Category: Epistemology and Method

(NLI CORE)
THE CRITERIA FOR A TRUTH CLAIM
Truth – In the Context of a Truth Claim, Truth consists of the promise of testimony of infallibility that has survived sufficient due diligence to promise the evasion of the imposition of involuntary costs upon any form of capital (demonstrated interest) from the temporal, to informational to normative, to institutional, to material, for the self or others. (promissory, performative, warrantied(due diligence), satisfying demand for infallibility that would impose involuntary costs upon the demonstrated interests of one’s self or others in the context in question.)
Therefore Consisting of Demand for:
– Infallibility – A decision upon which the resulting display word and deed impose no involuntary costs upon the demonstrated interests of one’s self or others in the context in question.
– Decidability – Sufficient information exists, and no other information is required, such that alternatives are sufficiently improbable to impossible to satisfy the demand for infallibility in the context in question.
Consisting of:
– Truthfulness – Testimony sufficient for the satisfaction of demand for infallibility in the context in question (Tautological, Ideal, Logical, Testifiable, Demonstrated, Honest, Explanatory, Analogical.)
Consisting of:
– Testifiability – The limited list of dimensions to which humans are capable of testifying, and if satisfied, constitute the possibility of a truth claim.
Consisting of Satisfying demand for:
– – Realism – All existence consists of the persistence of constant relations between states of energy, independent of human perception, mind, belief, or preference, yet categorizable by human sense and perception, into entities(references, states, nouns), categories, processes(verbs), and consequences (state changes, nouns).
– – Naturalism – All phenomena within existence have natural causes that can be observed, measured, described, understood as consistent and coherent with all other phenomena, and reduced to irreducible causes (first principles), using sense, perception, and logical and physical instrumentation.
Consisting of Satisfying demand for:
– – – Materialism (Persistence): Reality consists of physical or material entities that persist over time.
– – – Determinism (Lawfulness): Existence operates according to consistent laws and regularities that can be discovered and described by science.
– – – Reductionism (Reducibility): Complex phenomena can be explained by reducing them to their simpler, more fundamental components and processes.
– – – Opportunism (Emergence): The interaction of simple elements can lead to the emergence of complex systems and opportunities for combination, recombination, innovation, adaptation, and evolution.
– – – Scarcity (Constraint): All existence consists of limited availability of resources, which drives competition, adaptation, and evolution, influencing the behavior and interaction of organisms, shaping life and ecosystems through constraints.
– – – Continuity (Consistency): There exists continuity between humans and the rest of the natural world, with all entities and phenomena being subject to the same natural laws and principles.
AND
Satisfying demand for:
– – Identity – Categorically Consistent
– – Logical – Internally Consistent
– – Empirical – Externally Correspondent
– – Possible – Operationally Possible
– – Rational – Subjectively Rational (Bounded Rationality)
– – Reciprocal – Reciprocally Subjectively Rational
AND
– – Fully accounted
– – Within Stated Limits
– – Within the limits of warrantability
– – Within the limits of liability
This is all it is possible for humans to testify to.
If one cannot testify to these criteria then one cannot promise a truth claim.
The reason this took millennia to solve was because it was, in fact, a very hard problem.

Curt Doolittle
The Natural Law Institute