Karl, I thought that I was offering reasoned arguments, but apparently 
they have upset you. Of course I think it is necessary for us to argue in 
the proper philosophical sense (being on the hunt for good arguments, as 
Plato said), especially since we have such different points of view, but I 
see no point in becoming angry and making personal attacks. Perhaps I am 
wrong and you were not angry, but the tone of your writing strongly 
suggested to me that you were. In any case, I will respond to the 
arguments and attempt to clarify my points.

First, I am in agreement with Nick’s notion of conjectural objectivism, 
and I still maintain that you adhere to relativism. You claim that 
you ‘have repeatedly criticised relativism’ but in response to Roger’s 
post you wrote ‘well said Roger’. However, Roger clearly affirmed a 
relativist position in the email that you endorsed. He wrote:

‘On the emotive issue of child abuse, Society has had different beliefs as 
to what was acceptable. For instance in the Dickensian period (Victorian) 
it was acceptable to send orphans up chimneys to clean them, often they 
died; opinions changed and such a thing is now considered child abuse. 
Different societies will hold different opinions as to acceptable 
behaviour... opinions will vary over the years, and society will be based 
upon these different opinions which can reverse the beliefs of the past; 
so what is considered wrong will continually change.’

Perhaps I have misunderstood Roger’s point, but this above quotation seems 
unambiguously clear to me to be maintaining a relativist position, which 
you openly supported. If Roger is simply making the trivial point (non-
pejorative sense) that opinions are constantly changing among individuals 
and cultures, then I agree of course. We must be concerned about our 
opinions for they are often wrong (many people have held or hold opinions 
that women are inherently not as rational as men, homosexuality is bad 
etc.) So we need to analyze carefully our opinions. But, I am much more 
concerned about what is actually true independent of individual or 
cultural opinions. Not only do I think the opinions ‘woman are inherently 
not as rational as men’ and ‘homosexuality is bad’ are wrong in our 
culture now because of shift in popular opinion, but I think those 
opinions were always wrong and always will be wrong--women are not 
inherently less rational than men and homosexuality is not an evil sin. 
But I can make those claims only because I seek, as Chris Norris puts 
it, ‘verification-transcendent’ truth so far as possible. If we deny that 
there are objective truths, then we are relativists, and we risk the 
danger of once again condemning homosexuals and believing that women are 
inherently irrational if society’s opinions shift. 

If you do not support relativism and you actually believe that child abuse 
is wrong in any culture past, present or future, regardless of whatever 
opinions may have dominated, are dominant or will dominate, then you 
cannot agree with Roger’s above position. Of course, if you are not a 
relativist then you have to be a realist about truth, at least about moral 
(or ethical) truth in this case. In other words, even if you are a 
pluralist, you still must either be a realist (at least in Nick’s sense of 
conjectural objectivism), or you will have to maintain that any position 
in the pluralist pot is as good or bad as any other and so still lapse 
back into relativism. Your antirealist arguments in On the Metaphysics of 
Experimental Physics [MEP] make it difficult for me to see how you could 
be a realist, and so it is not clear to me how you could escape falling 
into relativism. But just because I do not understand how you could be an 
antirealist and not be a relativist does not mean that you do not have 
good arguments to convince me otherwise. I hope that you will make those 
arguments explicit.


I do not think it is necessary to ask me to read your post carefully. I 
did. I have read several of your posts, though not all of them. If we had 
to read everything ever written by someone in order to disagree with them 
on some point, then no one could criticize any aspect of Plato's 
philosophy unless she has read all of his work (and perhaps even all of 
the commentaries on his work) and Roger could not criticize Socrates at 
all because no one today has ever read anything written by Socrates. I 
certainly read your relevant post with proper attention.  I also read your 
MEP with extra care. In fact, on page 70 you inaccurately summarize 
Christopher Norris’ position as being based on nothing more than the banal 
claim that ‘anti-realist interpretations of quantum theory must be flawed 
because they are not realist’ (p. 70). Norris has a deep and subtle 
understanding of many of the perplexing philosophical issues inherent to 
quantum theory, and such a trivializing dismissal of his cogent arguments 
is misplaced, implying that you may not have read him carefully. But maybe 
you did read him carefully and just misunderstood him or disagreed with 
his realist position so strongly that you preferred to dismiss it. Thus, 
it is probably better if we assume that we are reading each other as 
carefully as we can, though we may not understand one another very well 
because we have such fundamentally different metaphysical assumptions. 
Maybe our disagreements will help us to articulate our positions more 
clearly and eliminate some of the misunderstandings.

Your response about pilots and medical doctors strikes me as very odd. You 
seem to be claiming that one can obtain a PhD without being graded and 
that would be okay, although pilots and medical doctors should be graded. 
I think this is wrong in several different ways. (Please keep in mind that 
I am disagreeing with your arguments. I do not know you as person and I am 
not attacking you.) First, you wrote that ‘one would hope that an airline 
or a hospital would test the abilities of applicants before letting them 
operate or fly’, and testing, obviously, is a form a grading. If after ten 
classes I still cannot fly a plane, then I will fail. Okay, so can we 
agree that pilots and surgeons need to be graded and we must fail those 
who are incapable of the requisite skills and understanding? But then I am 
perplexed about why someone should be able to get a PhD without being 
graded. Do you really think so little of the PhD? You wrote that ‘at the 
end of the day, they would receive their doctorate regardless of whether 
it was well received or not. Simply presenting it, explaining it, and 
defending it would be sufficient.’ Why should I be able to get a PhD if I 
am incompetent or do not have any understanding of the subject etc, yet a 
medical doctor must be competent and understand her subject to a very high 
level, otherwise she would fail? This makes no sense to me. If we followed 
your suggestion then there would be no way even in principle to prevent 
anyone from getting a PhD. If that is your goal, then it would make the 
PhD worthless. It does no good here to protest and say that an incompetent 
person would not be permitted to a PhD programme because all I need to do 
is pay a supervisor enough money (bribery or even blackmail) and once I 
was accepted then I would be guaranteed to obtain my PhD. Or the 
supervisor could be my mother’s friend etc. And, since you abolished all 
entrance qualifications to begin with, then there would be no objective 
grounds for anybody to object to my being accepted as a doctoral student.

But, there is another more sublet point here, and it is related to your 
specialty concerning the role of technology. The instruments used or 
relied upon by surgeons, and the airplanes with all their gadgetry, are 
only possible because of highly advanced technological developments, 
which, of course, have often been the result the of pioneering theoretical 
work. Consider Planck’s constant or Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, 
which are fundamental to physics, chemistry and biology, or consider any 
of the tremendous number of highly specialised PhD theses in the sciences. 
Should anybody be allowed to get a PhD in physics or engineering etc as 
well, so long as they go through the process of defending it during their 
viva and were able to convince a supervisor, perhpas with great charm, (or 
pay a supervisor enough) to let them enter the PhD ‘programme’ in the 
first place? You have missed the fact that the airplanes that pilots train 
with at pilot school are possible only because of the vastly complicated 
and highly integrated technological and theoretical background (among 
other socially, politically, and economically etc relevant factors), which 
is often enough based upon the difficult research of PhD students and 
those researchers who have obtained a PhD. I am not trying to imply that 
only someone with a PhD can do important research, as Einstein is a well-
known exception, but it also does not follow that a completely incompetent 
person with no scientific aptitude whatsoever should be permitted to get a 
PhD, and your proposal clearly allows the likely possible of just such 
people being awarded this degree. Are you going to modify your position 
and say that only PhD students in the sciences would require a genuine 
pass? Or, do you want to say that the technical arts, such as medicine and 
piloting, need to be graded, but that anybody, regardless of their 
incompetence, can work at the foundations of those technological arts and 
get a PhD? And if you say that those students doing a PhD in the sciences 
really need to be graded, then where is the dividing line between the 
arts, humanities and the sciences? What about psychology, the social 
sciences etc? Are the arts really nothing but a smorgasbord of opinions 
and so not worthy of being taken seriously?

Next, you wrote
‘the evaluation of students' abilities should be qualitative, rather than 
quantitative. The current system of grading is based on the limitations of 
statistics, computer programs, and lazy lecturers, and it is not at all 
clear that it is the best way to evaluate technical abilities or 
knowledge. It simply tests memory and basic composition skills.’

I cannot speak for your university or classes, but in the numerous classes 
I have taught, I have never used statistics or computer programs to grade 
the students. Sometimes a short test is used, but mostly assessment is by 
essays. I have to assess the quality of their work, but I do so based on 
as many objective factors as possible, and I strongly encourage 
originality, where the students can show how they actually understand the 
issues rather than simply repeating the text. And, I am not lazy. In fact, 
I think that most lecturers are not lazy. It seems to me to be entirely 
inappropriate for you to make such a generalized insulting comment. But, I 
agree that the current grading system could be improved; however, 
abolishing all objective criteria, which is usually the mark of a 
relativist, is not going to make things better. What concerns me the most 
about your desire to judge students only qualitatively is that this opens 
the door to far more rampant abuse of power than already exists. I, the 
tenured professor, judge the work of this person whom I secretly hate to 
be a fail, and the student will have no objective grounds for complaint. 
Or I simply write a horible reference for this student. I am sure you do 
not wish an Orwellian tyranny and that you have a genuine desire to seek 
what is best for the students and society in general, but I think your 
arguments open the way to full blown relativism with no objective 
standards to appeal to in order to avoid the frightening antirealist logic 
of O’Brien as he tortures Winston. 

You wrote that you 

‘do not believe that I am wiser or better than Roger. Please do not put 
words into my mouth. It is possible to argue with someone without thinking 
that one is better or wiser than them. It is a process of discovery 
through critical engagement.’

I agree with you about the process of discovery, except that although you 
as a person do not think that you are better than me as a person, you 
clearly think that your philosophical position is better than mine, 
otherwise you would not be arguing with me. And, since you must think your 
position makes more sense than mine, then it is reasonable to infer that 
you must implicitly believe that you are more rational or wiser or have 
some sort of quality better than me. In fact, you explicitly judged my 
previous email to be of very low quality, and you obviously believe that 
your own position is better. If you say that you do not believe that your 
position is better, but it is just different, then you are endorsing 
relativism again. So, I did not mean to put words into your mouth, and I 
apologize if my remarks came across that way, but I will stand by my 
current argument that it is reasonable to make the inferences that I have 
made about what your implicit beliefs must be given your philosophical 
position. If I am wrong about making such inferences, then please explain 
to me how I am wrong so that I can learn from my error.

You wrote
‘Strewth! Again, please be bothered to read my posts before you start 
wadding into me for positions that I do not actually hold. If you had 
bothered to read my posts on child abuse then you would have read that I 
am critical of relativism and I am a realist about suffering. I have also 
been repeatedly calling for the defence of judgements on the basis of 
reasoned arguments. Thanks for the Philosophy 101 seminar, mate, but you 
are preaching to the converted.’

I was not trying to lecture to you, and it is unfortunate that you took my 
criticisms in that manner. I am glad that you are a realist about 
suffering, which I guess can only mean that you really believe that people 
suffer. So we can agree on that. But, as pointed out earlier, you endorsed 
Roger’s relativism about views on child abuse varying in different 
cultures at different times. It is hard to reconcile these two positions 
you seem to hold. Moreover, you may say that you are a realist about 
suffering, but if forcing children to clean chimneys or work in coal mines 
or just giving them a good beating is seen by the adults (and likely even 
by many of the children—after all, they believe their parents about Santa 
Claus etc)  in their culture as being, say, character building rather than 
doing them harm, then it seems that you can no longer be a realist about 
suffering because what constitutes suffering would have no objective basis 
outside the dominant cultural viewpoint, which is the cultural relativism 
that you seem to endorse. If you want to maintain your realism about 
suffering, then you will have to disagree with Roger and give up cultural 
relativism. You will have to become a moral realist, a conjectural 
objectivist, at least about morality. Then I will ask you how you can 
reasonably maintain your antirealism about the sciences (including 
mathematics), as in MEP, but still be a realist about morality (or ethics).

Finally, from a different post you wrote that ‘my own approach to 
discourse has been greatly inspired by poststructuralism and its critique 
of meta-narratives.’ My understanding of poststructuralism is that at the 
very least there is a rejection of any claims to have discovered truths or 
facts about the world. Clearly, that is a relativist position, and if you 
reject truth claims about the world, then you cannot consistently be a 
realist about suffering, for to be a realist about suffering is to say 
that there really is a fact or genuine truth about people’s suffering. As 
a realist about suffering, you have to maintain that suffering is real 
even if the whole world denied that suffering was real. I have no idea how 
you can put yourself in the poststructuralist tradition and say that you 
are not a relativist and even claim to be a realist about anything. Your 
various claims are not simply in dialectical tension, they are 
incompatible, and your current explication leaves your position untenable. 
In the same quote just mentioned, you continue

‘I have a pragmatic stance of discourse and I believe that we can all 
learn from each other, providing that we respect that we have differences 
in perspective and goals, but we share the same world and many common 
problems. We can discover commonality and work cooperatively towards 
common goals, if we are willing to critically examine our goals and the 
means we propose to achieve them, through democratic participation in the 
development and differentiation of how we envision the nature of 
rationality, equality, and justice, and how to develop a rational, 
egalitarian, and just society on the basis of a social, critical 
examination and deliberation of these visions.’

Given the sarcastic, angry tone of your last email, I find your above 
words to be hollow rhetoric. Apparently all views are permissible except 
those views that are in deep fundamental disagreement with yours. You may 
see the value of having minor disagreements, but when someone like me 
offers views that run counter to your fundamental beliefs, you dismiss me 
as not having read your posts carefully etc. Your repeated insulting 
sarcasm does not create an atmosphere of equality, justice and rational 
inquiry, and your comments make me feel like there is an antirealist dogma 
that must be obeyed at the risk of petty insults and ostracism. I hope 
that I am wrong.

I have read your work carefully, but at the moment, I do not think you are 
offering a reasonable approach to education, and I am simply asking you to 
explain your position more clearly and address my objections with 
arguments, not sarcasm or personal insults. Attack my arguments, give them 
a good thrashing, show where I have made errors of understanding and 
logic, but please do it according to your own espoused ideals of equality, 
rationality etc. But, if I have misunderstood the intentions of the FoW as 
being a place that permits serious argumentation in the quest for what is 
right and true and reasonable and good, and if I am wrong to have assumed 
that we can engage in such fundamental questioning and arguing while being 
free from personal attacks and repeated sarcasm, then please let me know 
and I will refrain from participating in the future. (And, I am not here 
being sarcastic.)

A short comment to Roger regarding Socrates’ method ending up 
in ‘anarchy’: In the Crito, Socrates argues clearly that he should abide 
by the laws. He had many opportunities to escape, as he had many powerful, 
wealthy friends who begged him to do so, but he thought that it would be 
wrong, really objectively wrong, to disobey his implicit contract with the 
state. He had entered the court agreeing to their rules, and even though 
he thought their ruling was wrong he believed that it was the right thing 
to do to obey their sentence. Clearly, Socrates did not believe in 
anarchy. He did believe that it was better to obey God, the truth, to 
follow the road to wisdom wherever it leads, but it was this same 
commitment to an objective truth that forbid him to flee from prison and 
compelled him to obey the state, which is anything but anarchy. I hope 
that the members of this list also prefer the rough road to wisdom rather 
than merely floating along with the whimsical flow of shifting opinions.

John