A recipe for making a cake cannot exactly be true or false; you need additional criteria like a claim, “when followed exactly, this recipe will produce something most people consider to be a delicious cake.” Without a precise claim, there’s room for reasonable disagreement whether the recipe should be optimized for usability by the average individual or for perfect results from a master baker; what exactly constitutes a “delicious cake,” etc. (The Useful Idea of Truth tackles the second question only).
“when followed exactly, this recipe will produce something most people consider to be a delicious cake.”
Of course, for this particular claim to make any cake recipe in the real world true, we must understand “followed exactly” to include making a whole bunch of correct assumptions about how to do many things that are implied but not specified by the recipe (just to pick one example, when told to preheat my oven to 350 degrees, I’m expected to infer Farenheit, or at least whoever calibrated my oven’s temperature dial is expected to have done so).
Of course, many people have no difficulty in practice making cakes by following recipes, precisely because in fact we do routinely make those assumptions.
And I’m not sure how that process is any different from what I’m doing when, if asked whether a recipe is true or false, I assume an interpretive frame similar to the additional criteria you say we need. That is, faced with that question, I infer additional criteria like “following this recipe conventionally will produce a conventionally acceptable cake” whether the criteria are there or not, just like when faced with the instruction to set my oven to 350 I assume Farenheit rather than Celsius. Inferring the additional criterion is itself conventional.
So I would say that “A recipe for making a cake cannot exactly be true or false” is true denotationally but implies falsehoods; in practice, there seem to be conventional ways of casting a cake recipe to a Boolean type.
So I guess the question is, are there similarly conventional ways of casting an epistemology to a Boolean?
You seem to be suggesting otherwise, though you don’t precisely say so.
In my experience even the best cake recipes are not entirely reliable; the best you can coerce them to is an odds ratio. And since individual chefs have their own preferred recipes, it’s exceedingly hard to tell the difference between a bad recipe favoured by a good chef, and vice versa.
I agree with all of this except “exceedingly hard.” It’s not that hard to tell the difference between a recipe an average person can reliably make a tasty cake with (aka a “good recipe”) and one they can’t (aka a “bad recipe”) -- just ask a bunch of average people to follow the recipe and see what happens.
No comment on epistemologies, but (as someone who regularly bakes cakes) I must object to your views on cake.
It would be quite a stretch, I think, to say that cakes may usefully be classified as “good” and “bad”, or “tasty” and “not tasty”. Individual preferences are one reason, of course. Regional/cultural/etc. preferences are another. What threshold of “acceptability” (for any meaning of the word) you accept for your cake is yet another. How many people are “most people” is yet another.
In many of these things, there are both gradations (which do not, themselves, threaten the good/bad distinction, only force it into a continuous variable instead of a binary one) and sharper categories of ways in which a cake may or may not be acceptable (which do). For instance, a cake may be “bad” by being inedible by nearly anyone (you mistook salt for sugar); it may be bad by being a bland, sugary superstimulus, good-tasting but lacking in interesting flavor (you ruined or omitted the more delicate flavor-granting ingredients); it may be bad by being unacceptably and avoidably unhealthy (many forms of buttercream tend toward this); it may be bad by failing to satisfy the criteria of its design (you set out to make a red velvet cake, but the result was merely a chocolate cake with buttercream frosting and red food coloring).
And that’s not even getting into the quality of a recipe! One may make a cake by following either of two (or more) recipes that differ from each other far more than their versions of the finished product will! Recipes may differ by difficulty of execution; by difficulty of acquiring ingredients; by sensitivity to variation in conditions of preparation; and by other factors. And what is an “average person”, anyway? Do we judge a recipe by how reliably it makes a “good” (see above) cake when followed by someone with little or no knowledge of baking? Or by an experienced, though non-professional, home baker? Does “average” refer to general intelligence and cognitive ability? Some of these criteria are less fair to the recipe than others, I think!
Fair—I meant more at the margin, it’s hard to tell the difference between a quite good chef with a very good recipe and vice versa. Likewise there are many obviously bad epistemologies, but the ones that are still in serious contention, that successful philosophers use, will all be at least pretty good.
In this context, I’d probably say a successful philosopher is one who discerns truths that weren’t previously known. (This is not unique to philosophers.)
A recipe for making a cake cannot exactly be true or false; you need additional criteria like a claim, “when followed exactly, this recipe will produce something most people consider to be a delicious cake.” Without a precise claim, there’s room for reasonable disagreement whether the recipe should be optimized for usability by the average individual or for perfect results from a master baker; what exactly constitutes a “delicious cake,” etc. (The Useful Idea of Truth tackles the second question only).
Of course, for this particular claim to make any cake recipe in the real world true, we must understand “followed exactly” to include making a whole bunch of correct assumptions about how to do many things that are implied but not specified by the recipe (just to pick one example, when told to preheat my oven to 350 degrees, I’m expected to infer Farenheit, or at least whoever calibrated my oven’s temperature dial is expected to have done so).
Of course, many people have no difficulty in practice making cakes by following recipes, precisely because in fact we do routinely make those assumptions.
And I’m not sure how that process is any different from what I’m doing when, if asked whether a recipe is true or false, I assume an interpretive frame similar to the additional criteria you say we need. That is, faced with that question, I infer additional criteria like “following this recipe conventionally will produce a conventionally acceptable cake” whether the criteria are there or not, just like when faced with the instruction to set my oven to 350 I assume Farenheit rather than Celsius. Inferring the additional criterion is itself conventional.
So I would say that “A recipe for making a cake cannot exactly be true or false” is true denotationally but implies falsehoods; in practice, there seem to be conventional ways of casting a cake recipe to a Boolean type.
So I guess the question is, are there similarly conventional ways of casting an epistemology to a Boolean?
You seem to be suggesting otherwise, though you don’t precisely say so.
In my experience even the best cake recipes are not entirely reliable; the best you can coerce them to is an odds ratio. And since individual chefs have their own preferred recipes, it’s exceedingly hard to tell the difference between a bad recipe favoured by a good chef, and vice versa.
I would suspect the same of epistemologies.
I agree with all of this except “exceedingly hard.” It’s not that hard to tell the difference between a recipe an average person can reliably make a tasty cake with (aka a “good recipe”) and one they can’t (aka a “bad recipe”) -- just ask a bunch of average people to follow the recipe and see what happens.
No comment on epistemologies, but (as someone who regularly bakes cakes) I must object to your views on cake.
It would be quite a stretch, I think, to say that cakes may usefully be classified as “good” and “bad”, or “tasty” and “not tasty”. Individual preferences are one reason, of course. Regional/cultural/etc. preferences are another. What threshold of “acceptability” (for any meaning of the word) you accept for your cake is yet another. How many people are “most people” is yet another.
In many of these things, there are both gradations (which do not, themselves, threaten the good/bad distinction, only force it into a continuous variable instead of a binary one) and sharper categories of ways in which a cake may or may not be acceptable (which do). For instance, a cake may be “bad” by being inedible by nearly anyone (you mistook salt for sugar); it may be bad by being a bland, sugary superstimulus, good-tasting but lacking in interesting flavor (you ruined or omitted the more delicate flavor-granting ingredients); it may be bad by being unacceptably and avoidably unhealthy (many forms of buttercream tend toward this); it may be bad by failing to satisfy the criteria of its design (you set out to make a red velvet cake, but the result was merely a chocolate cake with buttercream frosting and red food coloring).
And that’s not even getting into the quality of a recipe! One may make a cake by following either of two (or more) recipes that differ from each other far more than their versions of the finished product will! Recipes may differ by difficulty of execution; by difficulty of acquiring ingredients; by sensitivity to variation in conditions of preparation; and by other factors. And what is an “average person”, anyway? Do we judge a recipe by how reliably it makes a “good” (see above) cake when followed by someone with little or no knowledge of baking? Or by an experienced, though non-professional, home baker? Does “average” refer to general intelligence and cognitive ability? Some of these criteria are less fair to the recipe than others, I think!
Yes, I agree with all of this.
Fair—I meant more at the margin, it’s hard to tell the difference between a quite good chef with a very good recipe and vice versa. Likewise there are many obviously bad epistemologies, but the ones that are still in serious contention, that successful philosophers use, will all be at least pretty good.
Mm. How do we recognize a successful philosopher?
Good question! How would you go about answering that?
In this context, I’d probably say a successful philosopher is one who discerns truths that weren’t previously known. (This is not unique to philosophers.)