>X is true when X follows from one or multiple axioms. Truth is simply internal consistency.
>One might counter that you can evaluate assumptions as being true or false. If I assume I’m purple, someone could say that’s a false assumption! But why, because it doesn’t fit reality? So you’re leaning on perception. To trust perception, you lean on assumptions about perception. To trust those assumptions, you lean on… you see where I’m going. It seems there are stopping points where some claims are taken as basic.
You still haven't explained why the purple assumption is false. If I have the "standard" set of axioms that everyone else has about perception, +"On any assumptions of purple, all other axioms fail and the purpleness is taken to be real", what is stopping me from just calling anything purple? Additionally, what if I hold the axiom "any axioms of any other agents that disagree with any of mine are false"? Is anything that **I** disagree with then truth? How do we compare axioms? This seems like such a more far fetched theory than simply that truth being what is the case.
A further problem with this theory is that it appears that to you, axioms cannot be true or false because they do not follow from one or multiple axioms. This seems problematic to me; why choose any one axiom over another if there is literally no truth value to them? If the answer is practicality, then my question is **why are some axioms more practical than others**. I think the answer is that because some of them are true. (Germ theory is more practical than miasma theory because germs are real and miasmas aren't!)
I think the post conflates justification (which might involve axioms/starting points) with truth (which is about how things are). We might need axioms to justify our beliefs, but that doesn't mean truth itself is constituted by axiomatic coherence.
Yeah this is definitely something I shouldn’t have skipped over in the argument. I think it’s a good critique and perhaps I could amend my definition to include two parts, the internal consistency, and then a 2nd definition of truth which is used less but still important, and this definition we use to evaluate axioms. I think perhaps you could put various stress tests on the axioms to see if they are true or not, like seeing if multiple ways of perceiving them gives the same answer. When I use truth in this way, like saying I assume what I see exists, I guess I mean, it exists! It’s true if it exists materially perhaps. So that’s long winded but I guess that would be my other definition of truth. But I rarely think common discourse uses this 2nd definition. It only happens when undergrads are drinking wine and getting to the very bottom of things, because most of the time, people are operating at a level where there’s maybe dozens of assumptions that are present in the conversation, and truth is just the first definition, what follows from those axioms.
>But I rarely think common discourse uses this 2nd definition. It only happens when undergrads are drinking wine and getting to the very bottom of things, because most of the time, people are operating at a level where there’s maybe dozens of assumptions that are present in the conversation, and truth is just the first definition, what follows from those axioms.
I can't imagine anyone using your first one at all? It seems backwards actually. "Who is the president?", "What's the weather like?", "Where are you parked", "Why did you do that?" , "How is a guitar built?" All of these questions appear to me to presuppose the correspondence/realist definition. When someone says "Nick was speeding," they mean Nick actually was going 90 mph in reality, not just "this follows from our shared axioms about what counts as speeding."
Also, if your updated definition is: "truth is internal consistency plus axioms must correspond to material reality." Is that not just correspondence theory of truth with extra steps? You've circled back to realism while trying to maintain that you're doing something different.
So people use my first one implicitly. When they say Nick was speeding they might be thinking about reality, but of course that statement being true relies on an axiomatic law assuming this is the case. It’s even more implicit in artistic commentary, sports, and math. The “traditions” I’m focusing on in the post are all made up of axioms and then things that follow from those axioms. So that’s why I think the definition is useful and you can get a lot of explanatory power out of it. For everyday things like the weather and various actions the 2nd is good. They aren’t buried in assumptions they’re operating at a base level. Those things aren’t not my focus in the post though.
If I just adopted correspondence theory of truth I feel I would be missing things when it comes to the above traditions. For the Marty Supreme example, or for the math example right before, what makes a good film or an equation true is based on axioms, not correspondence with reality. The axioms may or may correspond, but what people are deliberating over are the assumptions and what follows, and I think my first definition comes in handy (and importantly I think explains colloquially what people mean when they say something is false in these traditions) at this stage of analysis. Once you make the assumptions like x or y about a film, and a film has x or y, you can they say yes it’s true that film is good. But nothing had to correspond to reality. You could argue the base assumptions might have to, I’m not sure, but I think it’s valuable to think in terms of my 1st definition for these traditions. It reveals a lot of what I think people are saying when they try to establish truth and falsehood about elements of the tradition. So in the end I still think the definitions are complimentary.
I'm not quite following why I should come away wanting to be more of an empiricist
>X is true when X follows from one or multiple axioms. Truth is simply internal consistency.
>One might counter that you can evaluate assumptions as being true or false. If I assume I’m purple, someone could say that’s a false assumption! But why, because it doesn’t fit reality? So you’re leaning on perception. To trust perception, you lean on assumptions about perception. To trust those assumptions, you lean on… you see where I’m going. It seems there are stopping points where some claims are taken as basic.
You still haven't explained why the purple assumption is false. If I have the "standard" set of axioms that everyone else has about perception, +"On any assumptions of purple, all other axioms fail and the purpleness is taken to be real", what is stopping me from just calling anything purple? Additionally, what if I hold the axiom "any axioms of any other agents that disagree with any of mine are false"? Is anything that **I** disagree with then truth? How do we compare axioms? This seems like such a more far fetched theory than simply that truth being what is the case.
A further problem with this theory is that it appears that to you, axioms cannot be true or false because they do not follow from one or multiple axioms. This seems problematic to me; why choose any one axiom over another if there is literally no truth value to them? If the answer is practicality, then my question is **why are some axioms more practical than others**. I think the answer is that because some of them are true. (Germ theory is more practical than miasma theory because germs are real and miasmas aren't!)
I think the post conflates justification (which might involve axioms/starting points) with truth (which is about how things are). We might need axioms to justify our beliefs, but that doesn't mean truth itself is constituted by axiomatic coherence.
Yeah this is definitely something I shouldn’t have skipped over in the argument. I think it’s a good critique and perhaps I could amend my definition to include two parts, the internal consistency, and then a 2nd definition of truth which is used less but still important, and this definition we use to evaluate axioms. I think perhaps you could put various stress tests on the axioms to see if they are true or not, like seeing if multiple ways of perceiving them gives the same answer. When I use truth in this way, like saying I assume what I see exists, I guess I mean, it exists! It’s true if it exists materially perhaps. So that’s long winded but I guess that would be my other definition of truth. But I rarely think common discourse uses this 2nd definition. It only happens when undergrads are drinking wine and getting to the very bottom of things, because most of the time, people are operating at a level where there’s maybe dozens of assumptions that are present in the conversation, and truth is just the first definition, what follows from those axioms.
>But I rarely think common discourse uses this 2nd definition. It only happens when undergrads are drinking wine and getting to the very bottom of things, because most of the time, people are operating at a level where there’s maybe dozens of assumptions that are present in the conversation, and truth is just the first definition, what follows from those axioms.
I can't imagine anyone using your first one at all? It seems backwards actually. "Who is the president?", "What's the weather like?", "Where are you parked", "Why did you do that?" , "How is a guitar built?" All of these questions appear to me to presuppose the correspondence/realist definition. When someone says "Nick was speeding," they mean Nick actually was going 90 mph in reality, not just "this follows from our shared axioms about what counts as speeding."
Also, if your updated definition is: "truth is internal consistency plus axioms must correspond to material reality." Is that not just correspondence theory of truth with extra steps? You've circled back to realism while trying to maintain that you're doing something different.
So people use my first one implicitly. When they say Nick was speeding they might be thinking about reality, but of course that statement being true relies on an axiomatic law assuming this is the case. It’s even more implicit in artistic commentary, sports, and math. The “traditions” I’m focusing on in the post are all made up of axioms and then things that follow from those axioms. So that’s why I think the definition is useful and you can get a lot of explanatory power out of it. For everyday things like the weather and various actions the 2nd is good. They aren’t buried in assumptions they’re operating at a base level. Those things aren’t not my focus in the post though.
If I just adopted correspondence theory of truth I feel I would be missing things when it comes to the above traditions. For the Marty Supreme example, or for the math example right before, what makes a good film or an equation true is based on axioms, not correspondence with reality. The axioms may or may correspond, but what people are deliberating over are the assumptions and what follows, and I think my first definition comes in handy (and importantly I think explains colloquially what people mean when they say something is false in these traditions) at this stage of analysis. Once you make the assumptions like x or y about a film, and a film has x or y, you can they say yes it’s true that film is good. But nothing had to correspond to reality. You could argue the base assumptions might have to, I’m not sure, but I think it’s valuable to think in terms of my 1st definition for these traditions. It reveals a lot of what I think people are saying when they try to establish truth and falsehood about elements of the tradition. So in the end I still think the definitions are complimentary.