95 | Liam Kofi Bright on Knowledge, Truth, and Science

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 4 May 2020

⏱️ 96 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Everybody talks about the truth, but nobody does anything about it. And to be honest, how we talk about truth — what it is, and how to get there — can be a little sloppy at times. Philosophy to the rescue! I had a very ambitious conversation with Liam Kofi Bright, starting with what we mean by “truth” (correspondence, coherence, pragmatist, and deflationary approaches), and then getting into the nitty-gritty of how we actually discover it. There’s a lot to think about once we take a hard look at how science gets done, how discoveries are communicated, and what different kinds of participants can bring to the table.

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Liam Kofi Bright received his Ph.D. in Logic, Computation and Methodology from Carnegie Mellon University. He is currently on the faculty of the London School of Economics in the Department of Philosophy, Logic, and the Scientific Method. He has worked on questions concerning peer review and fraud in scientific communities, intersectionality, logical empiricism, and Africana philosophy. He is well-known on Twitter as the Last Positivist.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. And as you know,
0:04.8	we are not afraid here at Mindscape about getting deep into things. And today we're going to get
0:10.7	deep into some of the most profound ideas in philosophy. You know, we've talked about philosophy
0:16.5	before. We've talked to philosophers about pretty darn deep ideas, about realism, about consciousness,
0:22.5	about physics. Today we're going to talk about truth. And truth is one of those things you think,
0:27.9	well, you know, maybe it's a pretty straightforward idea. Some things are true, some things not
0:31.8	true. Anyone marginally acquainted with modern philosophy should know better than that, right? Of
0:37.6	course, things are going to get really, really complicated. The analogy that I have in my brain is
0:42.2	girdle's theorem in mathematics. Kurt Gertel proved that if you have a sufficiently strong
0:47.6	formal system, a system where you can like prove theorems and so forth using logic and math and
0:53.2	deduction, then there will always be one of two choices either. There are true statements in that
0:59.7	system that you can never prove or the system itself is somehow incomplete, somehow internally
1:06.4	incoherent. It's not consistent. And this is a surprising result, right? You might think, people
1:11.9	did think you could prove everything that was true in a formal system, not true. And in fact,
1:16.8	that lesson generalizes to other ideas that we might have about truth. It's very, very hard
1:22.9	to be formal and rigorous and careful about what you mean by the word truth. So today, we're going
1:29.1	to an expert, Liam Coffey-Bright is a professor of philosophy in the department of philosophy, logic,
1:35.6	and scientific method at the London School of Economics. If you want to know why the department's
1:39.9	called that, Karl Popper was an influential person back at the London School of Economics back
1:45.6	in the day. So things Karl Popper was interested in became an entire department, philosophy, logic
1:51.2	and the scientific method. We're going to talk about all of those things today. Liam is an
1:55.7	expert not only on the formal aspects of what truth is. There's a lot of simple manipulation and
	...

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