Epistemological Relativism (2016)
reading.ac.uk
reading.ac.uk
The wiki also mentions moral relativism in a pejorative context.
The steelman I would present: Moral Relativism is the belief that moral statements only make sense in the context of a "valuer" or thing that can perceive the goodness or badness of things. Absent a valuer, moral statements are under-specified or nonsensical.
Humans, animals, and anything with a self preservation instinct, all clearly seem to be valuers. There does not seem to be any evidence for the universe itself being a valuer.
Empiricism, taken most literally is, a relativist point of view. Your own consciousness is the only thing that must be real. If it appears that your percepts have predictable patterns, then so be it. Reliable prediction of future percepts is scientific knowledge to a relativist.
You may notice that there are other things in the environment (people) who also make predictions. In so far as they make similar predictions to you, that is what the realists call objective reality. But to the relativist, it's just a pattern of objects in perception, making predictions about perception.
The environment predicting itself, and agreeing with you, is realism to a relativist.
You can live your life perfectly well without it. Most people do. But if you look too closely at how it actually works, you keep discovering unexpected inconsistencies. They don't actually matter until you try to definitively refute people saying dumb stuff and it turns out you actually can't.
You can just ignore the people saying dumb stuff and you'll do just fine. But there will always be a nagging wonder if maybe somehow they were right.
There are a lot of realists who spend some amount of their time arguing with other realists who believe contradictory things. Or doing mental gymnastics to convince themselves that their beliefs about morality are somehow objectively true, and other people's are objectively false.
Moral relativists waste less time doing this. Your own percept of morality, better and worse, good and bad, is as real/true as any other percept. Morality isn't any more or less than that.
I think Lakatos’ Research Programmes give a good structure for demarcating scientific knowledge from pseudoscience. And precisely because he provides a pragmatic method for how this should inform low level decisions about scientific funding bodies and what scientists choose to work on.
I think most people would reject his ideas because of the intuition you describe: scientists ‘feel’ like they ‘know’ their expert subject and so epistemological relativism feels dirty because they lose their delusion of objectivity. “I use fancy methods so I’m a ‘real’ scientist and my conclusions are scientific!”
I believe the issues in nutritional science, psychiatry and psychology (to name a few) are fundamentally because these sciences are hard to study, so researchers use sophisticated statistical methods to hide their lack of ‘true knowledge’ or epistemological uncertainty.
It’s why Lobotomies won a Nobel prize and all the major classes of psychiatric medication were discovered accidentally. It is a discipline made up of mostly degenerate research programmes but too much inertia to change track.
The truth is somewhere in the middle...which is why nobody has won the argument yet.
> Making an objective claim that everything is relative is a performative contradiction...which is why the relativists are wrong.
Which is maybe why they approach the conclusion obliquely at best. If you state the conclusion clearly, the contradiction is clearly apparent.
The Unique and Its Propery by Max Stirner is extremely readable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ego_and_Its_Own
Particularly surprising in the case of Stirner because he was a friend of and contemporary of Marx (both Young Hegelians), who was writing extremely unreadable works at exactly the same time. Consider that they were all reacting to the least readable author in the modern cannon, Hegel
Does "relative" mean context dependent? Does it mean arbitrary? Something else? Nobody who uses this term seems to be in any hurry to clarify this.
I suspect it's more of a marketing term, hitchhiking on the prestige of Einstein, than a concrete position worth arguing about.
Galieo uses the term 'relative', and to mean the judgement about magnitudes, but not for the invariance. The paragraph about the motion (the ships) does not contain it.
The term 'relativity' in English was coined by Coleridge; in Physics, adopted by Maxwell - see https://www.etymonline.com/word/relativity
In philosophy, as the parent mentioned, 'relativism' appears first in German in Wilhelm Traugott Krug (the successor of Kant), in 1838 - seemingly in a lexicographical work -, then in English in John Grote (1865) - see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism
When using the terms(relativism and objectivism) more generally, it means something like that dichotomy of "there exist an objective set of univeral X" vs. "there is no objective set of X".
Note that in other contexts these terms can have other meanings (notably Rand's Objectivism political philosophy means something quite different).
Most objective phenomena are relative to something else, eg., space.
'Relative' has no relevance to 'objective'
It's kind of like how when we (programmers) say "functional programming" we have a very specific concept in mind. If a lay person read and interpreted that phrase literally, they would probably not have the same concept in mind. They might even ask "What is functional programming? Isn't all programming functional? How can there be non-functional programming? etc."
What we mean when we say it is a style of programming that is often contrasted against object-oriented or procedural programming styles. We have supplanted the ordinary English meaning of these words and attached additional connotations and meaning to them. It's the same thing happening with the terms above in philosophy.
In philosophy, 'relativism' is sometimes short for 'cultural relativism' as in the case of moral or epistemic --- but relativism in this sense is short for one highly specific 'relative' relation (ie., a relation to culture).
And lay people use 'objective' to mean 'universal', which it doesn't. Cultural relativism is consistent with an objective metaethics.
I've actually found the opposite - people will often use "subjective" when they really mean "relative". They often unwittingly imply the relation to culture. I think it's far more rare to find a lay person using the term "subjective" to precisely refer to the philosophical meaning of the word.
> And lay people use 'objective' to mean 'universal', which it doesn't. Cultural relativism is consistent with an objective metaethics.
It's true there is a distinction there between "objective" and "universal", but do you feel that in most contexts, when someone says "objective" they are also implying "universal" and the onus is on them to elaborate on the distinction when that implication doesn't hold? (I guess asking for both the case of lay people and the one for philosophers).
As for philosophers, objective means "of the object", and subjective means "of the subject".
In different domains these play different roles. In ontology, objective means that a property belongs to the object under study. In epistemology, it means that a claim is true because it describes the object (rather than the subject, etc.). In morality, it means both; ie., that moral truths are true due to properties of objects (including people); and those objects have morally-relevant properties.
The word 'relative' simply means that something depends on something else. 'Relativism' is a specific kind of relativity: that of some phenomenon to an 'intersubjective' perspective. Eg., a culture.
In the lay mind, because most things are relative (eg., the interpretation of these words to the english language), they are also subjective -- because these terms have become profoundly confused.
In all cases of 'objectivity' in every sense you also have 'relativity', since objects exist in relations to other objects.
What lay people mostly mean by 'relative' is subjective; ie., they're committing the genetic fallacy of the form: since understanding X requires a perspective in which to evaluate it, X itself must be a (inter)subjective phenomenon.
ie., they're saying that since understanding is relative to a perspective so is what is understood. This is the irritating fallacy popular amongst those who go around abusing the term 'relative'.
ie., they're saying that since understanding is relative to a perspective so is what is understood. This is the irritating fallacy popular amongst those who go around abusing the term 'relative'.
I'm not sure if I find this particularly convincing. I think most lay people are actually talking about the thing itself rather than their understanding/perspective on the thing.
Maybe this is something that a study could shed light on, if we're able to construct a survey that can give us some insight into how lay people are using/abusing these terms.
It was quite a force during her life.
One of the most notable adherents was Alan Greenspan, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/protagoras/#AllThinMeasMa...
Sure, it doesn't take long to explain the gist of Protagoras' Truth, because it is fairly bare bones. I'm not sure what the intent was to post this specific University of Reading link.
It's the kind of thing that is taught for a few minutes at the start of an intro course.
Many deny the existence of truth. 'Relativism' refers at least to that position.
How can I rate the app in the absence of an OS context?
How does one speak if not in terms of what exists?
The problem is that the appearance of thinking is not thinking. You don't actually know for sure that you are thinking. P-zombies will gladly tell you "they think therefor they are".
My ontological foundation starts with my uniqueness, coming from the "creative nothing". Go read stirner or like dharmic philosophy for a non-cogitoist take on ontology.
Of course there isn't. It might be useful, pretty, conventional, etc. But there's no actual connection.
So let's just say All Form is Interpretation. Then the relativism is explicit.