I do think all “evaluation” is relative to certain elements.
For example, when we measure length or distance, the resulting figure is relative to the unit of the measurement. (The same distance can be measured as 1 (mile), 1.6 (kilometer), and so on).
When we say something is “shorter”, it’s relative to the object we compared it against.
When we say something is “good” , it generally means it satisfies certain criteria and thus the evaluation is relative to those criteria.
The act f evaluation is to compare (against reference material), to measure (based on certain unit), to verify (if certain criteria is satisfied). And it’s relative to the element we perform our evaluation upon.
I think it’s pretty simple and easy to understand for someone with a bit of awareness and logical ability.
However, we know that there are great many people who consider some evaluations to be absolute.
Absolutism (of any evaluation) tends to cause conflicts because of its nature of fixation and rejection/denial of other perspectives, as well as because of its self-righteous nature and underlying fanatical inclination.
It’s one of the main cause of human stupidity, I’d say.
When someone takes certain evaluations to be “personally” absolute, it’s usually not very harmful.
But when someone thinks “absolutified” evaluations to be applicable to others (or worse everybody), it’s likely to cause conflicts with others.
Do you consider some of your evaluations to be absolute (consciously or subconsciously)?
How can you regard them as absolute?
I’d say that if we think of evaluations as descriptions, then the absolute ones would be descriptions of things, and not descriptions that include references to the self or a particular point of view.
Absolute - “The box is 3 feet by 3 feet.”
Relative - “The box appears ugly to me”
I think there’s something absolute about saying that a box is bigger than another, as long as we absolutlely know what “bigger” means we can extrapolate absolute things about a box, and another box, in a purely quantiatative way and understand that box 1 is bigger than box 2 without making any relativist statements at all.
I don’t think this is a complete understanding of this issue, but it’s all I’ve got right now.
I think that comparing and measuring are basically the same thing. The only difference is that by measuring you compare the observed with an abstract idea, abstract reference material. Verification can also be seen as comparing an abstract idea, in this case a hypothesis, against an observation, possibly followed by drawing or observing a conclusion. Comparing one abstract idea to another and from that drawing conclusions can be called reasoning, and now I’ll go back to the topic. I think I understand what you’re talking about.
I agree, and attachment to these (subconscious) assumptions can make life seem very difficult, both for the individual in question and his or her surroundings.
No. I do have many ideas in my mind that have proven to be very reliable, but never absolute.
Unfortunately, there is a gaping hole in your argument.
You start by noting that all things are measured according to a scale (which wasn’t really worth pointing out) and then somehow conclude that there are no facts.
Your premiss states the obvious and your conclusion is absurd (and doesn’t at all follow from the premiss).
The breakdown happens here:
“For example, when we measure length or distance, the resulting figure is relative to the unit of the measurement”
If something is 40cm long, and I measure it and declare it to be 50 cm long, then there is an absolute fact of the matter that I am wrong. The measurement isn’t relevent to anything.
“When we say something is “shorter”, it’s relative to the object we compared it against.”
Yes, thats why in linguistics we call “shorter” a comparitive.
“When we say something is “good” , it generally means it satisfies certain criteria and thus the evaluation is relative to those criteria”
This is a contestable point. But even if it is true, then its uninformative. What, for example, if I say that something is wrong if and only if it harms another human being. Don’t I now have an absolute criterion by which I can judge any actiong to be right or wrong? The fact that we (arguably) generally have a criteria in mind when we make ethical judgements does not seem to entail that the judgements are relative.
You have an conclusion that everything is relative - but no argument. More worringly, your conclusion that ‘everything is relative’ looks rather like a statement of an absolute fact.
You may be able to find a leg to stand if you just argue that Ethics is relative. But first I think its important to take in to account the motivations for some sort of non-relative ethical criteria.
The funny thing is, whilst you think your viewpoint is commonly held by intelligentsia, you couldn’t actually be more wrong. There are pretty strong motivations against relativism in Ethics. Often, there are things which most of us want to judge are wrong. Female circumcision, for example, to most people seems like a beastly practice. I would have no qualms at all in judging that it is wrong. (Though if you don’t agree with that - I’m sure I could find something which you think is wrong; perhaps genocide or other forms of child abuse would do the trick?). The problem is, if you think its ‘all relative’ then your going to struggle to justify your inclination that people ought not to do it. If there is no fact about whether cutting off your child’s clitoris is good or bad, then what right have you to stop people from doing it?
So, there is a strong intuitive motivation for supporting non-relativism. I think it was Russel who wrote that although when doing philosophy he sometimes struggled to justify an objective form of morality, as soon as he stepped back from his philosophy books he became convinced that some things in the world were right, and some wrong.
Ahhhhhh. This evaluation is relative to the unit (foot/feet).
If you think it’s absolute, it means you don’t understand the relative nature of evaluation, yet.
It’s an emotional evaluation. Although it lacks explicit criteria for the evaluation, its’ relative to the data used for such evaluation.
As you’ve said yourself, its’ relative to the knowledge of what “bigger” means and also the size of another box.
I’m saying all statement (that has evaluation in it) is relative, aware or not.
It’s evident for some people, but not so for many.
You didn’t read well enough.
I said all evaluation is relative.
I DID NOT say “all things are measured according to a scale” nor “there are no facts”.
Check the HUGE gap in your reading/understanding, please.
You made an absurd evaluation based on very bad understanding.
Nope.
Your falsehood is relative to and depending on this part “If something is 40cm long (or not)”.
Also, First of all, the evaluation of the said thing as 40cm is relative to the unit “cm” and actual measuring method, and so on.
Then your declaration (another evaluation) of 50 cm is also relative to the unit on “cm” and other things like above.
And the evaluation of if you are wrong or not is relative to such thing as the acceptable precision in the measurement, and the precision of the first (40cm) evaluation.
Can you understand?
Nope.
It depends on “(if) something is wrong if and only if it harms another human being”.
You can only have conditional certainty, here, again.
Isn’t it evident?
From this example of yours, we can guess that you want to and you have the tendency to consider something you declared as the based of the (delusion) of absolute certainty.
Judgements are evaluation. All judgment is relative to the criteria employed.
Again, I said all evaluation is relative.
I DID NOT say “everything is relative”.
And I showed how we can see it.
Another wrong evaluation based on bad presumption.
The evaluation of “all evaluation is relative” is relative to some elements such as awareness and moderate reasoning ability and the concept of dependency/relativity.
I’m not so interested in ethic.
I think ethic and moral to be rather stupid matter for mainly people without notion of relativity.
Obviously, there are some people who think it’s good (for whatever).
Usually, people try to do good things.
Personally, I’m against female and male genital mutilation.
In US, more than 60% of male were mutilated during certain period, while not very many female were mutilated.
Yet I didn’t see WHO, UN, FDA, CDC, whatever acting a lot.
But I’d not say it’s absolutely wrong or good.
I know certain dad (and mom) felt good when their boy was mutilated.
For them, it was good to mutilate.
I don’t feel the need to justify myself so much.
I’d explain my view and some would understand while others not.
If I want to control/manipulate others for some reason, I will employ effective method, whatever it is.
I may use the notion of “right”, if it’s effective in manipulating others.
But usually, I don’t feel the need to control/manipulate others, very often.
Yeah. Some people love to control/manipulate others, and they hope to achieve it by creating/using fake absolutes.
But it’s so ineffective to those who understand the relative nature of evaluation, because it would be seen simply illogical and silly.
Fake authorities, fake absolutes, these were somewhat widely effective.
These days, it’s less effective because we aren’t living in a small village and we can actually see how other people see/think/evaluate differently.
I guess he wasn’t very logical person, if what you said is true.
It can be like some scientists who can think and act very reasonably in the area of their profession, but pretty illogical in other areas.
I’m glad you came in to show the example of absolutist thinking and also the motivation for it.
Dude I understand the nature of evaluation. I also know that nothing can have just relative or just absolute aspects. I mean, the two sentences were supposed to be loose examples to sort of point to the problem. I mean, a foot is always a foot, no matter what foot-long object you’re measuring, and pointing out that this thing is a foot, relative to what a foot is, just seems a bit redundant. Things which are readily quantified I think of as being more absolute, (you like that? degrees of absoluteness? whoa man!).
All examples to the contrary are either: A negative value (something is absolutely not-true, which doesn’t say anything useful)
Or, based on a rule of measure for which we did not go back far enough to recognize its fundamental subjectivity/relativism.
In the case of a ‘foot’ - The current, accepted scientific definition for length-measurement is based on the distance light will travel in a weightless vaccuum over a given period of time. Given the continued expansion of the universe in which space itself is expanding, we could presume that ‘distance’ over billions of years can be shown to be non-universal. Also, the influence of gravity is ubiquitous in the universe, so how can we presume to have measured in a ‘weightless’ environment. Also, the fundamental forces are likely to have evolved over time, so the actual magnitude of electromagnetic and gravitational force the beam of light experiences is not universal. Also, if you zoom in far enough (the Planck length, 10^-43m) distance becomes irrelevant. It literally disappears and becomes immesurable (just like time). If we’re talking about being accurate, we would require a system in which we could zoom in indefinitely for ever more precise readings.
You also have yet to prove that your supremely physical ‘box’ has any rational noumenal existence.
There is a caveat to all this. Absolute perspectives can be gained in an indirect way (false, but functional) through the patterns and structures of emergence. When we view the reality that lies one level of emergence above or below our own direct experience (e.g. the ‘laws’ of chemistry or physics) we view what seem to be objective, absolute facts. That they are not so becomes somewhat irrelevant as they remain reliable and functional for all purposes to which we might apply our ‘objective’ observations.
My contention is that the whole form and function of emergence is to create functionally objective vantages from which ‘truth’ might be extracted in ostensibly absolute terms. It is the scaffolding, the complexified structure on which emergence rests, which is objective. This scaffolding is only an organizational matrix. It does not ‘exist’ other than by the negative-space between the objects of which it describes the organization. The objective perspective is a trick of reality, a way for it to know itself in some limited capacity, when it cannot truly know anything at all.
I assumed that you meant the truth of any evalution is relative, but that you expressed it poorly.
To say evalutions themselves are relative is utterly vaccuos. Of course, my judgement that something is wrong will be relative to my ethical beliefs. There’s no reason for anyone to deny this largely obvious fact.
However, that judgements themselves are ‘relative’ to my ethical beliefs, doesn’t entail that judgements can’t be true or false. What is contestable is whether there is or isn’t an objective fact of the matter that my evalutation is right or wrong. If there is an objective fact that makes ‘sodomy is bad’ true, then my judgement that ‘sodomy is not bad’ is false. In this case, the truth of the judgement is objective, not relative. This is the kind of thing you seem to be arguing against: which is why I read your argument as claiming that there are no facts.
There is a clear distinction between the claims ‘evalutions are relative’ and ‘the truth of evalutions is relative’. You seem to be claiming both. I am willing to grant you the first without hesitation. But I deny the second. And it is only the second that it is worth forming an argument for (and which you currently have failed to provide any argument for).
Occasionally you also seem to confuse these two with a third argument: that the language chosen to express an evalution is arbitrary. This is the point you seem to be making with: “First of all, the evaluation of the said thing as 40cm is relative to the unit “cm””
I think this is quite a benign point. I think we can safely assume that the words ‘40cm’ mean 40cm, and not 50 cm. The statement " the piece of wood is 40cm long" and “the piece of wood is 1.31 feet long” express essentially the same truth. It doesn’t matter which scale I used - so long as I had measured accurately I would have come to the same judgement, but expressed in a different way (and obviously the scale chosen will be relative to all sorts of factors - but this doesn’t in any way prevent the eventual judgement conveying an objective fact). I think for our purposes here we would be safe to assume that language can have objective meanings.
“Yeah. Some people love to control/manipulate others, and they hope to achieve it by creating/using fake absolutes.”
You seem to be comfortable with the idea that the holocaust was ‘good’ for the people who intitiated it, that it is only ‘bad’ for us.
Fair enough - but you really should stop the ridiculous statements that there is some sort of necessity for all intelligent and logical people to believe this. Do you have any evidence whatsoever that a significant amount of ‘logical’ people agree with you? I doubt it severely, because to be honest: they probably don’t. Your argument has radical conclusions that I think you show little awareness of: for example if it were widely accepted then the UN charter of human rights (a staement that certain fundamental things are absolutely right or wrong) would need serious revision, probably scrapping completely. If your argument was widely accepted as you claim it to be, one would expect a prominent movement led by ‘intelligent people’ for a revision of the absolutist moral creed - and yet no such movement exists, so far as I am aware.
Russell pretty much invented most of the logic we use today. He is widely regarded as the greatest logical philosopher of all time, and is also hugely repsected for his strong ethical framework, sharing many of his views and a great friendship with Einstein (who was also pretty logical).
Einstein had a strong belief that certain things (e.g. Nazism) was wrong. Are you seriously trying to tell me that Einstein was a ‘stupid person’ without notion of relativity?
I think your confidence in your argument comes largely from an entirely false belief that everyone intelligent would agree with you. I wonder if this is shakeable?
When I measure the length of a box, I hold a ruler next to the box, and see whether the length of the box is the same as x inches, or closer, or further. While I am doing this, I can continuously change x to get a more accurate measurement. You could of course do the measuring in your head, comparing the size with abstract ideas, but I think that there is no fundamental difference.
You are showing absolutist tendency, here.
Basically, you want something (in this case evaluations) to be always the same without condition/limitation.
You you evaluate something to be a foot long, it depends on many things.
It depends of the definition of the unit, how you (or someone) measure, the competence of measuring skill, precision (or margin of error), and so on.
When you are young, or when you are doing rough things, “a foot is a foot”, might be sufficient.
But it’s not enough if you want to do something with precision or if you want to think more about finer points.
For simplistic thinking and application, you may not need to think about all these.
But I’m talking about these because simpletons tend to think simple absolutist ways and don’t understand the nature of evaluation and they sometime harm themselves with simplistic thinking.
If so, we can probably say it’s more absolutely silly to think too naively in some occasion.
And we are talking in the forum where differentiating finer points is relatively important compared to a kid measuring a foot.
“Nothing” can be as close we can get as the concept of absoluteness.
As relativity is dependency, the lack of all dependency can be considered as being absolute.
“Nothing” or “void” has no relation/property/etc and has no dependency.
Well, what you call “absolute perspective” isn’t absolute since it’s relative to certain criteria and depending on certain conditions.
But some people think of these things because they want something absolute.
Actually, I think humans want something absolute and/or absolute certainty.
Basic desire/motive behind both religion and science, moral/ethic/ideologies is this desire, I’d say.
So, some people would make up “scaffold” so that things appear to be “fixed” and always unconditionally the same to everyone, as if it’s absolute.
And sometime, they forget that it’s relative to and depending on the scaffold and think as if it’s truly absolute.
Religious people do this nearly all the time with their religious frame/scaffold.
But some people do this with science, too.
You want to pretend that you understood?
But I don;t think you did.
There are plenty of people who would disagree to that.
If you haven’t encounter these people, I’m pretty sure you will, later.
I don’t think you understand very well what you are talking about.
If you do, explain what is "fact, especially “objective fact”, and also how can you evaluate something to be “fact” and/or “objective fact”.
What’s the “truth of evaluation”.
Is it another tool to dream about absoluteness in relative matter?
If you are talking about the correctness of the result of evaluations,
It depends on many things, too, since it’s the evaluation of “the result of an evaluation”.
I’m saying these things because it’s a pretty common cause of illogical thinking.
It’s like debugging human thought process. And detailed examination of steps is important to understand the nature of bugs.
When we say “this is 40 cm”, we are saying “there is something and its length is equal to 40 of the unit “cm” (measured with this ruler)”, for example.
It\s not 40 inches not 40 miles. And it’s “cm” of the ruler (or whatever), which is supposed to be pretty similar to international standard for “cm”.
So, there are lots of dependencies and thus seemingly simple evaluation of “40cm” can be actually relative to many elements.
And when we don’t understand (or when we forget), it can lead to mistakes and disputes.
Again, you are showing a typical absolutist way of thinking.
It lacks the notion of the reference, basis, evaluation method.
Anything can be evaluated “good” or “bad” depending on how you see certain things "good’ or “bad”.
If overpopulation of the earth is a bad thing, maybe holocaust or any war, disease might be good
And Americans are better compared to terrorists because US killed far more people than terrorist attack on 9/11.
It’s relative to and the perspective taken.
Relativity of evaluation is somewhat obvious if you can see how you think. No believing required.
It’s ridiculously obvious to some of us.
I do consider that we humans are pretty stupid.
It’s not surprising that huge chunk of people are comfortable with absolutist delusion and illogical thought process.
You don\t get it, do you.
There is nothing absolutely bad about humans being stupid.
It’s been like this for thousands of years, and it will continue yet many many years, most probably.
And when we do understand the relativity of evaluations, we aren’t so motivated to do many things (and do it fanatically…), and especially manipulating and controlling others.
I mean, I can see how you think and I frankly think that it’s naive.
But I don’t mind you being naive.
I do explain to you but I don’t expect much.
I’m rather using this to illustrate my point to a few others.
That’s why I thanked you.
Yeah yeah. Some people can think logically within their profession (and some other areas) but quite bad outside of it.
The excellence in one domain doesn’t mean s/he is good at logical thinking, all the time.
And I don’t take someone as authority just because s/he is “respected” by others.
If he did say so, I do think he was stupid about that matter. Yes.
But it’s understandable since he was a Jew and Nazis killed lots of Jews. Maybe his friends and relatives were killed.
I would say if someone is well aware of own thought process and also if s/he relatively free of messy chunk of beliefs, then s/he might understand what I’m saying a lot better than you.
It seems you like to be with “authority” and “majority”. But I don’t share that tendency. I don’t feel the needs for “moral support” in talking/reasoning.
Did I say “something can be created from nothing”?
I don’t think so.
“Nothing” I talked about is the concept. Not physical matter/object/existence.
I talked of it as the lack of all character/property/attribute/condition/limitation.
For us, our awareness might be the “ultimate” dependency, since without awareness we wouldn’t be able to evaluate/recognize anything.
As I said, I can think of "Nothingness/void/emptiness’ as the absolute. Other than that, pretty much everything is relative/dependent.
So, logically speaking, the absolute is just a conceptual thing just like “nothingness”, most probably.
But we love to think the absolute as something physical, dependable, fixed, solid, that is always and everywhere.
Call it “fact”, “truth”, “objective”, “god”, whatever, I think it’s in our head (and in the wrong way).
This is assuming physicality is ultimate reality or that it even exists. But I also have a problem with you saying things can depend on something that has no property, attributes, etc. Same thing as saying something can be created from nothing
But… but Nah, isn’t time, or the lack thereof, an issue here. And also just the way the world works. You are obviously absolutely correct that every evaluation is relative, but you need a lot of time and correct information to consistently make these kinds of evaluations. I just isn’t practical to make these in real life, ALL the time. You’re not the only one setting the pace, or the nature of the dialogue. Just look at my sig from your hand, you probably get these kind of reaction all the time. I sure know I did, if i for example tried to honestly and extensively explain the situation to my boss, coworkers,… I typically would get blank stares, my words would get misinterpretated, pulled out of context or even get downright abused.
Most people just don’t need this kind of precision anyway. I’d say holding some absolutes isn’t that bad, and can even be rational a lot of the time. They are shortcuts, and miss the mark sometimes, but that is made up in the time you save. Man is limited.
Nah, you seem to think that anyone that disagrees with you is simply stupid (no matter how intelligent the person).
I’m not lacking in understanding. I used to teach first year philosophy seminars and this kind of thinking came up quite a bit, it really isn’t very complicated.
What I am denying is simply that you have any coherent argument for your point of view (as well as denying that the point of view is valid in the first place).
“Fact”, roughly meaning ‘a state of affairs that obtains’ is taken as a primitive notion. For example, lets say that it is possible that the book in front of me is 20 cm long. From now lets imagine that this is a true state of the world. There is a fact that the book in front of me is 20cm long in this world. This fact can be expressed by the statement “the book in front of me is 20cm long”, or by equivelent statements in other languages etc.
‘objective fact’ means a fact not dependent on any one subject. That the book in front of me is 20cm long does not depend upon me at all. It depends merely on the physcial properties of the object itself. To illustrate this point, note that no change in myself or my mind would alter the length of the book.
Is that really what you’re saying when you say ‘this is 40cm’. It’s ceratainly not what most people are saying. When I say ‘this is 40cm’ I mean the object I am pointing to is 40cm long. My utterence of the statement has been caused, perhaps, by my belief that the object “there is something and its length is equal to 40 of the unit “cm” (measured with this ruler)” but this certainly isn’t included in the semantic meaning of the sentence “this is 40cm long”.
If I wanted to argue ad-hominem (as seems to be your preferred method of ‘argument’), I could throw this question back at you - seeing as earlier you said that I had made “a wrong evaluation”.
But instead of that I’ll just answer for you - the truth of an evalution is the truth or falsity of the fact that makes it true. The evaluation “this book is 20cm long” is true if the book is 20 cm long. If the book it 30cm long, then the statement is false.
Anyway: I think any reasonable philosopher would be able to see the ludicrousy in your thought train here. And so, I have no more work to do.
