Robin
Posts: 1431
Joined: Sep. 2009
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WJM doubles down on his "Objective Arbiter of Truth" from yesterday in the same thread:
| Quote | The problem is that RMD’s not only have a faulty brain (not mind, for an RMD, don’t steal the concept), as you say, they have no presumed means by which to check and correct the output of their faulty brain; they have no presumed non-arbitrary standard by which to evaluate arguments; they have no presumed supervening capacity to evaluate evidence and argument above whatever causes them to think whatever they think with their faulty brain.
(snipped the poetic waxing)
But I’m not arguing about what the world **is**, I’m pointing out – whether you realize it or now, and whether you accept it or not – that there are assumptions that must underlie any argument where you expect someone else to be able to reach a sound conclusion about the truth-value of your argument. RMD’s deny those assumptions, but unwittingly steal them in every argument they make. Because without those assumption, there’s no reason to make an attempt at a “sound argument” in the first place. |
C'mon William. Think for just one second about your claim. If "RMDs" (as you refer to us) actually had such faulty brains, we'd have been dead long ago. Now I freely admit that there's no way to be sure I'm not dead, but it gets just a little silly to presume such when it's perfectly easy to make up my own term of "living" and labeling myself as such. And so long as everyone else goes along with that label, guess what? It becomes a standard.
The easiest way to understand this is the King's standard. If I take a given length of string that more or less equals the length of my foot and call that length of string a "foot" and then precede to measure all other lengths by that string and tell everyone else they have to use it too, guess what? We have a standard of measure.
Oh, I can hear your retort now - "but your faulty brain doesn't know what a "foot" actually is and other people's faulty brains may perceive a different length of for the string". While I can't exactly argue against this, it does beg the question of how such hypothetical straw people could ever survive given that such faulty perception would invariably land them at the bottom of a very sheer cliff eventually.
Of course, we do in fact suffer from this perceptual inaccuracy to some degree. Just about everyone knows the old canard about how asking a man to demonstrate six inches will invariably lead to him holding his hands roughly a foot apart. But that sort of inaccuracy is fairly well known to derive from expectation, not lack of a standard. When presented with a one foot ruler, most men blush slightly and acknowledge their error. And much as this sort of estimation may vex us, most of us seem to figure out how far away we should stand from urinal without consulting some god.
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we IDists rule in design for the flagellum and cilium largely because they do look designed. Bilbo
The only reason you reject Thor is because, like a cushion, you bear the imprint of the biggest arse that sat on you. Louis
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