Enter Your Reply The Comment You're Replying To Joe Joyce wrote on Sat, Jun 27, 2009 07:21 PM UTC:Since I so cleverly made the initial posting unreachable by using the '&', I'll graciously/shame-facedly re-post the original post, a quote from D C Dennett: 'If we want to know what the answer to a question in, lets say, multiplication is, we can all sit down and calculate, but we may not all agree because some people may get it wrong. But we have got a very good way of determining, now, this is objectively the right answer. But it really does depend on people converging on the same answer. If they didn’t, mathematics would be a very different sort of endeavor. But we can achieve that sort of convergence, that sort of consensus. And we can do that too on empirical, factual matters, like, what water is; yes, its H2O. That’s a fact, no question about it. But there are other questions- not just ethical questions- where agreement has a different sort of status. Is chess a better game than checkers, or will the game of chess be better if the king can move two spaces rather than one? Now, there is evidence that can be amassed on both sides of the issue. And in the end we might find that no consensus could be achieved, no matter how much people learned about the variant ways of playing chess. The preferability of one game over the other would be a matter of opinion and that would be a subjective matter. But notice that its not subjective in the sort of wild sense. It could be perfectly objective that chess would not be improved by a rule that said that the pawns could be moved up to five spaces at a time. Everybody agrees that that’s a much worse game. It just does not warrant playing.' Daniel C. Dennett - Nirmukta interview May 2009 Thanks to Uri Bruck for pointing this out. It seems clear that Dr. Dennett is thinking either of rather small boards when he is considering 'chess', or of the 4-square spacing between the 2 lines of pawns, when he comments about 5-square pawns. I will also point out his use of the word 'could' in 'It could be perfectly objective that...', giving himself wiggle room. Edit Form You may not post a new comment, because ItemID Philosophy does not match any item.