While there are a bewildering number of types of relativism in the parent article, the most common by far is moral relativism, which is usually used as a slur against those who do not conform to general or specific ideologies.
The wiki also mentions moral relativism in a pejorative context.
Agreed. The Wikipedia article and other summaries always present a strawman that I've never heard anyone accept as their own position. Except for maybe politicians.
The steelman I would present: Moral Relativism is the belief that moral statements only make sense in the context of a "valuer" or thing that can perceive the goodness or badness of things. Absent a valuer, moral statements are under-specified or nonsensical.
Humans, animals, and anything with a self preservation instinct, all clearly seem to be valuers. There does not seem to be any evidence for the universe itself being a valuer.
The issue with most explanations of relativsm/subjectivism is they don't tie it back to intuitions about scientific knowledge. And so the reader is left confused, and rejects relativism because they have stronger intuitions about an objective reality.
Empiricism, taken most literally is, a relativist point of view. Your own consciousness is the only thing that must be real. If it appears that your percepts have predictable patterns, then so be it. Reliable prediction of future percepts is scientific knowledge to a relativist.
You may notice that there are other things in the environment (people) who also make predictions. In so far as they make similar predictions to you, that is what the realists call objective reality. But to the relativist, it's just a pattern of objects in perception, making predictions about perception.
The environment predicting itself, and agreeing with you, is realism to a relativist.
I agree most philosophy would benefit from being tied back to human experience in the material world, ‘touching grass’ so to speak.
I think Lakatos’ Research Programmes give a good structure for demarcating scientific knowledge from pseudoscience. And precisely because he provides a pragmatic method for how this should inform low level decisions about scientific funding bodies and what scientists choose to work on.
I think most people would reject his ideas because of the intuition you describe: scientists ‘feel’ like they ‘know’ their expert subject and so epistemological relativism feels dirty because they lose their delusion of objectivity. “I use fancy methods so I’m a ‘real’ scientist and my conclusions are scientific!”
I believe the issues in nutritional science, psychiatry and psychology (to name a few) are fundamentally because these sciences are hard to study, so researchers use sophisticated statistical methods to hide their lack of ‘true knowledge’ or epistemological uncertainty.
It’s why Lobotomies won a Nobel prize and all the major classes of psychiatric medication were discovered accidentally. It is a discipline made up of mostly degenerate research programmes but too much inertia to change track.
Well... they make utterances that you interpret as predictions, and do so more often than random chance would imply. You can impute prediction-making capabilities based on that, but hold out the possibility that the inference is incorrect.
It's not about utility. It's about putting knowledge on an unshakeable foundation.
You can live your life perfectly well without it. Most people do. But if you look too closely at how it actually works, you keep discovering unexpected inconsistencies. They don't actually matter until you try to definitively refute people saying dumb stuff and it turns out you actually can't.
You can just ignore the people saying dumb stuff and you'll do just fine. But there will always be a nagging wonder if maybe somehow they were right.
There are a lot of realists who spend some amount of their time arguing with other realists who believe contradictory things. Or doing mental gymnastics to convince themselves that their beliefs about morality are somehow objectively true, and other people's are objectively false.
Moral relativists waste less time doing this. Your own percept of morality, better and worse, good and bad, is as real/true as any other percept. Morality isn't any more or less than that.
It is quite hard to write about. Suppose you are defending the claim. Your conclusion that ‘All knowledge is relative’ inherently seems like a non-relative assertion of knowledge. ‘All knowledge is relative except this statement’ seems like cheating (can you say why this one is special without absolutes?). So you have to approach the conclusion obliquely at best.
You're exactly right. Making an objective claim that everything is relative is a performative contradiction...which is why the relativists are wrong. The objectivists are also wrong.
The truth is somewhere in the middle...which is why nobody has won the argument yet.
Particularly surprising in the case of Stirner because he was a friend of and contemporary of Marx (both Young Hegelians), who was writing extremely unreadable works at exactly the same time. Consider that they were all reacting to the least readable author in the modern cannon, Hegel
I’d add ‘For and Against Method’ in addition to / instead of ‘Against Method.’ I like FAAM because it compares Lakatos’ position to Feyerabend’s. It also has a jovial tone that made me smile a lot when reading it.
In the context of philosophy it's usually meant in contrast to objectivism. So a moral objectivist might say that there exist an objective set of universal morals that apply to everyone.
In contrast, a moral relativist might say that morality depends on the culture and that there is no universal set of morals.
There are shades in between as well.
When using the terms(relativism and objectivism) more generally, it means something like that dichotomy of "there exist an objective set of univeral X" vs. "there is no objective set of X".
Note that in other contexts these terms can have other meanings (notably Rand's Objectivism political philosophy means something quite different).
Isn't that just "conditional"? Saying "A depends on B" communicates more meaning than "A is relative to B". If someone says something is relative, I ask how, because otherwise it means very little.
FWIW, Galilean relativity aka Galilean invariance, the idea that Newton's laws are true in all inertial reference frames, predates that by a few centuries. But I'm not sure when they started using the word relativity for this.
Sure, it doesn't take long to explain the gist of Protagoras' Truth, because it is fairly bare bones. I'm not sure what the intent was to post this specific University of Reading link.
It's the kind of thing that is taught for a few minutes at the start of an intro course.
Because it’s useful. If Truth is relative, then we should approach the search for truth differently. These are classes of arguments that use ‘relative’ in this way, and it is useful to collect them together with the term ‘Relativism.’
I feel the same every time someone starts using terms without defining them. For an analogy, it’s like a page o’ code minus its dependencies. One should define the dependent terms if didactics is a concern, which in my opinion should always be. I guess this article is relativist on relativism, then?
More evidence for why I tell people that the Cogito was a massive mistake. You literally cannot even imagine ontology (being) without knowledge or "thought".
The problem is that the appearance of thinking is not thinking. You don't actually know for sure that you are thinking. P-zombies will gladly tell you "they think therefor they are".
My ontological foundation starts with my uniqueness, coming from the "creative nothing". Go read stirner or like dharmic philosophy for a non-cogitoist take on ontology.
The article's reference to Plato's discussion concerning Protagoras' doctrine that "Man is the measure of all things" (expounded in Protagoras' lost book, Truth) can be found in Plato's Theaetetus, beginning at 152.
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The wiki also mentions moral relativism in a pejorative context.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism
The steelman I would present: Moral Relativism is the belief that moral statements only make sense in the context of a "valuer" or thing that can perceive the goodness or badness of things. Absent a valuer, moral statements are under-specified or nonsensical.
Humans, animals, and anything with a self preservation instinct, all clearly seem to be valuers. There does not seem to be any evidence for the universe itself being a valuer.
Empiricism, taken most literally is, a relativist point of view. Your own consciousness is the only thing that must be real. If it appears that your percepts have predictable patterns, then so be it. Reliable prediction of future percepts is scientific knowledge to a relativist.
You may notice that there are other things in the environment (people) who also make predictions. In so far as they make similar predictions to you, that is what the realists call objective reality. But to the relativist, it's just a pattern of objects in perception, making predictions about perception.
The environment predicting itself, and agreeing with you, is realism to a relativist.
I think Lakatos’ Research Programmes give a good structure for demarcating scientific knowledge from pseudoscience. And precisely because he provides a pragmatic method for how this should inform low level decisions about scientific funding bodies and what scientists choose to work on.
I think most people would reject his ideas because of the intuition you describe: scientists ‘feel’ like they ‘know’ their expert subject and so epistemological relativism feels dirty because they lose their delusion of objectivity. “I use fancy methods so I’m a ‘real’ scientist and my conclusions are scientific!”
I believe the issues in nutritional science, psychiatry and psychology (to name a few) are fundamentally because these sciences are hard to study, so researchers use sophisticated statistical methods to hide their lack of ‘true knowledge’ or epistemological uncertainty.
It’s why Lobotomies won a Nobel prize and all the major classes of psychiatric medication were discovered accidentally. It is a discipline made up of mostly degenerate research programmes but too much inertia to change track.
You can live your life perfectly well without it. Most people do. But if you look too closely at how it actually works, you keep discovering unexpected inconsistencies. They don't actually matter until you try to definitively refute people saying dumb stuff and it turns out you actually can't.
You can just ignore the people saying dumb stuff and you'll do just fine. But there will always be a nagging wonder if maybe somehow they were right.
There are a lot of realists who spend some amount of their time arguing with other realists who believe contradictory things. Or doing mental gymnastics to convince themselves that their beliefs about morality are somehow objectively true, and other people's are objectively false.
Moral relativists waste less time doing this. Your own percept of morality, better and worse, good and bad, is as real/true as any other percept. Morality isn't any more or less than that.
The truth is somewhere in the middle...which is why nobody has won the argument yet.
The Unique and Its Propery by Max Stirner is extremely readable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ego_and_Its_Own
Particularly surprising in the case of Stirner because he was a friend of and contemporary of Marx (both Young Hegelians), who was writing extremely unreadable works at exactly the same time. Consider that they were all reacting to the least readable author in the modern cannon, Hegel
Does "relative" mean context dependent? Does it mean arbitrary? Something else? Nobody who uses this term seems to be in any hurry to clarify this.
I suspect it's more of a marketing term, hitchhiking on the prestige of Einstein, than a concrete position worth arguing about.
When using the terms(relativism and objectivism) more generally, it means something like that dichotomy of "there exist an objective set of univeral X" vs. "there is no objective set of X".
Note that in other contexts these terms can have other meanings (notably Rand's Objectivism political philosophy means something quite different).
It was quite a force during her life.
One of the most notable adherents was Alan Greenspan, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Most objective phenomena are relative to something else, eg., space.
'Relative' has no relevance to 'objective'
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/protagoras/#AllThinMeasMa...
Sure, it doesn't take long to explain the gist of Protagoras' Truth, because it is fairly bare bones. I'm not sure what the intent was to post this specific University of Reading link.
It's the kind of thing that is taught for a few minutes at the start of an intro course.
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Many deny the existence of truth. 'Relativism' refers at least to that position.
How can I rate the app in the absence of an OS context?
The problem is that the appearance of thinking is not thinking. You don't actually know for sure that you are thinking. P-zombies will gladly tell you "they think therefor they are".
My ontological foundation starts with my uniqueness, coming from the "creative nothing". Go read stirner or like dharmic philosophy for a non-cogitoist take on ontology.
How does one speak if not in terms of what exists?
Of course there isn't. It might be useful, pretty, conventional, etc. But there's no actual connection.
So let's just say All Form is Interpretation. Then the relativism is explicit.