Posted by zeugma on March 11, 2005, at 18:48:09
In reply to Re: Another go..., posted by Impermanence on March 11, 2005, at 3:51:55
ok, I'll try this one out: what does' 'relative' mean?
"Morality is relative' puts 'relative' in predicative position. Whereas in the statement '
Relative to the earth, the planets appear to move backwards at times', 'relative' is part of an adverbial phrase, and adverbs are 'operators' such as 'earlier' (this means that event e occurred previous to time t) or 'possibly'. As in, ‘Possibly the next president of the U.S. will be a Democrat.’ This means that there is a possible world, accessible to our own, in which the next President will be a Democrat. ‘Earlier’ and ‘possibly’, then, don’t denote concepts, which are either true or false (assuming bivalence) of objects within a domain, but are rather ‘quantifiers’, which denote relations between sets. Since I am lapsing, as is my wont, into jargon, (and I am also someone who EASILY loses track of what he is saying- IRL half my sentences trail off- that’s why I have a hard time IRL…) I’ll concretize this a bit:1) I got up earlier than usual that morning,.
‘Earlier’ here means that there is a relation between the set of events that include the getting up, and the set of events that don’t; here, those are the events arranged on a 24-hour temporal scheme, such that waking up at 4 am would qualify as ‘earlier’, and waking up at 5 am wouldn’t; hence, that there is a specific relation that obtains between two sets of actions. Compare this with (2):
(2) The carpet is green.
This means that an object (the carpet) is included in the set of objects that are green. It does not signify that there is any relation between sets, in the way that the set of actions that include getting up at 4 am relates to the set of events that include getting up at 5 am (viz., that one set is earlier than the other, relative to a 24-hour temporal scheme).
(3) The planets appear to move backwards at times, relative to the earth.
In (3) the phrase ‘relative to the earth’ likewise contrasts one set of appearances (those glimpsed from the earth) with another ( those obtainable from other vantage points); ‘contrasts‘ denotes the type of relation that holds between the sets (viz., that they are not identical).. The statement (4)
(4) The planets appear to move backwards.
Is true when considered from the vantage point of earth, but false when considered from a position outside the solar system. Thus, (4) resembles (1) in that it is ‘relativized’ to a set. (1) is relativized to a particular arrangement of the 24-hour temporal sequence: anything earlier than 5 am I constitutes the set that is ‘earlier than usual’ (note that ‘earlier than usual’ is a predicate) for me. Because the 24-hour sequence itself is an object which is accessible to participants in this discourse, the relativization implicit in (1) does not make it ‘relative’ in the sense intended in (5):
(5) Morality is relative.
Is it fair to paraphrase this as (6):
(6) Morality is relative to what individuals (groups, cultures, etc.) consider right and wrong?
Then, what (5) means is that there are diverse standards of what is considered right and wrong by individuals (etc.), just as we have different standards of what constitutes ‘earlier than usual’ for waking times.
The difference is that there is a 24-hour temporal scheme that we all can use; hence, statements that invoke the temporal scheme are ‘objective.’ There is also a spatial scheme in which we can identify our position as being within (or outside) the earth’s perspective; hence, (3) is also ‘objective.’ (6), however, contains the clause
(7) What I (groups, cultures, etc.) consider right and wrong.
While it is a matter of fact, and hence ‘objective,’ that I consider morality not relative in the same way that the appearance of retrograde planetary movement is, the truth of my belief itself notoriously is not. What this means is that it is true that I hold to the aforementioned belief, but the clausal complement, the ‘oblique’ part, does not contribute to the truth of (6) in the way that there has to be a 24-hour temporal scheme that I adhere to for in order for (1) to be true (hence, the scheme contributes to the truth of (1), in fact without it (1) is unintelligible).What this means is that we cannot infer from such statements as (8)
(8) Everyone thinks that morality is relative
That morality is in fact relative, any more than we can infer from
(9) Blake thought that the earth was flat
That the earth is in fact flat. Statements about morality, I would argue, contain oblique components, and this is how (5), (6), (8), and (9) differ from (1) and (3), which also contain ‘relativized’ elements. That is why a statement such as (5) has to be evaluated in a different way, and why it cannot be straightforwardly true or false in the way that the others can.
-z
poster:zeugma
thread:468601
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20050305/msgs/469819.html