Good vibrations

“Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.” ~ Mae West

 

Consider the 'property' of goodness. Goodness is not actually something we can measure empirically, as we can mass or temperature, and so we could say it is not a property at all; on the other hand, 'goodness' only really has meaning in the context of describing entities which exist objectively, and we have already said that things that describe objective entities are termed 'properties.' What we mean when we say some thing is 'good' is actually something along the lines of 'this thing is closer to the ideal of itself along some continuum than things which are less good' - 'goodness' is 'conformity to the ideal,' although of course in this formulation every property is measurable in direct proportion with its conformity to the ideal - an 'ideally' red entity would be absolutely red to the exclusion of all other properties; it would exist simply as 'a redness.' We seem to be very close here to saying outright that properties and relations are both distinct from one another and interchangeable with each other, and this is a more helpful conclusion than you might think. It's also, as with so much else, unnecessary. It forms a theoretical framework within which we can attempt to explain the what and why of your emotional response to novel stimuli, which in another perspective is an analysis of how your self-concept develops and evolves (leading to the very fruitful study of how your emotional response can be selected by willed agency rather than being the largely automatic manifestation of your existing subjective framework of ideas and impressions; this field of neurolinguistics, which examines the interface between objective and subjective realities, informs our psychological understanding of schemata, or worldviews: Leary called these 'reality tunnels,' and we'll find that a useful model as well by and by). But we don't need any of this nitpicking to satisfy ourselves that we do have such responses to stimuli, and that we are aware of them separately from the stimuli themselves or the media by which those stimuli arrive. We can also propose the tentative lemma that ideals become more prone to variance within communities the more abstract the properties they idealize become.