I don't understand the model you are working with here.

"The sun is shining"--fact

Now, what does comprehension of that fact and the interpretation of it involve?

Zeth a fact can neither be true or false, it just is. The attribution of falsifiableness is an interpretation of the fact. The only fact we actually discussed was a hypothetical (X person does and action) in this case bombs something. All subsequent discussion is interpretation. All interpretation of that fact is influenced by experience, ideology, culture, chemistry, biology etc... It is not an argument out of the (much derided by ken in happy ad hominem attacks, idealism) camp. It is strict empiricism, the only thing that is a fact in this case is that X person bombed.

My argument the relativism comes straight from a functional standpoint. Given the static parameters of experience, ideology, culture, chemistry, biology etc... in one place time and person it is a functional fact (i.e. a person uses it as an operational foundation for his/her actions) that the person who bombed (fact) is X or Y. Expand that to include all possible interpretations of the (fact person X Bombed), it is a functional fact (see above) that person X can be terrorist, freedom fighter, and everything inbetween. This being because random person Z uses the interpretation of a fact as a functional fact.


For Ken since he likes it simple and at this point I'm not above using not so subtle "I think you are stupid and pig headed" themes in my post.

If a person truely believes that he will get to where he wants to go by going in a direction it doesn't matter if there is a cliff in front of him. he is going that way anyway. The event of him falling off the cliff is the natural result of gravity. The world is full of people who do things because they believe it to be so. We all do. And we do them in spite of "the facts".

What I meant is that the true proposition which is reported by the fact, is still true, no matter if the fact is recognized. You don't believe that the true proposition reported by the fact is true, unless said fact is recognized?

I've always thought that arguing from a functional standpoint was a good argument against relativism. Saying that it is true that drinking and driving is dangerous is many times more functional than saying that it is neither true nor false that drinking and driving is dangerous. And you know, despite experience, ideology, culture and all that, years of saying that it is dangerous have lead to less people doing it. And less deaths, less people in wheelchairs for the rest of their lives, less heartbroken mothers.

This is true in that if more people treat the bombing functionally as terrorism it is likely that the incidences of bombing will also. The result of the bombing here, just like the result of drinking and driving is not in question. The motive of the bomber is.

---------- Post added 05-25-2010 at 03:34 PM ----------



Is there a falisfiable proposition that can be made about the fact that (X did the action of bombing) aside from the fact that (X did the action of bombing)?

So why not say "he is a terrorist who thinks he is a freedom fighter" instead of "he is both a terrorist and a freedom fighter"?

Because someone else would say that he is a freedom fighter who you that person thinks is a terrorist. Human behavior as of yet has not been quantifiably logical to impose that he can't be one and the other at the same time is imposing a physical law on behavior.

But when you say that he is "both a terrorist and a freedom fighter" someone else will say "no, he's a terrorist" and someone else will say "no, he's a freedom fighter". At least, this is my attempted reply, but I'm at a loss as to why you care that someone else would say he is a freedom fighter. Saying that he "is a terrorist who thinks he is a freedom fighter" is as good as saying that at least one person thinks he is a freedom fighter.

We can talk in terms of facts without pretending that people don't disagree about them.

There are literally dozens of things I could write in retort to this, pulling the sentences apart from one another, and querying each of them separately, and repeatedly.

(I'd only skip over the question about psychosis, which really is complex, on every level, and not suitable for a glib reply.)

But what would really fascinate me would be to understand what you mean, what you're getting at (never mind whether I agree with it or not).

To get one possibility out of the way: are you saying something more than that all human assertions are, to some extent, imprecise and fallible? (I'd agree with that.)

In particular, when you suggest that Fox Mulder may be wrong, and that there may be no truth out there, do you mean there is no real world?

(I assume Fox Mulder himself means that there are really aliens, etc. out there, but perhaps he means that the Cigarette Smoking Man et al. know the truth about the aliens, etc., but they aren't letting on?)

Or do you mean only that, although there is a real world, it is not entirely "out there"? (I'd agree with that.)

Your words don't seem to leave much room for doubt that you think there is no such thing as 'reality', however defined. I don't see how such a view can even make sense, but it feels as if it would be futile to try to argue about it (even though I been tempted to, and have choked back several responses).

Instead, I'll just mention a list of several [alleged] facts which have struck me in the last few years, and ask you whether you really believe, in each case, that the [alleged] fact in question is nothing more than some sort of social conspiracy ... the conspiracy in question presumably not itself being a fact ... you see, I can hardly even imagine what you could possibly be coherently asserting, even though I'm trying not to argue!

(Factual corrections welcomed.)

To make a black hole, the Earth would have to be compressed into a ball of radius (or diameter?) about 2 cm.

There are more stars in the heavens than all the grains of sand in all the world's beaches.

The age of the universe is 13-15 billion years.

A thimbleful of neutron star material weighs over 100 million tons.

For 1 second, a supernova puts out more energy than all the stars in all the galaxies in the universe.

We share 95% of our DNA with the gorilla, 53% with the cabbage.

90% of the living cells in a human body are bacteria? Really? [I must have heard that one wrong, mustn't I?]

There are no recorded instances of a healthy wolf attacking a human being.

The tallest tree ever is/was a 435' Australian mountain ash (eucalypt).

12% of hospital costs in the UK are caused by alcohol-related problems.

About 250,000 mathematical theorems are proved (in published papers) every year.

In 2001, "up to half a million" children [but what does that mean, exactly?] in the UK were robbed of their mobile phones.

A blue whale's tongue is heavier than an elephant, and a male blue whale's penis is 16 feet long.

More U.S. soldiers committed suicide after serving in Vietnam than were killed in the war itself.

Poor people in Britain donate 3% of their income to charity, rich people 0.7%.

Ronald Reagan walked up to his own son at his high school graduation, failed to recognise him, and introduced himself as the President.

By melting ice, Herschel accurately estimated the Sun's power output at about a billion billion billion (i.e. 10^27?) watts, 1 second of which would satisfy the Earth's power needs for a million years.

The core of the Sun is so dense that the speed of light is less than 1 millimetre per second, and light can take over 200 years (I think they said) to reach the surface.

Richard Leakey points out that we and the chimpanzees are more closely related than horses and asses, who can interbreed, which suggests that we might be able to interbreed with chimpanzees.

Samuel Johnson started out by believing that no word in English could have more than 7 applications, but found from his survey that many words could have many more; for instance, he found the one verb "take" to have 134 different applications, which altogether took him about 8000 words to explain. Difficult verbs (e.g. to "bear") started with the letter "B"! (There are apparently no difficult ones beginning with "A".) Johnson was very disappointed with the printed volumes for "A" and "B", but it was too late to change them. The OED began life as a revision of Johnson's dictionary, and still contains 1700 of his original definitions.

Richard Dawkins says that if he held his mother's hand, and she her mother's hand, and so on right back to our common ancestor with the chimpanzees, 5 to 6 million years ago, the line would stretch about 300 miles.

Elvis came in his leather trousers during the 1968 NBC TV special.

Overweight people burn off more energy than slim people.

About 600,000,000 years ago, "part of Scotland and Northern Ireland were [...] near the Equator [...], and England and Southern Ireland [and Wales] were right down South, almost near the Antarctic Circle".

The variable star Rho Cassiopeiae is a yellow hypergiant, 450 times the diameter of the Sun, and 550,000 times as bright.

No society in history has imprisoned as high a proportion of its population as the US. There are more 17-year-old black males in prison than in college. Prisons are run as businesses, and produce a very high proportion of all goods in certain sectors.

Lesbian and straight women are equally stimulated by viewing videos of sex, whether the sex they view is lesbian or straight. Gay and straight men, by contrast, respond differently in the way you would naively expect.

I don't have a vested interest in it either way Jeb. I was simply explaining how it could be given a particular tradition of looking at things. The strict material empiricist versus the forum thing is normal here. And for the most part I don't mind being part of the non-strict-material empiricist crowd. I respect POV's of people yourself like Zetherin who tend to make very well laid out arguments. In fact much of my rhetorical standpoint is self mediation between my tendency to lean toward the strictly empirical and my experience with things not strictly empirical. The only thing that gets my dander up about subjects like this is the ouright dismissal of the possibility of the non-materialistically empirical coupled with the inevitable derision of those viewpoints.

So in short, I'm actually fine with saying "he's a terrorist that thinks he's a freedom fighter" but I also know that saying it and being fine with it are part of my ideological makeup.

Yes, I find that the use of (and part of the motivation behind) relativism is to guard against our own potential arrogance and dismissal of unfamiliar viewpoints.

-edit-

Unfortunately though, relativism seems to lend itself to being more than a reminder. I have heard people, while telling others to be careful about making assumptions about another culture, say "because they might very well believe that...something or other", where the "something or other" turns out to be something that is actually despised in that culture.

I think reminding oneself that you don't know much about how it is over there is a much simpler check on our bias than considering the notion that truth is subjective as a way of opening one's mind.

Funny, that's exactly what I think is the use of realism!

I find it hard to improve on this statement (made by someone who, ironically, no longer seems to be a realist!):

Absolute values - talk.philosophy.misc | Google Groups

I find it much more productive to be practical about a utile un-provable than be ridgid about a non-utile proof.

The main point that many people here fail to recognize is not about 'factual validity' proper. Factual Validity, as Gosh hinted at and which I will elucidate is highly dependent on cultural principles and standards. It also lends itself to a kind of statement which is considered to be *factual* regardless of whether it is a "Real" fact.

"The earth is flat" is a factual statement, and so is "he is a terrorist"; my point now is not to determine whether the logic behind either of these factual statements (which if you pay attention, are actually propositions) is true or not, but the kind of statement that we are dealing with; they are part of the cultural/linguistic fabric; the point and intent of many of these statements is not purely to establish facts, but rather to claim that these statements themselves derive themselves from cultural realities, e.g. given a set of cultural factors, such a statement will coherently flow from what we know as reality and become fact.

In other words, when we name something, when we deem someone a terrorist, we are not doing so because we have carefully analyzed the "definition" of a terrorist and have logically concluded that this person indeed falls within it, but rather because "Terrorist" has a kind of typicality associated with it, and this typicality - these highlighted features are those which we see in someone and therefore *detect* and *sense* that he is a terrorist. Formal logic, and whether this attribution is actually correct is always an afterthought and is always a justification rather than a premise. As Gosh said, a fact is nothing without interpretation, this interpretation is the typicality invoked - the grounds for this justification, the actual factuality of the statement - whether the statement becomes true or false depends on the justification - if there is no accepted justification then it becomes folklore, folk knowledge etc, and if there is indeed an agreeable justification it then becomes a 'fact'.

The discussion here is not whether a terrorist is "really" a terrorist, as this is entirely dependent on what we actually consider to be the justification for this statement, which may or may not be true, empirical, logical etc. but rather the actual initial attribution of the term terrorist to the individual. Saying "But he *is* a terrorist" misses the point as the argument does not talk about the actual dissection and analysis of the justification, but rather about the cultural reality that is conducive to the typicalities which bring about this attribution in the first place.

In other words, people make claims without justifying them.

All facts are true. "True fact" is a pleonasm. The question is, what is the fact. For instance, is it a fact (is it true) that the attack on Dresden was an act of terrorism? That is where the controversy arises.

What he is saying is that people make claims with alternate justificatorial criteria, then when challenged with another set of criteria revisit the original claim. The issue is the criteria on which a claim is based, not the claim. Something can be a true claim using X set of criteria but not Y. That has been the issue with this whole thread. Is there a universal set of criteria on which to base a claim?

In all the practical sense of the concept, I agree, that there is a reality outside all of our human chatter. So yes, I agree that certain words and actions occurred independent of what is said about them in retrospect.

In the rape case, I suppose it comes down to details, legally and socially. We all agree, I hope, that "no" means "no." More difficult cases include partial or complete intoxication. How drunk is too drunk? And what if both parties are drunk? What if a woman initiates "erotic play" in this drunken or mutually drunken state and does not say "no."

I'm just trying to show the points at which the word becomes a little blurry. I agree in every practical sense that there were/are facts involved.
This is just the way we humans think, and must think. It went down one way and not another. The hard part is interpretation. Well, it's not always hard; sometimes guilt is obvious.

---------- Post added 05-25-2010 at 06:57 PM ----------



But doesn't a word like "terrorism" have a non-factual meaning? It does imply certain factual actions, but it also implies more than this. I'll agree that some could use it in a more neutral sense, or at least attempt to. But it's one of those words....

I would not call them criteria as these are essentially cognitive features and keywords. I am saying that people make claims based on deeply rooted cultural and psychological features which stand out and are noteworthy -- and I know I'll get a lot of people upset at this, but in our culture for example, a Terrorist is a religious fanatic who uses irregular means to combat us or our allies. This is the cognitive aspect, "Religious", "Extreme", "Fanatic", "Non-Organized", "Irregular" -- these are all key features we see in a terrorist, even though our *definition*, that is, our *justification* for calling someone a terrorist is completely different. The first is the "Gestalt" if you will, the second is the rational, discursive justification. We are speaking about the variations in the first sort.

Well said. I would also suggest that no one seriously argues in the strong sense that "truth is subjective." (or do they?) I think it's more a discussion about what constitutes "objectivity." For instance, the correspondence theory of truth, the coherence theory, etc.

Even though I see the general utility of the correspondence theory, and respect it for this, I also see that "objectivity" is largely founded on social language use. I put "objectivity" in quotes because it is indeed just an abstraction, even if this abstraction refers to something concrete.