Hugo Holbling

In light of the arrival of a few people prepared to make the required effort, i'll try again.

Thanks for your opinion, Nials. Do i read you correctly as saying the only test of an idea is coherence?

I wonder if you'd mind appending your comments on the quote from Habermas? Also, i found the following quote today while reading Stanley Fish, in which he gives Kramer's precis of Derrida's contribution to the debate on relativism, and would appreciate your consideration:

Derrida himself discusses this concept of differance with reference to Saussure, as i've mentioned before.

Edit: Fish goes on to say:

This is a nice way of explaining differance, i think.

(End edit...)

Sure, but i wanted to avoid these here (at least initially) to prevent the thread from being dragged into a discussion of objective morality. There's a whole other forum provided for that...

I'll be glad to look over your attempt.

Contingency isn't a problem for antifoundationalists or antiessentialists, so i think your objection doesn't stand. Perhaps i've misunderstood you, in which case i await your expansion of the point.

Okay, but i only do that to gently mock those with the urge to appeal to a standard beyond the merely contingent. It's a PoMo thing!

Sure, but i thought it was clear enough in my post that i don't want to argue morality here; the issue in my first post was to try to show that demarcation criteria (for instance, between "good" and "bad") may be arrived at on the basis of intersubjective agreement for relativists. By way of my examples, i wanted to point out that a declaration of human rights and what constitutes beauty can come about without God, objective (or Objective) morality, foundationalism or anything else, hence addressing the criticism that was levelled at relativism in the materialism thread.

I'll be glad to discuss whether or not demarcation criteria can be found and applied in the light of relativism, but i'm leaving objective or Objective anything for elsewhere.

I'm afraid i don't follow how this situation avoids being "linguistically saturated", John. Please try explaining again.

Thanks for addressing Habermas, at any rate.

NialScorva

It was probably a mistake for me to participate in this thread in the first place, I have enough drains on my time to not have to respond to 4-5 people on relativism vs objectivism.

Would one person like to participate in a formal debate on the subject?

NialScorva

Why is a "blank slate" needed? How does this connect with relativism vs objectivism, whether by ontological or moral?

I would love to argue with you on the subject, but I can't extract enough out of your posts to be more than assertions.

NialScorva

I find it eerie how close my view is to yours in this post, right up to the last step where we take opposite turns.



I agree with you almost completely, right up to the last sentence. I think the last sentence hides a lot of the details where the relativism comes into play. I don't think the "universal" attributes of language are nearly as "universal" as most of us would like to believe. A word in a language is an index to an area of our experiences, and we have no way of accessing other people's experiences to determine that a given word has the same boundaries. We have quite good evidence to the contrary, actually. I am not a big fan of closed in spaces. I have friends who are spulunkers. I have a very different reaction to certain descriptions than they do.

This is not just some emotional thing that can be waved off. This is part of the fundamentally different definition given to the same word. Consider arguing with a theist. His definition of truth is *nothing* like yours or mine. Ignore the question of who's definition is correct, consider how are you going to communicate with him at all if you cannot negotiate a definition for what "truth" is?

[qoute]
It is because of the mystery that we still don't understand exactly how humans categorizes knowledge is why you might consider it related to mysticism, platonims, etc.The rest of your statement here then fall flat because empiricism and metaphysical naturalism must first be based on an epistomological foundation for them to have any usefulness or meaning at all.
[/quote]

Empiricism *is* an epistomological foundation. Objectivism is a *ontological* foundation. I reject the need for ontology.

I'm not making an argument for ignorance. My position would not be affected if we figured out exactly how the brain works tomorrow, mostly because my position has been heavily influenced by my toy projects in artificial intelligences, specifically knowledge representation and natural language processing. Both of which have shown me repeatedly that when you do have access to the structures that underlie the language, they are rarely the same even when the surface is.

Quote:

I always thought of the cave allegory as implying that there is an "unseeable extra reality" that projects these shadows of which we humans will never be able to perceive, in effect implying some sort of supernatural explanation for reality itself. But still this is in no way discounts the fact that we can still categorize the differently and unique shadows but still similar to certain attributes and form foundational knowledge from these shadows, because its indeed a reality that we perceive that again is logically persistent and consistent with aggregatted memory.

Actually Plato used it to argue that a wise man would be able to ascend and leave the cave, to see the true forms that cast the shadows, but that's not terribly important here.

I agree with your evaluation here. To me, the essence of objectivism is that requirement to believe that there is something casting the shadows. If you merely want to build up a correlation of shape and probabilistic prediction of what the shadows will do based upon past experience, you never have to leave the realm of epistemology. You make some assumptions about causality and continuity, add a few trust networks, apply a skeptical edge, and suddenly you have science. If you want to insist that the things that cast the shadows are "material" or "natural", then that's fine, though largely superflous to building a predictive knowledge base.

Quote:

It doesn't work, because if your position is self-contradictory it must be based on some standard on which to be able to make the claim, a standard that relativism itself discards.

What if your standard is self-contradictory? You just move the problem back a step, but don't change the problem.

Quote:

Which still fails because preconditions X, assumptions Y, within context of Z must rely on an objective standard that relativism itself rejects.

You keep asserting an objective standard. I don't see where there is one involved at all. In fact, the ultimate implicit assumption is "In my experience, it is true that...". *Every* statement I read or write has that built into it. You'd be amazed at how much more sense people make when you read that way, not that it requires an abandonemnt of objectivism to do that. Howerever, if you're going to add that precondition to everything, then objectivism becomes superflous.

Quote:

Yes, but that doesn't discard objectivism itself. Objectivism states that if you have an error then you must check your premises (assumptions) all the way to its irrefutable foundations such as the law of non-contradiction (A=A), etc and start again.I would like you to see you refute anything I have said here.

This is where I think objectivists assume a perfect world, and typifies my argument. I wholeheartedly agree with the law of non-contradiction and identity. A=A for all valid statements about reality.

Who gets to decide what A is or is not? How can we tell that A[99percent]=A[nialscorva]?

NialScorva

Unfold the analogy-- the shadows are the perceptions of our senses. How do you gain knowledge of what causes the perception? You can't use your senses, that would be like saying that shadows cause the shadows. In fact, you can't use anything a posteriori at all.

Do you use a priori truths? How do you know they have any bearing on the outside world, then? How do you check them? With the shadows of perception? Again you have the problem of not being able to find out what is beyond them.

IMO, the solution is a relativistic one. There is now foundation, or rather the foundation is not needed to build knowledge about your perceptions. You assume that your perceptions are valid, and run with it as far as you can go. However, you should never forget that they are your perceptions.

The allegory was designed as an argument *for* the existence of something that casts the shadow, and man's ability to ascend and directly perceive them. You can read it for yourself.


If you are alone on an island, how do you determine if you are sane or insane? If there is an objective standard for knowledge, this should be easy. A relativist would gladly admit that you can only know by the reflection of yourself in other people, and you cannot determine this for yourself with any certainty.

Clutch

Yoicks. Yet again. It may be that rAnd=rAnd, but A=A is the law of identity, not non-contradiction.

John Page

Sure. No language was used by the participants in my example, therefore their communication is not linguistically polluted, it is by common experience alone.

Of course, this description uses langauge but I am asking you to imagine the scenario from the first person perspective of the participants.

Also, I should mention that I consider the proposition as represented by/communicated by language. Writing and spoken words contain information symbols intersubjectively understood by transmitter and receiver. Going back to the original quote from Habermas, there is an implication that the sentence is the proposition and I don't agree with this.

Finally, I'm not sure how we can "confront our sentences".

I have precognition that there may be a lot of shots fired at my response and I'm interested to see what objections arise.

Cheers, John

Keith Russell

Greetings:

The allegory of the cave is also an advertisement for mysticism folks...

Keith.

John Page

Sounds like a non-reviewable call to me! Really, though, which A in the above formula is the real A and which is the copy? One of them has to be an impostor, and projecting this onto your statement results in all statements about reality being invalid.

This is one reason why, IMHO, one must consider ontology and epistemology side by side. See quote from Pooh below illustrating why. Earlier you rejected the need for an ontology.

Explanation welcome.

Cheers, John

__________________________________________________
"And Pooh .... thought how wonderful it would be to have a Real Brain which could tell you things." A.A. Milne
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NialScorva

What is there to explain? I said I *believed* it, not that I knew it. Having an ontology doesn't really help that, again you just move the problem to having to *believe* an ontology. Which, as you put it, is a "non-reviewable call" to me.