12-14-2018, 08:47 PM
(12-14-2018, 05:41 PM)Dill Wrote: No. Circular. repetitive. Are you making a "subjective" judgment to declare subjective judgments--what? Useless, invalid, unreliable?
I asked what you meant by "100% subjective" to see if your assessment offers any means of discriminating between valuable and non valuable information in the article. If so, the means is not there on the surface. But when I ask for clarification, I only get more surface.
If asked "what do you mean by 100% subjective?" then your answering "that the information was subjective" provides nothing new. Like going to a dictionary to look up the word "specious" and being told: "it means what it always means in every sentence it is used."
But "subjective" can mean different things in different (i.e. "any other") contexts. Further, all value judgments are subjective, yet arguments based on values can be perfectly valid and sound. Not useless or false, though "subjective," as you appear to imply.
Factual judgments are not subjective, when they are actually factual judgments. But facts mean little unless they can be interpreted, or something can be inferred from them. They cannot be evaluated without values, which are "subjective." So every evaluation is in some sense "subjective," yet we still have ways of discriminating between good and bad subjective judgments. I don't see any recognition of that possibility or effort to achieve it, in a claim, repeated, that a multifaceted description of English political behavior is "100% subjective." Calling such arguments '100% subjective" is either trivial (like pointing out that a sentence is made up of 100% words) or mistaken, or informed by some hidden, inarticulable (and "subjective") assumption.
You might agree that statements by the banker and Patterson can be accepted as a factual report. After that you might disagree with either inferences they make or inferences made by the reporter, based upon their statements. You could assign various degrees of credibility to them.
But nothing is clarified at all by simply calling the whole "100% subjective." On the face that appears incorrect, and subjective grounds or elements do not, prima facie, render their points meaningless, useless, or otherwise invaluable.
That's a lot of words to say nothing. Let's try to be succinct, I'll illustrate.
When someone claims that Britain is in the ideal time zone for trade are they stating a fact or their opinion based on subjective criteria?
When someone claims that the EU relies too much on the British economy are they stating a fact or their opinion based on subjective criteria?
Does the fact that both statements are clearly the subjective opinion of one person automatically make them inaccurate? Clearly, no. Does the same fact make them any more important, or based in fact, than the opinion of anyone posting on this message board? Clearly, no.
It's good that you'll have the whole weekend to mull this one over. A small aside, no need for a pontificating overly verbose response.
