The definition of “right” isn’t “explanatory and predictive power”. Something could have a lot of both of those whilst being completely incorrect. The definition of “right” is that that’s what actually happened.
But these people I was debating refuse to accept that there is such thing as a ‘right’ by that definition. They say that ‘what actually happened’ is forever unknowable. I was trying to point out that while we may or may not find out exactly what happened, we can always tell if an explanation is ‘more right’ or ‘less right’ than another, based on how useful it is in explaining the evidence.
It’s worth asking whether your interlocutors were physical anti-realists or moral anti-realists who got quite confused about the scope of their anti-realist position.
That’s possible, but I got the feeling that they wouldn’t know what those positions are. Their positions were so self-contradictory that it makes me think that they had simply absorbed some of the zeitgeist without any kind of formal study and then failed to propagate the change all the way across their belief networks.
The definition of “right” isn’t “explanatory and predictive power”. Something could have a lot of both of those whilst being completely incorrect. The definition of “right” is that that’s what actually happened.
But these people I was debating refuse to accept that there is such thing as a ‘right’ by that definition. They say that ‘what actually happened’ is forever unknowable. I was trying to point out that while we may or may not find out exactly what happened, we can always tell if an explanation is ‘more right’ or ‘less right’ than another, based on how useful it is in explaining the evidence.
It’s worth asking whether your interlocutors were physical anti-realists or moral anti-realists who got quite confused about the scope of their anti-realist position.
That’s possible, but I got the feeling that they wouldn’t know what those positions are. Their positions were so self-contradictory that it makes me think that they had simply absorbed some of the zeitgeist without any kind of formal study and then failed to propagate the change all the way across their belief networks.