Ingvar Johansson wrote:
> 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.
>>
>
> 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. (01)
:) (02)
I haven't said that this was what *you* meant. (03)
>
>> If we assume that (1) is simply (?) true, then both (2) and (3) must be
>> (simply?) false to us.
>
> 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. (04)
Why? I don't see how this follows. Surely, there may be theories that
are simply true? Even if only incidentally? (05)
> 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. (06)
I do not deny degrees. I just say that -- for me, if you'd like it
stressed -- truth is as you call it 'polar'. Truthlikeness maybe is
not, but truthlikeness is not truth. (07)
>
> "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)." (08)
Here, apparently, Popper speaks about better or worse approximations of
truth, not of better and worse truths. These approximations can be
graded wrt. how well they approximate the truth -- but is this supposed
to support the view that truth is or can be graded? (09)
vQ (010)
>
> best,
> Ingvar
>
>> 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
>>
>>
>> _________________________________________________________________
>> Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
>> Subscribe/Config: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
>> Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
>> Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
>> To Post: mailto:ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>
>>
>
> (011)
--
Wacek Kusnierczyk (012)
------------------------------------------------------
Department of Information and Computer Science (IDI)
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
Sem Saelandsv. 7-9
7027 Trondheim
Norway (013)
tel. 0047 73591875
fax 0047 73594466
------------------------------------------------------ (014)
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
Subscribe/Config: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
To Post: mailto:ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (015)
|