Aug 7, 2018 08:55 PM
To my best belief: just what is the pragmatic theory of truth?
https://aeon.co/ideas/to-my-best-belief-...y-of-truth
EXCERPT: What is it for something to be true? One might think that the answer is obvious. A true belief gets reality right: our words correspond to objects and relations in the world. But making sense of that idea involves one in ever more difficult workarounds to intractable problems. For instance, how do we account for the statement ‘It did not rain in Toronto on 20 May 2018’? There don’t seem to be negative facts in the world that might correspond to the belief. What about ‘Every human is mortal’? There are more humans – past, present and future – than individual people in the world. (That is, a generalisation like ‘All Fs’ goes beyond the existing world of Fs, because ‘All Fs’ stretches into the future.) What about ‘Torture is wrong’? What are the objects in the world that might correspond to that? And what good is it explaining truth in terms of independently existing objects and facts, since we have access only to our interpretations of them?
Pragmatism can help us with some of these issues. The 19th-century American philosopher Charles Peirce, one of the founders of pragmatism, explained the core of this tradition beautifully: ‘We must not begin by talking of pure ideas, – vagabond thoughts that tramp the public roads without any human habitation, – but must begin with men and their conversation.’ Truth is a property of our beliefs. It is what we aim at, and is essentially connected to our practices of enquiry, action and evaluation. Truth, in other words, is the best that we could do.
MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/to-my-best-belief-...y-of-truth
The Quantum Revolution in Philosophy
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-quantum-rev...hilosophy/
Richard Healey, The Quantum Revolution in Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2017, 288pp., $45.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780198714057.
EXCERPT: . . . "Shut up and calculate!" is a physicist's slogan response to quantum puzzlement, often attributed to Richard Feynman but probably coined by N. David Mermin to caricature the Copenhagen interpretation. Healey's approach, sophisticated and reflective as it is, has something in common with this response: although we may speak about the functional role of quantum concepts, we must stay silent about quantum reality. Healey's pragmatist treats quantum theory as a black box for generating predictions for the behaviour of physical systems, and we are not permitted to seek a description of the operations of the black box without transgressing the boundaries of quantum theory. There is a great deal of novelty and philosophical interest in the resulting picture, especially in the connections that are drawn with contemporary pragmatism and inferentialism. Healey's book is sure to become a standard point of reference in the interpretive literature. Still, it seems unlikely that it will deter ongoing attempts to construct descriptions of quantum reality....
MORE: https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-quantum-rev...hilosophy/
https://aeon.co/ideas/to-my-best-belief-...y-of-truth
EXCERPT: What is it for something to be true? One might think that the answer is obvious. A true belief gets reality right: our words correspond to objects and relations in the world. But making sense of that idea involves one in ever more difficult workarounds to intractable problems. For instance, how do we account for the statement ‘It did not rain in Toronto on 20 May 2018’? There don’t seem to be negative facts in the world that might correspond to the belief. What about ‘Every human is mortal’? There are more humans – past, present and future – than individual people in the world. (That is, a generalisation like ‘All Fs’ goes beyond the existing world of Fs, because ‘All Fs’ stretches into the future.) What about ‘Torture is wrong’? What are the objects in the world that might correspond to that? And what good is it explaining truth in terms of independently existing objects and facts, since we have access only to our interpretations of them?
Pragmatism can help us with some of these issues. The 19th-century American philosopher Charles Peirce, one of the founders of pragmatism, explained the core of this tradition beautifully: ‘We must not begin by talking of pure ideas, – vagabond thoughts that tramp the public roads without any human habitation, – but must begin with men and their conversation.’ Truth is a property of our beliefs. It is what we aim at, and is essentially connected to our practices of enquiry, action and evaluation. Truth, in other words, is the best that we could do.
MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/to-my-best-belief-...y-of-truth
The Quantum Revolution in Philosophy
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-quantum-rev...hilosophy/
Richard Healey, The Quantum Revolution in Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2017, 288pp., $45.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780198714057.
EXCERPT: . . . "Shut up and calculate!" is a physicist's slogan response to quantum puzzlement, often attributed to Richard Feynman but probably coined by N. David Mermin to caricature the Copenhagen interpretation. Healey's approach, sophisticated and reflective as it is, has something in common with this response: although we may speak about the functional role of quantum concepts, we must stay silent about quantum reality. Healey's pragmatist treats quantum theory as a black box for generating predictions for the behaviour of physical systems, and we are not permitted to seek a description of the operations of the black box without transgressing the boundaries of quantum theory. There is a great deal of novelty and philosophical interest in the resulting picture, especially in the connections that are drawn with contemporary pragmatism and inferentialism. Healey's book is sure to become a standard point of reference in the interpretive literature. Still, it seems unlikely that it will deter ongoing attempts to construct descriptions of quantum reality....
MORE: https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-quantum-rev...hilosophy/