July 20, 2007
Theories and truth
In his debate with Myers, Mark uses as an illustration an orbiting billiard-ball theory of an atom that he judges false. This gives me an excuse to plug my favorite contemporary philosopher, Nelson Goodman. Boy, is Goodman a smart cookie. I've never opened to a page he wrote that didn't leave me smarter, engaged, and curious. In Languages of Art, he resurrected aesthetic philosophy from a century-long exile in a romantic swamp...
but I digress: Goodman suggests that we are better off asking whether theories and models are useful than if they are true. In Ways of Worldmaking, he offers the example of the Ptolemaic universe, in which everything revolves around the earth in complicated paths and cycles. Of course that isn't "true" in the sense Mark means, but an astronomer trying to point a telescope at something uses exactly this theory to make the trigonometric calculations he needs. This is behavioral evidence, the best kind, that he credits the Ptolemaic theory with a utility for a purpose that is not operationally very different from truth. It's not always necessary to pick one truth from a set of propositions that appear to be inconsistent, and to have what appear to be inconsistent models at hand for different purposes is not the same as post-modernist relativism or mushy contingency.
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