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Re: [ontolog-forum] {Disarmed} Reality and Truth

To: "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Ingvar Johansson <ingvar.johansson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 11:56:54 +0200
Message-id: <46419AE6.10604@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Waclaw Kusnierczyk schrieb:
> Ingvar Johansson wrote:
>   
>> Waclaw Kusnierczyk schrieb:
>>     
>>> Ingvar Johansson wrote:
>>>   
>>>       
>>>> Being a fallibilist means 
>>>> to accept that a theory may be empiricially adequate for a time without 
>>>> being completely true. I think what (reading vQ:s mail) might be 
>>>> pedagogically missing in Peirce and Sowa is a concept advertised by 
>>>> another fallibilist, Karl Popper. He verbalizes it using three different 
>>>> expressions: ‘truthlikeness’, ‘verisimilitude’, and ‘approximation to 
>>>> truth’. Theories are not just either true or false; truth can take 
>>>> degrees. And very very much tells in favor of the view that most 
>>>> empirically adequate theories have a rather high degree of truthlikeness.
>>>>     
>>>>         
>>> i am not sure how much to like the 'partially true' and 'truth can take 
>>> degrees' parts.
>>>
>>> clearly, if we think of a theory as of a set of statements, the theory 
>>> is partially true if there is a subset of it with every statement being 
>>> true.  (every theory is partially true, since every theory includes the 
>>> empty theory, which is vacuously true.)
>>>   
>>>       
>> This is *not* what I mean. The intuition behind the notion of 
>> 'truthlikeness' can be explained in the following way.
>>
>> Assume that the statement (1) "The sun is shining from a completely blue 
>> sky" is simply true. Look then at the statements (2) "It is somewhat 
>> cloudy" and (3) "It is raining". I would in this situation say that (2) 
>> is *more truthlike* than (3).
>>
>> Another case. Assume that the statement (1') "There are four blood 
>> groups plus the Rh factor" is simply true. Look then at the statements 
>> (2') "There are four blood groups" and (3') "All blood has the same 
>> chemical composition". I would in this situation sa that (2') is *more 
>> truthlike* than (3').
>>
>> The fact that we can never know with *absolute certainty* that (1) and 
>> (1') are true does not make the notion of 'truthlikeness' semantically 
>> incoherent.
>>
>>     
>
> I would think that, irrespectively of (1) being true or false (in the 
> sense of its correctly describing the state of the matters, as in some 
> flavour of the correspondence theory of truth), any of (2) and (3) is 
> either true or false.  Their truthlikeness is not really a measure of 
> how much they are true, but rather of how much we certain that they (or 
> the initial assumption) are or are not true.
>       (01)

You are saying that the truth of the notion of 'truthlikeness' is to be 
found in an epistemological notion of 'truthlikeness'. But you are 
simply bringing in *another notion* of 'truthlikeness' than the one that 
I have presented. Don't present your own preferred views as being the 
true interpretation of my views.    (02)

> If we assume that (1) is simply (?) true, then both (2) and (3) must be 
> (simply?) false to us.     (03)

As long as you stick to the polar notion of truth-falsity, then you have 
to say that all propositions that are not 'simply true' are 'simply 
false'. And then you end up in the curious position that all scientific 
theories - today, in the past, and for an immensely long future to come 
- are simply false. Usually, people who want to deny degrees and gray 
zones, and who want to see everything in only black and white, end up in 
curious positions. Here coms a quotation from Popper.    (04)

"I have in these last sections merely sketched a programme […] so as to 
obtain a concept of /verisimilitude/ which allows us to speak, without 
fear of talking nonsense, of /theories which are better or worse 
approximations to truth/. I do not, of course, suggest that there can be 
a criterion for the applicability of this notion, any more than there is 
one for the notion of truth. But some of us (for example Einstein 
himself) sometimes wish to say such things as that we have reason to 
conjecture that Einstein’s theory of gravity is /not true/, but that it 
is a /better approximation to truth/ than Newton’s. To be able to say 
such things with a good conscience seems to me a major desideratum of 
the methodology of the natural sciences ("Objective Knowlege", 1972, p. 
335)."    (05)

best,
Ingvar    (06)

>  That (2) appears more truthlike than (3) to you 
> reflects your uncertainty about how accurate (1) is.  (Not 'how true (1) 
> is'.)
>
> If I am sure that (1) is true, then (2) and (3) are equally truthlike to 
> me, in that I am sure that both (2) and (3) are false.  This is of 
> course completely irrespective of whether any of (1), (2), (3) is true.
>
> But if I have any doubt in (1), then (2) and (3) should appear at least 
> plausible to me.  And, as far as my experience reaches, the situations 
> in which it is raining are only some of the situations in which it is 
> cloudy, and all situations in which it is raining are situations in 
> which it is cloudy (leave exceptions aside).  So yes, (2) appears more 
> truthlike than (3) to me, but this is only in virtue of my doubt about 
> (1)s truth, and irrespectively of the truth;  either (1) or (2) are 
> true, but not both, and none of them is 'partially true'.
>
> Another thing is how likely it is that, given that the sky is completely 
> blue, it won't be completely blue in a few moments.  So you could say 
> that, given (1) is true, it is more likely that (2) will soon be true 
> than it is for (3).  I would expect that becomes cloudy before it begins 
> to rain, and that it may get cloudy and not raining, but not the other 
> way round.  So, given (1), (2) is more truthlikely to me;  but still, 
> either (1) or (2) is true now, and either (1) or (2) will be true later.
>
> Given a statement s, we should keep separate the truthness of s (s is 
> either true or not) and our confidence in that s is true (here you may 
> have degrees).  I agree that talking about truthlikeness may be very 
> useful, but it is not talking about truth.
>
> (In the case of (1') and the rest, I would rather subscribe to (3').)
>
> vQ
>
>  
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>       (07)


-- 
Ingvar Johansson
IFOMIS, Saarland University
     home site: http://ifomis.org/
     personal home site:
     http://hem.passagen.se/ijohansson/index.html      (08)



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