What is truth?
Will resolve proportionally to the answer or answers I like best. I'll resolve similarly to my previous open ended question market (linked below), but to raise the stakes a tad I will only choose up to 5 answers on this one.
https://manifold.markets/MattP/what-is-love
Matt P answered
ANTE
25%
wasabipesto answered
Truth is the closest possible approximation to objective reality. The truth value of a statement can be measured by how well it corresponds with observations about the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correspondence_theory_of_truth
23%
Angela answered
Truth (noun) is objective reality itself, not its closest possible approximation. Statements are evaluated based on whether or not they correspond to truth, and sometimes we only give an approximation, but truth itself is objective.
13%
Bionic answered
Beliefs determine experimental predictions, but only reality (truth) determines experimental results. Truths are the unalterable and objective facts of reality that don't depend on one's beliefs.
6%
Akhil Wable answered
Really good heuristics
6%
wasabipesto answered
P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B)
6%
Akhil Wable answered
Beliefs which are verifiable and unlikely to change over time
6%
Adrian answered
An ironically named social media platform
4%
Adrian answered
A social construct
3%
wasabipesto answered
The Truth is a fantasy novel by British writer Terry Pratchett, the twenty-fifth book in his Discworld series, published in 2000.
3%
Angela answered
Pilate, is that you?
0.2%
S G answered
A mobile army of metaphor
0.2%
J. F. Jurchen answered
Beauty
0.2%
J. F. Jurchen answered
Baby don't hurt me
0.2%
Matt P answered
ANTE
25%
wasabipesto answered
Truth is the closest possible approximation to objective reality. The truth value of a statement can be measured by how well it corresponds with observations about the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correspondence_theory_of_truth
23%
Angela answered
Truth (noun) is objective reality itself, not its closest possible approximation. Statements are evaluated based on whether or not they correspond to truth, and sometimes we only give an approximation, but truth itself is objective.
13%
@Angela Interesting! I can definitely see where you're coming from here. I guess I should clarify, my viewpoint is that truth is a property that statements can have, and that statements with more truth correspond more closely with observations about the world. A statement considered "maximally truthful" would correspond more closely with the world than other statements about those same observations.
0
Angela bought M$50
Stealing wasabipesto’s link, although from a brief glance-over of the page I think it may be talking more about truthfulness and falsity (evaluating if things are true). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correspondence_theory_of_truth
I think there’s something important about truth as a noun. Like, when someone says they “swear to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth”, there’s something specific(?) that they are binding themselves to do.
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@wasabipesto I think I (mostly) understand what you mean; it seems like we took the prompt from slightly different angles (truth as a descriptor vs truth as a thing)?
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@Angela In my view, when someone "tells the truth" they are not literally speaking reality. They are saying words, those words being the closest approximation they can generate in their language with the memories they can recall. They have a mental model of the world, that model is an approximation; they generate a sentence describing that model, which is also an approximation. Working with other people can help generate better models of the outside world, and increasing your vocabulary can help you generate better statements about those models. By generating better approximations you are adding truth to your statement.
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@Angela I agree we took this in slightly different directions but I think it's a really neat difference I hadn't really considered in-depth before!
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I think when someone “tells the truth” they speak of reality and only reality (or something like that, these discussions are something I need to be more careful in). (Regarding “not speaking reality itself”, I need to think more; maybe similar to when someone says “Come, and I will tell what this man has done for me”, it doesn’t mean that they are speaking his actions themselves; words are of course used. But they’re speaking /of/ the actions. Possibly relevant: Are there any other sentence constructions like “tell the ___” that we use in English?)
I think when someone promises to tell the truth, they’re saying that their will is committed to communicating reality (whether past, present, a question about intent or a question about something that’s externally measurable). And to intentionally shift from that even slightly, (which I’ve done) breaks the promise.
[Sometimes, when it comes to gathering data and modeling things (probabilities, etc), we are trying to learn about the truth, and our models can be more or less in correspondence with the truth.]
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I guess implicit in what I mean when I say “communicating reality”, “telling truth” might be the idea of “bearing witness to” something.
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Actually, maybe not quite. Let me retract this last message.
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@Angela I think I agree with a lot of the points you're making, just not the terminology. I think what you call "truth" I don't have a great word for. "Objective reality" is not perfect but I think gets at the heart of it- there's something out there that we can attempt to measure and know, but which is fundamentally separate from us and is always filtered through perception. (I also think that colloquially this is not a distinction most people make, but is useful in science and epistemic studies.)
I think your question about "telling the _" is a neat example, because it implies universal knowledge (or at least universal acceptance). Telling the time is one example: before accurate clocks were commonplace, "telling the time" was relatively rare, you had to judge the time by environmental factors or relative to other events. Only once one could measure the passage of time in increments could you say with any level of truth what "the time" was.
I also think the internal subjective experience is an interesting caveat, and may ironically be more objective in some ways. "I feel this way" may be an approximation through language, but it describes an internal state that you are not measuring in the way you measure the mass of an object. Is that internal perception more or less accurate than a set of scales? "I remember this happening" is similar, you're describing memories you have and not claiming to have facts about the outside world (just implying it).
I agree that making a promise to "tell the truth" will have the same effect no matter which definition you take (you'll try to speak as accurately about the world as possible) but whether the "truth" is the thing you speak or the thing you speak *about* is a tricky nuance.
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Bionic answered
Beliefs determine experimental predictions, but only reality (truth) determines experimental results. Truths are the unalterable and objective facts of reality that don't depend on one's beliefs.
6%
@BionicD0LPH1N Without rekindling centuries (millennias?) of debate between nominalists and realists, do you believe it is possible for anything to be unalterable or unchanged upon observation or measurement? Or is it possible that experiments and what we call reality are at least partially symbiotic with cause-effect running in both directions?
0
Akhil Wable answered
Really good heuristics
6%
wasabipesto answered
P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B)
6%
Akhil Wable answered
Beliefs which are verifiable and unlikely to change over time
6%
Adrian answered
An ironically named social media platform
4%
Adrian answered
A social construct
3%
That is to say, truth is whatever society agrees is true, because inherent truth does not exist.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_theory_of_truth
0
wasabipesto answered
The Truth is a fantasy novel by British writer Terry Pratchett, the twenty-fifth book in his Discworld series, published in 2000.
3%
Angela answered
Pilate, is that you?
0.2%
S G answered
A mobile army of metaphor
0.2%
J. F. Jurchen answered
Beauty
0.2%
J. F. Jurchen answered
Baby don't hurt me
0.2%
General Comments
As before, I'll refrain from offering too much commentary on answers while the question is open.
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