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Current time: June 26, 2024, 4:48 pm

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Is the Argument from Degrees contradictory to the 3rd Law of Thermodynamics?
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RE: Is the Argument from Degrees contradictory to the 3rd Law of Thermodynamics?
(June 26, 2023 at 5:52 pm)HappySkeptic Wrote:
(June 25, 2023 at 12:50 am)FlatAssembler Wrote: If I correctly remember what were taught in our philosophy classes, he is the author of the Correspondence Theory of Truth. Which is, I think, the least philosophically problematic theory of truth. Sure, it does make it tough to explain how could statements such as "Had Balsac not made a living of his writing, he wouldn't have written 20'000 pages of text." be true, but Coherentism just opens way more problems than it solves. And Pragmatism ("Truth is that which is useful.") is, in my opinion, even more ridiculous than Coherentism. The Correspondence Theory of the Truth makes by far the most sense.

The Correspondence Theory of Truth is the one that most people use in science and their daily life.  There is a sense that there is a single reality, and that statements are correct when they correspond to reality.  This single reality is what allows us to ask questions and get consistent answers.

The problem with it, is that there is no way to prove this "thing that truth corresponds to" actually exists.  All we have is our consistent set of answers to questions, with which we build models.  Our models are useful if they provide predictions.  The "things" within the model have no guarantee of existence beyond their use in the model.

An example is Space-Time.  Does it exist, or is it just a mathematical abstraction?  I don't know.  We could find another model that doesn't include it.

And what, precisely, do you mean when you say that something 'exists'?

I usually think of existence as a defined quality that corresponds to whatever all minimal predictive theories agree upon. So, if all such theories agree that something exists, it does.
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RE: Is the Argument from Degrees contradictory to the 3rd Law of Thermodynamics? - by polymath257 - June 26, 2023 at 6:41 pm

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