o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o (01)
BS = Barry Smith
HS = Henry Story
IJ = Ingvar Johansson
JA = Jon Awbrey (02)
Ingvar, (03)
I wanted to continue replying to one of your previous messages,
but 2 or 3 tries at doing that led me to believe that I should
review the way that "correspondence theories of truth" came up
in our discussions here. (04)
Many of the participants in this forum make it their business
to concern themselves with the relationship between realities --
very often all too harsh realities -- and the representations
that we form of the relevant piece of the world. As a result,
the question often arises, expressed many ways by many voices,
as to how realities impact -- or ought to impact -- on formal
theories and formal models, IF those theories and models are
to allow of "continuous quality improvement" (CQI), as one
recent buzzword expresses it. (05)
For my part, I've been focused for a couple of months now on
the questions that arose in the train of trying to answer the
question that Barry Smith raised back around the Ides of July: (06)
| If we have a sentence in a biology textbook,
| say "blood cells are non-nucleated", then
| is this about cells in reality (as I, and
| I guess common sense, would assume) or
| about cells in the biology model?
|
| Barry Smith, http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/2007-07/msg00077.html (07)
So we have (1) the "real world", the objective situations and things of
our various concerns, and we have (2) a wide variety of representations
on our "non-fiction shelves", so to speak, from the raw data of our own
senses to the cleaned-up data in our lab archives to axiomatic theories
and mathematical models, all of which "relate" to this world of reality. (08)
A very compelling question then arises:
What is the nature of this relation?
What is it? What ought it to be? (09)
Those questions bring us to the heart of logic -- What's it all about? (010)
One of the ways that I addressed the question of logic was in this form: (011)
| Peirce continues a classical line of calling logic a normative science,
| a science of how we ought to do things of we want to achieve a certain
| class of objectives. This makes logic, whose object is truth, akin to
| aesthetics, whose object is beauty, pleasure, or experiential goodness,
| and ethics, whose object is virtue, justice, or comportmental goodness.
|
| What is the good of logic? The classical answer is "truth".
|
| What is truth? It's a property of a sign, or a representation,
| that makes it a good sign, a representation that is so natured
| or so designed as to further the achievement its proper object.
|
| Jon Awbrey, http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/2007-08/msg00002.html (012)
One of the ways that another interlocutor addressed the question was this: (013)
| Now the other way of looking at truth is that there is a relation
| between statements and reality. That still holds. If you accept
| as true statements that are wrong, reality will soon remind you
| of your mistake.
|
| Henry Story,
|http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2007Aug/0025.html (014)
If we think of "truth" as a design objective of our representations,
the quality that justifies calling them "knowledge representations",
then we must attend to our concept of truth, and try to clarify it. (015)
That is where definitions of "truth" as "correspondence" came in. (016)
Jon Awbrey (017)
JA: In what "frame of reference" shall I evaluate your objection?
I tried to follow fashion by invoking analogies from physics.
Relative to that frame of reference, I can only iterate what
all my physics professors dinned into my skull, to wit, that
older common sense notions of magnitude had simply ceased to
make sense any more lacking reference to an observer's frame
and the specified operations commonly known as "measurements"
that are an absolute, er, relative "must" to pin operational
definitions to the given magnitudes. That's how they taught,
but I will refrain from echoing all the ridicule they heaped
on former generations of deluded philosophers, prescientists,
and especially common sense normal folks who ever languished
in the dissociative styles of thought that dreamed otherwise. (018)
JA: Ingvar sought to evade the point of that analogy by shifting
the frame of reference to everyday epistemology and ordinary
language acceptability. The very attempt to change the fact
by shifting the frame of reference has just proved the point. (019)
IJ: 1. I did not try to evade any lesson to be learnt from the
theory of special relativity. I tried to point out the
following. We learn (both as children and as adults)
many concepts (everyday as well as scientific) by means
of meeting protypical examples or performing prototypical
actions. In case of understanding the concept of
'the correspondence theory of truth' there is a
prototypcial example available: the correspondence
or non-correspondence between ordinary perceptions
on the one hand and statements in ordinary language
on the other. (020)
IJ: 2. I think it is fair to say that "older common sense"
implicitly had a Newtonian notion of absolute space
and time, and that the special theory of relativity (SR)
proved this notion to be obsolete. But this does does mean
that SR proved either that *epistemological relativism* is true
or that *operationalism* in the philosophy of science is true.
What SR does mean, among other things, is (i) that each inertial
frame of reference is just like the absolute space of Newtonian
mechanics, and (ii) that there is a special formula (the Lorentz
transformations) by means of which measurement values obtained in
one inertial frame of reference can be translated into the values
that would be obtained in another such frame. This story is
neither a threat to a fallibilist epistemology nor to the
correspondence theory of truth. (021)
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o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o (022)
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