Children's fuzzy concept of truths -- and the same as adults

[jack]

I doubt a child can articulate the difference between "don't touch the electric socket" and "don't touch the cracks in the pavement or the bears'll get you", but I think they understand one. Most of the time, they'll act on the former rather than the latter, but in their head, all jostle equally for space.

We encourage this with little fables like "Eat your crusts and it'll make your hair curl" and "Father Christmas" and "Jack and the Beanstalk" and "Newton's laws" that aren't exactly true, but we say, and expect to be "believed".

And on the whole it seems to do most people little harm and possibly a lot of good (though there are occasional unfortunate moments).

However, isn't this exactly the way many adults work? People believe "Eskimos have 500 words for snow" and "Aliens visit earth" and "astrology works" and a lot of the time don't put as much weight in them as day-to-day things, but fight vociferously for their right to believe it. And yet this really annoys me (see also the furore on science reporting, eg. in language log).

Is there a fundamental difference? Is it more important that adults know what truth is? Do most people grow out of it? Or is it just normal and I should let them be happy?

Comments

Newton's Laws

[ilanin.livejournal.com]

Gah. This one really irritates me. Newton's Laws are exactly true in any circumstances which one might reasonably expect to encounter. The relativistic correction to the second law is infinitesimal excepting at high speeds* and the quantum "correction" to the first and third laws are infinitesimal below atomic length scales. There is a major difference between statements which are false ("Father Christmas"), and statements which are true with very minor and almost entirely irrelevant exceptions ("A body at rest will tend to remain at rest unless acted upon by a force") though due to quantum effects there is a small possibility that if it is microscopic it might not being, frankly, small print.

*You can just about measure this one on a macroscopic scale using an atomic clock on an jet aircraft. You can't, by definition, measure the other two.

Re: Newton's Laws

[ilanin.livejournal.com]

Oh, and even then this isn't exactly uncommon in science. We have plenty of laws which some things just don't obey. Hooke's Law is another classic example which is taught to schoolchildren (and first-year materials scientists). There is a region in which materials obey Hooke's Law and a region where they don't. There is are regions where materials don't obey Newton's Laws; that doesn't make them, or Hooke's laws, "wrong" or "untrue" and I really wish people who should know better would stop saying it did.

Re: Newton's Laws

[thethirdvoice.livejournal.com]

Surely they give accurate results, but still aren't exactly true? If they were true, they would be true in any circumstances, not just in circumstances likely to be encountered by humans. Of course that goes for most scientific laws (in my experience), they are models of reality which are as accurate as either useful or possible.

Re: Newton's Laws

[ilanin.livejournal.com]

So Boltzmann's distribution isn't exactly true? (electrons don't obey it). A great many things can either be true or false depending on the circumstances. The statement 2+2=4 isn't true if you are doing your arithmetic modulo 3. The statement 1=1 is rather dubious and somewhat misleading if your context is the truth table of a NOT gate.

Re: Newton's Laws

[simont]

The statement 2+2=4 isn't true if you are doing your arithmetic modulo 3

On the contrary: 4 is by definition what you get if you add 2 and 2, and 2 in turn is by definition what you get if you add the multiplicative identity to itself. It just so happens that in GF(3), 4 is equal to 1 :-)

Indeed, many statements about the universe are explicitly stated to only apply in restricted areas or to particular materials (Ohm's Law being another good example), and are still useful, and it's missing the point to talk about whether they're "true". The thing about Newton's laws in particular, though, is that they were claimed to be universally applicable, and it is that which turned out to be untrue. In particular, they were claimed to be what governed the motion of the planets round the sun, and even that is untrue (Mercury's precession is only explicable by the relativistic correction).

Re: Newton's Laws

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Apologies -- I think that comment was mainly:

(a) To be amusing and
(b) To be an example of many "lies" that *are* useful and beneficial. Sorry, maybe the surrounding language could have been different.