ciphergoth comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong

77 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 October 2012 06:16PM

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Comment author: lukeprog 02 October 2012 06:24:00AM *  11 points [-]

Speaking as the author of Eliezer's Sequences and Mainstream Academia...

Off the top of my head, I also can't think of a philosopher who has made an explicit connection from the correspondence theory of truth to "there are causal processes producing map-territory correspondences" to "you have to look at things to draw accurate maps of them..."

But if this connection has been made explicitly, I would expect it to be made by someone who accepts both the correspondence theory and "naturalized epistemology", often summed up in a quote from Quine:

The stimulation of his sensory receptors is all the evidence anybody has had to go on, ultimately, in arriving at his picture of the world. Why not just see how this construction really proceeds? Why not settle for psychology? ...Epistemology, or something like it, simply falls into place as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science.

(Originally, Quine's naturalized epistemology accounted only for this descriptive part of epistemology, and neglected the normative part, e.g. truth conditions. In the 80s Quine started saying that the normative part entered into naturalized epistemology through "the technology of truth-seeking," but he was pretty vague about this.)

Edit: Another relevant discussion of embodiment and theories of truth can be found in chapter 7 of Philosophy in the Flesh.

Comment author: ciphergoth 02 October 2012 07:50:54AM 11 points [-]

Off the top of my head, I also can't think of a philosopher who has made an explicit connection from the correspondence theory of truth to "there are causal processes producing map-territory correspondences" to "you have to look at things to draw accurate maps of them..."

OK, I defended the tweet that got this response from Eliezer as the sort of rhetorical flourish that gets people to actually click on the link. However, it looks like I also underestimated how original the sequences are - I had really expected this sort of thing to mirror work in mainstream philosophy.

Comment author: DuncanS 04 October 2012 11:02:46PM *  2 points [-]

Although I wouldn't think of this particular thing as being an invention on his part - I'm not sure I've read that particular chain of thought before, but all the elements of the chain are things I've known for years.

However I think it illustrates the strength of Eliezer's writing well. It's a perfectly legitimate sequence of thought steps that leads in a clear and obvious way to the right answer. It's not new thought, but a particularly clear way of expressing something that many people have thought and written about in a less organised way.

To clarify - there are times when Eliezer is inventive - for example his work on CEV - but this isn't one of those places. I know I'm partly arguing about the meaning of "inventive", but I don't think we're doing him a favor here by claiming this is an example of his inventiveness when there are much better candidates.