4 ms·
Sure it is, for the perfectly ordinary notion of "truth" that most people use effectively and successfully every day. Does it conform to some philosopher's ess
by tjradcliffe 12y ago
Sure it is, for the perfectly ordinary notion of "truth" that most people use effectively and successfully every day.
Does it conform to some philosopher's essentially alchemical (that is: imaginary, unachievable, uninteresting and useless) idea of "truth"? Of course not, but then: why would it?
As a card-carrying Bayesian I'm somewhat sympathetic to Jaynes' position, but the fact is we can and do distinguish between relatively subjective phenomena ("broccoli tastes bad to me") and reasonably (but of course not perfectly) objective ones ("quantum uncertainty is not an artifact of our ignorance"). Both are a result of of the objective relationship that holds between the knowing subject and the "really" unknowable world, with different poles of the relationship being more or less dominant in different cases.
Reality is imperfectly knowable, and of course only knowable from the perspective of a knowing subject. We can only say a very small number of things about unknowable reality (it is probably non-local, for example) but all of our knowledge is still knowledge, and holding any of it up to the standard of "truth as in how reality would be known without a knowing subject" is not only wrong but incoherent.