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My New Philosophy Website

fallibleideas.com

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Re: My New Philosophy Website

#31

Post by swombat »

However, relativism is incorrect because it says that all knowledge depends on the context. It's a bit like saying that all questions are ambiguous just because some are and because precision is difficult. Also, relativism is ambiguous about whether contextual knowledge is absolutely truth within that context; many relativists object to the idea of any absolute, permanent, unitary truth. But why should the truth for a given context ever change? Relativism provides an argument that the context is important, but no argument that the truth can change if we keep the context constant.

If you look into eastern philosophies, you'll find an interesting concept: that there is in fact no objective truth that can be expressed.

This is subtly different from a relativistic argument, though. The idea is, we can only express thoughts, ideas, etc, in terms of words and concepts that are products of our minds. And those products of our minds are intrinsically personal. Even with mundane things like tables or hoovers we might disagree on the meaning of words. Society teaches us to have more or less the same meanings so we can communicate, but those are intrinsically relative.

So then, there may well be an underlying, intrinsically "absolutely true" reality (in fact, there almost certainly is), but any attempt to express it results in a statement of relative truth.

Re: My New Philosophy Website

#32

Post by xenophanes »

swombat wrote: post #31

However, relativism is incorrect because it says that all knowledge depends on the context. It's a bit like saying that all questions are ambiguous just because some are and because precision is difficult. Also, relativism is ambiguous about whether contextual knowledge is absolutely truth within that context; many relativists object to the idea of any absolute, permanent, unitary truth. But why should the truth for…

> those products of our minds are intrinsically personal

An idea in my mind is that 2+2=4. What's personal about that?

Re: My New Philosophy Website

#34

Post by randallsquared »

swombat wrote: post #31

However, relativism is incorrect because it says that all knowledge depends on the context. It's a bit like saying that all questions are ambiguous just because some are and because precision is difficult. Also, relativism is ambiguous about whether contextual knowledge is absolutely truth within that context; many relativists object to the idea of any absolute, permanent, unitary truth. But why should the truth for…

that there is in fact no objective truth that can be expressed.

Trivially self-contradictory. Of course, you can word it like, "I don't know of any such objective truth", but then it's not a very compelling idea.

Re: My New Philosophy Website

#35

Post by AngryParsley »

xenophanes wrote: post #32
swombat wrote: post #31

However, relativism is incorrect because it says that all knowledge depends on the context. It's a bit like saying that all questions are ambiguous just because some are and because precision is difficult. Also, relativism is ambiguous about whether contextual knowledge is absolutely truth within that context; many relativists object to the idea of any absolute, permanent, unitary truth. But why should the truth for…

> those products of our minds are intrinsically personal An idea in my mind is that 2+2=4. What's personal about that?

>What would convince me that 2 + 2 = 3, in other words, is exactly the same kind of evidence that currently convinces me that 2 + 2 = 4: The evidential crossfire of physical observation, mental visualization, and social agreement.

From http://lesswrong.com/lw/jr/how_to_convince_me_that_2_2_3/

I should note that Eliezer does not argue for moral relativism. Although there are no moral laws written into the fabric of the universe, humans all have very similar brains. With the exception of some outliers (sociopaths) most of our moral intuitions are very similar. There's also the caveat that culture, religion, and philosophy (among other things) can work as an "off switch" for these intuitions.

Re: My New Philosophy Website

#37

Post by vl »

eru wrote: post #23
barrkel wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, gouging may also attract social opprobrium or worse, get you killed.

That's why you need to spread the wisdom about the benefits of gouging _before_ the disaster.

That's why you need to stockpile 9mm Luger and 5.56 NATO ammo. In case of truly large-scale natural disaster ammo will quickly become standard (and possibly only) exchange equivalent. In other words ammo will replace money.

Re: My New Philosophy Website

#39

Post by AngryParsley »

swombat wrote: post #31

However, relativism is incorrect because it says that all knowledge depends on the context. It's a bit like saying that all questions are ambiguous just because some are and because precision is difficult. Also, relativism is ambiguous about whether contextual knowledge is absolutely truth within that context; many relativists object to the idea of any absolute, permanent, unitary truth. But why should the truth for…

> ...there is in fact no objective truth that can be expressed.

Agree denotationally but object connotatively. There are degrees of relativeness. Just because you can't be 100% sure about something doesn't mean you can't be 99.99999(insert more nines here)% sure. Of course there's some astronomically tiny chance that I'm a Boltzmann brain, but it's so small that I simply ignore it. Likewise, it's possible that my internal representations of some words or statements are quite different from everyone else's. But people don't look at me funny very often, so I guess I do a good enough job of conveying what I mean.

It's easy for someone to misinterpret your statement as endorsing the stereotypical hippie "dude, everything is like, relative, man" relativism when it's really very different.

I really hate to seem like a shill for the Less Wrong/Overcoming Bias crowd, but much of the discussion here has been covered there. For example, on truth: http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth

Re: My New Philosophy Website

#40

Post by eru »

vl wrote: post #37
eru wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why you need to spread the wisdom about the benefits of gouging _before_ the disaster.

That's why you need to stockpile 9mm Luger and 5.56 NATO ammo. In case of truly large-scale natural disaster ammo will quickly become standard (and possibly only) exchange equivalent. In other words ammo will replace money.

Perhaps in the US or Switzerland or Canada. I guess we do not have enough handguns in most of Europe for this to become feasible.

If I was a survivalist, I'd stockpile canned food and some can openers.

By the way, do you have any data for your argument i.e. any incident after which ammo was the primary means of exchange? After the last war in Germany, cigarettes were pretty big. What do people in Haiti use? (Or is this not large-scale enough?) What did people use after the Tsunami in south-east Asia?

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