Quote:
Originally Posted by cardboard adolescent
but there's a difference between truth and accuracy. just because a model is accurate at making predictions doesn't mean it tells you what is actually happening, you build your own ignorance into your systems. i can build a system that says the sun will rise tomorrow morning, and the morning after that, and the morning after that, etc. and it will be very accurate. but that doesn't mean that i know what the sun is, why it rises, what it means for it to rise, what the relation between the sun and the earth is, etc. it might be true, but it is only true in the context of my own ignorance. while it seems that we get closer to Truth as we decrease our ignorance, there is also the understanding that everything we understand about reality has to be translated from what it really is into what we can understand, and what we consider "reality" is really just a representation of our mind. thus, just because this representation gets more complex, it can never transcend its status as a representation, and as such can never actually bridge the gap between the contextual and the universal. so the ultimate truth of the human condition is paradoxically that we can never reach any ultimate truth. science operates on the opposite assumption, and hence leads us away from the ultimate truth.
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I for the most part agree with that, except I disagree that science leads us away from the truth. I don't think science operates on a particular assumption or agenda - in fact, I think most scientists would acknowledge that we can never fully understand the world, we can only fill in gaps.
I think of this from an engineering/computer science perspective. If we consider reality to be the lowest level possible, then we can build higher level models of reality (representations). George Box's quote "All models are wrong, some models are useful" is relevant here. From that I understand that we can further refine our representation of the world as we gain more knowledge through science - our representations will become more and more low level and approach reality but never reach it.
At the end of the day our representation can never transcend its status as you said... it is still a model and a model is only an abstraction of reality. Perhaps in some contexts, a model will be more useful to us than reality as a model emphasizes important points and encourages clarity, but it will essentially always be wrong.