We don’t have the option to trade off between truth and usefulness, because we don’t have a means of establishing truth, in the sense of correspondence to reality, separately from usefulness,in the sense of predictive accuracy . If you are a typical scientific philosopher, you will treat usefulness, or predictive power as a substitute for correspondence to reality without understanding how it could work.
I’m pretty confused at this point. You started with a fairly universal statement: “we don’t have a means of establishing truth, in the sense of correspondence to reality, separately from usefulness,in the sense of predictive accuracy”. I named a counterexample: the chocolate cake hypothesis. This invalidates the universal claim, unless I’m misinterpreting something here.
It’s transparently obvious that there are lots of hypotheses similar to the chocolate cake hypotheses (it could be a vanilla cake, or a cherry cake, or...). I’m not making any relative statement about how many of these there are compared to anything else.
Ok. What do you think of cartography? Is mapping out a new territory using tools like measurement and spacial representation a process that does not establish truth separately from predictive accuracy?
It seems wrong (and perhaps a form of scientism) to frame cartography in terms of predictive accuracy, since, while the maps do end up having high predictive accuracy, the mapmaking process does not involve predictive accuracy directly, only observation and recording, and predictive accuracy is a side effect of the fact that cartography gives accurate maps.
This actually seems like a pretty general phenomenon: predictive accuracy can’t be an input into your epistemic process, since predictions are about the future. Retrodictions (i.e. “predictions” of past events) can go into your epistemic process, but usefulness is more about predictive ability rather than retrodictive ability.
. What do you think of cartography? Is mapping out a new territory using tools like measurement and spacial representation a process that does not establish truth separately from predictive accuracy
It is a process that does not establish truth separately from predictive accuracy. You can have 100% predictively accurate cartography in a simulation.
observation and recording,
observation of what? Having a perception “as if” of something doesn’t tell you what the ultimate reality is.
I don’t know what you mean by “separate from” at this point and it’s probably not worth continuing discussion until that’s clearer. (In what sense can anything be separate from anything else in a causally connected universe?)
I mean observation in the conventional sense (getting visual input and recognizing e.g. objects in it), which in humans requires a working visual cortex. Obviously cartography doesn’t resolve philosophical skepticism and I’m not claiming that it does, only that it works in producing accurate representations of the territory given assumptions that are true of the universe we inhabit.
Yes, an agent’s goals aren’t causally or probabilistically independent of its intelligence, though perhaps a weaker claim such as “almost any combination is possible” is true.
EDIT: re philosophical skepticism: okay, so how does bringing in predictive accuracy help? That doesn’t resolve philosophical skepticism either (see: no free lunch theorems).
Even if the universal claim that complete orthogonality is impossible is true - - - I notice in passing that it is argued for with a claim about how the world works, so that you are assuming scepticism has been resolved in order to resolve scepticism - - even if it is true, the correlation between prediction and correspondence could be 0.0001%.
Predictive accuracy doesn’t help with philosophical scepticism. It is nonetheless worth pursuing because it has practical benefits.
To say that a map exists, is to propose that it has substance within the Territory. Existing within the concept of being fathomable and describable. In that sense a map is in the territory too.
Rationality: that map is not the territory.
Post rationality: “the map is not the territory” is a category error. Where the NotTerritory.map is in a broader territory that post rationality has stopped pretending doesn’t exist. That broader territory has a map that is the territory.
We don’t have the option to trade off between truth and usefulness, because we don’t have a means of establishing truth, in the sense of correspondence to reality, separately from usefulness,in the sense of predictive accuracy . If you are a typical scientific philosopher, you will treat usefulness, or predictive power as a substitute for correspondence to reality without understanding how it could work.
Aren’t there lots of false beliefs that are compatible with good predictions and we know are false? E.g. the chocolate cake hypothesis.
Lots compared to what? How do you compare that number to the number of predictively adequate models which are false for unkown reasons?
I’m pretty confused at this point. You started with a fairly universal statement: “we don’t have a means of establishing truth, in the sense of correspondence to reality, separately from usefulness,in the sense of predictive accuracy”. I named a counterexample: the chocolate cake hypothesis. This invalidates the universal claim, unless I’m misinterpreting something here.
It’s transparently obvious that there are lots of hypotheses similar to the chocolate cake hypotheses (it could be a vanilla cake, or a cherry cake, or...). I’m not making any relative statement about how many of these there are compared to anything else.
Then let me restate my point as ‘we dont have a general means...’
Ok. What do you think of cartography? Is mapping out a new territory using tools like measurement and spacial representation a process that does not establish truth separately from predictive accuracy?
It seems wrong (and perhaps a form of scientism) to frame cartography in terms of predictive accuracy, since, while the maps do end up having high predictive accuracy, the mapmaking process does not involve predictive accuracy directly, only observation and recording, and predictive accuracy is a side effect of the fact that cartography gives accurate maps.
This actually seems like a pretty general phenomenon: predictive accuracy can’t be an input into your epistemic process, since predictions are about the future. Retrodictions (i.e. “predictions” of past events) can go into your epistemic process, but usefulness is more about predictive ability rather than retrodictive ability.
It is a process that does not establish truth separately from predictive accuracy. You can have 100% predictively accurate cartography in a simulation.
observation of what? Having a perception “as if” of something doesn’t tell you what the ultimate reality is.
I don’t know what you mean by “separate from” at this point and it’s probably not worth continuing discussion until that’s clearer. (In what sense can anything be separate from anything else in a causally connected universe?)
I mean observation in the conventional sense (getting visual input and recognizing e.g. objects in it), which in humans requires a working visual cortex. Obviously cartography doesn’t resolve philosophical skepticism and I’m not claiming that it does, only that it works in producing accurate representations of the territory given assumptions that are true of the universe we inhabit.
So the orthogonality thesis is a priori false?
But that is exactly what I am taking about!
Yes, an agent’s goals aren’t causally or probabilistically independent of its intelligence, though perhaps a weaker claim such as “almost any combination is possible” is true.
EDIT: re philosophical skepticism: okay, so how does bringing in predictive accuracy help? That doesn’t resolve philosophical skepticism either (see: no free lunch theorems).
Even if the universal claim that complete orthogonality is impossible is true - - - I notice in passing that it is argued for with a claim about how the world works, so that you are assuming scepticism has been resolved in order to resolve scepticism - - even if it is true, the correlation between prediction and correspondence could be 0.0001%.
Predictive accuracy doesn’t help with philosophical scepticism. It is nonetheless worth pursuing because it has practical benefits.
To say that a map exists, is to propose that it has substance within the Territory. Existing within the concept of being fathomable and describable. In that sense a map is in the territory too.
Rationality: that map is not the territory.
Post rationality: “the map is not the territory” is a category error. Where the NotTerritory.map is in a broader territory that post rationality has stopped pretending doesn’t exist. That broader territory has a map that is the territory.