Subjectivity is Failed Objectivity

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I've been thinking that subjective 'truths' may be nothing more than objective falsehoods. I have been thinking about this for approximately ten seconds. I think I probably need to refine this opinion.

Does anybody agree/disagree/care?

I'll give an example... Moral Relativists often claim that truths about what is right and wrong are different for different cultures, or different individuals. They say that morality is subjective, so if one person thinks it's wrong to kill and another person thinks it is permissible, neither person is correct nor incorrect. But I think that when someone says 'It is wrong to kill', more often than not they are making an attempt to describe mind-independent reality. That is why people often impose their moral views on others, and defend them with a lot of passion - because they think they're the ones who are 'right', and that everybody else has got it 'wrong'. I don't think that moral claims are just claims about one's own subjective, inner-reality. They are attempts to describe what is objectively true (i.e. they assume Moral Realism, which is the vie that there are objective facts about what is right/wrong).

I also think that moral realism is false, and therefore that all moral claims are false. A relativist would say that moral claims are subjectively 'true' but I say that they are just objectively false. I've thought that for a long time, but now I'm starting to think that it could be true of all so-called 'subjective truths'.

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Is this in any way connected to the fact you want to have sex with underage girls?

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Chai wrote:

Is this in any way connected to the fact you want to have sex with underage girls?

Haha, no. Don't quite see the link there.

Well, I suppose my views about morality entail that underage sex is not wrong. But the reason I want to have relationships with teenage girls (rather than merely fantasize about them) is not that I don't think it's wrong... it's that I don't think it's harmful. In fact, I think it could be as mutually pleasant as an adult relationship. If it were harmful, I would not want to do it. It wouldn't be wrong, but it would still be cruel, and I don't enjoy being cruel.

Anyway, this thread isn't about morality.

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oh....since you used the word "moral" or "morality" at least 8 times in your initial post....I thought it had something to do with it.

as in...You all are just using your subjective morality to say that my wanting to have have sex with underage girls is wrong, when it's obviously an objective goal.

how could I have been so stupid?

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Chai wrote:

oh....since you used the word "moral" or "morality" at least 8 times in your initial post....I thought it had something to do with it.

Try reading my posts, instead of scanning them for recurring words. Look at the title and the opening paragraph.

It's a thread about subjectivity and objectivity in general. I talked about morality just to give an example of one application of my opinion about subjectivity. I clearly stated that it was an example. I could just as easily have talked about aesthetics, and argued that subjective 'truths' about what is beautiful/ugly are really just objective falsehoods.

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as in...You all are just using your subjective morality to say that my wanting to have have sex with underage girls is wrong, when it's obviously an objective goal.

So you didn't read my second post either. Look again:

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...the reason I want to have relationships with teenage girls...is not that I don't think it's wrong... it's that I don't think it's harmful... If it were harmful, I would not want to do it.

I don't believe that underage sex is 'wrong', because nothing is 'wrong'. But that is not relevant to my view on whether it should be done, or should be accepted by society... if somebody showed me conclusive evidence that it is a harmful practice, then I would no longer want to do it or to defend it, regardless of whether or not it is wrong. I don't believe that murder is wrong either, but I don't defend murder. Murder is cruel, and I am not in favour of cruelty.

So nice try, but you're wrong about my motives. The purpose of this thread is to discuss whether there is such a thing as 'subjective truth'. If you want to discuss hebephilia, there's another thread for that.

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I wasn't scanning...using morality as an example was to bring morality into the subject...I think I paraphased your meaning pretty well.

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Chai wrote:

I wasn't scanning...using morality as an example was to bring morality into the subject...I think I paraphased your meaning pretty well.

But you implied that I wanted to have a discussion about morality, for the purposes of defending my sexuality. And that is dead wrong. I was just trying to illustrate what I meant by the title of the thread. Morality was jsut the first example I thought of.

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Agrote, I don't agree but it IS an interesting idea. What about the opposite: Objectivity is failed subjectivity?

I like John Searles' dictum that everything is subjective and that's an objective fact.

You talk, I think, about a world of facts that exist (objectively) even though we are unaware of them. That's such a loaded thesis. We can't say a world of phenomena that we are unaware of because that would be contradictory. Phenomena are experienced by definition. I agree that there is a world of something that I am not aware of, but that world is, IN A SENSE, non-existent for me. MY world consists of that which is conceptualized in one way or another. I am not an idealist who claims that (esse est percipi) that to exist--as "substance"--is to be perceived. But the world that makes sense to me, the world that has existential meaning (personal reality) for me is a world that is profoundly subjective in nature. That is to say its "form", "meaning" and "value" are of my making. It's "objective" reality (that which physicists have yet to discover) is something else, and whatever that is it includes my true self but is not experienced in the usual sense of the word.

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JLNobody wrote:

MY world consists of that which is conceptualized in one way or another. I am not an idealist who claims that (esse est percipi) that to exist--as "substance"--is to be perceived. But the world that makes sense to me, the world that has existential meaning (personal reality) for me is a world that is profoundly subjective in nature. That is to say its "form", "meaning" and "value" are of my making. It's "objective" reality (that which physicists have yet to discover) is something else, and whatever that is it includes my true self but is not experienced in the usual sense of the word.

Where do your experiences come from? Isn't it plausible that they are caused by your perception of things in a mind-independent reality? If you see a pear, is it not plausible that you see a pear because there is a pear, and light is bouncing off the pear and into your eyes etc.

If not, then how come you can see a pear?

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Agrote, your position is obviously that of the epistemology referred to as naive realism, the perspective that the world is as we see it. This is the epistemology of my everyday life. But it is not philosophically correct. A more philosophically problematical position is that what we see results from a combination of "external" physical conditions and "internal" neurological/cultural conditions Notice the quotes: the distinction is problematical. All knowleldge is a matter of relationships between the processes in the world of "objects" like pears and the processes constituting the experiences of "subjects" like the perceiver of the pear.
The experience of a pear consists, then, of relations between so-called external and internal processes.

A man born blind cannot immediately see "a pear" when his sight is restored. He must learn to organize a bewildering array of "raw" sensations into conceptual units like pears, and this he does with reference to rules provided by his culture; he learns to see "pear."

So, I guess we can say that the experience, pear, can be defined in terms of both external processes, like the properties* of a pear and how they are translated into the objective side of "pear image" and the objective properties of a culturally conditioned nervous system which can be translated as the subjective side of the "pear image".
But it's never a simple matter of subjects seeing pears because pears are pears and eyes are like mere windows. The process of experience is always complex.

* The notion of properties is also problematical. Take the properties of an apple. If we remove its "roundness", then its "redness", then its "weight", then its "flavor", and so on, what do we have left if not its mere "thingness." How absurd. Can there be such a blank property as thingness? And what about its invisible "properties" like its nutritional value, its molecuar structure and on and on? Are these properties something we can abstract from the apple and leave an applething intact or are they abstract conceptual characteristics we ascribe to, and thus constitute, that external process we call apple?

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Agrote, your position is obviously that of the epistemology referred to as naive realism, the perspective that the world is as we see it.

Is that what naive realism is? If so, that is not my position. My position is ontological, not epistemic. I don't know to what extent the world is as we see it. But I believe that there is a world, and that there are things (or instantiations of properties) which exist independently of how we percieve them or what we believe about them.

The world might be completely different to how we see it. That is consistent with my realism, because it stills means that there is an objective, mind-independent reality.

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Agrote, I stand corrected about your orientation, even though I do not share it. Instead of naive realism you may be an objectivist. My confusion rests on my assumption that all objectivists are naive realists. To me there is no understanding of the world, no characterization of it that is mind-independent. Your "realism", I suppose, posits a world in which our minds have no awareness, like Kan't noumena. To me there is only phenomena in our experienced world, and that is always, indeed by definition, mind-dependent. A noumenal world would be non-existent for me, which is not to say that it does not exist. I would have no way of knowing that. To say it does not exist and is unknowable is to profess to know something about it. Right?

I'm not sure what you mean by epistemology and ontology.

By the way, I enjoy your posts; they are reasonable as are Chumly's even when I do not agree with them (I hope you can say the same about mine).

Nightrider, on the other hand.....

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JLNobody wrote:

I'm not sure what you mean by epistemology and ontology.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge, and I think ontology is the study of being, or of what is. My view on the external world is essentially ontological, and not epistemological. I believe that properties or things exist mind-independently. E.g., I reckon that pears could still exist even if all creatures were suddenly wiped out and there was nobody around to experience them. Similarly, trees can fall in the woods even when nobody is around.

These views have nothing to do with epistemology, because they are views about mind-independent reality - something about which we do not necessarily know all there is to know. Just because you see/hear/feel/sense something, that doesn't mean it's actually there. And just because you can't experience soemthing, that doesn't mean it isn't. Our senses, and what we come to 'know', do not tell us everything about what does/does not exist, because our brains and bodies are fallible. But if we think we see a pear, either there is one or there is not one - it's a matter of fact, because there is an objective external world in which pears may or may not dwell.

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By the way, I enjoy your posts; they are reasonable as are Chumly's even when I do not agree with them (I hope you can say the same about mine).

Certainly. There are a lot of people on here who can't write coherently, or who don't have the open-mindedness to take other people's views seriously (so they resort to personal attacks and sarcastic comments). You are not one of those people, well done![/quote]

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Does the world that exists objectively, i.e., mind-independently, contain objects with identities that are meaningful a priori (like pears), or does it consist of essentially meaningless processes (atomic, molecular)* that become meaningful when and because we have named them** by means of our meaning-generating (cultural) processes?

* even though these too are named processes.

** existence precedes essense (the existentialist mantra).

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JLNobody wrote:

Does the world that exists objectively, i.e., mind-independently, contain objects with identities that are meaningful a priori (like pears), or does it consist of essentially meaningless processes (atomic, molecular)* that become meaningful when and because we have named them** by means of our meaning-generating (cultural) processes?

* even though these too are named processes.

** existence precedes essense (the existentialist mantra).

Urm, I don't know. I suppose that I believe that it contains 'things' (using that term very loosely) which either cause or correspond to at least some of our sensations. E.g. there's a thing that causes/corresponds to my sensation of seeing a pear, and that thing would exist even if I wasn't having that sensation. Whether that thing actually is a 'pear', I don't know.

I don't think things can be meaningful unless we give them meaning. So if a pear falls in the woods when noone is around, I suppose it isn't a 'juicy', 'pear-shaped', 'soft', 'green' thing. But it may be an instantiation of properties which have the potential to give us sensations of juiciness, greenness etc.

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Agrote, I share more or less your definitions of ontology and epistemology. And I see why you disclaim epistemology tendences, as did Nietzsche. But I believe you both have epistemologies as tacit or implicit as they may be. Everyone has a working knowledge of the nature of knowledge and the legitimate ways it is acquired (or generated).
And even the nihilism (the emptiness of all things and processes of Buddhism and Nietzsche's rejection of all "beings" in favor of "becomings") are forms of ontology.

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Subjective truth is what most humans believe and live by; it's objective to the individual, and that's what matters.

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We're closer than I thought. Very Happy

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cicerone imposter wrote:

Subjective truth is what most humans believe and live by; it's objective to the individual, and that's what matters.

It's only what matters subjectively.

Some humans behave and live by the belief that God exists, and others behave and live by the belief that God does not exist. They can't both be right. One of them is objectively wrong. That's what matters to me.

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JLNobody wrote:

Agrote, I share more or less your definitions of ontology and epistemology. And I see why you disclaim epistemology tendences, as did Nietzsche. But I believe you both have epistemologies as tacit or implicit as they may be. Everyone has a working knowledge of the nature of knowledge and the legitimate ways it is acquired (or generated).

Yeah, I'm not saying I don't have views on epistemology. But this thread was intended to go beyond epistemology, and be about the true (ontological) reality that exists regardless of what we know about it, or regardless of what is true about epistemology.

I guess I'm not all that bothered about knowing what the world is like. I just want there to be a world.

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Subjectivity is Failed Objectivity

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