Let’s take the issue of truth and knowledge as an example. In terms of Genereal Semantics means to fail at consciousness of abstraction. The two happen on different layers of abstraction.
Lately it has become fashionable to speak about ‘post-truth’ and when you call for ignoring truth, you further the forces that attack it. When you redefine ‘truth’ to mean ‘knowledge’ that’s an Orwellian attack on the concept of truth that destroys that capability of the language to represent the very notion of truth and have a discourse about it.
As part of caring about practical applied ontology I participate in Wikidata. There’s a contentious question of whether the data quality of Wikidata is high enough to be automatically imported into Wikipedia.
You could go and argue that the data quality depends on how much of the information that gets imported is true and how much is false. That’s however not the central issue for the Wikipedians. They rather care about how much of it can be referenced with sources.
If you fail to mentally distinguish what’s true from what’s verifiable knowledge, that can produce problems because the two aren’t the same thing. When things become complex enough so that you can’t easily grasp it, you will start to believe that the tree didn’t made a sound because nobody heard it.
But lets get back to whether ideas can be true. If we have the sentence “autism rose over the last decade” it speaks about something called “autism”. From a physicalist perspective you can say that there are just configurations of atoms and there isn’t really anything that’s really “autism” so the whole question is pointless because you can’t make true statements about it.
This basically means that any conception of autism is as good as any other. As a result you get the awful DSM that based on consenus about clusters of symptoms that intended to be theory-neutral instead of a concept of autism that’s tries to answer based on empiric evidence what autism happens to be.
If we get back to the issue of “autism rose over the last decade” consciousness of abstraction is again important. There are the official numbers that get released. Maybe the official numbers rose because more people went to doctors that can diagnose autism. It takes consciousness of abstraction to keep the two apart. You get another layer when you think about how maybe doctors are more willing to diagnose autism given the same symptoms. As mentioned above there’s probably a cluster in reality that corresponds to autism and that’s distinct from autism!DSM, that distinction gets you another layer.
You can make reasoning mistakes by confusing all of those layers.
Let’s take the issue of truth and knowledge as an example. In terms of Genereal Semantics means to fail at consciousness of abstraction. The two happen on different layers of abstraction.
Lately it has become fashionable to speak about ‘post-truth’ and when you call for ignoring truth, you further the forces that attack it. When you redefine ‘truth’ to mean ‘knowledge’ that’s an Orwellian attack on the concept of truth that destroys that capability of the language to represent the very notion of truth and have a discourse about it.
As part of caring about practical applied ontology I participate in Wikidata. There’s a contentious question of whether the data quality of Wikidata is high enough to be automatically imported into Wikipedia.
You could go and argue that the data quality depends on how much of the information that gets imported is true and how much is false. That’s however not the central issue for the Wikipedians. They rather care about how much of it can be referenced with sources.
If you fail to mentally distinguish what’s true from what’s verifiable knowledge, that can produce problems because the two aren’t the same thing. When things become complex enough so that you can’t easily grasp it, you will start to believe that the tree didn’t made a sound because nobody heard it.
But lets get back to whether ideas can be true. If we have the sentence “autism rose over the last decade” it speaks about something called “autism”. From a physicalist perspective you can say that there are just configurations of atoms and there isn’t really anything that’s really “autism” so the whole question is pointless because you can’t make true statements about it.
This basically means that any conception of autism is as good as any other. As a result you get the awful DSM that based on consenus about clusters of symptoms that intended to be theory-neutral instead of a concept of autism that’s tries to answer based on empiric evidence what autism happens to be.
If we get back to the issue of “autism rose over the last decade” consciousness of abstraction is again important. There are the official numbers that get released. Maybe the official numbers rose because more people went to doctors that can diagnose autism. It takes consciousness of abstraction to keep the two apart. You get another layer when you think about how maybe doctors are more willing to diagnose autism given the same symptoms. As mentioned above there’s probably a cluster in reality that corresponds to autism and that’s distinct from autism!DSM, that distinction gets you another layer.
You can make reasoning mistakes by confusing all of those layers.