Observable consequences are part of what controls the plausibility of a statement, but not its truth. An unobservable truth can still be a truth. Things outside our past light cone exist despite being unobservable. Asking about a claim about some unobservable “Then how can we know whether it’s true?” is irrelevant to evaluating whether it is the sort of thing that could be a truth because we’re not talking about ourselves. Confusing truths with beliefs — even carefully-acquired accurate beliefs — is mind projection.
I’m afraid this explanation is all the citation I can offer. I would be happy to hear your opinion along the lines of “That ain’t ‘truth’. ‘Truth’ is to a Bayesian”
I can’t speak for everyone who’d call themselves Bayesians, but I would say: There is a thing called reality, which causes our experiences and a lot of other things, characterized by its ability to not always do what we want or expect. A statement is true to the extent that it mirrors some aspect of reality (or some other structure if specified).
Observable consequences are part of what controls the plausibility of a statement, but not its truth. An unobservable truth can still be a truth.
…
There is a thing called reality, which causes our experiences and a lot of other things, characterized by its ability to not always do what we want or expect.
If we’re going to distinguish ‘truth’ from our ‘observations’ then we need to be able to define ‘reality’ as something other than ‘experience generator’ (or else decouple truth and reality).
Personally, I suspect that we really need to think of reality as something other than an experience generator. What we can extract out of reality is only half of the story. The other half is the stuff we put in so as to create reality.
This is not a fully worked out philosophical position, but I do have some slogans:
You can’t do QM with only kets and no bras.
You can’t do Gentzen natural deduction with rules of elimination, but no rules of introduction.
You can’t write a program with GOTOs, but no COMEFROMs.
(That last slogan probably needs some work. Maybe I’ll try something involving causes and effects.)
Observable consequences are part of what controls the plausibility of a statement, but not its truth. An unobservable truth can still be a truth. Things outside our past light cone exist despite being unobservable. Asking about a claim about some unobservable “Then how can we know whether it’s true?” is irrelevant to evaluating whether it is the sort of thing that could be a truth because we’re not talking about ourselves. Confusing truths with beliefs — even carefully-acquired accurate beliefs — is mind projection.
I can’t speak for everyone who’d call themselves Bayesians, but I would say: There is a thing called reality, which causes our experiences and a lot of other things, characterized by its ability to not always do what we want or expect. A statement is true to the extent that it mirrors some aspect of reality (or some other structure if specified).
…
If we’re going to distinguish ‘truth’ from our ‘observations’ then we need to be able to define ‘reality’ as something other than ‘experience generator’ (or else decouple truth and reality).
Personally, I suspect that we really need to think of reality as something other than an experience generator. What we can extract out of reality is only half of the story. The other half is the stuff we put in so as to create reality.
This is not a fully worked out philosophical position, but I do have some slogans:
You can’t do QM with only kets and no bras.
You can’t do Gentzen natural deduction with rules of elimination, but no rules of introduction.
You can’t write a program with GOTOs, but no COMEFROMs.
(That last slogan probably needs some work. Maybe I’ll try something involving causes and effects.)