"Relativism: So What?": So What?

[koganbot]

I keep telling myself I'm going to write a series of lj posts called "Relativism: So What?" but I keep putting off beginning this. I think a major reason for my block is that, though I can lay out the "intellectual" issues surrounding "relativism," my true goal is to get at "what are people's underlying reasons for thinking there's an issue here?" or to put it better, "people wouldn't bring up the issue of 'relativism' if they didn't think they were taking care of something by doing so, so how do I get them to think and talk about what it is that they think they need to take care of?" A subsidiary question might be, "Frank Kogan thinks he's taking care of something when he tries to get people to think and talk about what they think they're trying to take care of when they raise the issue of 'relativism,' so what is it that Frank Kogan thinks he's trying to take care of when he does this?"

Anyhow, four questions:
(1) What do you mean by "relativism," when you use the word (assuming you use the word)?
(2) Does the issue of relativism matter to you? If so, why does it matter?
(3) What do you think other people mean when they use the word "relativism"?
(4) What do you think they think is at stake?

Don't let your answers by overconstrained by the questions. I want to hear your ideas before giving mine.

By the way, someone on my flist (though I'm not on his) used the term the other day, clearly believed that "relativism" was a potent force in the world.

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

1: not sure i've ever used the word -- i suppose i kind of treat it (in the discussion of others) as a marker for "nothing is decided yet"
2: the social issue of what can be taken to be known, and what is still being debated, is an exact cultural map of many (most? all? i don't know) pressing political conflicts
3: by relativists, some people seem to mean "those guys who are too complacently or vaingloriously superior, and/or cowardly, to take a stand on what they believe -- who argue that "the other guy may have a point" even when the "other guy" is some kind of crusading n4zi or similar"
4: what they think is at stake is the secureness of the institutions of established reliable knowledge

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

yikes the quotemarks in my (3) are breakdancin every whichway aren't they

3: by "relativists", some people seem to mean "those guys who are too complacently or vaingloriously superior, and/or cowardly, to take a stand on what they believe" or "those guys who argue that the other guy may have a point" even when the "other guy" is some kind of crusading n4zi or similar

(bah i hate trying to characterise bad arguments -- it always feels like i'm loading the dice or letting them off the hook)

[koganbot]

Well, your characterization feels pretty accurate, except it's really more an answer to (4) rather than (3). Which is to say that the person who espouses it may think he knows who he means by "relativists," but doesn't really know what he means by "relativism." Certainly you don't have to be a relativist to think that someone else might have a point. So the question would be, what is the relationship between a (supposed) doctrine - "relativism" - and thinking that other people may have a point. And what is the doctrine? (But getting such a fellow to answer...)

[koganbot]

Would love you to elaborate on your answer to 2.

In regard to your answer to 3 (which is a use I've run across), that's a pejorative use of the term. Have you noticed people ever using the term positively, as if being "relativist" were a good thing?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

re positive use: i think you quoted a friend (was it the "those were different times" woman?) hoi'd come across a use of it among students where it was being used as ideological elbow room to escape the mental conflict of having a fundie upbringing but mixing with liberal-arts types, and not wanting to be torn apart inside (but i think this is just a topsyturvy of the pejoriative use)

by 2: i don't mean anything very startling, just that not only do (eg) left and right (or any other embattled polity) have different beliefs, but (alongside these) they have different institutions they trust to deliver or protect the important truths ("science", "the church", "the proletariat", gaia): so that claims about the unreliability of your given vehicle-of-faith -- inc. secular vehicles of faith like universities -- are declarations of political war: you see it when you put sacred truths up for debate --- darwin, glboal warming, the superiority of the free market over the command economy, pick a concrete embattled line and you see a political map behind it

(question that disrupts my claim: what's the politics limned by the teenpop battle?) (in answer i cite m.jacques attali -- "all noise is prophecy" -- and punt wildly: the teenpop battle marks the dim outlines of a politics that has NOT YET BEGUN TO FIGHT)

[koganbot]

the social issue of what can be taken to be known, and what is still being debated

Agree, is important social issue, but wonder how it intersects with "relativism," given that what is taken as known is just as contextual, discourse-dependent etc. as what is still being debated. Cf. what I wrote in chapter 25: "that windows function as windows depends on their being distinguishable from walls and ceilings, after all." Yet "window" is a nonproblematic term, and there are no great debates about our knowledge of windows.

Don't see any particular new fight in relation to teenpop. The basic principle is that Ashlee Simpson and John Shanks and Kara DioGuardi - as a class - are as real as other musicians and therefore their musical choices count as choices for better or worse in the same way that real people's choices count. No different in principal from Otis Ferguson deciding way back when that Howard Hawks' and Carole Lombard's and Cary Grant's aesthetic choices counted. What's shocking is how many people still don't get this, but it doesn't require a new kind of politics.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

maybe the relationship to "relativism" -- in the panic-swamp-of-hostility sense we're discussing -- comes when the specific discourses relevant to discourse-dependence are at war with one another over the rights to dependency in relation to a given meaning (but of course there's an element of circularity here, isn't there? i think political cleavages intensify the problematisation of definition, where differences in definition may contribute to the initial fact of cleavage...)

(haha there was a window tax levied in queen anne's reign, during which era i bet definitions of window became a lively political and/or legal issue!

i think within the critical community (writers and readers) there's absolutely a small-p politics of "who gets taken seriously", much less negotiable now than it was 40 years ago: i somewhat assume this would map onto wider politics over the same span but i don't clearly see how -- i DO think it relates to the huge debate over who gets into higher ed (and what they do there) which has raged over the same timespan... but i think the link is intricate and complex

[ludickid.livejournal.com]

1. When I use the word "relativism", I refer to the belief that human ideals, truth, morals, ethics, and other values are relative to the time, place, culture and circumstance under which their judgments are developed, and cannot be held as being universally true. It holds that there is no bias-free platform from which a universal truth can be established, and that all human ideas are necessarily socially constructed.

Perhaps just as important is what relativism is NOT: it is not the belief that nothing is true. It is not a position from which you can make no moral judgments. Belief in it does not preclude you from thinking you are right about any given issue, or in pursuing a political or legal goal based on that premise.

2. Yes, I think relativism is important. It is important largely because it is misunderstood, and it is blamed (fraudulently) for all sorts of social ills, mostly by those who either don't understand it or deliberately misinterpret it. But it is also important because I think a lot of problems in our society come from the widespread adherence to non-relativistic – that is to say, so-called 'objective' or 'absolute' notions of morality, achievement, opportunity, culture, and behavior. I think if relativism were more widely understood and applied, we would be able to approach a lot of social and political problems in a more straightforward way, without a lot of unhelpful moral baggage (after Rorty, I am a neo-pragmatist in this regard).

3. I'm not sure; I'd have to ask them. I do think that when a lot of conservatives and right-wingers use the term, they more or less mean it as nihilism, a sort of omnipresent belief that nothing is true and all moral judgments are equally false and should be ignored. When they say "such-and-such is a relativist", they mean "such-and-such is a moral monster with no values", which is not correct.

4. I'm not sure how to address this either. I suppose if they're sincere, they worry that those under the sway of moral relativism have lost their moral compass and are capable of believing any sort of pernicious nonsense. If they're not sincere, they're just deliberately muddying the waters to make it look like people who adhere to a philosophy that threatens their position as arbiters of the only acceptable moral code are vile beasts inclined to murder and rapine.

[koganbot]

Hey Leonard, nice to have you on my lj!

The question I'd put to you is this: what do you mean by "universal"? For instance, I'd say that natural selection is a social construct, it's use is historically contingent, etc., but nonetheless it's an idea that I think is applicable wherever there is life. And I take the idea as axiomatic, meaning not just that I think it's true but that it's a principle used to organize facts. So I'd have trouble even imagining how a fact could run counter to natural selection, given that I'm using natural selection to interpret the facts rather than using the facts to test the axiom. So, do I believe in universals? Well, I understand that axioms get overthrown* (but that doesn't necessarily mean that this one will get overthrown), and though I think that natural selection is true, I don't believe it must be true in all possible universes (though I still can't imagine how it could be untrue), or even, therefore, in this one.

So, would an antirelativist call me a "relativist"? Probably, in that I don't think there's something beyond the practice of evolutionary biology that "grounds" or "proves" natural selection, that takes me beyond the axiom to a set of facts that could disprove natural selection. But to me that's a rather esoteric philosophical point I've made, that you can't get beyond the axiom to a set of facts that are "independent" of the axiom and that therefore can be used to test the axiom. For practical purposes, natural selection might as well be a universal, in the way that I use it.

My question, therefore, is why do people think that the esoteric philosophical point is a big deal? (My answer would be "Well, they don't understand the point," but that just begs the question.)

*The way an axiom gets overthrown isn't by being compared to a set of facts but by a different axiom appearing that seems to do a whole lot more than the first axiom.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

"why do people think that the esoteric philosophical point is a big deal" -- i've tried to answer this before (very speculatively) as being an epiphenomenon of the institution of the university, which is a social construct in a slightly different sense, with a fairly particular history which "philosophy" as a discipline (ignoring its specific content in any book, or college department, or general fashionable tendency) has an early and an intimate role: i think two-fold, one being the militant mind-army of scepticism against the hegemony of the church in matterws academics; two being a kind of handily pre-generalised organisational principle when it came to deciding what counts as an acceptable dicipline (yes to maths and greek and history, no to chemistry, until the late 19th century); how the departments are structured (no accident btw that DEWEY is famous for pragmatism AND the decimal library system)

given the pragmatics of departmental structure, any attempt to banish philosophy from its upper level role is going to seem to like the introduction of a revolutionary barabarian chaos -- it wouldn't BE this in my opinion, but to many embattled defenders of the state-funded liberal-arts college system we have, it would be opening the gates to catastrophe

so i think ceding big-deal-dom to the esoteric philosophical point is -- largely speaking -- an acknowledgement who the prevailing big daddy is of safe civil academic discussion: it's a kind of mental protection money

[koganbot]

Different Dewey who did the decimal system.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

oh! my entire system of value just collapsed!

haha my kind of dewey!!

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

"He advocated English language spelling reform... He considered changing his own name to simply Melvil Dui.. Late in his life [he] helped found the Lake Placid Club as a health resort. His theories of spelling reform found some local success at Lake Placid: there is an "Adirondac Loj" in the area, and dinner menus of the club featured his spelling reform. AA September 1927 menu is headed "Simpler spelin" and features dishes like Hadok, Poted beef with noodls, Parsli or Masht potato, Butr, Steamd rys, Letis, and Ys cream."

(also he was a racist, bah)

[koganbot]

I don't know. I think people's attachment to the big dealness of something is more than an attachment to the pragmatics of departmental structure. (Why would the far left be committed to the pragmatics of departmental structure?) They think it's more than an esoteric philosophical point that's at issue. And you do too, don't you? And Leonard does, and Martin does, right?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

well the far left -- if this means communists -- argued that university departments should be entirely shaken up and reorganised along party lines: they felt what was being protected was merely the social structures of capitalism as extended in the structures of knowledge -- they were anti-philosophy, considering it more or less the church of the bourgeoisie, as the (actual) church was more or less the church of feudalism

the point i'm making is more this: the attachment is not the pragtmatics itself, so much as a safe space in which "we" (ie those who believe they act as guarantors of open discussion) get to stay in charge of departmental pragmatics: for it to stay SAFE it has to stay sacred, hegemony not AT ALL up for negotiation, and attachments to the Sacred mean (in my judgment) intense passionate emotional and not necessarily very rational attachments --- and i think that "metaphysics" as the queen of the sciences does function as that kind of unthinking allegience, in the higher-ed community

as a triage thing, my feeling is that the reorganisation is would a GIANT FvCKLOAD of work (the debate and then the actual moving of furniture) and actually there's a ton of more urgent day-to-day firefighting to be done, and so the reorganisation always languishes; and rather than admit that it needs doing, we find ourselves acceding to a heirarchy of wisdoms which is a rationalisation

i don't think philsopsphy is higher knowledge; i think there are all manner of tactical and strategic reasons for not dissolving disciplinary structure too precipitately, but there are arguments in the other direction also

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

but what i'm giving is a negative reason -- why people feel alarmed by giving up on the centraloty of philsopsoph -- rather than a positive reason: what people think they're actually getting FROM philosophy

an old-fashioned answer for the latter would be that it allowed you to sharpen your mind in debate and intricate discussion about things which WEREN'T in daily political play, before going out into the concil chamber por courtroom to do verbal battle with your foes -- with the handy savant who taught the nobleman's son persuading him as a teen not to go clubbing all night and hawking all day but instead to study rhetoric and the classics, by impressing on him (maybe invoking plato), that disinterested logical speculation was nobler and deeper and more important than all local pressing political or legal concerns

the result would of course be a grown-up nobleman with all kinds of excellent
courtroom and council chamber skeez, who felt he partly owed his gift to time spent at the disinterested logical speculation-face as a child: even though actually, in practical terms, this had been a kind of feint by an employee to keep his boss's unruly kid in line

(there's a nice version of this in PRINCE CASPIAN -- the book if not the film -- where doctor cornelius manages to teach caspian stuff by appealing to his sense of the deep past and the deep future, via philososphy)

in other words: the apparent claims of the immediate important now may NOT as unproblematic as they seem

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

the thing that's a "big deal" is control of the world, or lack of it -- from your immediate locality on outwards: what's being ceded, when you accept "everything is still at issue", isn't just your sense of control over your neighbourhood (or deaprtment), it's control over the very language you speak, as well opening up the nature of the courtoom to contest also -- who will even get to be a judge here? what are the rules, the laws, the means of effective persuasion?

i think the attachment to philosophy is an attachment to a belief that some (moral) things are stable and decided: that there are these old folks out there, with beards and togas and everything, who have established structures we can all agree we should stay within

(the "groves of academe" was a little wood outside athens where the eggheads gathered to yatter -- kind of like ilx with olives)

which makes the idea of depth (as regards philosophy) a kind of optical illusion: what's being relied on is that a system of thought or analysis has "stood the test of time", so shoukd be maintained; rather than how revolutionaries think, which is that the problems that immediately face us create their own systems of solution, and too bad what everything that came before

[koganbot]

I'm not seeing where you came to grips with my question "why do people think that the esoteric philosophical point is a big deal?" - the esoteric point being that "you can't get beyond the axiom to a set of facts that are 'independent' of the axiom and that therefore can be used to test the axiom." The reason I think this is a mere esoteric mere philosophical point is that (a) there are other ways to test an axiom (e.g., adopt a competing axiom and see what happens) and (b) an axiom such as natural selection isn't weakened by the philosophical point that its facts aren't "independent" of the axiom. The only thing that could weaken the axiom is a viable competing axiom that appeared to do more than natural selection does. The esoteric point says nothing about whether natural selection is likely to be superseded someday, no more than the absence of such a point (that is, the presence of the belief that there are theory-independent facts) implies that natural selection won't be superseded. (All you need to supersede it would be something that explains the (supposedly independent) facts better.)

I've not read more than a paragraph of Karl Popper, but I'd think his view - that theories can only be falsified rather than confirmed, right? - would come closer to "nothing is decided yet" than would "relativism."

In any event, your answer to my question, "why is the esoteric philosophical point a big deal," seems to be, "because people esteem philosophy." I don't know enough about academia, but I'm skeptical that people esteem philosophy all that much or that people have much of a clue what modern-day philosophers actually talk about. And my assumption is that it's English and Art Departments where "relativism" gets talked about, not philosophy departments.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

"Always to keep hold of Nurse, For fear of meeting something worse..."

i guess what i'm trying to get at is that it's more "bcz ppl disesteem the concept of 'non-independent facts' -- or think they do": they and not very clearheadedly place philosophical demands in the role of nurse --- they assume it has the big back-up arguments if they had the time or patience or inclination to master them

we're back at characterising other ppl's bad arguments: i'm hesitant to lay this out in the form "they must think THIS even though HAH they'd be wrong to because THIS step is clearly wrong" -- bcz that's not how i think wrong arguments work

(eep have to break off as my furniture is arriving)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

what i'm proposing is less "esteem" than "isn't this as problem other smarter people have solved and therefore not my responsibility" -- which i'm suggesting is a fossil of an attitude somewhat built into the stones and corridors of the institution you're part of -- english and arts departments being late into the institution histrocially, and as a result ALWAYS somewhat over-aware of their "place" ("philosophy" was there from the START: and -- i just realised this -- plato's most famous disciple, aristotle, was alexander the great's tutor

i think the "esteem" is a structure-buttressing myth to keep outside forces (military, political) not so much at bay as onside: by keeping such fvorces believing that there are "bigger forces than might-as-right they don't want to tangle with; and indeed will do well to engage with respectfully" (cf how alexander got on)

this isn't all that's going on -- because this entire treats the content of philosophy as nugatory -- but, even as a negative reason for alleigance, i think it may have more shaping power than any positive reasons (not least bcz, as you have pointed out, the esteem seems to arrive from small knowledge: active modern philosophers don't believe they ought to be running everything; but they do often believe that the ppl who DO run things will do so most wisely when they have access to the esoteric grounding reasons philosophy provides) (arguably bcz these grounding reasons take the philosopher king AWAY from mere captious self-interest as a grounding drive)

this is totally a just-so story -- the situation we are "currently in" is one of unimaginably expanded literacy (compared even to the 19th century, let alone ancient greece) combined with a cosntant defensive semi-panic on the part of the long-term literate and/or learned classes; first, what manner of useless piffle are the newly literate classes using their literacy FOR; second, what myth do we hold out to THEM AND their untrammelled -- if currently sleeping or distracted -- might; third, plz to say we DON'T HAVE TO RESTRUCTURE cz it's too late for me to re-learn everything from the bottom up

i guess i see american pragmatism, jazz, rockwrite, as three different strategies to address this issue NON-defensively

[ludickid.livejournal.com]

I can tell, and not just from your tag, that you've read Thomas Kuhn. When you shift from moral relativism to scientific relativism, you're getting a tad out of my comfort zone (only because I've read a lot less philosophy of science than I should), but yeah, the principle is the same, and you can refer also to Derrida's claim -- feeding off of Kuhn's writing about paradigm shifts -- that what really happens in scientific study isn't the discovery of a new truth, but the development of a new language by which to describe observations, meaning that the whole thing is simultaneously becoming more "true" in a scientific way, and more "relative" in a linguistic way.

There's certainly nothing wrong with using something as a practical universal while at the same time admitting that it's based on something unverifiable or perspective-specific. The problem with some (not all) anti-relativists is that they get so hung up on the concept of there not being an ultimate absolute and discoverable truth that they ignore the fact that 'truth' isn't all that interesting or useful a concept. Richard Rorty is my guide here, and the philosopher has the most interesting things to say about the issue: he essentially argues that, since they disagree on so many basic premises, relativist and absolutists have nothing to say to each other, and so there's no point in them even having a conversation. Instead, they should focus on pragmatic issues, ignoring whether or not decisions should be made or programs should be pursued because they meet some 'truth' qualification and more whether or not they have an agreed-upon use value to which their absolute value isn't especially relevant.

[koganbot]

I've just added the "rorty" tag. I wrote about him a little bit here, if you're interested:

The Death Of The Philosopher

[koganbot]

Long ago in a distant galaxy I created a thread on Thomas S. Kuhn. I think it's one of the best things I've written. Also I believe it's relatively easy to read: I actually find the principles clearer when applied to science than elsewhere, despite my usually not understanding the science itself.

Also, while I'm in link-happy mode, if anyone is interested, here are my first two Department Of Dilettante Research posts, the second one of which is very Rorty heavy:

Department of Dilettante Research, Part 1

Department Of Dilettante Research, Part 2: Depart Harder

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

I think ludickid's points are sound, but they are the ideal situation, not the one we have. We're getting back to postmodernism here: if all metanarratives have equal value, none can be judged to be right at the expense of others. This does create problems with - the main cause of the issue I think you are looking at - an unwillingness to commit to an idea of what is right because there are people who disagree, and who is to say that they aren't right as well or instead? There are liberals who use this kind of thing to avoid making, or possibly just expressing, strong moral judgements, and this is often called relativism, so we can't pretend that the word's meaning doesn't include that, whatever we would prefer it to mean. Personally, I don't believe that you have to commit to an idea as permanent and absolute and universal to believe it is worth supporting or defending here and now.

It's most often used by the right to attack the left, often for failing to be critical enough of, in particular, ethnic minorities or foreigners for some action or other - sometimes as uselessly as 'it's PC gone mad!'. I'm inclined to think it's often basically the same comment dressed up in fancier clothes.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i don't know about "most often": it's also used by the far left to attack the "soft liberal middle" -- in fact this is the form i first got used to fending off (ok "most often" if you agree there are more "right" than "left" these days; but it wasn't always the case -- you could easily characterise the post-war hayekian or popperian counter-assult on the left as a re-institution of PROCESS against judgment-by-dogma)

lately the right has got extremely effective, while calling foul on the corruptions of the alleged objectivity of the institutions making claims for trhings they want to challenge (viz darwinism, global warming), at calling for equal time for all sides in all undecided debates -- this is certainly a bad-faith gamin of the ref if yr a fundie, but it's not as if fundies don't believe darwin's wrong, they just think the right information hasn't been gathered and presentyed yet

the claim "innocent until proven guilty" is a good chip in the wind: is "we haven't had the argument yet" DUE PROCESS or a FILIBUSTER (and who gets to adjudicate the process)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

oops there's two rival kinds of "right" in my post above, all muddled up: hayekian (and popperian) libertarians, and christianists -- by various accident of US (and USSR) history they've been in coalition for half a century, but there's issues and institutions you could get em to disagree violently over (libertarians are generally social darwinians; social darwinism is anathema to catholics and SOME radical protestants)

[koganbot]

We're getting back to postmodernism here: if all metanarratives have equal value, none can be judged to be right at the expense of others.

My questions are: (1) What is relativist about "all metanarratives have equal value"? That's an absolute statement if I've ever seen one, and I take it is a statement that ludickid would disagree with. (2) What do you mean by "metanarrative"? The word is not self-explanatory, and it can have different meanings, though people often don't make distinctions in meaning. That is (i) it can mean something like logic or the Kantian division between intuitions and concepts (basically between what's given to consciousness and consciousness itself), and the synthetic-analytic distinction, etc., basically the supposedly transcendent rules of any story, and (ii) something like the Oedipus complex or class conflict or natural selection, which is taken as axiomatic in some stories but isn't considered transcendent in the way that the first sort of metanarrative is. Anyway, it's possible to disbelieve in (i) while having no problem in principle with (ii), since they don't have anything to do with each other.

[ludickid.livejournal.com]

I take it is a statement that ludickid would disagree with

You take it right. Even if you were to strip that statement down to one I could agree with -- say, "no metanarratives can be viewed from a neutral platform, and thus no absolute value can be assigned to them" -- it becomes something completely other than how it's stated above, and leaves us discussing two very different issues.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

Hmm, sorry: a quick comment at work, knocked out without sufficient care.

Obviously the opposition to privileging any particular metanarratives is a standard explanation of major parts of PoMo. I should have phrased it more like that (as ludickid has below) - a refusal to accept any one as true as against others. This is a meaning of relativism.

There are all kinds of metanarrative, and it is used loosely. Systems of thought (your class i) are the kinds of things I had in mind, rather than specific ones about some detail of psychology or whatever. How we draw the line is questionable - some would regard Marx's political analysis as class i, some as class ii, I guess. Anyway, I'd put a system of ethics and morality in class i, and that is kind of what we were talking about.

There's a sketch on an Asian (Brit usage: ancestry from the Indian subcontinent) sketch show called Goodness Gracious Me where an Asian woman runs into some sort of community centre begging for protection from her violent husband, who is chasing her with a knife. The white community worker refuses to help on the basis that his behaviour may, for all she knows, be culturally valid, and she wouldn't want to oppress them with her values. The Asian woman obviously treats her as a lunatic.

It's nearly always moral relativism that is at issue when the term is used, especially in a negative sense. I was trying to say that we don't have to believe one moral-ethical system of thought is absolute, flawless, enduring or whatever to believe that we can adopt a set of moral values. I have mine, and while I don't have the imagination to know how mine will look to someone 100 or 1000 or whatever years from now, I am not fool enough to assume my ideas will be prevalent then. This same thinking applies to, say, critical ideas about music, except that seems even more volatile, perhaps because the musical environment is so volatile.

[koganbot]

Obviously the opposition to privileging any particular metanarratives is a standard explanation of major parts of PoMo. I should have phrased it more like that (as ludickid has below) - a refusal to accept any one as true as against others. This is a meaning of relativism.

I'm not sure what you mean by "not privileging any particular metanarratives" or "a refusal to accept one as true as against others." I'm pretty sure that this is not the same as what ludickid is saying, but that would depend on what you mean by "privileging." But I don't see where your new wording makes your idea significantly different from when you said "all metanarratives have equal value." If you think one has more value than another, then you've privileged the first in comparison to the second, right?

E.g., I think that someone like Leonard (ludickid) would say that there is no neutral platform (such as "the facts") from which you can decide that Einstein is right and Newton is wrong, since different paradigms give you different facts. But he'd also say that it doesn't follow that there can't nonetheless be a lot of good reasons for deciding that Einstein is right in comparison to Newton and therefore reasons to privilege Einstein and choose Einstein as true over Newton. All he'd say in the way of relativism is that there isn't some eternal neutral platform from which you're making the judgment. (Obv. I'm putting words in Leonard's mouth, since he said upthread that philosophy of science was outside his comfort zone, and I worded my sentence carefully ("doesn't follow that there can't nonetheless be a lot of good reasons for deciding Einstein is right") in case he, like me, doesn't know the actual physics very well.)

In any event, you and ludickid are still saying something very different. For him, relativism means that there's no neutral viewpoint from which to judge everything, whereas you seem to extend this to the idea that no viewpoint is better than another. (If you're not saying this, than what does the phrase "opposition to privileging" mean?) Of course, the latter is what a lot of people mean by "relativism," and they think the former entails the latter, though they generally don't give reasons as to why it does.

I was trying to say that we don't have to believe one moral-ethical system of thought is absolute, flawless, enduring or whatever to believe that we can adopt a set of moral values.

What I'm not grasping is how you can adopt a set of moral values without privileging it in relation to competing values.

[koganbot]

You misunderstand what I mean by my two types of metanarratives, so I'll try to make my meaning clearer. Systems (or "systems"; the word is not self-explanatory) like Freud's and Marx's would most certainly go into type (ii) not type (i), though I assume that Marx would include a lot of attempts to claim type (i) support for his system. (I say "assume" because I've not really read enough Marx.) In fact, I'm using Freud's and Marx's and Darwin's and Kuhn's "systems" to define type (ii). Maybe my saying "Oedipus Complex" was misleading, and perhaps I should have chosen "ego," "id," and "superego" instead; but no matter. The reason I chose it is that I believed it to be an organizing principle of Freudian psychology, not just a psychological feature - just as natural selection is an organizing feature of evolutionary biology and paradigm shift is an organizing feature of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. (I'm too ignorant to know for sure that "class conflict" is an organizing feature of Capital, but I believe it is, and if it isn't I'm sure dubdobdee could come up with a better one.)

The reason I'm calling "paradigm shift" a meta element is that it's not simply a fact - "this or that or even all scientific revolutions contain a paradigm shift" - but it's a defining characteristic that explains the revolution. If there's no paradigm shift, then it's not a scientific revolution as Kuhn would define it. There's something frankly circular about this. The idea isn't just supported by the facts, it interprets and creates the facts. (Which doesn't mean that such an idea can't be tested, but it wouldn't so much be tested against its own facts but rather against another idea that also doesn't just explain the facts but gives somewhat different definitions and therefore different facts.) This paragraph is meta too, in that it's definitional, not just observational.

But the term "meta" is a bit misleading here (and therefore so is the term "type (ii) metanarrative") in that I'm not saying that the idea of "paradigm shift" attempts to stand in complete independence of the narratives it is embedded in and defines. An axiom such as "paradigm shift" or "natural selection" is relatively axiomatic in relation to the constellation of narratives of which it is a part rather than absolutely axiomatic.

That I'm calling the systems of Freud and Marx and Darwin and Kuhn "type (ii) metanarratives" doesn't mean that these people didn't ever venture into type (i) metanarratives (as I said, my guess is that Marx did this a lot), but that you can strip that out of their writing and still come up with their basic systems.

[koganbot]

So what's a type (i) metanarrative? A type (i) metanarrative would be a narrative that purports to ground something - such as a type (ii) metanarrative - in a set of principles that are outside the circle.

E.g., a type (i) metanarrative would be the claim that Marx's ideas are true because he followed scientific method - an explanation of "scientific method" would then be given. Some type (i) principles (not necessarily the ones chosen by a Marxist, however) would be the three dogmas of empiricism disparaged by Quine (who attacked the first two) and Davidson (who attacked the third): first, that (in Quine's words) there is a "fundamental cleavage" between truths that are grounded in meaning independently of fact, and truths that are grounded in fact (this is the analytic-synthetic dichotomy); second, that "each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience" (Quine called this "reductionism"); and third, that there's a fundamental cleavage between content (what's given to you by the world) and scheme (how you organize that content). These dogmas don't merely purport to structure a particular story about the world (such as Darwin's story), but to structure our entire experience of the world, of any world.

The reason I think it's important for you to distinguish between type (i) and type (ii) metanarratives is that Quine, Wittgenstein, Kuhn, Davidson et al. didn't just feel incredulous towards type (i) metanarratives, they made specific arguments as to why they believed such narratives to be impossible or unintelligible. Their arguments - that fact and theory are intertwined, that "first" principles are somewhat dependent on nonfirst principles, etc. - leave the bulk of Freud and Marx and Darwin and Kuhn unscathed. That Freud and Marx have foundered isn't owing to our no longer believing in theory-independent facts but because of a lot of specific problems people had in making Freud and Marx work. But note that Darwin hasn't foundered; I haven't read much Lyotard, and you've always been bashful about elaborating on your ideas, but my impression is that people who would declare themselves incredulous towards metanarratives would nonetheless be open to endorsing The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions and its attack on the empiricist metanarrative, not noticing that Structure is itself a metanarrative in the same way that Freudian psychology and Marxism are metanarratives.

[koganbot]

and third, that there's a fundamental cleavage between content (what's given to you by the world) and scheme (how you organize that content).

Actually, I'm not sure of the correctness of the phrase "what's given to you by the world"; "what's given to you by something (whether the world or not)" might be an alternative. The dogma that Davidson was attacking was "the dualism of scheme and content, of organizing system and something waiting to be organized." That passage is from "On The Very Idea Of A Conceptual Scheme," an article that I don't own. (Rorty quotes it in Philosophy And The Mirror Of Nature.)

[koganbot]

So I'd say you'd be better off thinking of (at least) two different incredulities.

First, a disbelief in absolute transcendence, in the idea that there's a realm (facts or logic or whatever) that, while being absolutely independent of discourse, can nonetheless be a basis from which to ground and judge all discourses.

Second, a skepticism towards a "system's" claim to speak for all of human psychology or to give "laws" that explain all cultural development, and a skepticism towards claims that the systems that do work - such as physics, evolutionary biology - are successfully being extended to speak for all of human psychology and all cultural development.

Notice a big difference between the first and the second, not just in what one is being incredulous towards, but also in the force of the incredulity. The first is a disbelief; it's analogous to atheism. It says that something doesn't exist, that something is unintelligible. The second merely says that something doesn't seem too likely at the moment. I suppose one could extend the second by saying that no features of psychology can be common to members of all cultures and that no cultural developments can be common to all societies, but that's simply blind dogmatism, not any kind of principle.

(I know that you're saying that the word "relativism" tends to arise in relation to morals; but the basic arguments are the same. That is, (a) disbelieving in a neutral ground that's not dependent on the rest of your ethical system but that can nonetheless provide the first principles of your system is not the same as (b) deciding that your ethical system cannot or should not be generally applied across cultures.)

[koganbot]

When I run into the word "relativism" it's usually a pejorative, with people who take relativistic positions like pragmatism, holism, contextualism, structuralism, deconstruction, etc. generally not willing to apply the term to themselves (this strategy makes sense, given the crazy ways the term gets used, but the word itself when divorced from the craziness isn't misleading). But the term is being used positively more and more, I think. Here's the post that dubdobdee was referring to above, from my friend Charlotte Pressler. It's on a Matthew Yglesias comment thread (where Yglesias says he heard on NPR that "a majority of Americans (I forget the actual number) believe that 'truth is relative'"). Charlotte's comment:

I teach an introductory philosophy course in rural South Florida and so might be able to contribute some analysis (quickly, before Hurricane Charley gets here). Almost all my students are evangelical and/or charismatic Christians who believe in the literal truth of the Bible, and almost all believe that truth is relative. I found this contradiction interesting, and looked into it further.

It appears to have two sources. First, my students apply the word "truth" to all of the statements they believe, and don't distinguish between claims of fact and claims of value. They are not encouraged to make such a distinction by the local culture; the local authorities frequently describe obvious value claims as "facts," adding that "you can't argue with facts." "Truth," in my students' dialect, thus winds up meaning something like "my basic orientation to the world, the way I see things, my perspective"-- which would be correctly described as personal, individual, and "relative."

I might add that an article in the journal Teaching Philosophy (apologies to the author, whose name I can't remember) argued that the beginning philosophy students who claim that "truth is relative" are really trying to say something like this: "I don't agree with Mom & Dad any more about a whole lot of things, and I love them, so I don't want to say they're wrong, but I don't want to give up my own point of view either."

The second reason my students believe that truth is relative, however, strikes me as much more pernicious. They have grown up in small, tribal, tightly-knit, highly conformist communities that (needless to say) did not encourage free discussion or debate. In college, they meet for the first time people who do not share their presuppositions, and they begin to get an inkling that the wider world contains many more. They have never been asked to defend their own belief systems before, and, in all honesty, some of their beliefs are quite indefensible. When students in this position say that truth is relative, they are trying to exempt their own belief system from the requirement of rationality. They want to be able to go on believing whatever their local community has decided to believe, even though both argument and evidence are against them. Again, they are encouraged in this by the local authorities, who teach them to devalue reason and (especially) "book learning."

The fact is that my students will be ostracized by their local communities (it's called "disfellowshipping") if they disagree in any point with their community's creed. It is a public, brutal shaming, and any human who could avoid it, would. If this sheds any light on the "relativism" of the American public (or, perhaps, the persistence of "creation science" and other follies), I would be glad.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Had a conversation about the myth of "moral relativism" with someone after a (kind of dumb) commencement speech I just sat through that was saying, in essence, that there are THREE TYPES of readers: (1) those who read "naively," not taking into consideration social context (e.g. _____ is writing within a racist society and reflects its values), (2) those who read "in the know" and ONLY see the social context without recognizing the artistry etc. of the work (e.g. "OMG ____ reflects the values of a racist society [shutdown]!!!!"), and (3) truly critical readers (the readers at University X) that achieve a "second naivete" and recognize the value system without throwing out the possibility of artistry, validity, value, etc. in a problematic work.

This was stupid for fairly obvious reasons, the main one being that if we grant that there are hypothetically readers that fall into category (1) and (2), we DON'T need to suggest that this is some sort of "norm" of reading and we definitely don't need to condescendingly assert that University X has some sort of unique ability to create such an obvious model of critical thinker.

Anyway, I linger on the construction of the strawmen in this debate because she used the framework to justify what she called a "moral relativism" in students of hers (who had yet to become TRULY CRITICAL Type 3 readers, of course) who claimed that if they saw a violent cultural norm happening in front of them (the practice of a group of people ritualistically killing a widow after the death of her husband) they wouldn't stop it because it "wasn't for them to judge."

What she isn't thinking about is that she's given them an extreme hypothetical that they likely had no context for judging whatsoever AND were probably giving (vaguely) a response that seemed to "fit the teacher," even though in this case it DIDN'T fit the teacher. I find it difficult to believe that these students were all expressing something as specific as an ideology, or ideological tendency, that we can call "moral relativism." More likely, they were, with no little uncertainty, revealing their discomfort with their (now public) ignorance of a foreign culture. If you asked them "is murder wrong," I imagine most of them would say "yes." Then you could muck 'em up with something like "is ritualistic killing murder," and, having never actually experienced or had any knowledge of anything like a ritualistic killing, watch them not know exactly what to say. But this would probably be because it was considered to be outside the SCOPE of their judgment, not because "everything is relative." They would feel "unqualified" to respond. (That's my hunch for a more positive version of "relativism" anyway that isn't just constructing a strawman; i.e. this woman's students and their responses were presumably all real.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

That is "that isn't for me to say" might be closer to "I have no reference in the world I'm familiar with that tells me how to respond to what you're asking me" than "all cultures are entitled to do whatever they've already been doing."

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

see, here's a re-emergence of my "structure-buttressing myth": "pay attention student of the university of X: if you respect our powers, we will enhance yours" -- i agree with dave this is a silly just-so-story, but getting outside it, into the business of a general justification of the particulars higher ed (non-practical departments especially) is to risk stirring up a whole whirlwind of political arguments and currents WHICH UNIVERSITY X MIGHT NOT SURVIVE (or more pertinently may not survive in a shape which the commencement-speech (straw?)lady gets to give commencement speeches...)

so what we're talking about is a ritual invocation to stave off a particular cluster of demons -- and as dave says, the accusation of "moral relativism" isn't the identification of an ideology so much as a mediterreanean peasant's flashed finger-symbol, fingers as twinhorns meaning "avert the bad luck"

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

haha as you can probably tell from the tumbling chaos of some of my posts, this question uncorks a whole bunch of themes fermenting in my head lo! these 20-odd years, and they are REALLY NOT arriving on-page in an orderly or a clear fashion (for a change eh readers!)

the most compressed is where i just throw in "jazz" -- GOOD LUCK GETTING ME TO TEASE THAT OUT QUICKLY

[koganbot]

OK, some extrapolations from some of what you're saying:

(1) The academy feels it's in peril, is organized w/ philosophy as the queen, hence both gives weight to philosophy and doesn't want to imperil the academy by denigrating the queen, 'cause then they'd have to reorganize.
(2) People who dislike the "relativist" point but do feel committed to the importance of philosophy would have a motive both for (a) thinking the idea is dangerous because, being philosophical, hence important, it could motivate people to believe and do bad things and (b) thinking the idea is dangerous because it harms philosophy by getting in the way of correct philosophical points that could motivate people to believe and do good things.
(3) The esoteric philosophical point itself threatens philosophy. (No one has made the argument on this thread, but it would go: If you can't get beyond axioms to a set of facts that are "independent" of the axioms and that therefore can be used to test the axioms, then the various discourses and their axioms can take care of themselves and don't need philosophy to tell them about their grounds and conditions, since the point denies the existence of such grounds and conditions.)
(4) People (whether they care that the academy is in peril or not) want to draw on the philosophical point for authority, because they believe it justifies what they do.
(5) Sincere, thoughtful people such as dubdobdee and byebyepride, even if they're not likely to use the word "relativism," think the point and similar points provide support for the idea that nothing is decided irrevocably and conversations can be reopened. (Am I correct that you think this, or that you thought it seven years ago, anyway, and that Alex seemed to be thinking it back then when he was posting on the Derrida thread?)

[koganbot]

You are off for the weekend and shortly after you get back I will be off for a week, but rereading this I had an insight as to why you thought you were answering my question while I thought that you were dodging at least some of it.

The question starts with Esoteric Philosophical Point: "That's a rather esoteric philosophical point I've made, that you can't get beyond the axiom to a set of facts that are 'independent' of the axiom and that therefore can be used to test the axiom.... My question, therefore, is why do people think that the esoteric philosophical point is a big deal?"

And what my eyes were straining but failing to see in your responses was where the point in question was the source of the potential for institutional instability that you seemed to be taking for granted.

Maybe it would help if I rephrased the question:

Why does point A (Esoteric Philosophical Point that I stated above) appear to have consequences B, C, and D rather than consequences P, Q, and R or, as one might expect, no consequences at all?

And your response wasn't making sense to me, since you seemed to assume, without giving any reason, that point A would have a particular effect: "given the pragmatics of departmental structure, any attempt to banish philosophy from its upper level role is going to seem to like the introduction of a revolutionary barbarian chaos."

So now I'll ask the question again, more specifically: How does Esoteric Philosophical Point A ("you can't get beyond the axiom to a set of facts that are 'independent' of the axiom and that therefore can be used to test the axiom") result in an attempt to banish philosophy from its upper level role?

And it seems to me that YOU have jumped to consequence B: "nothing is decided yet" or "everything is still at issue." Whereas very the question I'm asking is why is the Esoteric Philosophical Point seen to have this consequence, that nothing is decided yet and everything is still at issue? You seem to assume that this is written into point A, but it's not. Point A has no opinion as to what's been decided and what hasn't been. (And what does have to do one way or another with the status of philosophy?)

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I think I agree with dubdobdee above if he is saying Jazz is the ultimate in relativism.

However, if he isn't saying that then I'm just putting that out there anyway.

I don't like jazz or relativism, I believe they're both totally contrary to any sort of value system and we'd generally say we need a value system. However, since semantically relativism would seem to suggest a belief in the relationships between things, ie: things are value positive or value negative comparatively to each other in their scale of thing-ness (a lion is more a cat than an ocean etc.) then we are all relativists because that's the very basis for a functional value system. And maybe in this sense jazz is listenable.

So swings and roundabouts, really.

[koganbot]

Wait, I don't understand why you think that relativism is contrary to any sort of value system. This is because you don't say what you think "relativism" is. If I say A is good in relation to B, then I am relating A to B (and perhaps implying that A's goodness is dependent on B's being not so good), but this doesn't seem "totally contrary to any sort of value system."

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Ah, sorry, yes; I take relativism to mean people who consider all things of equal 'ness' when regarding anything. Taken to its postmodern extreme, this would mean a lion was just as much a cat as an ocean. Relativism, as far as I think of it, is (perversely) what should be called "anti-relativism" or in other words, it's represented by the expression "it's all relative," when used to excuse oneself from bothering to properly analyse matters.

[koganbot]

Oops, I wrote this wrong the first time. In any event, my impression - correct me if you think this is incorrect - isn't that someone who would say "all points of view are equally valid" or someone who would oppose this idea but associate it with relativism thinks that the idea that all points of view are equally valid is a consequence of relativism. That is, relativism itself isn't the idea that all points of view are equally valid; rather, the idea that all points of view are equally valid is the result of relativism. Which (at least in regard to the people I'm imagining) still leaves the question what is this relativism that has such a consequence?

Note that ludickid, above, disputes the idea that a consequence of relativism is that all views are equally valid.

Also, I say in my intro that "people wouldn't bring up the issue of 'relativism' if they didn't think they were taking care of something by doing so." So what do you think they (incl. you if you're the sort who brings up the issue) are taking care of by bringing up the issue?

ack, brane rambling and have to get up in six hours

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Mmm, it's possible that relativism is victim to its own consequence. I have to say, I'm a bit of a positivist at heart (and generally think people have to be- you can't not think you're 'right' or 'wrong' about some things) so it basically peeves me because it tended to be implemented by smartasses in my seminars, usually wrongly, just to annoy everyone else (eg: 'but is there really a difference between our experience in a classroom and the experience of someone in a sweatshop, if this is each of our regular experience?' answer: 'err, yes, outside the baser elements of epistemology, which, whilst relevant on a metaphysical level are not actually used as poverty indicators') and so I'm a bit biasedly hostile towards the whole thing.

The problem with relativism in analytical action, actually, is that it's devil's advocate and it's often a good devil's advocate and one I've played myself a lot. However, it tends to be used by people who are debasing the idea of a structured value system (of any kind) rather than understanding that any value system has a structure which, if examined, is likely to be logical, etc. I feel I am probably not explaining this at all well.

I think I might have interpreted your question a bit literally when you asked what relativism means to us- I thought you meant our personal experience of it (like if you'd asked what Ashlee Simpson means to us) rather than something we would write in an wikipedia article or something. Of course this is all v. relativist itself.

I think this is the thing about relativism; you only experience relativism when it is used by a third party analytically, however, interaction is positivist and so no one can really say they're a relativist, however, analysis can be relative. Or something?

I am v. bad at talking about these things without sitting down for a week and thinking about them first, though, so I imagine I have just further obfuscated whatever it is I actually think about relativism to both you and I. I'll have a proper think about the whole thing after this interview business tomorrow, until then I have to re-learn French.