Every description of reality that matches it is true.
Descriptions are based on words. Those words have a pretty different quality than a bunch of physical atoms.
To quote Alfred Korzybski: “The map is not the territory.”
The guy wrote a big book titled “Science and Sanity”. It’s about building knowledge on different fundaments. It has been influential in cybernetics, constructivism and fields like NLP.
Even at my university people who do biological modeling don’t try to make models that match reality 100%. Part of what of the skill of making good biological models is about simplifying the right stuff given the purpose of the model.
Models get evaluated based on whether they are useful for a given purpose. They don’t get evaluated based on whether they are true.
Reality might be out there but there no way our descriptions can match it completely. They can just be good enough to allow us to make decent predictions about the world around us.
Descriptions are based on words. Those words have a pretty different quality than a bunch of physical atoms. To quote Alfred Korzybski: “The map is not the territory.” The guy wrote a big book titled “Science and Sanity”. It’s about building knowledge on different fundaments. It has been influential in cybernetics, constructivism and fields like NLP.
Even at my university people who do biological modeling don’t try to make models that match reality 100%. Part of what of the skill of making good biological models is about simplifying the right stuff given the purpose of the model. Models get evaluated based on whether they are useful for a given purpose. They don’t get evaluated based on whether they are true.
Reality might be out there but there no way our descriptions can match it completely. They can just be good enough to allow us to make decent predictions about the world around us.