Activity

When we search for truth, I think most of us are trying to understand the causal structure of the universe, not just predict it with our own fitted models. This is just a criticism of this notion of truth, which waters the concept down from what I at least think of as truth. Many incompatible theories can fit the same facts without capturing any causality. If you agree that truth is correspondence with reality, and not with the facts within our conceptual framework, the problem reemerges.

A statement carves the world into concepts standing in relations. For it to correspond with reality, those concepts must pick out genuine entities and relations in reality. But we have no way of verifying that our conceptual carvings track or pick out entities and relations in reality.

You might disagree. But when we search for truth, I think most of us are trying to understand the causal structure of the universe, not just predict it with our own fitted models. This is just a criticism of this notion of truth, which waters the concept down from what I at least think of as truth. Many incompatible theories can fit the same facts without capturing any causality. If you agree that truth is correspondence with reality, and not with the facts within our conceptual framework, the problem reemerges.

A statement carves the world into concepts standing in relations. For it to correspond with reality, those concepts must pick out genuine entities and relations in reality. But we have no way of verifying that our conceptual carvings track or pick out entities and relations in reality. This might not imply that some theories can't be more true than others. But it definitely rules out absolute truth.