Analog Truth
Dec. 23rd, 2004 12:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_tectonicSo how come I'm still running around half-frantic even though I got my Christmas shopping done early? Ah well. At least we're past the solstice, so now I get more sunlight in my day.
I borrowed a philosophy book from Jen & Nick the other day. Usually philosophy makes me want to tear my hair out, but this book is actually very interesting. I think it might be because the book isn't trying to convince me of anything; it just says, "here's what Kant believed, and here's the reasoning behind it," which means that I can then say, "Aha! And here and here are the spots where he's smoking crack," and figure out what to keep and what to toss.
I might post some summaries of various philosophical concepts and my responses to them, because I find that I'm thinking about a lot of these kinds of things lately, but if I do, I'll be sure to hide them carefully behind cuts, so as not to inflict my ramblings upon the innocent.
For example, I think that many problems in philosophy arise because "truth" means one thing when we're talking about abstract concepts and another when we're talking about the real world. In the world of pattern, which is sort of like Plato's "forms", statements are either true, false, or poorly-formed. You don't have things that are "mostly true" the way you do in the physical world.
Consider the statements "all triangles have angles that sum to 180 degrees" and "all mothers are women". The first statement is always true (as long as we're talking about Euclidean space); it's not like you can find one particular triangle that it doesn't hold for if you just look long enough. But for the second, well, everything is much messier. What about animals? Isn't a mare with a foal a mother? Okay, we say, what we really meant was "all mothers are female". But what about species that divide things up differently? Bees have queens, workers, and drones; which one is "female", and why? Is it ovaries that matter? Or the womb? What about seahorses? What about fish that change sexes under environmental stress?
Okay, maybe fish gender is irrelevant for philosophical discussions. Maybe we only care about humans. But even though the vast majority of humans fall into one of two sexual categories, there's a non-zero number that don't. Consider a woman who bears a child, then sexually transitions to male, including sex-change surgery. Is s/he a "mother"? Is s/he a "woman"? What about a similar person a few decades from now who gets gene therapy to replace X chromosomes with Ys? Science fiction, yes, but near-future, not far-future.
Anyway, the point is, when we talk about things in the real world (as opposed to purely abstract things), I think it makes sense to talk about truth being an analog and continuous value, not a discrete and boolean one. Things in the real world are more or less true, but never wholly so. We can be very sure something is or isn't true -- but not certain. Ivory soap is as pure as our truth can get.
Okay, I just rambled a whole bunch more than I intended to. Summary: I have this idea that abstract truth is boolean and real-world truth is floating-point. I think that might be philosophically interesting, and I might explore it more. Probably not a new idea, but as best I can tell from the book, none of the big philosophers has ever dealt with it.
For now, though, the truth is that I need to get to bed.
...As soon as I fold the laundry.
I borrowed a philosophy book from Jen & Nick the other day. Usually philosophy makes me want to tear my hair out, but this book is actually very interesting. I think it might be because the book isn't trying to convince me of anything; it just says, "here's what Kant believed, and here's the reasoning behind it," which means that I can then say, "Aha! And here and here are the spots where he's smoking crack," and figure out what to keep and what to toss.
I might post some summaries of various philosophical concepts and my responses to them, because I find that I'm thinking about a lot of these kinds of things lately, but if I do, I'll be sure to hide them carefully behind cuts, so as not to inflict my ramblings upon the innocent.
For example, I think that many problems in philosophy arise because "truth" means one thing when we're talking about abstract concepts and another when we're talking about the real world. In the world of pattern, which is sort of like Plato's "forms", statements are either true, false, or poorly-formed. You don't have things that are "mostly true" the way you do in the physical world.
Consider the statements "all triangles have angles that sum to 180 degrees" and "all mothers are women". The first statement is always true (as long as we're talking about Euclidean space); it's not like you can find one particular triangle that it doesn't hold for if you just look long enough. But for the second, well, everything is much messier. What about animals? Isn't a mare with a foal a mother? Okay, we say, what we really meant was "all mothers are female". But what about species that divide things up differently? Bees have queens, workers, and drones; which one is "female", and why? Is it ovaries that matter? Or the womb? What about seahorses? What about fish that change sexes under environmental stress?
Okay, maybe fish gender is irrelevant for philosophical discussions. Maybe we only care about humans. But even though the vast majority of humans fall into one of two sexual categories, there's a non-zero number that don't. Consider a woman who bears a child, then sexually transitions to male, including sex-change surgery. Is s/he a "mother"? Is s/he a "woman"? What about a similar person a few decades from now who gets gene therapy to replace X chromosomes with Ys? Science fiction, yes, but near-future, not far-future.
Anyway, the point is, when we talk about things in the real world (as opposed to purely abstract things), I think it makes sense to talk about truth being an analog and continuous value, not a discrete and boolean one. Things in the real world are more or less true, but never wholly so. We can be very sure something is or isn't true -- but not certain. Ivory soap is as pure as our truth can get.
Okay, I just rambled a whole bunch more than I intended to. Summary: I have this idea that abstract truth is boolean and real-world truth is floating-point. I think that might be philosophically interesting, and I might explore it more. Probably not a new idea, but as best I can tell from the book, none of the big philosophers has ever dealt with it.
For now, though, the truth is that I need to get to bed.
...As soon as I fold the laundry.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-29 01:10 pm (UTC)It's not a problem with imprecision in language. For one thing, it's meaningless to talk about truth outside the context of language.
The problem is that language is an inherently abstract system of representation, and "truth" is a description of a relationship between patterns. So if we're talking about other abstract systems, we can set up a perfect correspondence between representation and object, and "truth" only encompasses the consistency of the relationship.
Whereas if we're talking about physical reality, we're making abstract statements about observed patterns, but the observations are flawed and the patterns themselves are imperfectly instantiated. So there's always room for mismatch between the representation and the underlying reality. The notion of "truth" then has to deal not only with the abstract pattern relationships, which are boolean-true, but also with the relationships between representation and reality, which are analog-true.
To use
So in the triangle-versus-woman example, the problem isn't that we're using a flawed definition of the word. We all know what triangles are and what women are; those are decent representations of the abstract patterns in question. The problem is that women are real entities, and there are real-world entities that instantiate the abstract pattern "woman" imperfectly or incompletely.
And you can't solve that problem with better definitions. Pick a term, and no matter how narrowly you define it, I can construct an example that will straddle its definitional boundary. "Alive", "human", "male", whatever, as long as these terms are referring to real objects, there's a little bit of fuzziness, a small grey area at the edges where you can find boundary cases that are difficult or impossible to categorize.
The only statements that aren't fuzzy are basically identity statements ("the set of Floyds includes Chris, Rose, Andrew, and Liese"), and the process of refining definitions to exclude boundary cases eventually results in one big identity: "the universe is the way it is", which, while boolean-True, is not particularly useful.
So, to sum up, it's not that Hard-and-Fast Truth is absent in the real world, it's that the idea isn't even meaningful in that context beyond the non-linguistic atomic identity of "this-here-now". Any statement about patterns in the real world is More-Or-Less True because of the inherent mismatch or gap between abstract pattern and concrete instantiation of pattern. And it's not because language is imperfect, it's because reality is.
Fascinating!
Date: 2004-12-30 09:24 am (UTC)That's interesting, and I'm going to argue with it here to test it, not because I disagree with it. I might agree with it. I'm not sure. First, tell me: is this a notion that's plainly apparent to mathematicians or physicists? I think you made mention in another comment about chemicals or some such. If there's a scientific underpinning to this which is important, I'd like to hear it.
The first challenge to this notion that comes to mind is, If reality isn't perfect, what is? You seem to be arguing from an essentially Platonic stand-point, which is that these "patterns" are hard-and-fast True and perfect and reality is fuzzy and imperfect. But doesn't our knowledge of these patterns derive from observations in reality (and extrapolation beyond that)? And isn't it conceivable that the problem is not that reality is flawed, but that we either don't recognize all the patterns at work (perfectly at work) in reality or that we can't account for all the operative ones at work at a given observational moment?
I guess it seems to me that if we're going to start labeling things as imperfect, the first recipient should be ourselves, not reality.
Again, I still think the conclusions about how we should talk and think about abstract vs. real things is the same under either model. True/Accurate, for instance, is a useful--probably vital--distinction.
--Chris