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    If a belief system is massively false, maximizing truth a... — Carmelics
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    Challenges→Belief content and sentence meaning must be defined jointly in terms of a principle of charity — whatever assignment maximizes the truth of an agent's beliefs and utterances

    If a belief system is massively false, maximizing truth assignments misidentifies content rather than revealing it, inverting the explanatory order.

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    1 reason for
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    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Content is determined by causal-historical relations to the world, not by truth-value assignments within a system.
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    • 2.A radically false belief system's internal coherence can mask systematic distortion of what its terms actually refer to.
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    • 3.Maximizing true sentences in a false framework optimizes the wrong target, like perfecting a map of a territory that doesn't exist.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.Truth-tracking is precisely how we identify content: false beliefs about X still have X as their content precisely because they aim at truth.
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    • 2.Even massively false systems preserve referential relations through error patterns, so truth-maximization reveals rather than inverts meaning.
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    • 3.Without truth-based methods, we have no principled way to distinguish systematic error from content misidentification at all.
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    Connections

    2 topics

    Truth & Knowledge1 linkedPhilosophy of Language1 linked

    Related

    A radically false belief system's internal coherence can mask systematic distort...Belief content and sentence meaning must be defined jointly in terms of a princi...Content is determined by causal-historical relations to the world, not by truth-...Even massively false systems preserve referential relations through error patter...
    +3 moreShow less
    Maximizing true sentences in a false framework optimizes the wrong target, like ...Truth-tracking is precisely how we identify content: false beliefs about X still...Without truth-based methods, we have no principled way to distinguish systematic...

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    2 (1 for, 1 against)
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