So would you say that it is objectively true, or subjectively true, that we disagree? — Harry Hindu

"Objectively true" is a category error. Truth is a property of propositions. Namely, a relational property. That relational property is a matter of making a judgment about the connection between a proposition and something else. Judgments do not occur extramentally. (And neither does meaning, which is a precondition for making the judgments in question.)

Cool. So if something were universal, would that make it true? — Harry Hindu

No. That has nothing at all to do with what makes something true.

A common term for "the same for everyone" is "universal." "Uniform" would be another option.

"Varied" is a common term for the opposite of "universal."

Any time someone makes a claim about some state-of-affairs that is the same for everyone - like the claim that there is no objective truth - then that is an objective truth claim. The claim defeats itself. — Harry Hindu

What if the objective/subjective distinction isn't correlated to "the same/not the same for everyone"?

One of the reasons is probably that there wasn't anything equivalent to the Mediterranean Sea, the English Channel, the Irish Sea, the North Sea, the Black Sea, etc. separating large, independent resources (including cultures) that are worth making the effort to regularly traverse.

The Americas are a huge, resource-varied area that can be land-traversed, where most of it can not be sea-traversed just as easily--only the coasts work for that outside of the Great Lakes, which were often difficult to cross due to ice. The Great Lakes can be just as easily dealt with by land travel.

The closest thing to relatively manageable seas in the Americas are the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, but you can get around the Gulf of Mexico on land instead, and the Caribbean mostly leads to small islands that have the same resources as nearby mainland--there was no big payoff to building big ships to regularly travel to Caribbean islands. Heading further out into the Atlantic or Pacific would have required traveling huge, world-circumnavigating distances to get to anything worth regularly traveling to--at least aside from heading out from the more extreme northern and southern areas, but both of those were very treacherous due to ice.

That's not the only reason for it, but surely these facts contributed to it.

In day to day life you continually make choices and live according to that very logic. You don't have any proof that your neighbor/parent/spouse isn't a Korean imposter sent to kill you when you least expect it. Therefore you assume they aren't. You don't have any proof that people turn into pink unicorns when you're not looking, but I bet you still assume they don't.

I mean.... There's an infinite, incomprehensible number of things that we can't (currently) prove don't exist or happen, and yet we're all perfectly safe in assuming that absent any proof that they DO exist or happen, they don't. — NKBJ

Hey--a post that we completely agree on!

There is NO evidence to suggest no gods exist. — Frank Apisa

Sure there is. For example, when I look on my desk right now, I can't find any gods.

Anyway, you wound up skipping that it's worth diagnosing why it wouldn't be obvious to you that I'm not saying that "There is no objective truth" is objectively true.

Maybe the point to the last question was that you treat the term "objective" as a null term, as if it doesn't signify anything and it's superfluous to even write it?

It has to do with ontology. You asked about making a distinction between terms, however.

Sure--a distinction in that "objective" is adding a category-error adjective to the term "truth."

Which is another way of you saying that it's not obvious to you that I'm not saying that "There is no objective truth" is objectively true.

So now we need to diagnose why that wouldn't be obvious to you.

I'm someone who says there is no objective truth.

Shouldn't it then be obvious to you that I'd not be saying that "There is no objective truth" is objectively true?

Are you willing to admit that you don't know if there's a refrigerator in your kitchen?

I've already presented several arguments that a 2D universe could actually exit. — boethius

But it can't, because the actual world in no way hinges on stuff we just make up in what's essentially a fantastical manner.

In other words, how would it make sense to quantify such things in the first place?

Underlined is the very definition of sophistry. Perhaps you should try the Sophistry Forums instead! — Janus

So you actually do believe that there are things that are factually correct when it comes to (foundational) moral stances, aesthetic stances, etc. Even you had denied that, but it seemed pretty clear that you believe it.

Some opinion can be true/false though. — creativesoul

<sigh> as we laboriously lay down some kindergarten-level material: There are different senses of the term opinion. One sense is how a person feels about something. Whether they like or dislike the thing in question, whether they approve or disapprove, etc. That sense can only be true or false re whether the person is honestly reporting how they feel, and insofar as the sentences are framed more or less as "I feel . . . ," "I think . . . ," "In my opinion . . .," which they often are not. (For example, people often say "Beethoven is the greatest composer," rather than "I feel that Beethoven is the greatest composer." The former can't be true or false.)

The second sense of "opinion" refers to a person's view on a factual matter, where there's often an emphasis on the views of persons with some expertise in the area in question, and on matters that are still up in the air if not outright controversial epistemically. So, for example, we might query a cosmologist's opinion on dark matter--query exactly what the cosmologist believes dark matter to be. This is not querying how the cosmologist feels about dark matter, whether they like or dislike it, etc., which is unlike the other sense of "opinion." And unlike "Beethoven is the greatest composer," something like "Dark matter is simply an issue of having an incorrect model of physics, so that our gravitational formula are wrong at least in particular circumstances" can be true or false without needing to add "In my opinion" to it.

There are different senses of the word "opinion." Only one sense can be true or false when stated without an "In my opinion" (or equivalent) clause. You should have at least learned this in school as a little kid--by second or third grade, say.

Can moral opinions be true/false? — creativesoul

No.

Relevant because??? — creativesoul

Because it's the sense of opinion that's appropriate for the discussion. It's the sense pertinent to the subject matter, to the phenomena in question.

So, it would follow that all opinions about the relative permissibility or recommendability or obligatoriness of interpersonal behavior that the person in question feels is more significant than etiquette are moral. — creativesoul

Yes. Hence why I wrote that.

So, if person A has an opinion that they must act in whatever way it takes to acquire tremendous wealth and they feel that this is more significant than table manners, whatever they do is moral? — creativesoul

Yes, relative to them. In other words, to that particular person, it's moral to act in whatever way it takes to acquire tremendous wealth.

Opinions can be true/false. — creativesoul

Not in the relevant sense of "opinion."

What counts as being moral in kind — creativesoul

It's an opinion about the relative permissibility or recommendability or obligatoriness of interpersonal behavior that the person in question feels is more significant than etiquette.

Yes (for my views, at least. I can't speak authoritatively for anyone else. Also, technically the "yes" is assuming that we're talking about a foundational moral stance, but let's keep it simple for now.)

Libertarianism ultimately leads to chaos and anarchy. — Frank Apisa

Libertarianism has nothing to do with anarchy. Again, if you want to critique something, it might help to understand it first.

Another question: can't we say that there are thoughts and ideas that may be triggered for a particular individual rather randomly by an art piece, but which actually have nothing to do with said piece? — NKBJ

No. If they're triggered by the piece, then they have something to do with the piece. That's the case because we're stipulating that they're triggered by the piece.

You could say that they're triggered by the piece but where the person in question isn't thinking about what was tiggered as being about the piece, and then it's not going to be about the piece in their view. (Which should all be pretty obvious, no?)

Can I say that that "cat" also means "piano"? — NKBJ

Meaning is the associative mental act as such. It's not identical to what's being associated. So, for example, a text string isn't the meaning of another text string. The text strings (or sounds or whatever) are not the meanings. Meaning is the inherently mental act of associative "aboutness."

Specifically, what do you see as the major difference between "as little government as possible"...and "the smallest government sustainable?" — Frank Apisa

The rest of my post was part of my answer.

The idea of the latter is to non-arbitrarily have the smallest government that won't lead to additional organized control via force or threat of force. The former, in the context in which you employed it, referred to the current situation in someplace like Somalia, which has nothing at all to do with libertarianism.

One of the objects of libertarianism...is as little government as possible. — Frank Apisa

The objective is the smallest government sustainable, so that more government or control doesn't arise in its wake. That doesn't amount to libertarians wanting no government, or wanting some arbitrarily small government. Also, libertarians see government as organized, non-voluntary control, which isn't limited to formal or official governments per se.

It helps to understand what you're going to critique before you critique it, but when does anyone ever take that advice on the Internet?

Therefore, the contraposition of (P->Q) is (¬Q->P). — Nicholas Ferreira

(¬Q->¬P) you mean for the latter.

Information, interpretation and values must be (and are) applied disproportionately to reach a position. — Judaka

What would it amount to to apply them proportionately, first off?

:razz:

I really wonder, though. I read a lot of posts here, especially thread-starting posts, where I wonder how the topic creator expects us to figure out what they want to talk about or what they're asking us.

A typical approach is something like this:

"Axiomatic Theories of Truth"

"Kant distinguishes between two basic kinds of principles or rules that we can act on: what he calls material and formal principles. To act in order to satisfy some desire, as when I act on the maxim to go for coffee at a cafe is to act on a material principle. Formal causes in Aristotle are the structure which the matter realizes and in terms of which it comes to be something determinate, e.g., the shape of the president, in virtue of which this quantity of bronze is said to be a statue of a president. Trump might be sabotaging himself by tweeting his every thought, especially when he insists that those thoughts are true despite them clearly being lies.

"We could say that an axiom that we are only aware of things representationally. Whether this is true is not something for Trump to decide, but the hiatus, here, is well known: it is that already found between intuition and conceptual adequation; truth, in Plato's sense of an unmediated intuition of an Idea versus knowledge, as positing and possession of entities.

....................then 20 paragraphs later..............................

Does this suggest that we should build a border wall, or what would you say about the truth of axioms?"

When people write posts on this forum, do they:

(1) Read the post aloud to themselves prior to clicking "Post Comment"?

(2) Read the post with the realization that others don't have just the same mental content as themselves, so that they try to imagine the perspective of someone who can only figure out what they're talking about from what they write, where the other might not have the same background information?

(3) Read the post critically, with an eye on whether the sentence-to-sentence, paragraph, etc. structure all makes sense and has a flow if not some logic to it? Is superfluous, rambling content being cut? Are there adequate transitions between ideas, so that we're not abruptly jumping from one thing to another?

Here's a challenge for you. State a thesis, and what you want to ask about it if you want to ask something, in not more than 50 words.

Unless a work contains dialogue or natural language text that's literally something like a philosophical argument, the philosophy that's "in" any work is the philosophy that the viewer does in response to it, and viewers can do philosophy in response to any content, in any relation to any other content--inside or outside of the work in the latter case. The caliber of that philosophy will hinge on the philosophical abilities of the viewer in question.

At that, usually when artworks contain dialogue or natural language text that's literally something like a philosophical argument, it's typically of pretty low quality--often very confused, fallacious, etc. That's because artists/fiction authors do not typically have the formal philosophical background necessary to produce decent philosophical work. (Heck, even the folks who do have the necessary formal background have a really difficult time avoiding saying something stupid.)

Art doesn't work well by being that literal anyway. The whole gist of something being an artwork rather than some other kind of thing seems to functionally hinge on seeing the work as something not literal (in a couple different senses).

So, the descriptive gives a phenomenological account of how people's moral beliefs and dispositions are mediated by the community — Janus

That would have to hinge on claims that things like meaning as well as preferences can literally, wholesale be given to someone from something outside of themselves.

Those claims would require support.

The biggest problem I see with the crudest form of moral relativism ( morality relative to individual preference only) is that it is really a symptom of our modern, self-centred, exploitative culture. Is it really sensible to think that everyone should be ruled by their passions? — Janus

There's nothing modern at all about it. Morality relative to individual preferences is what morality IS, ontologically, and it's what it always has been--errant, confused, mistaken beliefs that it's something else aside. "Shoulds" are just as well individual preferences (re "should be ruled by their passions.") The fact that morality is individual preferences in no way implies what morality should be. It's just a fact about what it is.

but what of those whose moral feelings are underdeveloped, atrophied or whose feelings are just not moral at all? — Janus

All of that is only relative to someone else's opinions, opinions that hinge on their preferences contra someone else's.

When a sincere speaker says "I promise to plant a rose garden on Sunday", then it follows that there ought be a rose garden planted on Sunday.

You disagree, apparently.

I say, given those conditions, "there ought be a rose garden planted on Sunday" is a true statement in the same way that all true statements are. Correspondence to what has happened.

You disagree apparently. — creativesoul

I disagree, too, if you're saying that the ought is anything like a fact.

What, exactly, do you expect boldly forwarding straw men to accomplish?

I mean, John Cage's 4:33 is (in)famous, but I somehow doubt many people have "listened" to it more than once. — NKBJ

I've listened to it many times via this album:

Libertarians don't think that everyone should ideally be on a level playing field (although they wouldn't force an uneven playing field if that should contingently come to be). They realize that some people are going to have advantages that others do not, but there's a bit of a pro-"social darwinism" aspect to it. If you are at a disadvantage and you want to not be, you need to step up your game, be creative, be increasingly resourceful with what you can manage, to try to compete. Libertarians see that as an asset of libertarianism, not a liability.

This is a big aside, but don't people realize that when they write so many long posts in such a short period of time that most of what they're writing isn't going to be addressed or even digested very well (if read at all)?