Sunday, November 1, 2015

Self-Refuting Nonsense

Imagine a man with whom you were having a conversation who got up and said this:
“There is no such thing as spoken human communication or spoken human language.”
The very act of asserting that statement while others listen and understand its content utterly refutes what is being asserted: empirically, it is blatantly self-refuting.

Now consider the core belief of Postmodernism:
Proposition (1): there is no such thing as objective truth.
This is self-refuting nonsense as well.

If one believes that there are no objective truths, then it follows that nothing you can say is objectively true, not even the statement that “there are no objective truths.”

What kind of statement, then, were you making? Was your statement just gibberish like the bleating of a goat? Is it, semantically speaking, in the same category as Chomsky’s famous sentence “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously”?

And, epistemologically speaking, what kind of statement was it? If it is understood as a synthetic a posteriori proposition, it is, as we have seen, manifestly self-refuting.

Now of course the sophisticated Postmodernist might defend it as a merely culturally relative truth, true only to a community of people who wish to believe it.

But that will not do. If it is not defended as a universally and objectively true statement, then the Postmodernist has not considered the possibility that objective truths do exist over and above culturally-relative beliefs.

At any rate, we have seen in the last post where it leads: to an intellectually and morally broken world-view that cannot even defend the idea that the worst beliefs in Nazism were objectively false.

I have posed this question before, and I have never seen any Postmodernist sensibly answer it: if it is not an objective historical fact that the Holocaust happened, then why is there so much evidence that it happened? Why the numerous eyewitnesses and survivors and their testimony that we can still read today? Why the huge physical evidence? (e.g., the death camps, gas chambers, etc.).

Either (1) the Holocaust happened as a real, objective event in the past or (2) it did not as an objective fact, and any left-wing person who denies objective truth has got no business opposing, criticising and condemning the disgusting, shameful and ignorant fringe of Holocaust deniers we see today.

Rather, any Postmodernists who really believe their truth relativism and Foucault’s view of truth should be saying that “all truth is made by power,” no objective truths exist, and our “truths” are invented and not determined by some objective reality – not even the Holocaust.

But then the Postmodernist would face these questions:
(1) Is the proposition that “the Holocaust happened” just a truth made by power? If “yes,” what power system “made” it and why?

(2) If you think it is not an objective truth that “the Holocaust happened,” then explain why we have overwhelming evidence that it did.

(3) if you accept the overwhelming evidence that the Holocaust happened, then explain why you would persist in denying the reality of objective truth.
It does not matter what choice the Postmodernist takes, every path they could take here leads to exactly the same end as we saw in the last post: an intellectually and morally broken and bankrupt world-view.

9 comments:

  1. Just replace holocaust with holodomor and you'll find plenty of "leftists" still denying its existence.

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  2. You seem to think that an objective truth is just something you can wave your hand at, but you don't define what it really is. How accurate does something have to be to qualify as an objective truth? How do you know it is an objective truth? Do you believe as Ayn Rand wrote, that you directly perceive objective reality to learn your objective truths?

    Science has no need of objective truths. I don't know why you need them. Science is based on intersubjective corroboration of observation with a statement about the accuracy (which is never perfect.)

    Your "proposition 1" is a strawman. It could be more generously phrased as "we do not believe in objective truths because we have seen no evidence they exist and plenty of evidence that statements masquerading as objective truth are no such thing."

    I don't need to explain why there is no objective truth any more than I need to explain why there is no god. Intersubjectivity is sufficient to explain ideas of the holocaust and their correspondence to evidence. We don't need to believe in some hypothetical absolute in order to have synchronized beliefs any more than we need a god to explain order in the universe. Intersubjectivity also explains why we can have strongly conflicting beliefs given the same evidence, something that "objective truth" does not explain.

    PoMo's may or may not understand this the way I do, but that's no reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater and accept "objective truth".

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    Replies
    1. (1) I have explained it plenty of times before, and so have philosophers for thousands of years.

      Objective empirical truth is a property of well-formed propositions. Such propositions carry two properties: (1) being true or (2) being false.

      The property of being true consists in a relation of correspondence between what the proposition asserts and a state of affairs, condition, event, or thing in the real world. The objectivity of empirical truth is established by the fact that there is an external reality independent of what we think about it. E.g., if you jump out of plane you cannot just snap your fingers and make gravity go away.

      Empirical truths cannot be known with absolute certainty: their truth is probabilistic. We accept or reject empirical truths on the basis of empirical evidence and inductive argument.

      You say there is no such thing as objective empirical truth, but you utterly undercut yourself when you note that some beliefs (e.g., about the Holocaust) are backed up by evidence, and some not. A belief backed up strongly by evidence is an objective empirical truth.

      Step 1:
      there is an external reality independent of what we think about it. The very existence of "synchronized beliefs" about the world provides strong evidence of that fixed external reality (just because some people might not share these beliefs on *some* limited issues (e.g., the reality of Darwinian evolution), that does not refute the existence of such an external world, and may be evidence that such people are mistaken, delusional, liars etc.)

      Step (2)
      Our words and language can refer to objects and states of affairs in the world

      Step 3
      When language accurately describes reality and is backed up by evidence, objective truth is property of that language.
      -------

      (2) Science has no need of objective truths.

      Yes, it does. If Darwinian evolution is not objectively true, then what distinguishes it from creation science? If you say evidence does, you've already admitted that the evidence of the real world supports the theory of Darwinian evolution and not creation science, and so you are already at step 1 above. The other steps follow.

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    2. Philosophers have explained lots of things for thousands of years that we no longer think are right. That is hardly a defense of the idea of “objective truth”.

      I note that in your latest response you are now using the terms “empirical truth” and “objective empirical truth” instead of “objective truth”. Are you moving the goal posts?

      I notice also that you do not address many of my points, but rather resort to repeating the same argument that I have criticized.

      My position is that there are no truths, but instead we have intersubjective limited validity that is culturally relative to varying degrees. Validity is not truth: it merely is a description of observations that an idea usually works to some degree of accuracy. That’s why scientific “truths” are not really true: they are all known to fail at some point, be they gravity or relativity. There is no evidence I’ve heard of that shows any greater form of “truth” exists. Correspondence of “truths” to the real world are always flawed because ideas are expressed in limited language and are based on propositions that are culturally based or do not correspond to the real world. Plane geometry, for example, because the earth (and the universe) have curvature (contrary to earlier cultural assumptions) and because points and lines do not exist in the real world: they are abstractions.

      Validity doesn’t even require the assumption of a fixed external reality: for example, it works just fine with conspiracy assumptions such as solipsism, butterfly’s dream and brain in a bottle. IMHO, fixed external reality is a folk model just as much as the folk psychological assumption that there is a little man in our heads that directs our thoughts and actions. I suspect that it is as unnecessary as the assumption of a god.

      Science doesn’t need objective truths, and indeed it does not need Darwinian evolution. Darwinian evolution is in the same position as Newtonian mechanics: it has been superseded by the Modern Synthesis (evolution and genetics combined) and a huge amount of additional theory. Science is progressive: there is likely to always be room for improvement, and never the perfection of truth. Instead, science is valid. Leave truth to theologians and other foolish philosophers.

      Language (itself a social context) only describes reality within other social contexts, and then to a limited accuracy. That’s enough for various levels of validity. I’ve seen no evidence that this is wrong, and no evidence that there is any greater accuracy possible that you could call “objective truth”. It’s plenty for explaining “synchronized beliefs.

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    3. Language (itself a social context) only describes reality within other social contexts, and then to a limited accuracy.

      That language describes reality within social contexts, e.g., scientific statements within the context of science, is an utterly trivial statement that in no way refutes the reality of objective empirical truth.

      As for "limited accuracy" you do not need to explain absolutely everything about something to have objective empirical truth about it.

      We do not need to know the exact number of hydrogen atoms in the sun to know that it is objectively true that:

      (1) the sun is the star at the centre of the Solar System and is a nearly spherical object of hot plasma, inside which nuclear fusion occurs and which is made main of hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, neon and iron.

      The concepts here and the sun itself are not culturally relative. It would not matter if millions of people intersubjectively thought that the sun is made of orange cheese, this would it make it so.


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    4. "Science is progressive: there is likely to always be room for improvement, and never the perfection of truth."

      Yes, science is open to the possibility that its empirical truths may be falsified. That is why it is not dogmatic. There is nothing new here. We have known since Hume's time that empirical truth can't be known with apodictic certainty. But that refutes nothing I said.

      However, you have fallen for the absurd line that everything in science always get replaced or refuted or superseded.

      This is B.S. There are many propositions -- core propositions -- in science that still stand today and have never been refuted. E.g., the view that the earth revolves around the sun. The view that the moon revolves around the earth. The view that ocean tides are mostly caused by the gravity of the moon and sun.

      Also, the idea that science will never -- not even a 1,000 or 10,000 years from now -- arrive at, say, a physics so good that it can be regarded as a final theory of that discipline is just lazy bullshit thinking from people who read too much Thomas Kuhn and take their ideas from Postmodernism.

      How the hell do you know that 100,000 years from now, physics won't essentially be complete and rational people will understand that its explanations of quantum mechanics and macroscopic physics can't be improved on?

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    5. Correction:

      "The concepts here and the sun itself are not culturally relative. It would not matter if millions of people intersubjectively thought that the sun is made of orange cheese, this would NOT make it so."

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    6. LK, save your breath. Just note there is no operational difference between "inter subjective truth" and "objective truth". The former is used by those who want to feel sophisticated, that is all. Huben still won't swallow cyanide because he knows it will leave him inter subjectively dead.

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  3. (1) Philosophers have explained lots of things for thousands of years that we no longer think are right. That is hardly a defense of the idea of “objective truth”.

    Correct. That is why I did not use a fallacious appeal to authority but explained the argument to you patiently and carefully.

    (2) "I note that in your latest response you are now using the terms “empirical truth” and “objective empirical truth” instead of “objective truth”. Are you moving the goal posts?"

    Not at all. I have meant objective empirical truth in past posts too. The objectivity of analytic truth is much easier to defend. That is why I restricted myself to empirical truth here to make it easier for you.

    (3) "That’s why scientific “truths” are not really true: they are all known to fail at some point, be they gravity or relativity."

    This is complete rubbish. The view that our planet earth revolves around the sun has never "failed" and there is no rational reason to think it will. There are many core principles of science like this.

    You are simply confusing the idea that an empirical truth is not known with certainty (an epistemological issue about how we know something is true) with whether objective empirical truth exists (an ontological issue about what actually exists).

    (4) "Correspondence of “truths” to the real world are always flawed because ideas are expressed in limited language and are based on propositions that are culturally based or do not correspond to the real world. "

    Basically you are saying that no words can properly refer to objects in the real world, but you failed badly to defend that proposition last time when you repeatedly used examples of people doing exactly that.

    (5) " IMHO, fixed external reality is a folk model just as much as the folk psychological assumption that there is a little man in our heads that directs our thoughts and actions. "

    There is much evidence is to contrary. You cannot change the many aspects of world by thinking about, nor do we have the slightest evidence that laws of nature suddenly stop working.

    (6) "Science doesn’t need objective truths, and indeed it does not need Darwinian evolution. Darwinian evolution is in the same position as Newtonian mechanics: it has been superseded by the Modern Synthesis (evolution and genetics combined) and a huge amount of additional theory. "

    This is the same shoddy fallacy of equivocation used by all Postmodernists. When I said "Darwinian evolution", I referred to the core principles of the best modern theory, not to the early version of Darwin's time. Any intellectually honest person would have understood this without me having to explain it, but you simply think you can redefine any word or expression I use in order to win arguments. That is a fallacy of equivocation.






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