There are almost no just-plain-true (or false) facts in the macroscopic natural world. We’ve engineered our environment to support deductive reasoning, which doesn’t work in nature. Text from Elijah Millgram’s _Hard Truths_pic.twitter.com/e6HLMSjpb3
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“HIV causes AIDS” is about as certain as anything we know; there is no meaningful doubt. However, what it means for it to be true is highly dubious ontologically. In fact, each of the three words in the statement is extremely ontologically indefinite.
I am struggling to understand this. Have you written anywhere about the distinction between epistemic certainty/uncertainty and ontological indefiniteness? Or can you point towards another resource for understanding it?
Strangely, nothing is coming immediately to mind. There’s a long section on this in the book I’m writing now, but that won’t be available for a while yet.
HIV is defined as “whatever vaguely-related viruses cause AIDS” and AIDS is defined as “whatever diseases are caused by HIV.” And no one has any workable story about what “causes” means, in general.
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