"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

[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.)