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Objectivity

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Objectivity

Banno
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Posted 01/30/09 - 04:31 PM:	#21
ciceronianus wrote: Interesting. Philosophy is, then, an exercise which is, in some fashion, detached from, or unrelated to, how we normally act, how we normally speak, how we normally think, how we normally interact with people and things? When we are doing philosophy, we are dealing with the true nature of reality, which is something different from the world we deal with daily? Apparently
Davidson: We make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimizes agreement. Russel Morris: There's a meaning there, but the meaning there doesn't really mean a thing... Ned: Such is life

Dunamis
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Posted 01/30/09 - 06:59 PM:	#22
Banno wrote: Isn't that a rather silly thing to think about? Certainly, it is a game played only by philosophers. Do you think it is equally silly to try to think about a thing as it was before our perceptions colored it, so to speak? The roots of the "thing itself" is really the attention to the ways in which our perceptions/observations distort or filter out (or construct) aspects of an object or a situation. There is the sense that no matter how many aspects of a thing we take in, there will always be more to consider or observe. Is this too a game played by philosophers, or an essential assumption of observation itself, ever attempting to turn the corner.
Tractatus theologico-politicus [is a] work forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil and issued with the knowledge of Mynheer Jan de Witt. - Church Council of Amsterdam If no man ever thinks alone, then we might say that to know really is to think ever less by oneself - Balibar

Banno
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Posted 01/30/09 - 07:29 PM:	#23
We can describe the object in innumerable ways, and there may always be more possibilities. By all means, talk about the thing. But talking about the thing-in-itself seems to jump to the end of that process, as it were; I doubt that this is a legitimate thing to do. The obvious metaphor is counting to infinity. We count by adding a number; and we can jump to the end of this counting by talking of infinity. But I believe this analogy flawed. in the case of counting, we know pretty much what it is to add one to a number; and we can follow this rule for any number. Bit in the case of describing some thing, we do not know, we have no idea, what future descriptions might look like. How can we legitimize the jump to infinity?
Davidson: We make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimizes agreement. Russel Morris: There's a meaning there, but the meaning there doesn't really mean a thing... Ned: Such is life

Human5678
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Posted 01/31/09 - 12:20 AM:	#24
Kant in the Preface in Critique of Pure Reason stated; "it must still remain a scandal to philosophy and to the general human reason to be obliged to assume, as an article of mere belief, the existence of things external to ourselves (from which, yet, we derive the whole material of cognition for the internal sense), and not to be able to oppose a satisfactory proof to any one who may call it in question. " To counter the above, Moore presented his 'here is a hand' "Proof of an External World". Wittgenstein in his "On Certainty", posited there is no absolute certainty that one can prove the existence of the external world, as the proof is conditioned by the rules of the language-games, hinge and river-bed propositions. IMO, a controversial concept like 'objectivity' need to be viewed within epistemic contextualism. Within a certain perspective of reality, 'objectivity' is critically essential for survival and various purposes of humanity. However from a higher standard of philosophical knowledge, 'objectivity' when closely scrutinized is vulnerable to skepticism (not total but at least a 'pinch'). I think a pinch of skepticism is essential to open up greater possibility for mankind to progress. Note how uncertainty (QM) had enable physics to progress from its certainty base(Newtonian). As for a reality independent of human minds, humans have yet to establish any reasonable 'correspondence' of it with statements or propositions, since such a concept of introduced 2000 years ago. Since the ONLY available means to guess whatever-reality-is is via the human mind, it cannot be totally independent of minds. Objectivity is only objective within a stipulated framework, and that framework is established (consciously and unconsciously) and agreed by consensus amongst groups of humans (the subjects). As such objectivity is fundamentally subjective. Edited by Human5678 on 01/31/09 - 12:27 AM

radiohead269
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Posted 01/31/09 - 08:40 AM:	#25
Human5678 wrote: Kant in the Preface in Critique of Pure Reason stated; "it must still remain a scandal to philosophy and to the general human reason to be obliged to assume, as an article of mere belief, the existence of things external to ourselves (from which, yet, we derive the whole material of cognition for the internal sense), and not to be able to oppose a satisfactory proof to any one who may call it in question. " To counter the above, Moore presented his 'here is a hand' "Proof of an External World". Wittgenstein in his "On Certainty", posited there is no absolute certainty that one can prove the existence of the external world, as the proof is conditioned by the rules of the language-games, hinge and river-bed propositions. IMO, a controversial concept like 'objectivity' need to be viewed within epistemic contextualism. Within a certain perspective of reality, 'objectivity' is critically essential for survival and various purposes of humanity. However from a higher standard of philosophical knowledge, 'objectivity' when closely scrutinized is vulnerable to skepticism (not total but at least a 'pinch'). I think a pinch of skepticism is essential to open up greater possibility for mankind to progress. Note how uncertainty (QM) had enable physics to progress from its certainty base(Newtonian). As for a reality independent of human minds, humans have yet to establish any reasonable 'correspondence' of it with statements or propositions, since such a concept of introduced 2000 years ago. Since the ONLY available means to guess whatever-reality-is is via the human mind, it cannot be totally independent of minds. Objectivity is only objective within a stipulated framework, and that framework is established (consciously and unconsciously) and agreed by consensus amongst groups of humans (the subjects). As such objectivity is fundamentally subjective. But you completely ignored the original question posed in this thread - do you believe that there are objects that exist independently of your mind, regardless of your ability to know about them? If not, do you have any evidence to support such a position?

Vumba
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Posted 01/31/09 - 02:27 PM:	#26
radiohead269 wrote: Do you believe that there are objects that exist independently of your mind, regardless of your ability to know about them? No. How can I believe in an object if I am unable to know about it? Right at this moment there may be things I will come to know of - but then they won't exist independently of my cognitive experience of them. There are many reasons why I don't believe in objectivity: Appearances can be deceptive Chuang Tzu wrote: “I dreamed I was a butterfly, then I woke up. But then I wondered: maybe I’m now a butterfly dreaming I’m a man?” The fact that illusions, delusions, hallucinations, simulations etc are at all possible casts doubt on the verity of any belief or experience. We have yet to see proof that we are not ‘living in a simulation’. By the same token, there exists no proof that external, independent objects exist. (Evidence is not the same as proof.) Humans interpret their world Artists since time immemorial have taken for granted, and utilised, the fact that our interactions with the world result in subjective interpretations. Polyphony, narrative, metaphor, imagery etc are used to demonstrate this, implicitly or explicitly. Modern cognitive and neurological research supports this view: our thoughts and perceptions of the world are not using simple mirror-images of independent objects. Billions of biological informational patterning-events occur each second during the dynamic interplay between heterogeneous systems, internally and externally, as we interpret, enact and construct our entities. Teasing out which things are ‘objective’ is, both in principle and in practice, impossible. When I interact with anything, say, a glass of water, what I experience is not the same as 'an object out there’. My experience of the glass of water is exactly that: an experience, not an object. The language problem Much of our conscious thinking and experiencing takes place in a linguistic or symbolic context. One might argue that things like ‘1+1=2’ or ‘H2O’ or ‘water’ exist independently of us but this is impossible to prove. These statements use conventional (agreed-upon) symbols within formal systems – they may be checked against other statements or rules for verification, but the rules themselves are not verifiable. The rules are utilities; items of faith. Focus, perspective There is an old Indian story about six wise men who gather in a dark room with an elephant, to determine what it is. Each one arrives at a different conclusion: wall, fan, water spout, pillar, spear, rope, depending on which part of the elephant they investigate. Since we can never (by definition) get outside of our perspectives, neither can we ever ‘identify the elephant’, only our aspect of it. Another way of expressing this is: attention on one slice of reality, necessarily excludes identification of a complementary one. It doesn’t help much adding together different slices: that which is not identified must always exceed that which is. We have also boundary problems and fuzziness: depending on your viewpoint, you will only see the focal event – peripherals are indistinct. Where does one thing end and another start? What are the criteria for what constitutes ‘this thing’? As you zoom in or out, boundaries shift. And, of course, there is no final boundary, because the question immediately arises: what lies beyond that? Verification within the collective doesn’t help either. Naturally, you may find comfort in believing something accepted by a large group of people rather than a small one, but this doesn’t make the belief true or objective. It is merely accepted by a greater number. Empiricism You can set up criteria to decide the reliability of a belief, but this cannot provide more than a degree of reliability, not a status of objectivity. Again, this provides tools or strategies, not certainties or truths. Of course, you may be satisfied with this. But it's something quite different to justifying objective existence. Category mistakes - atomism. One of the commonest errors we make – quite naturally, because that’s the way we function - is to assume that things ‘out there’ are the same as their identities, even their names - things are what they are seen to be. We confuse the Laws of Thought with Laws of Objective Reality. But, to paraphrase Einstein, when things are the same as their identities, they have no objective reality; when they have objective reality, they have no identity. We live in a world of identities - not 'objects' A universal trait amongst humans is to entify; that is, to construe entities from events and processes, bestow on them an identity, even a name or symbol. We talk of ‘water’. Water is not an object or fixed unit; it is a symbol for an ensemble of identities. This is quite natural, and as it should be. We should have more faith in it. Edited by Vumba on 01/31/09 - 03:13 PM
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brainpharte
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Posted 01/31/09 - 03:24 PM:	#27
radiohead269 wrote: I define objectivity as the fact that there are objects/things/being/existents in existence external to our awareness or thought about them. Are there any people on this board that really truly believe such objects do not exist in any capacity? If so, do you actually have a good argument to provide evidence for your view? I think we surely can say that whatever it is that's out there apart from ourselves is not identical to our perceptions and conceptions of the various objects or attributes. Our perceptions and conceptions surely are a function of our particular (human) processing systems. But I think that the following is something that often gets overlooked: Say that we've perceived/conceived of three different objects--perhaps a red sphere, a blue cube, and a green cylinder. Now, I readily agree that our experience of those objects as a red sphere, a blue cube, and a green cylinder are a function of our human processing systems. Creatures with different systems would experience quite different objects and properties, if differentiated "objects" or "properties" at all. But there is surely something that each of the three objects brings to the encounter with us, and whatever it is that they bring is consistent enough for us to process it as red sphere or blue cube or green cylinder each time we encounter it. My point is that it takes both our particular processing systems AND whatever it is that the objects bring to the encounter for us to repeatedly and consistently perceive/conceive of one of them as a red sphere and the other as a blue cube and the other as a green cylinder. If the red sphere didn't bring the same or a similar enough thing to the encounter each time, we would not perceive/conceive of it as a red sphere each time.
"I don't see much sense in that," said Rabbit. "No," said Pooh humbly, "there isn't. But there was going to be when I began it. It's just that something happened to it along the way."

Banno
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Posted 01/31/09 - 03:24 PM:	#28
Human5678 wrote: humans have yet to establish any reasonable 'correspondence' of it with statements or propositions... Thanks for listing the main proponents. The quote above depends entirely on what we think reasonable. I think it dead wrong. It is wrong because it places the burden of proof in the wrong place. I think it entirely reasonable to suppose that the objects around me exist independently of my mind. I consider the alternative unreasonable. As claimed in #13, I am writing this on a computer. The statement "I am writing this on a computer" corresponds rather nicely with what is actually going on. It is unreasonable to suppose otherwise.
Davidson: We make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimizes agreement. Russel Morris: There's a meaning there, but the meaning there doesn't really mean a thing... Ned: Such is life

crazy8jacky
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Posted 01/31/09 - 03:39 PM:	#29
Banno wrote: Thanks for listing the main proponents. The quote above depends entirely on what we think reasonable. I think it dead wrong. It is wrong because it places the burden of proof in the wrong place. I think it entirely reasonable to suppose that the objects around me exist independently of my mind. I consider the alternative unreasonable. As claimed in #13, I am writing this on a computer. The statement "I am writing this on a computer" corresponds rather nicely with what is actually going on. It is unreasonable to suppose otherwise. \ a good thing what you 'think' is... you claim to write on a computer and that it corresponds with what is going on... yet you see nothing wrong with this assertion... you are making assumptions and claiming they are the only 'reasonable' assumptions one could have, inherently proclaiming any other possible beliefs incorrect... This argument is something that neither side can 'prove', but to claim one is 'wrong' is a very wide leap

Banno
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Posted 01/31/09 - 04:01 PM:	#30
Vumba Appearances can indeed be deceptive. Interesting that we are aware of that fact. It amazes me how many philosophers are unable to tell if they are awake or dreaming. I have no trouble telling when I am awake. I have often identified the fact that I am dreaming from the events in my dream. Similarly, we have a name for hallucinations because we are able to identify them. There is no reason here to doubt the existence of a mind-independent reality. Humans interpret the world. Doesn't that imply that there is a world to be interpreted? But you seem to think that it implies the opposite. As if my experiencing a glass of water implies that there is no such thing. Very strange reasoning. The language problem you set out is quite unclear. I put it to you that when you talk about a glass of water, it is the glass of water that you are talking about, and not the "perception-of-a-glass-of-water", whatever that might be. What else could be the case? Perspective. After the part of the story that is usually reported, the wise men sat down and had a chat. They decided that they could trust each other's accounts. They figured out that their individual accounts must all be correct; so they worked out what sort of beast could satisfy all the accounts. What they came up with wasn't exactly like an elephant, but it wasn't too bad a likeness. Cooperation is a wonderful thing. They certainly did not conclude, as you seem to think, that they had touched nothing... That boundaries may be fuzzy does not imply that there is no difference between one area and another. we can make the boundaries as sharp or indistinct as is needed. That others agree with me does not make what I think true - you are correct. It also does not make it false. But there is another step here, because if the group agrees, then we can move on and make some progress. If we find ourselves disagreeing, we can always come back to the issue and re-consider it. None of this implies that there is not a mind-independent reality. That our knowledge might be imperfect again does not imply that it is not imperfect knowledge of reality. It would indeed be silly to conflate the thing with its name. Who do you think makes this error? We live in a world of objects. Water, for example, is not a set of symbols, but stuff we drink. It is reasonable to doubt any particular belief. It is unreasonable to doubt all of them, because you would then have no possible basis for your doubt. doubt takes place only against a background of certainty. Edited by Banno on 01/31/09 - 04:15 PM
Davidson: We make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimizes agreement. Russel Morris: There's a meaning there, but the meaning there doesn't really mean a thing... Ned: Such is life

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