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> In fact it’s the same values that “science” stands on: do our best everyday and continue to try improving. Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a se

> In fact it’s the same values that “science” stands on: do our best everyday and continue to try improving. Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it. But philosophers still talk about Truth, they didn't get the message. As long as we are using leaky abstractions - which means all the time - we can't capture Truth. There is no view from nowhere.

glenstein 1y ago
I understand the spirit of what you're saying, but I think this phrasing can be abused by burn-it-all-down skeptics, and I would prefer to say the notion of forward iteration depends on there being some such real thing as truth. The "relativity of wrong" essay by Isaac Asimov, recently upvoted on HN, captures the idea pretty well imo.
dragonwriter 1y ago
> Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it. That’s not accurate. Science is orthogonal to belief in ultimate truth, and scientists have very diverse opinions on that point. Science is about finding more useful models to predict future observations, but whether and how that relates to truth is a question outside of the domain of science.
stogot 1y ago
That’s a bad take. Science does seek Truth. Take physics’ equations and the universal constants for example. Don’t act like there’s not objective, truthful realities that are undiscovered. Social “sciences”, humanities, and psychology maybe different
postmodern99 1y ago
> Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it. > it What is "it", if not truth?
- b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago
  The irony lol.
- logicprog 1y ago
  Yeah, that is where things get real fun!
- inetknght 1y ago
  > What is "it", if not truth? There's a misconception in this thread and commonly elsewhere. Scientists aren't after truth. They're after facts. Truth depends on context. Facts are indisputable. Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be true. But the fact might be that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently.
  - postmodern100 1y ago
    (Sorry I already forgot the password to my recently created account!) > There's a misconception in this thread and commonly elsewhere. Scientists aren't after truth. They're after facts. Truth depends on context. Facts are indisputable. Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be true. But the fact might be that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently. This to me reads as semantic games; let me rephrase your example: "Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be factual. But the truth is that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently."
    - inetknght 1y ago
      > can simultaneously be factual. But the truth is that the displayed color Your rephrase is incorrect. "Red" and "green" depends on what your brain interprets. That doesn't change the underlying EM frequencies of the color you see. Therefore, red and green are truth while EM frequencies are factual.
psychoslave 1y ago
Yeah sure, all scientists have the same opinion on that matter, while all philosophers have a different obsolete dogmatic view, both camp are perfectly disjoint, and only the first one is acquired this fundamental truth^W continuously improving model always closer to truth^W something relative to something else and disconnected of any permanent absolute.
tshaddox 1y ago
> Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it. I don't quite agree with this, unless what you mean is that there's no procedure we can follow which generates knowledge without the possibility of error. This doesn't mean that there's no such thing as truth, or that we can't generate knowledge. It just means that we can never guarantee that our knowledge doesn't contain errors. Another way to put this (for the philosophers among us) is that there is no way to justify a belief (such as a scientific theory) and as such there is no such thing as "justified true belief." But again, this doesn't mean that we cannot generate knowledge about the world.
- visarga 1y ago
  > This doesn't mean that there's no such thing as truth, or that we can't generate knowledge Oh I agree we can generate knowledge, but it is never the Truth, it can't be. Any knowledge is composed from imperfect abstractions, the edge cases of which we don't know. We are taking patterns from our experience, and coining them as abstractions, but ultimately we all have our own lived experience, a limited experience. We can only know approximatively. Some people know quantum physics, others know brain surgery, so the quality of our abstractions varies based on individual and topic. We are like the 5 blind men and the elephant.
  - tshaddox 1y ago
    A piece of knowledge is a claim about some property of reality, which is another way to say that it's a claim about what is true. Thus knowledge can contain truth and can also contain errors, and importantly it's impossible to guarantee that knowledge does not contain errors.
  - rfrey 1y ago
    > Any knowledge is composed from imperfect abstractions, the edge cases of which we don't know. That is a pretty concrete epistemological statement. Is it true? That's not just a game, or a "gotcha". Any discussion about "truth" eventually ends up with the question of what it means to know something, a subject about which you seem to be fairly confident.
bawolff 1y ago
Scientists are trying to make predictions about the future based on past experiences (inductive reasoning). Philosophers aren't necessarily trying to do that. You can't get to capital T truth via inductive reasoning like science uses. Just because the apple fell from the tree every single previous time, does not necessarily imply that it is going to fall down next time. But if you are after other forms of reasoning its possible. 1+1 will always equal 2. Why? Because you (implicitly) specified the axioms before hand and they imply the result. Talking about capital T truth is possible in such a situation. So its perfectly reasonable for philosophers to still be after capital T truth. They are doing different things and using different methods than scientists do.
throw4847285 1y ago
It's not a coincidence that somebody might insult philosophy as a discipline and then drop some freshman dorm room level epistemology as evidence. If you don't know anything about a topic, it is very easy to dismiss it.
- wolvesechoes 1y ago
  Very common in STEM circles.
Belopolye 1y ago
All you've accomplished here is to repackage the tired "there are no absolute truths" meme
- psychoslave 1y ago
  Yes, that’s a nice self-contradicting statement to ignite thoughts. One possible resolution is to conclude "even granted that absolute truths do exist, and humans can experiment the intuition that they indeed exist, doesn’t imply that humans can reach absolute truth and fathom it down."
  - Belopolye 1y ago
    I don't think there can be a resolution on a fundamental level, unless you count some therapeutic attempt at "we're going to pretend like we can grasp truth for the sake of convenience, or because the alternative is too uncomfortable" as a resolution. The consequence of what it means is that we can't have any justified claims or knowledge at all. If you can't even count on the law of identity you've lost all intelligibility. Alternatively, objective truth does exist and humans can comprehend it, and the issue of truth versus the development of how we come to understand it is a semantic one (I rather like the distinction between historie and geschichte in German). To my mind, where we've gone wrong is that we began by assuming transcendentals, holding certain axiomatic, a priori metaphysical assumptions that make the scientific method possible, and then turned around and denied that transcendentals exist in the first place- undercutting the foundation rather than really questioning our tooling or our capacity to understand the data.
    - psychoslave 1y ago
      >The consequence of what it means is that we can't have any justified claims or knowledge at all. Just that we can’t claim all of our knowledge are equally close to the absolute truth we suppose to exist. The belief that the current attention exist is among the closest thing we can have to an absolute truth. That something like "I" exists is a step further away. That an external world exists is yet an other step further. That 1+1=2, it depends if we take the road of Principia Mathematica à la Whitehead&Russel or if we take more faith in intuition on sensory/memory inputs + reward/penalty from what teachers asked us to integrate at primary school. >If you can't even count on the law of identity you've lost all intelligibility. Change as sole stable permanent foundation is harder to play with, at least by the most spread education systems in western civilization (outside it I don’t have first hand experience), and the concept of identity can be derived from it as a transitional side effect. Not that identity must be dropped entirely, but then considered under different perspectives. Somehow like we can build our math under ZFC or category theory (or without anything so firmly and meticulously founded really), and at high level notions it doesn’t prevent us to reemploy familiar patterns. Identity as a foundational block is not only an issue for humanity at epistemological level, but also at psychological and societal level. Used as inscrutable fundamental black box, it can actually prevent intelligibility and sound reasoning in all the contexts it’s broadly employed. >To my mind, where we've gone wrong is that we began by assuming transcendentals, holding certain axiomatic, a priori metaphysical assumptions that make the scientific method possible, and then turned around and denied that transcendentals exist in the first place- undercutting the foundation rather than really questioning our tooling or our capacity to understand the data. That’s probably smoothing "we" very broadly here. "We" also have a very firm tendency to easily build disagreement on every matters and the rest. Nonetheless I would be interested to know more about what leads to this perspective.
balder1991 1y ago
> Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it. But philosophers still talk about Truth, they didn't get the message. When philosophers talk about 'Truth', they aren't searching for a perfect static artifact. They're investigating the concept itself, which is very necessary. The entire project of model-building would be meaningless if there were no external reality to approximate. What is it that this "series of better and better models" is converging toward?
lordhumphrey 1y ago
Reading your comment, my mind is immediately awash with the endless sea of memories I cherish so dearly of discussions I've had with economists, psychologists, computer scientists, social scientists, political scientists, and of course let's not forget the physicists, chemists, biologists and mathematicians, and every scientist ever in fact, in which they, at all times, without fail, insisted on avoiding dogmatic truth! Not like those hair-brained philosophers! Sigh. One would have to possess an impressive level of ignorance in the history of philosophy and science in order to hold such a view. What would Raymond Smullyan, or Bertrand Russell, or Henri Poincaré, or who knows how many others, have to say about this remark, I wonder.
- ForOldHack 1y ago
  I had a shocking interaction with a scientist who insisted that theories are simply the best lies to explain the data. He has been nominated for two Nobel prizes. He will win neither.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

glenstein 1y ago

I understand the spirit of what you're saying, but I think this phrasing can be abused by burn-it-all-down skeptics, and I would prefer to say the notion of forward iteration depends on there being some such real thing as truth. The "relativity of wrong" essay by Isaac Asimov, recently upvoted on HN, captures the idea pretty well imo.

dragonwriter 1y ago

> Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it. That’s not accurate. Science is orthogonal to belief in ultimate truth, and scientists have very diverse opinions on that point. Science is about finding more useful models to predict future observations, but whether and how that relates to truth is a question outside of the domain of science.

stogot 1y ago

That’s a bad take. Science does seek Truth. Take physics’ equations and the universal constants for example. Don’t act like there’s not objective, truthful realities that are undiscovered. Social “sciences”, humanities, and psychology maybe different

postmodern99 1y ago

> Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it. > it What is "it", if not truth?

b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago
The irony lol.
logicprog 1y ago
Yeah, that is where things get real fun!
inetknght 1y ago
> What is "it", if not truth? There's a misconception in this thread and commonly elsewhere. Scientists aren't after truth. They're after facts. Truth depends on context. Facts are indisputable. Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be true. But the fact might be that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently.
- postmodern100 1y ago
  (Sorry I already forgot the password to my recently created account!) > There's a misconception in this thread and commonly elsewhere. Scientists aren't after truth. They're after facts. Truth depends on context. Facts are indisputable. Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be true. But the fact might be that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently. This to me reads as semantic games; let me rephrase your example: "Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be factual. But the truth is that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently."
  - inetknght 1y ago
    > can simultaneously be factual. But the truth is that the displayed color Your rephrase is incorrect. "Red" and "green" depends on what your brain interprets. That doesn't change the underlying EM frequencies of the color you see. Therefore, red and green are truth while EM frequencies are factual.

psychoslave 1y ago

Yeah sure, all scientists have the same opinion on that matter, while all philosophers have a different obsolete dogmatic view, both camp are perfectly disjoint, and only the first one is acquired this fundamental truth^W continuously improving model always closer to truth^W something relative to something else and disconnected of any permanent absolute.

tshaddox 1y ago

> Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it. I don't quite agree with this, unless what you mean is that there's no procedure we can follow which generates knowledge without the possibility of error. This doesn't mean that there's no such thing as truth, or that we can't generate knowledge. It just means that we can never guarantee that our knowledge doesn't contain errors. Another way to put this (for the philosophers among us) is that there is no way to justify a belief (such as a scientific theory) and as such there is no such thing as "justified true belief." But again, this doesn't mean that we cannot generate knowledge about the world.

visarga 1y ago
> This doesn't mean that there's no such thing as truth, or that we can't generate knowledge Oh I agree we can generate knowledge, but it is never the Truth, it can't be. Any knowledge is composed from imperfect abstractions, the edge cases of which we don't know. We are taking patterns from our experience, and coining them as abstractions, but ultimately we all have our own lived experience, a limited experience. We can only know approximatively. Some people know quantum physics, others know brain surgery, so the quality of our abstractions varies based on individual and topic. We are like the 5 blind men and the elephant.
- tshaddox 1y ago
  A piece of knowledge is a claim about some property of reality, which is another way to say that it's a claim about what is true. Thus knowledge can contain truth and can also contain errors, and importantly it's impossible to guarantee that knowledge does not contain errors.
- rfrey 1y ago
  > Any knowledge is composed from imperfect abstractions, the edge cases of which we don't know. That is a pretty concrete epistemological statement. Is it true? That's not just a game, or a "gotcha". Any discussion about "truth" eventually ends up with the question of what it means to know something, a subject about which you seem to be fairly confident.

bawolff 1y ago

Scientists are trying to make predictions about the future based on past experiences (inductive reasoning). Philosophers aren't necessarily trying to do that. You can't get to capital T truth via inductive reasoning like science uses. Just because the apple fell from the tree every single previous time, does not necessarily imply that it is going to fall down next time. But if you are after other forms of reasoning its possible. 1+1 will always equal 2. Why? Because you (implicitly) specified the axioms before hand and they imply the result. Talking about capital T truth is possible in such a situation. So its perfectly reasonable for philosophers to still be after capital T truth. They are doing different things and using different methods than scientists do.

throw4847285 1y ago

It's not a coincidence that somebody might insult philosophy as a discipline and then drop some freshman dorm room level epistemology as evidence. If you don't know anything about a topic, it is very easy to dismiss it.

wolvesechoes 1y ago
Very common in STEM circles.

Belopolye 1y ago

All you've accomplished here is to repackage the tired "there are no absolute truths" meme

psychoslave 1y ago
Yes, that’s a nice self-contradicting statement to ignite thoughts. One possible resolution is to conclude "even granted that absolute truths do exist, and humans can experiment the intuition that they indeed exist, doesn’t imply that humans can reach absolute truth and fathom it down."
- Belopolye 1y ago
  I don't think there can be a resolution on a fundamental level, unless you count some therapeutic attempt at "we're going to pretend like we can grasp truth for the sake of convenience, or because the alternative is too uncomfortable" as a resolution. The consequence of what it means is that we can't have any justified claims or knowledge at all. If you can't even count on the law of identity you've lost all intelligibility. Alternatively, objective truth does exist and humans can comprehend it, and the issue of truth versus the development of how we come to understand it is a semantic one (I rather like the distinction between historie and geschichte in German). To my mind, where we've gone wrong is that we began by assuming transcendentals, holding certain axiomatic, a priori metaphysical assumptions that make the scientific method possible, and then turned around and denied that transcendentals exist in the first place- undercutting the foundation rather than really questioning our tooling or our capacity to understand the data.
  - psychoslave 1y ago
    >The consequence of what it means is that we can't have any justified claims or knowledge at all. Just that we can’t claim all of our knowledge are equally close to the absolute truth we suppose to exist. The belief that the current attention exist is among the closest thing we can have to an absolute truth. That something like "I" exists is a step further away. That an external world exists is yet an other step further. That 1+1=2, it depends if we take the road of Principia Mathematica à la Whitehead&Russel or if we take more faith in intuition on sensory/memory inputs + reward/penalty from what teachers asked us to integrate at primary school. >If you can't even count on the law of identity you've lost all intelligibility. Change as sole stable permanent foundation is harder to play with, at least by the most spread education systems in western civilization (outside it I don’t have first hand experience), and the concept of identity can be derived from it as a transitional side effect. Not that identity must be dropped entirely, but then considered under different perspectives. Somehow like we can build our math under ZFC or category theory (or without anything so firmly and meticulously founded really), and at high level notions it doesn’t prevent us to reemploy familiar patterns. Identity as a foundational block is not only an issue for humanity at epistemological level, but also at psychological and societal level. Used as inscrutable fundamental black box, it can actually prevent intelligibility and sound reasoning in all the contexts it’s broadly employed. >To my mind, where we've gone wrong is that we began by assuming transcendentals, holding certain axiomatic, a priori metaphysical assumptions that make the scientific method possible, and then turned around and denied that transcendentals exist in the first place- undercutting the foundation rather than really questioning our tooling or our capacity to understand the data. That’s probably smoothing "we" very broadly here. "We" also have a very firm tendency to easily build disagreement on every matters and the rest. Nonetheless I would be interested to know more about what leads to this perspective.

balder1991 1y ago

> Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it. But philosophers still talk about Truth, they didn't get the message. When philosophers talk about 'Truth', they aren't searching for a perfect static artifact. They're investigating the concept itself, which is very necessary. The entire project of model-building would be meaningless if there were no external reality to approximate. What is it that this "series of better and better models" is converging toward?

lordhumphrey 1y ago

Reading your comment, my mind is immediately awash with the endless sea of memories I cherish so dearly of discussions I've had with economists, psychologists, computer scientists, social scientists, political scientists, and of course let's not forget the physicists, chemists, biologists and mathematicians, and every scientist ever in fact, in which they, at all times, without fail, insisted on avoiding dogmatic truth! Not like those hair-brained philosophers! Sigh. One would have to possess an impressive level of ignorance in the history of philosophy and science in order to hold such a view. What would Raymond Smullyan, or Bertrand Russell, or Henri Poincaré, or who knows how many others, have to say about this remark, I wonder.

ForOldHack 1y ago
I had a shocking interaction with a scientist who insisted that theories are simply the best lies to explain the data. He has been nominated for two Nobel prizes. He will win neither.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]