Truth is long-sighted

Silhouette, I don’t think there is anything especially vague about ‘there is a cat on the mat’. It doesn’t matter if the distinction between a cat and say a tiger isn’t entirely clear, or maybe it is more of a rug than a mat. I’m pointing to a particular. It suffices to communicate certain information about that particular to someone in my vicinity.

That is what you seem to be glossing over, that there is a point to all of this. Maybe you don’t gloss over it exactly, since you are splitting up utility and truth intentionally… But I just don’t see how that can work.

Again back to those mistakes of philosophers, the ideas that there is some pure truth out there, and that truth for truth sake should be a goal. We split up the world the way we do because of the kind of beings we are, and at what scale we tend to interact with cats.

Under a microscope cats may consist of molecules and atoms, and viewed from afar they seem only a speck of fur… But that doesn’t matter to us, we only care that they may bite, or that they make good pets.

Seperating truth from utility, or some other values we may hold, to have a more ‘pure’ notion of truth, is the path to becoming unhinged it seems to me. I’m taking the other way.

Although I applaud giving recognition to the elusive third option, in this case, it doesn’t apply:

:sunglasses:

Rather truth is only in the details.
A fact the pompous Einstein didn’t wish to accept, but which every nurturing person knows.

Value ontology aka the self valuing logic of being is the system whereby details are recognized as basic realities, and truth-models are built from details.

Hence, why progress is slow and steady and will never stop. There is never a shortage of details. I turned Truth into a goldmine.

I think we both agree that there is a different kind of value to staying close to reality as opposed to abstracting to various degrees - even though both are treated as paths to greater truth depending on who you ask - and you obviously privilege the former. I also think that you are mistaking me as privileging the latter and therefore attributing to me what you identify as a major mistake of philosophers. I do not in fact privilege either, I think either direction has value - I am simply pointing out that the distinction exists and as long as some people call one the path to truth and others say it’s the other path, the nature of truth is going to continue to be confused and unresolved.

I think you accept my distinction, but would “take the other way” as truth - and you would oppose it to “generalisation”. I would point out that you are arguing in favour of “sufficient” and practical information - we only care/value whether cats bite or make good pets - this is the most immediately useful information to our everyday physiological concerns. In privileging this path of utility in terms of “truth”, you align these concepts like Socrates et al. I agree that short-sighted utility is highly valuable, and not at all “untrue” - but I would say that it is possible to make more absolutely true statements the more you abstract away from the mundane and concrete. Surely you agree that “1+1=2” is more true than “cats say meow”? Whether you do or don’t - since identifying cats by their sounds can establish what can be referred to as a truth - you must surely see why I am using the term “truth” for things like maths and logic more than I am for where cats are sitting? Again, I’m not saying that what I term as truth is “better” (or worse), or that useful information has no truth. I think there’s a reason why the truth of useful theories is enhanced or even confirmed after having been mathematically/logically proven.

So you agree that truth is enhanced from the details of reality upward?

I’m not opposed to all generalisation, It’s fine if it’s done with care and for good reasons. I’m opposed to overgeneralisation and overvaluing of generalisation… to the point where the most abstracted is deemed more true and even more real than the source they were abstracted from. And I don’t allign with Socrates, he’s the one that got it all started by insisting on extracting essences from particulars using his dialectic method. Which Plato then turned into the Forms as the only truly true thing, while relegating the sensed world to the cave.

I’ve stated in previous posts why I don’t follow your distinction. I think it’s confusing because you are putting things that don’t belong together on the same axis (synthetic and analytic truths), and applying a metaphor (distance) where it’s doesn’t make sense. It’s actually an example of why to much generalisation can be problematic. To see clear in this, i think one needs to really look at some of the details, and start from there.

I do not agree with the OPs suggested equation of predictability and truth.
The orbit of our sun around the galactic center is only discernible through intense focus on innumerable details.
Science comes to be as the study of details. All scientists are experts at discerning nuance.

Truth is always nuanced.

Quantum Physics, thereby, is entirely truth-less, as it seeks to generalize away the very details its only task it is to observe.
Quantum Mechanics, as the gathering of information about things so small it is impossible to be nuanced enough about them in the language we have, is a form of diligent truthfulness.

Accuracy is easier to claim on behalf of great generalities than about quickly changing situations on the ground.
A successful military commander always has an eye for detail. And Id say the establishment of truth is always a hard-fought victory.
Thus, truth and power are quite akin.

People are so stupid it is just impossible to even think about. Really. It is. Impossible.

This is their “advantage”: they cannot even be thought-of.

Somehow this works to their advantage, hahahaha… allows them to evade something that the rest of us must deal with… what? Oh yeah… “reality”.

Damn! Reality, who the fuck needs it?!? Stupid. Better to not-exist so no one can ever think you, then you get to “live forever” free inside some bureaucrat’s wet dream.

Slavery, anyone? Where is PKummiue when you need him?

This aint your mom, not every dick gets in

Ok, I’m gonna pretend the above x3 didn’t happen…

Seeing as I am not privileging either one direction or the other, I still agree that looking at the details holds value. However, I think abstraction is getting a bit of a bad rap in this thread. I don’t see any issue in putting “degree of abstraction (with regard to truth)” on an axis… it’s the same thing and it comes in degrees so why not? It doesn’t have SI units, but then this is philosophy not science. I think with higher degrees of abstraction, you can increasingly state things with more certainty at the expense of their direct applicability to reality, and with lower degrees of abstraction allow more attention to detail and utility but at the expense of the precision of indisputable truths. The fact that analytic truths require high levels of abstraction and synthetic truths don’t doesn’t mean I’m making an axis of synthetic to analytic truths, those terms just happen to have relevant applicability to the axis that I am examining - hence why I avoided using them in my primary choice of terminology.

By all means start with the details, make useful statements and observations. They will be much more open to dispute and subject to opinion and interpretation, but they won’t be without truth I’m sure - and you’ve made it very clear that this is the direction in which your values lie. Not to say you are averse to abstraction - you say you are open to careful and justified generalisation and averse to “over”-generalisation, and who wouldn’t be? But I don’t think over-generalisation is the same as abstracting towards much more watertight truths that involve higher degrees of generalisation. Generalisation can extend beyond truth to ridiculousness, but I am talking about truth - not what happens when you take abstraction past it.

I think the kind of abstraction that I’m talking about has value in its provision of context. Exploring things that are connected and pattern-finding can provide much insight into how you approach the details - in my opinion this is what philosophy is for. Sticking close to the details runs the risk of not seeing the bigger picture, or at least not seeing alternatives. It serves the same role as pure mathematics and theoretical physics, it doesn’t apply the maths/do the experiments, but it continually provides inspiration and opens new avenues. I agree that it is a mistake for philosophers to take this too far down a rabbit hole and to stay there.

As for Socrates, I’m just referring to that triple-filter test that lumps truth and usefulness (and goodness) together, but yes - the comparison breaks down when Plato does what I would call “over-generalisation”. I am far more aligned with existentialism than essentialism.

Exactly.

I think my only mention of predictability was in reference to the movements of celestial bodies. When you are too far removed from the details, it certainly seems much more true to say how something will behave in precise and predictable terms. That doesn’t mean that predictability and truth are equal, but I would certainly say they were related. I would expect that ancient peoples would have thought the same - the predictable, mysteriously distant and seemingly perfect heavens were their inspiration for their gods. The proposed existence of a god of truth has surely been fairly ubiquitous, whether alongside other gods or not. But corruptible second-hand information aside, noticing relative consistencies in the movements of the sun, moon and stars hardly requires a great need for detail, just general memory and the ability to match similar enough memories together. You could certainly break it down into innumerable details! But that requires a closer look, which opens up further uncertainties and “not exactly as true as we thought it was”-ness - and utility.

Alright Silhouette, to not repeat myself over and over, i’ll try to tackle it in another way.

Newton’s law was found to be lacking because it couldn’t account for all gravitational phenoma. What science does, is posit theories and test those with experiments (aka test the theory in different settings of the world). If under some conditions it doesn’t hold up, you try to come up with plausible explanations for why it doesn’t hold… and if that’s not possible you revise the theory or come up with a new one. Rince repeat… general relativity.

It’s also perfectly possible that no general unifying theorie can be found. I don’t think there is a general rule for the level of generalisation or abstraction at which a theories reaches their most… let’s call it refined form for now. It just depends on the subject matter it seems.

So what you are doing could be compared to formulating such a theory. You have a particular (movement of celestial bodies seem best described from a distance), and you abstract from that to your more general theory :

So I think, alright, let’s test if the theory hold… So i’ve been bringing up objections to the theory in past posts, for instance :

Analytics truths don’t have their origin in the same proces of abstraction a scientific theory does. To verify if they are true you don’t verify them with data, you just look if their are coherent within the system. They are abstract, but not abstracted from particulars. It’s a different proces. So i think it’s a mistake to even include them in a theory about abstraction.

But here’s a new and possibly more fundamental objection. You have taken the movement of celestial bodies as an example. But I think there are lots of examples where it doesn’t necessarily hold. If you want to explain the behaviour of atoms you don’t go all the way to the stars to arrive at the best theory. Or if you want to describe human behaviour, the most general theories like physics will not be the best perspective to describe that etc… It does just seem to depends on the subject matter that is being examined.

In short, I think there is no justification in this case for going from the particular (celestial bodies) to a general theory.

I can live with that. I understand your thinking now, the way your terms are intended. Thats always the tricky part with statements about metaphysics. And Id say “Truth” is the primary term of metaphysics.

However, I disagree with the idea that there isn’t a great need for detail in observing (establishing knowledge of) predictable motions. As evidence I can only refer to the people that did that very work.

Eg
amazon.de/Schriften-Briefe- … 3928127942

Ive been looking hard for an English translation of this. If you can find it I highly recommend it. You can read his pondering as he observes through his lens the minutest changes in the appearance of Jupiter, deriving from these observations an understanding that the planet apparently has satellites, and from there on, he goes on to suggest the heliocentric model of the solar system.

I would claim that science, i.e the establishment and study of predictable phenomena, does have its roots in some peoples keen eye for details, along with, of course, a capacity for integrating numerous observed details into a universalizing method of thought, a model.

Such a model /universalizing method I would claim is the “container” for the notion of “Truth”.

General relativity arose from the abstract notion of not assuming absolute time. It may have been special relativity that did the same with absolute space, correct me if I’m wrong.

Of course what experimental science does is what you explained - I am very familiar with the process. But just gathering the details just expands the number of things you know. How to make them fit together into theories, and changing the assumptions you made in the pattern finding process - that is how we ended up with e.g. general relativity. Such a theory doesn’t just “pop out” from more/better data, you have to rethink the more/better data first - you have to abstract. The name itself “general relativity” even uses the term general as in generalised to describe what it is and what it was intended to do: apply more generally. And in abstracting further, we improved the level of truth behind our science…

The process towards a GUT is just the same, it’s only taking so long because the experiments required are so difficult to do. It’s all about finding things in common with different details, so that you can generalise them and explain the nuanced differences in terms of a common ground. With more/better data this will just continue - and we’re generalising the behaviours of elementary particles more and more all the time. This is what science does.

And yes, this is what I’m doing too. Your appreciated attempt to not repeat yourself by tackling things in a different way is actually an excellent counter-example to your view, unfortunately.

Of course you don’t “zoom out” in order to “zoom in” to the level of atoms… I think you’re getting confused about “the possibility” of more truthful truths and the idea that distance “necessarily” gets you to a more truthful truth. And actually, human behaviour is actually increasingly being studied through neuroscience…

Philosophers like Quine disagree with you that analytic truths don’t depend on synthetic truths. Obviously they’re defined as distinct - that was the purpose of using the two terms - they are indeed intended to describe different processes. Not that I wanted to get into it, but in practice they are related. Whether or not the meanings of different terms align analytically relies on meanings having been synthetically associated with the world. Meanings themselves are just alternative sounds/visual symbols associated with an element of the world - they relate to the world by definition. And whether they relate to each other by themselves is related to whether they relate to each other in the world…

I absolutely agree that there is a great deal of utility in observing the detail of seemingly predictable motions - it disrupts clear indisputable truths and we get a more useful fidelity to reality from the new perspective. In doing so, truths become much more contingent and less necessary, more open to interpretation and doubt, and more useful.

That is an interesting criterion for truth, its usefulness. Of course we need to take a slightly less cynical perspective to this than Nietzsche, especially in this context.

Id say that detail in this case, and in general as I have experienced it, is instrumental in clueing us in about what we are looking at. Like the twitch of an eye can reveal to us the context in which we need to interpret a lengthy story. Eg as a lie, telling us much about the one who tells it.

Before GG observed the small details about Jupiter, mankind had no grasp of the concept of orbit. And in orbit, gravity is implied.
This insight that the minute details around Jupiter provided, coupled with the much earlier work of Archimedes, ultimately led to Newton.

I will note that Archimedes’ observation, which must stand as the very outset of physics, did not revolve around details, but still it required an eye for the unexplained behind the seemingly obvious.

"The secret history of philosophers, the psychology of their great names, was revealed to me. How much truth can a certain mind endure; how much truth can it dare?—these questions became for me ever more and more the actual test of values. Error (the belief in the ideal) is not blindness; error is cowardice… Every conquest, every step forward in knowledge, is the outcome of courage, of hardness towards one’s self, of cleanliness towards one’s self. I do not refute ideals; all I do is to draw on my gloves in their presence… Nitimur in vetitum; with this device my philosophy will one day be victorious; for that which has hitherto been most stringently forbidden is, without exception, Truth. "

-Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

I have to disagree. Everything is a double-edged sword upon which we impale ourselves; every success a failure or error and every error or failure a success and the truth is imbedded in this simple statement in complex form of figuring out how it applies to each person and each situation as we all go through our shared lives in this divine comedy. We are all of us just stepping stones to greater, with a penultimate to ultimate pinnacle of truth, i.e., we can only get so high, or so depraved, or so far through a forest or desert before we start coming out the other side.

Then why did you not stop thinking after the first line? :mrgreen:

I realised that my conception of truth mirrors the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: instead of e.g. the more precisely you measure position the less precisely you can measure momentum and vice versa, it’s the more close to reality you are the less precise truth can be, and the more true your statements are able to be the less close they able to be to reality.

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