This feels incomplete to me in a fundamental way.  I am sure I will say the 
next thing badly, so will stay short.

I understand what “truth” is as a Boolean value propagated by rules within a 
formal system.  

For me to participate in the use of the tokens and rules of the formal system — 
including “participate in” in the sense of taking on its habits to organize 
where my attention or internal deliberations go — seems to involve another 
class of events that I would call “choices” for lack of an obviously better 
term.

The formal system (whether syntactic, a la Hilbert, or more constructivist in 
its semantics) is relatively sparse, which is one of the reasons we can scan it 
for consistency.

Meanwhile, the program of living, including all its events of choosing, is not 
contained within the formal system.  Alongside the formal system, the program 
of living as it is realized is yet-another thing in the world, of a different 
kind.

Truth as something formally propagated within the machinery of the formal 
system is not something I recognize as being transportable across the bridge 
that is built from choices.  Whatever we want to ratify those choices, or 
commend them to others, seems to need other terms.  Not that we couldn’t have 
used “truth” for that (though it would be way overloaded); only that if we want 
to use “truth” in the narrower formal sense, we would do ourselves a favor not 
to adopt exactly the same word to refer to some other value that is wildly 
different in its nature.

For some empiricist applications, “validity” seems an appropriate word.  But 
then validation also turns on choices, of how the “cookbook” aspects of our 
formal language get agreed upon to look at things in a certain way, or to build 
machines and read readings from them and consent to what moves those readings 
pick out in the next applications of the formal system.

For a “way of looking” that is communicated to me (a slave boy) to allow me to 
complete certain thoughts on my own (about Pythagorean theorem proofs) in the 
same ways as others would complete them, seems to be a way my choices of 
activity can be scaffolded through language that others use to point out things 
they have discovered it is possible to do.  The formal system, I, and the 
teacher are things in the world, and the teacher can coordinate experiences 
with me by way of the formal system.


I have found Dave’s last couple of posts very helpful.  I have a colleague, 
whom I often-not-so-affectionately refer to as The Mystic, who I think is 
trying to relay or reflect many of the same systems of thought that Dave does.  
But The Mystic enjoys being obscure for its own sake so much that I have not 
succeeded in making head or tail of much of what he has said for quite some 
time.  Dave’s willingness to use manners of speaking from the analytic world, 
while emphasizing that they are deliberately not the native vernacular of the 
system from which he is speaking, is helpful.

There’s a kind of interesting article, here:
https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Courses/2023%20Sellars/Sellars%20texts/The_Pragmatist_Enlightenment_and_its_Pro.pdf
 
<https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Courses/2023%20Sellars/Sellars%20texts/The_Pragmatist_Enlightenment_and_its_Pro.pdf>

I think that the lessons of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, limited as they 
are, should be helpful guides in turning Pragmatism onto itself as its target.  
One could revisit the exchanges between Quine and Carnap, but from a 
perspective decades on, and try to be at the same time cautious but also 
responsible about the thick layer of experience where they seemed to just walk 
off the field and go home.  Maybe Putnam did it better.  I haven’t looked much 
into him.

Eric



> On Jul 23, 2024, at 12:32 PM, Nicholas Thompson <thompnicks...@gmail.com> 
> wrote:
> 
> Hi   Jon,
> 
> As a Peircean, I neverdoubted it for a minute.  A true ;roposition is one 
> upon which we will agree in the very long run.  A real thing is any concept 
> about which a true proposition can be uttered.   I think that makes numbers, 
> and right triangles real given that 3^2 + 4^2 = 5^2 and  that the squire upon 
> the hippopotamus is equal to the son of the squires on the other two hides. 
> So they are real even though we will neverever touch one. 
> 
> Weird.
> 
> Nick
> From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>> on 
> behalf of Jon Zingale <jonzing...@gmail.com <mailto:jonzing...@gmail.com>>
> Sent: Monday, July 22, 2024 6:22 PM
> To: friam@redfish.com <mailto:friam@redfish.com> <friam@redfish.com 
> <mailto:friam@redfish.com>>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New Mexican's Sunday's story on education proficiency
>  
> Numbers are real things. The more one explores them, the more experiences one 
> has of them, the more confidently one comes to rely on them.
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