I might still want to know which concept I'm using when I say something is true.
I might also want to know which concept you're using when you say something is true.
Sure, if I don't know that (or am not confident I know that) then we can taboo "truth," but that gets unwieldy; if we can agree on a shared referent then communication is more efficient. Tabooing key words is sort of like running code under a debugger... a great way of identifying points of failure, but not the way I want to live my life.
If I know whether someone's conception of truth is correspondist or epistemic, they can say "X is true" and I know what they mean about X without having to taboo "truth".
This is something I understand and I can agree with. But it's a very practical problem, like making Europeans and Americans agree on the meaning of the word "football". It's very likely that I'm still missing something, though (see metaphysicist reply).
Despite being (IMO) a philosophy blog, many Less Wrongers tend to disparage mainstream philosophy and emphasize the divergence between our beliefs and theirs. But, how different are we really? My intention with this post is to quantify this difference.
The questions I will post as comments to this article are from the 2009 PhilPapers Survey. If you answer "other" on any of the questions, then please reply to that comment in order to elaborate your answer. Later, I'll post another article comparing the answers I obtain from Less Wrongers with those given by the professional philosophers. This should give us some indication about the differences in belief between Less Wrong and mainstream philosophy.
Glossary
analytic-synthetic distinction, A-theory and B-theory, atheism, compatibilism, consequentialism, contextualism, correspondence theory of truth, deontology, egalitarianism, empiricism, Humeanism, libertarianism, mental content externalism, moral realism, moral motivation internalism and externalism, naturalism, nominalism, Newcomb's problem, physicalism, Platonism, rationalism, relativism, scientific realism, trolley problem, theism, virtue ethics
Note
Thanks pragmatist, for attaching short (mostly accurate) descriptions of the philosophical positions under the poll comments.
Post Script
The polls stopped rendering correctly after the migration to LW 2.0, but the raw data can be found in this repo.