?

You earlier said "Correct. Authenticity does not require strict literal translation."

All I did was point out that I have never claimed the KJV does not retain authenticity, merely stated that it sacrificed authenticity to make poetic prose and rhyme. Which I think is a trivial statement, if I translate the "2+2 Terms and Conditions" into 1800s lyrical prose, I'm obviously going to lose authenticity - but it will of course be possible to make out the gist of the terms and conditions still.

I'm not sure why this even merits further posts. A cynic might believe you were using this tangent mostly to obfuscate valid criticism towards the KJV.

I guess I'm not following what you mean by "failure to retain authenticity" and "sacrificing authenticity." I take these to mean the same thing.

As I've noted, there's plenty of room to criticize the KJV. It's just that I don't really understand the criticism you're raising, and I don't know whether you've accurately portrayed a flaw of the KJV (mostly because I don't understand the distinction that you're making above).

I have written posts to you in good faith, I have linked and sourced what I have written, I have been forgiving about your failure to understand simple concepts and I have even made examples to explain them. I had also hoped the notion of translating the "2+2 terms and conditions" to archaic prose would have explained to you that sacrificing authenticity is not the same as not having any left.

I think its fair to say I really done my share to entertain your raised issues, and made every effort to raise this debate out of this tangential bog. Since it has not helped, there really is no reason to go further. I suspect any new concepts introduced would be equally difficult to understand, and I'm an empiricist after all.


Our friend, the cynic, might think also note that this acute lack of understanding is also very practical. It does save you the hassle of opinions, making valid arguments and researching claims.

In my mind, translating something into archaic prose is the same essential process as translating something to modern English, or French, or German, or any other langauge (Pig Latin).

I don't understand why you think that one language is less "authentic" than another, and I still maintain that "failure to retain authenticity" and "sacrificing authenticity" mean the same thing. If you've sacrificed authenticity, then authenticity is lost (ie, not retained), and if you fail to retain authenticity it's because authenticity was lost (ie, sacrificed) in the process.

As best as I can tell, you're saying that it loses authenticity simply because of the chosen destination language, NOT because the translation fails to capture the essential information communicated in the original. I simply disagree with that perspective of language translation. To hold that position would be to say that no translation retains authenticity, which is vaguely reminiscient of one of the reasons mass was held in Latin for a very long time, and would be roughly equivalent to the claim that any translation necessarily loses authenticity.

I disagree that you've put forward a meaningful description of your criticism, but you don't have to be convinced of this. Best of luck to you.

I honestly don't think it is necessary to write the same post three times.

I was hoping that by expressing my position using different words, something would actually connect and clarity would be found. Because I truly have no idea what your concept of "authenticity" is in this context.

Alas, no progress.

This is a very eloquent post and it makes it's point so well. I wish I thought as well as you do.

But I think, as far as how I would respond to the part I excerpted, were I the OP, I would say: "That's kind of the point".

and what I mean is that there's something interesting about the relationship between truth and truth-condition, or truth and provability.

I usually try to avoid referencing Gödel because I'm not a mathematician and I'm almost certain it's over my head, but it does fascinate me, both mathematically, and philosophically, and because of the relationship between all that work in the early 20th century and computer science.

If there exist undecidable propositions even in Principia Mathematica, which was almost designed explicitly to try to remove paradoxes and the like, it doesn't seem unreasonable to wonder about the relation between truth and provability in less formal contexts also, or to wonder about the value of metaphors like "Truth is Beauty". That's where I agree with the OP

Note that I talked not about "Truth" but about "Spiritual Truth". My view is that, unlike a truth that might be communicated by a proposition with positive truth value, Spiritual Truth is experienced. So, Spiritual Truth is not in the poem, or the film, or the painting, or song, nor is it in whatever propositional content one might try to gleen from such works of art, not is it in the note C#. It's not even "in" the experience. It is experienced or it is not. Evidence of its experience is a change in the spirit in which one lives their life and the fruits of that lived life.

Zumby's post as well as Original Position's comments prompted me to look into the Philosophy of Truth a little bit. Here is the Wiki entry for that:

Wiki - Philosophy of Truth

It looks like non religious approaches to truth do concern themselves mostly with criteria for the truth value of propositions. But evidently there is not philosophical consensus even for this. From the link:

It appears to me that Zumby and Original Position take it for granted that the only reasonable meaning of truth is propositions which correspond to the actual state of affairs - Correspondence Theory.

That does seem to be the majority view among philosophers. I myself am not so sure about it. I don't reject the notion that there is an actual state of affairs. But I'm sceptical whether any human language constrution of a proposition ever accurately captures any part of it. As I've posted here and in SMP in the past, I view human language as basically all metaphoric. Even our scientific models amount to metaphors in the highly structured language of mathematics - but metaphors nevertheless. As such we are always proposing what we think the state of affairs are like. We never accurately capture what they actually are nor do I think we ever can.

There's also Constructivist theory:



There's also Pragmatic theory:


Notice a similarity between the criteria for truth in Pragmatic Theory and my criteria for experienced Spiritual Truth. While there are no "concepts" to be tested I do propose that the experience of Spiritual Truth be pragmatically tested in the change of Spirit in which one lives their life and, importantly, in the fruits of that life.


There is also Coherence theory:

There are more in the Wiki entry.


Applicable, I believe, to all of the above and relevant to your comments on Godel is the Undefinability Theorem by Tarski; a kind of offshoot of Godel and likely of more transparent relevance to this discussion:

Wiki -Tarski's Undefinability Theorem


One more note of clarification. Original Position objected that I must have mispoke when I asserted that when we start talking about God we are necessarily speaking poetry. On the contrary, I meant exactly that. In fact, I think it's the heart of the matter. It is not a suprising statement coming from me considering my opinion above that all human language basically consists of metaphors. So in my view all of what we think is propositional content is actually poetry. If that's the case when considering what we think are mundane states of affairs, how much more so is it when delving into regions wrapped in the Great Mystery.

I admit that when I think of God, pray and meditate, I can't help but think of him as an objective entity that objectively exists. However, I recognize that is due to my limitations in perception. I believe it's similar to the way I undertstand most mathematicians view the work they do. Most mathematicians will tell you they don't believe their mathematics exist objectively like Platonic ideals. However they will also add that while working on their theorems they can't help but think of them that way.


PairTheBoard

Your view seems to be a version of theological non-cognitivism (the view that religious claims have no cognitive content). I disagree with this view for reasons I'll point out below. However, I do think it is possible to use religious language in this way. That is, I think you can say, e.g. "The Lord our God is One," as an expression of a certain kind of exalted emotional experience without being committed to any associated cognitive content.

This is an example of Wittgenstein's claim that language can be used for many things beyond just communicating propositions. However, I think if you accept this claim about language you should also accept Wittgenstein's notion of a "language game," that the meaning of your statement is some extent determined by the context in which you say it. For example, reciting the Shema in a synagogue is very different from saying it on a online forum oriented around a discussion of the truth or falsity of various religious claims. You might say with some plausibility that in the prior case there is the kind of "spiritual truth" associated with it that you talk about here. I am doubtful there is any of that associated with the statement made as a topic for discussion on 2p2. So while I won't protest to your using religious language in the context of a religious service or among fellow believers to express "spiritual truths" as you've defined it, I do think it is misleading to use it as such to nonbelievers or in an intellectual discussion of religion.

I don't have this view. I think the correspondence theory of truth is the correct way to understand "truth" in propositional contexts, but I don't think it is the only reasonable way to understand "truth."

This doesn't seem so much an argument against correspondence as an argument for skepticism. Incidentally, viewing language as metaphorical is consistent with accepting the correspondence theory of truth (and rejecting skepticism).

Honestly, I think the main difference between us has more to do with how we understand religious language than which theory of truth we accept.

For what it is worth, Tarski's most influential work in philosophy is his work on the definition of truth for model-theoretic languages, where he essentially formalizes an understanding of truth as correspondence.

In your response to well named above you were careful to distinguish between your use of "spiritual truth" from "truth" applied to propositional claims. But here you seem to generalize your understanding of "spiritual truth" to all truth claims. That is, you earlier said that spiritual claims are "true" if they have some kind of positive change in a person's life, and justified this on the grounds that we should understand spiritual claims as a form of poetry. But here you make the same claims about the meaning of statement in any form of human language--that they are actually poetry. Presumably then the same criteria for saying of these claims that they are true or false that you apply to spiritual claims would apply here--whether or not they have some positive effect on your life.

But now I think this really does become ridiculous. I don't mind if you want to use religious language to express some emotional experience, but this is because religious claims are largely unverifiable and so have little functional role beyond their emotional content anyway. However, this is not the case with other claims. I am absolutely not interested in a usage of "truth" whereby it ends up being "true" that the earth is flat if saying so gives you a profound emotional experience.

This is weird. You seem to here be acknowledging that in fact you do understand religious language as propositional. If you are thinking of God as an objective entity, then it seems obviously sensible to me to ask whether that objective entity actually exists.

As I've done a few threads on "truth" now I'll save time and pretty much just +1 OrP's response, though on some days I lean more towards a minimalist theory of truth than correspondence. For those interested but short on time, there is a nice summary of theories of truth here.

I'm really having trouble seeing how you can read my paragraph above and represent it as you do here.



My point is almost exactly opposite to how you have represented it. I'm saying that spiritual truth is not found in the truth value of spiritual claims. Rather, spiritual truth is experienced. That experience might be evoked by viewing a painting, watching a film, hearing a sonata, or simply seeing a waterfall. I don't claim all these things are forms of poetry nor are there any spiritual claims necessarily involved in any of them.

You seem to be stuck in a paradigm of thought whereby any talk of truth must involve propositions, or claims, with some criteria for their being true. My view is that when it comes to spiritual truth, that paradigm is too limited.




PairTheBoard

If we change where we place the bold, maybe OrP's reading will become clearer:

I don't see anything you bolded that mentions "spiritual claims" which are "true" if "they have some kind of positive change in a person's life".

I especially don't see how that comes when read in context of the whole paragraph which specifically rejects the notion.

Whatever.



PairTheBoard

I'll leave it to OrP to clarify his position, but I think you may be misreading him, especially given that you've pulled out the one small part of his post where his use of "claims" might be confusing where everywhere else he seems to acknowledge the non-propositional way you are using "spiritual truth".

It's a friendly conversation, chap, no need to get testy.

You said that a spiritual truth was the experience evoked by works of art, etc. You also said that we can see evidence of that experience by changes (presumably for the better) in people's lives that are caused by those experiences. Fine. So then when you talk about "spiritual truths," I take it that you are referring to these kind of aesthetic experiences. Applying this to a religious context, I understood you to be saying that the truth or falsity of a religious claim should be evaluated on the basis of whether it is "spiritually true," i.e. whether or not it evokes the kind of aesthetic experience you think is constitutive of spiritual truth. Thus, the claim, "God exists," is spiritually true for a person if praying, meditating, or communal practice around the idea of God evoke an aesthetic experience that affects her life for the better. Notice here that I am not denying that the aesthetic experience is constitutive of a spiritual truth. Indeed, it is exactly that experience that I am referring to here. So I don't understand what in my account you are criticizing.

I do think that there has to be some kind of criteria distinguishing true claims (or "true experiences) from false claims or experiences for our statements about these claims or experiences to have meaning. However, as I stated already, I don't think that "any talk of truth must involve propositions or claims." That isn't how I use the word "truth" though, so be careful to not let the fact that these two words are spelled the same way to cause you to think that we are talking about the same thing.

So you should be able to find a quote by me where I said,


Why don't you show that quote by me?


You seem to be having trouble with the fundamental idea. I think I've provided enough clarifications. I really don't know what you've been analyzing. It's evidently not what I've been talking about. You might try rereading my posts more carefully.


PairTheBoard

It is pretty obvious that you mean to be saying something different than what I'm getting from your posts, but it isn't like I'm just making this stuff up out of nothing.

I'm not sure why this phenomena should be called "spiritual truth". Art can make me both laugh and cry, but why invoke a claim of truth to this? It's an emotional and esthetical reaction, a reaction to beauty, memories or combinations thereof.

By plastering the term "truth" to such things, I fear we start attributing truth to things we wish were true rather than finding goods way of assessing evidence. Magic is an excellent example; it makes for wondrous stories but poor knowledge.

If I tell you I was up early this morning and exprienced the sun rising would you interpret that to mean the "sun rising" was my experience of it?

I don't think so.

But as I've emphasized repeatedly, my view is that Spiritual Truth is experienced. You seem unable to get past looking for something which you can identify as Spiritual Truth. You've misunderstood me to mean that Spiritual Truth is the experience. And you've misunderstood me to mean that a spiritual claim is true if the experience of it provides the evidence I mentioned for an experience of Spiritual Truth - this when I've never mentioned the term "spiritual claim".

So, I agree with you that you don't seem to be getting what I'm saying. I don't know how to be more clear about it though. I don't see anything in what you quoted that indicates differently. You also failed to quote my clarifications where I specifically addressed the misunderstandings of what I've presented.

I don't mind being disagreed with or people posting differing opinions. But it is a bit tiresome to have to repeatedly correct inaccurate paraphrasing of what I've said. I don't mind if you disagree with what I say. I do mind when you disagree with misrepresentations of what I've said.



PairTheBoard

If someone told me that their use of "sun rising" didn't involve the sun actually rising, yeah, I very well might. Since you said you were giving an account of faith without magic (by which I took it you meant the supernatural), I was expecting an account of faith wherein the objects of experiences, if they were supernatural (e.g. god or spirits, etc.), didn't actually exist. Obviously we can have experiences as of objects that don't actually exist, but we would generally consider such experiences to be illusory or non-veridical. To say that such an experience was nonetheless of a spiritual truth means that the truth or falsity of the spiritual truth being experienced doesn't rely on the veridicality of the experience. At that point, all that would seem to remain is some feature of the experience itself that makes the experience one of a spiritual truth. But, you've assured me that this is not so. So it seems to me that you've said that a spiritual truth is not the experience, nor is it what is being experienced, but rather something else. I don't know what else there is.

Maybe there is some kind of lurking Platonism in your view, and that is what is throwing me off. When I leave a movie feeling moved, I don't think there is something external to my emotions that I'm experiencing. To me, a "poetic experience" of art just is that experience. Maybe you have a different view.

It isn't so much that I can't get past it as that the reason I entered this thread was to ask you what you meant by "spiritual truth." I'm not really much closer to knowing what you mean and since you seem to resent having to explain it, there probably isn't much point in going on.

I've explained it as best I know how. I never said I resented doing that. What I said was that I find it tiresome to have to repeatedly correct inaccurate paraphrasings and misrepresentations of my explanations.

I suspect the problem may be that the view I'm proposing is actually innovative and you're having trouble finding a category you're already familiar with to pry it into. I recognize it's an unusual thing to view Faith as meaningful without its involving belief in some propositions and to view experienced Spiritual Truth as meaningful when not involving propositions claimed to be true. My intuition is that this view has value which will become more apparent to those willing to spend time getting used to it.


PairTheBoard

Considering the poetic ; the "blind poet" speaks from ancient Greece. the Iliad and the Odyssey are considered mainstays of the western ethos and certainly when placed within the dialectic, discursive paradigm would be considered illusory.

Homer, the poet, speaks from a higher thought filled realm and the truth or falsity of his works are within the human being. Man has a natural appreciation of truth and any dialectical category will, perforce, fall short within the poetic realm.

Music, likewise, speaks to the individual and offers whose truths unaquired through logic, etc...

this is not a call to give up logic and categories, etc.. but to know that the artist reaches to the highest realms of this thought filled cosmos and brings these effects to his fellow man. The artist is the practitioner of a spiritual practicum. Likewise the philosopher is he who enters these realms and is a artist of the spirit, again those realms of thought.

The artist and the philosopher both enter into the same arena, better known as the spiritual arena but the demand for absoluteness is negated as in those realms one looks at many sides of the tree and doesn't consider one picture of the tree the factual.

And so, the poet who is the most spiritually enlightened of the artists brings forth his practicum and the individual reader/listener can, in some way, "experience" these truths which are beyond the discursive but certainly within the realm of the human soul. If one denies the beauty and truth of the poetic due to some category within the logical and discursive it only means that the intellect has reached the limits of its abilities.

This may seem to be a bit reaching but I'll refer to the religious and specifically Dionysius the Areopagite whose of which (two) tomes are telling; The "Divine Names" and the "Mystical Theology".

Through his contemplative nature he presents the "Divine Names" in which the spiritual beings of our cosmos, by name and activity, are presented to the reader but better yet the meditative being as his mystery center was all about meditative contemplation passed by word and tone only later put to the written word. through this experiential meditation the cosmic beings are presented but more to the point "experienced" and thusly the realm of Angels, Archangels, Archae, Elohim, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim are brought forth. He speaks to the Trinity also as the drift is is of "divine names". Some measure of structure is present is this presentation.

The other methodology is the denying of any catagory as one meditates into the darkness. Thus of one says G- is Love, or justice, or beauty one denies the above. Any and all categorizing of the qualities of the godhead is denied and in this one comes to that realm of the ineffable (my word not his).

From the Mystical Theology:

"And this I take to signify that the divinest and highest things seen by the eyes or contemplated by the mind are but the symbolical expressions of those that are immediately beneath it that is above all. Through these, Its incomprehensible Presence is manifested upon those heights of Its Holy Places; that then It breaks forth, even from that which is seen and that which sees, and plunges the mystic into the Darkness of Unknowing, whence all perfection of understanding is excluded, and he is enwrapped in that which is altogether intangible, wholly absorbed in it that is beyond all, and in none else (whether himself or another); and through the inactivity of all his reasoning powers is united by his highest faculty to it that is wholly unknowable; thus by knowing nothing he knows That which is beyond his knowledge."

This is the entry through negation.

Note that these matters have a logic of their own and can be presented on a platform of comprehensibility to you and I; an open mind is the requirement. The platform of science speaks for itself as does the platform of religion but they are both comprehensible and in fact will have to merge in the future but that's another story.

Also, when I speak of "platforms" I am speaking to the reason within the particular realm. some may say that how can they know about the realm of the artist or the religious or the musician if they are unable to meditate or reach these reals themselves? The matter is that you don't have to be a Raphael or an artist to appreciate where he has traveled which is of the spiritual. This you do by experiencing his works, some more so some less. You can and do gain from the reading of the Iliad and will find this comprehensible for not only is it a great work of the spirit but it is a reminder of your home, that realm to which we wish to reunite whether we realize it or not. That is called religion or "religare" the Latin to reunite.