Truth value as magnitude of predictions

This article was originally published on my blog: https://blog.cerebralab.com/Truth_value_as_magnitude_of_predictions

The best way to discern truths from lies is to see if they have a probability and a margin of error attached to them.

The second best way to do so is to ask when the people holding those potential truths were able to bring them to bear to alter the course of the world.

Once you get past the silly phenomenological and metaphysical layers (i.e. “Do chairs exist ?” Style questions) the problem of truth becomes rather interesting.

In that “truth”, as we commonly use it, will always be dependent on the context, the individual thinking or saying it and the inherent errors in the ways we determine it.

Sometimes (usually) we consider the errors or the probability of it being “true” as being negligible, other times we go to great lengths to determine them.

When looking at a chair it’s rather obvious that the mental map we have for any given chair will differ between individuals. If two people were to strive towards perfectly describing a chair there might be some amount of difference between their description, but the difference would be of no consequence. Thus, we don’t ascribe any error bars to the truth of an object being a chair.

When looking at the data resulting from the collision between some particles, the instruments will have collected certain things that we consider to be…