People are always eager to know what the best car is, what the newest fashion is, who is the best at what. Sometimes you can determine a best, the fastest at 400 meter running is/was Michael Johnson, holding the world record. The fastest accelerating road car is the Ariel Atom. The best boxer in the world is. . . The best singer, the best thinker, the best looking, the best dancer are all things we can't know. They're matters of opinion. Today I read an article about the toughest sports, how can you compare sports? That's like comparing jobs and asking what the toughest job is, which very much depends on the individual; because if you hate animals undoubtedly your toughest job would be being a vet. If you are naturally very strong you might find powerlifting to be a very easy sport and if your hand eye coordination is poor tennis to be a very hard sport.
The same goes for almost anything that claims to be the hardest or the most fun or the most fulfilling, they are personal values. Not universal fact. The fact we buy into this way of having to have an objective best and turning opinions into fact says a lot about the way we live and the society we live in. Shouldn't we be content to make judgements ourselves and not have the verdicts given to us by advertisers?
By going to a shop and choosing the product that claims to be the best, are you truly choosing or has that choice been made for you, in the design rooms when they invented their claim of superiority?
Really good little blog post, must say I think it's impossible to get objective truths in the social sciences as far as everything is socially constructed. However, I guess natural sciences have a slightly different rule attached to them, in that truths can be announced through the process of elimination.
ReplyDeleteI think truths exist, but things we call facts are human interpretations of truth. Like maths, "there are no numbers or equations in the universe, but we use maths to interpret the universe into our own terms" [Andy Knott, his lecture the other day ;)]
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