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Luke_A_Somers comments on Intuitions Aren't Shared That Way - Less Wrong
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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 ?
I think is important to note that what we've been calling theories of truth are actually aimed at being theories of meaningfulness. As lukeprog implicitly asserts, there are whole areas of philosophy where we aren't sure there is anything substantive at all. If we could figure out the correct theory of meaningfulness, we could figure out which areas of philosophy could be discarded entirely without close examination.
For example, Carnap and other logical positivists thought Heidegger's assertion that "Das nicht nichtet" was meaningless nonsense. I'm not sure I agree, but figuring out questions like that is the purpose of a theory of meaning / truth.
I see, so you aren't really concerned with practical-use applications; you're more interested in figuring out which areas of philosophy are meaningful. That makes sense, but, on the other hand, can an area of philosophy with a well-established practical use still be meaningless ?
It sure would be surprising if that happened. But meaningfulness is not the only criteria one could apply to a theory. No one thinks Newtonian physics is meaningless, even though everyone thinks Newtonian physics is wrong (i.e. less right than relativity and QM).
In other words, one result of a viable theory of truth would be a formal articulation of "wronger than wrong."
That's not the same as "wrong", though. It's just "less right", but it's still good enough to predict the orbit of Venus (though not Mercury), launch a satellite (though not a GPS satellite), or simply lob cannonballs at an enemy fortress, if you are so inclined.
From what I've seen, philosophy is more concerned with logical proofs and boolean truth values. If this is true, then perhaps that is the reason why philosophy is so riddled with deep-sounding yet ultimately useless propositions ? We'd be in deep trouble if we couldn't use Newtonian mechanics just because it's not as accurate as QM, even though we're dealing with macro-sized cannonballs moving slower than sound.
... except, as described below, to discard volumes worth of overthinking the matter.
As far as I can tell, we're in the middle of a definitional dispute - and I can't figure out how to get out.
My point remains that Eliezer's reboot of logical positivism does no better (and no worse) than the best of other logical positivist philosophies. A theory of truth needs to be able to explain why certain propositions are meaningful. Using "correspondence" as a semantic stop sign does not achieve this goal.
Abandoning the attempt to divide the meaningful from the non-meaningful avoids many of the objections to Eliezer's point, at the expense of failing to achieve a major purpose of the sequence.
It's not so much a definitional dispute as I have no idea what you're talking about.
Suggesting that there's something out there which our ideas can accurately model isn't a semantic stop sign at all. It suggests we use modeling language, which does, contra your statement elsewhere, suggest using Bayesian inference. It gives sufficient criteria for success and failure (test the models' predictions). It puts sane epistemic limits on the knowable.
That seems neither impractical nor philosophically vacuous.
The philosophical problem has always been he apparent arbitrariness of the rules. You can say that "meaningful" sentences are empircially verifiable ones. But why should anyone believe that? The sentence "the only meaningful sentences are the empircially verifiable ones" isn't obviously empirically verifiable. You have over-valued clarity and under-valued plausibility.
Definitions don't need to be empirically verifiable. How could they be?
They need to be meaningful. If your definition of meaningfullness assers its own meaninglessness, you have a problem. If you are asserting that there is truth-by-stipulation as well as truth-by-correspondence, you have a problem.
Clarity cannot be over-valued; plausibility, however, can be under-valued.
If you believe that, I have two units of clarity to sell you, for ten billion dollars.
Before posting, you should have spent a year thinking up ways to make that comment clearer.
What about mathematics, then ? Does it correspond to something "out there" ? If so, what/where is it ? If not, does this mean that math is not meaningful ?
Math is how you connect inferences. The results of mathematics are of the form 'if X, Y, and Z, then A'... so, find cases where X, Y, and Z, and then check A.
It doesn't even need to be a practical problem. Every time you construct an example, that counts.
I don't see how that addresses the problem. You have said that there is one kind of truth/meanignullness, based on modelling relaity, and then you describe mathematical truth in a form that doens't match that. If any domain can have its own standards of truth, then astrologers can say there merhcandise is "astrologically true". You have anything goes.
This stuff is a tricky , typically philophsical problem because the obvious answers all have problems. Saying that all truth is correspondence means that either mathematical Platonism holds -- mathematical truths correspond to the status quo in Plato's heaven--or maths isn't meaningful/true at all. Or truth isn't correspondence, it's anything goes.
I don't think those problems are iresolvable, and EY has in fact suggested (but not originated) what I think is a promissing approach.
How does it not match? Take the 4 color problem. It says you're not going to be able to construct a minimally-5-color flat map. Go ahead. Try.
That's the kind of example I'm talking about here. The examples are artificial, but by constructing them you are connecting the math back to reality. Artificial things are real.
What? How is holding everything is held to the standard of 'predict accurately or you're wrong' the same as 'anything goes'?
I mean, if astrology just wants to be a closed system that never ever says anything about the outside world... I'm not interested in it, but it suddenly ceases to be false.
That doesn't matfch reality because it would still be true in universes with different laws of physics.
It isn't. It's a standard of truth that too narrow to include much of maths.
That doens't follow. Astrologers can say their merchandise is about the world, and true, but not true in a way that has anything to do with correspondence or prediction.
Right, but as Peterdjones said, in this case you have a meaningful system that does not correspond to anything besides, possibly, itself.
Example, please?
Physics uses a subset of maths, so the rest would be examples of vald (I am substituing that for "meaninful", which I am not sure how t apply here) maths that doesn;t correspond to anything external, absent Platonism.
The word "True" is overloaded in the ordinary vernacular. Eliezer's answer is to set up a separate standard for empirical and mathematical propositions.
Empirical assertions use the label "true" when they correspond to reality. Mathematical assertions use the label "valid" when the theorem follows from the axioms.
I dont' think it is, and that's a bad answer anyway. To say that two unrelated approaches are both truth allows anthing to join the truth club, since there are no longer criteria for membership.
However, there is an approach that allows pluralism, AKA "overloading", but avoids Anything Goes
Well, I don't think that Eliezer would call mathematically valid propositions "true." I don't find that answer any more satisfying than you do. But (as your link suggests), I don't think he can do better without abandoning the correspondence theory.
Simply put, there's no one who disagrees with this point. And the correspondence theory cannot demonstrate it, even if there were a dispute.
Let me make an analogy to decision theory: In decision theory, the hard part is not figuring out the right answer in a particular problem. No one disputes that one-boxing in Newcomb's problem has the best payoff. The difficulty in decision theory is rigorously describing a decision theory that comes up with the right answer on all the problems.
To make the parallel explicit, the existence of the external world is not the hard problem. The hard problem is what "true" means. For example, this comment is a sophisticated argument that "true" (or "meaningful") are not natural kinds. Even if he's right, that doesn't conflict with the idea of an external world.
I'm trying and failing to figure out for what reference class this is supposed to be true.
Who thinks that there isn't something out there which our ideas can model?
If I understood you correctly, then Berkeley-style Idealists would be an example. However, I have a strong suspicion that I've misunderstood you, so there's that...
Solipsists, by some meanings of "out there". More generally, skeptics. Various strong forms of relativism, though you might have to give them an inappropriately modernist interpretation to draw that out. My mother-in-law.