Dear John,
Dear Bruno, think about it as "absolute truth:
Isn't 1+1 not 2, but 11?
If "11" is a notation for 2, then it is the *same* "absolute" truth,
just written with non standard notation.
If "11" denotes eleven (1*10 + 1), as it usually does, then it is an
"absolute falsity", which contradicts directly what we have already
agree on since a long time, notably the law of addition:
x + 0 = x
x + successor(y) = successor(x+y)
OK?
Bruno
On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 10:01 AM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
wrote:
Hello John,
On 24 Jun 2012, at 21:43, John Mikes wrote:
Bruno:
Doesn't it emerge in this respect "WHAT truth?" or rather
"WHOSE truth?" is there an accepted authority to verify an
"absolute" truth judgeable from a different belief system?
I don't think such authority exists. We can only agree on
hypotheses, about such truth, concerning some domain of investigation.
We can also agree on the existence or non existence of facts
confirming some truth concerning some reality.
But we can bet such truth exists, even if we cannot believe it or
know it "for sure".
Examples:
- Few people doubt that "1+1=2" is an "absolute truth", when 1 and 2
are used as the usual name for the standard natural numbers, and "+"
represents the standard addition operation. Likewise for the whole
elementary (first order) arithmetic.
- We usually don't doubt the mundane informations. So, 'Obama is the
actual president of the US' can reasonably be assumed as absolute. I
mean, with "actual", that "Obama is the actual president of the US
in our reality" is the absolute truth. Not the proposition "Obama is
the actual president of the US" which might be false in the universe
next door.
Most theoretical truth are absolute, thanks to their conditional
shapes. For example the existence of parallel universes in the
theoretical framework of QM-without-collapse is absolute, accepting
some reasonable definition of what is a universe (a set of events
closed for interaction, for example). This is absolute as it is a
theorem in QM-without-collapse (or of comp). Of course the
proposition "parallel universes exist" is not absolute at all.
Bruno
On Sat, Jun 23, 2012 at 4:50 AM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
wrote:
On 23 Jun 2012, at 09:47, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
On 22.06.2012 08:03 Stephen P. King said the following:
On 6/22/2012 1:50 AM, Brian Tenneson wrote:
I have many questions.
One is "what if truth were malleable?" --
HI Brian,
If it was malleable, how would we detect the modifications? If our
"standards" of truth varied, how could we tell? This reminds me of
the debate between Leibniz and Newton regarding the notion of
absolute space.
If one assumes the correspondence theory of truth, then the
question would be if a reality were malleable.
Right. Which leads to the question; what does Brian mean by "truth
is malleable"?
Would this entail that arithmetical truth is malleable? What would
it mean that the truth of "17 is prime" is malleable. It looks like
we need a more solid truth than arithmetic in which we can make
sense of the malleability of the truth in arithmetic, but I cannot
see anything more solid than elementary arithmetic.
Some truth can be malleable in some operational sense, but this
will be only metaphorical. For example the "truth" that cannabis is
far more safe than alcohol, appears to be quite malleable, but this
is just because special interest exploits the lack of education in
logic. People driven by power are used to mistreat truth, but it is
just errors or lies. I guess Brian's question is more metaphysical,
but then in which non malleable context can we make sense of
metaphysically malleable truth? Perhaps Brian should elaborate on
what he means by "truth is malleable"? It seems to me that such an
idea is similar to complete relativism, which defeats itself by not
allowing that very idea to be relativized.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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