Note that science pretty much sticks to the latter. Sure, science is as much a social activity as anything else, but Latour’s conclusion that there is no Truth does not follow. On the contrary, science clearly demonstrates Truth in its ability to build upon itself, each generation seeing further than the last by standing on the shoulders of giants, as it were. If Latour were correct, we would still be living in the dark ages.

It’s not the idea of Truth that’s the problem. Rather, it’s the notion that there is some shortcut, revealed-knowledge sort of way to get to it. If you want to know Truth, the scientific approach is the only technique shown to have any value. But this approach only works when the target of inquiry is clearly defined, such that we can agree on which verifiable statements we should be looking at.

Our experiences of reality may differ in small ways, but they’re not totally uncorrelated. I think that’s what you’d get if there were no exterior reality. As it is, when you and I experience something differently, we can compare notes and get something useful out of thinking about what the differences are and what that implies, because we know that they both reference the same thing out there in Reality.

I think many appeals to Good, etc. are irrelevant, but sometimes they are used as shorthand for a long, involved, and valid path of ethical reasoning, in which case they’re totally relevant unless you can find a bad assumption in there somewhere. So I think complete relativism goes too far. There are universals that have to do with the things that we all share in common: sentience, reasoning, the human body, etc. And we can use those as a basis for developing a common system that still accommodates our differences. Right?

I think part of what I was trying to do was take an extreme position (there is no Truth), and see if I could derive logical inconsistences from it (reductio ad absurdum), but so far, I’m not seeing much wrong with it.

I’m also struggling to find the functional difference, if any, between “there is no exterior reality” and “there is an exterior reality, but we each experience it differently”. Since we can’t access it directly, and appealing to it doesn’t help because of the differences in experience, it becomes a ghost of perception, a placeholder that means whatever we want it to mean. And because it’s confusing because two people are using the same word to describe totally different concepts in their head, I wonder if it’s actually counterproductive.

I tried to get at that in the first post – without a direct line to the Truth, some sort of omniscient objective observer, then it might as well not exist because it has to be filtered through each of our (imperfect) perceptions.

I really struggle with Ethics as well, because absolute Good and Evil end up having the same difficulties in my mind as absolute Truth. We can always construct situations that make us have to make a judgment call, and there’s no system that anybody feels comfortable using in all situations.

In other words, I’m on the verge of being a complete relativist and treating all appeals to Truth or Good or Beauty as being appeals to irrelevant authority.

I agree with you. I think it’s a good way to look at things. Idea patterns and mental models are just tools, neither good or bad on their own, and their fidelity to exterior reality and their usefulness are two separate measures, not necessarily related.

Talking about usefulness has an implicit value judgement. Those values have to come from some system of thought that’s based on a priori assumptions. So the big question is, what are you assuming? That determines how you value a tool, and whether the use of that tool is ethical. Although we all have different systems, I think that the commonality of human experience can be used as a reference point to work from when we’re comparing ethical evaluations.

So idea-tool-patterns can be True, and they can be Useful, and they can be Ethical, but none of those measures is necessarily correlated with the others. They often are, but they needn’t be.

I’m probably blithering at this point.

WRT to core truths, I don’t think it’s possible to build up a logical system of any kind without some basic assumptions. You have to start somewhere. OTOH, I do think that you can do a lot by starting with a small number of well-identified axioms that you think would apply to any sane, sentient (human?) being. I think you can get most of what you need for a basic ethical framework out of the following basic concepts:

*The laws of logical reasoning
*Happiness is, by definition, desirable
*Objective reality exists, though I perceive it imperfectly
*My experience of consciousness, etc. is isomorphic to the experiences of beings who appear to be conscious, etc. in the same way that I am
*The natural flow of things is in a direction of increasing complexification; going with this flow improves things. (I think this last one is implicit in the others, but it’s worth stating explicitly.)

That’s what I work from to do ethics, anyway.

So, in other words, everyone is always wrong, to some degree. *Nobody* has access to Truth. Instead of saying I’m right and you’re wrong, I have to say that I think my model is closer in this way and that way, to which you can respond okay, yes, but your model neglects this thing and that thing. And we’re both better off as a result of the disagreement, because we can try to reconcile the models. And in the spirit of “all models are wrong; some models are useful” we can then consider ideas that are ‘wrong’ but useful approximations (like Newton approximates Einstein), but in a way that sort of demands the question “useful for what, and under what conditions?” Which seems like it’s less abusable than the “constructed truth” thing people sometimes use for spin, framing, cults, etc..

I would very much like to see a system of ethics that built up ideas of goodness and shouldness without referencing core truths.