Does "dictatorship of relativism" exist?

[Whaleboy]

Because holism allows context to determine meaning or truth without abandoning objectivity. There is no necessary connection between saying that context matters and relativism.

Then you're going to have to tell me how it remains an object.

This has nothing to do with it. Stop spouting crap. This isn't even Wittgenstein's example.

Ummm, one has to provide an example in order for their work to solve a problem?

What the hell does that have to do with it?

Well you're saying that they're mutually exclusive are you not? Davidson rapes that idea in DT.

No it doesn't. Davidsonian holism is independent of questions of essentialism -- that's his ****ing point.

If you can't define beliefs and preferences then meanings themselves become subject, it's the only way I can possibly fathom for Davidson to escape essense.

Belief and meaning are interdependent on Davidson's scheme anway.

It's beliefs and preferences.

This is meaningless ****. Subject and predicate are grammatical categories. You don't have to take them as indicating some Aristotelian scheme

Hang on, you're saying that a subject can exist independent of a predicate/context, because predicate is just a grammatical category? How do you reconcile that with what you said earlier about holisms and objectivity?

Neither of them have to care about your argument because languages can manifest ontological relativity - but this doesn't matter for Davidson, since even that does not justify epistemological relativism.

But absolutely none of this addresses my earlier point that for it to have meaning, it abandons objectivity... you're only recourse would be to say truth statements are logical holisms, but then how would they have any meaning? It's the usefulness of saying "at night, it is dark".

Emotivism is crap because it doesn't deal with the obvious feature of moral statements: that they are subject to logical consistency. Expressions of emotion are not. There's nothing wrong with me being entirely inconsistent in the way I feel, but there is something wrong with being inconsistent in my moral judgements.

IIRC, I said earlier that there is a difference between conscious emotion and emotive experience. You find the post, dial-up is too slow

Emotivism cannot account for inferences using moral statements. That's Metaethics 101 stuff.

Emotivism doesn't say that morality is equable to emotions, merely motivated by them.

This doesn't make any sense.

You say that a lot, but surely it's obvious? Same language and same sense-stimulus doesn't necessitate the same truth of the same statement for two different people.

I merely pointed out that if you are a semantic "relativist" it isn't the same as being a regular one, in fact it isn't being relativistic about truth at all.

But that goes way back to epistemology, not semantics at all, and there I think we're coming at it from completely different angles. Would you say then that being a moral relativist does not require being a semantic relativist, because that seems to be the implication of your statement but it flies in the face of your argument thus far.

You're not even thinking lucidly. You're just throwing around jargon with little or no appreciation for its actual meaning. It's not that your arguments are wrong, it's that they don't make any real sense.

The only reason that they don't make sense to you is that you're kicking around a woefully inadequate concept of "objective" which is the assumption that you are taking my arguments with. I know you think that they have at least some degree of internal consistency because you're arguing by implication of their reasoning.

[Whaleboy]

WRT Whaleboy, he always came back to the same argument in semantics and the meaning of words whenever you pushed him back on the relativist argument.

Actually I'd usually come back to emotivism, the predicate stuff is a departure since I've begrudgingly started to agree with Kant.

[Az]

Btw...

Hmmm I can see how you'd justify that but I still think it falls foul of the is-ought gap, which is to say that the premise does not necessitate a prescriptive conclusion since there is nothing prescriptive in the premises themselves. That goes for all consequentialist arguments that I know of.

I have no idea whatsoever what you mean by this. (?)

[Agathon]

Then you're going to have to tell me how it remains an object.

What remains an object?

Ummm, one has to provide an example in order for their work to solve a problem?

What are you talking about? Stop posting vague references and expecting people to understand what you say. It is customary in philosophy to be clear and to use words with their customary meanings.

Well you're saying that they're mutually exclusive are you not? Davidson rapes that idea in DT.

Where did I say that?

If you can't define beliefs and preferences then meanings themselves become subject, it's the only way I can possibly fathom for Davidson to escape essense.

No. Read "Radical Interpretation". Belief and Meaning are interdependent concepts. There are always an infinite number of translation manuals that will fit the evidence. Yet this doesn't matter since any interepretation requires that we hold the interpretee's beliefs to be mostly true.

It is a mistake to regard this as "intersubjectivity" because Davidson's conception of belief largely does away with the traditional notion of subjectivity.

Different translation manuals can express radically different ontologies. Hence there is no point talking about essence on Davidson's scheme. He's Quine's student, and Quine is quite clear about his rejection of the essentialist scheme. The only contemporary philosophers who believe in that stuff are Kripke and his followers.

It's beliefs and preferences.

He wrote a paper called "The Interdependence of Belief and Meaning".

Hang on, you're saying that a subject can exist independent of a predicate/context, because predicate is just a grammatical category? How do you reconcile that with what you said earlier about holisms and objectivity?

If you'd read and understood Davidson, you would know why. Both Davidson and Quine view the proposition as the fundamental semantic unit (Quine explains why in "Five Milestones of Empiricism"). Both Davidson and Quine allow for Radical Translation, which requires that translations only map on to each other at the propositional level. Words have meanings derivatively from their use in propositions, and we can only interpret peoples' utterances by their expressions of propositions.

This is the fundamental tenet of Davidson's philosophy. I cannot for the life of me see how you missed it.

But absolutely none of this addresses my earlier point that for it to have meaning, it abandons objectivity...

Jesus.... for Davidson "subjectivity" and "objectivity" are concepts internal to our language not external to it. Our beliefs are objective by their very nature (here Davidson disagrees with Quine, who holds to the proximal theory of reference rather than the distal theory that Davidson endorses).

You are assuming that our language stands as a mirror to reality, or that it attempts to do so. This is what generates all the worries about objectivity and so on.

But that is not the correct way of thinking about it - and it certainly isn't Davidson's view. His theory prevents us from having our terms mirror reality in any meaningful sense. He does not have a representational theory of language, nor does he believe that our beliefs are reports of private experiences.

For Davidson we cannot break out of the circle of belief (because only beliefs can justify our beliefs), but this is no problem since there is nothing relevant to epistemology outside it. The relation between our belief tokenings and the world is a causal relation, not something to be studied by philosophy.

Again" according to Davidson we are stuck inside what we might want to call "the circle of belief". But this doesn't matter because there is nothing outside it relevant to discussions of belief, meaning, or truth or even epistemology. Subjectivity and Objectivity are concepts internal to our belief system – it is not the case that our beliefs are "subjective" while the world is "objective". Davidson's whole project is to undermine that view of philosophy in favour of his semantic holism.

you're only recourse would be to say truth statements are logical holisms

WTF does that mean?

, but then how would they have any meaning?

Arrgghhhh!!! In Davidson's philosophy meaning is interdependent with belief. There's no such thing as "the meaning" of a word. Rather both belief and meaning are concepts that we use to make sense of the utterances of others. Meaning is an interpretative tool, not something magical that attaches to sounds and which reports an essence. Again, Davidson's philosophy is set against that view of language.

IIRC, I said earlier that there is a difference between conscious emotion and emotive experience. You find the post, dial-up is too slow

That makes no difference. Emotions are not truth apt. Blackburn and others have tried to find a way around this, but with limited success.

Emotivism doesn't say that morality is equable to emotions, merely motivated by them.

No. Emotivism says that moral statements are expressions of emotion, not descriptions.

You say that a lot, but surely it's obvious? Same language and same sense-stimulus doesn't necessitate the same truth of the same statement for two different people.

Sometimes it doesn't lead them to endorse the same statement, but then in that case one is right the other is wrong. The concept of belief works by creating a gap between what we endorse and the truth. If it didn't it wouldn't be of any use in interpreting the speech of others, which is its primary function.

But that goes way back to epistemology, not semantics at all

The whole point of Davidson's philosophy is that the two are not distinct. There is no fixed distinction between what people believe and what they mean – he's written countless papers on this.

and there I think we're coming at it from completely different angles. Would you say then that being a moral relativist does not require being a semantic relativist, because that seems to be the implication of your statement but it flies in the face of your argument thus far.

My argument is that the reasons that people are moral relativists are largely the same reasons epistemological relativists hold. Except that moral relativists illegitimately ignore epistemological relativism and fail to hold it to the same standard as moral relativism.

One standard argument is that moral statements do not describe the world. But lots of statements we make (like mathematical statements) do not on the face of it describe the world (although the empirical/a priori distinction is merely a pragmatic distinction and not a real distinction).

If mathematics is objective (i.e. the rules are the same for everyone) then there seems no prima facie reason to treat morality differently. And it so happens that the rules of mathematics are the same for everyone.

The only reason that they don't make sense to you is that you're kicking around a woefully inadequate concept of "objective" which is the assumption that you are taking my arguments with. I know you think that they have at least some degree of internal consistency because you're arguing by implication of their reasoning.

No. It's because you are misusing words with little or no appreciation for their customary use in philosophy. If I did this in a talk, I'd have **** thrown at me.

[Agathon]

Oh WB. You are picking on the wrong guy. I wrote my Masters thesis on this, for which I received a pretty high grade.

So I know most of the core Davidson stuff quite well (not so much the more linguistic stuff)

[Whaleboy]

I have no idea whatsoever what you mean by this. (?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume#The_is-ought_problem

What remains an object?

An objective holism.

What are you talking about? Stop posting vague references and expecting people to understand what you say. It is customary in philosophy to be clear and to use words with their customary meanings.

That has nothing to do with what you've said. You said my point wasn't Wittgensteins example, which I directly addressed and now you're asking what I'm talking about? You're accusing me of being pretentious and vague, but you are consistently failing to address some key points I raise against you, instead you prefer to denegrate it with little or no reason behind it. The only thing not customary in philosophy is that manner of debating.

Where did I say that?

"There are moral words and there are taste words, and never the twain shall meet."

He wrote a paper called "The Interdependence of Belief and Meaning".

Decision Theory is belief and preference. As for belief and meaning, correct me if I'm wrong but isn't that designed to hold belief as being constant while meaning is dependent? Tell me how this doesn't result in subjectivity, because I'm at a loss to understand what the hell you're on about! The whole point of Davidson is an assumption that beliefs are shared or objective within a context, but is that not predicated in the first instance by communication? There's something circular or contradictory going on if you're attempting to show that the claim of relativity is absurd.

Our beliefs are objective by their very nature

Then we're using different definitions of objectivity, do you take it to mean something relational to something else, in which case how can you possibly claim a proposition to be objective? Your Platonic Map Terrotory-relation that assumes agreement needs to be a necessary condition to communication in order to eliminate the relevance of the predicate.

You are assuming that our language stands as a mirror to reality, or that it attempts to do so. This is what generates all the worries about objectivity and so on.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this, in the sense I take it, yes I do assume language to be a mirror to reality, since any proposition's subject noun or verb boils down to being an adjective (consider to impetus in order to ascribe a noun to something... my assumption is that it cannot be an arbitrary assignment).

But that is not the correct way of thinking about it - and it certainly isn't Davidson's view. His theory prevents us from having our terms mirror reality in any meaningful sense. He does not have a representational theory of language, nor does he believe that our beliefs are reports of private experiences.

But Davidson is an epistemological pragmatist, which is worse than ABBA's secret paedophile ring.

The relation between our belief tokenings and the world is a causal relation, not something to be studied by philosophy.

Ah you said it. But why not?

Subjectivity and Objectivity are concepts internal to our belief system – it is not the case that our beliefs are "subjective" while the world is "objective".

And your argument is to say that if subjectivity and objectivity are internal to our beliefs, then relativism is as well, which is contradictory since it objectifies the subjective (in a manner of speaking), rendering it absurd? Let me know if I'm wrong in that assesment because there's a pretty obvious response if I'm right here.

That makes no difference. Emotions are not truth apt. Blackburn and others have tried to find a way around this, but with limited success.

IIRC, they were taking a rationalist response, whereas they should have been empiricalist.

No. Emotivism says that moral statements are expressions of emotion, not descriptions.

The "moral statements = expression of emotion" is simply a result of the moral statement being a sufficient condition to the emotive motivation.

If mathematics is objective (i.e. the rules are the same for everyone) then there seems no prima facie reason to treat morality differently. And it so happens that the rules of mathematics are the same for everyone.

If you meant by that "the rules of moral formulation" then I would agree, however for us to proceed you would have to define morality for your purposes.

Oh WB. You are picking on the wrong guy. I wrote my Masters thesis on this, for which I received a pretty high grade.

That's lovely, but if I think people are missing something, the honest thing to do is to press them on it is it not?

So I know most of the core Davidson stuff quite well (not so much the more linguistic stuff)

I have only limited reading on Decision Theory and spurious bits on linguistics, but I do think he falls foul of Wittgenstein on a few points, particularly if you're using him to show the proposition of relativism as being absurd, but for me to proceed there I need you to confirm my assessment of your argument.

[Agathon]

Frankly, you're talking crap.

WTF does this mean?

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this, in the sense I take it, yes I do assume language to be a mirror to reality, since any proposition's subject noun or verb boils down to being an adjective (consider to impetus in order to ascribe a noun to something... my assumption is that it cannot be an arbitrary assignment).

or this:

The "moral statements = expression of emotion" is simply a result of the moral statement being a sufficient condition to the emotive motivation.

?

or this:

Your Platonic Map Terrotory-relation that assumes agreement

What the hell that is supposed to be? Davidson is about as far as Plato as anyone.

This might mean something:

And your argument is to say that if subjectivity and objectivity are internal to our beliefs, then relativism is as well, which is contradictory since it objectifies the subjective (in a manner of speaking), rendering it absurd?

If this means what I think it means, then Davidson's response is just to point out that you have a mistaken view of the way the concepts of subjective and objective work.

But I have no idea of what you really mean. Some of it just sounds like those French books,

Try using philosophical words with the meanings that they actually have and then I might find it possible to argue with you. I can't respond unless you write something that I can understand.

[Az]

Originally posted by Whaleboy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume#The_is-ought_problem

I am well aware of the is-ought problem, what I am not aware of is that the problem is faced by consequentialists, but more of a problem facing anything trying to make any sort of "ought" statement, generally.

Ironically enough, my feelings are that the problem lies in the definition of 'ought'.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Az


After death, certainly.

But why not while they are still alive if it will save a life? Wouldn't that be consistant with utilitarianism?

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Whaleboy
But you need to establish that there can be an absolutely true moral claim/system, though you needn't be Jesus and tell me what it actually is. Put simply, you need to describe the conditions under which it can exist... like proving that an ocean exists, in which resides a fish.

My argument #1:
Morality exists as a subject-predicate form, dependent upon context
For any supposedly objective moral system, there can always be found a context where it does not apply (a consequence of both determinism and uncertainty principle)
Without context/predicate, all subjects are equally (in)valid, so without the context to say something is +1 or -1, the value is 0.
Adding a context depends upon the beholder
Morality is relative to the conscious beholder
Assumption: All conciousness's are of equal logical value objectively
Morality is relative

As for my somewhat more ontological emotive argument, I've mentioned that earlier.

I honestly don't get the subject-predicate thing you're talking about. I need to read more philosophy books. The only thing I know about it is from language.

This is how I establish that there can be an absolute truth. 1+1=(something). I can't show that it equals 2, even though I believe that it does, but I know that there is an absolute answer to the problem 1+1=?.

[Az]

But why not while they are still alive if it will save a life? Wouldn't that be consistant with utilitarianism?

The logic is very simple:

A) Won't it save a life after you're dead, as well? The answer is: yes.
B) Will the procedure currently cause you great discomfort? the answer is yes, also.

Thus, the more ethical thing to do is to donate your organs post-mortem.

[Agathon]

I honestly don't get the subject-predicate thing you're talking about. I need to read more philosophy books. The only thing I know about it is from language.

Don't. It has nothing to do with it. It's his own theory, which has little or nothing to do with contemporary philosophy.

In fact none of this seems to be philosophy.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Az

But why not while they are still alive if it will save a life? Wouldn't that be consistant with utilitarianism?

The logic is very simple:

A) Won't it save a life after you're dead, as well? The answer is: yes.
B) Will the procedure currently cause you great discomfort? the answer is yes, also.

Thus, the more ethical thing to do is to donate your organs post-mortem.

You just avoided the problem.

[Az]

How so? As long as one donates the organs, it's still right.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Az
How so? As long as one donates the organs, it's still right.

Ok, well what if the organs where no good after the person was dead?