Never Rebutted: Can Anyone Do It?

[kweschnz]

I just stumbled on a passage (see below) that echoes the arguments of a former best friend as well as an “infidels” forum where I tried to inject some truth. There was no refutation of this last post in the thread where it appeared, so I am desperately trying to get a hold of a solid counter-argument. Perhaps there’s already one here in the forums somewhere; if so, please direct me there. TIA.

We are historically situated culturally contingent finite beings with no abilty to step outside of our contexts. Having different histories means we can be rationally entitled to believe different things.

We have no way to appeal to standards of justifcation and for what ought to count as sufficient evidence to support our beliefs that themselves stand outside of history and culture. Our standards for evidence are for the most part handed to us by our cultures. There is no transcendent faculty of Reason that stands apart from culture. We ask the questions we ask, because we have the concerns that humans have, not because these questions are simply given to us by reality. They is no non-human part of reason that can claim independence of human values. Logic is objective in the sense that it is easy to get agreement on it, but not in the sense that Soulewolf wants it to be objective as nonhuman. It is not something value-free, it is a way we have learned to generate good rationales for our actions. Looking to objectivity versus subjectivity as an attempt to get past the human to something non human is like trying to step out of your own skin. There is no view from nowhere. We point out certain facts and not others and favor certain justificatory practices over others because we have the values we have. Objectivity is not a means for getting past values. It is a matter of asserting some values over others.

This is an excerpt from the last post in this thread.

I need to add one further crucial related point that was at issue in my own discussions: the idea that “society” is the ultimate arbiter of what is right and wrong in terms of what any group’s (nation, etc.) rules are. I replied that in that case, one can’t condemn something like Auschwitz or the execution of homosexuals, because those societies determined that those practices were “right” for them. The reply was, “Well, that’s simply the way it is.”

 

[DianaCC]

This is nothing more than good old fashioned radical relativism or subjectivism. It refutes itself. If you feel snarky you can refute it by saying, “You only believe this because you grew up in an affluent western post-Christian democracy in which truth and its knowability are being deprecated in order to make way for ideological tyranny. That’s simply the way it is.”

 

[At_Trent]

Faith crushes it

 

[Iron_Donkey]

There is no transcendent faculty of Reason that stands apart from culture.

Demonstrably false. Mathematics, for example, is independent of culture. That’s not to say that the expression of mathematics doesn’t vary, but it can easily be seen that what is being expressed is identical across cultures (in so far as any particular part of it is understood by those within a particular culture).

And this is only possible if there is some form of reason that is culture independent, since math is driven by reason, not as a way of determining rationalizations for what we want to do or believe, but as a way of getting truth from truth.

The argument that they’re putting forward is essentially one of laziness. Different cultures tend to value different things, I can’t figure out how to value one over another, so it must not be possible. Lack of discovery of a standard does not imply a lack of standard (and, of course, denying the standards that have been discovered doesn’t make them false either).

They also err in attempting to say that objectivity is like trying to find a view from nowhere. It is much more like a view from everywhere, if we want to use those types of terms.

 

[Bluegoat]

This is nothing more than good old fashioned radical relativism or subjectivism. It refutes itself. If you feel snarky you can refute it by saying, “You only believe this because you grew up in an affluent western post-Christian democracy in which truth and its knowability are being deprecated in order to make way for ideological tyranny. That’s simply the way it is.”

Yes, this.

OP, If what they are saying is true, there is no way they could know it to be true. That would require somehow getting above the various paradigms for thought, which the theory itself says is impossible.

Anyone who really thinks this should just be quiet and drink beer or whatever makes him happy - there is no point in trying to preach to people, since there is no truth to preach.

You might find the book The Abolition of Man by CS Lewis to be helpful and readable on this topic.

 

[Hokomai]

This is true if we just sit and think. You can know things more or less objectively by interacting with them and predicting their behaviour, and repeating the observations. "Right and wrong’ are, however, determined by society, that is, by us.