I believe there is a connection between everything including apples and oranges (don't compare apples to oranges). Some things have a one to one relationship, some a linear relationship, some a inverse exponential relationship and some things an exponential relationship. Then you have things like bell curves. Ofcourse we have to also consider constants and coefficients. — tilda-psychist
me explaining again how objective truth is not a thing. — Banno
Well, that's wrong for starters. — Banno
moral objectivity about an objective set of moral truths — Kenosha Kid
rationalism around objective reality as discoverable by thinking really hard about it — Kenosha Kid
i disagree. I don't know how we would prove each other wrong. — tilda-psychist
Neither of those arguments is valid, let alone cogent. — Banno
If it's not worth explaining again, it probably has no merit. — Merkwurdichliebe
So... 12 has no relation to life, except when it does. — Banno
No more so than notions of objective reality, which you support in your support of natural science. — Pfhorrest
Okay, so you meant capital-R "Rationalism" as in the anti-empirical philosophical movement containing people like Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, not just common-noun rationalism as in asking for reasons to (dis)believe things and not just obeying orthodoxy on faith. No disagreement there then. — Pfhorrest
Let's suppose you bought a dozen eggs, you are no longer dealing in pure mathematical truth, you have now introduced something external and independent to the universal idea of 12. More importantly, the mathematical concept "12" is only related to life, in this case, if you actually did buy something, and they were actually eggs, and you actually expected to receive a specified amount. Otherwise 12 in itself has no concrete relation to life. — Merkwurdichliebe
:up:Postmodernism is good for showing what not to do. ;) — jorndoe
:fire:Anyhow, I view it and postmodernism (to the extent I know anything about it) as a kind of reaction to the worst excesses of the Enlightenment and the faith in the scientific method and reason as methods by which we may obtain a better world. Because it flourished in the Academy, where all is seemingly incubated, the postmodern point of view came to be applied helter-skelter, and I think got out of hand to the point that the use of reason and science was discouraged, even thought declasse in a sense; not done by those in the know. — Ciceronianus the White
In both, objective reality is inferred from human activity. In science, the existence of objective reality is the simplest possible explanation for why the universe behaves as if it does, i.e. it appears to be a top-down. In morality, not so much. We know why morality is in some ways universal and others not, and it's a bottom-up structure, not a top-down one. (We'll end up making every thread about this before the week is out.) — Kenosha Kid
I’m not sure what you mean here by top-down and bottom-uo. I would describe science as a bottom-up process the way I mean those words: it’s a decentralized, fallibilist operation, rather than some authority handing down truths from on high. You seem to think that an objective morality would have to be that kind if from-on-high approach, but my point is that science doesn’t do that and yet is still objective about reality, so we can do likewise toward morality too. — Pfhorrest
At best, it makes no difference whether it exists or not, because bottom-up self-organising morality has all of the explanatory power and seems like what actually occurs. — Kenosha Kid
Beliefs about reality obviously differ drastically between cultures, especially historically before the rise of science (look at all the different religions’ accounts of the nature and history of the world). — Pfhorrest
It is in empiricism that the explanatory power of objective reality finds its place, not in belief systems — Kenosha Kid
An appeal to the things we have in common between such experiences and a commitment to sorting out why we sometimes have different ones would enable an approach to morality just as objective as a scientific approach to morality. — Pfhorrest
You have an embedded assumption that the causes of the differences are of a like kind. — Adam's Off Ox
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