"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]

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.