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We are discussing trolling in the context of communication between groups of humans. "Trolling is in the eye of the beholder" -- the intuitive basis for this c

We are discussing trolling in the context of communication between groups of humans. "Trolling is in the eye of the beholder" -- the intuitive basis for this claim is that there cannot be a method for establishing agreement about what is and is not trolling. I offered a minimal definition of trolling for which constructing agreement is clearly possible. My toy example is just to illustrate that there exist ways to construct or approximate agreement on what trolling is -- there are in fact many ways to construct such agreement. Pretending like such agreement is impossible is a strategy to empower trolls. I'll partially accept your pedantic criticism over my use of the phrase "logically false" -- but your attempt to disparage my use of the word Objective is welcome to go sit alone with you in a motionless universe for the rest of eternity.

ouid 10y ago
Let me put it another way. In your construction, if I make a post, and someone makes a comment on a post which a responder then describes as trolling, How may I objectively determine whether or not that comment qualified as trolling? Since I am the poster, and at least one responder has called it trolling, it is now trolling if and only if I say it is trolling. In this case, I have no objective definition to look to. This is both a real world case, and a case where your definition is degenerate, which I would call a critical failure of your definition.
- breatheoften 10y ago
  Either you agree it's trolling (establishing the fact that your post was trolling with respect to the toy definition) or you disagree (establishing that the post was not trolling with respect to the definition). Either way it's possible to label the post as trolling or not with respect to the toy definition and it's possible for observers to agree about that label. My response to the original beholder subjectivity claim is not about whether a thing "is" trolling or not, it's about whether people can agree a thing "is" trolling or not. There are plenty of sufficiently good methods for people to agree about this designation that we don't need to invoke a Plato's spheres argument asserting that "trolling doesn't exist".
  - ouid 10y ago
    You claimed that the notion of definition by agreement was sufficient to demonstrate the existence of some objective definition compatible with the first. I have plainly proven that false.
    - breatheoften 10y ago
      In the real universe, objective only ever exists relative to some set of observers. You have proven nothing I said false, you merely interpreted the words I used in a way that does not treat the implication that some interpretations of words which do not admit the possibility for such concepts as human communication to exist, are flawed interpretations with respect to the set of observations about human communication that it is possible to make (which show that human communication does exist). That's the original fallacy I pointed out which you rejected as non-fallacious because you seem to not believe that it is possible to talk about consistency of agreement between sets of communicating humans in objective terms. You think you've exposed a flaw in my argument but really you've just been spinning your wheels on misconstructions of what I said -- from my perspective either your interpretive process has misled you or you have engaged in a deliberate process of failing to communicate.
      - ouid 10y ago
        I have been failing to communicate, but it has not been deliberate. Your assertion that there is no such thing as objective truth is A) false and B) not a reason to redefine objective truth (a property that is impossible to obtain is still a useful thing to talk about). Humanity does not generate the properties that it invents language to describe. Those properties can be thought of objectively, but natural language does not always do that (it does do it sometimes though, the word "three" is objectively defined). Some words do not contain within their definition any objective phenomena; "Beauty", for example, does not. The reasoning you have applied thus far should apply to all words, since you have not expressed any particular property of 'troll' in any of your arguments. So if the original comment had said "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", and we had continued to have this same argument, the validity of either of our positions would be unchanged. Would you still be complaining about relativism if that had been the topic?

ouid 10y ago

Let me put it another way. In your construction, if I make a post, and someone makes a comment on a post which a responder then describes as trolling, How may I objectively determine whether or not that comment qualified as trolling? Since I am the poster, and at least one responder has called it trolling, it is now trolling if and only if I say it is trolling. In this case, I have no objective definition to look to. This is both a real world case, and a case where your definition is degenerate, which I would call a critical failure of your definition.

breatheoften 10y ago
Either you agree it's trolling (establishing the fact that your post was trolling with respect to the toy definition) or you disagree (establishing that the post was not trolling with respect to the definition). Either way it's possible to label the post as trolling or not with respect to the toy definition and it's possible for observers to agree about that label. My response to the original beholder subjectivity claim is not about whether a thing "is" trolling or not, it's about whether people can agree a thing "is" trolling or not. There are plenty of sufficiently good methods for people to agree about this designation that we don't need to invoke a Plato's spheres argument asserting that "trolling doesn't exist".
- ouid 10y ago
  You claimed that the notion of definition by agreement was sufficient to demonstrate the existence of some objective definition compatible with the first. I have plainly proven that false.
  - breatheoften 10y ago
    In the real universe, objective only ever exists relative to some set of observers. You have proven nothing I said false, you merely interpreted the words I used in a way that does not treat the implication that some interpretations of words which do not admit the possibility for such concepts as human communication to exist, are flawed interpretations with respect to the set of observations about human communication that it is possible to make (which show that human communication does exist). That's the original fallacy I pointed out which you rejected as non-fallacious because you seem to not believe that it is possible to talk about consistency of agreement between sets of communicating humans in objective terms. You think you've exposed a flaw in my argument but really you've just been spinning your wheels on misconstructions of what I said -- from my perspective either your interpretive process has misled you or you have engaged in a deliberate process of failing to communicate.
    - ouid 10y ago
      I have been failing to communicate, but it has not been deliberate. Your assertion that there is no such thing as objective truth is A) false and B) not a reason to redefine objective truth (a property that is impossible to obtain is still a useful thing to talk about). Humanity does not generate the properties that it invents language to describe. Those properties can be thought of objectively, but natural language does not always do that (it does do it sometimes though, the word "three" is objectively defined). Some words do not contain within their definition any objective phenomena; "Beauty", for example, does not. The reasoning you have applied thus far should apply to all words, since you have not expressed any particular property of 'troll' in any of your arguments. So if the original comment had said "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", and we had continued to have this same argument, the validity of either of our positions would be unchanged. Would you still be complaining about relativism if that had been the topic?