[FRIAM] Conditional Association and the "natural order"

[Marcus Daniels]

I can't find the clip now, but I'm reminded of scene in a drama (Queen of the South?) where a journalist is confronted by a bad guy who proposes "Let's find out whether the pen is indeed mightier than the sword."  He stabs the journalist in the stomach and he dies.   That kind of sets my threshold of tolerance for open-ended bullshit about the impossibility of truth.   Because that guy was dead.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2021 9:28 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Conditional Association and the "natural order"

Yes, I agree. But as with all aphorisms, yours is also vague. I like EricS' allusion to reductionism in "the whole meaning of something should be carried in the form of its expressions". This approximates the "monistic" sense of Truth often targeted by rationalists, idealists, and (naive) realists. But you've often argued for a subjective science (for lack of a better term) ... and I think that's worth calling "truth", too. Here, Emerson's "foolish" qualifier is important. Is there a stability of the mind? A repeatability/reproducibility to particular methods? Can you, by psychedelic drugs, meditation, exercise, etc. *move* that stable locus ... from, say, debilitating neuroticism to calm enlightenment? Etc.

And if that's the case, then we can call that stable locus Truth. And then truth is plural. Or we can call that locus something like a point in a space (neuroticism to enlightenment) and we could call the *space* "truth". And if that's the case, then we can talk about intra-personal truth versus inter-personal truth. To what extent does one's truth-space change as they age? To what extent do identical twins' truth-spaces intersect? Etc.

But of course we could simply jump to where you already are and say that the concept of truth is so vague and ambiguous as to be useless. We have plenty of other domain-specific words for concepts like "intrapersonal truth-space", that it's a bit silly to use them.

On 2/11/21 7:12 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> Emerson: " A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds."
> 
> Davew: "all consistencies are foolish. TRUTH is consistency. TRUTH is the hobgoblin of small minds."

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