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Mark_Friedenbach comments on Why I Reject the Correspondence Theory of Truth - Less Wrong Discussion

9 Post author: pragmatist 24 March 2015 11:00AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 24 March 2015 06:34:56PM 4 points [-]

The "Correspondence Can't Be Causal" section was unconvincing. The Ptolemaic model made advance predictions about astronomy that were experimentally falsified, leading to general acceptance of the Copernican system a millennium later. Models correspond to reality when the predictions they make are experimentally verified.

Regarding multi-model pragmatism, I get the feeling that you are not really arguing in the spirit of the original request for steel-manning. Due to my physics- and chemistry-laboratory training I have direct personally observed evidence that quantum mechanics and Einsteinium relativity are better descriptions of reality -- correspond more accurately -- than Newtonian mechanics and Galilean relativity. Yet I pragmatically choose to use classical models on a day to day basis. Because if one model corresponds better than another, it does not replace the old model. The old model still corresponds with reality, just perhaps not as precisely as once thought. The decision of what model to choose when making predictions depends on how accurately those models reflect reality within the problem domain, how efficient the model is to compute, and how much error can be tolerated. Pragmatism and correspondence are related but different issues.