Who Were the Sea Peoples?

If we take the distinction between more subjective ("Vanilla ice cream is yucky!") and more objective ("Mongolia is in Asia.") beliefs as a genuine difference in kind , then we must, if we are to be logically consistent, admit that every assertion that something is an objective fact is, itself, a mere subjective belief ! "Well," you protest, "it is an objective fact that the Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun: it's been measured by scientists!" But did you "measure" your belief that the mileage has been measured? Because if quantitative measurement is the lodestar of objectivity, then your belief that the Sun-Earth distance is an objective fact is itself completely subjective: you can't measure the degree to which that fact was determined by measurement, or, even if you could, you would just be stuck in an infinite regress: you'd have to measure the degree to which the belief in that second measurement was a...

As noted by Ed Feser, Thomas Nagel pins the tail on the exact same donkey I have in some recent posts: The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essentia...

Razib Khan knows that there is something wrong with the idea that beauty is "purely subjective." But, entranced by positivism, he can only place this non-subjective aspect in biology and evolution. Although he makes a passing mention of the Greeks, he seems to have given little thought to Plato's conception of beauty. The only small problem with his attempt to rescue some objectivity for beauty along biological lines is that it fails utterly. Biology can indicate to us fitness, but not objective truth. It is easy to come up with scores and scores of cases where believing a falsehood is more adaptive than admitting the truth, or where it is simply not important. A trivial case: Let's imagine that people from all cultures see the soldier on the right  in the linked illusion as tallest. That certainly would not mean that objectively he is the tallest! In fact, Khan's evidence could easily be trumpeted by someone who believes beauty is an illusion! "See,...