(important piece)
–“We can speak about truth even without a warranty, and we don’t mean truthlike or agreed to be true, just plain true.”—Bruce
[Y]es, but how do we know you are speaking truthfully? How do we prevent pseudoscience? Or are you, like free speech advocates, saying that the damage that is done by error is less than the good that is achieved by tolerating it? Which is terribly pragmatic. It’s also demonstrably false. Propagating false arguments turns out to be much more effective than true ones. Or do you claim that scientists should be able to engage in untruthful speech? Or are you saying that because truth is unknown and never knowable, that I can never speak the truth? ***What is the material difference between a theory stated truthfully (internally consistent and externally correspondent), and a theory not stated truthfully (internally consistent and externally correspondent) yet excused as not being possible to be true, and therefore not subject to requirement that it is spoken truthfully?*** This isn’t an immaterial question. It is perhaps THE ethical question facing scientific investigation in ANY field. Evidence is that in hard science this rule is respected. Evidence is that outside of hard science it is not. Then difference is that hard science is a luxury good without opportunity cost, and everything else is — particularly politics and law, where laws do not perish like falsified theories. The communist manifesto, the labor theory of value, the possibility of a universally DESIRABLE moral code vs a universally moral set of laws. These are all false statements, because they are false in construction, not in prediction. You see, science is pretty much ‘irrelevant’ because it is a luxury good, but truth must apply universally no? or it is not truthful definition of truth? ***While it may be true that the ultimate truth (the most parsimonious statement possible) is the optimum definition of true, does that obviate us from pursuing it with truthful statements? Furthermore why not simply state the truth: that all truthfully constructed arguments and theories are true but incomplete, and constantly open to revision, rather than no theories are true except the one most parsimonious statement that we can never make?*** You see, you might think it’s clear and simple – but it’s not. It’s just experience that has convinced you so. You see, popper’s warning is merely moral, not necessary. And I submit, like the ethics of the ghetto peoples whose verbal methodology, and whose ritualistic literature, was purely pragmatic, that there are vast consequences to platonic truth just as there are vast consequences to platonic (false) anything. As far as I know I am correct. I cant get away from it. because we are currently the victims of a century and a half of pseudoscience the immorality of which has not been achieved since the forcible conversion to christianity or the muslim conversion to scriptural perfection. If we look at just the one’s that I see as catastrophic; kant, freud, marx, cantor, russell/frege, keynes, mises, rothbard, then all of these fallacies were preventable by a requirement for operational definitions – proof of internal consistency: proof of existence. Analogy and meaning are properties of myths. Action and measurement are properties of reality. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine