Comments
LifeOfAPancake t1_jbfsnnx wrote
I think there might be some nuance that can be added in your second paragraph.
What we know to be true is not the same as what is true, I agree. However, in answering the question of what is truth, we should note that there are limits to our ability to know truth. Drawing from Kant, and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, there are things we just can never know the truth of.
So I feel that ‘what I currently know to be true’ is not the same as ‘what is true.’ But maybe there might be good reason to argue that ‘what I can possibly know to be true’ should be the same as ‘what is true.’ This requires a rejection of the inaccessible absolute Truth, in favor of an accessible but subjective truth. Reminds me of Ivan Karamazov’s “Even If” in Dostoevsky’s TBK.
rejectednocomments t1_jbfwtm6 wrote
No.
There is no good reason to think “what is true” is the same as “what I can possibly know to be true”. It may simply be that there are things which I cannot know.
LifeOfAPancake t1_jbgp373 wrote
I mentioned Ivan Karamazov’s “Even If” because it is a good reason to assimilate truth with what can be known of it.
What value is there in a truth that can never be known? Is there a good reason to maintain a notion of truth that is inaccessible? It becomes totally useless to us at that point
rejectednocomments t1_jbgs6l2 wrote
Well, I want some term which is correctly applied to a statement in case things are as that statement says they are.
If you want to use “truth” in some other way, I guess I can’t stop you. But I still want a term with such a meaning.
OuchYouHitMe t1_jbij2td wrote
If there is no way to differentiate the two, then no meaningful distinction can be expressed. Your comment provides no response to this and continues off the challenged premises.
You wanting a term is not an argument in this context. There is a difference between simple practical speech and philosophical terminology dealing with concepts such as truth. So much recognizes Blackburn himself.
frnzprf t1_jbiqil3 wrote
Schrödinger's cat experiment is often misunderstood to mean that just because we don't know whether the cat is dead or alive, it is actually half-dead and half-alive.
This has nothing to do with quants though. The same could be said about the shell game: I don't know whether there is a pearl under this shell or not, so it's half-there.
The point of Schrödinger's cat is to connect the actual half-facts (according to popular interpretation) of the quantum world to the macro world.
So, what is my opinion on the shell game? I'd say there is an actual reality independent of my knowledge. I can look under the shell afterwards and learn whether there was a pearl even before I looked. I mean - that's certainly the most popular, "naive" interpretation of reality, isn't it?
Would you say that "the universe" has no opinion about whether there is a pearl under a shell, or about how many fingers I'm holding behind by back, as long as you don't know anything about it?
I admit, it wouldn't cause any problems. It's unfalsifiable whether things really happen that nobody will know about or whether only things happen that people directly or indirectly observe.
Another game: In Germany it's called "Topfschlagen" - "pot hitting". One person gets blindfolded and the other people have to guide them to a pot by shouting "hot" and "cold". The blindfolded person doesn't know where the goal is (if we assume that the others don't help them). I think that means that at least things can exist when one person doesn't know about them - because other people still do. It could theoretically be the case that the pot stops existing once everybody puts on blindfolds.
rejectednocomments t1_jbj0l51 wrote
The objection was why care about truth if we can’t get to it?
Now, I never said all truths are inaccessible, only that perhaps some are.
So the objection is: why care about truth if some truths may be inaccessible?
My response is: this doesn’t change whether or not the way some things are might be inaccessible to us, and so we want a term for the way things are which applies in the those cases too. I think the term for that is “truth”, but I’ll go with another if you really insist on using it differently.
Hedgehogz_Mom t1_jbj83cg wrote
To my mind, the meaningful distinction is that I am capable of knowing that what I know to be true is not the extent of what may be possible to be true. It removes a limitation of absoluteness. It allows for the limitations of my own conceptual and intellectual abilities. It acknowledges and allows for the real limitation of confirmation bias to which all humans are subject, without closing the door behind what may be possible.
rolyfuckingdiscopoly t1_jbijiar wrote
A truth that can never be known, though, is an assumption. The inability of you or me to know something to be true does not mean that another human, or another creature of a different kind, cannot know it. I think dismissing the value of truth “because we cannot know it”, and presuming it inaccessible, is kind of a reach.
LifeOfAPancake t1_jbikmot wrote
There are some truths that are inaccessible. I referenced Kant and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem for that reason. How did the universe start? Do I have free will? Is there a God? What is Beauty? What is my purpose? These are not Truths that some other human (nor any other creature, unless they are God) will be able to stumble across, they are fundamentally unknowable.
OuchYouHitMe t1_jbimgmf wrote
Perhaps try thinking about it more in terms of inaccessibility rather than unknowability, because the latter might be creating some recursive confusion here.
> A truth that can never be known, though, is an assumption.
The real assumption, then, is correspondence. For example, it's not assumptive for me to discard a theory of fnördianism (where fnörd is a property of claims). That is because fnörd would something incomprehensible and I have no reason to believe that some creature out there comprehends fnörd. Why would I?
This example aligns more with arguments on correspondence being incoherent. If we wanted this example to get closer to deflationism, we'd associate fnörd one-to-one with some other property. Argument remains.
> I think dismissing the value of truth “because we cannot know it”
Then what is the value of a metaphysical correspondent truth, if we cannot speak of it meaningfully?
frnzprf t1_jbisg7l wrote
Let's say I have a box with a window and I see a red ball in it.
I also have a second box without a window. Would you say it's even wrong to say: "There could be a ball in this box or maybe there is no ball in this box."?
I'm kind of proposing a fact that I can't check.
If there was a ball in the box, it would be a fact that there is a ball in the box. Then there would be a fact about something that I don't know anything about. The same holds if there is no ball in the box.
If we assume there is no truth without knowledge, then the box can neither have a ball or not have a ball inside it.
If I understand correctly, you and /u/LifeOfAPancake would say that this neither-true-or-false state only occurs when no conscious being knows about it. So if I put a ball in the box without you watching, it would still be true that it's in there. But if I throw a dice in a cup and then I shake the cup again, then the dice has no true number on the upper side, because noone can check it afterwards.
This also leaves the question open whether it can be true that someone or something is conscious. If an AI is conscious and nobody besides itself knows about it, it is obviously true that it is conscious - in your and my opinion.
But as an outsider, I couldn't even entertain the possibility that it's conscious, because in case it's unconscious, nobody knows that it's unconscious and you say that it's not allowed to entertain the thought that propositions are true or false, when nobody knows about them. (I could have misunderstood you.)
In my intuition things can happen without anyone watching, even indirectly. Isn't that more "parsimonous"? It's more mentally efficient to assume the world exists without anyone watching. I have no better argument than that.
Well, maybe you could also say that a truth without knowledge is thinkable and as words are all about thinking, the word "truth" should be independent of the concept of "knowledge".
LifeOfAPancake t1_jbkuf0o wrote
I’m not proposing an idealist theory of Truth. Your case of the red ball has an important nuance. It is not about the present indeterminacy of the red ball being there or not. This is something that CAN be checked, it is a falsifiable theory. If you were to add as a premise that the box is indestructible and that it is impossible to verify whether there is a red ball or not, then we have an issue where we have to banish the possibility of objective Truth.
There might in fact be an objective Truth, the ball is there or it isn’t, but what good is it to us if its impossible to have the truth one way or another? If I correctly guess that the red ball is in there (assuming the objective Truth is the red ball is there), I will never be able to benefit from the objectivity of this truth, because for me it will always be doubtful, so it is inevitably reduced to the level of belief. So what good does it do me what the objective truth is? Even if I am holding the truth in my hand, I don’t benefit from it.
This indestructible box example is a better metaphor for your question of the consciousness of another being (AI, or even another human), because as far as an outsider is concerned, we can only make educated guesses based on intuition about the existence of a consciousness in another mind. Strictly speaking, you have never directly seen concrete evidence of another person’s mind, and so based on a theory of 100% certainty, you might as well be solipsistic. But we operate without having to know absolute truth. I operate on the basis of a very strong intuition that other minds are conscious, without a certainty about it. I have banished the need to know the objective truth here and allowed myself to be satisfied with an uncertain, but accessible and functional, subjective truth.
frnzprf t1_jbm11n8 wrote
> So what good does it do me what the objective truth is?
I don't disagree that true propositions that aren't known to me, aren't useful to me.
I just don't draw the conclusion that "true" and "possible to know" is the same concept. Maybe that depends on what possible means. Like "theoretically possible" vs "practically possible".
> There might in fact be an objective Truth [...] assuming the objective Truth is the red ball is there [...]
This looks to me like you agree that unknowable truths can exist.
You say there are propositions that can be true without anyone knowing them as it happens to be, such as a particular person is a philosophical zombie - a biological robot, or there being water on a planet beyond the observable universe.
You say that there are no true propositions without anyone knowing them because they are impossible to know, by principle, such as undetectable ghosts existing or them not existing.
Is that correct? That would be less controversial than if propositions of the first category couldn't be true either. I'm not sure, maybe the philosophical zombie belongs in the second category. Consciousness is weird anyway.
Can you think of good examples that people really care about in the second category - principally unknowable, and therefore impossible to be true or false claims?
Supernatural claims often just propose alternative physics. People say that ghosts act against the laws of physics, but they could theoretically exists and if they turned out to exists, the written laws of physics would need to be adjusted to accomodate them.
The existance of the judeochristian god is a weird claim. It depends how he is actually defined. Maybe god according to an unfalsifiable definition would occupy this space of neither true or false.
Is god's existance an example of unknowable claim? Does it make the claim neither true nor false or just false?
You can ignore the rest if you don't have much time.
"Possible" is an interesting word. I have a theory that possibility as opposed to certainty always has something to do with incomplete knowledge. In a universe without conscious humans with blind spots, there is no "possibility". It's not an inherent property of a shuffled deck of cards to be random. It can just be random to an observer. That's my weird theory.
If I'm correct then there is no difference between a fact that is impossible to know and a fact that I just happen not to know. Everything that is not actually the case, is impossible and everything that is the case, is impossible to be different. Possibility only arises when you don't know some facts or ignore them.
Well, maybe there are levels of impossibility. I can get to late to work, because I didn't set an alarm. Given that fact, it is impossible to arrive on time - but this excuse won't impress my boss. If I had to break the laws of physics or even logic, that's an arguably deeper level of impossibility.
rolyfuckingdiscopoly t1_jbsbd9o wrote
An interesting question is: why does the truth have to be immediately useful? Why would it be that truth must benefit you, or me, or any of us?
And- if it must be useful— is it not useful to have an idea, an inexact but working model, of the way the world exists independent of ourselves?
LifeOfAPancake t1_jbu3n2m wrote
It doesn’t have to be ‘immediately’ useful, it doesn’t have to be useful at all. But, if we are to care about truth, we care about truth FOR some reason. The question “why do I care about Truth” presupposes that it might be possible to answer “I don’t.” So it is not intrinsically necessary that we care about Truth, so it is up to us to justify our desire for it.
I think truth is useful to many people. You want your romantic partner to truly love you, you care about the truth of their feelings. Many examples where we care about truth. So then how do we get truth? You’re right, an inexact but working model of it is the best we can do. Thats what I was also getting at with my idea that we don’t care so much about absolute Truth, but only subjective truth.
frnzprf t1_jbj8zg9 wrote
This reminds me of Russel's teapot. I'm not completely sure what the point of it is. Maybe: If you believe in god without any evidence (some believers do, some don't), then you might as well believe in a teapot in space.
A teapot in space isn't usefully true without evidence. You might as well say it's existance isn't true at all. This also sounds like "pragmatism" from the video.
I think it doesn't hurt to say that there could be a teapot in space. It would be wrong to say for certain that there is no approximately teapod shaped asteroid in the asteroid belt.
A god that doesn't interact with the world is certainly irrelevant. A god that only punishes or rewards people in the afterlife is still unknowable but also very relevant. I still agree insofar that you shouldn't worry about that possibility, given you have no evidence now.
So there are three levels: true or false, eventually knowable, relevant.
amour_propre_ t1_jbjjoxx wrote
Yeah thump your book harder maybe you can silence everyone to agree with you. The ontological issue, “what is true” simply cannot be seperated from the verificational or the semantic issue, “how do we accept the truth of a proposition”. You strategy to establish this is simply book thumping, thumpf, I said so, no interpretation of an actual historical truths say in mathematics or sciences, nothing, just the claim that it might be the case that those 2 issues are independent. Which it maybe.
The worst part of this strategy when employed by “realist” philosophers is how disingenuous it is. There is very good reason why you are so sparse in your comments.
Suppose you decided to elucidate more on the notion of we and I which you use, the very next step would put you in realms of biology or cognitive science. Presumably our coming to know something etc are biological or sociological activities. When you do that then these questions become empirical scientific working hypothesis.
> It may simply be that there are things which I cannot know.
Precisely why we reject a correspondence view. If you do think it is plausible that there are truths we would never know, then why it is implausible for to hold that whatever statements one attaches the predicate is true() to, requires for it is very construction the same bounded/deficient/pre determined concepts/precepts.
Ipso facto reject the correspondence view.
rejectednocomments t1_jbjnfqx wrote
What is your objection to the correspondence theory?
Migmatite_Rock t1_jbi5udx wrote
No, I don't see his rejection of the correspondence theory having anything to do with a conflation between something being true, and our knowing something is true.
I think he's just endorsing the standard objection to correspondence theory, which doesn't really have much to do with how we know something is true, it is more about what constitutes a good theory (of truth or of anything else).
So if your theory of truth is something like "X is true if X corresponds to reality", the objection is that "corresponds to reality" is something like a synonym for truth rather than a theory of truth. It doesn't give us the sort of insight into truth we'd want for something to be rightfully deemed a theory of truth.
This is a little bit of a stretched analogy but I don't mean it to be exact, just to roughly get the idea across: If I offered a "cougar theory of mountain lions" that was like "X is a mountain lion if X is a cougar", that wouldn't be much of a theory. I'm just substituting two terms that refer to the same animal. A theory of mountain lions might be something like "X is a mountain lion if X is a large predatory cat species native to America.... etc etc." The objection to the correspondence theory of truth is that it is something like my "cougar theory of mountain lions".
So while it is true that cougars are mountain lions, that's not a good theory of mountain lions. Similarly, in the beginning of the video Blackburn says that while its perfectly correct to say that "x is true if x corresponds to reality", that is insufficient for a theory of truth.
OuchYouHitMe t1_jbim0ql wrote
Good explanation, I agree.
If you were to switch out correspondence with deflationism, OP's comment on "conflation of a claim’s between being true and being known to be true" would become more accurate. And a criticism of correspondence is the beginning of getting to deflationatism, and is the path that Blackburn takes. Though of course you could instead also reach some epistemic theory of truth.
rejectednocomments t1_jbizo3t wrote
Perhaps this was the objection intended. But I don’t understand it.
What sort of theory of a concept do you want, other than a definition?
tucker_case t1_jbh3221 wrote
Huh? that's epistemology. Blackburn doesn't deny epistemology.
rejectednocomments t1_jbh394s wrote
How do you interpret his criticism of the correspondence theory in that video?
Carniforist t1_jbilgnl wrote
Ain't that the truth
[deleted] t1_jbitoxd wrote
[deleted]
rejectednocomments t1_jbj0nws wrote
Me too! Correspondence with what the statement is about.
[deleted] t1_jbfmpgh wrote
I am highly sympathetic to disquotationalism/deflationism/etc, but something sticks in my craw (intuitively repugnant).
Blackburn seems to say that there is no foundation (aside from justification) that "grounds" morality, and that maybe (I'm inferring now) morality is a name we give teleologically to our already normalized position within an ostensible ethical framework. In this way, we should do what we have always done: not get ourselves excommunicated or exiled by perversions, or activism or some such.
But it seems like we have a sense that moral activism *would-have-been-*right so many times, and times when it is not the sociocultural norm.
Rorty addresses this I think to the effect of, we are always wrong with respect to future normalized positions, but maybe this is too dismissive.
Can moral truth be that normalizing force? Is this just semantic? How can we account for heroic activism that runs very much against utility?
GingerJacob36 t1_jbg9xta wrote
Can you explain how activism runs against utility? It seems like it could be very much in line, as it is aimed towards the greatest good, at least in the mind of the activist.
[deleted] t1_jbgcjel wrote
I guess utility is a complex idea. I was thinking something like martyrdom.
edit- one might imagine actions that are activist that have incalculable or unknowable utility. "I don't know if what I'm doing will amount to anything, but I am nonetheless compelled." I don't believe that every ethical choice can be reduced to something like an economic tradeoff.
jamesj t1_jbgsbr5 wrote
This is puzzling if you think natural selection acts on the level of organisms, but completely explained (along with other altruistically motivated actions) I'd you think that natural selection acts on the level of genes (selfish gene theory).
frnzprf t1_jbivmg9 wrote
It's also evolutionary beneficial if people influence each other by communicating and so the personal morality of a human can be influenced socially, which is indirectly evolutionary.
Human babies are relatively uncapable in comparison to other animals and they learn important skills by copying. It's like IKEA furniture that is easier to produce and ship, because there is still some assembly required.
[deleted] t1_jbjrs5b wrote
>I'd you think that natural selection acts on the level of genes (selfish gene theory).
Yes but just about any human action can be argued to have evolutionary benefit, so we can't use this as a feature or a marker of ethical progress.
frogandbanjo t1_jbgkzfv wrote
People martyr themselves for dumb and evil shit all the time, though. It's just that we refuse to call it martyrdom at a particular point in time and so perpetuate the illusion of objective morality.
Once you let go, you begin to understand that all "heroism" can be put in a same category of baffling behavior as people who behave "evilly" when they reasonably ought to know they'll get punished for it anyway. Clearly the human mind is capable of either rejecting utilitarianism outright (even just personal utilitarianism,) slipping below the bare minimum knowledge/intelligence requirements to engage productively with it, or convincing itself that the unquantifiable trumps the quantifiable. Those do not have any strict relationship to heroic moral action. They happen with "evil" actions all the time.
GingerJacob36 t1_jbgxlac wrote
Interesting that you feel there is no objective morality. I think we can agree that what is best for some is not best for others without feeling like we can't navigate the territory at all.
Even the martyrs are acting in a utilitarian mindset, either for a good we now generally agree about, or for a less discernibly positive way.
Ischmetch t1_jbhr9gn wrote
Not necessarily. Some simply act for the sake of Aristotelian virtue.
GingerJacob36 t1_jbjw0rv wrote
But it's not just courage for the sake of courage. There is always a motivating ethic of some kind, or a desire for change.
frogandbanjo t1_jbkro5x wrote
Morality doesn't follow from first-order premises (truth claims about the universe,) and so it's in even worse shape than "reality" is when challenged by Descartes. It relies upon either a middle or supplemental step to get to where it wants to go. That middle or supplemental step can be rejected by anyone trivially.
Push yourself to ask hard questions. What if ruthlessly enslaving 90% of the human race is the only way to ensure that humanity doesn't spoil its only life support system and doom itself to civilizational collapse and accelerated extinction? Personally, when I consider such hypotheticals, I become uncomfortable with even the vague notion that there is an objectively correct moral answer to them, regardless of whether I think I know what it is.
If you don't, by all means. Recognize that various moral systems posited throughout history would offer up both conflicting rationales and even conflicting answers outright, and then claim with confidence that surely there is an objectively correct answer, even if perhaps you don't know it.
GingerJacob36 t1_jbt5h6m wrote
That question doesn't negate the existence of an objective morality. If the scenario you presented was one possible way of life, we could all agree that it would not be the best one. It is objectively not as good for as many people as many other ways to live. Enslaving 60% of the population would be much better, and enslaving 0% would be much better than that. These are all objectively better than each other, and that thought process can continue into pretty much anything else that we encounter.
It's not that it wouldn't be a hard question to answer, but it's not an impossible one to answer and there are metrics along which that decision could be made.
JohannesdeStrepitu t1_jbhgl6v wrote
> But it seems like we have a sense that moral activism would-have-been-right so many times, and times when it is not the sociocultural norm.
Where here or in his written work does Blackburn imply otherwise?
[deleted] t1_jbjjnnw wrote
In this video he sort of goes through this history of Truth-seeking and at the end of this video, landing on Robert Brandom who is a deflationist. Brandom reduces (my opinion) morality to the making-explicit-of a "discursive rationality", which (I believe he implies) originates from implicit... practices?
All of that seems fine to me (logical, pragmatic), except it seems to say that Moral Good (which we make explicit always later) is dependent upon the happenstance of a landscape of possible actions with respect to that discursivity.
To say it stupidly, if one imagines the actions of the present time as a bunch of lines on a hurricane spaghetti model, the actions we later define as "good" are those ones which happened not to strike land. In this way, Moral Good (I'm specifically talking about non-normative Moral Good, thus "cancelling out" the utility of actions) at present is chaotic. To me this is intuitively repugnant. I believe humans can intuit moral good. I believe humans can "tap into something" morally good, when the world around them is screaming otherwise, even placing them at great peril. I think deflationism leads to [Brandom and Blackburns] conclusion about morality [that it is, in the moment, chaotic].
JohannesdeStrepitu t1_jbkgbdf wrote
At what timestamp does he mention Brandom? I don't remember Brandom coming up in the video (though given the context I did almost hear 'Brandom' when he talked about 'rebranding' the redundancy theory of truth as the deflationary theory). Brandom's anaphoric/prosentential theory of truth is definitely a version of deflationism but I don't know if Blackburn specifically had Brandom in mind when he mentioned deflationism at the end (again, unless I missed that moment or there's a longer version of this video?).
In any case, I don't think your worry applies to Brandom's account of truth. Yes, he does take the content of our thoughts and utterances to depend on how those discursive acts make explicit norms within larger social practices. However, those are specifically practices of giving and asking for reasons (his "deontic scorekeeping") and the structure of that scorekeeping in the cases of science, morality, and a host of everyday topics - e.g. what food is in the fridge, to take Blackburn's example - is specifically one of representing objects (his "de re ascriptions of propositional attitudes"). Those two features alone easily makes room for a minority of moral activists in a community to be right and even for an entire community to be wrong, since by making claims that answer not just to one another (in a community) but to objects they specifically point to limitations in individual perspectives on the truth and even to all of the perspectives the community has so far.
None of this would look like "tapping into something" in a sense that looks like a direct intuition of the moral good but it would involve responding to the objective moral features of the world, just in a way that involves a fundamentally perspectival access to those objective truths and a need to arrive at that truth by learning from the perspectives of others (including perspectives that no one in one's community has yet reached).
[deleted] t1_jbkyjxq wrote
That all sounds great to me. And I think
>responding to the objective moral features of the world, just in a way that involves a fundamentally perspectival access to those objective truths and a need to arrive at that truth by learning from the perspectives of others (including perspectives that no one in one's community has yet reached).
is obviously much better than "tapping into something". I do not have the best words. And admittedly I'm not well read on Blackburn OR Brandom, but I cannot help myself maundering. Thank you for humoring me!
edit- I have no clue where I got Brandom, it's very possible I was reading SEP and listening to the video at the same time, apologies.
JohannesdeStrepitu t1_jbl2rh2 wrote
Glad I could clear things up :) Brandom's someone I've spent a lot of time reading and talking with others about in my studies, so I'm always happy to talk about him more.
imgrandojjo t1_jbi2nf2 wrote
One of the things I'm hearing from this guy that I don't like is this notion that truth only exissts and is true when it's discovered. He appears to axiomatically reject the idea of absolute truth, despite the fact that it's at the core of science, engineering, art, music, all philosophical and intellectual pursuits really.
Here's the question: Is a thing true whether or not we know, and can relate to, the truth of the thing? Plato sure as hell thought so. This guy is muddying these waters in a way I find borderline dishonest. Knowledge and truth are two UTTERLY different things and he's conflating the two rather badly.
This conflation is a problem because he's mixing up the theory of truth and the theory of knowledge. Knowledge is not known until it is known, that's an axiom, but one of the axioms of truth is that truth is true whether it's known nor not.
Knowledge, or lack of knowledge, of a truth does not alter the truth in any way. Looking at the fridge will not put butter there, or take it away it was either already there or it already wasn't, the only thing that changed is our knowledge of the truth about fridge butter. His argument, insofar as I can follow it (no genius here) is fudging that boundary in an unpleasant way.
The only thing that can alter the truth is action. If I take all the butter out of the fridge, it renders the entire earlier question a matter of historic truth rather than existential truth. It invalidates no part of past fridge butter. Present truth is what it is, there is no butter. Historical truth is what it is, there was butter.. Again, this is something this fellow is playing fast and loose with in an unpleasant way.
If the goal of the pursuit of knowledge is to obtain the truth, which I believe it is, then we need to separate the theory of truth from the theory of knowledge, which this dude appears not to be doing.
In fact, I believe "the truth is what exists, or existed in a given timeframe, regardless of whether it is known" is pretty much axiomatic, and blows this guy's sophistries out of the water.
IAI_Admin OP t1_jbf3d42 wrote
After a career spent in the pursuit of truth, Simon Blackburn explains how the deflationist approach, one which demonstrates why there's nothing to say about truth, changed his mind. While truth may be found to correspond to facts, many philosophers agree that correspondence in itself cannot account for a theory of truth. We can try instead to assess truth in light of other things we believe to be true, meaning that fundamentally truth is coherence across all beliefs. But coherence does not exclude the possibility of falsity – we can easily conceive of coherent stories that are nonetheless fictional. An alternative approach is pragmatism, which supposes that truth is that which is useful, but this view also fails to capture the essence of truth as it cannot be guaranteed that what one finds useful has any valid relation to reality. Therefore, the question “what is truth?” ends up dissolving into another: “what are you interested in finding out?” Such an account renders the word ‘truth’ redundant, since saying something is true does not bring any new information to what had already been stated.
XiphosAletheria t1_jbf9mus wrote
I agree with the premises but not the conclusion. It is true that we tend to define "true" as those beliefs we hold that are both useful and cohesive with our other beliefs. It is further true that those criteria aren't definitive - we can never be certain about truth, and spend roughly a third of our lives in dreams that are pure illusion. Nevertheless, the inability to be certain of the truth doesn't mean that separating truth from fiction has no benefit or isn't meaningful. There is a reason a society based on the scientific method ends up much more advanced than one based purely in myth.
[deleted] t1_jbfip0f wrote
Do you mean, the inability to separate (uncertain, you admit) truth from (likewise uncertain) myth is meaningful, as borne out through a society's technological advancement? This seems like a nod to choosing a truth-position mostly based on its utility...
Well and to provoke a little, I would ask you to show me "a society that is based on the scientific method". I have not seen one lately.
If you admit that the truth is uncertain, but something like "rigorous justification" should be adopted within certain human modes (like tech or science), then it seems like you agree with the OP.
XiphosAletheria t1_jbflb1p wrote
>Do you mean, the inability to separate (uncertain, you admit) truth from (likewise uncertain) myth is meaningful, as borne out through a society's technological advancement? This seems like a nod to choosing a truth-position mostly based on its utility...
Sure, yes. That's largely why we care about the truth, after all. We believe operating on truth will result in better outcomes than operating on lies (in general, I'm sure you could come up with specific tortured examples in which that isn't the case). But generally, we care whether X is true because what we should do to get the outcomes we want changes depending on if it is or not. If "easy access to guns leads to more homicides" is true, then banning guns will lower the homicide rate (useful). If it is false, then doing so won't impact the homicide rate while driving up resentment among those affected (the opposite of useful). So knowing whether the statement is true lets us pick the better policy.
And your comment, like OPs, seems to imply a false dichotomy between "certain" and "uncertain". But we have degrees of certainty, and saying something is "true" has only ever meant that we have a high degree of certainty about something, and that is still a meaningful statement.
Basically, just because you can be wrong about what is true doesn't mean that truth should be dismissed as unimportant.
[deleted] t1_jbfoy4h wrote
I can understand all of that, but it seems like you would agree with the OP. There is no BIG T Truth, but there are many little truths and should be sought out on the bases of utility.
I don't think that professor Blackburn thinks the truths are unimportant at all, but he might say that Truth big T is ineffable.
XiphosAletheria t1_jbg8ifr wrote
I am not sure that Truth with a big T even makes sense. Unless you are religious maybe, but even then the truth about the existence of God, although very important, would still be a truth about a specific thing, and so a "little" truth in that sense.
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Koda_20 t1_jbfl5ch wrote
I love the deflationist approach. This is the way
rejectednocomments t1_jbflx2b wrote
Bah. Correspondence, obviously
AugustineSheen t1_jbgwh52 wrote
Cringes in Aristotle
[deleted] t1_jbiya3w wrote
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frnzprf t1_jbjcf6a wrote
> Everything Einstein said is true.
In many programming languages you can write:
while queue.hasValues():
process(queue.first())
Beginners are often introduced to loops as grammaticallically requiring a comparison, because a comparison is less abstract to think about, then a truth-value. In school you only learn to do math to numbers. That's why they often write this:
while queue.hasValues() == True:
process(queue.first())
In logical notation you can write one of those:
- Forall (reverse A) s in Einsteins-statements : s.
- Forall s in Einsteins-statements: s = T.
- Big-And (reverse V) Einsteins-statements.
Only the second phrasing has an analogue in natural language - "All Einsteins statements are true." It seems that unlike in mathematical or most(!) programming languages, this kind of sentence requires a comparison in English. "All <set> are <individual-comparator>".
There could be a natural language where you could indeed just say something like "All Einsteins statements." without "are true" and have it make grammatical sense. English just doesn't happen to be that language.
Actually, I have encountered "What he said." as an expression of agreement on Reddit.
Daotar t1_jbk3wio wrote
Just adopt a pragmatic account of truth like Rorty proposed decades ago. The truth is simply what works, it is the end point of democratic discussion and consensus.
Clarkeprops t1_jbfu8zq wrote
Is this suggesting that objective truth is impossible? I understand that some things are unknowable but I think that there can be objective truths in the universe. The Sun projects light and heat. Is that not an objective, unarguable truth?
Giggalo_Joe t1_jbg5bod wrote
I would postulate that 'can be' is the wrong language, and insert instead 'must be'.
To me its a closed and rather boring question of whether there are objective truths, yes there are. Instead the more fun question is can we ever know them.
Clarkeprops t1_jbg6g9u wrote
I guess that’s what I’m asking. Can we ever know I single objective truth. I thought yes. I don’t understand why not. Certain things are absolute. Caesar is dead, the sun is hot, and earth has water on it. How are these not absolutely knowable?
Giggalo_Joe t1_jbg92ye wrote
Well...let's start with for Caesar to be dead, he must have first been alive. For him to have been alive, he must exist. Can you prove that he existed beyond your belief? Can you prove that death is the end? Can you prove that you are having this conversation right now?
The sun. To an ice cube, rain is hot. To a human, Death Valley is hot. But relative to the sun, Death Valley is a quaint nice place to live. Our sun is 5,778 Kelvin generally. However, there are stars that are 210,000 Kelvin. The sun doesn't seem so hot anymore. And theoretically, there is no max temperature in the universe so hot gets very relative very quickly.
Clarkeprops t1_jbga4hu wrote
I’m not talking about relativity.
But if you want to argue semantics… While I can’t confirm that Caesar ever existed, we can be sure that without time travel, he’s not currently alive. Whether or not death is the end is irrelevant to him being currently alive as we all know the term to mean.
The sun not being hot… ok. Let’s move the goalpost for the sake of the point.
The sun is plenty hot enough to melt an ice cube if it touched the ice cube, yes?
Is that not an objective truth? Maybe I’m using bad points, or you’re not arguing on good faith. Please explain how we can’t have objective truths.
Giggalo_Joe t1_jbgemks wrote
How can you be sure he isn't currently alive? Are you aware of all the states of existence? Before you can determine that Caesar is dead you must first define it. And then you must acknowledge that it could all be a dream. The point being almost all reality and truth is unprovable by it's nature.
And yes, I'm suggesting you stick with Caesar because hot is a relative term in all contexts. In that sense, there is no hot, there is no cold, there is only relative to X.
And I'm not saying that we can't have objective truths, they are all around us. I am saying hot and cold are not among them. Temperature is among them, but temperature is not hot or cold, it just is.
If you want to follow this down a 10 year exploration, all you can prove as an objective truth at the moment is "I think therefore I am." Nothing beyond that.
Clarkeprops t1_jbik0nn wrote
I’m just saying that humans can’t have a corporeal form alive in the medical sense over 2000 years later. A different state of existence isn’t “Alive”. I’m saying alive with a body and a heartbeat.
So don’t ignore my example. Objective truth: The sun can melt an ice cube if it gets close enough, yea?
Giggalo_Joe t1_jbjmvj7 wrote
Salt can melt a snail, does that make it hot? Ice cream will melt if you do nothing, the world you live in is hot to the ice cream. I'm not ignoring your example, I'm trying to help you think differently. Your current method won't lead where you want it to go.
Clarkeprops t1_jbku2wf wrote
Salt doesn’t melt a snail. No.
Giggalo_Joe t1_jbl0d5e wrote
Ok, deydrate but...you kinda missed the point. Not trying to be your adversary here. Trying to help you learn how to think.
Let's look at it a different way.
The conversation started as one about 'objective truth'. That's a fairly high standard of truth and very little can be proven under it. You are thinking of truth in a different way, for lack of a better description let's call it 'practical truth'. In this we will essentially accept the world around us exists, and the data we receive from our perceptions in generally real (excepting things like hallucinations, mind playing tricks, etc.). So, with this frame of reference, you can start to look at things and say stuff like this table is X inches high, this table is made of cherry wood. But you can't say things like this table is brown because color is much like hot and cold. Color is subject to the lighting conditions. You may think, wait a minute "I can see that the table is brown." And that is a true observation, but not a true statement of the table itself. If the table is in a room, you can simply turn off the light and the table is no longer brown. Your brain thinks, "wait a minute, if I shine a light on it, I can see it is brown again." But in order to achieve that color you have to shine the light. And if you shine a light of a different color, the table changes color. You may want to say, "no that is the color of the light making it seem as if the table is different color." Nope, you only think the table is brown because of the color temperature of light you normally shine on it. If you lived on planet with a red sun, everything would look different and that would be the 'natural' color of the table instead, and if you shined a 2700K white light on it, that would be the same to them as you shining a red light on the 'brown' table. The point being, all color is subjective to the lighting conditions available. So while you may want to say something as simple as an orange is orange, that's not accurate. It is called an orange and that would be a practical truth, but to say an orange is orange is all dependent upon the lighting. So, the truth you are looking for doesn't exist. You can bring things down to another level and take things like lighting out of the equation and maybe get to something you might want to call 'everyday truth' but that's a simplification of a grand number of events and conditions happening all around you at all times. To sum it up, using the idea of 'objective truth': If a man is standing in the middle of a road, you must ask what evidence is there that he is a man? What evidence is there that he exists? How can you show he or the road even exist? Using the idea of 'practical truth': What road is he standing on? Is he on Earth? Then calculations come into play regarding how fast the Earth is moving as well as the galaxy. Technically, even the universe but that's a bit harder number to calculate so it can be ignored. But the conclusion is that a man standing on a object without moving is in fact moving. And then using the idea of 'everyday truth' yes, you can have what you are starting to think of as truth, the man is standing in the road because you can see him standing in the road. But this is a philosophy subreddit, and concepts of physics and existentialism are part of much of the conversation. Yeah it's a headache, but that's philosophy.
GetPsily t1_jbk5xmt wrote
It's true in the context of our idea about what we call the physical world, but really there's no way for you to find out the truth or reality of anything. Only through the help of knowledge passed down generation to generation do you experience anything.
So technically that statement is true, but actually it depends on what you mean by "sun", "ice cube", "close enough", and "melt".
One could argue the sun itself doesn't do anything to the ice cube. Do you define the sun as an entity that has heat separate from itself and applies it to the ice cube? Or is the sun itself heat? Etc....
What do you mean by ice cube? An ice cube 1000x the size of the sun will probably not melt.
What do you mean by close enough? An ice cube left out in the sun can melt on earth, but also the earth has huge ice caps that haven't melted. Etc
I think you get the point. For all intents and purposes that we would use, yes it is true. But it ain't necessarily so, or not objectively true without specific context. I think it was George Box that said "all models are wrong, but some are useful."
But at the same time the statement is false because an ice cube will likely sublimate in the vacuum of space before it came close enough to melt.
Clarkeprops t1_jbktybf wrote
This just seems like semantics. I’m not following you. Sorry.
GetPsily t1_jbm595x wrote
No that's actually what I'm saying. It's ALL semantics. Actual truth/reality is not words, only theories and concepts.
" A tree has leaves" is false because "tree" is a word, nothing like an actual, tangible tree. How can a word have leaves? The statement is true in the linguistic, semantic sense only.
Basically all truths experienced by us have to be translated into words before they can be spoken to ourselves or others. So anytime we communicate, the recipient gets the words, not the true, actual things.
EDIT: TL;DR: There is objective truth, but you can't tell anyone, including yourself.
Clarkeprops t1_jbrda91 wrote
Every time I talk philosophy with someone versed in it, I leave more confused than before.
velezs t1_jbjc42d wrote
>And I'm not saying that we can't have objective truths, they are all around us. I am saying hot and cold are not among them. Temperature is among them, but temperature is not hot or cold, it just is.
>If you want to follow this down a 10 year exploration, all you can prove as an objective truth at the moment is "I think therefore I am." Nothing beyond that.
Doesn't this first quote contradict the second? The temperature of an object is measurable and objective and is defined as the average kinetic energy of the molecules of the substance/material. That is not subjective or relative to the surrounding objects.
Why is this not provable to be objective in the 2nd quote but in the 1st "Temperature is among them" when referring to objective truths?
Giggalo_Joe t1_jbjndss wrote
Because even if you determine that the temperature of X is Y, you still can't prove that X exists beyond your mind.
If you accept that the object is there, regardless of the availability of proof, you can get as far as proving the object has a temperature. But you will never be able to determine if the object is hot or cold, because hot and cold are always subjective to what you're measuring it against.
WrinklyTidbits t1_jbi5vkq wrote
From reading the comments: isn't science a form of truth? The idea of a systematic process of evaluating facts that are measurable with a high degree of accuracy is a process where the limit approaches some truthiness. What's fascinating is that quantum mechanics, the edge of our measurable abilities, is governed by probability. Is truth, at its most accurate form, inexact because of this process governed by probability?
[deleted] t1_jbihy9i wrote
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Petal_Chatoyance t1_jbgebra wrote
'Truth' is an abomination. It once meant facts, but it has gradually become some almost mystical, vague, indefinable place-holder for something not-entirely-god but a close approximation of a mythical Absolute.
Facts exist, when supported by strong evidence. But then, that is science, not philosophy. And scientific fact is always held with a margin of doubt, because the possibility of the evidence being misinterpreted or false is recognized. 'Truth' doesn't exist, except as a general, common term for 'generally accepted evidence-supported fact'.
But capital 'T' truth is a lie. There never was any Truth beyond the masturbations of philosophers and theologians, and the arbitrary choice of those unable to accept approximate understanding as the best anyone can ever hope to get.
Truth in the philosophical sense cannot exist. It is an arbitrary, extremely fuzzy term, a variable into which any person can pour whatever they need to justify. More atrocity, horror, and disappointment have come from capital 'T' Truth than any other single fictional invention of Man.
There can be no 'Truth', there never was. Of course Blackburn finds searching for truth to be futile - it is the same as searching for god, another arbitrary, invented thing with no evidence and nothing besides human imagination behind its creation.
Giggalo_Joe t1_jbg090h wrote
Truth exists...mainly because it has to. That said, can we ever know what it is? Unlikely.
The above though is the heart of what is wrong with relativity, Shrodinger's Cat, and similar concepts that are based upon observational data alone.
johnblack372 t1_jbgi00k wrote
Speaking as a professional physicist, the idea that there is not such a thing as truth is infantile. 1+1=2 no matter how you feel or identify. Facts do not care about your feelings.
Iansloth13 t1_jbhe2qe wrote
according to deflationary theories of truth, there still is truth, but it’s nothing substantive—it’s nothing more than just asserting the statement its attempting to predicate as true.
rejectednocomments t1_jbfl2an wrote
So his rejection of the correspondence theory is just a conflation of a claim’s between being true and being known to be true.
“How do we know what is true?” And “How do we determine wha this true?” are important questions, but they aren’t the same as “what is truth?”