If people couldn’t come to acquire a correspondence theory over time, or come to acquire a ‘sense of reality’ over time, then I wouldn’t have either of those things today, since I didn’t start with them. I can remember relatively clearly what it was like to think of truth-claims primarily and consciously as tools or games, rather than as tokens mapping indifferent, objective states of affairs; and I can remember the feeling of changing my mind about that.
I agree with you that hypocrisy and self-deception are big human problems. Since this is a thread about steel-manning the other side, though, we should keep in mind the (e.g., game-theoretic) advantages to indirect communication. Refusing to develop the knowledge and social skills needed to read into others’ subtext and linguistic goals (based on an ideal of True Rationalists who speak literally, directly, and honestly in all contexts) would be straw Vulcan rationality. (Granting that mainstream society is more in need of honesty and openness, as a rule.)
Assertion-conditions for non-truth-functional things (e.g., ‘happy birthday!’, ‘could you pass the guacamole?’, ‘go away!’, ‘mmm, hot dogs’) can certainly be about the world, particularly if the facts of psychology are included as part of ‘the world.’ It makes sense to despise pointless ambiguity, but the same doesn’t hold for relevantly unambiguous (or for that matter usefully vague) indirect statements. We should also be a lot more careful about assigning the same value to ‘conversations about nothing-whatsoever’ as we do to ‘conservations about the participants’ affect’. I find it disturbing how easily we slide from the concept of ‘reality’ that includes mental states and the concept of ‘reality’ that’s defined in contrast to mental states.
If people couldn’t come to acquire a correspondence theory over time, or come to acquire a ‘sense of reality’ over time, then I wouldn’t have either of those things today, since I didn’t start with them. I can remember relatively clearly what it was like to think of truth-claims primarily and consciously as tools or games, rather than as tokens mapping indifferent, objective states of affairs; and I can remember the feeling of changing my mind about that.
I agree with you that hypocrisy and self-deception are big human problems. Since this is a thread about steel-manning the other side, though, we should keep in mind the (e.g., game-theoretic) advantages to indirect communication. Refusing to develop the knowledge and social skills needed to read into others’ subtext and linguistic goals (based on an ideal of True Rationalists who speak literally, directly, and honestly in all contexts) would be straw Vulcan rationality. (Granting that mainstream society is more in need of honesty and openness, as a rule.)
Assertion-conditions for non-truth-functional things (e.g., ‘happy birthday!’, ‘could you pass the guacamole?’, ‘go away!’, ‘mmm, hot dogs’) can certainly be about the world, particularly if the facts of psychology are included as part of ‘the world.’ It makes sense to despise pointless ambiguity, but the same doesn’t hold for relevantly unambiguous (or for that matter usefully vague) indirect statements. We should also be a lot more careful about assigning the same value to ‘conversations about nothing-whatsoever’ as we do to ‘conservations about the participants’ affect’. I find it disturbing how easily we slide from the concept of ‘reality’ that includes mental states and the concept of ‘reality’ that’s defined in contrast to mental states.