Absolutes

Marotta,

The definitions you found on-line are misleading:

"7. not dependent on anything else; considered without reference to anything else." and "5. Determined in itself and not by anything outside itself; not dependent or relative; ultimate; instrinic; as absolute moral law; absolute knowledge."

For example, "not dependent on anything else" - All definitions are contextual.  They all depend upon the context of our knowledge at the time we concieve of them.  A child's definition of a table can be true even though lacking sofistication.  It can be replaced by a better definition when the context of his knowledge increases.  This does NOT deny a valid definition from being absolute. 

Absolute does not require that a piece of knowledge be immutable through time.  Nor can it mean being "ultimate" since we never know when that would happen.  Nor can it mean 'intrinsic' since that leaves out conceptual knowlede altogether.  If someone says, "There are no absolute moral laws," they are making a statement of moral law that contradicts itself.  If they say that we can't know things absolutely, they have the same problem in the area of knowledge. 

The use of "Absolute" comes into play both in epistemology and in ethics.  Claiming that there are no absolutes is almost always used to deny that we can know things, or that there can be such a thing as an absolute good (or bad).

"Determined in itself" subtracts the context of existing knowledge which denies the process of integration which renders that understanding complete nonsense in the area of epistemology.
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You wrote:

...not every claim about "human nature" is absolute (or even true).

That is a failed argument.  False claims are not a valid measure to hold up for or against human nature being absolute.  When you say, "That humans have a nature is absolute," then human nature is absolute (which is just saying that you can't point at a human and say that you are pointing at an entity that has the nature of a squirel or a rock.  You said it: "Existence is identity. To be is to be something."
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You wrote:

Contextual truths are objective: based in physical reality, we know them through reason. But they are not immutable, eternal, or intrinsic.

They don't have to be immutable, eternal, or intrinsic to be absolute. 

Take a look at Ayn Rands description from Introduction to Objectivists Epistemology:

Concepts are not and cannot be formed in a vacuum; they are formed in a context; the process of conceptualization consists of observing the differences and similarities of the existents within the field of one’s awareness (and organizing them into concepts accordingly). From a child’s grasp of the simplest concept integrating a group of perceptually given concretes, to a scientist’s grasp of the most complex abstractions integrating long conceptual chains—all conceptualization is a contextual process; the context is the entire field of a mind’s awareness or knowledge at any level of its cognitive development.

She has made the point that all knowledge is contextual.  Therefore, when you say, "Absolutes are not contextual." you are implying that there are no absolutes that we can know or that there can be knowledge that has no context.  Both of those are epistemological disasters.
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You wrote:

To say that something is "absolutely true within context" is to steal the concept of "objective."

That doesn't make sense.  All knowlege is contextual.  Some pieces of knowledge are absolute.  Where is the conceptual theft in that?
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You wrote:

It is objectively true that I need glasses to work confortably on the computer. I do have other alternatives. I could make the display larger with a conventient key combination.

Your ability to see the screen as it is, is uncomfortable.  There are adjustments to your means of seeing or the screen display to work comfortably.  We are taking that as objectively true.  And, within the defined contexts, it is absolute (unless some important piece of context, like the light in the room, or the brightness setting of the display, or if the time of day has some effect on your vision, etc.).
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You wrote:

Some people claim that taking a human life is absolutely wrong.

The context that is needed here is the concept of individual rights and the context of the 'taking of that life.'  Supply the context of individual rights, and give 'taking of a human life' the context of initiating the force as opposed to self-defense or retaliation, and you know have the needed context to say that it IS absolutely wrong. 

In order to get rid of absolutes (for the purpose of sanctioning subjectivism and relativism requires the removal of the concept of context.  It is also encouraged by attacking "system building" - the concept of all knowedge being connected in the same sense that all of reality is connected.  I usually see the drive to get rid of absolutes (and the understanding of context and system building) as an intellectual softening-up process so that a person is prepared to give up their moral or epistemological beliefs and accept subjectivism, relativism and uncertainty.

The law of identity is absolute. This lamp in my office is not.

Painting an object blue doesn't change its identity.  You really don't grasp the law of identity as a law that is applied.  There is nothing that you could do that would violate the law of identity.  You can ignore it.  You can fail to understand it.  You can rebel against it mentally.  But it will remain true.  A lamp will be a lamp and parts of a lamp will be parts of a lamp (context... remember).  The lamp is not mutable in the sense that you can somehow step outside of the law of identity by messing around with it.
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When I'm talking about the moral difference between murder and killing in self-defense you point out that, "The moral absolutists disagree."  Well, no matter what anyone says, there may be someone who disagrees.  That doesn't not mean that we should view morality as subjective or moral values as relative.  There are many people who admit to an objective reality, but then say that moral values can't be treated objectively.
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By Wolfer's argument, it is absolutely wrong to terminate a pregnancy because the unborn child has not coerced the mother.

Wrong.  "Unborn child" is intended as a confusion.  It is such an obvious attempt to smuggle the possession of rights to any post-conception bit of tissue which is what the argument is about.  When do individual rights attach? Some religious folk believe that human life begins at conception AND assume that individual rights attach at that point.  But that won't stand up to logic.  Abortion is the termination of a pregnancy which does not take the life of an individual human being.  It isn't till the point where a fetus can reasonably be called a baby, which is legally defined at this point in history in this country as the moment of birth that individual rights attach and change fetal tissue to an individual human.
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I only assert that absolutes exist independent of context; and that which exists in context is objective.

Are you absolutely certain of that?  Is that the only condition in which an absolute exists?  And isn't stipulating a condition, identical in this case to stating of a context?

And the most important questions in this area have to do with admiting or denying that there can be such a thing as an absolute moral value.  And admitting or denying that we can have any absolute knowledge.  Where do you stand on those?
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Ayn Rand stated, explicitly, that all knowledge is contextual. How do you answer that?
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Ayn Rand stated that concepts are formed in a context and that conceptualization itself is a contextual process.  How do answer that?
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You can never escape context.  It is not possible.  You can never escape that some things are absolute.  At that point, you have to recognize that you need to understand how context and absolutes relate to one another, since if there is something that is absolute, it will still have a context.

Marotta,

Humans could not hold abstractions in their minds until they had language. By language, I mean something conceptually different from animal calls.  By language I mean the expression of a mental state with no external stimulus, i.e., with an internal motivation only.

Language can not exist without words.  Most words are not only symbols, but symbols for concepts.  Concepts are measurement-omitted summations of percepts.  Percepts are impossible without external stimulus.

Let me put it this way: You can't have language without prior perception of an external world. 
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How could you form the concept of context before you learned "concept" and "context"?

It is first grasped when a young mind sees that understanding is correct or not correct depending upon other, somehow related things.  When Mom plays peek-aboo with her baby she is having fun and the baby is learning about existence and context - not explicitly of course, but the way we learn most things - the practical and then, maybe, we learn the principles that explain the practical application.  Mom really doesn't cease to exist just because the baby can't see her.  The expanded context is that she probably hasn't ceased to exist when she leaves the room.  The baby is learning about those elements of the context that make object persistence a reality.  The baby is learning that other things do 'go out of existence' - like food that is eaten or taken away - what is that context?

The baby by grasping the context is acquiring certainty regarding the knowledge that Mom hasn't disappeared.  Inside of this primitive grasp of that context, the baby can act on that knowledge because of the increased certainty.  The paradigm is simple: We must act, to act successfully we must have knowledge AND have a degree of certainty about the knowledge.  Context makes that certainty possible.  When someone says that there are no absolutes inside of a context, I say there is no absolute until you do have a context.  The context for the law of identity is existence.
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If I say,  "My trash is picked up every Tuesday," I have made an assertion whose truth lies within the stated context.  We converse in ways where we have habits and understandings as to how much explicit context is appropriate to the purpose of the communication. 

I didn't need to say, "All items I consider to be trash that will fit inside this trash can, and will be put into the trash can, while I'm still alive and able to put things into the trash can, and while I still have an agreement with this trash company, and put out on the curb in front of my house by 8am on tuesdays will be taken away by the Republic Trash company because of the agreement that I have with them as long as that tuesday isn't one of the holidays recognized the United States government and unless the trash company changes the day, and as long as the company fulfills its side of our agreement and there isn't some intervening event that makes pick unlikely, such as nuclear war...."  The full, or technical context would include all items that need to be true to make the assertion true.  It could include many other details of the context like the specific meaning of the words, if for example, I were using the sentence in a philosophical communication.  Different purposes can require different amounts of the context being made explicit.

What we need to know is that certainty is possible.  Context in our daily usage is what we need to understand to satisfy the purpose inherent in the asserton which might have just been to tell my neighbor when my trash company does its pickup.  I only need so much in the way of context to feel certainty in the statement I made (the first statment, not the very long one.)
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Think of context almost the way we think of a concept as measurement-omitted summation of all possible concretes of a kind.  But with a context, instead of all possible 'concretes' it is all the possible direct relationships implied in the subject and verb of the thought.  All of those 'points' of a given context are not made explicit.  Only those 'points' of a given context that are needed to understand the assertion or thought, within the purpose of the communication, are made explicit.  When we chew on the the concept of some context, it is most likely to be because we are attempting to determine the truth of a statement.  And when we are chewing on the concept of 'true' it is about the possiblility of certain knowledge (absolute within a given context).

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I find it fascinating that you, who have often shown a penchant for floating abstractions, are keen on some kind of language that doesn't require any external connection (i.e., the very heart of a floating abstraction), and that we can't have anything be absolute (epistemologically certain) if it has any context (i.e., connects to anything specific in reality - more floating).

Marotta,

By Wolfer's argument, it is absolutely wrong to terminate a pregnancy

That was a strange statement.

1.  The posts I had made before hand had zero references to abortion.  It wasn't a part of the discussion.

2. My argument would not have lead to such a conclusion regarding abortion.

3. And I was quick to reply "Wrong," yet, now, in the reply above, you say you aren't going to argue about abortion.

I wasn't the one who brought up abortion.  You'll only need to stop arguing with yourself.
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In my example of the trash I was trying to point out there is an objective context that derives from a thought.  In our mind we have a thought we might believe to be true.  (Trash pick up is on Tuesdays)  Next we might cast that assertion as a written or spoken statement (it will likely have the same subject and predicate as when it was a thought in our mind - because we are predicating something about a subject with the understanding that we believe to be true).  But when we write or speak that thought as a statement we might add some qualifiers as adjectives, adverbs, clauses, and so forth.  These are additions on the context that exists in an implied form in the statment without the qualifiers.  Some of what is implied is in our time in history, our geographical place, our culture, and our understanding of our audience, and above all, in the purpose in making the statement.  If I'm telling a neighbor when the trash is picked up, the implied part is where it is picked up (at my house, not off in some other city), and in the here and now as opposed to years ago.  What I might need to specify is that it is Republic Trash company since there are several that could be used. 

But all of that is only on the epistemological side of things.  That is, it is from a thought in our mind to a spoken or written statement of that thought.  The epistemological principle it is based upon is that all knowledge is connected.  That is, no piece of knowledge is isolated such that it touches or is related to nothing else.  And that means that there are a great many relationships between pieces of knowledge.  That is context.  Or, I should say contexts.  We include what we need of all the possible contexts in order to suit the purpose of the communication.  We have to examine possible contexts at the time we mentally chew over a thought. Truth pertains to what is being predicated of a subject, and it requires enough qualification of what is meant by the subject and the predication to make the assertion true.  The qualifications (reasonably implied and explict) make the truth possible.

All of those epistemological observations are just mirroring existence.  Each existant is in relation to other existants.  We can identify things as if we poured a bucket full of marbles into a clear fish tank.  We can, with our minds identify marble X and we can see each of the other marbles that it touches.  Touch being a kind of relationship that we could use as a context.  We could choose to identify 'touching on a plane horizontal to the fishtank as a context.  We could choose to view marbles where the context was hierarchical in that each marble is its own little world of connecting silicon molecules, and each of those molecules containing atoms, etc. - a different context.  We can discuss the tank of marbles as legal property, as decorative art, as the storage mechanism of a child who collects marbles. All of these are external to the person concieving of them - they are external reality but with our identification of relationships between actual existants.

Then we can make a statement where we take an idea (including the finding of its context, e.g., relationship between concepts) and make a statement, and that statement will purport to express a truth about existants in the external world which includes the external entities that make up the context we are interested in.  The relationship between the external world and the statement can be true or false (or nonsensical) and in being true with adequate context we have absolute knowledge.  Imagine a fishbowl full of only blue marbles.  Now imagine putting a single red marble in.  At that point you can say, "Each marble in this fishtank that touches a red marble is a blue marble".  That is a statment that would be absolutely true and not just because what is predicated of the subject is true, but that it is so within the context specified.  You could pull out the red marble, but that would be the creation of a new context and does nothing to modify the truth under the old context. 

When you say that to be absolute something must, for example, be true for all time... is to say that you are including "all time" as a required part of the context.  You can not generate a statement of what is a characteristic of what it means to be absolute without having created a context.  Absolute requires context within which it is true.
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That which is absolute exists without context.

The law of identity is absolute.  The context for the law of identity is existence.  Nothing exists without context.

Marotta,

My point is that it is not absolutely true that civilization is collapsing and we must all run for our lives away from cities and to the farthest corners.

My point is that a statement can be absolutely true or not.  We apply logic, and we examine the context, and of course the meaning of the words themselves, and we declare that it is true.  Or, that it is not true.  Or, that it is missing something or written in such a way that it can't even be examined in this fashion, like a string of nonsense words.

We agree that there can not be statements that are both true and not true (at the same time and in the same way, i.e., in the same context).  What you are doing when you mention that something that might be in your self-interest but isn't necessarily in someone else's self-interest is to make values subjective, not just in the sense that we have different preferences and we construct different codes of values.  You are saying that statements involving man (each of whom may hold different views) cannot be absolutely true.  I maintain that is the same as saying they can't be measured as true or as false even when the context is firmly nailed down. 

This is very difficult to discuss in ways that make it clear because it is so complex, so abstract, and has such a complex context which at this level of abstraction appears to drift back and forth between metaphysics and epistemology.

It is true that different men can have different values.  It is also true that a man can change his values over time.  It is also true that the set of values commonly seen in one society may be different from those in another society.  These differences have to be sorted out in any statement in order to be comparing apples to apples.  The process of doing that sorting out takes us towards the truth.  You, I imagine, agree with that.  But if we put the word "absolute" in front of "truth" - even after we have sorted it all out, then you disagree. 

We could simply let this argument go, concluding that we have different definitions of the word "absolute."  And I think that is part of the issue.  But I think that there is more involved.  I think that there is an issue in definitional difference and - in my opinion - on your side it exists in your mind in some fashion that leaves you more likely to fall prey to the floating abstraction, and on my side, I don't think I have the clarity I'd need to explain these things as well as I should.  I can't be any more blunt or open about our differences here.

To you 'absolute' is about a context (or absence of), but for you it carries, in the concept, a kind of universal, for all time, for all people, etc., kind of meaning.  For me, the qualifiers of absolutism apply inside of the context, and by having that understanding it permits certainty which would otherwise have to be denied.  So, in my understanding "absolute" means certainty.  And "certainty" means an epistemological state that can be held with confidence, which also means that what is in the mind does, in fact, represent what is in external reality.  To me, without this understanding of "absolute" there is an epistemological loosness that makes the possibility of differences arising from choice a way to encourage floating abstractions. 

If you disagree that certainty is not possible, that would be easier to argue.

Nothing is as difficult as nailing down the objective weight of a given value within the framework of this universe of choice, politics, and individual preferences. We have the right to do some things and not others, our nature is such that we can choose to pursue things that are actually disvalues, in this totally objective universe we can have different preferences in ways that don't involve conflicts with other, and don't involve errors in choosing values.  But given all of that it is still possible to say that it is absolutely true that some people will prefer chocolate ice cream over vanilla.  Or that it is absolutely wrong to prefer blind faith over reason as a means of cognition.  "Absolute" applies inside of a context because the context is saying, "Under these conditions and all else remaining the same."

There is a strong drive in some people to cry out that there are always exceptions... as if they were psycholgically compelled to believe that there will always be an exception... as if they had to hold on to this avenue of escape from any universe that could actually nail something down as absolutely true.... as if an absolute truth were a danger.

Steve, I went back and read your #7 and #9 several times each. It is pretty interesting to see how your mind works. Mine is mostly the same, as most people more or less think the same way or we could not have mass transit tokens - and clubs for people who collect them. But we are individuals; not everyone is a vecturist. And those differences are important, sometimes tragically so.  

It is also unfortunate that we tend to engage by disagreement. That is not peculiar to you and me. It goes back to the Greek philosophers, at least. I wonder what it would be like if we only kept agreements and let disagreements fall away like chaff from wheat.

I agree that words are powerful tools. The handaxe was stable for perhaps a million years and was passed from one dominant hominid to another. It had to be shown. The idea existed in the minds of creators and imitators but it was impossible to communicate except by demonstration.  The revolutions in microliths, agriculture, and cities reflect changes in thought. Human language made that possible. It was revolutionary, a quantum leap, and very recent. 

I referred to the assessment test that I took as part of a job application.  

One like this was easy by perception:

As soon as it got complicated, I had to use words to describe to myself what was going on, how the images were changing.

But someone else might get farther down the line before they need words... or might not need words at all. The pictures just make sense, i.e., speak a language of their own.

I had to look up "crow epistemology". I have ITOE, but I needed to make sure that some other context was not being applied here. We humans only recently acquired that higher level of abstraction.  "One... two... many..." is very common across languages.  Moreover, in ancient Semitic as in modern Japanese, different words were used to count different things.  No common conceptual denominator united five sheep and five reeds.  In fact, the abstraction 5 was unknown 5000 years ago.  

It is dangerous to draw parallels between human infants today and human beings of a previous era. You started learning language in the womb. I wrote here before about  Foundations of Human Sociality (reviewed here: http://rebirthofreason.com/Spirit/Books/303.shtml).  The fundamental assumption of the research is that university psychology departments that attempted to glean "human nature" from experiments with the infants of their own students failed to understand how early socialization begins. I believe that our ideas of fairness, sharing, and the virtues of selfishness are not universal either in space or time. They had to be discovered, invented, and developed.  Ayn Rand made the same kind of error in ITOE by attempting to extend her own inner experience to the history of cognition. 

Bill,

I had the same response to Marotta's blue non-blue thing.  And to other points of his, like:

I believe that our ideas of fairness, sharing, and the virtues of selfishness are not universal either in space or time. They had to be discovered, invented, and developed.  Ayn Rand made the same kind of error in ITOE by attempting to extend her own inner experience to the history of cognition.

That means that Marotta abandons, at least partially, an objective morality.  The fact that we have to discover natural laws, doesn't mean they aren't universal.  And he seems to have a disagreement with Rand's description of concept formation.

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In that last paragraph of his last post he is muddying the waters of human nature by focusing on some difference that might exist between today's infants and infants from past years. 

Notice that the trend is very constant: A denial of universals, a denial (at least in effect) of the possibility of certainty... and the denials are at a basic level of metaphysics and epistemology.  That's a road to relativsm and even subjectivism by the way of floating abstractions.

Marotta wrote:

He [Steve] seems to want to drive me from RoR, or perhaps have me moderated, and put into Dissent.  The fact is that I am an Objectivist.

Marotta is wrong on both counts.  He isn't an Objectivist, he just thinks that he is.  And, I'm not trying to drive him away from RoR, or have him moderated or put into dissent.  Those wouldn't be appropriate since he isn't being abusive at that level, or disruptive, or attacking RoR,  or Rand, or Objectivism.

I don't like Marotta and I make no bones about that.  Back quite a while ago he accused me of being a self-admitted conservative and a self-admitted racist.  Both were very ugly lies.  Even after weeks had past he offered no apology.  Since then the word "Marottta," to me, means "no character."

I find a kind of fascination in some of his posts, like an entomologist might find the ugliest of bugs interesting.  I attempt to work out the chain of reasoning that connects the words to the epistemology to the psychology.  With someone else, out of respect, I wouldn't post anything that might make them feel uncomfortable... but with Marotta there is no such respect.

When I talk about seeing examples of subjectivism or relativism or floating abstractions, it is because they are there.  I take words, and their connection to reality, very seriously.

This discussion of identity reminds me of a pre-Socratic debate between Heraclitus and Parmenides.  Heraclitus argued that since everything changes, nothing remains the same, so there is no identity.  Parmenides countered that since it's obvious that things have identity, it follows that change is an illusion.  Aristotle replied that they were both wrong.  He said that change exists, but that that doesn't invalidate identity, because in order for a thing to change, it must in some sense remain the same; otherwise, one couldn't say that "it" has changed.  If there were no identity, there'd be no change; only replacement.

This leads into the Ship of Theseus paradox, recorded by Plutarch in the late First Century:  Imagine a ship belonging to Theseus, and suppose that as the ship grows old, the planks have to be replaced.  If they continue to be replaced until none of the original planks remain, do we still have the same ship?  Does it still have the same identity or is it now an entirely different ship? There's another version of this paradox called "Grandfather's Axe" -- an axe that first has its head replaced and then its handle.  Is it still the same axe?

What do you think?

In replying to my examples of change versus identity or of change versus sameness, Steve wrote,

"Which is why painting lamps blue doesn't alter their identity.  And changing the handle and then the blade of the axe doesn't change the identity of the axe, just as when I change my socks, or get a haircut I'm still Steve.  And Theseus has the same ship even after it has been replanked.  [Emphasis added] What is the alternative?  Does the axe or the ship or the lamp magically disappear when they undergo change - leaving existence?  Or are we no longer able to identify them because they no longer have an identity?  No, those are nonsense."

The Greeks would say that you're begging the question -- that you're assuming the very point at issue.  Why is Theseus' ship the same even after every plank has been replaced?  There's not one part of it that's the same.  It's an entirely different ship.  The old ship no longer exists and therefore no longer has an identity; it's been replaced by an entirely new and different ship.  The same is true of grandfather's axe.  With the replaced head and handle, it's an entirely new and different axe.  Of course the replanked ship and the axe with a new head and handle have an identity.  It's just not the same identity as the old ship and axe.  (Notice that this differs from simply repainting the ship a different color.)

To make this point even clearer, suppose that instead of replacing Theseus' ship plank by plank over time, we immediately destroyed the ship by chopping it into kindling wood and then in its place built a new ship with the same specifications, and suppose we did this while Theseus was away on vacation.  After he returns, he sees a ship with brand new planks.  Is it the same ship as the one he saw before he went on vacation?  If not, then why does replacing the planks one by one over time preserve the ship's original identity, whereas replacing them all at once destroy it?