Week 5

(upbeat music) - Welcome everybody to week four, or no, week whatever, I forgot to get a twigist of Philosophy of Language. (laughing) - Now we're editing is an important part of this process. Our guest for today is the wonderful Jodi Azuni from Tufts University. Go and eat a philosophy professor there, works on metaphysics, philosophy of language, epistemology, philosophy of math, philosophy of science, what am I missing Jodi? All of the aesthetics. - It's aesthetics, right? - I've done aesthetics. - Yeah, it brings me to another point, which is you are also an accomplished, published author of fiction, poetry, short stories. - Yep, novels. - I've written a lot of novels, I haven't published them. But I've published a lot of the stories, short stories. - You are a very prolific writer of many genres. And Jodi also has a number of really great books. Some of them all sort of not unrelated to what we're working on today, but about language, metaphysics, knowledge. He has a book, for example, called "Talking About Nothing", "Numbers, hallucinations, and fictions". So that touches on some of what we'll talk about today. And we're really, really lucky to have him here today. Thanks so much for joining us, Jodi. - Oh, I'm pleased to be here. - So we were just talking before I connected to the recording and Jodi was about to tell me his sort of overall impressions of the readings for today. Why don't we return to that topic? - Okay, well, I mean the thing that struck me actually with all of them is a funny kind of issue, which is what I would call the distinction between sentences or propositions and what we use them for and what we're up to when we use them. And true kind of, in fact, everything we say when we're talking about these things, including the Frankfurt on bullshit and all of this, kind of jumps back and forth between these. Sometimes the focus is on the very thing that's honored, the sentence and what it's doing. And other times it's, well, what's the speaker up to? What's the person up to? And I think there are some philosophers who think there's no real distinction here because there is only a speech act, right? There is no language. There's just, we make noises, we do things, but I don't think we experience language that way. We experience language the way we experience tools. Sentences are things we use. That's our experience. And so you can talk about the true and the false when you're talking about the sentences, but you can also talk about lying, about bullshit, about all these things. And you're never there just talking about the sentence. You're talking about the person in the person's qualities. So I thought, yeah, that's a really important distinction and I should make that distinction first. So I did. Yeah. I'm really glad you did. And actually, on the syllabus, you might have noticed that we will cover performative utterances by Austin to Brett Sherman, philosopher of language, about that. Maybe I'll switch them so that the students will, at this point, have learned about speech acts. So we'll be able to make some sense of this distinction, which is between whether or not the sentence is true. It means to say that sentence is true. And what it means to say that somebody is trying to assert truth, say with it or say nearly bullshit. That's right. That's right. Yeah. So I mean, again, this is, in my view, a lot of people, a lot of people who like speech acts think there are only speech acts. But I don't think that's our experience. But take a sentence, John is running. You can, the performance can be you're asserting it. There's a guy named John and you're saying he's running. It can be a demonstration, you know, here's the sentence. And I'm like, John, you know, I'm a grammarian. I'm saying, this is a three word sentence and it's got a noun and it's got a verb. And then I'm not, I'm using it, but in a different way. I'm not asserting anything or I'm in a play and I perform. Then I'm pretending. And it's really the right word. I'm pretending to assert the sentence. But it's a play and I'm not. So yeah, the same tool gets used in different ways. Think of a screwdriver. Maybe someday in the future we'll go or maybe it exists now. There's a museum of tools. And you go to the museum of tools and there's a screwdriver in a little box and, you know, this was used in mid 20th century, early 21st century, to do certain things. It's not being used, it's there. And other times people are using them. And I think exactly that is what's going on with language too. - It often thinks that most utterances have elements of both speech act and the specific kind of truth that sentences have that we'll talk about in a moment. And one thing he points out is that sometimes the truth of sentences affects the speech act and how successful it is, right? So I can't invite something to my house for dinner if there's not dinner at my house that night. So accuracy truth is an important element of that. But it's not the only element of that. - That's right. - And I think everything we read for today is more about the speech act part of truth. So all the authors that we read for today are really interested in-- - What we're doing with, right? - Yeah, exactly. What we're doing when we're trying to-- - Even at often talking to people, when we're bullshitting, when we're lying, when we're doing these things. These are really all about what we're doing with pieces of language. - Right, so, you know, actually to use bullshit as an example, utterances where the person doesn't really care whether it's true or false. That's not to the purpose, the truth or falseity of the sentence. What learning about speech acts brings out is that characterization that Frankfurt gives to it is a little too broad. That characterizes a lot of speech acts. The whole point of speech acts is that we're often trying to do things with language besides merely convey information or merely convey misinformation. - That's right, right. - Like, for example, we might utter everything that I say is actually true, every sentence is true. I'm doing something, I'm trying to persuade you. - Right. - And so, I've selected certain truths and I omitted other ones perhaps. And I can imagine in principle that a person who's bullshitting is only uttering true sentences. - I can see that. - But the true sentences would be vague or would be fluffy or would be irrelevant or would be, you know, they'd have all these other qualities that would make it clear that we'd say that guy's bullshitting me. - They could also be crystal clear, perfectly precise sentences. It would seem if Frankfurt is right about the definition. Imagine somebody hitting on somebody else at a bar and this guy is a physicist and he's like a really great physicist and he's trying to impress this person at the bar by just like telling them all of these interesting facts about the cosmos. And they're all absolutely true and indeed he's like an expert on this topic. But it is absolutely not to his purpose to convey information in this case, his purpose hit on this person in a bar. In that case, it stripes me that according to Frankfurt's definition, that counts as bullshit. I think again, we can ask whether it's maybe a slightly different speech act. - Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, under certain circumstances, we might say, well, that was a lot of bullshit, but we wouldn't if the person actually was telling us all stuff that was true. - Yeah, so I think this is a reason to question whether Frankfurt's characterization of bullshit is entirely right. It maybe seems a little too broad captures too many cases. - I think you're right. - So G.A. Cohen actually has an article where he argues that this may be too strong on the other side that actually bullshit has nothing to do with the speaker's intentions. That it has to be about the utterances, something about the utterances themselves. Namely, he says it's like unclarifiable, unclarity. I think that's how G.A. Cohen characterised it. That strikes me as also not right. Like, it's got to have to do with the intention as well at least, right? Maybe it's a combination of both. - I think it mostly has to do with the intention. And I don't really think clarity is an issue. You might be bullshitting somebody by deflecting. And then what you say is perfectly clear and perfectly precise, perhaps, but not to the point. - Interesting. - And then afterwards you might say to somebody else, he was bullshitting me. He was telling me all this stuff about how the door is structured. And I wanted to know if he knew how to build a door, you know, and he didn't really explain that he had anything more than book knowledge. He was bullshitting me. - That's interesting. So that suggests that a third thing might be involved, which is the heroes, desires. For example, the person in the bar, that might not count as bullshitting if they sort of understand, for example, that they're being hit on. Like, there's a part of participating in it. But, yeah, imagine if they really did want to know, about the physics and they had asked the person about the physics and then the person like starts telling them stuff that they didn't want to hear in order to hit on them. That might look a little more like bullshit because you're, you're bullying me like it's a thing you're going to me. That's right. I think that's got to be right. I think the first thing to get at is that bullshit is relational. It's a speech act but it's a speech act where there's an intention to do something to the audience. Let's say successful bullshit, I guess, is you, you, you, you sized up the audience correctly and now your term I use sometimes is you're snowing them. Okay. So you're like telling them a lot of stuff that you know is going to distract them and deflect them from getting the answer they want. In this sense, I mean a lot of good, good Lord, a lot of what politicians say is bullshit. And what it's going what's going on is they don't answer the question. They, they say a lot of things but also the things are perfectly clear. I was thinking about this while I was reading this article this morning and I thought to myself, yeah, did Donald Trump bullshit and I thought no, he didn't bullshit. He just lied. It wasn't bullshit. It was just outed out and no one ever called him that either as far as I know. I mean, Americans tend to be a little more polite than the Brits. On this score, I think British are perfectly willing to say, I mean the economist I think is willing to write something, call it bullshit than American papers. But nevertheless, I think you wouldn't want to say that Donald Trump was bullshitting. You want to say he was, he was lying. That's interesting. I'm less sure about. Actually, I think Frankfurt has an article he wrote about Trump after he was elected. He, a Frankfurt. Oh, okay, he did. Popular piece, yeah, where he described to him as bullshitting. So yeah, I mean, let's think we're sort of trying to hone in on some conditions for what counts as bullshit. Trump certainly seems to be bullshitting to me in the Frank Ferdinand sense because although often he was telling falsehoods, he didn't seem impressively uncaring about whether what he was saying was false. Like when you talk about somebody lying, I think it's Augustine who gives this really strong criterion of what counts as a lie. Your primary goal in order to really count as lying needs to be to see the other person with false beliefs as such, whereas anything else is like you're motivated to do other stuff with the falsehoods, right? Like you said, persuade people and it's not necessarily to see their line with falsehoods. And that strikes me as true about Trump. Like if it's lying, it's lying in that what Augustine thinks is the less liey sense, Trump didn't really care that we believed the false things. He just wanted to distract us or get what he wanted or or persuade. I really think it is a subtle question. What Trump thought he was doing most of the time? I think one of the things is I agree with the Frank Ferdinand. But I don't think that's a criterion for bullshit, but I agree that the person doesn't care. Trump didn't care. But I think Trump sees everything as a fight. So he's always trying to win the fight and the lot of the fights are verbal. So he wants to win the fight. And to him winning a fight if he interrupts you all the time and you don't get to say what you wanted to say, he won the fight. If he lies or tells the truth or some blend, what's important is that he got to say it and you didn't get to say it or you sounded silly or weak or whatever he won the fight. There are a lot of people that care about content. What they're saying is content and they have a debate. And philosophers were all professionally obliged to care about content, even if we don't. But there are a lot of people out there. They're not thinking of it in terms of content. They're thinking in terms of weapons or tools. So when someone's insulting someone else, they reach for cliches, they reach for obscenities, they reach for racism. They're not really, I believe they're not really concerned with content. These are weapons. They hurt people. And so that's what they're doing. That's why Trump is so focused on insults, which is like his go-to method. And that's why I almost feel the bullshitter. So now I'm disagreeing with Frankfurt. The bullshitter does care about content. They don't care about truth and falsity, but they care about content. Why do you think the bullshitter cares about content? Because that's what they're trying to do. They're trying to give you content that does something. That distracts you, that fogs you, that intimidates you. I always think someone who's bullshitting, or makes them look impressive, or allows them to fill the room with their voice as opposed to your voice. All of these motivations, but I think that's why they care about content. Not about truth and falsity, but about content. And I think Trump doesn't care about content. He's the other guy. He's like the insultor. Yeah. You know, imagine something insulting. I don't want to mention any phrases. You know, you're a blah, you know, an insulting thing. I may not even be aware of the content. Are you, you know, there's this thing I know about that. When you're screaming obscenities, etc., etc., like you bang your thumb by accident and you go, oh, you know, apparently that's a different part of the brain. That part of the brain isn't thinking about content. That's my theory. Yeah. I like that. And of course, it's possible for one person to do many of these things. Of course. Or different things at different times. I think of the injection of bleach stuff and the sunlight stuff as kind of closer to bullshitting. So when Trump got up talking about those as possible cures, like he seems sort of interested in the content. He seemed interested in the content there. I think he was like hopes that the science was promising on those fronts. Didn't really know the details. Didn't really care about the details. Wanted to give the general impression that like there was hope and he knew what he was talking about. See, that that's part of the problem with things like that is with him. You can't, you don't know quite what to make of it. The same thing happened when he suggested dropping a nuke on a hurricane to get rid of it. Can't we do that? And you're sitting there going, does he really not understand why that won't work? Why don't you? I have to admit, my reaction to this stuff is like, huh, could you get sunlight in the body? I don't know. Here is about these possibilities. Well, I guess, I guess. But you were thinking that way with the injecting bleach. Tell me you weren't. I was not sure. Yeah, turn, I actually look this up. It turns out that there is research on putting light sources inside the body to kill certain kinds of fire. Like people actually have done research on that. I don't know how convincing it turned out to be. But probably that's exactly what Trump had heard of. And again, so that strikes me as a pretty good example of bullshitting, right? He kind of heard something. He wanted to give you the impression of knowing about it. He wanted you to feel confident that Kira's were coming. And so, and the content was relevant there, but he wasn't too concerned with the accuracy of the content. Yeah, that you're probably right. That fits it. That fits it pretty well. Can we just very briefly talk about a philosophy, philosophy topic? So something that you work on with your most professional philosopher hat, which is the nature of that kind of accuracy truth. So I think we're going to spend most of the time today talking about the other part, the way we use truth. But I think it's worth getting on the table. What that other thing is, what do you think that that merely accuracy truth is? So if we could just bracket all that speech act stuff what we're trying to do with. Okay, I appreciate the sentence like there are no unicorns or I Alice in the six feet tall from false sentences. I don't want to talk about accuracy because I think accuracy has very precise use. But I'll talk about the truth of sentences and the falsity of sentences. I think that's the basic tool that we use. There's also the question of the word true. You know, what's going on with that word? And so my view goes like this, there are two pieces. One of them is there are sentences we're on board with. And I'm going to understand that in a broad way. Some of those sentences we're on board with because they describe the world in a certain way. There's a computer on my table, the statement of general relativity, you know, the existence of that there are no unicorns but that there are still zebras. But then I think there are other kinds of sentences which are we all also are on board with. And eventually I'm going to say which we take to be true. Our sentences like there are as many Greek goddesses as gods. Okay. Now that's not about the world, that's not about gods and goddesses if you don't think there are any. But the sentence is true. Okay. And you might say more broadly, well that sentence is about mythology. But of course the sentence doesn't say anything about mythology. It just talks about gods and goddesses. So some sentences are true because they correspond to the world. But other sentences are true for other reasons. And that's the sense in which I'm a deflationist or neutral about the idea of true. Because sentences are true for all sorts of reasons. So that's one bit. And now let's talk about the word true. What do you do with the why do we need the word true? And now I'm going to frame that a different way the way I like to frame it is. Suppose you had a language without the word true. How would it make life hard? And I think here's how it would make life hard. It doesn't make life hard if I want to say two plus two equals four is true because I can just say two plus two equals four. But suppose I'm really impressed with Allison. And so I want to say everything Allison said to me today is true. I can't list everything Allison said to me today. I don't remember everything that Allison said to me today. If I could do that I could bore you to death by repeating everything. So I end up being able to say is true. Same thing with you know I take it everybody's you know looked at the Euclidean axioms in high school you all did Euclid. And we can say something like every theorem that follows from Euclid's axioms is true. Well there are infinitely many of those I can't list them. So I need the word true for that purpose. So that's why the word exists and notice it's enabling us to say things about the sentences we already are on board with. That's its purpose. So if I want to say talking about someone who's been talking about Sherlock Holmes or about the Greek gods everything she said about Sherlock Holmes is true. Well those aren't going to be sentences that correspond to the world but they're the ones we take on board. Yeah great. So is it fair to say then that truth is a property that sentences have and like other properties for example blueness of things one reason why it's useful is you can make these more general claims about about groups of sentences or groups of things that are similar in this respect namely that they all have this property of truth. I think there's nothing wrong with talking that way. The way I would put it is true is simply a part of speech just like blue or tall etc. Just as you say a sentence is true you can say a sentence has six letters you can say a sentence is blue if you've written in blue ink. Yeah it's exactly the same. Now I don't know if you guys are going to worry about what properties are and things like that but to me it's not I'm not making a deep point. I'm just saying yeah here is a part of speech and it does what those other parts of speech do. In fact I think the word true as far as the language is concerned isn't special. What's special is just that it creates certain kinds of little puzzles. One of the oldest puzzles right I take it you brought it up is you know here I am talking to you and I say the sentence I am now uttering is false and you go oh my god that's a paradox if it's true then it's false if it's false then it's true this is an old paradox right the ancient Greeks were worried about this you can't do that with the word blue. Blue doesn't get you in trouble that way and so now people think oh so there's something weird and special going on with the word true and thousands of years while we're worrying about something going on and I think it's the word is important because of what it picks out but I don't think there's anything weird going on that's different from blue. What do you think accounts for the feeling of weirdness and the the sentence I'm not saying is false? Well in that particular case what's accounting for it is we want every sentence to be either true or false but that's already a weird generalization and I think when you start to really expand the number of cases you realize you know for example the sentence turtles are bald is that true or false and I'm like I don't know because we don't normally apply bald to turtles that's the problem. Now what's going on with the with that sentence the the sentence I'm now ordering is false isn't quite as bad it quite like that but it's actually in the ballpark what's happening is you know you're using a sentence to talk about itself and you might say oh well that's weird but of course we use sentences to talk about themselves all the time this sentence has five words is a perfectly good sentence and it's true and it could be false if I said this sentence has six words so we can talk about a sentence with that very sentence that's not weird so things often look weird because we're too focused on a special case and we're not realizing wait there are other cases like this and now we have to broaden it. Now when you end up doing logic the fact the true works this way and false works this way comes back and gives you trouble and gives you technical problems but fine there are technical problems again there's nothing really mysterious or strange or deep going on here. I want to talk a bit more about the correspondence theory which you kind of briefly mentioned and allow that to transition us into talking about fiction because I think you think that fiction considerations of how fiction fictional sentences sentences and fiction work shows that the correspondence theory is false. Yeah so and I think it's worth mentioning this in this way because some of the students have or will have heard or will hear about the correspondence theory that's usually offered as like the theory of truth in an introduction to philosophy course or reason and argument. The correspondence theory says a sentence is true just in case it corresponds to the world right just in case it it actually describes how the world is and like I said you you think that one reason to think that's false is that it doesn't work in the case of fiction can you talk a little bit more about that and maybe also an introduction sure sure so let me let me be a little more precise I think which is what you want to say the correspondence theory says is something like this which is the sentence and I think this is an Aristotle the sentence the sentence describes things being a certain way and they are that way so if there are three blocks on the table that's describing three blocks that are on the table and it's true if there are three blocks on the table and it's false otherwise right now fiction there are two things going on in my head one of them is when you're writing fiction so I would start a short story by saying something like I could my name is Mary Ann I live in Mississippi now am I lying I don't want to say I'm lying I want to say I'm pretending I'm pretending to be a narrator and I'm writing now if I have a sentence though that says the narrator describes herself as living in Mississippi that sentence is true okay but there is no narrator what do I mean there's me the author but I'm not describing myself as living in Mississippi it's the character in writing in the first person doesn't exist so the narrator describes herself as living in Mississippi that sentence is true of that story right you know put the story in the narrator in the story I live in Mississippi the story right to yourself is living in Mississippi, right? - I tell you. - Yeah. That sentence is true, but there are terms in it, the narrator that don't refer. Doesn't refer to anything. The story, I lived in Mississippi, that refers to something. So some of the terms refer, some of the terms don't, but it can't be correspondence because some of the terms don't refer. So it's not corresponding to anything. So it's correspondence is false. Same way, the number of Greek goddesses is the same as the number of Greek gods. By the way, I have no idea if that's true or false. Who cares? It's either true or false, but there are no Greek goddesses, right? Sherlock Holmes is depicted in everything about him as really, really smart. Again, that's true, but there's no Sherlock Holmes. So it's not corresponding. There's no correspondence to the world, to objects in the world. Now, I believe the same thing. You just throw this out about numbers. I don't think there are these things running around numbers. I think those, you know, so there is no largest prime is true in a weird way. Not because there were no numbers, but because there's no largest prime, but there are no numbers. So that's again, not correspondence. - We've talked about three kinds of sentences that can be true, but are sort of true and for different reasons, as you put it. It seems to be out of the world like Tessa has a cat. And that is true or false? Yeah, because it correctly describes the world or not. Do you think that's fair to say? - Correctly describes that. There's a person, Tessa. There's a cat, well, they may not be a cat because it may be that Tessa has a cat, but Tessa doesn't have a cat, it ends up being false, but that's because Tessa's a real thing and Tessa either has a cat or doesn't. And so the sentence is true or false, depending on how things are with Tessa. - Right, good. So to that extent, the correspondence theory as we described it applies to those kinds of sentences, but then you've got these other kinds of sentences, which are fiction sentences. Like the ones we were talking about and that Ligwin is talking about. And then finally, you mentioned sentences about numbers, like mathematical claims. And you say, that's not true. Those aren't true by correspondence because there aren't numbers flying around out there. Like, well, some people do think that that's the account of mathematical truth, but you don't. - Right. - What's not briefly about those kind of sentences because I think it's a natural thing for students to say when presented with that distinction that mathematical truths are true by convention. - Right. - So Euclid's propositions are true by convention because we define, we make up some concepts and we define them in a certain way. And then there are certain things that are true just because of how we've done that. Can you talk a little bit about what how those sentences are true or false? - Well, I mean, I actually think something like that is the right story. I don't actually think there need be a problem with the idea that we think of mathematics as true by convention that is to say we literally stipulate a bunch of truths. And if we say, why would we do that? And the answer would be because they're really useful. Now, there's a lot of mathematics that, and when I say useful, I mean useful for ordinary life, useful for the sciences, right? And I think that's why we want to stipulate these as true. Now, somebody might worry, why should something you stipulate be so valuable? And there's a story to tap, I think. But the point of the story is it doesn't require the value of a sentence, it doesn't have to be that it's correspondence true. There's an implicit assumption, well, if a sentence is valuable to us, it's because it corresponds to the way the world is. But I don't think that's the case. And I think mathematics is a good illustration of a bunch of truths which are valuable. And that's why we make them true. We stipulate them as true. So we can use them in inferences, right? I mean, you might ask, well, what do we do with truths? And we do two things with truths. One of the things is we describe the world. But the other thing we do is we infer things, right? And that's where the mathematics comes in as key. So I don't, but I don't have a problem with, I switched off of true by convention and said true by stipulation, but I'm not sure that's changing very much. - Yeah, I can see, I can imagine reasons why we wouldn't want to talk about truth by convention. For example, some things seem true by convention that aren't mathematical truths, true by stipulation, that sense, like my name is Allison, for example. There's a sense in which that's true by convention, namely the convention of naming and my parents having done that. But that's not the sense that we mean when we talk about truth by stipulation. - Right, right. Although, again, there's a legal use of it, which we will stipulate blah, blah, blah. And that means the court has decided to take that as true. That's not the idea here. I think we're not taking the mathematics to be true. Or if we are, we're taking it to be true exactly the same way we're taking anything else to be true. And what somebody says, what do you mean by that? The answer is we rely on it, we use it in inferences. All the good things we do with true, we do with mathematics. - Yeah. - Yeah, so that's the idea. So, Wigwin touches on this in the introduction to the left hand of darkness that we read for today. And at one point, she describes, she says something like, you know, novelists and science fiction writers are lying to you. - Yeah. - Yeah, so I think you've really nicely explained by that's not true on your account of truth. She also says, for example, science fiction writers aren't prognosticating. They're not predicting what will be true in the future. Rather, they're trying to reveal some truth now. And you might say, how can she think that? If she thinks that, you know, novelists are lying to you. And the thought is, she has some different kind of truth in mind, like an artistic truth. So she's talking about that there. Another example of somebody who I like who talks about this a lot is the director of Werner Herzog, who I think the students may just know as the actor who plays the client on the Mandalorian, but is also a well-known director. And he often talks about, he calls it ecstatic truth, but I don't think you need to name it that. He often talks about the distinction between truth, artistic truth, and what he sometimes calls facts. Something he likes to say is the book of books is not the New York City phone book, or he might one point interview, he quotes, "Gee, dude," says, "I'm not if I facts in such a way that they resemble truth more than reality. What do you think people like Luguin and Herzog and Gede have in mind here when they're trying to make this distinction between facts and truth?" - I mean, here's what I think is actually going on, and I think this is what they're trying to get at. So I'm gonna start with an analogy or a metaphor. So imagine you had a language that was impoverished in a certain way. You only had the terms black and white. You did not have red, blue, green, et cetera. You didn't have those color terms, okay? There is white that's light black. And you know, somebody might say, "Well, that sounds contradictory." And you said, "Nevertheless, if you look at the world, you'll see some whites are like blacks." And then you would say, you know, and some whites are scary, because red makes us a little jump in, and other whites are soothing. So you come up with these metaphors, which are attempts to describe colors because you don't have the vocabulary. - The color analogy to me makes some little sense of poetry, because I think poetry, in poetry, it's just sort of obvious that you're using language, and maybe even inventing language to fill in those empty spaces where we don't currently have the right words or word combinations. Fiction is interesting because it has this added element of what LaGuin calls lying, which is like the storytelling. And actually, this comes up in Diania's paper as well. He talks about tale being a kind of untruth. - Right. - And that seems, I mean, that's of course also a way to fill in gaps in language, but it's doing something slightly different. It's not using language to kind of, it's not reinventing language always, but using language to describe scenarios that you can see something displayed [BLANK_AUDIO] of embodied that you that you might not always be able to so easily put into words. So I am curious if you have thoughts on that distinction. And then the other thing that I think can't come up in like Herzog's, you know, when Herzog talks about this is presumably a lot of artworks are supposed to make you feel a certain way. And that's a different thing too than just describing states of affairs in words. So I think I take it part of Herzog's point and people who make this point is feeling a certain way is is another kind of sense that humans tap into a kind of truth. Like you can feel a truth in addition to just understanding a truth where it's not even really put into words a ball even if we had an ideal language. So yeah, let me let me try to do the first one first. I was unhappy with the term lying because I think when you're doing fiction, you're pretending and pretending isn't lying any more than theater or movies. The actors uttering words, they're not lying. They are acting and as a narrator when I adopt the narrator or I even write in the third person and I'm talking about things that didn't happen, I'm pretending. Everyone knows it's a story. So I like not calling things other things if I think they're different. I think lying is just different from that. It uses the same resources but pretending isn't lying. So that's one thing. Now I think what happens is when you engage in that, you are conveying a lot of things and you're eliciting things from the reader. The reader is having an emotional reaction. That's absolutely right. And often what's happening is again, this would be with the more psychologically oriented fiction. Fictions are of all sorts but a psychologically oriented fiction. I might be by putting characters in a situation you haven't thought about before or felt about before. You discover things about how you feel. You may be able to put those into words. You may not. Again, our vocabulary for our own psychology and for other people's psychology, it's really poor. It's really hard. So often you might think like you might have said to me about somebody we know. So and so did something that I'm uncomfortable with I think is wrong. And I say why? And you say, well, I can't really explain that. But let me give you an analogy. And now you make up another alternative picture. And in the alternative picture, it's been set up so it's clearer. So that certain elements have been stripped away. Other elements added. But the upshot is as I see two things, if it works, what you've done works. I see yes, I am uncomfortable with this story, what the character did in this story. And I see the connection to the actual event. None of that's being put into words. It might be put into words, but it might be just too hard. So that's how I think about it. I don't really think that there's anything intrinsically inexpressible. I think with enough work, you can always do it, but here's the writer. And this is really important. And it shows up with something silly. It shows up with jokes. I tell you a joke and you laugh. It's a successful joke, right? Or I tell you a joke and you don't laugh. But it's a good joke. And you don't laugh because there's a cultural difference or because of something. I then explain the joke. Now you get it, but you don't laugh because you had to be traveling along. That happens a lot with fiction and with poetry. We can put it in other words, but you're going to then just recognize that you would have an emotion if you were there, but you're not going to have the emotion because it's not the same. So the important thing that the narration does is it immerses you in the event. You identify, and this is where identification comes in or whatever, you travel along with the story, and that's how you elicit your emotion. That's how we do it. We don't, if I describe a certain event, some people will have an emotional reaction because they build the narrative for themselves, right on the spot. Other ones won't. They'll realize that. They would have an emotion, but they won't do it otherwise. That's how I want to describe this. You mentioned something that I want to kind of follow up on, which is that you didn't think that any truths are intrinsically inexpressible. I find this question really interesting. Of course, there are some philosophers who would disagree with that. So you might think that there are mystical traditions that think that they're intrinsically inexpressible truths. I think one really interesting body of evidence these days is people's reports on experiences on psychedelic drugs. They often report having a really intense experience of seeing something or seeing that something is a certain way or the world is a certain way that is completely inexpressible and I think I'm curious why you think that there can't be inexpressible truths in particular because you acknowledge, for example, that there are uses of the word true, which don't eventually trace back to the kind of philosophical sense of truth, truth of propositions. Now, we've been talking about like truing a bicycle tire, for example. Of course, that is sort of loosely connected. Well, there are things in terms of true friend. Right. Or true friend. So I wonder then if you don't think that there are inexpressible truths, then do you think that all those uses of true eventually kind of get cached out, unless they're totally not synonymous, but like eventually they get kind of cached out in terms of sentence truth? I'm going to treat those separately. So on first, I'm going to talk about the second thing you mentioned. I'll go back to the inexpressible business. So things like true friend, I think what's happening there is like what we talked about at the very beginning. We're focusing on the qualities of the person and some of those qualities trace back to the fact that they will tell you true sentences, but not all of them do. Right. A true friend may lie to you on occasion. We're sophisticated enough to understand that. Okay. So I think what's going on there is we're really talking about the person and there is a relationship but not very tight to true proposition or true sentence. I guess I would have thought that the relation to true proposition there is something like to the proposition that person is a friend. And then you think, well, what does a friend mean? A real friend is somebody who does x, y, and z, you know, shows up for you when you need them and so on. Well, sure. But also keeps their promises, doesn't lie to you. So that's how I think the word truth coming into place, into play there, but I'm not going to swear by that. It may be that when you trace back the history, it doesn't work that way at all. You know, the actual development of language could be very different. It could be true friend came first. I think of it like, yeah, that's really interesting. I want to look this up after we talk, but I think of it more like true mench or something like and that person who would stand by you, but stand by you might be speak the truth to power on your behalf. What about like true asshole? Yeah, there, I think what's going on is some that's more like the original use of true life at the proposition use of true because I think the idea there is do not take asshole here is metaphor. This person is literally an asshole and you're like thinking it's a joke really because of course literally he's not an asshole. That's a piece of an anime, but but I think that's the idea. Do not, you know, soften this up. Do not think I mean less, you know, do not think I'm just annoyed. I think that's what's going on with it. The inexpressibility thing. Let me be careful. Here's what I want to say. In any particular language, including natural languages, including formal languages, there are expressibility limits. There are things that can't be expressed in the language. Maybe they can be expressed in other languages, but they can't be expressed in those languages. And some of the things that we see, or otherwise get access to, can't be expressed in the language. I don't think there's anything really mystical about this, that's why I gave my analogy. If you don't have a language for certain shades of colors, then you can't express the relations about them. This is why Crayola invented all these other names. You go to a paint shop and there's sky blue, there's morning after pink, there's all sorts of names. Because they want to be able to say things like morning after pink is less saturated than another color. And you need more vocabulary to do this. Mathematics is the history of the invention of new vocabulary. So I'm really getting at the fact that there are A limits to what can be put into words at any time, B, that there are things we may recognize that go beyond that language. But C, I'm saying also, I don't think there's any reason to think we couldn't develop the languages vocabulary to capture these other things. Yeah, I think that I just want to flag how I saw those connected for the students, which is that if you thought that the core meaning of truth wasn't truth of propositions, if you thought other things that were unrelated to the truth of propositions, then it wouldn't be surprising if it turned out there were truths that were unsaible, right, or not, a observable in language. So those two positions kind of go together in an interesting way. Ah, yes, I think you're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, I want to talk about the Gianna piece. I really like that piece, but I think it's also pretty difficult. I take it the main problem of that piece is what do we do when our religious traditions and it really important, deeply seated, cultural for their forms, truth, newly discovered. What did you think of that piece? My own view is that there's always been a problem with inherited traditional claims. And what you do is there's always a struggle with interpreting them. So you either go herminutical, don't read the literalite, or your literalist, some people are. But most of the time, we understand the metaphorically. And that's a way of recognizing, we think, what they wanted to say, or how they're able to still speak to us. Right, so if you want to take the scientific picture of the cosmos seriously, you do not read Genesis literally. Period, the end. That's what I would want to say. Maybe that's a little sharply put, but that's what I was thinking when I was reading. Yeah, and I think in the end, Genius says something like that, he talks about things which seem like ultimately to conflict with scientific facts. So the ancestors is what Genius characters in the dialogue call it. What should we say when the truth of the ancestor seems to conflict with truth, being extracurable in a different way appropriate to the time? What were after might be, in the end, the same or equally true as what the ancestors were after, it's just uttered in ways that are appropriate to the time? That's right, but then what we have to engage in is translation. Right, and that's always the case. I mean, it doesn't have to be a religious tradition. It can be how people are describing a certain phenomenon around them, you know, a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago. It can be the question of something as contemporary sounding as, well Newton's notion of mass, exactly how does that connect or not connect to the contemporary Einsteinian notions of more than one of mass, right? And in those cases, what you're engaging is in a certain sense, you're going from one language to another. Where the expressive powers are not the same. So I think you're facing a problem like, so when they described some black as frightening, what were they talking about in our terms? And we might say, well, they were talking about certain shades of red, but that's going to always be, you know, that's a delicate matter. The way that Gianna sort of interprets the problem of deciding what to say that the ancestors is to, he asks, what is the opposite of truth? So as he puts it in the dialogue, one of the characters says, do we not have any single word that we could say is the opposite of truth just as night is the opposite of day? And one thing I want to bring out is this is really consistent. Gianna treatment, I think, is really consistent with how we started, which is he's really thinking of truth and the untruth that he offers as speech acts because the untruth puts it ways of missing the target. So as mistakes and tails are ways of missing the target, where what we're trying to do and uttering truths is hitting the target, which I think is really cool. So I'm curious if you want to say more about that. And I also kind of want to know, what do you think the core, what do you think the opposite of truth in that core philosophical sense that we were talking about earlier is? Well, in the core, in the core notion, which we would call "sentential or propositional truth" is just falsehood. It's just not, you know, P, not P. That's the opposite. But when you get to the speech act, of course there's no single. You know, if we think one speech act is just saying the truth, all I want to do is declare a propositional truth. In a certain sense, it makes no sense to say, what's the opposite of that? It's just there are all these other things you could be doing instead, and none of them would be declaring the truth. So I think that point that he's making is absolutely right, because he's thinking of speech act. Right. It's not thinking of proposition. Proposition is straightforward. It's false. I want to follow up in two ways. One is, and I'm curious if you think there's anything more worth saying about the notion of falsehood. So you said, you think, as a deflationist about truth, I think you think that truth as a concept is, like you said, there's different reasons that things could be true, and like as in the case of contingent claims about existence, mathematical claims, and fictional claims. I wonder if you think similarly that there are different reasons that sentences like that could be false. Totally. Yeah. Totally. And I gave an illustration earlier when I said, you know, if you say there is a largest prime number, that's false, but that's not false because it corresponds in the wrong way to the world. That's false because it doesn't follow from our stipulations about numbers, let's say. Right. So yeah, justice, there can be different ways. Then that's why I prefer, I called myself a deflationist for many years. That was a mistake. I'm really a neutralist. Okay. Yeah, I like that too. Yeah. I think it's more accurate for me to call myself a neutralist, which I've started doing recently. But, but, you know, neutralist says there are many ways in which a proposition can be made true. There are many ways in which a proposition can be made false, depending on what kind of proposition it is. Yeah. I think that's absolutely right. But nevertheless, to be true or to be false, that's straightforward. The other question I had was it's true, as you say, and we've explored here that there are many, many other things we can do with words besides uttering the truth. It does seem like the three speech acts that Gianna suggests, of Gianna's characters suggest, are a little bit more than just not true. Blies, mistakes, and tales are different from, say, promising or christening. They do seem to walk as be non-truths, but untruths. What Gianna says they have in common is that they're always of missing a target. That suggests that what they, you know, that the other speech acts aren't even aimed at a target, for example, in the case of promising or persuading or something. But I also wonder if it does make sense to describe them all as ways of missing a target, because for example, tales doesn't like a fiction story, doesn't seem to be aimed at the target where the target is understood accurately reporting. That's right. That's why I prefer to call it a pretence. You're not trying to aim at a target. Now, let me, let me stop a second. you're most not trying to aim at a target. You're telling a story, but writers vary in what they're trying to do and even what they're trying to do in one place or another. Sometimes our writers just engage in sheer entertainment. That's just a pretence. But sometimes they're trying to make you concerned about something, something real, something true. And then their aim isn't to hit the target, not that target. Their aim is to hit a different target. In other words, succeed at their task, which they may actually do. So I don't see that as fair to telling tales. I don't think that's the right way to think about telling tales. Yeah, I agree. I was curious about that part. It doesn't seem like the relevant target in tail telling is whether the thing is true or not. It's that you've got other aims and you may hit them and you may not. And those aims can be concerned with truths. And then I think the same thing is true of lying. I mean, we do talk about lying by omission. Well, what's that? Well, everything I said was true. Yes, but you left out the fact that there was a dead body that you had just buried in the garden. And most of us would say you were lying about what you had done that afternoon when you dwelt so long on the turkey sandwich and what it involved in making it. You said nothing falls. But also, I mean, even if you think of cases of lies, which are just straightforward utterances of falsehoods, presumably the target, precisely in the case of lying, this is the deep Augustine sense of lying, is not the truth. It's not what's real. Your target is to deceive. That's right. I don't think a little odd to characterize lying is missing a target in that way. That's because it sounds like there's a confusion there between the proposition true and what we're trying to do with the tool. Yeah, I wonder if it's a confusion so much as like an interesting complication of them because actually what what he defines the target as is what is real. So it's not put in it's put in sort of metaphysical terms not in whistic terms. And I guess it does seem right that those are three ways of not hitting what is real. Right, right. Well, that's true because that's but hitting what is not real, hitting what is real is vague enough to cover all of that. You know, it's a metaphor. You're hitting you're not hitting what's real. But I mean, I agree. I think that that that malicious because Augustine is clearly thinking of a kind of malicious desire just to fill the person's head with falsehoods. If that's the target, it's clearly not connected with true. It's clearly I'm trying to achieve something. And if I persuade you, I'm trying to achieve something. And if I'm entertaining you with my diction, I'm trying to do something. So I think really the right way to think about it is what are you trying to do? What's the person trying to do? And and then you can talk about how true comes into that or does cool. Well, this has been really wonderful as I suspected you're the perfect person to talk to about this. Oh, well, thank you very much. I enjoyed it enormously. I hope everybody likes it. I think they will. I think they're very lucky to have you here. Well, they'll certainly like it after you're finished editing it maybe. Don't worry. I won't insert or delete any knots. All right. Well, thank you so much, Jody. Thank you.