Showing posts with label agreement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label agreement. Show all posts

Friday, March 21, 2014

"God agrees with me" and "I have the truth"

Suppose I am convinced that God exists. Then if p is true, God believes p. So it seems that whenever I have the right to assert p, then as long I should also be willing to say: "And God agrees with me." But to say that God agrees with me sounds awfully arrogant!

I suppose some of the apparent arrogance comes from the implicature that I have independent evidence that God agrees with me—a special line to God. But of course in the typical case, my evidence that God agrees with me about p just is my evidence for p (plus my evidence that God exists and that I believe p).

Or maybe it's that one implicates certainty. (Why? Is it because there is a stereotype that when people make claims about God they are certain of them?)

There is a similar impression of arrogance one conveys when one says: "I have the truth about p." Yet, of course, if one is justified in believing p, one is typically justified in believing that p is true, and hence that one has the truth about p. Again, maybe the issue is that saying one has the truth implicates certainty?

There is, indeed, something odd about claiming that God agrees with one or that one has the truth on a subject where one has only a weak opinion. I am about to have random.org choose a number between 1 and 10, both inclusive. I think that the number will be smaller than 10. But it would be odd to say: "God agrees with me" or "I have the truth on that." Yet, my evidence that I have the truth on the number being smaller than 10 is almost as good as my evidenec that the number will be less than 10, and my evidence that God agrees with me is very good, given that I have very good evidence that God exists. (Oh, and I was right. The number turned out to be 1.)

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Agreement and tensed propositions

Suppose I assert a proposition p, and you assert p. Then we agree, don't we?

But suppose that propositions are tensed in the way presentists typically think, so that they change in truth value. Then it could happen that I assert p, you assert p, and yet we disagree. For instance, suppose we are watching a gymnast practice. I say: "He's only now got the hang of it!" A minute later you say: "He's only now got the hang of it!" We plainly disagree. Yet on the tensed proposition view, we asserted the same proposition. On an untensed proposition view, we asserted different propositions, say <He's only got the hang of it by t1> and <He's only got the hang of it by t2>, where "t1" and "t2" are names of times (this works best with a non-Millian view of names).

A necessary condition for me to be convinced by your assertion is that I come to believe what you asserted. But not so if propositions are tensed. You say: "She's scoring a goal." Reflecting on your reliability for a bit, I accept your assertion. But if propositions are tensed, what I come to believe is not the tensed proposition that she's scoring a goal, but the tensed proposition that she's scored a goal. It's not easy to get a tenable view of untensed propositions that gives the right answer here, but it's probably not impossible.