Suppose it is because they believe that after death the souls of humans inhabit the bodies of animals, especially cows, so that a cow may be someone's grandmother. Now do we want to say that their values are different from ours? No; the difference lies elsewhere. The difference is in our belief systems, not in our values. We agree that we shouldn't eat Grandma; we simply disagree about whether the cow is or could be Grandma.
The point is that many factors work together to produce the customs of a society. The society's values are only one of them. Other matters, such as the religions and factual beliefs held by its members, and the physical circumstances in which they must live, are also important. We cannot conclude, then, merely because customs differ, that there is a disagreement about values. The difference in customs may be attributable to some other aspects of social life.
Thus there may be less disagreement about values than there appears to be. Consider again the Eskimos, who often kill perfectly normal infants, especially girls.
We do not approve of such things; a parent who killed a baby in our society would be locked up. Thus there appears to be a great difference in the values of our two cultures. But suppose we ask why the Eskimos do this. The explanation is not that they have less affection for their children or less respect for human life.
An Eskimo family will always protect its babies if conditions permit. But they live in a harsh environment, where food is in short supply. A fundamental postulate of Eskimos thought is: "Life is hard, and the margin of safety small:' A family may want to nourish its babies but be unable to do so. As in many "primitive" societies, Eskimo mothers will nurse their infants over a much longer period of time than mothers in our culture.
The child will take nourishment from its mother's breast for four years, perhaps even longer. So even in the best of times there are limits to the number of infants that one mother can sustain. Moreover, the Eskimos are a nomadic people—unable to farm, they must move about in search of food. Infants must be carried, and a mother can carry only one baby in her parka as she travels and goes about her outdoor work. Other family members help whenever they can.
Infant girls are more readily disposed of because, first, in this society the males are the primary food providers—they are the hunters, according to the traditional division of labor—and it is obviously important to maintain a sufficient number of food providers.
But there is an important second reason as well. Because the hunters suffer a high casualty rate, the adult men who die prematurely far outnumber the women who die early. Thus if male and female infants survived in equal numbers, the female adult population would greatly outnumber the male adult population.
Examining the available statistics, one writer concluded that "were it not for female infanticide…there would be approximately one-and-a-half times as many females in the average Eskimo local group as there are food-producing males.
So among the Eskimos, infanticide does not signal a fundamentally different attitude toward children. Instead, it is a recognition that drastic measures are sometimes needed to ensure the family's survival. Even then, however, killing the baby is not the first option considered. Adoption is common; childless couples are especially happy to take a more fertile couple's "surplus.
I emphasize this in order to show that the raw data of the anthropologists can be misleading; it can make the differences in values between cultures appear greater than they are. The Eskimos' values are not all that different from our values.
It is only that life forces upon them choices that we do not have to make. It should not be surprising that, despite appearances, the Eskimos are protective of their children. How could it be otherwise? How could a group survive that did not value its young? It is easy to see that, in fact, all cultural groups must protect their infants:.
Human infants are helpless and cannot survive if they are not given extensive care for a period of years. Therefore, if a group did not care for its young, the young would not survive, and the older members of the group would not be replaced. After a while the group would die out. Therefore, any cultural group that continues to exist must care for its young. Similar reasoning shows that other values must be more or less universal. Imagine what it would be like for a society to place no value at all on truth telling.
When one person spoke to another, there would be no presumption at all that he was telling the truth for he could just as easily be speaking falsely. Within that society, there would be no reason to pay attention to what anyone says. I ask you what time it is, and you say "Four o'clock:' But there is no presumption that you are speaking truly; you could just as easily have said the first thing that came into your head.
So I have no reason to pay attention to your answer; in fact, there was no point in my asking you in the first place. Communication would then be extremely difficult, if not impossible. And because complex societies cannot exist without communication among their members, society would become impossible. It follows that in any complex society there must be a presumption in favor of truthfulness.
There may of course be exceptions to this rule: There may be situations in which it is thought to be permissible to lie. Nevertheless, there will be exceptions to a rule that is in force in the society. Here is one further example of the same type. Could a society exist in which there was no prohibition on murder?
What would this be like? Suppose people were free to kill other people at will, and no one thought there was anything wrong with it. In such a "society," no one could feel secure. Everyone would have to be constantly on guard. People who wanted to survive would have to avoid other people as much as possible.
This would inevitably result in individuals trying to become as self-sufficient as possible— after all, associating with others would be dangerous. Society on any large scale would collapse. Of course, people might band together in smaller groups with others that they could trust not to harm them.
But notice what this means: They would be forming smaller societies that did acknowledge a rule against murder: The prohibition of murder, then, is a necessary feature of all societies. There is a general theoretical point here, namely, that there are some moral rules that all societies will have in common, because those rules are necessary for society to exist. The rules against lying and murder are two examples. And in fact, we do find these rules in force in all viable cultures.
Cultures may differ in what they regard as legitimate exceptions to the rules, but this disagreement exists against a background of agreement on the larger issues. Therefore, it is a mistake to overestimate the amount of difference between cultures. Not every moral rule can vary from society to society. In , a year-old girl named Fauziya Kassindja arrived at Newark International Airport and asked for asylum. She had fled her native country of Togo , a small west African nation, to escape what people there call excision.
Excision is a permanently disfiguring procedure that is sometimes called "female circumcision," although it bears little resemblance to the Jewish ritual. More commonly, at least in Western newspapers, it is referred to as "genital mutilation. In other instances, the practice is carried out by families living in cities on young women who desperately resist.
Fauziya Kassindja was the youngest of five daughters in a devoutly Muslim family. Her father, who owned a successful trucking business, was opposed to excision, and he was able to defy the tradition because of his wealth. His first four daughters were married without being mutilated. But when Fauziya was 16, he suddenly died. Fauziya then came under the authority of his father, who arranged a marriage for her and prepared to have her excised.
Fauziya was terrified, and her mother and oldest sister helped her to escape. Her mother, left without resources, eventually had to formally apologize and submit to the authority of the patriarch she had offended. Meanwhile, in America , Fauziya was imprisoned for two years while the authorities decided what to do with her. She was finally granted asylum, but not before she became the center of a controversy about how foreigners should regard the cultural practices of other peoples.
A series of articles in the New York Times encouraged the idea that excision is a barbaric practice that should be condemned. Other observers were reluctant to be so judgmental—live and let live, they said; after all, our practices probably seem just as strange to them. Suppose we are inclined to say that excision is bad.
Would we merely be applying the standards of our own culture? If Cultural Relativism is correct, that is all we can do, for there is no cultural-neutral moral standard to which we may appeal. Is that true? There is, of course, a lot that can be said against the practice of excision. Excision is painful and it results in the permanent loss of sexual pleasure.
Its short-term effects include hemorrhage, tetanus, and septicemia. Sometimes the woman dies. Long term effects include chronic infection, scars that hinder walking, and continuing pain. Why, then, has it become a widespread social practice?
It is not easy to say. Excision has no obvious social benefits. Unlike Eskimo infanticide, it is not necessary for the group's survival. Nor is it a matter of religion. Excision is practiced by groups with various religions, including Islam and Christianity, neither of which commend it.
Nevertheless, a number of reasons are given in its defense. Women who are incapable of sexual pleasure are said to be less likely to be promiscuous; thus there will be fewer unwanted pregnancies in unmarried women. Moreover, wives for whom sex is only a duty are less likely to be unfaithful to their husbands; and because they will not be thinking about sex, they will be more attentive to the needs of their husbands and children.
Husbands, for their part, are said to enjoy sex more with wives who have been excised. The women's own lack of enjoyment is said to be unimportant. Men will not want unexcised women, as they are unclean and immature. And above all, it has been done since antiquity, and we may not change the ancient ways.
It would be easy, and perhaps a bit arrogant, to ridicule these arguments. But we may notice an important feature of this whole line of reasoning: it attempts to justify excision by showing that excision is beneficial— men, women, and their families are all said to be better off when women are excised. Thus we might approach this reasoning, and excision itself, by asking which is true: Is excision, on the whole, helpful or harmful?
Here, then, is the standard that might most reasonably be used in thinking about excision: We may ask whether the practice promotes or hinders the welfare of the people whose lives are affected by it. And, as a corollary, we may ask if there is an alternative set of social arrangements that would do a better job of promoting their welfare. Multiculturalism The main idea of multiculturalism is the equal value of all cultures i.
However, multiculturalism does not mean cultures as normally understood but rather as biologically defined i. Multiculturalism, a politicized form of cultural relativism, rejects the idea that there are general truths, norms, or rules with respect to both knowledge and morals. Gone are the Enlightenment beliefs in objectivity, reason and evidence, and principles of freedom and justice that apply equally to all individuals. Multiculturalists dismiss the significance of Western civilization by claiming that Western traditions of elitism, racism, and sexism are the cause of most of our current problems.
They accept a Romantic view of human nature as beneficent and benign until it was corrupted by flawed Western ideology and culture. There are many closed systems of perception, thought, and feeling each affiliated with some biologically defined group.
At one time, truth was viewed as transcendent, fixed, and unchanging. Epistemological egalitarianism has accompanied the loss of transcendence. Each group of persons now is thought to have an equal right to make truth claims. Truth is now thought to be a constructed cultural product that is immanent in each individual culture or subgroup.
For the multiculturalist, truth only exists by consensus within each biologically defined group. Multiculturalism is anti-individualistic in the sense that it expects each person to agree with the perceptions, thoughts, and judgments of his group in order for his own perceptions, thoughts, and judgments to be legitimate. The victim mentality is both a cause and effect of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism promotes a culture of victims who have a perpetual claim on society and the government.
The result is the division of society into political interest groups with conflicting demands that cannot all be met. Educational proposals from multiculturalists attempt to inculcate in students the idea that Western classical liberal order is, in fact, the most oppressive order of all times. As a result, people are taught to view themselves as victims. This perspective is based on the relativistic assumption that because all cultures are inherently equal, differences in wealth, power, and accomplishments between cultures are, for the most part, due to oppression.
Thus, in order to establish cultural equality, multiculturalists emphasizing non-Western virtues and Western oppression dismiss the illiberal traditions of other cultures and attack the ideas of a common culture based on an intellectual, moral, and artistic legacy derived from the Greeks and the Bible.
There would be no harm in multiculturalism if the term simply meant that we should acknowledge and teach truths about many cultures. It is admirable to teach students both the noblest aspects of various cultures and of their failings. In actual fact, there are both laudable and condemnable aspects of all cultures. Once it is recognized that different cultures exhibit varying degrees of good and evil, it becomes appropriate to inquire which culture exhibits the best characteristics on an overall basis.
Some cultures are better than others: reason is better than force; a free society is superior to slavery; and productivity is better than stagnation. Multiculturalists argue that education can build the self-esteem of minority students by presenting non-Western cultures in a favorable light in order to compensate for historical and curricular injustices, thereby restoring cultural parity between ethnic groups.
Replacing education with therapy, the multiculturalist attempts to enhance self-esteem by teaching the students of oppressed cultures to be proud of their particular ancestry or race. When education is turned into therapy, the likely result is to teach history not to ascertain truth but to empower i. The result is the introduction of distortions, half-truths, fabrications, and myths into the curriculum in order to make students from certain groups feel good.
In addition, multiculturalists denounce the emphasis in American schools on American history and culture and western civilization. Some even portray western civilization and Americans as evil and ideas such as reason and objective truth as Eurocentric and patriarchal for the feminist biases with the purpose of exploiting oppressed cultures.
Academic standards of excellence are of no use to the multiculturalist because they are simply means through which the dominant culture oppresses minority cultures. Students are instructed that there are no objective merits or failings of theories, arguments, policies, works of art, and literature, etc.
Instead, they are only valorizations of power that require deconstruction in order to reveal their true nature as devices of repression. It is Marxism that has provided multiculturalism with its rationale and concepts e. The goal of the multiculturalist is to change the United States from a culturally assimilated society to an unassimilated multicultural society with a wide range of cultures and subcultures accorded equal status.
Multiculturalism promotes quotas rather than competition, allocating resources rather than earning them, and a cabinet that looks like America instead of one that has an adequate background to do the required job. Multiculturalists fail to see that the diversity methods they use to find and create diversity will, in fact, divide the country. In the name of diversity and multiculturalism many Americans are taught to base their sense of self in their racial or ethnic identity.
Accordingly, each person is destined to interpret events according to the sentiments of his racial group. Such an attack on reason creates a herd mentality by which people thoughtlessly follow those who proclaim themselves to be the leaders. Racial preference is the common ingredient of the diversity movement i. Proponents do not realize that racism cannot be cured with more racism. When people are taught to think in racial terms instead of according to individual merit and character, and groups are identified as having special status e.
Obviously, the rational and proper approach is to evaluate candidates based on individual merit. This simply means appraising candidates based on their possession of relevant knowledge and skills, their willingness to exert the requisite effort, and their possession of a good moral character. The diversity movement states that its purpose is to eradicate racism and produce tolerance of differences.
This is a pretense. A person cannot teach that identity is determined by race and then expect people to view each other as individuals.
People have competent minds, efficacious intellects, and free wills that enable them to be judged as individuals. A person cannot inherit moral virtue or moral vice. Think of the absurdity of recent proposals for apologies and compensation on behalf of America and the U. A person who is a member of a certain race cannot legitimately be blamed for the deeds of other members of that race unless people are simply interchangeable cogs within a racial collective.
Individuals should be judged based on their own actions. They should be rewarded on their own merits and should not be compelled to apologize or pay for acts committed by others, simply because those others are of the same race. Individualism is the only acceptable alternative to racism. It is essential to recognize that each person is a sovereign entity with the power of independent judgment and choice.
Political Correctness Multiculturalism leads to politically correct language. Such language must be consistent with multiculturalist principles. This infatuation with sensitivity has spread throughout the media and academia, leading to the creation of feel-good euphemisms which part with accuracy and unambiguity in the interest of feeling and sympathy.
Advocates of political correctness attempt to homogenize our language and thought not only to enhance the self-esteem of minorities, women, and beneficiaries of the welfare state but also to preserve the moral image of the welfare state itself. One approach to reaching this goal is to eliminate disparaging, discriminatory, or offensive words and phrases and the substitutions of harmless vocabulary at the expense of economy, clarity, and logic.
Another approach is to deconstruct a word or phrase into its component parts, treat the component parts as wholes, and focus on secondary meanings of the component parts. For example, the term mankind is said to be exclusive, misleading, and biased when it is employed to refer to both men and women. The politically correct fail to understand that language is the result of an evolved social process that results in a systemic order achieved without the use of a deliberate overall plan.
Language simply arises out of accidents, experiences, and historical borrowings and corruptions of other languages. No one intended to exclude women when generic terms like he or mankind were used.
With respect to human beings, the male gender was used to denote the species. On the other hand, both countries and ships are referred to as she. Using he or she or him or her simply clutters the language and conveys no further information. However, such use does imply that those who use the masculine terms hold hostile or exclusionary thoughts toward women! What counts as a correct account of logical consequence and validity or even the choice of logical vocabulary are relative to the system of logic that embed and justify these accounts and choices.
See Steinberger for a useful survey. Stewart Shapiro is probably the most vocal defender of this approach. His argument for relativism about logic is similar to defences of relativism in other areas where intractable differences in a particular domain and an inability to reconcile them are used as the motivators for relativism.
The claim is that there are different conceptions of logical consequence. Therefore, it does not make sense to think that there is a uniquely correct conception of validity and logical consequence. Different conceptions can be legitimate in so far as each is internally consistent and also non-trivial in the sense that it is the basis a workable mathematical systems, i. Intuitionism and fuzzy logic are notable examples. Choices between different logical vocabularies also can lead to a relativized conception of logic in so far a these vocabularies play a decisive role in generating different relations of logical consequence.
For further discussion, see the entry on logical pluralism. Pronouncements such as. In so far as their only recourse to [the] world is through what they see and do, we may want to say that after a revolution scientists are responding to a different world Kuhn []: The very ease and rapidity with which astronomers saw new things when looking at old objects with old instruments may make us wish to say that, after Copernicus, astronomers lived in a different world Kuhn []: Although Kuhn stepped back from such radical relativism, his views gave currency to relativistic interpretations of science though see Sankey Relativism about science is motivated by considerations arising from the methodology and history of science Baghramian Physical theories can be at odds with each other and yet compatible with all possible data even in the broadest possible sense.
In a word, they can be logically incompatible and empirically equivalent. Relativists about science have argued that only with the addition of auxiliary hypotheses could the scientist choose between various theories and that such auxiliary hypotheses are colored by socially and historically grounded norms as well as by personal and group interests.
According to Feyerabend, underdetermination ultimately demonstrates that. Larry Laudan usefully lists the ways underdetermination is used to motivate relativism or its proximate doctrines. Lakatos and Feyerabend have taken the underdetermination of theories to justify the claim that the only difference between empirically successful and empirically unsuccessful theories lies in the talents and resources of their respective advocates i.
Hesse and Bloor have claimed that underdetermination shows the necessity for bringing noncognitive, social factors into play in explaining the theory choices of scientists on the grounds that methodological and evidential considerations alone are demonstrably insufficient to account for such choices. Collins, and several of his fellow sociologists of knowledge, have asserted that underdetermination lends credence to the view that the world does little if anything to shape or constrain our beliefs about it.
Laudan The key issue is that both the relativists and the anti-relativists could agree that the totality of evidence available does not prove the truth of any given theory. But the anti-relativists responds to this fact of underdetermination by pointing out that the we have good reasons for embracing the best theory available and moreover that there are indeed objective facts about the world, even if we are not in possession of them.
The relativist, in contrast, argues that there are many, equally acceptable principles for accepting theories, all on the basis of evidence available, but such theories could result in very different verdicts. They also argue that in the absence of any strong epistemic grounds for accepting the existence of absolute facts in any given domain, we have no grounds, other than some kind of metaphysical faith, for thinking that there are such facts.
Relativism about science is also influenced by the related doctrine that all observations are theory-laden. But some relativists about science offer a particularly extreme form of the doctrine of the widely accepted thesis of theory-ladenness. Feyerabend, for instance, goes so far as to argue that different systems of classification can result in perceptual objects that are not easily comparable. Relativists about science also point to the prevalence of both synchronic and diachronic disagreement among scientists as a justification of their view.
Looking at the history of science, Kuhn and his followers argued that Aristotelian physics presupposes a totally different conception of the universe compared to Newtonian physics; the same is true of Einsteinian physics compared to its predecessors. Moreover, these differing conceptions may be incommensurable in the sense that they are not readily amenable to comparison or inter-theoretical translation.
There are also strong and unresolved disagreements between scientists working contemporaneously. The many different interpretations of quantum mechanics are a case in point. Anti-relativist philosophers of science are often willing to concede all three points above, but insist that they do not, singly or jointly, justify the claim that scientific knowledge, in any philosophically interesting sense, is relative to its context of production.
The success of science, both theoretical and applied, indicates that progress does take place. Fallibilism, the view that all scientific claims are provisional and liable to fail, they argue, is sufficient for dealing with difficulties arising from considerations of underdetermination and theory-ladenness of observations.
Relativism, with its attendant denial that there could be objective and universal scientific truths or knowledge exacts too high a price for dealing with these allegedly troublesome features of the methodology and history of science.
Social constructionism is a particularly radical form of conceptual relativism with implications for our understanding of the methodology and subject matter of the sciences. A crucial difference between scientific realists and constructionists is that whereas the realists see nature and society as the causes that explain the outcomes of scientific enquiry, for the constructionists the activity of.
Knorr-Cetina It may be argued that the view, if taken literally, entails a counter-intuitive form of backward causation to the effect that, for instance, the scientific facts about dinosaur anatomy 50 million years ago were caused in the 20 th century when a scientific consensus about dinosaur anatomy was formed see Boghossian a.
But constructionism, at least in its most extreme form, accepts this consequence, insisting that there are indeed no facts except for socially constructed ones, created and modified at particular times and places courtesy of prevailing theoretical and conceptual frameworks. Moral or ethical relativism is simultaneously the most influential and the most reviled of all relativistic positions. Detractors think it undermines the very possibility of ethics and signals either confused thinking or moral turpitude.
Briefly stated, moral relativism is the view that moral judgments, beliefs about right and wrong, good and bad, not only vary greatly across time and contexts, but that their correctness is dependent on or relative to individual or cultural perspectives and frameworks.
Moral subjectivism is the view that moral judgments are judgments about contingent and variable features of our moral sensibilities. Moral relativism proper, on the other hand, is the claim that facts about right and wrong vary with and are dependent on social and cultural background. Understood in this way, moral relativism could be seen as a sub-division of cultural relativism. Values may also be relativized to frameworks of assessment, independent of specific cultures or social settings.
Moral relativism, like most relativistic positions, comes in various forms and strengths. It is customary to distinguish between descriptive or empirical, prescriptive or normative, and meta-ethical versions of moral relativism.
These views in turn are motivated by a number of empirical and philosophical considerations similar to those introduced in defense of cultural relativism. The purported fact of ethical diversity, the claim that there are no universally agreed moral norms or values, conjoined with the intractability of the arguments about them, are the core components of descriptive moral relativism.
The anti-relativists counter-argue that the observed diversity and lack of convergence in local norms can in fact be explained by some very general universal norms, which combine with the different circumstances or false empirical beliefs of the different groups to entail different particular norms. The objectivist thereby can accommodate diversity and lack of agreement at this higher level of generalization see Philippa Foot for this type of argument.
As in the case of cultural relativism, the imperative of tolerance is often seen as a normative reason for adopting moral relativism.
Moral relativism, it is argued, leads to tolerance by making us not only more open-minded but also alerting us to the limitations of our own views. Edward Westermarck, for instance, in his early classic defense of relativism writes:.
Could it be brought home to people that there is no absolute standard in morality, they would perhaps be on the one hand more tolerant and on the other more critical in their judgments. Westermarck Critics however point out that for the consistent relativist tolerance can be only a framework-dependent virtue, while Westermarck, and others, seem to recommend it as a universal desideratum.
A second problem with arguing for normative moral relativism on the grounds of tolerance is known as the Argumentum ad Nazium. Relativists, as this argument goes, are not in a position to condemn even the most abhorrent of worldviews as they are forced to admit that every point of view is right relative to the perspective of its beholder.
Certainly, if we believe that any one moral standard is as good as any other, we are likely to be more tolerant.
We shall tolerate widow-burning, human sacrifice, cannibalism, slavery, the infliction of physical torture, or any other of the thousand and one abominations which are, or have been, from time approved by moral code or another.
Stace 58— More moderate forms of normative moral relativism, positions that sometimes are characterized as moral pluralism, have been defended by David Wong and David Velleman Whether particular instances of moral pluralism entail moral relativism depends entirely on the details of relevant claim to pluralism.
Metaethical versions of moral relativism are often motivated by the thought that ethical positions, unlike scientific beliefs, are not apt for objective truth-evaluation. This is a metaethical, rather than a descriptive or normative position, because it is a theory about the nature of ethics or morality. The ethical domain, Harman argue, is such that all relevant evaluations could be undertaken only in the context of social norms or personal preferences and commitments.
Values are not objective—they are not part of the fabric of the universe. Rather they always arise from some form of convention and agreement among people.
Therefore, there can be no objective or externally justified ethical knowledge or judgment Harman In this sense, metaethical relativism shares common concerns with non-cognitivist approaches to ethics. It is possible to talk about the truth or falsity of a moral judgment but only in the context of pre-existing standards or value systems. For instance, we can ask questions about just actions or judgments in the context of standards of justice prevalent in a society at a given time; but questions about the objective standing of these standards do not make sense cf.
For further discussion of moral relativism see the separate entry on this topic. What has become known as New Moral Relativism will be discussed below. In this section we aim to i outline several features that individuate New Relativism; ii consider in turn motivations for and objections to several prominent strands of it; and, finally, iii conclude with some philosophical problems that face New Relativism more generally.
It is a commonplace that the truth-value of an utterance can depend on the context in which it is uttered. In such cases, the context of utterance plays a role in determining which proposition the sentence expresses. This can happen even when the sentence does not contain an overtly indexical expression. On this point, New Relativists claim an important advantage over contextualists. New relativism , by contrast with contextualism, aims to achieve this advantage via a much less familiar form of context dependence.
To see how this view is claimed to offer a satisfying take on disagreement in types of discourse see Beddor , consider a simple example, concerning predicates of personal taste. While the semantic invariantist for whom the truth-value of taste predications is in no way context sensitive will insist that the above exchange constitutes a genuine disagreement about whether pretzels are tasty and that at least one party is wrong , contextualists and truth-relativists have the prima facie advantageous resources to avoid the result that at least one party to the apparent disagreement has made a mistake.
This maneuver avoids the result that at least one of the two parties has uttered something false, but as the new relativist points out this result comes at the price of being unable to offer a clear explanation of our intuition that there is some uniform content about which A and B disagree.
The new relativist, on the other hand, claims to be able to preserve both the apparent subjectivity of taste discourse and and, unlike the contextualist our intuition that exchanges of the form mentioned constitute genuine disagreements.
They do this by first insisting unlike the contextualist—though see Suikkanen that there is a single truth-evaluable proposition which A affirms and B denies. So we have a genuine disagreement. Hence, the truth-relativist about predicates of personal taste will, by insisting that the truth of Pretzels are tasty depends on the context of assessment, allow a single proposition to be at the same time :.
New Relativists inherit the formal apparatus of Lewis and Kaplan and add another parameter, but their reasons for doing so are quite different from the reasons that motivated the framework in the first place. A circumstance will usually include a possible state or history of the world, a time, and perhaps other features as well. The amount of information we require from a circumstance is linked to the degree of specificity of contents and thus to the kinds of operators in the language….
MacFarlane 6—7. A question on which New Relativists are divided, however, is: what contents are non-specific along dimensions other than world, time and location? It is with respect to this general question that different families of New Relativism are generated. The motivations for truth-relativism in each of these domains include various considerations unique to those domains. We consider some of the arguments for New Relativism in four of these domains in the following sections.
One area of discourse that has been particularly fertile ground for New Relativism is discourse that concerns predicates of personal taste e. One affirms what the other denies. And yet neither is wrong. Lasersohn argues that there is an elegant way to make sense of the idea that John and Mary are both in some sense right, even though John asserts the negation of what is expressed by Mary.
What Lasersohn suggests, more formally, is the introduction of a judge parameter. Instead of treating the content of a sentence as a set of time-world pairs, we should treat it as a set of time-world-individual triples.
We assume that the content will provide an individual to be used in evaluating the sentences for truth and falsity, just as it provides a time and world. Lasersohn: Lasersohn adds 23 that in order to maintain an authentically subjective assignment of truth-values to sentences containing predicates of personal taste, we must allow that the objective facts of the situation of utterance do not uniquely determine a judge.
But who is the judge? Typically, it is us , and when it is, the evaluation is from what Lasersohn calls an autocentric perspective. Importantly, Lasersohn allows that in certain circumstances we take an exocentric perspective when assessing predicates of personal taste: assessing these sentences for truth relative to contexts in which someone other than ourselves is specified as the judge cf.
The proof proceeds from two premises: an equivalence schema. ES and T generate the conclusion that there is no faultless disagreement through the following proof see also Wright For other discussions of faultless disagreement, see Richard , MacFarlane , ch.
There is a version of moral relativism e. We can think of this relativism simply as a generalization of the position just discussed that treats moral terms e.
Such an extension faces problems analogous to those faced by truth-relativists about predicates of personal taste cf. Beebe for a helpful discussion of truth-relativist semantics versus varieties of contextualist competitors. A broader kind of problem for this semantic thesis as well as to moral relativists more generally , raised by Coliva and Moruzzi is that it succumbs to the progress argument , an argument that famously challenges, in particular, cultural relativists as well as indexical contextualists about moral judgments by insisting that moral progress is both evident and not something the relativist can countenance e.
A third and particularly important kind of worry, addressed by Capps, Lynch and Massey , involves explaining the source and nature of moral relativity, on a truth-relativist framework. Specifically, they claim that.
Epistemic modality e. A key reason for this is the dialectical force of Eavesdropper Arguments , which attempt to show the perils of contextualist treatments of utterances containing epistemic modals. Another prominent argument concerns metasemantic complexity. We will examine both of these argument strategies.
To say that p is metaphysically possible is to say that p might have been the case in the sense that: in some possible world, p is true. To say that p is epistemically possible is by contrast to say that p might be the case, or that p is the case for all we know see the entry on Varieties of Modality.
A canonical example of a statement expressing an epistemic modal is the claim A might be F. The truth of claims of the form A might be F will depend on whether F is an epistemic possibility for some individual or group, which is to say, that F must not be ruled out by what some individual or group knows. But which individual or group? This is not always clear. As Egan and Weatherson 4 remark:. One of the key issues confronting a semanticist attempting to theorize about epistemic modals is what to do about this lack of reference.
A variety of different eavesdropper cases have been given by different proponents and attempted refuters of truth-relativism about epistemic modals in the literature.
No party to the conversation that I am listening in on knows that Susan is on vacation. But I know that she is. Hawthorne As noted, the truth of claims expressing epistemic modals must depend on what some individual or group knows. But in these cases the context of use does not pick out a single such individual or group. After all, if it did, then either Sandra or I would be wrong, but it seems that neither of us is. MacFarlane c. Additionally, as Egan and Weatherson suggest, any contextualist account of the semantics of epistemic modals that could handle eavesdropper-style cases in a principled way would be hideously complicated.
However, Glanzberg notably denies that metasemantic complexity in this case must be problematic. How can the relativist accommodate eavesdropper cases? MacFarlane b articulates the relativist solution: Sandra and I disagree about the truth-value of a single proposition , the proposition that Susan might be at the store.
This proposition, even when fully articulated, makes no reference to any particular body of knowledge. But such propositions cannot be true or false simpliciter. They are true only relative to a context of assessment that includes a body of knowledge. In this case, the proposition is true relative to a context of assessment where what Sandra knows is operative—a context in which Sandra is the evaluator—and false relative to a context of assessment where what I know is operative because I am the evaluator.
Thus: both disagreement and faultlessness are preserved cf. More recently, experimental philosophy has contributed to this debate. However, see Beddor and Egan for experimental results that are argued to better support a version of relativism than contextualism.
In a deterministic world there are no future contingent statements in this sense. But in an indeterministic world, statements partly about the future will often satisfy these conditions. The indeterminacy intuition leads us to think the truth-value of future contingents is indeterminate at the time of utterance, and either true or false at a later time cf.
MacFarlane ; Carter John MacFarlane thinks that both the indeterminacy intuition and the determinacy intuition should be taken at face value and that the only way to account for the semantics of future contingents is to allow the truth of future contingent statements to be, as he puts it, doubly relativized: to both the context of utterance and the context of assessment. However the very same statement will have a determinate truth-value relative to the context of assessment of the following day.
So we can have faultless transtemporal disagreement about the truth-value of a single utterance MacFarlane 36; cf. Carter Much as the relativist about future contingents aimed to accommodate both the determinacy and indeterminacy intuitions, the relativist about knowledge attributions can be viewed as offering an attempted synthesis between the contextualist and both sensitive and insensitive varieties of invariantist see entry on Epistemic Contextualism.
As MacFarlane puts it:. Invariantism is right that there is a single knowledge relation, and that the accuracy of knowledge ascriptions does not depend on which epistemic standard is relevant at the context of use. But contextualism is right that the accuracy of such ascriptions depends somehow on contextually relevant standards. Relativism seeks to synthesize these insights into a more satisfactory picture. For the truth-relativist, the standard will be the operative standard in the context of assessment.
See Stanley ch. See also Richard , for another version of truth-relativism for knowledge attributions. We turn now to two general arguments against New Relativism in all its forms. The first is an argument from assertion , the second an argument from simplicity. Two assertion-related objections to New Relativism arise from work by Gareth Evans and Robert Stalnaker , respectively. The relativist must plausibly take issue with 2 or 3 , or both.
MacFarlane ; though see also his ch. Relativism comes in a plethora of forms that are themselves grounded in disparate philosophical motivations. There is no such thing as Relativism simpliciter, and no single argument that would establish or refute every relativistic position that has been proposed.
Relativism remains a hotly disputed topic still surviving various attempts to eliminate it from philosophical discourse. What is most surprising, however, is the recent popularity of some versions of the doctrine in at least some circles of analytic philosophy.
What is Relativism? Local Relativism 1. Weak Relativism 2. Why Relativism? A Brief History of an Old Idea 4. Varieties of Relativism 4. New Relativism 5.
Here are three prominent, but not necessarily incompatible, approaches: 1. Bibliography Arageorgis, A. VIII, trans J. Smith and W. Ross, Oxford: Clarendon Press, Ashman, K. Ashton, N. Baghramian, M. Baker, C. Barnes, B. Barry, B. Beebe, J. Beddor, B. Berlin, B. Kay, , Basic Color Terms. Bloom, A. Bloor, D. Boas, F. Boghossian, P. Brandom, R. Brogaard, B. Brown, D.
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