RE: Devil's advocate for why ontology is meaningless and vacuous.
September 11, 2016 at 3:07 am
(This post was last modified: September 11, 2016 at 7:23 am by Edwardo Piet.)
(September 11, 2016 at 2:52 am)Jenny A Wrote: My brain may be fuzzy , premise 1 doesn't make sense to me. Ontology is the study of what is existent. So the statement seems redundant. All you've said is subjectivity is objectively extent. Is that all you mean?
No because many would think that "subjectivity is objectively existent" would be a contradictory statement. Indeed ontology is the study of being or existence. There is ontological objectivity and there is epistemological objectivity. For that reason "subjectivity is objectively existent" is not a contradiction because I have specified that I am talking about ontological subjectivity which is indeed is objectively existent if only as a totality of subjective objects or 'subjects'.
I specified it because although "subjectivity exists objectively" is a contradiction if we're talking about epistemology it's not a contradiction if we're talking about ontology.
Quote:Premise 2 is also fuzzy. Moral values subjective in that there is no agreed upon moral standard. But some proposed standards are objective so morals are not wholly subjectve.
What do you mean some proposed standards are objective? Could you give an example?
Quote:Premise 5 makes no sense to me either. Extant objectivity is valueless or meaningless because there is no difference between existing objective and subjective morals?
Ontologically objective moral values are moral values that objectively "exist" but the point is it doesn't matter whether moral value "X" objectively 'exists' outside of subjectivity or not.
A lot of confusion resides over a different answer to the question "Does the imagination exist?" or "Is the imagination real?" and the proposed differences between the two. For the former question I'd either answer "yes" or "yes but only in one sense" but to the latter I'd answer "no".
What is imaginary is the opposite of what is real but both imaginary things that only reside in the mind and real things that also reside outside the mind still reside somewhere or are present or existent or extant or 'there'.
Quote:Regardless, you premises don't lead to the conclusion that existence is a meaningless term.
In that case I challenge you to define "existence" in a non-circular way and also allow it to include the fact that subjectivity and the imagination itself objectively exists without it collapsing into "everything exists in the sense that every thing exists in the sense that if a thing does not exist it is not a thing at all. Whether that 'thing' be an imaginary or real thing."


