Bob Stewart

I have a question before I try to post something here. This is addressed to anyone who has responded so far.

Is the relativism you are talking about moral relativism, or conceptual relativism, or epistemological relativism (I'il admit that I am not entriely clear about the difference between the latter two)?

Bob Stewart

long winded fool

Absolutism does not preclude flexibility or tolerance even though the word absolute does. A true absolutist doesn't have to be in possession of all the absolutes. He or she merely believes that there are absolutes. It sounds like your arguing for tolerance and open-mindedness as opposed to indiscriminate intolerance of anything outside one's philosophical system. I argue for this too. My understanding of relativism is that it is an acceptance of, and a refusal to judge, all behaviors. Tolerance is an acceptance of a wide range of behaviors, but it stops short of claiming an inability to discriminate. "Murder," when defined as the deliberate killing of a human being can either be right or wrong depending on the circumstances, (an example of tolerant, not relative, thinking.) Murder for the sake of preventing more murder, i.e. criminal execution, war, self-defense etc. is considered right, however unfortunate and painful it may be. Murder for the sake of personal gratification is always wrong and always has been wrong, however gratifying it is or has been. Slavery was always a wrong behavior, even when we didn't know it.

Agreed. But that still doesn't make these values absolute. Even if a particular value was shared by every single human being on the planet, that still wouldn't make it an absolute value. It is a relative value, because it's only common to human beings. It's not necessarily shared by other animals, and it's not necessarily integral to the universe as a whole.

But it's integral to reasoning human beings as a whole. How can absolute morality apply to anything incapable of abstract thought? Yes, philosophical systems apply only to rational, sentient beings. This doesn't mean that all philosophical models and moral codes are equal in truth. I don't believe that there is an absolute moral system on the planet, but I do believe that truth is absolute even if I'm not in possession of it and that the moral systems that are on the planet are subject to this truth as being either correct or incorrect.

To uncritically apply human values to inhuman objects and animals is a common and very primitive error, and it leads to such things as animism. It also leads to huge problems in the conservation movement, because everyone wants to save endangered cute, furry mammals, but nobody wants to save an endangered species of cockroach -- even if the cockroach happens to be more important in the ecosystem than the cute and cuddly mammal.

Very true. I believe that to uncritically apply human values to inhuman objects is absolutely wrong.

You see, here you're trying to have it both ways. You use the phrase "more right" which is a relative judgement. I thought you were arguing against relativism here? The traditional judgement system requires that something either be right or wrong. It's not supposed to be an "assumed absolute", it's supposed to be an absolute and universal truth. The whole point of absolutism is that you're supposed to be discovering an idea that is incorruptible and 100% certain, which is supposed to then become the unchallengeable basis of your philosophical system.

Absolutism isn't necessarily dogmatism. Attempting to discover the incorruptible 100% certain truth is not the same as claiming to have discovered it. Once you believe you have all the answers, you stop asking questions. Once you believe there IS no 100% certain incorruptible truth, you also stop asking questions. The ability to ask questions is the adaptation that has allowed the human race to prosper. True relativists cannot ask questions. Doing so is merely a throwback to absolutism. Extremely tolerant and humble absolutists, (which I believe make up all who claim to be relativists) can ask questions and simply not be satisfied with the answers. There is nothing wrong with this. Questioning everything is learning. Questioning nothing because one assumes that there are no right or wrong answers is refusal to think critically.

For a true absolutist, near enough isn't good enough (because near enough can still be challenged). But since it's impossible to determine whether an idea is "absolutely true" (for reasons I've already mentioned), if you're a true absolutist, you must also be a solipsist.

I agree that near enough isn't good enough. Someone on this thread I believe mentioned Newton's laws and compared them to Einstein's theory of relativity. Here is a case where near enough wasn't good enough. Einstein had to rework the supposed absolute laws of Newton, because, though they were near, they weren't good enough. Einstein wasn't intolerant of anything that defied Newton’s laws. He accepted that they didn't quite get the job done on the quantum level and formulated a better system. Keep in mind that true absolutists don't need to be in possession of absolute truth. They simply accept that it is there to be discovered. I could just as easily say that true relativists must also be solipsists. To assume that nothing is true seems closer to solipsism than assuming that we simply don't know what is true.

They're not "wrong" models, they're just less useful models. You might point to one philosophical model and say it is "wrong" because it promotes some behaviors that are detrimental to the survival of the species. But what happens if you then come across somebody who holds to an even more detrimental philosophical position? For this unfortunate person, upgrading to the model you have just labelled "wrong" would actually be an improvement.

I would say that anything not 100% useful is wrong, but perhaps "incorrect" carries a less judgmental connotation. (Though in reality it is just as judgmental.) If Newton was right about everything except for a few variables, his law was wrong. A law that corrects these variables must be assumed right until proven otherwise, in which case it will become wrong or incorrect. True relativism would say that Newton's laws are no less true or false than Einstein's. Non-dogmatic absolutism would say that Einstein's laws are absolutely more correct than Newton's, but may still be proven incorrect in the future.

Take, for example, the Deism of eighteenth century intellectuals. From my atheistic viewpoint, I would have to label Deism wrong, if I was an absolutist. Deism still assumes the existence of a god that I don't think exists. But Deism is still an improvement over the supernaturalism of a medieval churchman. And in the eighteenth century, before Darwin, Wallace, Einstein, and company, we didn't know enough about the workings of the universe to reason our way to an atheistic point of view.

So as far as I'm concerned, it was a good thing that the great thinkers of the eighteenth century became Deists. That sort of value judgement on my part only gives you a headache if you're an absolutist. As a relativist and atheist, I don't have any trouble at all with the relative concept that Deism is better than theism, but not as good as atheism.

On the contrary, it is relativism that cannot distinguish between more or less serious wrongs. Something that comes closer to truth than another may be considered "more correct" than the other, but can still be absolutely wrong. 90+90=179 could be considered almost correct, yet is definitely and inarguably wrong. Because a wrong system works temporarily doesn't make it any less wrong. If you were teleported into the Middle Ages with the knowledge you have right now, would your current atheism become intellectually inferior to the supernaturalism of the time? Or if in the eighteenth century would your atheism still be closer to the truth and therefore more correct than deism?

As an absolutist, you would have to conclude that the eighteenth century intellectuals should have held off becoming deists, and sat around and twiddled their thumbs for two hundred years until the "truth" became known. Indeed, as an absolutist, you would have to conclude that we should still be sitting around and twiddling our thumbs, because we still don't know the "absolute truth" about everything (and we probably never will).

Sooner or later, you've got to say to yourself, "okay, this is the best we can do for now, and we'll use this idea until something better comes along." That is a purely relativistic judgement.

I disagree. Assuming no truth is the equivalent to sitting around twiddling your thumbs. Relativists cannot by definition believe in progress. They merely believe in change. Something can never become "better." Things can only become different. You're claim that it is better for a society to accept an unsure idea than to wait for a sure one shows your absolutism, tolerant though it may be.

Here you're saying "humans consider survival... more valuable than extinction". That's a relative judgement, not an absolute judgement. And I'd be willing to bet that, in practice, there are all sorts of exceptions to the rule. A mother, for example, will often favor the survival of her children more than her personal survival. You can't really say that survival is right and extinction is wrong in any absolute sense. Otherwise you would have to conclude it would have been better for the dinosaurs to have survived, even though this would have made the evolution of human beings impossible.

No, it's an absolute judgment. There are no relative judgments as judgment cannot be relative. It would have been absolutely better for the dinosaurs to have survived from the dinosaurs’ point of view. It is absolutely better that the dinosaurs are extinct from a human point of view. Since I am a human, the absolute nature of this assertion is clear. It is not relative to individuals or ethical systems that dinosaurs' extinction was bad for them and good for us. Relativism would say that these are equal in value or lack of value. Since as a human I value life and can extrapolate that value onto the dinosaurs, I can come to the conclusion that extinction is a wrong goal for a species. Once you establish a goal, there is only one absolutely correct way to achieve it. It is possible to achieve it less efficiently, but it is not possible to label the inefficient equal to the efficient.

But you cannot in practice establish an absolute value. That's the whole point. That's why I'm a relativist rather than an absolutist. Any scientist with a good understanding of the scientific method would tell you that it is not possuble to prove a theory true, you can only demonstrate that it hasn't been falsified yet.

In philosophy, the only thing you really can do is say, "let us assume this set of axioms for the sake of the exercise", but that's a very long way from proving those axioms true in any absolute sense.

It is possible to assume and establish an absolute value, and then change it if it turns out to be anything less than absolute. It is impossible to reject all value. I agree that assuming one is in possession of absolute truth is irrational. I disagree that the idea that there is no truth to be learned is rational. It is rational to deny that an authority is in possession of absolute objective moral standards. It is not rational to deny the existence of objective moral standards.

In other words, you're saying, "Shhh! I'm really a relativist underneath, but don't tell anyone."

I am a tolerant, open-minded absolutist. I do not think that I know what is absolutely true. I think I know that, apart from my own imperfect reasoning, all things are absolutely black or absolutely white.

How do you figure that then? I think you're assuming that "values" are absolute. Throughout this response, I think I have amply shown that values are relative as well. Remember the example concerning "murder" I gave above? There are any number of circumstances where killing another human being is deemed by some people to be appropriate, so murder is a relative judgement -- something to be decided on the merits of the case, not an "absolute" value. And even if you could get everyone to agree about what constituted murder, it still wouldn't be an absolute value, because it would be "true" only of human beings and not the universe as a whole.

Why wouldn't the wrongness of murder not be true of the universe as a whole? Is it right to murder a human being on Alpha Centauri? What about in Andromeda? Is self-defense only wrong in certain locations? Why or why not?

I disagree most strongly with this. I would consider that for intellectual growth to occur, we must first realize that the "truths" we see in the world around us are not absolutes; they are just patterns we impose on reality in order to understand it. From this comes the realization that there could be different patterns -- different systems of organization -- other than the ones we just happen to have inherited. And we can realize that perhaps we can build better and more useful philosophical frameworks than the ones we have. That, I think, is the very essence of intellectual growth itself.

To progress we require humility rather than certainty, and the willingness to learn rather than the arrogance to exterminate everything that doesn't fit one notion of "absolute truth".

Again, you are arguing against dogma and close-mindedness. You are not a true relativist. Relativism says that dogma and close-mindedness have an equal place in the universe and that they are neither better, nor worse, than humility and open-mindedness. I agree that we must be logically critical of things that others accept as absolute. I don't think that there is no objective, universal meaning and that all behaviors are equal and should be accepted as such, (and I don't think you honestly do either.) You admit that you don't know what this universal truth is, and you don't think anyone else knows either. I am in total agreement. Open-mindedness is the refusal to prejudge ideas. Indiscrimination is the inability or refusal to judge ideas. True absolutists can be open-minded. True relativists must be indiscriminate.

John Page

IMO all of them, the relativity of all parts of existence to other parts form which conceptual relativism follows, and the knowledge that those concepts are relatigvfe results in the knowledge being relative and our behaviou based on that knowledge is relative. Something like that, anyway.

Cheers, John

mhc

Isn't it enough to say that relativism posits an absolute, and so is contradictory?
Isn't saying that all knowledge is relative to the knower an absolute by virtue of the universal *all* ?

John Page

Relativism embraces contradiction, the latter not disproving the former. Contradictions exist in logic, such as Russell's Antinomy, so I don't think there is a strong case for throwing out an -ism due to contradictions.
But the knower doesn't actually know "all knowledge". IMO the mind fabricates the extensions "some" or "all", we only receive sense data about specific instances of reality which is then categorized within the mind. If this were not the case, the Law of Identity would seem to be breached - you may see two trees but they are separate entities.

Cheers, John

Kim o' the Concrete Jungle

Back seven or eight years ago when I first started getting interested in philosophy, that old objection to relativism had me fooled for a while -- until I actually started to think about it.

A relativist does not posit an absolute -- not even to establish relativism. It is not necessary to establish that an idea is "absolutely true" before you can make use of it; which is just as well, because as far as we know, it is not humanly possible to establish an absolute truth.

A relativist adopts relativism in an entirely pragmatic way. He says to himself, "Absolutism has failed on its own terms, and all the things we thought were based on 'absolute truth' proved not to be the whole story: Newtonian mechanics, the particulate nature of light, and so on. So I will look at things from the relativists point of view, not because it is absolutely true, but because its useful, and because its the best I can do at the moment."

Adopting relativism as a philosophical position is not an authoritative decision based on "absolutes". You don't say, "I'm a relativist, because relativism is right and everything else is wrong." That's exactly the trap an absolutist falls into -- and an honest absolutist will realize that a single counter-example of where absolutism fails as a philosophical position is enough to descredit the whole system. Relativism does not have this problem.

Several posters here seem to be implying that because the Absolutist approach might work in a number of very limited circumstances (at least, in theory), this automatically disproves relativism. Actually, it doesn't. In fact, it accords entirely with what a relativist would predict: there are many different and sometimes competing philosophical models, and any one of them might be useful for some task or other. Some of them might be more useful for a particular task than others. In this sense, relativism is more useful as a philosophical system than absolutism, because it doesn't automatically exclude ideas that are contradictory, and it doesn't insist that you work with absolutes.

nermal

Sure, contradictions exist in logic, just like singularities exist in mathematics. The difference is, of course, that logic itself is not a contradiction. You can at least define the system before you run into any trouble.

My problem with relativism is: what axioms is it based upon? By definition, it cannot be based upon any--it's like ships at sea trying to decide which way to port by getting a fix on each other. It tells you nothing which allows you to make a decision without resorting to the fixed axioms of logic.

The relativist is a clipped chicken. He gets a good running start on logic's terra firma and launches, flapping madly, proclaiming himself free of axiomatic constraint. But ultimately he can't stay up very long. Come decision time, he has to light somewhere.

Ed

John Page

Go on then, prove the axioms of logic are not contradictory.
I think its based on experience. Why does it need to have axioms?
LOL - and there is some truth in what you say. How about "All philosophers are clipped chickens, flapping madly and alighting upon axioms that are merely self sufficient opinions they use to justify their views of reality" as a proposition?

Cheers, John

mhc

So relativism is a kind of pragmatic coherence theory?

I mean, one adopts it because it is useful, and integrates with other beliefs, and not because it corresponds with external reality?

the other option would be that relativism is adopted because it does correspond with external reality as we percieve it. But if that's the case, then relativism and absolutism are mutually exclusive. And if they are mutually exclusive, then relativism, if true, must be absolute.

I think only in a coherence theory of knowledge can truth admit of degrees.

John Page

Relativism seems to correspond with reality quite well - although its usefulness seems to be in doubt.
Well, one could say this is self-defeating since the coherence theory then becomes a correspondence theory....

Cheers, John