The Truth of a Falsity

The debate of realism and anti-realism is that between a system of directly observable truth and that of truth that is either beyond our grasp to understand or beyond our ability to describe and comprehend. To try to get a handle on this debate A.F. Chalmers invites us to consider a card--on one side it says 'the sentence on the other side of this card is true' and on the other it says 'the sentence on the other side of this card is false' - according to Chalmer's book What is this thing called Science pg. 211. What is the nature of this card, it is both false and true. It is false in the sense that what it utters is not consistent with our use of language when viewed on both sides. However it is true in the sense that it exists. A card exists that when read on both sides leads one to realize something paradoxical. What this shows about language is that language has limits in its correspondence to reality. Its limits are reached by the very fact that it is representational. When a person says, "I am hungry," they either do not understand their own appetite or they are hungry. However when a person is feeling hunger there is no truth or falsity in that feeling. They either do feel it or they don't. In the same way a person either feels like saying they're hungry or they do not feel like saying it. Truth value comes by how closely their language correspondence comes to the actual feeling of hunger. Thus there is a gap between truth and reality that would not be apparent in the eyes of realists. This gap is that there is the labeling of a particular concept (in this case feeling) with its linguistic counterpart, how well the description fits depends on several things, including the broadness and accuracy of the language and the capability of the speaker to utilize that language. To extend this to science, we cannot see those things which leave their signature marks of what we call, for instance, atoms and molecules. Thus we must make representations of them, much like that of language, which can either be accurate or inaccurate. If we use Einstein's equations sending a rover to Mars, then we can say his equations are accurate, if we send one to Alpha Centari--even more so. Likewise if they miss their target, they are inaccurate. But, even if we grant they are accurate, the reasons why they are accurate are not necessarily the reasons for them being accurate, but only a good justification. No matter how close science gets to perfect prediction, scientists will always flounder that their knowledge is based on some sort of representation of reality and not reality itself. Reality, like the card, is neither true nor false. It is only representations of reality that can either be true or false.