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Luke_A_Somers comments on Intuitions Aren't Shared That Way - Less Wrong
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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.
If you're in a different universe with different laws of physics, your implementation of the 4 color problem will have to be different. Your failure to correctly map between math and reality isn't math's problem. Math, as noted above, is of the form 'if X and Y and Z, then A' - and you can definitely arrange formal equivalents to X, Y, and Z by virtue of being able to express the math in the first place.
It's about the world but it doesn't correspond to anything in the world? Then the correspondence model of truth has just said they're full of shit. <voice actress="Hayashibara Megumi">Victoreeee!</voice>
(note: above 'victory' claim is in reference to astrologers, not you)
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.
But you can BUILD something that corresponds to that thing.
Which thing, and why does that matter?
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.