What is truth?
7th July 2010
Eric Raymond has some useful stuff to say.
No matter what you think you are and no matter what “reality” may be, the experience that you have to deal with (like every other human being) is of being thrown into a surrounding that does things independently of your thoughts. Shit happens, and you have to deal with it. The first step to dealing with it is to be able to predict it.
All truth claims can be unpacked as predictions. Sometimes they’re predictions about obvious, directly observable events in our immediate environment (”Rain will make your head wet.”). Sometimes they’re predictions about events we can’t observe directly but which have consequences we can observe (”Electricity is a flow of electrons,” or “Genetic information is carried by DNA.”) Sometimes they’re predictions about the distribution of outcomes in repeated tests (”A flipped coin will fall heads-up half the time and tails-up half the time.)
We can also say what “theory” is. A theory is just a machine for generating predictions. We judge the theory’s “truth” by whether those predictions are correct. And, remember, we make predictions because we need to cope with the shit that happens. A theory is a survival adaptation: we are theory-builders because we are prediction-needers because we are goal-seekers because we are survival machines.
July 7th, 2010 at 12:20
Yup.