"Maria and Peter are students and meet up for a late dinner.
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A new study shows that there is much, much less agreement on the answer to this question than I would have expected. Even after reading about the study, I still expect people in my bubble to have the same answer as I do. Let's see. But this probably means that the meaning of truth, in the general population, is simply different from what I would have assumed. And explains a number of public discourses.
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The surprising divide over what counts as true
A new study finds that what people think about facts, authenticity, or coherent beliefs explains why they disagree about what is true.
Reason.com (reason.com)
When a religious Christian understands “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” they are not thinking about boolean logic.
It does not escape me that the percentage of U.S. and British respondents in the survey reviewed by Reason, who report coherence and authenticity as determinants of truth (rather than correspondence), roughly matches the percentage of U.S. and British who consider themselves religious.
It also probably is not neutral to such a respondent that the interlocutors in the example are named Mary and Peter.
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R relay@relay.infosec.exchange shared this topic
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@vrandecic
I voted false, because Maria was claiming knowledge she did not have. The truth would be ‘he told me he’d be there’.@KimSJ @vrandecic
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agreed. -
"Maria and Peter are students and meet up for a late dinner. Peter asks Maria whether Tom is at the party that they intend to go to after dinner. Maria answers that Tom is at the party. After all, Tom had told her that he would be at the party. When they arrive at the party, it turns out that Tom had changed his plans, and is not at the party. Was Maria's answer true or false?"
(please spread for visibility, I would like this to be as wide as possible)
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@vrandecic @brooke Schrödinger's Tom. The answer was simultaneously true and false
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"Maria and Peter are students and meet up for a late dinner. Peter asks Maria whether Tom is at the party that they intend to go to after dinner. Maria answers that Tom is at the party. After all, Tom had told her that he would be at the party. When they arrive at the party, it turns out that Tom had changed his plans, and is not at the party. Was Maria's answer true or false?"
(please spread for visibility, I would like this to be as wide as possible)
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@vrandecic This is really two colliding questions: truth-conditions vs. assertion-appropriateness.
Maria satisfied justification (reasonable grounds). But the Gettier intuition: her justified true belief wasn't knowledge because the contingency broke.
The key: can future contingents even have truth values yet? If not, she made a grounded assertion about something uncertain—not lying, not bullshitting.
Does your survey distinguish between what she *should* have said vs. what was actually said?
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"Maria and Peter are students and meet up for a late dinner. Peter asks Maria whether Tom is at the party that they intend to go to after dinner. Maria answers that Tom is at the party. After all, Tom had told her that he would be at the party. When they arrive at the party, it turns out that Tom had changed his plans, and is not at the party. Was Maria's answer true or false?"
(please spread for visibility, I would like this to be as wide as possible)
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@vrandecic
It's the person telling the story that is most likely "paraphrasing" Maria's answer for effect.
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"Maria and Peter are students and meet up for a late dinner. Peter asks Maria whether Tom is at the party that they intend to go to after dinner. Maria answers that Tom is at the party. After all, Tom had told her that he would be at the party. When they arrive at the party, it turns out that Tom had changed his plans, and is not at the party. Was Maria's answer true or false?"
(please spread for visibility, I would like this to be as wide as possible)
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@vrandecic it comes down to whether you believe there is an absolute truth, or whether "truth" is simply not telling a lie.
Truth and lie are opposites for one meaning of truth. Truth and falsehood are opposites for another meaning of truth. The issue is that English does not distinguish between these concepts.
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"Maria and Peter are students and meet up for a late dinner. Peter asks Maria whether Tom is at the party that they intend to go to after dinner. Maria answers that Tom is at the party. After all, Tom had told her that he would be at the party. When they arrive at the party, it turns out that Tom had changed his plans, and is not at the party. Was Maria's answer true or false?"
(please spread for visibility, I would like this to be as wide as possible)
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@vrandecic Maria's statement is false, but she isn't lying. Her answer is completely in agreement with the information available to her, but the information available to her is incomplete.
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@janjko yeah, I have the same problem. I would say Maria never lied. But for me, that doesn't mean what she said is true.
@vrandecic @janjko this. What she said was not true, and I don't understand* how that can be controversial because it was factually incorrect. That doesn't mean she was lying, it just means she was wrong
*I understand better after reading the article but it still boggles my mind
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"Maria and Peter are students and meet up for a late dinner. Peter asks Maria whether Tom is at the party that they intend to go to after dinner. Maria answers that Tom is at the party. After all, Tom had told her that he would be at the party. When they arrive at the party, it turns out that Tom had changed his plans, and is not at the party. Was Maria's answer true or false?"
(please spread for visibility, I would like this to be as wide as possible)
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@vrandecic if we can't answer this question, you think an AI can?
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@vrandecic Seems like a false (true?) dichotomy: true, false, uninformed/incomplete
@rjblaskiewicz @vrandecic it is uninformed, but it's still false. He was objectively not there.
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"Maria and Peter are students and meet up for a late dinner. Peter asks Maria whether Tom is at the party that they intend to go to after dinner. Maria answers that Tom is at the party. After all, Tom had told her that he would be at the party. When they arrive at the party, it turns out that Tom had changed his plans, and is not at the party. Was Maria's answer true or false?"
(please spread for visibility, I would like this to be as wide as possible)
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@vrandecic presumably no-one was at the party at that point; it hadn't started yet.
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@msbellows @vrandecic @poupou and then they went through a double slit and ended up scattered all over the place
@stk @msbellows @vrandecic @poupou at a party we just call that "mingling".
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"Maria and Peter are students and meet up for a late dinner. Peter asks Maria whether Tom is at the party that they intend to go to after dinner. Maria answers that Tom is at the party. After all, Tom had told her that he would be at the party. When they arrive at the party, it turns out that Tom had changed his plans, and is not at the party. Was Maria's answer true or false?"
(please spread for visibility, I would like this to be as wide as possible)
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@vrandecic it’s a false statement which she believes to be true.
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"Maria and Peter are students and meet up for a late dinner. Peter asks Maria whether Tom is at the party that they intend to go to after dinner. Maria answers that Tom is at the party. After all, Tom had told her that he would be at the party. When they arrive at the party, it turns out that Tom had changed his plans, and is not at the party. Was Maria's answer true or false?"
(please spread for visibility, I would like this to be as wide as possible)
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@vrandecic Maria's answer was false but even if Tom would have been at the party and Maria's answer would have been true, it would have only been accidentally true.
Not true in the sense that she knew he was there. Just true in the sense that he happened to be there.
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@vrandecic Maria's answer was false but even if Tom would have been at the party and Maria's answer would have been true, it would have only been accidentally true.
Not true in the sense that she knew he was there. Just true in the sense that he happened to be there.
@vrandecic Was it a reasonable assumption for Maria to make in a casual conversion? 100% yes.
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"Maria and Peter are students and meet up for a late dinner. Peter asks Maria whether Tom is at the party that they intend to go to after dinner. Maria answers that Tom is at the party. After all, Tom had told her that he would be at the party. When they arrive at the party, it turns out that Tom had changed his plans, and is not at the party. Was Maria's answer true or false?"
(please spread for visibility, I would like this to be as wide as possible)
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@vrandecic False but not a lie because it was believed by Maria.
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@rjblaskiewicz @vrandecic it is uninformed, but it's still false. He was objectively not there.
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"Maria and Peter are students and meet up for a late dinner. Peter asks Maria whether Tom is at the party that they intend to go to after dinner. Maria answers that Tom is at the party. After all, Tom had told her that he would be at the party. When they arrive at the party, it turns out that Tom had changed his plans, and is not at the party. Was Maria's answer true or false?"
(please spread for visibility, I would like this to be as wide as possible)
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@vrandecic I wonder how much, if at all, this (type of) study can tell us about how people think about factual reality, rather than just how they feel about particular words.
Off topic: it never seizes to amaze me how lackluster web versions of scientific publications are made (see attached images of web version and PDF).
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@rjblaskiewicz @vrandecic it is uninformed, but it's still false. He was objectively not there.
This last semester, my students and I were reading about the psychology behind "the dress" and one of the articles noted the dozens of processes that take place before you become aware of the color. The idea was that it's not even a decision. The brains of people who worked outside saw it one way and those whose brains compensated for artificial light saw it another way. Baseline understanding of concepts are similarly filtered, apparently....
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This last semester, my students and I were reading about the psychology behind "the dress" and one of the articles noted the dozens of processes that take place before you become aware of the color. The idea was that it's not even a decision. The brains of people who worked outside saw it one way and those whose brains compensated for artificial light saw it another way. Baseline understanding of concepts are similarly filtered, apparently....
So, following from that, there are a lot of notions, ideas, and predispositions that filter what gets assigned the feeling of "obviously and inarguably true." That said, I am inclined to agree with you.
