From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!eagle!allegra!sbcs!debray
Newsgroups: net.religion
Title: Re: There are no absolutes
Article-I.D.: sbcs.271
Posted: Wed Apr 13 21:01:44 1983
Received: Fri Apr 15 06:42:04 1983

When one says "there are no absolutes", one has in mind, presumably, some
sort of hierarchical organization of the domains under consideration.
Principles that are absolute inside one level of this hierarchy would not
be so within a higher level. For example, Euclid's fifth postulate is
absolute within Euclidean geometry, but not so at the higher level of
abstraction where we can have non-Euclidean geometries as well. Similarly,
the invariance of mass, which is absolute in Newtonian mechanics, is no
longer so in the higher level of relativistic mechanics (I call this a
"higher" level because Newtonian mechanics is a special, much-lower-
velocity-than-light case of relativistic mechanics).

To claim that "A is absolute" without specifying the domain within
which it is absolute seems to imply that it is absolute in the topmost
level of such a hierarchy. This seems to presume a finite hierarchy,
but it isn't obvious why one can't go on abstracting indefinitely
to give an infinitely high hierarchy of this sort. For example, the
law of modus ponens holds in any logic that represents the "real" world,
just because our universe is structured in a particular way. However,
we can (in principle, at least) abstract out over universes and
postulate the existence of worlds that are fundamentally different
from ours, where such a law might not hold. The fact that we cannot
possibly observe any such different world does not invalidate the principle
used in the abstraction process.

I don't think, therefore, that unqualified statements like "X is absolute"
can be defended on their own right. In the context of the above argument,
a statement like "there are no absolutes" could be interpreted to refer to
a process where, given any X that was absolute in a given domain, we could
abstract out to a domain at a higher level where X was not absolute.

Comments welcome.

						Saumya K Debray
						SUNY at Stony Brook
						... allegra!sbcs!debray