Truth

My Positions

1. That which is true is that which corresponds with reality (the Correspondence theory of truth).
2. Truth is a property of reality, not of our descriptions of it. Our descriptions are only ever more or less accurate provisional models of reality models.
3. People frequently mistake the model for the Truth (see The Map Is Not the Territory, and as these model often are expressed in language they fall victim to a failure to understand Language Games).

Notes

• What is true is unaffected by:
  • Belief: a thing is not made true by being believed, nor false by being doubted.
  • Awareness: a thing can be true without anyone knowing it.
  • Argument: a thing is not made true by being argued for persuasively. A bad argument for a true conclusion does not make the conclusion false (see The Fallacy Fallacy).
  • Consensus: a thing is not made true by the number of people who accept it.
• Because we do not have direct access to reality, we cannot compare our models to it directly. We can only test their predictions against further experience. This is why I treat knowledge as "sufficiently true", rather than True, and why I do not wish to mistake the map for the territory.
• Statements about my own mental states ("I am in pain") and statements about reality ("the Earth is an oblate spheroid") are both truth-apt, but they are verified in different ways.

Also see

• Knowledge
• Justified True Belief
• Fallibilism
• Data and Evidence