Category: Epistemology and Method

SPEAKING THE TRUTH

(reposted)

You can claim you have done sufficient due diligence to warrant your words against retribution. That is all you can claim. Otherwise you can speak to the air (yourself) but not to another.

If you have done so you can err, or your information may be insufficient, or more information in the future may be uncovered.

But we can never claim a thing is true if there is more information that can ever be presented that could falsify the claim. When we say something ‘is’ true. we CAN only say that we have done due diligence against it’s falsehood to the best or our knowledge and ability.

if you say something ‘is’ true, you must also state how it exists, since ‘is’ refers to existence.

We use the verb ‘to be’, especially in the form of ‘is’ to avoid describing how something exists – for rather complicated reasons – most of which are saving of effort, others are the high cost of changing between experience, intention, action, and observation – a grammatical cost that is quite high for us humans.

What we evolved the verb “to be” to mean, is “I promise that you will come to the came conclusion by making the same observation”

So to say ‘the cat is black’ is to say ‘if you observe this cat then it will appear black in color.’ This is the only thing you CAN mean, because it is the only existentially possible thing you could mean. We just habituate language out of experience and effort reduction, rather than follow rules of truthfulness of language, which is expensive to learn and speak.

So that is what statements mean: they mean that you have made observations of something or other, translated that experience into analogies to experience, then spoken that to another who upon listening recreates the experience through language. He then fails to understand, or requires additional information until he does understand, and the additional information so that he does not err. So just as we accumulate sounds into words, we accumulate experiences generated by words into reconstructions of the speaker’s experience.

You can convey truthfulness (tested), honesty(untested), error, bias, wishful thinking, deception and fantasy. But only you can create a statement so only you are responsible for the truthfulness of your statement. Your statement is not true. You speak truthfully(having tested), honestly(having not), in error, bias, wishful thinking, fantasy, or deception. That is all that is possible.

Someone else finds your statement true when they reconstruct the same experience. So whey I say x=y I am saying that I promise you will also find that x=y if you choose to test this. This is all you CAN mean.

Now you can say that you speak impulsively, honestly, or truthfully, or something in between. So that you cannot promise that the audience will also come to the same conclusion that you do. That is the difference between information (impulse), hypothesis(honesty), theory(truthfulness). So you can then only promise that what you’re offering is information, honesty, or truthfulness. But one must tell others which we are offering: information, honesty, or truthfulness.

So correspondence exists when you have done due diligence on your observation, and when you consequent speech allows your audience to reconstructs your experience, and when they possess sufficient knowledge to do so. In other words the other person may lack the knowledge to reconstruct the experience of correspondence.

This does not mean you cannot know a truth candidate. You can. Since you can reconstruct it. But you cannot test it without others with more knowledge. This is why science is a social construct. it is very hard to know the ‘ultimate’ most ‘parsimonious’ truthful statement because it is increasingly hard to possess sufficient information to know if it could produce greater correspondence.

So in practicality, if you establish limits on your truthful statement such as “this works for tis circumstance’ then it is fairly easy. But if you say this works for N circumstances this gets increasingly difficult because there is more and more information that you can’t necessarily account for.

You probably note by now that I do not rely upon ideal types, but force construction of both spectra and sequences when making arguments. And this is why I can make these statements. Because i have tested them for truthfulness before speaking them, and you on the other hand are speaking honestly, most likely because you do not yet know how to speak truthfully. Because it’s hard.

I hope this was helpful to you.

Affections.

Curt