Is correspondence true (in CR)?
This thread is based on Lucas Smalldon's talk and article on correspondence: https://barelymorethanatweet.com/. Later Dennis Hackethal followed up with criticism on X: https://x.com/dchackethal/status/1977089334294516124. This is my attempt to continue the discussion here on Veritula.
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas, and submit new ideas.CR is an evolutionary theory. There's no need for correspondence in Darwinism. Therefore, we don't need it in CR either.
I think correspondence is to epistemology as adaptation is to evolution. Knowledge that corresponds more to reality tends to be more useful (and/or has more reach), similar to biological adaptation.
Memes and genes are the same type of knowledge. Since we can "let our theories die in our place", as Popper said, we can make faster iterations and expand the environment to which the idea is adapted (including potentially the whole universe). There's no need for correspondence, just more reach and adaptation across contexts.
Typo in discussion title: “correspondance” should be ‘correspondence’.
@erik-orrje You (and only you) can update the title here.
It sounds like the core disagreement is around Lucas’s idea that the concept of correspondence fragments the growth of knowledge: if correspondence is the aim of science but not of other fields, then that means the growth of knowledge works differently in science than in other fields.
I think Lucas is right to reject that fragmentation but I don’t think it happens in the first place.
CR universally describes the growth of knowledge as error correction. When such error correction leads to correspondence with the facts (about the physical world), we call that science. When it doesn’t, we call it something else, like art or engineering or skill-building.
It’s all still error correction. There is no fragmentation due to correspondence.
Would you say there's correspondence for some knowledge in genes as well?
Yeah I could see some knowledge in genes corresponding to certain facts about reality, like knowledge about flight corresponding to facts about certain laws of physics.