Countries are going to be plethoras of cultures, arts, customs, etc. Those things vary by all different sorts of social groupings, whether they're localized or diasporas, from broad trends all the way down to individual neighborhoods and families even. The different cultures, arts, etc. both overlap and diverge in all sorts of complex ways.

I'm not satisfied with nihilism. I'm looking for an objective interpretation. — Chris Liu

I'm just curious if you have any insight why (you're not satisfied with nihilism)

that is a conclusion based on evidence. You a mis-understanding me - I am not saying science will not say something does not exist, but they will only say that when there is evidence that it does not exist — Rank Amateur

Ah, then we agree on that. But who would even suggest that anyone is claiming that something doesn't exist on no evidence?

You see, all these papers and articles and books are page after page and word after word of evidence. These are people who have meticulously documented Shakespeare's greatness. If even half of it is true, he's much better than Bay. By the way, I'm still waiting on anyone offering such evidence in Bay's support? — NKBJ

What would be true is that those folks feel that Shakespeare is great for the reasons they give.

It's not true that he IS great outside of that context, outside of persons feeling how they feel about him.

We can't give evidence that Bay is better than Shakespeare--or worse than Shakespeare--outside of someone liking one or the other more, because there are no facts about one being better than the other aside from that.

On your view, by the way, you wouldn't be able to make sense of me saying "That's not what I meant." That's a pretty common thing for people to say, which makes it problematic to not be able to make sense of it.

lol okay

Meaning is conveyed through many elements of the English language. — NKBJ

Maybe you could be a bit more specific, especially given that you're attempting an argument that I stated an argument despite not at all thinking about it that way?

A minor rearrangement of word order changes the entire meaning. — NKBJ

Not necessarily.

We don't at all have the same view about what meaning is or how it works. So appealing to me agreeing with you isn't going to work.

And hence why I'm asking about your view of meaning. So if meaning isn't identical to structure on your view, then you can't just appeal to structure in your argument that I was stating an argument despite not at all thinking about it that way.

What else would you say it's dependent on?

If you agree that faith in the earlier sense undermines conviction/commitment/significance of religious belief, why would you think that the other sense is something we should go back to and that the original sense is more nuanced and richer?

What would make the original sense different from belief in something based on logical argumentation or empirical evidence?

Structure is identical to meaning in your view?

What do you think? Does the idea of personal identity impose any problem on the concept of reincarnation? — Purple Pond

The only thing one has to realize to know that the idea is bogus is that you are identical to your body. Your mentality is identical to your brain functioning in particular ways. Supposing that you can continue somehow past your death is suppose that somehow your brain can keep functioning as it does "apart from your brain."

Doesn't that simply amount to insisting that your interpretation is correct, and contra what the author intended, because . . . well, I guess because it's your interpretation?

not that I positively need evidence other than testimony for a conclusion. — Echarmion

Anyone can reach a conclusion based on anything they like, no?

I wouldn't be saying what's necessary for all people to reach a conclusion. That would entirely depend on the person in question.

People certainly can and do reach conclusions based on testimony only.

I think that's a horrible idea. I explained why. Not everyone is going to agree with me, no matter what I do.

You mean that you're saying that I may have been forwarding an argument even though I didn't think I was forwarding an argument?

Or are you saying that fallacies apply to things that aren't arguments?

It's still circular and needs a more adequate explanation. — NKBJ

Arguments can be circular. It wasn't an argument.

Geez, it's like talking to a wall.

How you read something and how I was thinking about something are the same thing?

You turned it into an argument by using the word "since." — NKBJ

Again, it was an explanation. I wasn't saying that I was presenting premises and a conclusion where the conclusion logically follows from the premises. In fact, I explicitly said that I wasn't doing that.

Maybe you read it as an argument. Okay. Nothing I can do about that. But I wasn't presenting it as an argument, as premises and a conclusion.

The problem with that for religious belief is that it undermines the conviction/commitment of it. If you only believe because there's a logical argument or proof, then your belief isn't as significant, and your belief can also crumble if the logical argument is shown to have problems.

That's why faith as something sans other evidence is cherished in religion.

I wasn't trying to be sarcastic. If that's your (sole) criterion for explanations, you'd have to say that in 200 CE, that was the explanation of eclipses, and there was nothing wrong with it as an explanation in 200 CE.

If that's the criterion, then I'd agree that there's no way that a physicalist account of mental phenomena is going to be an explanation any time soon, but that simply tells us about biases at present.

What's the epistemological grounding of treating physical evidence as qualitatively different from testimony (ignoring for the moment that testimony is physical, so we'd need additional qualifiers)? — Echarmion

Hence why I put "physical" in quotation marks, by the way.

The grounding is that the facts can't be wrong about the facts. But a reporter can be, including that reporters can be dishonest/they can weave fictions (so that it would turn out that they're not actually reporters at all), they are biased in many different ways, etc.

Actually, I was referring to the post-comma statement. Which IS question begging. — NKBJ

Question begging occurs when premises assume the truth of a conclusion. A single phrase after a comma in a sentence can't do all that.

At any rate, nothing in my comment was presented as an argument, so fallacies can't apply. Fallacies are validity problems. Validity pertains to the truth values and relations between premises and conclusions that supposedly follow from each other. But I wasn't stating premises and a conclusion. I was simply explaining.

You believe it was true, but you could be mistaken — Janus

I know I shouldn't address more than one thing because the other will be overlooked, but I can't bypass this. As a response to my example of a common way to use the concept of truth, your response shows that even you, as someone forwarding a consensus theory of truth, do not actually use the word "true" to refer to a consensus.

How do we know this? Well, because saying "You believe it was true," in response to the example, would make absolutely no sense if you were referring to something that a consensus of people are doing. If the scenario is to write down whether something is true or false that only that individual can know, then obviously it's not a question of whether a consensus of people is doing/saying something.

The whole point of the example is to show that if "true" refers to something that a consensus is doing, then no sense can be made of "true" in the context I presented. But you seem to have made sense of it just fine. So you're not actually using "true," intuitively, to refer to something a consensus is doing.

Now maybe you're not actually forwarding a consensus theory of truth, but you're doing the old "A consensus that P is true makes it more likely that P is true," but in that case a consensus that P is true isn't identical to what it is for P to be true, so the fact that there's a consensus about some moral stance wouldn't amount to that moral stance being true by virtue of the consensus. In other words, what it would "mean" for a moral stance to be true wouldn't be identical to there being a consensus on the stance. What it would "mean" for a consensus to be true would have to be something aside from that. Well, what would it be aside from that?

You believe it was true, but you could be mistaken. Obviously consensus can have no purchase in regard to some matters than can only be known to the individual. But again, this is a red herring in the context of discussing moral truth, and it is typical of you to introduce such weak analogies when you cannot come up with any cogent response. — Janus

I just want to address one thing first: I wasn't introducing an analogy. I was explaining a common way that true/false are used that the consensus theory of truth can't make sense of. It's an objection to the consensus theory of truth based on there being phenomena that the theory is supposed to address that the theory can't make sense of.

A similar example is, "It is either true or false that one hour ago, you were thinking of airplanes. I want you to not tell anyone the answer, but think it to yourself, then write it down on this piece of paper that you do not show to anyone, and seal it in this envelope."

There is a truth value there, but one that we've designed so that no one else at all can corroborate, unless we unseal the envelope at some future time.

On a consensus view of truth, the above can't make sense. Yet it's a common sense in which truth value is used. So a consensus theory of truth winds up ignoring common usage of the term it's supposed to be defining.

Would you not be able to make sense of "It was true a moment ago that I thought of eating ice cream"?

The fact that it was true a moment ago involved no one else in any manner, and it couldn't have--since I didn't tell anyone what I thought at the time. Yet it still was true at that time.

On your view, you should not be able to make sense of that usage of "true."

The things that are true in human life are the things that all of us (the sensible ones at least) can agree upon. — Janus

Do you not realize that people use "truth" in a way that doesn't at all hinge on (the possibility of) communal agreement?

There's no sense of the word "opinion" that I use, or that's in common use, that I would say fits that. You could suggest a definition, though, I guess. — Terrapin Station

Ah--maybe I have to take that back. Here's one supposedly common definition of "opinion:" "the beliefs or views of a large number or majority of people about a particular thing"

Given that definition, it would be very strange to say that one doesn't think that 2+2=4 is an opinion that people have.

2+2=4? Mere opinion according to Terrapin. — tim wood

There's no sense of the word "opinion" that I use, or that's in common use, that I would say fits that. You could suggest a definition, though, I guess.

He thinks if there's anything bad, it's only because they think so. Do you agree with Terrapin? — tim wood

So is this trolling, or are you really dim enough to not even realize that I consider anything morally bad? One thing I might consider morally bad is continually trolling straw men.

All truths are only such insofar as they are based on inter-subjective agreement; and that goes for both scientific truths and moral truths. So, the universally agreed upon idea that murder, rape, torture and so on is wrong is a truth in the context of the inter-subjective agreement that it is such. individual preference doesn't come into it when it comes to such moral truths, any more than it does with science. The simple-minded demand for empirical evidence in the domain of moral thought is the category error. — Janus

Interesting to find someone who actually subscribes to a consensus theory of truth . . . interesting because it's rare. Rare because it's pretty clearly wacky, unless it's simply borne out of a passion for sociological phenomena at the expense of describing other phenomena.

Begging the question. — NKBJ

No, because that wasn't an argument. The part after the comma simply explains the part before the comma. Question-begging is an argumentative fallacy. You can't commit an argumentative fallacy sans an argument.

If you are the kind of moral relativist who claims that moral truths are relative only to individuals' preferences, then you are not "fine with inter-subjectivity", despite the fact that you might lack the subtly to realize that. — Janus

Again, it depends on what you're saying intersubjectivity amounts to, exactly.

I'm the sort of moral relativist who says that there are no moral truths, period. Subjective, intersubjective, objective, whatever. Truth value is a category error here.

In case you forgot, I am fine with inter-subjectivity. — S

I'm fine with it, too, depending on how we define it, but the definition I'm fine with doesn't amount to much, and the definition I'm fine with doesn't actually cover moral judgments qua judgments. Third-person observable behavioral stuff isn't identical to mental stuff. Judgments are incorrigibly mental stuff.

Morality is obviously an inter-subjective phenomenon, — Janus

Are you saying anything different ontologically with "intersubjective" other than the fact that people can interact with each other behaviorally, including that they can utter agreements, they can cooperate, etc.?

I would go with the "you live there" answer personally. You have a legal status that allows you to live there for an extended period of time, and you live there at least part time.

Hopefully Mueller discovered that it's ridiculous that we're spending so much time on this sort of nonsense rather than figuring out how to directly, practically make a positive difference in folks' lives.

The technical definition of faith is: Complete trust or confidence in someone or something.(noun) — OpinionsMatter

It's trust or confidence in something in lieu of other evidence/support for it.

Which apparently you reserve unconditioned license to do. Or since everything is relative, agreement cannot have anything to do with things, because that would allow for something to be the case — tim wood

Again, in my opinion the definition is too narrow, because it would amount to ignoring a significant portion of the phenomena that people typically characterize as morality, moral stances, etc. It's the case that people commonly refer to other things, too, by those terms. I'm not saying that we have to go with what folks explicitly have in mind regarding what they're referring to--especially because many people believe fictions, believe things that are incoherent, etc., and we want to talk about what's really going on, the phenomena that are actually occurring, but a definition of a term like this should be able to cover what most folks are functionally doing with the term in this regard. The suggested definition is far too narrow for that.

For Terrapin, Nothing is Wrong. — tim wood

That's not at all my view.

That it's not my view doesn't imply that I think there is something that is correct and incorrect for everything we can mention/talk about. I'm able to look at things a bit more nuanced than thinking that if one thing has a property, everything extant must have the same property. You should be able to do this, too, unless you think, for example, that ice cubes must be able to make toast just because a toaster can.

Sure. I wouldn't say that nothing stupid is forwarded in the name of science. Scientists don't actually have a monobrain. :razz:

"Science saying something" is scientists saying something. And scientists definitely say that completely implausible, incoherent, etc. things don't exist when there's no evidence for them. They don't remain agnostic on everything.