Re: virus: KMO quotes Plato

Jason McVean (jmcvean@acs.ucalgary.ca)
Wed, 30 Oct 96 19:05:10 MST


KMO said:
> This is a response to one of Jason's recent posts:
> Objective reality is a state of affairs. States of affairs are not the
> kinds of things which have truth values. Propositions about states of
> affairs are the kinds of things which have truth values. To equal
> Absolute Truth (a proposition) with Objective Reality (a state of
> affairs) is equivilant to claiming that an apple is true or the annual
> rainfall in the Amazon basin is false.

I knew this was going to be raised even as I wrote last time.
I was sloppy. What if I define AT as the state of OR? Hmmm...
I guess the crux of the issue is here:

> Absolute Truth (a proposition) with Objective Reality (a state of
> affairs)

If you say that Absolute Truth is a proposition, then obviously
AT does not equal OB. I'm proposing that we adopt something
along the lines of "absolute truth is what objective reality
is". I agree that there is a bit of incongruity there but at the
same time, that suggestion would require very little alteration
to how "truth" is used in everyday language. And I tried to show
in my previous message that something like "truth" is still a
useful term and that abandoning the term "truth" leads to
terribly awkward phrasing.

To use your example, I don't mean to say that an apple is
true. Rather that the truth of an apple (type T) is that it (on
average) has a concentration of fructose=C, a diameter=D,
contains N seeds, and so on.

Jason

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Dept. of Physics and Astronomy University of Calgary
jmcvean@acs.ucalgary.ca http://www.ucalgary.ca/~jmcvean

"And it would have worked if it weren't for those meddling kids."
-----------------------------------------------------------------