Political Theory

Re: Where does Subjectivity end and Objectivity begin?

z1235 — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 03:47:17 GMT

There's no (objective) reality other than the one which is (subjectively) perceived as such.

Re: Where does Subjectivity end and Objectivity begin?

liberty student — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 19:17:54 GMT

StrangeLoop:
Sorry, I'll use your code words from now on. I meant to say: you're very, very illogical.

I wasn't being illogical, but I am happy to see you make this progress. Your rhetorical skills have a lot of room to grow.

Re: Where does Subjectivity end and Objectivity begin?

liberty student — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 19:17:11 GMT

StrangeLoop:
Do you believe there is any social use for reputation? And, if so, what?

Absolutely there is a use for reputation. Reputation (good and bad) helps us to estimate transaction costs.

That said, a reputation alone isn't proof of anything in particular. It is at best a generalized indicator and only useful (in my opinion) if the person supporting the reputation bears the cost of the reputed one falling on their face. For someone to appeal to Wiggenstein or Rothbard, and bear no cost if Wiggenstein or Rothbard are wrong, then I (personally) don't put a lot of stock in their opinion. Someone like Grayson, who is my friend, and has our friendship on the line, is less likely (unless he has stopped valuing our friendship, or misinterpreted it) to squander our situation by giving me casual and unfounded references.

However, it is obvious that if 1 billion fools believe something or in someone, that doesn't make that idea or person any more true or false.

So instead of appealing to eminence and respect, share the argument or idea which is worthy of my attention and appreciation.

Re: Where does Subjectivity end and Objectivity begin?

Lagrange multiplier — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 19:04:49 GMT

liberty student:
I didn't claim that you were making it up, and if your best response is to call my opinion stupidity, take it to the member issues forum

Sorry, I'll use your code words from now on. I meant to say: you're very, very illogical.

Re: Where does Subjectivity end and Objectivity begin?

Lagrange multiplier — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 19:01:14 GMT

Do you believe there is any social use for reputation? And, if so, what?

Re: Where does Subjectivity end and Objectivity begin?

liberty student — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 18:42:05 GMT

StrangeLoop:
Either way, the more you wish to ridicule well-respected arguments from our most eminent philosophers, the more I'll rest confident your arguments can only reveal ignorance. (Don't worry, I already know you're about to bust out an "appeal to authority" here--of course, I have enough sense to trust reputation, which is considered even by Austrians to carry important information).

It is an appeal to authority. It is a logical fallacy. You knew that when you wrote it, and you wrote it anyway.

Re: Where does Subjectivity end and Objectivity begin?

liberty student — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 18:36:02 GMT

EconomistInTraining:
Exactly, at least the scientific method makes explicit what it would take to reject a piece of research. On the other hand, I've always found it a weakness of Austrian economics that it's not quite clear exactly what it would take to disprove a particular theory or piece of research.

Is that a shortcoming of your understanding of AE, or AE itself?

EconomistInTraining:
And yet people still try desperate to make the facts fit their theory and presume that the ABCT is applicable to every business cycle in history.

Who are "people"?

Re: Where does Subjectivity end and Objectivity begin?

liberty student — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 18:33:23 GMT

StrangeLoop:

liberty student:
Do you ever get the feeling that sometimes we're debating with people who just make it up as they go?

To claim that I am a person that "just make[s] it up" only confesses your own stupidity.

And that's okay. It's nice to have mounting evidence.

I didn't claim that you were making it up, and if your best response is to call my opinion stupidity, take it to the member issues forum because it doesn't belong on the main board and you know that.

Re: Where does Subjectivity end and Objectivity begin?

Jackson LaRose — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 14:48:55 GMT

William,

In addition, the statement you quoted is an unfounded assertion, and without an appeal to circular reasoning, seems rather difficult to validate.

Re: Where does Subjectivity end and Objectivity begin?

I. Ryan — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 14:46:31 GMT

StrangeLoop:

Furthermore, it's quite a leap to claim that experience is unusable without fully-developed logic or maths first. Is that how it worked in history? Did humans actually have full-blown logic before they interacted with the external world? I can't even make sense of such an idea.

Well, it is possible to work with an implicit praxeology, logic, or mathematics. Ludwig von Mises didn't contend that his mainstream contemporaries didn't use praxeology, but just that they weren't explicit in doing so, which led them to have an unsystematic, unscientific body of theory, which they used to study history, instead of what he thought could be a systematic, scientific body of theory. He didn't contend that his mainstream comtemporaries didn't make use of non-empirical facts like means and ends, desire, and so on, but just that they used their common sense versions of those ideas.

So they didn't have to have a fully developed praxeology, logic, and mathematics to study the empirical world right from the beginning, but just needed a common sense praxeology, logic, and mathematics, to do so.

Re: Where does Subjectivity end and Objectivity begin?

EconomistInTraining — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 14:10:23 GMT

Exactly, at least the scientific method makes explicit what it would take to reject a piece of research. On the other hand, I've always found it a weakness of Austrian economics that it's not quite clear exactly what it would take to disprove a particular theory or piece of research. Take the ABCT, Mises expert Richard Ebeling claims that Mises original exposition was actually only meant to describe the course of one particular housing bubble in Vienna, and no more than that.

And yet people still try desperate to make the facts fit their theory and presume that the ABCT is applicable to every business cycle in history.

Re: Where does Subjectivity end and Objectivity begin?

Lagrange multiplier — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 13:59:43 GMT

Not to mention that a community practicing the scientific method is a systematic way to avoid confirmation bias, so the whole point was rubbish.

Re: Where does Subjectivity end and Objectivity begin?

EconomistInTraining — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 13:33:44 GMT

Repeatable experimentation is susceptible to confirmation bias. The scientific method is dubious because it is seems to me impossible to isolate all variables but one in any experiment. What we have is confirmation based on the limits of our understanding and capacity to discern minute differences, and the faith that repetition = truth.

If this is his criticism it shows that he doesn't really get the point of the whole scientific method business. Look, nobody is claiming that you can control all variables in every experiment all the time. The point is that by making explicit your requirements for a theory to be scientific you can improve the efficiency with which you weed out those theories that don't fit reality.

Of course, the process isn't always that smooth. But it's the best we can do.

Re: Where does Subjectivity end and Objectivity begin?

Lagrange multiplier — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 13:16:04 GMT

liberty student:
Do you ever get the feeling that sometimes we're debating with people who just make it up as they go?

To claim that I am a person that "just make[s] it up" only confesses your own stupidity.

And that's okay. It's nice to have mounting evidence.

But, to reference Quine's fallibilistic, empirical commitments as grounds for leaving logic open to revision is (A) an argument I've made before and at length, not an ad hoc rambling (B) a very well-known naturalistic philosophy that anyone with a cursory knowledge of 20th-century philosophy should recognize.

So far, I've seen very little evidence--none, actually--that you've investigated the ideas of contemporary philosophy.

Furthermore, it's quite a leap to claim that experience is unusable without fully-developed logic or maths first. Is that how it worked in history? Did humans actually have full-blown logic before they interacted with the external world? I can't even make sense of such an idea. And, to claim "apodictic certainty" from deductive reasoning always leaves me baffled: how do you believe the human body generate "concepts," and how could you possibly trust them so absolutely? This is a mechanical process dependent on many contingencies.

Either way, the more you wish to ridicule well-respected arguments from our most eminent philosophers, the more I'll rest confident your arguments can only reveal ignorance. (Don't worry, I already know you're about to bust out an "appeal to authority" here--of course, I have enough sense to trust reputation, which is considered even by Austrians to carry important information).

Re: Where does Subjectivity end and Objectivity begin?

liberty student — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 08:37:01 GMT

DD5:
Then once again, you cut the very branch you were sitting on. It is nonsensical to criticize or cast doubt in logic without also undermining the scientific method. The latter relies on the former.

Do you ever get the feeling that sometimes we're debating with people who just make it up as they go?