Re: Cybernetic Communications • Stephen Paul King

There are many conceptions of truth — linguistic, model-theoretic, proof-theoretic — for the moment I’m focused on cybernetics, systems, and experimental sciences and this is where the pragmatic conception of truth fits what we naturally do in those sciences remarkably well.

The main thing in those activities is the relationship among symbol systems, the world, and our actions, whether in thought, among ourselves, or between ourselves and the world.  So the notion of truth we want here is predicated on three dimensions:  the patch of the world we are dealing with in a given application, the systems of signs we are using to describe that domain, and the transformations of signs we find of good service in bearing information about that piece of the world.

I’ll dig up some material on the pragmatic conception of truth …

cc: Systems Science • Structural Modeling • Peirce List • Ontolog Forum • Cybernetics