Evaluating a claim — any claim — demands that you use some sort of standard of truth in your head; it helps a great deal if you know there are really only four approaches that are worth talking about. LKY wasn’t just using ad-hominem in his attacks. logical test for the truth or acceptability of any proposition is whether it coheres with some of the other propositions I find LKY a fascinating leader with a fascinating set of contemporaries (the most interesting of which to me is Goh Keng Swee, who, amongst other things, moved Singapore to a monetary policy based on a managed float of its currency, giving up all control of its domestic interest rate), mostly because so many of them were such excellent systems thinkers. Pragmatists are interested in partial truths, often known as grey areas, as these have … Well, whenever you come across an argument in a blog post or article or speech, realise that there are four possible standards for truth to evaluate that argument against. One of the problems, implied here, is that if you use the pragmatic theory of truth you would naturally evaluate people based on their credibility. You have to know how to look for them, of course. In other words, pragmatism often forces you to be pragmatic. Long-term readers of this blog would not find this surprising — I’ve long argued that if you need swimming advice, you do not go to a non-swimmer for it, and if a non-swimmer spends an hour telling you how to swim, the correct response isn’t to argue with him; the correct response is to tell him to go learn swimming, and to discount everything he says. So instead we trust in the system of science itself — the consensus of scientists, shaped by the incentive systems of research — to come to a tentative conclusion on what is true and known about the world. But I think pragmatism, while it is less popular in online discourse, is found wherever effective people are found. Originally developed by Hegel and Spinoza, it often seems to be an accurate description of how our conception of truth works. The answer is no to both (although there have been many compelling arguments for and against mask-wearing in the months since the pandemic began). Similarly, if you read in a blog post that ‘action produces information’, you would compare the examples in that post against your past, and then evaluate it according to how convincingly those claims line up with your lived experiences. These versionsdiffer on two major issues. The pragmatic theory of truth is — to me — the most interesting theory of truth. The problem is: What does it mean to say that it is true that there is extraterrestrial life? But, much later, I realised that this wasn’t the only explanation for what I had seen. If a friend claims that “all men are terrible at housework”, for example, you would immediately evaluate that claim against all the men you’ve met in your life. Recent critics of the coherence theory of truth have alleged that the theory is incoherent, since its defence presupposes the correctness of the contrary correspondence theory of truth.Coherentists must specify the system of propositions with which true propositons cohere. This idea might seem strange to you. One is the coherence theory of truth; the other, the coherence theory of justification. More importantly, it was a first brush with the idea that there are different standards for truth, and that arguments that sound reasonable given one standard might sound terrible when evaluated against a different one. But master debaters and good writers alike are able to bend this to their advantage. Consensus plays an important part in the scientific method. Thomas Carson Mark, Spinoza’s Theory of Truth (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1972), especially pp. The coherence theory of truth has its place — when you are writing, for instance, it is table stakes to have your arguments flow logically from premises to conclusions. The core idea of this piece is simple: there are four theories of truth that are worth talking about, and once you know this, thinking critically about an argument or a piece of writing becomes somewhat simpler. The coherence theory of truth is the idea that arguments must make sense — that is, arguments must flow logically from premises and intermediate propositions. The coherence theory of truth has several versions. This analysis can be expressed with the following questions: I’ve noticed for some time that people don’t naturally reach for a pragmatic evaluation of an argument. It’s basically that truth (of any proposition) is a property of its context. Among rival theories of Deng Xiaoping used to say “No matter if it is a white cat or a black cat; as long as it can catch mice, it is a good cat” (不管黑猫白猫，捉到老鼠就是好猫); Charles Koch liked to say “true knowledge leads to effective action.” Both are expressions of pragmatism. I think it is an example of what systems thinking can do if applied to a nation-state, carefully adapted to its unique history, iterated over by three generations of sharp thinkers, and given a half century of care. Is my argument coherent? And so Singapore continues to confound foreigners; as Ha-Joon Chang puts it in Economics: The User’s Guide: Such an odd mix of policies could only come from repeatedly asking ‘what is useful for our goals?’ and ‘what has worked elsewhere?’, persistently, pragmatically, over five decades of trial and error, as LKY and his colleagues (and eventually their successors) did. (One is reminded of Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, where he talks about appeasing The Muse in his writing practice. I can give you a rough definition of coherence theory. Example of a coherence theory of truth 2 See answers dionsayshandy dionsayshandy Answer: It may, for example, be true of water at sea level but not at high altitudes. 1-18. For example, on the one hand, correspondence theorists hold that the truth of a proposition is a matter of the proposition’s standing in a relation to something else which is not a proposition, such as a fact. And just with the theory of coherence, we won’t find out. On this view, to say that aproposition coheres with a specif… The more counter-examples you are able to generate, the less highly you should think of the author’s thinking, and the less credible you should find the entire piece. Expertise, experience, and credibility ; he was being pragmatic Sucha set will be called a specified of... 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