Re: Universality as warrant for relative truth value

Neil W Rickert <rickert+nn@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Haines Brown <brownh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
Neil W Rickert <rickert+nn@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

In most cases, at least for scientific theories, explanations don't
actually explain.

Most cases? I'm not sure. Perhaps you are right. I'm using to scientific
situations (spoken of as the evolutionary sciences in which the aim is
to explain a particular outcome rather than arrive at general laws. And,
yes, f=ma does not explain anything; it is a prediction based on a
generalization of experience.

Evidently what you mean by "theory" and what I mean by "theory" are
two quite different things.

Perhaps. In a scientific context, by theory I meant an exposition of the
general principles of a science or description of the organization of a
domain of our world that represents a broad consensus of experts in the
field, or an explanation of a situation for which there is a consensus
that it is as close an approximation of truth that we today are able to
achieve.

Apparently you use the word otherwise. What is your definition?

STR is conventionally taken to be statements about the world. I'll bet
99% of all scientists would agree.

That's tradition.

That's correct, but not my point.

As to yours, the majority of scientists STR to represent an
approximately true description of reality. That is, it is necessarily a
tradition in a sense that any constructed (vs. accidental) consensus
represents transmitted knowledge. Without such transmission, there can
be no consensus, and this makes theory only an hypothesis.

There's a postmodern view that the authoritative weight behind an
established theory represents an imposition on the thinking of other
scientists in that it brings pressure upon them to conform. I don't
agree with this for reasons I'll not go into here, for you have not said
it is your position.

There's also a postmodern view that suggests that mind (logic, language)
is the sole foundation of knowledge, and I consider this just as
problematic as the old empiricist view that the world has that
function. I see them merely as the two poles of a contradiction in
capitalist ideology (Cartesianism) which, whatever one might think about
the proposed alternatives, has come in time to clearly represent an
intellectual failure.

News to me. I thought dictionaries defined words. True, the
definitions tend to be empiricist or functionalist, but that's another
issue. I take a dictionary to define words as they are commonly
used. Why should a definition engage some principle?

Dictionaries are inherently circular - with the exception of
cross-language dictionaries.

Defining words as they are commonly used is indeed circular, but
instrumental. That's the purpose of a dictionary, to support effective
communications, not to convey conventional truth. Encyclopedias do that.

I am disagreeing with the idea that the knowledge is the facts.

Knowledge is a practical or theoretical understanding of a subject,
what is know of it, facts concerning it.

It's that understanding part that I see as the core of knowledge. It
isn't the facts.

OK, we are actually in agreement if you think about this exchange.

Remember, we are speaking here of the conventional meanings of words,
which are a precondition of meaningful discussion. True, we might prefer
to assign our own private meanings, which is OK only if the person to
whom we speak knows we are doing that and what our intended meanings
are. Otherwise we betray communications. I may have my own way to define
"fact", but that is irrelevant when the discussion is of the shared
meaning of a word.

To ascertain the generally held meaning of words we turn to
dictionaries. For example, I have a scientific dictionary that suggests
that fact is an event, phenomenon or fragment of reality that is an
object of man's practical activity or knowledge. This dictionary further
defines knowledge as the product of social material and intellectual
activity of people; an ideal reproduction in sign form of objective
properties and connections in the world, of the natural and the human.

Well, there is a difference here between the words fact and knowledge. A
fact refers to the object of knowledge, while knowledge is our
understanding of these facts. This seems to assume there's a relation
between what's in the mind and the world about which we are thinking,
and fact refers to one pole of that relation, while knowledge the other.

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that positivism held to a fact/value
dichotomy that gave ontological independence to fact, while the
dictionary definition above does not and the fact is only that part of
the world at which we happen to be looking and is therefore partly
subjective. Is it not the consensus today that "fact" is both subjective
and objective at the same time? Or so I thought.

If you are willing to offer cogent and better definitions of fact and/or
knowledge, I'd be interested in knowing what they are. Since we are
speaking of the conventional meaning of words, I have every reason to
adopt them for myself unless an attractive alternative shows up.

Coherence is useful, perhaps important. But I don't see it as the
basis for truth.

Agreed. I think we need to distinguish both the foundation ("basis") of
truth and its meaning from our techniques to assess the relative truth
value of competing hypotheses. Coherence, correspondence and pragmatism
I see as pertaining to the latter. True, a coherence theory is often
definitional for truth, but I agree that using it both as a definition
and a test is circular. Likewise, things like empirical adequacy and
coherence offer tests, but they are not foundational for truth, only for
weighing the relative truth value of hypotheses.

A problem here seems to arise from a confusion of three things: a) How
do we arrive at truth; what is its foundation? b) What defines truth as
the word is conventionally understood? c) How do we know that a
statement is true? As I've indicated, I don't believe correspondence
constitutes truth; it is not a foundation for the construction of
truth. However, it is a conventional "definition", however constituted
or tested, and I see nothing wrong with that. And an empirically
testable correspondence seems unproblematic, where we establish there is
in fact an analogy between our sentences and the world to which they
refer.

As for the foundation of truth, there are various suggestions, such as
that of Kant, Bishop Berkeley, and postmodernists who apparently deny it
(I hope I don't meet one in a dark alley ;-)). I personally see action
as the foundation of truthful knowledge, not in the sense of a pragmatic
test of the truth value of a hypothetical, but as the beginning point
and necessary condition for the construction of truthful statements.

I must admit that there are ambiguities in my position, and so I would
appreciate criticism of them. There is ambiguity concerning the word
fact. I have suggested that facts are constructed and so would appear to
reside in the mind, but at the same time I suggested that facts refer to
the object of knowledge that resides in the world. If we mistakenly
follow Descartes and assume that mind and body are ontological
categories, then perhaps one can't say there is a determinant relation
between them. But if we instead embrace a materialistic monism, then
that problem disappears, and facts are those aspects of the world that
are represented in the mind and that we (a community) can agree are
truthful because the sentence corresponds to its referent.

There's also ambiguity in my use of the word correspondence. If I say
that a bit of knowledge corresponds to the world in that its elements a,
b, and c refer to corresponding features of the world, I am testing that
knowledge for its truth value. But at the same time, I defined truth as
a correspondence of a sentence and the world, and so is not a test of
truth, but a defining of truth as a correspondence. So I've used
correspondence as both a test and part of a definition. Doesn't this
suggest that the word correspondence has two meanings?

A theory of truth should give a mechanism (or processes, or whatever)
that accounts for the distinction being between different ink marks on
paper.

The correspondence theory does not do that. And that's why I cannot
see it as a theory of truth.

Please understand that I'm not defending correspondence theory, but
discussing what I take to be a common view. Not sure what "mechanism for
processes" is unless you mean causal mechanism. I'd agree that
scientific explanations usually mean an identification of a causal
mechanism, but, as I've said, I'm not sure that all theories are in fact
explanatory (I may have previously hinted otherwise, in which case I was
probably wrong).

Incidentally, when it comes to causal mechanisms, I unfortunately
complicate things:

a) A "causal potency" is a real potential for change for a
system. This potency can be internal to it, such as the system's being
far from equilibrium, or external, such as arises from its necessary
relation to the rest of the universe. I hold that all things have this
potential at least in principle; all things are in motion. That is, at
the very least they can in principle move to a state of higher entropy
and it seems ultimately will do so (heat death).

b) Actualized "causal relations" are a causal potency constrained by
the empirical properties of a system and are what make the system a
"process". These causal relations determine the probability
distribution of the possible outcomes of a process. So I would define
"process" as the probability distribution of its possible outcomes
arising from the empirical constraints on causal potency.

c) The empirical effect of a causal relation is an empirical "outcome"
of the process and it is necessarily unequivocal (lest there be actual
multiple worlds). That is, we necessarily one-sidedly collapse the
process in thought as a observable static state.

This set of definitions is only tentative and I'd sure like constructive
(i.e., not deconstructive) criticism of it.

As that Martian anthropologist, you see ink marks on paper. What
corresponds to what, and how could you tell.

I had suggested the word correspondence might be ambivalent, and your
question seems to imply the use of the word as a test of truth, not as a
definition for it. Keep in mind that I've not been defending a
correspondence theory of truth.

As for your example, I suppose that what the Martian misses is a
meaningful context in which to understand the import of dots on
paper. If the Martian has been around long enough to realize that there
is a human animal that produced a shape by placing dots on paper, and
that there's another bird animal, he might see that the shape of the
dots _corresponds_ to the shape of a bird and possibly infer that the
human can see, has consciousness, is referring to a bird, has knowledge
of a bird.

You are really saying "we all know what 'truth' means.

I'm suggesting that truth is a correspondence between a sentence and the
world. I suggested that the man on the street understands truth in this
way, that it is the dictionary definition, and generally speaking this
is what the scientist means. Since your question is about the _meaning_
of the a word, I can in principle I go out to ask people what they mean
by it, and if there is a consensus we have the word's shared meaning.

It is something else to ask, "What is truth?" But that's not the
question you asked. You asked about the meaning of truth.

Aha! I've been using the word "world" here without troubling to define
it. The world is everything outside consciousness: the moon,
breakfast, the ruler, my brain. A social convention is real, is it
not? Try violating them and you get into trouble.

People like to say that there is a certain way the world is, that is
independent of humans. Social conventions are not independent of
humans.

If you want to say that social conventions are real, then I think that
makes you a social constructivist.

The issue was the meaning of "world", not a "certain way the world
is". The latter seems to imply a truthful statement about some aspect of
the world. In this sense, you are right, for the truth being a statement
depends on consciousness. But neither I or anyone else seems to deny
this, and so I'm not sure of your point.

Constructivism is, like everything else, rather ambivalent. Sometimes
when people use the term they mean that reality _reduces_ to a social
construction (a dubious and unpopular view). Or it could mean that
knowledge is socially constructed in a necessary relation to the world,
which I assume most people find obvious. In either case, the
construction is real. If not real, what is it? I assume that the content
of consciousness represents a real state or property of the mind in that
it is contingent.

And how would you justify such a position? I don't mean to be cruel,
but an alternative perspective than the conventional one used by
scientists is of absolutely no interest or use (except mildly as a
kind of intellectual aphrodisiac) to anyone but yourself.

There are two different meanings of "used by scientists".

Meaning 1: Used by scientists when they write about science, or after
they transmute into philosophers of science.

Meaning 2: How they actually carry out their empirical science.

The two are different (in my opinion). That is to say, what
scientists think they do, and what they actually do, are very
different. But if you look at some of the history of science, you can
get an idea on what they actually do.

I suppose so. The first is a representation of what the scientist is
doing, and the second is their practice. While different, I don't know
that they are entirely separate. Any practice is a praxis in that a
practice is informed by consciousness; any representation of action is
informed by the action.

The "history of science" seems to be two things, about both the practice
and the praxis, and I suppose that an account of the history of science
takes both into consideration, although not necessarily both, of course.

There is a postmodern view (and you have not identified yourself as one
of that breed) that suggests that a) there is a meaningful hidden code
in a text representing what the scientists said they were doing, b) but
this hidden code necessarily contradicts the ostensible meaning of their
text, and c) it is exclusively preferred over any evidence of scientific
practice or the ostensive meaning of writings by scientists. I believe
the first proposition to be correct, but not the second or third. There
are successful histories that draw out hidden meanings in text, but none
that I know of that thereby precludes both any ostensive meaning of
texts and the traces of past practice as useful evidence. This strikes
me as dangerously close to occultism, or at last is profoundly
unhistorical.

--

Haines Brown, KB1GRM



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