Acting on True Beliefs

The 'Holds True' Relation. Business progress requires transitions from existing to projected states of affairs. Accomplishing these transitions depends among other things on business actors having true beliefs about the environment. Acting on truths is more likely to produce the outcomes we envisage than will acting on falsehoods. This is intuitively obvious, but it is useful to make explicit the reasons.  

Suppose John's destination is the local airport. Why is he more likely to reach the airport by acting on true beliefs about the geography, available routes, distances, and so on – than if he acts on false beliefs? John's trip to the airport is accomplished by interdependent stages logically and temporally ordered. The extent of this interdependence and order increases over the course of the trip. Moreover, the transition's enlarging pattern is moving John closer to his destination; the nature of the pattern is such that the probability of his reaching the airport increases as his journey proceeds, until eventually he arrives. 

That state of affairs - John's having arrived at the airport - is a state of affairs in reality; John, in fact, is at the airport. This has occurred as a function of a particular relation - namely the relation between John's beliefs about the structure of the environment and the actual structure of the environment. The correlative effects of that relation manifested the state of affairs in which John arrived at his destination. His beliefs were consistent with matters 'as they really are'. They were 'true' beliefs because that structural relation held. 

The structure of truth and the structure of reality are thus intimately connected. If a particular intentionality to modify the environment were directed to phenomena whose structures were other than what we believed them to be, our actions would not, except by accident, have efficacy. Our beliefs would not have a correlate in reality; we would not be acting on the ‘holds true’ relation. 

Complex environments can make transitions more difficult. One way of improving the strength and quality of transitions is to be more aware of the dynamics of the ‘holds true’ relation. Pragmatica offers help on this score.