Is there any serious doubt truth doesn’t exist ?
My teacher (who is not a philosophy teacher ) said truth didn’t exist. However I know cogito ergo sum ( even if it’s all a simulation or sth , I know I’m what is called a human organism in the fabric of this world, real or fake ) , I also know the earth has to do 584 million miles relative to the sun to do a whole orbital rotation around it . So unless I’m missing something, what my teacher said isn’t correct . So truth exists. What is more likely is that we can’t appreciate reality entirely because our perception is tainted. In my philosophy class we always talked about everyone seeing the world with tainted glasses so it’s impossible to see reality. But that doesn’t imply reality doesn’t exist , we just don’t have the ability to reach it , and we may never will. But we can still reach to some truths . I know in 24 hours the earth would have moved 40k km and it will be night again .
That's some true statement for not provably true.
My original statement was meant to be cute. But it can spawn a wider discussion if we're malicious enough to do that.
Back in the 90s when I was working an AI before neural networks and llms took over everything, the focus was on symbolic and linguistic approaches like prolog. I was paid to do research and develop an AI system that could handle puzzles in non-monotonic modal logic using Kripke models. These usually involve independent agents that know facts that other agents don't know, and as they learn more from each other they're able to solve puzzles.
I was always troubled though by the thought, what if agents can lie? Then the whole system breaks down. You can rewrite the formulas in Kripke notation to get around it but it seems like information is lost that way.
Likewise there are problems with AI languages like prolog and that they break down if you give them one false statement. Rather than considering what the possibilities are if this statement is false for that statement is false, it just throws his hands up in the air and says FALSE. That's not very real world.
The human mind is capable of holding multiple inconsistent ideas and picking and choosing from them what seems useful based on a limited context. So I started working on my own time on logic systems that could do this.
That's how I got into dialetheism, the idea that some statements can be both true and false. In godel terms, this opens up possibilities of complete but unsound logic. In dialethist systems, "this statement is false" is both true and false.
So I started working on whodunnit mystery puzzles. The last person to see the boss must have killed him. Al says he talked to the boss but bob was there when he came in and left before he left. Bob says Charlie was there when he came in and left before he left. Charlie says Al was there when he came in and left before he left.
A traditional AI system like prolog goes FALSE and gives up. But a good detective draws what conclusions he can and asks follow-up questions and form theories. For instance, maybe they're all liars and they killed the boss together.
Interesting.
It seems to me that you can avoid dialethism when modeling beleifs by adding belief operators and being careful with inference rules in statements containing such operators.
B(P & ~P)
Is not a genuine contradiction.
