[Retra]

I've always considered true and false to be properties of models, which are (necessarily) approximations of some underlying reality. So I'd say "8 is larger than 5 in some sense" and "Sydney is larger than San Francisco in some sense", where we might admit that the senses differ, and maybe 8 > 5 is 'truer' because the senses in which it are true are more general and require fewer experiences to verify.

But at the end of the day, you don't want to just say "everything can be true if you stretch far enough", you want to say that things are true only when we've demonstrated some utility in saying that they're true. So we just defer the issue: if you want to say something is true, you always need to know what difference it makes.

[__mbm__]

> if you want to say something is true, you always need to know what difference it makes.

Absolutely. It seems that fictionalism avoids both the "in some sense" qualifications and worrying about what difference it makes by asserting that statements out of context are simply false. While consistent, I'm similarly not convinced that its useful.