Posts by BenWilson
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If you subscribe to the view that there is no such thing as a single Truth, but rather a series of contingent truths in constant negotiation with one another, then you can and in fact should categorically and, yes, objectively reject Fascism. I don't think that this is in fact a contradiction, quite the contrary.
Not so sure about that. It's a different meaning of "objective", then. It becomes "Fascism has a very small bank balance at the table of contingent truth negotiation". This might change if other systems lose too much currency. I think in the countries that are still rather fascistic, this is exactly how it came about. Fascism might have seemed better than violent anarchy, which may have resulted from a breakdown of other forms of government. Fascism might also seem like a very good system for dealing with a very powerful external threat.
Which seems an altogether more sane way of seeing it. Fascism = Bad is far too simplistic. There are reasons for and against it, for different places and times.
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Copy Australia day?
Nice one :-)
I vote that instead of mining we start our own car manufacturing industry, and force all the locals to drive them with huge tariffs. This could potentially employ hundreds of thousands of people. Perhaps we could make our own international racing event, around some open cast mine, which carefully exploits non-tariff barriers to keep all the competition local. We'll invent a V9 engine, the extra chamber taking only biofuel made from kumara. It could also become a local drink, so we'd need to increase the tariffs on imported spirits too.
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Rich, seems like a fairly simple yes. Just because rules are arbitrary doesn't mean the satisfaction of them is. The length of a meter is an arbitrary measurement. But there are still a lot of statements involving that measure that are as close to certain as anything in the world can be. New Zealand is over a meter long. For some things that are close to a meter, it can be a bit iffy, but there are still clear calls.
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I was always a fan of liver and kidneys. But no one else I know likes them so I haven't had them for years.
I had lambs brains once, but I found it too fatty. I never realized brains had so much fat up there.
But I draw the line at sweetbreads.
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People can judge for themselves, but “of course everything in them boils down to subjective opinion” doesn’t seem that far from “it’s all just opinion” to me. My summary was (obviously) a little flippant, but not unfair.
It's not that far, but it's also not the same. Boiling down is a process which could be valuable. I used that terminology deliberately, though, because boiling down tends to degrade in return the longer it goes on. By the time you've laid down all your subjective tastes, and everyone else has done the same, you're mostly done. What more is there really to argue about? What is ultimately rational or reasonable about an argument that can never end, never be resolved, never come to any conclusion, never come up with any new points? It's actually more reasonable to accept the subjective nature of the subject matter, and move on. That's if finding some 'truth of the matter' is your objective. If you have other objectives, sure, you can argue until doomsday.
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Anybody ever been given a decent answer as to why double-belt safety-harnesses for drivers (i.e the kind pilots and racing-car drivers wear) are not allowed in yer average vehicle?
My guess is for the same reason that crash helmets are not allowed, nor roll cages. They might encourage dangerous driving. LOL. But adding 200 horsepower is all good.
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Sure, but that doesn't stop us putting a time period around our "fastest drag car" fact. In practice, it will be needed anyway because the records keep getting broken. Guiness calls them "Progressive speed records" for a reason.
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@3410
rather that examining those thing that are, and the relationship between them and the things that are not, might tell us more about the latter, and therefore about the nature of quality in art.
It seemed like a promising approach. I'm kind of regretting saying anything on the subject too. I think I have a warped perspective.
@Gio
Of corse once you form that model of how knowledge is reached
The work of a mere epoch...
one risks forgetting how asymmetrical the conversation just is, and that there is such a thing as privileged speaking positions and power differentials.
Which are pretty much built into every model of decision making that involves more than one person. There's always going to be more eloquent people, more powerful people, better resourced, better able in every way, who still, for all of that, could be totally wrong about art. Maybe God sees real art in the fecal smears of some poor misunderstood child more than He/She/It does in any Old Master.
What we can do, however, is forge ahead and build that consensus, or a large number of isolated consensuses, and look at how society deals with them, what they mean about that society, etc. As a sociological study it could probably be somewhat more objective. I expect this has already been done (it's not my field, I don't care to display my pitiful level of understanding of sociology and other soft sciences), and we're doing our little bit on it right here, right now.
@Keir
But what is a legal car to use in a drag race? That's hardly objective.
It is if has been defined in advance, although practically it will still need to be actually evaluated by some human judge, so accusations of bias can still creep in. Happens all the time in car races. Disputes about exactly how much of each thing are allowed, particularly when those things can be twisted just that little bit so that they can be argued to be something else. Every new trick spawns a new rule.
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The question, IIRC, was about which was the best of two cars (for a defined purpose). Surely, if you eliminate (or match) all the identifiable variables, then you can say, with a fair degree of accuracy, which one is the best for the job.
If the defined purpose is very simple, and also one of the candidates is a clear winner, then yes.
A standing quarter mile, for instance, is race with very few variables, by comparison to other races. The hardest part is to define what constitutes an allowable vehicle. You can make the world's fastest dragster if it doesn't have to have any extra weight for safety features. It might have no braking system whatsoever, no cage to protect the driver, or an extremely flimsy one. It might kill 99% of drivers, but the one who survives is indisputably the fastest over the 1/4 mile for that class.
But, so long as the rules were set, and followed, and the process agreed by which to establish a winner, then yes, a winner can be found.
If you can't agree on any of these things, then you have an analogy with our discussion on the merit of Avatar and a Wellywood sign. Also just about every interesting discussion. If the answer is clear it doesn't really need discussion, except for purposes of schooling those who might not know the answer yet.
I tend to think this is the real downfall of absolutism - it's not that it is clearly wrong, it's that there is no way agreed upon for us fallible humans to actually find out what the objective truths are. Instead we have to deal with a vast interconnected web of subjective truths (was this what Gio meant by 'Intersubjective'?). We can settle on methods to do so. For blatantly obvious facts our common sense is usually good enough, although it does have the problem of insane or contrary people (who could still be right). For more complex things about which fact would still seem to be clearly possible, like scientific facts, there is the famous "scientific method", something that would seem to be "common sense for scientists", and in the end, neither common, nor sense for anything controversial (although always fantastically good at hindsight, the method is perfect for evaluating exactly why the science of the past was not scientific, despite having been what got us to here). Then there is the whole nebulous world of moral issues, in which even the most basic facts have been disputed forever. Progress in this is almost entirely limited to things happening outside of the core prejudices built into human organisms, facts that can at least be generally agreed upon by observers who still detest each other. So, despite having gone from splitting bones to smashing subatomic particles, we're still disputing whether it's OK to kill people in a "good cause". We have untold more information to bring to hand, and thousands of years and billions of people contributing to arguments either way, yet each person seems to have to make the decision afresh in each case.
As for aesthetic issues, it's even clearer to people that it's subjective because differences in moral issues tend to make for physical distancing, at the very least, or the actual death of a viewpoint that is considered wrong or evil by some enemy of it. With aesthetics you can disagree with your best friend, and still remain friends, although it does seem to help a lot if you have aligned prejudices.
Coming back to absolutism, it's still not clear at all if there isn't, after all, some actual truth, even in aesthetics. Quite a lot of people who have highly developed tastes seem to think so. The religious minded might think that God knows what's beautiful, and/or is the source of all beauty. They might even be right. But for non-deities, when we pick an absolutist position, most likely we're simply wrong. However, you could argue, this choice is the only one that also has the chance of being right. To choose subjectivity is not to choose. A cautious approach, but also one that seems unlikely to blunder into the truth, if there is one.
So I can see why absolutism is still popular after all these years. It's probably built into us as a fundamental decision making heuristic, that locking into a position at least carries the hope of truth and progress. I recall being rather surprised to find that most scientists are 'realists'. They really believe in the true reality of the laws they are inquiring into, that gravity or any other thing is real, objective truth - they just aren't sure that they know the truth. I thought that was a rather naive view initially, but later came to think that it's probably psychologically necessary for their business. So long as they can eventually concede defeat after some decisive experiment, they can still call themselves scientists, and have the 'relevant community' agree on that. If they don't concede they slip into the crackpot community, one that does occasionally make profound discoveries, but usually on a very slim budget.
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Well, I had in mind comments such as:
>...everything in them boils down to subjective opinion of artistic worth.Trying to drag me back into it?
Best not lift it out of context or turn it into a straw man then. You're most likely aware that my position on truth of aesthetic matters borders on non-cognitivism, and that I extend that to ethics. I don't have the same position on clearer 'matters of fact', like 'which of these two cars is the fastest', although of course I'm familiar with the never-ending disputes that have actually arisen on that matter, disagreements about methods of measurement, what rules define a car as opposed to a rocket on wheels, etc.
My point re: art is still that it basically does boil down to a bunch of subjective opinions. But that doesn't mean discussion is pointless. You might want to know which subjective opinions those are. You might want dispute the boiling down process, showing it to be unreasonable.
These disputes can be useful and progressive for a while. But there's no clear or agreed system for resolution, so they can also drag on forever like an internet thread, going over the same ground. Then they're not so useful, and usually people that actually wanted to find something out have left by then and the only people left are die-hards defending their core beliefs, which are ultimately subjective.
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