I thought our discussion on symbolism today was very interesting, but I had a question and was wondering what everyone thinks.
If practically every thing can be interpreted as a symbol (or bears a symbolic meaning), and our own perceptions of each vary dramatically, then is Hayakawa implying - or can we infer - that there is no absolute 'truth' or 'reality'?
And if so, then what do we call the things in which we believe or live?
Julie W
12 comments:
Yes, I believe that if you essentially boil it down, there is no absolute truth. In fact, our perceptions are flawed and are symbols or reality. A reality that cannot even be proven. What looks green to me may look blue to you. However this thought makes no addition to our analytical thinking and has no empirical evidence, and therefore is not verifiable and serves little practical use.
Mr. Lazarow mentioned the existence of Madagascar and there is a great video that addresses this online (with Australia instead of Madagascar).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbcS234hvQc
-Alex Altaras
*of reality (not "or reality")
I think that there can be absolutes even in a world of symbols only if we all agree on that the given thing that is symbolized corresponds with a one specific symbol. For example, is not death an absolute truth?
Earlier today a group of students and i were debating on whether death was an abosulte truth. In my opinion death is an absolute truth, only if we can all agree that death is absence of life and that all livings things die. Someone else pointed out that their was a loophole in my logic, what if something or someone couldn't die. If it is possible than death can not be an absolue truth. My counter-agrument was that there is not, to my knowledge, scientific proof of a some living thing that could not die. Thus couldn't death be a absolute truth?
-Ashley Hill
(Ashley)
I see what you're saying... but can't one argue that death itself is also symbolic? And if we can make such an argument, then doesn't death cease to be 'truthful' and absolute?
(Just throwing in some thoughts)
In semi-agreement with Ashley I think people can get as close as they can to the truth by agreeing on a symbolic representation of something. For example, people agree on the "truth" that a stapler is a stapler because that is what we have symbolically said it is and therefore we all agree on the fact that it is a stapler. But referring back to how death could possibly be an absolute truth, what if people believe in life after death or reincarnation? Then death isn't absolute for those who believe we come back in another life. Its just a cycle and cycles have no absolute end so how can death be an absolute truth if not everyone believes that death is truly the end of a being's existence?
(Melissa) I didn't say that death was the ending of life but in fact the absence of life. Thus if we agree that every living thing experiences this absence of life, death, whatever happens after that is up to interpretation. So if agree that death is the absence life, death is an absolute.
-Ashley HIll
Although I understand where you guys are coming from I don't think you can interpret anything as an absolute. There isn't one thing that every single person would be able to accept as such because they all have their own ideas and beliefs. For example, some may not even consider our lives as absolute truths which brings up the point that Mr. Laz discussed in class about dreams possibly being our actual lives and vice versa. That would complicate death as being an absolute truth because if you had that perspective then it could be viewed as a dream.
Joe M
Joe what you said is essentially the post-modernists playground. The thought of the inability to distinguish reality from virtuality. Jean Baudrillard in particular. Film wise, The Matrix is a decent example of this. Mulholland Dr. even more so.However, this is all fooling around, essentially. You can't prove it therefore it carries no reason to believe it. A superficial understanding of post-modernism is fine, but I would disagree with post-modernism's role as a real philosophy. It's fun to learn and its connections to semantics are well used in this class, but further study I dislike. Much post-modernism is big words to cover up essentially useless ideas. The Sokal affair certainly shed some light on this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_Affair
Chomsky has written about post-modernism a bit, if you'd like to check it out: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html
If we are all agreeing that symbols can and do represent everything in our world, then we have to accept that the ideas of reality and virtuality are nothing more than human constructions engineered in order to communicate the expression of certain thoughts between people.
Reality and virtuality are just symbols themselves.
So then how can you or anyone prove that there is a difference between the two or for that matter that either idea actually exists?
Basically you accept their existence just because someone else says they exist and you don't question them. This is probably true for most abstracts, like the time example we talked about in class.
-Mike Bass
Did you read what I wrote? I recognize the ability to do this, I deny the value. I also wouldn't tell me what I believe and why I do. I accept the need to accept our perceptions because of practical needs. It serves no use to live our lives as if the universe isn't real. This is falsifiability advocated by Karl Popper. Now I would advise actually reading the links I posted, it actually helps to know what someone's position is before you argue against it. What I posted may have been long, here are some excerpts of Chomsky's.
Talking about post-modernism:
"people in physics, math, biology, linguistics, and other fields are happy to do when someone asks them, seriously, what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc? These are fair requests for anyone to make. If they can't be met, then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circumstances: to the flames."
"There are lots of things I don't understand — say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. — even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out."
Going back to Ashley's topic of death possibly being an absolute truth when death is considered to be the absence of life, but adhering to this definition wouldnt every inanimate object infact be death? For example a rock has no life but it is not death, so i think in order to conclude that death may be an absolute truth your definition must be refined somewhat.
-Tyler H
(Ashley) You said that death was just the absence of life, but can an object that was never living in the first place die? And, as I believe Melissa was getting at- couldn't death to one person just mean the end of a cycle (not necessarily life- such as the death of a star)? This means that death wouldn't be an absolute, to that person.
I also was wondering if you can really know that anything is real, or is reality just what we call our interpretations of the world around us? We only know what is around us because of electrical signals to our brain (our sense of sight, smell, touch, taste) so in essence even what we perceive in the world around us may not be absolute.
-Kelsey W.
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