Is the core position I'm pushing the distinction between the map and the territory?
My mental map of the world has me as an explorer with a map, looking at the map, and trying to use the map to travel about the world...swapping maps when I move from city streets to trails to freeway driving...different maps each giving different, useful information...but ignoring parts of the reality.
When do I become aware that my map correctly predicts what I'll encounter? When I encounter it.
When do I know that the map will predict correctly the next time? I don't.
The key problem, though, is that I don't have direct access to the territory. I predict, and then I sample. There's no cheat-sheet ... no cliff notes ... no answer in the back. I've got maps and...more maps.
How do I confirm that the map matches reality (is true?). I can't. It's impossible.
The best possible certainty status of a map is that it has, as of yet, failed to predict wrong.
Is that what you mean by true? Certainly that's all you can say about a map.
Or does true mean that you believe that your map will continue to predict well?
My claim is that once you recognize the map/territory distinction...
AND you recognize that you have no answers in the back....
AND we're talking about the real world, instead of the imaginary world of math...
Then the notion of truth is epistemically fishy. All you have is justifications, and maps...no truths. And your thinking will be clearer if you abandon the silly notion.
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The absence of an ability to know the truth doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Your thinking will be more accurate, I don't know that it will be clearer.
Clarity and accuracy are different domains. If I spent time figuring out the position and angle of descent and velocity of the ball, I'll know exactly where it was two minutes ago when I failed to catch it.
Truth has value as a heuristic.
(That is to say, you don't ask the most important question - whether "Truth" as a concept predicts well enough to use as a map of philosophic territory. I find that it does; there are some ideas which will hold firm, at least within my lifetime, even if I don't know exactly which ones yet.)
Anon, Orphan,
I admit the existence of a territory. I admit that some models may predict perfectly inside their limited contexts...even if we don't know which ones. I'll admit that some models may capture useful information about what is really happening, even if that renders things upredictable (nonlinear dynamic systems). But I care deeply about my relationship to the map and to the territory.
But truth is normally understood to be a claim about the relationship between maps and territories. And you don't have access to the territory. Making claims about the "actual" relationship between maps and territories is simply unknowable. And just like I tend to disallow claims about "God" in rational discourse for unknowability... truth is awfully close to the same state.
And I find that truth has emotional baggage that gets in the way of dispassionate consideration of the separateness of the map and the territory. I suppose YMMV, but I'm not at all convinced.
Truth is something to be passionate about. The need for truth is a cornerstone of what it is to be human. Without it, something is lost.
When O'Brien and Mustapha Mond make their cases at the end of their respective books, they are certainly logically consistent. Winston would be better off to believe 2+2=5. People would be better off accepting the world states reality. Screw the truth, accept the "truth" that makes reality work well enough.
And yet, don't we feel that something real, something of paramount importantace to the very core of humanity, has been taken when 2+2=4 is taken from Winston? Truth matters.
Anon,
A religious person (not me) could say exactly the same thing about God, word for word, that you said about truth, minus the lit references. Well, and they have.
I think the aesthetics is there...but don't think the usefulness is.
I don't have direct access to the territory
This strikes me as overly skeptical.
It is true you don't have "direct access" in the sense that you don't have Godlike knowledge. Nor do you have direct access to most of reality -- you only have access to a very limited piece of it. But you do have direct access to a tiny slice of reality, in that you are part of it and can sense it directly, using your five senses.
Put it another way: I see a rose; it looks like a rose. I smell it; it smells like a rose. I feel the petals; they feel like rose petals. I then believe it is a rose.
Now, maybe it is a very accurate simulacrum of a rose, perhaps created by godlike high-tech aliens. But this doesn't invalidate how it looks, smells, or feels. Perhaps I am a brain in a vat -- or a computer sim. Could be a Matrix. But -- so what? My sensations still did happen, in whatever neurons or simmed neurons or circuits or whatever are computing me. The sensations are real; thus it is true that they are happening to me.
Permit me to come at this a different way, then -
If it is true that truth cannot be truthfully known, then what should I make of this sentence?
Certainly a truth about how our minds map knowledge to reality is itself a truth about reality, our minds being a part of that which is real. What would you call your certainty, but truth?
This is an epistemological and linguistic difference between us; you would say, if in shooting for the moon and landing in the stars, "Moon" cannot truthfully describe what you were shooting at, because you knew you probably wouldn't make it.
We can call something truth even knowing it can and maybe even probably will be proven wrong tomorrow. It doesn't harm the word, after all that is the way it has always been used.
Orphan,
"If it is true that truth cannot be truthfully known, then what should I make of this sentence?"
Too much verbosity? The word truth is superfluous in the sentence, all 3 places you use it.
My map of the world suggests that other peoples' uses of the word "truth" have at best highly tenuous relationships to underlying territory.
I want to go one further than your moon-stars. I'm inclined strongly towards the position that I am shooting for the moon for a reason.
The reason is the core here...and talking about it in terms of truth ignores the fact that all that is accessible to me is probability distributions relating to whether my map predicts what I see next.
3. Calling something truth knowing that it willbe proven wrong tomorrow is a strong violation of common usage. Historically, the word was used, believing that it wouldn't be proven wrong tomorrow.
4. My primary attack is not actually on truth, but on certainty. I think certainty is an entirely wrong concept. It approaches the problem completely bass-ackwards.
Leonard,
I'm pretty close to willing to grant the direct access in terms of sensory awareness. It's just stuff like: theory of atoms, theory of chemistry, theory of mechanics, etc...that are models. And since the number of times we talk about our objective sensory inputs (we do receive things in awareness as objects, which is why doing art is so hard) is near zero...I'm nudging that problem to the side.
If you admit any real ability to sense reality (and thus, "truth" in some sense), then the question becomes "how do you exploit that?" And hence science. The door is open a crack. I want to jam in a wedge and start hammering on it. What mapping tools are you prepared to allow into the territory?
Take a simple optical microscope for example. We cannot see bacteria with the naked eye, but we can using a microscope. I have done it, myself. So for me, at least, the existence of bacteria in a drop of water is "real", not a map. Or is it? Do I have to have also played with lenses, enough to have built my own microscope? Well, I did that, too, although nowhere near the quality/power of the factory-built microscope in which I saw bacteria. So is the existence of bacteria a map or territory?
I agree you could substitute "truth" and "God", and as a religious person I do.
I can't keep a concept of choice in my head without God. And I found your links on determinism unsatisfactory answers. Without God, it's all just pretermined interactions of particals. No "real" choice.
And yet I believe in choice, and I believe in truth/God, even though I can't prove them. Because it just feels like such a fundamental part of being a human being.
If you'll allow an example. I faced a situation where I was asked to rip a lot of people off in business. I knew that if I did I would get rich and get many things I wanted. There was no chance of negative consequences. And as icing on the cake I knew that another person would take my place immediately and do it, so it wouldn't actually change anything.
And yet, I couldn't do it. I felt this giant weight on my soul. It ate at my very being. I was consumed with guilt. It made me physically ill. I had an airtight intellectual rationalization based on the material world to go through with it, but it wasn't enough. Even though I couldn't explain why it was "evil", I felt that was the fundamental truth that I couldn't deny no matter how many brain hacks I threw at the thing.
Maybe that's wrong. Maybe it's just some illigitimate mental neurosis. But for me it's still something undeniable. Still something I deal with everyday. God is the only way I can understand that feeling. Throwing philisophy at it for a decade didn't work.
Anon,
I completely admit to the feelings of "bad". I avoid big cheats...my teen son finds well-filled wallets, and turns them in. Ethics is tremendously important to me.
On the other hand...I also acknowledge that evolution necessarily hacked my brain over the last 200 million years...culminating in the last 6m, wherein I was built/ evolved iu order to have instincts that make me an effective large-pack predatory tribe-member: my built-in ethics.
The question is ... is it a feature of the monkeybrain evolved into me, or something more. I vote the former. God doesn't help *me* explain it at all.
Leonard,
I know the wedge which is why I hedged the prior comment.
The clean answer is NOT to treat the planet-like orbit-model of atoms as other than a model/map.
The most useful answer seems pretty clearly to treat sense data as low-error-rate maps (refraction) which works out to awfully close to the same result as direct access.
1) Ethics implies choice. How can you have choice in a material world? Choice is just: "my brain chemicals line up in such an such a way at such and such a time and then I take action X."
That is not choice as I understand it. This is my biggest reason for not believing in just the material world.
2) Monkeybrain socialization arguement just doesn't seem to cover all of the situations of genuine ethical actions that I see. It feels like an arguement people who don't want to believe in God use to justify ethical behaivor, but it's a pretty weak arguement.
If you'll allow a bad analogy, it would be like arguing that the 10th best NFL QB was better then the 1st best. I'm sure you might find one or two statisical categories or interviews or opinions where #10 is better, but at the end of the day any thinking person looking at the evidence and "weighing" it would probably decide that #1 was better then #10. Monkeybrain socialization as ethics explanation seems like it has some merit, but it's still not good enough to be #1. Then again my opinion of base material human nature is extremely low.
This is also why I have a big problem with what I'll call "naturalists". People who feel that whatever the human condition was in 20,000 BC is the "right" way to be and we should try to get back to that. But the world isn't like 20,000 BC. Maybe human beings did evolve to be social in tiny HG tribes. Does that have any bearing on how they will interact socially in a world of 6 billion? I don't get the logic of, "we are meant to treat people in a small group kinduv nice so we are meant to treat six billion people in a totally different world nice."
2b) As a simple example I knew plenty of IB people that were very ncie to family and friends, but made all their money by destroying other peoples families in crooked deals. HG niceness genes just don't work in that situation.
Aretae,
Now I think where I disagree is with your third "AND".
The real world is real. So is math. We know both are real for the same reasons.
No, your map is not the territory. But a good model is far more than a 'map' (or a recipe for generating predictions). Models are explanations - deep explanations. That is, they can extend (when true) further than some particular situation. Prediction can be one thing that falls out, but the real benefit of a model is understanding, description, encoding, problem solving.
So in this context the 'map' (if true) can encode the territory in a deep and useful way. Some assert this to be a fundamental property of the universe; it is what makes science possible.
Read David Deutsche.
RWCG,
I know the Deutch-ian perspective. That clarifies things for me. I've been arguing with him, re: childrearing for ... 10+ years now (even though we agree at 90%+). I'm not convinced. But I acknowledge his position as convincing some folks.
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