Or, as he puts it: "we can all quote facts all day, and I do, as you have no doubt ignored them, let me point this out to you

facts exist to be interpreted, thats what we all do. its not my fault you come to different conclusions then label others as delusional, its an arrogant and ignorant thing to do, but everyone has flaws"

and

"If you want absolute truth, you're not going to find it, unless of course you believe in God and have the ability to ask the Almighty a question (Note, I do not believe in God). Nothing exists in a vaccuum, something is always affecting it, in this case, bias and perspective. Everything we humans know of the world around us is reported by humans, who are inherently flawed. This gives all of us the leeway to interpret news and events, and as long as we can make coherent arguments for them... "

My 'perspective' is that while there is no 'universal truth' there are hard facts that can be analyzed, and there are only a select number of logical possibilities that can be correct.

I'm not a philosophy major (and neither is he), I'm a numbers person. But, he is speaking from a philosophical perspective, and I just can't imagine that philosophical thought would back up the notion that there is no such thing as truth, but just 'relative (and I suppose) equal opinions.

Any philosophy majors (or professors!) prepared to back me up, or him, or somewhere in between?

[ 11 October 2004: Message edited by: Adam T ]

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This is circular though: I can just ask the question, "Why do we respect the jurisdiction of the court if it isn't based on anything solid?"

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We respect the court because the majority(or the government, or the powers-that-be or whomever you want to credit) have decided that certain laws should be passed and that the courts should be empowered to enforce those laws. Basically, respect the law, and tell the truth about it in court, or you'll be thrown in jail. THAT, at the end of the day, is why people(criminals excepted) repsect the courts.

Here's a better example, more comparable to the Iraq situation: a student wants to get out of writing an exam, so he calls the university and says that there's a bomb on campus. Now, if the student is arrested for his hoax, is anyone going to buy the idea that it's just a matter of "perspective" as to whether or not there was a bomb on campus? Even the most jaded metaphysical nihilist wouldn't accept that, nor would he accept the idea that it's just a matter of perspective whether there were WMD in Iraq.

[ 11 October 2004: Message edited by: voice of the damned ]

I mean, why bother to talk to others if there is nothing "real" as the topic?

Why try to convince them that there was a Holocaust? They have their opinion, and that's that.

A frog or an atom bomb is quite a different order of "anything solid" from a law or a rule or a taboo.

There is no "radical subjectivity" of the kind parodically posited by jeff house in characterizing laws, eg, as social-historical constructs. Some basic principles of democracy, for instance, have clearly emerged only slowly, through centuries of collective meditation on central human problems -- on the impulse to vengeance, for instance, and its consistently horrifying consequences.

So a democrat's response to the impulse to seek revenge, while it has no metaphysical authority and is not one of Mandos's "solids," is none the less more than a pure fantasy: it is anchored both in particular, concrete human experiences and in evolving human understanding of those experiences. And there are always other responses possible, although it should always be possible to show their grounding in different kinds of history.

There is a different kind of contested statement being tossed in above (in these extremely confused discussions of epistemology). Again, the positivist parody picks a straw-man: Holocaust denial, or to pick a less loaded topic, flat-earth faith.

But anyone who has studied any historical period in depth knows -- and is grateful for -- the immensely different insights of people who really were looking from different angles at the same thing. By starting from a different place, for instance, Neal Ascherson (in The Black Sea, early 1990s) managed not only to re-centre the old plot of European history but also to demonstrate how much it was a plot. That doesn't make any of the events of that history un-happen; it just teaches us more and shakes prejudice and complacency by shifting emphasis and showing us where our prejudices and complacency lay.

The same could be said of many many great contemporary historians -- Edward Said, eg, or the wonderful American social historian Robert Darnton, who sent so many C18 specialists back to their books with new eyes.

This thread puzzles me. Epistemology is an immense discipline. What we know and the way we know -- obviously these things work on many (forgive me) different levels. I can't see the value of mixing up such different sorts of knowledge claims -- unless it is just to mock others.

[ 11 October 2004: Message edited by: skdadl ]

Fact: George Bush presented a certain argument as the reason for invading Iraq. You can find sufficient evidence in records and the recollection of witnesses to reach a consensus that he did this. However, there are people who may dissent and deny it, and you have to judge their credibility.

Fact: The argument Bush presented was not based on actuality; there were no WMDs. Again, consensus can be reached based on evidence from inquiries, lack of any positive evidence, and evidence of experts' doubts expressed before the war.

Supposition: George Bush lied when he presented the argument. To reach consenses that this was fact, you would need to find out if he knew or believed that what he said was not true; you would rely mostly on accounts from insiders who may have heard him express scepticism. Such accounts may not become available for decades. You could make a value judgment that he should have known that he was lying, but may have been too stupid or intellectualy lazy to realise it and to admit it even to himself.

Supposition: Bush lied about WMD's because he wanted to outdo his father, establish democracy in Iraq, get re-elected, get control of the Middle East's oil, please his substitute daddy Cheney, etc., etc. Bush's motives are subject to interpretation; sorting out lies, subconscious and conscious personal motives, national aspirations and mixed motives. It is unlikely that a consensus will be reached for decades, and probably the consensus will change over time, with the times.

IE: Fact - no WMD found in Iraq. What about the bias and perspective of the people who looked at a particular object and concluded that the object was or was not a WMD?

As jeff house put it

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...why bother to talk to others if there is nothing "real"...

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There is no "radical subjectivity" of the kind parodically posited by jeff house in characterizing laws, eg, as social-historical constructs.

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Of course there is. If literature can be interpreted any which way, then why not other "texts"?

Read Richard Posner on postmodern interpretation of law, or read someone from the legal realist school.

The problem with claiming that truth is wholly subjective has to do with the very real tendency for a lot of things to be the same for all of us. If I drop a ball, all of you fine people will see the ball fall to the floor (towards the center of spacetime distortion).

There is an "out", though.

"Of course there is. If literature can be interpreted any which way, then why not other "texts"?"

With the exception of literature that is intentionally vague and left open to interpretation, I would argue that there are probably no more than 7-8 logical arguments or hypothese that can be made about most anything.

And then, those hypothese can be debated on the basis of the 'facts' that support them. From there, conclusions can be drawn (using the empirical method) While there are often 'exceptions' and different answers in different situations (i.e weight is always approx 1/6 what it is on the moon, than what it is on earth), these conclusions are drawn on the basis of hard facts, and with rare exceptions under unusual circumstances (most of which can be detailed too), these hard facts will always be universally true.

Of course, this is difficult to do, as we see from the number of juries that take a long time to reach a verdict. But, to suggest that everything is relative, and then to extrapolate to that that trying to determine something close to a universal truth is essentially pointless, seems to me the opposite of human endeavor. It's like in that Radiohead video where everybody layed down on the road at the end because life was pointless. (to be sure, the video seemed more about depression than the nature of truth)

This seems to be an area of genuine conflict between the discipline of philosophy and the discipline of science. Where I come down is pretty obvious. After all, how many philosphers ever cured a disease?

[ 12 October 2004: Message edited by: Adam T ]

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If literature can be interpreted any which way, then why not other "texts"?

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Excuse me, but this is the parody. You seem to be implying that somebody serious claims this.

Who?

I strongly suspect that some people are wanting to drop Derrida's name in here, so that they can kick it around, but jeff, if you are implying that that is anywhere near any position that Derrida himself ever took, then you just have not ever read him reading anything.

Y'know, I'm sure that some of you have suffered through a few conversations with pretentious graduate students, and I'm sure I should empathize with you over the pain you endured, although on the scale of general human suffering, I suspect that that super-common experience ranks rather low.

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Originally posted by Adam T:
This seems to be an area of genuine conflict between the discipline of philosophy and the discipline of science.

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No, not really. You malign philosophers. It's an area of genuine conflict between the disciplines of literary criticism and some sociology, and the discipline of science.

Although it's a philosophical question, I think you'll find rather few philosophers (yeah, there are still some, but I really think the question has died down a lot) subscribing to any theory of truth other than the familiar correspondence theory, of which a capsule version reads as follows:
The proposition "snow is white" is TRUE if and only if snow is white.

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Again, that question of jeff house's simply erects again a straw man. There is nothing here to respond to.

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Sorry if you think so. You might read someone like the German philosopher Carl Schmidt, or the special issue of Telos in which his philosophy is discussed by about twenty people.

Or, you might read Roberto Manguebera Usher, who has dealt with the question in three or four books.

Or you might check out the legal realists, or Michael Mandel's book on the Charter.

But maybe it will be more convincing if you just say "there's nothing to respond to."

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Originally posted by Rufus Polson:

it's nothing new for actual philosophy, having cropped up ever so often ever since the Sophists in Plato's day, basically.

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I tend to agre with jh over skdadl on this one. I think. What do I know from "legal realism"?

Legal texts are qualitatively different from literary texts -- one has some relation to the state or other authority, and literature posits other meanings. Edmund Spenser's instrumental writings on what new imposition would be made on the people of Ireland is qualitatively different than The Faerie Queen. Swift's polemics for the Church of England are very different than Gulliver's Travels. I think this is the value of a Nietszchean approach -- what does this "truth" do? What are its effects?

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Originally posted by Adam T:
...But, to suggest that everything is relative, and then to extrapolate to that that trying to determine something close to a universal truth is essentially pointless, seems to me the opposite of human endeavor...

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I think your touching on the philosophical confusion right there: saying something is "relative" then assuming that this implies everything is "subjective", meaning something that can be interpretted any way anyone prefers, which can then be treated as an absolute in itself. Great verbal foil that can be used to defend or attack anything without requiring anyone to define what they're really getting at (if anything) or coming up with any empirical evidence that others can judge for themselves.

Maybe I'm too primitive in my outlook, but seems to me that everyone can have a different "relative" view on something, seeing a different side of things and interpretting or responding in different ways, but can still agree on just what that "something" is in most situations, building our propositions from there. Assuming that that something has any objective reality at all. Can always argue over the "meaning" of its "objectivity" later of course.

[ 12 October 2004: Message edited by: Erik the Red ]

I don't remember seeing you there, are you really here?

I don't think I will see you there, when I leave here and go back to that place...before I was here.

should I care what I say or do here? I don't remember any rules being given to me before I arrived here...

I know I need to keep breathing...
I know I should eat when hungry...
Sex feels good...
I like to gather things.
Hunting, stalking, the conquest...even if its just for a new toaster...its like sex...rewarding.

perspective...should I care if what you do is right or wrong?

My perspective: will you make my life easier or harder?

Is your opinion, hypothesis, editorial, contradiction, sermon going to make my life easier or harder.

Me like rewards...me like to feel good, like sex...me no like words or actions that don't feel good.

maybe if I crush you...you will stop saying/doing things that do not make me feel good.

maybe crushing you will feel good.

Baudrillard's a postmodernist. Derrida's a post-structuralist. I know that Anglo-American thought the distinction between the two is often dropped, but I think it's important. French post-modernism is exeplified by Baudrillard and Lyotard, both useless nihilists, while French post-structuralists include deeply ethical thinkers, like Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Felix Guattari.

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there are influential figures about whose work can be boiled down to the flat claim that there is no truth, just perspective.

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Well, no one can be "boiled down" to anything, but of course it is Nietszche's central contention that reality is aesthetically created by the will.

Insofar as others such as Foucault follow Nietszche, they will privilege concepts such as "power" which take the place of the Nietszchean concept of "will."

"Will" is the force which proceeds from the core of the individual subject; at its origin, it is not influenced by objective reality; it CREATES that reality.

The "will to power" refers to the core capacity to constitute reality according to inner dictates preceding from the self.

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None of this is in any way controversial. I think it is implicit in Nietszche's book "The Birth of Tragedy" as well as in "Beyond Good and Evil", "Ecce Homo" and others.

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The first is just a dogmatic statement based on the idea that if I can't see it, it is not there.

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I don't think that is what is meant. I think Nietszche believed that the world is CREATED by the self, in a way similar to the manner that a novelist creates a novel.

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Originally posted by Contrarian:
The second is arguable.

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How?
I mean, it's assertable. But it's not very falsifiable. If you say that "we" can't know things, but things are nonetheless in some way "knowable", then can some standard of knowledge be advanced that some hypothetical being could meet, but we can't?
If such a standard is advanced, how can we possibly test whether this hypothetical hyperadvanced being could meet it?
And what basis could you have for advancing such a standard--how could you (being one of "we" who can't know things) possibly *know* that it was the right standard?
It's the same problem, it's just clothed in cute-sounding wrappers that push the contradictions a step or so back.

Meanwhile on Nietszche, I think I will take Jeeves' advice to Bertie Wooster: "You would not have enjoyed Nietszche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound."

[ 14 October 2004: Message edited by: Rufus Polson ]

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Originally posted by voice of the damned:
[QB]

We respect the court because the majority(or the government, or the powers-that-be or whomever you want to credit) have decided that certain laws should be passed and that the courts should be empowered to enforce those laws. Basically, respect the law, and tell the truth about it in court, or you'll be thrown in jail. THAT, at the end of the day, is why people(criminals excepted) repsect the courts.

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Rufus; I guess you could argue that it would be possible to fully comprehend the truth if you were in possession of all the facts. Basically a historian argument in reverse; we don't know all of the facts so cannot be certain we know all of the truth.

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Originally posted by B.L. Zeebub LLD:

So the threat of violence is at the root of all social institutions and, more importantly is responsible for the production of "truth"?

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Originally posted by Contrarian:
Are they pronouncing "There is no truth"? Or are they saying "Truth may exist, but we are not capable of fully comprehending it"? The first is just a dogmatic statement based on the idea that if I can't see it, it is not there. The second is arguable.

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Originally posted by Rufus Polson:
How? I mean, it's assertable. But it's not very falsifiable.

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It seems to me that all epistemologies have some metaphysical (i.e. non-falsifiable) foundations. Science, for example, demands that empirical evidence be inter-subjective and reproducible. Underlying this demand is the metaphysical assumption that the behaviour of the universe is regular, i.e. that it is subject to natural laws. The value in this approach is that it has lead to much useful knowledge. Nevertheless, it remains a non-falsifiable claim.

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But that does not get you "Modern biology has an equal informational footing with medieval beliefs in spontaneous generation", which is the kind of thesis I was saying involved rejection of truth.

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Interesting example, Rufus.

When I read MacD this morning, what sprang to mind immediately was modern medical "science" -- I thought of posting to that topic and then gave it up ... But you have re-inspired me.

Equal footing? No. And I have depended a great deal on post-Renaissance advances in biology -- in fact, I would have been dead twice without them.

However, like everyone who has had much to do at all with modern medicine, I have learned a lot about what is not known. Like all women my age and younger, I have watched medical "scientists" change their minds suddenly about treatments once urged upon us and now known to be dangerous. I remember the arrogance and the condescension of those presumptuous creeps. (Sorry: doctors.) I have learned how peculiarly difficult it is for most of the conventionally trained in any applied science ever to admit that vast patches of their disciplines remain majorly untracked and uncertain.

I've also met a few brilliant medical researchers and practitioners in recent years, most of them specialists in diseases of the brain. Guess how I decide who is smart and who isn't.

If they can't say "We don't know" much of the time, I don't trust 'em.

Arrogance. It doesn't matter how smart anyone is, how advanced his tech, how skilled he has become, even how good his data.

Not so long ago, the average life-span of women in the Northwest Territories was 28 years.

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Or, you might read Roberto Manguebera Usher, who has dealt with the question in three or four books.

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skdadl, knowledge about the brain is SO limited. Dialectical scientists/biologists/psychologists, Oliver Sacks, David Healy, Richard Lewontin and Stephen Gould would say that they didn't know. They know a little, well Gould doesn't but did, but all they can really describe is clusters, patterns, very particular details, and while dealing with the why and how questions have very limited answers. I don't know if we're actually very far apart, but I feel like your looking for a Prime Mover or a telos. Is this so? I understand it emotionally, but it ain't so. Or maybe it is.

Have you read Daniel Pinchbeck's
Breaking Open the Head? It's a very readable book, pop journalist on the surface, but quite profound under multiple readings. It provides a map of the contemporary state of the culture of altered states from an anticapitalist perspective, critical of masculinism and ecological destruction.

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Originally posted by BLAKE 3:16:
I don't know if we're actually very far apart, but I feel like your looking for a Prime Mover or a telos. Is this so? I understand it emotionally, but it ain't so. Or maybe it is.

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Originally posted by jeff house:
The way to measure whether medical scientists know anything, or are merely arrogant, is to take a look at life spans in countries where medicine is largely absent.

Not so long ago, the average life-span of women in the Northwest Territories was 28 years.

Now it is 66.

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BUT... I suggest that most of the 'medicine' that has increased life expectancy or could make a difference to life expectancy in the countries you are referring to is technology that has existed for a comparatively long time in the arc of 'modern medicine', and has adhered because it is tried and true (I'm thinking of things like childbirth assistance, simple but lifesaving surgery like apendectomy, antibiotics, immunisation, and antiseptic measures like antiseptic surgery, clean water, pest control and quarantine).

It's also simplistic to make a cause and effect argument between the absence of western medicine in certain countries and mortality rates. What good is 'modern' medicine when there is no food, clean water or electricity? What good are hospitals where people and supplies cannot get to them?

IMO in lots of cases folks in countries where there are high mortality rates are suffering *because* of the imposition of western methods, rather than suffering from the *absence* of them. The application of western industrial values has robbed millions of people worldwide of their traditional environments and practices that have allowed them to live fairly well for centuries, and replaced them with systems that do not deliver as promised.

Is there a way for dullards like me to discern the importance of these musings?

Well, I note there are no postmodern engineers, or nuerosurgeons. And if there were, I doubt anyone would use them. Because when it counts everyone is an empiricist.

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Originally posted by jeff house:
The way to measure whether medical scientists know anything, or are merely arrogant, is to take a look at life spans in countries where medicine is largely absent.

Not so long ago, the average life-span of women in the Northwest Territories was 28 years.

Now it is 66.

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Anchoress has already taken care of part of what I would have said in response to this post.

Embedded in it is a common misconception of what scholars in a number of disciplines (statisticians, epidemiologists, medical historians, social historians, etc) are talking about when they discuss life expectancy.

Scholars study a series of life-expectancy tables (which are really death tables) -- not just life expectancy at birth, but life expectancy at 20, at 40, at 65. A moment's reflection will tell you that those are significantly different populations each time, somewhat more select each time, and "select" on several different counts.

We have enough statistics from Western Europe and North America since the late C18 to draw useful historical conclusions about what factors most affect life expectancy at each stage of life. Life expectancy at birth is the yo-yo table: it is affected by almost everything, beginning with the health of the mother and her socio-economic status, but including any other factor you can think of -- medical advances, yes, but most consistently, and most dramatically through the C19, shifts in general social welfare, both up and down.

The most common causes of death for people in their twenties and thirties always have been and still are wars, accidents, and epidemic diseases. Historical comparisons of the tables for l-e at 20 and, to a lesser degree, at 40, show that medical advances have had a predictable, moderate impact on survival for these cohorts, understanding of infectious/contagious diseases especially having been a true victory thus far, although not an uncomplicated one, of course.

The population that reaches 65 is still a select population, although obviously not quite as select as the C18 cohort. In the C18, you got to be 65 either because you had great genes or because you had lived a privileged life. Now, it is true, medicine and social advances both get far far more people through to 65 who would have died younger even fifty years ago.

However: the great lesson: the tables for l-e at 65 have basically not changed at all since the late C18. We have gained perhaps a year on average, but given the much bigger and substantially different populations involved, the lack of change is striking. On average, today's 65-yr-old men can expect to live eleven or twelve years more, women a couple of years longer. These are averages, of course.

In other words, it is odd to say that medical advances of any kind, even the legitimate ones , extend life expectancy. At certain stages of life, they may help larger numbers of people to survive that stage and join the next, smaller cohort. But the tables seem to indicate that social change has historically had a much greater role in doing that at all stages of life.

Blake, I'm not sure where you get that reading of me from, but no: I don't do beginnings or endings. I just do close reading.

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But the tables seem to indicate that social change has historically had a much greater role in doing that at all stages of life.

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Isn't it rather obvious, though, that "social change" was driven by science, medical included?

London, England cleaned up it's water system in the 1800's based on carefull statistics gathering, coupled with the contageon theory of desease, another scientific discovery.

The wealthy didn't change society because it was the right thing to do. They changed it based on the evidence that showed it was in their best interests to change it.

Like I said, in the final analysis, we are all devotees of the scientific method. To be human is to be an empiricist.

My point wasn't about correctness. It was about naive enthusiasm for what medical science can and can't do, has or hasn't done. That is all.

I have to side with TomPaine on this;

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Like I said, in the final analysis, we are all devotees of the scientific method. To be human is to be an empiricist.

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Life expectancy at birth is the yo-yo table: it is affected by almost everything, beginning with the health of the mother

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Sorry to be so "unsubtle", but maybe the mother's health is a factor affected by such things as the substantial conquest of many diseases, such as smallpox, polio, and malaria?

And yes, social factors do influence things. For example, the availability of universal professional health care is extremely important.

So is education, for example, teaching people that cleaning ones hands before cooking is a useful measure, teaching about the dangers of raw pork, and a thousand other things.