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Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

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Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#61

Post by roenxi »

twoodfin wrote: post #44
roenxi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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…

> ... Try to get through life considering the color of the traffic light you’re approaching as a subjective rather than objective fact. ...

You didn't consider what I wrote - colourblind people get through life without considering the colour of traffic lights at all. They have to. They are colour blind. The colour of a traffic light as a practical matter is a subjective fact. In fact, the practical colour of a traffic light is more subjective than the philosophical take because at least philosophers can be convinced with a wavelength argument.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#62

Post by mcv »

irrational wrote: post #18
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?…

I have a bachelors in Linguistics. We were taught what Chomsky believes, but our professor also made it clear that many linguists, including himself, didn’t believe it was right or true. Though, this was 30 years ago. I haven’t kept up with the field to know what professors of linguistics think today.

I think his importance to linguistics is not so much due to being he's correct, but due to moving forward the way the field thinks about language and grammar.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#63

Post by cracrecry »

elondaits wrote: post #15
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 one of the most internationally-known intellectuals. Most people in my country (Argentina) know him for that, rather than his work in linguistics. ... So I think it's very unfair to say he's speaking "outside of his niche" here.

I don't believe that. I have traveled the world and very few people I know know about Chomsky.

I know a lot about Chomsky as someone who has studied parsers and natural languages a lot and I usually ask people I talk with if they know Chomsky so I can explain something I do.

People in Argentina knows Chomsky because he has always been Communist and an apologist of marxist dictatorships and regimes while a harsh critic of the West values and institutions.

Argentina has been a Marxist loving country for a long time. I was born in Spain and lived in Mendoza for some time. Argentinians also love to feel victims about everything that happens to them so they don't have responsibility on it so Chomsky message is powerful there.

I am not criticising Argentina, but describing it.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#64

Post by roenxi »

knewter wrote: post #46
roenxi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

We universally agree that it is at least "the wavelength produced from a well-calibrated display when asked to render #ff0000'

I mean, ok. But that isn't objective. That is a subjective judgement of the display calibration standards body, with no reference to what most people think "red" means.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#65

Post by hotdogscout »

debok wrote: post #34
epups wrote: post #10

There almost certainly isn't a universal moral code. For every abominable act you can think of - murder, slavery, even genocide -, we can find examples of human groups that glorified them, usually by evoking religion, group affiliation or a mix of both.

How do human groups glorifying immorality imply that there is no universal moral code? If the universal moral code exists outside of those groups, then it can be applied to their actions, and we can call them wrong for the thing they glorify. Your very sentence implies a universal moral code. You are calling murder, slavery, and genocide wrong. By which standard do you know them to be wrong? Such a standard must nece…

If there are states/governments where Murder, Slavery and Genocide are fine, can you say it is universal if it cannot be applied in that place?

What are the conditions for a universal morality?

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#66

Post by maeln »

imjonse wrote: post #35
maeln wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But whenever I hear him speak outside his niche his points are stupid (like this one) or harmful (like his Ukrainian takes). Chomsky was always like this. He is an unapologetic hypocrite, constantly criticizing the U.S and "the west" while defending "socialist" country for the exact thing, and often even worse, than he was criticizing the U.S for. Even going as far as denying the existence of genocide during the Yu…

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 "with restrain and moderation" in Ukraine: https://archive.is/EJp7e

That is how he operate. Whenever there is a conflict involving the U.S, even remotely, he is systematically downplaying the opponent violence and insisting that everyone focus on the U.S and ally violence. This way he can always look like the reasonable man, while basically defending massacre and dictator. How can he do this when criticizing (rightfully so), the U.S for the Vietnam War or the Contra, and not see the hypocrisy, is beside me.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#67

Post by mcv »

olalonde wrote: post #58
irrational wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a bachelors in Linguistics. We were taught what Chomsky believes, but our professor also made it clear that many linguists, including himself, didn’t believe it was right or true. Though, this was 30 years ago. I haven’t kept up with the field to know what professors of linguistics think today.

His editorial on ChatGPT definitely read like "sour grapes"[0]. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chat...

ChatGPT does feel a bit like a refutation of his life's work.

Because whether or not ChatGPT can think, it certainly has a good command of language without starting out with an inborn sense of grammar. It learns grammar by copying. Just like kids do, I suspect.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#68

Post by ducharmdev »

twoodfin wrote: post #14
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?…

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.

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 red considering how close it is to red. Or someone with protanopia won't see anything in those bounds as red either.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#69

Post by maeln »

dgb23 wrote: post #27
maeln wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But whenever I hear him speak outside his niche his points are stupid (like this one) or harmful (like his Ukrainian takes). Chomsky was always like this. He is an unapologetic hypocrite, constantly criticizing the U.S and "the west" while defending "socialist" country for the exact thing, and often even worse, than he was criticizing the U.S for. Even going as far as denying the existence of genocide during the Yu…

You seem to mix things up? He has been very critical of "socialist" countries, especially towards their underlying political ideology.

Yes, fair enough, it is more that he systematically downplayed the violence of the "red" side whenever there was a conflict with the U.S. Like how he basically tried to deny the Cambodian and Bosnian genocide.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#70

Post by botanical57 »

dsego wrote: post #23
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.

Does that relate to Plato's world of ideas?

To his doctrine of the Forms, yes I think it does. He seemed to think that when humans gain knowledge, they do not generate it, but rather discover it. For knowledge to be discovered, it must have already existed - in the abstract, non-material world of the Forms. Plato had an involved epistemological argument for why the human process of gaining incrementally less partial knowledge of a subject fundamentally must be a process of discovery - but I would fail to do it justice.

Chomsky seems to imply that in a moral context, similarly, as humans learn abstract concepts and boundaries from sparse data, we are also carrying out a process of discovery. He seems to skip over the epistemological reasoning.

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