Moral and Epistemic Relativism

[little man]

Originally Posted by Kobi

Is it a false understanding or an incomplete understanding? Or, perhaps did we ask the wrong question?

Example. A generalize agreement over centuries and today is the sky is blue. But by todays knowledge we know that when transmitted light such as sunlight enters our atmosphere it collides with the oxygen and nitrogen atoms. The color with the shorter wavelength is scattered more by this collision. Because violet and blue are the shortest wavelengths the sky appears to be violet / blue. But because our eyes are more sensitive to blue light than they are violet light, we perceive the sky as blue.

So is the sky blue because it is blue or is it blue because human eyes perceive it is blue? Or is it blue because the neurochemistry of the brain is telling the eye what it is perceiving is the color blue? Or, have I now totally confused even myself?

for me, this tracks back to relativity. relative to time, perception and (as you've stated) generally agreed upon notions.

if you take into account folks who are color blind, animals that don't see color...where does that leave the 'factuality' of "the sky is blue"?

[Kobi]

Good point. Kind of gives new meaning to...in the eye of the beholder.

Originally Posted by little man

for me, this tracks back to relativity. relative to time, perception and (as you've stated) generally agreed upon notions.

if you take into account folks who are color blind, animals that don't see color...where does that leave the 'factuality' of "the sky is blue"?

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by little man

for me, this tracks back to relativity. relative to time, perception and (as you've stated) generally agreed upon notions.

if you take into account folks who are color blind, animals that don't see color...where does that leave the 'factuality' of "the sky is blue"?

To say 'the sky is blue' is a close approximation and true enough for our species. Ultimately, we perceive it as blue for the reasons that Kobi gets into (more on that in a minute) and that makes it true for all the members of homo sapiens that can see color. (I suspect, given WHY we have color vision and where it came from, that if chimps, gorillas, orangutans and bonobos could talk that they would agree with us about the color of the sky. I suspect that the old-world primates probably would as well because our visual systems evolved to solve the same kind of problem.)

I want to make clear that when I'm talking about truths I am talking (mostly) about a localized (meaning here on Earth) phenomena. Sci-fi geek and aspiring science fiction author that I am, I can easily imagine sentient beings that see into a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum than we do who would see, for instance, radio waves or something.

Originally Posted by Kobi

Is it a false understanding or an incomplete understanding? Or, perhaps did we ask the wrong question?

Example. A generalize agreement over centuries and today is the sky is blue. But by todays knowledge we know that when transmitted light such as sunlight enters our atmosphere it collides with the oxygen and nitrogen atoms. The color with the shorter wavelength is scattered more by this collision. Because violet and blue are the shortest wavelengths the sky appears to be violet / blue. But because our eyes are more sensitive to blue light than they are violet light, we perceive the sky as blue.

So is the sky blue because it is blue or is it blue because human eyes perceive it is blue? Or is it blue because the neurochemistry of the brain is telling the eye what it is perceiving is the color blue? Or, have I now totally confused even myself?

LOL. I follow you. I give a lot of thought to this kind of thing. Since vision is a neurochemical process what we're really talking about is that our eyes evolved to see a particular part of the light spectrum and so we see the sky as blue. The sky is not *really* blue. However, the reasons why we see the sky as blue are objective and empirical. Any animal that has eyes tuned by evolution to be sensitive to the same part of the spectrum as ours will agree with us. If we ever meet another technological species we would likely agree on what was happening in our eyes even if they saw a different part of the spectrum than we do--they might disagree with us on what 'visible' light means but they would recognize, as do we, that what we call light is the same thing as microwaves which is the same thing as radio waves. I can easily imagine a slightly different homo sapiens with a slightly different visual system that is, say, closer to bees which see further into the violet end of the spectrum than we do. What bees see as color is valid and genuine for them. However, if a bee Stephen Hawking were to sit down with the primate Stephen Hawking, they would agree on *what* light was they would just disagree on how one defines 'visible' light.

The question of 'ultimate' truth is stickier although, again, I still think that there are some ultimate truths that can be known. Almost ALL of them fall into the realm of the physical sciences and all of the examples I can think of off the top of my head certainly fall into them. Unfortunately, we have an inconveniently small sample size for knowing about ultimate truth claims regarding living things because we only have the living things here. However, everywhere we have looked in the Universe we have seen certain things:

Gravity holds throughout the Universe.
Light is the fastest moving thing throughout the Universe.
As far as we can tell, all three laws of thermodynamics hold throughout the Universe.
This means that, most likely, very large swaths of chemistry will probably be true throughout the Universe.

One of the reasons why I bring in the physical sciences is because much of what we have discovered appears to be invariant wherever we look. When talking about truth claims the sciences give us a means of testing our claims, a language to use to talk about where we have it right, where we have it wrong and where we have no idea what-so-ever. For me, the physical sciences form the foundation of how we know about the world we live in. We can argue about why the Civil War happened. We can argue about the relative truth claims undergirding the various religions. We can debate whether Marx or Smith or Ricardo or Rand or Hayek was right about economics. However, there is nothing so real as a rock that has landed on your toe or that glass that you knocked off the table which shattered when it hit the floor.