No, a "position" is always held by a person, but is always a "position on" something. And I don't think the objective/subjective debate, as it is generally understood, is about whether or not "positions" are subjective, but about whether they are "on" anything objective. At least, it seems to me the only question worth pursuing here.Terrapin Station wrote:That's fine, but you asked if the position was objective, not whether what it's about is objective.
The value of any "position" is not in the person who has it, but on its relevance to an accurate understanding of the thing it's "on." A person may want to "take a position" that he or she can flap his or her arms and fly...but before they get up on the roof to try, they had better be sure they're understanding aerodynamics accurately.
No actual value inheres in a wrong "position," no matter how fervently held.
Again, in my view, truth value is a judgment about the relation of a proposition to something else (the something else depends on just what approach to truth someone is using, whether correspondence or coherence or whatever).
That seems implausible to me. I think the "something" people are always looking for is the objective truth. In fact, I would suggest their arguments are always about that very topic: which person's view has better reference to the objective truth about the topic. Look at us right now: what else are we doing?
A common judgment would be one with all parties take for granted or agree on. Every debate needs a common agreement for when the debate will be settled, and when it will not be, what sort of evidence is going to be accepted, and whether it will be argued on reasons.I don't know what a "common judgment" would be, unless you're just saying a judgment that's statistically common.
You and I are talking about Materialism. If you suddenly switched to epistemology, or I suddenly switched to football scores, the debate would simply fall apart. Unless I miss my guess, our agreement is that the most logical and rational argument will win. That's a common judgment on our part.
It cannot be. I think you've decided to impose a definition of your own on "truth." It's not one you and I have in common -- nor, indeed, do most people share yours.It's a fact that truths are not objective, and that's an objective fact.
When someone says, "Are you speaking the truth?" the asker is never assuming you're going to answer, "Of course: but it's not a fact." The truth is about the facts. The two are inseparable, at least in normal usage.
*Sigh*. I did NOT speak of normatives. That is why I put the word "rational" before them. I was trying to keep you from barking up the wrong tree about that, and I just knew you'd wander into morality. But no, I was not going there.Re normatives ("should," "ought," etc.),
"Ought" can be moral, but a different "ought" is rational. There is no moral wrongness to writing 2+2 = 5. The claim, "You ought to say 2=2+4 is not normative or moral, but rational. It means, "You're being irrational if you don't," not "you're being bad if you don't."
I suspect you may need to reread the previous question in that light in order to understand it now, because your answer wasn't actually to the question I was asking.
So...just making noise, but not expecting anyone to care? I doubt that. I think you're expecting more: you wouldn't argue if you weren't. You'd just state your case and leave.I indeed have no expectation that anyone is going to agree with anything I say in forums like this. I say what I do because I like to express myself, I like to broadcast what I think.
They're adjectives. So to pose such a question is as bizarre as to ask, "What is red made of?" or "What is old made of?" Adjectives don't have their own substance, like most nouns do. They're modifiers implying real qualities (or rather, quantities) that nouns can have.Wait, so numbers in your ontology are "descriptors of attributes of quantity." What exactly, as existents, are those? What are they made of, for example?