Benito comments on Rationality Quotes September 2013 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Vaniver 04 September 2013 05:02AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (456)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Benito 07 September 2013 09:57:19AM 5 points [-]

Secondly, you might have the nagging feeling that not much has happened, really. We wanted an answer to the question "What is truth?", and all we got was trivial truths-equivalences, and a definition of truth for sentences with certain expressions, that showed up again on the right-hand side of that very definition. If that is on your mind, then you should go back to the beginning of this lecture, and ask yourself, "What kind of answer did expect?" to our initial question. Reconsider, "What is 'grandfather-hood'?". Well, define it in familiar terms. What is 'truth'? Well, define it in familiar terms. That's what we did. If that's not good enough, why?

by Hannes Leitgeb, from his joint teaching course with Stephan Hartmann (author of Bayesian Epistemology) on Coursera entitled 'An Introduction to Mathematical Philoosphy'.

The course topics are "Infinity, Truth, Rational Belief, If-Then, Confirmation, Decision, Voting, and Quantum Logic and Probability". In many ways, a very LW-friendly course, with many mentions and discussions of people like Tarski, Gödel etc.