[guitarman531]

Now I'm not just trying to be a smart-aleck here...

Seriously, what is "truth"? I've heard it said that truth is "that which accurately describes reality", but then the question pops up of "how do you know what you 'reality' isn't flawed?" To me, this just seems to be an endless loop of questions that really has no answer.

So I'm not trying to get into word arguments and hair-splitting. I'm really curious as to what my fellow CGRers consider to be "truth". As a follow-up question, do you guys think there is such a thing as "truth" outside of the Bible and God?

[Chrysostom]

Originally Posted by guitarman531

Seriously, what is "truth"? I've heard it said that truth is "that which accurately describes reality",

This is the so-called correspondence theory of truth (i.e., truth is when a proposition corresponds to the world) and while it seems pretty intuitive to modern people it turns out that there are holes all over it.

But I'd flip the question around on you -- how do you use the word 'truth'? What do you mean when you say it? Or what do you read/hear when someone else uses it to you?

[guitarman531]

Originally Posted by Chrysostom

This is the so-called correspondence theory of truth (i.e., truth is when a proposition corresponds to the world) and while it seems pretty intuitive to modern people it turns out that there are holes all over it.

Would you mind elaborating on said holes? This is honest curiosity here...

Originally Posted by Chrysotom

But I'd flip the question around on you -- how do you use the word 'truth'? What do you mean when you say it? Or what do you read/hear when someone else uses it to you?

In the most dramatic personal meaning, I would say that a "truth" is a claim that I believe in so much that I'd die for it. Now I know this is a bit drastic, but in my own mind, if I know it's "true" that "the sun is shining"/"my name is Ted"/"I love guitar"/etc. and someone disagrees with me, I'd be willing to "bet my life" on said truth. Now because I value my life, that isn't always a very practical bet to make , but I'm just trying to convey the amount of conviction that I have regarding certain claims.

[jengoesup]

Hmm interesting question...I guess truth is whatever is happening in the tiniest slice that you could possibly pare down truth to, because truth is always changing. Truth is a state of being, of existence. If something exists, it is "true".

Or maybe it's easier to define it by its opposite...a lie is what does not exist, what is false.

When you use the word truth, you are usually looking for what is actual; what is the real cause behind this, what are you not telling me, what did you really mean, etc etc. Tell me the truth. In many religions, the truth is what is divinely revealed; what is the "right" way of acting, the straight and narrow path. Truth is not necessarily what is evident, but is what God intended.

And then to some, there is no core, single truth; every person makes his own truth. But I'd think that God would be able to know everybody's individual truths, and call that truth.

Again I don't think truth is necessarily a central tenet, it is merely what exists; and that existence doesn't need to be physical; it could be mental, spiritual, emotional, whatever.

[SomeCallMeTim?]

truth.. I would say is the ultimate objectivity. And as such, it cannot really be obtained by any person. We can only believe that it exists - any proof would always have some mote of subjectivity in it.

In more everyday sort of use, I use truth as what I see to be consistent throughout the world... it is true that gravity pulls massive objects together, it is true that I am wearing a shirt, etc.

[Qingu]

Truth is a perceptual state that emerges from principles of natural selection.

For example: when most organisms touch fire, they burn. An animal's brain can react in several ways to this stimulus (apart from the obvious "flee pain reaction"):

• Memorize stimulus of pain reaction (the fire)
• Categorize the stimulus as causing pain reaction (the fire + burning)
• Draw a causal connection between the stimulus and the pain reaction (the fire causes burning).

All of these reactions are perceptual states in the brain. They exist as electrical impulses in the brain, and they represent and organize an animal's sensory experiences.

"Truth" is simply those perceptual states that get selected for over time. "Fire burns" is one such brain-state. It's a very useful brain state because it leads to a useful behavior (avoiding fire).

Obviously, an animal that categorizes "fire" with "not burning" is not going to last that long. The brain that makes those categorizations is going to be selected against. Similarly, "water = solid," is not true because an organism that believed that would quickly die.

Humans have evolved language, so we have the ability to categorize our perceptual brain states (truths) using language. This has allowed us to develop more complex and esoteric truths, such as "e^x = 1" and "matter and energy are equivalent." Many of these truths are still selected for by experimenting and testing them against physical observations.

[Chrysostom]

Originally Posted by guitarman531

Would you mind elaborating on said holes? This is honest curiosity here...

The only thing I've been able to find online is this, which offers a lot of the critiques and comes from an analytic perspective.

Originally Posted by Qingu

Truth is a perceptual state that emerges from principles of natural selection.

Originally Posted by Qingu

"Truth" is simply those perceptual states that get selected for over time.

This basically looks like a version of Quine's theory of truth, which was that truth is the end of science. IOW, "truth" is whatever science would say whenever it is finished. The difference for you being a sort of evolutionary historicism -- "truth" is whichever beliefs win. The problem with your version over his is that it's not clear what direction we've got today as to how to try to figure out truth. While his carries the same drawback that any empiricism will -- i.e., that in order to get anything useful you've got to privilege the past but it's not clear why we should do that -- his says that we've already got the methods that will ultimately be used to get truth. Yours doesn't offer any methods of getting truth.

[Qingu]

Originally Posted by Chrysostom

This basically looks like a version of Quine's theory of truth, which was that truth is the end of science. IOW, "truth" is whatever science would say whenever it is finished. The difference for you being a sort of evolutionary historicism -- "truth" is whichever beliefs win. The problem with your version over his is that it's not clear what direction we've got today as to how to try to figure out truth. While his carries the same drawback that any empiricism will -- i.e., that in order to get anything useful you've got to privilege the past but it's not clear why we should do that -- his says that we've already got the methods that will ultimately be used to get truth. Yours doesn't offer any methods of getting truth.

Implicit in your post is the assumption that there is some sort of "truth" that we can "get" apart from our methods of categorizing sensory experiences.

The methods for (so-called) "getting truth" are quite simply the ways in which our brains (or our cultures) categorize sensory experience. The scientific method is one way in which sensory experiences are categorized. The reason the scientific method is the most "truthful" way of categorizing information is because it wins—it is the most useful, it leads to the most advantages.

In exactly the same way, the ant whose brain categorizes fire as "pain!" will have an advantage over the ant whose brain categorizes fire as "food!" Which ant brain has a more "truthful" view of "reality"? The one that survives.

Now, you may well believe that there is some objective separate truth out there and that our brain and cultural categorizations are approximations of this Truth, to varying degrees of accuracy. Except I don't see how this is functionally distinguishable from my view of truth, except for of course that you are inventing an unknown entity (objective Truth) out of wholecloth, whereas I'm simply naming an observed phenomenon.

[Chrysostom]

Originally Posted by Qingu

Implicit in your post is the assumption that there is some sort of "truth" that we can "get" apart from our methods of categorizing sensory experiences.

Not really. I'm more saying that on your view we don't know there isn't, and there must not be if we're going to have any confidence in the truth of present beliefs. Or, further, that we don't have a meaningful reason to think that the "truth" that we presently "get" through our present methods of categorizing sensory experiences won't be entirely contrary to what wins in the long run.

Originally Posted by Qingu

The methods for (so-called) "getting truth" are quite simply the ways in which our brains (or our cultures) categorize sensory experience. The scientific method is one way in which sensory experiences are categorized. The reason the scientific method is the most "truthful" way of categorizing information is because it wins—it is the most useful, it leads to the most advantages.

I'm assuming that by "wins" you mean that it's been the most effective at propagating itself (or the beliefs it produces). But there are two problems with that. First, it doesn't matter what's currently most effective; it matters what "wins" in the long run. (Or, at least, I would think so. It's your view, so tell me if you don't have the long run in mind.) Second, the scientific method hasn't at all been the most effective at propagating itself or the beliefs it produces. The big scientific models out there get the imagination for hypotheses from somewhere, and it isn't the scientific method; once you get those models, then you can start plugging things in using the scientific method on the basis of those models. And while the scientific method is a model with heuristic value, it's not a good description of what actual scientists are actually doing most of the time. But worst of all, the vast majority of beliefs clearly come from elsewhere; beer commercials are funny and involve bikinis rather than appearing in syllogism form, after all. So not only is it irrelevant whether the scientific method is currently the "winner," it also isn't the winner.

Originally Posted by Qingu

Except I don't see how this is functionally distinguishable from my view of truth, except for of course that you are inventing an unknown entity (objective Truth) out of wholecloth, whereas I'm simply naming an observed phenomenon.

Not really, because you're basing your view on "categorizing sensory experiences," while (to my knowledge) nobody's ever observed a "sensory experience," which you say we're then "categorizing." So I wouldn't say you're naming an observed phenomenon.

Though of course it's clear that (assuming we can talk about discrete propositional beliefs) certain beliefs do survive others ("win"), so in that sense it might seem like you're just naming an observed phenomenon. (Since for you truth is about propositional beliefs.) But while it's clear what it means for one belief to "win" over another at some point in time, it's not clear what it means for a belief to "win" overall. After all, are we assuming that eventually evolutionary forces will reach a final equilibrium someday, and that whatever we've got then has won? This was the assumption of most of the older philosophizing about evolution, but it seems pretty baseless to me. Or are we saying that certain beliefs will "win" against all conceivable others in the abstract? No, this doesn't really work either, because "winning" is entirely relative to the particular situation. The last possibility I can think of is that "winning" might be whatever is currently "winning," but since presumably you're trying to use "truth" to help us act in ways that will help us survive in the future we can't deify what the past has brought us so far. (And it's not clear what it would mean to be "winning" at present; who has to believe it for it to be "winning" right now?)

[Qingu]

Originally Posted by Chrysostom

Not really. I'm more saying that on your view we don't know there isn't, and there must not be if we're going to have any confidence in the truth of present beliefs. Or, further, that we don't have a meaningful reason to think that the "truth" that we presently "get" through our present methods of categorizing sensory experiences won't be entirely contrary to what wins in the long run.

This is true.

People (like the ancient Mesopotamians and Hebrews) used to believe the earth was flat, the sky was a solid dome, and that there was an ocean of water above the sky. This mythology was based on their sensory experiences—the earth looks flat, water falls from the sky, and the sky is blue (like big bodies of water), so of course there's an ocean up there.

Then the Greeks observed that the horizon is slightly curved from tall mountains, so they concluded the earth was, in fact, round. This "truth" won out in the long run, for various reasons.

Isaac Newton's theories on gravity and forces unified physics. They explained the motions of the heavens and the earth. Before Newton, people treated these realms as separate, much as people treat the realms of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity separate today. Newton figured out how to unify all of the disparate observations (based on sensory experiences) in his time into a single, elegant theory, and that is why his "truth" won out. Similarly, Einstein further refined Newton's theory—Einstein's theory encompasses more of observed reality than Newton's, so Einstein's relativity wins out today. And someday, we will probably have a theory that unifies the (very large) observations dealt with in Relativity with the (very small) observations dealt with in QM.

The truth-value of these theories lies in how well they explain and categorize sensory experiences. As long as we continue to refine our sensory experiences, truth will change based on that. I don't really see why this is a cause for alarm, though.

I'm assuming that by "wins" you mean that it's been the most effective at propagating itself (or the beliefs it produces).

Not exactly. I'm not really talking about memes here, although that is a perfectly valid point. By a lot of accounts, Islam is propogating itself quite nicely, despite its relative inability to categorize and describe sensory experiences compared to a Western scientific outlook. This is because the meme of Islam is better suited to propogation than the meme of Western science (what with "have lots of children," "shun/execute apostates" and "don't trust anything the kufr say" sub-memes)—at least in the short term.

However, in the long term, I do believe that the memes that closest reflect and best categorize our sensory experiences will win "in the end." This is because, quite simply, they confer more advantage than other memes. Islam and other religions do confer many advantages (social harmony, existential meaning, etc) but in the long run these religions are wholly dependent on technological advances to survive, and those tend to come from a scientific outlook. Saudi Arabia, which is by far the greatest propogator of Islam (in the form of billions of dollars it spends building madrassas all over the world) only has this ability because we pay them billions of dollars for their oil. Without this money, and without the technology driving this exchange, Islam would not be nearly as popular as it is today.

Second, the scientific method hasn't at all been the most effective at propagating itself or the beliefs it produces.

It's been quite effective, actually—nearly all countries use it to some extent today. And it's notably propogated itself without violent conquest, unlike other memes I could mention.

The big scientific models out there get the imagination for hypotheses from somewhere, and it isn't the scientific method; once you get those models, then you can start plugging things in using the scientific method on the basis of those models.

The ability to imagine these models is actually a really interesting phenomenon; people have likened the "genius" of scientists and mathemeticians to the "genius" of great artists.

But of course, you can describe this phenomenon wholly within the context of brain states. Our brain's function is to categorize sensory experiences. But there are no hard and fast rules for doing so. I see a computer, and my brain can categorize it as "piece of metal and plastic" or "crystalized meme evolving towards the technological singularity." It depends on the other ideas—memes, methods of categorization—we've been exposed to, and sometimes the brain combines ideas from different places to come up with something new. I think that, mechanically, this is all that genius really entails, though of course it's much more exciting than that when it happens.

And while the scientific method is a model with heuristic value, it's not a good description of what actual scientists are actually doing most of the time.

I'm not sure what you mean? Are you referring to Kuhn's distinction between "normal science" and "revolutionary science"?

But worst of all, the vast majority of beliefs clearly come from elsewhere; beer commercials are funny and involve bikinis rather than appearing in syllogism form, after all. So not only is it irrelevant whether the scientific method is currently the "winner," it also isn't the winner.

I would argue that, with the possible exception of Islam, the general body (vaguely defined, like Islam) of scientific knowledge is the winner when it comes to truth. When people want to know about the shape of the world, or the nature of disease, or what happened in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, they don't read the Bible (because it's "just a metaphor" or "flawed human creation" some other excuse), they go to scientists. I work for an encyclopedia, and we have PhD's write all our articles because we figure their method is the best description of the "truth." We don't go to Muslim clerics or Christian theologians—even on the articles about Islam and Christianity.

Not really, because you're basing your view on "categorizing sensory experiences," while (to my knowledge) nobody's ever observed a "sensory experience," which you say we're then "categorizing." So I wouldn't say you're naming an observed phenomenon.

You've observed a category of sensory experience. You can read, can't you?

Though of course it's clear that (assuming we can talk about discrete propositional beliefs) certain beliefs do survive others ("win"), so in that sense it might seem like you're just naming an observed phenomenon. (Since for you truth is about propositional beliefs.) But while it's clear what it means for one belief to "win" over another at some point in time, it's not clear what it means for a belief to "win" overall. After all, are we assuming that eventually evolutionary forces will reach a final equilibrium someday, and that whatever we've got then has won?

Actually I'm not assuming this at all.

Truth for humans is ultimately limited by the extent to which we can make observations and have sensory experiences. We've augmented our ability to do this by creating machines, like telescopes and particle colliders. But these enhanced observations still have to be processed by human brains.

I don't know how you feel about transhumanism, but I think it's only a matter of time before people figure out how to enhance our brains, or create an artificial brain that surpasses human brains. This will lead to a very different set of truths, in the same way that our truths are quite different from the truths held by a dog or an ant. And of course, this superhuman/AI brain wouldn't be the "end" of truth's evolution either, because it could likely go on to create an even more advanced brain, and so on.

And I don't know about you, but I'm perfectly comfortable with this. I know that our truth today is almost certainly going to be surpassed and replaced by a "better" truth in the future, possibly by inhuman robot overlords even. But I do take some satisfaction in knowing that our current truths are setting the foundation for those future truths, and that there does seem to be a direction to all this.

[Chrysostom]

Originally Posted by Qingu

This is true.

People (like the ancient Mesopotamians and Hebrews) used to believe the earth was flat, the sky was a solid dome, and that there was an ocean of water above the sky. This mythology was based on their sensory experiences—the earth looks flat, water falls from the sky, and the sky is blue (like big bodies of water), so of course there's an ocean up there.

Then the Greeks observed that the horizon is slightly curved from tall mountains, so they concluded the earth was, in fact, round. This "truth" won out in the long run, for various reasons.

Isaac Newton's theories on gravity and forces unified physics. They explained the motions of the heavens and the earth. Before Newton, people treated these realms as separate, much as people treat the realms of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity separate today. Newton figured out how to unify all of the disparate observations (based on sensory experiences) in his time into a single, elegant theory, and that is why his "truth" won out. Similarly, Einstein further refined Newton's theory—Einstein's theory encompasses more of observed reality than Newton's, so Einstein's relativity wins out today. And someday, we will probably have a theory that unifies the (very large) observations dealt with in Relativity with the (very small) observations dealt with in QM.

The truth-value of these theories lies in how well they explain and categorize sensory experiences. As long as we continue to refine our sensory experiences, truth will change based on that. I don't really see why this is a cause for alarm, though.

This means that we can only say what truth was in the past, because only then do we have the perspective to see what won. Else I don't see how we're going to judge "how well they explain and categorize sensory experiences" -- we can only judge that by seeing how things turn out. But a truth that's consigned to the past isn't particularly useful.

Originally Posted by Qingu

Not exactly. I'm not really talking about memes here, although that is a perfectly valid point. By a lot of accounts, Islam is propogating itself quite nicely, despite its relative inability to categorize and describe sensory experiences compared to a Western scientific outlook. This is because the meme of Islam is better suited to propogation than the meme of Western science (what with "have lots of children," "shun/execute apostates" and "don't trust anything the kufr say" sub-memes)—at least in the short term.

However, in the long term, I do believe that the memes that closest reflect and best categorize our sensory experiences will win "in the end." This is because, quite simply, they confer more advantage than other memes. Islam and other religions do confer many advantages (social harmony, existential meaning, etc) but in the long run these religions are wholly dependent on technological advances to survive, and those tend to come from a scientific outlook. Saudi Arabia, which is by far the greatest propogator of Islam (in the form of billions of dollars it spends building madrassas all over the world) only has this ability because we pay them billions of dollars for their oil. Without this money, and without the technology driving this exchange, Islam would not be nearly as popular as it is today.

So, you're saying that even though Islam is the truth right now (because it's propagating itself best, as the areas with the most faith in Science are dying while Muslim areas are growing), Science will be the truth in the future, because you're convinced that Science will ultimately win. (Though I can promise you that Muslims are just as convinced that Islam will ultimately win, and if Islam is winning now then that means it is the truth now so now it's quite a bit more true than Islam will ultimately win than Science.) But, to refer back to the last point, truth is a judgment about the past, not the future, so you can't make the judgment that you're making here.

Originally Posted by Qingu

It's been quite effective, actually—nearly all countries use it to some extent today.

Yet the supermarket tabloids are full of reality tv celebrities, not science. (Pseudo-science tends to be particularly popular, though.) What knowledge most have of real science is mediated through some authority, not discovered through a scientific method. Beliefs about who loves me, my favorite websites, how to order at a restaurant, and what color pattern will look good in my living room don't come from Science. Even in the parts of the world where scientism is a bourgeois virtue, the vast minority of beliefs -- and particularly the most important ones -- come from Science.

Originally Posted by Qingu

And it's notably propogated itself without violent conquest, unlike other memes I could mention.

Violent imperial colonialism is what brought science across the world, and it could do so thanks to the technological superiority brought to it by scientific work.

Originally Posted by Qingu

The ability to imagine these models is actually a really interesting phenomenon; people have likened the "genius" of scientists and mathemeticians to the "genius" of great artists.

But of course, you can describe this phenomenon wholly within the context of brain states. Our brain's function is to categorize sensory experiences. But there are no hard and fast rules for doing so. I see a computer, and my brain can categorize it as "piece of metal and plastic" or "crystalized meme evolving towards the technological singularity." It depends on the other ideas—memes, methods of categorization—we've been exposed to, and sometimes the brain combines ideas from different places to come up with something new. I think that, mechanically, this is all that genius really entails, though of course it's much more exciting than that when it happens.

Brain states are irrelevant; that would be about physicalism, not about Science winning for your capitalist-pragmatist theory of truth. The point is that the hypotheses don't come from the scientific method -- they're inputs into the scientific method.

Originally Posted by Qingu

I'm not sure what you mean? Are you referring to Kuhn's distinction between "normal science" and "revolutionary science"?

If we're just talking about Kuhn's world, obviously the simplistic model that schoolchildren learn won't really work, but the two kinds of science could be part of some scientific method: One is weighted more heavily toward the hypothesis end, and one toward the confirmation end. So I don't think his system of revolutions and normal science is necessarily at odds with some sort of method, even though it isn't the toy example of grade school curriculae. (Of course, normally toy examples are used for heuristic purposes, not because they fit all the nuance of the more sophisticated realities, so this isn't really a problem.)

Two examples I could give of what I'm talking about are Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's Laboratory Life, and Paul Feyerabend's Against Method. (I don't agree with all their conclusions or interpretations, but I think the smaller building blocks of their arguments are true and my Realist scientist friend agrees.) Latour and Woolgar observed a real laboratory -- wanting their beliefs to come from and conform to their sense experience, of course -- and discovered that science is as much "art" as "science." The "scientific method" is a sort of idea, but it doesn't actually describe what scientists do.

Feyerabend takes it a step further, arguing that every major principle of the "scientific method" has been broken by a major scientist in making what are considered landmark scientific discoveries -- in other words, the primary exemplars of what science is show that there isn't a scientific method. In fact, he shows that often major revolutions took hold because of political expediency. His conclusions is that the scientific method is "anything goes." This, I think, is pretty amenable to your line of thinking, because for him you basically just throw a bunch of people and theories out there and "anything goes" -- meaning, whoever wins, wins.

Originally Posted by Qingu

I would argue that, with the possible exception of Islam, the general body (vaguely defined, like Islam) of scientific knowledge is the winner when it comes to truth. When people want to know about the shape of the world, or the nature of disease, or what happened in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, they don't read the Bible (because it's "just a metaphor" or "flawed human creation" some other excuse), they go to scientists. I work for an encyclopedia, and we have PhD's write all our articles because we figure their method is the best description of the "truth." We don't go to Muslim clerics or Christian theologians—even on the articles about Islam and Christianity.

So, in other words, Science is believed by a certain group of rich, Western, predominantly male, predominantly white elitists whom you know somewhat personally. In this case, to be frank, we're talking about some people who are so out of touch with reality that they're still publishing encyclopedias, as if anybody cares. What about the other 99.9% of the world? Do you think people in the Congo are yearning for Science textbooks, because otherwise they won't know how to breastfeed their children, or how to breathe? Or, if we're privileging America (and I can't see why we would do that), why do the majority of Americans believe that evolutionary theory is false? Which is more important to the average Westerner: Whether the world is round or flat, or how to get to the grocery store?

Originally Posted by Qingu

You've observed a category of sensory experience. You can read, can't you?

No, I've observed text. I've never observed a sense experience.

Originally Posted by Qingu

Actually I'm not assuming this at all.

Meaning, I'm guessing, that you're saying that nothing ultimately "wins in the end," it's just that something might win at this time or that. And again in that case we're stuck with making truth-judgments of only the past.

Originally Posted by Qingu

But I do take some satisfaction in knowing that our current truths are setting the foundation for those future truths, and that there does seem to be a direction to all this.

I don't see what reason you'd give for that.

[Jeffrey]

Originally Posted by Qingu

Truth is a perceptual state that emerges from principles of natural selection.

For example: when most organisms touch fire, they burn. An animal's brain can react in several ways to this stimulus (apart from the obvious "flee pain reaction"):

• Memorize stimulus of pain reaction (the fire)
• Categorize the stimulus as causing pain reaction (the fire + burning)
• Draw a causal connection between the stimulus and the pain reaction (the fire causes burning).

All of these reactions are perceptual states in the brain. They exist as electrical impulses in the brain, and they represent and organize an animal's sensory experiences.

"Truth" is simply those perceptual states that get selected for over time. "Fire burns" is one such brain-state. It's a very useful brain state because it leads to a useful behavior (avoiding fire).

Obviously, an animal that categorizes "fire" with "not burning" is not going to last that long. The brain that makes those categorizations is going to be selected against. Similarly, "water = solid," is not true because an organism that believed that would quickly die.

Humans have evolved language, so we have the ability to categorize our perceptual brain states (truths) using language. This has allowed us to develop more complex and esoteric truths, such as "e^x = 1" and "matter and energy are equivalent." Many of these truths are still selected for by experimenting and testing them against physical observations.

I'm not going to necessarily deny this, but I think it presumes that there is an external truth that we can only partially perceive. The rational mind, perhaps, must take as axiomatic that an external, objective truth exists, while noting that perception only allows us to view truth in a practical sense as the widest body of consistent perceptions and deductions that we each hold.

This isn't to deny absolute truth, only to say that our interaction with objective truth is mediated.

Or I could be full of bumpkis.

[Jeffrey]

Originally Posted by Chrysostom

So, in other words, Science is believed by a certain group of rich, Western, predominantly male, predominantly white elitists whom you know somewhat personally. In this case, to be frank, we're talking about some people who are so out of touch with reality that they're still publishing encyclopedias, as if anybody cares. What about the other 99.9% of the world? Do you think people in the Congo are yearning for Science textbooks, because otherwise they won't know how to breastfeed their children, or how to breathe? Or, if we're privileging America (and I can't see why we would do that), why do the majority of Americans believe that evolutionary theory is false? Which is more important to the average Westerner: Whether the world is round or flat, or how to get to the grocery store?

Not sure where you're getting a lot of this. Encyclopedias still sell very well.

And people in the Congo know that breastfeeding works for reasons other than mystical revelation.

I really, really don't see how you read all that pro-Western bias into Qingu's post. Not to say he doesn't have it, but still...

[Chrysostom]

It's been almost 7 months, I think. Is there a good reason to resurrect now, J?

1 - What does "very well" mean? Britannica has had all kinds of trouble with profitability. What numbers suggest that it is a central pillar of contemporary American conception of how the world is? (Assuming we want to center on America.)

2 - Irrelevant?

3 - I was directly responding to his point that his encyclopedia is scientistic, and of course the Britannica is notoriously myopic in its Enlightened biases so now doubt that will come up. He's citing as authorities people like Wendy Doniger, and frankly those folks tend to live in a narrow bubble that the rest of us don't get to inhabit, non-Westerners especially but also any Westerners who aren't part of that elite. It would be like citing my biography as a decent example of what life was like for people at my high school; my high school experience was very detached from the main body of high school experience and there is no reason for it to be normative, so it's not a good representative.

[Thrash]

That certainly was vague... and you certainly are good at resurrecting dead threads.