How do you see the analytic/synthetic distinction relating to map/territory? I suspect I read the logical positivists with too much charity, because I fit their arguments into my conception of map and territory. Quine attacked the positivists’ view with what I know you’ve said is a view much like what LessWrong holds.
I figured my answer will be helpful for others, too, so I’ll post it here:
The analytic/synthetic distinction is quite different than map/territory. The map/territory distinction is a metaphor that illustrates the correspondence theory of truth which Eliezer endorses but I am unsure of.
The analytic/synthetic distinction was used by the logical empiricists to draw a strict line between sentences that were true in virtue of the relations between the meanings of words (analytic), and sentences that were true in virtue of the relations of the meanings of words plus extralinguistic facts (synthetic).
Quine argued that the distinction can’t be made so easily. He gave several arguments for this conclusion. One of the easier-to-summarize ones that I’ll use as an example is his argument against sentence-by-sentence meaning. He said that individual sentences taken in isolation from each other do not imply certain anticipations. For that, you need individual sentences plus larger chunks of theory in which the terms of the sentence are embedded. This is one part of Quine’s “holism.”
More generally, Quine said that Carnap (representing the best of logical positivism in The Logical Structure of the World, which was a masterful step forward for human thought even if it is flawed) and the logical empiricists had failed to provide clear and unambiguous boundaries for the analytic, and that the line between analytic and synthetic was instead quite fuzzy.
As for this: “Quine attacked the positivists’ view with what I know you’ve said is a view much like what LessWrong holds.” I don’t think I said Quine attacked the positivists’ view with a view much like LessWrong’s typical view. What I remember saying was that many positive aspects of Quine’s worldview resembled standard LessWrong positions, not that his negative work on logical empiricism made use of standard LessWrong positions.
The map/territory distinction is a metaphor that illustrates the correspondence theory of truth which Eliezer endorses but I am unsure of.
Its role in the sequences seems much simpler: if you look at human minds as devices for producing correct (winning) decisions (beliefs), the “map” aspect of the brain is effective to the extent/because the state of the brain corresponds to the state of the territory. This is not correspondence theory of truth, it’s theory of (arranging) coincidence between correct decisions/beliefs (things defined in terms of the territory) and actual decisions/beliefs (made by the brain involving its “map” aspect), that points out that it normally takes physical reasons to correlate the two.
I like how you’ve put this. This is roughly how I see things, and what I thought was intended by The Simple Truth, but recently someone pointed me to a post where Eliezer seems to endorse the correspondence theory instead of the thing you said (which I’m tempted to classify as a pragmatist theory of truth, but it doesn’t matter).
My point is that the role of map/territory distinction is not specifically to illustrate the correspondence theory of truth. I don’t see how the linked post disagrees with what I said, as its subject matter is truth (among other things), and I didn’t talk about truth, instead I said some apparently true things about the process of forming beliefs and decisions, as seen “from the outside”. If we then mark the beliefs that correspond to territory, those fulfilling their epistemic role, as “true”, correspondence theory of truth naturally follows.
Someone asked me via email:
I figured my answer will be helpful for others, too, so I’ll post it here:
Its role in the sequences seems much simpler: if you look at human minds as devices for producing correct (winning) decisions (beliefs), the “map” aspect of the brain is effective to the extent/because the state of the brain corresponds to the state of the territory. This is not correspondence theory of truth, it’s theory of (arranging) coincidence between correct decisions/beliefs (things defined in terms of the territory) and actual decisions/beliefs (made by the brain involving its “map” aspect), that points out that it normally takes physical reasons to correlate the two.
I like how you’ve put this. This is roughly how I see things, and what I thought was intended by The Simple Truth, but recently someone pointed me to a post where Eliezer seems to endorse the correspondence theory instead of the thing you said (which I’m tempted to classify as a pragmatist theory of truth, but it doesn’t matter).
My point is that the role of map/territory distinction is not specifically to illustrate the correspondence theory of truth. I don’t see how the linked post disagrees with what I said, as its subject matter is truth (among other things), and I didn’t talk about truth, instead I said some apparently true things about the process of forming beliefs and decisions, as seen “from the outside”. If we then mark the beliefs that correspond to territory, those fulfilling their epistemic role, as “true”, correspondence theory of truth naturally follows.