Vinterland

This is an interesting topic. Shaun can you clarify what constitutes an evident truth that math and language is based on?
I think your opinion has changed because you are agreeing to what Shaun was trying to convey when he responded to your claim that everything is relative.

__________________
And on we walked. Suddenly we heard a voice crying, "This is the sea. This is the deep sea. This is the vast and mighty sea." And when we reached the voice it was a man whose back was turned to the sea, and at his ear he held a shell, listening to its murmur.
And my soul said, "Let us pass on. He is the realist, who turns his back on the whole he cannot grasp, and busies himself with a fragment."
—Gibran Khalil Gibran, “The Greater Sea.”

NotConvinced

If we don't truly know anything, we don't even know what "unknown" means. So the statement "everything is unknown" doesn't require you to know anything. If knowledge is also relative, then what one man believes is "unknowable" might indeed be known by someone else, in which case the unknowable would be known.

And even if we can't express in words the idea that nothing is knowable, we can still attempt to understand such an idea, and it can still be right in the end.

Overall I think the idea of not allowing the definition of relative truth to even exist due to the definition of absolute truth itself, is a cheap technicality that most people can see past.

Silence Dogood

NotConvinced, thanks for the reply.

Agreed wholeheartedly. In fact we wouldn't know the meaning of anything at all, let alone what unknown means. That, by the way, was the thrust of my previous post.

In one sense, I suppose you're right. A man could make a million statements based on ignorance. But this fellow who said everything is unknown is proclaiming a piece of knowledge, not ignorance. And, in harmony with what you just said, shadowind has just destroyed any epistemological platform on which he might stand. It's absurd to state you know something and then follow it up with stating you can't really know anything.

Furthermore, to make any assertion (whether it be as esoteric as "everything is unknown" or as mundane as "today is Wednesday") you must know the meaning (connotations and/or denotations) of the very words that you are using to express your thoughts.

I'll be honest here: I'm not entirely certain of your meaning. Do you mean that if I know something that you don't (or vice versa) that knowledge is therefore relative? I know my social security number. You don't. That doesn't make knowledge relative, however. The nine digits of my SSN are what they are whether you know them or not. A man's not knowing something is no more a threat to the reality and nature of knowledge itself than a dark closet is to the brightness of the sun.

Well, actually, I do believe we can express (in words) the notion that nothing is knowable. But I also believe that such an expression is, at its core, inconsistent with reason and, ultimately, nonsensical. And by nature, nonsense in not understandable (thus the word NON sense).

I am perfectly willing to allow the defintion of "relative truth" to exist, whatever it may be. What I am unwilling to do is embrace two notions that are mutually exclusive. Reality is either knowable or unknowable. I adhere to the former. And anyone who would disagree with me is, curiously enough, also stating that reality is knowable. After all, you can't disagree with a man unless you know what he thinks and you know what you think.

Thanks for your time. I look forward to your reply.

bobleplask

You think?

I think absolute truth exist, this I have always said.
Everything is also relative, and therefor I do not trust it as absolute truth.

My conclusion from this is I can not find something that is absolute true.

Is this different from my first post?

NotConvinced

Enjoyed the response Dogood...

Yes, but if the very assertion you are trying to make affects you knowing the meaning of the words you are using to express your thoughts, it can complicate things. Man I had to read that sentence a few times after I wrote it.

Well, was just trying to poke fun at the idea of the unknowable being known in a relative sense. Didn't mean that the example alone proved relative knowledge. I also think it's funny that when you look up "know" it can tell you it means to perceive, and when you look up "perceive" it can tell you it means to know. In that sense I might argue that absolute truth is harder to prove than relative. We define something by relating it to something else, hence the relativity. If something were absolutely true it would need to exist outside of being relatable to something else in it's definition, which I think atleast initially, is quite hard to achieve. A definition of something without using words...hmmmm....

Quite the predicament, although I would still argue that if I'm picking the relative truth side, that it inherently means I can't define or state even the idea of relative truth in absolute terms. Thus making it immune to self contradiction.

I think the difference between 'knowing' and 'thinking you know' is merely measured in degrees of how sure you are. I would argue that since nothing is absolute, it leaves room for error in every perception. Wouldn't this mean that technically you can't truly "know" what the man your disagreeing with thinks? You're then disagreeing with a man because you think that what he thinks and what you think are in contradiction.

It's funny, everytime I think I'm being trapped by an argument toward absolute truth, I almost forget that it's impossible to win from within that world of absolute truth. The closest I could get to proving relative truth within the absolute truth realm was: "I believe that beliefs always change."
Could this not work to show relative truth? The idea of relative truth expressed NOT in an absolute truth (If the definition of absolute truth was: something always being the same).

shaun

An evident truth is something that is valid, in the sense that it is valid in a system. I am stating that even the systems we base our perceptions on are determined by certain self-evident truths that we hold to, and that are a priori by their very nature.

Mathematics at its core assumes that A = A, and that A is not ~A. Without this distinction, mathematics falls apart and logic is unusable, because no hypothesis or theorems can be made from undefinable things.

Language exists the same way, albeit different in different contexts. When I speak of me, whether I say "me", "ego" (latin), "ana" (arabic), "mi" (spanish), or whatever, I come with the predetermined notion that those words all mean me. Therefore, I have an assumption that I know that me is always me, regardless of how it is communicated or linguistically defined. In other words, the cover may change, but the book does not.

If I do not know that me is always me, then I cannot define a linguistic construct for me, because I cannot consistently communicate something that has no or varied meanings.

shaun

I'll agree that things are defined in the context of other things - I've been asserting this all along. But I think you're going the road of semantics at this point, and what I'm trying to say (and from what I follow, Dogood as well) is that there are some things that are inherently true regardless of our knowledge (relative or not) of them.

I wouldn't say "immune." An argument that is self-contradictory is not "immune" - it simply is invalid. And even then, you're still making an absolute claim by saying that you can "never define or state the idea of relative truth in absolute terms." That is an absolute statement - you're saying that in absolutely all cases relative truth is undefinable in absolute terms. Hence, you are using an absolute truth claim to prove universal relativity - something you cannot do, since it contradicts your argument.

If there is absolute truth, there is still room for error. Error is totally valid in absolute truth - whereas I would argue that you cannot even have "error" in wholly relative truth. If truth in its core is relative, nothing is wrong, just different. Error assumes that something is right, and something else is wrong. It assumes absolutes.

Sure, this is the nature of debate. I don't understand why or how this proves your theory.

For example, if I think there is a cookie in the cookie jar, and you do not, we can verify the validity of each others' claims by opening the cookie jar and having a look. If there is one, I was absolutely right in claiming there was a cookie. If it's empty, then you were absolutely right in claiming there was not. To say that we were both relatively true is absurd - it doesn't match up with reality.

shadowind

"A man could make a million statements based on ignorance. But this fellow who said everything is unknown is proclaiming a piece of knowledge, not ignorance."-Silencedogood

can a man not have knowledge of ignorance? i know i know not, if this truth i observe is reality.
to me logic seems like pattern recongintion, and how do we know that this pattern that apears before us, is really there, or is it a illusion? how do we know that the pattern of others, of things that we observe, is reality, i could be in a dream, and how would i know?

Silence Dogood

Yes, I'd say we're walking the same path.

NotConvinced

But inherent to the relative truth claim, is the absence of absolute truth. In order to "prove" something you use absolute truth, although if relative truth exists, you can't "prove" anything. All this means is that our perception system is built up on the appearance of absolute truth, and that inherent to that system, we can't prove relative truth. If you start in a relative truth based system it would seem impossible to validate absolute truth, and likewise for the other way around. Just because our current perception system is supposedly set in certain ways, shouldn't be reason to invalidate relative truth.

Ah, I like this example. The validation though, is made independently by you and I. If you think there is a cookie, and I do not, and we open the jar to find that you see a cookie, and I do not, we are both validated on our own terms. Now if we open it up and both of us view a cookie, then one of us was relatively right and one was not, however this is ONLY based upon objective comparison. What if we could not open the cookie jar at all to attempt to validate our claims? I would argue both of us would be relatively right until we could open it.