creativesoul wrote: ↑Thu Nov 15, 2018 2:27 am
Because X, Y, and Z are true...
C'mon
Time, you can say whatever you like, but you - just like everybody else who is a language user - presuppose truth(as correspondence).
Coming from the logical positivist school there are two distinctions that need to be drawn
1. X,Y and Z are first-hand experiences.
I have seen/experienced them with my own eyes - empiricism. Based on this I have no use for "truth". Either you trust your senses or it's all pointless.
This is what logical positivists call protocol sentences (
https://www.britannica.com/topic/protocol-sentence ).
2. X, Y and Z are 2nd hand (or higher order) reports:
2.1 By the verification principle (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verificationism ) - if I can't (at least in principle) contrive a way to empirically confirm what you are saying then it's not meaningful to me - it's just linguistic lip service that will take far too long to unpack. I discard such statements immediately (this is the modern-day Qualia debates philosophers like to have).
e.g to say "There is a blue coffee cup on the table" is not a statement of fact/truth. It is a statement of linguistic convention for our experiences.
This thing on the floor (table!) and this other thing on top of the table (cup) which contains a liquid (coffee) reflects light in a particular way (blue).
2.2 If X, Y and Z are verifiable and I have a mechanism to verify them immediately - then I don't need your 2nd hand report, because I can (empirically) obtain the knowledge I need 1st hand.
2.3 If I can verify it in principle but not in practice then I have no way of confirming the truth-value of any 2nd hand information so I get to choose whether to trust the 2nd hand source or not.
2.3.1 I can do my utmost best to avoid errors in reasoning e.g using heuristics (falsification, contradiction, laws of physics as limits etc.) I can rapidly discard things that are clearly invalid.
But despite all caution at some point you get to choose. Either you will trust 2nd hand information or you wont.
This is where risk management kicks in. If the consequences of error are too grave to endure then I will not ACT on 2nd information without 1st hand validation. This is what we call pessimism in statistics.
If I am comfortable with some error margin - I will ACT on 2nd hand information. This is what we call pessimism in statistics.
In this entire framework the concept of "truth" is absent...