Excellent points.Thomyum2 wrote: ↑September 21st, 2020, 11:05 amFrom the perspective of a logical argument, I would side with Steve on this one. The speed of light is going to be the same to any observer - the beauty of the flower will not. (If you believe that beauty is a property of the object and not dependent on the observer, I'd suggest you visit an art or music forum and see how often you can persuade anyone that a particular work of art or style of much is beautiful if they find it ugly - I predict your success rate at this will be very low.)Angel Trismegistus wrote: ↑September 21st, 2020, 4:00 am Angel's point
beauty:flower::speed:light
Steve's straw point
beauty:flower::300,000 km/s::light
But that aside, I think there's more to this argument than first meets the eye, and Angel, I'm surprised you haven't turned to the work of your favorite philosopher on this point. In his lectures on Pragmatism, James said that:In this sense, I think James makes a very important point that the truth of something, such as the correct measurement of the speed of light, is indeed a matter of value. We hold something to be true because it does have value in a particular sense. So if you follow me, I think you are approaching your case a little bit backwards by suggesting that value 'is real' - that Beauty, or God, are a subset of the collection of things that we identify as being 'real', or that we can can deduce or prove that they are real by any argument that proposes that they meet the requirements to be considered as such because they share some properties in common with those other objects. Rather, it is value itself, in its various forms, by which we make the determination itself that any and all things are real or beautiful in the first place. Value precedes these determinations - it does not follow from them.truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it. The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.
Let's start in the museum. If you and I disagree about the beauty of Van Gogh's The Starry Night -- you find it beautiful, I grotesque, let's say -- we certainly have different subjective valuations of the same painting, as you say, but your valuation is inextricably tied to this and not another painting. The Starry Night is not The Potato Eaters, or the Mona Lisa for that matter, and the beauty you find (that I don't) is the beauty of The Starry Night, the beauty of this particular painting, and unless the beauty is there in the painting, your value judgment is illusory. Now, we move on tp another gallery and our value judgments are reversed before Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror. The beauty I find there is inextricably tied to that particular painting, and not another, and if my aesthetic judgment is not illusory, the beauty I find in Girl Before a Mirror must be contained by Girl Before a Mirror and not another painting.
At the end of our visit we've disagreed, let's say, about every painting we've viewed together. Still, we've found beauty in painting today, and not in music or anything else. The Jamesian "good" we've found is in different objects, though it is the same "good" and the same "truth" -- aesthetic good, aesthetic truth. If the value is detached from the object valued, if the value determines the judgment rather than the object determining the value, then it doesn't matter what we're looking at when the determination is made. If value precedes determination, the object of value is nugatory.
Had the speed of light never been measured, speed would nevertheless be an essential part of the character of light.