Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
"I find the complaint that art/wine/literature are complex, multivariate and thus irreducible to be intellectually lazy. Of course there is error and nothing explains anything perfectly, we don't really know the exact nature of protection of some vaccines, does that matter at the level of public health outcome? The consistency, accuracy and precision of the generalizations make them more or less useful."
This is an ignoratio elenchi. No one argues that complexity means that things don't exist and that those things that do exist can't be described. But value doesn't have any obvious empirical existence in the way of things in the world that have causes. In the sentence, "the boy tied a can to the dog's tail and that was a mischievous thing to do," the first clause may describe a real action. What thing in the world does the second clause describe? Now in the case of morality, there are some obvious near universal common judgments (almost every culture, I am told, has some version of the golden rule) as to make us think that, even if we can't yet explain how moral judgments are based in reality, it may be the case that they are. This is empirically false with regard to aesthetic evaluation, where there is no judgment that doesn't have respectable counter-argument--even the quality of Shakespeare and Homer--and, where, more importantly, there is no common causal criterion to which the positive evaluations appeal (in other words, lots of people may think Shakespare is great, but they have suspiciously divergent reaaons for so thinking). And virtually no judgment of physical taste either a)is uncontested, or b) has anything remotely resembling a cause (as opposed to the taste itself). If you like vanilla ice cream and I don't, we really can't even have a rational dispute about it. And the same is true for a given wine. This is why, though I think you are manifestly wrong in your confidence that taste is even largely the same and your science is as dated as Hume's, I am willing to stipulate that you are right for this argument. It still misses the point. No one is contesting that you can't describe what you taste objectively, only that you can't evaluate it objectively.
As to your claim that if you put those of us who have been drinking wine together for the last 20 years together and we drank a rated set of wines together, we could use the rated scores to come up with some objective idea of the relative and absolute quality of the wines, I think the fact that this bored and wine therapy together have existed for almost twenty years is very nearly sufficient counter-evidence that we could even really understand what we meant by the points, which would be the stronger argument. The claim that what we meant by the points because of our common understanding of how we evaluated corresponded to an objective evaluation is really fairly obviously a bridge too far. Do you really believe that because a bunch of literary critics who have been communicating with each other for the past fifty years agree on certain evluations, they are objectively right in the evaluations they make even though you would find many of them, I suspect, as absurd you do the common high evaluation of Derrida among a certain class of literary and philosophical theorists who have been discussing things with each other for the past forty years?
This is an ignoratio elenchi. No one argues that complexity means that things don't exist and that those things that do exist can't be described. But value doesn't have any obvious empirical existence in the way of things in the world that have causes. In the sentence, "the boy tied a can to the dog's tail and that was a mischievous thing to do," the first clause may describe a real action. What thing in the world does the second clause describe? Now in the case of morality, there are some obvious near universal common judgments (almost every culture, I am told, has some version of the golden rule) as to make us think that, even if we can't yet explain how moral judgments are based in reality, it may be the case that they are. This is empirically false with regard to aesthetic evaluation, where there is no judgment that doesn't have respectable counter-argument--even the quality of Shakespeare and Homer--and, where, more importantly, there is no common causal criterion to which the positive evaluations appeal (in other words, lots of people may think Shakespare is great, but they have suspiciously divergent reaaons for so thinking). And virtually no judgment of physical taste either a)is uncontested, or b) has anything remotely resembling a cause (as opposed to the taste itself). If you like vanilla ice cream and I don't, we really can't even have a rational dispute about it. And the same is true for a given wine. This is why, though I think you are manifestly wrong in your confidence that taste is even largely the same and your science is as dated as Hume's, I am willing to stipulate that you are right for this argument. It still misses the point. No one is contesting that you can't describe what you taste objectively, only that you can't evaluate it objectively.
As to your claim that if you put those of us who have been drinking wine together for the last 20 years together and we drank a rated set of wines together, we could use the rated scores to come up with some objective idea of the relative and absolute quality of the wines, I think the fact that this bored and wine therapy together have existed for almost twenty years is very nearly sufficient counter-evidence that we could even really understand what we meant by the points, which would be the stronger argument. The claim that what we meant by the points because of our common understanding of how we evaluated corresponded to an objective evaluation is really fairly obviously a bridge too far. Do you really believe that because a bunch of literary critics who have been communicating with each other for the past fifty years agree on certain evluations, they are objectively right in the evaluations they make even though you would find many of them, I suspect, as absurd you do the common high evaluation of Derrida among a certain class of literary and philosophical theorists who have been discussing things with each other for the past forty years?