I’m going to deploy what I call the Wittgenstein Chomsky blah blah blah argument. Philosophy is just words in English; there is little ultimate meaning we are going to find here unless we declare our mathematical axioms. Already most of the views here seem reconcilable by redefining what exactly the different words mean.
To answer the question: some things can be proven objectively true, some things can be proven objectively false, some things can be proven to be undecidable. A fact is a true statement that follows from your given system of axioms. I personally am unsure if most moral principles or meta ethical systems can be declared objectively true or false with a standard ethical system, but I’m not going to take it seriously until a theorem prover says so. We are never going to convince each other of ultimate philosophical truth by having conversations like this.
I suppose this makes me an anti-realist, unless someone feels like redefining realism for me. :D
I’m going to deploy what I call the Wittgenstein Chomsky blah blah blah argument. Philosophy is just words in English; there is little ultimate meaning we are going to find here unless we declare our mathematical axioms. Already most of the views here seem reconcilable by redefining what exactly the different words mean.
To answer the question: some things can be proven objectively true, some things can be proven objectively false, some things can be proven to be undecidable. A fact is a true statement that follows from your given system of axioms. I personally am unsure if most moral principles or meta ethical systems can be declared objectively true or false with a standard ethical system, but I’m not going to take it seriously until a theorem prover says so. We are never going to convince each other of ultimate philosophical truth by having conversations like this.
I suppose this makes me an anti-realist, unless someone feels like redefining realism for me. :D
Again, it feels like I am missing something… http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-axiomatic/ helped a little.