What is this "scientific method" you all speak of?

[Bradski]

Again, not kosher as an argument.

I think that we are beginning to realise that by ‘not kosher’ you mean ‘a scenario where there is not universal agreement’.

And a funny thing…whatever scenario is proposed, whether it is objectively beautiful or ugly or right or wrong seems to always agree with your position. Again, I will ask for anything that you consider to be objectively beautiful or ugly or whatever, where you disagree.

If you can find one, then the situation is obviously then relative. If you can’t find one, then it appears you have direct access to the correct ruling on all objective matters. You are never wrong. If in the majority, that just proves it. If the minority, then all the others are wrong.

You will be god-like in your certitude. A seer for all. World leaders will defer to your judgement in all cases.

That war is justified!
That fish is too salty!
You wife is plug ugly!
This porridge is too cold!

It’s the End of Doubt. Praise the Lord…

 

[Charlemagne_III]

I think that we are beginning to realise that by ‘not kosher’ you mean ‘a scenario where there is not universal agreement’.

And a funny thing…whatever scenario is proposed, whether it is objectively beautiful or ugly or right or wrong seems to always agree with your position. Again, I will ask for anything that you consider to be objectively beautiful or ugly or whatever, where you disagree.

If you can find one, then the situation is obviously then relative. If you can’t find one, then it appears you have direct access to the correct ruling on all objective matters. You are never wrong. If in the majority, that just proves it. If the minority, then all the others are wrong.

You will be god-like in your certitude. A seer for all. World leaders will defer to your judgement in all cases.

That war is justified!
That fish is too salty!
You wife is plug ugly!
This porridge is too cold!

It’s the End of Doubt. Praise the Lord…

Are you absolutely certain of all the above?

 

[Bradski]

Are you absolutely certain of all the above?

I’m pretty certain that you don’t have a reply that won’t attempt to deflect from answering the question.

 

[Lion_IRC]

…Is hunting objectively good or bad? What sort of a majority do we need? Or are the percentages irrelevant and what actually decides the matter is what Charles thinks on it.

Because that leaves you somewhere between a rock and a hard place. If everything is objectively ugly or beautiful or right or wrong just based on your personal view then your argument is: It is beautiful because I say so! If that is not the case, then you are going to have to come up with something you claim is objective about which you personally disagree.

In which case, it becomes…subjective.

I think that the careful, deliberate act of hunting (for food) is objectively good - on a moral landscape basis - because it can objectively/empirically be shown that the active pursuit of nutrition
benefits the overall flourishing and continuation of life on earth.

 

[Hee_Zen]

blah

Changing the goalposts… or trying to. The current topic is about the existence of some “objective” epistemological method to make value judgments about the subjective attributes of aesthetics. Since you have nothing to say about that, you try to move goalposts, and hope that no one will notice. As said before… par for the course.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Changing the goalposts… or trying to. The current topic is about the existence of some “objective” epistemological method to make value judgments about the subjective attributes of aesthetics. Since you have nothing to say about that, you try to move goalposts, and hope that no one will notice. As said before… par for the course.

No, actually, I’m just pointing out that the goalposts are pretty much worthless placed where you have put them, since the goalposts, in themselves, don’t allow anything of value to be decided upon.

It would be like planting goalposts such a stingy distance apart that it is impossible to actually play any game since no points of any value can be made by either team.

You may feel your goalposts are set in stone and by merely pointing out that they are worthless where you set them I am “moving the goalposts,” but I never agreed that your placement was acceptable or suitable to begin with.

Nor have I been taken in by your insistence that by assuming the right to place the goalposts where you have arbitrarily decided, you thereby also earn the right to detemine all the rules of play.

 

[Lion_IRC]

The goal post analogy is a good one.

In a game of soccer/football, the players all agree that the rules of the game are objectively real.

You cant just make up the rules (or move the goal posts) while you are in the middle of a game.

But more importantly, the rules of the game are enforced by an objective Umpire. The players may dispute whether or not the ball was illegally touched or didnt make the 50 yard line or whether the half-time siren had sounded - but ultimately, the Umpire has the arbitrary power to make the objective and binding ruling.

In a moral dilemma, two humans might “argue the toss” so to speak, but the existence of a Higher Power (Umpire) with the prerogative and ability to enforce the objective “right” and to punish the objective “wrong” is what really distinguishes something as “objectively” true.

A law which nobody ever enforced could hardly be called a law, let alone an objectively moral law. (Likewise, an army which nobody could prove was the biggest/strongest/most powerful in the world, could never objectively be called the Super Power.)

 

[Peter_Plato]

Changing the goalposts… or trying to. The current topic is about the existence of some “objective” epistemological method to make value judgments about the subjective attributes of aesthetics. Since you have nothing to say about that, you try to move goalposts, and hope that no one will notice. As said before… par for the course.

To be clear, the current topic is the scientific method, which, according to you, is the only reliable method for determining anything objective about the world since “objective” entails, for you, repeatable and measureable.

My point has been that having such a miserly view of objectivity gets us no where because it tells us absolutely nothing about what is worth our time to become involved with, what is meaningful, what is significant, what we ought to do, what we should think about and what ought to preoccupy the little time we have.

Neither does it tell us what society or government should do with respect to ordering civil life and constructing laws or administering those laws.

In short, your grounds for objectivity provide us with a lame duck epistemology that neither looks nor tastes very appealing – not that there is much meat on the beast to speak of, anyway. Far too scrawny for my taste – I’d rather have something I can sink my teeth into and enjoy.

Just 'cause the thing sits still to be objectively and repeatedly measured does not mean it is worth dressing up and having as a meal.

How is that for mixing metaphors? Not to your taste, I’ll bet.

Yes, I know [blah, blah, blah.]

Oh, sorry…
I should have quoted your EXACT words:

blah

 

[Charlemagne_III]

I’m pretty certain that you don’t have a reply that won’t attempt to deflect from answering the question.

You suffer from the classic dilemma of relativism: nobody can be right but the relativist.

 

[Bradski]

You suffer from the classic dilemma of relativism: nobody can be right but the relativist.

I was just accused of this:

I notice you totally refuse to answer difficult questions…

Whereupon you received a reasonably detailed answer. How about you reciprocate?

 

[tonyrey]

Don’t see how it makes any difference. Her children are unlikely to think she’s both beautiful and ugly, just as you wouldn’t see Christ as both beautiful and ugly. Cognitive dissonance overload bro.

Cognitive absence! Children are often more perceptive than adults when it comes to recognising the beauty of love despite the ugliness of the grey hair, “the brow that’s all furrowed and wrinkled with care” and “the dear fingers so toil-worn for me”. There is such a thing as spiritual beauty - even though, alas, many people are not aware of it - wonderfully manifested in the life and teaching of Jesus.

You probably feel she’s ugly because humans tend to prefer symmetry around the vertical plane in a potential mate, since that’s an indicator of potential heath and suitability in humans. Sorry to rain on your parade, but without such raw matters of survival we might never have developed aesthetic feelings at all.

Darwinism is a hopelessly inadequate explanation of both the spiritual and physical beauty that are the basis of the teaching of Christ:

Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

Your original claim that materialism is the prevailing ideology is not supported by the evidence. Whether people would be better off adopting your ideology is a separate question.

Then how do you explain the decline in religious belief in the West? Vague beliefs without specific moral teaching have little influence on people’s lives. The fact that there are more than a million one-parent families in the UK speaks for itself - plus the fact that many people do not bother to get married…

 

[inocente]

This entire post is simply misconceived. I don’t have time at the moment to address it entirely, but I will say it is nonsense to demand a beaut-o-meter be presented because no one is claiming beauty is a measurable or quantifiable fact about the world that can be subjected to some metric or other, but I WOULD make the claim that beauty is an objective quality (not fact) with regard to things in the world, though not one necessarily subject to quantification in the sense you demand. Yet your position is that it must be before you accept beauty as an objective reality.

If beauty really was objective, there would have to be a procedure for deciding whether one thing is more or less beautiful than another. Otherwise there would be no way to determine whether Pink Floyd’s greatest hits are more/less beautiful than a can of baked beans, and your “objective quality” = your personal opinion.

That you now have inocente trumpeting your point of view doesn’t say much - he pretty much began on these forums claiming philosophy and logic were entirely subjective and without merit. He has slowly, over the past two years, been much less vocal about that, but his sympathies do have a tendency to be fideist and anti-reason.

Well no, none of that is true. There’s no need for tantrums, it’s not as if your life is in danger because your claim has failed, we’re only shooting the breeze here. You’ve always made personal attacks when you run out of rational arguments. That’s your “tell”, that’s how everyone knows you’re covering your retreat.

I am against faux pseudo-philosophy. The kind who pretends all philosophers agree, by ignoring all philosophers except the one in the poster on his bedroom wall. Or the kind who tries to force Christians into his own personal dogma. Or the kind who thinks philosophy means making up fairy stories to help him sleep at night.

Never had a problem with real philosophy. It would be good if there was a lot more of it.

 

[inocente]

What is interesting is that inocente – what seems a long time ago – used virtually those exact words for impugning all of philosophy as irrelevant and a waste of time BECAUSE philosophers have been unable to reach consensus about philosophical issues, completely forgetting that science has also failed to come to much of an abiding consensus regarding any of its theories which, likewise, are constantly changing.

You two, have, apparently, each found a sympathetic ear. It should be pointed out that you sit on opposite sides of the fence as far as the existence of God is concerned, however. Good luck working that one out.

You comparison doesn’t work. Science progresses. Newton got gravity right for all the data he had, and his equation is still used in most situations as it gives good answers. Einstein had more data and got even closer.

While the philosophy of beauty hasn’t got anywhere. The various opinions are interesting but they don’t make any progress, and they’re unhelpful. For instance, how is it that a man can look at portrait images of women and instantly decide which is the most beautiful face? Then, how come different men may make different choices? Is there a face which all men will unswervingly find most beautiful? Would that depend on photoshopping out some details? How much of this is cultural? In fairy stories, a male frog is supposed to find the princess more beautiful than a female frog. Do frogs have aesthetics?

The artist in me has all these questions and more, but it seems that armchair philosophers can’t answer a posteriori questions, only philosophers who get out of their armchairs and do some real-world research can find answers to such questions.

Whereas if you go to MoMA and sit in front of Monet’s water lilies, you start to see vivid colors, beautiful because they’re produced within the eye itself due to Monet’s careful arrangement of colors to create after-images. He knew enough to generate beauty within us. Artists give answers.


en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Lilies

 

[inocente]

Darwinism is a hopelessly inadequate explanation of both the spiritual and physical beauty that are the basis of the teaching of Christ:

Cut a couple of words out of that and you’ll have yourself a mighty fine haiku!

Then how do you explain the decline in religious belief in the West? Vague beliefs without specific moral teaching have little influence on people’s lives. The fact that there are more than a million one-parent families in the UK speaks for itself - plus the fact that many people do not bother to get married…

It’s regrettable and I’d have thought there are many factors: increased freedom and independence of women, greater individualism, higher wealth, routinely traveling all over the world when a couple of centuries back most people lived their whole life in one village…

I don’t know. Not sure people now are less spiritual or moral than the previous generation. Fewer go to church, but Christ is still here. Your lament reminded me of this:

Christian Zeal and Activity; John Adams; San Francisco SO (Edo de Waart) - ‘Adams states that the title of the movement was “stolen out of old Methodist gospel or hymn tune book” and is an arrangement of “Onward, Christian Soldiers”’

 

[Hee_Zen]

No, actually, I’m just pointing out that the goalposts are pretty much worthless placed where you have put them, since the goalposts, in themselves, don’t allow anything of value to be decided upon.

You just declared aesthetics to be useless. Actually, I agree, and that is what I have been trying to teach you in all these posts.

Just 'cause the thing sits still to be objectively and repeatedly measured does not mean it is worth dressing up and having as a meal.

So the study of reality is worthless? Now you declared science to be worthless. Way to go!

 

[Peter_Plato]

You just declared aesthetics to be useless. Actually, I agree, and that is what I have been trying to teach you in all these posts.

So the study of reality is worthless? Now you declared science to be worthless. Way to go!

You seem to have missed the key point. If objectivity - in the narrow sense you insist it must have - is all there is to knowing, then objectivity boils down to quantifiable accuracy. If the only kind of knowledge possible is the kind brought by the scientific method, then worth is an indeterminable and merely subjective quality - we can’t “know” anything about worth.

So don’t put YOUR problems on me. I didn’t declare aesthetics useless or science worthless. It is the implication from your position which I am trying to point out to you, which don’t even get YOU to THOSE conclusions, in any case.

You make a serious logical misstep, not unexpectedly, I might add. Your own position doesn’t lead to the conclusion that science is worthless or aesthetics useless. Those are not even qualities that can be determined by your method because worth and utility are not objective. What your position leads YOU to is that “worth” and “utility” have no objective meaning and are merely subjective and arbitrarily assigned - there is no real sense to be made of “worth” or “use” for YOU according to YOUR epistemic assumptions.

No one - according to YOUR position - can objectively determine that science is worthless, no more than anyone can determine with any degree of epistemic certainty that it has some or a great deal of worth. YOU must remain authoritatively mute on the subject because no certain claim can be made that science is worthless any more than a claim can be made that it is of great worth because any such claim would be a “de gustibus” one by the implications of YOUR position itself.

At least take the time to work out the consistencies of your own point of view before saddling me with wild statements I never made; implications which don’t even follow from what I stated about your position.

 

[Peter_Plato]

I am against faux pseudo-philosophy. The kind who pretends all philosophers agree, by ignoring all philosophers except the one in the poster on his bedroom wall. Or the kind who tries to force Christians into his own personal dogma. Or the kind who thinks philosophy means making up fairy stories to help him sleep at night.

Never had a problem with real philosophy. It would be good if there was a lot more of it.

Uh huh.

Apparently, you have now learned to sing a new tune, one markedly different from the “Philosophy…What is it good for?” song you were spouting back in '13:

I’m arguing that modern professional philosophy can’t rid the world of disease, can’t put a man on the Moon and can’t explain consciousness. It can’t feed the poor, doesn’t look good hanging on a wall, you can’t dance to it, it doesn’t keep you warm in winter. The song is called War, huh, what is it good for only after the producer turned down Philosophy, huh, what is it diddily goodily doddily.
forums.catholic-questions.org/showpost.php?p=10866979&postcount=205

 

[Peter_Plato]

Interesting observations concerning the scientific method here…

tofspot.blogspot.ca/2015/01/a-startling-proposal.html

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Well no, none of that is true. There’s no need for tantrums, it’s not as if your life is in danger because your claim has failed, we’re only shooting the breeze here. You’ve always made personal attacks when you run out of rational arguments. That’s your “tell”, that’s how everyone knows you’re covering your retreat.

So this is not a personal remark?

 

[Peter_Plato]

Uh huh.

Apparently, you have now learned to sing a new tune, one markedly different from the “Philosophy…What is it good for?” song you were spouting back in '13:

Well no, none of that is true. There’s no need for tantrums, it’s not as if your life is in danger because your claim has failed, we’re only shooting the breeze here. You’ve always made personal attacks when you run out of rational arguments. That’s your “tell”, that’s how everyone knows you’re covering your retreat.

Here we have a problem distinguishing “personal attacks” from evidentially true remarks. I was not throwing a “tantrum” merely pointing out that failures to distinguish legitimately subjective claims from those which are objectively true in more than a mere repeatible or measurable sense leads those who fail to see the difference into real conundrums. Oh, what a tangled web we weave…

As, for example, your diatribe against philosophy which you claim was not against “real” philosophy but merely against the “faux-pseudo” type which then nullifies any truth to your first statement under the guise that it was meant as merely a subjective assessment on your part. The waters become very murky when we begin to allow relativity and subjectivity to rule. We can change the meaning of words and ideas on the fly as it suits us.

This subjective/objective distinction is kept deliberately confused so that you can hide apparently objective claims behind a facade of subjectivity at the same instance as inflicting those claims on others as objective. You and Hee_Zen are both playing that game.

“I didn’t say that, I meant this. I didn’t mean that, I said this.” Both are games being played while profiting off the keeping of ideas and words deliberately arcane and ambiguous so as to justify murky claims and spouting confused notions.

When you are called on it, you play the “personal attack” card, ostensibly because anyone who questions your subject cum objective claims must, therefore, be attacking your subjectivity.