“I may call a chair, ‘a chair’ and someone may call it ‘a bed.’ Who can say who is right? We’re both right.” What’s wrong with this claim? What’s right about the claim?I really dont understand what could be wrong or right about the claim...if you could help me understand it that would be great! Maybe some of examples of philosophers that could help me understand this claim like Kant i guess. im not to clear on all this.Thanks in advance!
Language is a complex communication tool that is created collectively by humanity. A chair is only a chair because the majority of English speakers agree that the word we use for a certain range of objects with very similar shapes and properties is 'chair'. If the language shifted through use to the point where most people accept that what we now call a 'chair' should instead be called a 'bed', then it would be so. Any word has only the meaning we ascribe to it, and no more. This is what Kant is really saying, albeit in a very unclear way. Kant could be said to be wrong, because one person alone cannot redefine the language. He could be said to be right, in that words are impermanent things that have no meaning we do not give them. Hope that helps :)
Sorry about the stupid popup when you open the page, but it is a good read and only a few paragraphs long, unlike the link above.
What you have largely created is the beginnings of a postmodern argument. We are in the postmodern era now( most would say). Postmodernism is the view that everything is subjective- mankind cannot understand objective truth- he is lost within the confines of language and his limited senses so he cannot know what truth really is. Although there is logic to back this up, I reject this claim( for the most part) due to Postmodernism's unreconcilable paradox. The paradox is that by its skepticism, it indirectly deconstructs itself, and by using the exact logic it rejects, claims an objective statement. How is it reasonable to make a statement and claim it valid when with the same logic it entails everything else to be invalid? While this may seem off topic, it refers to exactly what you are talking about. I believe in truth to the degree that it is decipherable among empirical human means and observation. Although a chair can be called a table, a chair in the language spoken should allow the speaker as well as the listener to come to a common ground of understanding as to what they are talking about through context clues and other means of common sense. For Example, if I say go sit on the chair. You wouldn't obviously go sit on a table even if you thought 'chair' meant 'table. You would probably question what I meant and we would come to an understanding through means of other words. So, unless you are essentially speaking another language, it is very possible to understand the given object. Using this very logic we are able to use or senses and our logic to understand and establish absolutes.
Nietzsche would say (I think he would say this but I haven't done that much study yet; just starting) that all supposed truths are in fact metaphors. The use of a name for an object we see is a metaphor; thus different metaphors can be used to describe the same object. Truths are metaphors since we are using something else to describe an object (as opposed to simply waving the chair in air). The problem is that we have forgotten that names are in fact all metaphors, and take them to be truths. Nietzsche uses the example of a leaf, in that no one leaf is the same as the other, yet we call them all leaves. Thus they are both right; however society would see the person who calls the chair a bed as a liar, even though the truth itself doesn't exist since its simply a metaphor. I'm just sort of guessing this because we're just starting to read Nietzsche but hopefully this will be somewhat helpful.
Part of the stupidity of our times is the demanding of impossible absolutes without context and then claiming it proves no absolutes are possible. The sound to express a concept (like chair) is arbitrary within the totality of all sounds, but is not arbitrary within the context of a pre-established language. In another language maybe bed is a reference for what is a chair in English, but chair is the correct reference within English. If the majority of references were not largely known in a language then communication as we know it would be impossible. Part of arcana mystery of post modernism is the drive to claim arbitrariness everywhere without addressing the fact that we actually communicate. Shakespeare long ago defeated post modernism by uttering rose by any another name... which means the reality of the reference comes before the word(Amazing some post moderns think this line supports them, but they're wrong). The sound of a concept is arbitrary, but not within a historical language. The meaning of a concept is not arbitrary since it references a thing. While the expression of that concept is universally arbritrary, it is a contextually absolute in the language it's uttered in.
