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Benquo comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong
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There are some kinds of truths that don't seem to be covered by truth-as-correspondence-between-map-and-territory. (Note: This general objection is well know and is given as Objection 1 in SEP's entry on Correspondence Theory.) Consider:
Maybe the first two just argues for Platonism and modal realism (although I note that Eliezer explicitly disclaimed being a modal realist). The last one is most problematic to me, because some kinds of normative statements seem to be talking about what one should do given some assumed-to-be-accurate map, and not about the map itself. For example, "You should two-box in Newcomb's problem." If I say "Alice has a false belief that she should two-box in Newcomb's problem" it doesn't seem like I'm saying that her map doesn't correspond to the territory.
So, a couple of questions that seem open to me: Do we need other notions of truth, besides correspondence between map and territory? If so, is there a more general notion of truth that covers all of these as special cases?
I don't think 2 is answered even if you say that the mathematical objects are themselves real. Consider a geometry that labels "true" everything that follows from its axioms. If this geometry is consistent, then we want to say that it is true, which implies that everything it labels as "true", is. And the axioms themselves follow from the axioms, so the mathematical system says that they're true. But you can also have another valid mathematical system, where one of those axioms is negated. This is a problem because it implies that something can be both true and not true.
Because of this, the sense in which mathematical propositions can be true can't be the same sense in which "snow is white" can be true, even if the objects themselves are real. We have to be equivocating somewhere on "truth".
It's easy to overcome that simply by being a bit more precise - you are saying that such and such a proposition is true in geometry X. Meaning that the axioms of geometry X genuinely do imply the proposition. That this proposition may not be true in geometry Y has nothing to do with it.
It is a different sense of true in that it isn't necessarily related to sensory experience - only to the interrelationships of ideas.
You are tacitly assuming that Platonists have to hold that what is formally true (proveable, derivable from axioms) is actuallty true. But a significant part of the content of Platonism is that mathematical statements are only really true if they correspond to the organisation of Plato's heaven. Platonists can say, "I know you proved that, but it isn't actually true". So there are indeed different notions of truth at play here.
Which is not to defend Platonism. The notion of a "real truth" which can't be publically assessed or agreed upon in the way that formal proof can be is quite problematical.