Re:The Truth Matters and Secular Humanists Should Defend It
by analog31 on Saturday December 03, 2022 @04:47PM
(#33847760)
I'm an experimental scientist. My take would be that truth is reachable, but the Truth with a capital T is a potentially meaningless throwback to a past age of certainty.
What I mean is that some theories have been corroborated to the point that they can be regarded as "truth" for all intents and purposes, and despite known limitations in some cases. Examples might include electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, gravitation, and biological evolution.
Regarding those theories, we can still say that we accept them on a tentative basis, but it would not be irrational to assign a vanishingly low likelihood that any of them will be radically overturned.
Re:The Truth Matters and Secular Humanists Should Defend It
by naasking on Saturday December 03, 2022 @10:59PM
(#33850459)
Radically overturned is an overstatement I think. The theories you've listed are all tautologically valid in the domains in which we've tested them. What will happen is that either they will continue to hold in new domains where they haven't yet been tested, or we will discover a more general theory that will reduce to these theories in the limit.
Re:The Truth Matters and Secular Humanists Should Defend It
by jhanschoo on Sunday December 04, 2022 @02:40AM
(#33851496)
Indeed, to illustrate; Einstein and Planck doesn't mean that for most of our lived experience and work, classical mechanics offers a far more useful model of the world.
Re:The Truth Matters and Secular Humanists Should Defend It
by jltsiren on Saturday December 03, 2022 @05:01PM
(#33847862)
I was referring to the crisis in the early 20th century, when the paradoxes and inconsistencies in the foundations of mathematics became too troublesome to ignore. The crisis was eventually resolved, but the mathematics that arose from it was more limited in scope than what earlier mathematicians had hoped. That is usually not a major concern if you work in mathematics, but it was a significant change in the understanding of the nature of truth.
I am not an experimental scientist or philosopher, but I am a mathematician, and I thoroughly reject the claim that the big idea of 20th-century mathematics is that the truth is fundamentally unreachable. To be sure, we found that one can speak meaningfully, and rigorously, of the limits of decidability; but only an algorithmic view of mathematics will lead one to conclude that this makes the truth unreachable. Perhaps one could advance the claim that certain truths are unreachable (I do not, and find the claim woolly), but that is quite different from saying that truth itself is unreachable.