"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]

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.)