"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]

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)