Truth doesn't exist

>huemer agrees with me
>that means everybody agrees with me DEGENERATES BTFO
The only people agreeing with you, are those misunderstanding the argument.

what? it's the relativist who posited the "truth" in the first place.

again, "everything is relative" is a proposition which necessarily has a truth value

I generally am more along the lines of "Truth exists, but as humans our limited faculties are more or less incapable of knowing it for certain." If we do stumble into truth it is as a blind man fumbling about with his hands out and looking for a wall to use for direction.

no it just goes to show that huemer BTFO relativists. as shown by the fact that you haven't even posted a good argument in response

> the problem is that "truth is relative" seems like a universal claim that would be true regardless of who believes it
Ah, well if you get to that meta level then as far as I'm concerned it gets pretty pointless because you can always one up it and redefine the terms, i.e. what constitutes truth, etc. You can get down a pretty useless rabbit hole this way and the further you go, the more tortuous the reasoning becomes, but I fail to see what the goal is here.

if you were remotely smart you would know that the easiest way out is to go with nihilism. it avoids the major problems with relativism and subjectivism. it's not self-refuting.

it has it's own problems but it's much harder to prove wrong so easily

>You can get down a pretty useless rabbit hole this way and the further you go, the more tortuous the reasoning becomes, but I fail to see what the goal is here.

I'm kind of confused. Idk it seems like relativists are making a meta claim as to what is really going on when we claim that something is "true". We're just trying to see if that statement is logically consistent (it seems like it isn't).

It's like when scientists say things like "well if it can't be proved by science, then it's not true", and ignore the fact that THAT statement itself is a philosophical claim which isn't empirically verifiable.

Language is constructed to represent ideas which transcend culture.

Your fucking stupid as shit m8

Mathematics is absolute truth because the conclusions always follow from the premises. Sure, you can deny the premises are correct, but that doesn't make mathematics wrong.

>I'm a relativist
>I have an opinion
>Truth does't exist

See? Relativism wins

Logic or Language is to blame. Just because we can't express or conceptualise what we know intuitively to be true doesn't mean it isn't.

I get that part, thanks, I guess it's just that it's early in the morning and I first chimed in before it looked like the thread would shape in a serious discussion. I'll step away to leave more interested anons at it.

No you flaming retard, the point is that 'logic' is based on truth-axioms, as is everything else.
Rejecting those axioms means you don't have to be consistent.
Relativists don't care about truth-claims, they care about value-claims.
Wrong, sorry child! Your precious textbook editor is wrong!

>Language is constructed to represent ideas which transcend culture.
1. Can you prove the existence of these ideas?
2. Can you prove that the relation between language and these ideas is one of representation?

>Relativists don't care about truth-claims, they care about value-claims.
that doesn't make any fucking sense. if "everything is relative" ISN'T true, then relativism is FALSE

those are the only two options. either relativism is true, or relativism is false. relativism is universally true, then relativism is false.

the whole theory doesn't make any fucking sense

>Wrong, sorry child! Your precious textbook editor is wrong!

really well thought out response. thanks

stop capitalizing words for emphasis you fucking sperg

You are so fucking stubborn, it's comedic.
Again you stupid STEMsperg, since they reject truth and thereby axioms, they do not need to be consistent. They don't fall into your dualistic horseshit.

>OP just learned relativism is retarded
what's this, the 1930s?
Nobody outside of meme fields believe in relativism.

>being right = being truth
Ebin

>Being coherent is being truthful
hmmmmmmmmmmm

Brainlet post

who cares? i'd italicize them but i can't on here

>you stupid STEMsperg
are you fucking retarded? read literally one of my posts and you'd understand i am advocating against stem shit. STEMlords are literally the biggest proponents of le relativism

>they reject truth and thereby axioms, they do not need to be consistent.

they don't reject truth you idiot, they're making a proposition that they claim is truthful. the proposition is:

everything is relative.

how do you not fucking understand that? they are arguing for that claim

ITT: undergrads who think Socrates didn't realize his "all I know is that I know nothing" statement was self contradictory.
Being coherent doesn't imply being right

>everything is relative
Isn't a truth-claim when truth is rejected, it becomes a value claim, because the axioms behind logic become null.

You are a seriously stupid if you cannot comprehend nonlogicism.

Reject the axioms and it all falls down

>nonlogicism
kek. i didn't realize you were baiting

that wasn't his statement, idiot. what he meant was that you have to be aware of the limits of your knowledge. not that you literally can know what you don't know.

>truth doesn't exist
>relativists
ah yes, another brainlet in my Veeky Forums

don't italicize words for emphasis either you fucking sperg

>being clear makes you autistic

wow, great insight

also, just to be clear, we're talking about moral truths ITT, right OP? because who the fuck would ever claim that truth doesn't exist in a universal sense. that doesn't even make sense and i have never heard of one person that would claim that

Y'all niggas retarded

*holds up spork*

>MUH FUGGIN LAWJIK MUHFUGGA

I don't even know how to read this post, ergo I'm the smartest person in the thread.

But is there any babby's first philosophical primer that can explain why relativism is considered wrong by some? From a layperson's point of view, it just seems normal that everything is always relative. I would like to think that there is a big "truth" that's unattainable to us, but as far as we are concerned relativism is the best anyone can do.

Math is circular, it‘s true because it defines itself as true.

>bro like we can't even be sure of anything, we don't even know like that ANYTHING is true man

literally epic

Itt: people yelling "Everything don't real!" This is followed by other people responding "Everything does real!" Autistic spergs then follow up with "Math tells us that at least some things are sometimes real depending on the rules established prior to your evaluation governing what your conditions are for real and not real"

fuck off you idiot. stop trying to reduce the thread into nonsense.

this is an actual discussion that philosophers have been having for centuries. why don't you actually contribute to the thread instead of making a shitpost that's somehow supposed to make you seem smarter than everyone ITT (tip: it doesn't)

I don't think I'm smarter. I posted my position earlier, and am enjoying the arguments back and forth.

Read Diogenes Laertius chapter on the philosopher Pyrrho. He summarises the problem clearer than anyone else I have read.

fun fact: alternative axiomatic systems exist

also what ZFC axioms would you call out?

>if i just deny that things exist, it means that things don't exist

mathematicians eternally BTFO by anons in a Veeky Forums thread

leave being right about everything to me

The kind of "sentence" youre talking about in 1 is not the same as the kind of "sentence" youre talking about in 2

also 4 doesn't even follow from your premises (fallacy of composition)

I'm not a relativist, I'm just explaining the position.
fun fact: they all presume similar things, so it really doesn't matter

>1. Can you prove the existence of these ideas?
Here is one hand
Here is another
>2. Can you prove that the relation between language and these ideas is one of representation?
"Here is one hand"
"Here is another"

The statement is not that that user's waifu is cutest, it's that for all who have a waifu, all would agree their waifu is the cutest

>nothing has meaning except the statement nothing has meaning
>not having the same problem

nope, not universal nihilism (how could that exist?)

moral nihilism

>there are no true or meaningful moral claims except for this metastatement on moral claims

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivialism

why isn't that consistent?

>why is a statement on moral claims not consistent in a framework which rejects the truth value of moral claims

the statement "moral claims do not have a truth value" isn't a moral claim. a moral claim is something like:

"x is good" or "torturing for sport is wrong"

>analytic fags not knowing anything

nothing new here in this thread Veeky Forums. just the usual assblasted analytic fags who read a few lines of witty and think they know shit

That overarching statement essentially goes to every moral claim and modifies it, so "x is good is false", "torturing got sport is wrong is false", etc. The metastatement can be reduced to negations of all the moral claims

you're a moron who continues the tradition of misunderstanding nihilism.

the biggest revolution possible here is for you brainlets to realize that these arguments do not adhere to your systematic logical fetishizations. at this point it's just circular conflation of the word 'truth' being used by two different sets of people.

>continually misrepresents the person he's arguing with

nice

>dude FUCK lawjik lmao
Wew

How have I misrepresented him?

To what extent do you look for your final truth? How do you know that it is unobtainable? Sure, people have been looking since it was possible to look, but that doesn't mean it is unobtainable.

yeah i suppose that's true. were you agreeing with me or is this supposed to refute something i previously said?

saying that it's impossible to know that torturing babies for fun is wrong is ridiculous to me.

even from a relativist point of view, most cultures in the world agree on many moral facts

I'm derailing this thread so we can talk about anime instead, because I like anime. So, which kinds of anime do you guys like?

>which kinds

"this moral claim is false" is a moral claim in the same way "1+1=2 is falsd" is a mathematics claim

well moral nihilism is an error theory. you might be right, i need to read Mackie again.

i know that nihilism is a cognitivist theory. so nihilists agree that our moral language tries to assign truth to moral claims. but they think that we are always incorrect in asserting moral truths (because they think there are no moral truths).

if "there are no moral truths" is a moral truth, then i suppose it's self-referentially incoherent.

the error theorist could consistently say "except this one moral truth" and get out of the problem in theory though

but maybe it's a meta-ethical claim that's distinct from actual moral truths.

Would "it is not the case that murder is wrong" and friends be true or false according to error theory

Yaoi and sports

it would be true according to the error theorist. why?

it would be false in the exact same way that an atheist would say that "God created the Heaven and Earth" is false. he thinks it's false because he doesn't think God exists. so every statement about God would be false. except the statement: God doesn't exist.

sorry you're right. but only if the moral nihilist arrives at his position through global skepticism. it's still possible to create a consistent moral error theory as long as you don't start from global skepticism though

either way global skepticism refutes itself. in pic related Shafer-Landau does a good job of explaining why

Retard

Culture is more shaped by language than vice versa. This is why we talk about "the french speaking world" or the "anglosophere"

It would be much more correct that cultures are created by and relative to languages than vice versa

Also, cultures are either:
1) An idea in people's heads
2) Some arbitrary sum-totality of interactions and people

In either case, they are not ultimate in themselves, but in fact relative to something else. However you look at it, cultural relativism collapses to something else - usually "I'm right about everything because I say so"

cultural relativism is retarded because it implies that any society as a whole can never be wrong.

it says that america was correct to own slaves in the 1800s, yet it also says that america is correct in saying that owning slaves is wrong now. it doesn't admit the possibility of moral progress at all

>cultural relativism is retarded because it implies that any society as a whole can never be wrong.
Unless that society is white

yup, like logic. you can "prove" things with logic, but you cannot prove that things/logic are logically provable

come to the coherentist side and be relax

you just have to agree that certain principles (the principle of non-contradiction and some others) are true before you do anything.

if you reject those then there's really nowhere to go from there

yo this board is lit.

"truth doesn't exist" isn't a statement of a truth, it's a commandment. you're not saying that it's true, you're saying it the same way that God says "let there be ..." i.e. "let there be no truth"
any statement using the verb "to be" is going to sound like a truth-statement from the standpoint of truth. from the standpoint of non-truth it acquires a different meaning.

>self-refutation is bad
Dualists belong in the gulag

nothing that is true is self-contradictory

Don't ever crop the "mama mia" out of that picture ever again.

look into paraconsistent logic, it at least tries to work around contradictions

but contradictions in paraconsistent logic aren't really contradictions per se (e.g. it will rain tomorrow and it won't rain tomorrow - which works if it rains for half of the day - not really a contradiction in the strict sense but in a more general one)

Good ol' maybe logic.

How far is a relativist willing to go for relativism is a question I'd like to ask

bc you phrase it semantically correct aligning with the notion that its all a language game

Why? becuz u sed so?