[MD] Relativism

[MarshaV]

Dmb,

Are you going to use wiki as a source for your thesis?   I think your professors might
think it's full of wikishit.


Marsha 







On May 15, 2010, at 4:36 PM, david buchanan wrote:

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> Marsha wondered if this definition is too plain-spoken:
> rel·a·tiv·ism  n.   Philosophy. A theory, especially in ethics or aesthetics, that conceptions of truth and moral values are not absolute but are relative to the persons or groups holding them.
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> dmb says:
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> If we compare that definition of relativism to the Wiki section I quoted, it's easy to see that the shoe fits.
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> "Rorty takes a deflationary attitude to truth, believing there is nothing of interest to be said about truth in general, including the contention that it is generally subjective. He also argues that the notion of warrant or justification can do most of the work traditionally assigned to the concept of truth, and that justification is relative; justification is justification to an audience, for Rorty. Thus his position, in the view of many commentators, adds up to relativism".
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> I fail to understand why Steve keeps asking me for a definition or why he accuses me a have a strange idea of what it means to be a relativist. My argument is more specific than the dictionary or encyclopedia, of course, but I would have thought the basic idea was not in dispute.
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> Marsha supplied a definition that describes relativism as the theory that truth and values are relative to the persons or groups holding them. Rorty says justification (forget truth) is relative to the group, the audience. This is the position that adds up to relativism. 
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> The pragmatic theory of truth is different from this, BUT it does not oppose relativism with an idea of absolute truth or a single objective truth. Usually, relativism is opposed to realism but that is a debate that only makes sense if you're operating with the assumptions of SOM, with the assumption that there really is an objective reality.
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> Instead, the pragmatic theory of truth says that ideas are true if they can operate successfully in actual experience. This is not disinterested observation or sensory empiricism, but it still says our ideas have to be tested empirically. This is neither absolutist nor relativistic. There can be more than one truth, truth is open to change and in fact totally expected to change. But the standards of justification are not simply dictated by one's historical and cultural context. I mean, the assertion of empirical standards does not mean a rejection of contextualism, but as Pirsig says, language PREDISPOSES us to notice some things and ignore others. Other contextualists will tell you that your beliefs are wholly determined by the culture. This view often leads to relativism and the more deterministically you see it, the more relativistic the result. Pirsig and James retain this empirical element that constrains our beliefs and which prevents their contextualism from leading to relativism. 
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> Constructivism, the idea that reality is socially constructed, usually leads to relativism too. Again, Pirsig and James can be constructivists without being relativists. For Pirsig and James, our conceptual reality was something that evolved and was constructed over long periods and the constructions that we've inherited are the inventions that work, the ghosts we still believe in. But the reason we believe is that they operate successfully in actual experience and not just within our web of beliefs, although that's true too.
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>> From the point of view of a hard nosed realist, let's say a scientific materialist, Rorty and Pirsig won't seem very different from each other. They're both denying the notion of objective truth. They both think truth is plural and provisional. But Rorty won't touch epistemology or empiricism or even "truth" with a ten foot pole. He's convinced that it's a dead horse and we should stop kicking it. And that's where their differences lie.
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> Pirsig and James expand and improve the very thing Rorty that gives up entirely. His position amounts to a general refusal to be answerable to "the world" or anything else besides us. So scholars, the more scientifically minded philosophers, keep pushing back at him with various kinds of realism. And, just as I suspected, Rorty takes radical empiricism to be another variation on realism. In his response to Putnam, Rorty says...
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> "Putnam has, in recent years, become convinced that something like direct perceptual realism is the key to avoiding the traps into which he sees me as having fallen. So, as is evident from his Dewey Lectures, he finds McDowell's Mind and World and James' Radical Empiricism, much more promising than I do."
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> As i read it, this means that Putnam and Rorty see James as advocating "direct perceptual realism". One embraces it as such and the other rejects as such but the both see it as such. I think they're both wrong and that the cool thing about radical empiricism is that it can reject objectivity and relativism at the same time. 
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