I get all this, I think. I didn’t realize you were equating “socially useful” and “socially true.”
I guess those might feel very similar; that one’s experience of the social use of a belief could feel a lot like truth. In fact, a belief seeming socially useful, a belief seeming not to cause cognitive dissonance, and a belief seeming epistemically true might be the same experience in other people’s heads—say, a belief feeling “right.”
Despite knowing this, I still feel deeply wronged and get filled with negative emotion whenever I see or hear the phrases “social truth” or “socially true”. A bit like watching someone get raped or pushed onto the tracks of an incoming train or something.
Thanks, your comment was useful. This helped me reorder and re-estimate my values a bit.
I get all this, I think. I didn’t realize you were equating “socially useful” and “socially true.”
I guess those might feel very similar; that one’s experience of the social use of a belief could feel a lot like truth. In fact, a belief seeming socially useful, a belief seeming not to cause cognitive dissonance, and a belief seeming epistemically true might be the same experience in other people’s heads—say, a belief feeling “right.”
Despite knowing this, I still feel deeply wronged and get filled with negative emotion whenever I see or hear the phrases “social truth” or “socially true”. A bit like watching someone get raped or pushed onto the tracks of an incoming train or something.
Thanks, your comment was useful. This helped me reorder and re-estimate my values a bit.
I agree with you—social truth or intersubjective truth are different things than empirical truth and pretending otherwise is misleading.