Item — HN Reader

I'm baffled by this bit:

> "Different things are true for different people" (which is simply false).

I mean, "English is the easiest language to understand" is clearly true for me and untrue for others. I suppose one could couch it in terms of the specific point of view but that seems to be finesseing away the counter argument.

I presume I'm missing something. What's the author getting at here?

4 comments

"English is the easiest language to understand," is not true for you, because it is (strictly) a statement about the English language. When you say it you implicitly mean "English is the easiest language for me to understand," which is true for everyone because no matter who you are, you can look at dcminter and observe that English is the easiest language for them to understand.

The author also wrote this post:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZTRiSNmeGQK8AkdN2/mind-proje...

which points out the implicit reference to a specific speaker in sentences like yours.

But if you define truths in that rather narrow axiomatic way then there doesn't seem to be much to stop people from saying "from our point of view $countertruth is true."

Which is surely what his point about dark side epistemology was raising? It just seems a kind of odd thing to bring up in the context of the essay.

The statement "English is the easiest language to understand" is either true or false, and doesn't reference any specific speaker. It may or may not be the "easiest language to understand for a specific person", but that is a different statement, which is also either true or false.

If it doesn't refer to any speaker at all it will be neither true nor false. It will just be meaningless.

Context is important, and not having a shared context, or thinking you do when you don't, is a major cause of miscommunication in my experience.

That passage is pretty incoherent and badly needs a rewrite. But the point he's trying to make is that there are universal truths that are true for everyone, but that these are hard to discover, and it's easy to fool yourself into thinking you've discovered a universal truth when in fact what you have discovered is a locally contingent truth, you're just not aware of the local contingencies.