Debates about relativism permeate the whole spectrum of philosophical sub-disciplines. Detractors dismiss it for its alleged incoherence and uncritical intellectual permissiveness. Defenders see it as a harbinger of tolerance and the only ethical and epistemic stance worthy of the open-minded and tolerant. Relativism has been, in its various guises, both one of the most popular and most reviled philosophical doctrines of our time. Relativists characteristically insist, furthermore, that if something is only relatively so, then there can be no framework-independent vantage point from which the matter of whether the thing in question is so can be established. More precisely, “relativism” covers views which maintain that-at a high level of abstraction-at least some class of things have the properties they have (e.g., beautiful, morally good, epistemically justified) not simpliciter, but only relative to a given framework of assessment (e.g., local cultural norms, individual standards), and correspondingly, that the truth of claims attributing these properties holds only once the relevant framework of assessment is specified or supplied. Relativism, roughly put, is the view that truth and falsity, right and wrong, standards of reasoning, and procedures of justification are products of differing conventions and frameworks of assessment and that their authority is confined to the context giving rise to them.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |