"Relativism: So What?": So What?
Jun. 24th, 2008 08:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
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.
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Date: 2008-06-24 02:43 pm (UTC)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
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Date: 2008-06-24 02:48 pm (UTC)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)
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Date: 2008-06-24 03:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-24 02:51 pm (UTC)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?
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Date: 2008-06-24 03:06 pm (UTC)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)
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Date: 2008-06-24 05:47 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2008-06-24 06:11 pm (UTC)(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
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Date: 2008-06-24 02:54 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2008-06-24 03:39 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2008-06-24 03:51 pm (UTC)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
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Date: 2008-06-24 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-24 04:00 pm (UTC)haha my kind of dewey!!
Date: 2008-06-24 04:07 pm (UTC)(also he was a racist, bah)
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Date: 2008-06-24 04:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-24 04:18 pm (UTC)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
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Date: 2008-06-24 04:30 pm (UTC)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
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Date: 2008-06-24 04:40 pm (UTC)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
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Date: 2008-06-25 07:41 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2008-06-25 07:55 am (UTC)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)
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Date: 2008-06-25 08:56 am (UTC)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
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Date: 2008-06-24 04:01 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2008-06-24 04:15 pm (UTC)The Death Of The Philosopher
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Date: 2008-06-24 05:06 pm (UTC)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
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Date: 2008-06-24 03:15 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2008-06-24 03:28 pm (UTC)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)
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Date: 2008-06-24 03:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-24 03:54 pm (UTC)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
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Date: 2008-06-24 04:42 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2008-06-24 10:43 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2008-06-25 06:51 am (UTC)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
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
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.
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Date: 2008-06-25 04:12 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2008-06-25 04:15 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2008-06-25 04:36 pm (UTC)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.)
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Date: 2008-06-25 04:17 pm (UTC)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.)
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Date: 2008-06-24 04:36 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2008-06-25 02:39 am (UTC)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.)
no subject
Date: 2008-06-25 02:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-25 09:04 am (UTC)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"
no subject
Date: 2008-06-25 09:07 am (UTC)the most compressed is where i just throw in "jazz" -- GOOD LUCK GETTING ME TO TEASE THAT OUT QUICKLY
no subject
Date: 2008-06-25 09:56 pm (UTC)(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
no subject
Date: 2008-06-28 02:19 pm (UTC)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?)
no subject
Date: 2008-06-25 01:29 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-25 05:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-25 06:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-25 09:00 pm (UTC)Note that
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
Date: 2008-06-25 09:28 pm (UTC)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.