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Comment by jaw | Hacker News Reader

I think that's a potentially misleading way of summarizing it. Facts are true beliefs; not all beliefs are true. The trilemma only implies that there's no way for me to step outside of my own head and know, beyond the possibility of error, that my beliefs are true. But they may still be true. (That applies recursively to the trilemma itself!)

So if you dig far enough, how accurate our beliefs are is partly reliant on factors beyond our control: if our minds happen to be wired with bad axioms we may be unable to avoid inaccurate conclusions.

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> But they may still be true.

How? If beliefs have no way to be verified, what does it mean to say one still may be true.

This statement has as much meaning as randomly uttered noise.

> If beliefs have no way to be verified, what does it mean to say one still may be true.

It may not be able to be verified, but it can often be falsified. Suppose I believe that all bridges are safe for me because there is a swarm of fairies following me around holding up the bridges. And suppose you believe that no bridges are safe between the hours of 2 and 3 am, because the gods have so decreed. And suppose we both come to a bridge at 2am.

If I walk over the bridge and it collapses, it falsifies my belief that fairies will always hold up bridges for me, but it doesn't prove your belief that the gods have promised universal collapse for bridge-walking at 2am. On the other hand, if I walk over the bridge and it doesn't collapse, it falsifies your belief that the gods have promised universal collapse for bridge-walking at 2am, but does not prove my belief that fairies will always hold up bridges for me.

"All models are wrong, but some models are useful."

As a corollary to this - a principle I've accepted goes like this: "If you don't know what evidence could show your belief to be false, you don't really know what it means for your belief to be true."

For all of our important beliefs -- about people, politics, religion, whatever -- it's always important that we ask ourselves, "How would I know if I was wrong?"

It seems that falsifying would provide an escape route. Unfortunately it doesn't, because you would first have to establish - without a doubt - the truth of the contradicting statement. That works ok-ish for collapsing bridges, but it breaks down for less direct observations, e.g., when reading experimental data from a computer screen, collected to refute a Physics theory.

Moral and purely subjective beliefs aside, unless we're talking about a wave function collapse, observing (proving?) a belief does not change the truth value of the underlying point of discussion. So implicitly... it is what it is whether you confirm it to be true or not. Broken clock telling the right time twice a day and all that.

Take "the Earth is round" belief. The Earth was round since before humans existed. Having or not having evidence to support this belief did not and does not alter the shape in any way. The Earth is still round. So this belief was always true (even if unbeknownst to anyone) regardless of who held it and whether they had any evidence to support it.

I'm not sure the concept of "truth" is reducible. Any argument about the question "what does truth mean?" implicitly requires that participants can already make some sense of the idea that some answers would be true and others would be false. Also, it seems like you're implying that unverifiable claims are meaningless - but isn't that an unverifiable claim?

Putting that aside, some things are unverifiable yet have concrete ramifications for people's lives. Some examples:

- If "earth will be swallowed by a black hole in ten seconds" is true, I'll never be able to verify it, even though it will have the concrete effect of ending my life.

- I can't verify _or_ falsify that other humans have conscious experiences, but I believe they do. If that belief happens to be false, the world is vastly different than if it is true.

- _Nobody_ could 100% verify that a given physical law applies everywhere at all times. But if it does, some people's lives will be different than if it did not. The fact that everyone in the cosmos has experiences consistent with the law being true, and nobody ever has an experience inconsistent with the law, are part of what make the law true. But that fact can't be verified by anyone.

(A hypothetical omniscient person could verify all these things, but omniscience just means "knowing all true things", so redefining truth in terms of what an omniscient person could verify would be circular.)

I don't believe the other replies answer your question sufficiently. Here is my answer:

Just because you can't prove something is true, doesn't mean it's not true. You can just never know whether it's true or not. See also the Zen Proverb that someone posted in this thread.

When people start debating the truthfulness of things the rest of us agree upon, it's usually time to disengage because they are being unreasonable. Another option is to question not the truth of a belief, but its usefulness.

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