OK, I'm done playing this game. I answer your questions, but you make a habit of ignoring mine.
I have the exact same impression. We seems to be living in two parallel universes ...
That is why I was trying to make the vocabulary clearer. Let us speak about the usage of the word "true" (and the noun "truth") first
In my book, "true" is the opposite of "false". Therefore, if an entity
a from a set
A can have the attribute "true", then there must be an entity
b, also in
A, that has the attribute "false". This works with statements, ideas, impressions, thoughts, beliefs, memories, ...
statement
a is true but statement
b is false
idea
a is true but idea
b is false
impression
a is true but impression
b is false
belief
a is true but belief
b is false
memory
a is true but memory
b is false
But it does not work with facts and sensory inputs.
You
cannot say "this fact is false". A fact cannot be false, in the English language. It is a contradiction in terms. What you might be saying is "your
statement about this fact is false" or "your
memory of this fact is false". Therefore, a fact cannot be "true" either.
In the above, I am talking about words and how the rules of the English language allow us no use them, not about whether the corresponding concepts are useful or not (I don't believe they are but that is another matter)
Now, you
cannot say either "the pain sensation I am having right now is false". What you might be saying is "He says he is in pain but it is false". Therefore, a pain sensation cannot be "true" either. Sensory input are outside of the domain of applicability of the words "true" and "false" in English
Now that we have cleared up the potential misunderstanding about words, let us move on to the concepts they correspond to.
Let us first consider your pain example. According to you, there are two things:
- a description of the pain you are feeling in "perfect descriptive language" (presumably true, in some sense)
- the feeling of the pain
You are saying that 1. and 2. are not equivalent because someone who is the recipient of 1. will not have 2. What I am saying is this: if 1. and 2. are not the same, how can 1. be said to be "perfect"? What does "perfect" means in that context?
What you are trying to say, I believe, is that my pain is somehow "true" (in the sense of "undeniable") and yet it cannot be put into words. To this I reply the following:
- You are doing violence to the word "true" as it is normally used in the English language. As stated above, the word "true" is not normally used as an attribute of sensory inputs.
- Even if we grant that my pain is somehow "true", what do we gain by that? This is exactly the kind of case where philosophy loses contact with reality (Wittgenstein argued about that extensively). The word "true" or "false" always implies communicability when it is used in practice. These words are always used in sentences like "is it true that X?", which implies that X is communicable. It is only when we are doing philosophy that we imagine that we have some kind of "truth" that is private to us and cannot be communicated to others. Interestingly enough, foids have ripped a page from philosophical nonsense and often say things like "I know that this is true but I cannot put it into words". This is a trick, of course, that they use to terminate the conversation and prevent you from replying. Another category of dishonest people who use the same trick are superstition-mongers who say "I know the superior truth that cannot be expressed in mere words" (like Plato's pure forms).
You
can engage in the mind game of positing incommunicable (unteachable) "truths". But do you see in what company it places you?
