What is relativism

Realism , when defined in such a way that it entails both the objectivity and singularity of truth, also stands in opposition to relativism. What also binds various forms of relativism is an underlying idea that claims to truth, knowledge or justification have an implicit, maybe even unnoticed, relationship to a parameter or domain. Gilbert Harman , Robert Nozick , and Crispin Wright b are among the philosophers to propose versions of this thesis.

Paul Boghossian summarizes the position this way:. Boghossian b: To take an example, moral relativism, according to this approach, is the claim that the truth or justification of beliefs with moral content is relative to specific moral codes.

The justifying thought is that judgments about the morality of slavery, or any other ethical issue, are based on differing conventions, and there is no universal or objective criterion for choosing among differing competing socio-historically constituted conventions.

Moreover, as a corollary of this approach, there is no truth of the matter of whether it is wrong to sell people as slaves, independently of the specification of some standard. Thus on the hidden parameter account, a consequence is that the relevant claims will be true, if at all, only relative to some parameter.

This particular approach to relativism is often expressed in explicitly linguistic terms and is favored by philosophers interested in the semantic dimensions of relativism.

The three approaches outlined here are compatible and sometimes complementary. Moreover, as we shall see, since various subdivisions of relativism appearing in table 1 could, with appropriate modification, be expressed as claims about the truth of sentences falling in a particular domain, then the hidden predicate approach is applicable to them as well. The claim is that all beliefs, regardless of their subject matter, are true only relative to a framework or parameter. Local relativists, by contrast, limit their claim of relativization to self-contained areas of discourse, e.

It is worth noting that local relativisms, typically, are endorsed on the basis of philosophical considerations connected to the kinds of features that are claimed to be relative e.

Global relativism, by contrast, seems to be motivated not so much by considerations about particular features, but by more general considerations about truth itself. As we will see, global relativism is open to the charge of inconsistency and self-refutation, for if all is relative, then so is relativism. Local relativism is immune from this type of criticism, as it need not include its own statement in the scope of what is to be relativized.

Unsurprisingly, local rather than global relativism is much more common within contemporary debates. A further distinction is made between weak and strong forms of relativism.

Strong relativism is the claim that one and the same belief or judgment may be true in one context e. Weak relativism is the claim that there may be beliefs or judgments that are true in one framework but not true in a second simply because they are not available or expressible in the second. Williams argues that certain concepts are only available to people who live a particular form of life. Truths that require these concepts for their formulation are expressible only in languages whose speakers take part in that particular form of life.

Such truths need not be true in a relativized sense—true relative to some parameters, false relative to others; rather, such truths are perspectival: real but visible only from a certain angle, i. Interest in relativism as a philosophical doctrine goes back to ancient Greece.

In more recent decades, however, relativism has also proven popular not only as a philosophical position but also as an idea underwriting a normative—ethical and political-outlook. A number of philosophical considerations as well as socio-historical developments explain the enduring interest in and the more recent popularity of relativism.

The mere fact of empirical diversity does not lead to relativism, but, relativism as a philosophical doctrine, has often been taken as a natural position to adopt in light of empirical diversity, in part, because relativism helps to make sense of such diversity without the burden of explaining who is in error. Descriptive relativism, an empirical and methodological position adopted by social anthropologists, relies on ethnographic data to highlight the paucity of universally agreed upon norms, values and explanatory frameworks.

From polygamy to cannibalism, from witchcraft to science we find major differences between the worldviews and outlooks of individuals and groups. Descriptive relativism is often used as the starting point for philosophical debates on relativism in general and cultural relativism in particular. The observed radical differences among cultures, it is argued, show the need for a relativistic assessment of value systems and conceptual commitments. Some anti-relativist universalists, on the other hand, argue that underlying the apparent individual and cultural differences, there are some core commonalities to all belief systems and socio-cultural outlooks e.

The anti-relativist may concede the point and insist that where such disagreements exist, at most one view is correct and the rest mistaken. But in so far as we are reluctant to impute widespread and systematic error to other cultures, or to our own, relativism remains an attractive option.

There is not only a marked diversity of views on questions of right and wrong, truth and falsehood, etc. There are instances of long-standing disagreement, such that the disputants are very plausibly talking about the same subject matter thus avoiding incommensurability and genuinely disagreeing with each other; and yet, no amount of information and debate enables them or us to resolve the disagreement.

And moreover, in such cases, it can seem that neither side seems to have made any obvious mistake see, e. If well-informed, honest and intelligent people are unable to resolve conflicts of opinion, we should, some relativists argue, accept that all parties to such disputes could be right and their conflicting positions have equal claims to truth, each according to their own perspective or point of view.

Many relativistically inclined philosophers, e. When people disagree at least one of them is making a mistake or is failing to believe what he or she ought to believe given his or her cognitive aims. Relativism accordingly offers a revisionary account of what it means to disagree e. According to Rovane, relativism is motivated by the existence of truths that cannot be embraced together, not because they contradict and hence disagree with each other but because they are not universal truths.

The example Rovane gives is conflict between a belief that deference to parents is morally obligatory in Indian traditionalist sense and the belief that it is not morally obligatory in the American individualist sense. Each belief is true within its particular ethical framework but the two beliefs cannot be conjoined or embraced together. The underlying thought, for Rovane, is that not all truth-value-bearers are in logical relations to one another, that there are many noncomprehensive bodies of truths that cannot be conjoined.

What the two approaches have in common is the claim that truth and justification are plural, that there could be more than one correct account of how things stand in at least some domains and their correctness has to be decided relative to a framework of context of assessment. Additionally, the relativistically inclined find further support for their position in the contention that there is no meta-justification of our evaluative or normative systems, that all justifications have to start and end somewhere see Sankey and and that there are no higher-order or meta-level standards available for adjudicating clashes between systems in a non-question begging way.

Steven Hales, for instance, argues that faced with disagreement and given non-neutrality, relativism is the most viable non-skeptical conclusion to draw Hales 98; Similar considerations apply to attempts to anchor beliefs on secure foundations.

Various intellectual developments, leading to loss of old certainties in the scientific and social arena have strengthened the appeal of this point. The relativists often argue that justifications are not only perspectival but also interest-relative and there is no neutral or objective starting ground for any of our beliefs see Seidel ; Carter ch. According to the underdetermination thesis, incompatible theories can be consistent with available evidence. Relativism threatens whenever conflicting theories or views appear to have equal claim to truth or justification.

The relativistically inclined use underdetermination to claim that evidence could be brought to justify opposing explanations and justification. The underdetermination thesis is also used to highlight the absence of neutral starting points for our beliefs. Choices between incompatible but equally well-supported rival theories, it is argued, are often made based on interests and local preferences rather than neutral universal grounds. Relativists argue that beliefs and values get their justification or truth only relative to specific epistemic systems or practices see Kusch forthcoming.

Strong support for this view has come from social scientists and cultural theorist who focus on the socio-cultural determinants of human beliefs and actions. The social sciences, from their very inception, were hospitable to relativism.

Other social scientists, under the influence of Karl Marx — , Max Weber — , and Wilhelm Dilthey — , have given credence to the idea that human beliefs and actions could be understood and evaluated only relative to their social and economic background and context cf.

Beliefs, desires and actions, the argument goes, are never independent of a background of cultural presuppositions, interests and values. We cannot step out of our language, culture and socio-historical conditions to survey reality from an Archimedean vantage point. Context-dependence is also used to explain empirical observations of diversity in beliefs and values; different social contexts, the argument goes, give rise to differing, possibly incompatible norms and values.

Advocates of relativism, particularly outside philosophical circles, often cite tolerance as a key normative reason for becoming a relativist. On this rationale, all ways of life and cultures are worthy of respect in their own terms, and it is a sign of unacceptable ethnocentrism to presume that we could single out one outlook or point of view as objectively superior to others.

Anti-relativists find this normative advocacy of relativism unconvincing for two key kinds of reasons. Some anti-relativists e. Others argue that if all values are relative then tolerance and maximizing freedom are valuable only to those who have already embraced them. Relativists counter that they are not defending a global version of relativism regarding all truths and justification but local versions concerning the ethics and politics of belief and the usefulness of relativism in our attempt to become better, or at least more flexible and less dogmatic, thinkers and more tolerant citizens e.

The anti-relativists counter-argue that even if we grant that political tolerance is an important value, and that accepting relativism would promote it, we should never adopt philosophical views about the nature of truth or justification simply because of their assumed good moral or political consequences. Second, and more importantly: political toleration does not require the strong doctrine of philosophical relativism.

As Knobe and Nichols point out, simply being made aware of radically different view points can lead to a:. A separate strand of argument connecting tolerance and relativism has appealed to the claimed virtues of relativism as a kind of philosophical stance e. The idea that a relativistic stance involves the manifesting of intellectually beneficial attitudes has been championed by, along with Bloor, Feyerabend and Code , the latter of whom have emphasised the value of emancipatory thinking, e.

Baghramian , for instance, has suggested that even if we grant that a relativist stance aligns with a cluster of intellectually virtuous dispositions in thinking, the stance also has the consequence of encouraging several corresponding vices, including intellectual insouciance e.

John Grote was probably the first to employ it when in Exploratio Philosophica he wrote:. The notion of the mask over the face of nature is…. Grote I. Krug []: Protagoras of Abdera c. Each thing appears phainesthai to me, so it is for me, and as it appears to you, so it is for you—you and I each being a man. Theaetetus a 6—8. For instance, the same wind could be cold to one person and hot to another. As Burnyeat b: notes, Sextus Empiricus thought—though Burnyeat thinks mistakenly—that the Protagorean measure doctrine was to be understood as the subjectivist thesis that every appearance is true simpliciter.

And so this radical subjectivist interpretation, regardless of whether it is accurate, is as Sextus had thought, untenable. However, Plato also ascribes a social or ethical dimension to Protagorean relativism which seem to go beyond individualistic subjectivism. In Theaetetus a 2—6 he says. In such matters, neither any individual nor any city can claim superior wisdom. Sextus Empiricus PH I Glimpses of relativistic thinking were in evidence in Boethius — see Marenbon as well as in the double truth doctrine, or the view that religion and philosophy are separate and at times conflicting sources of truth, originally found in Averroes — and the 13 th century Latin Averroists.

However, the dominant belief in a singular and absolute revealed truth within a Christian framework, on the whole, made the medieval period inhospitable to relativism. There was a renewed interest in both relativism and skepticism at the inception of modern philosophy inspired, in part, by Latin translations of Sextus Empiricus in the 16 th century.

His advocacy of toleration, even for the cannibal, paved the way for not only the acceptance but the valorization of idealized versions of alien creeds and distant cultures by Enlightenment figures such as Rousseau — , Voltaire — , Diderot — , Montesquieu — and Condorcet — , who in turn, were instrumental in establishing an intellectual climate hospitable to cultural relativism.

Diderot accordingly opposes the European mission of civilizing the natives, and despite his belief in a common human nature, he advocates the relativistic sounding maxim to.

Put on the costume of the country you visit, but keep the suit of clothes you will need to go home in. Diderot []: in Baghramian Discussions of relativism in the 19 th century had two sources see Gardiner On the one hand, figures from the so-called Counter-Enlightenment, a philosophical movement which arose in the late 18 th century and the early 19 th century in opposition to the Enlightenment, Johann Georg Hamann — , Johann Gottfried Herder — , Wilhelm von Humboldt — emphasized the diversity of languages and customs and their role in shaping human thought.

Furthermore, the rules of rationality are embedded within language, which in turn, is governed by local norms of custom and use Hamann []. Relativism ensues because languages and their rules of rationality vary a great deal. Herder, on the other hand, not only railed against the rational, universalizing and science-oriented ethos of the Enlightenment but, much like later relativists, also argued that different nations and epochs have their distinct preferences in ethical and aesthetics matters as well as their varied conceptions of truth and we are not in a position to adjudicate between them Herder [ —].

The Counter Enlightenment had a significant influence on Hegel, Nietzsche, and Dilthey, who in turn have shaped relativistic thinking in certain strands of continental philosophy, postmodernism and cultural studies.

And indeed, Nietzsche is possibly the single most influential voice in shaping relativistic sensibilities in 20 th century continental philosophy. His declaration that all human conceptions and descriptions, including those advanced by scientists, are. The end of the 19 th century witnessed the emergence of yet another strand of relativism motivated by empirical-psychological and physiological interpretations of Kantian categories. The view, known as species relativism , and defended by neo-Kantian psychologists such as Theodore Lipps — , holds that the rules of logic are products of the human mind and psychology and therefore may be unique to the human species; different species could have and use different logical principles.

Logic in this approach is identified with the actual thinking processes of individuals or communities and its authority is seen to be local, or relative to the practices of particular epistemic groupings. But Frege and Husserl argued that with such relativization we would lose the ability to distinguish between reasoning correctly and merely seeming to do so. Gilbert Harman is among the philosophers to use Einsteinian relativity as a model for philosophical versions of relativism.

He says:. An object can have one mass in relation to one such framework and a different mass in relation to another. I am going to argue for a similar claim about moral right and wrong. Harman 3. It is however worth noting that Einstein did not think that the Theory of Relativity supported relativism in ethics or epistemology because, although in his model simultaneity and sameness of place are relative to reference frames, the physical laws expressing such relativity are constant and universal and hence in no sense relative.

The different strands of the intellectual genealogy of relativism have shaped a variety of relativistic doctrines. Relativism is discussed under a variety of headings some of which have been more prominent in recent philosophical and cultural debates. Public debates about relativism often revolve around the frequently cited but unclear notion of cultural relativism. The idea that norms and values are born out of conventions can be traced back to the Greek historian Herodotus c.

Franz Boas, responsible for the founding of social anthropology in the U. The data of ethnology prove that not only our knowledge but also our emotions are the result of the form of our social life and of the history of the people to whom we belong.

Boas Since those early days, social anthropologists have come to develop more nuanced approaches to cultural relativism see for instance Geertz ; however, its core tenet, a claim to the equal standing of all cultural perspectives and values which co-vary with their cultural and social background, has remained constant.

Cultural relativists justify their position by recourse to a combination of empirical, conceptual and normative considerations:. Claims a — d are open to a variety of objections. Some anthropologists and biologists have argued against the empirical assumption of the variability of cultures and have disputed its extent.

Kinship, death and its attendant rituals of mourning, birth, the experience of empathy, expressions of sympathy and fear, and the biological needs that give rise to these, are some of the constant elements of human experience that belie the seeming diversity reported by ethnographers Brown Moreover, Moody-Adams , among others, has argued that cultures are not integrated wholes that could determine uni-directionally the beliefs and experiences of their members; they are porous, riddled with inconsistencies and amenable to change.

Finally, d is under pressure from the very relativism it advocates. An influential form of descriptive cultural relativism owes its genesis to linguistics. In the case of the Hopi, the claim was that their language imposes a conception of time very different from that of the speakers of the Indo-European languages.

However, the empirical work by the psychologists Berlin and Key and later by Eleanor Rosch pointed to the universality of color terms.

The linguistic theories of Noam Chomsky regarding the universality of grammar were also widely taken to have discredited linguistic relativity.

Similar claims have been made about emotions, object representation, and memory. Historical relativism, or historicism, is the diachronic version of cultural relativism. Historicism originated in reaction to the universalist tendencies of the Enlightenment but proved most influential in the social sciences, particularly in the hands of 19 th century theorists such as Karl Marx and Max Weber.

Karl Mannheim, to whom we owe the sub-discipline of sociology of knowledge, pronounced that historicism is a significant intellectual force that epitomizes our worldview Weltanschauung. The historicist principle not only organizes, like an invisible hand, the work of the cultural sciences Geisteswissenschaften , but also permeates everyday thinking.

Mannheim [] Conceptual relativism is a narrowly delineated form of relativism where ontology, or what exists, rather than ethical and epistemic norms, is relativized to conceptual schemes, scientific paradigms, or categorical frameworks. In this sense, conceptual relativism is often characterized as a metaphysical doctrine rather than as variant of epistemic or cultural relativism. The underlying rationale for this form of relativism is the anti-realist thesis that the world does not present itself to us ready-made or ready-carved; rather we supply different, and at times incompatible, ways of categorizing and conceptualizing it.

Reflection on the connections between mind and the world, rather than empirical observations of historic and cultural diversity, is the primary engine driving various forms of conceptual relativism, but data from anthropology and linguistics are also used in its support. The conceptual relativist adds, as Kant did not, that human beings may construct the real in different ways thanks to differences in language or culture. In the 20 th century, a variety of positions sympathetic to conceptual relativism were developed.

But his thesis of the indeterminacy of translation makes the stronger claim that different incompatible manuals of translation, or conceptual schemes, can account for one and the same verbal behavior and the indeterminacy resides at the level of facts rather than our knowledge, a position that leads to unavoidable ontological relativity. Sider According to Putnam, our most basic metaphysical categories, e.

What counts as an object itself, he argues, is determined by and hence is relative to the ontological framework we opt for. The key difficulty facing conceptual relativism is that of formulating the position in a coherent but non-trivial manner. Trivial versions allow that the world can be described in different ways, but make no claims to the incompatibility of these descriptions. The charge of incoherence arises from the claim that there could be genuinely conflicting and equally true accounts or descriptions of one and the same phenomenon.

As Putnam puts it:. The suggestion … is that what is by commonsense standards the same situation can be described in many different ways, depending on how we use the words. Putnam The puzzle is to explain how both the Carnapian and mereological answers to the one and same question could be correct and yet mutually incompatible, for unless we abandon the most fundamental law of logic, the law of non-contradiction, we cannot deem one and the same proposition true and not true.

Relativists respond that both answers are correct, each relative to the conceptual scheme it invokes. So, once we accept the insight that there is no Archimedean vantage point for choosing among conflicting frameworks, we no longer face a genuine contradiction.

The response invokes, often implicitly, a relativized conception of truth, which as we shall see below, faces its own difficulties. Relativism about truth, or alethic relativism , at its simplest, is the claim that what is true for one individual or social group may not be true for another, and there is no context-independent vantage point to adjudicate the matter.

What is true or false is always relative to a conceptual, cultural, or linguistic framework. For instance, relativism about logic may be restated as a view according to which the standing of logical truths including truths about consequence relations is relative to cultures or cognitive schemes.

Ethical relativism can be seen as the claim that the truth of ethical judgments, if such truths exist, is relative to context or culture. If truth is to be seen as equally applicable to all areas of discourse and also unitary, rather than domain specific or plural, then alethic relativism is not only a strong form of global relativism but it also entails the denial of the possibility of more local forms of relativism because all localized relativistic claims are also attempts at relativizing truth seemingly in a particular domain of discourse.

For instance, should relative truth be understood as a modification on an already familiar strategy for thinking about truth e. MacFarlane ch.

The strongest and most persistent charge leveled against all types of relativism, but global alethic relativism in particular, is the accusation of self-refutation.

Here is for instance Harvey Siegel:. This incoherence charge is by far the most difficult problem facing the relativist. It is worth noting that attempts to overcome the problem by appealing to the notion of relative truth appear not to succeed. Many versions of relativism rely on such a notion, but it is very difficult to make sense of it.

Siegel Therefore, Protagoras must believe that his own doctrine is false see Theaetetus : a—c. On this view, Plato begs the question on behalf of an absolutist conception of truth Burnyeat a: Protagoras, the relativists counter, could indeed accept that his own doctrine is false for those who accept absolutism but continue believing that his doctrine is true for him. He could also try to persuade others to become the sort of thinker for whom relativism is true without being entangled in self-contradiction.

Such an effort at persuasions, however, could involve Protagoras in a performative contradiction as the relativist cannot assume that her arguments are good for persuading others. Ordinarily, the very act of defending a philosophical position commits us to the dialectical move of attempting to convince our interlocutors of the superior value of what we are arguing for.

The relativist cannot make such a commitment and therefore his attempts to persuade others to accept his position may be pragmatically self-refuting. The relativist can avoid the standard charge of self-refutation by accepting that relativism cannot be proven true in any non-relative sense— viz. In other words, if Protagoras really believes in relativism why would he bother to argue for it?

This form of alethic relativism allows for argument and persuasion among people who initially disagree, for despite their disagreement they may share or come to share a framework. Protagoras may, on this reinterpretation, be trying to persuade his interlocutor that if she were to reason cogently by her own standards from their shared framework, she would accept relativism. However, it is not clear how the relativist could share a framework with the absolutist on the nature of truth or what argumentative strategies he can use to convert the absolutist without presupposing a shared relativist or absolutist conceptions of truth.

A second strand of the self-refutation argument focuses on the nature and role of truth. But the relativists reject the quick move that presupposes the very conception of truth they are at pains to undermine and have offered sophisticated approaches of defense. Shogenji for a criticism of Hales on this point. It has also been claimed that alethic relativism gives rise to what J.

One version of the argument, advanced most notably by Gareth Evans —63 , begins with the premise that a publicly shared distinction between correct and incorrect, and hence true and false, assertion is a necessary condition for coherent assertoric discourse.

As Evans puts it, a theory that. What should we aim at, or take others to be aiming at?. And if truth is relative, then there is no single shared definite aim for any given assertion see MacFarlane ch.

The relativists however, could respond that truth is relative to a group conceptual scheme, framework and they take speakers to be aiming a truth relative to the scheme that they and their interlocutors are presumed to share. The difficulty with this approach is that it seems to make communication across frameworks impossible. Such a response, however, will be answerable to the charge of incoherence raised by Donald Davidson against both alethic and conceptual relativism.

According to Davidson, the principle of charity—the assumption that other speakers by and large speak truly by our lights —is a pre-requisite of all interpretation. He takes this to imply that there could not be languages or conceptual schemes that we cannot in principle understand and interpret, in other words, if a system of signs L is not recognizable as a language by us then L is not a language. Languages are either inter-translatable and hence not radically different from ours, or incommensurable and beyond our ability to recognize them as languages Davidson The relativist, in effect, places other speakers and their languages beyond our recognitional reach and thereby undermines the initial claim that they could be radically different or incommensurable.

Claims to knowledge and justification have proven receptive to relativistic interpretations. Epistemic relativism is the thesis that cognitive norms that determine what counts as knowledge, or whether a belief is rational, justifiable, etc.

The three key assumptions underlying epistemic relativism are:. One crucial question facing epistemic relativism is how to identify and individuate alternative epistemic systems. A simple and quite commonly used example is the contrast between scientific and religious belief systems.

Boghossian has been criticized however for his characterization of epistemic relativism. And on this basis, Boghossian concludes that there is no coherent way to formulate the position because the relativist in formulating his position and setting up the opposition between two or more alternative non-convergent epistemic systems cannot but assume the universality of at least some epistemic principles, including deduction, induction, warrant through empirical evidence, etc.

Wright , our italics. Moreover, Wright argues, the epistemic relationist clause Boghossian includes in the kind of epistemic relativism he challenges betrays a failure to distinguish between i making a judgment in the light of certain standards and ii judging that those standards mandate that judgment.

Conceptions of rationality, and its key components of logic and justification, are some of the principles that are often used to differentiate between epistemic systems. Time Traveler for relativism The first known use of relativism was in See more words from the same year. Statistics for relativism Look-up Popularity. Style: MLA. English Language Learners Definition of relativism.

Get Word of the Day daily email! Test Your Vocabulary. Can you spell these 10 commonly misspelled words? Love words? Need even more definitions? Just between us: it's complicated. Ask the Editors 'Everyday' vs. The main genera of relativism can be distinguished according to the object they seek to relativize. Thus, forms of moral relativism assert the relativity of moral values; forms of epistemological relativism assert the relativity of knowledge.

These genera can then be broken down into distinct species by identifying the framework to which the object in question is being relativized. For example, moral subjectivism is that species of moral relativism that relativizes moral value to the individual subject. How controversial, and how coherent, these forms of relativism are will obviously vary according to what is being relativized to what, and in what manner. In contemporary philosophy, the most widely discussed forms of relativism are moral relativism , cognitive relativism , and aesthetic relativism.