It seems worth noting that taking map-territory distinction as object is useful in contexts that aren't about highminded philosophy or epistemology. Eg if I'm debugging some software, one angle to do that from is searching for the relevant difference between my mental model of how the software works, and how it actually works.

For the highly abstract epistemology stuff, my stance is: Most people should probably be more pluralistic. Thinking about map-territory correspondence is a frame in which you can figure out what's true. Thinking about predictiveness is a frame in which you can figure out what's true. Coherence, Bayesianism, and pragmatism are frames in which you can figure out what's true.

A lot of philosophy seems like what it's trying to do is to establish a pecking order between frames: to make one particular thing The Ultimate Source of Truth, and rebuild and justify the rest in terms of that. I think this is a mistake. What we actually do, when we're not trying to be philosophical, and what actually works, is we use all the frames we've picked up, we use them to judge each other's predictions, we kick out the ones that underperform too badly, and eventually wind up at a fixpoint where all our models of truth are making mostly the same predictions. This works better because lots of things are easy to think about in one ontology and hard to think about in another, and if we try to mash everything into the same ontology for philosophical reasons, the mashing process tends to force us into tortured analogies that yield unreliable conclusions.

In order to set up a correspondence between map and territory and judge truth based on the accuracy of that correspondence, there must be an assumption that there is something we call "the territory" and that in some way we can construct a map that points to it.

Suppose that I happen to believe that there is a physical universe "out there" even if I don't know about it or have wrong ideas about it.

Suppose I also happen to believe that a mathematical claim can be true or false or undecidable even if we humans don't know which one it is, or are wrong about it.

Suppose I hold those beliefs very strongly, so strongly that I have no interest whatsoever in arguing about them, or questioning them, or justifying them to myself or anyone else. Suppose I pondered and debated those beliefs as a teenager, but I feel like I've reached the correct answer, and now I just want to take them for granted and move forward to tackling other questions that I find more important and interesting, like how to build safe AGI or debug my code or whatever.

Would you nevertheless say that "the map-territory distinction creates confusion" even for me? If so, why?

Theories of truth are motivated by questions such as:

Why is 'snow is white' true?

Correspondence theories of truth generally say something like 'snow is white' is true because it maps onto the whiteness of real snow. A general description of such theories is the idea that "truth consists in a relation to reality."

In your proposal, it appears that reality is defined as an individual's experience, while the relation is prediction. The sentence 'snow is white' is true because that sentence predicts (relation) experience (reality). As such, it would be beneficial to my understanding if you either:

1. Emphasized that you are proposing a particular correspondence theory of truth, rather than an alternative to correspondence theory, OR
2. More clearly described why this is not a correspondence theory of truth.

This is an interesting take on the map-territory distinction, and I agree in part. Thinking about it now, my only issues with the correspondence theory of truth would be

1. that it might imply dualism, as you suggested, between a "map" partition of reality and a "territory" partition of reality, and
2. that it might imply that the territory is something that can be objectively "checked" against the map by some magical method that transcends the process of observation that produced the map in the first place.

These implications, however, seem to be artifacts of human psychology that can be corrected for. As for the metaphysical assumption of an objective, external physical world, I don't see how you can really get around that.

It's true that the only way we get any glimpse at the territory is through our sensory experiences. However, the map that we build in response to this experience carries information that sets a lower bound on the causal complexity of the territory that generates it.

Both the map and the territory are generative processes. The territory generates our sensory experiences, while the map (or rather, the circuitry in our brains) uses something analogous to Bayesian inference to build generative models whose dynamics are predictive of our experiences. In so doing, the map takes on a causal structure that is necessary to predict the hierarchical statistical regularities that it observes in the dynamics of its experiences.

This structure is what is supposed to correspond to the territory. The outputs of the two generative processes (the sensations coming from the territory and the predictions coming from the map) are how correspondence is checked, but they are not the processes themselves.

In other words, the sensory experiences you talked about are Bayesian evidence for the true structure of the territory that generates them, not the territory itself.

Thanks for this.  I sometimes forget that "predicted experience" is not what everyone means by "map", and "actual experience" not what they mean when they say "territory".

The claim that the map-territority model impliesa correspondence theory of truth is boldy stated and for clarity tha is good. I think the "proof" of it is quite implicit and I kind of find the claim not to stand. I still think that the phrasing is prone to support that kind of mode of thought that is problematic.

I find that if I want to avoid mention of territority I can do it mostly fine in that framing. I keep my nose stuck on a piece of paper and if my walking doesn't get me surprised I am happy and confident to walk on. I don't need to claim that I am walking in anything.

I suspect that having a priviledged entity such as "prediction" to be in the map is more misleading than it is fixing. That is a list of directions like "walk 100 m turn right walk 200 m" would be equally a "map" than a "free view point" representation and having a specific this kind of map format be somehow more important than others works in a different dimension than the map and territority distinction touches on.

One issue here: often we don't just care about our own experiences, but also those of other people. Of course, if other people were just hallucinations in our head we probably wouldn't care about them.

What alternative theory of truth can we use if not a correspondence one? There's a few options, but I'll simply consider my favorite here in the interest of time: predicted experience. That is, rather than assuming that there is some external territory to be mapped and that the accuracy of that mapping is how we determine if a mapping (a proposition) is true or not, we can ground truth in our experience since it's the only thing we are really forced to assume (see the below aside for why). Then propositions or beliefs are true to the extent they predict what we experience.

Could you set up a mathematical toy model for this, similar to how there are mathematical toy models for various correspondence theories? Or point to one that already exists? Or I guess just clarify some questions.

In particular, I'm confused about a few things here:

• What's the type signature of a proposition here? In a correspondence theory, it'd be some logical expression whose atomic parts describe basic features of the world, but this doesn't seem viable here. I guess you could have the atomic parts describe basic features of your observations, but that would lead you to the problems with logical positivism.
• Can there be multiple incompatible propositions that predict the same experiences, and how does your approach deal with them? In particular, what if they only predict the same experiences within some range of observation, but diverge outside of that? What if you can't get outside, or don't get outside, of the range?
• How does it deal with things like collider bias? If Nassim Taleb filters for people with high g factor (due to job + interests) and for people who understand long tails (due to his strong opinions on long tails), his experience might become that there is a negative correlation between intelligence and understanding long tails. Would it then be "true" "for him" that there's a tradeoff between g and understanding long tails, even if g is positively correlated with understanding long tails in more representative experiences?