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TimS comments on Intuitions Aren't Shared That Way - Less Wrong
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BS. For example, Eliezer's take on logical positivism in the most recent Sequence is interesting. But logical positivism has substantial difficulties - identified by competing philosophical schools - that Eliezer has only partially resolved.
Aristotle tried to say insightful things merely by examining etymology, but the best of modern philosophy has learned better.
I only see objections to traditional strains of positivism. It doesn't seem they even apply to what EY's been doing. In particular, the problems in objections 1, 3C1, 3C2, and 3F2 have been avoided by being more careful about what is not said. Meanwhile, 2 and 3F1 seem incoherent to me.
I don't see how Eliezer could dodge this objection, or why he would want to. Very colloquially, Eliezer thinks there is an arrow leading to "Snow is white" from the fact that snow is white. Labeling that arrow "causal" does nothing to explain what that arrow is. If you don't explain what the arrow is, how do you know that (1) you've said something rigorous or (2) that the causal arrows are the same thing as what we want to mean by "true"?
As stated, this objection is too strong (because it assumes moral anti-realism is true). The correspondence theory can be agnostic in the dispute between moral realism and moral anti-realism. But moral realists intend to use the word "true" in exactly the same way that scientists use the word. Thus, a correspondence-theory moral realist needs to be able to identify what corresponds to any particular moral truth - otherwise, moral anti-realism is the correct moral epistemology.
Most people are moral realists, so if your theory of truth is inconsistent with moral realism, they will take that as evidence that your theory of truth is not correct.
Look, no one but a total idiot believes Mark's epistemic theory. There is an external world, with sufficient regularity that our physical predictions will be accurate within the limits of our knowledge and computational power. The issue is whether that can be stated more rigorously - and the different specifications are where logical positivists, physical pragmitists, Kunn and other theorists disagree.
I do agree that objections 2 and 3F2 are not particularly compelling (as I understand them).
This is actually a very easy one to respond to. Truthbearers do resemble non-truthbearers. What must ultimately be truth-bearing, if anything really is, is some component of the world -- a brain-state, an utterance, or what-have-you. These truth-bearing parts of the world can resemble their referents, in the sense that a relatively simple and systematic transformation on one would yield some of the properties of the other. For instance, a literal map clearly resembles its territory; eliminating most of the territory's properties, and transforming the ones that remain in a principled way, could produce the map. But sentences also resemble the territories they describe, e.g., through temporal and spatial correlation. Even Berkeley's argument clearly fails for this reason; an immaterial idea can systematically share properties with a non-idea, if only temporal ones.
Language use is a natural phenomenon. Hence, reference is also a natural phenomenon, and one we should try to explain as part of our project of accounting for the patterns of human behavior. Here, we're trying to understand why humans assert "Snow is white" in the particular patterns they do, and why they assign truth-values to that sentence in the patterns they do. The simplest adequate hypothesis will note that usage of "snow" correlates with brain-states that in turn resemble (heavily transformed) snow, and that "white" correlates with brain-states resembling transformed white light, and that "Snow is white" expresses a relationship between these two phenomena such that white light is reflected off of snow. When normal English language users think white light reflects off of snow, they call the sentence "snow is white" true; and when they think the opposite, they call "snow is white" false. So, there is a physical relationship between the linguistic behavior of this community and the apparent properties of snow.
Yes, but is our goal to convince everyone that we're correct, or to be correct? The unpopularity of moral anti-realism counts against the rhetorical persuasiveness of a correspondence theory combined with a conventional scientific world-view. But it will only count against the plausibility of this conjunction if we have reason to think that moral statements are true in the same basic way that statements about the whiteness of snow are true.
In brief, I disagree that we are trying to explain human behavior. We are trying to develop an agent-universal explanation of truth. The risk of focusing on human behavior (or human brain states) is that the theory of truth won't generalize to non-human agents.
Regarding moral facts, I agree that our goal is true philosophy, not comforting philosophy. I'm a moral anti-realist independent of theory-of-truth considerations. But most people seem to feel that their moral senses are facts (yes, I'm well aware of the irony of appealing to universal intuitions in a post that urges rejection of appeals to universal intuitions).
The widespread nature of belief in values-as-truths cries out for explanation, and the only family of theories I'm aware of that even try to provide such an explanation is wildly controversial and unpopular in the scientific community.
I'm not sure 'agent' is a natural kind. 'Truth' may not be a natural kind either; it may be a very gerrymandered, odd-looking collection of properties. So I spoke in terms of concrete human behaviors in order to maintain agnosticism about how generalizable these properties are. If they do turn out to be generalizable, then great. I don't think any part of my account precludes that possibility.
Yes. My explanation is that our mental models do treat values as though they were real properties of things. Similarly, our mental models treat chairs as discrete solid objects, treat mathematical objects as mind-independent reals, treat animals as having desires and purposes, and treat possibility and necessity as worldly facts. In all of these cases, our evidence for the metaphysical category actually occurring is much weaker than our apparent confidence in the category's reality. So the problem is very general; it seems that most of our beliefs are predicated on useful fictions (analogous to our willingness to affirm the truth of 'Sherlock Holmes is a detective, not a carpenter'), in which case we are committed either to an error theory or to revising our standards for what 'truth' is.
If so. rationalists may as well shut up shop, because anyone would be able to add an interest-specific lump to the gerrymander.
ETA
I go for the third option.
People already do that, and yet rationalists see no reason to 'shut up shop' as a result. 'True' is just a word. Rationality is about systematic optimization for our goals, not about defending our favorite words from the rabble. Sometimes it's worthwhile to actively criticize a use of 'truth;' sometimes it's worthwhile to participate in the gerrymandering ourselves; and sometimes it's worthwhile just to avoid getting involved in the kerfuffle. For instance, criticizing people for calling 'Sherlock Holmes is a detective' true is both less useful and less philosophically interesting than criticizing people for calling 'there is exactly one empty set' true.
Also, it's important to remember that there are two different respects in which 'truth' might be gerrymandered. First, it might be gerrymandered for purely social reasons. Second, it might be gerrymandered because it's a very complicated property of high-level representational systems. One should not expect mental states in general to be simply and nondisjunctively definable in a strictly physical language. Yet if we learned that 'pain' were a highly disjunctive property rather than a natural kind, this would give us no reason to stop deeming pain unpleasant.
People try to do that, but rationalists don't have to regard it as legitimate, and can object. However, if a notion of truth is adopted that is pluralistic and has no constraint on its pluralism --Anythng Goes -- rationalists could no longer object to,eg. Astrological Truth.
So you say. Most rationalists are engaged in some sort of wider debate.
Even if it is intellectually dishonest to do so?
I think you may have confused truth with statesof-mind-having-content-about-truth. Electrons are simple, thoughts about them aren't.
Somethings not being a natural kind, is not justification for arbitrarily changing its definition. I don't get to redefine the taste of chocolate as a kind of pain.
No one on this thread, up till now, has mentioned an arbitrarily changing or anything goes model of truth. Perhaps you misunderstood what I meant by 'gerrymandered.' All I meant was that the referent of 'truth' in physical or biological terms may be an extremely complicated and ugly array of truth-bearing states. Conceding that doesn't mean that we should allow 'truth' (or any word) to be used completely anarchically.
I would phrase that as that he has recast it so it is non-objectionable.
A lot of the other objections are of the nature "how do you know?" And generally he lets the answer be, "we don't know that to a degree of certainty that - it has been correctly pointed out - would philosophically objectionable."
Well, that moves much closer to making objection 2 meaningful. If all that the correspondence theory of truth can do is reassure us that our colloquial usage of "truth" gestures at a unified and meaningful philosophical concept, then it isn't much use. It is not like anyone seriously doubts that "empirically true" is a real thing.
And I say that as a post-modernist.
I still don't understand this 'usefulness' objection. If the correspondence theory of truth is a justification for colloquial notions of truth, its primary utility does lie in our not worrying too much about things we don't actually need to worry about. There are other uses such as molding the way one approaches knowledge under uncertainty. The lemmas needed to produce the final "everything's basically OK" result provide significant value.
There are many concepts where the precise contours of the correct position makes no practical difference to most people. Examples include (1) Newtonian vs. Relativity and QM, (2) the meaning of infinity, or (3) persistence of identity. Many of the folk versions of those types of concepts are inadequate in dealing with edge cases (e.g. the folk theory of infinity is hopelessly broken). The concept of "truth" is probably in this no-practical-implications category. As I said, there's no particular reason to doubt truth exists, whether the correspondence theory is correct or not.
Anyway, edge cases don't tend to come up in ordinary life, so there's no good reason for most people to be worried. If one isn't worried, then the whole correspondence-theory-of-truth project is pointless to you. Without worry, reassurance is irrelevant. By contrast, if you are worried, the correspondence theory is insufficient to reassure you. Your weaker interpretation is vacuous, Eliezer's stronger version has flaws.
None of this says that one should worry about what "truth" is, but having taken on the question, I think Eliezer has come up short in answering.
I don't see where it's coming up short in the first two examples you gave. What else would you want from it?
As far as the third, well, I don't know that the meaning of truth is directly applicable to this problem.
I haven't communicated clearly. There are two understandings of useful - practical-useful and philosophy-useful. Arguments aimed at philosophy-use are generally irrelevant to practical-use (aka "Without worry, reassurance is irrelevant").
In particular, the correspondence theory of truth has essentially no practical-use. The interpretation you advocate here removes philosophical-use.
"Everything's basically ok." is a practical-use issue. Therefore, it's off-topic in a philosophical-use discussion.
I mentioned the examples to try to explain the distinction between practical-use and philosophical-use. Believing the correspondence theory of truth won't help with any of the examples I gave. Ockham's Razor is not implied by the correspondence theory. Nor is Bayes' Theorem. Correspondence theory implies physical realism, but physical realism does not imply correspondence theory.
Out of curiosity, which theory of truth does have a practical use ?
... except, as described below, to discard volumes worth of overthinking the matter.