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lionhearted comments on On Empirical Truth and Affective Truth - Less Wrong
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There is a certain relationship between the statement "snow is white" and what you see if you look at snow. The same relationship holds between the statement "my partner is cheating on me" and what you will see if you covertly follow your partner around all day. Between the weather forecast and the weather. Between what a government says about its military activities and what you will see if find all its forces and watch what they are doing.
This concept is of fundamental importance to every aspect of life: thinking, doing, feeling, everything. It deserves a single, short, familiar word that means that thing and nothing else. That word exists: it is the word "truth". To discover truth, you must look and see, and experiment.
All of the extensions of that word to other concepts, such as "affective truth", "my truth", "spiritual truth", and so on, apply it to things that lack that fundamentally important quality: that the words match the way things are. They are ways of passing off ignorance as truth, feelings as truth, lies as truth. It saves you the trouble of looking, seeing, experimenting, and updating. You can say "this is true for me" and pull the wool over your own eyes while claiming that blindness is but truer vision.
Likewise, replacing "truth" tout court by adding limitative modifiers, like "empirical truth", "scientific truth", "rational truth", and so on, is an attempt to pretend that that fundamentally important quality is not of fundamental importance, but just one small part of a rich panoply of other ways of relating to the world. But it is not.
Feelings exist. True statements can be made about them. Whatever feelings you are having, it is true that you are having that feeling. But the feeling itself is not something that is capable of being true or false. Whenever you say "I feel that...", it is more accurate to say "I believe that..." Only when you do that can you ask, "Is this belief true?" Only when you shy away from that question will you need to say "it feels true."
Incorrect. You missed the point.
It's a way to communicate with less analytical people without acting like a clueless sledgehammer that alienates people.
We might both disagree with "Serbia is the greatest country in the world" but that's not a very good argument to communicate to a Serbian who holds that view as deeply true.
Alternatively, do the Spock thing and try to instruct the average Balkan-country citizen on their "language accuracy" and see how far it gets you.
If you can get someone who asserts their opinion is "true" to grant it's true to them but not empirically true you've already won half the battle in helping them think and communicate better.
There are other ways to not be a clueless sledgehammer. Speaking of which...
Ahem.
What is true, and what is needful to say to the person in front of you, are two different things. The difference between them is not necessarily, not even usually, one of truth and falsity, but of what truths to express, and how to express them in such a way that when the other person hears then, what they hear is true.
Why would I be arguing with him at all about that?
I am more interested in thinking and communicating better myself than in helping anyone else to. It is not that I do not care, but that I have no business doing so unless particular circumstances make it necessary. Just because I hear someone talking in terms I think mistaken is not a reason for me to jump in and start counselling them on epistemic hygiene. I do not play this person on the net or anywhere else.
If you regard valuing the simple virtue of truth as "the Spock thing", why are you here?
I think most people here are aware that there's a gap between how we tend to communicate on Less Wrong or in other rationalist circles, and how people tend to communicate in various other circles. I think that's a component of the concept of inferential distance.
But separating out various types of beliefs into categories such as "empirical truth" and "affective truth" also has a gap of inferential distance from most of the people we'd be using such concepts to communicate with, and I think it's questionable whether it's a step along the direction that brings them closest to the position we're trying to get to.