Comment on Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 22:36:30 GMT

Thanks for clarifying!

For the record, my own take:

As a descriptive theory of how humans use language, I think truth-conditional accounts of meaning are inadequate. But that's the domain of contemporary linguistics, anyway - which tends to line up more with the "speech acts" camp in philosophy of language.

But we need something like a Tarskian theory of language and truth in order to do explicit AI programming, so I'm glad we've done so much work on that. And in certain contexts, philosophers can simply adopt a Tarskian way of talking rather than a more natural-language way of talking - if they want to.

And I agree about there being meaningful and true beliefs that we cannot experientially distinguish. That is one point at which you and I disagree with the logical positivists and, I think, Korzybski.

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