An estimated 40,000 Iraqies died

I must disagree again.

Your premise may be the modus operandi for most people, most of the time, but that does not make it normative or "real life" any more than the content of god belief is validated by the sheer number of people who hold it.

Arbitrary disctinctions are only arbitrary as long as one is unaware, or unwilling to admit, that they are arbitrary. Once that is done they can begin to be brought into the light of objectivity.

An example: People are fond of placing (quite unconsciously..) the word "my" in front of things they came into posession of purely by chance, usually because it makes them feel superior or gives them reason to make negative comparisons. Me good, you bad! My religion, my family, my country, my culture, my people, good! Your country, your religion, your culture, bad!

The obvious objection is true, someone might freely choose a religion, choose to move to another culture, or choose to disavow their own, but these people are by far the minority. People sufficiently endowed of character to make such choices objectively are also usually the last one we will find "my'ing" things for egotisms sake, so to them this doesn't apply.

GB,
Perhaps I am misinterpreting this.
Are you actually saying there is such a thing as an absolute objective reallity ???

ifa white boy said that to me in my face I would punch him out..if a black person said that in my face I would punch him out too...that word is straight disrespectful no matter how you say it...

heh, it depends just how picky you are about the proof you will accept for the existence of a coherent, external reality.

Problem 1: Solipsism, the belief that nothing exists apart from or outside of ones own mind, is irrefutable. Since we can't refute it, we have to assume solipsism isn't true. Now we have an external reality, or so we assume.

Problem 2: Inductive reasoning (upon which every Law of science is based), causality, the law of non-contradiction, and logic itself are all ultimately based upon circular reasoning (see David Hume for a more in depth exploration of this subject). That is, they must be taken as transendentally true rather than subject to verificationism. For example, we say we can verify the truth or falsity of a proposition with formal logic, but how do we verify the truth of formal logic itself? You can't verify logic with logic, so we have to assume its truth. Things which we hold as transendentally true rather than subject to verificationism are called axioms. So now we have imposed coherence upon our external reality with reason and logic, or so we assume.

If you are willing to accept those axioms as true, then objective reality does exist. "The sun emits electromagnetic radiation" would be something objectively true in that case.

The existence of transcendental *ethical* truths, which is what I was addressing in a round about way above, is much more problematic.

This is why people either love philosophy or hate it. It takes foundational things most people take for granted, exposes them as nothing more than a stack of assumptions, and then makes one argue endlessly to justify those assumptions. It can be very frustrating, especially for people who like to invest their ego's into being on the right side of an argument. :)

I agree with this 100%. The thought of being disrespectful to my elders when I was a kid never entered my mind.

But hold on, is it all adults who complain about how the youth of the day carry on? Do we all say stuff like "when I was that age... blah blah blah" ?

This is , of course , Godel's theorem.

Re the existence of an objective reality :

I think it's not merely a matter of how stingent a proof one demands but also of how you choose to define objective reality .


Re assuming the truth of logic :

Perhaps it may be more rational to say that for pragmatic reasons we may consciously choose to make the assumption of the "truth" of a given logic system but acknowledge that there is no theoretical reason for doing so .

Perhaps too , we must acknowledge that we are boring the shit out of most ppl on this board..

I'm actually getting quite the kick out of this thread. I bet half of the parents bitching here have little hellions running around at home. It's common, people always bitch about the neighbor boy because their kids are angels, no doubt...

About 95% of the time I don't want kids. Then there's the other 5% of the time I do want kids just to watch them grow and make me proud. My kids would never get away with half the crap my friends used to get away with a couple years back, there's no doubt about that...

I do not care to engage in pure philosphical rhetoric. I have found philosophical discussions to be a composition of a play on words, and ultimately circular.

If you reduce any discussion of anything it to its component parts you will invariably end up in one of the philosophical quagmires I illustrated above. The only way to avoid it is having conversations with people who can't deconstruct arguments very well :winkwink:

Agree on both counts :) Discussing that stuff on a webmaster board makes me feel like a pedant.

It is not invariably the end result. It is only if one chooses to reduce the component parts of a discussion to philosophical argument.

To make the above statement accurate:

The only way to avoid it is having conversations with people that do not deconstruct "real life" argument into philosophical argument.

As you are aware; there is a difference.

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