Would you care to distinguish between “there is no territory” (which on the face of it is a metaphysical claim, just like “there is a territory”, and if we compare those two then it seems like the consistency of what we see might be evidence for “a territory” over “no territory”) and “I decline to state or hold any opinion about territory as opposed to models”?
I intentionally went a bit further than warranted, yes. Just like atheists claim that there is no god, whereas the best one can claim is the agnostic Laplacian position that there is no use for the god hypothesis in the scientific discourse, I don’t really claim that there is no territory, just that we have no hope of proving it is out there, and we don’t really need to use this idea to make progress.
Would you care to distinguish between “there is no territory” (which on the face of it is a metaphysical claim, just like “there is a territory”, and if we compare those two then it seems like the consistency of what we see might be evidence for “a territory” over “no territory”) and “I decline to state or hold any opinion about territory as opposed to models”?
I intentionally went a bit further than warranted, yes. Just like atheists claim that there is no god, whereas the best one can claim is the agnostic Laplacian position that there is no use for the god hypothesis in the scientific discourse, I don’t really claim that there is no territory, just that we have no hope of proving it is out there, and we don’t really need to use this idea to make progress.