A couple of days ago, Buybuydandavis wrote the following on Less Wrong:
I'm increasingly of the opinion that truth as correspondence to reality is a minority orientation.
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:
I’m always fascinated by the number of people who proudly build columns, tweets, blog posts or Facebook posts around the same core statement: “I don’t understand how anyone could (oppose legal abortion/support a carbon tax/sympathize with the Palestinians over the Israelis/want to privatize Social Security/insert your pet issue here)." It’s such an interesting statement, because it has three layers of meaning.
The first layer is the literal meaning of the words: I lack the knowledge and understanding to figure this out. But the second, intended meaning is the opposite: I am such a superior moral being that I cannot even imagine the cognitive errors or moral turpitude that could lead someone to such obviously wrong conclusions. And yet, the third, true meaning is actually more like the first: I lack the empathy, moral imagination or analytical skills to attempt even a basic understanding of the people who disagree with me
In short, “I’m stupid.” Something that few people would ever post so starkly on their Facebook feeds.
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"
I am mostly a coherentist and get constantly tripped up by the correspondencist attitudes the sequences here take. So it may be a job for me. But beware, I am a sloppy arguer, I suck at being precise and exact, as I think in pictures which may be a good thing but the result is often "sorta-kinda y'know what I mean?" and useless for people who have a mathemethicians precise mind.
A) My main issue with correspondence theory is over-valuing the accuracy of observation, sensory experience etc. There is a hidden assumption that hypothesis-building or theories are far, far more inaccurate than observation. Eliezer frequently talks about just opening the box and looking, just opening your eyes and seeing, just checking etc. in short he has high confidence in observation being accurate.
B) I think observation is nothing but a lower-order theory/model/hypothesis. It can be just as inaccurate as theories. Quite literally: not only the conscious mind is affected by biases, but even the visual cortex.
C) The proress of science was retarded mostly by not having access to good enough observation instruments. You cannot really be a Galilei without a telescope. Bare-eye observation fails us all kind of ways, gives us a universe that is likely to be Ptolemaian.
D) But observation with instruments is just as problematic, as instruments can go wrong, can get miscalibrated, and ultimately they themselves rely on theory. You cannot build a LHC without already having lots of theoretical physics. Observation is fallible.
E) From this follows that you cannot simply match unreliable theories to unreliable observations and call it a day. You must also match observations to observations, theories to theories, and sometimes even observations to theories.
F) In other words, truth is whatever is coherent with the whole body of science, all observations and all theories cross-validating each other. One potentially faulty observation or ten does not a theory validate.
G) Quine: Two Dogmas, demonstrating how can only experimentally verify the whole body of science only, not any individual statement.
H) Data is Latin for "given". Its etymology sounds like we are getting our data on fax from Heaven. In reality, data is anything but given. Data is gathered, mined through hard and fallible work.
I) The useful data is that gives diffs. I.e. when I am debugging a software I need not only data that says it fails in this case but also that it does not fail in that case. Mining these kinds of data is not easy, fallible, and relies on theory. I.e. I hunt for a diff only when I already have a hypothesis of what may be the cause of failure. As data is not given, you often need to form a hypothesis first and mine and gather data specifically to test it.
J) Objection: but in instrumental rationality, we want to change our sensory experience, so even if my observation of something being painful is wrong, if I made the pain go away I solved the problem, right? No. You are a doctor. A patient complains of stomach pain. You give painkillers. Pain goes away. A year later he dies of cancer. We cannot simply reduce instrumental rationality to felt, observed needs, and just assume the correctness of such assumption does not matter. Theory plays a role here. Knowing medical theory which gives a guess of cancer helps the doctor and the patient more than a very, very accurate observation of the pain.
Finally, let me quote from this Quine summary "Our beliefs form a web, with the outer fringes connecting to experience. Revision at the edges leads to revisions elsewhere in the web, but the decisions of where the revisions will occurs are underdetermined by the logical relations among the beliefs. In the revision, "any statement can be held true, come what may, if we make drastic enough changes elsewhere in the system".
Of course, "Darwin" from "The Simple Truth" would point out that some of those drastic enough changes involve dying.
To simplify the whole thing, if truth is correspondence to reality, our data / observation of reality should be highly reliable meaning it should be "given" (Lat. datum) instead of mined and gathered through hard and fallible work, the direction of that work often determined by fallible hypotheses, relying on potentially faulty instruments, even worse bare-eye observation, bias in the visual cortex and symptoms of pragmatic problems often being quite far from their actual causes. And since it is not the case, we are better of matching everything with everything, not just theory with observation, and that grand system of cross-matching is called the body of science.
Scientists conduct experiments on individual statements, or small sets of them, all the time. Quine's nihilistic conclusion that "any statement can be held true, come what may, if we make drastic enough changes elsewhere in the system" fails to grapple with the question of how knowledge can be achieved in the face of the fact that it is achieved. The words "drastic" and "come what may" should h... (read more)