"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

[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.