"It would be very uncomfortable to have discussions that on the surface appear to be about the nature of reality, but which really are about something else, where the precise value of 'something else' is unknown to me."
Indeed. I agree, although I find it extremely uncomfortable even when the something else is known to me.
For example, once I had a discussion with someone which seemed to be going pretty well, and which fully appeared to be about the nature of reality, and which we were both enjoying. Then at one point in the discussion I said something like "you know, the reason I thought X was true was because of Y", where X and Y had some reference to another discussion that we had once held and in which we had disagreed.
The person responded, "now you're ruining everything!!"
Why was I "ruining everything"? The reason is that I misunderstood the point of the discussion. I thought it was about the nature of reality. But, in fact, they simply intended it as a discussion about the relationship between the two of us, and they understood my reference to a discussion in which we disagreed as something harmful to the relationship.
In the end I have come to the very uncomfortable conclusion that at some level, most conversations are like this, and are not about the nature of reality even when they appear to be, and that most people in fact either never or almost never engage in conversations which are actually about the truth of the matter. And the result is that in most conversations I feel like I am speaking with aliens -- although the truth may be that the aliens here are the people like us who are actually concerned with reality, and the others are normal human beings.
There is consequently a problem with your four options, although I would say that the third is basically true. It is not that people think that "truth" means something other than "correspondence with reality." If you ask them what they mean, they will say it means that, and they will disagree with any other definition. But the very discussion about the meaning of truth, is not about the nature of reality, while your attempt to resolve the problems by discussing the nature of truth, is meant to be about reality. So when you engage in this discussion you be at cross purposes, and you will not be able to resolve anything. Nor will you be able to show people that they are unable to have a discussion about the nature of reality; they will be equally and similarly unable to accept that very truth, precisely because they are unable to have a discussion like that.
Basically I think Robin Hanson has it right with his definition of human beings as "homo hypocritus." In theory people claim accept the correspondence theory of truth, but it is basically hypocrisy, and precisely for that reason, people are unable to have the kind of discussion you want, and they will never understand this nor the reason for it, and you can never explain it to them.
I agree that Option 3 is correct here.
Personally I pretty much exclusively use face to face conversation for social reasons, such as building rapport/relationships, fighting status and dominance battles, bonding through shared experience, checking in for updates on moods and desires, or setting up plans. So OP, when you say that you can't talk to many people about the nature of reality, my reaction is, "Of course! You're using the wrong medium."
You may have heard before that communication is only X% verbal (what you say), while the rest is parav...
A couple of days ago, Buybuydandavis wrote the following on Less Wrong:
I've spent a lot of energy over the last couple of days trying to come to terms with the implications of this sentence. While it certainly corresponds with my own observations about many people, the thought that most humans simply reject correspondence to reality as the criterion for truth seems almost too outrageous to take seriously. If upon further reflection I end up truly believing this, it seems that it would be impossible for me to have a discussion about the nature of reality with the great majority of the human race. In other words, if I truly believed this, I would label most people as being too stupid to have a real discussion with.
However, this reaction seems like an instance of a failure mode described by Megan McArdle:
With this background, it seems important to improve my model of people who reject correspondence as the criterion for truth. The obvious first place to look is in academic philosophy. The primary challenger to correspondence theory is called “coherence theory”. If I understand correctly, coherence theory says that a statement is true iff it is logically consistent with “some specified set of sentences”
Coherence is obviously an important concept, which has valuable uses for example in formal systems. It does not capture my idea of what the word “truth” means, but that is purely a semantics issue. I would be willing to cede the word “truth” to the coherence camp if we agreed on a separate word we could use to mean “correspondence to reality”. However, my intuition is that they wouldn't let us to get away with this. I sense that there are people out there who genuinely object to the very idea of discussing whether a sentences correspond to reality.
So it seems I have a couple of options:
1. I can look for empirical evidence that buybuydandavis is wrong, ie that most people accept correspondence to reality as the criterion for truth
2. I can try to convince people to use some other word for correspondence to reality, so they have the necessary semantic machinery to have a real discussion about what reality is like
3. I can accept that most people are unable to have a discussion about the nature of reality
4. I can attempt to steelman the position that truth is something other than correspondence
Option 1 appears unlikely to be true. Option 2 seems unlikely to work. Option 3 seems very unattractive, because it would be very uncomfortable to have discussions that on the surface appear to be about the nature of reality, but which really are about something else, where the precise value of "something else" is unknown to me.
I would therefore be very interested in a steelman of non-correspondence concepts of truth. I think it would be important not only for me, but also for the rationalist community as a group, to get a more accurate model of how non-rationalists think about "truth"