> There is very little about the universe that is axiomatically true and correct in and of itself. Math is about the only thing I can think of, and really that's in a different category.

My thought is that math (broadly speaking) possesses correctness because of axiomatic decisions. The consequences of those decisions lead us to practice math that can't express everything that we can imagine (e.g., see axiom of choice/ZFC).

The math humanity practices today is a result of tuning the axioms to be: self-consistent, and, useful for explaining phenomena that we can observe. I don't believe this math is correct in a universal or absolute sense, just locally.

I think you are confusing what we believe to be the truth at a point in time and how the physical world is.

Either atoms exist or they dont. Our idea of atom has evolved over time, but the thing that we call "atom" has always been there (at least on the time scale of human civilization).

The probabilistic nature of quantum objects isn't really a problem either. Electrons may be particles, waves, both or neither, but the "thing" is a real phenomenon of this world regardless of how we talk about it.

Similarly, the truth value of alien existence is well defined: either they exist at this time or they do not. We don't know it for sure, but this doesn't change whether they are actually there or not.

> Any knowledge is composed from imperfect abstractions, the edge cases of which we don't know.

That is a pretty concrete epistemological statement. Is it true?

That's not just a game, or a "gotcha". Any discussion about "truth" eventually ends up with the question of what it means to know something, a subject about which you seem to be fairly confident.

A piece of knowledge is a claim about some property of reality, which is another way to say that it's a claim about what is true. Thus knowledge can contain truth and can also contain errors, and importantly it's impossible to guarantee that knowledge does not contain errors.

>Scientists aren't after truth. They're after facts.

Is Bertrand Russel a scientist or a philosopher according to you?

https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/classicreadings/chapter/bertr...

What about Albert Einstein?

https://todayinsci.com/E/Einstein_Albert/EinsteinAlbert-Trut...

Or Richard Feynman?

https://www.cantorsparadise.com/the-fundamental-principles-o...

Finding resources for perspectives on truth by Ada Lovelace, Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin is left as an exercise.

(Sorry I already forgot the password to my recently created account!)

> There's a misconception in this thread and commonly elsewhere. Scientists aren't after truth. They're after facts. Truth depends on context. Facts are indisputable. Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be true. But the fact might be that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently.

This to me reads as semantic games; let me rephrase your example:

"Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be factual. But the truth is that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently."

Epistemology fight! Facts are ideas like there are 60,000 species of beetle. They're different from other ideas in that they don't explain very much, don't really contribute to understanding, and are quite boring. They are disputable, because my source for that particular fact is quite old, and by now we may think the fact is that there are 70,000 species of beetle. Objective facts are actually true, and nobody is ever completely, indisputably certain of those, although in some fields like mathematics we try very hard to say indisputable things, and in others like literary criticism we don't, because the subjective is of more interest in that context - that is, there is higher tolerance for vagueness. But really every claimed statement is a subjective attempt to approach the objective, which is forever beyond us, but we can travel in its direction.

I don't think there can be a resolution on a fundamental level, unless you count some therapeutic attempt at "we're going to pretend like we can grasp truth for the sake of convenience, or because the alternative is too uncomfortable" as a resolution.

The consequence of what it means is that we can't have any justified claims or knowledge at all. If you can't even count on the law of identity you've lost all intelligibility.

Alternatively, objective truth does exist and humans can comprehend it, and the issue of truth versus the development of how we come to understand it is a semantic one (I rather like the distinction between historie and geschichte in German).

To my mind, where we've gone wrong is that we began by assuming transcendentals, holding certain axiomatic, a priori metaphysical assumptions that make the scientific method possible, and then turned around and denied that transcendentals exist in the first place- undercutting the foundation rather than really questioning our tooling or our capacity to understand the data.