It pays to taboo the term, as I’ve been advocating for years here, with little success.
Say what you really mean instead of this nebulous misleading concept! Sometimes it is a truth value of a provable or disprovable mathematical statement (e.g. the Pythagoras theorem), sometimes it is someone’s best guess at the truth value of a mathematical statement (P is is very likely provably not equal NP), sometimes it is a statement about accuracy of some model of the physical world (e,g, Quantum Mechanics is “true” in its domain of applicability), sometimes it is a statement of faith (“my truth” vs “your truth”) etc.
Tabooing “truth” avoids pointless arguments over statements of the form “unprovable/untestable but true”, like MWI is obviously true”, or “Genghis Khan liked horse milk” or “BB(10)’th digit of Pi has 10% probability of being 0″. Alternatives to the term “true” are “testably accurate”, “holds in all but measure zero possible worlds, given a certain set of assumptions”, “something I fervently believe in” and other items from your list.
“Fact” is another term that is worth tabooing, I call it yet another four-letter f-word.
I like this proposal. In light of the issues raised in this post, it’s important for people to come into the custom of explaining their own criteria for “truth” instead of leaving what they are talking about ambiguous. I tend not to use the word much myself, in fact, because I find it more helpful to describe exactly what kind of reality judgments I am interested in arriving at. Basically, we shouldn’t be talking about the world as though we have actual means of knowing things about it with probability 1.
It pays to taboo the term, as I’ve been advocating for years here, with little success.
Say what you really mean instead of this nebulous misleading concept! Sometimes it is a truth value of a provable or disprovable mathematical statement (e.g. the Pythagoras theorem), sometimes it is someone’s best guess at the truth value of a mathematical statement (P is is very likely provably not equal NP), sometimes it is a statement about accuracy of some model of the physical world (e,g, Quantum Mechanics is “true” in its domain of applicability), sometimes it is a statement of faith (“my truth” vs “your truth”) etc.
Tabooing “truth” avoids pointless arguments over statements of the form “unprovable/untestable but true”, like MWI is obviously true”, or “Genghis Khan liked horse milk” or “BB(10)’th digit of Pi has 10% probability of being 0″. Alternatives to the term “true” are “testably accurate”, “holds in all but measure zero possible worlds, given a certain set of assumptions”, “something I fervently believe in” and other items from your list.
“Fact” is another term that is worth tabooing, I call it yet another four-letter f-word.
I like this proposal. In light of the issues raised in this post, it’s important for people to come into the custom of explaining their own criteria for “truth” instead of leaving what they are talking about ambiguous. I tend not to use the word much myself, in fact, because I find it more helpful to describe exactly what kind of reality judgments I am interested in arriving at. Basically, we shouldn’t be talking about the world as though we have actual means of knowing things about it with probability 1.