Naive as in "This essay is meant to restore a naive view of truth.".
I do think "A true theory is a map that corresponds to the territory" is right as far as it goes. But there are going to be people who will ask things like "What the hell do you mean by territory?" and "How do you have any idea if your map corresponds to the territory?". I don't think those are wrong questions and I think answering them might require a little more work.
That said I might be missing where people are at on this because this line, from the wiki, is exactly right:
Since our predictions don't always come true, we need different words to describe the thingy that generates our predictions and the thingy that generates our experimental results. The first thingy is called "belief", the second thingy "reality".
I think stopping there is about right but "reality" tends to get loaded with a bunch of additional properties. I think attributing features of your theory to reality other than it's experimental predictions is a kind of map-territory confusion that nearly everyone still falls for, so I think looking at two empirically equivalent theories and saying one is true and the other is false can't just mean "one matches the territory and the other doesn't". So either we say of these theories that they are both true but one is better for reasons other than truth or we say that truth involves something other than just corresponding to the territory.
A related issue is that it is unlikely the core concepts we need to state any theory themselves correspond exactly to an external world. A mathematical description is fine by itself but we always feel that merely stating the math is some how insufficient so we end up reifying our variables. At least when the object of the theory is significantly divorced from the environment that gave rise to the concepts used to state the theory it is extremely unlikely that these concepts map exactly to things in the the world. This doesn't always change our predictions but it suggests that of two empirically identical theories neither is likely to conceptually correspond to an external world (the external world, if there is one, isn't made up of concepts) but both will correspond empirically. So then how can we contrast these theories on the basis of their correspondence to reality?
the external world, if there is one, isn't made up of concepts
... well, maybe...
- Eliezer Yudkowsky, Collapse Postulates
In the olden days of physics, circa 1900, many prominent physicists believed in a substance known as aether. The principle was simple: Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism had shown that light was a wave, and light followed many of the same equations as sound waves and water waves. However, every other kind of wave- sound waves, water waves, waves in springs- needs some sort of medium for its transmission. A "wave" is not really a physical object; it is just a disturbance of some other substance. For instance, if you throw a rock into a pond, you cannot pluck the waves out of the pond and take them home with you in your backpack, because the "waves" are just peaks and troughs in the puddle of water (the medium). Hence, there should be some sort of medium for light waves, and the physicists named this medium "aether".
However, difficulties soon developed. If you have a jar, you can pump the air out of the jar, and then the jar will no longer transmit sound, demonstrating that the wave medium (the air) has been removed. But, there was no way to remove the aether from a jar; no matter what the experimentalists did, you could still shine light through it. There was, in fact, no way of detecting, altering, or experimenting with aether at all. Physicists knew that aether must be unlike all other matter, because it could apparently pass through closed containers made of any substance. And finally, the Michelson-Morely experiment showed that the "aether" was always stationary relative to Earth, even though the Earth changed direction every six months as it moved about in its orbit! Shortly thereafter, the inconsistencies were resolved with Albert Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, and everyone realized that aether was imaginary.
Shortly thereafter, during the 20th century, physicists discovered two new forces of nature: the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. These two forces, as well as electromagnetism, could be described very well on the quantum level: they were created by the influence of mediator particles called (respectively) gluons, W and Z bosons, and photons, and these particles obeyed the laws of quantum mechanics just like electrons and mesons did. The description of these three forces, as well as the particles they act upon, has been neatly unified in a theory of physics known as the Standard Model, which has been our best known description of the universe for thirty years now.
However, gravity is not a part of this model. Making an analogy to the other forces, physicists have proposed a mediator particle known as the "graviton". The graviton is thought to be similar to the photon, the gluon, and the W and Z bosons, except that it is massless and has spin 2. I posit that the "graviton" is essentially the same theory as the "aether": a misguided attempt to explain something by reference to similar-seeming things that were explained in the same way. Consider the following facts:
And, with reference to the graviton itself:
So, what's really going on here? I don't know. I'm not Albert Einstein. But I suspect it will take someone like him- someone brilliant, very good at physics, yet largely outside the academic system- to resolve this mess, and tell us what's really happening.