# What are some examples of Objective Truth?



## thesoundofmotion

That is if you believe in Objective Truth.

I can say that 1+1=2 and that might be the case, but does that refer to reality?

I can say that the temperature is 40 degrees out, but does that refer to reality as well?

Are these just not systems created by us?

Does Objective Truth exist? On the contrary does Subjective Truth exist?

Do they both not exist and are actually just concepts? Could there be no objective and subjective truths?


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## KamMoye

is anything objective?

id suppose time


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## being

Time is subjective. Actually I believe there is no time and it's just a concept made up by human mind. There's only 'one moment', in which things change.
Also I think that to conceptualize is to go further away from the 'true reality', than the opposite. My post is also filled with concepts, which aren't the reality, but just signposts trying to point at it.


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## thesoundofmotion

I asked this question to someone the other day and they said Science proves Objective Truths.

How can I still be so sure of this though? 

The person also told me to look at the ground and notice the difference between the colors of two concrete platforms. We both noticed they were indeed different colors so that is what he deemed objective.


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## L2R

the difficulty in finding objective truth is more to do with man's propensity toward self serving dishonesty than to an actual absence of it.


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## Psychodelirium

Some examples of objective truth:

The time is 7:00 PM in Chicago at the time of my writing this.
Paris is the capital of France.
JFK was assassinated in 1963.
A piece cannot be taken on the first move in a game of chess.
Sherlock Holmes lived on 221B Baker Street.
Snow is white.

Some of these truths may be true by convention, but they are not for that reason "subjective" rather than "objective". The truth about chess, for example, is most obviously true by convention, but it is perfectly objective. If you disagreed with it, you would be totally wrong, because you would not understand the convention. It is doubtful whether the truth about Sherlock Holmes "refers to reality", but its nonetheless objective.

In general, I think that concepts such as truth and objectivity make a good deal more sense when left uncapitalized.


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## KamMoye

to fully answer ur question i dont think there are any. it's all biased by our perceptions.


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## rollingstoned!

Objective truth: I am.


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## ntuck1

Like most things in philosophy it comes down to definitions.


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## alasdairm

"_snow is white_" is so open to interpretation it's entirely subjective.

alasdair


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## slimvictor

Psychodelirium said:


> Some examples of objective truth:
> 
> The time is 7:00 PM in Chicago at the time of my writing this.
> Paris is the capital of France.
> JFK was assassinated in 1963.
> A piece cannot be taken on the first move in a game of chess.
> Sherlock Holmes lived on 221B Baker Street.
> Snow is white.



The time was only 7 PM because we defined it as such.  There is nothing objective about that - merely conventional. 
Saying that "a pitch in baseball that bounces on the way to home plate is a ball" is objective truth is ridiculous.  
It is a rule in a game we made.
All of your examples are of this type, merely conventionalized systems that most or all people would agree on, because they are conventional.  That doesn't make them objective.
Objective = conventional?  
That is silly.

What if I make a sandwich with the mustard on the outside of the bread.  I have broken convention, but have I destroyed objective reality?  Of course not. 

What if my friends and I play chess with different rules? 
Are we breaking objective reality?

What if someone argues that France really has two capitals when it comes to fashion, and three when it comes to wine, and several when it comes to food?

What if someone uses the Chinese calendar to describe when JFK was killed?

You might want to say that I am using language "illegally", so that what I am talking about is not really "playing chess", or not the real capital of France.
But this is just appealing to conventional uses of words.  Again, conventionality.
It also requires that I understand and accept your definitions of each word you used. 
But I don't, and I am willing to bet that you would have a great deal of difficulty defining a good many without appealing to the notion of convention. 

Your argument against this seems to be to state that, if I disagreed with X I would be totally wrong.

Weak argument, I would say.  Different interpretations will arise, without anyone necessarily being "wrong".  Someone must be elected or appointed to determine what counts as "right" and "wrong", but this does not bear any relevance to objective truth. 

As you mentioned, Sherlock Holmes was fictional.  He didn't live anywhere. 
Also, in American English, we cannot say that he lived "on" such and such, unless he actually lived on top of the building.
Is the word "on" included in your so-called objective truth?
If so, it doesn't work for hundreds of millions of people.
If not, which words are included? Who decides?

Are only the ideas to which the words point included?
What if your conceptualization of the ideas differs from mine? Whose should we use?
What if I have a more fleshed-out conceptualization of Paris, since I have been there, but yours is more abstract?  
What if someone thinks about "Paris" as representing the geographical entity one time, but the voting population another time, the fashion world another time? This is not some trick of semantics, but something people actually do all the time. For example, the following sentences are really very normal, but each selects a different entity to refer to with the name "Paris":
‘Paris is a beautiful city’ (location) vs. 
‘Paris set a curfew’ (government) vs. 
‘Paris elected the Green candidate as mayor’ (population)

I do not consider anything you wrote to be (or represent) objective truth. 
I also do not believe in objective truth.


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## morpher001

I just farted. This is an objective truth. That it smells delightful, is a subjective truth.


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## KamMoye

But what is "I"?


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## ebola?

^^^^
That question proves key. 
...
I think that to engage this question thoroughly, we need to ask what objectivity and subjectivity are, how they interrelate, and what conditions give rise to their interrelation.

ebola


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## Psychodelirium

slimvictor said:


> The time was only 7 PM because we defined it as such.  There is nothing objective about that - merely conventional.
> Saying that "a pitch in baseball that bounces on the way to home plate is a ball" is objective truth is ridiculous.
> It is a rule in a game we made.
> All of your examples are of this type, merely conventionalized systems that most or all people would agree on, because they are conventional.  That doesn't make them objective.
> Objective = conventional?
> That is silly.



As I said in my original post, conventional is conventional, objective is objective, and subjective is subjective. The issue of whether something is true by convention is a separate issue from whether it is subjective or objective. If truth is a property of language (I think so), then all truth is conventional because all of language is conventional. It doesn't follow that no truth is objective, or that no distinction can be made between claims of fact and claims of opinion.

If two people agree on the convention and the convention is internally consistent, it can be used to settle matters of fact. For example, if you and I agree as to the rules of chess, then we should agree that a piece cannot be taken on the first move. If you dispute this, then either you do not agree as to the rules or you do not understand the rules. It is not a matter of opinion but a matter of fact.

If you want to use the Chinese calendar to determine the date of the assassination of JFK, well and good. But remember that according to the convention of the Chinese calendar, there will still be a unique date and an objective way of arriving at it. People who claim to use the Chinese calendar but supply the wrong date are factually wrong.

Of course, it is only convention that tells us that Paris is the capital of France, but if someone told you that the capital of France was Berlin, I would hope that you would correct this person instead of telling them that they were welcome to their subjective opinion. It is far more likely that this person is ignorant of the objective facts of geography than that they are playing word games.


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## ebola?

I think that intersubjectivity, entailing constant practical interaction between social organisms and their environment (and thus each other) conditions the emergence of both subjectivity and objectivity.  Insofar as intersubjective practices coordinate individuals to undergo particular (ie, 'shared') experiences, intersubjectivity conditions how we form subjective impressions, socially conditioned concepts framing personal meanings.  Insofar as intersubjective practice coordinates overt investigation of the world, it conditions objectivity, in framing what criteria constitute 'evidence', and in leading individuals to observe a common object in similar ways, to establish 'objective knowledge' (ie, universal across time, space, and individuals, and thus reproducible).

ebola


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## Psychodelirium

alasdairm said:


> "_snow is white_" is so open to interpretation it's entirely subjective.
> 
> alasdair





You're probably right that is the most subjective of the examples that I've given. Actually it's an allusion to a theory of truth called the disquotational theory. The theory holds that to say of a proposition that it is true is just to assert the proposition. The example usually given to illustrate this is:
"Snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white. 
This is probably not the kind of answer that people are looking for when they ask questions like "what is truth", but it's one of the least confusing that are out there.


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## Psychodelirium

ebola? said:


> Insofar as intersubjective practice coordinates overt investigation of the world, it conditions objectivity, in framing what criteria constitute 'evidence', and in leading individuals to observe a common object in similar ways, to establish 'objective knowledge' (ie, universal across time, space, and individuals, and thus reproducible).
> 
> ebola



Sure, this sounds right to me. I would only argue that shared epistemic criteria are conditioned more by shared neural architecture than by any amount of intersubjective practice. People see the world and use language in similar ways primarily because their brains and sensory inputs are similar.


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## slimvictor

Psychodelirium said:


> If two people agree on the convention and the convention is internally consistent, it can be used to settle matters of fact. For example, if you and I agree as to the rules of chess, then we should agree that a piece cannot be taken on the first move. If you dispute this, then either you do not agree as to the rules or you do not understand the rules. It is not a matter of opinion but a matter of fact.



It is a matter of convention, not objective truth.  



> If you want to use the Chinese calendar to determine the date of the assassination of JFK, well and good. But remember that according to the convention of the Chinese calendar, there will still be a unique date and an objective way of arriving at it. People who claim to use the Chinese calendar but supply the wrong date are factually wrong.



Again, such a person would be wrong due to conventional standards, but this says nothing about objective truth. 


All of your rebuttals failed, in my mind, because you merely restated that convention does not permit certain interpretations, which you then labeled as "fact" (and ostensibly were referring to objective truth with this label).




> If truth is a property of language (I think so), then all truth is conventional because all of language is conventional. It doesn't follow that no truth is objective, or that no distinction can be made between claims of fact and claims of opinion.



I don't believe that language bears any relationship to truth.
More relevant, however, is that you used language to express what you termed objective truth. 
Just where do the objective truths lie? 
In the language?  I have already argued that such an interpretation does not work.
In the ideas evoked by the language?  I have already argued that such an interpretation does not work. 
Somewhere else?  I would love to know where.


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## ebola?

slim victor: y'all got late-Wittgenstein'd!


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## slimvictor

Psychodelirium said:


> People see the world and use language in similar ways primarily because their brains and sensory inputs are similar.



Do people see the world in similar ways?  How can you tell?

Do people use language in similar ways?  

Have you ever studied an American Indian language, or another language that differed greatly in structure from English? I have, and it convinced me both that
1) People do not see the world in similar ways, and
2) People use language in incredibly different ways. 

That said, what commonalities do exist are surely due to shared perceptual/conceptual apparatus as well as social and environmental similarities.


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## slimvictor

ebola? said:


> slim victor: y'all got late-Wittgenstein'd!



Sorry, you have lost me here.


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## slimvictor

ebola? said:


> I think that intersubjectivity, entailing constant practical interaction between social organisms and their environment (and thus each other) conditions the emergence of both subjectivity and objectivity.  Insofar as intersubjective practices coordinate individuals to undergo particular (ie, 'shared') experiences, intersubjectivity conditions how we form subjective impressions, socially conditioned concepts framing personal meanings.  Insofar as intersubjective practice coordinates overt investigation of the world, it conditions objectivity, in framing what criteria constitute 'evidence', and in leading individuals to observe a common object in similar ways, to establish 'objective knowledge' (ie, universal across time, space, and individuals, and thus reproducible).
> 
> ebola



I think that this is close to the mark, but are you saying that subjectivity emerges as a social and psychological phenomenon, rather than as something externally inherent in the world?  I believe that you are, and in that case, I can agree.


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## Psychodelirium

slimvictor said:


> All of your rebuttals failed, in my mind, because you merely restated that convention does not permit certain interpretations, which you then labeled as "fact" (and ostensibly were referring to objective truth with this label).



I really don't know what else to add. But let's go with this: Is it true or false that the convention does not permit certain interpretations? Is it objectively true or false? If it is _not_ objectively true or false, in what consists the convention?



> Just where do the objective truths lie?
> In the language?  I have already argued that such an interpretation does not work.



Sorry, I was not convinced. 
What about tautologies? Aren't tautologies a clear case of truths that are (a) objective and (b) artifacts of language?


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## slimvictor

Psychodelirium said:


> I really don't know what else to add. But let's go with this: Is it true or false that the convention does not permit certain interpretations? Is it objectively true or false? If it is _not_ objectively true or false, in what consists the convention?



It is clearly true that convention does not permit certain interpretations.
But what does that have to do with objectivity?
As I have already argued, convention can be violated.
Objectivity presumably cannot. 
The convention consists of social accordance on a set of rules.
These rules change over time, and over space. 
Objectivity should be stronger than this, dontcha think?



Psychodelirium said:


> Sorry, I was not convinced.



Then permit me to ask which part of my argument failed to convince you.
For example, I mentioned that Americans cannot say that 
_Sherlock Holmes lives on XXX  Y Street
_unless he literally lives on top of the building. 
Is there some objective truth there that American English speakers are missing?

What about my questions highlighting how language is interpreted differently by different people at different times? 



Psychodelirium said:


> What about tautologies? Aren't tautologies a clear case of truths that are (a) objective and (b) artifacts of language?


Tautologies are most definitely NOT artifacts of language, as I understand them. 
They arise from a study of formal logic, which is something entirely different from (and, dare I say, tangential to) language.


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## KingBlueTwista

We believe objective reality exists. 'Abstract truth' (referred from here on as 'truth', you'll see why) exists in the form of language and mathematics. But 'truth' is only a concept that helps us to understand the world, created by man and interpreted by man; therefore it is necessarily subjective.

We would not say that an atom is the truth. Atoms _exist_ sure, and our interpretation of their existence may be true for us, but labelling an atom as an atom brings nothing new to the table, no objective truths have been established. All we created was a sound that we attribute to an entity we can't fully understand, so we simplify it with words and believe we really grasp its essence.

It seems this example of naming objects/concepts in language can be extrapolated to our _entire understanding_ of the world, that all 'truth' is composed of only words that relate (in a very watered-down and simplistic way) to existences strung together with logic in order to make sense of reality. Not to say this isn't useful, but it is not the truth.


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## ebola?

slimvictor said:
			
		

> Sorry, you have lost me here.



In that case, you'd love Wittgenstein's _Philosophical Investigations_, as you are putting forth very similar ideas.



> I think that this is close to the mark, but are you saying that subjectivity emerges as a social and psychological phenomenon, rather than as something externally inherent in the world? I believe that you are, and in that case, I can agree.



I'll note from the outset that my best ontological guess is unorthodox: I believe it a misstep to parse the world into subject and object as separate phenomena on an absolutely a priori basis; rather, the interaction between organism and environment stands logically primary to subject and object, the latter two emerging as 'aspects' of this interaction.

I've for the most part abandoned the notions of things 'in themselves', of objectivity as usually construed, as a viable project; at best, this kind of objectivity is myopic.  Similarly, I don't think that construing subjectivity as radically free, adopting perspectives completely arbitrarily, yields much either.

ebola


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## Psychodelirium

slimvictor said:


> It is clearly true that convention does not permit certain interpretations.
> But what does that have to do with objectivity?
> As I have already argued, convention can be violated.
> Objectivity presumably cannot.
> The convention consists of social accordance on a set of rules.
> These rules change over time, and over space.
> Objectivity should be stronger than this, dontcha think?



The point is that so long as the convention is in force (i.e. agreed upon), the convention can serve as an objective standard. If you agree to the rules of chess, you must agree that you cannot take a piece on the first move. You cannot agree to the former but disagree about the latter _without being factually wrong_.

You seem to be arguing against a position that I never claimed to endorse, viz. that objectivity is some kind of mythical noetic property that transcends speakers' agreement on shared epistemic standards. But all along I have been saying that speakers' agreement on shared epistemic standards is all there is to objectivity. This is precisely why I initially tried to pick mundane conversational examples and insisted that truth and objectivity should not be capitalized (i.e. mystified). We all know how to use these concepts in daily life but suddenly start picking nits and talking nonsense on philosophy boards on the internet. Or do you mean to tell me that you do not draw any distinction between matters of fact and matters of opinion in your daily life?



> Then permit me to ask which part of my argument failed to convince you.
> For example, I mentioned that Americans cannot say that
> _Sherlock Holmes lives on XXX  Y Street
> _unless he literally lives on top of the building.
> Is there some objective truth there that American English speakers are missing?



This is picking nits as far as I am concerned. To begin with I am an American English speaker and use that expression interchangeably with "at", as do many other people I know. My point was simply that although Holmes is a fictional character, it is not simply a matter of your personal subjective opinion where that fictional character resides. If someone asked you, "where did Sherlock Holmes live?" and you answered, "Sherlock Holmes did not live anywhere, because he was a fictional character" you would either be being snarky or being an idiot, but in no way would you be legitimately answering the question that was asked. On the other hand, if you answered that he lived on (or at) 218C Barker Street, you would just be wrong. Or do you mean to tell me that the number and the name is a matter of opinion?



> What about my questions highlighting how language is interpreted differently by different people at different times?



These are fair insofar as they illustrate context-sensitivity, but so what? Again, I say simply that so long as all the parties agree as to the context, matters of fact may be settled objectively.



> Tautologies are most definitely NOT artifacts of language, as I understand them.
> They arise from a study of formal logic, which is something entirely different from (and, dare I say, tangential to) language.



I would say that formal logic is just a special case of language, but this is getting off-topic. I think that tautologies are relevant not only because they are an obvious case of objective truth but also because they illustrate the lack of necessity for invoking "correspondence to reality" or some such mysterious notion in order to see "objective truth" staring you right in the face.


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## slimvictor

Psychodelirium said:


> You seem to be arguing against a position that I never claimed to endorse, viz. that objectivity is some kind of mythical noetic property that transcends speakers' agreement on shared epistemic standards. But all along I have been saying that *speakers' agreement on shared epistemic standards is all there is to objectivity.*



Forgive me; I did not understand what you had in mind when using the word _objective_.
I was arguing that you had equated objectivity with convention, but little did I suspect that you had knowingly done so. 

In that case, I am not sure why we need the concept of objectivity, however...


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## slimvictor

KingBlueTwista said:


> We believe objective reality exists. 'Abstract truth' (referred from here on as 'truth', you'll see why) exists in the form of language and mathematics. But 'truth' is only a concept that helps us to understand the world, created by man and interpreted by man; therefore it is necessarily subjective.
> 
> We would not say that an atom is the truth. Atoms _exist_ sure, and our interpretation of their existence may be true for us, but labelling an atom as an atom brings nothing new to the table, no objective truths have been established. All we created was a sound that we attribute to an entity we can't fully understand, so we simplify it with words and believe we really grasp its essence.
> 
> It seems this example of naming objects/concepts in language can be extrapolated to our _entire understanding_ of the world, that all 'truth' is composed of only words that relate (in a very watered-down and simplistic way) to existences strung together with logic in order to make sense of reality. Not to say this isn't useful, but it is not the truth.



Agree.
However, when you say in the first paragraph that truth is created by (hu)man(s), you seem to be using the word differently than at the end of the final paragraph, when you seem to be using it more traditionally.


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## Morpheus19

You want an objektive truth? here it comes:

Something exists. Because the process to fake what we perceive as existence would also need something to exist.


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## ebola?

What do we mean, "thing"?  What do we mean, "exist"?

This may appear facile, but I believe that your statement of the self-evident (I hold a similar belief) carries key assumptions, these assumptions necessary for anchoring the objectivity of your claim.

ebola


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## Morpheus19

ebola? said:


> What do we mean, "thing"?  What do we mean, "exist"?
> 
> This may appear facile, but I believe that your statement of the self-evident (I hold a similar belief) carries key assumptions, these assumptions necessary for anchoring the objectivity of your claim.
> 
> ebola



I'd say that the process of being self aware and to experience is enough to claim that there 'is' something, although the nature of 'being' can just be experienced intuitively - I don't think that someone could claim that the feeling of being self aware could be based on something not in existence. 
The argument continues as in my last post.


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## ebola?

I'll concede that experiencing occurs, in some fashion...and that this fact holds necessarily for all matters we encounter.  However, need we assume that a process inheres in 'things' 'as such'?  And how do we evaluate whether this immediate fact is "objective"?

ebola


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## Morpheus19

ebola? said:


> I'll concede that experiencing occurs, in some fashion...and that this fact holds necessarily for all matters we encounter.  However, need we assume that a process inheres in 'things' 'as such'?  And how do we evaluate whether this immediate fact is "objective"?
> 
> ebola



Whats the alternative for a process, if it's not in some way existent? It wouldn't  make any sense to say that something described as 'process' don't exist, or simpler: It doesn't make any sense to say something is nothing. 
I only claim that it is an objektive fact that there is MORE than nothing. What 'something' is doesn't matter.


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## KingBlueTwista

That is the vaguest objective truth I have ever heard, but I think you may be right.

The only alternative embodiment of a process would be a metaphysical one; by its very definition it would be beyond our realm of verifiability and is thus pure speculative nonsense, although the possibility -however infinitesimal- cannot be excluded.

slimvictor: I'm glad you agree! My usage of the word man was a lazy shorthand for humanity, stuck in old habits I guess :/ And yeah I meant objective truth in that last sentence


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## alasdairm

Morpheus19 said:


> Because the process to fake what we perceive as existence would also need something to exist.


only if you assume that the process to fake what we perceive as existence would also need something to exist...



alasdair


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## Morpheus19

alasdairm said:


> only if you assume that the process to fake what we perceive as existence would also need something to exist...
> 
> 
> 
> alasdair



That's correct


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## slimvictor

I think that there are many assumptions needed to even begin to approach this question.
Which leaves me unconvinced that we can answer it successfully...


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## ebola?

> Whats the alternative for a process, if it's not in some way existent? It wouldn't make any sense to say that something described as 'process' don't exist, or simpler: It doesn't make any sense to say something is nothing.



I believe that I explained myself poorly.  Rather than implying that the immediate such-ness of experience could somehow not exist, I wanted to suggest that our delineation between things and actions those things take might not apply to reality outside of our investigation of it.  My qualm with the claim that something must exist is with the "thing" part.  Abandoning this, though, suggests that we cannot capture this truth linguistically

However, further scrutiny demonstrates it hard to establish what existence and nonexistence are, set in general relation to one another.  Similarly, engaging this raw suchness, what subjectivity or objectivity might mean becomes unclear.



> I only claim that it is an objektive fact that there is MORE than nothing. What 'something' is doesn't matter.



I think that I agree with the gist of this, but I'm still dissatisfied with my conception of nothing.

ebola


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## slimvictor

ebola? said:


> I wanted to suggest that our delineation between things and actions those things take might not apply to *reality* outside of our investigation of it.  My qualm with the claim that something must exist is with the "thing" part.  Abandoning this, though, suggests that we cannot capture this truth linguistically
> ebola



There is psychological evidence for the differentiation of actions and objects at even level, from perception to memory. 
This isn't to say that the "reality" that you allude to in this quote (are you assuming objective truth in order to think about objective truth?) necessarily contains actions and objects, but that, at least, we are programmed to think in terms of actions and objects. 
Additionally, essentially every language in the world differentiates between actions and objects (through the precise membership of each set does differ slightly from language to language, the bulk are the same).  
This shows that we find it convenient to think in terms of actions and objects. 

However, I am not entirely sure why you say "Abandoning this, though, suggests that we cannot capture this truth linguistically".  Whether we assume a priori that things exist or not doesn't change the linguistic facts.  It doesn't determine if the sentence makes sense, for example.  Are you concerned with the question of whether the linguistic sign has a real-world referent, instead of "just" one in our minds? If so, linguistics cannot solve this problem for us.
But if we are to be concerned with the language used to express the (attempt at) objective truth, we need to look at all aspects of the statement, not just the concept of "thing". 
Surely, if someone says "something exists" and that something is an action, for example, or a property, that doesn't change the truthfulness of the sentence.  
Existence without a thing (etc.) to exist is meaningless. 
Existence implies something to exist. 
Therefore, the verb "exist" is just as relevant as the noun "thing" in the original sentence. 
If we have captured the "truth" (as you put it) of existence linguistically, we must be prepared to accept all of the assumptions entailed by the rest of the utterance, including the verb in particular.
(I am not ready to allow that this is an objective truth.)


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## slimvictor

Morpheus19 said:


> I only claim that it is an objektive fact that there is MORE than nothing. What 'something' is doesn't matter.



Once again, I am afraid that "objective truth" has been reduced to meaning "everyone would agree on this".  Such an approach doesn't really even begin to get at the question of whether an objective reality exists, which seems like the question we want to look at here.


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## ebola?

victor said:
			
		

> There is psychological evidence for the differentiation of actions and objects at even level, from perception to memory.
> ...
> Additionally, essentially every language in the world differentiates between actions and objects (through the precise membership of each set does differ slightly from language to language, the bulk are the same).
> This shows that we find it convenient to think in terms of actions and objects.



This sounds essentially right.



> This isn't to say that the "reality" that you allude to in this quote (are you assuming objective truth in order to think about objective truth?) necessarily contains actions and objects, but that, at least, we are programmed to think in terms of actions and objects.



Yes, I was trying to point to phenomena including those out of the scope of the subject's interaction with 'stuff'.  One odd thing is that due to various inter-connective links, the subject interacts with the entirety of his surroundings (the universe writ-large), but sans awareness of most of this interaction.



> However, I am not entirely sure why you say "Abandoning this, though, suggests that we cannot capture this truth linguistically".



Oh.  I was talking about what language tries, and fails to, point toward, the extra-linguistic.



> Are you concerned with the question of whether the linguistic sign has a real-world referent, instead of "just" one in our minds?



I think that it's likley some other relation...



> If so, linguistics cannot solve this problem for us.



I agree, given language's failure to straightforwardly point to things outside of its sphere of influence.



> But if we are to be concerned with the language used to express the (attempt at) objective truth, we need to look at all aspects of the statement, not just the concept of "thing".
> Surely, if someone says "something exists" and that something is an action, for example, or a property, that doesn't change the truthfulness of the sentence.
> Existence without a thing (etc.) to exist is meaningless.
> Existence implies something to exist.



Actually, I was trying to use language to say something which structures of language preclude expressing.  Thus, I am imprecise and in-exhaustive.



> Therefore, the verb "exist" is just as relevant as the noun "thing" in the original sentence.



I should have clarified, substituting "prior to the distinction between thing and act".



> If we have captured the "truth" (as you put it) of existence linguistically



We can't.

ebola


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## Pythagoras

Very interesting thread. I think the impasse has been reached.

Slimvictor posits language as mere convention, even the most fundamental statement, say 'cogito ergo sum' does not satisfy his strict reduction of language as mere convention. Ebola I think is correct in concluding that within the limits of Slimvictor's ontology, seemingly objective statements, even tautologies, collapse into subjectivity.

I think that ebola's formulation of an ontology that delineates subject from object, that something is both until a temporally relevant point in time where linguistic/conventions collapse the ontological distinction.

perhaps the phrase

'I will not die' is such a objective statement, rendered true or false when I must skip this mortal coil. 'I am, that I am' is another such statement that alludes to ebola's object-state ontology, where language by its very nature must be absent due to its function in splitting the object-subject's undifferentiated nature?

Either that or I have misunderstood everyone.

EXEUNT


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## morpher001

Perhaps objective truth is only possible for an observer standing outside a well defined system. Simply because the system is well defined, objective truths should be attainable. This should be possible even when the facts defining the system are purely arbitrary.


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## Pythagoras

I have a few remaining problems with slimvictors assumptions.

That tautologies are not objective truths, ignoring logic's central role as meta-language, or at least a surer basis to discuss the role of convention in seeking the truth. Why ignore modal logics' novel approach to truth?

Not being a linguist, but speaking several (admittedly badly) the object/action dichotomy  is less obvious in the Latinate branch where a single word so often denotes both object and action. The psychological level, that of memory, neurology I think remain evidentially underdetermined to support the 'naturalistic' certainty that directs us to adopting such a model, which implies an ontology that can appear so natural ,perhaps rightly so, perhaps not when matters of objective truth, more properly framed, demand new and unexplored ontologies, as suggested by ebola.

As ontologies that allow for new (yet counter-intuitive) truths, that allow the questions of philosophy to gain a new impetus, and regain its cardinal role in forming intersubjective objects that allow it to engage the academic spectrum anew. That said, the hour is late, but perhaps there is more meat on this metaphysical bone.

PAX


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## Vader

slimvictor said:


> I do not consider anything you wrote to be (or represent) objective truth.
> I also do not believe in objective truth.


Is that objectively true?

Language is not the only bearer of truth. Beliefs can also be true, so if they correspond with objective reality (or bear whatever the appropriate relation is to objective reality), then there will be an objective truth that sidesteps your assertion that all truths are contingent on convention. So, what might some beliefs of this kind be?

I think that conditionals are likely to be our best bet:

If there is a triangle, then it has three sides.
If there is a ball that's red all over, then that ball isn't blue all over.
If classical logic is true, then there are no contradictions.

You'll have to excuse the fact that I've attempted to express these beliefs in language, I'm aware it must be confusing but it's very difficult to communicate without doing so. To my mind, the beliefs that those propositions represent are onjectively true.


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## slimvictor

I just saw an article entitled "Five Reasons you won't Die" that essentially relies on the argument that there is no objective reality for you to die from. It mentions some evidence that the objective world is an illusion - sums it up rather well, I thought. 




> We've been taught we're just a collection of cells, and that we die when our bodies wear out. End of story. I've written textbooks showing how cells can be engineered into virtually all the tissues and organs of the human body. But a long list of scientific experiments suggests our belief in death is based on a false premise, that the world exists independent of us − the great observer.
> 
> Here are five reasons you won't die.
> 
> Reason One. You're not an object, you're a special being. According to biocentrism, nothing could exist without consciousness. Remember you can't see through the bone surrounding your brain. Space and time aren't objects, but rather the tools our mind uses to weave everything together.
> 
> "It will remain remarkable," said Eugene Wigner, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the conclusion that the content of the consciousness is an ultimate reality."
> 
> Consider the uncertainty principle, one of the most famous and important aspects of quantum mechanics. Experiments confirm it's built into the fabric of reality, but it only makes sense from a biocentric perspective. If there's really a world out there with particles just bouncing around, then we should be able to measure all their properties. But we can't. Why should it matter to a particle what you decide to measure? Consider the double-slit experiment: if one "watches" a subatomic particle or a bit of light pass through slits on a barrier, it behaves like a particle and creates solid-looking hits behind the individual slits on the final barrier that measures the impacts. Like a tiny bullet, it logically passes through one or the other hole. But if the scientists do not observe the trajectory of the particle, then it exhibits the behavior of waves that allow it pass through both holes at the same time. Why does our observation change what happens? Answer: Because reality is a process that requires our consciousness.
> 
> The two-slit experiment is an example of quantum effects, but experiments involving Buckyballs and KHCO3 crystals show that observer-dependent behavior extends into the world of ordinary human-scale objects. In fact, researchers recently showed (Nature 2009) that pairs of ions could be coaxed to entangle so their physical properties remained bound together even when separated by large distances, as if there was no space or time between them. Why? Because space and time aren't hard, cold objects. They're merely tools of our understanding.
> 
> Death doesn't exist in a timeless, spaceless world. After the death of his old friend, Albert Einstein said "Now Besso has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us...know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." In truth, your mind transcends space and time.
> 
> Reason Two. Conservation of energy is a fundamental axiom of science. The first law of thermodynamics states that energy can't be created or destroyed. It can only change forms. Although bodies self-destruct, the "me'' feeling is just a 20-watt cloud of energy in your head. But this energy doesn't go away at death. A few years ago scientists showed they could retroactively change something that happened in the past. Particles had to "decide" how to behave when they passed a fork in an apparatus. Later on, the experimenter could flip a switch. The results showed that what the observer decided at that point determined how the particle behaved at the fork in the past.
> 
> Think of the 20-watts of energy as simply powering a projector. Whether you flip a switch in an experiment on or off, it's still the same battery responsible for the projection. Like in the two-slit experiment, you collapse physical reality. At death, this energy doesn't just dissipate into the environment as the old mechanical worldview suggests. It has no reality independent of you. As Einstein's esteemed colleague John Wheeler stated "No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon." Each person creates their own sphere of reality - we carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which energy just dissipates.
> 
> Reason Three. Although we generally reject parallel universes as fiction, there's more than a morsel of scientific truth to this genre. A well-known aspect of quantum physics is that observations can't be predicted absolutely. Instead, there's a range of possible observations each with a different probability. One mainstream explanation is the 'many-worlds' interpretation, which states that each of these possible observations corresponds to a different universe (the 'multiverse'). There are an infinite number of universes (including our universe), which together comprise all of physical reality. Everything that can possibly happen occurs in some universe. Death doesn't exist in any real sense in these scenarios. All possible universes exist simultaneously, regardless of what happens in any of them. Like flipping the switch in the experiment above, you're the agent who experiences them.
> 
> Reason Four. You will live on through your children, friends, and all who you touch during your life, not only as part of them, but through the histories you collapse with every action you take. "According to quantum physics," said theoretical physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, "the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities." There's more uncertainty in bio-physical systems than anyone ever imagined. Reality isn't fully determined until we actually investigate (like in the Schrödinger's cat experiment). There are whole areas of history you determine during your life. When you interact with someone, you collapse more and more reality (that is, the spatio-temporal events that define your consciousness). When you're gone, your presence will continue like a ghost puppeteer in the universes of those you know.
> 
> Reason Five. It's not an accident that you happen to have the fortune of being alive now on the top of all infinity. Although it could be a one-in-a-jillion chance, perhaps it's not just dumb luck, but rather must be that way. While you'll eventually exit this reality, you, the observer, will forever continue to collapse more and more 'nows.' Your consciousness will always be in the present -- balanced between the infinite past and the indefinite future -- moving intermittently between realities along the edge of time, having new adventures and meeting new (and rejoining old) friends.



source


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## schwiftee

thesoundofmotion said:


> That is if you believe in Objective Truth.
> 
> I can say that 1+1=2 and that might be the case, but does that refer to reality?
> 
> I can say that the temperature is 40 degrees out, but does that refer to reality as well?
> 
> Are these just not systems created by us?
> 
> Does Objective Truth exist? On the contrary does Subjective Truth exist?
> 
> Do they both not exist and are actually just concepts? Could there be no objective and subjective truths?



dr,tl
theres a problem in all of this in that the more you try and define exactly what something is you realise it is only that way because thats how you chose how to define it.


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## slimvictor

Yerg said:


> Language is not the only bearer of truth.



I have argued here that language is not a bearer of truth at all. 




Yerg said:


> If there is a triangle, then it has three sides.
> If there is a ball that's red all over, then that ball isn't blue all over.
> If classical logic is true, then there are no contradictions.
> 
> You'll have to excuse the fact that I've attempted to express these beliefs in language, I'm aware it must be confusing but it's very difficult to communicate without doing so. To my mind, the beliefs that those propositions represent are onjectively true.



What if your ball is red all over, but then someone paints it blue?
There is a ball that is red all over, and that ball is blue all over.
The red is still there, underneath the blue paint.
It is also still vividly alive in my mind.
And yet, it is hard to deny that it is blue now. 
Maybe you need to add "at any given point in time" to your sentence?
But the ball is still red in my mind....
It is red for me.  
And my color-blind friend has no idea what you are talking about.  It looks green to him in any case.
And, to my blind friend, those words are just abstract concepts, nothing tangible.  She experiences color in a very different way.
And to my Russian friend, you are being extremely uninformative.  Russian has two basic color terms that divide up the blue spectrum.  Which one are you referring to?
And my Tarahumara friend has only 3 color terms dividing up the entire spectrum, so to her, you are being far too specific.  She mentally translates "red" to "warm color", and "blue" to "cold color". 

At what point does your "objective truth" lose its objectivity?
How many people does it take to disagree before you accept that it was subjective?
Maybe you, yourself, are the one to determine what is "objective" for everyone else? Sounds fishy to me. 


My friend had a triangle with 4 sides.
It was a triangle used in an orchestra, made a metal and struck with a metal piece.
However, it was made in the shape of a square.

Just when you thought you had overcome the problems with considering language as a system of expressing beliefs without altering them in any way, without allowing subjectivity to enter into the encoded message (as if there were no subjectivity in beliefs themselves!).
That is not the way language works.
It is not a system designed to express the way the world is. That is a fallacy/myth.
It is inherently a system designed to express *individual humans' experiences of the world*.  The evidence for this is everywhere (including my last 4 or 5 posts).

You claim to have recognized the problem, but then you try to get around it using language anyway.  
Impossible.


----------



## slimvictor

Pythagoras said:


> I have a few remaining problems with slimvictors assumptions.
> 
> That tautologies are not objective truths, ignoring logic's central role as meta-language, or at least a surer basis to discuss the role of convention in seeking the truth. Why ignore modal logics' novel approach to truth?
> 
> Not being a linguist, but speaking several (admittedly badly) the object/action dichotomy  is less obvious in the Latinate branch where a single word so often denotes both object and action. The psychological level, that of memory, neurology I think remain evidentially underdetermined to support the 'naturalistic' certainty that directs us to adopting such a model, which implies an ontology that can appear so natural ,perhaps rightly so, perhaps not when matters of objective truth, more properly framed, demand new and unexplored ontologies, as suggested by ebola.
> 
> As ontologies that allow for new (yet counter-intuitive) truths, that allow the questions of philosophy to gain a new impetus, and regain its cardinal role in forming intersubjective objects that allow it to engage the academic spectrum anew. That said, the hour is late, but perhaps there is more meat on this metaphysical bone.
> 
> PAX



It seems that you believe that logic has a role as a "meta-language".
I would argue that logic is only tangentially related to language.
Language is about subjective experience.  (as in my post immediately above)
Language is a purely human creation and tool.
Logic is scientific, mathematical, and super-human.  
Human beings are mostly illogical.  
(Hadn't you noticed?  )


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## Jabberwocky

tarski proved that any predicate that acts as 'truth like' is inconsistent. i.e. that anything which we might want to define as 'truth' is undefinable. individual facts can be objectively true, but you cannot collect together every objectively true fact and point to that collection as 'the objective truth.'

i know you wanted to differentiate between 'abstract truth' and 'objective truth' and this, as a logical theorem, looks like it addresses the former not the latter, but as the theorem holds regardless of the kind of objects you're talking about (as long as the objects can logically exist) it holds for the type of things you want to know the truth about.

it seems, in parallel to Socrates on Knowledge, the only objective truth is that there is no objective truth. 

nb- this is my interpretation of the implications of the undefinability of truth, and i may have missed something in the details of the proof, however i have discussed it with both logicians and philosophers and met little disagreement to the overall conclusion about objective truth. 

omfg- abuse of quantum theory again. Many worlds does not imply death does not exist!!!


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## slimvictor

chinup said:


> omfg- abuse of quantum theory again. Many worlds does not imply death does not exist!!!



The many worlds part says that the meaning of death is different if you believe that you live in one universe of many (as compared to believing that you live in the only universe).  This is undoubtedly true.


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## Jabberwocky

eventually all the yous will die, and then you will be dead. so yeah its a slightly different concept but death does still exist. Many Worlds is only a viable interpretation because it leaves all the laws of physics, biology, etc, intact. were it to genuinely undermine the rest of science, which a lot of people seem to think it does, it would not be genuinely upheld by scientists.


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## Vader

> You claim to have recognized the problem, but then you try to get around it using language anyway.


As I said, I am not trying to claim that language is an objective truth bearer, because of course language only has meaning by virtue of convention. What I am trying to do is talk about pure, unexpressed beliefs (although, of course, talking about them without language is rather difficult).

My belief is that if there is a triangle (a thing that has three points at which one side meets another side), then it must have three sides. Now, there's no need to get all caught up in what I mean by "side" or "angle", because I don't mean anything by them other than what I conceive of in my head. My idea of a side or an angle is not conventional, and it doesn't matter if it coincides with anyone else's concepts. All that matters is that, given my conception of an angle, and my conception of a side, it is true that if there were to be a thing that had three of one, it would also have three of the other. 

Now, equivocation would render this truth subjective; your example of the musical instrument which shares its name with the shape I am thinking of demonstrates this. However, there is no equivocation inside my own mind. There is no ambiguity, and there is no way that my belief could be false. You might object, and say that given your conception of what a side is, and of what an angle is, that it is possible for a triangle with a different number of sides to exist. But this misses the point. If I were to (attempt to) express my belief in language, that proposition would not be objectively true, because you might interpret in completely differently. But beneath the wishy-washy language, there is a concrete concept in my head, with real content, which coincides with objective reality.

Let us examine the ball example. Your objections do not apply to my belief. My conception of "red" has caught up in it the notion of being instantaneous. For me, if an object is red, it is red right now. Therefore, it cannot be both red and blue all over. The word might mean something else to you, but that seems like a totally arbitrary consideration when weighing up the truth value of my belief.


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## slimvictor

Yerg said:


> My idea of a side or an angle is not conventional, and it doesn't matter if it coincides with anyone else's concepts. All that matters is that, given my conception of an angle, and my conception of a side, it is true that if there were to be a thing that had three of one, it would also have three of the other.
> 
> ...
> However, there is no equivocation inside my own mind... beneath the wishy-washy language, there is a concrete concept in my head, with real content, which coincides with objective reality.



Sounds like your understanding of objective truth would allow it to be confined entirely to one person's understanding.  This does not fit the definition of objective truth I had assumed. 

It may be that the definition of objective truth is the issue here. 

How you can know if your conception coincides perfectly with objective reality is baffling to me. 

I also do not assume the existence of objective reality as you do. 



> Let us examine the ball example. Your objections do not apply to my belief. My conception of "red" has caught up in it the notion of being instantaneous. For me, if an object is red, it is red right now. Therefore, it cannot be both red and blue all over. The word might mean something else to you, but that seems like a totally arbitrary consideration when weighing up the truth value of my belief.



I would contend that "red" is not an instantaneous notion. 
It takes time for something to be red.
For example, I can show you a video of a blue square that changes to red for only 2 milliseconds, and then ask you if the square was red.  You will have been unable to perceive the redness, due to the limited time it was red, and you will most likely answer that the square was not red. 
It was red in some sense, but you do not perceive that, and therefore it was not red to you.  

Redness is a property of objects that is less permanent than objecthood, but less ephemeral than actions generally are.  Actions, properties, and objects form a continuum of temporal stability, with actions lasting the shortest time (and being encoded in language as verbs), properties lasting a longer time (and being encoded as adjectives), and objects lasting the longest time (and being encoded as nouns).  
A dog "lasts" 15 years, but its color may change (or be altered) in a shorter time than that.  What is does - eating, sleeping, running - lasts a far shorter time. 
This is not exceptionless - some languages don't have adjectives, for example, and some verbs describe actions that last a very long time, such as _endure_, and some verbs and nouns refer to essentially the same thing, such as _flash_ - but as a general rule, it is true. 
Adjectives even have special grammatical properties in English (and some other languages), permitting them to take a suffix to mark the change of state leading to the condition in which the adjective applies.  This is because adjectives are not permanent, but are sufficiently state-like to warrant a treatment intermediate between nouns and verbs. (_The sky is reddening_ works, but this is not possibly with verbs or nouns.)
So adjectives, such as _red_, prototypically require some temporal stability.
Therefore, you claim that your conception of red is atemporal or instantaneous, but such a conception is not supported by the linguistic or perceptual evidence.  

Finally, I should mention that, once again, your assumptions of objective reality and a belief system that corresponds more or less- perfectly to that reality do not mesh with my own.


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## Tromps

I am a male. If you think that's subjective you're an idiot 

Don't over think it. 

I really don't think it's one way or the other though. Some thing's are subjective, and some things are objective. Everything isn't so black and white.


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## slimvictor

Tromps said:


> I am a male. If you think that's subjective you're an idiot
> 
> Don't over think it.
> 
> I really don't think it's one way or the other though. Some thing's are subjective, and some things are objective. Everything isn't so black and white.



Will you be a male after you've died? 
What is the "I" to which you refer?
Some people have claimed that the "I" is a spirit, neither male nor female. 
Don't under-think it. 
It might not be as self-evident as you take it to be.


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## IamMe90

i dunno, i think descartes (ironically) demonstrated to us that skepticism is always going to defeat the possibility of a perfectly objective truth. we'll have intersubjective consensus to an asymptotically probable degree, but that consensus between subjects will never transcend into objectivity. 

it's a basic structural issue - as a subject i can't certainly confirm that my perception of anything adheres to yours - because i have no direct access to your perception. 

you have to keep in mind arguments like 



			
				yerg said:
			
		

> My idea of a side or an angle is not conventional, and it doesn't matter if it coincides with anyone else's concepts. All that matters is that, given my conception of an angle, and my conception of a side, it is true that if there were to be a thing that had three of one, it would also have three of the other.
> 
> ...
> However, there is no equivocation inside my own mind... beneath the wishy-washy language, there is a concrete concept in my head, with real content, which coincides with objective reality.



while tempting, are irrelevant to the discussion at hand. this is only an example of subjective certainty, but "objective" requires a transcendence of mere subjectivity - if we were only arguing the viability of subjective truths, there wouldn't be an issue, for precisely the reasons outlined in the argument above - but we are not arguing subjective truths, we are arguing objective truths. 

and until you not only provide a way for me to directly hijack not only yours, but everyone elses' perceptions of reality directly, but also provide a way for me to combat the skeptic doubts that will follow (e.g. how is that i am sure that what i am perceiving as "hijacking into your perception" is actually your perception?), you will not justify objective truth. the problem is that even if you somehow fulfilled requirement 1, you will NEVER fulfill requirement 2 - it is simply a by product of living a subjective existence in a world of (what we assume to be) other subjects and objects.

hopefully this is articualte as i intended... writing on drugs always seems so much easier than it really is at the time haha


----------



## Vader

> Sounds like your understanding of objective truth would allow it to be confined entirely to one person's understanding. This does not fit the definition of objective truth I had assumed.


If you are going to define objective truth as such, then you effectively rule out the possibility of any truth-bearers but language having the property, and given that all language is necessarily contingent on convention for meaning, you have framed the concept in such a way that it is impossible before we even begin.


> How you can know if your conception coincides perfectly with objective reality is baffling to me.


It doesn't have to. All I am claiming is that if one of my conceptions (a three angled shape) were to coincide with a real object, then another of my conceptions (a three sided shape) also latches on to that object. The fact that any three angled object existing in a two-dimensional space must also have three sides is so intuitively obvious that I don't see how you can doubt it.


> I also do not assume the existence of objective reality as you do.


How on earth do you make sense of our experience then? I'm more than happy to admit that we are detached from objective reality, and that we can never experience nuomena, but to me the best inference to make to explain our mental lives is obviously (to me) that there is, in fact, a world independent of any consciousness.



> I would contend that "red" is not an instantaneous notion.
> It takes time for something to be red.
> For example, I can show you a video of a blue square that changes to red for only 2 milliseconds, and then ask you if the square was red. You will have been unable to perceive the redness, due to the limited time it was red, and you will most likely answer that the square was not red.
> It was red in some sense, but you do not perceive that, and therefore it was not red to you.
> 
> Redness is a property of objects that is less permanent than objecthood, but less ephemeral than actions generally are. Actions, properties, and objects form a continuum of temporal stability, with actions lasting the shortest time (and being encoded in language as verbs), properties lasting a longer time (and being encoded as adjectives), and objects lasting the longest time (and being encoded as nouns).
> A dog "lasts" 15 years, but its color may change (or be altered) in a shorter time than that. What is does - eating, sleeping, running - lasts a far shorter time.
> This is not exceptionless - some languages don't have adjectives, for example, and some verbs describe actions that last a very long time, such as endure, and some verbs and nouns refer to essentially the same thing, such as flash - but as a general rule, it is true.
> Adjectives even have special grammatical properties in English (and some other languages), permitting them to take a suffix to mark the change of state leading to the condition in which the adjective applies. This is because adjectives are not permanent, but are sufficiently state-like to warrant a treatment intermediate between nouns and verbs. (The sky is reddening works, but this is not possibly with verbs or nouns.)
> So adjectives, such as red, prototypically require some temporal stability.
> Therefore, you claim that your conception of red is atemporal or instantaneous, but such a conception is not supported by the linguistic or perceptual evidence.


See, I really feel you've missed my point here. All this talk about language is irrelevant to belief. It doesn't matter one jot if what "red" means to you isn't what "red" means to me. Detached from the language is a mental object, that exists in my consciousness, the nature of which is not subject to debate because I know what it is.

The example you give of a square that reflects/emits light at one wavelength and briefly changes to another shows that sentences in English using the word "red" are not objectively true. But my beliefs are not in English; they are bundles of concepts. Given my concept of redness, the square isn't red unless I perceive it as red. I think that the example is an awkward one in this instance, given the inherently subjective nature of colour.

When we talk of objective truth, I guess what I think of is truth concerning what Locke would term primary properties of objects, the thing as it is independent of perception. My belief, even if it is shared by no-one else, would be objective (in my understanding) so long as it concerned objective reality.


----------



## IamMe90

Yerg said:


> If you are going to define objective truth as such, then you effectively rule out the possibility of any truth-bearers but language having the property, and given that all language is necessarily contingent on convention for meaning, you have framed the concept in such a way that it is impossible before we even begin.



This is where the problem stems from. _Yes_, the way we're defining objectivity in a way that makes it SEEM impossible (this is important, because we're not actually creating a tautology here, the purported "impossibility" really stems from a synthetic root, not an a priori root) to begin with. That doesn't imply some sort of incorrectness with the definition, it implies that we mean by "objective truth" is impossible. In a philosophical debate, it is not an option to snake out of every argument by redefining the central question at hand so that it fits your view of the answer. 

Do you understand what OBJECTIVE means? It is inherently _not_ subjective and to claim something as an objective truth when it is confined to your own subjective perspective is simply incorrect. Again, you can redefine objectivity to essentially mean subjectivity but then you've created a tautology that renders the entire point of this debate moot given that the dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity no longer exists - there would be no point to the question "are there objective truths?" because it would simply translate to "are there truths?" This is NOT the question at hand. We want to know if there are truths which transcend the restriction of our own perception/subjectivity.

So yes, it IS seemingly impossible to start out with because the structure of our consciousness prevents it. I ask you to offer evidence to the contrary that anything here isn't true without redefining the question at hand.


----------



## Vader

> This is where the problem stems from. Yes, the way we're defining objectivity in a way that makes it SEEM impossible (this is important, because we're not actually creating a tautology here, the purported "impossibility" really stems from a synthetic root, not an a priori root) to begin with. That doesn't imply some sort of incorrectness with the definition, it implies that we mean by "objective truth" is impossible. In a philosophical debate, it is not an option to snake out of every argument by redefining the central question at hand so that it fits your view of the answer.


I don't see how a definition can be incorrect. As we've established, language only has meaning by virtue of convention, and anyone is free to define their terms as they please. 


> Do you understand what OBJECTIVE means?


I understand what I mean by it. I may not understand what you mean by it. 


> Again, you can redefine objectivity to essentially mean subjectivity but then you've created a tautology that renders the entire point of this debate moot given that the dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity no longer exists - there would be no point to the question "are there objective truths?" because it would simply translate to "are there truths?"


Truth is a property that is borne only by such things as propositions and beliefs, things that supervene on consciousness. Given that, I agree that the existence of what you consider an objective truth is impossible. Thinking about it, I'm not really sure that I understand the nature of the dichotomy. In fact, I was returning to this thread to suggest that there not need be a triangle that exists outside of my consciousness in order for my beliefs about it to be objectively true. It is a mental object, yes, but it has certain concrete properties.


----------



## IamMe90

Yerg said:


> I don't see how a definition can be incorrect. As we've established, language only has meaning by virtue of convention, and anyone is free to define their terms as they please.



Of course a definition can't technically be "incorrect" but when someone asks a question, we answer in the terms they've laid down. It is not "incorrect" to answer someone's question by redefining his central question and then answering, but it is entirely unhelpful to the asker of question.



> I understand what I mean by it. I may not understand what you mean by it.



an objective truth is an assertion about "reality in itself" that coheres to reality in itself. the fact that you're perceiving an object at all negates the possibility of the object being "objectively true," no matter how veracious it may seem to you. until you somehow gain the ability to view reality free of perception, "in itself," you can't know for sure if the way you're perceiving the object of your mentality is coherent with the way reality it is.

i agree this subject gets a bit muddled in discussions because it's hard to distinguish yourself as a subject from reality, perhaps even impossible... but you still have to understand that your perceptual tools may be clouded and you could hypothetically never know this as you have no way of accessing another perception or a view of yourself and the objects of your thought without perception. it's a fundamental issue


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## Vader

> Of course a definition can't technically be "incorrect" but when someone asks a question, we answer in the terms they've laid down. It is not "incorrect" to answer someone's question by redefining his central question and then answering, but it is entirely unhelpful to the asker of question.


I'm afraid I missed the precise definition of "objective" that determined how we were to understand the term in this discussion. There was no such definition in the OP.


> i agree this subject gets a bit muddled in discussions because it's hard to distinguish yourself as a subject from reality, perhaps even impossible


I think it's impossible because it's an arbitrary and artificial distinction. That's what I was getting at when I discussed the possibility of an objective truth about my mental objects. I don't see how they're not part of objective reality tbh, does your ontology not permit things of this kind?

EDIT:
Another interesting point has occurred to me:


> How you can know if your conception coincides perfectly with objective reality is baffling to me.


Do I have to know that it coincides with reality for it to be true? My belief might be totally unjustified, and it might be impossible for me to know if it coincides with reality, but that doesn't make it false.


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## Psychodelirium

Yerg said:


> Detached from the language is a mental object, that exists in my consciousness, the nature of which is not subject to debate because I know what it is.



This is a pretty baffling statement. Any attempt to move beyond mere hand-waving and describe the nature of this "object" (even to yourself) will necessarily involve you in the use of language. Further, any attempt to describe the condition of "external reality" such that your mental object might correspond or fail to correspond to it, will also necessarily involve you in the use of language.

If you insist that nevertheless, before language comes into the picture, there is a _something or other_ that is "mental" that corresponds to a _something or other_ that is "external to the mind", then you have succeeded in saying nothing that makes any sense. I do not know what you could possibly mean when you say that its nature is not subject to debate and that you know what it is. What is it that you know, exactly?

All of this is to point out that it makes no sense to speak of truth as a property independent of language. It is impossible to step outside of our language and compare it with reality. A non-linguistic reality might be, so to speak, gestured towards, but certainly it cannot be _described_, by definition. If it cannot be described, then talk of your beliefs corresponding or failing to correspond to it cannot be made to make sense.


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## IamMe90

Yerg said:


> I'm afraid I missed the precise definition of "objective" that determined how we were to understand the term in this discussion. There was no such definition in the OP.



ok, but there is a pretty commonly held definition of what "objective" means in the context of philosophy. if you had a basic understanding of the etymology of the word, I would have thought it would be clear? From wikipedia (not citing it as a source because it's a "good" source, but because they succinctly state how MOST people define objective): 

"a proposition is generally considered to be objectively true when its truth conditions are "mind-independent"—that is, not the result of any judgements made by a conscious entity or subject."

thus, your examples aren't _objective_ because they are confined to a mental perception. 



			
				yerg said:
			
		

> I think it's impossible because it's an arbitrary and artificial distinction. That's what I was getting at when I discussed the possibility of an objective truth about my mental objects. I don't see how they're not part of objective reality tbh, does your ontology not permit things of this kind?



I think the distinction is impossible, too, I guess I wasn't clear enough on that, reading back. I'm not saying mental objects are or aren't part of objective reality, I'm saying we have _no way to confirm that they are_ because they're inherently confined to your subjective interpretation of them. The objective world is the mind independent world, the world "in itself" and the objects of your mind are necessarily restricted to your perception of them, which necessarily dictates that they are subjective. That is why we have the word _subjective_.



			
				yerg said:
			
		

> EDIT:
> Another interesting point has occurred to me:
> 
> Do I have to know that it coincides with reality for it to be true? My belief might be totally unjustified, and it might be impossible for me to know if it coincides with reality, but that doesn't make it false.



No, you do not have to know that your perception of an object coincides with reality for it to be true, but you do have to know this if you want it to be _objectively_ true. *forehead slap* I have already outlined why that is above.


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## Vader

> This is a pretty baffling statement. Any attempt to move beyond mere hand-waving and describe the nature of this "object" (even to yourself) will necessarily involve you in the use of language. Further, any attempt to describe the condition of "external reality" such that your mental object might correspond or fail to correspond to it, will also necessarily involve you in the use of language.


I don't understand why a description is necessary.


> If you insist that nevertheless, before language comes into the picture, there is a something or other that is "mental" that corresponds to a something or other that is "external to the mind", then you have succeeded in saying nothing that makes any sense. I do not know what you could possibly mean when you say that its nature is not subject to debate and that you know what it is.


When I picture a triangle in my head, that conception is not caught up with the word "triangle". I didn't realise that this was so controversial. I have a clear, distinct image of an object that has some inherent properties. It seems to me quite obvious that a person oblivious to language could have a mental object, and that this mental object could correspond to something in the real world. A baby can have a perception of a rattle, a mental object, which corresponds to a real rattle, an external object, before it knows any words.


> What is it that you know, exactly?


I know that it has three things that , were I attempt to describe them, I would call "angles", and that as such, it also must have three things that I would call "sides".


> All of this is to point out that it makes no sense to speak of truth as a property independent of language.


Of course it does. A belief can be true. When I drop a glass onto a hard surface, I believe it will shatter. At no point to I form a proposition, "that glass will shatter", but I certainly have a belief which is true.


> A non-linguistic reality might be, so to speak, gestured towards, but certainly it cannot be described, by definition.


I'm afraid I still don't understand the problem.


> If it cannot be described, then talk of your beliefs corresponding or failing to correspond to it cannot be made to make sense.


Redness and pain and love cannot be described, is it impossible to have true or false beliefs concerning these things?
...


> "a proposition is generally considered to be objectively true when its truth conditions are "mind-independent"—that is, not the result of any judgements made by a conscious entity or subject."


And it is _objectively_ true that if there is a thing that has three of what I would describe as "angles" then it would have three of the things I call "sides". The concepts are, of course, mind-dependent, but the kinds of objects they latch on to are not. 


> thus, your examples aren't objective because they are confined to a mental perception.


They are confined to mental perception because belief is necessarily a mental kind of thing. How can I have a non-mental belief?


> No, you have to know that your perception of an object coincides with reality for it to be true, but you do have to know this if you want it to be objectively true.


I still think you're getting justification all tangled up with truth when it need not be. My belief is objectively true if its truth conditions are mind-independent. Why do I have to know that it is objectively true for it to be objectively true?


> if you had a basic understanding of the etymology of the word, I would have thought it would be clear?
> *forehead slap*


There's no need to be condescending. I'm sorry I'm not as brilliant a mind as you; please be patient with me, I'm just a simple country mouse, Sire.


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## Psychodelirium

Yerg said:


> I don't understand why a description is necessary.
> 
> When I picture a triangle in my head, that conception is not caught up with the word "triangle". I didn't realise that this was so controversial. I have a clear, distinct image of an object that has some inherent properties. It seems to me quite obvious that a person oblivious to language could have a mental object, and that this mental object could correspond to something in the real world. A baby can have a perception of a rattle, a mental object, which corresponds to a real rattle, an external object, before it knows any words.
> 
> I know that it has three things that , were I attempt to describe them, I would call "angles", and that as such, it also must have three things that I would call "sides".



The description is necessary to communicate and to express your meaning, i.e. to make sense. Moreover a description is more or less what you have now produced. You have parsed the contents of your mental imagery into discrete objects and assigned names to them ("triangle", "angle", "side"). You have parsed the _world_ into objects and assigned names to _them_ ("rattle"). Now, I know what you mean. We can make meaningful statements and figure out if they are true or false.



> Of course it does. A belief can be true. When I drop a glass onto a hard surface, I believe it will shatter. At no point to I form a proposition, "that glass will shatter", but I certainly have a belief which is true.



The point is that you cannot be said to have such a belief unless you understand the concepts "glass", "surface", etc. You have to interpret the world to form beliefs about it.


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## IamMe90

yerg said:
			
		

> And it is _objectively_ true that if there is a thing that has three of what I would describe as "angles" then it would have three of the things I call "sides". The concepts are, of course, mind-dependent, but the kinds of objects they latch on to are not.



I think there is just a disconnect between what I'm saying and what you're understanding me to say. I'm not sure how I can clarify any further...

Whether truth of objective or subjective does not make any negative or positive assertion on the truth itself - it only qualifies it. It's kind of like asking "is this balloon red or blue?" - the question doesn't touch on whether the object is a balloon or not, only the type of balloon it is.

"The concepts are, of course, mind-dependent, but the kindsof objects they latch on to are not."

But they are. The objects they latch onto are mind-dependent because any object that coheres with the concept you've thought of is necessarily perceived by your mind. You have _no way of telling me_ whether an object with three "angles" that will necessarily have three "sides" exists in objective reality. You don't even have a way of telling me if, in objective reality, if "angles" necessitates the existence of a correlative "side." This is because you have no access to objective reality. 

It seems to me what you're saying is "if object a contained angles in objective reality, it would necessarily contain correlative sides." But despite you can't actually prove this assertion to me, since you can't access objective reality. You can't prove to me that this relation isn't manufactured by your mentality.



			
				yerg said:
			
		

> They are confined to mental perception because belief is necessarily a mental kind of thing. How can I have a non-mental belief?



You can't. And thus your beliefs can't be objective.



> I still think you're getting justification all tangled up with truth when it need not be. My belief is objectively true if its truth conditions are mind-independent. Why do I have to know that it is objectively true for it to be objectively true?



Uh.. because "truth" is an assertion about a claim's correctness. For an objective true belief to be true, it must be objectively true. This is basic non-contradiction, here. You don't need to know if an objective truth is objectively truth for it to be objectively true, but you still can't assert that it is objectively true if you don't know the status of its objective truth.

I suppose what we're getting at isn't "are there possibly objective truths" but "are there confirmed truths which are objective and could there ever be?"

It's not exactly the same, but it's practical - we're not really interested in the possibility of objective truths so much as if we can ever access them.



			
				yerg said:
			
		

> There's no need to be condescending. I'm sorry I'm not as brilliant a mind as you; please be patient with me, I'm just a simple country mouse, Sire.



you're right, and I apologize. However, putting the facepalm after the etymology statement made me sound a LITTLE more condescending than I was being, just sayin


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## slimvictor

Yerg said:


> When we talk of objective truth, I guess what I think of is truth concerning what Locke would term primary properties of objects, the thing as it is independent of perception. My belief, even if it is shared by no-one else, would be objective (in my understanding) so long as it concerned objective reality.



The thing as it is independent of perception? 
In that case, there is no way you can know what it is. 
You can only experience it through perception. 
So you (and all of us) have no direct experience of objective truth, right?


And yet you insist that it must exist...


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## thesoundofmotion

slim, I am glad I started this thread because it provided some good thoughts.

I do agree with you. Everybody views the world differently therefore it really is hard to decide on whether Objective Truth exists or if even Truth exists at all.

Language is just convention like you said.

I think if some sort of Objective Reality does exist, it can't be explained in just mere words and that humans can only get glimpses of it from time to time. Maybe it's beyond all human perception.


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## Pythagoras

*7 is a prime*



slimvictor said:


> It seems that you believe that logic has a role as a "meta-language".
> I would argue that logic is only tangentially related to language.
> Language is about subjective experience.  (as in my post immediately above)
> Language is a purely human creation and tool.
> Logic is scientific, mathematical, and super-human.
> Human beings are mostly illogical.
> (Hadn't you noticed?  )



Syllogistic Logic can be easily described as a metalanguage. Certainly this is how the logical positivists/empiricists viewed it, using it as a tool for ascertaining valid truth statements.

On the question of objective truth it depends on one's metaphysical position.

As a strict Kantian whose ontology places value and reality to the phenomenal world, whilst parsing off the noumenal as unknowable and lacking any correspondence to mental phenomena, then the 'objective truth' is anathema, your anti-realist stance precludes it.

One can argue from a neo-Platonic ontology that the statement "7 is a prime number' is an example of an objective truth, represented by the Form "7" A combination of two different abstractions, number, and the primes which exist apart from human opinion. Once must accept neo-Platonic concepts.

The question hinges on whether one is an epistemological metaphysical realist or anti-realist.

As a neo-Platonist I give you "7 is a prime" as an example of an objective truth.

FIAT LUX


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## IamMe90

Someone who believes in the theory of forms... interesting, to say the least.


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## Tromps

slimvictor said:


> Will you be a male after you've died?
> What is the "I" to which you refer?
> Some people have claimed that the "I" is a spirit, neither male nor female.
> Don't under-think it.
> It might not be as self-evident as you take it to be.



So it is in fact a matter of time then?
My physical body will still be male after I die, for as long as its there.
The "I" I am referring to is my physical being, it is male, in this moment. 
I am not talking about a spirit. I am distinguishing the physical world from the mental world. The physical world being objective, and the mental world being subjective. There are physical 'laws' which cannot be broken, however when referring to the mental world, possibilities seem to be endless. It is how I interact between these two worlds which causes variations.


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## Pythagoras

IamMe90 said:


> Someone who believes in the theory of forms... interesting, to say the least.



If you follow current Platonic theories of correspondence theories of epistemology, then the inevitable question is 'to what does your metaphysical objective universe relate. It seems the only way to answer the OPs question

You may be surprised that Platonism is undergoing a resurgence, in metamathematics for eg in concretising such concepts as number, and other objective conceptions. It may have been well critiqued with Moral Error theory, though I contend that there are objective moral Goods that exist in a 'realist' sense, I don't see how that is stranger than theories that conclude that there is nothing we can know about the noumenal world that they posit in support of their phenomenalistic epistemology


...the forms merely commit us to metaphysical beliefs of a kind not so bizarre given the various philosophies they contend with and at least offers the possibility of 'objective truths'


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## Vader

> You have no way of telling me whether an object with three "angles" that will necessarily have three "sides" exists in objective reality. You don't even have a way of telling me if, in objective reality, if "angles" necessitates the existence of a correlative "side." This is because you have no access to objective reality.
> 
> It seems to me what you're saying is "if object a contained angles in objective reality, it would necessarily contain correlative sides." But despite you can't actually prove this assertion to me, since you can't access objective reality. You can't prove to me that this relation isn't manufactured by your mentality.


Well, if we're getting right down to the nitty gritty of it, I can't prove anything to you. I can't even prove that I exist; even if I were to sit at a table, smoke a joint and play backgammon with you, I wouldn't have any way of proving to you that I'm not a philosophical zombie. No-one can prove anything, really. It all comes down to faith, and to making sensible inferences from the phenomena we percieve. I think that anyone who doesn't infer to an objective reality (preferably one in which all triangles have three sides) is being rather silly.


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## IamMe90

what exactly is bizarre about theories that assert the unknowability of the numenal world? 

just curious, i'd like to hear an explication of those condensed views you have put forward. i don't really know much about neoplatanism, i've only lightly studied plato's actual theory of forms itself, not modern takes on it.


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## IamMe90

Yerg said:


> Well, if we're getting right down to the nitty gritty of it, I can't prove anything to you. I can't even prove that I exist; even if I were to sit at a table, smoke a joint and play backgammon with you, I wouldn't have any way of proving to you that I'm not a philosophical zombie. No-one can prove anything, really. It all comes down to faith, and to making sensible inferences from the phenomena we percieve. I think that anyone who doesn't infer to an objective reality (preferably one in which all triangles have three sides) is being rather silly.



no one is saying that things aren't _practically_ knowable, though. i agree with you that objective reality _probably_ exists and, our experiential perception correlates to a consistent degree with what is going on in objective reality - even if it isn't descriptively accurate (that is, every time i experience a "red," object, i'm experiencing an object in objective reality that has some sort of consistent quality). 

the point though, is that "truth" and "certainty" are different from probability. we can intuit and depend on these probabilities, but we still can't assert objective _truths_. that's all.


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## webbykevin

Psychodelirium said:


> Sherlock Holmes lived on 221B Baker Street.



Sherlock Holmes didn't live anywhere, he was a fictional character in a book.


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## Vader

> the point though, is that "truth" and "certainty" are different from probability. we can intuit and depend on these probabilities, but we still can't assert objective truths. that's all.


Well, we can assert them without making a knowledge claim. I believe it to be objectively true that triangles have three sides. 



> Sherlock Holmes didn't live anywhere, he was a fictional character in a book.


Well, now we're going off on a tangent...abstract objects can have properties. Unicorns have a horn, right?


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## Pythagoras

> what exactly is bizarre about theories that assert the unknowability of the numenal world?



When I say neoplatonist I meant to clarify that we are talking about contemporary usage of Platonic Forms, or 'Metaphysical realism', which accepts an objective reality as being real and holding some correspondences between certain 'facts' and what we can say about them. Number, time and space, but also the Good (objective moral truths as features of the cosmos, however weird and unique such entities might be,) do have a place at the table of modern epistemology and Ethics.

As for those that reject any correspondence between noumena and phenomena, the adjective bizzare was a poor choice, when my aim was to show that a Platonic cosmos is no less likely as those who choose a supermundane reality that is the source of 'reality' about which nothing can be known - essentially Kant doesn't neccesarily 'best' Plato in ontological, Metaphysical, or even ethical thought, the latter being free to posit a select number of objective truths; oddness and evenness, unidirectional time, and possibly moral objectivity, however 'queer' such a thing might be.

PAX


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## Pythagoras

> Well, we can assert them without making a knowledge claim. I believe it to be objectively true that triangles have three sides.



Triangles are a good example of a concept that does not invite subjective language to derive its description. Three abstract zero points in euclidean space 'describe' a triangle, without dismantling the whole edifice of mathematics, one can infer the objective truth of the set labelled 'triangles' leaving little wiggle room for the subjective commentator.


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## webbykevin

Yerg said:


> Unicorns have a horn, right?





Ok you got me there


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## vegan

"existence is"

even if reading this board were not actually happening, there is some consciousness imagining it

so this imagination exist
there is at least existence


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## Pythagoras

^^ vegan is spot on in that the 'Cogito' of Descartes is where debates of this type crop up, the only truth being the existence of some conscious reality, that are personal (when strung together conscious moments can build a perception of 'individuality', and therefore subjective.

'Cogito Ergo Sum' is one of the simplest  and Justified truths.


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## Vader

There seems to be a sentiment in this thread that that wouldn't count as objective truth as it isn't mind-independent.


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## Harry Hood

How's this:

This too shall pass


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## Pythagoras

I think Descartes meditation goes on to explore what might be the source of his reductive claim, positing either a manevolent trickster (a supercomputer in modern parlance), or from God (the natural world), but definitely 'other' than him giving him reason to believe in an objective nature underpinning his sense data.


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## IamMe90

Pythagoras said:


> When I say neoplatonist I meant to clarify that we are talking about contemporary usage of Platonic Forms, or 'Metaphysical realism', which accepts an objective reality as being real and holding some correspondences between certain 'facts' and what we can say about them. Number, time and space, but also the Good (objective moral truths as features of the cosmos, however weird and unique such entities might be,) do have a place at the table of modern epistemology and Ethics.
> 
> As for those that reject any correspondence between noumena and phenomena, the adjective bizzare was a poor choice, when my aim was to show that a Platonic cosmos is no less likely as those who choose a supermundane reality that is the source of 'reality' about which nothing can be known - essentially Kant doesn't neccesarily 'best' Plato in ontological, Metaphysical, or even ethical thought, the latter being free to posit a select number of objective truths; oddness and evenness, unidirectional time, and possibly moral objectivity, however 'queer' such a thing might be.
> 
> PAX



you're saying that Plato is ontologically, metaphysically, and ethically stronger than Kant as a result of the consequences of his theory, this seems rather backward. i don't think it matters what plato is free to posit under the theory of forms if the theory of forms isn't justified. 

i don't see what evidence or argumentation you can provide for the existence of forms. enlighten me?


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## Pythagoras

^^Your summary of my position is somewhat misleading.

I was stating that modern Platonists, and Platonic thought  could in some regards be seen as equal to anything of Kant's (philosophy tends to lack diachronic uniliniarity of thought, which is why we have modern-day Platonists and modern-day Kantians...its been a long thread and I was merely trying to answer the OPs question, then later indulged yours. It is not through idolatory than Whitehead charecterised the whole of European Philosophy in his time as '...a footnote to Plato'. I think I stated that one's Platonism is generally regarded as a toolbox for certain parts of philosophy (and needn't be accepted wholesale). One can garner the Justifications posited for Plato's  arguments from any good anthology.

I find SEP a useful starting point, though metamathematics or Metaphysical realism will lead you to the ongoing debate that contemporary philosophers' are engaged in with regard to Plato's original arguments and later refinements. Become an autodidact for the day. I am sure your capacity for learning far outstrips mine for teaching.

Good luck, and let me know how it goes.

MENS AGITAT MOLEM

errata - my previous post should have read (end of line 2), 'Number, *outside *of space and time [...]'


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