There. I pretty much just solved all philosophy. You're welcome.

As a scientist, I want to thank you for this very clear explanation of what science is and why we need it.

That ending was an implied mic drop if ever I've heard one. Brilliant!

I really like how you think. Having been involved in the new-age, hippie, pseudo-psychology comunity for several years during my education, i must say it is so refreshing to adopt this stance. Everything is clear, simpler and less stresfull, and most important, it works.

One of the best philosophy videos I've seen. Clear, concise and informative. 10/10.

At the end of the day, our evolved brains are essentially Bayesian engines assessing the probability of things being true based on prior experience and evaluation of new evidence coming through our sensory organs. That marvellous engine is sadly prone to many bugs though ...

So... Tell me more about this..... Science.

What is truth? Baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me, no more...

Man, I am a philosophy student and your explanation was more clear and usefull than most I have heard from my colegues. When I finish my undergrad, I wanna make a PhD in pragmatism epistemology (I'm very interested in empirical knowledge and the pragmatic aproach (Specially Peirce and Haack). I'll share your videos with my friends. (I am not fluent in english yet. So, I'm sorry if I wrote something wrong).

You are correct. Mathematical Logic is a TOOL we use to analyze nature, or an idea, or whatever. It is not some independent ultimate truth about reality. IF something in reality behaves similar to something WE defined, then we can use OUR logic to make predictions about that something. If our prediction is way off, it's not that something is special---it's our logic that is flawed.

A wonderful Re-telling and clarification of one of his earlier videos. I always find that I got MORE out of his responding to peoples objections. He doesnt break too much new ground from the older video, but he does succinctly describe and defend his position. I particularly loved the. "Beliefs Drive Actions Actions have Consequences. Consequences are Objective." Couldnt say it better with 9 paragraphs, what he does in 9 words.

I am so glad i fell on this video thank you for existing and trying to save humanity from its self inflicted confusion. It's slowing us all down. Good thing people like you still exist.

Love your channel. Keep up the good work. :)

That's it. That's where the rubber meets the road, both literally and figuratively. Go argue materialism with a fast moving Mack Truck.

Thank you for explaining the useful parts of philosophy and not mentioning the useless stuff.

AntiCitizenX is among the best educational content producers on youtube. Thanks for another great video!

He's back! Thank my nonexistent god!

Jesus hates ponies is true. It's vaccuosly true.

Thanks for sharing the script. Makes it MUCH easier to follow along and deeply reflect on the content.

You covered this before in the Responding to Objections series. Nice up-date. You could just say, "Truth is what works, Science works, therefore Science is true!" Then mic drop, and walk off the stage. Love your work.

"Pragmatism is the ultimate measure of all philosophical truths" Pragmatism is a belief system, with assumptions, thus it can only measure truth within that framework. You simply stated your position (one I sympathize with ), but you haven't "solved" anything, philosophy is not that easy. Unless you define philosophy as pragmatism, but then it's just a tautology.

This video convinced me that subscribing to this channel was a worthwhile decision. And I've only seen one other video of yours before, the one on omnipotence. Excellent work.

It's interesting that when people really put truth above all else and sacrifice it for nothing, they all arrive at exactly the same epistemology even without any of them influencing the other. I arrived at this epistemology before I watched King Crocoduck, and I watched him before I even heard about you. And yet, we all share precisely the same epistemology.

Awesome video. I always come back to your channel for clarifications like these.

18:32 This pretty much the conclusion I came to when I was talking intro philosophy. Though, I couldn't articulate it as well as you did in your video.

What philosopher is this Chewbacca guy?

This channel is a masterpiece and very much underrated

so I listen to hours of philosophy almost every day. this video is the best I've ever heard on theories of truth and their usefulness. I'm spreading this video and subscribing.

May 1000 Velociraptors descend upon those who dislike your videos. LOL

Absolutely feckin' awesome. Now... cue the comments from the outraged fuckers who think that sitting around on your arse expelling flatulence from your ears is a valid a valuable tool for allowing us to understand and manipulate _physical_ reality.

16:54 «I have yet to encounter a single philosopher who could successfully argue with a speeding bus» Dat's ork filosofy fo' ya' >:D

I could not help but picture Sye Ten Bruggencate standing in front of 'The Thinker' and saying "How can you know that?"

I really really like this. After watching too many videos about philosophy I start to feel like I know less after doing so. So many philosophers seem to want to turn everything into goo. Nothing is solid, nothing is real. I've even heard about people who literally believe the world is illusory. I wonder how they cross the street.

Finally found a fellow pragmatist!

Wow, thank you for this very clear explanation of "truth".... which I will forget in 2 days. But no worry, I've bookmarked it, and I probably will come back many a time !

Truth and reality will never be the same.

I really appreciate this channel.

I think you're putting correspondence theory to a higher standard than it deserves. The definition of truth is not in itself an epistemology and it doesn't need to be. What truth is and how we go about determining it are two separate questions. I think when we claim something is true, what we mean is this: "truth is that which corresponds to the version of reality I experience, assuming that the reality I experience corresponds to objective reality." With that assumption made, the definition becomes less vacuous. A question on axiomatic formalism. A common definition of knowledge is justified true belief (JTB). A common objection to JTB is the gettier problem, to which I tend to be inclined to modify the definition of knowledge to JTB, where the justification is also a JTB. For instance, you might see a jumping man next to you who looks like Johnny Depp and think, "I know that Johnny Depp is jumping", where the justification is composed of 2 propositions: the person next to you is Johnny Depp, and the person next to you is jumping. If Johnny Depp is actually miles away but coincidentally jumping, you would still have a JTB, but the justification would not be a JTB, so that's why it doesn't seem to be knowledge. The problem with this is you must show that every subsequent justification is a JTB, and eventually you fall upon axiomatic statements. I don't think this solved the problem of skepticism, however. A = A, to be known, would require a justification. I suspect many would say "A=A because the definition of A is A", which would imply the following principle: "If the definition of A is A, then A=A". But of course any skeptic would then ask, "how do you know that if the definition of A is A, A=A?" Even avoiding the problem of the reliability of our senses, we're still going to have to justify claims that we have no choice but to presuppose. So is knowledge of our world possible, even if our senses can be perfectly trusted? I also don't think pragmatism solves epistemology, at least not in the sense you seem to think it does. Even if you acknowledge that you can't prove the correspondence of your experience to objective reality, you still have to deal with the skepticism of other assumptions science makes. For instance, the gravitational constant = 6.67408 × 10^-11. Who's to say that 5 seconds from now it won't equal 6.67408 * 10^-5? Science has to presuppose several things, such as the consistency of the laws of nature, the principle that all events have some cause, and of course that observations can be used as data to model reality. Even worse, if you can trust that the laws of nature are guaranteed to remain constant, everything has a cause of some sort, and your senses are reliable, how do you know that your cognitive faculties that you use to come to conclusions based on your perceptions can be trusted? It's true, I'll avoid a bus if I see it, but that's because I am conditioned to do so. If someone were to continue asking me why it's wise to avoid a bus, I would eventually run out of answers.

Conclusion: Ignore any philosophical concerns anyone may bring up.

This is the long form version of Dawkins's "Science. It works, bitches."

I love this video so, so much.

The real question should be: what is Shrek

"The pragmatic scientific method therefore is the measure of all philosophical truth." That's a bit of a broad stroke. What about mathematical truth? Metaphysical insights? Sensory perception (the state of consciousness itself)? Historical epistemology? Legal judgments? The latter two cases don't apply science science rigorious theorization and experimentation is impossible but I can understand that that's a minor issue.

Plato don't hurt me, don't hurt me, no mo'...

Yeah, science! Hahaha Thank you for making this thought-provoking video. I had found a lot of things in philosophy very confusing, but late in the video, especially when you mentioned pragmatism and how a question of the number of angels on a pin is irrelevant, I felt relieved. I remember hearing about philosophies that were difficult to understand, and I admit that while I have an interest in philosophy, it's off-putting when it becomes difficult to understand. One thing that also came to mind about this was the culture of political correctness and identity politics in today's society. It can become so confusing, to say the least

You ended the video with: "So unless your truth assignment can somehow facilitate my desire to solve actual problems and reliably predict the outcomes of my actions, then by definition and admission it is irrelevant and worthless. Pragmatic Scientific Method therefore is the ultimate measure of ALL philosophical truth." Any time somebody says "all" and "truth" and "ultimate" in the same sentence, my skepticism signals an alarm in my mind. I hope it does for you too. While I agree that pragmatic empirical rationalism (PER) is a solid epistemology, it strikes me as a wee bit egocentric and subjective. As philosophers, we should be pursuing models of realism that are "one size fits all" not "this size fits me, fuck you if you think otherwise." It's entirely possible somebody could pragmatically, empirically, and rationally decide something is true, when it could objectively be false, and they go about living their lives normally because they had a desirable outcome. You're equating beliefs and decisions with desirability, which is prone to cognitive biases. I completely understand that the cognitive-behavioral distinction is necessary, but the Principle of Consistency is way more important that the Criterion of Falsifiability when it comes to pragmatism, and was worth mentioning in this video. If something is consistently true, then it will always be true irregardless of time and place. This separates the boys (pursuit of provisional beliefs that result in egocentrically desirable outcomes), from the men (pursuit of consistent beliefs that result in desirable outcomes for all). I think if we want to marry epistemology with ethics (which is what I think you're trying to do), then we cannot absolve ourselves from cognitive biases. If you invoke falsifiability as your only arbiter of what can be a potentially true or false, then your epistemology defaults to a single heuristic process, and you'll have no way of measuring non-empirical claims. Particularly, discussions about morality, beauty, justice, existentialism, causality, contingency, meaning, or freedom are abstract in nature and make no predictive claims that can be empirically falsified. With PER, it seems awfully easy to justify true beliefs ex post facto according to whatever preference for a desired outcome you had to begin with. But hey, every philosophy has problems at the end of the day. So, fuck it.

Yay!!! I was worried you weren't doing any more videos. Thanks for the new one! :)

A very nice find. Seems to nicely package my direction / conclusions.

Fucking Love it! Been using a Pragmatist function to assign truth values to propositions for quite some time now, without even realizing it. I'm just finishing up my degree in astrophysics, and I really enjoyed the mathematical philosophy. You should make a video explaining it in more depth, or maybe actually using a somewhat realistic example in a pragmatists world view and boil down their thought process to assign truth to values using the math! Your crossing the road example was excellent, but something like that but perhaps more complicated, and then use the truth values to have some character make a decision.

I think it's fine to define truth for purposes of philosophical discussion as a linguistic/semantic property. However I don't think it can be categorically stated that truth is "not some intrinsic, metaphysical quality of reality itself" unless a basis for the charge can be made. Truth as a property of propositions is not what truth is, it's one of the things truth does. Truth as a metaphysical quality of reality itself on the other hand is an actual definition--maybe the only proper working definition--of what truth IS. Truth that inheres the essence of existents seems an actual explanation for why propositions are coherent, can correspond and are found to be useful (pragmatically speaking).

Imagine people in power giving a fuck about logic.

- Hey, let's discuss truth! - Ok! To be fair, first let's get rid of all assumptions and start from the ground up! - Right! - ... - ... - squirrel squirrel. - fladgibommmm ...BAPHUSTA!

I think that although this view is basically very sound it misses at least one important detail. I am definitely an atheist who loves the scientific method so don't worry I don't think I will say anything too insane here. By science we can make accurate predictions about what will happen when we do a specific action, or when a specific event happens. That is all well and good but unless we have some reason to decide one outcome is objectively better than another we still have no way to decide how to act. For example, let's look at the example of crossing the street. We can deduce using science that certain methods of crossing will result in us making it to the other side safely. Others might cause us or someone else to get harmed or cause legal action or damage to property. It is obviously not hard to assign truth values in such a way that we will be able to see which result is which. But that does not help us unless we have a reason to prefer one future over another. All people basically agree on the axiom that "A future where I am unharmed is preferable to a future where I am harmed." This seems to be a very reasonable axiom, but it is not derived from any scientific observation. Infact, no amount of scientific observation can ever lead us to any statement of preferability unless we have a preview statement of preferability to build from. So to build a truth function that encourages outcomes that benefit humans it is necessary to give at least scientifically arbitrary statement a value of true. Otherwise all of our truth statements say nothing about morals and have nothing to say about what we should and should not do. So unless we take at least one axiom of preferability as true, all of pragmatism, and by extension science, fails to drive actions, and is therefore reduced to useless rhetorical gibberish. **Drops Mic** I do genuinely really like this video though, despite that little failure.

Do you use science to prove your science right? If yes, how do you know your science is right? If no, why do you trust in the scientific method?

You might be laughing now, but just you wait until someone argues that the consequences are false and pain is just another stimulus that causes a mind-controlling spirit guardian to make their body do things that would, in their psychological understanding, minimise the chances and effects of pain and that is also false and just something to black out and meditate away while being totally awake

That was the greatest 20 minutes of my life. Thank you, AntiCitizenX.

People should just, ya know....read the Pragmatists so they can understand what ACX is getting at. Start with Peirce, James, and Dewey then see what happens.

Thank you for the video. Your vids are educational for me and they inspire me to make my own videos. Have a nice day!

10:00 That is not true. Equality has a definition in axiomatic set theory (x = y is defined as: for all z, z being a member of x is equivalent to z being a member of y). And transitivity follows from that definition.

does this mean ignorance is bliss so long as it cant become in-covenant ? i dont know is all i feel left with help ? or is there non Also dose this mean only testable beliefs that interact with other testable beliefs may as well be used so long as they work or are convent or am i getting this wrong ?

3:06 actually there is a third one "the question is improperly phrased or can be interpreted differently to have different answers"

When it comes to truth values informing actions and actions having consequences, I don’t actually need to conclude that the world outside my mind actually exists in order to conclude that I should behave a certain way. For instance I know that I have unpleasant experiences, such as pain, fear, and sadness, pleasant experiences such as excitement, happiness, and pleasure, and neutral experiences such as seeing and hearing regardless of whether or not the world outside my mind exists. It’s possible to conclude that I should behave in ways that I know are likely to have certain desired affects on those experiences without necessarily concluding that the world outside my mind exists. I can also conclude that the world outside my mind is a useful fiction that is unreasonably effective at predicting my experiences similar to how it’s sometimes argued that math is a useful fiction that is unreasonably effective at predicting how the world behaves.

wow, what a good video

I still come back from time to time to watch this video

Technically speaking we ate just brains in a vat, the vat being our skulls, and or bodies being the vessel our brains in a vat operate and use to make contact with the outside world, we are our brains.

Truth to be called so must be true unconditionally at any part of space or time. Period.

Biblical inerrancy also has another problem; it is internally inconsistent. For instance, Genesis 1's creation account contradicts that of Genesis 2. Even if we knew nothing about the creation of life and the universe, we must necessarily reject at least one of the biblical accounts. Internal inconsistencies literally disprove a model with 100% certainty.

Love your channel. Keep up the good work!

I love it! This is just the video I needed in my epistemological existentialism of recent, but since it hasn't been quenched despite being calmed, I question further: what about the philosophical problems science cannot solve? What do we answer them with? How do we know if those answers are proper or not?

Pragmatic. That's a good word. It's a strong word. It makes sense to be pragmatic. I would rather start a crusade or a world war over the word pragmatic.

This video is my Bible. I now follow the truth assignment structure of "What is truth? inerrancy". Actually I think I disagree on truths definition where I'll accept truth as an assignment for the value true within prepositional logic, but also I will accept the correspondence theory of truth as a distinctly separate definition of truth used colloquially as a tautologically phrased shorthand for mind independent reality which is unknowable but conceptually exists. I think the second definition would apply in the phrase "knowing the truth"

it's the old philosophical debate between idealists and materialists. The idealists won and we had the middle age, then the materialists won and we still live in this world. We still see idealists today, thinking that the "Truth" is outside of our world and abstractions are possible and are the "truths". I think this is the main problem. But, I have a biais: I'm materialist.

I really like all of your content , but this is by far your best video in imo Thanks

damn this video hits hard

Its sad that many are scared to go outside their comfort zone and look around... The truth is out there!!

One feedback on your videos. I love your content but your voicing and tempo are way way out and difficult to follow because you use the same tone over and over without inflections...it becomes boring to listen to because it sounds like a long long sentence. Don t get me wrong I love your points and content but you need to improve your delivery mechanism. Space your points and paragraphs when you are reading instead of those long long sentences. Break into sections... this is your first video I left after 12 minutes because I lost the train of thought because of your tone. Do something to make it sound less like you are reading

That truth exists at all shows that there has to be a standard of what is right and what is false. Truth is not a human construct. If there was not a single person on earth, truth would still exist. Since it exists, there must be the one who sets the standard and that one is what Christians call God. It is God’s nature that he is truth. He is the standard for all truth. That’s why Jesus said “I am the truth.”

Man, I love your videos.

as long as you don't believe your own lies, there is hope

But you have to admit, no matter how much science advances, no one would argue we got to the point that science has left humanity with no need for philosophy

I'm wondering if you're working on a video about the synthetic/analytic distinction, it sounds right to me, but from what I've seen your defense of it is the 2/3 majority consensus of academic philosophers, a source of knowledge you seem to disavow to some extent. Additionally people usually mention a priori / a posteriori distinction for a full 2x2 box of possible kinds of statements, what od you make of that?

This is fantastic, very well made. Exactly what I was looking for

Good to see you again

"...as if no one really knows what the rules are when engaging in this process." Yeah, I think they call that, um, because they don't.

This video is like a proof of de Groot's Empirical Cycle. Nicely done.

Regarding correspondence theory. We each evaluate any given proposition as true or false in context. Given a proposition our first evaluation is just what that proposition means in context. "Dogs are furry" is neither true nor false. "Dogs are usually furry" is more accurate. "Snow is white" but don't eat the yellow snow. The second evaluation is of the state of reality. Only if these two judgments match does an individual judge a statement true. What we should believe to be true is embodied in Bayes Theorem. Unlike symbolic logic the real world is probabilistic. Do you judge any of the above to be false statements? Do you judge them true? What any individual believes to be true is a judgment call.

i can certainly understand your assertion that material and physical fields of scientific enquiry are the only way of understanding the physical and material universe. however, it is important to me to say, that while i appreciate your work, your final assertion that "nobody cares about things that (like the angels dancing on a pin) are not directly related to science "is simply false. science dosen't rule out that a human being is a whole larger than the sum of it's parts. even if thoughts and feelings have a physical and chemical basis, this does not automatically devalue them. why did prehistoric humanity paint animals on cave walls, when deriving food from the animals and shelter from the cave was more vital to humanity's survival? why did jews in the concentration camps insist on writing poetry and ensuring it's survival for publication when someone could kill them at any given moment? because humanity has a need to express how it relates to it's surrounding circumstances . individually and collectively. restricting human thought and expression in the name of science isn't much different from restricting the intellectual freedom of science in the name of religious or totalitarian regimes. it's also a contradiction of the principle according to which science teaches you how to think but not what to think. for your information, the question of the angels and the needle's point actually appeared around 1625, as a PARODY of philosophy and not as an actual philosophical or theological thought. surprisingly, there are some PHYSICISTS who published their answers to this question, within the boundaries of physics....

Even better philosophy "does it help me win videogames and puzzle-games?" Does me sitting their pondering about the Gods that run the Mushroom Kingdom enable me to solve the lore of the videogame or get Mario to the finish-line? No? Golly... that's useless

well.....that's truth.

So glad you agree with me that debates are worthless bullshit. That is why I have never watched a single political debate. Ever. In my 50+ years. Never will. And, specifically, thank you for mentioning Western courtrooms. I recall reading somewhere that in the Soviet Union, there was none of this artificial distinction between "civil" versus "criminal" crimes. That has nothing whatsoever do to with the issue of the idiocy of deliberately constructing an adversarial legal system, but more the fact that, something that the law cultists (judges, lawyers, and the police officers and prison guards who defend them) take as some sort of absolute "truth": the sharp division between an action which is criminal versus something civil you could get "merely" sued for, is just a non-objective artifice.

Truth = One of two possible subjective conclusions to a proposition

I agree with the conclusion arrived at, but I disagree with the raw pragmatism you're talking about towards the end. For example, let's go with the typical rustling in the bushes example. You'll survive a false positive where it's the wind that's responsible but you attribute the sound to a dangerous animal, but might not survive a false negative where it really is an animal. Does that mean we should assign a "true" label to the source of the sound being a threat, or does it simply mean that we should behave cautiously based on a risk assessment? Perhaps we could assign "false" to the proposition that there's an animal in the bushes yet still decide we ought to distance ourselves from that bush anyways. And I guess the "you can't get an ought from an is" comes into play here as well. When it comes to making decisions we're ultimately dealing with "ought"s, and truth assignments are more in the realm of "is", are they not. All that to say, I think you're approximately right, but there's something between the truth assignment and the behavior that's been left out. It's some decision making function (something like a risk assessment) that allows us to act as though a statement were different because, despite believing a proposition true or false, we determine that we ought to act differently for the sake of the risk.

Oh wow. I actually understood it. Nice video.

Beautifully articulated - thanks so much for sharing!

Why don't more people understand this? Well done.

I disagree. Axioms are generalisations of empirically observed properties. That is why logic is so successful. It isn't just invented. It is abstracted.

I'm glad that your dog isn't hungry !!

This is a gem.

Brilliant video. Thanks.

You had me until you started dogmatically asserting that pragmatism is the beacon of all truth. Pragmatism works with relative truths, but not any absolute truth. You said yourself that pragmatism is still based on our egocentric perspective. Surely it makes sense then to conclude that we can’t know absolute truths. Only relative truths. Your video proves this but you concluded something completely different.