MichaelVassar 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: MichaelVassar 02 October 2012 07:16:36PM 13 points [-]

It's not that clear to me in what sense mainstream academia is a unified thing which holds positions, even regarding questions such as "what fields are legitimate". Saying that something is known in mainstream academia seems suspiciously like saying that "something is encoded in the matter in my shoelace, given the right decryption schema. OTOH, it's highly meaningful to say that something is discoverable by someone with competent 'google-fu"

Comment author: lukeprog 03 October 2012 10:55:20AM 0 points [-]

Agree with all this.

Comment author: DaFranker 03 October 2012 01:26:06PM 0 points [-]

It's not that clear to me in what sense mainstream academia is a unified thing which holds positions, even regarding questions such as "what fields are legitimate".

Strongly seconded.

Hell, some "Mainstream" scientists are working on big-money research project that attempt to prove that there's a worldwide conspiracy attempting to convince people that global warming exists so as to make money off of it. Either they're all sell-outs, something which seems very unlikely, or at least some of them actually disagree with some other mainstream scientists, who see the "Is there real global warming?" question as obviously resolved long ago.