NationStates Jolt Archive

Sooooo elsewhere I'm stuck in a heated relative/objective debate about truth and knowledge.

Is there such a thing as objective knowledge/truth or is knowledge relative.

My stance, of course it is relative if nothing else because all knowledge is based upon what our sense tell us, and what others senses have told them.

We are though stuck withour human sense, and the question that I ask is if our senses differ from say a flies, then how can we be sure that our perceptions of what surrounds us is the truth, or is it the flies?

We are therfore stuck with only our subjective sensory data from which to interpet subjectivly the universe around us.

Comments!

yeh, it's relative. i'm studying an interesting example at the moment involving cartography and the interests of the various countries sponsoring it during the 'age of discovery'. there were tonnes of people going out making maps using very standardised and quite reliable techniques and yet all the maps are significantly different. the significance being that the differences mainly played to the interests of those sponsoring the particular cartographer. there's also the problem of the 'immutable mobile' - does knowledge remain the same between one place and another. the map was thought to be an immutable mobile but that fact is, it was viewed differently by different people in different places and for different reasons. for each person the knowledge gleaned from the map was different. immutable mobiles and objectivity are a nice idea but are a dream because humans are not purely rational or objective.

Sooooo elsewhere I'm stuck in a heated relative/objective debate about truth and knowledge.

Is there such a thing as objective knowledge/truth or is knowledge relative.

My stance, of course it is relative if nothing else because all knowledge is based upon what our sense tell us, and what others senses have told them.

We are though stuck withour human sense, and the question that I ask is if our senses differ from say a flies, then how can we be sure that our perceptions of what surrounds us is the truth, or is it the flies?

We are therfore stuck with only our subjective sensory data from which to interpet subjectivly the universe around us.

Comments!


Maybe your truth about truth being relative is also relative.

Maybe your truth about truth being relative is also relative.

Heh I would argue that there was no maybe involved.

There's a priceless moment on the Firesign Theatre's third album when an authority figure (a prosecutor who is somehow also an auctioneer) bellows, “What do I hear?” and a stoned voice from the back of the room responds, “That's metaphysically absurd, man. How can I know what you hear?”