Truth-conditional accounts of truth, associated with Tarski and Davidson, are popular in philosophy of language. But most approaches to language do not contain a truth-conditional account of truth. Philosophy of language is most reliably associated with a theory of meaning: How is it that words and sentences relate to reality?
You might be right that Eliezer’s theory of truth comes from something like Korzybski’s (now defunct) theory of language, but I’m not familiar with Korzybski’s theory of truth.
My theory of truth is explicitly Tarskian. I’m explicitly influenced by Korzybski on language and by Peirce on “making beliefs pay rent”, but I do think there are meaningful and true beliefs such that we cannot experientally distinguish between them and mutually exclusive alternatives, i.e., a photon going on existing after it passes over the horizon of the expanding universe as opposed to it blinking out of existence.
As a descriptive theory of how humans use language, I think truth-conditional accounts of meaning are inadequate. But that’s the domain of contemporary linguistics, anyway—which tends to line up more with the “speech acts” camp in philosophy of language.
But we need something like a Tarskian theory of language and truth in order to do explicit AI programming, so I’m glad we’ve done so much work on that. And in certain contexts, philosophers can simply adopt a Tarskian way of talking rather than a more natural-language way of talking—if they want to.
And I agree about there being meaningful and true beliefs that we cannot experientially distinguish. That is one point at which you and I disagree with the logical positivists and, I think, Korzybski.
I’m not familiar with Korzybski’s theory of truth.
I’m only familiar with it through Hayakawa. The reference you provided to support your claim that the General Semantics theory of language is “defunct” says this about the GS theory of truth:
Hayakawa is quoted as saying:
[General semantics] tells you what to do and what to observe in order to bring the thing defined or its effects within the range of one’s experience.
which the ELL entry precisifies as:
The literal meaning of a statement expressed by sentence Σ is given by defining the method for observationally verifying the conditions under which Σ is properly used.
All of which sounds pretty close to Davidson and Tarski to me, though I’m not an expert. And not all that far from Yudkowsky.
I made my comment mentioning Language in Thought and Action before reading your post. I now see that your point was to fit Eliezer into the mainstream of Anglophone philosophy. I agree; he fits pretty well. And in particular, I agree (and regret) that he has been strongly influenced, directly or indirectly, by W. V. O. Quine. I’m not sure why I decided to mention Hayakawa’s book—since it (like the sequences) definitely is too lowbrow to be part of that mainstream. I didn’t mean for my comment to be taken as disagreement with you. I only meant to contribute some of that scholarship that you are always talking about. My point is, simply speaking, that if you are curious about where Eliezer ‘stole’ his ideas, you will find more of them in Hayakawa than in Peirce.
Perplexed,
Truth-conditional accounts of truth, associated with Tarski and Davidson, are popular in philosophy of language. But most approaches to language do not contain a truth-conditional account of truth. Philosophy of language is most reliably associated with a theory of meaning: How is it that words and sentences relate to reality?
You might be right that Eliezer’s theory of truth comes from something like Korzybski’s (now defunct) theory of language, but I’m not familiar with Korzybski’s theory of truth.
My theory of truth is explicitly Tarskian. I’m explicitly influenced by Korzybski on language and by Peirce on “making beliefs pay rent”, but I do think there are meaningful and true beliefs such that we cannot experientally distinguish between them and mutually exclusive alternatives, i.e., a photon going on existing after it passes over the horizon of the expanding universe as opposed to it blinking out of existence.
Thanks for clarifying!
For the record, my own take:
As a descriptive theory of how humans use language, I think truth-conditional accounts of meaning are inadequate. But that’s the domain of contemporary linguistics, anyway—which tends to line up more with the “speech acts” camp in philosophy of language.
But we need something like a Tarskian theory of language and truth in order to do explicit AI programming, so I’m glad we’ve done so much work on that. And in certain contexts, philosophers can simply adopt a Tarskian way of talking rather than a more natural-language way of talking—if they want to.
And I agree about there being meaningful and true beliefs that we cannot experientially distinguish. That is one point at which you and I disagree with the logical positivists and, I think, Korzybski.
I’m only familiar with it through Hayakawa. The reference you provided to support your claim that the General Semantics theory of language is “defunct” says this about the GS theory of truth:
All of which sounds pretty close to Davidson and Tarski to me, though I’m not an expert. And not all that far from Yudkowsky.
I made my comment mentioning Language in Thought and Action before reading your post. I now see that your point was to fit Eliezer into the mainstream of Anglophone philosophy. I agree; he fits pretty well. And in particular, I agree (and regret) that he has been strongly influenced, directly or indirectly, by W. V. O. Quine. I’m not sure why I decided to mention Hayakawa’s book—since it (like the sequences) definitely is too lowbrow to be part of that mainstream. I didn’t mean for my comment to be taken as disagreement with you. I only meant to contribute some of that scholarship that you are always talking about. My point is, simply speaking, that if you are curious about where Eliezer ‘stole’ his ideas, you will find more of them in Hayakawa than in Peirce.
Probably, though Yudkowsky quotes Peirce here.