Why do people keep saying "there is no absolute truth"

Because debating is fun.

>>7677803
What was the argument about?

People still want to be right because that makes them feel important.

On the flipside there are guys who like to "argue" because under the right mentality it can be a good way of learning and expanding your conception of things.

>>7677812
>>7677806
I know it is.
Which is why "there is no absolute truth" statement bothers me a lot....They will always pull this card as soon as they are loosing the debate.Which is not only lazy but also borderline retarded as the logic self negating .

>>7677810
it was about something called otherkin or soemthin......people who think they are animals and other weird sorts of things.

>>7677803
This is a kind of argumentative fallacy, isn't it? I'm pretty sure that, unless the argument is centered around the nature of "absolute truth", there's a name for this. It's usually when someone has been defending a point and it starts to weaken that they immediately negate the point of arguing anyways.

But yes, people have been aware of this for years, for the reasons you mentioned. TL;DR, it's because people are too stupid to either gracefully concede or defend their argument.

>>7677803

There may be no "absolute" truths, but there are multitudes of approximate truths, so in an argument, you are trying to prove that your approximation to the truth is more accurate than the other person's approximation to the truth

>>7677829
Even if "there is no absolute truth", its the very process of arguing and bumping our knowledge against another's that has lead to science, literature, art, and the overall development of our species.

Sure we're feeling around in the dark, but we're still going places.

>>7677803
i mostly agree w/ you that's it's a boring thing to say but uh it's not self-negating once stated with proper level of precision

"as far as it seems possible to ascertain by formal methods, which themselves seem unassailable, the project of setting up any truth from an unshakeable and justifiable foundation seems doomed from the start"

you just have to be okay w/ sounding like an autist

>>7677836
I agree with you anon it would have been relevant then.But it was about something really stupid about people claiming to be animals and dragons.

>>7677838
>>7677841
nicely put anon.

>>7677856
do u really think that it applies to those claiming to be dragons and animals??

>>7677829
what was their actual sentence ?

>>7677883
>You are so close minded that you believe that there can be no other answer but the one you believe in. And there is no absolute truth. Not religion, not science, not anything. Nothing is certain. Our existence, or lives, not even the laptop I'm using to type this comment with. That is why there is no truth. Because there is no certainty whatsoever. I can't prove you exist anymore than I can prove I exist. This discussion is getting nowhere, and obviously, we're going to stand by our beliefs.

>>7677883
>>7677886
>Reality is subjective. Thinking that reality is objective implies that there is something that defines everything. That simply is not true.Is it such a problem that these people identify with the norm?

>There are no negative effects in a person identifying as a different species. you keep saying they are deluded, but by whose standards do you base that on? Why is it that they are deluded? Who draws the lines between sane and insane? And society was create with the original idea of keeping the majority happy. Rather I should say that is the way that American society was crafted. But with that being said, American society has gone through many changes in the past. So the fact that American society is still changing is no surprise.

98% of people don't get into "debates" to learn more or prove others wrong. They just like to argue and feel good about themselves

>>7677923
I have fun imagining someone like The Amazing Atheist pummeling some guy into the dirt while shouting "LET'S HAVE A DIALOGUE! AN OPEN DISCUSSION!"

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>>7677886
>can't prove he exists
>not knowing about the cogito
Also, since what you are arguing about didn't have anything to do with the nature of knowledge in the first place, them conceding nihilism is basically saying "I don't know anything so I think nobody else does either, so you can't be right". It's projection and ignorance. In terms of the argument, it's safe to say you're view beat theirs out.

>>7677932
"i think therefore i am" wasn't something i going to use against them.They will basically use it tp support their claims of not being human "spiritually".

But i did pointed out their projection and ignorance.He basically said it is ad hominem .And i was being disrespectful.

There may be no absolute truth which exist independent of human view, however that doesn't mean that we shouldn't assume some basic laws. For example, I don't think it's worth arguing for hours on whether our senses are lying to us, or asking questions like "are my hands real" or "is this the matrix", because they lead nowhere. In order to move forward and to have meaningful debate we must simply assume the general trustworthiness of the senses. From here on we can discuss what is subjective i.e the arts.

That's just how I see it anyway. What always annoyed me about philosophy was these overly abstract nothing questions; I'm by no means a logical positivist but there need to be boundaries.

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>>7677803
A tactic to discredit something they dislike but cannot actually provide an argument against. I used to have conversations with this person who would always reply "well that's just your opinion!" or "well art is subjective" as if to suggest from there that everything is irrelevant. These were this person's only arguments about anything.

>>7677829
>Which is not only lazy but also borderline retarded as the logic self negating .
Logic itself is self negating.

>>7678049
>There may be no absolute truth which exist independent of human view
Woaaaah you mean a lion wouldn't agree with a human that, given both are not sensory impaired and the lion could speak, he can perceive things external to him?

>. What always annoyed me about philosophy was these overly abstract nothing questions
It's a certain subset of philosophy whose job is to do exactly that: ask and try to argue for provocative and speculative views. Such branches of Philosophy are not and never were pragmatic. This is a straw man--having distorted expectations and reactions about something you don't know about.

>people are actually agreeing with OP to certain extent

OP, there is nothing contraditory about those two things. There is no absolute truth, but how is that a key element to have an argument? Why is that you cannot imagine an argument if not as a fight for who's got a hold of some absolute truth. If truth is relative and personal in anyway, isn't that more so of a reason for an argument to occur? You could flip the whole situation around and ask why are people arguing, or even seeing different things, if there were an absolute truth in front of us all.

It might be so that some people (if not most) who engage in arguments do so because they are enamored with their perception of the world and the words they use to speak of it. These attachment to what they perceive is something else entirely.

An argument, or a conversation of any kind, happends because of an assumption that the other knows what you are talking about. Even when we use the same words, this assumption doesn't make it true.

The notion that there is an absolute truth comes precisely from this assumed coherence in speech. You point me to what you call a dog and I too will call it a dog, so you think the dog is there in an absolute way and you're mad when we talk about more complicated things and our words begin to diverge. We perceive very different worlds, we cannot imagine how each other sense life, because our only glimpse of that is through that which we speak to each other. So why exactly is it surprising that we encounter each other in conflict or in love or in opinions that differ?