Michael wrote: "I believe it is possible to speak of good and bad qualities in things, and these qualities are independent of the perceiver's/interpreter's set of standards for such things. The raw material that leads to "good" and "bad" predicates reside in the objects, not exclusively in our heads."
I, said Cheerskep megalomaniacally, am saying something very fundamental, and contrary to almost all philosophy of the last two-and-a-half millennia. You have said, "the quality resides in the object." My position is not only that your assertion about the location of "qualities" is wrong, but that "qualities" -- as entities in the world outside our minds -- don't exist at all. Note: I do believe in the non-mental world, the "material" world. I'm with you in your belief in "raw material" "out there". Note further that I'm not denying solely the existence of merely "judgmental qualities" -- goodness, badness, niceness, kindness, prettiness, pettiness. I'm denying the non-mental existence of hardness, redness, tigerness, waterness. To begin to convey my position, I submit this: You may reply, "When you squeeze a rock, don't you encounter the quality of hardness?" No. My fingers encounter only the raw material. My fingers then send certain nerve impulses that eventuate as sensation in my brain. I notice the rock does not crumble when I squeeze. "That thing is hard!" I cry. But the big strong guy next to me crushes the thing to crumbs. "That wasn't hard," he says. "In fact it was only dried mud." Can you see that "hard" or "soft" is not a "quality" of the thing we squeezed, but only a word we summon up to describe our experience caused by our encounter with the "raw material"? I agree with you that linguistic convenience leads us to say the likes of, "The apple IS red." The lingo then seduces us into accepting that "redness" "inheres" in the apple. But in Epistemology 101 we come to realize that all we can reasonably assert about the apple is that its raw material surface is such that it reflects light-rays of a certain frequency, which excite the retina in such a way that our mind experiences the sensation, red. That sensation is not in the apple, it's solely in our heads. Though we all understand why we come to talk this way, it is ultimately indefensible to claim that "redness" "inheres" in the apple. It is extremely hard to push ourselves back to square-one thinking about all this, thinking that will at last make us see it's absurd to say that object over there has "tigerness". All the object "has" is raw material that, when sensed by our various nerve endings, results in certain sensations that, in their combination, prompt us to say, "That thing is what we call a tiger." And then, by devilish extension, "That thing IS a tiger." A word often used by philosophers is 'property'. Some use it synonymously with 'quality'; others use to, allegedly, "refer to" something "in" that object that gives it a related "quality". But at base all tthey have in mind with the word "property" is raw material of a certain makeup that results in certain effects. Those effects can be sensations when our nerve-endings encounter the raw material, or they can simply be effects that take place in the material world -- e.g. the raw material we call "water" expands when it is frozen. Our minds, including our language, misleads us when it talks of water as "having" a certain "property". This is misleading because it seduces us into mistakenly believing in the existence of an entity, a "property". For another (not perfect) example of our mind's tendency to imagine and reify a "property", take the word 'heat'. When the raw material of a given material object is composed of molecules undergoing rapid kinetic motion, and we touch that object we are apt to say, "It is hot," or "I can feel its heat." We tend to think of "heat" as a "quality" or "property" of the object at this moment. But, strictly, we aren't feeling a "thing" called 'heat'. We are feeling molecules vibrating against the molecules in our fingertips. When our molecules get bumped against, they move. The more they move, the more excited are the nerve impulses to the brain -- where the sensation "Hot!" arises. "Lot of heat there!" But there is no mind-independent entity that is separate from the kinetic motion. In our blurry way, we dimly reify an entity beyond simple molecular motion, and even tend to impute part of our sensation to those molecules. We say the object "is hot", it "has heat". Similarly "goodness" or "badness" is never in an external object. Only "raw material" is. When Kate talks about "good" tools, and "better" work, it would be wrong to claim the tool has "goodness" or the work has "betterness". There are no "nesses" in the material world. ************** You're invited to Hollywood's biggest party: Get Oscars updates, red carpet pics and more at Moviefone. (http://movies.aol.com/oscars-academy-awards?ncid=emlcntusmovi00000001)
