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[JoshuaFH]

This is something I think about alot:

http://www.via-web.de/universalism-vs-particularism.html

America is extremely universalistic, atleast as far as I can tell, which I find very disheartening, as I prefer particularism, with things handled individually and with thought of the circumstances involved.

Does anyone else think about philosophy stuff like this?

[chaoticag]

If you are saying what I think you are saying, then I really do prefer Particularism over Universalism, because you end up with weird shit happening when you try to be universal about it. Case in point: a seventeen year old girl sleeps with a guy three weeks shy of his sixteenth birthday, which gives her the label "sex offender" for life, and she was forced to move out of her house because she was within range of a church. Another kid had "sexual harrasment" on his permanent record because he hugged his teacher while he was in elementary.

[Aqizzar]

Oh why did you have to post this now?  I won't be back for 16 hours!

This is something I think about alot:

http://www.via-web.de/universalism-vs-particularism.html

America is extremely universalistic, atleast as far as I can tell, which I find very disheartening, as I prefer particularism, with things handled individually and with thought of the circumstances involved.

Does anyone else think about philosophy stuff like this?

All other points about the crushing oppression of Community Standards being foisted on people by arbitrary and ossified laws, let me say this-

You're surprised?  Of course American law is "Universalistic".  All laws are everywhere.  That's what a system of written laws means, an acknowledgment of the extremely finite resources we can devote to law enforcement, which means however poor the results might be for every individual who goes through it, it's simply not possible to judge each and every happenstance by it's own merits and context.  We can hope to get close, but ultimately any time you have a pre-written standard of judging a situation crime or otherwise, it's Universalistic.

And what's all this crap on that site about how China doesn't have these exact same shortcomings?  "a particularisticic culture where people look at relationships and circumstances in a specific situation to decide what is right"?  Don't make me laugh.  Who wrote this?  Where's it from?  Because I'm the last person to say that the American legal system should not be more responsive to circumstance, but this sounds like more ennui-induced America bashing by an American who's comparing it to another country he's never been to and knows nothing about.

[Ampersand]

I think about philosophy stuff all the time. In my case it's usually Nominalism versus Realism, which is far more metaphysical than what you're talking about.

The Realists say that concepts are existent and universal independent of particulars. "Picasso was a painter" is only meaningful of there was an individual who possessed a quality of paintership, and thus the property that is assigned to Picasso is assumed to be transcendent, independent of physical objects, that certain objects can portray an aspect of.

Nominalists claim that no universals are existent, and only particulars are, that humans simply label things which hold similar particular traits as having a property, and reapply this label whenever another particular is encountered, that Paintership is not an object which is possessed by multiple people in multiple locations at the same time.

It's a bit more deep than that, of course. I subscribe to realism, myself because of certain logical axioms that are always true in the presence or absence of mind, or even in the presence or absence of a universe. That is, an object is always itself and is never not itself. An apple is an apple, an apple can never be a panda. That principle is what can be said to exist, that A = A, and A != !A.

[IndonesiaWarMinister]

Heh.
Universalism is for lawyers Law Enforcers, they can't tolerate Relativism.

Particularism is for psychologists philosophers, for an obvious reason.

[ChairmanPoo]

I think about philosophy stuff all the time. In my case it's usually Nominalism versus Realism, which is far more metaphysical than what you're talking about.

The Realists say that concepts are existent and universal independent of particulars. "Picasso was a painter" is only meaningful of there was an individual who possessed a quality of paintership, and thus the property that is assigned to Picasso is assumed to be transcendent, independent of physical objects, that certain objects can portray an aspect of.

Nominalists claim that no universals are existent, and only particulars are, that humans simply label things which hold similar particular traits as having a property, and reapply this label whenever another particular is encountered, that Paintership is not an object which is possessed by multiple people in multiple locations at the same time.

It's a bit more deep than that, of course. I subscribe to realism, myself because of certain logical axioms that are always true in the presence or absence of mind, or even in the presence or absence of a universe. That is, an object is always itself and is never not itself. An apple is an apple, an apple can never be a panda. That principle is what can be said to exist, that A = A, and A != !A.

based on your definitions above, you are not addressing the crux of the nominalist thesis. Namely, if I understood you correctly, a nominalist would argue that an apple is not "an apple" because there is no such thing as a cosmical, apple-defining principle (or a panda defining principle, for that matter). We just lump together a set of objects with more or less simmilar particulars as "pandas", and another set of objects with a different set of particulars as "apples", without it meaning anything inherently except as reference.



(I made this up on the spot. Do I get a cookie?)

[Armok]

To add my point of view:
I'm probably something in the middle of the spectra; I think there IS such a thing as an apple, because apples have a specific common ancestor, and are genetically related so that different kinds of apple can crossbreed. There is, however, no such thing as a tree, because different kinds of trees are not actually related, but rather different plants that have evolved  into similar results due to convergent evolution.
The same can apply to more abstract things like the Picasso example mentioned above: here is no such thing as a painter, because there is really no uniform agreement about what defines a painter, different paints use different styles, colours, equipment, etc. and any definition broad enough to cover it all would include people who are not pointers, such as photographers or causal doodlers. There is, however, such a thing as a manga artist, because all of manga is derived from a single person who invented the specific style, so all of them have a memetic common ancestor that all of it can be traced back to.

[Cthulhu]

I'm also into philosophical questions.  My main deal is the debate between philosophism and hosophosophism, which is waaaaay deeper and more philosopholosical than anything you guys are talking about.

[bjlong]

I see Nominalism and Realism as a sort of dilemma of symbols or ideas. Words and ideas work because they have grounding in reality--there are a set of fruits that come from a species of fruit-bearing tree that have similar qualities that we call an apple. This is true. But we don't want to refer to that ambiguity-slashing phrase every time we call on that idea/ideal apple. So we just say "apple." But if there comes a time when we run into a fruit that has some apple properties and some orange properties, then we might need to roll back to the definition of an apple to say if the fruit is an apple or not.

Does this mean that appleness is not a real thing? No, that's not the whole picture. Appleness helps us understand the world around us, but it also has some specific properties that allow us to perform logic or horticulture or whatever at an advanced pace, and it's meaningful. The final one allows us to say, "Ok, yes, that is real," moreso than the other properties.
 
I'm going to use a math example. We define multiplication as a function f(x,y)=x*y, where the function involves adding x to itself y times. We then can say that multiplication is just a special case of addition. But! We can clearly see that multiplication is used repeatedly in real life, and that it has unique properties. It is therefore real. If we want to understand its properties, though, we often have to take it back to its original definition. It's real, but it breaks down after a certain point.

[Muz]

Hmm.. I dunno, this seems like one of those topics which people bring up to sound smart. It's really a simple thing, just made a lot more complicated to make philosophers seem more significant. I like philosophy, but this is like when some food scientist makes up a long word for potato and wheat and tries to compare why which country goes with what.

It's really dependent on situation. Universalism is easier to work with, because there's less work. When you have a lot of people, like in China, you can afford to be particularistic. Obviously, going into particulars is better than not going into particulars, but it's just not possible all the time. Particularism is an ideal.

[Ampersand]

Suppose you were to land on an alien planet and find an object that looks very much like a hat. You place it on your head. An alien walks over, grabs the object off of your head, and places it upon it's strangely shaped foot. The object was in fact an alien shoe, despite the fact that all of it's properties neatly fitting in with our conception of a fedora.

Then one must realize, the object is both a hat and a shoe. It has Hatness and Shoeness at the same time, and the individual is able to select which conforms to it's own frame of reference, but the fact that there are no aliens on earth that would see a Fedora as a shoe does not mean that those hats on Earth do not hold a property of shoeness.

[Jualin]

I'm also into philosophical questions.  My main deal is the debate between philosophism and hosophosophism, which is waaaaay deeper and more philosopholosical than anything you guys are talking about.

I can neither deny or approve that statement because I know not of what you refer to. Perhaps I do not know what you are referring to by any name, but I know. Perhaps I know it not at all. Regardless, in this respect I'd like you to substantiate your arguement.


In the arguement of Nominalism vs. Realism, I'm a conceptualist.


Seeing as how the issue of Universalism vs. Particularism died after Aqizzars post, shouldn't this thread be renamed to "The Philosophy Thread" or something similar as we are no longer dealing with Universalism vs. Particularism?

[JoshuaFH]

Sure, why not.

[Vester]

There are a lot of threads in philosophy, though.

EDIT: And by threads I mean schools of thought, since Philosophy is a really broad concept. (I don't mean topics on a forum. )

[Pjoo]

Quantum Mechanics not working with Determinism, or that's what I hear. I would be very much intrested to hear on how this works, if someone could explain that. Is it just the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, or is there more?