Is there an objective quality?
I have always wondered whether there is an objective quality. Specifically for different forms of art and such.
It is easy for a person to judge the quality of an object. Most people would agree that it's a combination of multiple factors including function, durability, etc. Most of the time a person can pick out a quality item from a cheap one.
However, the same cannot be said for art, specifically books. What is the mode or standard to judge? Usually art is judged by how many people like it, however that seems wrong to me. If something is good, but not many people know of the piece it should still be quality. Or people don't realize the true value of the piece, but an expert does. Overall I think it isn't just the number of people who like a piece that determines it's quality.
The closest thing I have come up with for a mode or standard is emotions, but there are works that I consider cheap that still inspire emotions.
Does anybody have any ideas or opinions they would like to share?
{This is my first discussion, so I might not use some functions properly.}
It is easy for a person to judge the quality of an object. Most people would agree that it's a combination of multiple factors including function, durability, etc. Most of the time a person can pick out a quality item from a cheap one.
However, the same cannot be said for art, specifically books. What is the mode or standard to judge? Usually art is judged by how many people like it, however that seems wrong to me. If something is good, but not many people know of the piece it should still be quality. Or people don't realize the true value of the piece, but an expert does. Overall I think it isn't just the number of people who like a piece that determines it's quality.
The closest thing I have come up with for a mode or standard is emotions, but there are works that I consider cheap that still inspire emotions.
Does anybody have any ideas or opinions they would like to share?
{This is my first discussion, so I might not use some functions properly.}
Comments (150)
Now what?
If you have an idea or opinion you would like to share, please do so.
I think we can identify several objective criteria for the evaluation of art. Since you mentioned books Ill focus on novels.
A good novel often has the following:
These are neither necessary nor sufficient for a great novel, but I think theyre good contenders to answer your question. There are many others and Ive probably missed some important ones.
People will disagree over whether a novel satisfies any one of these criteria, but that's actually an indication that they are objective.
Quoting Red Sky
I think its a pretty good criterion, and I think we can recognize in ourselves the difference between a cheap emotional or sentimental response and a complex and profound one.
Would I still be able to call something good if nobody liked it?
Or is it just the difference between good work, and popularity?
Or is it the desire for what others to also like what I think is good?
Not a single one on which there is full consensus. There are criteria on which the majority of academics, or critics, or authors or editors or readers agree, though two or more of those groups might not agree with one another. Craft is high on the list: the author should have a strong command of language, its structure, deployment and nuances; should be able to plot a compelling story and invent relatable characters, then give them appropriate dialogue; should understand the setting and historical background of the story, and weave all these elements into a well-paced and balanced narrative. Content is also important: the author must have some message worth conveying. For me, emotion is not enough; there must also be something worth my time thinking about.
Quoting Red Sky
If you want to call it good, then at least one person liked it.
But then, there are different kinds of liking. I can admire something I don't enjoy or enjoy something I don't admire. Timothy Findley's Headhunter was a critical success but not very popular. It is one of the most terrible stories I've ever read, and one of the most absorbing novels. I read it two decades ago, and I keep harking back to some aspects of it to explain what I see happening in the world. The reason this is uppermost in my mind: Earlier today I was bemoaning the absence of birds in the clear blue June sky and also reflecting on toxic teenage social media, and I saw a copy in a used bookstore. I picked it up, put it back, picked it up again, put it back and hurried away. Chickened out. Now I regret it. Book that leaves that kind of impression has to be doing something right.
Some madly popular literature, oth, even if competently written, as well as some highly extolled examples, leave me cold.
This does no good when not one of these itself can be objectively measured.
Short answer, no!
See David Hume's is/ought distinction.
Objective facts do not add up to subjective values.
Aesthetic judgements are subjective.
You cannot have an objective standard for a subjective quality.
I think the best you can do is consensus of experts. Or, consensus of the general population. This is not quite objective, but not subjective either, they are social realities which share properties of both.
If moles generally prefer to mate with big eared moles, this is an objective fact of mole behavior. Big ears are objectively attractive: to moles. Yet, there is nothing intrinsically attractive about big ears.
I think it depends on what you mean by "objective." Within certain cultures or even human culture at large, I think there are some "objective" art standards that tend to appeal to how our brains are wired. However, I think what we see as objective truths are just subjective truths that are broadly applicable to our lived experiences, and are not based on true external universalities. If nothing else, there have been so many conflicting theories of art and what makes it good that it seems impossible for there to be a single "standard" for what makes objectively good art.
I don't know what does no good means. Maybe you mean that because they are not quantifiable, they are not objective? But that doesn't follow.
When two critics cite passages from a novel to show that its characters are or are not emotionally complex, this is more than I like it/I dont like it. About the latter, there can be no reasonable disagreement, but the former involves shared standards. The intersubjective is a kind of objectivity.
Disagreement doesnt disprove objectivity; it presupposes it.
I'm not sure I understand your point. My argument is that if artist A and B have conflicting opinions about what makes art good (say, maximalist vs minimalism), then that implies there isn't an objective correct answer.
And Im saying it implies there is an objective fact of the matter. If it were merely subjective, there would be no reasonable disagreement. It would be e.g., I find this boring vs I find this exciting.
The subjective is about the subject. The moment people disagree, they are talking about what is not specific to a subject.
I'm not sure I agree, if I understand you correctly. I would think it would be the opposite: that there could be no arguing with objective truths because they are, by their nature, objectively self-evident. It is difficult to argue that the sky is not blue, for instance, but people can argue all day long about how the color blue makes them feel. Though as I said in my original comment, I think the difference between objective and subjective is partially a matter of where you approach the question from. In minimalism, less is better. In maximalism, more is better. Within their own genre there are "objectively correct" approaches, but within the larger field of art there is not.
But these arguments are stupid. Since they are not arguing about something shared, their argument is meaningless.
What people actually do is dress up subjective differences as objective, e.g., the skys colour has a peaceful quality vs no, the skys colour has a stressful quality.
Practitioners in the Humanities, like historians and philosophers, endeavour to do more than that, i.e., to give their arguments about objective qualities some substance, even if they cannot be decided. The primary cause of the Second World War was the harshness of the Treaty of Versailles cannot be proved, measured, or agreed upon, and is certainly not self-evident, but its not merely subjective.
If you ignore Hume's dictum, there are certainly objective facts about a piece of art that can be pointed out in support of a subjective value judgement; but they do not necessitate such a judgement. After all, people liked Star Wars.
I'd admit the special effects, the art and design, the music and so on were all good. But the writing was bad, the light/dark moral dichotomy - simplistic and positively damaging, the politics was contrived, the force is wholly unscientific, there are allusions to bestiality, I could go on.
The fact it was popular is not an objective fact that necessitates subjective approval.
I positively disliked Star Wars; other people loved it.
I think we may be talking past each other, tbh. I'm not necessarily saying that popularity = objective quality. I'm saying that if there was an objective standard of "good art" then it would be impossible to make good art that does not follow that standard. The fact that this is not the case implies there is no objective standard, imo. If there was a known way to make art good every time, artists would just do that.
An example that comes to mind is how art of the past sometimes becomes subject to "Seinfeld is unfunny" syndrome, where when it first came out it was considered groundbreaking and amazing. However, over time other art emulated it to the point that it robs the original of all the things that made it new and interesting, making it seem bland in hindsight. Over enough time, this cycle can start over with the changing of culture, and those things can become new and fresh again.
If it were objectively true that Seinfeld broke new ground when it first came out; that wouldn't necessitate that someone like it. Maybe some people don't enjoy new things. That's a subjective value judgement. Nor is it necessary that just because something has been emulated - that it is robbed of what makes it interesting. Again, that's a subjective value judgement.
Getting down to long established philosophical principles.... no quantity of objective facts add up to a subjective value. If the purpose here is discussion rather than learning philosophy, maybe I'm stepping on the discussion, but I feel like the OP asked a specific question deserving of, what is - the well established answer.
But that goes back to my original point, that it depends on how you define objective vs subjective. I think the answer changes depending on what scale you look at, but that on the largest universal scale, there is no objective standard of art. The point I am trying to make is that on small scales (small communities or specific art movements), objective standards might be possible for art, but that in the larger scale they are not. I feel like that's not coming across based on the responses I'm getting.
There are deeper arguments that invoke evolution in relation to physical reality, in the construction of aesthetic psychological architectures, but I think that's a lot to lay on the OP, who - it seems to me, is probably not an expert.
There are also arguments that might be made about whether x painting is an objectively good example of a certain style of painting, maybe. But again, I think you're then into philosophy as it plays out in a socio-cultural milieu - again, pretty advanced stuff.
The short answer to the OP's question is 'no.' There is not an objective quality. That's a contradiction of terms. Rule of thumb: Qualities are subjective. Facts are objective. And then we can see how far we can bend the rule.
So hackneyed a term, given that no one seems to know what it means.
Are you looking for a mind-independent truth? But how could a judgement be mind-independent? Are you looking for something impartial or unbiased? But the whole point of attributing quality is to be partial and biased. So are you looking for values that exist despite opinion? What could that mean?
Are we left, then, with "intersubjective agreement", So that the bare fact that so many people eat McDonalds (or watch Star Wars) means it must be of a high quality?
Or is aesthetic judgement embedded in community and culture, tradition and workmanship, coherence and responsiveness; is it learned and communicable, an aspect of growth?
An activity rather than a thing.
And clearly in many occupations objectivity is necessary and desirable - such as jurisprudence, history, and the like. But aesthetics, literature and philosophy are a different matter. Objectivity is part of it, but youre also appealing to factors which cant be reduced to objective terms. How it moves you, what it evokes, how it resonates - none of these qualities are strictly objective, but theyre also not necessarily subjective in the sense of being simply or merely personal or pertaining only to the individual.
Meaning it doesn't help to answer the question. Not only are these not objectively quantifiable, they are not objectively evaluable at all.
Quoting Jamal
Except the standards are likely not shared at all, hence such arguments are interminable.
Quoting Jamal
It might presume it. But that presumption can easily be a mistake, precisely the kind of mistake philosophy should aim to correct.
I can see how this works and there's an intuitive appeal to it, after all, if people are disagreeing, they seem to be appealing to some shared standard, however vaguely defined. But I remain ambivalent.
Isnt it also possible that disagreement just reflects a clash of preferences or worldviews, with no stable objectivity underneath? When I respond to your view here, am I really engaging in a rational pursuit of truth, or am I simply performing a kind of power move, attempting to universalise my own subjective stance?
Even the very structure of philosophical debate sometimes feels less like a search for objective truth and more like a struggle over whose lens on the world becomes dominant. In that case, disagreement doesnt so much presuppose objectivity as it performs a social contest, perhaps masked, by the language of reason. Or something like this.
And yes, this implies that all discourse is problematic, ultimately lacking foundation. You raise the idea of intersubjective agreement or epistemic communities. But does that amount to a form of objectivism, or is it merely a cluster of like-minded individuals reinforcing a shared orthodoxy? After all, what counts as evidence or sound reasoning within such communities is often defined by the very group that claims to be rational. So are we talking about objective standards, or just mutual reinforcement dressed up as epistemic legitimacy?
Great post. I hope to reply later. I suspect I will conclude that all of that makes objectivity difficult, but not impossible.
If had only said that disagreement can only take place against, and so presupposes, a background of agreement, instead of saying it presupposes objectivity.
But yes, great post.
Maybe it means the same thing. Maybe I'm bringing the concept back to its roots.
But sure, point taken.
No!
The objective/subjective dichotomy is a mistake. Much clearer to use charity and truth, after Davidson.
Good stuff. Right now I choose the way of dialectics: to ditch the metaphysics but also maintain the dichotomy. The dichotomy is not just a mistakeor if it is, its an important one.
I may return to these fascinating issues later.
I can probably work with this. Language is such a bastard!
Ice cream tastes good.
Two propositions, both with truth values. Do you ask "to whom?" when answering the first, the second, both, or neither when determining that truth value?
If you answer the first without regard to whom, you are seeking the objective.
Quoting Banno
Yes!
https://chatgpt.com/c/68464d0f-584c-8007-9245-f61243387086
And yet, there is more to the history of a concept than etymology.
Don't want to clutter with cut and paste, but let me know if this won't open.
I dont know if murder is wrong in any objective sense, beyond the fact that it's a proscribed activity under the law. And even, more generally, killing in itself isnt necessarily wrong; I can easily imagine situations where it might be justified. But cultures that permit casual killing among the population tend to be unsafe and verge on anarchy.
But what about something more extreme, how about killing babies for sport? That seems like a clearer case. Id have to say we would find broad, almost universal agreement that this is abhorrent. (Not that it stops countries at war from energetically mowing down children as part of the process.) So while I might hesitate to call it objectively wrong in a metaphysical sense, there is a strong intersubjective consensus. Id say the prohibitions and values of my culture have been passed down to me, so I share in teh consensus that finds killing babies abhorrent.
But a consensus like this doesnt rest on some timeless truth. It rests on who weve become as a species, it rests on shared stories, emotions, and histories that shape our moral imagination. Its not that we know such an act is wrong in some final sense; its that weve learned not to be the kind of people who could consider it. (Again, unless you're in one of the many war-torn countries where such horrors are treated as routine.)
Quoting Banno
Is what I wrote above an example of such a background of agreement or have I strayed too far?
Then upon what basis do you condemn their acts you find abhorrent? You have your preferences and they theirs.
Where are your jurisdictional boundaries that define your moral community? Am I bound by the consensus of the West, the US, the Southern US, my ethnicity, my religious heritage, my compound of similar thinkers? Can't it be that the entirety of my community could be wrong, yet I am right? If not, must I sacrifice babies to the gods if my community says it is good even if I disagree?
So ChatGPT's argument would be something like, replacing moral with aesthetic,
But it's a false dilemma. Aesthetic claims - that the roast lamb in the oven as we speak, slow cooked with six veg, to be served with greens - is better than a Big Mac, is not just an expressions of feeling nor statements of factbut an interpretation within a context of belief, intention, tradition, form, and reception. It arises as a triangulation of speaker, interpreter and dinner. It's not objective, but it's not relative, either. It is cultivated and critiqued, without requiring foundational aesthetic truths, because it is an integral part of a holistic web of taste that extends beyond the speaker and even beyond the interpreter into the world at large. Further, no such aesthetic scheme is incommensurable with other such schemes.
We do not need some absolute aesthetic algorithm in order to make aesthetic judgements, but instead make them in a community as we discuss the gravy, decide if the potatoes really did need to be scraped in order to brown, and choose between the chard and the Brussels' sprouts.
No simple algorithm or rule will suffice for every aesthetic judgement. It's an activity in which we engage and improve.
And the lamb smells wonderful. Bah.
Pretty much.
Quoting Tom Storm
This is to the point - wants a "basis" so he can "condemn their art you find abhorrent"; and that basis is all around us and includes our community of learning and language.
Descriptors can come from any angle, from any mouth, and can vary in degree from similar to opposite according to whomever describes it. Therefor it is necessarily distorted by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations.
It is enough that the work itself is objective, and anyone can view it and come to their own conclusions. In that sense, that a work is objective is itself an objective quality, and probably the only one that matters.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Hanover
Yes, to all of the above. Thats the condition weve always lived in. It seems to me morality emerges from a shifting balance of perspectives, shaped by history, culture, conversation, and imagination. There is no final foundation, only the ongoing work of negotiation, persuasion, and a hope for common ground. And yes, some cultures do lose this fragile balance though war or vested interests and anarchy results.
But I can already hear some asking but what does common ground matter if there's no objectivity? We are motivated by the desire to live with others without constant fear or conflict, to reduce suffering (our own and others), to be understood, to feel belonging, to imagine a world less cruel or arbitrary. Even without objectivity, these needs and aspirations dont disappear. We dont act because weve found final truths, but because we live among others, and must find ways to manage that fact.
Why?
Reciprocation!
We evolved as social animals; and have a moral sense attuned to reciprocal social justice.
Jane Goodall noted that in troops of chimpanzees, they would share food, share childcare responsibilities, groom each other, fight to defend the troop etc.
They also remembered which individuals engaged in these activities, and withheld services in future from those who did not.
An inclination toward sharing behaviours was rewarded, serving the interests of the individual within the troop, and such behaviours served the interests of the troop overall in the struggle for survival, ingraining a moral sense grounded in social reciprocity in the psychology of subsequent generations.
This is the basis of the evolved moral sense; a sense that might require one to commit murder in response to a murder being committed. i.e. An eye for an eye!
A society that makes it illegal to commit murder, even in response to a murder being committed, breaks the cycle of violence. It relieves the individual of the moral obligation to take revenge. i.e. Turn the other cheek!
In my opinion, the value of a novel lies in its ability to captivate me from the first page to the lastso compelling that I cant put it down and regret how quickly the remaining pages dwindle.
My favourite novels often werent enjoyable at first. They grew on me, and the initial struggle with the author transformed me as I persisted. I didnt come away simply entertained, I came away enlarged. I remember fighting with George Eliot in Middlemarch and with Faulkner in As I Lay Dying. In the end, I got through, and the effort itself felt like an achievement. For me, reading great novels isnt always about immediate pleasure; its more like climbing a mountain, demanding, sometimes punishing, but meaningful precisely because of the journey into unfamiliar territory and even the sacrifices required.
Interesting. I tend to think if a book feels like self-mortification, I might be in the wrong genre. Then again, maybe thats the Calvinist in you talking.
:rofl:
Quoting Jacques
More like self-overcoming. I tend to hold good art should challenge and offer new ways of seeing. But maybe I'm doing it wrong. I do most things wrong so that's ok.
I took though Davidson's critique to be that objectivity is universally muddled thinking. If the point he makes is simply that aesthetic judgments in particular don't lend themselves to objective reasoning, then his is just a platitude that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." That's obvioulsy not what he's limiting himself to when he challenges objectivity.
There are different sorts of judgments: moral, aesthetic, and empirical/ontological for example. I think we must maintain objectivity to morality. I would agree that the aesthetic is largely if not entirely subjective. The empirical/ontological is the most confusing because it asks what the thing is devoid of subjectively imposed attributes, leading us down the Lockean path of trying to distinguish what properties are inherent in the object and what are imposed by the person. It's the whole phenomenal/noumenal debate that leads us to direct and indirect realism conversations.
You list out objective criteria for determining morality: (1) negotiation, (2) persuasion, (3) search for common ground, (4) avoidance of anarchy, (5) avoidance of war (6) reducing suffering, (7) increasing our feeling of being understood, (8) increasing feeling of beloingingness, (9) reduction of cruelty, and (10) reduction of arbitratry rule. You also impose an unspoken meta rule, which is that rationality is the arbiter of morality.
Does any theocracy adhere to any of these rules? Do they even apply your meta rule? The point here is that you can't assert there are no hard and fast rules, but then identify the hard and fast rules, and then suggest that your rules are not simply a recitation of Western values generally but are just obvious truths everyone takes to be self-evident. These rules are not universal and it is not a universal truth that morality is to be found through reason. That's not even the rule within traditional theistic systems within the West (i.e. divine command theory).
And this is the bigger question of moral realism. The question of moral realism is not whether we know for certain what every moral justification is, but it's whether there are absolute moral rules that we are seeking to discover. If the answer is that there is not, that it's just a matter of preference, then we are left asking why we can impose our idiosyncratic rules on others. If, though, you say there is an objective good, we can impose our assessement of what they are on others, recognizing we could be wrong in our assessment. However, to do this will require us to say that we assess morality based upon X because that basis is right, and if you don't use X, you are wrong. Once you've taken that step, you stepped outside of subjectivity and you've declared an absolute truth.
And how do you know your moral basis is right (whether it be the Bible, your 10 point system, Utliltarianism, Kantianism, or whatever), you just do. This is where faith rears its ugly (or clarifying) head once again.
It's neither objective in the sense that there are objects with properties like "beautiful" of which we can say they are true and false, and it's not subjective because it's not just my opinion but the shared structure of the mind which allows us to judge and understand one another's judgments.
Broadly speaking these are attitudinal theories of aesthetics to where it's the attitude of the person witnessing the work of art which explains our judgments about beauty.
So I'll respond to the greater Wittgenstenian allusion here, which if Davidson is following (and you know better than me), we end up with a profound shallowness, particularly in the area of aesthetics which, properly understood (I'd submit), is to identify the underlying internal meaning of the thing to that person experiencing it. I understand that it's not that Witt denies the internal meaning is there, but it's that he ushers it out as superfluous, a sort of epiphenomenon that might exist alongside our speech. That is to say, ChatGPT can discuss at wonderful length the beauty of any piece of art, convincingly and entirely, playing the language game like the pro it is in manipulating syntax and identifying patterns. But it lacks the experience. And that is the point of aesthetics. It has no necessary utility. The Mona Lisa doesn't keep the wall in place. It has internal experiential meaning, so applying the analytic tradition to beauty seems an oddity unto itself.
I think this sort of disagreement only helps to support to the position that there is nothing objective to agree about if one has already presupposed that there is nothing objective to agree about (i.e. it is confirmation bias).
Consider that two scientists might disagree as to whether or not vaccines are a major factor in increasing autism rates. Does their disagreement demonstrate that there is no fact of the matter here? Or suppose a man is found murdered and detective A thinks the butler did it and detective B thinks it was the estranged heir. Does this imply that there is no fact about who killed the man?
Note that this applies equally with arguments from cultural relativity. For most of history, where you grew up and which culture you belonged to, determined what you thought about the shape of the Earth, the etiology of infectious diseases, etc. Beliefs re these issues have tended to be strongly dependent on time and place. Does this mean that the Earth has no shape, or that its shape varies by culture and historical epoch?
Most theories of objective beauty hardly deny that different things please different people. Aquinas' famous answer is that: "beauty is what pleases when seen," but in context this means more "beauty is what pleases when [I]known[/I]." But knowing cannot be relativized, on pain of a thorough-going relativism about all sorts of things. A denial of aesthetic quality might very well lead to a denial of all qualities on the same grounds.
Hence, in these theories there is a healthy taste, a healthy response to and respect for things of beauty, and intelligible beauty is in some sense higher and fuller than sensible beauty. That some men are color blind does not imply that nothing is red or green, and that some men are blind does not imply that nothing "looks like anything." In the same way, some men are said to have healthy, educated tastes, versus unhealthy or defective tastes. Health is the standard, not illness, else blindness would be equally the measure of sight and deafness equally the measure of hearing. But note that the idea of sickness versus health, while common sense enough, requires some notion of human telos, a measure of human excellence/perfection, which much modern thought is likely to deny due to extreme nominalism.
Nonetheless, beauty is not a quantitative (dimensive quantity) univocal measure, and so we shouldn't expect everyone to agree. There are a number of reasons why people might disagree on aesthetic judgements even if there is a truth underlying such judgements (see below):
Indeed, "objective" is often taken as a synonym for "noumenal" rather than "without relevant bias." This is often grounds for equivocation. Someone says that "morality is not objective," and so it cannot enter into politics or education. But, upon investigation, we learn that by "objective" they mean "noumenal" and they end up agreeing that the whole of engineering, physics, and chemistry is also "subjective." Yet usually, they do not think engineering should be barred from having any influence on education, constructing aircraft, or bridge building due to its "subjectivity," and so the entire point about morality or taste failing to be "objective" ends up being wholly irrelevant.
I don't think art and science are comparable in that way, tbh. Science concerns itself with proven and repeatable things in a way that art does not. My point is that if there was a science to art that resulted in proven, repeatable "good art," then any artist that doesn't do that would be a fool doomed to failure. However, we frequently see art that "breaks the rules" change how we think about art and what makes it "good." I think that volatility of opinion and inherent subjectivity means that there cannot be a wide, objective standard of art beyond insular taste groups. Though perhaps I am misunderstanding you. It seems like you may agree that art is on some level subjective, but I got a little lost as to what your point was tbh.
My point was merely that disagreement is poor evidence for a lack of objective aesthetic value/criteria. People disagree about virtually everything.
Now you've offered a supporting thesis, that science is objective, and aesthetic judgements not, because the former involves observations that are repeatable.
However, this poses another problem if it is the sole thesis. For the facts that historians, detectives and prosecutors, etc. deal in, and many practical judgements we make in life that we think involve facts (a "truly best choice"), are not repeatable in this way, even in theory.
One cannot, for example, run the American Revolution 100 times and discover that the Declaration of Independence is signed on 7/4/1776 in 99 of them.
But yes, I would agree that scientific facts are not the same as historical or aesthetic facts. Generally, the former are considered to involve something like necessity or universality, while history (and arguably beauty) is always particular.
One thing I wanted to know was when it came to art what was the judge of quality.
Specifically if there was one thing you needed no matter what. (I am still open to opposing ideas)
Do a number of factors combined have to meet some standard? But if something was slightly less than that standard, would it also not qualify?
The reason for this post is that in art I don't understand anything about why people like it (besides something just being cool). For example, the Mona Lisa to me is just a painting of a woman, but when I think about how the world views it there is a big difference. Much less abstract art.
Books are different, because they are stories and people have different tastes and experiences, but even then I don't understand why people like books I find especially boring or bad. (I know people have different tastes)
However I still don't understand what makes 'the world go round' in the sense of artistic quality.
There is nothing wrong in it. Everyone does it in their own way. I'm more the type who likes to savor things, whether it's music, art, or literature.
If you were to ask for a universal standard, then you would be stuck with the majority's vote unfortunately.
If you were to ask for the best conceivable standard of quality that should be universal, you would be stuck with multiple want-to-be-universal qualities as quality is in the artistic sense (by def. of it being dependent on the human conscience) is subjective. Evidently, there are many art forms which judge art by different standards. So, you may be left with pretty robust standards of quality but none can overthrow the other as art is seen through the human mind.
A pretty common description of this would inter-subjectivity.
No, they are not objective criteria nor do i lay them out as my version. I'm saying that this is what generally happens in the pluralistic West.
Quoting Hanover
They are not rules and I do not say they are universal, but I do think they are practiced widely in the West. Possibly elsewhere, I have not made a survey.
Quoting Hanover
I don't think so. Firstly, we dont know what is right. There's no neutral, context-free standpoint from which to declare one moral system universally right.
We can probably start with a goal, something like reducing suffering. No need for faith in the religious sense although we'd acknowledge the religious values that run through Western thinking. We might have a view that certain systems work better for people than others, but again, that's the ongoing conversation humans have with each other.
Which provides a safer culture: Islamic theocracy or Western-style democracy? Which parts of democracy arent working? It's the conversation we have, and are having, and we can agree on goals we want and situations we want to avoid. None of this involves objectivity, it's more like a recipe made out of our shared judgements and hopes.
Quoting Hanover
In reflecting on your response, I would say that calling someone morally 'wrong' doesnt require escaping subjectivity or appealing to some higher moral realm; it means staying grounded in our shared world, giving reasons, listening carefully, and trying to find common ground. We dont need absolute foundations to act; we need commitment, dialogue, and the willingness to stand by our views while accepting theyre always open to challenge.
The answer given for aesthetics is applicable to ethics and science. I gave aesthetic examples becasue that's the topic here.
Aesthetic and moral judgements tell us how we want things to be, other judgements tell us about how things are. That's a useable distinction.
It often seems that folk misapply this is/ought distinction, thinking it is the same as that between subjective and objective. Such folk are apt to say that morality and ethics are subjective while science is objective. That's a mistake.
We end up with folk thinking that "though shalt not kick puppies" is about the way things are, when it is about the way things ought be. They look for proof that one ought not kick puppies in the wrong place.
That's a deeply mistaken account of Wittgenstein, for whom the most important things were aesthetic and ethical.
If the conclusion here is that there cannot be 'a science to art that resulted in proven, repeatable "good art"' then we are in agreement. Art is not algorithmic. Few things are.
All well and good, provided that we do not conclude that there must be an "objective " aesthetic value. That there is some agreement on aesthetic value does not imply that there is a fact of the matter.
No sooner is the "one thing you need no matter what" specified than some smart arse provides us with a counterexample.
Aesthetics is not a search for One Ring To Rule Them All, but a conversation between artist and viewer, triangulated with the piece. A fancy way of saying that the quality of the piece does not in some way inhere in the piece, but is found in the conversation.
It's the story that makes the piece valuable.
There's a key difference here. @Hanover seems to be looking for a set of rules that are practiced. But what answers the question, and what you have provided, is a set of rules that ought be practiced.
So Hanover points out in triumph that they are not practiced everywhere, missing the point entirely.
Wouldn't a "simple statements of fact" also involve: "an interpretation within a context of belief, intention, tradition, form, and reception?"
I'd argue that it will. You could look to someone like Rorty here. Hence a workable definition of "objective" cannot allow the aforementioned to be disqualifying factors, else hardly anything would qualify as objective.
But, more to the point, I am not more inclined to think that man, with our without his institutions and "games," is the sui generis source of beauty in the cosmos (or goodness, or truth for that matter). Discourse on beauty is affected by the aforementioned factors, as light passes through tinted panes of glass, but beauty is not [I]contained[/I] within, nor created by, these things. "There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard" (as Psalm 19:3 puts it).
As Plato has it:
The idea is that beauty is prior to individual experiences of finite, contextual beauty. Or as more recent thinkers have put it:
Schiller and Goethe would be another counterpointhere.
Yep.
Glad we have a point of agreement.
Is it worth my saying I don't usually read your long cut-and-paste quotes? Will it save you the effort? I will presume that if you have an argument of substance you will present it in the body of your post.
Why supose there is a "sui generis source of beauty ". Do you supose that that in order for beauty to be real, it must have a source, and that source must be outside human life? I don't agree. I'll throw the burden back to you to show that such a thing is needed.
Can man create something from nothing?
Yes. The notion of beauty.
And that's all? If one thing can come from nothing, why not anything more? Why just this one thing?
Goodness, and to a lesser extent, Truth are often offered up as other examples of things that man creates. I disagree. Ex nihilo nihil fitout of nothing, nothing comes. Man does not act without causes, and does not create from nothingif he did, we'd have no way to explain why he has created one thing and not any other. That's my contention.
Plus, I find it particularly strange that this sort of theory of man's creative powers is so often couched in terms of epistemic humility, since it is saying that all Goodness, Beauty, and Truth in the cosmos is the work of man's willthat man is essentially God, making things what they are, bestowing onto them their unity, goodness, purpose, and beauty.
We did not starting from nothing. We start embedded in the world and in a community.
Right, we are embedded in the world, its beauty, truth, etc.the world is not embedded in our communities, practices, and "language games." One is prior to, and the ground of the other.
It was just a quip. But I would say that concepts like God, goodness, evil, and charity are human constructsthey arise from human experience and imagination rather than existing independently.
The notion that something can come from nothing is typically embraced by those invested in teleological arguments for transcendence.
If beauty were created by man and his practices, I'd contend that there would be no proper orientation towards the world. And if there is no proper orientation to the world, then something like Huxley's A Brave New World has no aesthetic defects. The wilderness, sunsets, flowers, love, commitment, romance, justice, parenthoodthese are hideous because society has said that they are so, and people have been conditioned accordingly. What is beautiful is mass produced consumer products, orgy porgy, utilitarian "pneumatic" relations of pleasure, etc.
But even Huxley has the problem of explaining how his miracle drug soma tends to make [I]everything[/I] that is sensed more beautiful.
If Hamlet is right, if "nothing is good or bad (beautiful or ugly) but thinking makes it so," we are left with the question of why anything should be thought beautiful or ugly in the first place. Such notions should be uncaused, and thus random, but they do not seem to be. Pastural poetry from ancient Greece and Rome, or India, Persia, or China, is still quite accessible to people across the world millennia later, after vast social changes.
By who? It seems to me that it is normally quite the opposite. For instance, the contention that there must be a being that is pure act to explain any move from potency to act. Or that there must be a first cause in a chain of efficient causes. Or that there must be a being that is necessary and subsistent, whose essence includes existenceall so that we don't have "something coming from nothing."
Yes, well I know it isn't a unique view but my position is that goodness, truth, and beauty are not transcendentals but are contingent products of culture and language. I dont think we are God so much as we see the world in certain ways and create the frameworks that give gods their life.
So I have to ask: arent you smuggling in a theological or metaphysical assumption, something like a First Cause or transcendent source? Why suppose that beauty must have a ground outside human lifeoutside history, culture, or shared understanding?
Why does this need for an external source apply to aesthetic judgments in particular? Does language require a source beyond human life? Do games, rules, rituals, or cultural artefacts?
We dont create beauty from nothingperhaps. But why assume the alternative is no creation at all? Isnt that a false dichotomy? Why not acknowledge that we shape, interpret, and respond to the world from within itnot outside it? That we bring forth meaning without having to posit some metaphysical before or beyond?
This need to find beautys origin elsewhere seems to rest on an unexamined assumption: that whats meaningful or real must come from outside us. But why believe that?
I'd say there is no proper orientation towards the world.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I don't see how this follows. It feels like this is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Just because something doesn't have a transcendent source doesn't mean it's nothing or we can readily reverse perspectives at will. (Although, grant you, in some areas we've almost done this - slavery, women's rights, our more recent changing understanding of gender) Human taste has a lively intersubjective dimension, it's a contingent but powerful force based on our interactions with the world. And although it evolves and changes over time and is the product of contingent factors, it still matters to us and we can talk about it and cultivate views. I think some of those views can be pigheaded attempts at objectivist dictatorialism, but that's people, right?
I think this is a false dichotomy. I mentioned Rorty above to head of exactly this sort of false dichotomy, whereby the later empiricst trots out the earlier empiricst's failed model, knocks it down, and then proclaims that "if not-a, then it is necessarily b." I don't think this follows, one could just as well turn around to attack the presuppositions made by both a Russell/early-Wittgenstein and a Rorty/late-Wittgenstein.
I already allowed that "a 'simple statements of fact' also involves: "an interpretation within a context of belief, intention, tradition, form, and reception." But this is different from saying that there is no truth prior to "interpretation within a context of belief, intention, tradition, and reception." To say that would be to say that nothing was true until man's communities arose. Yet the order of human discourse is not the order of being, the former is contained within the latter, not vice versa.
Why would notions of beauty be one way and not any other if beauty was not in any sense prior to human life?
You could ask the same sort of questions re truth. Why did disparate culture groups come to recognize ants and cockroaches as distinct species, and individual ants and cockroaches as individual organic wholes, animals? The most obvious answer is: these organisms already existed as species with individual members prior to the advent of man and his languages. So here, the truth is prior to its culturally bound representation. The priority which exists is not merely temporal, but also exist in terms of a hierarchy contemporaneous efficient causes, in the same way that a hanging chandelier depends on each link in the chain above it to be hanging rather than falling at any particular moment.
A First Cause, First Principle, and First Mover might follow from the idea that explanations need to be intelligible and do not bottom out in "it just is" and the spontaneous movement of potency to actualitythat's another question however.
Certainly. They do not spring from the aether fully formed. Language has causes outside language. If language had no prior cause, there would be no reason to explain why it is one way and not any other.
It comes from the assumption that our language and judgements have causes.
So, then Hitler, Stalin, and the BTK killer represent equally valid orientations towards being as anyone else?
Right, no need to bring up transcedence. It follows from the assertion that there is no proper orientation towards being. If there is no proper orientation towards the world then the orientation represented by the society of A Brave New World could hardly be improper, no?
People acting properly?
Others here have focused on this as well. It simply doesn't follow that, because there is no transcendental or foundational basis for aesthetic values, our notions of value are therefore uncaused or random.
I'm puzzled by this reply because the post says this follows from Hamlet's position, not from a lack of "transcendental or foundational basis."
The question of whether man's will and his various "games" (which are said above to ground aesthetic judgement) generate their own existence is a different question. I would maintain they do not, that they have causes that are prior to them. But this is not the same question as the ultimately arbitrary nature of aesthetic and moral judgement if Hamlet is correct and man wills values. IDK, perhaps Milton's Satan is the better example here: "evil be thou my good," through the act of the "unconquerable will."
It absolutely does follow that if there is nothing prior to man, his communities, and his "games" then there is no reason for them to be one way and not any other. If something "just is" ("always already") why is it one way and not any other? The "community" as a bare primitive has this problem.
I should note that the austere physicalist doesn't have this problem. They have an idea of what lies prior to man and his games. They might have a similar problem when it comes to "why is the universe one way rather than any other," though (it depends).
I disagree. If you consider that, in every society, the uneducated constitute the majority, then only someone who is similarly uneducated and shares their tastes can benefit from the majoritys vote. For an educated reader, however, this vote of the masses is irrelevant. If there is anyone you can trust in this regard, it is a critic whose taste you know and whose preferences you share.
:up:
And indeed, there is an issue with feedback between educated/elite opinion and majority opinion, in that the two shape each other. What gets taught as a matter of a normal education also matters. Plus you also have the issue of earlier works affecting later works. Although, these are less of an issue with natural beauty.
I once saw someone argue that Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer were given undue praise because there are so many more people alive who can write in English today than in their epoch. Thus, "the Bayesian prior for them being truly elite writing talents would be quite low." This, to me, totally misses the close relationship between history, philosophy, culture, etc. and art, both art as received, and how it is produced.
Didn't you mean Hamlet to be articulating the position that there is no transcendental basis for values?
Transcendent in what way? I am saying something about the things judged good/beautiful must be prior to the act of judging/thinking itself, else the objects themselves would only be arbitrarily related to the judgement. Anything could be judged any which way, because the properties of objects do not determine how they are judged. Note that the post you are quoting is the second one a chain in which Tom said that Beauty was an example of man creating something from nothing, which is what I was responding to.
This seems to be obviously false for something like color. That something is judged to be blue is dependent on the object judged. Why would it be different for beauty?
Quoting Tom Storm
That deserves its own thread. Its the nut of so many discussions.
If one answers that giving an opinion is performing a kind of power move, making universal that which is really subjective arent those who hold such a view basically lying when they offer their opinions?
Here is an opinion, for example: to judge art as good is a subjective view and is not about the piece of art in itself.
This is a universal statement about what art and what good art is.
If I offer this opinion as part of an argument for the sake of a rational pursuit of truth, than whether this opinion is either true or false will require supporting argument to prove its merit. But I can honestly mean it. This can be an honest opinion about the truth of art as part of an honest debate.
But since the opinion itself is a universal statement, if I believe universal opinions cannot be true (or are not real, or are some sort of categorical mistake of language), because all such statements are really attempts and power moves, then I am lying to you about what I actually think when I tell you what I think art is. If I think art is only subjective is universally true, then I am attempting to universalize my own subjective stance and make a power move; I am not really saying anything true about art, or more plainly, I am lying to you.
Bottom line, as is so often the case, where all is relative and subjective, there can be nothing to honestly discuss about it. So if you are bothering to speak, you must see something objective we both would have to say, or you are lying to me in order to over power me.
How else can I be corrected but by something prior to your opinion that can be prior to mine? Your view may over power my view, but it cant correct error if it is merely your powerful view.
If one honestly thinks judgements are simply subjective then you should be agreeing with the Count about Brave New World having no defects as all such orientations are like all other human endeavors - inventions from nothing, purely conventional, in a world where the practical can be re-trained according to any subsequent and new power move.
Or if you disagree with Hitler, on principle, you might be engaging in a rational pursuit of truth. But if you disagree with Hitler absent any objective, prior principles or belief in universal truths, you might be simply performing a kind of power move, attempting to universalize your own subjective stance. In which case you said nothing about Hitler anymore, but merely became the over-powering dictator.
Last point, when people who think all is subjective and relative agree with each other, there is no real point in debating, but they might enjoy themselves making small clarifications (which would really be attempts at universalizing as they win power struggles). But when people who think all is subjective and relative truly disagree with someone, their best argument is really you are stupid and you should just shut up because otherwise they have to pretend (attempt) to engage in rational argument for the pursuit of truth, which would be lying.
Right?
You can have any opinion you want. But if you are trying to tell me Im wrong, then you cant have any opinion you want.
Well, because there is universal agreement on how to recognize and judge blue, and nothing similar in regard to beauty. But in any case, I see the context for the Hamlet quote, thanks.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Now it's
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
If you are now saying only that the flower is prior to the flower being called pretty, then you have dropped your main gambit. But it does not follow that judging the flower to be pretty is arbitrary.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
"The properties of objects do not determine how they are judged" is rubbish. The flower is judged to be pretty because fo the properties it has.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
It's also dependent on the eyesight of the person doing the judging, together with the language they use and the community in which they use it.
So we are still at:
Quoting Banno
It's funny how people always reach for Hitler in these discussions. Why not Pol Pot, surely a satisfying enough human rights violator in his own right?
Like many people, you assume there's a need for a universal moral standard that tells us the right way to relate to the world. I'm positing that no such standard exists. That doesnt mean I approve of people like Hitler or whoever, just that I don't believe there's some higher, absolute scale to measure orientations to the world.
But note: we can still judge and reject them, but we do so from our own perspective, not from some objective, godlike viewpoint.
It's perfectly legitimate to condemn Hitler or Pol Pot on the basis that they do not create the society we wish to build. This is a discursive process. Not all all values are equally appealing or equally helpful for us as human beings trying to live together.
It seems to me that this is all culture ever does - balance pluralism and proffer assessments and values based on human-made frameworks. We don't get access to some objective standpoint outside all human values.
Besides, even if one believes the good is something non-human or absolute, people will still disagree. Some will passionately insist that their Pol Pots or their Trumps represent the way forward and the true path. Appealing to an absolute standard of the good doesnt settle the issue, it merely relocates the disagreement to whose interpretation of that standard prevails.
This is spot on. It marks the link here between Tim's approach to aesthetics and his comments against liberalism and in favour of elite education.
It would appear that Tim thinks he has understood the Devine.
But why should we take his word for it?
No, this misses something. We do not need to have absolute right and wrong to have a debate about value. Society is the product of discursive practices, we have an ongoing conversation about how we want to live together. Certain ways of living work better to achieve certain results. You dont need a Gods-eye view of reality to make such choices.
It should be obvious that if you want a village to flourish (however that might look to you), poisoning the entire water supply will not achieve that goal. We can choose goals and aims without requiring non-human views of reality.
And in this way, I can challenge your opinions within the context of how we wish to live together. I am probably not going to say you are 'wrong' as such, more that a given view or course of proposed action may not be helpful, subject to a goal.
Quoting Banno
I think @Count Timothy von Icarus is well-read, a deep thinker and orients himself within the classical tradition, like some others here. It seems to me that for some people, philosophy revolves around finding non-human justifications, while for others, its a discursive process we have with ourselves.
Do you mean wrong as in mistaken about something, or wrong as in morally wrong? Or both?
Quite so. However I often find it difficult to see much argument in his posts. They read more like just-so storiesrich descriptions of how he pictures the world, but with little in the way of justification for that picture. It's one thing to affirm a vision; it's another to show why we should accept it.
Consider:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Here's a false dilemma - that either there are truths prior (a loaded term) to humanity, or nothing was true until man's communities arose. Perhaps we can say truth is not invented by humans, but neither does it exist in some Platonic realm, independent of all interpretive conditions. Instead truths become available within human discoursenot arbitrarily, not as illusions, but as intelligible articulations of a world we are always already in relation with.
And notice the "might" in
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Again, a false dilemma. The might is doing slippery rhetorical workit creates the appearance of modesty while still reinforcing the idea that unless you accept some First Cause, you're left with unintelligibility. Theres no reason to think that rejecting a First Cause commits one to irrationalism or incoherence.
And this admission:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
conflating causal explanation with justificatory structure. To move from our judgments have causes to therefore they must be grounded in a First Cause is to blur the line between what explains a beliefs origin and what justifies its content. It's precisely the kind of category mistake that thinkers like Davidson, Sellars, and Brandom have warned against.
One alternative is that aesthetic judgement is embedded in community and culture, tradition and workmanship, coherence and responsiveness, and is it learned and communicable, an aspect of human growth. Aesthetic judgements are part of the stories we tell each other about what it worthwhile. This view places aesthetics firmly in the human, not the divine.
Quoting Banno
This is a really interesting fulcrum for different styles of philosophy. One might ask a proponent of any philosophical perspective, "Could you specify what conditions, if any, guide your interpretations of the key terms you're using?" You might find some who would claim that interpretation is not an issue at the level of first philosophy, and that would be an important way of categorizing their method.
Thats sharper than my view and nicely put.
Theres probably a need to go deeper into this, partly as a way to address the you cant have values if theres no external validation of the good.
An interesting thought. I fond it hard to see how a first philosophy (again, a loaded term) might be articulated without being interpreted. But I supose that just marks my position on the issue.
And the question becomes, external to what? If the world is always, and already, in a context and a language, then there is nothing "external" to the interpretation.
Which brings us back, I think, to how it is that Tim can understand the divine, without thereby interpreting it.
So for Tim the world is already divided up. Whereas for me the division is something we do, and re-do, as our understanding progresses.
And so I again throw the question back to Tim, why should we accept that your divisions are the absolute ones?
And it seems to me that he can answer with an argument, or simply rely on faith. But his reliance on faith is not a reason for others to follow his account. So I think he needs to present some sort of argument.
I can't see how he can do so without thereby giving some sort of interpretation of how things are.
I mean wrong in any sense or application.
There is your opinion.
There is my opinion.
We can leave it at that.
But if we want to debate which opinion is correct, we have to go after some third thing between us that matches one of our opinions.
That third thing would be the prior, or the objective, or the truth. With a capital T as some like to call it.
Thats my opinion.
Quoting Tom Storm
That is well put.
But there is a bit of tension between these two terms:
truth is not invented by humans and
truths become available within human discourse
They may contradict each other a bit.
And there may be another contradiction by saying not arbitrarily .
I think the precise point we are debating is whether quality is arbitrary or not. I am saying all is NOT arbitrary. If you are saying all is not arbitrary (as in, not arbitrarily) then we agree. You should then agree that:
You can have any opinion you want. But if you are trying to tell me Im wrong, then you cant have any opinion you want.
All Im saying is if you want to have the opinion all is arbitrary you can. But if you want to correct me, about anything, you are actually saying something is not arbitrary, or you are lying, or contradicting yourself.
But regardless, I think this part is all you need to sum up your main point:
Quoting Banno
I would restate this as, truths are moving targets (ie. becoming available in discourse) articulating things that are moving (ie. of a world of relations).
I agree that articulating truth is a pickle. We may rarely hit the mark.
But it is not even possible or worth attempting if there is no truth.
What Im saying is, the above would be better stated without using the word truth as in opinions become available within human discourse[s]not arbitrarily, not as illusions, but[/s] as intelligible articulations of a world we are always already in relation with.
This is fine. That may be the human condition.
But then there is no truth.
And then there is no error, or correction.
And no reason to debate our opinions.
Quoting Banno
If there is nothing external to the interpretation, than what is it an interpretation of?
This has become a chicken and egg discussion about a statement and the truth of a statement. Or maybe a statement and what the statement is truly about.)
I agree the division is something we do. This is to give an opinion.
But then we can debate and determine something else about this opinion - does it reflect something true? Is it an opinion of something anyone who could give opinions would (or should) indeed hold because it is also there in the world, truly?
We divided the morning from the evening, and even though the light was similar at both times, one was getting brighter and the other was getting darker. So maybe the opinion that the morning is different than the evening is false because the light was similar at both times (and this division was arbitrary), or maybe it is true because of other divisions we can point out such as brightening or darkening. These divisions and interpretations are OF not merely our words and language, but of the world, not arbitrarily divided.
There is also nothing similar in regards to truth or goodness.
But, at any rate, we're talking about dependence and priority, not agreement. If beauty is posterior to social "games," then it follows that nothing was beautiful before such games existed. Perhaps things were beautiful potentially, waiting for man to actualize that potential?
The problem I see for this answer is that it is hard to see how culture could form prior to the aesthetic (or moral and theoretical) sense. These would seem to be [I]prerequisites[/I] for culture. More to the point, if beauty is "what pleases when known," then it would seem to already exist, in at least a primitive form vis-á-vis sensation, in lower animals that existed millions of years before the first man. If Beauty is the going out in appearances of Goodness, the "pleasingness of appearances," then I find it hard to see how life could evolve without it, since animals are presumably motivated by what pleases their senses.
Now, I'd agree that only man experiences Beauty as such, in a full sense, but this is also true of Truth. Yet the fact that Beauty (and Truth) are always filtered through and contextualized within culture for man does not require that they be posterior to culture. If they were posterior (dependent, as smoke generated by a fire) then nothing would have been true prior to the advent of man.
Right, but how does this amount to more than emotivism (or does it?)more than "boo hoo for Hitler?" No doubt, no one denies that people can say "boo hoo for Hitler." Yet people can, and do, also say "hoorah for Hitler." If there is no human telos or values that transcend current sentiment then it seems only power relations can ultimately end up determining the question of which [I]ought[/I] to prevail, no? That is, reason cannot judge between the life of the BTK killer and the life of a saint.
Note that the transcendence is question here is only of current norms and sentiments. Nothing "platonic" need he inferred.
"Godlike," "One True," etc., ...do pluralisms' detractors ever use this language? This language is only ever rolled to create a dichotomy to argue [I]against[/I], right? That might be an indication that it's a strawman.
The idea of a human telos doesn't require anything that transcends man. It merely requires something that transcends man's current sentiments, norms, and beliefs.
For example, it is bad for a bear to have its leg mangled in a bear trap [I]because of what a bear is[/I]. Likewise, I'd argue that there are ways of living that are better and worse for man. No "Godlike" perspective is required to reach this judgement. This is observable through the senses. Being neglected is not good for children, being maimed is not good for human beings, education is conducive to human flourishing, etc.at the very least, ceteris paribus. I would argue that these are facts about what man is that do not depend on current norms, yet neither do they depend on a god-like view, nor a view from nowhere.
But, even if you have the suspicion that my point must somehow reduce to an appeal to the "transcendent" (and I'm not sure how it does), I still think your argument has a weakness (to be fair, it's one that seems fairly endemic around these parts when it comes to arguing these sorts of things). It seems to follow the form:
Either A or B
Not A
Thus, B
That is:
Either we have access to a god-like, One True Perspective, or "view from nowhere," else man has no particular telos.
Similar arguments have been made in this thread re the status of beauty. Either we have the "god-like view," else beauty is posterior to custom and culture.
But the truth of the premise: "either A or B" is never addressed. A more convincing argument doesn't need to merely show that we lack a god-like, One True, etc. view, but rather that, if we lack this view, it entails that man lacks a telos (or, likewise in the case of beauty, that some sort of constructivist pluralism where beauty is posterior to culture and custom [I] necessarily follows[/I] from the absence of a One True View).
That would be more convincing, particularly since I don't think I've suggested A in the first place. I've said many times on this forum that I would consider a strong challenge to a virtue ethics grounded in man's telos to be one which can demonstrate that, ceteris paribus (and not just in contrived counterexamples), it is, on average:
Not better to have fortitude, but rather better to have weakness of will.
Not better to be prudent, but rather better to be rash.
Not better to be courageous, but rather better to be reckless or cowardly.
Not better to be temperate, but rather better to be gluttonous and licentious.
Etc.
Or, barring that, that different cultures actually have wholly equivocal notions of the virtues. I think this will be an extremely hard challenge to meet though. So too for the idea of a human telos, e.g. that ceteris paribus, on average, things like lead poisoning, hunger, lack of education, lack of physical activity, etc. do not negatively impact human flourishing.
Well, here is a fundamental disagreement. I think that language is something [I]within[/I] the world. Language is just one thing in the order of human experience, and human experience is just one thing in the order of being. The world is not "in a language." This is backwards, the former is what contains the latter. Likewise, it has not "always already been in a language" because language has not always existed.
The limits of language are not the limits of being. Being is not something contained in language. This is inflating a part into a whole, and leads to a misunderstanding of what language is and how it works. Likewise, the limits of reason are not the limits of existing languages, because reason is more than just discursive linkages between elements language or something akin to computation.
Right, what decides what an ant is has something to do with what we decide to count as an ant. I will just note that I find this implausible. The subject matter of biology is prior to our doing. Something like "how many chromosomes does a tiger have," is [I]discovered[/I] (the uncovering of something prior). Which isn't to say science isn't bound up in culture, but rather that the facts science studies are not posterior to (dependent on) culture. Biology is not primarily the study of human distinctions, but of living organisms. Distinctions are secondary, related as means but not ends. So it is for theoretical reason, and so too for moral and aesthetic reason.
Again, this is a question of what is prior and posterior. The ant and tyrannosaurus are prior to human language. We might get them more or less correctly, but their preexistence is a key cause of our knowledge of them. There would be no reason for language to develop for these concepts if their existence wasn't prior.
[Quote]
And so I again throw the question back to Tim, why should we accept that your divisions are the absolute ones[/quote]
You're going to run out of straw too early again friend, I cannot keep up.
I guess the compromise for me might be to say that truth is a product of human beings, their interactions, and discourse. But perhaps the word truth is the problem, it's so ossified and redolent with pious meaning.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I agree it's not arbitrary, there are frameworks and values underpinning our discourse. What they are not is universal or scientifically binding.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Not sure I follow. My point can probably be summarised like this: all we have available is a discourse that identifies better and worse ways to achieve certain goals. Within that framework, we can say whether something is 'wrong'. That's why I gave my crude example, if you believe in human flourishing, then poisoning the town's water supply would appear to be the 'wrong' way to achieve it. But like 'truth', words like 'right' and 'wrong' are distorted by piety and a myriad preconceptions.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I'm not saying everything is arbitrary, It's the product of discourse over which we can deliberate. Just because we have no ultimate foundation for morality doesn't mean we can't identify goals and aims for how we live together. A starting point might be found in the fact that humans, as a social species, ususally try to avoid suffering and cruelty. What more do we need as a starting point?
Interesting reponses. Thanks.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Well, Ive spent some time arguing with Hindus and Baptists who do indeed maintain that morality emanates from Gods nature or flows from the Godhead, etc. But I take your point, especially given what you write next.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Well I guess I am arguing that pragmatic ethics is likely all we have, so if that's sufficient we are in agreement.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yep, so we're in agreement on this. We can identify a series of aims, and, subject to those aims (flourishing, well-being, etc.), identify better or worse ways to achieve them.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
And this is where things can get tricky, the judgment about what is better or worse can become quite shrill very quickly. Still, I prefer 'better' and 'worse' to 'right' and 'wrong'.
I start with the goal of increasing suffering. Why choose yours? I'll answer that question. Because my goal is immoral.
Quoting Tom Storm
Of course it involves objectivity. You're specifically stating that the advancement of "our shared judgments and hopes" is the Good. Notwithstanding that fact that "our" is undefined here because who "our" encompasses in the antebellum south, Nazi Germany, and in the various less than humanistic societies over time would arrive at very different "shared judgments and hopes."
So, is rape wrong? That is, regardless of how a society values women, regardless of what some dictator might say or do, are you willing to go out on a limb and say "rape is wrong, anytime, anywhere, and regardless of the consensus."
If you're not, tell me the scenario where it's ok.
I don't think you will. What that means is we need to take seriously the objectivity of morality and figure out what we're talking about and not suggest there is some sort of preference or voting taking place. If you think there are principles that apply throughout all societies, you are going to be referencing the objective whether you like it or not.
Quoting Banno
No, I recognized his itemization was of the aspirational. I questioned if there were an objective anchor for those ethical statements, as in, is there something other than our agreement that makes the good the good.
If I say, we ought reduce suffering, I'm speaking in the objective. If not, then for some the increase of suffering might be good. But you disagree I'm sure in the proposition that we ought increase the pain of all redheads, for example. Why? They are a tiny little minority, and if the rest of of enjoy their pain, why limit it? Assert for me your principle. This isn't that hard.
Given this, I think your dictum could be phrased more clearly as: "Opinions are plural; anyone can have one. But if your opinion happens to be that there is nothing beyond opinions, no truth, no fact of the matter, then it is meaningless for you to also tell me I am wrong about something."
Does that work for you? It's less snappy, but it captures the self-contradiction you're claiming, which the original version does not. "Can't have" is confusing.
Quoting Tom Storm
Yes. Something can be far from arbitrary -- it can have good reasons and justifications -- without needing a universal, cross-cultural explanation.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I'm having trouble understanding how that "something" would not transcend humans. Is the idea that we could discover such a telos by only studying humans as a species, the way anthropologists do? Or understanding humans' role in relation to other species and to the planet as a whole?
Quoting Hanover
If by OK you mean, "Something I might feel ethically obligated to do": Sure. A foul regime imprisons me and my family and indulges its jailers' sadistic fantasies. (This example actually happened in Nazi Germany.). "Rape your daughter," they tell me, "otherwise we'll torture your entire family to death before your eyes." I emphasized might, above, because I don't presume to know what would seem right to me under the circumstances. But I might well decide that the rape was the lesser of two evils.
This highlights two important points. First, if that's not what you mean by OK -- if, rather, you mean "Rape becomes a good thing in this scenario" -- then I agree, this can never happen. Second, while we are helpless in the face of circumstances to rely on rules, that doesn't meant that teaching our children that rape is wrong should always be contextualized. I am not a utilitarian, but this is one area where the distinction between act and rule utilitarianism is useful.
Sure. I would argue that such a view ultimately runs into many other problems, but such a view of man's telos does not seem prima facie unreasonable, whereas a blanket denial does.
Now, the classical view would be that man, as a rational being, is always oriented towards Truth and the Good by the two faculties of the rational soul, intellect and will. This is the natural the desire to know what is really true and possess/attain to what is truly best (both, ultimately being a sort of union). It is these intellectual appetites by which man transcends his finitude and seeks his end in rational freedom.
But, supposing we deny that man is a rational being (at least in this sense) and instead claim he is something more like a very clever rat or fox, then it would still be the case that man has a nature that determines the human good (leaving aside the question of cosmic ends).
The point of the question is whether there are objective, universal rules that have to be applied in order to determine morality. It's not relevant which moral dilimma you create in answering this abstract question. The question I posed was meant to just provide a very straight forward question, as in, is it morally wrong to rape someone without adding in a bunch of absurd facts with guns to people's heads and whatnot. But, to clarify, is it wrong to rape someone just for fun, who was otherwise just an innocent bystander.
Your example does not pose a challenge to my question. It just poses a very strange example we have to consider, as in "Is it wrong to rape someone if it is the only means to save the life of another," where we then have to get into a hierarchy of moral rules and how to prioritize them.
OK. But in fairness, what you said was, "Are you willing to go out on a limb and say 'rape is wrong, anytime, anywhere, and regardless of the consensus'?" This inevitably pushes to the foreground the question of the hierarchy of moral rules. I don't think it's possible to say that "getting into" how we prioritize these rules is optional, that we can achieve some kind of moral clarity without doing so.
Also, much as I wish I could agree with you that "gun to the head" dilemmas are "absurd" and "strange examples," in the world I see around me they are irrefutable facts of ethical life. Moreover, I have a hunch they always have been. Humans can be cruel to a degree that will challenge any moral system.
Yes, more precise is better. But less snappy.
Maybe, you can have any opinion you want, but if one has the two opinions you can have any opinion you want and your opinion is wrong then you are contradicting yourself.
In the context of is there objective quality or is there truth, good and beauty prior to recognition as such in the eye of the beholder, the point of the statement you clarified for me above is that, if we dont think there is anything objective or non-subjective to beauty and truth and good, then the words beauty and truth and good are meaningless.
Maybe there is nothing good, true or beautiful, and we all fumble around when using these terms. But if you think there is nothing objective about them, we will always, only fumble. And what is the point of fumbling at each other in a debate/discussion? Power struggles for competitions sake? But thats a zero sum loss of the war (game) for sake of some stupid battle between we fumblers. It would be like two smart people trying to win at tic tac toe. Pointless as long as each has mastered the game.
In other words, if you can convince someone that there is nothing objective and that context will always undermine the prior and overwhelm the conclusion, all is provisional stipulation to later be revised and discarded, then really, why bother asserting anything?
I dont believe anyone really believes these things - that nothing is ever fixed and there is no opinion that must be absolutely held by all opinion holders. Thats why we continue to assert things. Pursuit of truth, good and beauty.
Even saying there is no one truth for all is a truth for all. The only way to truly have the opinion there is no truth is to stop speaking about it. You dont tell someone you cant say there is truth. If someone is saying there is one truth for all and you disagree, and you think that there is no such thing, you simply cannot speak without contradicting yourself.
Cratylus, Heraclitus pupil, was known to wiggle his finger in response to questions about these things. That was, in my opinion, a more honest form of response based on the belief that all is flux and there is no objective quality.
Well, that's the difficult leap. Yes, we might be able to discover human "nature," if that is something that science can reveal. (I'm not sure it is, but let's say so.) But learning what such a nature is can't tell us what the human good is. But you and I have been here before! :smile: "Human good" is simply not an anthropological term. Unless you equate it with "survival and flourishing of the human species," which I don't think you do.
Right, and this is fairly obvious as regards statements that are straightforwardly self-undermining, if not fully self-refuting.
However, the tricky part here with various forms of "constructivist pluralism," for lack of a better term (and some other notions as well), is that the response will be: "but of course there is goodness, beauty, and truth, it just isn't what you think it is." So here, truth is no longer the adequacy of thought to being, but is variously:
- what follows from given hinges (groundless grounds, of which there are a plurality);
- "the end of inquiry," what satisfies our needs;
-consistency with other existing beliefs;
-defined wholly formally (leaving natural language truths too vague and equivocal for rigorous analysis);
etc. (with various combinations as well).
This isn't quite so straightforward. There is an equivocation at play between both parties. The question then must turn to the alternative notions of truth (or goodness, or beauty) and their appropriateness. This is likely to be fraught. However, one can look at the new definitions of truth and also see if the new definitions might themselves be self-undermining or self-refuting.
For instance, do they allow for violations of the principle of non-contradiction such that, by their own standards, they are both correct and not-correct? Do they fail to ground our most bedrock intuitions (perhaps not fatal, but certainly a difficulty)? Do they allow for conflicting truths, and in particular, conflicting truths about truth itself?
Of course, some views will claim that contradiction, of itself, is no problem. But it does seem to be a problem if a redefinition allows us to assert that the new definition (or the old for that matter) is both correct and not-correct, for then it hasn't really said anything at all.
We might also ask, given the momentous nature of the change, what presuppositions undergird the move. The move to dismiss truth as adequacy or correspondence, and to posit some particular replacement, relies on arguments. These don't tend to be presuppositionless arguments. Hence, we can ask, are these presuppositions beyond doubt? If arguments lead to radical conclusions, the first things to do are to check the validity of the argument and the truth of the premises.
And nothing can be known about what is good for a rat and a fox either?
I understand that virtue ethics collapses this difference.
But I'm happy to let it go, as I know this is one of those deep and significant differences in interpretation.
I don't think it does. There is a difference, it's just that the ethical good is not sui generis, and it is [I] desirable.[/I] But at any rate, I was speaking to the view that doesn't acknowledge man as possessing rational appetites, but rather treats man like a clever rat or pigeon.
I don't think you can get to any robust "ethical good" from this presupposition. If you try, you get an "ethical good" that is desired by no one, except accidentally, and is to no one's benefit, except accidentally, which means there is no reason why anyone should care about it. Things are only good for man in the same way that they can be good for a rat or cow.
What does it mean to "have ethics" here? Does man have an appetite for this ethical goodness, or some sort of duty vis-á-vis ethical goodness? What's the positive formulation?
You are critiquing a "naturalistic," purely immanent explanation of the human good for not including a dimension of ethical/moral goodness, yet you've also expressed disapproval for the notion of any values transcending man and his culture, no? So how is this ethical/moral goodness explained?
No. I was trying to understand how you could regard a telos as strictly humanistic or anthropological in some way, not involving transcendent elements. (You said that "such a view of man's telos does not seem prima facie unreasonable.") Personally, I think that if we're talking telos, we're talking transcendence. That is not how I understand the origin of values, because I'm not happy with talking about telos at all. But -- and again, this is the either/or thinking that is so discouraging -- that doesn't leave me in the position of reducing values to purely immanent explanations.
I really think our previous conversations about ethics have gone into this thoroughly.
Prior and posterior are "loaded terms" now?
The bronze of a statue and the art of sculpting are prior, the finished statue is posterior. Parents are prior to their children, the children are posterior. What is posterior comes from, or is dependent on what is prior. Is truth neither prior nor posterior to language and interpretation?
If this were so then the truth of an interpretation would not be dependent on the being of whatever the interpretation is an interpretation of. Second, since language and interpretation are not prior to truth, truth can hardly be said to always depend upon them. At the same time, to say that truth is both prior and posterior to language is a contradiction.
Whereas, to say that truth is posterior to man and his language is to say that truth is somewhat like a statue. But perhaps the "raw material" of truth is prior to language, as the bronze exists before the statue? Perhaps we could say that truth exists [I]potentially[/I] prior to man, yet is only actualized by his language and culture?
Here is the problem with this. Truth reflects the mind's grasp of being, the adequacy of thought to what [I] already is.[/I] Truth is founded in the being of things, in re. But things must already be actual for them to act on our intellect, and for our knowledge to be determined by them.
Being is prior to knowledge. If it weren't, then knowing (or speaking) would make things what they are (which, aside from basic plausibility, would also make it difficult to explain error and a lack of correspondence between intellect and being). Further, if we know things potentially before we know them actually, then it would seem that our potential knowledge would have to be actualized by merely potential truth.
Another way to say this is that the measure of a duck is a duck. The measure of a riverbed is a riverbed. When we assess the truth of a model, we assess the degree to which it is adequate to what it measures. But this requires that the measure is not dependent on (posterior to) the measurement (though no doubt, measurement can influence the measure, e.g. quantum mechanics), e.g. that the coastline exist prior to the map whose truth is its correspondence to the coastline.
Nothing about this priority requires any claim about stepping outside of all interpretations. This is a non-sequitur as far as I can see. I agree wholeheartedly with Rorty on the impossibility and inadvisablity of the "view from nowhere" or of "knowledge of things in themselves." That isn't what is at issue though.
Our knowledge of the truth is indeed developed over time and influenced by culture; it is situated within practices and interpretation. The truth itself is grounded in being, and hence is already actual prior to any interpretation. This gets back to the idea that language and interpretations are means of knowing, not (primarily) the objects of knowledge.
Do you think we need transcendence to speak of the goal-directedness of life?
Really? Certainly, I've responded to a lot of critique. I don't know what the corresponding positive formulation is supposed to look like at all though. Indeed, I am pretty sure I've asked what an "ethical good" is supposed to be before.
Apparently, a naturalistic approach to telos is flawed without it. And apparently my own view of the classical tradition is also flawed because it doesn't capture it adequately. But what is exactly is this "ethical good" and "ethical ought?"
In asking for my view, you're speaking to someone socialised in the progressive West, so its hardly surprising that I affirm the belief that rape is wrong. But ask men in, say, Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. Then ask them about homosexuality, or even womens rights. People tend to reflect the values of the cultures theyre raised in. Thats the point.
In fact, here in the West, marital rape wasnt even considered a crime until the late 20th century. The most insidious forms of immoral behaviour must be those that aren't even recognised as problematic, perhaps trans bigotry today is such an example, where a man can never be seen as a woman
So conversation is still needed to promote and enlarge empathy around the world. Where do you see the objectivity?
And sure, if we set a form of simple/minded human flourishing as the goal for our morality, we can devise some semblance of objective standards to achieve these. Is this what you mean? But the point surely is that flourishing looks different to different folk and we have nowhere to go to find justification, except discursively with each other in the knowledge that full agreement will never happen.
Your response rightly notes that in some cultures, even the most egregious human rights violations are considered accepted practice. We also know that racism, anti-trans bigotry, misogyny, and even that old standby, anti-Semitism, are still seen by many as acceptable, even in the West. They may even be growing. So yes, moral certainty is often claimed, but whose morality are we talking about? Where is your objective foundation to settle these questions?
I can't quite tell is this is part of hte false dilemma, for you. The above seems to me to be the case wrt truth. Things are as they are, and our existence only changes that insofar as our existence includes considerations of truth. Whether these can be 'moral' truths being another question, though, to be clear.
We are a long way apart in out views.
Of course being is not contained in language. Being is not contained in anything, and neither is language a container. Hence any any attempt to step outside of all language to describe being as such is suspect. But this seems to be what you would do - supposing that there are ants prior to "There are ants" being true; and not temporally prior, but logically prior, as if it were not sentences that are true or false. We can't stand outside of the interpretation that claims there are ants, in order to say there are ants outside of that interpretation...
And that's also why is loaded.
Truth doesn't reflect the mind's grasp of being, it is the minds grasp of being. Prior suggests an ontological gap that cant be made coherent. We dont grasp being by representing it from the outside, but are embedded in a structure of interpretation, where belief, truth, and world hang together.
I can't see how to make sense of your attempt to foreclose on this. You bold "Nothing about this priority requires any claim about stepping outside of all interpretations" only to then say " The truth itself is grounded in being, and hence is already actual prior to any interpretation." You appear to just be smuggling back in the scheme/content distinction you reject.
I'm at a loss to make sense of such an approach.
I think it's a little more radical than that. Consider any physical object - the ever-useful rock example, let's say. But now wait a minute . . . what makes it a solid object for us? Is being the discrete, solid thing that it appears to us to be a feature of "things as they are", which we have only to note and make true statements about?
Rather, isn't it the case that our particular needs and capacities as humans allow us to perceive and group items in the world according to categories like "discrete" and "solid"? This has nothing to do with whether they "really are" this or that. Now I'm not a proponent of anti-realism. For our purposes, certainly they are, and atoms are real, etc etc. My point is that we don't approach the world as a collection of neutral phenomena which hold still for us as we go on to discover what is true about them. We have a large role to play in constituting the phenomena we then say true things about. Again, this doesn't mean we make them up or that they could be any which way, or that the things we say aren't true. It means that "things as they are" should probably be reserved for a particular reductive conception of physics, and even there viewed with some doubt.
Also, if you wanted to confine "things as they are" to terms of intersubjectivity, that would work well for me. It might capture your idea, which I agree with, that the rock is going to appear discrete and solid to any normal human, and it would have this appearance even if, per impossibile, there could be an appearance with no one to appear to.
Everything is relative. Theres no true or false. Theres no right and wrong.
But I dont agree with that.
Then youre wrong!
In an earlier thread, I called this an example of "crude relativism," and said that I didn't think anyone who was familiar with philosophical inquiry could take it seriously. The relativist is obviously contradicting themselves.
I'm wondering whether this is the same position you're alluding to when you say:
Quoting Fire Ologist
That is, crude relativism would assert this without apparently noticing that it's contradictory.
Tell me what you think about this. Could this really be what relativism comes down to?
I think I am simply saying, if one wants to tell someone else you are wrong than one is operating from the standpoint that something is objective between them.
If you have the opinion that I am wrong, you also have the opinion there is something objective.
With regard to relativism, if the only basis you operate from to judge another person right or wrong is your own, subjective point of view, then you would be more consistent with your viewpoint to never see anyone as wrong. They would just be different, from their point of view, not yours.
Incoherence versus coherence is an agreed upon game, but then the agreement takes the place of objectivity. We dont get to agree to do math and each say 2+2 equals all sorts of things. How math works becomes objective and is not subject to opinions about how to do it, if you want to play math.
They say ritual human sacrifice is good and beautiful.
You say it is not.
The relativist might say its culturally dependent and so it is both good and not good depending on who you ask (so neither good nor not good objectively speaking)
If there is nothing objective, then all opinions may seem different, but what else is there to say?
So if you want to have the opinion that someone else is wrong, you cant have any opinion you want.
This has "hence" so I assume the third claim follows from the other two. But does it?
P1: Being is not contained in anything (including language).
P2: Language is not a container.
Conclusion: Any attempt to step outside all language to describe being as such is suspect.
I don't see any connection here. And I don't know what to make of your prior statement that "the world is always already in a language" in this case. What does it mean for the world itself to (as opposed to say, human experience of the world) "be in a language" and how was this "always already" the case for the billions of years when no language could have existed?
I don't think human experience is "in a language" either, language is one element of human experience, but that at least seems to make more sense to me.
It isn't primarily sentences that are true or false. The intellect is not a database of sentences. Animals without language certainly appear to have beliefs that can be true or false as well, and this was so before man and his language. So too for infants and those with aphasia. Models can be true or false as well as sentences; artwork more or less "true to life," etc. The truth of sentences is parasitic on truth in the intellect; it is not that certain arrangements of scribbles or sound waves themselves hold a special property of relating to being of their own accord. Speech is a sign of truth in the intellect.
Anyhow, that seems besides the point. If the truth of "there are ants" is [I] dependent[/I] on human language existing (even if "always already") then truth is posterior to language (the problems with this are addressed above).
No standing outside is required, just acknowledgement that the thing that is being interpreted in an "interpretation" is prior to the interpretation, i.e. that its being is not dependent on the interpretation. This is ontological priority. You are conflating epistemic limitation with ontological limitation, which is why the issue of priority seems unresolvable to you. But as noted above, if truth is neither prior nor posterior to language, it can hardly be dependent on it in the way you are saying.
I think you're wrong about the epistemic limits, that they follow from a fundamentally misguided philosophy of language grounded in empiricist epistemic presupposition, but even if I agreed with the epistemic limits, they still wouldn't be ontological limits. Something has to exist before it can be interpreted. The truth of an interpretation is measured by what is interpreted.
This just seems like the old Kantian dualism, only now couched in terms of language and interpretation, rather than the shaping influence of the mind. But if we have never, and can never know ants, but only interpretations of ants, then there would be no grounds for the appearance/reality (interpretation/reality) distinction at play in the first place. There would only be interpretation of interpretation, "nothing outside the text." The same sort of representationalism seems at play.
Now, if the truth of an interpretation is not dependent on the prior being of what is interpreted, then this is the same as saying that the truth of what we say about ants is not dependent on ants. But I'd maintain that botany texts are primarily about plants, not about interpretations. Linguistic interpretations are a [I]means[/I] of knowing (and just one such means among many) not [/I]what[/I] is known.
This seems to rely on the same conflation of epistemic and ontic priority addressed above. Consider what you are taking umbrage with: "things are what they are."
What is the response then? Things aren't as they are? Things are as they aren't?
This post once again sets up a false dichotomy between a "view from nowhere" and agnosticism about ontological priority. Denying the former does not imply the latter though. That our understanding of a rock is shaped by the mind, language, etc. should not lead us to conclude that the rock is not actual (existing as it is) prior to our knowing it. Interpretations are interpretations of things that already are, that's what makes them "interpretations of [I] something[/I] and not nothing in particular.
As you say yourself: "this doesn't mean we make them up or that they could be any which way." Yet [I]what[/I] determines interpretations? Something must first be something determinant before it can determine anything else in any determinant way.
That things must be as they are does not require knowledge of "things-in-themselves," (which is itself a completely misguided standard of knowledge grounded in representationalism.)
Now either the way things are effects interpretation or it doesn't. Either we know things as they are, or we don't. Perhaps we know things as they aren't? But if this is so, in what sense can we even say that we know them? What we know is not thing "what they are" but something else "what they aren't."
Either what things are is communicated by interpretation (the being of things is known through interpretation) or it isn't. That things are known through interpretations doesn't necessitate that the interpretation is identical with the thing it interprets, but it does mean [I]something[/I] must be identical between the two, else they are unrelated. If they are unrelated (if we know things as they aren't) I don't know what grounds we have for the initial interpretation/reality distinction in the first place. We should just say interpretation is reality; it's interpretation "all the way down."
I would put it this way. We know things as they interact with us (not exclusively through language). We also know them through a process of triangulation, by which we see how things interact with each other, through their interactions with us (e.g. experiment, scientific instruments, etc.). Interaction is not secondary to what a thing is though. To know how something interacts is to know what it is. Interaction is the only thing that makes anything epistemically accessible in the first place, and act follows on being. If act didn't follow from being, then appearance and reality would be arbitrarily related, and we might as well call appearances reality, since reality is irrelevant.
It occurred to me that Cicero might be an example of an ethics grounded in an understanding of human nature and telos that is more "naturalistic."
I'm not really sure what you mean when you refer to "transcendence," though. Is this supposed to be God alone? These posts gave me the feeling that what is really at stake is nominalism, not "transcendence," i.e. whether or not goodness is merely a name.
Or they just don't mind contradiction.
Tell me, do you think Wittgenstein's thesis about hinge propositions is meant to apply universally, for all people, or does it only apply to those people whose existing hinge propositions allow Wittgenstein's arguments to succeed? It seems obvious to me that Wittgenstein's argument fails in the context of any philosophy that admits of a faculty of noesis, since if we have direct justifcatory knowledge of first principles due to the communication of form through the senses, then "hinge propositions" are not unjustified and have determinant truth values for all. So, is what he says about truth not true for people whose hinges include something like direct justifcatory knowledge of first principles?
You might find this of interest: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetic-concept/
"Things are as they are to us."
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The idea is that "the rock" is a construct, a very useful and non-arbitrary and important one for us. But for all we know, God doesn't see it that way at all; perhaps God sees an astonishing interplay of quantum phenomena.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
That's fine. But that "something" may not much resemble what we call a rock. See above -- God and quantum beauty. Do you really believe you know "what things are"? Everything I manage to learn about physics shows me that the physicists themselves are no longer able to use such a concept, and remain baffled and fascinated about the ultimate structures, if any, of reality.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
That's why I call it "crude relativism," somewhat derisively, and contrast it with a relativism worth reading and thinking about. Yes, I suppose there are thinkers who don't mind contradiction, but if you've read any actual relativists, and especially people like Gadamer and Habermas and Bernstein who try find interpretive middle ground between totalizing critique and unworkable foundationalism, you see that the issue of contradiction is very much on their minds. The idea that relativism -- one of the most influential philosophical positions of the previous century -- was espoused by philosophers who "don't mind contradiction," just doesn't stand up under even a cursory reading of their work.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I've just been following along in that discussion. I don't know enough firsthand about what Witt says on that subject to be entitled to an opinion.
Right, which is dependent on how they are. "Things as they are for us" is, you might say, a slice of how they are (perhaps mixed in with error, i.e. how they aren't).
Constructed from what? Presumably how the rock actually is (its being), as it interacts with us, no? So the construction involves/expresses the actuality of the rock, what it is. Truth involves the degree to which the interpretation is adequate to what it is an interpretation of. "Everything is received in the manner of the receiver" is the old maxim, and this is as true for how salt interacts with water as for how we interact with rocks.
And sure, God would presumably be the measure of total knowledge. But the absolute is not the objective as set against appearances, but must include all appearances as well; otherwise it wouldn't be absolute. The way things appear is part of what they are (else they wouldn't be that things' appearances). Hence, total knowledge of a thing's being includes its appearances, which flow non-arbitrarily from its actuality.
I am just pushing back on the idea that one either knows everything or one knows only a simulacrum. The actuality (or form) of things must be present in the senses and intellect, else knowledge and interpretation would not be "of" anything prior (which is what makes them determinant, non-arbitrary).
Sure, to some degree. What's the counterpoint. That we don't know what thing's are to any degree? That we are totally ignorant of what anything is and cannot ever know? How is that not epistemic nihilism? One need not know everything to know anything, or be infallible to be even partially correct. If we have any grasp on truth at all, then by definition, we have some grasp on being as it actually is.
Now, if one is fully committed to representationalism [I]and[/I] is skeptical about the logic of priority (i.e. that representations are posterior to/caused by what they represent), then the epistemic difficulties are immense. Indeed, I hardly see how we could be justified in calling our representations "representations," in this case, since by our own admission, it is quite impossible to know if these "things" are related to anything they are "representations of" in any determinant way. Nor would we have justifications for positing "things to be represented in the first place."
Every philosopher is a relativist, contextualist, and perspectivist to some degree. Some things obviously are culturally or historically relative. Opposition to relativism is normally opposition to epistemic or moral relativism in some robust sense, i.e. that goodness and truth (and not just their expressions or reception) are posterior to culture.
Did I mean "transcendental"? I actually meant a source of morality beyond the human, like God or Plato's forms, or anything external to humanity.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Could be, but do we even believe theres such a thing as human nature? I'm not sure. We are a social species, and that tends to promote certain behaviors, like the codes of conduct we call morality. Im just not sure how deep that really goes. I'm not partial to essentialism.
1. Yes. It is a fact about the world; true without humans (is my view);
2. Yes. That does not mean they do not exist otherwise.
Quoting J
I think we do. I think that is the intuition of 99+% of people and, as far as I can tell, the basis for why anything we do actually works.
Quoting J
I have been over this position a few times (in various forms - a semi-popular one in phil). I don't buy it. I don't think we have anything to do with the actual things which are out there that we are describing. We constitute our own concepts, and overlay these onto those things - thus, potentially creating daylight between the 'real world' and ourselves (i'm an anti-realist about perception, anyways just not objects). But I do not buy, and can't see any reason to think this affects the world around us, rather htan our internal (collectively internal?) world.
Quoting J
Hmmm. I can still buy this, due to the (now) bolded above. That said, I do not think anything at all is going amiss when we do this outside of those fields. It seems to be hte case - we're just inadequately clear when we want to make that distinction, i'd say.
Quoting J
That certainly could be done.. No real issue.
Now mayhaps it's inevitable, but give how little attention is paid to aesthetics on the fora I thought it worth noting that the OP was asking after the notion of "objectivity" not with respect to knowledge, ontology, or ethics.
There's a clear distinction that George Dickie describes which might help you as you go forward, though won't answer these questions.
He notes how there's the categorical and the evaluative use of "work of art"
So we can say "yes that's art" even if we like or dislike it, or would even rather it not be art.
But we can also say "That's a work of art" to mean "that's something excellent for what it is, something worthy of appreciation"
*****
If there was one thing you'd need to know no matter what I'd say it's some art or other. Else you'd just be reading about what others said -- it can be performance or appreciation, but it seems you'd have to engage in art in some way in order to to be able to judge the quality of art (in the "no matter what" way)
Being isnt a content to be grasped outside languageits not in language, but we can only talk about it within language.
The idea of stepping outside language is incoherent, not because language limits being, but because thought and communication are what make talk of being meaningful in the first place.
The goal is not to deny reality, but to deny that we can talk about reality as it is apart from us in any meaningful way.
We are not going to achieve anything much here, so go back a bit. The claim you made was as follows:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The obvious response is, why should we supose that there is a "sui generis source of beauty in the cosmos" at all?
And go back a bit more, where I said
Quoting Banno
Supose that there is a "sui generis source of beauty in the cosmos". How do we mere humans identify it?
How would what you are suggesting differ in application to what I have suggested here?
Even if the metaphysics of beauty differwhether it's mind-independent or constituted in interpretationthat makes no difference to how we actually respond to or deliberate about aesthetic judgments.
We still compare, critique, educate taste, appeal to tradition or innovation, and seek resonance with others. Whether beauty is discovered or constructed, the practice of aesthetic lifewhat we do in the face of a judgmentremains the same.
We don't grasp being at all with the senses prior to language acquisition? So infants have no grasp of being? Animals as well? The disabled who cannot speak?
Being is either a content that can be grasped outside language or all those without language have no grasp of being (which presumably means something like: "they have no thoughts, beliefs, or goals vis-á-vis being")." This seems obviously false in terms of humans without a grasp of language and higher animals.
Sure, you cannot speak about things without language. This amounts to "you cannot not use language while using language." This is a limit on the order of speaking and writing. It does not seem to be a limit on the order of knowing or being. Why would it be?
There seem to be plenty of counter examples, like the poor language user who knows what they want to communicate but cannot do so. Here, language is not the limit on their knowing.
To counter the priority of being, my argument, you need to support instead: "being isn't something that is outside language; things cannot be (or be known) without being spoken about; things need language to exist (or to be known)" That is what would show that being (or knowledge) is not prior to speech.
Again, it seems the senses must be prior to speech, and that man must first be before he can sense or speak. Your positioning of philosophy of language as first philosophy has you reversing the orders so that everything must collapse into the order of speaking as an absolute limit. But things are intelligible and meaningful in the senses prior to being so in speech, else how could we intelligibly speak about what is known through the senses?
Deflation, whereby reason (and so intelligibility) is simply reduced to rule following in "games" seems to be lurking here.
[Quote]because thought and communication are what make talk of being meaningful in the first place[/quote]
Right, this is the claim that "meaningfulness," i.e. intelligible content, form, or "being something determinant and actual," is posterior to language. All my prior arguments apply here.
First, riddle me this, if true interpretations "of something" do not convey something actual about that thing that existed prior to the interpretation, in what sense are they "interpretations of" anything in particular? In virtue of what are they "true?" By your claim, there was nothing meaningful vis-á-vis anything spoken of until after it was spoken of. Talk is what makes being "meaningful." The speaking generates all the intelligible content.
Yet if things were not determinant and actual prior to being spoken about there would be no reason to speak of them one way and not any other. That the sky is called blue has to do with something that is prior to human speech. Indeed, this seems obvious because, at the very least, things must have determinant actuality vis-a-vis the senses prior to being spoken of in any particular way. Else, everything is merely potential prior to speech, and so there is no prior actuality to explain why one thing is said and not any other, and "interpretations" are not really "interpretations of" anything definite, but rather nothing in particular. And it cannot be that "everything is always already spoken of," since language has not always existed, and we discover new things to speak about all the time (which presumably existed prior to entering language).
Only man has language right? Didn't you just claim that all meaningfulness only exists within language? By your logic, it seems that to be beautiful, something must be called beautiful in language. No? So, if only man uses language, then man's language is required to make anything beautiful (or good, or true presumably). Indeed, if truth is only a property of sentences, and only man uses language, then man would also be the source of truth, since man generates language (language is posterior to man), and truth is dependent on sentences (is posterior to language).
For someone who accused me of making "no arguments," you don't seem to want to address the argument about priority at all. The priority issue applies just as well to "use" as well. Something prior needs to determine what is useful, else things would be arbitrarily useful (which is not what we encounter). Hence, use is dependent and cannot be appealed to as an unanalyzable metaphysical primitive.
BTW, let me try to break this down into premises:
P1: One cannot use language to speak of anything without using language.
C: Therefore, being isn't a content to be grasped outside language (i.e. it lacks meaning outside language).
This seems to be a formulation of the same idea.
I am not sure about how the conclusions is supposed to follow. That you cannot use language without using language is true, but that you cannot use language to refer to anything outside of language seems obviously false, since we refer to things that exist outside language all the time. One would need a very particular philosophy of language where it is hermetically sealed and cannot refer outside itself for this conclusion to make sense, but then that would also need to be included as a premise. Prima facie, language would be fairly useless if it only referred to itself. When I refer to trees, I refer to trees, not some linguistic entity, etc.
This is not unlike the position that we can never know anything outside the mind, because one always uses the mind to know anything. Indeed, it seems to me to be the same position applied to language. But such a position has a mistaken idea of how the mind and language grasp being (as well as the aforementioned issues with priority that make it impossible to justify the relationship between the non-prior "noumena" and the phenomena of mind or language).
Going carefully into that would require a paper, not a post. I'll just give one example of what I mean.
Quoting J
Quoting AmadeusD
But I do think they exist otherwise. So what would lead to you believe I don't? Here, it looks like you want to equate what I'm calling "items in the world" with "things that exist." How should we think, then, of an item? In my way of talking, there is a description of such items that we can give, while allowing the possibility that the item could still exist under another description. In your way of talking, that isn't possible. You seem to be saying that for the item not to be described in a certain way would mean it "does not exist otherwise" -- that is, that is ceases to be an existent thing at all. Whereas I'm saying that there is a way of existing that doesn't require our usual terminology.
So we're differing about what to quantify over, I'd say.
To my eye, and I'd supose to the eye of many who have given it some thought, this use of "being" is fraught. The question as posed seems to depend on a very specific and perhaps equivocal sense of "grasping being," without clarifying what that would amount to. As such much of what you say here has a merely rhetorical quality.
That is, you seem to have missed the point entirely.
Now It's clear that the picture you see before you makes sense to you. Uncharitably, you seem to think that God made the world in discrete pieces ready for the Greeks to name.
But that's a very suspect view.
You would have me respond to sentences such as that quoted above, but "being" is not a term I would choose to use, let alone defend. That we "grasp being" strikes me as verging on a nonsense expression. That I use the term at all is by way of showing how problematic it is.
All this to say I will not be joining you in the metaphysician's chamber. It's a waste of time.
I'll instead insist on a path I set for us earlier. I'll change it a bit, to see if it can elicit a reply. If there is a "sui generis source of beauty in the cosmos", and also a nice ceramic before us, how would we go about deciding if this particular ceramic is in line with the "sui generis source of beauty in the cosmos", in order to evaluate it aesthetically?
Now I suggest that we settle such things by engaging in a conversation involving the pot, discussing glazes, inclusions, differing firings and clays, workmanship and provenance. We make up a story.
And I suggest that we would here have common ground, regardless of whether there is a "sui generis source of beauty" or it's something that we decide for ourselves.
And here's the rub: it is this way becasue even if there were a "sui generis source of beauty" it is we who would still have to decide how the pot exemplifies that beauty.
Man is the measure of all things because it is always human beings who determine what counts as a thing to be measured, and by what standard.
I'm quite enjoying this thread. Aesthetics is not something we discuss as often as we perhaps might, but that can bring out quite profound differences in our approaches to philosophy more generally. I hope you are reading along.
I came into this thread in my heavy handed way, voicing objections to objectivity. Too esoteric to be of much use.
We agree that how good a book is, is not related to how many people like it. But on the other hand, it would be mere snobbery to reject something becasue it is popular. Popularity must count for something.
I'd suggest that the quality of a book, and of any item, is seen in the stories that accompany it. If this is so, then the value of a piece is not so much in the piece itself as in what we do and say about it.
And popularity is part of that story.
Of course what we do and say varies with our emotional response to a piece, and so also becomes a part of its story. It's not a mistake to think in terms of the emotions elicited, but it's one part of a complex.
If we were to come up with a "standard" by which to judge the quality of a book, wouldn't that just set a challenge for an intrepid writer to produce something that fails to meet that standard, brilliantly?
Setting a standard runs the danger of freezing creativity.
All of this talk of "standards" and "stories" could be made more sophisticated, defended and critiqued at length. The core here is that aesthetics is not a found thing with rules, but a process that promises no end.
The verbage of "grasping being" is yours Banno. You wrote that "being cannot be grasped outside language". Now it is "bad argument" and "merely rhetorical" to respond to someone's exact words? Was your statement that:
also "merely rhetorical" and an equivocation?
I might have said something like "knowing," although I think "grasping being" or "grasping truth " is fine. It's good enough.
The question is: can animals know anything? Can infants or those who have lost their language production and comprehension capacities? It would seem so. There seems to be a sort of sense knowledge that animals and infants are capable of, which implies a grasp of truth, i.e.., what is the case. It would seem that they can know what is without language. Hence, your claim that "being cannot be a content grasped outside language" seems false. Sense knowledge would seem to be a "grasp on being" if anything is.
However, per your previous claim that truth is a property of sentences, there would be issues here. If committed to this idea, we would have to say that either infants, the disabled without language, and animals somehow grasp or possess sentences, or else cannot understand if their beliefs or perceptions are false (which, based on research, seems false).
Another ridiculous strawman mixed with bigotry. I said nothing about Greeks or God. Very briefly, the issue is that:
A. if the actuality of things is not prior to language, why would language "about things" be one way and not any other?" Likewise, if "meaning is use" this just brings up a similar question: "what determines usefulness?" Either something determines language or usefulness, and is thus prior, or nothing does. If nothing prior determines language or usefulness, why are they one way and not any other?
Aside from this difficulty, the idea that language or what we find useful can be "any which way," is deeply contrary to experience.
B. if the being of what is being interpreted is not prior to an interpretation, how could an "interpretation" actually be "of" anything? If being lacks determinant actuality prior to interpretation, then interpretations are "of" nothing in particular (nothing determinant).
You make metaphysical claims all the time. Then when challenged, you claim, without supporting argument, that every term involved in metaphysics is simply unusable (even though you yourself use them to make the claims you favor).
This is a non-argument. Stop making metaphysical claims like "the world is always already in language," if you're going to turn around and say "I cannot defend anything I am saying because all metaphysical language is too problematic." You're rejecting even basic terms like prior and posterior (actually, you claimed, with no supporting argument, that one needs a "view from nowhere" to discuss priority).
You say things like:
This presupposes that language is something that must be "stepped outside of" to know or refer to the world. That is a metaphysical/anthropological claim.
But now "being" is in fact a nonsense term. This is reminding me of when you claimed that "correct logic" was also a "loaded term" in a discussion of logical pluralism, and I had to point out that it's a term in every major article on the subject, including the one you were citing (in the first sentences), and in the first sentences of the SEP article on logical pluralism.
Terms can be unclear. It is not good argument to just claim that all the basic terms of a field are "unusable" especially if you yourself keep using them to advance your own position. You have to show why a term is unclear.
This is the same old, tired false dichotomy. Either there is a "view from nowhere" or linguistic turn philosophy must follow. I already pointed out how your conclusion has no clear relation to your premises in other instances, and it is the same here:
P1: We dont grasp being by representing it from the outside, but are embedded in a structure of interpretation, where belief, truth, and world hang together.
C: Therefore, it is impossible to speak of anything being prior to language, or for language to refer to what exists outside the context of language itself.
The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises.
You need additional premises like "knowing something in any way requires language," and "what something is must be posterior to human speech about it" or "nothing can be actual prior to human speech about it," as well as "language only ever speaks about language and linguistic entities, never about what exists outside the context of human language." That is, you need to actually support a metaphysics of language that concludes that language cannot ever refer outside itself, else you are just engaged in question begging.
"There is no view from nowhere," does not entail any of those additional premises. Indeed, since you're not making a skeptical argument i.e., "we can never know if anything is prior to language," but rather a positive one "nothing is prior to language and it is meaningless to claim otherwise," I think you'll need all of those premises.
Here are your previous arguments:
P1: One cannot use language to speak of anything without using language.
C: Therefore, "being isn't a content to be grasped outside language" (i.e. it lacks meaning outside language).
The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise.
Likewise:
P1: Being is not contained in anything (including language).
P2: Language is not a container.
Conclusion: Any attempt to step outside all language to describe being as such is suspect.
The conclusion doesn't follow here either. Nor have I argued for anything like the position that is dispatched by the conclusion in the first place. I have said that we can use language to speak of things that exist prior to language. That's not the same thing as "stepping out of language." It is using language. You need an additional premise:
P3: To ever speak about anything's being outside the context of human language, or ontological priority, requires not using language while you speak about it.
But P3 seems obviously false.
Are these merely rhetorical objections?
or beginning or even a specific process
An eternal reinterpretation of the same process
Quoting Banno
How not arbitrarily? From whence comes that which prevents arbitrariness?
If not arbitrarily or as illusions, then it seems to me you should be agreeing with Count.
And if not arbitrarily, you have promised an end, namely, something that is not arbitrary or illusion (also namely, the truth).
Banno, although I think my questions follow from the position you are articulating, (or are in the process of articulating), Id much rather see you respond to Counts post just above.
Tim, in this discussion between us, "being" is first used by you here: , several times in your extended quotes concerning Plato. A quick flick through the subsequent posts shows that you used it a dozen times before I used it, , in responding to a direct quote from you.
From this search, we see you use Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus first, and again, Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus before I quote your use.
It's not a term I use happily. It's yours. It pleases me that you would disown it, perhaps you see now that it isn't of much help.
Why is that the question? The topic here is aesthetics, not animal psychology.
Look at the question: can animals know anything? Giving an answer presumes we have a grasp of what "know" means. What conditions make it intelligible to attribute knowledge in the first place?
After the dog chases the possum up a tree, we might say that the dog knows where the possum is. It shows that it knows which tree the possum went up by circling the trunk and looking up. If knowledge is taken to be justified true belief, then there is the problem that the dog cannot provide a justification for it's knowledge, nor make any knowledge claims. Nor can the dog give reasons, represent its belief or its justification to others, or doubt or reflect on whether it was mistaken.
The question "can animals know anything?" is as much about how we ought use the word "know" as it is about animal psychology. It is equally a question about how we ought to use the word "know," and what background conditions make such a concept meaningful. Without clarifying that, we risk treating what is a conceptual issue as if it were merely empirical.
I'll happily attribute knowledge to the dog, so long as we recognise that knowledge is not monolithic.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
It was an obvious joke.
However your use of "straw man" might be telling. It's not uncommon for accusations of committing the straw man fallacy to come from folk who have not set out their account as clearly as they think.
The topic here is aesthetics, not metaphysics. You emphatically wish to shift the ground. Why is that?
And why insist on attributing arguments to me that I have not made? I would not use "actuality of things" any more happily than "grasp of being". Nor does it follow, from what I said, that language can be used "any which way".
There is straw in your house as well.
But there remains the issue I've now raised several times, to which I would like to see your response.
Can you set out what practical difference you see resulting from the view of aesthetics that you defend?
I've made the claim that aesthetic assessments are a construct of human culture, built by an interaction between the object, the speaker and those in the community.
How are assessments made, in a world that features your "sui generis source of beauty in the cosmos"?
My hands are open: If your assessments in your account are made in the same way as are assessments in my account, then deciding if something matches the "sui generis source of beauty in the cosmos" is a construct of human culture.
If so, like Wittgensteins beetle in the box, , the "sui generis source of beauty in the cosmos" drops out as irrelevant. a placeholder for something that makes no practical difference in our shared practices of judgment.
Davidson might have it that there can be at most one description. He resists the relativism of multiple, equally valid but irreducible worldviews. There's a tension here for my own views, since I would side with Davidson while maintaining that there can be different descriptions. I think it can be managed.
In Davidson's triangulation we have the speaker, the interpreter, and the world. While the conclusion from "On the very idea..." is the rejection of a gap between scheme and content, this does not imply that we could not have more than one description of the very same state of affairs.
Multiple true descriptions can emerge, provided that they are mutually interpretable and answerable to the same worldly constraints. That preserves both Davidsons realism and the possibility of plural, non-relativistic perspectives.
And @frank, this is not unlike the way in which intentional states vary depending on the description given - after Anscombe as well as Davidson. Turning on the light and alerting the burglar as different intentional interpretations of the very same act.
So we might describe a chair variously as constructed from multiple pieces of wood, or as a collection of gluons and forces, and yet have both descriptions as equally true, but differing in intent.
And the vase as polycrystalline with have amorphous (glassy) phases, or as ochres, umbers and intentionally rough instantiation of wabi-sabi. Both may be true.
Exactly. And if nothing determines language, then all that we say is arbitrary.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes. Although language can be any which way to the equivocator who is not interested in truth, who is only interested in some sort of meaningless game. But for anyone who uses language to convey meaning to another about the world we share in common, it is certainly contrary to experience.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Existence, actual things, the world. What is. Being.
Cannot be grasped outside of language?
How about with a hand?
Or by grasped do we mean understood? Then how about as an intuition, too vague to be put into words but nevertheless grasped? Or analogously as sensation, or sense knowledge?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Right. That is a metaphysical claim. About language and the world.
Aesthetics entails a metaphysical standpoint.
Ethics entails a metaphysical standpoint.
Which is why threads starting along those lines, like this one, when placed in the hands of the Wittgensteinians, end up in this same conversation about language and not the thing language is speaking about (whatever the thing is). Sparring for the most consistent use of language instead of saying something about the world that another person might also say about the same world.
Doesnt there inevitably have to be something else to talk about besides talking?
By talking, people inevitably make metaphysical claims. Why is it so hard to make that obvious point?
But isnt that all blathering about ourselves, meaningless in the world, only for the sake of being reinterpreted into some other blather, if in fact the chair is always already in a language?
(You said the world is always already in a language. Here, applying this theory, your world is a chair. Or should I say a chair?)
I mean, what could possibly be the point of trying to put into words that which distinguishes wood from gluons, without a pre/non-linguistic world/experience that necessitated different words for different things, regardless of any intent? Are you just gaming the listener, and if so, why ever settle on any distinctions? Gluons are wood, and forces, and are not forces, etc. as long as they remain in a language to be reinterpreted, promising no end.
Because you have denied the priority of not only Beauty, but of Being itself to language. So, if I want to move on to Beauty, wouldn't it make sense to demonstrate that Being and Truth are first prior to language?
Now, your earlier ad hominems said I offered nothing but rhetoric, so I set my and responses out in clear premises. You haven't responded them at all (despite claiming all I offer is rhetoric and not the vaunted "dissection" of argument you claim to prize). I have dissected your argument.
All you have offered in response is that this is now "off topic" and that now "knowing" is also too problematic of a term to use. So now "being," "exists," "prior," "posterior," (and so presumably "cause" and "effect") and "knowing" are out as problematic.
To be sure, these terms are difficult and could require unpacking, but do they really require much unpacking for my particular example?
My point is that things are prior to their being spoken of. Existence precedes speech. The order of speaking is not the order of being; the world is not "in language" as you put it. One does not need to "step outside language" to point out that this priority must exist.
Do we really need to unpack "know" here? I don't think so. Swap out "grasp of being" for "know" or put in "experience." The same thing will apply.
Do dogs have "experiences," or is "experiences" also a "loaded term?" If dogs have experiences, they presumably do not have them "within language," but presumably they are experiencing [I] something[/I] actual that exists, else they would not have any reason to respond to their experiences one way and not any other. Likewise, infants either experience (or "grasp") being prior to knowing language, or they do not have experiences prior to having language. If it is the latter, how do they learn language without experiences?
Is it too problematic to say that infants experience things before having language? Do the disabled who lack language lack experiences? It would seem not. Are their experiences of "what is?" It would seem so. Presumably, their experiences aren't self generating and causeless. If they were, there would be no reason for them to be one way and not any other. Hence, what exists is prior to experience.
But if things exist prior to language, what of truth? If it is the case that things exist as determinant actualities prior to language, then surely "what is the case" is also "true."
This means that the world is not "in language." One never needs to "step outside language" to experience being. Infants are born experiencing without language. One does not need to step outside language to speak of ontological priority. If something can be experienced prior to language, it clearly exists prior to language. One does not need to step outside language to speak about what is not language. Again, you haven't backed up the need for this "stepping outside," you've just asserted it.
See below again, in line with your stated preference for dissection:
P1: We dont grasp being by representing it from the outside, but are embedded in a structure of interpretation, where belief, truth, and world hang together.
C: Therefore, it is impossible to speak of anything being prior to language, or for language to refer to what exists outside the context of language itself.
The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises.
P1: One cannot use language to speak of anything without using language.
C: Therefore, "being isn't a content to be grasped outside language" (i.e. it lacks meaning outside language).
This also doesn't follow.
P1: Being is not contained in anything (including language).
P2: Language is not a container.
Conclusion: Any attempt to step outside all language to describe being as such is suspect.
This also doesn't follow, and as noted before, for the conclusion to be relevant it would have to be the case that one must "step outside" language to describe being, which would be an additional thesis that needs defense.
As I noted earlier:
[Quote]
You need additional premises like "knowing/experiencing something in any way requires language," and "what something is must be posterior to human speech about it" or "nothing can be actual prior to human speech about it," as well as "language only ever speaks about language and linguistic entities, never about what exists outside the context of human language." That is, you need to actually support a metaphysics of language that concludes that language cannot ever refer outside itself, else you are just engaged in question begging.
[/Quote]
Thank you for confirming my suspicion that my point was not impenetrable and too unclear to understand. I thought it was clear enough, at least clear enough to address.
Well, this is the great sin of anti-metaphysics, right? It ends up being a sort of metaphysical position. It can hardly do otherwise. Indeed, in terms of recent history, it has been arguably the most dogmatic and overzealous, with a huge negative effect on quantum foundations up through the 2000s. Its practitioners still want to interject in metaphysical discussions, and still serve up their own metaphysical positions.
Which is fine. The difficulty is that, if one goes in assuming all problems are pseudoproblems, it lends itself to a tendency to ignore argument in favor of appeals to having "unmasked the pseudoproblem." Because the anti-metaphysician assumes that their position is somehow "non-metaphysical," it is taken to be immune from metaphysical scrutiny. Hence, threads like: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15218/wittgenstein-and-how-it-elicits-asshole-tendencies/p1
Yes. Discussion becomes a bait and switch. They posit something, thereby staking a metaphysical position, but then, if someone disagrees, they switch the conversation to one about what is or is not metaphysical and what one can or cannot say about anything. The belief that the the goal posts are always moving allows for a consistent defense against all who disagree.
When they agree with each other, they sound like metaphysicians.
But I guess this is off topic, although not really since the topic poses a metaphysical question.
There's two definitions of disagreement at play here. Disagreement can be applied as differences in belief or as differences in values.
If person A enjoys metal and person B enjoys classical, and they are both objectivists about aesthetic value, then they have a disagreement in belief and it does imply an objective conclusion.
However, if they are both subjectivists, then while they disagree with their values (as in they hold seperate values), they dont find anything 'incorrect' about the other so theres no implication of objectivity.
Disagreement only implies objectivity if objectivity is already presumed within the point of disagreement. I think it's an unfortunate equivocation rather than a self-refutation.
Quoting Hanover
This statement cannot be objectively true because it's incomplete and thus, at present moment, meaningless. Its essentially saying "It is bad to do bad killings" which reduces to "bad is bad", which is meaningless without a definition of "bad" to refer to, hence requiring subjectivity to fill the gap. However, each person simply maps their conception of what constitutes "murder" and thus the statement becomes definitionally true, because "bad is bad" is logically true regardless of definition. The only other way I can imagine the statement is "It is wrong to kill" which I think the vast majority of people would disagree with, as there is seemingly many justified reasons to do so in various situations.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
If the aesthetic value of an object can be driven by psychological interactions rather than perception itself, then surely even if there is a objective property being observed, one cannot point to a single response as correct/true. If person A see's beauty where person B see's ugliness, and they are both seeing the same object, then surely they are both correct? Otherwise, this line of argumentation would seemingly imply that there is no aesthetic property, hence the disagreement despite perfect perception.
While I agree that disagreement itself does not negate the possibility of an objective answer, disagreement in psychology despite perfect perception implies at the very least that aesthetics responses are not objective, even if there is some true aesthetic property being seen. Hence an object could be both beautiful and ugly simulataneously, and this could be considered objective. Although I consider this is equivalent to aesthetic subjectivity at this point.