Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

openculture.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 464 posts

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#101

Post by boppinz »

hef19898 wrote: post #96
ajuc wrote: post #7

I start to dislike Chomsky more and more. His work in linguistic is over my head, maybe it's true, I can't tell. But whenever I hear him speak outside his niche his points are stupid (like this one) or harmful (like his Ukrainian takes). Everybody sees faces in rocks because we have brains fine-tuned for seeing faces. Does it prove that there's something universal in looking like a face or even worse - being a face?…

Chomsky is yet another person, who gained public "fame" for expertise in his initial field. And who then went on to believe that his newly gained recognition, and expertise in one field, qualifies him to reach out into other fields with public comments. And since the internet and society works the way they do, people assign him authority in those fields as well since he's famous. Hence, he became more popular science…

I'm sorry but that discredits his wide history as a modern intellectual. He did philosophy and linguistics from the start.

Like it's fine to not agree with him, but he often offers a great introduction to topics like war and labor organizing for folks. His pop science is at least based on real science and his own reasoning.

And who would you suggest instead? If you say anyone before the 1960s but filtered through the likes of Jordan Peterson or Steven Pinker I'm going to have a hernia. THEY are pop science crap.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#102

Post by chromoblob »

roenxi wrote: post #28
twoodfin wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Chomsky is arguing is that, yes, in an important objective sense there is such a thing as “faciness” that our brains recognize. In the same way, I hope we’d all agree there’s objectively a color red—even accepting that it’s the structure of our optical and neural systems that are the basis for this fact.

> I hope we’d all agree there’s objectively a color red We don't. For starters there are colourblind people, for seconds there is no specific colour that can be called "red". There is a large and fuzzy category of red-ish colours like blood-red or rose-red. Even if there is some academic "these light wavelengths are the ones" definition of red that is arbitrary. Aliens might have drawn the lines elsewhere.

If you insist on a definition in terms of physics, there may be a universal standard way of interpolating all distributed ideas of red into a main definition, even if extremely high-tech.

Otherwise, this question comes down to whether the meaning of the term 'red' is generated objectively or subjectively, which is related to philosophy of language and mind. See article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_... .

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#103

Post by 6stringronin »

maeln wrote: post #66
imjonse wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you cite him exactly on any of your points or are you paraphrasing what you have heard second hand?

You could just go to his wikipedia article. Anyway, he tried to downplay the genocide and the violence committed by the Khmer Rouge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom... He, in the same fashion, downplayed the bosnian genocide: https://www.dw.com/en/dissident-intellectual-noam-chomsky-at... https://books.google.fr/books?id=7Bl9KT9NME0C&pg=PA142&redir... And said that the Russian was acting…

He tried to make sense of numbers, as a point that it serves the US geopolitical goals at the time to have a distraction from their own atrocities.

"We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments; rather, we again want to emphasize some crucial points. What filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasizing alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial U.S. role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered."

Calling it downplaying genocide is a nice strawman. In any developing situation the media wants to jump yo a conclusion, that's his point overall.

He wasn't denying or downplaying just stating, if its happening how can we know to what degree when we have unreliable sources?

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#104

Post by hef19898 »

boppinz wrote: post #101
hef19898 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chomsky is yet another person, who gained public "fame" for expertise in his initial field. And who then went on to believe that his newly gained recognition, and expertise in one field, qualifies him to reach out into other fields with public comments. And since the internet and society works the way they do, people assign him authority in those fields as well since he's famous. Hence, he became more popular science…

I'm sorry but that discredits his wide history as a modern intellectual. He did philosophy and linguistics from the start. Like it's fine to not agree with him, but he often offers a great introduction to topics like war and labor organizing for folks. His pop science is at least based on real science and his own reasoning. And who would you suggest instead? If you say anyone before the 1960s but filtered through the…

Personally, I have a peoblem with all those "intelectuals". Most of the time they were never top of the crop in their field to begin with, and then switched over to general intellectualism using top notch rethoric skills. Peterson is living, or already fell off, the extreme end of this spectrum. People like Chomsky occupy places on the same spectrum so.

And spare me philosophers.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#105

Post by boppinz »

ajuc wrote: post #7

I start to dislike Chomsky more and more. His work in linguistic is over my head, maybe it's true, I can't tell. But whenever I hear him speak outside his niche his points are stupid (like this one) or harmful (like his Ukrainian takes). Everybody sees faces in rocks because we have brains fine-tuned for seeing faces. Does it prove that there's something universal in looking like a face or even worse - being a face?…

1 - His Ukraine stance is simply that we have had a Cold War paradox in our American minds since the 50s, Russia is both too strong a foe to ignore and a paper tiger working off of shoddy USSR tanks and being beat by some farmers with lock-on missiles.

This article helps clarify his points, he absolutely calls Russia's invasion barbaric, but he has always vehemently stated the West's bloodlust and policing has never helped our case as peacemakers: https://jacobin.com/2022/06/noam-chomsky-interview-russia-uk...

2 - Sometimes philosophy is about stating the obvious "well duh". Because if you can't establish solid axioms, then how can you try to prove a higher-level thesis?

And if the linguistic stuff is over your head, I'm not sure the philosophy stuff will be easy for you to grasp either. Unless you have a major/minor in dialectics I don't know about.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#106

Post by chromoblob »

ajuc wrote: post #83
twoodfin wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly Chomsky’s point. Try to get through life considering the color of the traffic light you’re approaching as a subjective rather than objective fact. To pick an example closer to the morality case: Hunger could equally be called a subjective phenomenon. Aliens may not experience anything like hunger. A rare genetic condition might produce a human who experiences escalating hunger as an escalating degree…

Hunger is subjective. Starvation isn't.

Hunger is pretty objective if your body isn't malfunctioning (and it never is logically, "malfunctioning" body isn't yours). If your body works correctly, you are not free to choose whether to consider yourself hungry, and this is what I understand as objectivity.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#107

Post by cmrdporcupine »

hef19898 wrote: post #96
ajuc wrote: post #7

I start to dislike Chomsky more and more. His work in linguistic is over my head, maybe it's true, I can't tell. But whenever I hear him speak outside his niche his points are stupid (like this one) or harmful (like his Ukrainian takes). Everybody sees faces in rocks because we have brains fine-tuned for seeing faces. Does it prove that there's something universal in looking like a face or even worse - being a face?…

Chomsky is yet another person, who gained public "fame" for expertise in his initial field. And who then went on to believe that his newly gained recognition, and expertise in one field, qualifies him to reach out into other fields with public comments. And since the internet and society works the way they do, people assign him authority in those fields as well since he's famous. Hence, he became more popular science…

This is absolutely not the case. His political writings and interventions got publicity the same reason as for many other people who were in academia in the 1960s: public opposition to the Vietnam war. This was a fulcrum in American (and western) culture and opposition germinated strongly on college campuses, so plenty of people in academia got a bit of "fame" as a result of this.

Most people I know who have read Chomsky have read his political writings only, and barely know him for his linguistics, and he almost never in any of his writings blurs the distinction between the two or mentions one in the context of the other.

I'd say rather his linguistics career has been mostly something that ran parallel to, not intersecting with, his interventions in debate about foreign policy etc.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#108

Post by ajuc »

beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #91
ducharmdev wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's odd to me that you chose color as an example of something objective, since so much about perception is subjective. Even if we think about it in more quantitative terms, with red being defined as having a dominant wavelength approximately 625–740 nanometres, it's a bit of an arbitrary definition isn't it? If we observe a wavelength of 624, objectively we might say it's not red, but someone may still observe it as…

Color relies on ostensive definition. It's a public part of language whether someone is color-blind or not. When we say "that car is red" we are, in a sense, pointing to something and then using the concept and rules of color in our language. We might see something as a particular color through perception, but when we see "that --->" we are, in a sense, "seeing" in language (including body language, for instance. You…

I use f.lux - it changes the screen color temperature through the day to make it easier to sleep.

If I sit late at night my desktop walpaper (which is a regular photo with a lot of blue sky) becomes basically all red if you look at rgb values. But I still perceive the sky in it as blue because other things are "more red" so it looks blue, and because I know sky is blue, and because I remember how it looked before and the change happened slowly.

All of these scream "relativism" to me, in fact the mapping to common moral fallacies is surprisingly direct :) When law changes around you you might not recognize when it got evil. Obeying the law is good because it's the law. When everything around is evil - small evil seems good.

As for language and law - these are arbitrary. "Yellow pages" can be any color, so can "blue screen of death". Green traffic lights are actually blue in some countries.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#109

Post by hef19898 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #107
hef19898 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chomsky is yet another person, who gained public "fame" for expertise in his initial field. And who then went on to believe that his newly gained recognition, and expertise in one field, qualifies him to reach out into other fields with public comments. And since the internet and society works the way they do, people assign him authority in those fields as well since he's famous. Hence, he became more popular science…

This is absolutely not the case. His political writings and interventions got publicity the same reason as for many other people who were in academia in the 1960s: public opposition to the Vietnam war. This was a fulcrum in American (and western) culture and opposition germinated strongly on college campuses, so plenty of people in academia got a bit of "fame" as a result of this. Most people I know who have read Cho…

And he if he wouldn't have been an linguist at university during Vietnam, just how many people would have read his thoughts on policy?

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#110

Post by LindeBuzoGray »

jebarker wrote: post #56
LindeBuzoGray wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be seen in an individual. A boy is raised in rural Oaxaca, Mexico. He works on a farm, speaks Copala Triqui and no Spanish. Then when he's 14 his family moves to east Los Angeles. As he adjusts to his new situation, his behavior changes. The moral code of rural Oaxaca is different them that of east LA. His moral code changes. Perhaps he always gave a great amount of help when needed to neighbors in rural Oaxac…

I don't think it's obvious that those traits, e.g. not stealing, are universal or part of some fundamental moral grammar. It just means they're common and widespread.

Not stealing, but as I said, stealing from one's friends. Most cultures frown on that.
Post reply on HN