The Outhouse - The Greatest Comic Book Forum

[S.F. Jude Terror]

no comment on diamondhead?

Listening to Diamond Head is the most rational way to achieve the goal of being awesome.

[eltopo]

Listening to Diamond Head is the most rational way to achieve the goal of being awesome.

[Timbales]

I think people have always been somewhat amoral when it comes to their own comforts, but I think that the increased use of the internet and technology in our daily lives has made us more detached from a feeling of community and other people.

[Arion]

I had this 4-hour long discussion w/ my cousin last night. Are people and society becoming more evil? Like, do we glorify things that we might otherwise think are fundamentally or morally wrong? For example, things in excess, or the use of violence and sex and drugs in our culture. Are these things making our society worse?

I argue(d) that things have been like this forever and there is a balance of the two. My cousin said that things were getting progessively worse.

Do you really think sex is evil?

[Cat-Scratch]

Do you really think sex is evil?

You must not be a Catholic or been around one enough.

[Strict31]

You must not be a Catholic or been around one enough.

I've known a number of catholic girls who did NOT think sex was evil...

[MistaT]

I think we are becoming more selfish allowing people to justify their heinous actions. But out and out evil, nah I don't think so. We were pretty evil back in the Spanish Inquisitions era and mid-evil times. The way people were treated and tortured back in those days was some truly evil shit.

[Nacmir]

Do you think there's a third option? I'd be interested to hear it.

None of them, neither true nor false. And both being true and false at the same time, as the 2 + 2= 5 example, or time being constant. People tend to forget about those two very often.

If you honestly believe this, I'd love to make a bet with you.

Einstein said that under specific circumstances, time was relative. Other constants could be objected too, and so other "truths". That's the point. Sooner or later, some cience-dude will say something that will revoke "truth" until the next one revokes it again. As you like to say, they will change the territory, converting evething that was behind in false.

No, the starting point was that only takes one thinking different to make stuff relative.

But this is false and you've already conceded it when you said "You do "uncertainty" once. I do it twice, as I don't believe in a specific and static truth that can be approached: terriory change, map change."

People thinking differently shows that their maps are different, it doesn't show that the territory is. You've still got a long way to go before you establish that.

I'm not establishing anything, That's the point. Nothing can be established.

I don't need to show anything, I'd show stuff if I were wanting to prove things, but as I believe there is nothing to prove...

Of course you have to back up your argument just like everyone else does. You've made incredibly bold claims about reality that nearly everyone who's thought about this would disagree with.[/quote]

As long as there is not an absolute matter in which there is not a second point of view, I'm quite happy with it. I don't have to back things up as I don't think they gain or lose somethings by means of being backed up. You think it makes them closer to "truth" but we were there already, isn't

(sorry for not answering, I have limitated internet access)

[Nacmir]

Well, yeah, that accurately describes our disagreement but at least one of us still has to be wrong about this.

You can disbelieve in the cliff but that doesn't mean that you can't still fall off it.

I mean, what do you think you're doing right now? You see my words on the screen and assume that they mean something particular. You may not be exactly right but you're close enough that we can have this conversation. That wouldn't be possible if what you were saying was true. If every opinion was equally valid then you could just as easily type a random string of letters and pretend it was a coherent sentence.

But I wouldn't be able to understand what you were saying. We need a basic grasp of rationality just to get through the day.

Old Socrates would have said that we are both wrong, and I'm ok with it.
But I could read your words as if they were written in spanish and it would be a mess. Meaning depends on context. Context fucks meaning with a strap-on under the blue moon, that' what I've trying to tell you. And context would eventualy make everything his exact oposite just for kicks. We could all somethat agree to asign "a" the value of "e", thus convering the word "value" into "velua" and it would be true. Territory changes.
We get that basic grasp of rationality by means of convention, not because it is right or wrong. Conventional and arbritrary, as Saussure said.

[PDH]

None of them, neither true nor false. And both being true and false at the same time, as the 2 + 2= 5 example, or time being constant. People tend to forget about those two very often.

The problem is that both horns of the dilemma result in relativism being false. So, if you try to have it both ways you just end up being double wrong.

2+2=5 is not both true and false at the same time. We can know to a high probability that it is false.

Einstein said that under specific circumstances, time was relative. Other constants could be objected too, and so other "truths". That's the point. Sooner or later, some cience-dude will say something that will revoke "truth" until the next one revokes it again. As you like to say, they will change the territory, converting evething that was behind in false.

The territory didn't change when Einstein developed the theory of relativity. It's not like you could go faster than the speed of light in 1904 and then a year later it became impossible to do that!

Likewise, it was not possible to fall of the edge of the world prior to ancient scientists discovering that it was round.

And yes, undoubtedly science will discover that many things currently believed to be true are actually not. Beliefs can certainly be wrong. It is the map that changes, not the territory. That's why all knowledge has to be regarded as probabilistic. Given the evidence available at the current time, X is the most probable belief. That is what Bayesians mean by knowledge.

Baye's Theorem tells you by how much and in what direction to update your probabilities in light of some new evidence. It's the logic behind science. A consequence of this is that when you get more evidence you have to change your beliefs accordingly. Otherwise you're being irrational, ignoring evidence that contradicts your beliefs.

So obviously when we make new discoveries we will be changing our beliefs.

That does not mean that the truth is constantly changing!

I'm not establishing anything, That's the point. Nothing can be established.

If you can't establish anything, then you can't establish relativism, meaning it is possible to establish things.

As long as there is not an absolute matter in which there is not a second point of view, I'm quite happy with it.

But you haven't shown that this is the case! That's the whole point. If relativism is not true then there is an absolute fact of the matter. So you do have to show that relativism is true. However, if you did that it would undermine your own argument.

It's a self-defeating position.

[PDH]

Old Socrates would have said that we are both wrong, and I'm ok with it.
But I could read your words as if they were written in spanish and it would be a mess. Meaning depends on context. Context fucks meaning with a strap-on under the blue moon, that' what I've trying to tell you. And context would eventualy make everything his exact oposite just for kicks. We could all somethat agree to asign "a" the value of "e", thus convering the word "value" into "velua" and it would be true. Territory changes.
We get that basic grasp of rationality by means of convention, not because it is right or wrong. Conventional and arbritrary, as Saussure said.

Saussure said that the signified and the signifiers can change from person to person but he never said that the referent could.

All your above example shows is that you can change the spelling of a word. That wouldn't change the territory. If value refers to anything at all, that thing will be unaffected by the decision to call it something else. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

[PDH]

The self-refutation of relativism a well-known problem with the thesis. See, for example, the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy's article on the subject:

A completely global version of normative relativism (e.g., normative relativism about truth or about epistemic justification) claims complete, across-the-board coverage, and this would make the relativist's own claims and arguments relative too. This can lead to severe difficulties, including self-refutation, and a recurring danger for relativists is to assume, often tacitly, that the concepts, principles, or standards used to formulate their own relativist theses somehow escape the relativity they insist permeates everything else.

This difficulty, which we might call the exemptions problem, turns up in many guises. Here are a few:

-It can be tempting for a global normative relativist to hold that the claim that truth is relative is itself somehow true absolutely or that the claim that justification is relative is justified in some absolute sense.
-Many relativistic arguments employ the premise that it is impossible to think or speak about reality “as it really is”--as it is independently of our modes of thought--because thinking and speaking requires us to use our concepts and words. But in order to explain things like intra-framework objectivity, it can be very tempting to go on to offer minimal descriptions of an extra-mental reality, e.g., as containing objective similarities that guide our classifications or as playing a causal role in our perception.
-Claims that values or truth or rationality are relative to culture, language or the like often assume that there are various absolute truths about culture, language, or the like.
-The claim that ethical (and perhaps other) values are relative to cultures or moral codes plays a key role in some defenses of tolerance; all views are equally good, so we should respect them all. But tolerance and open-mindedness are values, and they can hardly be defended by arguing that there are no objective values.

Relativism is not always the most effective topic for promoting consistency in those who discuss it, and as we will see below many relativistic views are unable to give a consistent account of the status of their own claims.

Truth is the Achilles' heel of relativism. According to the normative thesis of strong truth-value relativism one and the same thing can be true relative to one framework and false relative to another, true for some groups and false for others, and ever since Plato's argument against this form of relativism in the Theatetus many philosophers have agreed that the view is self-contradictory or self-refuting. Plato's argument is sometimes known as the peritrope; it's a turning the tables, turning the relativist's line of reasoning back against itself to show that his thesis succumbs to the very relativity he defends. Relativists always face the occupational hazard of sawing off the limb they are sitting on, but with strong truth-value relativism they seem to cut down the whole tree.

Plato's argument against strong truth-value relativism is typically said to go like this: either the claim that truth is relative is true absolutely (i.e., true in a non-relative sense) or else it is only true relative to some framework. If it is true absolutely, all across the board, then at least one truth is not merely true relative to a framework, so this version of the claim is inconsistent. Furthermore, if we make an exception for the relativist's thesis, it is difficult to find a principled way to rule out other exceptions; what justifies stopping here? On the other hand, if the relativist's claim that truth is relative is only true relative to his framework, then it can be false in other, perhaps equally good, frameworks. And why should we care about that the relativist's (perhaps rather idiosyncratic or parochial) framework?

Weak truth-value relativism escapes many of the dangers of self-refutation, since it does not allow one and the same thing to be true in one framework and false in another. But if normative truth-value relativism is intended as a view that is true simpliciter, it metastasizes very quickly. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that truth is relative to a person's (or group's) conceptual framework (for ease of exposition we consider individuals, but the point generalizes easily). Then, the relativist tells us, the very same belief (or sentence), call it p, can be true in Wilbur's framework, W, but false in Sam's framework, S. But if truth is relative in the strong sense, it can also be true in Wilbur's framework W that p is true in W and false in Sam's framework S that p is true in Wilbur's framework W. There is not even any objective fact about what is true in any given framework.

Worse is in store. There could be frameworks in which it is true that Wilbur's current belief has the content that grass is green and other frameworks in which his belief has the content that snow is white. There could be frameworks in which it is true that Wilbur's framework is W and other frameworks in which it is false that Wilbur's framework is W, and so there is no objective fact about what framework anyone has. Furthermore, it may be true in Wilbur's framework that the frameworks W and S are identical (W = S) but true in Sam's framework that W and S are distinct (W ≠S). It may also be true in Wilbur's framework that W itself is a framework and true in Sam's that W is not a framework. It may be true in Sam's framework that there are no frameworks, or that everything is true in every framework, or that nothing is true in any. It may also be true in some frameworks (e.g., ones without concepts of physical objects or persons) that Wilbur and Sam do not exist.

In short, there is no fact about whether there are frameworks, about what frameworks are, about what is true in any particular framework, about what framework anyone has, about what anyone even thinks his own framework is like, or about anything else. It is quicksand all the way down. The metastasis is total. The meltdown is complete.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/#5.9

Relativism can be safely put to bed at this point. The only versions of it still on the table are trivial and non-threatening. The extreme versions such as the one you defend are self-contradictory. As wrong as you can get.

[Eli Katz]

Are we murdering, raping, and stealing more? Well, wars are certainly deadlier now than in the past because of technology. Sixty million dead in World War II were a result of mechanized warfare. But the battle of Stalingrad was much different than the sacking of Baghdad in 1258. More people died in Stalingrad, but not because humans were more brutal in the 20th century than in the 13th century.

All Western democracies today enjoy a level of peace and prosperity that is unparalleled. Bad things still happen in these societies. Serial killers, pedophiles, and organized criminal gangs operate even in the nicest places. But the level of institutional stability, the strong rule of law, and the unrivaled monopoly of violence by the Western states has allowed two dozen countries in the world today to enjoy the closest thing we've known to heaven on Earth.

Is that because people are "better" or "less evil" in these societies? No; it's just that these societies have figured out how to organize themselves better than most other places. Francis Fukyama has called this "the end of history." In other words, liberal democracy is the best possible system of government for us frail, flawed humans, and that this is about as good as it gets.

So we're about the same as we've always been. But our institutions have become better and less evil.