We don’t take causal claims like “It’s going to rain tomorrow” to imply a position on how to interpret quantum mechanics.
If someone asks the awkward question “how do you know”, you need to drill down to something, if not all the way to QM, and not just repeat the claim.
But I don’t think these categories and distinctions regularly figure into everyday normative and evaluative claims. They’re philosophical inventions, and have little to do with what ordinary moral and normative discourse is about.
Yes, and they are useful inventions, because they provide a justification for doing things based on ethics, such as putting people in jail. If someone asks the awkward question “why should people go to jail for that”, you can’t answer it just by saying it’s against your preferences.
The realist case against relativism consists of a positive claim, that realism works, and a negative claim, that relativism doesn’t. If the positive claim fails, that doesn’t mean by itself that the negative claim fails. The relativist still needs to show that relativism can do the required real-world lifting.
I’ve referred to the need to justify real world ethical practices many times, without hearing any response from yourself.
If we want to know what people are doing when they make moral claims, we should be doing empirical work that involves examining actual instances of usage, not hypothetical ones.
That’s where I am starting from.
What I think they are doing is trying to form alliances and make changes in the real world. As I have said many times.
And I think they have good reasons to reject relativism as insufficiently committal. Even if realism isn’t the only alternative.
If someone asks the awkward question “how do you know”, you need to drill down to something, if not all the way to QM, and not just repeat the claim.
Yes, and they are useful inventions, because they provide a justification for doing things based on ethics, such as putting people in jail. If someone asks the awkward question “why should people go to jail for that”, you can’t answer it just by saying it’s against your preferences.
The realist case against relativism consists of a positive claim, that realism works, and a negative claim, that relativism doesn’t. If the positive claim fails, that doesn’t mean by itself that the negative claim fails. The relativist still needs to show that relativism can do the required real-world lifting.
I’ve referred to the need to justify real world ethical practices many times, without hearing any response from yourself.
That’s where I am starting from.
What I think they are doing is trying to form alliances and make changes in the real world. As I have said many times. And I think they have good reasons to reject relativism as insufficiently committal. Even if realism isn’t the only alternative.