A Reliability Theory of Truth
This work addresses foundational issues in truth theories for philosophy and AI, offering a novel alternative to coherence theories.
The paper tackles the problem of coherence theories of truth by introducing a reliability-based approach that replaces consistency with support and attack mechanisms, allowing all theories or agents to contribute without requiring privileged access to reality. The result is a framework that can be extended to value systems and actions, such as those of animals.
Our approach is basically a coherence approach, but we avoid the well-known pitfalls of coherence theories of truth. Consistency is replaced by reliability, which expresses support and attack, and, in principle, every theory (or agent, message) counts. At the same time, we do not require a priviledged access to "reality". A centerpiece of our approach is that we attribute reliability also to agents, messages, etc., so an unreliable source of information will be less important in future. Our ideas can also be extended to value systems, and even actions, e.g., of animals.