From: andrew@rentec.com (Andrew Mullhaupt)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Re: Having to believe
Date: 15 Aug 92 02:31:40 GMT
Organization: Renaissance Technologies Corp., Setauket, NY.

In article <Bstrsw.LC6@unx.sas.com> sasghm@theseus.unx.sas.com (Gary Merrill) writes:
>
>In article <1166@kepler1.rentec.com>, andrew@rentec.com (Andrew Mullhaupt) writes:
>|> Is this a statement aimed at the slipperiness of reality or the imprecision
>|> of theory? The former, I worry about, the latter, I probably accept. 
>
>The slipperiness of reality is not distinguishable from the imprecision
>of theory.

I can't swallow this. The reason seems to be that granting that we're talking
about your 'ideally accepted' theories, i.e. theories that we can't find anything
wrong with, but that the possible multiplicity of such theories points more
to inadequacy in the criteria for evaluating theories than that the underlying
reality is to blame. The idea that truly different world views can be equally
and maximally validated (which seems to be lesson 1 of anti-realism) seems
premature to me - have we ever come across even one such theory? And it seems
to be some kind of word game has to result when we confront a concrete situation
which turns up an essential difference between to maximally validated theories
(there must be some such circumstance, or else in what sense are these theories
different) and yet we have to wonder how in this experimentum crucis, the
outcome validates both different theories. 

> The assumption about all these theories
>is that they are "ideal" in the sense of satisfying *all* of our criteria for
>theory acceptance -- in particular, that all of them save the phenomena.  There
>is *no*way*to*tell* which is true (assuming for a moment that *saying* one is
>true and the other is not makes sense).  The typical example here would be two
>theories that are alike in their fundamental "observational" vocabulary, their
>predictions, etc., but differ in their "theoretical" terms.  Of course you would
>not accept *both* theories as true, but the anti-realist position is that
>*neither* is true -- and that this does not render either theory less acceptable.

Actually, I do not consider such theories as _different_. Just as you can
claim that Hamiltonian mechanics and Lagrangian mechanics are theoretically
different, they are not different until you come to a situation (nonintegrable
nonholonomic constraints) where this difference is actually meaningful. As
a result most people consider these two theories as restatements of the
same theory. Until you have a difference which is observable, how different
is the theory?

>|> But what prevents the realist from defining reality to be the 'equivalence
>|> classes' formed by the relation of descriptive equivalence, and declaring
>|> your many theories to be isomorphic as far as this reality is concerned?

>This is fine, but it isn't *realsim* in the usual sense of this term since it
>leaves out a certain portion of each theory (usually thought of as the "theoretical"
>terms and the laws in which these appear).  In fact, in any real theory, such
>terms are so entwined in the theory that you wouldn't have much left over for
>your equivalence classes. 

I tend to agree, but there are no two real theories which are maximally
validated. As far as I can tell, whenever we have to theories which differ,
we've either concluded that they are observably different, or else that
they are only apparently different interpretations of the same theory -
(i.e. many worlds as an interpretation of the Copenhagen theory). It's kind of
like a question about translation and hermeneutics - is general relativity
in Russian the same as in French? If so, then there may very well be other
'translations' of theory, perhaps not so obvious. Thermodynamics may very 
well be none other than information theory. There is essentially no difference
between measure theory and the usual mathematician's probability theory. When
you want to say two theories are different, I think it means that there must
be some meaningful situation where they _disagree_. Note that if the
disagreement is about a situation that both theories accept as unobservable,
the theories both are defective by making essential predictions which are
theoretically unobservable, and so this doesn't arise for ideal theories.

>You are also then stuck with having to provide some
>semantics for these terms and laws since you aren't interpreting them in the
>usual denotational way (your reject Semantic Realism for this part of the theory).
>So where do you go?  Back to instrumentalism?

The semantics are provided through the mechanism of equivalence. If this
is a problem, then the theories you started with were not equivalent enough
in the first place. You may ask which theory of these to prefer - the
answer may be that _all_ of the original theories are defective, else you
would be able to tell which one to prefer.

>|> reality is a matter of aesthetics. Is it possible that one of the many true
>|> descriptions that the anti-realist accepts as true is the description of the
>|> realist? (If you can't beat 'em, adjoin 'em...)

>This is what the realist would have us believe.  However, again, the point is
>that it is useless to make such a claim.  All of science and epistemology
>proceeds quite smoothely without additonal claims that we ought to pursue
>a "true" theory or that we would know one if we saw one.

I agree completely with this. But I don't see how the realist can't cope
with it. Why can't the realist do science as usual with the expectation
that there may very well be a true theory of real reality. I don't see
convincing evidence that there is one, but I certainly don't see that there
can't be one. The question looks open to me.

>I object to the use of "truth" as though it were a mass noun such as "sugar".
>Sugar is sweet.  Sugar is white.  Similar assertions involving truth are at
>best shorthand or metaphorical.  You still haven't given me any examples of
>*other* properties that truth might have (except "good").

Sugar is not quite so single-minded an idea - it refers as well to people
and relationships between them, and even programming glosses (syntactic
sugar). But in these cases the statement "Sugar is sweet" can be asserted
as well. (Sugar and sweetness are tightly coupled and can remain associated
even across metaphors - the association is a definite relationship which
extends beyond denotation.)

But even if one relegates sugar to the physics of its constituent atoms,
there is a bit of trouble. DNA has lots of 'sugar' in it but is it sweet?
And is sweetness the chemical reaction on the taste bud, or does it also
include other physical aspects of the perceptive mechanism, and what
about fictional sweetness - is the honey that Winnie the Pooh eats
sweet?

So where is truth any different?

>|> Truth is, after all good. It is good, since it can be used for good. Nothing
>It can also be used for evil.  Thus it is good and evil.  Whoopee!

I thought this line might get short shrift. However, the two assertions are
not necessarily equivalent. One can take the view that the possibility of 
good use makes something good, as opposed to that which cannot be used for
any good whatsoever. When something is used for ill, it does not negate
the possibility of the good use. If you have a Persian notion that good and
evil are symmetrical, then this may not convince you. But this is not the
only view, since you can look at evil as not being anything other than a
deficiency of good - i.e. good and evil need not be opposites.

>|> else can replace truth in its useful form. Nothing forces us to accept the
>|> good of truth so well as the _bad_ that can only avoided by the use of truth.
>|> The goodness of truth seems to be available even when truth is only present
>|> in approximation, but we tend to find greater value in better approximations.
>Your off the rails here, Andrew.  Rein it in and get a grip.  (This is not
>bad as poetry.  But as cognitive analysis it is bordering on the contentless.)

It is also to take the assertions seriously. I claim that truth is not
replaceable - which seems to directly contradict the anti-realist position
that truth fails to distinguish equally valid but actually different theories
of the world. I point towards the idea that there is value is using truth
as an ideal, and I sort of expected to get refuted - the idea that this is
content free makes me wonder about the content in the anti-realist position
that opposes it...

Let's use a concrete example. Until this century, there was a dreaded lethal
disease called pellagra which was utterly beyond the understanding of medecine
and was responsible for a horrible lingering death in a significant fraction
of the population of the American south. It was found that the disease was
a nutritional deficiency, and that it could be reversed by changing the diet
of patients. This saved untold misery, but it was only an approximation to
the truth. It was later determined what the specific ingredient was (niacin,
I think), and this enabled further progress. So there was goodness in the
approximation, more goodness as the approximation was refined, just as
I claimed. Could the knowledge that niacin deficieny causes horrible lingering
death be put to ill use? It could certainly be a part of some demented
crime, yes. But we are not rendered neutral to this knowledge by this fact.

Where it might be clear is in the alternative - would it be better not to
know about niacin since it can be used for evil? It is a very serious
matter to contemplate affirming this. Unless you can say yes to this, then
this truth must be counted good _because it can be used for good and despite
the possibility of evil use_.

>|> We cannot always know truth, especially since the more reliable identifications
>|> of truth come from rigorous logical frameworks which can have definite
>|> limitations or require intentional choices. Ideas of truth which evade these
>|> difficulties tend to leave out important elements which unify our view of
>|> different instances of truth.
>|> 
>|> Truth is frequently viewed as a Hellenic abstraction, but there are several
>|> strong connections between truth and the physical world. The most obvious
>|> (and perhaps least observed) aspect is that all known instances of truth
>|> have been recorded in the physical world. Even truth in fiction or dreaming
>|> seems to be the result of intentional or volative acts of physical beings.
>|> The second important connection of truth to the physical world is the 
>|> apparent considerable success in the truthful description of the world. That
>|> there are speculative physics based on alternative coherences than Aristotelian
>|> logic reinforces this idea - when the truthful description of the world is
>|> problematic, we seem committed to truth more than logic, or any other component
>|> in the picture. A third connection is furnished by our understanding that
>|> truth - in all the physical instances - is directly governed by specific laws
>|> of nature which we think we understand. I have in mind here the information
>|> theoretic interpretation of thermodynamics, and possibly some other things.
>|> 
>|> How's that for a start? My approach is essentially to view truth as a natural
>|> phenomenon, (which includes the possibility that it is a human artifact). You
>
>How utterly weird.  You mean like a tornado?

Yes. Also like the perception of a tornado. Also like the perception of
sweetness, even as a fictional metaphor. (Aside to the determinists - your
theory predicts Winnie the Pooh. I'm impressed.)

But did you expect me to divorce truth from the physical world - where all
the sightings have been? And can we separate truth from humans? (Are we
having AI yet?) Real (natural) truth is the elephant to our blind men -
including the staggering masterpieces of mathematics and the sciences.

So when I claim that truth is good, and you disagree, but we're both looking
at the same world, is it the slipperiness of the theory or the imprecision
of reality? Is this a matter of translation, or have I made your argument
for you?

I take the point of view that the blind men and the elephant analogy is
a bit like the claim of anti-realism, which says that the blind men can't
agree, they're all thinking straight and making valid observations, and
espousing different theories.

But the refutation of the analogy (and I think the problem I have with
anti-realism, by analogy) is that there is something _wrong_ with the
picture. The theories _are_ incomplete and defective because the men
are blind. They are not maximally validated, since the theory a sighted
person could supply would be accepted by the blind men. It would integrate
their individual pieces of the picture, and _truth_ would be that quality
which enabled them to accept the theory. The situation that the blind men
do not transcend, of multiplex irrefutable theories, says nothing about
whether there is or is not a succesful theory beyond their grasp.

Later,
Andrew Mullhaupt