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There are truths that hold across cultural barriers. We call them “Mathematics”. It’s the only commoditized excellence I know of.
by bjornsing 7y ago
There are truths that hold across cultural barriers. We call them “Mathematics”. It’s the only commoditized excellence I know of.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoMath "proofs" and empirical "evidence" mean that all humans who take an interest in these things have compatible experiences. Thinking they give us access to truth in some explicit objective universal sense is naive - because we could just be cataloguing our most persistent cognitive and perceptual habits.
- kragen 7y agoThe thing is that when people from totally different cultures do math, they come to compatible conclusions. The algorithms in the Rhind Papyrus still work, the ones we understand, anyway. And that's from 1000 years or more before Euclid. This is not true of cooking, fashion, law, childrearing, painting, or religion. So maybe there isn't an underlying objective truth people observe mentally in math, but there's something that has some properties shared by objective truth and not by other human inventions.