Tyranny of Relativism

[wesmorris]

There is, of course, such a thing as Subjective Truth, by which you really mean Subjective Experience.

That makes no sense.

That thing can be said to be True when sense
experience confirms any given proposition.

What if my sense confirm that you're a moron, or that you have a plot against me, or that your shirt is orange when you insist it's mango? What then? Have you not witnessed hundreds of events where people confirm propositions with their senses only to find out later their senses were wrong? It's not their senses that discern the truth, they just provide information regarding environment. You can't necessarily say at any given time how accurate that information is. Worse, the host of said senses must then JUDGE or PROCESS the stimulous and draw conclusions abou tit. Many, many people seem to be weak in this area.

Thus, if I assert that x is a non Apple, and my senses confirm this,
then I have objective truth.

What if you take a bite and it's wax? *sigh*

Have you really thought about this, or are you just spewing theistic dogma?

What if it's not really an apple, but a genetic clone of an apple?

What if it's a virtual apple and your senses are being manipulated by the equipment strapped to you?

Subjective truth is not
"to you its an apple but to me its an orange", no, thats just someone lying.

LOL. You really haven't though about this have you? I could set up a scenario where you'd see an apple and I an orange and neither of us be lying. *sigh* Couldn't you?

Subjective truth is experiential and derived only
from sense experiences on a personal level,
experiences which cannot be submitted for validation.

Tell me how you circumvent this? Your experience is all you have to work with. YOURS. Even your dogmatic expulsions are YOUR EXPERIENCE reflected back out into the world.

Absolute Truth is different.

It's forever unknowable. Locked into the tao via observational distance. Such is the opportunity cost of perspective.

It refers both to the truthfulness of the
divine teachings about God and Man,
as well as the Ontological Truth (Being) which is Christ.

Riiight. How uhm... non-sequiter.

 

[Lawdog]

What if you take a bite and it's wax? *sigh*

Have you really thought about this, or are you just spewing theistic dogma?

What if it's not really an apple, but a genetic clone of an apple?

What if it's a virtual apple and your senses are being manipulated by the equipment strapped to you?
.

I need not refer to anyone as a moron,
however, taking a bite of the non Apple would
be a sense experience, which would provide a
new insight into the truth of the matter.
ALSO A genetic clone of an apple is still an apple.
AND, since a virtual Apple cannot be touched,
no full conclusion of the sense experience can be drawn.
Your arguments need work.

perhaps you did not think much about what you were writing, did you?

 

[wesmorris]

I need not refer to anyone as a moron,

Only said it to make the point more vivid. Wasn't calling you a moron. Said IF. I think you should take the point that if I were to gather you're a moron, at least YOU would likely disagree, hence illustrating one of a thousand gazillion scenarios contradictory to:

"That thing can be said to be True when sense experience confirms any given proposition."

- which I find very short-sighted. My senses that President Bush was at my house. Turns out it was the tv.

Senses can be wrong.

however, taking a bite of the non Apple would
be a sense experience, which would provide a
new insight into the truth of the matter.

I agree that it would provide YOU with evidence as to the thing itself... but we apparently disagree on the reliability and authority of such information. You seem to find yourself authoritative outside your own context, or you couldn't claim "objective truth".

ALSO A genetic clone of an apple is still an apple.

Is a copy of you, you? Since it looks, smells and tastes like the original, it IS the original? Of course that's not necessarily so... which is the point.

Further, since only YOUR senses are available to verify the apple, you have no frame of reference to which to do so. All you can assert is "to me, this is an apple" because there is nothing else for you to assert. You can't necessarily say, to you, this is an apple - because of the chance that it isn't. I would agree that you can assert it is an apple within YOUR reference frame, but in reference to reality or 'das ding en sich' (the thing itself)

AND, since a virtual Apple cannot be touched...

Well, not at the moment, but give it time.

no full conclusion of the sense experience can be drawn.

A "full conclusion of the sense experience" is not necessarily reliable. It could be that I'm a moron and can't interpret my sensory input to draw a valid conclusion about it, or that my stimulus is distorted, or that i'm tired or confused... it could be that I'm very bad at pattern recognition in some contexts, and awesome in others. It could be that there are elements of reality to the subject of my observation that I'm simply ill-equipped to sense.

Surely you can admit that "That thing can be said to be True when sense experience confirms any given proposition.", fails to consider the reality that senses are not 100% reliable, nor are the conclusions drawn from them.

 

[Lawdog]

Well, it seems that you will remain sceptical of the aregument from sensation. An aristotelian you are not. For you I recommend Plato, but stay away from anyone writing philosophy after 1500.

 

[spidergoat]

Whatever a particular apple is, you can be sure that it is anything but an apple. What can be said isn't true, and what is true can't be said.

If you want to get reductionist about it, look at things at a quantuum level, things can be in more than one point at a time, act like waves and particles, it all depends on how you observe it.

 

[wesmorris]

Well, it seems that you will remain sceptical of the aregument from sensation.

It's not my fault that it's a failing argument.

I agree with it in part. It's the scope of its authority that we seem to disagree upon, well, and it seems to me that you must find senses infallable, which is clearly wrong.

 

[Lawdog]

No, actually I was originally a hard core Platonist, and the argument from sensation is Aristotelean. I just used it because I thought people would understand it better than trying to come to a definition of Truth in the abstractive Platonic manner.