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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy - Less Wrong
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Maybe I'm out of my depth here. But from a semantic standpoint, I thought that a theory of language pretty much is a theory of truth. At least in mathematical logic with Tarskian semantics, the meaning of a statement is given by saying what conditions make the statement true.
Perplexed,
Truth-conditional accounts of truth, associated with Tarski and Davidson, are popular in philosophy of language. But most approaches to language do not contain a truth-conditional account of truth. Philosophy of language is most reliably associated with a theory of meaning: How is it that words and sentences relate to reality?
You might be right that Eliezer's theory of truth comes from something like Korzybski's (now defunct) theory of language, but I'm not familiar with Korzybski's theory of truth.
My theory of truth is explicitly Tarskian. I'm explicitly influenced by Korzybski on language and by Peirce on "making beliefs pay rent", but I do think there are meaningful and true beliefs such that we cannot experientally distinguish between them and mutually exclusive alternatives, i.e., a photon going on existing after it passes over the horizon of the expanding universe as opposed to it blinking out of existence.
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.