Relative vs absolute
I struggle to see the sense in defining anything as relative. You could say something changes in relation to something else, but that relation is defined in absolute terms. To say the world is relative seems arbitrary. Relative to what? I also have the issue that I don't see the sense in defining anything as absolute, since a word means nothing in isolation. It requires context to provide any meaning. That context can be seen as its relation to other words. Defining something is like providing a set of boundaries for that thing. Those boundaries can be seen as a definition of its relation to everything else, its context. Without anything else, so in isolation, this would make the definition of that thing meaningless.
I am interested to hear what people have to say about this. I'm open to hearing an approach from any direction.
I am interested to hear what people have to say about this. I'm open to hearing an approach from any direction.
Comments (45)
Do you really struggle or is that just a rhetorical garnish? As Lao Tzu wrote:
Quoting Tao Te Ching - Verse 2 - Derek Lin translation
This is a fundamental insight from just about all ways of seeing the world, not just eastern philosophies. When you get to know me better, you'll see I bring the Tao Te Ching into just about all my arguments.
Welcome to the forum.
Math is a good place to start:
[*]Relative: x = y * 3
[/list]
There is a qualitative difference between the first example and the second example, is there not? When children are introduced to algebra they must make quite a leap from what they have known previously.
The definition is in words, and words are not absolute. Words have relatively fixed meanings: less firmly fixed in colloquial speech, more firmly fixed in scientific papers; less in the case of general, multi-purpose words like 'up' and 'run'; more in specific ones like 'cantilever' and 'teak'.
There may be absolutes in the process of change - e.g. water is heated at so many calories per second, wherein the quantities of both heat and time units are fixed in absolute numbers - but the observer may not know what that rate is; he may only know that the water is hotter is than it was (a relative condition) or hot enough for tea but not for cooking pasta (an approximation fixed to defined range).
Quoting Matt Thomas
Arbitrary, unnecessary and meaningless - which may be why nobody said that. A planet may have greater mass, less atmosphere, a cooler core, less gravity or whatever, compared to others of its category; only characteristics of an object are relative; not objects themselves.
Quoting Matt Thomas
That's true. And that's why words don't occur in isolation; they come as part of a package: in a language, with grammar and syntax. In the language, words have definitions, expressed in other words, subject to misuse, abuse, combination, transformation, translation and gradual change of usage. Verbal language is an evolving tool of human communication. To call a single word relative or absolute is meaningless, but one can show that the word is more or less appropriate in a particular application than an alternate word that might be used in that context, or that one is more precise than another, more elegant. These judgments are [relatively] subjective.
The languages that consist of absolute fixed vocabularies are those of mathematics and music.
This: Quoting Leontiskos
applies to what I said here: Quoting Matt Thomas
I would say that x = y * 3 describes the natures of x and y in terms of each other. However, I don't think it is true to describe it as statement of relativity. I am more of the opinion that the terms relative and absolute are pretty much redundant. So, I would describe the two examples you gave as equally absolute and relative, and equally neither. X = 5 describes the natures of x and 5 in terms of each other, just how the other example does for y and the other x. At the same time, they both the examples are saying that each side of the equations are not just equal, but the same. Saying that there is fundamentally no difference between the two, that they are two ways of saying the same thing, that x is y * 3. In this way, they can't really be seen as providing comparisons, or description of a relation between two things, if fundamentally each side of the equation is referring to exactly the same thing. As far as I know, there are infinite solutions to the second example you gave. But, in any example that fits the conditions of that equation would provide a very absolute comparison between the value for x and the value for y. It is really arbitrary in this case to make a distinction between numbers defining a value and letters not. For example, if we are to look at the first equation you gave, we could define another variable that is perfectly logical within the boundaries that equation defines. We could say y = 2.5. Then that equation could be re-written as x = 2y. What I'm getting at is that real numbers also only provide a comparison. None of them mean anything in isolation. They only appear to mean anything because of the rules that define how they relate to each other, their relative values. For example, 2 is defined by being 1 bigger than 1, or being double 1. And you can represent how two numbers relate to each other, their relative values, in whichever way you like. However, this is the only thing that gives numbers meaning to us. We only know the value of one number because we know the value of another. Nothing has value in isolation. The value of one thing implies the value of another, because it is dependent of the value of that other.
I guess I'm more inclined to side with the idea of relativity, but this is due to the language that I don't really have a choice but to use. But I tried to show here that all you can really show is equivalence or non-equivalence, and that there is no intermediate. I'm not happy to support the idea of relativity though, because it implies the idea of absolutes, which I tried to show as illogical. Of course I can't support an idea that requires another that I consider illogical.
So you would say that example (1) and example (2) are equally absolute and relative? The value of x and the value of y are equally absolute and relative? Example (2) is not more relative than example (1)?
Well let's try a third example just to be precise:
The question is whether the value of y is more relative than the value of x; whether example (2) involves more relativity than example (1). To say, "example (1) requires additional knowledge of maths" does not answer that question. The simple fact is that even if you want to say that the value of x is relative, it is still true that the value of y is more relative than the value of x, because the value of y varies relative to the value of z.
Even if we grant that the symbol '1' is relative, it is still true that the symbol 'z' is more relative than the symbol '1'. This is because 'z' is relative in the same sense as '1', but it is also relative in an additional way because it is defined as a variable as opposed to a constant, and it is therefore relative to the numerical domain in a way that '1' is not. Thus example (2) is clearly more relative than example (1). If you can't see this then I'm not sure what else to tell you.
To use words of any kind requires a vocabulary. If you don't know any Latin "in vino veritas" doesn't mean anything more or less than X=x+2. If you don't know what words or numbers mean, you can't use either relative nor absolute terms in a meaningful way.
Certainly. I can use words in many ways, because I know them.
But you do have knowledge of math, so why pretend otherwise? I chose to give the example in mathematical terms because I knew you had knowledge of math, and I was correct. To Vera's point, if I didn't have knowledge of English then the words you are writing would make no sense to me and we would not be able to communicate. But I do have knowledge of English and that is why we are able to communicate.
Saying, "If I didn't understand the words then I wouldn't know what they mean," is a tautology. It isn't an argument against the meaning of any word, including the word 'relative'.
That is a hilarious bastardisation of what I said. However, I can directly quote many tautologies in what you said, if you think it's important. This includes all the mathematical examples you gave. So, I think you need to start again.
But regarding this: Quoting Leontiskos there was a key word in what I said: Quoting Matt Thomas
Compare:
There is a sense in which the world is relstive to human experience; we only know things as they are experienced and understood by us.
A bunch of familiar metaphysical dichotomies have been organising Western thought since Ancient Greece.
Take for example the oppositions of stasis and flux, chance and necessity, matter and form, the one and the many, the discrete and the continuous, meaning and nonsense, atom and void, local and global, etc, etc.
Change can be measured in terms of a lack of stability. And stability as a lack of change. That is, applying the law of the excluded middle - the dichotomy defined as that which it is both mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive - stability = 1/change, and change = 1/stability. There is an inverse relation that defines its own absolute measurable limits. The measureable lack of one is the measurable degree of presence of its other.
So problem solved. We seek opposites that have metaphysical strength generality. And use them as our yardsticks to measure reality.
To be discrete is to be absolutely broken apart in some fashion. To be continuous is to absolutely lack that characteristic. We then can relate these two absolute ideals by the inverse operation which can tell us that how far or near we are from those bounding ideals in any particular case in question.
In reality, nothing could be absolutely continuous as it would indeed just break the yardstick. It would claim that the absolute simply existed in a way that made its opposite pole of being - the discrete - not even a remote possibility.
But we can still stay within the measurable bounds of possibility if the amount of discreteness being claimed as part of our continuous whatever is infinitesimal. That is, we are infinitely distant from a state which we would label as discrete.
So you get both the relative and the absolute out of a dichotomy for all practical purposes. Two poles are related in a mutually self-measuring fashion. And that relation is absolute to the degree it conforms to the constraints of the LEM.
Continuity and discreteness can have an absolute limit state description even if it is one based on the asymptotic approach to those limits via acts of relativistic discrimination.
Our understanding doesn't affect the world; some aspects of the world affect our understanding. What we know is not comparable to the world; the world and knowledge are not in the same category - not related. Our current knowledge is relative to what we knew last year, or to what Centaurans know, or to what God knows.
Our understanding may or may not affect the world. The world certainly presents itself as being largely independent of human control, so that was not the point. The point was that what we know of the world is dependent on, meaning relative to, human experience and judgement.
Absolute continuity
I know, not quite what you mean. :cool:
It doesn't. The world doesn't perform for us. It simply exists.
Quoting Janus
Yes: knowledge is comparable to knowledge. Worlds are comparable to worlds.The worlds and the knowledge are not relative to each other.
The world doesn't perform for us, but is given as always already interpreted. Of course we think there must be a pre-interpretive world, and must acknowaledge that we are pre-cognitively affected in ways we cannot be conscious of, and consequently have no control over.
So yes the world simply exists, but we know nothing, cognitively speaking, of the nature of that existence.
Quoting Vera Mont
You are making the point for me. The world of our experience is the world of our knowledge and understanding; we can imagine a world that exists in itself prior to our known and understood world but we cannot imagine what it would be like.
If something is X, only because of its relation to something else, then it's relative, if it's X regardless of anything else then it's absolute.
It doesn't matter if you isolate the claim to itself, it's about the logic of the claim. A word such as "superior" can be described as relative, because it simply can't function without comparing one thing to something else. A word like "flying" could be described as absolute because it's a binary, something qualifies as flying or it doesn't.
That being said, I'm not confident that I even understand the OP, it could be interpreted in a multitude of different ways, but I decided to assume the context here is linguistics.
Happy to be of service.
What I didn't get was how it relates to the concepts of 'relative' and 'absolute'.
But note how fractals neatly express the intermediate case between the continuous and the discrete.
To label something 6 feet is to describe it relative to something, like the length of someone's foot.
What is an object without its characteristics?
What I have been trying to say is that the reciprocity is an absolute aspect something. The way it is reciprocal to something else does not change. So I'm asking, what is the point in describing anything as relative if that 'relative' aspect can be defined completely synonymously in a way that most people here seem to describe as an example of absolute?
If this is true, then the same applies to the second example. The conditions we all understand to be defined by the word "flying" is what gives the word meaning, because it allows us to compare the state of "flying" to other states, such as "not flying". If we couldn't compare, then the word "flying" would have no meaning. How would you identify something as "flying" if you couldn't recognise it as different to something that was "not flying"? There is a comparison being made.
unknowable
Are you asking people to comment, relative to your own views?
Quoting Matt Thomas
So an approach, in relation to/relative to yours?
Are the opinions in your op, absolute or relative?
In the mind, definitions and relations between absolutes exist. The world, however, is another matter.
As the SEP article on Relations wrote:
Some philosophers are wary of admitting relations because they are difficult to locate. Glasgow is west of Edinburgh. This tells us something about the locations of these two cities. But where is the relation that holds between them in virtue of which Glasgow is west of Edinburgh?
Bradley's Regress makes the same point.
Either a relation R is nothing to the things it relates, in which case it cannot relate to them. Or, it is something to them, in which case R must be related to them. But for R to be related to a and b there must be not only R and the things it relates, but also a subsidiary relation R' to relate R to them. But now the same problem arises with regard to R'. It must be something to R and the things it related in order for R' to relate R to them and this requires a further subsidiary relation R'' between R', R, a and b. But positing more relations to fix up the problem is only throwing good money after bad. We fall into an infinite regress because the same reasoning applies equally to R' and however many other subsidiary relations we subsequently introduce.
IE, I can say "the Sun is larger than the Earth", in that "larger" exists as a concept in my mind, but where in the world does "larger" actually exist ?
I think the easiest way to have evidence for ' thesis is to admit that despite the ambiguities surrounding the concepts of relative and absolute, some things are more relative and some things are less relative. For example, the location of a trailer that is attached to a truck is more relative than the location of a trailer that is unattached and at rest; because the location of the first trailer is relative to something which is itself more variable. It is obfuscation to claim that the second trailer is relative to the movement of the Earth, and that they are therefore equally relative. It is obfuscation because the location of the first trailer is also relative to the Earth, but it is simultaneously relative to another variable body (the truck) and is therefore more relative than the second trailer.
I would say it requires obstinacy to deny that some things are more or less relative than others, but it also involves an inability to look at things from a different frame of reference or paradigm. The claim that 'relative' and 'absolute' are tricky concepts is understandable. The claim that they do not signify anything meaningful at all is unserious.
Not so much. Using words in the description of a subject is using the absolute definitions of those words.
Quoting Matt Thomas
That the claim absolutely was made or wasn't made, is irrelevant to the logic of the claim. I agree that the claim that something is superior to something else is either made or it isn't.
Anyway, perhaps you subscribe to an understanding of language that is incompatible with mine. You can't just interpret for yourself what it means for something to be relative and absolute, and then explain that the words are redundant. They're clearly not redundant, as long as you understand they convey a particular meaning, and not whatever meaning you've made up for them.
But to be absolute is a relative thing. The absolute only exists in terms of reciprocal bounds that mark the limits on being. Thus no thing itself can be absolute. All things are relative to those bounding limits.
Don't need fractals. There is no intermediate case. The continuous is the limit of the discrete.The limit definition of the common integral does the job. And when I write a computer program to obtain the image of a contour in the complex plane I choose a value of N and plot N points, then increase N to get a better image until reaching the limitations of my computer.
And how are you defining the discrete? What grounds claims of there being a difference? Why is differentiation reciprocal to integration?
I agree maths likes to sweep its metaphysics under the carpet. And here you are on a philosophy site, doing just that. :roll:
Quoting jgill
You are missing the point. The real world of natural processes is pretty fractal, ain't it? Mountains, coastlines, rivers, earthquakes. Anything described in the language of dissipative structure.
So mathematically, we have an interest in modelling the fact that nature is indeed organised by emergent dynamical balance. It is not one thing or the other, but some equilibrium fluctuation around its opposed tendencies.
The earth's crust is a balance between cooling crust formation and weathering erosion. A coastline is irregular over every scale of observation because it is a dynamical balance between smoothness and roughness. Or "integration and differentiation".
Fractal maths showed up in that link as the kind of bug that the patch of "absolute continuity" is designed to fix.
But maybe the Cosmos just ain't a computation as maths would like to demand, and instead dynamical balance self-organised emergence from symmetry-breaking is the logical core of its being?
You've got to be kidding. Reciprocal?
Quoting apokrisis
In a very rough sense of the word. Not mathematically. No coastline is patterned the same upon closer and closer examination.
Quoting apokrisis
Irregularity is a long way from fractal. Smoothness and roughness is comparable to integration and differentiation? :roll:
Quoting apokrisis
No reason to assert that "dynamical balance" is not mathematical.
OK. Inverse if you prefer. And from there, the multiplicative inverse.
Quoting jgill
Again you are talking about the absolutism built into the maths model and not the world of physical process that it then only roughly models.
Reality ain't a computation or a simulation. Coastlines aren't actually generated by an iterative algorithm.
Quoting jgill
There you go again. Maths in its casual absolutism can provide pragmatic models of reality. But here you would need to start to think about how reality itself might be more deeply described.
As I said, the relative is what is relative to human experience, and the absolute is what cannot be experienced, which in the context of this discussion is the existence of anything as it is pre-cognitively.
What you say here speaks precisely to this:
Quoting Vera Mont
The characteristics of objects are all and only those attributes of objects cognized by us. If we cognized no attributes, then there would be no object presenting itself to us.
Quoting Leontiskos
Some things are relative to more other things than other things are is a better way of putting it. There are no degrees of relativity per se and certainly no degrees of absoluteness.
Nothing is absolute for us, everything is relative to us. However, we cannot but think that things have their own independent existence which is not dependent on, meaning not relative, to us. But even then, those things must be relative to other things, and then it would only be the sum of everything which is absolute, in the sense that there is nothing left out for it to be relative to. Is the sum of everything a thing, though? Seems like it is just an idea.
Edit: It just occurred to me that we might say the sum of everything is relative to everything in which case there would be no absolutes and the sum of everything would be the most relative thing of all. But then again, the question that arises is whether relation (being relative) is an actuality or merely an idea.
You're right. It's like left and right, up and down, big and small. If you could delete one side from human thought, the other side would also disappear.
It's a pervasive situation. Every object of thought appears to the mind against a backdrop of it's negation. It's part of how we think.
I see. Is anything in the universe independent of humans?
it seems there must be, but we cannot say what it is...
No need to start thinking about the obvious. Thanks for the reminder. :smile: