Sunday, July 28, 2013

Objectivity and intent

As I zero in on what I can be objective about, I think I understand that, as long as my senses are accurate, then I can describe the physical attributes of an object. I meandered through my thoughts in these previous posts:
As I’d mentioned a while back, looking at the object from design and intentional stances (after Dennett) makes the state of “objectivity” much harder to achieve.

If I know the designer of an object, I can query her and discover what the object is designed to do. That can also uncover its purpose, because the designer, or the party that commissioned the design, will know what the object “intends to do”.

If the object is a living being, design and intent are truly difficult to be objective about, because we can only rely on our assessment of what the entity looks like it can do, and we can never be sure what the entity intends to do, in spite of what it might say or physically signal.

This all leads me back to my original seed: “can there be objective moral values?”

Final thoughts soon.

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