Request for Steelman: Non-correspondence concepts of truth

"It would be very uncomfortable to have discussions that on the surface appear to be about the nature of reality, but which really are about something else, where the precise value of 'something else' is unknown to me."

Indeed. I agree, although I find it extremely uncomfortable even when the something else is known to me.

For example, once I had a discussion with someone which seemed to be going pretty well, and which fully appeared to be about the nature of reality, and which we were both enjoying. Then at one point in the discussion I said something like "you know, the reason I thought X was true was because of Y", where X and Y had some reference to another discussion that we had once held and in which we had disagreed.

The person responded, "now you're ruining everything!!"

Why was I "ruining everything"? The reason is that I misunderstood the point of the discussion. I thought it was about the nature of reality. But, in fact, they simply intended it as a discussion about the relationship between the two of us, and they understood my reference to a discussion in which we disagreed as something harmful to the relationship.

In the end I have come to the very uncomfortable conclusion that at some level, most conversations are like this, and are not about the nature of reality even when they appear to be, and that most people in fact either never or almost never engage in conversations which are actually about the truth of the matter. And the result is that in most conversations I feel like I am speaking with aliens -- although the truth may be that the aliens here are the people like us who are actually concerned with reality, and the others are normal human beings.

There is consequently a problem with your four options, although I would say that the third is basically true. It is not that people think that "truth" means something other than "correspondence with reality." If you ask them what they mean, they will say it means that, and they will disagree with any other definition. But the very discussion about the meaning of truth, is not about the nature of reality, while your attempt to resolve the problems by discussing the nature of truth, is meant to be about reality. So when you engage in this discussion you be at cross purposes, and you will not be able to resolve anything. Nor will you be able to show people that they are unable to have a discussion about the nature of reality; they will be equally and similarly unable to accept that very truth, precisely because they are unable to have a discussion like that.

Basically I think Robin Hanson has it right with his definition of human beings as "homo hypocritus." In theory people claim accept the correspondence theory of truth, but it is basically hypocrisy, and precisely for that reason, people are unable to have the kind of discussion you want, and they will never understand this nor the reason for it, and you can never explain it to them.

The blue apple test: Speak out the sentence "I'm a blue apple". See how it feels. It likely makes you laugh because it's absurd. That's how beliefs that feel absurd feel like.

If you have that reference feeling you can speak a sentence like "I'm not worthy of success" and see how that sentence feels like. If it feels more true, than you believe it on some level even if as an rationalist you would never ever say that you believe "I'm not worthy of success".

If the beliefs that actually drive your actions are radically different than the beliefs towards which you admit to when thinking intellectually about them, you are likely going to be plagued by akrasia.

On LW we have the alief/belief distinction. We might say that you don't believe "I'm not worthy of success" when it fails the blue apple test but you just alieve it. Most people don't distinguish the two and only deal in aliefs.

Having a conversation where you actually express your alives and express them can be interesting.

I went down the rabbit hole of researching the question "what is truth?" soon after I joined LW almost 3 years ago, and ended up with a rather unpopular anti-Platonic ontology of the term "truth" being worse than useless in most cases. The correspondence theory of truth stopped making sense to me because there is nothing for it to correspond to. So, it's somewhat more radical than William James's pragmatic theory of truth. But I guess this is probably not what you are interested in.

As for your options, have you considered the possibility that 99% of people have never formulated a coherent philosophical view on the theory of truth?

BBDD: I'm increasingly of the opinion that truth as correspondence to reality is a minority orientation.
PeerGynt: I've spent a lot of energy over the last couple of days trying to come to terms with the implications of this sentence.

Let me give you the basic outlines of what I am thinking. It has been a gusher of explanation and clarity for me.

First consider the basic distinction around here between between epistemic rationality and instrumental rationality.

Epistemic Rationality:

The art of obtaining beliefs that correspond to reality as closely as possible.

But we recognize the broader skill of Instrumental Rationality:

The art of choosing actions that steer the future toward outcomes ranked higher in your preferences. On LW we sometimes refer to this as "winning".

Winning is about more than epistemic rationality, though epistemic rationality can be pretty dang handy.

Second, consider a Truth. What is it? At least some Truths are statements (don't want to deal with algorithmic or model based truth today). Consider Truths as the winning statements, the statements that allow you to do something that "steer the future toward outcomes ranked higher in your preferences". We do lots of things with statements. We repeat them. We use them to generate other statements. We agree or disagree with others who say them. And, sometimes, we use them to more accurately map the world. But only sometimes.

Third, consider the etymology of the word "probability". On reading Ian Hacking's book "The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference ", I came on what seemed an odd fact. Once upon a time, probable wasn't about frequencies or likelihood of events, it was about the standing, credibility, and authority of the speaker. We can interpret that as the way they identified the statements with the better numbers, but maybe that's not what it meant to them - it really just meant a quality of the speaker, and instead, through time, people found that it was a more winning way to characterize the meaning in terms of frequency and likelihood. The criteria for choosing the statements you wanted changed.

Fourth, consider Haidt's recent work on moral modalities. http://www.moralfoundations.org/

the theory proposes that several innate and universally available psychological systems are the foundations of “intuitive ethics... The five foundations for which we think the evidence is best are:
Morality has numerous dimensions Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, Sanctity/degradation,
We think there are several other very good candidates for "foundationhood," especially:
Liberty/oppression

It's interesting to think of these moral modalities as innate, as biological pattern recognizers that evolved and don't need to be learned. The morality of something is how hard it pings these pattern recognizers, and there is wide variation in the pattern of pings between different people - people weight the different modalities very differently.

Finally, think of a Truth detector, a filter between the winning Truths and the losers, as another candidate for evolutionary development, similarly with different Truth modalities as pattern recognizers, and similarly with widely varying weights between people.

What kind of Truth modalities would you expect? Certainly, correspondence with reality would be a good one. But it's not the only one. Spoken by those in power. Spoken by authorities. In consonance with the tribe. With parents. Quieting a disagreeable confusion.

It's not that people have no conception of correspondence with reality. It's that that pattern recognizer just doesn't ping that loudly, and so is drown out by the others when they ping. Certainly, some of those other pattern recognizers don't ping so loud for me, but seem to ping pretty loud for other people.

Years ago, arguing about God with a Christian girl I knew, she said something that just struck me as bizarre. "I just decided my life would be better if I believed in God." What? What does that have to do with anything? That doesn't make it true. That doesn't mean it corresponds to reality.

It's taken me decades to catch up with her. She seemed to have the idea of "Truth as winning statements", but being a fanatic for "truth as correspondence", I just didn't get it.

I am mostly a coherentist and get constantly tripped up by the correspondencist attitudes the sequences here take. So it may be a job for me. But beware, I am a sloppy arguer, I suck at being precise and exact, as I think in pictures which may be a good thing but the result is often "sorta-kinda y'know what I mean?" and useless for people who have a mathemethicians precise mind.

A) My main issue with correspondence theory is over-valuing the accuracy of observation, sensory experience etc. There is a hidden assumption that hypothesis-building or theories are far, far more inaccurate than observation. Eliezer frequently talks about just opening the box and looking, just opening your eyes and seeing, just checking etc. in short he has high confidence in observation being accurate.

B) I think observation is nothing but a lower-order theory/model/hypothesis. It can be just as inaccurate as theories. Quite literally: not only the conscious mind is affected by biases, but even the visual cortex.

C) The proress of science was retarded mostly by not having access to good enough observation instruments. You cannot really be a Galilei without a telescope. Bare-eye observation fails us all kind of ways, gives us a universe that is likely to be Ptolemaian.

D) But observation with instruments is just as problematic, as instruments can go wrong, can get miscalibrated, and ultimately they themselves rely on theory. You cannot build a LHC without already having lots of theoretical physics. Observation is fallible.

E) From this follows that you cannot simply match unreliable theories to unreliable observations and call it a day. You must also match observations to observations, theories to theories, and sometimes even observations to theories.

F) In other words, truth is whatever is coherent with the whole body of science, all observations and all theories cross-validating each other. One potentially faulty observation or ten does not a theory validate.

G) Quine: Two Dogmas, demonstrating how can only experimentally verify the whole body of science only, not any individual statement.

H) Data is Latin for "given". Its etymology sounds like we are getting our data on fax from Heaven. In reality, data is anything but given. Data is gathered, mined through hard and fallible work.

I) The useful data is that gives diffs. I.e. when I am debugging a software I need not only data that says it fails in this case but also that it does not fail in that case. Mining these kinds of data is not easy, fallible, and relies on theory. I.e. I hunt for a diff only when I already have a hypothesis of what may be the cause of failure. As data is not given, you often need to form a hypothesis first and mine and gather data specifically to test it.

J) Objection: but in instrumental rationality, we want to change our sensory experience, so even if my observation of something being painful is wrong, if I made the pain go away I solved the problem, right? No. You are a doctor. A patient complains of stomach pain. You give painkillers. Pain goes away. A year later he dies of cancer. We cannot simply reduce instrumental rationality to felt, observed needs, and just assume the correctness of such assumption does not matter. Theory plays a role here. Knowing medical theory which gives a guess of cancer helps the doctor and the patient more than a very, very accurate observation of the pain.

Finally, let me quote from this Quine summary "Our beliefs form a web, with the outer fringes connecting to experience. Revision at the edges leads to revisions elsewhere in the web, but the decisions of where the revisions will occurs are underdetermined by the logical relations among the beliefs. In the revision, "any statement can be held true, come what may, if we make drastic enough changes elsewhere in the system".

Of course, "Darwin" from "The Simple Truth" would point out that some of those drastic enough changes involve dying.

To simplify the whole thing, if truth is correspondence to reality, our data / observation of reality should be highly reliable meaning it should be "given" (Lat. datum) instead of mined and gathered through hard and fallible work, the direction of that work often determined by fallible hypotheses, relying on potentially faulty instruments, even worse bare-eye observation, bias in the visual cortex and symptoms of pragmatic problems often being quite far from their actual causes. And since it is not the case, we are better of matching everything with everything, not just theory with observation, and that grand system of cross-matching is called the body of science.

I'd say there are three phenomena going on:

1. There are specific problems with correspondence theory -- what do mathematical truths correspond to? moral truths? modal truths? vague truths? -- which either cause philosophers to reject correspondence theory in more classical domains, or cause them to adopt an ersatz theory where some truths depend on correspondence and some depend on other things. (This is approximately where I am, and arguably makes me a rejector of 'correspondence theory,' though I accept it in the mundane contexts LWers generally mean it.)

2. There are some people who really do just have silly views like 'there's nothing outside of our experiences' or the more respectable 'reality outside our experiences is ineffable' (thanks to Berkeley, Kant, and various mystics). There is then a larger pool of people who don't quite hold those beliefs, but believe they believe in them, or (more accurately) have positive associations with asserting those statements in arguments.

3. Most other people probably just have different interests/goals, and these are being misconstrued as a disagreement. Some people think it would be interesting or useful or elegant to define 'truth' in a way that makes us keep the Real World in mind; others think it would be interesting or useful or elegant to define 'truth' in a way that makes it reasonable proxy for 'epistemic praiseworthiness', so that even a systematically deceived agent could still be given a 'truth' ranking that matches its level of revealed virtue. These may both be good concepts to have a name for, and which one (if either) we call 'truth' is not so important.

Steel-manning group 1 means talking about the problem cases where correspondence theory seems to break down, while granting the general point that there is a universe outside my head and there's some fashion in which the assertion-conditions for many of my ordinary statements depend on how the world is. A group 2 steel-man might look like an exotic simulation hypothesis -- perhaps combined with rejecting Chalmers' theory of skeptical hypotheses in The Matrix as Metaphysics. A group 3 steel-man would involve reasonably, explicitly discussing the pragmatic value of different conceptions of truth, relative to our linguistic needs and history.

I reject the correspondence theory of truth (at least what philosopher's call the "correspondence theory", which I think has certain important differences from the view Eliezer subscribes to).

I started out writing a description of my views in a comment, but it ended up being way too long, so I made it a separate post. Here it is.

On the other hand, I am also basically in agreement with Megan McArdle's point of view. Despite maintaining what I said about people's relationship with reality, I think that particular arguments and positions that people hold usually do have some worth, and that you can always get something out of it if you try. Any discussion will go much better you take what people say and begin with part of it that you agree with -- and you should always be able to find something that you agree with -- rather than jumping immediately to the parts you disagree with. This makes the whole difference between a friendly discussion and an angry argument, and the former is much more productive for everyone than the latter.

I think you need to distinguish between rejecting the correspondence theory (wholly) , and rejecting the correspondence-only approach in favour of something more multifaceted. I'm happily in the latter camp, FYI.

I'm not sure succeeding at number 4 helps you with with the unattractiveness and discomfort of number 3.

Say you do find some alternative steel-manned position on truth that is comfortable and intellectually satisfying. What are the odds that this position will be the same position as that held by "most humans", or that understanding it will help you get along with them ?

Regardless of the concept of truth you arrive at, you're still faced with the challenge of having to interact with people who have not-well-thought-out concepts of truth in a way that is polite, ethical, and (ideally) subtly helpful.

I'd love to hear a more qualified academic philosopher discuss this, but I'll try. It's not that the other theories are intuitively appealing, it's that the correspondence theory of truth has a number of problems, such as the problem of induction.

Let's say the one day we create a complete simulation of a universe where the physics almost completely match ours, except some minor details, such as that some specific types of elementary particles, e.g. neutrinos are never allowed to appear. Suppose that there are scientists in the simulation, and they work out the Standard Model of their physics. The model presupposes existence of neutrinos, but their measurement devices are never going to interact with a neutrino. Is the statement "neutrinos exist" true or false from their point of view? I'd say that the answer is "does not matter". To turn the example around, can we be sure that aether does not exist? Under Bayesianism, every instance of scientists not observing aether increases our confidence. However we might be living in a simulation where the simulators have restricted all observations that could reveal the existence of aether. So it cannot be completely excluded that aether exists, but is unobservable. So the correspondence theory is forced to admit that "aether exists" has an unknown truth value. In contrast, a pragmatic theory of truth can simply say that anything that cannot, in principle, be observed by any means also does not exist, and be fine with that.

Ultimately, the correspondence theory presupposes a deep Platonism as it relies on the Platonic notion of Truth being "somewhere out there". It renders science vulnerable to problem of induction (which is not a real problem as far as real world is concerned) - it allows anyone to dismiss the scientific method off-handedly by saying that "yeah, but science cannot really arrive at the Truth - already David Hume proved so!"

We have somehow to deal with the possibility that everything we believe might turn out to be wrong (e.g. we are living in a simulation, and the real world has completely different laws of physics). Accepting correspondence theory means accepting that we are not capable of reaching truth, and that we are not even capable of knowing if we're moving in the direction of truth! (As our observations might give misleading results.) A kind of philosophical paralysis, which is solved by the pragmatic theory of truth.

There's also the problem that categories really do not exist in some strictly delineated sense; at least not in natural languages. For example consider the sentences in form "X is a horse". According to correspondence, a sentence from this set is true iff X is a horse. That seems to imply that X must be a mammal of genus Equus etc. - something with flesh and bones. However, one can point to a picture of a horse and say "this is a horse", and would not normally be considered lying. Wittgenstein's concept of family resemblance comes to rescue, but I suspect does not play nicely with the correspondence theory.

Finally, there's a problem with truth in formal systems. Some problems in some formal systems are known to be unsolvable; what is the truth value of statements that expand to such a problem? For example, consider the formula G (from Goedel's incompleteness theorem) expressed in Peano Arithmetic. Intuitively, G is true. Formally, it is possible to prove that assuming G is true does not lead to inconsistencies. To do that, we can provide a model of Peano Arithmetic using this standard interpretation. The standard set of integers is an example of such a model. However, it is also possible to construct nonstandard models of Peano Arithmetic extended with negation of G as an axiom. So assuming that negation of G is true also does not lead to contradictions. So we're back at the starting point - is G true? Goedel thought so, but he was a mathematical Platonist, and his views on this matter are largely discredited by now. Most do not believe that G has a truth value is some absolute sense.

This aspect together with Tarki's undefinability theorem suggest that is might not make sense to talk about unified mathematical Truth. Of course, formal systems are not the same as the real world, but the difficulty of formalizing truth in the former increases my suspicion of formalizations / axiomatic explanations relevant to in the latter.

The common-sense version of truth is "telling it like it is". The big problem with this notion is that reality makes it hard to properly perceive truth. Figuring out the laws of reality is an arduous task that took thousands of years, required a level of civilization far removed from our ancestral environment, and is still far from complete. Survival means using a number of shortcuts and heuristics to get a good enough approximation. This leads to a pragmatic notion of truth where "correspondence to reality" is a goal insofar as it has a practical benefit. The ideal Platonic truth takes a backseat.

For example, determining whether God exists is a rather unimportant academic point (not to mention being impossible to decide one way or the other). Evaluating the social utility of religion, on the other hand, is a lot more important. If a religion is good enough to benefit the group, that truth is much more important than the literal truth of its dogma. Many cults are "true" in the sense that they provide a community and sense of purpose for people who were otherwise unfulfilled.

Your optimism is heroic. I also don't think we should accept that the rest of humanity are morons, going to hell in a hand-basket. I subscribe to a bit from Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men, "I think the truth is always simple. It has pretty much got to be. It needs to be simple enough for a child to understand. Otherwise it'd be too late. By the time you figured it out it would be too late." I also think the main fundamentals of reality have to be like that. If they weren't we'd just have to despair over our fellow man.

Your understanding about academic philosophy is right on the mark; the coherence camp would not accept that a sentence can refer to mind-independent facts about the world. And Cormac's character Sheriff Ed Tom Bell has something to say about that too:

The stories gets passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the sayin goes. Which I reckon some would take as meanin that the truth cant compete. But I dont believe that. I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It dont move about from place to place and it dont change from time to time. You cant corrupt it any more than you can salt salt. You cant corrupt it because that's what it is. It's the thing you're talkin about. I've heard it compared to the rock — maybe in the bible—and I wouldnt disagree with that. But it'll be here even when the rock is gone. I'm sure they's people would disagree with that. Quite a few, in fact. But I never could find out what any of them did believe.

I think one the most important propositions that is too often ignored in today's society is that reality is knowable, that discussion can be rational and not emotional, that opinions can be informed rather than uninformed, that arguments can be passionate without being belligerent, and that discomfort is a small price to pay for a little more truth in our lives.

Basically, if people don't believe in heartily defending the truth, then they are only ever paying lip service to the correspondence theory.

Statements contain primary, secondary, tertiary, and quatnary meanings and nuances.

I don’t understand how anyone could...

There's a simple example of a case where the secondary meaning supersedes what I'm temporarily calling the primary meaning. The above statement is incorrect in a primary sense (in truth, they believe they understand perfectly well), and correct in a secondary sense of what they're really trying to convey. The user is operating in the secondary sense when they speak.

But here's the fun part - people usually don't know which sense they are operating in. They operate in all of them simultaneously. They bleed over, too - sometimes, if they say something in a secondary sense, they will fool themselves into believing the primary sense, and so on.

It seems like they're not operating on connection to reality, but here is usually at least some level at which a statement implies a belief about reality, but it's not always at the primary level.

For most examples of where someone makes a statement clearly at odds with (to you) obvious truth, it's generally also possible to figure out a certain prediction they have about reality - it's just often hidden under layers of meaning and not explicitly made.

...on the surface appear to be about the nature of reality, but which really are about something else, where the precise value of 'something else' is unknown to me."

Right, exactly. Except that "something else" is also part of reality. So you are discussing reality, still, it's just conflated. Something is being lost in translation.

The thing is, not everyone conflates the same way, and some conflate more than others, so we are often bad at figuring out what is really being discussed, and that's where part of the divide and misunderstandings comes from.