Terrapin_Station

You're not an objectivist or something are you?

Key

No, but I have ears. And while listening to Led Zeppelin is already a snoozefest, the inability to handle a guitar is thrown into the equation.

Terrapin_Station

You don't care for his guitar playing. I do. I feel he's one of the 10 best.

There are no facts about this. We're talking about how we feel about his playing.

One can't know that someone can or can't play well, that something is good or bad--knowledge claims require truth values (propositional knowledge is justified true belief), and there are no truth values for evaluative assessments a la good, bad, better, worse, etc.

Key

While music itself is up for interpretation whether it is good or not, guitar playing isn't always up for interpretation. There is a specific standard to be held to when playing guitar, and again, I say this fully knowing that Jimmy Page is a good guitar player, never said he wasnt, I only said that it's a shame that he's not up to par with what could be considered one of the greats, but to put him in the top 10 is showing your ignorance toward guitar players that can actually play both technically and melodically.

Terrapin_Station

Yes it is. I'm not just talking about aesthetics above. Evaluative statements a la good, bad, better, worse, etc. PERIOD are noncognitive. They have no truth values. Or we could say that they're subjective--they're not extramental facts.Insofar as that's the case, it's subjective. It's an agreement (among the people who agree and can exert some social influence about this) about how people FEEL about guitar playing (or whatever we might be talking about if we make it broader). It's an agreement about what people prefer or not. That's subjective. Nothing is factually correct or incorrect, true or false, just because people agree on it. To claim otherwise is to commit the argumentum ad populum fallacy. So you are an objectivist to an extent. But objectivism is factually incorrect on this stuff, because it's an extramental fact of the world that there are no extramental facts regarding whether anything is good, bad, better, worse, etc. Rather, your view about this is showing your complete imbecility when it comes to the ontology of this stuff.

Key

We may end up needing to agree to disagree to stay away from further name calling, which I did start, and I apologize. But if the bold were true, guitar lessons would be completely irrelevant. And again, I want to focus on the fact that I have admitted a few times that Jimmy Page is not a mediocre guitar player, but he's certainly not skilled in the art to be considered one of the best. He's sloppy a lot of the time, and the only thing he's particularly amazing at is creating a rhythm that the rest of the band can feed off of. I don't even want to mention songwriting because it's been mentioned here before. But the ability to play guitar isn't always subjective if you take into fact that many of the greats spent their whole lives trying to master their craft.

Terrapin_Station

That's entirely up to you. This is a pet topic of mine, so I'll continue with it as long as you'd like to. I've been doing work on this topic (including from an academic perspective) and writing and talking and debating etc. about it for about 40 years now. I don't mind however many posts you'd be interested in so that I can try to get you to think about it a bit more in depth. Because you think that people have no preferences or desires to play particular ways rather than other ways? I'm not saying that people do not have preferences, am I? What, do you think that people only prefer to play particular ways because there's an objective fact that playing that way is better? The idea of that is completely absurd.There are no facts that he's good or bad or that he doesn't completely suck or that he's not the best, miles beyond anyone else. We're not dealing with facts when we talk about this stuff. We're dealing with our tastes, our preferences. What we individually like or do not like.That's fine as a statement of how you personally feel. Just don't believe that it's anything like a fact, or correct. "Playing in way x, where I call that 'sloppy,' is not as good as playing in way y, where I call that 'not sloppy,' but rather quite precise, etc."<------That's not a fact. It would be a way that you feel. It would be a statement about what you prefer.Again, that's fine as the way you feel, but it's nothing like a fact. What's good and bad, better and best, is ALWAYS subjective. Not just when we're talking about how someone plays a guitar. Not just when we're talking about music. Not just when we're talking about ethics. Not just when we're talking about someone's health. When we're talking about ANYTHING.

Frownland

Some of my favourite guitarists sound like they've never played a guitar before in their life to the untrained ear.

__________________

Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

Frownland

What you're describing is standardization, and that doesn't mean much in the way of whether or not it's a good system to be based off of. The lessons bit is a bit of a strawman, because if I started teaching kids how to play prepared guitar, which I'm excellent at and have a very deep understanding of what can make a great prepared guitar player, their parents would fire me because their kid didn't learn how to play Mary Had a Little Lamb.

So what you're calling facts in this post...are opinions.

__________________

Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

Terrapin_Station

Elliott Sharp taught prepared guitar techniques to some students, by the way (a good friend of mine was one of those students), but yeah, not to little kids. (Re Elliott Sharp, I'm pretty sure we talked about that a long time ago--shortly after I first joined the site, I think. I wound up telling you a couple people I'd played with, which I usually don't do online.)