The Question:
How do we warranty that we speak the truth, given any subset of properties of reality? Testimonial truth is a promise, a warranty. But a warranty of what? All knowledge is theoretical; and all non-tautological, non-trivial premises and propositions are theoretical. Therefore how to we know our theories can be warrantied?
We can warranty that our statement somewhere in this spectrum:
- Sensible (intuitively possible)
- Meaningfully Expressible ( as an hypothesis )
- Internally Consistent and Falsifiable (logically consistent – rational)
- Externally Correspondent, and Falsifiable ( physically testable – correlative)
- Existentially Possible (operationally construct-able/observable)
- Voluntarily Choose-able (voluntary exchange / rational choice)
- Market-Survivable (criticism – theory )
- Market Irrefutable (law)
- Irrefutable under Original Experience (Perceivable Truth)
- Ultimately Parsimonious Description (Analytic Truth)
- Informationally Complete and Tautologically Identical (Platonic Truth – Imaginary)
And we can state what criteria any proposition tested on this spectrum satisfied. And we can conversely state whether a proposition is required to satisfy each criteria.
All disciplines are subject to this list, and to testimony. All that differs is whether the properties are necessary for application of the theory to the context (scale) at hand.
Only such statements made under this warranty, are classifiable as moral: consisting of Truthful, fully informed, productive, voluntary exchange free of negative externality.
The Warranty that we give is that:
- I. A statement is stated *TRUTHFULLY*: satisfying the criteria for such a warranty to be made.
- II. A statement is *TRUE*: Assuming that we eliminated the barriers of time, space, scale, and observability, we warranty that one would come to the same conclusion if equally truthful in his actions.
We can never state whether a statement is “Absolutely True”, as in satisfying Platonic truth. And rarely can we state that we have satisfied analytic truth, and only at human scale can we testify that we have satisfied Perceivable Truth – original experience. But we can always state whether we have stated something truthfully.
The question is only *whether we truly desire to*.
Criticism of Intellectual History:
We have been obsessed with science and math rather than seeing them as simple subsets of the more complex problem. And in the west, we took truth telling for granted, when it is the first principle upon which all other western advances were made.
(Next. Information Differences Necessary in Verbal Expression)
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine.