In logic, when someone speaks of something being “true” or “false” they are speaking in terms of either self-evident — as in axioms, which are alleged to be neither verifiable nor falsifiable, on the grounds that any proof or disproof must use the law itself prior to reaching the conclusion, and are therefore assumed to be true — or they are speaking in terms of empirically verifyiable statements.
Neither of these leave room for subjective statements…which are by their nature neither true or false…hence “subjective”. “Big” is a subjective term, and therefore attempting to envoke dialetheism by claiming a subjective statement can be “both true and false” simply because it is subjective, is, needless to say, asinine.
I’ve been away for awhile but I’ll give a few responses/questions:
(1) what does makes a term subjective? Is it the fact that that term’s definition relys on a comparison with other things?
(2) Let me restate my thesis: the word big is logical for we then couldn’t say that the sun is bigger than the earth and assign the statement wuth either a true or false value.
Normally I would turn you to a dictionary, but I’m feeling festive. I’ll go out on a limb and offer that a statement is subjective when it is a matter of opinion…in otherwords, existing in one’s mind as opposed to being empirical reality.
What term?
Um. No. See, “big” and “bigger” are two different terms. The fact that you can make an empirical statement with one has no bearing on the other.
You’re trying way too hard to finagle your false premise into somehow not being false. Just admit you made a mistake and move on.
Pretty good points so I only wanted to comment on your “equivocation” judgment: the word sun is not equivocated in my examples -the sun as defined as the solar disk is emphatically (though incompletely and analogously) a real sun, and the sun itself is the real sun; no equivocation. The word size is not equivocated either for “whether something is x units large” is applied to both the solar disk and the sun w/o prejudice.
Edit: something I forgot to mention earlier RE: fish,
“You don’t take a fish out of the water and then claim that it is in the nature of fish not to swim in water. That would obviously be your preference that you have imposed onto the fish.”
True, but a fish that was born w/o lungs would be considered an “unatural” fish since measured against its nature, it falls short. So in so far as you know both the nature and that preferences should be proportioned to nature, then it is possible to know that a fish would prefer to be breathing than not.
I think that something similar is possible for humans.
There is plenty reason to believe you made one (particularly the fact that you did).
Um. Okay.
One finds it funny how you would go back and forth using the term “big”, and then all of a sudden use the word “bigger” to try to prove it can be used in an empirical statement, and then when I call you out on the word change, you ask if the new word is the subjective one, and use the exact same example you tried to use before…and notat all mention the original word you used.
(And this is not even to mention the fact that I explicitly said “‘Big’ is a subjective term” when this nonsense started. And yet here you are acting completely oblivious and asking: “is it the word I had to switch to to try to make my point? Is that the subjective one? Because look, if I use it in the exact same sentence as I did before when I first made the switch, it doesn’t sound very subjective! So what do you have to say to that, huh??”
personally, I thought you were going to say that “bigger” was the subjective term. But now that we have this out of the way, I’ll just ask one more question for the road: “what makes big so subjective”? It seems to indicate something much more discrete and precise than “bigger” which latter is a relative term admiting of variation. Yet as you said, big is the matter of opinion?
There is no way you are this dense. Are you seriously unsure as to whether something being “big” is a matter of fact or opinion? Or do you just not know the definition of “subjective”? Is that it?
Well, you can make an objective statement that the 5mx5mx5m object is “big”. It is a perhaps meaningless statement, but it is objective nonetheless, according to the definition I am using.
EDIT- Note that if you are using John’s definition - at any rate what I presume is his definition - of objective as “not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts,” then he is entirely correct that “big” statements can only be subjective. It would be silly to argue that.
So you mean if you actually operate as if words mean what they are commonly understood to mean, and what a dictionary says they mean, then I’m right and it would be silly to argue otherwise. Great. Glad we were able to clear this up.
So you mean if you actually operate as if words mean what they are commonly understood to mean, and what a dictionary says they mean, then I’m right and it would be silly to argue otherwise. Great. Glad we were able to clear this up.
I was not challenging your assertion. I’m just making sure it is known that objective also has a useful philosophical meaning. It’s what people always forget when I talk about objective morality, for example, so it is best that they know this.
If you read what I wrote, I’m very clearly supporting what you are saying. It is simply that when you make claims such that “do you know what the definition of the word subjective is?” you have to be able to support your claim with the right definition. And “commonly understood” is meaningless to me.
How is someone who puts a lot of stock in traditional dictionaries similar to a nihilist?
I am merely saying that the “commonly understood” definitions of commoners are meaningless to me. Unless they are objectively written out, in which case I shall consider them. (Hence my willingness to entertain your definition, which is not written in the OED, but various modern dictionaries).
I think I see your point. So there’s no way to figure out if something is unambiguously big w/o some external desideratum? And if that’s true, then the word “big” doesn’t really have any meaning or coherence?
But does that mean that the T or F is non-existent?
I think the main problem that I have with the proposition that “big” is just an opinion w/o a T or F value is that when someone says something is big, it is commonly accepted that he means either “absolutely of some definite size” or “absolutely bigger than something else” so that “big” has an absolute, objective, referent. Is that wrong or are we using words differently?
Think of it in terms of cardinality vs. ordinality, or absoluteness vs. relativity. “Big” is cardinal (absolute), while “bigger” is ordinal (relative). But there’s no objectively determined size which, along with any size greater than it, must be called “big”. Another way of putting this is that “big” is arbitrary - or subjective. My own definition of “subjective” is “existing entirely within the mind”.