faul_sname 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: Wei_Dai 02 October 2012 07:23:34PM 19 points [-]

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:

  1. modal truths if one isn't a modal realist
  2. mathematical truths if one isn't a mathematical Platonist
  3. normative truths

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?

Comment author: faul_sname 02 October 2012 11:22:07PM 2 points [-]

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.

It seems that way to me. Specifically, in that case I think you're saying that Alice (wrongly) expects that her decision is causally independent from the money Omega put in the boxes, and as such thinks that her expected utility is higher from grabbing both boxes.