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comment by ChristianKl · 2017-12-17T17:01:09.163Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I had a hard time following the article. It points to a variety of ideas, but I feel it's not really clear.

In the start you speak about truth. Then you say:

An understanding of truth as insight into the essence of something, as seeing essence unhidden [3], in much the same way how you see how a friend really is after getting to know him, does not have that pathology.

This means that the tree that falls in the forest doesn't truly make a sound because there's nobody around to have the insight that it makes a sound.

For a variety of reasons that's not satisfying. As a result in Western thought we have the concept of truth and the concept of knowledge as distinct concepts.

Next you get to "the map is not the territory". It's the catchphrase of Korzybsky's Science and Sanity (and therefore general semantics) which lays out a complex way of thinking about the world. You dismiss it by saying: "How can I find a way to rethink the following insight in terms of maps and territories?"

General semantics is not about thinking about whether something is a map or the territory. It's not about dualism and how things are either the map or the territory. General semantics rather rejects dualism and the is of identity.

Next you speak about whether an idea like shit exists. For purposes of applied ontology it's useful to say that an idea like that can truly exist. The ability to reason about abstract concepts is very useful to deal with them effectively. If you keep all knowledge implicit you are going to run into problems when things get complex. Keeping concepts implicit leads to moat-and-bailey problems.

When you move past the idea that abstract concepts can be true you get people who say that for example a Wikipedia article is fine when it accurately represents the view of authoritative sources about the topic because any idea of it being true in a more absolute sense doesn't exist.

Denail of abstract concepts having the ability to be true caused a lot of mess. I like Barry Smith's Introduction into Applied Ontology where he makes a deeper case for why it's very useful to be able to think of abstract concepts as true.

You speak about "Joint-Carvey ontologies". A quick Google search suggests that you are the first person who uses this phrase online. I can guess what you mean by thinking about the phrase and having cultural LW background but it's hard to follow along. Without Googling I don't know whether you actually refer to something that has a more formal definition.

comment by ChristianKl · 2017-12-18T00:23:27.969Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Let's take the issue of truth and knowledge as an example. In terms of Genereal Semantics means to fail at consciousness of abstraction. The two happen on different layers of abstraction.

Lately it has become fashionable to speak about 'post-truth' and when you call for ignoring truth, you further the forces that attack it. When you redefine 'truth' to mean 'knowledge' that's an Orwellian attack on the concept of truth that destroys that capability of the language to represent the very notion of truth and have a discourse about it.

As part of caring about practical applied ontology I participate in Wikidata. There's a contentious question of whether the data quality of Wikidata is high enough to be automatically imported into Wikipedia.

You could go and argue that the data quality depends on how much of the information that gets imported is true and how much is false. That's however not the central issue for the Wikipedians. They rather care about how much of it can be referenced with sources.

If you fail to mentally distinguish what's true from what's verifiable knowledge, that can produce problems because the two aren't the same thing. When things become complex enough so that you can't easily grasp it, you will start to believe that the tree didn't made a sound because nobody heard it.

But lets get back to whether ideas can be true. If we have the sentence "autism rose over the last decade" it speaks about something called "autism". From a physicalist perspective you can say that there are just configurations of atoms and there isn't really anything that's really "autism" so the whole question is pointless because you can't make true statements about it.

This basically means that any conception of autism is as good as any other. As a result you get the awful DSM that based on consenus about clusters of symptoms that intended to be theory-neutral instead of a concept of autism that's tries to answer based on empiric evidence what autism happens to be.

If we get back to the issue of "autism rose over the last decade" consciousness of abstraction is again important. There are the official numbers that get released. Maybe the official numbers rose because more people went to doctors that can diagnose autism. It takes consciousness of abstraction to keep the two apart. You get another layer when you think about how maybe doctors are more willing to diagnose autism given the same symptoms. As mentioned above there's probably a cluster in reality that corresponds to autism and that's distinct from autism!DSM, that distinction gets you another layer.

You can make reasoning mistakes by confusing all of those layers.

comment by NunoSempere (Radamantis) · 2017-12-17T19:23:26.289Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thank you for your polite reply.

This means that the tree that falls in the forest doesn't truly make a sound because there's nobody around to have the insight that it makes a sound.

Precisely! This is really unsatisfactory. However, it is still sometimes useful to think in those terms, to not distinguish between knowledge and truth, or to ignore truth and focus on knowledge. The question "How can I find a way to rethink the following insight in terms of maps and territories?" is not rethorical, and wasn't meant as a dismissal: I really do have a hard time rephrasing something like that in terms other than that the student is beginning to grok, or beginning to develop a relationship with European History in the same way that he might develop a relationship with a friend. I understand that this might be a crutch, and therefore I asked that question.

By joint-carvey ontologies I mean ontologies that carve reality at its joints. Divisions that point at something significant.

The middle half of your commentary leaves me confused, because I don't see what prompted it.