What I'm saying is, when you by your standards define a game as 'good', that's not the same as a scientist who concludes a report by using whatever scales he wants but limits his conclusion to observing invariable relations of the cause-and-effect type that we call 'laws' over here. For example: a psychologist would never conclude a report by saying: "We now have reason to accept that people we call schizophrenic are bad, and people we call sane are good".

Edited by The Mole at 22:39 on January, 04th 2003

It is the same, because a psychologist would close his/her report by stating "because of the observations stated before, this person can be considered schizophrenic". That is a judgement, just like my judgement about a game being good or bad. The psychologist used 'scales' which had been defined before to analize the objective observations. The observations might have been "patient talking in different styles" and something like that. Completely objective. But then the subjectivity kicks in: standards set by humans which this psychologist adopted. These standards serve as a 'translation table' between observations and conclusions. From whom these 'translation rules' come doesn't matter. Mine are are good as Freud's or yours.

No, because he means the term schizophrenic in a way that does not hold any good or bad connotation, although prejudiced people may interpret it as having a bad connotation. Scoring someones IQ is something subjective, but diagnosing someone is not, or at least was not meant to be.

I see the problem in this discussion is just your own prejudice against the terms 'good' and 'bad'. I consider them normal terms, defined by humans, just like 'schizophrenic'. Again, the same 'translation rules' I mentioned before apply: someone set standards for a term which people agree on. 'Schizophrenic' has been defined at some point and so was 'good'. They're on the same level.

I have to admit that maybe you're right; the problem might be I don't always see the same consensus on what is 'good' and 'bad' than I do for more strictly defined terms; their definitions seem to have more of a personal character... But I see what you mean: if it's raining outside, I'll probably agree with everyone that there's 'bad' weather, even if I don't mind at that moment. That doesn't necessarily make it 'bad' weather for me, so the word has lost all its meaning, but I can at least talk about it using a common standard.

Now I'm confused...

Whatever I know what you mean and you know what I mean - that's a good outcome, isn't it?