I do think “A true theory is a map that corresponds to the territory” is right as far as it goes. But there are going to be people who will ask things like “What the hell do you mean by territory?” and “How do you have any idea if your map corresponds to the territory?”. I don’t think those are wrong questions and I think answering them might require a little more work.
That said I might be missing where people are at on this because this line, from the wiki, is exactly right:
Since our predictions don’t always come true, we need different words to describe the thingy that generates our predictions and the thingy that generates our experimental results. The first thingy is called “belief”, the second thingy “reality”.
I think stopping there is about right but “reality” tends to get loaded with a bunch of additional properties. I think attributing features of your theory to reality other than it’s experimental predictions is a kind of map-territory confusion that nearly everyone still falls for, so I think looking at two empirically equivalent theories and saying one is true and the other is false can’t just mean “one matches the territory and the other doesn’t”. So either we say of these theories that they are both true but one is better for reasons other than truth or we say that truth involves something other than just corresponding to the territory.
A related issue is that it is unlikely the core concepts we need to state any theory themselves correspond exactly to an external world. A mathematical description is fine by itself but we always feel that merely stating the math is some how insufficient so we end up reifying our variables. At least when the object of the theory is significantly divorced from the environment that gave rise to the concepts used to state the theory it is extremely unlikely that these concepts map exactly to things in the the world. This doesn’t always change our predictions but it suggests that of two empirically identical theories neither is likely to conceptually correspond to an external world (the external world, if there is one, isn’t made up of concepts) but both will correspond empirically. So then how can we contrast these theories on the basis of their correspondence to reality?
Well I don’t know if “the external world is made of concepts” is a meaningful thing to say. It strikes me as a kind of category error. But yes, I can always be wrong. I actually had a hedge in there original but took it out for stylistic reasons since it was already a parenthetical.
Well I don’t know if “the external world is made of concepts” is a meaningful thing to say.
It probably depends on what we mean by ‘concept’. The laws of physics can probably be described as concepts and if we knew all the laws of physics the concepts would then be quite likely to include the entire universe as artifacts. But yes, parenthetical to the extreme.
Naive as in “This essay is meant to restore a naive view of truth.”.
I do think “A true theory is a map that corresponds to the territory” is right as far as it goes. But there are going to be people who will ask things like “What the hell do you mean by territory?” and “How do you have any idea if your map corresponds to the territory?”. I don’t think those are wrong questions and I think answering them might require a little more work.
That said I might be missing where people are at on this because this line, from the wiki, is exactly right:
I think stopping there is about right but “reality” tends to get loaded with a bunch of additional properties. I think attributing features of your theory to reality other than it’s experimental predictions is a kind of map-territory confusion that nearly everyone still falls for, so I think looking at two empirically equivalent theories and saying one is true and the other is false can’t just mean “one matches the territory and the other doesn’t”. So either we say of these theories that they are both true but one is better for reasons other than truth or we say that truth involves something other than just corresponding to the territory.
A related issue is that it is unlikely the core concepts we need to state any theory themselves correspond exactly to an external world. A mathematical description is fine by itself but we always feel that merely stating the math is some how insufficient so we end up reifying our variables. At least when the object of the theory is significantly divorced from the environment that gave rise to the concepts used to state the theory it is extremely unlikely that these concepts map exactly to things in the the world. This doesn’t always change our predictions but it suggests that of two empirically identical theories neither is likely to conceptually correspond to an external world (the external world, if there is one, isn’t made up of concepts) but both will correspond empirically. So then how can we contrast these theories on the basis of their correspondence to reality?
… well, maybe...
Well I don’t know if “the external world is made of concepts” is a meaningful thing to say. It strikes me as a kind of category error. But yes, I can always be wrong. I actually had a hedge in there original but took it out for stylistic reasons since it was already a parenthetical.
It probably depends on what we mean by ‘concept’. The laws of physics can probably be described as concepts and if we knew all the laws of physics the concepts would then be quite likely to include the entire universe as artifacts. But yes, parenthetical to the extreme.