Doubt: Difference between revisions

If we take it that “[[truth]] is a property of a sentence, not of the world”<ref>Richard Rorty: {{br|Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity}}.</ref> and ''a sentence is an artefact of a language'', then, for there to be no doubt between us, our language would have to be a ''closed logical system'', in which both of us were fully conversant. Not only, typically, are languages ''nothing like'' closed logical systems in practice — natural dialects are are quite loose things, littered with ambiguities, metaphor, slang, malapropism and error,  around which it is hard to draw boundaries:  — but languages cannot be closed logical systems ''even in theory.  

This observation we owe to [[Kurt Gödel]]. The same one snookered Bertrand Russell: not even ''mathematics'' is a closed logical system. It also snookers [[reductionism]] and [[modernism]]. A single, transcendent truth is an ''incoherent'' idea.<ref>Note: not ''false'', but ''meaningless''. Impossible to consistently articulate.</ref> So is an [[ontology]] that depends on one.

Now we can, with our word games, do our best minimise indeterminacy. For example, [[legal language]] is ''meant'' to do this, by convention eliminating [[metaphor]], slang and informal constructions; generally sacrificing ''elegance'' for [[certainty]]. Where there remains potential ambiguity, legal language tries to further diminish it with [[definitions]], but even there, the best we can hope for is that our static document can describe the order, state and function of a simple system. It is beyond the power of any algorithm to describe a complex system.