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From: tmoody@sjuvax.UUCP (T. Moody)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Consistency Again
Message-ID: <2479@sjuvax.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 29-Oct-85 10:41:26 EST
Article-I.D.: sjuvax.2479
Posted: Tue Oct 29 10:41:26 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 3-Nov-85 13:16:22 EST
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Organization: St. Joseph's University, Phila. PA.
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[]
I recently received some comments from Laura Creighton, concerning my
"Consistency" article.  I include them here, with permission:

begin(laura)

             I think that what you are pointing out is that what
mathematicians mean by ``true'' and what everybody else means by
``true'' may be similar but not identical concepts.  

I think that ``true'' means ``consistent with all the facts I have
available to me''.  There is a need for a more rigorous definition, since
people can play word-twisitng games with this definition and say that
it is possible to not examine one's beliefs despite having evidence 
which is entirely correct, but is also what I call ``weaselling''...

So, given this definition of true, you can reformat your statements to
read:

     S1.  Take any particular belief of mine that you choose; I hold
that belief to be consistent with all the facts I have available to me,
since that's what it means for something to *be* a belief (of a 
rational person).

     S2.  I believe that there exists facts which are unavailable to me
now but which, if they were made available, would cause me to change
certain of my beliefs.

I think that you have eliminated the consistency problem here.  What
you have lost is a belief in truth that is utterly independent of the
observer.  I believe that there are such truths, but I never get to
deal with them in life (I only get truths in the context of the rest
of my experience).  For that reason, I believe that for human beings
``consistency is truth''.  Clearly if my set of beliefs come to approach
a list of Capital-Truth (the absolute, independent of observer kind)
then I will have a very good working set of consistency-truths for my
beliefs.

But I am not sure whether Truth exists at all except as a ``theoretical
construct'' in the same way that Black Holes may have no real existence 
and that I believe Omnipotence has no real meaning.  It is an extrapolation
and explanation for the fact that we can attain a high level of consistency
perhaps?

end(laura).

I think it is fair to describe Laura's position as a "coherence
theory of truth."  For a coherentist theorist, truth is only definable
within sets of statements, I take it.  Individual statements would
lack truth values.  A false statement, on this view, would be one that
would make a contradiction derivable from the set, that would not have
been derivable had that statement not been added.

For purposes of analysis, regard someone's belief system as the set of
propositions to which that person would assent.  When contradictions
become apparent, a rational individual rejects the smallest possible
number of propositions required to remove the inconsistency.  This
ranking process is necessary to keep the coherence theory from
licensing the rejection of tremendous portions of the belief system
for the sake of isolated incongruities.  Nothing said so far requires
that truth be defined as a relation between statements and
mind-independent reality.

But I am not clear about what Laura means by "facts", since these, on
the face of it, appear to be observer-independent Truths.  If that is
the case, then the inconsistency is reintroduced after all.


Todd Moody                 |  {allegra|astrovax|bpa|burdvax}!sjuvax!tmoody
Philosophy Department      |
St. Joseph's U.            |         "I couldn't fail to
Philadelphia, PA   19131   |          disagree with you less."