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it is quite precise and surely wrong?

 
 
Reply Tue 27 Jan, 2015 10:41 am
"it is quite precise and surely wrong"? In my intuition, if something is precise, it can't be wrong at the same time?
Is this rhetoric called "ambivalent rhetoric"? Is so, do you think it is logically acceptable?

Context:

rationally), but which remain impossible to describe with precision. Consider the complete set of "birthday wishes" corresponding to every conscious hope that people have entertained silently while blowing out candles on birthday cakes. Will we ever be able to retrieve these unspoken thoughts? Of course not. Many of us would be hard-pressed to recall even one of our own birthday wishes. Does this mean that these wishes never existed or that we can!ˉt make true or false statements about them? What if I were to say that every one of these wishes was phrased in Latin, focused on improvements in solar panel technology, and produced by the activity of exactly 10,000 neurons in each person's brain? Is this a vacuous assertion? No, it is quite precise and surely wrong. But only a lunatic could believe such a thing about his fellow human beings. Clearly, we can make true or false claims about human (and animal) subjectivity, and we can often evaluate these claims without having access to the facts in question. This is a perfectly reasonable, scientific, and often necessary thing to do. And yet many scientists will say that moral truths do not exist, simply because certain facts about human experience cannot be readily known, or may never be known. As I hope to show, this misunderstanding has created tremendous confusion about the relationship between human knowledge and human values.
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