The Acceptance of Oracles

In a previous post I said no one truly knows anything. Of course, we must use reasonable knowledge. The knowledge we act on is always imperfect, it's important to recognize that, since many people go about their lives believing they are acting on evidence. I doubt anyone really makes their daily decisions on evidence.

There is always a smarty pants who says that saying "nothing is truly knowable,"is just a high toned stance of philosophers and not really anything people in the real world should go by. The problem I have with such statements is that there exist people in our world, called rationalists, who pretend to act only on evidence in their decisions and lives. They act as if everything is knowable and that everything they know comes from evidence. They are frequently vocal advocates of science and reason as the only legitimate truth. That may be, but since we know reason is subject to fallacy, and that reason is a product of the human mind, it lacks the power to discern truth. Reason is a tool to be used to extend scientific knowledge, but it requires experiment, observation and prediction to verify that flights of reason are representative of reality. Even then, this mechanism may fail since we may lack complete observations, miss the one exception that proves the rule or disproves it. We may look at the data we have and say, continents never drift, then look again at later data as see that nevertheless the move. Science isn't truth. It's a successive approximation to the truth. It may be reasonable to trust science more than what someone says to you on the street, or what the good book tells you about the creation, but that does not mean either of those sources are wrong. In fact, if the lesson the Getty museum learned over the purchase of the Greek statute (Gladwell, Blink!), which science "verified" and an expert determined was a fake from a single glance lasting a few milliseconds, has anything to say about truth, is that sometimes individuals without any evidence are more accurate than scientists with rooms full of instruments and the wrong assumptions. It may just be, we have to recognize that there are times we must depend on oracles.

Some day, we may be required to accept the pronouncements of software intelligence, without any evidence at all, maybe not even evidence we could comprehend, with our limited mental capacity.

Citizendium: Multiple Truths Welcome?

I've been reading the Citizendium's approach to governing what goes into their content. This new attempt at a wiki encyclopedia favors an approach with less rules, greater oversight and tries to accommodate a multiplicity of views on truth.

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Neutrality_Policy

I wish they would not call it a neutrality policy. I strongly dislike the oxymoronic "neutral point of view."

I don't know how far the Citizendium will go, but I do believe multiple truths should be represented transparently. There is no reason not to accommodate multiple truths and no reason not to build information systems capable of accommodating multiple truths.

Contrary to popular belief, there does exist more than more than one truth. In genealogy, for example, the idea of multiple truths is necessary, since the same individual is frequently claimed by more than one family. Information about the past is sketchy and subject to interpretation. When the first online genealogies were being discussed on the GenWeb mailing list, it was ultimately concluded that there should not be a single unified global genealogy, since the "facts" could never be reconciled perfectly. There would by necessity be a need for representing multiple truths, based upon facts weighted by how much confidence we have in the sources (familiar to anyone who sources their genealogy).

Moreover, the truths we hold in our minds are imperfect, and emerge from our folk knowledge, through narrative and are based upon assumptions, which generally are made not on evidence (and probably can never be made upon anything else), but on the folk knowledge we absorb from our surroundings.

An absolute truth may exist and be determined by the physical universe, but there are many questions that arise about the human mind, society and the constructions of the human mind, which society is an example, which have no physical existence at all and it may never be able to determine what is true. There is also the nature of our knowledge existing only as sense perceptions, which makes science a kind of honorable delusion, as accurate as we can determine to agree on shared descriptions of phenomena. We have a reasonable idea of what we know is true or not through careful scientific inquiry, assisted by not guaranteed by reason, but in the end the only thing we know is: No one truly knows anything.