An observation

[Ilander]

Somehow, in an age where we're downright slaves to the idea of tolerance, it seems to me that often, in believing that there is no absolute truth, we discard the possibility that there could be one.

That doesn't seem like a problem until one comes to think about it in terms of people. Somehow, the very people that preach tolerance of all veiws seem to believe that their view of relative truth is the right one.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like circular logic.

I don't mean to seem too critical, as I believe things should be looked at from many sides...but really, one of my friends accused another of being "closed-minded" tonight because he believed in absolute truth, while proving his own close-mindedness in not allowing for the existence of a belief in absolute truth in his world of relative truth.

Opinions? Is it right for relativists to ostracize absolutists? Doesn't that defeat the ideas of relativism?

[Dron_Cah]

Indeed. Or so one would LOGICALLY argue. Sadly, some people must think Aristotle was just some old guy, and his analyses of the world were worthless.

[Harkoliar]

im pretty open minded with many things. absoloute truth i believe is science.

[Skippy1]

Originally posted by Harkoliar: im pretty open minded with many things. absoloute truth i believe is science.

Hmmm.....most scientific study is motivated by the wish to prove somethign is true. This is achieved by statistical analysis.

Ever heard of the term 'lies and damn statistics'? Stats can nearly always be twisted to read whatever you want them to.

Too heavy.......sorry. Just musin'........

[Stratos]

Well, science (or rather scientific truth) isn't really absolute truth in the normal sense of the word, it's just what we believe to be correct given the knowledge or information we have at the moment. [img]smile.gif[/img]

To the OP, absolute truth rules out relative truth if it's on the same topic.

[ 04-05-2005, 11:55 AM: Message edited by: Stratos ]

[Lucern]

Well observed Ilander. Some people have no tolerance for intolerance

Seriously though, since I do not know the situation, I'll just use a cheap facimile of it from my perspective as a social science student(anthropology).

I agree with your analysis: and from a cultural relativist perspective, friend #1 has no right to make any kind of moral judgement on friend #2, if we assume that relativism is all that informs his outlook. Interestingly, friend #2, the absolutist, has every right to make moral judgements on others according to his ethos.

If one of my peers or future peers took such a position as friend #2, as much as I might judge him useless and incompetent as an analyst of social behavior, from an intellectual perspective I've got no right to let that inform our interpersonal interactions. It doesn't mean I won't on some level, but I wouldn't have a right to do so. People have no inherent problem with living in hypocracy, but many will realize the error and do things differently if you point it out. I'm pretty sure I would, and it would be a sad world where we're only friends with those similar to us in our beliefs.

Simply, if you follow an ethos that is tolerant of others, you should freaking BE tolerant of others, lol or at least try. This should be a good reminder that tolerance (and probably intolerance) is a learned behavior. It should also remind us that there's no such thing as a pure relativist or absolutist (or anything), but rather humans trying to follow whatever they believe to be right amidst the backdrop of personal experience and prejudice. Only at our best can we realize the errors in our own thinking. Sometimes it takes a pirate (or, I guess any bystander will do) to realize the hypocracy.

Edit: and good point about scientific truth Stratos. It's important to realize that no scientific fact is so set in stone that it cannot be challenged and revised as a greater quantity and variety of hypotheses are tested and retested.

[ 04-05-2005, 12:52 PM: Message edited by: Lucern ]

[Dron_Cah]

Originally posted by Lucern: If one of my peers or future peers took such a position as friend #2, as much as I might judge him useless and incompetent as an analyst of social behavior...

Hmm, I could see that. But I always thought it was quite interesting that people with an absolutist point of view can analyze things scientifically, very well. Of course, I suppose we could assume that, being absolutists, they prefer the "exacting nature" of science. Just a thought. [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Lucern]

I could see how that could theoretically be beneficial, Dron_Cah, especially in math and technical matters (where there is often one answer). I do see some serious conflicts with absolutism in science though.

In science you don't try to prove what you already think is true. Or if you are you don't admit it lol. It's important that a scientific hypotheses can be proven false, but what do you do when you get findings that surprise you, and how would an absolutist deal with it? From what I've read, they can get stubborn and academically belligerent (if you can picture that lol). A scientist that fits this model might be Alan Feduccia, who continues to defend the idea that birds did not evolve from dinosaurs despite the more and more fossilized dinosaurs with feathers they find, and his total lack of a suitable non-saurian bird predecessor in the fossil record.

The point is that scientists generally change their analyses of subjects as the evidence clearly favors or disfavors certain aspects of it to stay relevant to what they're studying. However, from a relativist perspective...it's good to have those people researching and staunchly defending their positions, adding to the scientific debate holistically through their particular perspective

But that doesn't really apply to my peers/future peers, because social sciences are a bit different. I won't bore you with the details, but humans will never be as predictable as chemicals, gravity, or weather, so there's a lot less certainty in social science. An (unfavorable) example of a social scientist whom I would call an absolutist would an anthropologist by the name of Morris in the late 1800's who was looking to prove his ideas about races, and in particular, cranial capacity. He ended up fudging his data, giving those of European descent much larger cranial capacities (implying their cognitive superiority). In the social climate it was pretty easy for many people to accept too, and it was pretty common for early anthropologists to use their ethnocentric notions as analytical tools. However, in the last 75 years or so, after 'discovering' and studying 1000's of cultures around the world, anthropology eventually developed a culturally relativistic default for the investigators of other cultures. Objectivity, though realistically impossible to purely attain, is the goal, and absolutism would tend to cancel that out. Objectivity issues can also foul an experimental design in the physical sciences - ie, setting it up to succeed under unrealistic conditions. Given that social sciences are even more subject to the researcher's biases, an absolutist perspective would add unecessarily to those biases.

But in all likelihood I doubt Ilander's friends were debating objectivity and relativism in science. He described it more philosophically than that, in any case.

[Dron_Cah]

Aye, true. Though, we are thinking of the idea that the absolutist has this point of view about the topic. I was also commenting on how it can have almost no bearing at all on their studies. They could be "anal" about mathematical equations, but could still be very open-minded regarding biological studies.

[Lucern]

Absolutely true. However, now that we've both said that, there's nothing left to debate. lol

And I think you just described some of my friends.