The epistemic problem of "deriving truth from scratch "

[LastThursday]

@zurew as I said we're arguing from different paradigms, so you're not going to agree with me, and that's fine by me. For example:

27 minutes ago, zurew said:

There are facts of the matter about the laws of physics independent from your knowledge of it. It might be the case, that you dont know anything about the laws of physics , but thats just a statement about  knowledge, but that doesnt change anything about the laws of physics.

I say the laws of physics are a construction of human thought. We observe nature, make up hypotheses (propositions) about our observations, and then validate those hypotheses to get at their truth value. The very concept of "law" is a construct. There's nothing instrinsic at all about "the laws of physics". The laws of physics don't hold if you have no notion of laws or physics. In any case the laws are constantly revised and added to, a Victorian's laws of physics is not a 21st century person's laws of physics.

Equally, propositions are constructions of human thought, not separate from them. A proposition only "exists" as human thought, nothing else. And, as such propositions must be shared into other minds, and so suffer from relativity. Epistemology is not prior to human thought.

27 minutes ago, zurew said:

I dont know what it means for a proposition to exist

Because you paradigm doesn't allow it.

Edited Saturday at 04:06 PM by LastThursday

[zurew]

23 minutes ago, LastThursday said:

I say the laws of physics are a construction of human thought.

Lets clear up what you actually mean by that and what that entails. There is an interpretation of that statement that is sensible to me , but there is another that isn't sensible at all.

Given how you intended to mean that statement - does that mean that if I think I can fly, then that actually makes it so that I can fly?

I also think there might be an equivocation and misinterpretation on the sentence "laws of physics" - I meant the behavior of nature and I didnt mean our modelling of nature.

23 minutes ago, LastThursday said:

Because you paradigm doesn't allow it.

It has nothing to do with what my paradigm allows or doesnt allow and it has everything to do with that sentence not being intelligible to me.

It might be a sensible and coherent statement and view, I just dont understand what 'propositions existing' mean.

Edited Saturday at 04:30 PM by zurew

[LastThursday]

19 minutes ago, zurew said:

does that mean that if I think I can fly, then that actually makes it so that I can fly?

Believing you can fly doesn’t make you able to fly. But understanding the structure of reality well enough that we can build aeroplanes, does make human flight possible. My point is that physical laws are descriptions of structures in reality, not things created by belief.

21 minutes ago, zurew said:

I meant the behavior of nature and I didnt mean our modelling of nature.

What's the difference? Both are interpretations of "things we notice" in nature. The two are exactly the same. Scientific laws are just a more formal system of modelling. Interpretation is constrained by cognition and what we're wired to perceive.

22 minutes ago, zurew said:

I just dont understand what 'propositions existing' mean.

A proposition is simply a verbal statement in thought, to put it in a simple way. As such, as soon as it arises in thought, then it exists. That's it. Before it arises, it doesn't exist. I mean nothing more than that.

[zurew]

2 hours ago, LastThursday said:

What's the difference?

The difference between a thing and a description of a thing.

The difference between a thing that is interpreted and an interpretation of said thing.

The difference between the thing that is modelled and your model of said thing.

The difference between the thing that is propositionalized and a proposition of said thing.

--

Whatever you meant in your earlier statement by the structure of reality is what I meant by behavior of nature.

All im saying is that prior to modelling or interpreting or propositionalizing or making a description of the structure of reality , there is the structure of reality.

Edited Saturday at 06:54 PM by zurew

[Eskilon]

3 hours ago, zurew said:

All im saying is that prior to modelling or interpreting or propositionalizing or making a description of the structure of reality , there is the structure of reality.

Does a tree fall in the forest if you're not there to listen?

Does prior and after exist?

[LastThursday]

4 hours ago, zurew said:

The difference between a thing and a description of a thing.

The difference between a thing that is interpreted and an interpretation of said thing.

The difference between the thing that is modelled and your model of said thing.

The difference between the thing that is propositionalized and a proposition of said thing.

That's a fair and a common sense way of understanding it, the observer and the observed. Or you could say we're in Plato's cave looking at shadows, and inferring that there's an actuality beyond. It's construction, models and interpretation all the way down. The structures in reality are in fact shadows, they are the "things we notice" about reality.

[Breakingthewall]

On 10/3/2026 at 3:54 PM, Someone here said:

I've been contemplating this recently and I wish to share this with you guys .

Anything I come to know from the external world is prone to error and falsehood . It can never be trusted as an absolute truth.. Because of the very fact that it is derived from the outside world ..which automatically means it has been known by others and now delivered to you..but if it is not derived by you personally..how can you trust it ? Even if Leo or your Guru tells you something.. you should never trust it but you should validate it in your own direct experience..including this very advice from me right now..and this just goes on in a circle and becomes obsessive and meaningless. Like "this statement is false".

 I think it's a very nasty epistemic problem. This entanglement of everything . just the fact that obviously everything everywhere across all places..and in all dimensions or times or whatever ..everything is interconnected. Like for example you cannot separate the observer from the observed..Or this moment from the next moment . Etc .

If you ask AI or Google about any question or information then you have to be skeptical ..because what the hell is the very origin of that information and how was it known at all ? Likewise you can't trust other people. Truth has to be derived personally. But aren't I creating a false duality here which is just circular and absurd?  Because there cannot be a personal experience without an other experience..and the two are tied Togther. And if you push this inquiry further to the ultimate end you arrive at the conclusion that since self =other or at least interrelated then it doesn't matter whether you go through the work of discovering truth or whether your Guru spoon-fed you it . It's tricky. 

Very good reasoning which would lead you to the inevitable conclusion that any realization, knowledge, or understanding is relative, and therefore true or false depending on how you look at it, depending on a given context.

Then, the only absolute truth appears when there is no grade, when relativity doesn't exist, when everything is equalized and there is no definition, differentiation, or comparison. Therefore, absolute truth is neither expressible nor conceivable, it's just what you are. 

[zurew]

@LastThursday So lets check what we disagree on.

15 hours ago, LastThursday said:

The order of importance is then first Existence, then Proposition, then Truthiness.

Reading back some of the stuff that you said - you seem to agree with me on the distinction between what is propositionalized (Existence) and a proposition of Existence.

When I said that proposition (X) is true about the rape case (independent from the jury's knowledge about it), there what I meant was that if the jury would have known all the info surrounding the case, then he/she would have realized that proposition(X) is true.

This is also what I meant by there being a fact of the matter about proposition (X). It just means that assuming that you are perfectly informed about the rape case, you will say that proposition (X) is true. 

The question related to this issue given your paradigm is just this: Do you agree that all perfectly informed agents would give a univocal "its true" answer to the question "Is proposition (X) true or false?"

[Malkom]

You cannot know the Truth on your own if you are separated from it and from other people and subjective opinions about it, which will make up objective reality..

Edited yesterday at 09:28 AM by Malkom

[LastThursday]

5 hours ago, zurew said:

Do you agree that all perfectly informed agents would give a univocal "its true" answer to the question "Is proposition (X) true or false?"

No, because information requires interpretation by pulling in a load of personal context. Each member of a jury will give a different value of truthiness for the proposition. Indeed, even if A raped B (the proposition), A and B themselves could disagree about whether it was rape, because each has their own context and interpretation of the "facts". In short you can't evade interpretation when assigning a value to a proposition. To compound that, there isn't necessarily a binary true/false value to a proposition, in reality there will always be uncertainty however small. 

The only sense in which a proposition can uniquivocally be true then, is if the proposition uses the definition of a thing, i.e. "a triangle has three sides" is true because a triangle is by definition a three-sided thing. Nearly all propositions are more like "it's always sunny on Tuesday", with no definite truth value: what do we mean by always, what do we mean by sunny, where is the sunny day happening? and on and on.

[zurew]

42 minutes ago, LastThursday said:

Indeed, even if A raped B (the proposition), A and B themselves could disagree about whether it was rape, because each has their own context and interpretation of the "facts

That would be an equivocation on the term 'rape' though. Once it is layed down what is exactly meant by the term, after that the only hurdle is getting informed about the case and checking whether the defined conditions were met or not.

42 minutes ago, LastThursday said:

In short you can't evade interpretation when assigning a value to a proposition.

I agree that it can be an issue, but once it is specified what was the intended meaning and interpretation when the sentence was used, then you can narrow down the possible interpretations.

I take it that once you go with a different interpretation, you are not really engaging with the same proposition anymore, because the misinterpretation you go with creates new meaning for the exact same sentence and with that you tackle an entirely different proposition.

42 minutes ago, LastThursday said:

To compound that, there isn't necessarily a binary true/false value to a proposition, in reality there will always be uncertainty however small.

 I dont reject the the law of excluded middle, and I dont do fuzzly logic stuff (unless there is really a case that classical logic cant handle). What you describe there is what I would label again as just an epistemic problem - in this specific case related to not giving a precise enough definition and or not being informed enough about the case (but once those conditions are layed down and met I dont see why couldnt the proposition be handled in a binary way).

I find the problem about "which logic should I use here" to be just a representation problem (in this case) , and not anything more significant than that. You can represent and express the exact same proposition under multiple different kind of logics, where you capture and maintain the exact same meaning.

 

But in any case, I think we agree on the thing that I cared about and I wanted us to agree on - and that has to do with the fact that a propositions truth value will be univocally shared given the assumption that all the epistemic issues are resolved (agents are perfectly informed, have the exact same interpretation , use the exact same logic to assing truth value etc).

Edited yesterday at 10:43 AM by zurew

[LastThursday]

@zurew I understand where you're coming from. Propositional logic is supposed to be this mathematically precise system with only definite answers, and that anything outside of that is not logic. You could argue that the definition of a proposition is that it only has one interpretation and only a true/false validity, and if those conditions are not met, it is not a proposition. Maybe the idea of a hypothesis takes over here instead.

The law in your example tries to be mathematical about what it defines, and so yes, rape has a list of predefined conditions which have to be met (i.e. there is a fixed interpretation), and if all conditions are met then it is unequivocally true otherwise it is most definitely false. "Rape" is a proposition in its purest sense in law.

1 hour ago, zurew said:

a propositions truth value will be univocally shared given the assumption that all the epistemic issues are resolved (agents are perfectly informed, have the exact same interpretation , use the exact same logic to assing truth value etc).

This being the case, then why are agents needed at all, if there is no free will in either intepretation or assessment? Why have a jury, if it is clear that rape occurred under the list of conditions in law?

What I'm pointing out in my roundabout way is that a pure propositional logic does not generally hold in the real world. There is no pure fixed interpretation and there is no pure fixed assessment of that interpretation.

What I'm also pointing out is that propositional logic is a product of messy human minds in the first place. It is a product of the thing the propositions seek to describe. As such it can suffer from self-referencing or circularity.

[zurew]

59 minutes ago, LastThursday said:

Why have a jury, if it is clear that rape occurred under the list of conditions in law?

Well because of the reasons you layed down and because law is complicated and the definitions there even though are much more precise compared to other domains, they  are still not defined with as much precision that would narrow down the possible interpretations to 1 (and thats probably good).

its also the case that we cant exhaustively think through all possible combinations beforehand about how  a given crime could occur and how it should be handled, so pragmatically there needs to be a jury who can navigate the messy cases within the bounds of reasonable interpretations and law.

its also the case that law is extremely context sensitive and there are a bunch of issues with trying to capture that context in higher order rules (because there is necessary info loss about context and there are epistemic issues that we already talked about - in this case , issue about how you need to interpret and apply the higher order rules given a specific case)

59 minutes ago, LastThursday said:

What I'm also pointing out is that propositional logic is a product of messy human minds in the first place. It is a product of the thing the propositions seek to describe. As such it can suffer from self-referencing or circularity.

I agree that our minds are naturally messy (our pre-theoretic usage and understanding of logic is different from prop logic, but I would argue that  rules of inference captures our pre theoretic notion of deduction quite well), but in any case, I dont see how what thing produced the given logic is relevant.

I also dont think this is a prop logic issue, because no jury formally uses any kind of  fuzzy logic or any non-conventional logic either. I think the issues surrounding this has to do more with how precisely defined a given proposition is (and thats gonna be an issue for all kinds of logics, although you might argue that the degree to which lack of precision is gonna be a problem will differ from logic to logic).

Not sure what you mean by circularity issue or how that is a unique issue to prop logic.

Edited yesterday at 01:13 PM by zurew

[LastThursday]

Thanks for the sparring @zurew, I haven't got much else to add, I'll call it there.

[zurew]

@LastThursday Interesting, engaging talk, thanks.

Also appreciate that you actually engaged with my points in good faith.

[Joseph Maynor]

One thing to consider in this project is who is deriving truth from scratch?  It all presupposes a story of the self.

[Willy Phallicus]

Epistemic sounds like something the ego wants to put in a sentence.

[GodisOne]

@Breakingthewall

You say: "the only absolute truth appears when there is no grade, when relativity doesn't exist, when everything is equalized and there is no definition, differentiation, or comparison."

"when relativity doesn't exist": Truth has to be relative, because without relativity, how will you define Truth? Truth is defined relative to their being no relativity. Therefore, the Truth you speak of is not absolute, but relative, as you say it's "when relativity doesn't exist". 

"when everything is equalized": Being relative, Truth does NOT contain everything, and so cannot be "when everything is equalized". Everything contains falsehood, so Truth cannot contain everything. 

"no definition, differentiation, or comparison": Truth, being relative, is defined, different, and comparable

"Absolute" (by itself) on the other is beyond all distinctions and as you described "when everything is equalized and there is no definition, differentiation, or comparison". 

Therefore, no such thing as the absolute truth. Whatever is absolute, is neither truth nor un-truth, because "absolute" is beyond all distinctions.

So, you mixed up the definition of two things here: truth and the absolute. But there is no such thing as absolute truth, because it is self-contradictory, as one implies distinction, the other doesn't.

Edited 1 hour ago by GodisOne