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

0:00 Mark: So I'm thinking, even though we're only five pages into the Austin paper, maybe we should jump to the Strawson paper. Because I think the most important things he says against Austin or against the points we already made about Austin, get Strawson's main points about what is the appropriate entity that has. That deserves the appellation true or false. And then what his critique of Austin's use of the term fact or even situation or state of affairs, he sort of doesn't think any of those are particularly informative. Thinks Austin is doing something wrong there.

So if we get that much of the Strawson out there, then maybe we can kind of open it back up to whatever interesting parts of the rest of the Austin paper or the rest of the Strawson paper in particular, both of their relations to what we are just calling the deflationary theory of truth. I think those are going to be an interesting. Are they deflationists? Are they both giving some sort of performative theory? How are they different? So how do we want to start with Strawson here?

0:59 Wes: You know, his. He has a short and sweet characterization of Austin, which is that in the first paragraph, his own theory is roughly that to say that A statement is true is to say that a certain speech episode is related in a certain conventional way to something in the world exclusive of itself. And he doesn't mind the convention part. And he calls this a defense of a sort of purified version of the correspondence theory. Purified in just this way that truth is not being predicated of sentences, but it's being predicated of speech episodes. The other purification element is this emphasis on convention and just the sort of definition of truth that we just talked about, where states of affairs are correlated to state of affair types. But Strawson doesn't like that.

So the critical thing here is, does truth apply to the token or to the type Austin applies to the token, which as far as I know is a very unusual minority position. And Strawson's going to defend the idea that the truth actually does belong to the sentence. He's going to call it statement, but the non historical sentence, not the particular speech episode, but to the content of the speech, let's say. So when I say Augustus Caesar was an emperor of Rome, the truth doesn't belong to my particular statement of that. The truth belongs to the content of my statement or the sentence that I use to make the statement.

And that's the timeless entity that could sort of be latched on to by anyone here, there, everywhere to assert the same single sentence which has its own truth value. Whereas for Austin it's like, well, when Dylan says it, it's true. When Wes says that it's true, his statement is true. When Mark says that his statement is true, it's not the single shared content that's true, it's each particular assertion or statement. And like I said, Strawson objects to that. I don't fully understand his reasoning.

3:02 Seth: What Strawson is objecting to is the idea that the statement is going back to thinking about what we just said in the last episode about descriptive versus demonstrative. That for Austin, descriptive words qua sentences exhibit the type token relationship. Demonstrative sentences create historic situations that ultimately are the sources of truth or the sources at which you can judge truth. What Strawson says is if I say that the same statement was first whispered by John and then bellowed by Peter, uttered first in French and repeated in English.

I am plainly still making historical remarks about utterance occasions. But the word statement has detached itself from reference to any particular speech episode. The episodes I am talking about are the whisperings, bellowings, utterings and repetitions. The statement is not something that figures in all of these episodes. So it's almost as if Strawson's criticism of Austin is saying that, okay, Austin thought the buck stopped at statements like, he did a great job of distinguishing the descriptive from the demonstrative. But for Strawson, there's a performative component that Austin does not distinguish in the demonstrative aspect.

Maybe it's assumed by Austin as part of that. But for Strawson, the performative aspect is a critical additional term that is required in order to be able to assess the truth. Now, whether you need that for truth, I don't know, really.

4:42 Wes: There are two elements to each of these papers. One is whether the correspondence, the theory of truth, is defensible, and in particular, whether Austin's purified version, with these statements as speech episodes and his. The definition we discussed whether that's defensible. And then the other part of this is whether we like the deflationary theory. And that's where the performative element comes in. In a way, Strawson's going to claim that he's not a. Doesn't subscribe to the deflationary theory. But arguably, once you say that asserting truth of something is just to assert your ascent or your agreement or something like that, that's the performative element.

5:21 Mark: But I get Seth's desire to not separate those, because I think maybe that is. I mean, it would be surprising, as we said, if Strawson is historically categorized as having the performative view here, because Austin is known for that. Now, of course, the lectures are from five years later that we read in talking about that. But. So I think what Seth was suggesting is that maybe the performative aspect is just in Austin's move of identifying the utterance as the thing that has truth or falsity. What you're saying is that when you say, I promise, you are performing an action.

When you say, I declare that the cat is on the mat, you are also performing an action. It's just that the action in this case is the act of linking the demonstrative aspects that are displayed in my performance with the descriptive aspects of just the conventions of the words that I'm using. Does that sound right, Seth, what you were saying?

6:27 Seth: Yes. What Strawson seems to me to be saying is that the assessment of a particular speech episode might hinge on the performance itself and not the statement. And so I think he's questioning the validity of just focusing on the statement, because it still doesn't. I think he thinks that it doesn't capture all of what's encompassed in the idea that something is historic. So Austin's contention is there are the words that represent some state of affairs in the world. And then there are when and how those words are uttered right. By this person in this time, in this place.

And Strawson is saying there's another element which is the performative aspect of it, which is a kind of like a how they're uttered that's also required. Why? Because you could be sarcastic, right? You could be. You could be making a joke because of speaking in code. Not everything is straight up demonstrative like that. So I think that's. That was my read anyway, of what he was trying to bring to the table. Is that what you were saying?

7:29 Mark: I just, I thought that was all. I thought that was all contained in Austin, that you could be playing different language games depending on why you're saying something that.

7:37 Wes: That.

7:37 Mark: Why Strawson is called the performative view of truth is because he is a deflationist in that saying the cat on the mat versus the cat on the mat is true. Like having that quote unquote is true. That those actually mean the same thing in the sense that there's no additional informational content. But the is true has itself a performative aspect. It is a move in a language game. And maybe the reason that this is attributed to this. I think maybe this is something that Austin and Strawson share, frankly. But the reason it's attributed to Strawson is because he's the one who said it, apparently in 1949, before either of these papers were written.

8:16 Wes: Yeah, we'd have to go back to review Austin's anti deflationist argument to say exactly what he thinks is true is doing.

8:25 Dylan: Yeah. Because at this point right now, it seems to me like they're saying exactly the same thing, with possibly one caveat, which is whether or not there's even a sliver of correspondence meant when we mean something to be true.

8:43 Wes: Well, in this particular passage. Right. The claim is. Well, no, truth is not a predicate of statement in the sense of speech, episode or token, but it is a predicate of the type of the sentence, if you like. Unfortunately, he's going to agree to call it a different version of statement here. But anyway, we should avoid confusing ourselves with listeners of the mad and think in terms of type and token. So that's the basic disagreement. Strawson's defending the old line point of view, where it's the timeless content of our assertions that can be true or false, and Austin saying it's the particular historical assertions themselves that are true or false. That's actually tremendously, to me, confusing issue I don't know how to arbitrate that disagreement. I don't know if you guys have more light to shed on that.

9:35 Mark: Not without repeating quibbles that I already have on that interpretation of Austin. Maybe we should just move on to page four about facts. So section two of Strawson's paper. This is where he, I think at least claims less uncontroversially diverges from Austin here. Facts. What of the second term of the correspondence relation? For this, Mr. Austin uses the following words or phrases. Thing, event, situation, state of affairs, feature, and fact. All these are words which should be handled with care. I think that through failing to discriminate sufficiently between them, Mr.

Austin first encourages the assimilation of facts to things or what. It's approximately the same thing of stating to referring, and 2 misrepresents the use of true and 3 obscures another and more fundamental problem, which I guess is what he's about to say. Or is he just dropping it and saying, I'm going to eventually get to it?

10:29 Wes: Well, now he's going to go through one by one. So the first criticism is just that the whole allure of this whole state of affairs talk or fact talk is just because it looks so much like thing talk, Right? In a way, it's more simpler to say, okay, here's a word, and it refers to an object. It's linked up some way to the world, and there's something satisfying psychologically by

saying, okay, well, I can take a

whole sentence now and do that, or I can take a whole statement or proposition, and it has its own entity in and of itself. That's what he means by saying that Austin is assimilating facts to things.

11:08 Dylan: Is the argument there about whether or not facts are things or whether or not we treat facts like things and whether or not that is sensible or not.

11:18 Mark: What is the difference between those two options, Dylan?

11:22 Dylan: Well, the difference would be whether you're going to argue about whether facts exist in the world as separate entities and where I mean by exist, something like the way I mean that this computer exists in the world. Right. As opposed to having facts be placeholders that are not actual things but represent essentially a conglomeration of ideas that you say are true, right?

11:51 Wes: No, you're right, Dylan. So this is another confusion because we described Wittgensteinian fact ontology, and when Strawson uses the word fact, he's really thinking of the content of statements. Facts are not things in the world. They're not entities in the world. They do not belong in our ontology, only objects. Facts are what's stated about the world, but they're not. He says that in section 11, but

12:17 Dylan: he's accusing Austin of saying that facts are things in the world.

12:22 Wes: Exactly. Which Austin. Yeah, he doesn't need to accuse him. I mean, Austin. Even though Austin's using the word states of affairs. Yeah, it's pretty clear, right, that that's part of Austin's ontology. Right. To say that our state of affair types have to correlate to these state of affair tokens in the world is to say that the state of affair tokens are something like objects in a way.

12:45 Mark: And you might want to wonder what could possibly be wrong with that. I mean, there are things in the world, and those things have properties. And we don't want to say, okay, that then the having of property by a thing is another entity, is another thing, over and above that. But I don't think just talking in terms of types and tokens, saying, I can categorize these relations between things and their properties, and I can ask, is this relation between a thing and a property of the same type as another relation between a description of a thing in a property as associated conventionally with some words that I just uttered?

That doesn't seem to say that a state of affairs or a fact is something on the ontology at all, but it is something that is serving as the subject of the domain of a quantifier. Right. So in that sense, it is an object. In Quine's sense, Quine said anything that you put that, you say there is some X such that, blah, blah, blah, then that X counts as something is in your ontology. And okay, so fine. A fact or a state of affairs in Austin's definition does count as a thing in that very limited sense.

13:53 Dylan: It's thing. Like if by thing I usually mean something that I would conventionally think of as existing.

13:58 Wes: Yeah, that's part of the world.

14:00 Dylan: Part of the world, yes.

14:02 Wes: Yeah. Strawson wants their ontology to consist only of objects, only of actual things. And then properties are not their own objects. They're. So we're rejecting properties as entities. In our ontology, we're rejecting states of affairs, in other words, that kind of holistic thing property connected whole as entities. Our ontology. And we're just gonna be left with objects. For Strawson, Austin pretty clearly wants the ontology to consist of these connected whole states of affairs which link up the property and the object and keep them together for obvious reasons, you know, to avoid philosophical problems.

14:44 Dylan: So I don't Want to get derailed by the following question. But I do want like a, you know, if you guys know, like a concise answer for how someone like Strawson or Austin would answer this in terms of objects, in preserving the metaphysics of objects in the world. And other things that I would talk about, like just abstract things, love and justice and friendship and things that have meaning that I can talk about. I can talk about their characteristics and their properties. I can write whole books and essays about it. But they're not things the way a lamp and a computer and a glass are. Right. They don't seem like objects in the same way. And they use all. They always use all these examples that are objects in sort of a very clear and trivial way.

15:36 Wes: Yeah, I think those things are thought to be analyzable ultimately into, fair enough, content and not necessarily in terms of. Could be in terms even of dispositions. Right. Disposition would be. Would play.

15:49 Dylan: So they become properties in some important way.

15:52 Mark: Yeah, I don't know that either of these guys is actually as concerned with ontology as maybe we're were describing it. That Strawson's point is not that I want to have a very limited ontology and I don't want facts to be in it. He's just doing again, an ordinary language analysis supposedly of the word fact. And he's saying that it is not accurate to say that a fact is something in the world in the way that we use that term.

16:20 Wes: Ultimately he's going to say in this

whole section that the statement is what it's about, is not an ontological factor, state of affairs, but it's about the object, it's about the reference. And then the describing part fits it or fails to fit it. So I actually do think he's concerned here more actually with ontology. And then he'll say there's really no other relatum required. So I could read that part if you want.

16:45 Seth: Yeah, please do.

16:47 Wes: So that person, thing, et cetera, to which the referring part of the statement refers to and which the describing part of the statement fits or fails to fit is that which the statement is about. It is evident that there is nothing else in the world for the statement itself to be related to either in some further way of its own or in either of the different ways in which these different parts of the statement are related to what the statement is about. And it is evident that the demand that there should be such a relatum is logically absurd. A logically fundamental type mistake, like a relatum is in the state of state of affairs is the relatum.

But the demand for something in the world which makes the statement True. Mr. Austin's phrase or to which the statement corresponds when it is true is just this demand and then going down a little bit. We never say that a statement corresponds to the thing, a person, etc. It is about what makes the statement that the cat has mange true is not the cat, but the condition of the cat. That is the fact that the cat has mange. The only plausible candidate for the position of what in the world makes the statement true is the fact that states. But the fact that it states is not something in the world.

18:00 Dylan: But saying the fact it states is not something in the world is the same thing as saying it's not a thing.

18:07 Mark: Right. It's not saying it's not. It's something in the mind instead of something in the world. It's saying it's not a thing at all. It's like more like a verb than a noun.

18:14 Dylan: Yeah.

18:15 Wes: Or red. Right.

18:17 Dylan: Or maybe I'm confusing the issue by

18:19 Mark: saying that I think red is. Is in the world. Maybe red is also not a thing.

18:24 Dylan: Yeah. So that's in the world. Yeah. We should read the footnote where he's going to clarify this kind of thing. This is not, of course, to deny that there is that in the world which a statement of this kind is about. Yep. True or false of which is referred to and described in which the description fits. Like Wes said, it's the cat. If the statement is true or fails to fit if it is false, the cat has mange. So, okay, this truism is an inadequate introduction to the task of elucidating not our use of true, but a certain general way of using language, a certain type of discourse, viz.

The fact stating type of discourse. What confuses the issue about the use of the word true is precisely its entanglement with this much more fundamental and difficult problem. Well, I thought the first part of the sentence, I mean, at least the first sentence was hard to understand, But I thought ultimately helpful in that the fact is not something in the world, but it is about some things that are in the world.

19:37 Wes: Yeah. Statements are about such objects, but they state facts.

19:41 Dylan: Yes.

19:41 Wes: So the fact that the cat has mange is there's no entity corresponding to that in the world Correspond. Right. But it is a true. It can be truly said to be about the cat because the description fits the cat.

19:57 Dylan: And in fact, this would be something true of facts that facts themselves are not in the world, but facts are about things that are in the world.

20:07 Mark: The language of facts includes a mind world relation in it. So the big point of this paper is saying that correspondence means that my statement or my sentence or my proposition accords with the facts is totally unhelpful because it's just the fact is kind of a different way of stating the fact that there is a relation between that what was said or thought or written or whatever and the world.

20:39 Dylan: I'm wondering about the unhelpful part. It seems to mean that saying it serves a different function. You're making a declaration, an assertion. It's not changing whether or not it's true. Performative aspect to it. Yes, but that's not the same thing as being unhelpful, right?

20:57 Mark: Yeah, well, it has a performative aspect in the same way that true does. So you could say, you ask me a question and I say that's a fact, then I'm not saying anything more than just. It's like I'm pounding my fist in the air. That's what it's doing.

21:11 Dylan: Maybe I'm quibbling, but I want to disagree about that. It's empty, but it's doing something different than adding to its trueness in it being performative. That just means it's serving a different function that doesn't contribute to its trueness. But that doesn't mean that it's empty or without use or any of that.

21:33 Wes: Mark, the part you read or paraphrased before about fact sort of already being crossing the divide, being this kind of hybrid thing. I think that's worth. If you want to explain that a little bit more. That's a really like essential concept in this whole thing. I don't fully get it yet.

21:50 Mark: And I wonder if that works for state of affairs. He's going to say that it doesn't help by moving from. Because Austin is uncomfortable with the word fact as well.

22:00 Wes: Right.

22:00 Mark: And so that's why he talks about situations or state of affairs. And does that help or did those also jump the line? This is the bottom of page six. Facts are what statements when true state. They are not what statements are about. They are not like things are happenings on the face of the globe, witnessed or heard or seen, broken or overturned, interrupted or prolonged kick, destroyed, mended or noisy. Mr. Austin notes that the expression fact that warns us that it may tempt us to identify facts with true statements and explains its existence by saying that for certain purposes in ordinary life, we neglect or take as irrelevant the distinction between saying something true and the thing or episode of which we are talking.

It would indeed be wrong, but not for Mr. Austin's reason to identify fact and true statement. For these expressions have different roles in our language, as can be seen by the experiment of trying to interchange them in context.

22:49 Wes: I think that's kind of a side point.

22:51 Mark: Okay, all right. Nevertheless, their roles or those of related expressions overlap. There is no nuance except of style between that's true and that's a fact, and is it true that? And is it a fact that. Okay, so I just made that point. But Mr. Austin's reason for objecting to the identification seemed mistaken, as does his explanation of the usage, which he says tempts us to make it, because he thinks of a statement as something in the world, a speech episode, and a fact as something else in the world, what the statement either corresponds to or is about.

He conceives the distinction as of overriding importance in philosophy, though surprisingly sometimes negligible for ordinary purposes. But I can conceive of no occasion on which I could possibly be held to be neglecting or taking as irrelevant the distinction between, say, my wife's bearing me twins at midnight and my saying 10 minutes later that my wife had borne me twins. On Mr. Austin's thesis, however, my announcing the fact that my wife has borne me twins would be just such an occasion. This is referring to part of the Austin that we didn't refer to yet, that he actually attacked Strawson right at the end.

I think that was helpful, but that's not what I was looking for.

23:51 Wes: At the end of one of the

preceding paragraphs, he said, roughly, the thing person, et cetera, refer to is the material correlate of the referring part of the statement. So that's the real material correlate. The, you know, the thing referred to by the subject and then the quality or property the referent is said to possess is the pseudo material correlate. That's the describing part, right? So that's him rejecting entities for properties. And then. And the fact in which the statement corresponds is the pseudo material correlate of the statement as a whole. So our fact talk is something like our property talk, which is to say they don't have these correlates.

They don't refer to entities in the world in the same way that the subjects of our sentences do. So I can say, you know, cat refers to an entity, but not mange in the sense of. Or. Or, you know, the property, the particular property black. If I'm saying the cat is black entity out in the world and hookup of the two. The fact there's just the cat.

24:52 Seth: The fact is the connection between the thing that's in the world and the property of the thing, which there is no red, there is no black, there is no mange. Well, and that's essentially what he's saying, right? He's basically enunciating that ontology, saying the only thing that matters are things, substances. There it's perfect. He's in the proceedings of the Aristotelian society. It's makes perfect sense. So there are only things, and we describe things, and our description of a thing is a fact.

25:31 Dylan: I confess to not having completely processed this in terms of the ontology, but there being only things.

25:39 Wes: Conditions. Right? Remember that word conditions. So the cat indeed does have a condition of some sort that justifies our predicating mange of it. But that's not the same thing as saying that I'm linking up two entities in the world.

25:53 Dylan: Same thing would go true for activities of the cat. Those are also just conditions. The cat runs, cat vomits. Those are all just conditions.

26:03 Seth: The point is, you can't say of a thing that it's true. You can't go cat. The statement cat is not true. It's a referring statement. There is a cat can be true or false. The cat has mange can be true or false, but cat part of that

26:21 Dylan: is it's neither a statement nor a sentence. Right.

26:24 Mark: Well, clearly it could be in a certain circumstance, and Austin has already anticipated this, that if you go cat, then what you're really saying is, watch out, there is a cat coming. Or something like that. And maybe true or false is not the greatest way to describe that because it's a performative act, but it could still be. It could be an apt thing to say at that point, or an inapt thing to say at that point. Like, Austin really wants to get rid of the special place that true and false have as like the things that. That you have to, you know. And by taking all the different reasons for saying something, put it more on par with other different kinds of evaluative terms.

27:02 Dylan: So. But your example there, Mark, is good in that it reminds us. And maybe this is part of the demonstrative and descriptive distinction that Austin is making in the historical context. And who says it that when you say, you say, well, what about when somebody goes cat? It just means that that word cat doesn't sufficiently encapsulate all that I've rendered by saying it in that way.

27:33 Mark: Right. So you need to look at the speech act, the Utterance, the utterance and not the proposition. Yes, contra Strawson. But let's get back to Strawson there, which I feel like I should just keep reading on page seven here, exactly where I stopped about the wife has borne me twins or elsewhere in his paper, Mr. Austin expresses the fact that there's no theoretical limit to what could truly be said about things in the world, while there are very definite practical limits to what human beings actually can and do say about them. By the remark that statements always fit the facts more or less loosely in different ways for different purposes.

But what could fit more precisely the fact that it is raining than the statement that it is raining? Of course statements and facts fit. They were made for each other. If you prise the statements off the world, you prise the facts off it too. But the world would be none the poorer. So that's I think one of the place, the first place where he explicitly says the word fact crosses the idea to world divide.

28:31 Dylan: Well, and this parenthetical is revealing, right? You don't also prise off the world from what the statements are about. For this you would need a different kind of lever.

28:43 Wes: So in other words, we don't prise off the objects off the world. Exactly, yes. So he's responding here to Austin had a section where he talks about the facts fitting more or less loosely. It being a matter of degree, right? Not necessarily just true or false, but a matter of, you know, degree how well our statements fit the world. And Strawson's coming back and saying, well, no, actually, you know, this relation is actually between statements and facts and they are both not things in the world. Exactly. This is not a statement world relation. It's not a matter of our rough general, you know, statements using general terms lining up with the world in some way.

It's, you know, they're on the same plane really that it's this thing like thing that can have a property predicated of it. Then it makes no sense at that point to say that the situation makes it true. Right? We'd have to say the property of the situation makes it true. So in that case it can't be the relatum of correspondence.

29:44 Mark: So situations, state of affairs are not parts of the world, they are collections of facts. We've established that facts is our way of describing the conditions of things in the world. And so situation or state of affairs is a way of bulking together a bunch of facts and referring to them collectively.

30:01 Wes: I'm not sure I see how that. Where he says that it's the page

30:05 Mark: eight, the end of the first long paragraph, he just says that, look, whenever we, you know, I give a big explanation or something, I describe a complex, and then I just refer to it as that. I kind of give it a thing like character, just as a way of using it as a pronoun. A situation or state of affairs is roughly a set of facts, not a set of things.

30:27 Dylan: It makes me want to go back to understanding how Austin would think of facts as things. I mean, it seems overly platonic in the way Strawson is framing it. It makes me wonder if Austin actually meant that, because in the way that he's formulating facts, which seems reasonable, seems like it would be like many, many other things which are not things, right? There's all kinds of stuff that we talk about that aren't things right.

30:59 Mark: And as I was saying before, you know, Carnap or Quine are maybe not so worried about it, right? Quine says, whatever you talk about it, it's a thing, it's fine. And Carnap is saying, well, no, it's not actually a thing. It's not an ontology, but it is. It's just part of the technical vocabulary of that particular domain that you're using in either way. Neither guy is worrying about it in the way that Strawson is in.

31:24 Dylan: All you're meaning by thing in that case is just a distinction between a this and a that. You're making a distinction of some sort and you're glomming it together into one package, and that's what you mean by it. And you're not worrying about whether it exists or not. I want to say the word referent, but that's not, you know, I'm going to get all kinds of trouble.

31:44 Wes: Page nine. The first part of the answer is that the whole charm of talking about situations, states of affairs or facts as included in or parts of the world, consists in thinking of them as things and groups of things, the temptation to talk of situations, etc. And the idiom appropriate to talking of things and events is, once the step is first taken, overwhelming. Mr. Austin does not withstand it. And then he basically goes on to say, correspondence theorists think of a statement as describing that which makes it true. Fact, situation, state of affairs in the way a descriptive predicate may be used to describe or referring, expression to refer to a thing.

This is what Austin is kind of doing. I don't think it necessarily doesn't make sense in the way that Strawson does. That's why I said earlier on I didn't fully understand his reasoning. I see him as asserting all these things, but I don't quite understand the justification. I don't know exactly why he thinks it's so absurd to do that. But yeah, this is what he's claiming.

32:48 Mark: So I do want to just nip any further speculation about Strawson's ontology in the bud, because Strawson has written a lot about metaphysics, and we can read some Strawson on metaphysics at some time in the distant future, and then those questions will be answered. For now, we should just kind of stick with the points that are made and not try too hard to make positive sense of them. I'm not.

33:09 Wes: I'm reading from the text.

I'm saying, exactly.

33:12 Mark: No, no. I'm more anticipating what Dylan was about to say next. I'm not reacting.

33:19 Dylan: The only thing I would say is that Strawson brings it on himself, right?

33:25 Mark: Whatever his ontology may be. I like the idea that the notion of fact, I'm not so sure about situation or state of affairs. I'm not sure I buy his take on that. But I like the idea that the notion of fact already crosses the mind to world divide. And so pretending that your account of the correspondence of theory of truth by referring to facts is illuminating is bullshit. That's what I like about.

33:48 Wes: I found the place where he says

this, by the way. This is on page 10. The point is that the word fact and a set of facts, words like situation, state of affairs, have, like the word statement and true themselves, a certain type of word world relating discourse, the informative, built into them. The occurrence in ordinary discourse of the words fact, statement, true signalizes the occurrence of this type of discourse, and so on. He has that whole great example of obedience, right?

34:18 Mark: So just like we say the word order or obey, those signalize the occurrence of another kind of conventional communication. The imperative. If our task were to elucidate the nature of the first type of discourse, in other words, the descriptive, it would be futile to attempt to do it in terms of the words fact, statement, and true, for these words contain the problem, not its solution. It would for the same reason be equally futile to attempt to elucidate. And any one of these words, insofar as the elucidation of that word would be the elucidation of this problem in terms of the others.

And it is indeed very strange that people have so often proceeded by saying, well, we're pretty clear what a statement is, aren't we? Now let's settle the further question, viz. What is it for a statement to be true so in other words, this much. And he hasn't actually gotten to the funny part about obedience yet. But this is an echoing of what we just saw in Davidson.

35:06 Wes: Right.

35:06 Mark: Davidson was saying, look, these concepts within a given type of discourse come as a group, and you can clarify. Well, I mean, it's funny. Davidson is saying, yes, actually, the best you can do is to clarify the relation between them. Like, you can't actually necessarily give a description, you know, in something more basic than that, but you can talk about what truth is in terms of what statements are and things like that. That's okay. It's that you. You can't expect to get outside that circle of truthy descriptive sort of language to give something more basic. Anyway, they're both saying something about the connections between them.

35:41 Dylan: I just want to reread what you quoted, but say the next sentence because I think that it makes it clearer when he says, it's very strange that people have so often proceeded by saying, well, we're pretty clear that what a statement is, aren't we? Now let us settle further the question what it is for a statement to be true. This is like, well, we're clear about what a command is. Now, what is it for a command to be obeyed? As if one could divorce statements and commands from the point of making or giving them.

36:14 Wes: And the rest of this is good too, just a little longer. Suppose we had in our language the word execution, meaning action, which is the carrying out of command. And suppose someone asked the philosophical question, what is obedience? What is it for a command to be obeyed? A philosopher might produce the answer. Obedience is a conventional relation between a command and an execution. A command is obeyed when it corresponds to an execution. This is the correspondence theory of obedience. That's pretty funny. Yeah.

36:42 Mark: In both cases, the words occurring in the solution incorporate the problem. Here you go.

36:47 Wes: So I don't know what to think of all that. I haven't.

It's clever.

36:49 Dylan: Yeah, it's clever, but it makes you wonder about the thing about the correspondence theory has to do with tying it to the world. And the implication here would be that the world is tied in already by the statement itself. And maybe that's true. I'm brought back to Austin's. Well, we already said Strawson is the performative guy, Right. I keep wanting to say that Austin is a performative guy.

37:12 Mark: I think they're both. Yeah. For reasons I have elaborated.

37:16 Wes: I don't agree with respect to truth, but in general, yeah. Austin talks about performatives. I don't think he has performative theory of truth, though he's defending the correspondence theory.

37:25 Dylan: Yeah, the problem is that sounds so much like a performative theory, and I'm struggling with the distinction that Strawson seems to be articulating.

37:34 Mark: Again, the reason I was saying both of them involve the performatives is because for Austin, if you say that the utterance.

37:40 Wes: Right.

37:41 Mark: The statement in his terms is the fundamental thing that you're describing. Well, the utterance is a performance in that sense. He has a performative theory of truth. But you're still trying to. It's not an alternative to the correspondence theory. It's a way of elaborating what the correspondence theory actually means. And Strawson here is saying that that supposed elaboration is totally uninformative and probably is going to reject any other. Again, I'm kind of brought back to the Davidson from last time, that Davidson also just thinks that these attempts to describe, even by calling it correspondence, just really don't add anything to the basic it is raining is true if and only if it is raining. The deflationary theory.

38:24 Wes: So, by the way, we've gotten to the point where what Strawson's responding to is actually part of the Austin stuff that we haven't gone over.

38:33 Mark: Should we jump back to Austin?

38:34 Wes: He gives this argument Against Deflationism on PDF page 14, the start of the section 4, and we don't have to define all of this T and S stuff, except to say Austin's trying to say it's not the same thing to assert that the cat is on the mat as to assert the cat is on the mat. Mat is true, right? Well, what is saying the cat is on the mat is true. He's going to use this formulation, the statement, then. So we'll use that the statement that the cat is on the mat is not the same as saying that the statement is true. What do you add when you say it's true?

He gives this argument about saying, well, imagine if we had two different trials for two different crimes. One of them is for libel, for saying that Mr. W is a burglar, and the other one is to determine whether he is in fact a burglar. And in fact, those are two different sorts of trials for two different sorts of questions. One is whether is it true? Was the statement that Mr. W is a burglar true? Is it liable? And then the other one is he is in fact a burglar. Now, I don't fully, completely understand that attempt at making a separation, but what ultimately he does on page 10 is he's going to say there's something peculiar about the fact which is described by the statement that the cat is on the mat is true.

Something which may make us hesitate to call it a fact at all, namely, that the relation between the statement that the cat is on the mat and the world, which the statement the cat is on the mat is true asserts to obtain, is a purely conventional relation. What he seems to go on to say, we got to the point where Strawson was going to start to criticize this, is that what we are actually doing is when we say that a statement is true is somehow we are at a meta level, pointing to the conventional linkage between word and world, between a statement and the world.

So whereas when we're within the statement and just making a statement, we're easily referring to states of affairs. But when we go to that meta level of truth, we're not simply remaking the statement. We are somehow pointing to the semantic relationship. We are pointing to the conventional tie between words and world. Strawson's gonna have a field day with that idea. And attacking that.

40:53 Mark: Yeah. Another way of putting the point you were just making about page nine there is the statement the cat is on the mat is true, as you were just saying is about the statement.

41:02 Wes: Yeah.

41:02 Mark: Whereas the cat is on the mat is just about the cat and it's being on the mat. I'm thinking of Tarski again in that what I just said earlier, that Austin just rules out that a statement can be about itself. And this is why he says, yes, okay, There's a biconditional relation between them.

41:19 Wes: Right.

41:19 Mark: If one is true, the other is true. If one is false, the other is false. And that goes both ways. For a lot of folks, that would just be okay, then those sentences mean the same thing. If they're true in all the same circumstances, false and all the same circumstances, they must mean the same thing. But we already saw with Tarski that no one is actually in the object language and one is the. The metalanguage. So in that sense, they're not the same.

41:42 Wes: Yeah, you're talking about the paragraph before the one where I just quoted from, where he sets all that up and then says, in a way, that little thing we're doing in the metal language is sort of pointing to the conventional relation in the object language between the word and what it stands for. And then he says, for we are aware that this relation is one that we could alter at will, whereas we like to restrict the word fact to hard facts, facts which are natural and unalterable, or anyhow, not alterable at will. So in a way it's like he's saying that we're saying something about the semantics of the language. Really. You know, when we say the cat is on the mat, we're saying something about the world. When we say that that is true, we're at a meta level pointing to the relationship between the statement and the world. We're saying something about semantics.

42:26 Mark: And that seems like that would hold that if you're actually saying when I'm talking about the object language. Well, what the object language was, was a particular utterance by a particular person at a particular time. It is not a proposition that could be then in any obvious way voiced by a number of people over different times. It is not a timeless context free thing. So yeah, I'm talking about the actual words that you said. So the conventional definitions of those words actually do matter in a way that when you're talking about the things themselves, who cares what the language is?

The meaning of the cat is on the mat is going to be the same no matter what language you speak it in. But if I talk about your utterance of the cat is on the mat, then I'm talking about the fact that you said something in English. And if we change what those English words meant, that would change the truth conditions of the sentence. I don't see any problem with that. Do you want to read where Strawson rips on that?

43:15 Wes: Yeah, this is basically on page 12 of Strawson. His conclusion is that when we use these words like true or fact or whatever in ordinary life, we are talking within and not about a certain frame of discourse. We are precisely not talking about the way in which utterances are, or more may be conventionally related to the world. So that's his direct refutation of what we've just talked about in Austin. Maybe I should read on a little bit. We are talking about persons and things, but in a way in which we could not talk about them if conditions of certain kinds were not fulfilled.

Problem about the use of truth is to see how this word fits into that frame of discourse. So the wrong answer is to confuse the problem with the question, what type of discourse is this? It's on section three after that. So that basically Austin confuses the semantic conditions of a statement's truth with what a true statement asserts. So to say its statement is true is not to say that the semantic conditions are fulfilled. That's kind of what Austin's saying. We're saying right when we say the cat is on the mat is true. We're saying, hey, the semantic conditions of that statement are filled, you know, in our meta language.

You're saying that about the object language language again, it's something, as far as I can tell, Strawson asserts, I don't understand. If there's an argument for that, I don't understand it. He just thinks that's an absurd idea. Austin's idea that to assert truth is to talk about semantic conditions.

44:41 Mark: I just think I'm going to use this. So if my wife says to me, you locked the cat out of the room with his litter box in it and he shat all over the floor, you did that. I'm going to say the semantic conditions of your statement have been fulfilled.

44:56 Wes: You gotta say it in the really robotic voice, though.

44:59 Mark: The semantic conditions of your statement are fulfilled.

45:03 Wes: Surprised there's not a science fiction robot character that looks like that

45:09 Mark: whose name is Strawson.

45:12 Wes: Strawson.

45:13 Mark: Strawson x1.

45:14 Wes: Yeah, Strawson. PF9, 7, 6.

45:22 Mark: So your other point in Austin about the trial, you've committed a crime and I say that you've committed that crime and you accuse me of defamation. And he says those are actually different kinds of trials, even though it's like the same thing. I mean, if you actually, we have a trial that proves that you did the crime, then, well, I wasn't lying about it. So I'm not guilty of defamation by, you know, the ordinary terms of defamation. So it seems like the substance of those two things are the same, but the fact is that we have different.

45:48 Wes: The investigations will be the same, but what's at stake is not the same.

45:53 Mark: But to me, that actually shows that Austin does think about ascribing truth as a performative, that just the fact that you did a crime is different than my saying so. My acting, my performing, I'm doing something over and above, you know, in just stating a fact, I'm doing something over and above, you know, that fact existing.

46:18 Dylan: It's not the crime, it's the cover up.

46:20 Mark: Maybe, I'm not sure. Am I just merely stating that the crime happened if that captures where the cover up would come in?

46:27 Dylan: Well, I guess what I mean is not exactly the same distinction, but the being guilty of the crime and being whether or not it's libelous or that

46:37 Mark: I say that you committed the crime?

46:39 Dylan: No, no, apparently you can't be guilty of libel if the thing that you said, the person did, they actually did. So one way to show that you weren't being libelous is that you actually show that they did it.

46:52 Wes: So, yeah, he thinks that this idea that, you know, saying the statement is true, but that's just saying the semantic conditions are fulfilled is absurd. And here's the example that he gives. Suppose in a room with a bird in a cage, I say that parrot is very talkative. Then my use of the referring expression that parrot with which my sentence begins is correct. When the token object bird with which my token expression event, is correlated by the conventions of demonstration is of a type with which the type expression is correlated by the conventions of description.

So he's giving Austin's criteria here. Here we do have an event and a thing and a type mediated conventional relationship between them. If someone corrects me saying, that's not a parrot, it's a cockatoo, he may be correcting either a linguistic or factual error on my part. The question of which he is doing is the question of whether I would have stuck to my story on a closer examination of the bird. Only the former case is he declaring a certain semantic condition to be unfulfilled. In the latter case, he's talking about the bird. So in other words, when we're questioning, you know, the truth or falsity of something, it's not like saying, well, I don't think you understand the word that you're using, right?

So we're not talking about semantic conditions in that sense. You know, what we're saying is that you just got it wrong. So things are not the way you say they are. So it's not a matter of you using parrot to refer to cockatoo or vice versa or something. It's just that made a factual error. So that does seem kind of intuitively to point to the idea that, yeah, if we say a statement is true, we're really. We're not thinking so much about semantic conditions, if that's necessarily about the meanings, the words, as much as about the fact of the matter.

I don't know. None of these things, like, are like convincing arguments, partly because I don't feel like I fully understand it, but some of it's intuitively evocative. But I would not know how to choose between Austin's position or Strawson's position.

48:52 Mark: It seems like a good exercise to kind of follow, you know, especially if we read the original Strawson paper. And let's see, like, did they have any exchanges after this? Is there. Were there questions that people asked and how did. At the colloquy, and how do people. How do they answer these questions? It would be illuminating. I. I have the feeling that they are kind of talking past each other a little bit that really his like, you know, as I was saying before, I think Strawson's view of what Austin means by a statement is probably not actually what Austin means, but I think Austin was pretty damn unclear about it.

So I think Strawson is giving a reasonable interpretation. I'm not sure. I think we don't understand fully what is motivating Strawson's take on states of affairs and facts ontologically and what the hell is Austin's ontology? And how is that at the root of why they're insisting and talking different ways about these things? It's just, it would require a lot more delving into this in ways that are already unpleasant enough to really figure out how these two views relate to. So that's why I like looking them as disputes within a general, ordinary language school that are pointing out some interesting issues that you can think about rather than this is the view you should have.

I think it's not surprising that describing what correspondence Theory amounts to is going to be difficult. I think we can go into our Blackburn discussion with that pretty confidently in mind. And my last point, I'll consider this. My closing is I am understanding more and more the deflationary view of truth is the more you talk about this stuff, the more deflated you feel.

50:30 Wes: I wanted to say, just because we talked about Strawson's theory that when we say something is true, it's kind of what Strawson calls an assertive device, or it's to confirm or agree or something like that. So Austin at the end of the paper replies to that point of view, which has obviously been expressed previously, that Strawson is. And says basically says, yes, well, sure, I. I agree that when we say something is true, we're doing this confirming or granting thing. But that doesn't mean we're not also using it to make a statement or an assertion.

He says this, but this cannot show that. To say that S is T is not also. And at the same time to make insertion about the statement that that s. And then he goes on to say, so the fact that there's a performative aspect to statements doesn't mean that they aren't also true or false. Like when you call someone a cuckold, right? There's a performative aspect to that, which is where you're insulting someone. That's really the point, calling them that. But that doesn't mean it can also be true or false, which it is. So I think, you know, despite the fact that he would Agree with Strawson that, you know, this confirm or grant thing is, is part of what it means to say something is true.

True. It's important to him. And that something more has something to do with a, with a correspondence theory of truth. In other words, that in some way we're pointing to that conventional relationship between words and states of affairs when we use this predicate is true. So anyway, like I said at the very beginning, I go into these analytic philosophy episodes thinking, oh God, why are we doing this? Ultimately, the exercise, I think it's clarifying. I mean it's. I understand much better what the sorts of allusions that analytic philosophers frequently make to this type of stuff where I used to be just have a very, very vague understanding of it.

So I think it's good to get through this stuff. It's not my preferred way of thinking about these things. You know, this focus on language I think is in fact the way analytic philosophers talk about language, sort of leading to metaphysical deceptions. And I think the focus on language in fact ultimately is quite philosophically deceptive when it comes to this stuff. But I think it can be clarifying to go through all this stuff.

52:43 Mark: Let's just quick go around if you have to give a winner between these two authors. Seth, who won?

52:50 Seth: Strossen.

52:52 Mark: Did you say Austin?

52:53 Wes: Strawson? Austin?

52:57 Seth: Strossen.

52:58 Mark: Dylan, who won?

52:58 Dylan: I'm going with Austin.

53:00 Mark: And Wes, you already said you don't know. Or did you. Despite saying you don't know, you still have.

53:05 Wes: You think I understand Austin better?

53:08 Dylan: Yeah, yeah.

53:09 Mark: I think Davidson won. All right, so please go chime in. Which, which that actually means that of the two that Austin. I took his point more that I think it's okay to define one semantic term in terms of others from the same family. I don't think that that analogy that Strawson gave about the let's give a theory of commands using the term obey or something that, that, that it's as ridiculous as that. I think the best we can probably do is define one terms in terms of the other things in its domain, which is exactly what Davidson said. But I think that, I think Austin kind of fulfilled that in his little take.

So we can see what Blackburn thinks of it. Yeah, folks should tell us who they think won. At partiallyexaminedlife.com you can respond to the blog post about this or you could follow us on Facebook and talk about this there, or you could read everything yourself and you could tell us you would have understand if only you'd read this other thing and this other thing and this other thing. You guys are just. It's going to take until next year to read all this stuff, by the way. We'll listen to that.

54:08 Wes: Can I just jump in with a quick story? Yes, I know he heard us. Some people in a. Like, he goes to a sauna and he heard some people talking about us.

54:16 Mark: Who did?

54:17 Wes: Just this guy that I know. And so he told me about this, and he's like. They were basically saying they understand our analytic philosophy episodes way better than our continental philosophy episodes, which blew my mind because I just imagine people listening to what we just did, and just.

54:34 Dylan: That's only because we're like, what?

54:39 Mark: That's cool.

54:41 Seth: What the.

54:41 Wes: What?

54:42 Mark: It just. It would have been a better story if you'd put a celebrity name in there. Liam Neeson was listening to some people talk about our analytic. And he called me up.

54:54 Seth: All right.

54:54 Mark: Our closing song is by Shawn Phillips from his 1974 album, Furthermore, the song is called Troof T R O O F. Shawn is a fascinating guy, and you can hear me interview him on Nakedly Examined Music, episode 77. Check it out at nakedlyexaminedmusic.com Good night.

55:13 Seth: Good night. By.

55:38 Wes: And the light is all around us Even the some people really couldn't give it a damn but those people gonna find out and that the world is here to feel and oh my God, I do feel real Feel so real. Breath. Take my heart and lead me through. Will you be with me tomorrow? Spinning my soul with all your love and care and if you do decide to leave Then you must know the way I feel and oh my God, I do feel real. You feel so real. Since the dying I saw your face. I have wondered how to touch you Bright light shining through the depths of my very core and if you do decide to leave me I will lose my fear But I still know I did feel real Felt sorry. Shall make us free. Man I speak of the love I'm ending Even though some people really won't give it a chance but we are here to make it stronger for as many as want to feel and all the black could be could be raining Sam.