On a meta level, you’ve written a bunch about the problem of the criterion, and I don’t really feel like I see much productive from it. The problem with the problem of the criterion is that in general the appropriate criterion depends on what criterion you have, on the case you’re dealing with. So it’s extremely limited what universal things you can say about the problem of the criterion.
Less cryptically, let’s take an example. What is “truth”? Well, concretely, my girlfriend recently lost her phone, what defines the truth of “where her phone was”? Well, it’s the place where her phone was; the place she could go to and reach for to get the phone. That’s fairly simple, and it’s a resolution that is straightforward and intrinsic to the sentence of “where her phone was”, rather than general.
Now you could say that “where her phone was” is defined based on what she cares about. But the sentence makes sense to you too, even though you don’t know her and aren’t really affected by the sentence. So clearly language is much more broad than what you just care about.
You claim:
[...9 It’s easy to think about truth as a concept and argue which notion of truth is best. It’s much harder to think both about how to evaluate if something is true and remember at the same time that this method of evaluation is contingent on which method you think is best.
[...]
Why argue all this? Because I think people suffer and cause unnecessary harm because they get wrapped up in their own ideas about truth (and many other things!). By learning to look up, even just a little, we can break free of our self-construct dreams and start to engage with the world as it really is. And if we can do that, maybe we can make a little progress on some of the hard problems we face instead of spinning our wheels trying to solve the problems we make up in our heads.
But none of this philosophizing actually helped find the phone. Breaking free of our self-construct dreams of “where her phone was” wouldn’t help at all; what did help was calling her phone and following the sound, which made it turn out that it was hidden behind a bag on the table. This only really worked because we had a good map-territory correspondence that allowed us to understand what happened in various cases, which requires a vary solid grasp on truth, and it’s probably also more available because we’ve learned this heuristic from other cases where a lost phone was a problem.
That she and you aren’t trying to resolve problems where the contingency of facts matters is a blessing. Please enjoy not having to deal with these problems.
This is not sarcastic or a joke. Really, you’re lucky!
On a meta level, you’ve written a bunch about the problem of the criterion, and I don’t really feel like I see much productive from it. The problem with the problem of the criterion is that in general the appropriate criterion depends on what criterion you have, on the case you’re dealing with. So it’s extremely limited what universal things you can say about the problem of the criterion.
Less cryptically, let’s take an example. What is “truth”? Well, concretely, my girlfriend recently lost her phone, what defines the truth of “where her phone was”? Well, it’s the place where her phone was; the place she could go to and reach for to get the phone. That’s fairly simple, and it’s a resolution that is straightforward and intrinsic to the sentence of “where her phone was”, rather than general.
Now you could say that “where her phone was” is defined based on what she cares about. But the sentence makes sense to you too, even though you don’t know her and aren’t really affected by the sentence. So clearly language is much more broad than what you just care about.
You claim:
But none of this philosophizing actually helped find the phone. Breaking free of our self-construct dreams of “where her phone was” wouldn’t help at all; what did help was calling her phone and following the sound, which made it turn out that it was hidden behind a bag on the table. This only really worked because we had a good map-territory correspondence that allowed us to understand what happened in various cases, which requires a vary solid grasp on truth, and it’s probably also more available because we’ve learned this heuristic from other cases where a lost phone was a problem.
That she and you aren’t trying to resolve problems where the contingency of facts matters is a blessing. Please enjoy not having to deal with these problems.
This is not sarcastic or a joke. Really, you’re lucky!