet called (in English) "earth" and a physical property called (again, in English) "round".  And that proposition is true because that thing actually has that property.

Note that evaluating the truth of statements on my theory is a two-step process.  The first step is mapping a rendering or a representation of an idea, which here will almost always be marks on a computer screen, onto an actual idea, and the second step is mapping that idea onto reality.  The importance of the first step cannot be overstated.  It is capable of cutting huge swathes through the philosophical underbrush.  Many seemingly intractable philosophical problems fall before it.

Take the example of "Gandalf was a wizard."  That string can reasonably be interpreted in two different ways, one of which is true, and the other false.  It can be taken to mean, "Gandalf was a real person in the real world, and he was a wizard" or it can be taken to mean, "Gandalf, the fictional character in J.R.R. Tolkein's 'Lord of the Rings' was, within the context of that fictional world, a wizard."  Disagreements over the truth of "Gandalf was a wizard" are nothing more than quibbles over this particular ambiguity of the English language.

The example of "all triangles have three sides" can be resolved similarly.  The word "triangle" means "a shape with three sides" and so this statement really means "All shapes with three sides have three sides."  Which is pretty obviously true, and also not very interesting.

A more interesting example is "The United States is a Christian Nation."  This turns on what is meant by the ambiguous phrase, "Christian nation."  It might mean that the United States is a Christian theocracy, which it is not (at least not yet).  It might mean that the United States was intended to be a Christian theocracy, which it also was not.  Or it might mean that the majority of the people living in the United States self-identify as Christian, which is true.  Again, disagreements over this are disagreements over the meanings of words, not good-faith disagreements over actual facts.

Good-faith disagreements over actual facts are very rare in science.  This is one of the reasons that scientific disagreements are almost invariably settled without resorting to violence, which is in very stark contrast to other methods that humans have tried.

As an exercise, see how far you can get following this line of thought to attack the Liar Paradox, i.e. "This statement is false."  I'll give the answer to that in a future installment because this one is getting too long.  But as a hint, here are two incorrect answers.

Most people upon seeing this puzzle for the first time think that the resolution has something to do with the self-referential nature of the phrase "this statement".  That's not the case.  It's straightforward to construct a similar paradox without any self-reference.  Here is one way:

The following sentence is false.
The preceding sentence is true.
We can even stop playing fast-and-loose with the distinction between strings and propositions simply by giving names to strings:
S1: "The proposition denoted by string S2 is false."
S2: "The proposition denoted by string S1 is true."
And we can even do the same thing without labels by using a clever trick called Quining, which consists of filling in the details of a string that looks something like, "The string that you get when you follow this procedure ... is false", where the ellipses are filled in with instructions such that the string that you get when you follow those instructions are the exact string that you started with.  It's quite a neat trick, and it's the foundation of Godel's famous incompleteness theorem, wherein he constructs a string that essentially says, "This proposition denoted by this string cannot be proven by standard mathematics."

So self-reference is not the problem.

A second possibility is that the liar string does not denote a proposition.  Just because a sentence bears a superficial resemblance to a proposition doesn't mean it actually is one.  "Love is a many-splendored thing" bears a superficial resemblance to "love is an emotion", but the latter denotes a proposition while the former does not.  In order to be a proposition on my theory, an idea has to refer to objective reality somehow because truth is determined by correspondence to reality.  The words "love" and "emotion" refer to things in reality, but "many-splendored thing" does not; it's just a poetic rhetorical flourish.

No such problems are immediately evident in the Liar Paradox sentence.  It refers to an idea, and ideas are part of reality, and so we cannot reject it as a proposition on the grounds that it does not refer to reality.

I'll give you one final hint: the resolution of the liar paradox involves discharging a tacit assumption about propositions which turns out not to be true according to the definition of truth I've advanced here.  If you think you know the answer, put it in the comments.  (Note that I have comment moderation turned on.  This blog has been around for twenty years and it attracts a lot of spambots.)

In closing, I want to reiterate that the main point here is not to resolve the liar paradox (that's just a fun puzzle that happened to come up) nor any other hard philosophical problem, but merely to show how the scientific method can be applied to such problems.  Philosophers have been puzzling over what truth is for millennia; I can't provide an academically rigorous answer in 2500 words.  The best I can hope for is to show that these questions are not beyond the scope of scientific inquiry.

But stay tuned.  There's more to come.

12 comments:

  1. True or false?

    1. Gandalf has arms and legs.

    2. You ate an entire moose for breakfast today.

    3. If you touched a hot stove, you would burn your had.

    4. An object can be blue and green at the same time.

    5. 7 + 5 = 12

    6. 3 is a prime number.


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  2. Correction:

    2. You did not eat an entire moose for breakfast today.

    @Ron:
    Yes.

    How you deal with the issues and complications from your answer may be interesting in your future writing about your theory of truth.

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  3. @Publius: I honestly don't see why you think any of these are problematic, let alone the moose. Do you really think any human is capable of eating an entire moose in one sitting?

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  4. Life is a journey, enjoy the moose on the way.

    @Ron:
    >Do you really think any human is capable of eating an entire moose in one sitting?

    The moose is just a stand-in for something I'm sure you didn't eat for breakfast. I could have used "grapefruit," but there is a chance you actually ate that. Feel free to substitute a breakfast food you didn't eat for "moose".

    2 (corrected) is an example of a negative fact. It didn't happen that you ate an entire moose for breakfast. 2 (corrected) is evaluated as True.

    Similarly, 3 is a counterfactual. It didn't happen either (but if it did ...). It is evaluated as True.

    Yet, Ron's Theory of Truth requires correspondence to an actual circumstance of objective reality. How does that work with events that didn't actually happen?

    4 is an example of a synthetic fact. One evaluates this proposition entirely in one's head, without any reference to objective reality. Again, Ron's Theory of Truth has no objective reality to evaluate a correspondence to.

    5 is an example of abstraction. One can think of a set of 7 objects being united to a set of 5 objects, resulting in a set of 12 objects. Yet sets are abstract -- in this case, they are non-spatial, non-temporal, and causally inert. If abstract objects exist in your theory of the world, this is not a problem. If abstract objects don't exist in your theory of the world, then how can Ron's Theory of Truth evaluate the truth of 7 + 5 = 12?

    For 1 and 6, I need to know if you evaluate each as True or False before I can comment on them.

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  5. @Publius:

    > The moose is just a stand-in for something I'm sure you didn't eat for breakfast. I could have used "grapefruit," but there is a chance you actually ate that.

    Ah. Well, this matters. You can know I didn't eat a moose because that is physically impossible. The only way you can know whether or not I ate a grapefruit is (hopefully!) by my testimony.

    But your knowledge of the truth is independent on the actual truth. Maybe I ate a grapefruit, maybe I didn't, but one of those it definitely true irrespective of whether you know which on it is.

    > 3 is a counterfactual

    To review:

    > 3. If you touched a hot stove, you would burn your had.

    That doesn't sound like a counterfactual to me. It sounds like a prediction. The only way to know for sure if that prediction is true is to do the experiment, but I'll give you long odds that it's correct.

    A counterfactual is something more like: if I had touched a hot stove this morning, my hand would be burned now.

    > How does that work with events that didn't actually happen?

    The same way it does for evaluating the truth of propositions in fictional worlds. Fictional worlds are counterfactual. "Within the context of a fictional world where I (counterfactually) touched a hot stove, my hand would be burned." That's (probably) true. Since I didn't actually do that experiment, we can't know for certain.

    > 4 is an example of a synthetic fact.

    > 4. An object can be blue and green at the same time.

    That turns on what you mean by "being green and blue at the same time." Here is an example of an object that is (arguably) green and blue and white at the same time.

    If you meant can an object be *entirely* green and *entirely* blue at the same time, the answer is obviously no because that's part of what the word "entirely" means and how colors work.

    > 5 is an example of abstraction

    Yeah, that one is actually a good example. The next entry in the series is entirely about that.

    > For 1 and 6, I need to know if you evaluate each as True or False before I can comment on them.

    For 1 I would guess that it's true. I'm not a LOTR expert, but I recall that Gandalf carried a staff and walked places, and it's hard to imagine how he could have done that without legs and at least one arm.

    6 is obviously true, but the justification is complicated, similar to 5. Mathematical truths require their own dedicated blog post. Stay tuned. I'm working on it.

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  6. We Know What You Did With That Stove

    @Ron:
    >But your knowledge of the truth is independent on the actual truth. Maybe I ate a grapefruit, maybe I didn't, but one of those it definitely true irrespective of whether you know which on it is.>

    What I know is irrelevant to the truth proposition "Ron did not eat a grapefruit for breakfast."

    Say you really didn't eat a grapefruit for breakfast.

    Now we need to evaluate the proposition "Ron did not eat a grapefruit for breakfast."

    The evaluation of that proposition is: true

    Yet, how did we determine that using Ron's Theory of Truth?

    >The same way it does for evaluating the truth of propositions in fictional worlds. Fictional worlds are counterfactual. "Within the context of a fictional world where I (counterfactually) touched a hot stove, my hand would be burned." That's (probably) true. Since I didn't actually do that experiment, we can't know for certain.

    Can't we know for certain? Consider the proposition straight on: your bare hand forcefully touches a red hot stove -- an action that is guaranteed to result in a burned hand. The proposition, "If you touch a hot stove with your bare hand, you will have a burned hand" would be evaluated to be True. Yet under Ron's Theory of Truth, we don't have a correspondence to the objective world.

    >If you meant can an object be *entirely* green and *entirely* blue at the same time, the answer is obviously no because that's part of what the word "entirely" means and how colors work.

    How can you evaluate that using Ron's Theory of Truth? Here we have a synthetic fact, completely in the mind, and with no correspondence in the objective world. Similarly, we know that "Bachelors aren't married". We know these truths a priori to any interaction with the objective world.

    >For 1 I would guess that it's true. I'm not a LOTR expert, but I recall that Gandalf carried a staff and walked places, and it's hard to imagine how he could have done that without legs and at least one arm.

    Given that Gandalf is abstract, how can he have arms and legs? Arms and legs are only properties of (concrete) people.

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  7. > how did we determine that using Ron's Theory of Truth?

    I don't see the problem. "Ron did not eat a grapefruit" is true because, as you stipulated, I did not eat a grapefruit. (What is it with you and grapefruit? Why not an egg? It's to much less typing.)

    > Can't we know for certain?

    No, because you didn't stipulate the reason I touched the stove. Maybe it's because I was possessed by a demon, and maybe demonic possession protects you from being burned.

    > The proposition, "If you touch a hot stove with your bare hand, you will have a burned hand" would be evaluated to be True.

    No. Conditionals are not claims about the actual state of the world, they are *predictions* made by a *theory*. Theories *might* be True, but we know that our current best ones are not.

    That said, I'd assess the odds of being burned as indistinguishable from 100%. But that's not the same as being True.

    > How can you evaluate that using Ron's Theory of Truth?

    By looking at the meanings of the words. It's the same way we can know that all triangles have three sides, because that is part of the definition of the word "triangle".

    > Given that Gandalf is abstract, how can he have arms and legs?

    The same way he can carry a staff and smoke a pipe. All of these things are abstract. Abstract pipe. Abstract staff. Abstract arms. Abstract legs.

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  8. Grapefruit is a hybrid between pomelo and orange

    Negative Facts

    @Ron:
    >I don't see the problem. "Ron did not eat a grapefruit" is true because, as you stipulated, I did not eat a grapefruit.

    I will explain the problem. To start, let's just copy your theory of truth:

    Ron's Theory of Truth: Truth is a property of propositions, which are ideas that stand in relation to some circumstance in objective reality (whose existence we have assumed for the sake of argument). If the circumstance corresponding to that proposition actually pertains, then the proposition is true, otherwise it is false.

    The problem with applying your theory of truth to the proposition "Ron did not eat a grapefruit for breakfast" is that the proposition is about a negative fact, something that did not happen. Yet your theory of truth requires a correspondence to a truth-maker (entities in the world that make propositions true) -- but nothing happened in the objective world. Identifying truth-makers for negative propositions requires specifying something that doesn't exist as contributing to the truth of the statement.

    Does this mean your theory of truth requires an ontological commitment to negative facts? What is the nature of a "negative fact"? If we take negative facts seriously, we seem committed to a kind of entity that is non-existent.

    Counterfactuals

    >No, because you didn't stipulate the reason I touched the stove. Maybe it's because I was possessed by a demon, and maybe demonic possession protects you from being burned.

    You're not addressing the issue straight on. None of those are relevant, as they aren't in the truth proposition.

    >> The proposition, "If you touch a hot stove with your bare hand, you will have a burned hand" would be evaluated to be True.

    >No. Conditionals are not claims about the actual state of the world, they are *predictions* made by a *theory*. Theories *might* be True, but we know that our current best ones are not.

    So you evaluate the proposition to be false?

    What about this counterfactual proposition: If you eat a turkey sandwich, the mass of your body will increase.

    Now, it's not a zombie turkey sandwich, nor are you going to turn into a turkey yourself. It is just an ordinary turkey sandwich.

    Most people would evaluate that proposition to be True.

    Now the problem here is counterfactuals refer to situations that did not actually occur. Your correspondence theory relies on a proposition aligning with actual states of affairs. Since counterfactuals describe events that are not part of the actual world, it's unclear what these propositions would correspond to.

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  9. > your theory of truth requires a correspondence to a truth-maker

    No, it doesn't. It merely requires that "the circumstance corresponding to that proposition actually pertains." (This is a tricky thing to find the right words for.)

    There is no invisible pink unicorn in my office. Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election. Miley Cyrus is not a leprechaun. All of these things are true despite being "negative facts".

    > So you evaluate the proposition to be false?

    It's not a proposition, it's a prediction. One with an extremely high likelihood.

    > If you eat a turkey sandwich, the mass of your body will increase.

    Another prediction. To make it a proposition it would have to be something like: on those occasions in the past where I did eat a turkey sandwich, my mass increased. And that is true.

    > Since counterfactuals describe events that are not part of the actual world, it's unclear what these propositions would correspond to.

    They correspond to hypothetical worlds in which the counterfactual holds. It's no different than the Gandalf example. If LOTR described reality, Gandalf would be a wizard. Different counterfactuals require different levels of suspension of disbelief, and at some point we stop using the label "counterfactual" and start calling it "fiction" instead. But those are just two different degrees of the same thing.

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  10. The turkey was a little dry

    >> your theory of truth requires a correspondence to a truth-maker

    @Ron:
    >No, it doesn't. It merely requires that "the circumstance corresponding to that proposition actually pertains."

    Wouldn't your truth-maker be "the circumstance corresponding to that proposition actually pertains."?

    When did the circumstance of you not eating a grapefruit for breakfast occur?

    > If you eat a turkey sandwich, the mass of your body will increase.

    >Another prediction.

    It's a valid truth proposition. You seem to be getting hung with with "time". Try this counterfactual proposition:

    If Oswald didn't kill Kennedy, then someone else did.

    >To make it a proposition it would have to be something like: on those occasions in the past where I did eat a turkey sandwich, my mass increased. And that is true.

    Your revision doesn't contain a counterfactual condition.

    You're also dodging and weaving around how your theory of truth deals with counterfactuals. Everyday people have no trouble evaluating the propositions like "We would have been home by ten if the train had been on time" and "Tom would have cooked the dinner if Mary had not done so." Yet your theory of truth is impotent in addressing these propositions?

    Synthetic Facts

    I forgot this from my last comment.

    >>If you meant can an object be *entirely* green and *entirely* blue at the same time, the answer is obviously no because that's part of what the word "entirely" means and how colors work.

    >>How can you evaluate that using Ron's Theory of Truth?

    >By looking at the meanings of the words. It's the same way we can know that all triangles have three sides, because that is part of the definition of the word "triangle".

    ... and, as I stated: "Here we have a synthetic fact, completely in the mind, and with no correspondence in the objective world. Similarly, we know that "Bachelors aren't married". We know these truths a priori to any interaction with the objective world."

    So, tell me, what is "the circumstance corresponding to that proposition actually pertains" did you evaluate to determine the that the proposition "Bachelor's aren't married" is True?

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  11. > When did the circumstance of you not eating a grapefruit for breakfast occur?

    At breakfast, obviously.

    > You seem to be getting hung with with "time".

    Yeah, well, time is kind of an important thing in the world I live in.

    > If Oswald didn't kill Kennedy, then someone else did.

    True. Someone killed Kennedy. If it wasn't Oswald, then it was someone else. But that's not a very interesting observation because that's true of everyone, not just Oswald.

    > Your revision doesn't contain a counterfactual condition.

    That's right. Moving it straightforwardly into the past makes it a truth claim, not a counterfactual. If you want to make it a counterfactual, substitute a whole moose for the turkey sandwich.

    > You're also dodging and weaving around how your theory of truth deals with counterfactuals.

    I don't think so. Gandalf is a counterfactual. I think I tackled that one head-on.

    > Yet your theory of truth is impotent in addressing these propositions?

    Not at all. Gandalf was a wizard, no question about it.

    > we know that "Bachelors aren't married". We know these truths a priori to any interaction with the objective world."

    No, you only know that bachelors aren't married because you know the definition of the English word "bachelor". You do not have that knowledge a priori.

    > what is "the circumstance corresponding to that proposition actually pertains" did you evaluate to determine the that the proposition "Bachelor's aren't married" is True?

    I looked up the meaning of "bachelor" in the dictionary.

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