[A]fterward I quickly walked over to Ms. Egan and explained the
correspondence theory of truth: “The sentence ‘snow is white’ is true if and
only if snow is white”; if you’re using a bucket of pebbles to count sheep
then an empty bucket is true if and only if the pastures are
empty.
Thanks! That does seem to be his position, then. I’m tempted to write a post of objections to the correspondance theory, but… my post queue is already so long! And I’m not sure how much Eliezer and I disagree on the issue in practice.
I would love to read you critique the correspondence theory. I’ve never been able to really imagine a non-correspondence view of truth for more than ten minutes. Every now and again I can use pragmatist goggles, but then I ask why true sentences are more useful to believe than false ones, and I come right back to correspondence.
As I understand things, EY is a hardcore correspondence dude, and so is the rest of most of LW. I’d be very interested to hear what problems you have with correspondence. I just can’t imagine a belief being rational for any reason other than it modeling reality, and I can’t imagine what it means for one statement to be truer than another without imagining that one models reality more accurately than the other. I’d love to know how you do this, if you do. Or if you could recommend a couple texts on correspondence you sympathize with.
I was thinking I would try to stay away from things already on LW. But correspondence is a big topic. I’ll include it, but I already started working on something else for the first question.
suggesting that this got to the heart of Truth. Without any explicit mention of either correspondence or facts, I’ve always thought of this as a deflationary theory.
To understand whether a belief is true, we need (only) to understand what possible states of the world would make it true or false, and then ask directly about the world.
That is from the LW entry on truth. Pretty clearly correspondence if you ask me.
Not sure.
But I’m not sure LWers share correspondence theory much. Eliezer’s position seems to be more Peircian.
Eliezer considers himself to hold the correspondence theory (and for what it’s worth I agree, though I’m not familiar with Peirce’s position):
Thanks! That does seem to be his position, then. I’m tempted to write a post of objections to the correspondance theory, but… my post queue is already so long! And I’m not sure how much Eliezer and I disagree on the issue in practice.
I would love to read you critique the correspondence theory. I’ve never been able to really imagine a non-correspondence view of truth for more than ten minutes. Every now and again I can use pragmatist goggles, but then I ask why true sentences are more useful to believe than false ones, and I come right back to correspondence.
As I understand things, EY is a hardcore correspondence dude, and so is the rest of most of LW. I’d be very interested to hear what problems you have with correspondence. I just can’t imagine a belief being rational for any reason other than it modeling reality, and I can’t imagine what it means for one statement to be truer than another without imagining that one models reality more accurately than the other. I’d love to know how you do this, if you do. Or if you could recommend a couple texts on correspondence you sympathize with.
Perhaps this can be the subject of your first post in the series on philosophical questions for LW discussion.
I was thinking I would try to stay away from things already on LW. But correspondence is a big topic. I’ll include it, but I already started working on something else for the first question.
Peircian as in pragmatist? I always thought EY was a correspondence theorist with a hint of redundancy theory.
He’s written stuff like
suggesting that this got to the heart of Truth. Without any explicit mention of either correspondence or facts, I’ve always thought of this as a deflationary theory.
That is from the LW entry on truth. Pretty clearly correspondence if you ask me.