Episode 195: Truth-The Austin/Strawson Debate (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 195 is again, what is truth? We'll be discussing two articles in the ordinary language philosophy tradition. They both have the title of simply Truth. They're Both written in 1950 for the same conference, and one is by J.L. austin. Responding to it is by P F Strawson. For links to both these articles and other information, Please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, the facts about which do not reside as objects in the world in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:37 Seth: This is Seth Paskin satisfying the condition of being in Austin, Texas.

0:42 Wes: This is Wes Alwan on a mat in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:47 Dylan: It is true that this is Dylan Casey in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:51 Mark: Oh, you are one cool cat, Wesley. So this was sort of a last minute insertion of an episode as we discussed last time. Next time we plan on having Oxford University Simon Blackburn on, because he has written a book called On Truth, which kind of goes through the history and the different positions within that. And as a result of that, we read Alfred Tarski for last time, representing, let's just say the tradition of early Wittgenstein of logical positivism, of just the general urge to formalize. Whereas these folks, I was saying, are in the tradition of ordinary language philosophers, in the tradition of later Wittgenstein.

And you know, we just had one on JL Austin, episode 186 just recently. This paper is five years before the how to Do Things with Words lectures. And Strawson we've also hit in our Free will episode, but not for a long time. And I think unlike the Austin, the Strawson had very little to do with what we talked about before in terms of Strawson. So I would not have put predicted his view. But yeah, they both are working kind of within the ordinary language tradition. So in other words, rather than thinking about truth as a metaphysical entity, it's kind of how do people use the word true?

And what can we learn from that?

2:03 Wes: Yeah, so we're into a sort of debate about deflationary theory and whether the correspondence theory of truth makes sense. And Austin is a proponent for a certain kind of what Strawson will call purified correspondence theory. And Strawson doesn't like the correspondence theory at all.

2:22 Mark: Right. They both seem to have kind of a relation to the deflationary theory, sort of like Tarski did that the deflationary theory is again to say that the cat is on the mat. And it is true that the cat is on the mat. That those actually just mean exactly the same thing. There's no addition whatsoever. And I think both of the authors that we read today don't think that's quite true, but still don't think that to add it is true that as a whole extra metaphysical dimension or anything like that.

2:52 Wes: Yeah. I think Strawson Wright would say there's a performative sense to the is true in the sense of giving one's affirmation or assent or something like that.

3:02 Mark: Yeah.

3:03 Dylan: Wasn't Austin the performative guy that we talked about ironically?

3:07 Wes: Yeah.

And he's taking a hard stance against Strossen's performative stance.

3:12 Dylan: Yeah. I didn't do any follow up reading on whether or not this discussion continued, except to know that this was known as the Austin Strawson debates and I didn't know if it continued on for years with them refining their points of view or not.

3:24 Wes: Mark, do you know if this is part of an ongoing back and forth of papers or.

3:28 Mark: I don't think so. I mean, I know that within this sequence the Austin came first, but Austin himself is referring to another paper that we did not read. In fact, I could not even find it online by Strawson from 1949, one year earlier, also called Truth.

3:44 Wes: Right.

3:44 Mark: So he's picking a fight. And so I had to get a little information. I think Strawson kind of reiterates his point well enough that we didn't have to read this earlier paper. But it did help that I just looked at some secondary sources which were describing, you know, what is Strawson's overall theory, which is, as you said, when I say it is true that the cat is on the mat or the cat is on the mat in quotes is true. That's different from saying the cat is on the mat, full stop. Not in that I'm adding additional information, but that I'm doing something else in a conversation with it. Why would I say that? Because maybe you're denying it. You say, I, I don't think the cat is on the mat. Hey, it is true that the cat is on the mat. The cat is on the mat. Like that would be actually the same way. Just emphasizing the is. Those would mean the same thing.

4:31 Wes: Yeah, just a way of saying you agree with someone. Really. This is not something Strawson himself spends a lot of time talking about. He's more focused on debunking Austin's theory of what it is to say something is true.

Yeah.

4:45 Dylan: Especially as it's tied to facts or

4:47 Wes: states of affairs, actually, which I did

4:50 Mark: see in Austin a lot of the nuance that we saw in how to do Things with words in that, you know, he mentions performatives toward the end. And I think what we reached in the end of how to Do Things with Words is that, yes, we started out by considering things like I promise and talking. That sounds really different than a descriptive statement. But then by the end of that book, it was like, no, no. Even when I make a descriptive statement, I'm still doing something. I'm still performing an act, a move in a language game. And maybe this particular act is a descriptive act.

But Austin warns us that not everything that looks like a description really is a description. And he has some weird things that we can point to that. Like if you make a claim in geometry, he says, that's actually not a statement. It's not the same language game, certainly. And he never uses the term language game. So this is again, an imposition. But it's an easy way to interpret what Austin is doing. But it's a different enterprise, you know, to pull from the carnap that we talked about a couple episodes ago. Maybe it's a different domain specific technical vocabulary.

When you say this geometric axiom is true versus this statement about the cat being on the mat is true, that those are just. Even though they both use the word true, it actually doesn't mean the same thing.

6:06 Wes: Should we start at the beginning of Austin?

6:09 Seth: I will try to refrain from expressing large amounts of disdain and

6:17 Dylan: nay, shall we say contempt.

6:18 Seth: Yes, yes, contempt. I mean, I can remember being in school and these were the patron saints of the analytic philosophy movement, the ordinary language. Looking back at it now, I mean, that Austin paper, it's terrible. I mean, it's terribly written. It's unclear. He says sentences where he'll talk about six different qualifiers. It's one of these things where I'm like, wow, somebody got into a position where people felt like they had to take what this guy said seriously. And at least in this debate, it felt to me like Strawson at least was able to articulate his criticisms of Austin seem pretty devastating.

But at least he's articulating a position clearly and giving arguments in favor. Whereas, I mean, Austin, I was shocked at how bad it was, particularly after how to do things with words, which is not well written either, but at least gets a point across. And maybe in Austin, there are two or three points that you can kind of pull out, but I'm scratching my head, wondering where this guy got the authority that he got, and why he's such a major figure. I'm at a loss.

7:21 Wes: I feel like I corrupted you, Seth, by saying at some point, sending a note to you guys saying, these papers seem pretty far in the psychoanalytic. Psychoanalytic. In the analytic philosophy. Seriously, the analytic philosophy weeds. But as usual, going over them the second time, I'm actually became interested. And actually, I thought Austin was actually the easier, the far easier of the two papers. I mean, Seth, like you, when I first got to grad school at the University of Texas, well, probably unlike you, I had zero background in analytic philosophy.

And I was of a sort of purified continental tradition, but not contemporary continental or recent continental. So to me, there were two things in the world, just mind and matter. And that's what I wanted to talk about. And analytic philosophers talk about neither of those things. Well, they sort of do talk about matter, but mainly they talk about language. And I do not know what that is. I do not know where that fits in. And neither do they really. All this talk of propositions and sentences and statements, a lot of it's a hedging of bets about what sorts of entities we're talking about, which we'll get into with Austin here shortly.

Because the first part of this paper is an attempt to say, well, what is it we are predicating is true of? Is it sentences? Is it what he calls statements? And then what exactly do we mean by a statement? So somehow, after doing enough episodes on the podcast, I've acclimated well enough. And it's scary. I mean, it really is genuinely scary. Now I sort of understand the language that they're speaking and I don't know

9:06 Dylan: and why they're talking about language all the time.

9:08 Wes: Good thing or a bad thing?

9:09 Dylan: Bad.

9:10 Seth: But, yeah, look, I get it. Here's where I think the kind of perversion happened. I think early on in the 20th century or turn of the century, the 20th century, it was this idea that. And this was what episode was, Tractatus number seven or something like that. I don't even remember. So philosophy has just been a giant series of mistakes. Talking past each other. We're not being careful the way we use language. And language itself creates the illusion of problems where there are none. So all we have to do is get clear about language and we'll get clear about everything else.

So that thesis goes through a number of iterations, and at some point, I think people finally abandoned it. But at the point that these guys are writing, that problem is still alive. In the sense of philosophy will be essentially more like science. Or really, philosophy is meaningless. And what we should really be focusing on is undergirding science or justifying the scientific enterprise to, okay, well, that's not exactly working. That's not exactly what's going on. But we still think we can take some kind of quote, unquote, I mean, look at the name of it, analytic philosophy, suggesting that what they're doing is analysis against some kind of commonly accepted methodology or whatever.

And it's a bunch of just constant circle jerking. And many of these people, most of them, I think, are very unclear about how language actually works and don't have strong foundations in grammar and other things. So we get fixated on this idea that the simplest sentence, the most declarative sentence, X is Y. If you did a search on X is Y in, like, the academic database, whatever, how many billions of instances, right? They're saying something to the effect of, well, if we can figure out how X is Y accurately or inaccurately reflects the world or can be assessed and judged by people, well, then we'll figure something fundamental out about.

About the way that language and the world work together, and then we'll go and be able to build something else off of it. And that project never worked. It was doomed from the start. So this is just what we're reading here is just the latest iteration at that time, contemporary iteration, of trying to work through that particular problem. And I gotta say, it's just not a very disciplined approach. There are writers in the tradition who are much more disciplined. But, I mean, when you just. The kind of cavalier attitude that comes across in Austin's paper just made me angry.

11:42 Wes: Wow.

11:44 Mark: It's interesting that Austin was talking, since this is a colloquy, right? A conference. This is professionals talking to each other, right? This is not like the other Austin that we read lectures to his students. So we have to actually slow down and explain everything in detail. This is, I think, why this seems very offhand to you. Let me just throw out the couple of points, right? I suggested this episode. I had pulled these papers, along with the Tarski and the Field and the Davidson out of the compilation of papers, which is quite long. It has way more than these five in it.

It's many, many essays that Blackburn had put together before actually writing his book on truth, the Oxford Collection of Readings on Truth. So I pulled these all out potentially to read for last time, to kind of get a synoptic view of the topic. And it was clear, just from getting into Tarsk no, we needed to actually treat these in detail. But yet I looked at these two enough to make me think, like, oh, these actually might be more interesting than the Tarski and Field debate that we read about last time. And a couple of things that jumped out at me were, as has been said here, that Austin starts by asking, what is the thing that is true or false?

And he actually doesn't like. I mean, of course, we think that it's not just a string of words in terms of a sentence written on a page. Right? Because you need. Maybe you can imagine Austin is going to say, no, you need like a situation. Just saying the cat is on the mat. Like, what the hell cat are you talking about? What mat are you talking about? What situation is this being? So there at least has to be something more than just the words spelled out on the page. And so just Austin, in keeping with what you would think, given what he said in our last episode about him, is.

Comes down to. It's the utterance. So I thought that was pretty damn cool. Like, that seems to just completely turn the whole idea of logic where the fundamental things that are true and false are just these propositions. Propositions are timeless entities. They are floating out in the ether. They could be spoken by their thoughts in the mind of God, you know, but he just. He even refers to proposition as a term of art. That was the thing that really sparked my interest in Austin and made me want to keep reading.

13:56 Wes: Yeah, well, we should say more about that, because it's the. Right. Like you said, Mark, it's a sentence or an utterance. Ultimately, he's going to settle on something. He calls the statement as the thing that is true or false. And the statement is what Strawson calls a speech episode. So, for instance, normally, I think with analytic philosophy, we're used to thinking in terms of someone saying, well, it's the proposition which is true or false, and the proposition is not the actual episode of me stating the proposition. So if the proposition is that the cat is on the mat, that is, in a way, a type, a sort of type of statement.

And the episodic statement of me saying, the cat is on the mat is a token of that type. It is an example of that type. Philosophers, from what I've seen, I've never seen, I had no idea that anyone had made the claim that Austin is making here, which is that truth, instead of being a predicate of the proposition, the statement type is actually a predicate of a historical truth episode of someone's particular claim at a particular time. And so that's unique and interesting from my knowledge of this stuff.

15:13 Dylan: One of the things I found myself confused about was as I was on the one hand, drawn in about the question about what is truth? In the articulation, I felt a drift of where it mattered about the normal things that I'm saying. So this is why I found myself kind of laughing when we were talking about the tradition of ordinary language philosophy. Because on the one hand, I understand what that means, but then something about it, I feel like it's no longer ordinary language anymore that we're talking about. We've wrung the ordinariness out of it.

15:50 Seth: Yeah. I could find numerous examples to prove that point. Dylan.

15:54 Dylan: I don't feel as strongly as Seth does. I don't mean it super pejoratively. Maybe it'll become more clear as we talk about it that it's covering the things that are more rich than the cat is on the mat.

16:05 Mark: So I think the thing to keep in mind with Austin, to go along with this idea that truth is properly predicated of the individual utterance is the point that he makes at the end of the paper.

16:16 Wes: So I would use the word statement like him, because utterance might be taken as a non meaningful, just. Just the sounds, but.

Yeah, go ahead.

16:24 Mark: Although he does say, as in how to do things with words, that it could just be waving. Right. Actually, it doesn't even need to be a sequence of words, even though we call it words.

16:35 Wes: Yeah. But it needs to be significant.

Right.

So we're not predicating this of marks or sounds. We're predicating what we're talking about here

of meanings, which is why it would be a statement.

16:45 Dylan: And it seems like he could easily abstract a gesture into a statement, even though it didn't have sounds.

16:52 Wes: Yeah, it could represent a statement, sure.

16:54 Mark: This is page three. A statement is made and its making is a historic event. The utterance by a certain speaker or writer of certain words, a sentence to an audience with reference to a historic situation, event, or whatnot. There's his definition.

17:11 Wes: To give another example of that. If I say, let's say Augustus Caesar was an emperor of Rome, I have just made a particular statement that the proposition, which is really what? Strawson is going to stick to the idea that the proposition is the thing that's true, even though he's going to make a concession to Austin by saying, okay, we can call that a statement if you like, but the universal proposition is something that could be asserted by anyone that's been asserted thousands of Times over history, by different people. It could be asserted by Dylan a few seconds from now. And that thing is the same. That itself is not a historical episode proposition. The statement is me making that particular assertion. And then maybe Dylan making the same assertion would be a different statement later on.

17:57 Dylan: But I think when you said Augustus Caesar was the 12th Caesar in Rome, Augustus Caesar was the emperor of Rome. So one thing I found really interesting in the Austin was that you were actually doing two things, right? That's a sentence and a statement.

18:15 Wes: Right.

18:16 Dylan: And the statement ends up being the one that's most interesting in terms of the question of truth, because it wraps up assertion in it that it's about something.

18:26 Wes: With Tarski, remember, we were talking about sentences.

18:30 Mark: We were talking about sentences, but in a logical language, which had no sense, it had only reference. So I think that would be the logician's response to why I was describing. Austin wanted to take that position in the first place. Because if I say the cat is on the mat. Which cat? Which mat? Well, no, it would be A is S, whereas where A is referring to a specific cat, or maybe we have the existential quantifier, there exists such an object, such that X is a cat and X is properly predicated by is on the mat or something like that. So it would have some way of picking out either an individual cat, if that was the point, or if the point is to just say, you know, some cat is on the mat, or anything that is a cat is on the mat, you know, it'll make clear what you're actually trying to say and what individuals you're picking out. So the logician thinks that's enough.

19:20 Dylan: Yeah, because they're not making the distinction between a sentence and a statement that Austin is making. In that case, the fact that you're using words. So Austin says a sentence is made up of words, a statement is made in words. A sentence is is not English or not good English. A statement is not in English or not in good English. Statements are made, words or sentences are used. So that distinction is not one that Tarski would follow.

19:48 Mark: So I don't know how much Austin had thought of this locution versus illocution versus perlocution at the time of writing this. But I could see why he would want to make the statement, AKA assertion, AKA utterance, the primary thing, because, yes, there is the locutionary meaning, which I think does come down to what the logician would consider to be the statement or the proposition. But then there also is the illocutionary and perlocutionary properties of the statement, and I don't even know if those are going to be replicable. In other words, if I say Augustus Caesar was the emperor of Rome, well, why am I saying that?

Am I answering your question? Did you ask me who's the emperor of Rome? So that it becomes not just a descriptive statement, but an answer. If I'm just saying it out into the nothing, then that's not even like a sensible assertion. Why would I say that? Am I saying it as magic words? Like, what am I saying to my God?

20:47 Dylan: The fact that there would be a question about it? Isn't that somehow capturing something that we want to say about the meaning of the word true, which maybe it's at issue with these guys, right. Is that there's a. Well, let's call it naive. There's a naive sense when you have the sentence Augustus Caesar was an emperor of Rome, that there ought to be a way to talk about whether or not that's true or not, that that's a true statement.

21:11 Mark: Yeah, apart from why I bothered to say it, you should be able to say whether it's true or not. And the thing that I want to point out to keep in mind that he doesn't make until the end of the article was this point that we made again in the previous Austin discussion about using the example of France is an octagon. It's not unambiguous. It matters why you want to know that, what circumstance you're uttering it, whether you want to say it's true or not. And at the end of this paper, he actually compares is true to is probable and is an exaggeration and other things like that, and actually wants to say that true is something we've become obsessed with due to the influence of logicians, when there are so many other aspects.

Again, if you think in terms of moves in a language game, and this is the one that fits as an appropriate response to this, yeah, true might be one way of describing that. But there are many other things that you could say that sound like they're again stating a descriptive fact, but really are playing some other role in a language game. And that actually matters whether you would want to say it's true or false, or that the predicates true and false don't really apply to it because, like, it's about the future. You really want to say that a statement about the future is in fact true or is in fact false based on what eventually is going to happen.

If you're a Logician, you have to say, yes, that these are timeless statements, and it doesn't matter if I'm stating it now or I'm stating it when it has in fact happened. But that's not really the ordinary way that we would treat a statement like that. We would treat descriptive statements about things that are right in front of us or things that we couldn't possibly know anything about, or things that are in the future. We really treat those all differently. And to ask, well, but is it true? You should be able to say whether it's true or false, regardless of the context is just ignoring the actual facts on the ground.

23:01 Wes: For the most part, though, in this paper, we're focused on. So, yeah, you could use the Augustus Caesar was an emperor of Rome as a sort of password to a club, or you could use it in any number of different performative ways, but you could also just be using it to make a statement, a descriptive statement about history. And so that's mainly what he's concerned with in this paper, and those sorts of descriptive statements and how those statements are made true. What are the conditions of their truth?

23:33 Seth: I mentioned that, despite how much I despised the article, that I thought he came up with, you know, there were two or three things in there that made sense. Let me quote. So this is from page three still. It's another one of these episodes. This is why analytic philosophers, they didn't have to read a lot and they didn't have to write a lot to spend a lot of time arguing about one paragraph. The irony that these papers come from the proceedings of the Aristotelian society is not lost on me. Okay? A sentence is made up of words. A statement is made in words.

A sentence is not English or not good English. A statement is not in English or not in good English. Statements are made. Words or sentences are used. The same sentence is used in making different statements. I say it is mine, you say it is mine. It may also be used on two occasions or by two persons in making the same statement, but for this, the utterance must be made with reference to the same situation or event. This, to me, is the clearest articulation of the distinction that Austin is trying to make, which I think is his rebuttal of Tarski.

Right? Or maybe I'm. I don't know, maybe I'm just in the weeds. If all four of us are looking at the same thing, object in the world, and we all four say it is mine, then the common sense notion of the use of that term and whatever is let's say it's a book that belongs to one of us, right? And we all say it is mine. Three of those. If you say that truth is predicated of sentences, what I think Austin's trying to say is you can't. If you just look at the sentences uttered without regard to who utters them and the context, there are them and their relationship to the world.

You can't make a judgment about which one of those utterances or which one of those sentences is true. It's something else beyond the sentence that constitutes what he calls the statement, which is some kind of relationship to, on the one hand, the notion of utterance that will become more fully developed later in another context. And on the other hand, the actual quote, unquote, world he uses. He talks about words and world. And I think if anything shows the idea that there's more to truth than just ascription to sentences, and that it has somehow a connection to the world, AKA the correspondence theory, this statement does as good a job as anything in the paper in pointing that out.

26:10 Wes: So this is actually related to what I was saying before, and I think I'm going to reiterate it just to make sure I think our listeners understand it, which is that a sentence, in a way, is a type. Okay, it is mine. There can be many different iterations of that. Many different speakers can use that sentence to make a statement. And each of those different statements is, in a way, a token of that type. So when Seth says it is mine, when I say it is mine, when Mark says it is mine, those are tokens. Those are little examples of the general type. It is mine. The sentence is the type. The statements are the tokens. Traditionally, philosophers think of truth as a property of the type of the sentence, or the proposition, or whatever you want to call it. Austin's innovation here is to make truth a property of the token of the particular assertion or statement, the token of the type.

27:07 Mark: Although I think actually the quote that Seth just read there doesn't entirely support what you were just saying. The same sentence is used in making different statements. And that's not just to say that I say it is mine, and you say it is mine. And those are two different utterances. It's that they actually mean different things, that when I say it, it is. I'm saying this is belonging to Mark, and when you say it, you're really saying this is belonging to Wes. So those are not two tokens of the same type. The way he's saying is the same sentence. We both say the Same three words, it is mine. But we're actually making different statements. So it's not that we're just saying different tokens of the same statement.

27:47 Wes: Yes, this case isn't a great example of it.

Yep.

27:50 Mark: But actually I see this pretty problematic as to say, aren't we in a sense really all actually making the same statement that we're each saying it belongs to the speaker?

28:02 Dylan: Yeah. I don't understand why that's so complicated.

28:04 Wes: No, Mark, I think you're right. But I think you're right on both directions. This becomes vastly more complicated with the it is mine example than it is

28:13 Dylan: with the Caesar example just because of the word mine. Right. I mean, west just said the sentence it is mine is vastly more complicated than Augustus Caesar was an emperor of Rome. And that's true because the words that are in there are vastly more complicated. A pronoun is vastly more complicated than a simple noun.

28:37 Seth: Right.

28:38 Dylan: It's a variable word in a way that a straight up noun is not. And you have there a kind of very early first order instead of 0th order kind of way of using language which you're using it to refer to context and time and location and constituents.

28:57 Seth: But on the Tarskian analysis, they have the same logical structure, don't they? X is Y. In this case, it is mine. It's more complicated because the referring. The point is that in the prototypical example X is Y, you have a subject which has a referring relation to something and you have a predicate which has a satisfaction relation to that referring subject.

29:21 Dylan: Yeah, but the problem there is that even in math saying X is Y, it depends on what the X and the Y are. X can be a number or it can be a matrix. It can be all kinds of other entities that don't have the same problem. So just the fact that it has that is in there doesn't make it even. It's wrong to say it has the same structure because it is only on the most simplistic looking at it that it has the same structure because it matters what those things are. Either ends are.

29:49 Seth: No, I agree with you. The point I'm trying to make is that I think the simplicity is misrepresented here and in the other context with Tarski, my point is just as you mentioned, it and mine both have not just referring relationships to the world. It's not just that they refer, but that they refer with context. So it's not just a proper name like Augustus Caesar or Rome. Right. Or Cicero, whatever, where we have all kinds of complications with definite descriptors and proper names and all that. But when you take a pronoun, you can say, okay, well, if it refers to the proper thing or refers correctly or whatever the.

I don't remember the nomenclature. But for it to do that, it's not just simply the name and making sure that it picks out the right thing in the world. It has reference to the performative act or the context or what have you. And that's where the complication comes. So my point is, structurally, it's the same. But the complication comes in because making the point exactly that Austin meant, which is that the context and the utterance and the reality of the historical situation are what determine really where the conditions of satisfaction or truth lie.

31:01 Mark: And to move to the second half of the sentence, it may also be used. And this is not just talking about, it is mine. You know, that was an example for making the same sentence used in making different statements. But just a sentence may be also used on two occasions or by two persons in making the same statement. But for this, the utterance must be made with reference to the same situation or event. So in that case, he really is saying that the statement is not the token, because on two different occasions, if I'm making the statement, you know, about Caesar, and maybe you're even referring to Augustus Caesar in a different way, you're saying in Latin or something like that, or you're giving a definite description that points at the same guy, the guy that was trained by Julius Caesar, whatever.

But we're ultimately, the reference comes down to the same thing. Then he thinks that we're actually making the same statement, Right?

31:51 Wes: Yeah. So it's important we get this straight, because otherwise we have vastly different understandings of the reading. So remember, Strawson calls statements speech episodes throughout his paper commenting on Austin. He calls them speech episodes. So again, these are the particular historical events of saying something. We can make the same statement, which is to say that our two different token statements can say the same thing. But it doesn't mean that our two statements aren't two different statements, as in two different historical speech episodes, as Strawson would call them.

32:26 Mark: I just think what the quote I just read shows that Strawson doesn't understand Austin. You're giving the Strawson version of Austin by saying that a statement is a speech episode. But Austin has just said right here that you and I can both make the same statement. It seems it would be hard for

32:42 Wes: that to happen, unless that's just misleading. He says so much else in this paper to make it clear that he's talking about speech episodes like.

32:49 Dylan: Well, especially the definition itself of a statement in that historical context would seem to confirm Strawson's interpretation as used by

32:56 Wes: a certain person on a certain occasion. Yep. Yeah. If we just move up a little bit, we may, however, genuinely say his closing words were very true, or the third sentence on page five of his speech is quite false. But here, words and sentence referring, as is shown by the demonstratives, etc. Which in this usage consistently accompany them to the words or sentence as used by a certain person on a certain occasion. That is, they refer to statements. That statement has to be a historical speech episode. And that's what Austin, interestingly enough, is claiming. Truth is a predicate of a statement, is made and its making is a historic event. The utterance by a certain speaker or writer of certain words.

33:38 Mark: I think the historic situation is supposed to, according to Austin, fix the reference in the truth conditions of the word. And we should actually just use this to get into what Austin's definition of truth actually is, because maybe this will make this clearer. So it's not actually, though we would use the specific utterance. And again, maybe there's so many performative aspects between the locution and the illocution and the perlocution. It may be very rare for two speech acts, two utterances, to actually use the same statement. But I think he says right here, two people, two different historical occasions of utterance, can make the same statement as long as they're made with reference to the same situation or event. That's all you need. So that sounds like it's just an interpreted proposition.

34:21 Wes: I just think in the context of the way he defines statement above and then the rest of the paper and Strawson's analysis to favor your interpretation, we would have to basically think Strawson's whole commentary is irrelevant.

34:33 Dylan: Well, Mark just said he thought that Strawson on this count got Austin wrong.

34:37 Wes: I think the phrase same statement, unfortunately, can create the confusion. Of course, there's a sense in which we can make the same statement, because you and I, on two different occasions, making two different historical speech episode statements can mean the same thing, can use the same sentence. So maybe we should just keep both of these interpretations in mind as we move forward and we can see how they fit with the rest of the paper.

35:01 Dylan: When I first read this section, the definition of a statement I took him to be his qualifications here are historic event, a certain speaker using certain words with respect to a certain receiver. It seemed to me that the Main function of that definition is to make the occurrence of a statement or the utterance a contextually laden thing happens at a time, at a place, with people. In order to assess that statement, you need to understand that context.

35:33 Mark: Yes, and this is very much in line with Allan Bloom's charge that we have to keep philosophy concrete, that once you say, we're just going to talk about the proposition, Caesar was the emperor of Rome and just treat this as an abstraction apart from anybody that might have actually thought this and what their situation was and why they thought this, that. That leads to. To something dehumanizing. And so this move toward the concrete is supposed to make things more, let's say, phenomenologically accurate. But we should move to number three here on page four.

When is a statement true? The temptation is to answer, at least if we confine ourselves to straightforward statements, when it corresponds to the facts. As a piece of standard English, this can hardly be wrong. Indeed, I must confess, I do not really think it is wrong at all. The theory of truth is a series of truisms. Still, it can at least be misleading.

36:23 Seth: Okay, here's my opinion going forward. We should not read anything parenthetical or any footnotes in this article because it fucking adds nothing and it's just disruptive and annoying.

36:37 Mark: I took notes on some of the footnotes, so I might have to bring some of them out.

36:41 Wes: So what he's referring to, right, is the classical early Wittgenstein way of thinking about truth, where we say, in this case, I think it would be proposition, but we can refer to statements. Here the truth of a statement is a matter of whether it corresponds to a fact in the world. So a fact is this weird entity, right? In our common sense experience, we're used to thinking of there just being objects in the world. Those are the entities. And then we get ourselves confused when we start, as Plato did, when we start thinking about, say, well, what are we doing when we say an object has a certain property or a relation to another object?

Is the property an entity? Is the relation itself an entity? And then if the relation is an entity, then how does it relate to the object? All of that weird metaphysics ontology stuff, this Wittgensteinian entity fact was meant to help solve by simply taking the predication itself and postulating some entity that corresponds to that. So I don't have to worry about black as an entity and then cat as an entity. And then how do they join up? I just say that the fact itself, that the cat is black, corresponds to an entity with the predication, the structure kind of built into it.

And that's the whole function of that little bit of classical metaphysics thinking of

37:59 Mark: it, kind of like a molecule, the individual, the property and the thing. The individual are the atoms and they connect each other. Of course, it's complicated in the way that Wittgenstein describes it that these are actually atomic facts. And so the property by itself, like, isn't a thing in the ontology. Actually the atomic fact, something having a property is the basic thing in his ontology.

38:22 Wes: In Wittgenstein's language, at the level of the atomic fact, it's just the linking of objects. And he says they're linked together like links in a chain, which is a way of getting away from any idea that there's some other material link that links the links. Right? So the linkage is itself structural. So we want to think of this sort of structural element as built into facts to solve the problem of simply multiplying entities, to figure out the relation between, say, properties and objects or relations and objects. So that can be misleading. According to Austin, that whole picture is not the picture that he's advocating.

39:00 Mark: Continuing on the same page, if there's to be communication of the sort that we achieve by language at all, there must be a stock of symbols of some kind, which a communicator can produce at will and which a communicatee can observe. These may be called the words, though of course they need not be anything very much like what we should normally call words. They might be signal flags, etc. There must also be something other than the words the words are to be used to communicate about. This may be called the world. There's no reason why the world should not include the words in every sense, except the sense of the actual statement itself, which any particular occasion is being made about the world.

39:33 Wes: I want to emphasize on any particular occasion, but go ahead.

39:37 Mark: Yeah, this is to get rid of the liar paradox.

39:39 Wes: No, I'm just emphasizing the speech episode element of this.

39:42 Mark: Well, I'm just saying, the reason he's saying that, and this is actually sort of a digression right here in the middle of this definition, is because if you allow statements about the statement, you know, like this statement is false. We were just saying that he wants to rule that out as well. So he's just going to say, look, you can talk about the world. I can say, you just said that, blah, blah, blah. So I'm talking about your statement. The verbal utterances are entities in the world. I just can't refer to the one that I'm making right now. I think I'm saying this sentence right now very confidently. Didn't I just successfully do that?

40:14 Wes: Anyway, yeah, you're completely right.

40:16 Mark: Further, the world must exhibit similarities and dissimilarities. If everything were either absolutely indistinguishable from anything else or completely unlike anything else, there'd be nothing to say. And finally, there must be two sets of conventions. Okay, so here's where it gets good.

40:30 Wes: I posted this to Twitter today for the audience. This is really the meat of the whole thing. This is his central claim on how statements and states of affairs are linked up. But go ahead.

40:40 Dylan: How they're true.

40:41 Wes: Yeah.

40:42 Seth: Yes.

40:42 Wes: How a statement can be true via its linkage to.

40:45 Dylan: It's his definition of truth right here,

40:47 Wes: what he calls states of affairs, page 5.

40:48 Seth: Keep dragging it out there before Mark reads it, let's keep inserting more of the things so we can talk about this being the thing where all the important stuff is said. Can we do that so we can just prevent Mark from saying what it actually is?

41:00 Mark: The longer we wait, the sillier A voice I will use to read it.

41:04 Seth: Chicky says descriptive convention.

41:07 Mark: So there are two sets of conventions. Descriptive conventions correlating the words with the types of situations, the thing, events, et cetera, to be found in the world. And demonstrative conventions correlating the words. See, and I have to read the parentheses here. Sorry, Seth. But the descriptive conventions correlating the words equals sentences with the types of situation, thing, event, etcetera, to be found in the world. And there are also demonstrative conventions correlating the words, I.e. statements with the historic situations, et cetera, to be found in the world. A statement is said to be true when the historic state of affairs to which it is correlated by the demonstrative conventions. The one to which it refers is of a type with which the sentence used in making it is correlated by the descriptive conventions.

41:53 Wes: This is why I think the token and type thing is so important for understanding all this.

41:57 Seth: Okay, let's unpack it.

42:00 Wes: So why is he referring to descriptive conventions as sentences? Well, even though we're making statements, right. We're still using sentences to make those statements. And we're attributing, say, a property to something or a relation. You know, if we say the cat is on the mat, we're using that sentence, the cat is on the mat, with this sort of general descriptive meaning to say something about the world. The demonstrative conventions say, I'm using This particular statement that I'm making right now, this historical event, to refer to this particular state of affairs in the world.

So in other words, it's analogous to the idea of linking, but it's not the same thing, but analogous to linking up objects and property or a particular thing and then some type or class to which it belongs. And I say it's true because, well, yeah, the object really, I asserted the object has the property which is in the property is the same thing as the descriptive convention. And the object is my demonstrative conventions allow me to refer to it. And I say it's true because, yes, the object really does have that property. In other words, it is, as he would say, it's correlated.

The object that my demonstrative convention has given me is correlated to the actual type that the descriptive conventions are being used to assert of it. All right, forget about object and property, because he's moving this to a different level. Instead of objects and properties, we are talking about states of affairs. He wants to use that instead of fact now to distinguish that from fact theory, stuff. So states of affairs, it's a relation between that and then a type, in a sense, a descriptive type, where instead of saying the property is the type thing.

Well, it's the whole sentence which is the type. It's the whole assertion. So we're still holding on to that element of the fact theory where we don't want to let go of the holism of the assertion. So instead of correlating properties and objects, I'm correlating sentence types and then particular states of affairs. And I'm doing that through statements, through these particular historical utterances, which include demonstrative and descriptive conventions, which allow me to grab onto a state of affairs and then correlate it with this more general thing, respectively.

44:22 Seth: Okay, I'm going to violate my parenthetical omission statement and I'm going to read this in a different way. Descriptive conventions correlating the words qua sentences with the types of situation, thing, event, etc. To be found in the world. This is your token type distinction, Wes, that you mentioned earlier, right? Words qua sentences are types, demonstrative conventions correlating the words qua statements with the historic situations, etc. To be found in the world. Now, essentially, what he's saying is statement is not like a separate metaphysical entity, so to speak.

That is to be opposed to the fact in the world or the state of affairs or whatever. What he's basically saying here is that the words have two functions related to these conventions. In one case, they function as types that can pick out tokens. On the other hand, the words in the context of the speaker, the physical location, like every bit of information that you could bring from the historical circumstance, generate a statement, and it's only the statement itself where we can assert the truth conditions for things that we say about the world.

45:37 Dylan: Is it only that, or is it that he's solved the problem or purified the correspondence theory by separating the correspondence into these two pieces?

45:47 Seth: Well, the correspondence theory just basically says that something corresponds with reality. He's not. I don't think he's done anything novel. He's changed the terminology, but it's still descriptive of the correspondence theory.

45:59 Wes: The difference is part of that whole correspondence theory was trying to say something, in a way about the isomorphism or the structure of sentences somehow replicating the structure of the world. And he wants to do away with that.

Right.

That's the whole point of using this word convention all the way language is referring to the real world is arbitrary, and we don't need the structure of language to somehow mirror the structure of the world.

46:24 Seth: When you read that latter part, you say demonstrative conventions correlating the words qua statements with historic situations to be found in the world. Then he says, a statement is said to be true in the historic state of affairs to which it is correlated by the demonstrative conventions. The one to which it quote, unquote refers is of a type with which the sentence used in making it is correlated. But this is just terrible writing.

46:47 Wes: It is.

That is actually one of the most confusing ways of putting that.

46:50 Seth: But, yeah, I'm asking myself, has he really done anything more than the disquotational. Has he done anything more here than, say, quote, we are recording tonight on Austin and Strawson on truth, unquote is true, if and only if we are recording tonight on Austin and Strawson on truth, has he done that just by inserting a third term to mediate between the two. It feels like that's the same thing to me.

47:14 Wes: You may be right. But think of this as saying, again, analogous to the way you would say, okay, if I assert a certain property of an object, it's true if the object actually has that property. Where here we go to a more macro level with truth, and we say, all right, there are state of affair types and there are state of affair instances. So the cat is on the mat could be used a million times over in many, many different situations throughout the world and throughout time to describe similar states of affairs. But the demonstrative convention is the context in which I'm making it.

However it is that my language gets linked up to a particular state of affairs, Then the question is, okay, does the particular state of affairs that the demonstrative convention somehow give me, is that actually of the type, the state of affairs type. That's being assertive of it, where the state of affairs type, which is my phrasing, not Austin's, but it's clear to me the state of affairs type, which is given to us by the sentence, is the thing articulated at the particular state of affairs. So we get these little replacements, right? We replace object with state of affairs.

We replace property with state of affairs type, and we don't talk anymore except in a loose way about the propositions corresponding to facts in the way that it implies some sort of structural correspondence between language and the world. I think that's really the whole point of this. He wants to get away from the fact idea where there's somehow a mapping or picturing quality going on here. There's no picturing. He boils it back down to like a property object analogy. Right?

48:48 Mark: Well, he makes this point explicitly later on in the article when talking about simpler languages. So an example I was thinking of is you could say fubar, and just saying that one word, fubar, is supposed to relate like, you know, you could unpack that there is something going on here in which, you know, things are messed up. And that's a very broad type. There are lots of ways in which things could be messed up. You know, there are lots of circumstances where that phrase could be uttered. And as long as the conventional meaning of the word, in other words, the descriptive conventions associated with sort of in the abstract matches the exact thing that I.

Not that I have in mind or not just that I have in mind when I utter it, but I'm uttering it to you in a particular circumstance. I mean, you to understand what I'm talking about, we're both beholding the same situation, and so does that situation that we are both beholding, then that I'm using this one word as a shorthand to describe is that of the same type as well, generally, situations that would be described by that word. And if so, then the statement is true.

49:52 Wes: Yeah, it's very important here, right, that the correlation is between the actual state of affairs and the type. The state of affairs type.

50:00 Dylan: So this way of talking about it just seems to confirm exactly the way Seth was characterizing it as being exactly the same thing as the disquotational mode of talking about whether something is true or not. Maybe that's only because, I guess Strawson was the one who's associated with the trivial interpretation of what it means to say something is true, that it's somehow super added. And Austin isn't necessarily associated that way. So maybe I need to understand more about how he's different. But he's going to say what I mean by true, but it doesn't seem that it's going to allow me to talk about whether something is true.

50:37 Seth: Yeah, there's still, to use a crusty term, verificational aspect. If you're going to assess whether a statement's true or not, somebody has to make an assessment of the demonstrative conditions, which means going, okay, who said it? Was that thing actually in their possession? Are they actually there does this. There's still a kind of, let me look at the real world and let me look at the statement and see if they are actually talking about the same thing. Whether it's isomorphic is irrelevant. It's still the same function.

51:05 Dylan: That seems to be the most interesting part of the question about a claim about whether something is true. Not so much what you mean by saying that is true is the judgment that something is true. And so there's all kinds of work that you have before you in establishing all the pieces, I guess, and maybe in that way this is work that has to happen beforehand or arguably would have to happen beforehand is, well, what do I mean when I say that it's true? And that's all that the problem that Strawson and Austin are arguing about and putting aside the question of how do I come to that conclusion, once I know what I mean by what I say, when I say something is true, how do I come to that conclusion or demonstrate it or argue it or whatever?

51:54 Mark: So I think that this actually gives us a good hint on what procedure we would follow to determine whether something is true or not. I'll read some of the footnote. So in the definition that we just read, we want to see if the historic state of affairs to which the statement is correlated by the demonstrative conventions is of a type with which the sentence used in making it is correlated by the descriptive convention. So of a type has a footnote next to it is of a type, which means is sufficiently like those standard states of affairs with which, thus, for a statement to be true, one state of affairs must be like certain others, which is a natural relation, but also sufficiently like to merit the same description.

Description, quotes which is no longer a purely natural relation. To say this is red is not the same as to say this is like those, nor even to say this is like those which were called red. That things are similar or even exactly similar I may literally see, but that they are the same I cannot literally see. And calling the same color convention is involved, additional to the conventional choice of the name to be given to the color which they're said to be. Okay, so the latter part of that is a confusing, thorny mess.

52:55 Wes: Yeah, the conventional part is just that they don't have to be identical. Right. Even though I call two things that are different shades of red red, I don't mean by using the exact same word red. Oh, these are exactly the same.

That's the convention part.

53:09 Seth: Right.

53:09 Mark: So there's the convention that just hooks the word red to some set of things at all, and then there's the convention of judging. This is exactly my point in saying is sufficiently like. Well, what is sufficiently, sufficiently obviously is going to depend on what the situation is, why you care. So if I want to say fubar, and you say, what are you talking about? I think things are totally under control, then the demonstrative conventions of even what aspects of the situation I am pointing to in trying to describe the situation as completely messed up might be ones that you hadn't even noticed.

So it might require more explanation than my merely exclaiming that word to you to get across what exactly I'm talking about. But maybe even when I do point out exactly what I'm talking about, your judgment is going to be be different. So as a colloquial phrase, of course that's going to be kind of vague, like what counts as really messed up, what counts as fubar. So that just shows that depending on what kind of claims you're making, there are going to be different procedures to determining whether the claim is true or not. You know, some of them are going to be pretty obvious where the linguistic conventions are clear and the demonstrative conventions are clear, and some of them are not at all.

So does that convince you, Dylan, that at least that gives you the clue that in determining whether something is true or not. And again, I'm kind of pulling from now Blackburn's discussion, you know, when he gets down to what's good about the disquotational or deflationary theory of truth, is when you want to determine whether something is true, you actually have to start talking about the subject matter itself. That talking about the is true part actually does not help you figure Anything out. So if you want to say this scientific claim is true, you understand what a scientific claim is, and you understand that you have to do experiments or whatever.

And so you go do those things. You go actually investigate what it's about. And you don't think about what is. Is true mean here. You just think about what the claim actually involves. And if I'm making a claim like that in art or in psychology, and, you know, those have very different epistemic grounds. And there's no reason, says Blackburn, that you would think that all these different situations that true means the same thing in all those situations. So I'm kind of imposing that I'm thinking Blackburn might have gotten that idea out of. You know, we just read Davidson saying it doesn't make any sense to come up with a general theory of truth.

Even Tarski was saying you can only do it within a language, and you can only do it by kind of basically listing all the sentences that are true. You can't actually come up with a characteristic of this is what truth actually means. And I think something like that is going on here. I think what Austin is saying is a little more informative, at least, is saying, yeah, to figure out whether something is true, you have to compare linguistic conventions to what's actually going on in the world. And because in different domains, the linguistic conditions and referential conditions are going to be more or less vague depending on the situation, then they're going to be different ways that you have to find out whether something is true.

56:06 Dylan: That sounds right.

56:07 Mark: So you think that's helpful, or you think that's just uninformative but correct?

56:11 Dylan: I guess I leaned more towards. It feels descriptive, but not particularly illuminating, just to be perfectly honest. Because the interesting part is the things that you're saying that are true, and maybe what it is is that it feels a lot of inside baseball kind of thing going on. And I find myself wondering, so what's at stake here? And what we talked about earlier was what was at stake was the progression of a kind of empiricism and logical positivism about how you can say things about the world and correspondence theory of truth and stuff like that.

I guess I see some of the argument going on there about an overly simplistic way of having empirical facts sort of plainly explicate themselves about the world. And that's a pretty naive way to look. Look at things. And the classic correspondence theory that Wes articulated earlier, it just seems kind of naive. And maybe these guys, their analysis is part of making me coming after Them say, yeah, that sounds pretty naive about the way in which language works and the way in which what we mean by saying something is true, by asserting it, and that their unpacking of it demystifies the word true to bring the question down into the individual parts and the judgments that are there.

But I still feel like that's still by far the most interesting part.

57:39 Wes: I don't have an answer to this question, but why not say a statement is true if the property being ascribed to the object referred to through via demonstrative conventions actually does belong to that object or something like that? Why move up to this level of saying, well, it's true. If the state of affairs being referred to belongs to the right state of affairs type, why not just say the object being talked about has the property being predicated of it, or something like that? There's got to be a motive for moving to this particular level. I mean, I've already described some of those motivations with the fact, with my sort of history of the whole fact problem. But it's something that's at least worth thinking about for listeners.

58:20 Dylan: And maybe we can articulate that more about the kind of mistake that you end up making and the consequences of that mistake if you don't go up to a higher level about it. Because I confess I'm a little confused about it.