If the natual world is all there is?

Why don't you ask questions about what was said instead of being just talking around the comments?

Where does the "interpreted statement true" come from?

Where does the "interpreted statement true" come from?

As it happens, I am working on a book tentatively entitled "Analytic Dualism," in which I take an approach that is really just that of analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy began with Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose view was that many apparent philosophical problems were actually the result of the misuse or abuse of language and that at least some of them could be made to vanish by the appropriate formulation of our concepts in language, that is to say, by the clarification of our language use. But I want to stress two dualisms in what I'm writing--the meaning/language dualism, and the mental/nonmental dualism--so I've given my approach its own label, perhaps somewhat presumptuously. Anyway, a sentence by itself has no meaning. "Jupiter is the most massive planet in the Solar system" is just a collection of pixels on a screen, or of printed dots on a page, or of compression waves in the air. It has no God-given, objective meaning. Whatever meaning it has is just whatever meaning we give it. We give it an interpretation. And yes, we use dictionaries, and yes, we understand sentences' intended meanings by looking at their syntax, and if we are proficient users of English, we may write sentences that other proficient users of English give the same meanings we give them, so that we may clearly communicate our thoughts to them via language. But it is never the sentence itself that is true or false, but the interpretation given to it. It's the interpreted sentence that is true or false. If one person interprets the sentence as "Jupiter, the gas giant, is the most massive planet in the Solar system," but if another interprets the sentence as "Jupiter, the Roman god, is the most massive planet in the Solar system," then the first person will intend to say something true where the second will intend something false; and if still another interprets the sentence as "Bananas are yellow" (we are free, as Humpty Dumpty tells us, to make words mean whatever we want them to mean), then he intends something quite different. 

I will frequently leave out the word "interpreted" and just say that a sentence or statement is true, for ease of exposition--but my so doing will assume that we proficient users of English are all giving the sentence the same interpretation. (I have begun using the term "natural interpretation" to the meaning a proficient user of English would give a sentence. If there is only one natural interpretation of the sentence, then the focus on interpretation can be dropped.) Of course, "proposition" is the word we use for a sentence so interpreted as to express something about which there is a fact of the matter, so if I say "proposition," I won't be using shorthand, as I will be if I say "sentence" rather than "interpreted sentence."

So, I could say, "What makes a sentence true is its correspondence to fact," but if I did, I'd be assuming that the sentence was being given a particular interpretation. My inclusion of the word "interpreted" in "What makes an interpreted sentence true is its correspondence to fact" was just a matter of precision. I'm sorry if it was confusing.

As to post 41's question "Why don't you ask questions about what was said instead of being just talking around the comments?"--well, I really am mystified as to what was being argued about in your and stephen_33's posts about truth, and I hoped to say something that might be helpful. I still don't know what points, exactly, were being debated. Perhaps the two of you could enlighten me.

I don’t think I follow you; you are suggesting sentences have no meaning on their own, what do you mean by that? A sentence gets written to express, assert, exclaim something, and so on, we don’t have to get to the nature of God to see this. Human writing may cause pixels to form into words; the pixels are not necessarily important themselves, but their arrangement is. They give rise to meaning that transcends the pixels, or the ink on paper, or whatever form of communication we could be talking with. I’m assuming you mean to get your points across to me in our discussion here and now.

Among other things, one of the points I was making was all truth is are absolute truths as it relates its reference point, change the reference change statement to something else. You brought the date for some event as a reference point for something that has occurred, making it a truth statement about that event. Alter the statement you change the reference, keeping it an accurate statement; it will always be the truth as it relates to that event; it doesn’t matter that people may in time forget or lose track of it. Our opinions or I suppose our interpretations are either correct or not as they relate to everything around us.

In 'truth', I was a little lost myself as to what exactly TruthMuse meant  😉

I was trying to express how I understand truth in the context of truth-valued statements about matters of fact. I'm not sure he understood?

Truth and righteousness, I think, are some of the essential things in life, with love being the most important. That said, all of them can be distorted to our thinking, and I believe truth is one of the easier things that we can see with logic, as I have said before, two contradictor claims about the same thing in the same time frame will not be valid together. We cannot have competing views on A and not A being true at the same time, either one or none of them will be correct, but never both true at once making truth very exclusive.

“To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true; so that he who says of anything that it is, or that it is not, will say either what is true or what is false.” – Aristotle

The Aristotle quote lays it out nicely, for all true statements, when we make any claim that is a truth statement, it is either truth as we relate to our references or not. If I say I believe in little pink unicorns are real things, that could be true, I believe it, but it doesn’t mean that little pink unicorns are real, only that I believe them to be. If I believe the universe that we live in is all there is, there is nothing transcendent that put it here, that would be a true statement on what I believe, but the truth of the about my belief is another topic altogether and I could be wrong about it.

We shouldn’t determine truth by popularity, consensus, or because some authority says so for ourselves if we do, why bother thinking about any topic if we don’t let ourselves be engaged thinking things through. If we are simply taking on faith, those things that the herd is saying by consensus or someone else says so, which is what we would be doing if we cannot look at things ourselves. We need to put to the test those things that we believe are being given to us as truth, but if we have given this over to others, than we will never be able to see the truth ourselves, unless someone else tells us it is okay now change our minds.

I fervently believe that everything I am as a conscious, experiencing creature will end when my brain ceases to be alive.

That I believe this to be the case is a fact. Whether or not I cease to exist as a conscious entity when my brain dies, is an open question however. Such questions are not yet settled.

I think most people grasp the difference between the two.

Where there is a void in our knowledge, it's true to say that we do not know.

Anyone is entitled to believe what they wish but if we want our propositional beliefs to be aligned with how things actually are, then we need to scrutinise the available evidence & form our beliefs accordingly.

I find it a bit odd how you apply the use of words like fact, bias, and faith. 

Why? I thought I'd been clear enough. And I have very little use for the term faith.

I have little use for your twist of the word faith; it is not a religious term based only on religious verbiage. Attempting to paint is as that strips its real meaning from you and hides particular realities found in your own life.

We accept things as real because we trust (put our faith in) those things we use to validate what is trustworthy. I can have faith in you because I believe you are an honest person. That is faith in its proper use, and it is no different when applied to anything else in any setting.

Facts are not something we can only believe to be true. Therefore what occurs after death is not a fact; it is a matter of faith and belief. Now you can totally and completely believe it to be accurate, there may not even be the slightest inkling of doubt about it in your mind that what you accept as truth is true. Still, that speaks only to your mind, not that the thing you believe is real or not. You could be entirely wrong about what occurs after death, so suggesting it is a fact, is not a true statement, it is a belief, a matter of faith.

A bias is your starting place; it is the world view you have when looking at everything. We do not disconnect our brains and pour out all of our reasoning before looking at the rest of the world. We take what we think is correct and use those things to see and understand the universe.

Attempting to remove prejudice is not something that can be done, attempting to remove a slant towards one end and another to get at the truth is something we can do in our experiments. When we set up our experiments, we do so attempting to get the cleanest results possible, that is not a removal of bias, bias is applied when we start giving our explanations to those things we are looking at.

When I was in a lab, and things were going wrong with an experiment, the class team programmers always blamed the equipment. The mechanical team that worked on the equipment always blamed the programs for the issues. Those accusations were biased in play that had more to do with people's trust in their work versus someone else. When anyone automatically assumes specific slants towards one fundamental truth over another, that is a bias. (Sorry for the book)

If you consider me to be an honest person, isn't it more correct to say that I havn't up until now resorted to dishonest means to argue my case?

That's a form of evidence that I'm generally an honest person, so you're basing your judgment of me on that, not on faith alone. Trust in people behaving consistently isn't unreasonable because most people do behave consistently.

"Facts are not something we can only believe to be true. Therefore what occurs after death is not a fact; it is a matter of faith and belief. Now you can totally and completely believe it to be accurate, there may not even be the slightest inkling of doubt about it in your mind that what you accept as truth is true. Still, that speaks only to your mind, not that the thing you believe is real or not. You could be entirely wrong about what occurs after death, so suggesting it is a fact, is not a true statement, it is a belief, a matter of faith."

This is not correct & may explain why you're getting confused?

What happens to a person when their brain has ceased to function most certainly is a fact! We may not understand precisely what that state of affairs is but knowledge of some fact, or it's lack, in no way changes it.

What a person chooses to believe about what happens after their death is up to them but what actually happens is not. No fact is altered by what we believe about it.

* I'm not sure you're differentiating between what a person might sincerely believe to be the case regarding some matter of fact (example: I believe my consciousness will cease with the death of my brain) & the matter of fact itself? I did explain above that while it's a fact that I actually believe this to be true, what I believe is not necessarily a fact.

Why do I believe that the death of the brain means the person's 'conscious self' ends as well? Because I believe my consciousness arises from the activity of my living brain. Why? Because all manner of injury & disease can seriously affect the functioning of the conscious mind.

Like it or not, many of us will suffer impairment of our conscious faculties as we grow older. This strongly suggests that consciousness emerges from the activity of the brain & is dependent on it's good health.

So you see, I haven't simply plucked this notion out of thin air!

Isn't it a pity that some of these topics have become dialogues between the two of us?

Is anyone else there? Knock once for no & two for yes....  😄

Actually, the notion of this material world is all there is will be revealed when you die. If you are more than just chemicals and particles, and the important part of you is just that and moves on. Then what happens to your material body is known, and meaningless, dust to dust it goes. You have no idea what will occur after death, you may have cause to believe what to you, I agree. It isn't blind faith, it is still faith for you, it is just what you believe nothing more, the reality of what occurs at death and beyond is you at this time, you have yet to encounter. We only know it is coming for us all, no matter what confession of faith we each have about what happens next.

Very few people have faith about things just plucked out of the air.

Like I said, people are free to believe anything they wish.

I choose to examine the best evidence I can find & I conclude that we do not continue after the death of our brains. Despite the reasons I gave above for believing this, the notion that consciousness is able to endure, absent of a physical vehicle, makes no sense whatsoever.

And I haven't yet heard an explanation of how it might work from anyone that makes the slightest sense. That saying about the triumph of hope over experience comes to mind.

You don't know why we are here, if there is a reason or not. You cannot know the end of things, because you don't any of the whys, so stating what you believe about this great unknown cannot be a fact. If our make up is body, soul, and spirit you are failing to recognize all of the variables to put together what could possible come next, looking at only the body is just the material part, the most temporary piece of the puzzle.

That isn't a question I ever dwell on because I have no reason to believe there is a 'why'.