On Things and Stuff and Their Properties
In an attempt to become utterly removed from any semblance of applicability to the real world, let me discuss briefly the philosophy of things and their properties.
There is significant philosophical literature, much of it completely unreadable as is the case for much philosophical discourse, on what exactly things and properties of things are. To what am I referring when I say 'that chair is red?' There is a model that resembles a pincushion, where the cushion is the thing and the pins are properties. In this case, red-ness and chair-ness are somehow stuck in to whatever the pincushion happens to be. But what is the cushion? The model doesn't really make sense. There is an alternative model, in which the properties just clump together, and that's all things are: just a collection of properties.
That is an interesting debate - interesting insofar as it is utterly academic and means nothing to anyone in the whole world - but it is not what I want to discuss. I want to discuss two types of properties which things have, and I think this concept is much more understandable to any individual, even those who have not been cursed with a philosophical mind.
Let me start by saying that I think there are two types of properties that things can have and that they are relative and objective. An objective property is independent of the observer of the property and should be the same no matter where one stands, so to speak. A relative property is just the opposite in that it has no intrinsic validity and depends entirely on the speaker or the person professing something about that property. It might suffice to think about the term 'property' here as very similar to 'adjective.'
For example, weighing fifty pounds is an objective quality, perhaps of some particular bag full of sand. Well, weighing fifty pounds at a particular elevation on earth is an objective quality, if you really want to split hairs. The fact that it weighs fifty pounds (at that location) is independent of the observer. However, whether or not that same bag of sand is considered heavy does depend on the person making the assertion. Most people would consider that bag to be heavy, but some unusually strong individuals wouldn't have any trouble lifting and carrying it and would therefore not find it be heavy to the same degree.
So weight vs. heaviness is a fairly clear-cut example of a pair of objective and relative qualities. Assuming the reliability of the weighing system, no one would question that the bag of sand weighs fifty pounds. Likewise, very few people would argue over whether or not they consider the bag to be heavy. They might say, "It's not heavy to me," (a relative assertion) but the only reason someone might say, "Oh, it's not that heavy!" (an objective assertion) would be if they thought the other person was feigning weakness in order to escape additional work. If the person's difficulty in lifting the bag of sand is to be considered sincere, then their estimation of the bag as heavy is beyond counterargument.
While this instance of the two types of properties is easy to see, most of the time people get confused over which type of property they are observing or talking about. Take, for example, the difficulty of some pop quiz. Even if someone actually had difficulty with the quiz, they still might find themselves on the end of some teasing by another student who found the quiz simple. In this case, it seems to mean approximately the same thing to say, "It wasn't that difficult to me," and "It wasn't that difficult at all," even though the first sentence refers to both the quiz and the resources available to the particular test-taker, while the second refers only to the quiz, as if the quality of difficult-ness was identical irrespective of the person taking the quiz. The trickiness of this distinction is compounded by the fact that their is no objective scale for 'quiz difficulty' which can be differentiated from the relative claims about same, as there is a recognized scale for weight.
This confusion, when someone talks about a relative property as if it were objective, (and its opposite, discussed later) leads to a great deal of disagreement. Take, for example, some review of some movie. It is not at all uncommon for the reviewer to say that the movie is either 'good' or 'bad,' but they're not actually referring to qualities of goodness or badness in any significant way. If they were, there would be significantly less disagreement among movie reviewers and movie patrons over the quality of movies. What the reviewers are actually doing is saying something akin to 'the movie was in accordance with my vision of what constitutes a good movie' or 'the movie met (or surpassed) my expectations.' I contend that this cognitive sleight of hand, in which people compare a movie to their hypothetical ideal of movie-ness without even being aware of it, is done in similar types of processes many times every day.
While the disagreements people have over the merits of some movie or book are usually minor, it would still be useful to recognize where these disagreements come from. It is more productive to ask the question, "What is about the movie that you liked?" (in a serious way, not assuming that the answer ought to be 'nothing') than it is to assume that the other people's ability to judge good and bad is somehow flawed since their estimation was not in line with yours in this instance.
A clearer example of this principle can be seen by looking at things that are funny and things that taste good. Those are two qualities that some people think of as objective and therefore have trouble understanding why others disagree with their claims that something has these qualities. A facile definition of funny is the property of eliciting laughter. If one person laughs at a joke and another doesn't, the first found it to be funny while the second didn't. It would be difficult to claim that one or the other person is wrong. Of course, funny doesn't necessarily equate to laughter, so a more complex but still valid comparison in which funny means stimulating your sense of humor in a way that makes you think, "That's funny" will serve the same purpose. Different people have different senses of humor, so funniness depends both on the joke and observer.
Likewise, different people have different senses of taste. Some people don't like spicy foods, but that doesn't mean that spicy foods aren't tasty. People gloss over the complex mechanism going on in their mouths and in their brains when they say that something "tastes good" as if they were saying that something weighs fifty pounds. These mechanisms, an intricate interaction between certain parts of your brain and the taste buds on your tongue with the food in question is not identical in every person, just like the two quiz-takers in the earlier example didn't necessarily have identical kinds of mental acuity, which ultimately had different levels of appropriateness for the quiz they were taking.
It is important to try to recognize when a disagreement is of this type, because you cannot convince someone else to have your perspective or your tasting mechanism, or what have you. Arguments with foundations in disagreements over relative properties are futile; instead, one should recognize if the difference in points of view is significant and what can be gathered from it. For example, if two people are having a disagreement over whether a movie is good, you might establish what each of you thought were the qualities of the movie which contributed to its goodness or badness (this is a difficult process, since the cognitive activity is buried quite deeply) and then see what emerges. It might occur such that the disagreement stems from the fact that one of them happens to particularly like a certain actor while the other is not much of a fan. The process can then be repeated, nearly ad infinitum - or at until the limit of one's self-knowledge is reached.
With that subject essentially exhausted, I think, the opposite type of confusion needs some mention. The confusion of objective qualities for relative qualities is more insidious than its complement. One example of this type of process is the assertion that, due to a significant degree of confusion over events that may or may not have occurred, it somehow becomes the case that whether or not those events happened in a particular way has no inherent reality. That is, whether or not this or that happened is just a matter of your perspective.
This is the fear of the people who cry out against relativism, and they are right to do so. It is dangerous to suppose that there are no truths independent of the observer. This problem is tied up in the fact that in order to describe the world around us, we have to use words that inevitably carry with them connotations with relative qualities tied up in them. Whether or not a suicide bomber is a 'freedom fighter' or a 'terrorist' depends on your point of view, but whether or not he blew himself up and killed some number of other people is incontestable.
It's an extremely complicated linguistic dilemma to which there is no clear solution, since we need to use words to describe the world, but the words we use make assertions we don't necessarily want them to make. Often, we make those assertions on an accidental cognitive level. That is, we have an point of view that we don't recognize as such which makes the suicide bomber into a terrorist, so using that word doesn't seem to be an issue. The only solution I have to offer is to try and be conscious of our perspectives and to try to see where other people are coming from as well.
I don't pretend to try and perform the delineation of the world into the two types of properties. Such an exercise would be futile, because while there are clear cases where a property is objective and where it is relative, there are many where one person would claim it to be one type and another would disagree. Is intelligence objective? People who think it can be measured by IQ would say so. Even people who don't think IQ equates to intelligence can claim that it is objective, but I don't think so. I don't think it's quite relative, either - I think there are different kinds of intelligence. But that's a question for another day.
When considering this essay, I would ask that you think about your own opinions on relativism and objectivity in the larger sense and see how your preconceived notions of the admittedly very much loaded terms in the discussion affected your estimation of my conclusions. Also, I would appreciate it if you could try to imagine where I'm coming from in writing this.
There is significant philosophical literature, much of it completely unreadable as is the case for much philosophical discourse, on what exactly things and properties of things are. To what am I referring when I say 'that chair is red?' There is a model that resembles a pincushion, where the cushion is the thing and the pins are properties. In this case, red-ness and chair-ness are somehow stuck in to whatever the pincushion happens to be. But what is the cushion? The model doesn't really make sense. There is an alternative model, in which the properties just clump together, and that's all things are: just a collection of properties.
That is an interesting debate - interesting insofar as it is utterly academic and means nothing to anyone in the whole world - but it is not what I want to discuss. I want to discuss two types of properties which things have, and I think this concept is much more understandable to any individual, even those who have not been cursed with a philosophical mind.
Let me start by saying that I think there are two types of properties that things can have and that they are relative and objective. An objective property is independent of the observer of the property and should be the same no matter where one stands, so to speak. A relative property is just the opposite in that it has no intrinsic validity and depends entirely on the speaker or the person professing something about that property. It might suffice to think about the term 'property' here as very similar to 'adjective.'
For example, weighing fifty pounds is an objective quality, perhaps of some particular bag full of sand. Well, weighing fifty pounds at a particular elevation on earth is an objective quality, if you really want to split hairs. The fact that it weighs fifty pounds (at that location) is independent of the observer. However, whether or not that same bag of sand is considered heavy does depend on the person making the assertion. Most people would consider that bag to be heavy, but some unusually strong individuals wouldn't have any trouble lifting and carrying it and would therefore not find it be heavy to the same degree.
So weight vs. heaviness is a fairly clear-cut example of a pair of objective and relative qualities. Assuming the reliability of the weighing system, no one would question that the bag of sand weighs fifty pounds. Likewise, very few people would argue over whether or not they consider the bag to be heavy. They might say, "It's not heavy to me," (a relative assertion) but the only reason someone might say, "Oh, it's not that heavy!" (an objective assertion) would be if they thought the other person was feigning weakness in order to escape additional work. If the person's difficulty in lifting the bag of sand is to be considered sincere, then their estimation of the bag as heavy is beyond counterargument.
While this instance of the two types of properties is easy to see, most of the time people get confused over which type of property they are observing or talking about. Take, for example, the difficulty of some pop quiz. Even if someone actually had difficulty with the quiz, they still might find themselves on the end of some teasing by another student who found the quiz simple. In this case, it seems to mean approximately the same thing to say, "It wasn't that difficult to me," and "It wasn't that difficult at all," even though the first sentence refers to both the quiz and the resources available to the particular test-taker, while the second refers only to the quiz, as if the quality of difficult-ness was identical irrespective of the person taking the quiz. The trickiness of this distinction is compounded by the fact that their is no objective scale for 'quiz difficulty' which can be differentiated from the relative claims about same, as there is a recognized scale for weight.
This confusion, when someone talks about a relative property as if it were objective, (and its opposite, discussed later) leads to a great deal of disagreement. Take, for example, some review of some movie. It is not at all uncommon for the reviewer to say that the movie is either 'good' or 'bad,' but they're not actually referring to qualities of goodness or badness in any significant way. If they were, there would be significantly less disagreement among movie reviewers and movie patrons over the quality of movies. What the reviewers are actually doing is saying something akin to 'the movie was in accordance with my vision of what constitutes a good movie' or 'the movie met (or surpassed) my expectations.' I contend that this cognitive sleight of hand, in which people compare a movie to their hypothetical ideal of movie-ness without even being aware of it, is done in similar types of processes many times every day.
While the disagreements people have over the merits of some movie or book are usually minor, it would still be useful to recognize where these disagreements come from. It is more productive to ask the question, "What is about the movie that you liked?" (in a serious way, not assuming that the answer ought to be 'nothing') than it is to assume that the other people's ability to judge good and bad is somehow flawed since their estimation was not in line with yours in this instance.
A clearer example of this principle can be seen by looking at things that are funny and things that taste good. Those are two qualities that some people think of as objective and therefore have trouble understanding why others disagree with their claims that something has these qualities. A facile definition of funny is the property of eliciting laughter. If one person laughs at a joke and another doesn't, the first found it to be funny while the second didn't. It would be difficult to claim that one or the other person is wrong. Of course, funny doesn't necessarily equate to laughter, so a more complex but still valid comparison in which funny means stimulating your sense of humor in a way that makes you think, "That's funny" will serve the same purpose. Different people have different senses of humor, so funniness depends both on the joke and observer.
Likewise, different people have different senses of taste. Some people don't like spicy foods, but that doesn't mean that spicy foods aren't tasty. People gloss over the complex mechanism going on in their mouths and in their brains when they say that something "tastes good" as if they were saying that something weighs fifty pounds. These mechanisms, an intricate interaction between certain parts of your brain and the taste buds on your tongue with the food in question is not identical in every person, just like the two quiz-takers in the earlier example didn't necessarily have identical kinds of mental acuity, which ultimately had different levels of appropriateness for the quiz they were taking.
It is important to try to recognize when a disagreement is of this type, because you cannot convince someone else to have your perspective or your tasting mechanism, or what have you. Arguments with foundations in disagreements over relative properties are futile; instead, one should recognize if the difference in points of view is significant and what can be gathered from it. For example, if two people are having a disagreement over whether a movie is good, you might establish what each of you thought were the qualities of the movie which contributed to its goodness or badness (this is a difficult process, since the cognitive activity is buried quite deeply) and then see what emerges. It might occur such that the disagreement stems from the fact that one of them happens to particularly like a certain actor while the other is not much of a fan. The process can then be repeated, nearly ad infinitum - or at until the limit of one's self-knowledge is reached.
With that subject essentially exhausted, I think, the opposite type of confusion needs some mention. The confusion of objective qualities for relative qualities is more insidious than its complement. One example of this type of process is the assertion that, due to a significant degree of confusion over events that may or may not have occurred, it somehow becomes the case that whether or not those events happened in a particular way has no inherent reality. That is, whether or not this or that happened is just a matter of your perspective.
This is the fear of the people who cry out against relativism, and they are right to do so. It is dangerous to suppose that there are no truths independent of the observer. This problem is tied up in the fact that in order to describe the world around us, we have to use words that inevitably carry with them connotations with relative qualities tied up in them. Whether or not a suicide bomber is a 'freedom fighter' or a 'terrorist' depends on your point of view, but whether or not he blew himself up and killed some number of other people is incontestable.
It's an extremely complicated linguistic dilemma to which there is no clear solution, since we need to use words to describe the world, but the words we use make assertions we don't necessarily want them to make. Often, we make those assertions on an accidental cognitive level. That is, we have an point of view that we don't recognize as such which makes the suicide bomber into a terrorist, so using that word doesn't seem to be an issue. The only solution I have to offer is to try and be conscious of our perspectives and to try to see where other people are coming from as well.
I don't pretend to try and perform the delineation of the world into the two types of properties. Such an exercise would be futile, because while there are clear cases where a property is objective and where it is relative, there are many where one person would claim it to be one type and another would disagree. Is intelligence objective? People who think it can be measured by IQ would say so. Even people who don't think IQ equates to intelligence can claim that it is objective, but I don't think so. I don't think it's quite relative, either - I think there are different kinds of intelligence. But that's a question for another day.
When considering this essay, I would ask that you think about your own opinions on relativism and objectivity in the larger sense and see how your preconceived notions of the admittedly very much loaded terms in the discussion affected your estimation of my conclusions. Also, I would appreciate it if you could try to imagine where I'm coming from in writing this.
posted by Matthew at 11:47 AM
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