It is a fact that the preceding is NOT a coherent statement.
Nah…dope’s still going.
A universe in which thin teenage white chicks and cool fast cars can’t factually be proven as being hott! is not a universe I want to live in. Let the cold death by entropy begin.
Basically this, but I would start with urging the OP to read up on the fact-value distinction and then take it from there. You can’t solve issues of aesthetics (or ethics, which is the more usual setting for this discussion) by appealing to what is the case—that some majority percentage of men prefer a certain type of women may be an empirical fact, but that fact does not tell us anything about beauty, as such, but merely about preferences. And to say that beautiful is just the majority preference is then an unsubstantiated assumption on top of that—something which would, e.g., make Justin Bieber’s music more beautiful than Mozart’s, which is just a reductio of the whole deal right there.
OK, after mentally transporting myself to a smoked-up dorm room (I tried doing it in actuality, but the kids there wouldn’t let me in), I think I sort of grok what the OP is getting at. A few thoughts so far:
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
This is often taken to mean that what is beautiful to one person may not appeal to another. Therefore, it’s all opinion, and everything is relative. Nothing objective can be stated about beauty.
Another take on it, though, is to simply see it as a statement about what your object of study should be, if you wish to understand beauty. On the one hand, you have a beautiful woman, or an epic mountain chain. To understand the beauty or the epicness, you probably won’t get far by dissecting the woman or measuring the proportions of the mountain. But, on the other hand, you also have the observer who states that the woman is beautiful or the mountains epic. Dissect that person’s eye, and maybe you’ll get further. For bonus points, find someone else, who finds the woman meh or the mountains “whatever”, and do a comparative dissection.
Factual statements that those are either definitely true or definitely false. For instance, the statement “there is life in other solar systems of our galaxy.” is a statement of fact. We may not know for sure whether it’s true or false, but we could theoretically know whether it is true or false if we had enough information.
Opinions are statements that might be legitimately true for some speakers and legitimately false for others. That is, there is no way to gather enough information in theory to determine whether the statement is correct, often because some of the terms are subjective. “Slavery is immoral” is an opinion, because the set of things that are immoral is subjective. One can legitimately believe that slavery is appropriate, and indeed people did for a very long time. That modern society effectively always views slavery as immoral does not make it any less of an opinion.
My point is that the widespread belief in a statement being true has nothing to do with whether the statement is a fact or not. What’s important is whether it’s possible for someone, however out of tune with the rest of culture, could be led to a conclusion about the statement’s truth that is opposite of yours despite having been given all the information and rationally processing the implications of that information.
Thus it might be factually said that “Most men prefer thin women”, and this might be verified by asking every single man (in theory). “Thin women are more preferable than those not thin” is a statement of opinion, and the phrasing of the first quoted statement this paragraph should reveal why: it is only (possibly) true that most men prefer thin women, and thus possible some men do not. Different men might have different preferences, and those preferences would be legitimately held.
That’s just, like, my opinion, man.
One form of bias is human instinct. Studies with photographs of landscapes show that more people identify a grassland scene as “beautiful” than they identify a mountainous scene, or pictures of other biomes. We evolved in grasslands, and have instincts telling us they’re pretty.
Apparently, sparkly lights, like the stars, or fairy-lights in gardens, are also pleasing to our instincts.
So, here is a sub-subset of aesthetics where some things are naturally pretty to humans, for (apparently) evolutionary reasons. Cool beans for science!
(Similarly, nearly everyone is okay with the aroma of mint or pine…but doesn’t care much for the stench of feces. Instinctively.)
“Popular opinion” is not the same thing as fact. And if there was a “rhyme or reason” for creating art, then there wouldn’t be shitty art. Scientists would just plug in a bunch of algorithms and engineer perfect movies and books every time and they would have universal appeal. It turns out, trying to do that actually makes art worse. Ergo, you have the expression “formulaic”.
Also, that girl you linked to looks gross. I hope that’s not your girlfriend.
You shouldn’t argue that a given (supposedly) generally held belief is really a fact rather than an opinion without trying to find out first whether it really is generally held as a belief. That’s the case with the (supposedly) generally held belief that thinner women are more attractive than heavier women. There is good evidence that it’s only held in certain social groups of certain societies at certain periods of time:
http://www.tolerance.org/article/size-bias-social-construction
Thus there’s no point in discussing whether the (supposedly) generally held belief that thinner women are more attractive proves anything about the boundaries between fact and opinion. Yes, it’s a generally held belief among white non-Hispanic Americans at the present time, but even within that group it’s not universally held. Show me any evidence that it’s anything like a generally held belief over history and over all societies. Until you do, it says nothing about opinion and fact.
The last one can be a fact within a specified scope - for example:
“in a survey of the opinions of 1,000 heterosexual men aged between 20 and 40 from the town of Snerdville, New Guernsey, 85.4% expressed a marked preference to women with BMI of 30 or above”
That’s data, but assuming all of the asserted points are all true, it’s also a fact that the surveyed group said they like larger women. I guess we still can’t call the actual preference a fact, because they might all be lying.
Facts are things that are true even if nobody thinks so. Opinions are what you get from weighting different sets of facts differently. Most arguments are confusing the one with the other.
Regards,
Shodan
Fact:
At 450 hp, the 1970 Chevrolet’s 454 V8 engine offers superior power and acceleration to that of the 2000 Ford Taurus’s 3.0 L V6 (155hp)
Opinion:
The Chevy is a superior car.
The “opinion” is further complicated by asking “superior how?” Superior for driving to work in New England winters? Picking up high school girls?
Opinions can be supported with facts, however. But even then. One person might find the Chevy superior because of it’s power, speed and number of cheerleaders banged in the back seat (all measurable quantities). Another person might find the Taurus superior for it’s safety features and practicality.
Others have explained it well, but it’s pretty straight forward that facts are objectively verifiable and anything else that is subjective is not. That’s not to say that there aren’t facts related to things like attractiveness and such.
So, for instance, if I say person A is more attractive than person B, that’s an opinion. If I get a hundred people and they all agree person A is more attractive than person B, that’s still an opinion. However, I could factually say that I polled 100 people and 94% of them agree that person A is more attractive. That’s backed up by the data from the poll, it doesn’t make it a fact that person A is more attractive, just that those people stated that. You can then do statistics and all that kind of stuff, but that’s just sort of muddying the waters.
This is why we can say something like, in general, men prefer certain characteristics in women and vice versa. There are tons of studies out there that will find very strong correlations between any number of physical characteristics (e.g., body symmetry, proportions, body fat, etc.) and whether or not someone will tend to find that person attractive. But, again, it’s not objective fact that someone is attractive, just tendencies. These tendencies are based in objectively verifiable data (assuming the studies are well-conducted), but what gets people in trouble is assuming these sorts of things are true across the board.
And this is where stereotyping and all that gets us in trouble. No one is going to question that, for instance, men tend to be physically stronger than women. What gets you in trouble there is interpreting that as a black and white statement that all men are stronger than women. For instance, I weight train and do some power lifting and I’m stronger than 99% of the men out there, but some of those women I saw power lifting in the Olympics are considerably stronger than me. Hell, I’ve even seen guys quite a bit smaller than me that can lift considerably more than me too.
And so take that back full circle. There are plenty of people, men or women, that huge swaths of the population might say are attractive or unattractive for whatever reason. There might even be biological or evolutionary explanations for why a lot of their characteristics are going to tend to be attractive to most people. But even still, there’s no accounting for taste. Speaking for myself, there are plenty of famous women that are generally regarded as being very attractive to most men, and I’ll vary from finding them incredibly attractive, to fairly “meh” about them, and occasionally just being completely baffled why anyone finds them attractive at all. Similarly, there are some women I find highly attractive that others don’t. But in the end, who cares? If I’m attracted to someone or not, or someone else is or not, why does it matter?
And (I believe someone else may point this out but I sort of lost track reading the thread) facts can change. That the speed of light was the absolute Speed Limit of the Universe was touted as a “scientific fact” for a lot of years until it was found to be not quite accurate.
Well, yes and no… Once the opinion develops a consensus that strong (94%) then the working definition of the word “attractive” will align with the opinion. Such people will actually be “more attractive” because that will be what the word comes to mean.
If “Gentlemen prefer blonds,” then that means “blonds are preferable,” in a descriptivist kind of way. (And I ain’t a descriptivist.)
Wait, what now?
It gets into tachyon or faster-than-light particles and the possibility that they are some form of neutrino. It was a three hour seminar and gave me a headache.
The “Popular Science” versions are at
http://www.sciencealert.com/these-4-cosmic-phenomena-travel-faster-than-the-speed-of-light
and
Actually, right off the bat, you are of course right. Sort of.
“Nothing travels faster than the speed of light” is inaccurate. One step better is: “Nothing travels faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.” That’s still not great, though. Even better is: “Nothing travels faster than c.” Light in a vacuum is just one thing, and not the only thing, that travels at c. However, some things can and/or do travel faster than c, such as the expansion of the universe. Except that this is not exactly a “thing” and it doesn’t exactly “travel”. Anyway, oddly enough, long story short, it seems that what actually doesn’t ever travel faster than c is information.
So, what is going on isn’t that relativity turned out to be wrong. It’s just that “nothing travels faster than the speed of light” is everyday shorthand for “information doesn’t travel faster than c”.
Examples of things that carry information: Well, anything with mass. So that’s a bummer right there.
A look at the examples in your links:
Cherenkov radiation. This outpaces light in a medium. But it still doesn’t travel faster than c. So, whatever.
The expansion of the universe. As I said, it travels faster than c, sort of. But you can’t use that to transmit information. So we’re still fine.
Quantum entanglement. This phenomenon is weird as all get out. But you can’t use that to transmit information, either.
Wormholes. Pretty weird, totally speculative. Great as a shortcut to the other side of the universe, or the bathroom, if you can figure out how to make one. Still no violation of relativity going on, though, as far as I know. It’s not FTL, it’s space taking on a wonky shape.
Tachyons? Hypothetical particles. As far as I can make out, most scientists don’t think that they can exist. Certainly not in the realm of observed or factual.
Normative realism is an interesting philosophical pickle. If you believe in epistemic norms you open the way for moral and aesthetic realism, as argued by Cuneo in The Normative Web. According to the PhilPapers survey, 56% of philosophers are moral realists and 41% are aesthetic realists.
Social facts can be mind bending unless you’re really careful. Objective facts are usually said to be mind independent, meaning they aren’t dependent on people’s attitudes, desires, and so on. Subjective views are dependent on minds. You can have descriptive facts about people’s views, but the view itself isn’t objective.
Where it gets tricky is what’s sometimes called intersubjectivity, or what Searle called observer-relative facts. These are things like languages, government, money, social manners, rules of games or sport, basically most human institutions. In a way the rules of chess are a descriptive fact – this is how people play chess. They’re written down, you can point to them. But you could wave a magic wand and brainwash people to believe the rules are different. But then they would be confused by old archived games and the old written rules. So they’re not totally mind independent, but they’re not exactly subjective opinions either. There’s probably not a platonic form of chess out there we’re striving to capture.
I think morality and aesthetics are in a similar sort of fuzzy gray zone, but that doesn’t seem a popular view. Most philosophers say it has to be either real or non-real. Constructivists toe the line, but doesn’t seem too popular.
Humans are not blank slates with arbitrary views, they are shaped by evolution. The relationship between selecting for fitness and the accuracy of our intuitions is argued all the time, yet our intuitions give us science and math. Speaking of math, have fun figuring out if it’s discovered or invented and how real it is.
Not all moral realists think humans are capable of divining moral facts. But “slavery is wrong” would generally be considered a basic, obvious moral fact, or if not that then something like “it’s wrong to torture people for fun.” Whether people disagree is immaterial, since people disagree about all sorts of facts for all sorts of reasons. The age of the Earth, for example. I’m not sure what the most popular anti-realist argument is nowadays, maybe the argument for queerness.
A lot of what we call “good” is pretty much evolved social-animal behavior. Wolves practice a lot of “good deeds” for roughly the same reason. (Sharing, taking care of the wounded, protecting the young, play-behavior in the young, displaced aggression, accepting surrender, and others.) Humans are evolved to be “good,” but, of course, that leads to circularity.
It’s fun to try to imagine a number system that doesn’t have prime and composite numbers. Is it even possible? Does it have any actual meaning? One of my favorite college classes was Number Theory, and it’s fascinating to try to figure whether those laws and theorems are “discovered” or “invented.” I lean toward “discovered,” but would never be dogmatic about that!