Statistical Truth
Posted by carlopenco on January 8, 2010
In the Philpapers Survey the results about truth are the following:
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic?
Accept or lean toward: correspondence 1450 / 3226 (44.9%)
Accept or lean toward: deflationary 670 / 3226 (20.7%)
Other 659 / 3226 (20.4%)
Accept or lean toward: epistemic 447 / 3226 (13.8%)
It looks like philosophers tend towards the most traditional vision of truth, despite the big effort of “experts” in truth theories to give alternative options (*). However, this is not true; we don’t know exactly what hides behind “Other”, and if we want a yes/no divide, correspondence is 44,9% against non-correspondence (54,9% ..something is missing). Doest it mean traditional views lose against more sophisticated views? The point is that we like winning-losing; but the contraposition is weak; that there is some aspect of correspondence is an idea generally shared, without accepting a strict correspondence view of truth. Therefore it is not clear whether people accepting correspondence were just rejecting coherence theory of truth or something else. What is true: many philosophers have spent some time in answering a question about truth.
(*) Remark: who are the experts? Probably the few that have made the meta-survey where you were asked to say not what you think, but what you think philosophers think; in the meta-survey (“mean estimate”) correspondence is less that the actual and epistemic is more than the actual. I suppose that in the meta-survey there were more philosophers aware of the epistemic chance.
| Option | Mean estimate | Actual |
| Correspondence | 40.8% | 50.8% |
| Deflationary | 29.6% | 24.8% |
| Epistemic | 15.5% | 6.9% |
| Other | 14.0% | 17.5% |
Anonymous said
why not?
Anonymous said
Actually the meta-survey shows that at least some philosophers think that other philosophers are more up-to date and expert than they normally are, and that the most recent and critical views (in this case the Epistemic view and the Deflationary view) are more widespread than they are.