truth=facts. facts are objective. it’s a fact that the USA is a country in north America. there is no disputing that.
the notion that the USA is a good place to live is not a fact, it’s a subjective opinion
Comment on The Projected Truth
Telodzrum@lemmy.world 4 weeks agoTruth is entirely subjective because all observations are subjective.
BloodMuffin@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
lena@gregtech.eu 4 weeks ago
What if someone doesn’t recognize it as a country?
Lumidaub@feddit.org 4 weeks ago
In the first case, they’re simply wrong, a country is a country. We might disagree on whether it is a sovereign state and worthy of establishing diplomatic ties. In the second case, they’ll gave to accept that the America continent has a part that is closer to the pole that a compass points to.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
my compass points wherever the hell i want it to. what do you use to draw circles because i suck at it
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
or what if they believe that there’s no north america, that there’s only one american continent?
THANK you i feel seen
Holytimes@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Then they would be ignorant at best and poorly educated at worse.
They would be mixing up two entirely different classification systems. Functionally the equivalent of saying theirs no stars in the sky because water isn’t wet.
Its just nonsense.
You would have to first educate them enough to understand the defined terminology before you could even consider them a peer in the discussion.
Objection@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
truth=facts. facts are objective. it’s a fact that the USA is a country in north America. there is no disputing that.
Not trying to say that everything is subjective, but that in particular is kind of a bad example.
Countries are socially constructed. The US is something that only exists so long as people agree that it does. There is no objective, material way of determining where one country ends and another begins.
In fact, there was quite a bit of disputing that historically. Prior to the American Civil War, lots of people said that the US was not a country but a union between countries, they were called “states” after all, and it was common to say “The United States are” rather than “The United States is.” There are still successionists today who argue for that interpretation. To say that the US is objectively a country means that there must be something in material reality that we can point to to prove that one interpretation is correct and the other is incorrect. What is that thing?
Whatever that thing is would have significant implications for how we see the world and look at other disputes, whether we’re talking about Spain and Barcelona, the UK and Scotland, China and Tibet, or Israel and Palestine. For example, if you say that historically, most US secessionists supported slavery and therefore they lacked moral character and the position is illegitimate, then it follows that what states exist is a function of the moral character of their supporters, and that seems to be adding lots of assumptions and moving away from any sense of objectivity.
“The US exists” is much more subjective than something like “This chair exists.” With the latter, you could argue that grouping a collection of atoms into the category of “chair” is arbitrary and there’s no way of determining when an atom stops being a part of “chair,” but that’s much more pedantic than socially constructed concepts that don’t really have a physical essence.
BloodMuffin@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
people created the ideas of countries, then made a list of them. USA is on that list.
if you really want to get philosophical about it, you can say the only fact that anyone knows for sure is that they are experiencing something. Nobody knows for sure that everyone else in the world isn’t an NPC, nor whether this world is real or a hallucination.
I’m trying to keep it simple for the purposes of this argument
Objection@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
people created the ideas of countries, then made a list of them. USA is on that list.
People? Which people? If I get a bunch of people and declare a micronation within what the US considers it’s borders, is that objectively a country or not? Or suppose I convince a bunch of Americans that Germany isn’t really a country, does it then cease to be a country despite what the Germans themselves believe?
In any case, I would think that if something falls under the standard of, “This is true because a bunch of people say it is, even though there’s nothing physical you can point to to prove it” then it seems somewhat absurd to call that an “objective fact” What do “objective” and “subjective” even mean, then?
MrSmith@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
A fact is something that can be proven.
“I love my wife” is the truth, but it’s not a fact, since we can’t really measure “love”.
Uebercomplicated@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
Descartes wants a word…
Cethin@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
I’m 14 and this is deep.
Sure, we can think there’s no way to actually know anything because your mind could have made up everything that happened before this moment. That’s a stupid way to interact with the world though. It doesn’t help you do anything thinking that way and only makes everything pointless, including conversing with you for people who don’t even believe this.
OccamsTeapot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
What about a thermometer?
BloodMuffin@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
mine says 0° but yours says 32°
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
what about a tachometer?
BloodMuffin@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
from my angle it says 4950RPM but from your angle it says 5000RPM
Feathercrown@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Gogo gadget boltzmann brain
0ops@piefed.zip 4 weeks ago
Aurora borealis?
OccamsTeapot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
The whole truth?! At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localised entirely within your brain?
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Yes!