Race & Impact on Personality Types

[Phaedrus]

You are trying to turn your own unempirical value judgment into a fact.

No. I am trying to make a value judgment based on the fact that LIIs are Subjectivists and ILIs are Objectvists. I don't respect our differences. I can't stand relativism in any form, and Subjectivism is a form of relativism, so I am kind of allergic to Subjectivism itself and the kind of world view that is typical of LIIs. Even though LIIs can't help that they are Subjectivists, it is objectively wrong to think like an LII. The thinking of an LII like tcaudilllg is logically incoherent, and we should never accept logical contradictions in our explanations or views on reality.

[Logos]

No. I am trying to make a value judgment based on the fact that LIIs are Subjectivists and ILIs are Objectvists. I don't respect our differences. I can't stand relativism in any form, and Subjectivism is a form of relativism, so I am kind of allergic to Subjectivism itself and the kind of world view that is typical of LIIs. Even though LIIs can't help that they are Subjectivists, it is objectively wrong to think like an LII. The thinking of an LII like tcaudilllg is logically incoherent, and we should never accept logical contradictions in our explanations or views on reality.

You have warped views of Socionics.

[tcaudilllg]

@Phaedrus: you've yet to corroborate with regard to the liberal/conservative brain study I linked to (by linking to its lead researcher's website).

[Phaedrus]

You have warped views of Socionics.

They are correct, so what is your point?

[Logos]

They are correct, so what is your point?

You believe that you know that they are correct, but it has yet to be empirically seen.

[Phaedrus]

You believe that you know that they are correct, but it has yet to be empirically seen.

You are free to pursue your own research in order to confirm them or try to falsify them. In fact, I am inviting you to do it.

[Slacker]

No. I am trying to make a value judgment based on the fact that LIIs are Subjectivists and ILIs are Objectvists. I don't respect our differences. I can't stand relativism in any form, and Subjectivism is a form of relativism, so I am kind of allergic to Subjectivism itself and the kind of world view that is typical of LIIs. Even though LIIs can't help that they are Subjectivists, it is objectively wrong to think like an LII. The thinking of an LII like tcaudilllg is logically incoherent, and we should never accept logical contradictions in our explanations or views on reality.

And he thinks he's the dual of an ESFp. ROFL

[Phaedrus]

And he thinks he's the dual of an ESFp. ROFL

No. I don't think so, I know it for a fact.

[Creepy-Cyclops]

@Loki, you invite a conversation perhaps from Phaedrus that beauty is indeed objective (haha, memories Phaedrus )

[Phaedrus]

Ugh. Meh. Reading this entire discussion is annoying.

Read the thread http://www.the16types.info/vbulletin...ad.php?t=18671 and maybe you will understand a few more things about the differences in perspective between LIIs and ILIs.

Phaedrus, is there any way you could expand your horizons? You appear to only recognize your own point of view.

Is there any way that you could expand yours? I have thought about almost every possible view you can have for ages. It has taken me some 20 years or so to examine all the arguments on each side, but some day you will arrive at a conclusion on which of all the possible perspectives is the correct one. It has not been an easy path to walk, but now I am finally standing at some sort of secure foundation. I'm not sure it was worth all the effort, but I had no choice. I have always had a pathological need to seek the objective truth no matter what it will cost me in effort or suffering.

You are an absolutist in that you think that everything there is to think about (every view, every idea, every piece of information, every concept, etc.) must be either entirely correct (true) or entirely incorrect (false). This is the way in which you seem to think. As such you only recognize what is "objective."

Yes. And that attitude I share with several famous philosophers. If you don't have it, you will probably not persist long enough. You will more likely give up somewhere along the way and never arrive at the truth at the end of the road. Like Ludwig Wittgenstein, I have to understand or die.

As you have said before 2+2=4 is an objective truth, in that at every time in every possible universe, this is always true. Thus you can say that 2+2=4 is a fact, a truth in the universe.

Correct.

This works fine for something like 2+2=4 (though I'm sure someone on Earth could come up with an ingenious argument about why that doesn't hold true in every possible universe at every possible time, but never mind that... I don't have an issue with saying that 2+2=4 is an objective truth... close enough). This doesn't work so well for other things though...

That 2+2=4 is a truth in every possible world is an objective fact that we cannot doubt, but there are other objective truths that can be doubted. But the fact that they can be doubted is no argument against them being objectively true. And even though they may be objective truths, we may not be in a position to know that they are objective truths. There is a crucial and fundamental logical difference between an objective truth and a known objective truth. Truth is not the same thing as knowledge.

For instance, if someone were to say "Nicole Kidman is beautiful" perhaps you would also try to analyze that objectively.

Yes, I have analayzed a lot of similar statements made by others and myself. I have thought a lot about objective beauty. I have spent many years on that specific problem, partly as the result of an intense interest in Robert M. Pirsig's books Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila. I wrote a university paper on the first book in 1992.

The statement can either be absolutely true or absolutely false in your view (correct?).

Yes. Assuming that the statement is correctly formed and have a meaning according to the rules of language. Strictly speaking it is propositions that have a truth value, and statements are the "package" through which propositions are expressed.

So we would have to break down the entity "Nicole Kidman" and figure out what we mean by that and then apply the objective criteria of beauty to see if the statement either is or is not true.

Yes, exactly. And in order to do that, we first must determine whether objective truth exists or not.

"Nicole Kidman is beautiful" could be an example of a subjective truth.

No. There are no subjective truths. Either the statement "Nicole Kidman is beautiful" has a truth value or it doesn't have a truth value. If it has a truth value, and if it also happens to be a true statement, then it is objectively true that Nicole Kidman is beautiful. It could of course, hypothetically, be the case that Nicole Kidman is not objectively beautiful. If the statement "Nicole Kidman is beautiful" does not have a truth value, then it does not express a proposition. Some philosophers argue for such a position, often on the grounds that value statements are really nothing but expressions of a feeling or some sort of recommendation on which attitude to adopt towards, in this case, Nicole Kidman. If those philosophers are right, then the statement about Nicole Kidmans beauty would belong to the same group of language expressions as, for example: "Oh!", "Hot!", "Nice!", "Shit!", "", "", "LOOOOOLLLLL!!!!!", etc.

The person stating it finds whatever they call Nicole Kidman to be beautiful at that particular instant in time. It's a "truth" in that it is "a fact of their reality" or "describes their reality" in that moment... It is subjective in that beauty is itself subjective.

No. What you try to say is that the person likes the look of Nicole Kidman. The person is, in that case, only trying to express a certain attitude towards Nicole Kidman, not stating a fact about an objective quality that Kidman might, or might not, have. If the person is really making a statement about the beauty of Nicole Kidman, then the positive feelings or the the attitude that the person might have towards her are irrelevant. They are irrelevant, because if Nicole Kidman really is beautiful, then nothing you do or nothing you feel can change that fact. Even if you would hate the look of Kidman, she would, in that hypothetical case, be objectively beautiful anyway.

If we were to get every human on the planet together to come up with an objective criteria of beauty that they all agree upon without compromising their own changing views on what is beautiful, no agreement could ever be reached.

Totally incorrect. Such criteria have already been established. There is a very clear general pattern in what people find beautiful, and that pattern has been confirmed in many empirical studies. How attractive a person really is, or how attractive people perceive her to be anyway, can literally be measured by a ruler and a calculator. The Golden Ratio is a mathematical relation that can be used to measure the degree of beauty in people to some extent.

Even an individual person would not be able to agree with him/herself on what this criteria is some time later. You could say that all these people haven't studied aesthetics enough and haven't truly explored beauty enough and that's why they are unable to find the one true objective criteria of beauty. After all you know what it is, and you could enlighten them all if they'd just subscribe to your view on the matter. But though a few of them might because they're sick of thinking about it and just need someone to tell them what to believe lest their head start hurting more, most would ardently agree and disagree with certain points of your "criteria." It's not because they can't see the "one truth." It's because in this case there is no "one truth."

It is very clear from what you say here that you haven't studied this scientific problem at all. You don't know what you are talking about; you are only expressing your own totally undfounded prejudices.

[Phaedrus]

A couple ways to look at this...

1. Truth is absolute and objective. Everything can be relegated into the realm of absolute truth or falsehood, including statements like "Nicole Kidman is beautiful." Only objective truth (that which is true in all possible times in all possible universes) is truth; subjective truth does not exist. What most call a subjective truth is merely a subjective view. (This boils down to the semantics of how we define "truth.")

2. Truth is not absolute. You can say that some things can be relegated into the realm of objective truth or falsehood (e.g. 2+2=4), but some things cannot be (e.g. "Nicole Kidman is beautiful").

a. Truth can only be objective, but is not always absolute. If something can't be deemed absolutely true or absolutely false... it simply has no truth value... it's not that it is a subjective truth (as there is no such thing), but that it is indeterminate.

b. Truth may be subjective or objective, but only objective truth may be absolute. If something can't be deemed absolutely true or absolutely false, then if it is a truth, it is a subjective one (relative).

This whole quote reaveals some misunderstandings of the key concepts. If many people on this forum understand the concepts objectivity and absolute in the way you describe here, that would explain why people are so confused about it. They simply don't understand what I am saying, and they don't understand the meanings of words like "objective" and "absolute truth".

In order to make these things a bit more clear to everyone, I am going to quote a passage from Tibor R. Machan's book Objectivity: Recovering Determinate Reality in Philosophy, Science, and Everyday Life:

What is an 'objective, absolute truth'? It is a proposition that identifies facts of reality that are basic, universal, and inescapable.

Such a truth is objective because it identifies something that exists and is what it is independent of the proposition. If one states that the sun is shining today, and it is shining to today, the sun would be shining no matter who made the proposition or whether the proposition had been uttered at all. This view is known as the 'correspondence' theory of truth.

A truth is absolute if it states a fundamental, universal, and inescapable fact, a fact that holds no matter what other facts might also exist. Not every objective truth is absolute. The sun, after a time, will no longer shine. But all absolute truths are objective, else they would not be truths.

If you could easily grasp their point of view, we wouldn't have to choke over this distinction like a bone in a piece of chicken one is trying to swallow. But because this has to be constantly choked over... discussions go nowhere. And that's why it's annoying. (Maybe you do easily grasp their point of view, but it doesn't have any bearing on how you respond.)

To problem for me is that people on this forum don't use already established philosophical terms in the way they should be used, because people on this forum don't understand the concepts correctly. And that makes it hard for me to know what they really have in mind.

To avoid confusions and misunderstandings people must simply learn the correct meaning of these concepts, otherwise we turn this into a stupid guessing game in which we can never know for sure that we are talking about the same thing or not. Therefore people should accept what I say is the correct use of philosophical terms without questioning.

You can deny what may be the subjective aspect of reality if you like, and try to take these "subjective" aspects and dissect them to sort out the absolute truth and absolute falsehood of all of them so that they fit into your absolutist objectivist system without contradicting one another. But I don't know how you would know that this constitutes finding the truth of reality rather than just constituting the workings of your own mind and how it is sorting out reality. Maybe it's all in your head, true to you, and reality remains as indistinct as it wants to be.

And here you confuse again, as people on this forum do all the time, the different logical concepts truth and knowledge. That is another fundamental logical distinction that people just have to learn and accept as valid without questioning it. It is irritating that people don't understand that they don't understand these concepts correctly. They simply don't realize the logical errors they are making.

That you don't recognize anything as being subjective, or recognize any point of view other than your own... that's why there are constant disagreements between you and most people on the forum.

There are a lot of things in the world that are subjective, but truths are not members of that category.

It's difficult to communicate with you because one has to translate everything into your worldview to understand what you mean.

The only thing people have to do in order to understand what I am saying is to learn the basic rules of a philosophical discussion. You have to learn the common language that is used and accepted by everyone who has a basic education in philosophy. You are simply uneducated, and that should really not be my problem, even though I try my best to correct your misunderstandings and lack of knowledge by giving small lectures on philosophy now and then. The problem is, however, that people are questioning the content of what I teach, and that is both irritating for me and stupid of them, because that means that they will remain ignorant.

[misutii]

jesus there's no way I'm trudging through the mound of semantic crap that's already been posted.

My first thoughts on this issue: race likely doesn't significantly effect the distribution of type but race does probably play a role in accentuating certain types (see info. on integral types) giving others the illusion that race effects the distribution of type