shminux comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (513)
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 think a more general notion of truth could be defined as correspondence between a map and any structure. If you define a structure using axioms and are referencing that structure, then you can talk about the correspondence properties of that reference. This at least cover both mathematical structures and physical reality.