Episode 194: Alfred Tarski on Truth (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: So there's still the second half of that paper left, but we should probably just get on to the other ones which are commenting on Tarski's overall project. In the second half of Tarski's paper, he comments himself on his project. He kind of responds to some objections, and maybe those will come up as we're going through here. I think we've kind of established that he doesn't think that he's doing metaphysics. He doesn't think there are any metaphysical implications of what he's doing. But he thinks it's useful. He thinks it can be, even though it's not about everyday language that could be applied to at least scientific languages within a particular small field.

He sees what he's doing is kind of comparable to pure mathematics. You might not know how to apply that to anything, but it sure is impressive and probably applications come up eventually. So, yeah, let's get into the Hartry Field article, Tarski's theory of Truth from 1972. What are our reactions to that? What's the thesis of that? What's going on here? Why did we read it?

1:01 Wes: Well, Field is kind of pivoting off. Right. Some of the. His criticisms have something in common with our sort of gut reaction to, or at least my gut reaction to Tarski's definition of truth, where you're giving a list. I think essentially he's trying to say what motivated Tarski to do this. And it's really interesting to read a paper in which here's a sentence. In the early 1930s, many philosophers believed that the notion of truth could not be incorporated into a scientific conception of the world. I just think that's hilarious. So truth was philosophically problematic and Tarski wanted to sort of un.

Delegitimize it. It had a bad reputation at that time. And to do that he would have to define it in terms which did not reek of metaphysics at all, which is to say to define it in semantic terms. But not just any old semantic terms. Semantic terms which were clearly defined, which I don't think that Tarski thought denotes, for instance, was clearly defined. I think satisfaction was the one defined semantic term, as far as I can tell, because that's the one Tarski reduces everything to. And Field is going to say that reduction, it kind of parallels other attempts at reduction in philosophy and the sciences.

So for instance, the reduction of valence to the physical properties of atoms, except that it's very, in that case, it's very unlike them, it's artificial in a sense, it doesn't work in the way that a real reduction does does and it's not helpful.

2:39 Mark: So this was one of the papers in Blackburn's big book of essays on truth. So this is not just a random secondary source that we picked. This is an influential response and development of the idea. And what Field wants to say is that actually that whole idea, that concern with reduction and physicalism ultimately that they were concerned with back in the 30s, that's just kind of misconceived. And what Tarski is doing, he's trying to define a semantic notion, truth, in terms of non semantic notions. Is that right? Satisfaction is not. It's supposed to be a non semantic

3:21 Wes: notion, only well defined semantic notions. And satisfaction seems to be only the only one that's well defined according to Tarski.

3:29 Dylan: He's making a semantic definition, right?

3:32 Wes: Yeah.

3:33 Dylan: And so satisfaction is semantic.

3:36 Wes: So Field himself, for instance, is going to give sort of this parallel Scheme Tarski or Tarski prime, we could call it. What he does is he reduces the semantic notion of truth to three others. He reduces it to denoting for a name to denote something, what it means for predicate to apply to something, and what it means for a function symbol to be fulfilled by some pair of things. That, for Field, gives him his little parallel universe, the kind of thing that Tarski would not have liked because it employs semantic notions he does not like. And then he's going to compare that to Tarski's attempt to reduce it purely to the concept of satisfaction.

4:16 Mark: Field says on page 347, this is just the second page of the article. My contrary claim will be that Tarski succeeded in reducing the notion of to certain other semantic notions, but that he did not in any way explicate these other notions so that his results ought to make the word true acceptable only to someone who has already regarded these other semantic notions as acceptable. So again, it's only if you're a behaviorist do you care about completely getting rid of semantic notions. Because you say, oh, you know, that's like minds. We don't want to have minds.

Everything's supposed to be minds need to be reduced to the laws of physics. And in the same way, intentionality aboutness, you know, the properties of meaning that sentences have, those are weird. We need to somehow get rid of those. We need to get rid of all semantics and reduce it to something physical, non semantic. This is what confused me, because that's the way that Field characterizes it. But the way you were just saying Wes, and what we just read is, no, he actually does leave in this notion of satisfaction that that is still a semantic notion.

5:24 Wes: So it's not. So Field doesn't say non semantic. He says, no, undefined, reduce it to, only to very well defined semantic terms and denotation. And all that gets us into the thorny problem of correspondence theories and sentences corresponding to reality and all that stuff or names linking to objects in the world and all the philosophical problems that accompany that satisfaction is supposed to avoid that. That seems to be what Tarski thought, that it was not an undefined term,

5:57 Seth: what I believe Tarski thought he accomplished. There's a term that came up in Davidson, but we'll go ahead and introduce it now. Okay. There are two key semantic functions that underlie Tarski's definition of truth. The first is referring. The second is satisfaction. Referring is it's somehow how putting something in quotes and you say snow refers, you know, to snow, quote snow, unquote. Refers to snow. There's a fundamental relationship between the expression snow and snow, the thing snow or the fact of snow or something like that. So there's this referring relationship is different than satisfaction, it's different than predication.

Satisfaction is the relationship of saying that something that refers to satisfies a condition when that condition is expressed in terms of is P, right? X is P. So X is the thing that refers. P is P is the satisfaction condition. And if it's the case that X in quotes refers to X not in quotes and X is P, so X satisfies P, then you can say X is P is true. That's what this all boils down to, is that Tarski is trying to come up with a way of defining truth not in terms of something else that requires truth conditions. And so by characterizing truth as a predicate in this sentential format, X is P.

And that only in this format where you have predication, P is a property of X, that's the only way, or at least the most basic way. And Tarski says we start here and maybe we can extend it to other concepts and relationships later. And then he's trying to say that there's some fundamental non predication relationships that exist and there's some kind of. He doesn't want to say truth, but he says satisfaction in the one case and refer in the other.

8:27 Wes: Are you in field? Are you in Tarski?

8:31 Seth: This is what Tarski says. And what Field is saying is that yes, he succeeds in saying that truth can be sort of boiled down to these two other things of referring and satisfaction, but that those things stand in need of explication. And that's not. And he doesn't provide that. That was my reading of it.

8:51 Wes: So I think there's some confusion here because Field spends the first part of his paper characterizing his own Tarski prime version of Tarski's theory, which is unlike Tarski's theory, does make use of the concept of denotation or referring, I think, as you're putting it, and the concepts of predicates and the fulfilling of the function symbol. But he's doing that in a contrast to Tarski, where Tarski wants to boil things down just to satisfaction. Because Tarski doesn't like denotation or referral, he doesn't like predicates and things like that.

And he's going to try and Field is going to try and say, well, actually there's no point in doing what Tarski does. It doesn't really have any advantages over my reduction to these not well defined concepts like denotation. You're seeing Tarski's boiling things down to reference and satisfaction, where I think he's trying to get rid of as many semantic notions as possible. In the end, all we see is the word satisfaction.

9:59 Mark: I think, though, that field's analysis is that Tarski says he's just trying to do it in terms of satisfaction, but that he does illicitly bring in reference. The way we were giving examples about. Okay, let's look at the world. We've established that Snow is the thing we're filling in to X is white. And so we look at all the other things in the world. Well, doesn't that seem like. Even if we don't say the world is a metaphysical concept, we're just talking about the domain of whatever this is. You know, the quantifier is ranging over. It seems like we have the notion that a symbol stands for something in the domain. We have a notion of reference in there. Whether or not Tarski is acknowledging that or not, it's right there. And I think that's what Field is

10:45 Wes: pointing out, because I thought he was saying that the elimination of those semantic terms actually doesn't. It's artificial, an artificial reduction that doesn't accomplish anything in the field.

10:59 Seth: Paper, page 347, second and third paragraph. A philosopher who shared Popper's reaction to Tarski's discovery would presumably argue as what Tarski did was to define the term true using in his definitions only terms that are clearly acceptable. In particular, he did not employ any undefined semantic terms in his definitions. So Tarski's work should make the term true acceptable even to somebody who is initially suspicious of semantic terms. This contention has an initial plausibility, but I will argue that it is radically wrong. My contrary claim will be that Tarski succeeded in reducing the notion of truth to certain other semantic notions, but that he did not in any way explicate these other notions so that his results ought to make the word true acceptable only to somebody who has already regarded these other semantic notions as acceptable.

11:55 Mark: Yeah.

11:55 Wes: Okay.

11:56 Seth: The two semantic notions that. The two semantic notions that you have to regard as acceptable are referral and satisfaction. Referral or reference with respect to the constant or the subject. As Dylan said in the previous part, the noun, the subject, the that is the thing that there's a referential relationships, quote, snow unquote and snow without quotes. And then satisfaction is. Is white. Those are the two terms that Tarski boils truth down to. And what Field says is those things require further Explication, you may say, oh, well, if you think those two things are obviously clear, then yes, Tarski has succeeded in defining truth in terms of some fundamentally more primitive terms that are obvious and acceptable.

But Field says basically, no, I think he succeeded in getting down to that level. But those two terms, reference and satisfaction, require further explication. And then the Davidson paper goes further to say just even that whole project of trying to boil things down to more simple is ultimately going to fail because it's not about trying to define those simpler terms, but just the whole exercise of trying to define things in terms of other things will ultimately fail.

13:29 Wes: Yeah, I think I forgot about that very first part because I'm not sure where he makes good on that. And I think I was paying attention to other things and I'm just, well, I thought Tarski thinks he reduces everything to satisfaction, but Field is saying, no, I think Mark is right. The theory smuggles in other semantic notions. And in any case, satisfaction is not itself necessarily this very well defined thing in the first place.

13:55 Dylan: But isn't that why Field turns to denotes? I mean, his reformulation is explicit about bringing in denoting. That's what I understood Seth's formulation to be.

14:09 Mark: Can I ask Wes, you're the one who kind of guided us through the, hey, be careful. We're giving examples of semantic categories at the beginning of our discussion, and there's reference and there's satisfaction and there's definition. But be careful, because Tarski only, he thinks reference is suspicious, so he wants us to only base it on satisfaction. And I agree that when I look at the definition, I only see satisfaction in there. I don't see reference specifically pointed out, but I don't remember a passage in the Tarski paper where he says, and I don't trust reference. So where did you get that impression specifically? Do you know?

14:44 Wes: Notes here. I think I was probably just relying on Field's characterization because, yeah, Tarski doesn't come out and say what Field says about him exactly, which is, you know, I want to reduce everything to only the well defined semantic notions and satisfaction is the only well defined one. So that accusation is in the first paragraph where he says, or is it the second paragraph that Seth's just read, but definitions only terms that are clearly acceptable and particularly did not want to employ any undefined semantic terms. And yeah, and Tarski doesn't really explicitly talk about that. Exactly.

15:20 Mark: I think maybe the reason that you could say, think that reference is metaphysically problematic is because it sounds metaphysical when you just say, what is reference? It sounds like oh, this term is picking out something in the world, but just the way that I just qualified it before. Forget about in the world, just mean in the domain. So we, we're not saying what kind of domain it is. Could all be in your head. You could still have reference in that sort of setup. But that at least makes it sound like just when you defined what Tarski says, semantics is right.

It's the part of language that has to do with what the terms actually mean, how they actually, well, hook up with the world, as opposed to just their syntax, what their form is. So it just seems like semantics is just inescapably metaphysical. And I think that's Tarski's. I don't know if it's his accomplishment or just the worldview that he was working within was to try to avoid those metaphysical entanglements that he thought were so problematic. In the same way, in our last discussion, Carnap was saying, oh yeah, you can use all these different pieces of language and they don't actually have any metaphysical implications.

It's just that's the vocabulary you happen to be using when the whole vocabulary as a unit is serving some function. Well, in the same way, here we see Tarski is using semantic terms, but they're all. It's sort of its own domain.

16:45 Wes: So I found the place in Tarski, like the one clue that we have, I think he says on 351 in particular, we desire semantic terms referring to the object language. This is in the meta language to be introduced into the metalanguage only by definition. And then he talks about that these must be clear and unequivocal terms. This is sort of like Descartes clear and distinct ideas thing. So it is very vague. I mean, we just have that and then we have the fact that we end up with satisfaction in the definition. I think that's really all we have in Tarski and stuff.

17:21 Dylan: The other thing that we have is this move to a metal language.

17:27 Mark: Yeah, but I think none of the semantic notions were going to be in the object language, right? That whenever you say reference or satisfaction or anything, you're talking about a language, you're not allowing those in the object language ever.

17:38 Dylan: There are no semantic notions in the object language, or there are no semantic notions in the metal language.

17:42 Wes: In the object language, like the meta language is what you use to talk about the object language. And the meta language, by the way, includes the object language as a part of it.

17:50 Mark: So I'm not totally sure about that, but it seems that that's where you would have the problem with the liar paradox and stuff that whenever you start talking about sentences in the language that you're speaking in, then. So how would I say the word duck refers to those things that swim around unless I had emerged from the object language? You know, if I just actually use the word duck, maybe I am in fact referring to something, but I'm not talking about reference.

18:21 Dylan: I guess that's all I meant is that the move to a metal language is a way of trying to avoid reference.

18:29 Mark: Maybe. I mean, I think we're kind of making this up because now that I think about it, like, can't I say, oh, yeah, Joe is referring to the duck over there?

18:36 Dylan: I'm not saying that it's successful. I'm saying that that's part of the attempt to remove metaphysics from your claims of untruth is to cast it in a formal language. And one part of doing that for Tarski is setting up a meta language to strictly accomplish the formal aspects of the semantic relations in the language. In some funny way, it's making a model for the language. In that model is one that has complete enunciation of all of the rules within it. For Field, he tries to recharacterize Tarski Star in a way that tries to out Tarski. Tarski, right. He's trying to come up with a Tarskian way that actually succeeds, that does this kind of thing. Here is the characterization of a language that gives you the a truth condition

19:36 Mark: need to sort of correct something I just said, which is my trying to make sense of these things by reflecting on ordinary language. Of course, we've said it's not going to work because he's talking about technical formal languages. However, another thing wrong that I just said is Tarski makes it clear that this relation between object language and metalanguage is relative. So that you've gone up to the metalanguage to talk about the object language, but then you can use the metalanguage itself as an object. You can theorize about that language using a meta meta language.

So if I'm saying that reference can't be in the object language, well, you can make the meta language into the object language. So reference with regard to the language below it, I guess can be in an object language, but when it is in the object language, it is not actually talking about the reference of the meta language is talking about one, one layer lower.

20:34 Wes: So I did find, by the way, in Field More, he actually does quote Tarski from other Tarski papers to support some of These claims that we can't find in Tarski. He gives his own theory. T1 right field does, and he says basically TC, which is his truth characterization. His theory, not Tarski, reduces one semantic notion to three others. It explains what it is for a sentence to be true in terms of certain semantic features of the primitive components of the sentence, in terms of what it is for the name to denote something, what it is for a predicate to apply to something, and what it is for a function symbol to be fulfilled by some pair of things.

Sorry, I know, I've read that before. T1 he's going to say, explains truth in terms of primitive denotation and then the semantic, with the whole recursion thing, the semantic properties of complex expressions in terms of the semantic properties of primitive components. On 354 though, we get to where his system differs from Tarski's. So this is right at the beginning of the section 2. The kind of truth characterization advocated in the previous section differs from the kind of truth characterization Tarski offered. In one important respect, Tarski stated the policy I shall not make use of any semantical concept if I'm not able previously to reduce it to other concepts.

And this policy is flagrantly violated by T1. T1 being Field's theory. Not to get confused, T2 will be Tarski's theory. T1 utilizes unreduced notions of proper names denoting things, predicates applying to things, and function symbols being fulfilled by things. Tarski's truth characterizations, unlike T1 accorded with a stated policy, they did not contain any semantic terms like applies to or denotes. How did Tarski achieve this result? And then he's going to go on to say basically he did that list thing that we talked about. Basically you end up just talking about satisfaction and giving a list of all the sentences.

So to get at the whole list thing, let's just read on a little bit because this is just this very symbolic logicy.

22:40 Mark: Gonna be reading math for 10 minutes.

22:43 Seth: Bracket. Sideways. Bracket.

22:47 Wes: So this is page 365. What Tarski's definition of satisfaction tells us is this. For any name N, an object satisfies the sentential function x1 is n if and only if A is France and N is France. So the object A is France and then the name N refers to quote unquote France or A is Germany and N is Germany. And then you go through every single object in the language and you say that you give this big disjunction of every object in the language. That's the whole list thing. That's the whole reduction that he's going to criticize using valence. So is that clear?

As the general sketch of the argument Field says, look, here's my thing where I reduce my T1, where I use these primitive notions, semantic properties that are undefined. But Tarski wants to be able to reduce everything to non semantical concepts, which is weird because. Right. Satisfaction seems to be a semantic concept, but leave that aside. But by doing this whole list thing,

23:50 Dylan: I think you could drop the mic. It's totally clear.

23:56 Wes: Is there meta language for talking about sarcasm?

24:01 Mark: So this is why he's saying that, right? I was quoting Field before that Field was taking Tarski to be trying to get rid of semantical concepts altogether, not just reduce them to satisfaction, which is a well defined one. But he thinks even satisfaction goes away because it is only really defined by a list.

24:23 Dylan: So can we clarify something? Because this juxtaposition occurred also in the SEP article, which was the notion that Tarski titles his paper Semantic Conceptions of Truth. And in it he seems to be saying that the thing I need to do is to restrict a definition of truth. I can succeed in a proper definition of truth if I only use semantical notions. And then there seems to be the sense that he either a isn't actually doing that, that's not actually his what he's trying to accomplish, that he's trying to accomplish a non semantical notion of truth, or it's that he was deluded in that what he ought to have been doing is doing a non semantical notion of truth, because a semantical notion of truth actually brings in metaphysics.

And therefore if he was going to accomplish his true task, he would have called it a non semantical notion of truth, and he would have continued on along his direction, but more along the lines of what Field did.

25:30 Wes: So can I just read this quote from Field again? He is quoting from Tarski. All right, just want to make this clear. He's just quoting Tarski's own words. But it's a different paper. I shall not make use of any semantical concept if I am not able previously to reduce it to other concepts

25:46 Dylan: and not other semantical concepts.

25:48 Wes: So in other words, it's still a semantic theory of truth. It's just that these semantical concepts have been reduced or well defined, however you want to put it. Either they're well defined or they're reduced or whatever. It's not that they're not semantical, it's just that they're not thorny in the way that denotes as thorny.

26:05 Mark: They're metaphysically rooted in less problematic domains.

26:10 Dylan: Well, do you want to say metaphysically rooted or just defined?

26:14 Wes: They're rootless, really metaphysically ruthless.

26:18 Mark: Well, the way Field was saying it was that he was actually trying to metaphysically root it in physicalism. That again, that semantic concepts are mental concepts, even truth is a mental concept. And again, that sounds weird for people because they think truth and fact are the same thing, but fact is kind of the way the world is, or at least that's one way to put it. Whereas truth is a property of sentences. So it's something about the relation of mentality to the world.

26:49 Dylan: But you understand why a person might think that fact and truth are related in some ways, right? That you get to truth by understanding

26:57 Mark: the facts or you understand the fact because you have the truth.

27:02 Dylan: Yeah, but this gets to this distinction between whether truth is. It hinges on a metaphysical question or an epistemological question, which is sort of outside of these papers. But where's the real problem in understanding what truth is? And it seems like in Tarski and in Field, it has to do with we must purge truth of the metaphysical problem.

27:26 Wes: Well, I think he thinks he's. So the interesting. Mark, you just got us to section three here. And the whole motive, like, yeah, basically Field is trying to say, well, why? Why would you want to do what Tarski is doing? So this is the way Field thinks of it. So let's just talk about it in these terms. Why do you want to eliminate semantic terms? And yeah, it's his physicalism. He's thinking about reduction. He's thinking about the hope that say, biology and psychology and even chemistry can. Not even chemistry, but everything can be reduced to physics, basically.

And this, he says, is sort of a follow up to the idea that mechanics can explain everything, the idea that Newtonian mechanics can explain anything, which fell apart with the discovery of electromagnetic radiation. You're not going to explain things in terms of an ether or save mechanics as a universal explanation, no matter how hard you try. So this reduction, this desire to reduce, though he kind of doesn't get it in the sense that, say, if you want to talk about a physical reduction in the sciences, like with valence, where you say, okay, I'm going to look at.

I'm going to say valence can be reduced to the properties of atoms. That's like a real reduction with explanatory value. But the other way you could do that, says Field, is just exactly the way Tarski did it with truth. You could define valence in just the way he defines truth by giving a list. You could just give a list of all the elements and their valences. And that's a silly sort of reduction. That's basically what he's saying. It's not even though it's trying to save physicalism, there's something fundamentally anti scientific about it. It doesn't explain anything.

29:11 Dylan: It's a kind of enumeration.

29:14 Mark: Yeah. Do you have any further thoughts, Dylan, about how that analogy works as a physics thing? This is your opportunity. You're being invited.

29:24 Dylan: What do you mean by the analogy

29:26 Mark: to valence between Tarski's notion of truth as being fundamentally uninformative and a pre reduction notion of valence. In other words, now we know that valence is. Tell me if I'm getting this right, that we know that it is. Has a matter of the atomic number of the element in question and so the number of electrons that are spinning around. And so the. That's as far as I get. Complete the analogy. Just explain it a little better, Dylan.

29:54 Dylan: Mean valence describes the way in which an atom has its structure based upon the number of electrons in it.

30:04 Wes: It's the amount of electrons available for chemical bond formation, basically.

30:08 Mark: So that's what we understand now and we've successfully done the reduction to physicalism by coming up with that number of electrons and talking about electrons at all. Right. Whereas he's saying there was a long period before we had that model of the atom with a specific number of electrons that would then behave differently depending on how many it had. But, but we still noted that different elements behaved in systematic ways. And so just noting that there's a regularity without really understanding the mechanism of the regularity means you don't actually understand the phenomenon at all.

30:45 Dylan: Sure, sure. So it was early on, or the early days of chemistry that the notion of element was linked directly to these sort of ratioed combinations of materials that combine together in fixed ratios, which supported the idea that those elements were constituted of individual atoms. But the point being there that that notion of a chemical reaction that is occurring in those fixed ratios is a kind of maybe a phenomenological explanation and that you get an explanation of that in terms of valence. And I guess you would, of those individual atoms.

But I guess you would also make the next step that say valence really isn't very well explained. Right. Because the underlying explanation of that would be quantum mechanics. Right. And why are those particular electrons available? What are the laws underlying that. And then you have quantum mechanics. And then you have a question. Well, okay, so all those electrons are fermions, and they can only have two electrons in each shell in each energy state because of the Pauli exclusion principle. Well, why is that the case? I mean, doesn't it become a kind of, I don't want to say turtles all the way down, but a kind of.

Every time you come up with an explanation, then you can criticize that explanation as being merely phenomenological because there's something underlying that.

32:17 Wes: So the relevance here is that the Field is saying, well, even before you discovered that valence was related to the properties of atoms at all, you could have given a Tarskian definition. So he says, 362 to 363. It would have been easy for chemists late in the last century to have given a valence definition of the following form. For all elements and all N. The element has a valence N if and only if E is potassium and N is plus one, or E is sulfur and N is negative two. And then you just keep going through everything, keep going through every element.

And there's my reduction, but very different kind of reduction than the atom's reduction. So he goes on to say, this is like the big field takedown of Tarski on page the middle of page 363. But the methodology is not to resist A and B by giving lists like three. Don't worry about A and B. The methodology is to look for a real reduction. This is a methodology that has proved extremely fruitful in science. And I think we'd be crazy to give it up in linguistics. And I think we are giving up this fruitful methodology unless we realize that we need to add theories of primitive reference to T1 or T2 if we are to establish a notion of truth as a physicalistically acceptable notion.

In other words, he's arguing that his characterization, where he doesn't try and get rid of denotes or get rid of predicate, that's better. What Tarski's doing is not better because he's getting rid of those terms. Fields is better because he's trying to describe the mechanism. And so we need those terms if we're to think about the mechanism involved in truth. We can't just give them up. It'd be like giving up atoms and resorting to a list with valence. Isn't it like giving up quantum mechanics or fermions or. Yeah, we could keep going all the way down.

34:09 Mark: Field is not acknowledging this. Turtles all the way down. Thing that you're just referring to. He seems to sympathize like that. We do want to reduce these things to physicalism, which I think maybe is the thing Davidson is going to give up. But we'll see. But we just haven't done it yet. So don't pretend you've done it. In fact, what he has done, if he just gives up the pretension of reducing it to physicalism, is very useful in itself. In the same way that pre electron theory of valence, it was still very useful. Just a callback to a previous episode, right?

In Heraclitus the logos is the ratio. Why do certain chemicals combine in certain ratios? Well that's just the balance of the universe, man. Like okay, that's not a very, in some ways not very informative, but it can be applied practically in lots and lots of ways. So it's certainly nothing to sneeze at. And that's what he thinks, that we can have a very practically applicable self standing semantic vocabulary that isn't necessarily in a way that we understand yet reducible

35:11 Wes: to something more basic, but serve as the basis for what he calls psychological models and investigations in neurophysiology that will allow us to discover the mechanisms involved in reference. So they're fruitful in that sense, they're like models in science and they can lead us to certain sorts of investigation and experimentation which presumably we'll just have

35:35 Mark: to take his word for. Because I cannot see for the life of me how Tarski's theory as we have spelled it out, provides a useful avenue for investigation for ultimately figuring out

35:48 Wes: well no, not Tarski's theory, but a theory which doesn't give up on. So the way he puts it, this is near the very end and it's his kind of sum up. Our accounts of primitive reference and of truth are not to be thought of as something that could be given a philosophical reflection prior to scientific information. On the contrary, it seems like that such things as psychological models of human beings and investigations of neurophysiology will be very relevant to discovering the mechanisms involved in reference. The reason why accounts of truth and primitive reference are needed as in what field is doing?

Not what Tarski does, leaving in the concept of denotation, not trying to take it out. The reason why accounts of truth and primitive reference are needed is not to tack our conceptual scheme onto reality from the outside. The reason rather is that without such accounts our conceptual scheme breaks down from the inside. On our theory of the world, it would be extremely surprising if there were some non Physical connection between words and things. So physicalism, we need this for physicalism and reference. We need to use the concept of denotation if we want to do a true scientific reduction ultimately.

36:57 Dylan: But isn't that preserving some salient aspect of correspondence theory? I mean, even if it isn't correspondence theory, Right. It's sort of saying, if I'm going to speak about anything, I'm going to talk about anything true at all. I want to be speaking about the world, period. I shouldn't say that pejoratively. I mean, that seems to me perfectly sensible.

37:17 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I don't think Field talks specifically about that stuff. Unless I'm wrong, what you just quoted

37:24 Dylan: sounded to me like that's what he is saying.

37:27 Mark: So he's not the one that brings up Kripke, right? That's Davidson.

37:30 Seth: Yeah.

37:31 Mark: It just sounds stupid to say, oh, if we just learn some more neuroscience, then we'll understand reference. Like. No, that's exactly the hard problem of consciousness. It's a version of that coming in that the semantic level of explanation is just fundamentally different than the physical level of explanation. So at best, you know, you could talk about the relation between the two in terms of emergence or something like that, but you're not going to get the kind of reduction. It just seems obvious to me conceptually. It doesn't make sense that you would get the kind of reduction in the way that you would get from chemistry to physics.

38:01 Wes: Even if you thought that you could still believe that investigations into neuroscience and psychology could shed a lot of light on the concept of reference. I think, and I think that Davidson thinks so too, if we want to move to Davidson.

38:15 Mark: It only made sense to me just in Davidson's talking about Kripke, which was. I'm sure we've talked about this in, you know, either in our Kripke episode or other. Is what determines the reference of a word is some causal link, Right. It's the fact that this object not only, you know, caused my perception that then elicited that word, but socially is the thing that bumped into enough people enough times that they came up with a word to refer to that thing, which then I, in mouthing that word, am using that shared meaning. And so there's. It's a physical in that it is causal explanation for why reference is what it is, why words refer to what they refer to instead of something else. It's just the history of use.

38:56 Wes: Yeah, exactly. The whole causal history of the use of the word and then within the life of the individual, the way it's used to fix. Right. Remember that whole concept of fixing and then subsequent use from there, which still

39:09 Mark: doesn't make it sound like neuroscience is going to make that clearer. No, the causal, on a sort of social level and whatever the science that is, talks about the origins of language and the history of words. That's not physicalist either. Right. It's causal and that sounds physical, but it's not the language of physics, it's the language of social science.

39:29 Wes: I don't know. It's so weird that we've almost flipped positions. My gut feeling is that actually the more we know in the sciences, the more we can say about the causal theory. But I don't know.

39:41 Mark: I remember Seth messaging us how he thought the Davidson article was vastly superior, more philosophical than the other two articles. Can you start us, Seth? What did you find awesome about this? What is his point?

39:53 Seth: Well, there's very few logical symbols in it. That's a good start. No, I just felt like he clearly articulated what was at stake and what Tarski thought he was accomplishing and then clearly stated his objections. I think the key was that he just seemed to be a very clear writer, just a very good writer and a very clear thinker about what was at stake and his reaction to it. And I might also say concise, relative. Let me characterize this. So Davidson, the title of the paper is the Folly of Trying to Define Truth. And he's taking aim at what he calls the deflationists.

40:34 Wes: Quine and Horwich, mainly right.

40:36 Mark: But going back to Frege.

40:39 Seth: Right. So he's talking about the increasing popularity of minimalist or deflationist theories of truth, theories that hold that truth is a relatively trivial concept with no, quote, important connections with other concepts such as meaning and reality. I guess it's probably somewhat indisputable whether Tarski counts as a deflationist, but I think the point is to say that when Tarski says truth is just a simply semantic notion that is a function of predication that has these two other semantic notions underlying it, and meaning or significance or correspondence is not a critical part, that truth is trivial in that respect.

That's what Davidson's pointing at. And he says, I sympathize with the deflationists. The attempt to pump more content into the concept of truth are not for the most part appealing, but they're wrong in their conclusion, even if they're mostly right in what they reject. So what the deflationists are essentially saying is that there's no point in trying to come up with a universal concept of truth. Truth is relatively trivial. You can think of it as trivial, for example, it's localized to specific languages or grammars. It has certain characteristics that don't allow you to make a universal conception or a grandiose kind of statement about what truth is.

He says, I'm sympathetic with that, but the trivialization of truth is also unacceptable. So ultimately, Davidson's paper comes out as saying, like, I'm sympathetic with trying not to make truth out to this grandiose thing, but at the same time trivializing it doesn't work. And he kind of throws in this thing at the end where he says, let me just point to what I would like to say if I actually did the work instead of writing this paper. But his clear explication of the challenge, the biases, or as Dylan would say, the conceits and the sort of strengths and weaknesses on both sides, I thought was very good.

So if you're asking me why I like the Davidson paper, that's why I liked it.

42:43 Mark: And I guess his relation to Tarski is kind of like what Fields was, is that he's trying to follow in Tarski's tradition, but he's trying to clarify

42:53 Wes: what that means, except that he's rejecting the idea that we need to define truth in the first place before we explore it. Right. We just.

43:02 Mark: Isn't he actually attributing that to Tarski? We just said Tarski only finds truth within a given language. He has no general definition of truth. And that's what Davidson is saying. Look, people following Tarski have sort of lost track of that. They take his thing to be, oh, I've defined truth. But Tarski himself said, I'm not defining truth, I'm defining truth within a lang, a specific technical language that is closed. That's not like it's a local.

43:27 Seth: Just like Seth was saying, defining truth conditions, not truth, but truth conditions or truth satisfaction.

43:34 Wes: Whether it's Tarski or people who have been used and misused and abused Tarski. I think what's really interesting here is this rejection of the idea that it's important to define our terms before we have a discussion. He says we still fall for the freshman fallacy that demands that we define our terms as a prelude to saying anything further about them. And this is exactly right. That's sort of the pseudo scientific sophomore thing to do. And you see it in training manuals for corporations and scientific papers. And I've seen so much of it in my life, and it's never actually useful.

So what David's saying is that. Well, actually, concepts like truth and knowledge and belief and action, all that stuff, these are basic primitive concepts, and they're really the grounds for having any other concepts at all. They are foundational in some way, and truth is undefinable. But that doesn't mean that we can't investigate it and learn about it. What we have to do is we have to relate the concepts of truth and belief and desire and cause and shed light on it in that way. We don't start out with a definition. We start out with a rough intuition and then investigate its relations to other concepts.

44:46 Seth: So it should be noted that Davidson has a bigger project in this paper, too, that he's taking aim not just at Tarski, but also the whole notion of defining truth, whether you do it in terms of correspondence or coherence or pragmatic conceptions of truth. What's fun about Davidson is his rhetoric, the way that he essentially plays the game to begin with, but also simultaneously expands the scope of the conversation. So there's a short conversation where Tarski starts off saying, this is how Aristotle defines truth and falsity. And it's problematic for these reasons.

Davidson comes back and says, no, actually, the Aristotelian formulation seems to me to be superior to Tarski's formulations in the three different ways that Tarski did it over the course of a number of years. And I think that rhetorical flourish, which sort of takes the steam out of the Tarski project. And then he pivots immediately to talking about correspondence. You know, he ties Tarski to correspondence theory as opposed to coherence and pragmatic theories of truth. It's an excellent example of how to write about philosophy in a way that's intelligent but also playful.

And that's another thing that I liked about it quite a bit.

46:06 Dylan: One thing that he is trying to do is disabuse other philosophers of the notion that you can separate meaning from truth. On 275, he refers to a list of philosophers, some of whom I know, some of whom I don't. Dummett, Putnam, Soames, following Wittgenstein and Grice, believe that an account of meaning can be made to depend on a notion of assertibility or use, which does not in turn appeal to the concept of truth. So he says, my hope lies in the opposite direction. I think the sort of assertion that is linked to understanding already incorporates the concept of truth.

We are justified in asserting a sentence in the required sense only if we believe the sentence we use to make the assertion is true. And what ultimately ties language to the world is that the conditions that typically cause us to hold sentences true constitute the truth conditions, and hence the meanings of our sentences. So there's a kind of bootstrapping that's going on with Davidson, which to me makes him very appealing to my pragmatic notions. But he's not a strict pragmatist. In a way that's typically characterized. Right. That associates truth is sort of whatever we end up with, except in a qualified sense.

It means that he would agree with that up to a point. Right. I use the word bootstrapping this nice, you know, saying, well, look, I can't define truth by itself, and I can't define it without meaning, but I shouldn't even be trying to do that. Truth and meaning and its relationship to the world, all those things are all tied up together. It's kind of silly even to be trying to disgorge any one of those terms and stand on the island of only one of them for fear that the others are going to sully my philosophy. In fact, I need to hold them all together all at once.

And yes, it's going to be. There's a kind of way in which it's going to be messy, but that's the only way in which you maintain the richness that will actually get you what you want.

48:06 Mark: Yeah. So like Field, he sees semantics as this autonomous domain, seemingly, where all the terms sort of refer to each other. But Davidson is even more explicit that there's no reason to hope that we could reduce it to physicalism or something like that. There's no reason to expect, as he says, that you'd be able to define basic terms. I mean, how much more basic than reference or truth can you get in terms of more basic terms? Like, the thing that you do to understand them is to define the basic terms in terms of each other. Other is to understand the relations between them. And so that's the same thing Field was saying that Tarski was ultimately doing that, you know, whether Tarski knew it or not or admitted it or not, what he was doing is finding the relation between truth and reference and satisfaction, as opposed to basing it on something more basic than those.

48:53 Wes: Yeah, there's a lot of parallels between the Davidson and the Field because it leads him to say, you know, again, we can do something that's more like the sciences here. We can, by not simply trying to define the terms up front, but we can treat a primitive notion, say, of denotation as a kind of theory or model, and then test It So he says on 276, I hope I'm about to read the same place that you're excited about. Now I want to describe what I take to be a fairly radical alternative to the theories I've been discussing and with unseemly haste dismissing.

What I stress here is the methodology I think is required rather than the more detailed account I have given elsewhere. The methodology can be characterized on the negative side by saying it offers no definition of the concept of truth or any quasi definitional clause, axiom, schema or other brief substitute for a definition. The positive proposal is to attempt to trace the connections between the concept of truth and the human attitudes and acts that give it body. The methodological inspiration is the sciences, where we can take one or more undefined concepts and then prove that any model of such a theory has intuitively desired properties, that it is adequate to its designed purpose.

50:07 Dylan: The last sentence in the last full paragraph.

50:10 Wes: Yeah, why don't you read the rest of that?

50:11 Seth: Yeah.

50:11 Wes: Since you're.

50:13 Dylan: We cannot demand a precise indication of how to do this. Finding a useful method for applying the theory is an enterprise that goes along with tampering with the formal theory and testing its correctness as interpreted. This is the back and forth is you have a theory, you have a way of interpreting the world and then you test it against the world. This sounds very, very, very pragmatic in that respect, that sort of scientific back and forth.

50:40 Wes: We've had these discussions before where we've had linguistic philosophers who want to be very deflationary about philosophy. Oh, it's meaningless. Oh, it's this and that. And my argument was always, well, actually these are models. Like these theories are models and they may not be testable in a typical way as per the empirical sciences, but they. This is not. By the way, I'm not saying Davidson is talking about this, but I'm just relating it to past conversations. But they are, you know, they might be testable phenomenologically or through conceptual analysis.

And that's where I think some of this whole Tarskian, remember the grumpy anti philosophy stuff is not quite on base. I think in fact we can have philosophical theories and we can subject them to useful testing and examination in various ways and so on and so forth. But I think Davidson here is thinking more about ultimately about the sciences. I think from what I recall him

51:32 Mark: ending up with Davidson says on 265, Even if we were persuaded the concept of truth cannot be defined, the intuition or hope remains that we can characterize Truth using some fairly simple formulas. What distinguishes much of the contemporary philosophical discussion of truth is that though there are many such formulas on the market, none of them seems to keep clear of fairly obvious counterexamples. So, I mean, it sounds like he's sharing Tarski's disdain for philosophical theories of truth, and he's trying to be sort of neutral, trying to give some kind of.

Just because Davidson starts off the paper by saying, I don't buy correspondence theory, I don't buy coherence theory. I think these are all adding something extra, which I remember William James in our Meaning of Truth episode, specifically saying, of course, I'm not arguing that, you know, he could use the example the sentence snow is white is true if and only if snow is in fact white. I think that's not enough. I think you gotta add, you know, something about the mechanism of how that actually works and how, you know, he took it as epistemological as how we actually go about confirming that something is true.

52:38 Dylan: How do you judge that? The snow is white?

52:41 Mark: Yes, exactly. There has to be extra content there.

52:44 Seth: How do you even know what white is?

52:46 Wes: You're blowing my mind.

52:48 Mark: You just start the discussion by saying, this is what I mean by white.

52:54 Wes: What I mean by white is all the objects that are white. Yeah, Mark, he says assertibility, correspondence and coherence are actually not as so much theories as I was thinking of them, but as substitutes for definitions. They reflect the definitional urge. And I think he thinks the causal theory of reference is the one that is more on the track of a theory or a model.

53:17 Dylan: Yeah, you just mentioned this definitional urge in that section where he calls it a freshman fallacy. He points back to the Socratic desire of sort of analyticity, of saying what you mean and defining your terms and stuff like that, and putting aside whether or not that's a satisfactory rendering, that definitional urge where you say, well, I don't understand this. What does it mean? I got to define it. He's essentially saying that if you're going to define something, you have to remember that it is provisional and contextual and is tied to other things. And that's okay, you know, it's not the end of the world. Right. Not only is it not the end of the world, you're not going to be able to talk about the world. You're not going to be able to do the work that you need your theory to do unless those definitions are tied to one another in important ways. That's the work that it has to do.

54:09 Mark: I Like how Davidson says at the beginning, just this is how philosophical theorizing works. When the concept of truth is the focus of your attention, then you worry about it, but you pretend to understand it. When trying to cope with knowledge or belief or memory perception, we come across the same puzzling strategy. David Hume and others who forget their skepticism about the external world when they formulate their doubts concerning the knowledge of other minds. When a philosopher is troubled by the idea of an intentional action, he would be happy if he could analyze it correctly in terms of the concept of belief, desire, and causality.

And he does not, for the moment, worry too much about those at least equally difficult concepts. If memory is up for analysis, the connections with belief, truth, causality, and perhaps perception constitute problem. These further concepts are pro tem taken to be clear enough to be used to clarify memory if only the connections could be got right.

54:57 Wes: Yeah, he starts out seeming to make fun of that, but that's actually the approach he endorses.

55:02 Mark: It's so good that we just covered the other Davidson article on the very idea of the conceptual scheme, because we can kind of, for this specific way, maybe you can put together why he thinks that knowledge and truth are related. Meaning and truth have to be related.

55:18 Seth: Right.

55:18 Mark: We said that essential to the concept of meaning is the ability to translate, you know, at least in theory, that you could. If you meet somebody who's speaking a foreign language, figuring out that their speech is meaningful at all is really the same procedure as trying to get a handle on translating it. And in order to do either of those things, you have to assume that the person is telling the truth most of the time, or at least, you know, telling the truth as they see it. Most of the time you can't figure out if they're pointing to a ball and say whom. You have to assume that they mean ball or something round or something. There might be other ways that they carve up the world, but they can't be lying. Like, if they were lying about everything, you could never translate anything. Like, they couldn't understand each other. So truth and meaning are tied right there.

56:09 Wes: Yeah. I think the idea too is that to know the meaning of something is just to know all the ways it can be used in sentences that are true. I think that's the basic connection. But Mark. Yeah, the other important connection is this idea that he has that his theory of charity. I think it is where we make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimizes agreement, which is to say we Assume that most of what people say is true and in fact it is. And we have to do that to make sense of things.

56:41 Mark: So by insisting that meaning is relevant to consider in a theory of truth, you know, he's following sort of the ordinary language philosopher, later Wittgenstein kind of thing. Because, like Tarski, if you say, I'm going to, in fact invent fake languages, so I don't have to worry about the difference between sense and reference. I don't want to worry about meaning in the sense of the different connotations of word by have. I only want to worry about what things are pointed to by the word. I only want to care about the reference part of, you know, what we think of ordinarily as meaning.

And so I'll create a semantically transparent language where we can never be confused about what's being referred to, because every word only refers to one thing. And so Davidson is, you know, following the tradition that has abandoned that project to say no, you have to actually care about the sense part of meaning. You have to care about the connotations and the different ways of getting at something and not just the referent itself. You can learn nothing interesting, nothing philosophically interesting about meaning if you just ignore the sense half of it.

It might be too strong, but I

57:44 Dylan: think we've done a good job, or

57:46 Mark: at least we're re energized by getting to turn partly away from Tarski. Yeah. So what.

57:51 Unknown speaker: What do you.

57:53 Mark: Let's get some.

57:54 Seth: It's a common rhetorical arc on the partially examined life where we read three things and the third one is the most interesting, but we spend way too much time on the first one setting it up.

58:07 Wes: Well, I mean, I actually thought, like, finally, not just vaguely understanding Tarski because he's referred to so much, but actually getting deep into it for some reason. I just got into it in a way I didn't expect.

58:20 Seth: Agreed. Agreed. I think I came to UT as an analytic guy. The past is shrouded in mystery for me. But are you Darth Sidious?

58:29 Mark: Seth?

58:31 Seth: It just, you know, I definitely had a continental conversion while I was there. But, you know, these names, there's this narrative in history and experience that's associated with these names. Quine, Tarski, Frege, Grice, Austin, Strawson, Wittgenstein. Of course. Right. You know, Russell, and being wrapped up in these projects and this arc of the problems that were being posed and responded to and solved, there's a seductive element. You get caught up. Right. You get caught up in trying to Figure out. I have my own little separate document here where I was trying to figure.

I needed to look at the quotation marks around Snow. Right. Snow refers to snow and is white and all these kinds of things. Like, it's the seduction of scientific inquiry, but without the connection to the physical world that grounds science. I mean, ironically, right. That they're having a conversation about what the relationship is between sentences in the world. And it's that idea that where physics and the other physical sciences are creating mathematical formulations of the way in which physical objects interact with each other, that they're trying to emulate that.

And it's seductive. You want to be the person that finds the law or the principle or the axiom that describes the way the world behaves, but you're not doing it for the way the world behaves in a physical sense, in the same. A causal sense. And it's that level of breakdown, but it's seductive.

1:00:09 Mark: Yeah, I'll admit I got sucked into this whole side of philosophy as well and was downloading. Oh, he talks about Horwich as a follow of Tarski, who was very, you know, upfront about being an advocate of the deflationary theory of truth. And so I was looking at his book and was looking at some other Davidson papers because Davidson has done stuff that has more logical symbols in it and was very much more directly influenced by Tarski. So he's kind of writing this whole thing as very much a Tarski acolyte of sorts. So I'm not saying we're going to do a bunch more episodes on this we should definitely not do, but like just understanding now what normative semantics is like, that I just didn't know what is he talking about?

This is semantic theory. And I just had to look up what that actually meant, that it's. So it's different. Right. What you normally think of semantics might be as part of linguistics, that would be descriptive semantics. How do people actually refer to stuff? Well, this is normative. It's logical. It's like normative grammar versus, you know, in other words, the rules of grammar you learn in grade school versus descriptive grammar, how people actually talk, which is what linguists are concerned with. So just the fact that there is a thing called normative semantics was a surprise to me.

I just did not. I had blocked out enough of this part of my education that I only remembered very vaguely. And I really did think of Tarski as exactly the deflationary version of truth. In other words, oh, the sentence snow is white is true if and only if snow is white, that's all there is to it. Or the way Frege puts it, look, in my logical symbolism, if you want to write snow is white or you want to write it is true that snow is white, that's the same symbol. Adding is true adds nothing. And for various reasons, Tarski is actually not a deflationist, but it's barely worth going into.

I mean, what.

1:02:02 Wes: Yeah, he puts that in his polemical remarks. We don't have to discuss why, but he says, no, you can't actually eliminate, say, for universal statements about sentence types. All consequences of true sentences are true. There's no elimination of true for such sentences. So it simply is not the case that you can eliminate the truth predicate.

1:02:22 Mark: Yeah, you can't get rid of the quotes if you haven't actually given it in quotes in the first place. I like the example that he gave. The first sentence that Plato wrote is true. Like there's an example, but we don't know what the first sentence that Plato wrote is. So you can't just say. You can't remove the is true from that like that. It would be an open quantifier anyway. So this is some cool stuff. I think we could definitely just. The deflationary theory of truth itself. I'm sure that'll come up again, you know, as an alternative to the correspondence and the coherence theory, and we're going to address those globally very soon after this when we talk with Simon Blackburn, who is the guy that really called our attention to all this stuff. He edited a big Oxford book, collecting all these papers, other closings.

1:03:07 Wes: I think that's it for me.

1:03:09 Dylan: Me, too.

1:03:10 Mark: Well, next time, before we talk to Blackburn, there were two other papers, one by J.L. austin, one by P F Strawson. Nice to return to those analytic authors. They're not as technical as what we've just covered at all. They're both from 1950, they're in direct conversation with each other, and they're both called truth. So we're going to talk about just those two papers next time, and then we're going to get to Blackburn. So you should. Yeah. Between those. These three visits, and maybe go back and listen to our William James episode where we talk, you know, about Rorty and about different.

The pragmatist versions of these. Between those four episodes, I think we'll give a fairly well rounded version of this. But if you think we're really missing something, why don't you go chime in@pre partiallyexaminedlife.com. you can comment on the blog post itself or or follow us on Facebook or Twitter and point things out to us that way. Email us@pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com follow us on LinkedIn. Come to our don't come to our homes. But yeah, thanks for listening through this very you're a special kind of person if you got to the end of this episode, I think truly yeah, sweet.

Our closing song is In Vino Veritas by the band Sunspot. I interviewed Mike Huberty, the singer on Nakedly Examined, music number 64. Check it out at nakedlyexaminemusic.com I also wanted to announce that while there is not a follow up episode to this discussion, there is another piece of bonus content that will go up within the week after this episode. Going up Wes Alwan talked with friend of the podcast Bill Youmans, whom you'll remember from our Lysistrata episode about the Shakespeare play the Tempest is the first in a series of discussions Wes will be doing about literature and film.

Maybe will be eventually made into its own podcast, but for the foreseeable future the only way to listen to those will be to become a partially examined Life Citizen or $5 a month Patreon Supporter. Go to partiallyexaminedlife.com support if you want to know how to do that and this series does not yet have a name. If you want to send us suggestions the Alwanist who knows Good night everybody.

1:05:17 Wes: Good night.

1:05:18 Seth: Good night.

1:05:20 Unknown speaker: In vino,

1:05:24 Mark: in vino

1:05:27 Unknown speaker: the drunk man's words are the sober thought. A little bit of true serum in the salt, Another round you're all tell me the secrets of your soul confess your sins and let go I love you more when you lose control then you can call me when you're messed out of your mind there's something I can't get behind. You finally say the words you've always wanted to when you bit so rightly you do and there's nothing to tell but the truth. The woods come fast with a wedge of line in moderation's just another waste of time. Another round you're on the road tell me the secrets of your soul confess your sins and let go I love love you more when you lose control then you can call me when you're messed out of your mind that's something I can get behind.

You finally say the words you always wanted to know you're so much more fun when you get crushed cause you don't lie to me when you're drunk. You're much more interesting on your third glass of wine? Your honest flavors always come out of the B? It's a boss in a sacro? Or your friend in the potter cherry? The truth is you ain't no girl scout?

1:08:16 Mark: When the skeleton.

1:08:44 Unknown speaker: Tell me the secrets of your soul? Confess your sins and let go? I love you more? When you lose control? Then you can call me? When you're messed out of your mind? That's something I can't get behind? You finally say the words you always wanted to? When you miss sobriety, you do? And you can call me? When you mess out of your mind? That's something I? I can't get behind? If I just say the words you always wanted to? It's so much more fun when you get lost? Envino Paradise? In be no?

1:09:59 Mark: In be no.