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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Either atoms exist or they dont. Our idea of atom has evolved over time, but the thing that we call "atom" has always been there (at least on the time scale of human civilization).
The probabilistic nature of quantum objects isn't really a problem either. Electrons may be particles, waves, both or neither, but the "thing" is a real phenomenon of this world regardless of how we talk about it.
Similarly, the truth value of alien existence is well defined: either they exist at this time or they do not. We don't know it for sure, but this doesn't change whether they are actually there or not.
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.
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.
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.
> it
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.
Is Bertrand Russel a scientist or a philosopher according to you?
https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/classicreadings/chapter/bertr...
What about Albert Einstein?
https://todayinsci.com/E/Einstein_Albert/EinsteinAlbert-Trut...
Or Richard Feynman?
https://www.cantorsparadise.com/the-fundamental-principles-o...
Finding resources for perspectives on truth by Ada Lovelace, Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin is left as an exercise.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
Social “sciences”, humanities, and psychology maybe different
