Author: Curt Doolittle

TRUTH, HONESTY, COSTS, JUSTIFICATION, CRITICISM

COSTS OF TRUTH

Hierarchy of Truths by internality to externality of costs.:

1) True enough to imagine a conceptual relationship

2) True enough for me to feel good about myself.

3) True enough for me to take actions that produce positive results.

4) True enough for me to not cause others to react negatively to me.

5) True enough to resolve a conflict without subjective opinion among my fellow people with similar values.

6) True enough to resolve a conflict without subjective opinion across different peoples with different values.

7) True regardless of all opinions or perspectives.

8) Tautologically true: in that the two things are equal.

CATEGORIES OF TRUTH

1) TRUTH: That testimony (description) you would give, if your knowledge (information) was complete, your language was sufficient, stated without error, cleansed of bias, and absent deceit, within the scope of precision limited to the context of the question you wish to answer; and the promise that another possessed of the same knowledge (information), performing the same due diligence, having the same experiences, would provide the same testimony.

2) TRUTHFULNESS: that testimony (description) you give if your knowledge (information) is incomplete, your language is insufficient, you have performed due diligence in the elimination of error, imaginary content, wishful thinking, bias, and deceit; within the scope of precision limited to the question you wish to answer; and which you warranty to be so; and the promise that another possessed of the knowledge, performing the same due diligence, having the same experiences, would provide the same testimony.

3) HONESTY: that testimony (description) you give with full knowledge that knowledge is incomplete, your language is insufficient, but you have not performed due diligence in the elimination of error and bias, but which you warranty is free of deceit; within the scope of precision limited to the question you wish to answer; and the promise that another possess of the same knowledge (information), performing the same due diligence, having the same experiences, would provide the same testimony.

….CATEGORIES OF HONESTY

….3.1 Demonstrated Preference: – Evidence of intuition, preference, opinion, and position as demonstrated by your actions, independent of your statements.

….3.2 Position: (criticism) – a theoretical statement that survives one’s available criticisms about external questions.

….3.3 Opinion: (justificationism) – a justified uncritical statement given the limits of one’s knowledge about external questions.

….3.4 Preference (rational expression) : a justification of one’s biases (wants).

….3.5 Intuition: (sentimental expression) – an uncritical, uncriticized, response to information that expresses a measure of existing biases (priors).

JUSTIFICATION (SUPPORT) VS CRITICISM (SURVIVAL)

1) OBVERSE: We justify moral arguments given the requirement to preserve the disproportionate rewards of Cooperation, without which survival is nearly impossible. Law and Morality are Contractual, informationally complete, and open only to increases in precision – we know the first principles of cooperation.

2) REVERSE: We criticize intuitions, hypothesis, theories and laws to remove imagination, error, bias, wishful thinking, and deception from our imaginations in order to identify truth candidates. Reality is Non Contractual, informationally incomplete, and forever open to revision. We do not yet know the fist principles of the universe.

The reason it took us so long to identify the meaning of truth (Testimony) was that we evolved from moral and cooperative creatures, and we evolved science from moral and cooperative and therefore justificationary reasoning. However, now that we know the first principles of cooperation we can complete the evolution of physical science by adding to it the criticisms necessary for cooperative science:

Physical Science Criticisms

i. identity (category)

ii. internal consistency (logic)

iii. external correspondence (often called empirical testing)

iv. existential possibility (existence proof)

v. limits (falsification) (often called parsimony)

Additional Cooperative Science Criticisms:

vi. full accounting (prohibition on selection bias)

vii. morality (consisting of productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfers of property en toto)