It seems worth noting that taking map-territory distinction as object is useful in contexts that aren’t about highminded philosophy or epistemology. Eg if I’m debugging some software, one angle to do that from is searching for the relevant difference between my mental model of how the software works, and how it actually works.
For the highly abstract epistemology stuff, my stance is: Most people should probably be more pluralistic. Thinking about map-territory correspondence is a frame in which you can figure out what’s true. Thinking about predictiveness is a frame in which you can figure out what’s true. Coherence, Bayesianism, and pragmatism are frames in which you can figure out what’s true.
A lot of philosophy seems like what it’s trying to do is to establish a pecking order between frames: to make one particular thing The Ultimate Source of Truth, and rebuild and justify the rest in terms of that. I think this is a mistake. What we actually do, when we’re not trying to be philosophical, and what actually works, is we use all the frames we’ve picked up, we use them to judge each other’s predictions, we kick out the ones that underperform too badly, and eventually wind up at a fixpoint where all our models of truth are making mostly the same predictions. This works better because lots of things are easy to think about in one ontology and hard to think about in another, and if we try to mash everything into the same ontology for philosophical reasons, the mashing process tends to force us into tortured analogies that yield unreliable conclusions.
Yes, different tools are useful to different purposes, but also sometimes trying to extract a general theory is quite useful since tools can get you confused when they are applied outside their domain of function.
It seems worth noting that taking map-territory distinction as object is useful in contexts that aren’t about highminded philosophy or epistemology. Eg if I’m debugging some software, one angle to do that from is searching for the relevant difference between my mental model of how the software works, and how it actually works.
For the highly abstract epistemology stuff, my stance is: Most people should probably be more pluralistic. Thinking about map-territory correspondence is a frame in which you can figure out what’s true. Thinking about predictiveness is a frame in which you can figure out what’s true. Coherence, Bayesianism, and pragmatism are frames in which you can figure out what’s true.
A lot of philosophy seems like what it’s trying to do is to establish a pecking order between frames: to make one particular thing The Ultimate Source of Truth, and rebuild and justify the rest in terms of that. I think this is a mistake. What we actually do, when we’re not trying to be philosophical, and what actually works, is we use all the frames we’ve picked up, we use them to judge each other’s predictions, we kick out the ones that underperform too badly, and eventually wind up at a fixpoint where all our models of truth are making mostly the same predictions. This works better because lots of things are easy to think about in one ontology and hard to think about in another, and if we try to mash everything into the same ontology for philosophical reasons, the mashing process tends to force us into tortured analogies that yield unreliable conclusions.
Yes, different tools are useful to different purposes, but also sometimes trying to extract a general theory is quite useful since tools can get you confused when they are applied outside their domain of function.
Cf. Toolbox Thinking and Law Thinking