"The chili tastes better today."
Well, that sounds good, so I figure let's have a little thought experiment. I say to my wife, "Now imagine that I have a magic time machine, and go back to last night, get some of the chili, and bring it back. You taste it, and it tastes exactly the same as the chili we are eating now. Is your statement then still true?"
Before I say what she said, think for a moment. Could the same taste in the chili taste better today? It's the same after all. The seemingly logical answer would be, "No." A bit deeper look into it isn't quite that simple though, but it is neatly solved by a triviality.
So she says that the statement is true. Fair enough I suppose. But is she right? So I ask and explain about the chili being the same chili. She replies that it tastes better today because we're hungrier than last night. Notice that she said nothing about the chili. That's significant.
The statement is perfectly true once you consider that the question isn't about "the chili", but rather, it's about US and how we feel about the chili. Today and yesterday aren't the same days, so it make sense to feel different about something at two different times. My wife's got a good point there. She isn't talking about "the chili." She is talking about herself when she says, "The chili tastes better today."
Now, linguistically or literally, the statement still has problems and it's hard to get around the urge to say that it is false. However, since pretty much every single sentence you ever utter can be prefaces with, "I believe that..." or "I feel that"... we can substitute that in and get this:
I believe that the chili tastes better today.
Now that is perfectly true, and obviously so.
However, this doesn't take into account things like insane people or relatively simple facts or derivable facts. I suppose the best example to demonstrate this would be, "The Earth is flat," and "I believe that the Earth is flat." Factually, the first statement is false. The second statement, if the speaker is telling the truth, is true even though the fact is false.
That situation there differs in that it is about an objective truth, where the statement, "The chili tastes better today," is not about an objective truth. Subjective truths are speaker dependent. I love watermelon, and think that it tastes great. A friend of mine can't stand watermelon and the taste of it makes her feel nauseous. On the other hand, seafood makes me want to vomit, while I know countless people that simply love it.
It's pretty silly to actually believe that objectively, "strawberries are wonderful." However, it seems that most people walk around believing that those sorts of things really, actually are TRUE in a general and objective sense. Still, the same people will often admit that art is subjective, and that it all depends on the person. How is it that people (myself included) manage to confuse so many other issues that are essentially the same.
I remember eating out with some friends and there was some god-awful food on the table that made me simply sick. A friend expressed disbelief that I could not like it and went on to extoll the virtues of how wonderful it was and how delicious it was. I'm certain I do the same idiotic thing in other circumstances. I'll need to work on that.
Anyways, like I said... I'm easily distracted and go off on tangents at the drop of a hat.
Cheers,
Ryan