ruby sparks said:
But are you or are you not (simple yes or no please, for clarity) saying that whether something actually has a disease (eg cancer) depends on intuitions, but whether something is actually dead doesn't depend on intuitions?
No, I am not saying that whether something actually has a disease depends on intuitions. I am saying that in order to ascertain that something has a disease, we need to rely on intuitions. More precisely, in order to ascertain whether a certain condition that some organism has is a disease, we need to rely on a very specific intuition, namely one by which we make judgments of health/illness.
That said, that particular intuition actually informs the referent of the terms 'illness', 'health', etc., so in a very indirect way, it would depend on it, but only in the way of informing how we humans coin and use words.
ruby sparks said:
If so, fine, it's trivially true for all human knowledge that assessments of everything and anything depend on such things, but, for disease and death we surely agree, I hope, that there is also an objective, intuition-independent and attitude-independent fact of the matter.
Well, you and I, and the vast majority of humans, agree that there is a fact of the matter. I have explained what I mean by 'attitude-independent'. I am uncertain as to what you mean, but
if it is the same, then you and I agree that the fact of the matter is attitude-independent. The word 'objective' does not seem to add anything to the usual expression 'there is a fact of the matter', but sure.
So, you and I, and the vast majority of people, agree that there is a fact of the matter. And we agree with that because we intuitively perceive it as such. However, this has the following problems:
1. A first problem is that you earlier said (for example):
ruby sparks said:
But let's suppose, hypothetically, that humans generally are moral realists about at least some things, that there are at least some moral 'facts'. I don't have a problem with this. I agree with it. There are certain things which humans regard as having a factual, right or wrong answer in moral terms. The problem is, what does this tell us? It tells us what human beliefs are like. It does not necessarily extend to showing they are correct that there are objective, independent moral facts. Moral realism, if it relies on commonsense human intuitions, has built its house on sand, because human intuitions have often been shown to be wrong. All normal human brains are prone to and predisposed to false beliefs about the world. Science in particular shows this over and over. It's the achilles heel for the idea that human intuitions and commonsense and everyday language are the proper or best basis for realism about anything at all. The beliefs, including the ones deemed to be to do with what we call morality, may be pragmatically useful for successfully navigating the world, but that could be all it is.
More to the point, they are human intuitions. They are not independent of humans.
Surely, a person who is in the minority who rejects the existence of objective facts of the matter about illness can make the following parallel:
But let's suppose, hypothetically, that humans generally are health/illness realists about at least some things, that there are at least some health/illness 'facts'. I don't have a problem with this. I agree with it. There are certain things which humans regard as having a factual, right or wrong answer in health/illness terms. The problem is, what does this tell us? It tells us what human beliefs are like. It does not necessarily extend to showing they are correct that there are objective, independent health/illness facts. Health/illness realism, if it relies on commonsense human intuitions, has built its house on sand, because human intuitions have often been shown to be wrong. All normal human brains are prone to and predisposed to false beliefs about the world. Science in particular shows this over and over. It's the achilles heel for the idea that human intuitions and commonsense and everyday language are the proper or best basis for realism about anything at all. The beliefs, including the ones deemed to be to do with what we call health or illness, may be pragmatically useful for successfully navigating the world, but that could be all it is.
More to the point, they are human intuitions. They are not independent of humans.
Do you see the point?
You could insist that illnesses existed before humans, or whatever. But the point is that whether those conditions that existed before humans were illnesses (as a matter of fact, independent of attitudes, etc.), is something that you and I (and nearly all humans) ascertain
intuitively. It's not because of empirical science. One could do empirical science and study how to stop a virus or modify the eyes so that they see better without saying anything as to whether cataracts or the flu are illnesses.
The structure of your anti-intuition argument would give the health/illness anti-realist a tool for challenging health/illness common sense realism that seems to be no worse than it is as a tool for the moral anti-realist to challenge common-sense realism. Note that this argument does not depend on whether the conditions that look like illnesses to humans existed also before there were humans.
2. A second problem is color. When it comes to color, the vast majority of people - not you - agree that there is a fact of the matter, with all of the objective, independent bells and whistles of illness/health. Yet, you do not. Why? Are you relying entirely on intuitions? Surely, for billions of years, there were things with reflective properties that would make them look red, or green, or blue to us if a human had been there to look at them. Or look at
this picture of Martian rocks of different colors. Many Martian rocks had been there for millions of years, eroding very, very slowly, and some probably have the same reflective properties as they did before there were any humans. Why would the facts that they have such-and-such colors be not attitude-independent, objective, etc., as nearly every human believes?
3. A third problem is morality, but I will leave it for later.