I'm not a skeptic to truth! There are many truths out there and I'm saying this.
Even if we don't know neither the biggest facts nor the smallest facts, we should affirm our existence and its whole journey up to today, 22.04.2010, and assert that we pretty much know all that's between these levels/frontiers in the boundary, being between these biggest and smallest facts. That is: our language is precise when it's applied within this boundary and consequently it expresses truth!
I think I'm very much aligned with both Tarski's theory of truth and the Logical Positivists' protocol sentences.
I have really told this story, being a kind of Cumulativist version, in a Philosophy in Science class in Spring 2008. The story is that astronomy represents the biggest facts and physics, biochemistry and medicine to mention some, represent the smallest facts. Everybody knows by now that knowledge in astronomy has grown enormously since ancient times and that the cattle on the fields are now consisting of molecules and DNA where they've been representing meat and milk before, perhaps in 2000 BCE.
You can hold your hands in a 45 deg. arc with one straight hand pointing downward and the other straight hand pointing upward to give a very fine, simple picture of this Cumulativist version above and it probably goes well with the young in being a story of Philosophy of Science you can tell them.
By Terje Lea, 20.03.2010, 21.03.2010 and 22.04.2010.
I have also written on "Remark on Truth - Plain Realist View" which runs nicely along with "Epistemology of Logics", one that I think Colin McGinn has picked up on by his concepts as "atoms". Atom is indeed a concept that I hold to be valid still yet there are smaller parts of it below, being additional concepts akin to the example of the Cow and how the cow has been parted to other concepts, now being DNA, molecules and "atoms" in some sense...
ReplyDeleteEven then, you should note that serious science is the frontier for new "truths" and that calory has gone into the history books as an invalid concept, not true as such, but true in other senses such as a concept that has been investigated and that can be found in the history of science and how scientists have
been searching and sometimes failed in the search, making funny concepts exactly like the concept of "calory" or "calory theory", more preferred...
Equally, in being in this 45 deg. arc. Harry Potter, the Hardy Brothers of the teen crime novels and a bunch of other fictional characters are added to the story of
concepts, but only on that level, never in history, but in the books, that they are now true characters of stories, of fiction, but they have NO standing as being TRUE
in the real world. They don't obtain truth in the same sense as quants, photons, atoms, ions, chemical substances, etc.! This is an addition of explanation, pedagogics, to my remark on Truth as a matter for the realists out there in the World!
Truth theory is sometimes placed in either of two subjects, metaphysics and philosophy of language!
Clearly then, the World of Truth today is ENORMOUS!
You just need to place the truths correctly!
Even then, when Tarski says that "snow is white" and means it, it doesn't mean that the chemical definition is less right, NO, it means that when we are out in the nature to identify snow, we look for something white (or grayish, if we look for ash/dust-covered snow by the roads, for some foolish reason or another). Similarly, we look for small spots of green or yellow as we approach our petri-dishes. This, either, doesn't take away the description of bacteria as such, no, it's just the way we approach them in real life when we are to identify them!
Note: This has just (written minutes ago) been transferred from a public posting under my profile on Facebook, Leonardo F. Olsnes-Lea, time, 03:55, date, 26. Feb. 2012 CET!