Zlatko Zvekic 11 January 2017

Reality is not a democratic process where people vote for their favorites and elect representatives. It is something that we, human and other living beings, have evolved thru. All brutality and necessities have crystal clearly cut out and enabled many features that supported our survival as a specie. That is reality. Our senses have evolved to give us ability to protect and defend from the perils. That is real. We have learned to build shelters, grow food, love, and hate. Real. We have developed language and we are capable of communicating about events that have happened, that are happening as well as those that may happen. That is reality. The most interesting concepts, fantasies, and possibilities are part of the inventory of our thoughts and guess- works and speculations. As if by talking about reality we could change it to fit our wishes.

mickofemsworth 9 November 2015

If you take the view that relativism debunks the idea of truth, then the question of whether relativism is true is a silly one. Similarly, why should incoherence be the ultimate sin? It gives one's perspective that little bit more flexibility. Philosophy is the business of finding convincing reasons (in the sense that they do a good job of convincing other philosophers) for what one is determined to believe anyway. I think that quantum mechanics (the two slit experiment, etc) demonstrates the incoherence of the idea of objective truth. It's a useful working hypothesis in many contexts but over-extending it is just silly.

blank 30 October 2015

'the fact that there is a reality being described from that point of view and that indeed, from that subjective point of view we can make epistemically objective statements.'

In plain English he's saying that we can say things that everyone who is now living understands, even though in the long run these facts are arbitrary. It means rationality is the rationality of this society, the essential concern of us who are now living. But the mere fact of knowing that what is relevant now won't be in a billion years is of crucial importance for philosophy, it means philosophy is defective, and no ultimate truth can ever be established.

Ergo, the practical situation is largely indifferent to this discovery. Except that if it is learned that that is what the most serious students of the matter think, if that becomes known, as it is, it changes the atmosphere of human life. As it has.

Searle is making an argument that was accepted by Nietzsche over a hundred years ago, Searle simply does not care about truth in the ultimate sense.

Raoul Adam 11 August 2015

Subjective and Objective are entangled 'opposites' on a loop of consciousness. One can only defeat the other by consuming so much of it that it ends up looking like the very thing it claims to have defeated. This is not middle ground fence-sitting fluff - it is the recognition that the truth lies simultaneously and co-definitively at both extremes. It's the rabbit and the duck and everything in between and beyond them. The real struggle is not between sophisticates likes Searle and Lawson; the real struggle is between Searle and Lawson and those who appropriate Subjective or Objective from an exclusively binary oppositional position that admits no phenomenological meanings or relational truth. Lawson appreciates the essence of objectivity because he appreciates the idea of better and worse metaphors to describe and construct reality. He argues that it was hyper-rationalism that led him to see the constructedness of all reality. Perhaps it's time to look at the brilliance of both philosophers and the longevity of the philosophical struggle and to wonder if there may not be more encompassing and productive ways to conceptualise 'who' is right? For me, the onto-epistemological truth is that the coordination of subjective and objective is one of life's defining developmental tasks in complex mental terrains. As Dr Suess reminds us, 'be dexterous and deft and never mix up your right foot with your left'.

jeremyholmes 9 August 2015

Relativism may appear 'democratic', but in fact it is individualistic -- if implies a word full of solipsistic -- albeit aspirationally politically correct -- relativists. It is objectivism that is democratic -- the way we overcome relativism is through the 'wisdom of the crowd' -- when a whole lot of relativists come together to discover that their 'relativistic' truths correspond one with another -- then we have reached epistemic truth. This all starts in infancy: the baby has 'epistemic trust' vis-a-vis (literally -- lots of eye contact) the mother and although they are looking at the same object -- e.g. the family cat - from different perspectives, and it subtends different images on their retinas, depending where they are standing (i.e. it's relativistic), when the baby says, looking at mother "Meaow...?", the mother says "yes, cat" they have arrived at epistemic truth.

Maximilon Baddeley 8 August 2015

Then what for ontological objective statements?

mebigguy 7 August 2015

Anyone not believing in objective truth needs to wonder about what hold airplanes up, how the voice of their mother could be coming out of that tiny box that they carry around. They should hit themselves in the head with a hammer, hard. There's no excuse for such nonsense in a world dominated by scientific understanding of the world we live it. Why is this tolerated in academia?