The sky is not blue (pardon the obviousness)
You do not know what the reality is. It’s damn multidimensional and complex.
On one system level it can be described as the interaction of human beings. On another (parallel) level—as the interaction of collectives of various scales. On the third (parallel) - through the interaction of atoms and molecules. On the fourth (parallel) - through string theory. On the fifth (perpendicular) through the psychology of crowds. On the sixth (perpendicular), through the influence of culture. On the seventh (perpendicular), through the influence of the weather. On the eighth (perpendicular) through the influence of the second law of thermodynamics. And so on.
Any model of reality is a priori an incomplete slice of it in several of an infinite number of dimensions, useful for something to the one who made this model and presents it to others.
And from this it follows directly that one can speak of truth, as Tarsky does, only in limited application to a particular tangible case that is practically verifiable and useful for some purpose to you (or the group of people around) right now. The case of the diamond in the box is fine; also the case of causality with important consequences is perfectly fine: if you go out the fifth-story window, you will die. But to say that something (especially intangible) is true in principle is wrong. Because it isn’t the truth, but only a small slice of it, a slice in one person’s (or a group of people in this time and place) perception, in his terms, in his ontological space of concepts and connections between them, in his life experience, etc.
// This is different for the case of scientific experiments, which are conducted in a pre-agreed terminology and repeatable. Here we can talk about truth for a group of scientists who have certain knowledge and use certain terminology[1]. Case with a fifth-story window goes into that basket of experiments.//
But most of the time in real life we don’t conduct scientific experiments in a pre-agreed upon terminology, we apply our notions of “truth” to how we see some intangible aspects of reality around us (is the sky blue? exactly? for everyone?) and, even worse, clash with other people who see that same reality differently.
“Blue sky” version of Litany of Tarski is wrong in principle.
“If the sky is blue” is a meaningless phrase, and you can’t draw a meaningful conclusion from a meaningless phrase.
- ^
That there is now the only scientific method generally accepted by all scientists as an ideal for conducting experiments in physics or other exact sciences, as well as the only Aristotelian logic invented thousands of years ago, and no other options are searched for (or I’m wrong and they do it now?), doesn’t that strike you as somewhat, um, a little overconfident?
Please stop pretending to be wise. Your position is not some kind of neutral high-ground, but rather a definite judgement about truth, which has to be defended on its own merits, not just by pointing out the flaws in other viewpoints.
In other words, let’s assume we live in a world which operated under your principles, where everyone was radically skeptical of every claim, to the point of disbelieving even simply statements like, “The grass is green,” or “The sky is blue.” Would that world have a better understanding of reality than this one? Would that world’s maps correspond better to its territory? No. Everyone would be so caught up in their radical skepticism of everything that no one would be able to build upon each others’ knowledge.
My principles are not in disbelieving simple statements, but to see and articulate that these statements (especially not scientific ones) are not truth as many of people even here tend to believe.
My position is: I know that I don’t know a lot, much more than I know, and the more I live the bigger my knowledge and the bigger my ignorance. And I’m quite sure of my stance here.
This position of me is not preventing you from having your own, different position, as we can see by your comments.
And you, at the other hand, just told me to stop pretending to be wise.
Yes, because that’s what you’re doing. You’re pretending that because things are unknown to you, they are unknowable to everyone. You’re pretending that it’s impossible to know things about the world unless that knowledge meets some kind of impossibly high standard of scientific rigor. And you’re dressing it up by using high status words (in italics), to make it seem as if you’re enunciating some kind of deep insight.
Remember that confusion and ignorance are properties of your own mind, not properties of the world. That is not the proper use of humility.
some of those equivalences in the first paragraph felt like they stretched far enough that they exited the domain of the type being described. But, it does seem approximately true that the way we say “the sky is blue” is only an approximation of a much more complex histogram of photon frequencies detectable from angles received from away from the surface of earth during daylight when the air is relatively uniform in composition. or whatever the actual precise query is that will mean the same thing even to a robot who has to infill the concept of “blue” in response to the query.
About domain of type: I see the reality as infinitely complex system and causal links are as much a part of this system as objects and events and actors and laws of physics and other entities and phenomenons, named and separated from the background by human’s attention. The sky is one of these objects, it doesn’t exist by itself in reality, except that in the imagination of people (as well as money, states, gods etc.), unlike living objects (subjects?) and phenomenons which do exist independently of our attention to them. While this concept of sky is useful—it is used. If people will not need it, it will disappear from existence. And for me the speaking of the truth of the some qualities of such concept is a not-correct way of looking at things.
Agreed. “Sky is blue” is quite a good model of reality, useful for some purposes, but it’s not the truth.
The problem with the truth is that many most terrific wars in the history of humankind were ignited by different concept of the truth.
And people who think they know the truth are the most intolerant as we can see here.