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> 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 t

> 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.
estimator7292 1y ago
There is very little about the universe that is axiomatically true and correct in and of itself. Math is about the only thing I can think of, and really that's in a different category. Everything we know as a species is really just consensus. "Truth" is what we agree it is because the universe does not offer actual truth. What we know is the best guess that our greatest minds can agree on. What we consider to be truth changes far more often than it stands to scrutiny. There are only a very few people from the entire history of our species who have run particle collider experiments and verified first hand what's inside an atom. What they agree on is truth for everyone because almost nobody has the means to test it themselves. And then of course this truth is modified and updated as we find more data. Then old conclusions are rejected and the entire baseline of truth changes. We can be sure of things to however many decimal places as you'd like, but reality itself is fundamentally built on probabilities and error bars. What we think we know is built on probabilities on probabilities.
- postmodern100 1y ago
  > There is very little about the universe that is axiomatically true and correct in and of itself. Math is about the only thing I can think of, and really that's in a different category. My thought is that math (broadly speaking) possesses correctness because of axiomatic decisions. The consequences of those decisions lead us to practice math that can't express everything that we can imagine (e.g., see axiom of choice/ZFC). The math humanity practices today is a result of tuning the axioms to be: self-consistent, and, useful for explaining phenomena that we can observe. I don't believe this math is correct in a universal or absolute sense, just locally.
  - ironSkillet 1y ago
    It seems like there is a universal sense in which statements like 1+1=2" or "7 is a prime number" are true, no?
    - card_zero 1y ago
      Mathematics does its best, but it's still a language, and fallible. It's trying to explain things, and the concepts like "prime number" and "one" can be shaken by later improvements to understanding.

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.

estimator7292 1y ago

There is very little about the universe that is axiomatically true and correct in and of itself. Math is about the only thing I can think of, and really that's in a different category. Everything we know as a species is really just consensus. "Truth" is what we agree it is because the universe does not offer actual truth. What we know is the best guess that our greatest minds can agree on. What we consider to be truth changes far more often than it stands to scrutiny. There are only a very few people from the entire history of our species who have run particle collider experiments and verified first hand what's inside an atom. What they agree on is truth for everyone because almost nobody has the means to test it themselves. And then of course this truth is modified and updated as we find more data. Then old conclusions are rejected and the entire baseline of truth changes. We can be sure of things to however many decimal places as you'd like, but reality itself is fundamentally built on probabilities and error bars. What we think we know is built on probabilities on probabilities.

postmodern100 1y ago
> There is very little about the universe that is axiomatically true and correct in and of itself. Math is about the only thing I can think of, and really that's in a different category. My thought is that math (broadly speaking) possesses correctness because of axiomatic decisions. The consequences of those decisions lead us to practice math that can't express everything that we can imagine (e.g., see axiom of choice/ZFC). The math humanity practices today is a result of tuning the axioms to be: self-consistent, and, useful for explaining phenomena that we can observe. I don't believe this math is correct in a universal or absolute sense, just locally.
- ironSkillet 1y ago
  It seems like there is a universal sense in which statements like 1+1=2" or "7 is a prime number" are true, no?
  - card_zero 1y ago
    Mathematics does its best, but it's still a language, and fallible. It's trying to explain things, and the concepts like "prime number" and "one" can be shaken by later improvements to understanding.