A Companion to Relativism E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1664

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

A Companion to Relativism presents original contributions from leading scholars that address the latest thinking on the role of relativism in the philosophy of language, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of science, logic, and metaphysics. * Features original contributions from many of the leading figures working on various aspects of relativism * Presents a substantial, broad range of current thinking about relativism * Addresses relativism from many of the major subfields of philosophy, including philosophy of language, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of science, logic, and metaphysics

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Table of Contents

Blackwell Companions to Philosophy

Title page

Copyright page

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: Characterizing Relativism

1 Global Relativism and Self-Refutation

1. Self-Refutation

2. Defining Relativism about a Feature F

3. Relativism about Truth

4. Defining Global Relativism

5. Difficulties with Unrestricted Global Relativism

6. Difficulties with Global Indexical Relativism

7. Applying Global Relativism to Itself

8. Self-Refutation Again

2 Relativism Requires Alternatives, Not Disagreement or Relative Truth

1. Two Intuitions Underlying a Consensus on Relativism

2. The Real Dividing Issue: Is the World One or Many?

3. Disagreement and Relative Truth

3 Three Kinds of Relativism

1. Thoroughgoing Relativism

2. Alethic Relativism

3. Absolutist Relativism

4 Varieties of Relativism and the Reach of Reasons

1. Definition

2. General Contrasts between Relativism and Absolutism

3. Reference Frames

4. Domains

5. Levels

6. Values

7. Absolutist Strands a Relativist Might Negate

8. On the Putative Self-Contradiction of Relativism

9. Reach of Reasons

10. Conclusion

Part II: Truth and Language

5 Truth Relativism and Truth Pluralism

Introduction

1. Truth Relativism

2. Metaphysics of Truth Relativism

3. Truth Relativism and the Scope Problem

4. Truth Pluralism

5. Example: Relative Moral Truth

6. Conclusion

6 The Many Relativisms: Index, Context, and Beyond

Introduction

1. Relativism and Apparent Faultless Disagreement

2. The Many Relativisms: Moderate vs. Radical

3. Moderate Relativisms: Indexical vs. Non-indexical Contextualism

4. Radical Relativism: Content vs. Truth Relativism

5. The Many “Relativism”s

7 Variation in Intuitions about Reference and Ontological Disagreements

Introduction

1. Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style

2. Metalinguistic and Linguistic Intuitions

3. Speaker’s Reference and Semantic Reference

4. The Vacuity of Ontological Disagreements

5. Conclusion

8 Centered Worlds and the Content of Perception

1. Relativistic Content

2. The Argument from Primitive Colors

3. The Argument from the Inverted Spectrum

4. The Argument from Dual Looks

5. The Argument from Duplication

6. Conclusion

9 Conceptual Relativism

1. What is Conceptual Relativism?

2. The Kantian Roots of Conceptual Relativism

3. Epistemology or Metaphysics?

4. Conceptual Relativism and Truth

5. The Scheme and Content Relativized?

6. Davidson Against the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme

7. Empirical Sources: Conceptual Relativism in Linguistics and Psychology

10 The Limits of Relativism in the Late Wittgenstein

Introduction

1. Anti-Realism and Meaning

2. Two Types of Anti-Realism

3. What Functions Are “Language-Games” Supposed to Serve?

4. Realism and (Dummett’s) Anti-Realism

5. Resisting Transcendentalism

6. Wittgensteinian Realism

Part III: Epistemic Relativism

11 Epistemological Relativism: Arguments Pro and Con

Introduction

1. Arguments Con

2. Arguments Pro

3. Ambivalence Concerning Relativism? The Case of Richard Rorty

4. A Newer Argument Pro: Hales’s Defense of Relativism

12 Relativism About Epistemic Modals

1. Epistemic Modals

2. Contextualism

3. Contextualism about Epistemic Modals

4. Relativist Proposals

5. Relativists’ Arguments Against Contextualism

6. Conclusion

13 Relativism and Confirmation Theory

Introduction

1. First Attempts

2. The Bayesian Paradigm

3. What Good Is There in a Subjectivist Confirmation Theory?

4. Concluding Remarks

14 Epistemic Relativism, Epistemic Incommensurability, and Wittgensteinian Epistemology

1. From the Epistemology of Disagreement to Epistemic Relativism

2. The Irrelevance of Epistemic Externalism

3. Wittgensteinian Epistemology and Epistemic Relativism

4. Williams’s Wittgensteinian Contextualism

5. Wittgensteinian Epistemology Reconsidered

6. Concluding Remarks

15 Relativism and Contextualism

Introduction

1. Classical Invariantism and the Ho-Hum View

2. Relativism and Contexualism: Clarifications and Distinctions

3. Relativism and Contexualism: A Quick Look at Some Sample Views

4. Flexibility and Disagreement, Charity and Error: A Common Motivating Idea, and a Common Objection

5. Conclusion

Part IV: Moral Relativism

16 Relativism in Contemporary Liberal Political Philosophy

Introduction

1. Liberalism and Relativism

2. Liberalism, Reasonable Disagreement, and Relativism

3. Liberal Approaches to Universal Justification and Application

4. Conclusion

17 Secularism, Liberalism, and Relativism

Introduction

1. Tolerance and Blasphemy

2. Muslim Identity and Internal Reasons

3. Liberal Pluralism

18 Moral Relativism and Moral Psychology

Introduction

1. Psychological Studies of Folk Moral Judgments

2. From Expressivism to Moral Relativism

3. From Sentimental Rules to Moral Relativism

4. From Constructive Sentimentalism to Moral Relativism

19 Bare Bones Moral Realism and the Objections from Relativism

Introduction

1. Three Objections From Relativism

2. Bare Bones Moral Realism

20 Virtue Ethics and Moral Relativism

Introduction

1. The Confrontation of Aristotelian Virtue Ethics and Moral Relativism

2. Foot’s Challenge

3. MacIntyre’s Tradition-Based Defense of the Virtues

4. Nussbaum’s Non-Relative Virtues

5. The Ethical Naturalism of Foot and Hursthouse

21 Relativist Explanations of Interpersonal and Group Disagreement

Introduction

1. The Tacit-Agreement Approach to Morality as Social Construction

2. Speaker Relativism

3. What it Might Mean for Morality to be Constructed as Part of Human Culture

4. Explaining Moral Commonalities and Differences Across Cultures

5. Relativism and the Meaning of Moral Terms

6. Explaining Intra-Group Disagreement

7. Why Fundamental Intragroup Disagreement Might Be Inevitable

Part V: Relativism in the Philosophy of Science

22 Relativism and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

Introduction

1. Disentangling the Social

2. The Definition of Relativism

3. The Confusion of Relativism and Idealism

4. The Confusion Between Relativism and Subjectivism

5. The Confusion Between Relativism and Particularism

6. Are All Truths Absolute Truths?

7. Propositions

8. Concept Satisfaction

9. Rules

10. The Naturalistic Framework

11. Verbum Sat Sapienti

23 Incommensurability and Theory Change

1. Relativism and Incommensurability

2. Semantic Incommensurability

3. Methodological Incommensurability

4. Prospects for Incommensurability

24 Thomas Kuhn’s Relativistic Legacy

Introduction

1. Paradigms, Disciplinary Matrices, and Epistemological Relativism

2. Incommensurability

3. The Transcendence of Truth

4. World-Change, Idealism, and Ontological Relativism

5. Relativism in the Sociology of Science and the History of Science

25 Anti-Realism and Relativism

Part VI: Logical, Mathematical, and Ontological Relativism

26 Horror Contradictionis

Introduction

1. Logic and Confronting the Truth

2. Avoiding Contradiction in Discourse

3. Relativism Inside Logic: Ways of Avoiding Contradictions

4. Avoiding Contradiction in the Setting of Agency

5. Conclusion

27 Varieties of Pluralism and Relativism for Logic

Introduction

1. Defining Terms: Relativism, Pluralism, Tolerance

2. What Is Logic?

3. One Route to Pluralism: Logic-as-Model

4. The Boundary Between Logical and Non-Logical Terminology

5. Vagueness

6. Relativity to Structure

28 Relativism in Set Theory and Mathematics

Introduction

1. Mathematical Relativism: Does Everything Go In Mathematics?

2. Conceptual, Structural and Logical Relativity in Mathematics

3. Mathematical Relativism and Mathematical Objectivity

4. Mathematical Relativism and the Ontology of Mathematics: Platonism

5. Mathematical Relativism and the Ontology of Mathematics: Nominalism

6. Conclusion: The Significance of Mathematical Relativism

29 Putnam’s Model-Theoretic Argument

1. The Model-Theoretic Argument

2. Difficulties and Differences

3. Putnam’s Progress

4. Implications

5. Objections and Replies

30 Quine’s Ontological Relativity

Introduction

1. The Inscrutability of Objectual Reference

2. Empiricism, Naturalism, and Provincialism

31 Carving Up a Reality in which There Are No Joints

Introduction

1. Sameness and Objects

2. The “Softness” of Sameness in Kind and Numerical Sameness

3. Carving out Strange Kinds

4. Carving Out Strange Individuals

5. The World Onto Which We Project Kind-Sameness and Persistence

6. We Who Project Kind-Sameness and Persistence

Index

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47. A Companion to Relativism

Edited by Steven D. Hales

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This edition first published 2011

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A companion to relativism / edited by Steven D. Hales.

p. cm. – (Blackwell companions to philosophy ; 74)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-1-4051-9021-3 (hardback)

 ISBN 978-1-4443-9248-7 (ebk)

1. Relativity. I. Hales, Steven D.

 BD221.C65 2011

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2010038871

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Notes on Contributors

Mark Balaguer is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at California State University at Los Angeles. He is the author of Platonism and Anti-Platonism in Mathematics (1998) and Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem (2009).

Akeel Bilgrami is Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. He is the author of Belief and Meaning (1992) and Self Knowledge and Resentment (2006).

Alexander Bird is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol, and is author of Thomas Kuhn (2000) as well as co-editor of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

David Bloor is Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Knowledge and Social Imagery (1976), Wittgenstein: A Social Theory of Knowledge (1983), Wittgenstein on Rules and Institutions (1997), and Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis (1996, with B. Barnes and J. Henry).

Paul Boghossian is Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He is the author of Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (2006).

Berit Brogaard is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Missouri, St Louis. She has published in journals such as Noûs, Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Studies, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. She is the editor of Erkenntnis.

Otávio Bueno is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami. He is the author of Constructive Empiricism: A Restatement and Defense (1999) and the co-author of Elements of Paraconsistent Set Theory (1998, with Newton da Costa and Jean-Yves Béziau).

Igor Douven is Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy, Centre for Logic and Analytical Philosophy, at the Catholic University of Leuven. He is the editor of Scientific Realism (2005) and has published in journals such as Mind and Synthese.

Andy Egan is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He has published articles in journals such as Philosophical Review, Philosophers’ Imprint, and Australasian Journal of Philosophy.

Crawford L. Elder is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Real Natures and Familiar Objects (2004).

Maximilian de Gaynesford is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading. He is the author of John McDowell (2004), Hilary Putnam (2006), and I: The Meaning of the First Person Term (2006).

Christopher W. Gowans is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. He is the author of the entry on moral relativism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the editor of Moral Disagreements (2000).

Steven D. Hales is Professor of Philosophy at Bloomsburg University. His books include Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy (2006, 2009) and Nietzsche’s Perspectivism (2000, with Rex Welshon).

Patricia Hanna is Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Utah. She is the co-author of Word and World: Practice and the Foundations of Language (2004, with Bernard Harrison).

Gary L. Hardcastle is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bloomsburg University. He is co-editor of Logical Empiricism in North America (2003, with Alan Richardson) and is the Executive Secretary of the Philosophy of Science Association.

Bernard Harrison is Emeritus E. E. Erickson Professor of Philosophy, University of Utah, and Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Humanities, University of Sussex. He is the author of Form and Content (1973) and the co-author of Word and World: Practice and the Foundations of Language (2004, with Patricia Hanna).

Max Kölbel is ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona. He is the author of Truth Without Objectivity (2002) and the co-editor of Relative Truth (2008, with Manuel García-Carpintero).

Michael Krausz is Milton C. Nahm Professor of Philosophy at Bryn Mawr College. His books include Rightness and Reasons: Interpretation in Cultural Practices (1993), Varieties of Relativism (1995, with Rom Harré), and several edited volumes on relativism.

Graham M. Long is Lecturer in Politics at Newcastle University. He is the author of Relativism and the Foundations of Liberalism (2004).

Dan Lopéz de Sa is an ICREA Researcher at the Logic, Language and Cognition Research Group at the University of Barcelona. He has published in journals such as Mind, Noûs, Synthese, and Analysis.

Michael P. Lynch is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. His books include Truth in Context (1998) and Truth as One and Many (2009).

Edouard Machery is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Doing Without Concepts (2009).

Christian B. Miller is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Zachary T. Smith Faculty Fellow at Wake Forest University. He is the editor of The Continuum Companion to Ethics (forthcoming), and has published in journals such as Ethics and Noûs.

Christopher Norris is Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy at Cardiff University. His books include Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism (2000) and Philosophy of Language and the Challenge to Scientific Realism (2004).

Duncan Pritchard is Chair in Epistemology at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Epistemic Luck (2005), Knowledge (2009), and Epistemic Disjunctivism (forthcoming).

Carol Rovane is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. She is the author of The Bounds of Agency: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics (1998) and For and Against Relativism (forthcoming).

Patrick Rysiew is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Victoria (Canada). He has published in journals such as Noûs, Philosophical Quarterly, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

Howard Sankey is Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of The Incommensurability Thesis (1994), Rationality, Relativism and Incommensurability (1997), and Scientific Realism and the Rationality of Science (2008).

Stewart Shapiro is O’Donnell Professor of Philosophy at Ohio State University. His books include Philosophy of Mathematics: Structure and Ontology (1997), Thinking about Mathematics: The Philosophy of Mathematics (2001), and Vagueness in Context (2006).

Harvey Siegel is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami. His books include Relativism Refuted: A Critique of Contemporary Epistemological Relativism (1987), Educating Reason: Rationality, Critical Thinking, and Education (1988), and Rationality Redeemed? Further Dialogues on an Educational Ideal (1997).

Kenneth A. Taylor is Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. His books include Reference and the Rational Mind (2003) and Referring to the World (2007).

Johan Van Benthem is University Professor of pure and applied logic at the University of Amsterdam and Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of philosophy at Stanford University. His books include The Logic of Time (1983), Logic, Language, and Meaning (2 vols, 1991), and Logical Dynamics of Information Flow (2009).

David B. Wong is the Susan Fox Beischer & George D. Beischer Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. His books include Moral Relativity (1984) and Natural Moralities: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism (2006).

Acknowledgments

Chapter 4: This chapter is adapted from Michael Krausz, “Mapping Relativisms,” in Michael Krausz (ed.), Relativism: A Contemporary Anthology. Copyright © 2010 Columbia University Press; used by arrangement with the publisher.

Chapter 11: This chapter is adapted from Harvey Siegel, “Relativism,” in Ilkka Niiniluoto, Matti Sintonen, and Jan Woleski (eds.), Handbook of Epistemology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004), pp. 747–780; used with permission from Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Chapter 30: Text extracts from “Ontological relativity,” in W. V. O. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (Columbia University Press, 1969); reprinted with permission of the publisher.

Introduction

Relativism is one of the oldest and most tenacious ideas in all of philosophy. About 2,500 years ago, Protagoras reportedly began his book Truth (now regrettably lost) with the claim that “Of all things the measure is man, of the things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not.” Protagoras was apparently struck by the fact that there were situations in which it looked like two parties disagreed, and yet they were both right. Protagoras’s idea is explained by Plato in his dialogue Theætetus: suppose we both have the same wind blowing in our faces and you are cold and I am hot. You claim that it is a cold wind and I claim that it is a hot wind. While we disagree, it seems implausible that one of us is objectively right and the other objectively wrong. Not only could we argue indefinitely without resolution, but it seems quite peculiar to suppose that there even is some absolute matter of fact upon which we might converge. Protagoras’s solution is that we are both right: it is a hot wind relative to me and a cold wind relative to you. There is no further, human-independent fact of the matter.

Protagoras’s relativism is a form of conflict resolution. You and I dispute about whether the wind is hot or cold, and some sort of relativizing move is a way to make the disagreement go away. There are other approaches to disagreements too. Here are a few:

1 We keep arguing even though you think I’m too hard-headed to ever to see the light of reason, and I think the same thing about you.

2 We agree to disagree and move on to other topics.

3 We compromise and decide that we’re each partially right. We agree that the wind is sort of hot and also sort of cold. Maybe it’s in-between.

4 We determine that we’re using our terms differently and settle on a common usage. So what you mean by “cold” isn’t the same thing that I mean by it, and what I mean by “hot” isn’t the same thing that you mean by it. We work out our linguistic differences and reach agreement.

5 We continue to argue until one of us capitulates.

The first two options aren’t really a way to resolve a disagreement. Still, someone very hopeful or very willful might put the first into practice when arguing with a fanatic. Friends stuck in a dialectical impasse who value their continuing friendship more than their continuing argument might opt for the second. But for philosophers bent on ferreting out the truth through universally recognizable reason, neither seems very appealing.

Compromising is a genuine way of reaching agreement. For example, an abortion conservative (one who believes that all abortions, even of zygotes, is morally impermissible) and an abortion liberal (one who believes that all abortions, even of very late-term fetuses, is morally permissible) might settle their differences through compromise on a moderate position. Perhaps they decide that early abortions are morally permissible, late abortions are not, and that they can amicably work out the middle-term boundary cases.

The fourth option is also a promising means of settling some seemingly intractable disputes. William James opens the second lecture of his What is Pragmatism? (1904) with a nice example of a purely verbal disagreement:

Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel – a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree’s opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the man go round the squirrel or not? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel? … “Which party is right,” I said, “depends on what you practically mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb ‘to go round’ in one practical fashion or the other.”

Once James was able to make clear two different senses of “to go round,” there was no longer any dispute to be had. James offered the squirrel story as an example of his pragmatic approach to “settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable.”

Yet not all metaphysical disputes can be so easily converted to verbal ones. Again, consider the abortion debate. An abortion conservative and an abortion liberal might both be in complete moral agreement – both agree on the principle that it is wrong to kill persons. What they disagree about is whether fetuses are persons. The liberal thinks that they are not and the conservative thinks that they are. While their point of contention is metaphysical, this dispute does not seem like just a verbal quarrel. Even if both parties recognize that the liberal defines “person” in terms of functional mental capacities and the conservative defines “person” in terms of biological humanity, the disagreement between them does not go away. With James’s squirrel, it seemed unreasonable to insist that there is One True Definition of “to go round.” In the case of “person,” it seems that there is a more substantial dispute that simply making a definitional distinction does not solve. The liberal and the conservative each believes that it is they who have limned the metaphysically correct kind.

When opposing parties reject compromise and their differences look more than merely verbal, the most common response is to choose option (5) above: continue the debate until someone gives in. Many times this is surely the right approach. Plato remarks in Euthyphro (7b–c) that if there is a dispute about numerosity, then the disputants can reach agreement by counting; if there is a dispute about size, agreement can be achieved through measurement; if the disagreement is about weight, they can use a weighing machine to end the controversy. In short, we keep looking for the appropriate kind of mutually agreed-upon evidence that will settle the matter to everyone’s (epistemic) satisfaction. That’s perfectly fine for certain sorts of conflict. However, as Plato goes on to say (using Socrates as his mouthpiece):

But about what would a disagreement be, which we could not settle and which would cause us to be enemies and be angry with each other? … Is it not about right and wrong, and noble and disgraceful, and good and bad? Are not these the questions about which you and I and other people become enemies, when we do become enemies, because we differ about them and cannot reach any satisfactory agreement?

It is in such cases of apparently intractable disagreement that one starts to look for an alternative solution.

Although Plato specifically addresses moral conflicts in Euthyphro, they are not the only ones about which one might despair of fighting to eventual unconditional surrender. Consider aesthetic predicates, like those of personal taste. I declare that spicy lamb curry tastes delicious and you deny that it does. You insist that death metal is the finest music ever made and I extol Philip Glass as vastly superior, or I maintain that Halle Berry is more beautiful than Nicole Kidman, but you think the reverse is true. Such debates appear intractable; we could argue forever over whether spicy lamb curry is delicious without any prospect of resolution. Even more, such an argument seems pointless – not because there is no merit to the question, but because it does not look like either one of us could reasonably be said to be in error. I’m in a sense epistemically blameless for believing that spicy lamb curry is delicious, since it unambiguously tastes that way to me. Likewise, you too can’t be blamed for thinking that it is not delicious, and no amount of testimony from others will affect your judgment of the curry’s flavor.

Sometimes such cases are described as instances of faultless disagreement. It doesn’t seem right to dismiss faultless disagreements as empty, as if there is no fact of the matter. After all, spicy lamb curry really does taste wonderful, and I appreciate that fact with every bite. Rather than there being no truth about the taste of curry, instead there may be multiple truths. It is true (relative to me) that spicy lamb curry is delicious, and it is false (relative to you) that it is delicious. This sort of relativizing approach is another way to resolve contradictions. We don’t argue endlessly, compromise, decide that we’re engaged in a purely verbal dispute, or agree to disagree. Instead, we determine that we are both right!

There are many kinds of relativizing strategies in philosophy, made under the pressure of varying considerations and for diverse ends. Some are so routine and commonplace that one hardly notices them – indexicals for example. The thesis that tomorrow never comes because it is always today would be a serious metaphysical conundrum without recognizing that “today” and “tomorrow” are indexicals, and the proposition’s content is relative to these variables, even if its character is not. But once this relativity is understood, then the claim is just a child’s joke. Or take relative terms, such as “being short,” “being heavy,” “being small,” and “being rich.” Two people might dispute whether John is rich while both being in full possession of all the facts about his net worth and income. How such a thing could happen is again puzzling, until the implicit relativity of “being rich” is appreciated. “John is rich (for a philosopher)” might be true while “John is rich (for a capitalist)” is false.

Or imagine two people debating whether Australia is the land down under. One person insists that all one has to do is look at a globe to see that Australia is buried deep in the southern hemisphere and that most of the Earth’s land is above it. The other person turns the globe upside down, noting that there is no privileged position from which the Earth is to be viewed, and that the perspective from which Australia is close to the top of the world is just as legitimate as any other. We might as well call Australia “the land up over.” The relativizing strategy (and the astute reader will sense the shade of Carnap here) is to invoke the notion of cartographic frameworks. “Australia is the land down under” is true relative to our usual cartographic framework, and false relative to other astrophysically legitimate frameworks. There is no framework-independent fact of the matter.

Another respectable form of relativizing involves modal language. Two people might agree about all the relevant empirical facts and still be at loggerheads over whether “it is impossible for Kathy to move her bishop that way” is true. The dissolution of the dispute again comes from the recognition of an implicit relativity. One party might accurately judge that it is impossible for Kathy to move her bishop that way, given that which possible worlds are accessible from the actual world are completely determined by the rules of chess, the position of the pieces in this game, and whose move it is. A disputant might veridically judge that it is not impossible for Kathy to move her bishop in a certain way, assuming it is only physical law that determines which possible worlds are accessible from the actual world. In other words, a prospective move might be impossible relative to the rules of chess, but not impossible relative to the laws of nature.

One final, philosophically current, example is contextualism. In epistemology, the view is motivated by cases in which two people agree about the merits and quantity of evidence that S possesses in favor of p, and yet one person judges that S knows that p and the other person denies it. The contextualist solution is, roughly, to say that both may be right. Under lower, everyday epistemic standards, S does know that p; S’s warrant for p clears the low bar. But given the high standards insisted upon by an intransigent critic, S does not know that p; S’s justification just can’t measure up. According to contextualists, these epistemic standards are relative to variable contextual features such as conversationally salient assumptions, the interests of the knowledge attributors, and so on.

Inclusive-minded folks are happy to classify all of the preceding forms of relativizing as species of the genus relativism. Such inclusivity means that relativism is so ordinary and familiar that endorsing it should hardly raise an eyebrow; it is a semantic feature so mundane that the heated opposition of social critics and popes (see John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio) seems bizarre. Of course, there are more radical relativist programs, and some philosophers prefer to consider these alone to be relativism proper, relegating indexicals, modality, contextualism, etc. to a distant branch of the family tree.

Consider the simple relativism of predicates of personal taste sketched a few paragraphs back. There the fact of whether curry is delicious is relative to tasters, an idea that doesn’t seem prima facie implausible. Now, “delicious” is obviously a normative term; something is delicious just in case it tastes very good. What about other normative predicates, such as ethical ones? Should we analogously say that whether an action is good is somehow relative to the actors, so that the same (type of) action is right for me, but wrong for you? Such egoistic relativism is clearly more controversial. Yet all it took was a left-hand turn from aesthetic predicates to ethical ones to wind up in a much scarier part of town. Other forms of ethical relativism are in the same neighborhood too, such as ones that relativize moral truth to cultures instead of individuals.

Moral relativism is not the only relativizing move that engenders controversy. Contested relativistic approaches also appear in logic, the philosophy of science, and ontology, to name a few. One might think that of all the subfields of philosophy, logic has the best claim on producing absolute truths. Yet even here there are relativistic motivations. For example, von Neumann–Bernays–Gödel set theory (NBG) and Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice (ZFC) are both perfectly suitable for use by mathematicians. In fact, NBG is regarded as a conservative extension of ZFC, so that anything that’s a theorem of NBG is also a theorem of ZFC and conversely. In that sense they (successfully) aim to capture the same truths. However, NBG and ZFC have different metalogical properties. It is a metalogical fact about NBG that it is finitely axiomatizable and a metalogical fact about ZFC that it is not finitely axiomatizable. Well, then, is the one true set theory finitely axiomatizable or not? Perhaps the correct answer is that there is no one true set theory; instead there are many equivalently true set theories. That is, set-theoretical truth is relative to whichever set theory one has chosen.

Here’s an example from ontology. Consider the principle of unrestricted mereological composition. According to this principle, every combination of things is a thing. Accepting or rejecting this principle matters a great deal in answering the question of what there is. To take a simple illustration, suppose you have three marbles. How many things do you have? If we accept unrestricted composition, then the answer is “seven.” If we reject it, then the answer might be “three.” How many things there are is thus relative to which composition principle is correct. As it stands, that’s rather innocuous. However, it is very hard to determine which composition principle is correct, or even that any composition principle is correct. As David Lewis argued, a satisfactory composition principle must accommodate our intuitions about which ostensible things are genuine objects and which not. Such a principle would give a precise ruling in every case, for instance, that a marble is an object but a pair of marbles is not. However, our intuitions about objects involve vagueness, as the sorites paradox shows. Thus no composition principle could accord with our intuitions. Lewis takes this argument to motivate unrestricted composition, but one might conclude instead that there is no uniquely true principle of mereological composition, and that it is theoretically arbitrary which we choose. If that’s right, then the nature of objects is deeply relative – in the case of the marbles, it is true that there are only three things (relative to a more atomistic mereology) and it is also true that there are seven things (relative to a mereology with unrestricted composition).

So far I have painted a broad-brush picture of various relativistic ideas and some motivations for them. Philosophically adequate accounts of relativism must fill in the details. If truth is relative to a parameter other than times, possible worlds, and contexts of tokening, what is it? Is truth relative to individuals? cultures? investigative paradigms? abstract perspectives? If truth is so relative, what does this mean about the property of truth itself? Perhaps there is no one univocal property that corresponds to “being true,” and instead we should adopt a truth pluralism according to which there are multiple, divergent properties that serve the role of truth.

Or maybe truth is not relative at all, but it is the conceptual content of truth-value-bearers that is somehow relativized. At Phaedrus 265e, Socrates advises the use of reason to classify objects into natural kinds, carving reality “where the natural joints are, and not trying to break any part, after the manner of a bad carver.” For conceptual relativists, there is no such thing. Reality is more like an amorphous jellyfish than a segmented chicken, and there are many possible conceptual schemes, no one of which can be privileged above the others as delivering the proper way to conceptualize reality. A conceptual relativist may hold that Goodman’s grue and bleen are as legitimate as blue and green, despite the fact that the latter concepts are more familiar and well entrenched. Or they may aver that our familiar understanding of the world as consisting of objects that persist through time does not reflect reality more accurately than the reputed Hopi conceptual scheme in which the world consists of events and processes.

I have tried to present a few of the motivations that philosophers have had to promote relativist theses and show the intuitive pull of the relativist vision. Of course, the broad category of relativism includes a very contentious set of theories, and there are many objections, worries, and concerns that have been raised about them. Here are some of the more prominent general objections.

Conceptual relativist views often give rise to concerns involving incommensurability. One problem about incommensurability can be put as a dilemma. Either (1) two distinct conceptual schemes are transformations of each other, i.e. there are rules that allow an assertion employing concepts from scheme1 to be translated into an assertion employing concepts from scheme2, or (2) there are no such translation rules. Under the first disjunct, the two schemes aren’t fundamentally distinct after all; really, we have one conceptual scheme with different expressions for the same concepts. Therefore, conceptual relativism is false. Under the second disjunct, it becomes difficult to see why we should think that the two conceptual schemes are different ways of conceptualizing the same thing. If there is no way of interrelating the content of scheme1 and the content of scheme2, then they might as well be about completely different things. The US Tennis Association rulebook cannot be translated into the engineering guidelines for microchip design, which is a good reason to think that they concern unrelated topics. If scheme1 and scheme2 aren’t different ways of conceptualizing the same subject matter, then again conceptual relativism is false.

Probably the most famous complaint was raised by Plato himself. Consider a form of relativism that relativizes truth to some parameter. What facts are thus relativized? We needn’t suppose that all truths are merely relatively true. Perhaps moral relativism is true, but absolutism is correct for empirical propositions, or relativism is true for predicates of taste, but not for morality. One might defend a local relativism without being committed to the view that all truths are relative ones.

However, suppose that one does want to support a global relativism, the view that everything is relative. This was apparently Protagoras’s view. In Theætetus Socrates argues that, taken to its logical conclusion, Protagorean relativism means that no one is any wiser than anyone else. Protagoras himself is no more knowledgeable than a baboon or a pig and yet he is as wise as any of the gods (Theætetus 161–2). Since all who disagree with Protagoras are as equally in the right as he is, those who deny his relativism must also be in possession of the truth. This, of course, implies that Protagoras is wrong about man being the measure of all things. Yet the doctrine states that Protagoras, along with everyone else, must be right in his opinions; thus for Protagoras relativism is true. The apparent contradiction Socrates calls “a really exquisite conclusion” (Theætetus 171a). Many subsequent philosophers have taken Plato’s self-refutation objection to be a definitive blow against global relativism.

Other critics of relativism argue that it is not a coherent solution to the problem of disagreement. If two parties disagree, then one asserts p and the other not-p. That is, disagreement means contradiction: p and not-p. The usual, absolutist approach is to continue arguing about which conjunct is true until one side gives up and everyone settles on either p or not-p, exclusively. The relativist solution is to divide and conquer: p is true relative to some parameter, and not-p is also true, relative to a different parameter. The objection is that by relativist lights, the original two parties never disagreed at all; their dispute was merely superficial. In fact, they actually agree! Person A believes that p is true, relative to X, that not-p is true, relative to Y. Person B believes the exact same thing. Not only is there no disagreement, but there is no relativism. Reality contains these absolute truths, upon which all ideal observers concur: p is true relative to X, and not-p is true relative to Y. Thus “relativism” fails to preserve the datum of disagreement and even fails to offer a cogent alternative to absolutism.

Yet another objection is that avowed relativists are incapable of rationally convincing their opponents. Either the arguments for relativism are presented from a neutral or transcendent perspective, or they are presented from some specific perspective; i.e. the reasons themselves are perspective-dependent. First horn of the dilemma: if pro-relativist arguments are presented from a neutral or transcendent perspective, then substantive relativism is abandoned. Relativism is presumably in the business of denying that there are neutral or transcendent perspectives. Second horn of the dilemma: if the articulation and defense of the relativist’s thesis is launched from some particular perspective or other, then opponents in alternative perspectives will have no rational reason to accept the thesis. By the lights of the opponents, the reasons offered don’t count as adequate ones, if they count as reasons at all. Thus the relativist must either abandon relativism or concede that she has no means of rationally persuading her opponents.

A Companion to Relativism attempts to present a wide range of approaches and responses to relativism. Some of the authors take relativism seriously, but argue that it is ultimately untenable. Others defend relativistic positions that range from the humble, limited, and mild to the extreme, far-reaching, and radical. Still other authors engage in neutral explorations of what relativism has to offer in different domains of inquiry without choosing up sides. Relativist ideas have been investigated in all the major subfields of philosophy, and A Companion to Relativism provides a smorgasbord of these regional dishes. Other readers on relativism are typically narrowly focused on relativism as conceived by one group of practitioners – philosophers of language, say, or ethicists. It is hoped that the more synoptic overview provided here will be an impetus to a fruitful dialogue, and that philosophers well versed in Kuhn-style relativism in the philosophy of science might find it useful to see how epistemologists have developed similar ideas, or that there might be a cross-fertilization between moral relativism and ontological relativism. At least, those are valuable goals from my perspective.

Steven D. Hales

Part I: Characterizing Relativism

1

Global Relativism and Self-Refutation

MAX KÖLBEL

Abstract

Relativism, in particular global relativism, is often said to be “self-refuting.” In fact, there are several different shortcomings that may be meant by the term “self-refuting.” The purpose of this chapter is to survey and assess some interesting ways in which some forms of relativism may be thought to be self-refuting. I begin by clarifying what can be meant by “self-refutation,” and by providing a definition of “relativism” to work with. Since self-refutation is usually thought to be a problem specifically for global forms of relativism, my preliminaries will include a section that clarifies the senses in which a relativistic doctrine might be global. With the preliminaries out of the way, I consider, in sections 4 and 5, certain fundamental difficulties faced by global forms of relativism and how they might be avoided. Sections 6 and 7 then move on to an assessment of several different self-refutation arguments against relativism. The result of the investigation will be that any form of global relativism that manages to avoid the more fundamental difficulties discussed in sections 4 and 5 has little to fear from self-refutation objections.

1. Self-Refutation

The dialectical notion of self-refutation (peritrope) originates in the early Hellenistic period (third century BC, see Burnyeat 1976a). Arguments against relativism that have been styled “self-refutation arguments” go back further, for example to Plato (Theaetetus 171a–b) and Aristotle (Metaphysics Γ 1008a 28–30, 1012b 12–18, K 1063b 30–5) and even, according to Epicurus, to Democritos. The general idea of self-refutation seems to be that a claim is self-refuting if it can in some way be turned against itself. This might involve the content of the self-refuting claim entailing its own falsity, either on its own or in conjunction with further premises. Alternatively, it might mean that making the claim (perhaps making it in a certain way) somehow entails its falsity or else commits the person making it to its falsity. Or, finally, it might mean that the claim cannot be defended in a debate that is conducted according to certain dialectical rules.

It will be worth pausing briefly to appreciate these subtle and perhaps initially confusing distinctions. Consider the following sentence:

(L) What I am saying at this moment is false.

Suppose I uttered (L). I would then be claiming that what I am saying is false. Thus what I have claimed entails that my claim is false. Thus, my claim would be self-refuting in the first sense mentioned above: the content of the claim entails its falsehood. (NB: the difficulties with (L) go far beyond this: consider the assumption that my claim is false.)

Another example. Consider Would-be-Socrates, who claims to know that he does not know anything. We can again use what he has claimed as a premise in an argument that shows that what he has claimed is false:

(P1) Would-be-Socrates knows that he does not know anything. (That’s what he has claimed.)

(P2) What is known is true. (This is an additional a priori premise.)

(C1) So, Would-be-Socrates does not know anything. (Follows from P1 and P2)

(C2) So, in particular, Would-be-Socrates does not know that he does not know anything. (Follows from C1)

Thus, we have used what Would-be-Socrates has claimed (the content of his claim) together with a further a priori premise, to deduce that what he has claimed is false.

However, traditional self-refutation arguments usually seem to involve a charge that is subtler than the charge of direct or indirect self-contradiction. Consider a different example. Many of us are familiar with situations where someone shouts the following sentence at the top of their voice:

(S) I am not shouting.

It would be correct (though in many cases not prudent) to point out to such a person that their shouting is “pragmatically self-refuting” (Passmore 1961; Mackie 1964): the fact that they are shouting the sentence refutes what they are shouting, namely that they are not shouting. However, what they are shouting (the content of their claim) is in no way self-contradictory. For they could have made the very same claim – asserted the very same content: that they are not shouting – in a calm voice, or they could have remained silent altogether. In either case it would have been true that they are not shouting.

Some sentences are worse off than (S), in that one cannot use them to make a true assertion (NB: this is not the same as saying that the content expressed by such a sentence in a context could not be true). For example, the sentence “I am not saying (claiming, asserting) anything.” No one can truly say (claim, assert) that they are not claiming (claiming, asserting) anything. We could call contents of this sort “necessarily pragmatically self-refuting.”

The difference between self-contradictory and pragmatically self-refuting claims (of both kinds) may seem subtle, but it is in fact important. From the fact that a certain content is self-contradictory, one can normally safely conclude that that content is false, as in the case of P1. (The case of (L) is special: here, even the conclusion that what was claimed is false leads to a contradiction. This is what makes the liar sentence so troublesome.) However, we cannot conclude from the fact that it would be pragmatically self-refuting to assert a certain content that that content is therefore false. If I don’t assert anything, then it is true that I am not asserting anything. If I don’t shout, then it’s true that I am not shouting. Analogously, by the way, if I were to think that I am not thinking, I would be wrong. Does it follow that I am thinking?

There is yet another way in which a claim can be said to be self-refuting. Making a claim or an assertion is often thought to engender certain normative requirements. Thus, for example, it is sometimes thought that one ought to assert a content only if one believes it (e.g. Searle 1969), or only if one has reasons for believing it, or even that one ought to assert only what one knows (Williamson 1996; 2000). Let us assume the last of these views for the sake of argument. If assertion is governed by the norm that one ought to assert only what one knows, then for anything one asserts, one commits oneself to knowing it. One undergoes this commitment in the sense that one can be legitimately criticized, and perhaps forced to withdraw an assertion, if one has asserted a content one does not know. Now, if the content of an assertion is incompatible with this commitment, then that content is self-refuting in yet another way, which we might label “conversationally self-refuting.”

Consider again the self-contradictory claim made by Would-be-Socrates above: that he knows that he knows nothing. Suppose Would-be-Socrates retreats to a less problematic second assertion, namely the claim that he knows nothing (without claiming that he knows this to be so). This is clearly not self-contradictory: what he has asserted may well be true, for it may be true that Would-be-Socrates knows nothing. It is not pragmatically self-refuting for him to assert this either: the fact that he makes the claim does not entail that he knows something. However, if asserting something commits the asserter to knowledge of what he has asserted, then Would-be-Socrates’ second assertion commits him to the falsity of what he has asserted, and it is in this sense “conversationally self-refuting.” While what he has asserted may be true, given that assertion requires knowledge (as we are supposing), the truth of the assertion would show that he can be criticized for asserting something he does not know. Similarly, suppose that the assertion commits the asserter to believing (rather than knowing) what he or she has asserted. Then it is conversationally self-refuting to assert that one believes nothing.

The difference is again significant. When someone makes a pragmatically self-refuting claim, we can conclude that what he or she has asserted is false, as in the case of someone shouting (S). However, we cannot conclude from the fact that a claim is conversationally self-refuting that the claim is false. Would-be-Socrates’ assertion that he knows nothing may well be true. But it cannot meet the knowledge requirement for assertion.

A fourth notion of self-refutation is bound up not specifically with the norms governing a particular speech act, but with certain dialectical norms, i.e. rules of engagement in a debate. These rules say which sorts of conduct by the debating parties are permissible or required. Thus, an ancient debate was a kind of cross-examination (see Aristotle’s Topics discussed in Smith 2009). The rules of debate defined the role of the questioner and the respondent: the respondent had to begin by putting forward a thesis, and the questioner would then ask questions to which the answerer was supposed to answer either “yes” or “no,” though he could also reject the question for certain specified reasons. The aim for the questioner was ultimately to refute the respondent, by forcing him to concede a contradiction. Just as in other games there may be types of position that inevitably lead to defeat, given the rules of the game, there can also be theses that it is impossible for a respondent to defend in debate, given a certain set of rules of engagement.

We do not need to speculate about the exact rules of dialectic in ancient Greece, and the idea of dialectical self-refutation need not be restricted to the specific form of debate practiced then. Rather, to illustrate dialectical self-refutation let us just assume an eminently reasonable rule for any reasoned debate, namely the rule that says that in a debate each debating party must acknowledge the claims made by the other side, and not impute claims that the other side has never made. On this background, it would, for example, be dialectically self-refuting to put forward the thesis that no one claims that there are flame-spitting dragons. For the opponent need only go on to claim that there are flame-spitting dragons. The rule just mentioned requires that the proponent of the thesis now acknowledge that his or her opponent is claiming that there are flame-spitting dragons. But this contradicts the thesis. Thus a dialectically self-refuting thesis is a thesis that cannot be defended in a debate (given certain rules of debate and given an able debating opponent).

In section 8, I will assess whether relativism is self-refuting in any of these four ways: dialectically, conversationally, pragmatically, or contradictorily.

2. Defining Relativism About a Feature F

Before we can consider the question whether relativism is self-refuting in any of the four senses, we need clarity about what relativism is. I shall offer a definition that is meant to capture the core of what philosophers have had in mind when discussing relativism. I do not claim that it actually does capture their meaning – that would probably be a dialectically self-refuting claim in the sense just discussed. I am confident, however, that the position here defined as “relativism” is a position sufficiently interesting to be discussed with respect to charges of self-refutation.

One can be a relativist about one domain but not about another, so I will be defining “relativism” as a relative term. What I am trying to define is “relativism about domain D” for variable D. So what is it to be a relativist about a given domain?

The core commitment of any relativist seems to be a claim to the effect that something is relative to something. For example, that beauty is relative to an aesthetic standard, that moral value is relative to a moral code, or that truth is relative to a conceptual framework. Most people will have a vague idea of what such claims of relativity mean, but to what exactly do they commit their proponents? It turns out that it is not easy to explicate the characteristic relativity claims made by relativists.

Abstracting from concrete cases, the general idea seems to be that the possession of some feature depends on some factor. However, not just any type of dependence will qualify. We are not talking, for example, about causal dependence, as in the claim that the looks of a person depend on their genes and their lifestyle. Rather, the dependence in question seems to be similar to that claimed in the following examples:

1 Whether it is 12 noon depends on (is relative to) a time zone.

2 Whether a car is suitable depends on (is relative to) a purpose for which it is to be used.

3 Whether a quantity of wine is enough depends on (is relative to) a purpose for which it is to be used.

4 Whether a type of action is legally permitted depends on (is relative to) a legal system.

5 Whether a person is of average height depends on (is relative to) a reference class.

6 Whether the palace is to the left of the cathedral depends on (is relative to) an orientation.

It seems clear that in all these cases, the dependence is not a causal one, and not in any straightforward way empirical either. Arguably, the dependence is conceptual. Perhaps it is conceptual in the sense that anyone fully competent with these concepts (12 noon, suitability, sufficiency, etc.) will know that they are relative in this way (more on this below). This is not so in cases of causal dependence: I can fully understand the concept of body-height without realizing that body-height causally depends on, for example, nutrition in childhood.

I will say that a feature is relative to a “parameter,” where the parameter (time zone, purpose, legal system, etc.) can be thought of as a range of possible “values” of that parameter. Thus the parameter time zone consists of the values Greenwich Mean Time, Central European Time, etc., the parameter purposes for car suitability consists of the values driving on a steep dirt track, driving on a well-maintained motorway, etc., the parameter legal system