| | | There seem to be several different ideas being mixed up here...
The first is the idea that, because a statement is not complete, it cannot be true. This is largely incorrect. For example - "George Bush is the President", if spoken in Pakistan, might reasonably receive the correction "No, General Musharaf is the president. You are describing a condition that has valence in America."
Likewise, if one were to say in 1998 "George Bush is the president" inside America, you might receive the response, "No, Bill clinton is the president".
In both cases, your statement is strictly incorrect, in the sense that it describes a set of conditions that do not in fact pertain.
However, we can assume that the statement "George Bush is the President", if spoken in the United States on March 31st, 2003, contains by implication the modifiers "in this country, and at this time", just as the invalidity of the unspoken modifier "in this country" is Tasmeen's reasoning for the statement being invalid in Pakistan.
Now, Lupus' objection is actually a slightly different question, because it assumes that "is the president" also contains the implication "is the president, as a result of a fair and proper electoral procedure", and therefore that the statement "George W Bush is the president" can in fact never be true in the United States on March 31st, 2003, because he believes the term "president" to be an invalid descriptor of the person currently identified as the President of the United States.
Does this mean that all truths are relative? Not necessarily. What it does mean is that, in an open system, where ascription is also open, terminologies are subjective; we can ascribe these qualities to the descriptor "president", and assume to a greater or lesser degree that consensus exists on our definitions - on what consitutes "facts". So, Lupus contests the "fact" that George Bush is president, based on a subjective definition of the concepts associated with "president", which could itself be questioned, accepted or challenged.
Now, if we lok at "war" and "genocide", or "person" and "Osama worshipper", we're looking again at subjective terminologies, but these subjective terminologies are based on certain things that, although not incontrovertible, do have a a consensus existence. There are 22 million or so "people" and/or "Osama worshippers" in Iraq. There is military action involving Iraqi forces and Coalition forces. Although I have not experienced these things personally (and, pace Nick, the Cartesian argument - someone else who believed the Earth was round, by the way - would potentially cast doubt on the evidence of those senses), somebody is going to an awful lot of trouble to fool me into thinking that Iraq exists and that there is an action going on. After a certain mutable point, we move into interpretation, based on information which may or may not be accurate, and may be possessed to different extents by different people.
That doesn't necessarily mean that there are no absolute truths, but it might mean that access to those truths is functionally impossible, as it woudl require either total understanding or total consensus, or possibly both. So, we come down to questions like when Baudrillard said that the first Bush-Saddam war never happened, what did he mean? |
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