[MD] suspended in language

[MarshaV]

Relativism:  


"There are so many forms of relativism, that is, epistemological, ethical,
aesthetical, perceptual, and so forth, that it is hard to find a common
feature to them all. Since it is such a slippery concept, many thinkers
hostile to relativism have claimed to have refuted it; in some cases, they
have refuted a version of it, but whether they have been successful in
refuting all forms is still disputable.  As Alasdair MacIntyre once wrote,
'relativism, like scepticism, is one of those doctrines that have by now
been refuted a number of times too often.  Nothing is perhaps a surer sign
that a doctrine embodies some not-to-be-neglected truth than that in the
course of history of philosophy it should have been refuted again and again.
Genuinely refutable doctrines only need to be refuted once'.  So, as far as
relativism is concerned, the situation is very far from being clear. If one
wanted to formulate a very general definition of relativism, designed to
capture the common feature to all the kinds of relativism available to us,
the following ones might be of some use:  'relativism is not a single
doctrine but a family of views whose common theme is that some central
aspect of experience, thought, evaluation, or even reality is somehow
relative to something else'.  Relativism can also be defined as the
following broad thesis: 'Statements in a certain domain can be deemed
correct or incorrect only relative to some framework'"

   (Zilioli, Ugo,'Protagoras and the Challenge of Relativism', P.9, Ashgate,
2007)