Jack_LaSota comments on Request for Steelman: Non-correspondence concepts of truth - Less Wrong

13 Post author: PeerGynt 24 March 2015 03:11AM

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

Comments (74)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: shminux 24 March 2015 05:20:51AM 6 points [-]

I went down the rabbit hole of researching the question "what is truth?" soon after I joined LW almost 3 years ago, and ended up with a rather unpopular anti-Platonic ontology of the term "truth" being worse than useless in most cases. The correspondence theory of truth stopped making sense to me because there is nothing for it to correspond to. So, it's somewhat more radical than William James's pragmatic theory of truth. But I guess this is probably not what you are interested in.

Comment author: Jack_LaSota 30 March 2015 12:22:24PM -1 points [-]

"There is nothing for the correspondence theory of truth to correspond to" is a feature, not a bug. Because this is one of those philosophical debates which is really just a choice of definition. "Something is true if it corresponds to reality" is just a definition, and definitions don't have truth* value.

*truth defined in a way that I think is pretty useful to define it, which is what we're usually looking for when we pick definitions.