Jeremy,
Really? You're going down the dictionary bullshit route?
Yes. In ordinary discourse we say things like, “this is a true statement” and people know what’s meant by it. In a discussion about epistemology though precision is essential. When you said that “true” means describing reality “accurately” the problem is that there’s no way to know what “accurately” means. We can say things like, “most congruent with explanations derived from the methods and tools available at this time” or some such but claiming accuracy in the sense of certainty is necessarily to overreach.
Indeed and we can therefore label them as false. What's your point?
My point is that those things too would have been thought to be true before they were falsified. Thor making thunder was “true” for the people who believed it inasmuch as it accorded with the best reasoning available to them.
There's what we can say and there is what is true. Because of the limitations of our perceptions and methods, we can never say with certainty that some statement about the real World is true, but that doesn't mean that the statement is not true.
No-one said that it does. Rather what I’m saying is that “true” isn’t the absolute you implied it to be. The statement “Thor” wasn’t false either for the people who believed it at the time they believed it.
For them, it was perfectly true.
Bollocks. Either the Moon orbits the Earth or it doesn't. The statement "the Moon orbits the Earth" doesn't suddenly change from being true to false just because our understanding of gravity improves. It was false all along. All that's changed is our understanding of it.
Charming. Yes, either the moon orbits the Earth or it doesn’t. This discussion isn’t about that though – it’s about what we
believe happens and why. How do you know that the statement “the moon orbits the Earth” couldn’t changes if our understanding of gravity improved? What if some hitherto unknown property of gravity was found that showed us that it creates the illusion of the smaller object orbiting the larger one when it’s actually the other way around?
What you have said here is equivalent to a geocentrist in ancient Greece saying, “Either the Sun orbits the Earth or it doesn't. The statement "the Sun orbits the Earth" doesn't suddenly change from being true to false just because our understanding of gravity improves”.
Bluntly, yes it does.
