Of course I didn’t think you read it all those years ago and remembered it. However, I had already linked it again in a comment on this thread, which I had addressed to you. Here is the comment where I linked it in this thread.

Another stance that is opposed to moral relativism is that truth does exist, and that it is our duty to come as close to it as we humanly can, knowing that we only see truth through a glass darkly. But we can still see it and strive to know it.

neo: No, I didn’t read your 2008 post as I recall. I like your blog and your writing but not so much I read everything and remember it, especially not 12 years ago. I hope you don’t expect me to.

But until your comment in this topic, no one has offered any alternative to bagging on “truth is relative” as though only foolish kids could argue for it.

Your “truth does exist but we only see it through a glass darkly” (1 Cor. 13:11 BTW — I love St. Paul) doesn’t contradict “truth is relative” on the level at which I and my friends meant it.

Any class in microeconomics will include discussions in the income elasticity of demand and the trade elasticity of demand, as well as the distinction between normal goods, inferior goods, and luxury goods.

*Well, there is a sense in which, in identifying someone as a man, you have put him in a specific group, all of whose members are, by definition, equally in that group. So, simply considered as “man”, they are equal, as that’s all we know about them, at that level. Hence the difference between those who defended slavery by saying the slaves weren’t really men, and those who regarded it as an unfortunate necessity. (BTW, it had almost died out in the Latin West, but returned with the Renaissance. The big exceptions were those cheek by jowl with Islam. And they, in principle, were enslaving captives of war.)

I find that to be sad, but true.

Weirdly enough, my math prof buddy (really, ex-university roommate) assures me that most mathematicians, even today, are Platonists. The Timeaus lives!’
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Mathematicians were Platonists in my day, too. And logicians. It goes with the territory. 2 is NECESSARILY an even number. If you don’t see that, you really are misunderstanding.

That is, of course, where the arguments for objective truth start, as in many Platonic dialogues. See the tour de force at the core of the Meno.

But scientists have largely used a pragmatist view (even if they don’t know that’s what it is), “if it works, that’s all I mean by ‘true'”. Of course, this fails because there is no way to get “works” to mean any more than “produces results I like.” The fact that you have a formal description defining what you like, doesn’t change that.

I wasn’t so much arguing for absolute truth, as simply laying out the basis for saying what one can do to say that a proposition is self evident. Note that, one of the premises – that there is a Creator – was explicitly denied by Aquinas as being self evident. That doesn’t mean he didn’t think it couldn’t be demonstrated – he gave Five Ways (actually, 6). But there is a difference between objectively demonstrable and self evident.

Note also that huxley’s 2nd example of objective truth “the boiling point of H20 at sea-level” is also not self evident. We have to check. That is a key difference between experimental science and deduction. Both aim at truth, but truths of different kinds, and therefore by different methods.

Perspectivism cannot work, because while it claims not to be full on relativism, it ends up saying that what is true for A is false for B. And that takes you right back to pure relativist skepticism. As Roger Scruton put it, when someone argues for that, he’s telling you not to believe him. So don’t.

It would entail believing – at a minimum – that there was really no truth of the matter studied by science, as well of course as believing that Washington wasn’t President, or really, anything. (Pure logic possibly excepted.)

Note that this does NOT entail a claim that we have got that much of the truth. Nor does it deny that we often err in reasoning. But dismissing reason because we don’t do it well is like blaming math when you messed up your budget. Even to try to make such an argument relies on such things as the law of non contradiction. But it’s a huge area.

I will say that, while I like Bloom OK, he’s not one of my guides. I’m not a Strassian, but I like a lot that they do. For that matter, the great conversion in my thought – c 1980 – was from Plato to Aristotle, and then Aquinas. But I still read Plato by preference. What other philosopher gave us a character as well presented as any novelist could?

Childhood indoctrination works.

Bloom is a thoroughly second-rate mind, in love with his own opinions, and with an ax to grind. None of which I find recommending. Furthermore, he was ignorant and bigoted about rock music, since you bring it up.

Perhaps, and Huxley identifies with hippies that have an ax to grind against the Establishment Blooms over counter or mini cultures like the hippies.

All of your identities are wrong and gets in the way of Divine aspirations.

Yeah, I think you’re straining too hard to deny the obvious. She refers to journalists in the context of them working at the Times and then says she’ll continue to read them. Suggesting she might read them BUT ONLY when they write for someone other than the Times seems a bit silly.

The fact that she beat the Times about the head and shoulders but pointedly declined to add “I won’t continue to be a reader” kind of says it all. She’s going to keep reading. She’s going to keep giving them her money and her attention and, most importantly, her respect.

Some psychologist somewhere has got to do a paper on how the people who are so proud of themselves for demistifying and demythologizing traditional authorities like the Church and the military and the police and government leaders are still naive and trusting little children when it comes to one stinkin’ newspaper.

Mike

“On the ground” not on the grown.