We don't speak the same language.
You honorary Sassenach.
How confident are you about various so called facts?
by slimboyfat 175 Replies latest social entertainment
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slimboyfat
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slimboyfat
LoveUniHateExams
I don't believe in truth as such. I think it's based on the false reality/appearance distinction. There are no facts only interpretations. I always link this video. Anything Rorty had to say on the matter is worth listening to.
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cofty
It's as if you know exactly what I mean but you are determined to hide behind pedantry of the highest order to maintain a position that is blatantly ridiculous.
Did you really think even for a moment that when I said "earth" I didn't mean the planet in it's entirety?
When I say it isn't flat I am obviously not talking about the perspective of a worm. You know that.
If we say the earth is approximately spherical you know without the slightest shadow of doubt what I mean.
No description of anything will ever satisfy the professional pedant. Is that all you actually wanted to say?
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slimboyfat
Why is the perspective of the worm any less valid than the perspective of the spaceman? One more "true" than the other?
"Man is the measure of everything" is the doctrine of the age. But as Foucault said:
“One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area – European culture since the sixteenth century – one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it. It is not around him and his secrets that knowledge prowled for so long in the darkness. In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order, the knowledge of identities, differences, characters, equivalences, words – in short, in the midst of all the episodes of that profound history of the Same – only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear. And that appearance was not the liberation of an old anxiety, the transition into luminous consciousness of an age-old concern, the entry into objectivity of something that had long remained trapped within beliefs and philosophies: it was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility – without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises – were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”
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cofty
Why is the perspective of the worm any less valid than the perspective of the spaceman? One more "true" than the other?
So it turns out that "there is no such thing as a dumb question" is a myth.
Who would have thought?
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Simon
Worms don't have perspective in the same way we do. Duhuh.
And when you ask someone a question the assumption is you are asking from their perspective, not that of a much simpler life-form.
The question was "how confident are YOU". Not how does a worm feel about Maslow's hierarchy of pre-potency and is it really happy and satisfied in it's current role.
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slimboyfat
My chemistry teacher sometimes told me my answers were "not only not right, but not even wrong". Maybe he was a reality fascist, although he looked like a hippy.
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slimboyfat
Simon isn't truth meant to be apart from perspective? Not my truth, the Cofty kind. -
sparky1
Wow, this discussion sure has opened up a can of worms! -
cofty
Not my truth, the Cofty kind.
There is no such thing as your truth.
Wow, this discussion sure has opened up a can of worms!