Activity
#4928·Knut Sondre Sæbø revised about 21 hours agoYou 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.
[W]e have no way of verifying that our conceptual carvings track or pick out entities and relations in reality. … [This] definitely rules out absolute truth.
I don’t see how it does. That we have no way to verify our theories (“conceptual carvings”) doesn’t rule out absolute truth. It does sound like we have different notions of ‘absolute truth’ in mind. For mine, see #4894.
Ironically, your idea that theories can be “more true than others” rules out absolute truth in the sense that truth leaves absolutely no room for deviation. Absolute truth is a binary: true or false. Nothing in between.