Relativism: So What? (Part Four)

[koganbot]

Here are six ideas that I associate with "relativism." I agree with (1) through (4), disagree with (5) and (6), but I think that (5) and (6) are where all the action is. If no one associated (5) and (6) with (1) through (4), there'd be no hullabaloo. (A better way of putting this might be that people link (5) and (6) to (1) through (4) so that they can have their hullabaloo.) I'm just sketching the ideas, might give each its own post later or elaborate here in the comments.

(1) "Independence" is a relative term. "Principal McVicker, which one of these two students is the smartest?" "Well, Butt-head's smarter than Beavis, but 'smart' is a relative term." This is where "relative" actually appears in everyday speech. The idea is that a pair of terms, such as "smart"-"stupid," is comparative, like "soft"-"loud" or "cold"-"hot," rather than being either/or, like an on-off switch. So a cold star is 2,000 degrees above zero and a high-temperature superconductor is a couple hundred degrees below zero, the comparison being to other stars and other superconductors. The gorilla is a smart animal, but if I were to call you a gorilla you'd probably take it as an insult. For our purposes, the relevant pair is "independent"-"dependent" (and similar terms such as "autonomous"). Related pairs would include "cause"-"effect," "reality"-"appearance," "intrinsic"-"extrinsic," "ground"-"that which is being grounded." A cause is supposed to be independent of its effects in that the effects don't cause the cause, reality causes appearances but appearances don't cause reality, your reasons or justifications or grounds for believing something are supposed to cause the belief not be created by the belief, and so on. To say that these are relative terms is to say that a cause can be somewhat dependent on its effect, while still being considered independent for practical purposes - just how "dependent" it can be while still being "independent" depends on the circumstances and whatever you're using for comparison. So a ground can be somewhat dependent on what it grounds. (Obviously, the future can't cause the past; I'm either/or on that one. So in the temporal sense causes are independent of their effects, and hopes and plans and goals are included within causes, since the actual outcome doesn't cause those hopes, plans, goals. But what's at issue here isn't temporal cause and effect but the supposed ontological, where one class of thing is supposed to cause another; e.g., facts causing the conclusions we draw from them, logic and axioms causing our logical deductions, our reasons causing our actions, our beliefs underlying our judgments, and so forth.)

(2) Difference, or contrast. This is the idea that for something to be meaningful it has to make a difference: i.e., for any phenomenon (word, statement, object, event, etc.) to be meaningful there has to be a difference between its existing (or occurring) and its not existing (or occurring) - which makes its significance dependent on what it is not, a matter of its contrasting with other words, statements, objects, and events, which in turn contrast with yet other words, statements, objects, and events, and so on. This connects to (1) in that it suggests that absolute independence is not really conceivable.

(3) Contextualism. Wittgenstein: "'I set the brake up by connecting up rod and lever.' --Yes, given the whole of the rest of the mechanism. Only in conjunction with that is it a brake-lever, and separated from its support it is not even a lever; it may be anything, or nothing." So what something means in one sentence, conversation, circumstance, social practice, culture, etc. isn't necessarily what it means in other sentences, conversations, circumstances, social practices, cultures, etc. This links up to (1) and (2) in that the axioms or first principles of a social practice are still dependent on the practice as a whole.

(4) "Incommensurability." The term is Kuhn's and Feyerabend's, but I'm putting it in quotation marks because it's somewhat misleading. The idea isn't that things can't be compared to one another but just that there isn't one transcendent standard that works for everything. If people make radically different assumptions in one discourse from those they make in another, then they'll use crucial words differently and they'll come up with different facts, hence they can't simply look at the facts to see who is right. An innocuous example would be that a tomato is a "vegetable" in cookery but a "fruit" in botany. A potent one would be the word "motion" as used differently by Aristotle and Newton. I talked about this a lot on the Kuhn thread, which is one of the best things I've ever written, if you want to take a look. For Aristotle, motion is a change in state leading to a particular end result, e.g., rocks moving to their place in the center of the universe, fire moving towards the periphery, an acorn growing into a tree, a man returning from sickness to health. For Newton, motion is just an object's change in position, and there doesn't need to be an end result or stopping point but rather, the object stays in motion until acted on by an outside force. If an Aristotelian and a Newtonian observe a man regaining his health, there's no third thing - "the facts," "reality" - for them to look at to see who is right, since the Aristotelian has defined what he's seeing as motion, and the Newtonian has defined motion otherwise. This doesn't mean that you can't compare the two ideas to see which is better. E.g., Newton created laws that predicted planetary motions with great accuracy and that, more convincingly than Aristotle, explained why spears didn't fall to the ground the moment they left your hand, etc. Note that botany and cookery aren't in direct competition with each other, so it's nonsensical to argue over which one is right. Whereas between Aristotle and Newton you have to choose; then, between Newton and Einstein. Also, there are fundamental disagreements where anyone who cares should have an opinion but the disagreements shouldn't get resolved (e.g., whether the Clash are real punks, whether Jay-Z is too pop to be real hip-hop, etc.). [I don't mean to imply here that I understand or have even read Aristotle's concept of motion.]

(5) Skepticism. "Skepticism" is a broad term ranging in meaning from "you should test your ideas" to "there is no way to tell that you are not a brain in a jar." But the three that are relevant here veer towards "brain in the jar." They are (i) If you are ensconced within one discourse or paradigm or culture you can't understand another one, or anyway you can't know that you understand the other one. (ii) Some fundamental, unquestioned ideas, e.g., the Earth is the center of the universe, have turned out to be false, therefore any idea could potentially be false, any discourse could potentially be displaced by another one, nothing is decided yet, and every conversation is still open. (iii) Recall that idea (2) goes: "for any phenomenon (word, statement, object, event, etc.) to be meaningful there has to be a difference between its existing or occurring and it's not existing or occurring - which makes its significance dependent on what it is not, a matter of its contrasting with other words, statements, objects, and events, which in turn contrast with yet other words, statements, objects, and events, and so on." So if you follow along on these differences/contrasts, you either go around in a circle (things contrasting with other things that contrast with the original things) or you get an infinite regress, hence the meaning of phenomena can never be nailed down, is always open. [I think (i) is stupid on the face of it and that (ii) and (iii) start reasonably and then cheat in their reasoning to get their supposed results.]

(6) Nothing is better than anything else. No one really believes this, that nothing is better than anything else, which is a self-contradictory sentence anyway. But people are willing to believe equivalents, such as no culture is better than any other, all paradigms are equally true, all metanarratives have equal value, one shouldn't privilege one discourse over another, etc. A milder idea would be that you're certainly entitled - and in some instances required - to judge and to choose between competing paradigms, but since the paradigms have some radically different assumptions, your choice is frankly a matter of taste or social preference or a value judgment, and that there's no truly rational way to decide between the paradigms. The logic goes like this: (a) the competing paradigms are equally rational (that is, smart people who work within them are being true to their own terms), and (b) there's no "neutral" ground of facts that can validate one paradigm at the expense of the other, since each paradigm creates its own facts, so (c) there can be no rational ground for saying that one paradigm is better than the other. [For me, the jump from (b) to (c) is terrible, and more to the point, is profoundly nonrelativistic. But if you want to think of relativism as something that's liberating or if you want to think of it as something dangerous, you will take that leap, and you won't notice that you've unconsciously smuggled absolutist assumptions into your idea of "relativism."]

Overall, I'd say that (1) through (3) are true but don't have much consequence, at least don't have much consequence for me; they accurately depict, e.g., how we actually use the words "independent" and "significant," but they seem like platitudes or truisms, not insights; so we need to ask ourselves why - i.e., in what contexts - people like me or Wittgenstein thought the points were worth making, thought they made a difference; (4) is true and consequential, but I think the consequences are practical rather than being a challenge to standard practice; (5) is ridiculous but I understand how it can ensnare smart people; and (6) is even more ridiculous, and I'm astonished that smart people embrace it or impute it to others, but they do, and this needs to be explained. Oh yes, and (5) and (6) are actually at odds with (1) through (4), so we need to ask ourselves what smart people gain by not noticing this.

My hypothesis is that, even among thoughtful people, "relativism" is a stand-in issue (and I'm including within "relativism" the attempts to find social implications for pragmatism or deconstruction). But I'm not wedded to that hypothesis, and I'd expect that ludickid, dubdobdee, byebyepride, piratemoggy, and martinskidmore would want to dispute it.

Comments

[ludickid.livejournal.com]

Well, (6) is the thing that Rorty in particular defends as theoretically true but largely an unimportant distraction. It's not that anyone really believes that nothing is better than anything else, or perhaps more to the point that all value judgments are equally valid; obviously everyone believes to one degree or another that their opinions, culture, values, etc. are more correct than those of any oppositional ones, and there's nothing non-relativistic about saying so, as long as you don't pretend that your judgments are universally true in contrast to, especially, (3) and (4).

The problem is that making relative value the end of the argument ("I believe x=3, and here is why, but in the end that judgment is simply a function of my cultural framework") as opposed to the beginning of it ("although this opinion is informed by my cultural framework, I believe x=3, and here is why) doesn't get you anywhere. It's not that your point (6) is necessarily ridiculous; it's just that it doesn't have a lot of utility.

[koganbot]

Hmmm. Rorty has rejected the strong form of (6), specifically said that he thinks some cultures are better than others, and I don't see why he (and you) wouldn't also reject the weaker form, though that doesn't mean for sure that he does reject it, and there are essays in Truth and Progress that I should reread. But I think that you're thinking of (6) as something different from what I think it is. In other words, I agree heartily with you and Rorty that my judgment is inextricable from my cultural framework and can never be not so (and that includes my judgment that my judgments are intextricable from their cultural framework, which is a judgment that makes sense in this cultural framework), but I don't see any conflict between my believing this and believing, for instance, that natural selection is universally true and is in play anywhere there is biological evolution, which can't be understood without it. This of course doesn't mean that natural selection is universally believed or is universally intelligible within all cultural contexts. It means I'm going to apply it universally. It also means that in regard to evolution I think that all people should accept my premises. (There's a six-of-one, half-a-dozen-of-the-other question as to whether this means they're adopting my culture in this regard or incorporating my premises into their own culture.) But I need to have good reasons. What makes me a relativist (at least in the eyes of an antirelativist) is that I don't believe that there's a set of transcendent facts available to anyone with eyes and a transcendent principle ("empiricism") that makes natural selection true. Rather, natural selection's ability to explain a whole lot of stuff that nothing else can explain is my good reason for considering it true. And I'm totally baffled why anyone would think that such reasons in principle couldn't be good enough for me to decide that an idea is true - unless that person believes that the only way that an idea can be true is if there are a set of readily available, supertranscendent facts that somehow make it true. In which case that person isn't a relativist, if "relativist" is to mean anything coherent. (One could well argue that in common usage "relativist" doesn't mean something coherent.)

Of course, I'm with you on the crucial point that one has to give reasons for why one's ideas are true, though a reason I think that "relativism" is a stand-in issue is that I don't see how my being a relativist has anything to do one way or another with what those reasons will be. But from my relativist view, (6) isn't theoretically true but a distraction, it's flat-out wrong. But, back to the first sentence of this paragraph, considering it a distraction or considering it flat-out wrong brings us to the same point, which is that we've got to give reasons for our ideas and "relativism" doesn't absolve of us of that requirement.

(Btw, I think that what Rorty would label a useless distraction is the question whether Copernicus discovered the solar system or whether he invented it. Whereas I'd say Copernicus discovered it but that this is a trivial point that simply reiterates that I believe in the solar system, and says nothing about why one would be justified in believing in it or how Copernicus came to believe in it.)

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

I'd dispute less than you think - we were at cross-purposes in the last discussion: you thought I was putting forward my opinions, I thought I was offering the way some people use the terms and why they are a problem.

One note: I wouldn't be quite so sure that the future can't cause the past. It's by no means clear that this is not possible. Godel has proposed some fascinating models than show time travel as possible, for instance, though it seems highly unlikely that our universe is Godelian, in that sense. There are other models that relativity (not really related to relativism) allows that offer circular time. We don't understand time anything like well enough to be sure about this issue. Our ideas of time's arrow might prove to be as accurate and useful as Newton's laws - nearly always plenty true enough, nearly always applicable, but actually wrong.

I think you're pulling in opposite directions when you want a clear and rigorous statement about each of the different usages of 'relativism' AND want to understand why people have a problem with their ideas of it. Most people don't have a clear and rigorous understanding of anything, let alone anything as contested and vague and multivalent and even incoherent as this. However stupid it is, there are people who refuse to make value judgements across cultural boundaries, for instance - I think this is cowardice on all kinds of levels, and is reinforced by the fear of censure and worse in environments where people are closely policing anything that might be thought of as racist. Frankly, I think the end results of this are racist, in that they refuse to engage in a meaningful debate or to ask for a justification (or at least one stronger than cultural tradition) for what strikes me as appalling behaviour. The other end of this is people who won't consider taking seriously anything from outside their cultural context - this is related to the kind of racism that's had infinitely worse effects over the centuries. These are often the people most likely to use 'relativist' as an insult, sometimes to anyone who will pay any serious attention to ideas from other cultures. ('Cultures' here is standing in for a multiplicity of discourses or indeed metanarratives - it's sometimes the easiest to use as an example, rather than the only one.) (Let's give two examples: someone who won't condemn 'female circumcision' (a circumlocution I despise) because we don't understand its cultural context, as against the determinedly ignorant outcry the moment someone mentioned the UK adopting any aspect of Moslem sharia law.)

That extreme use of scepticism as an excuse is regularly intellectually dishonest too. I'm all for it when it leads to questioning, to testing the existing theories, to positing new ideas, but when it's just a way of dismissing anything that disagrees with often unfounded notions, a way of saying that you can't be sure I'm wrong, however feeble the case I can put forward is, I have nothing but contempt for it.

So I'm agreeing with you about the quality of these last two ideas, but that doesn't mean that these are not a lot to do with what people are complaining about when they moan about relativism. Very few people would even attempt the kind of thinking you do, and even fewer are remotely capable of it.

[koganbot]

I was just reading that physics hasn't made up its mind if time is unidirectional, or even if time is derivative of something else rather than being fundamental. But unless someone actually finds a way to travel back through time, whatever physics decides probably won't affect the past causing the future in our day-to-day lives (any more than quantum uncertainties have anything to do with our own). Unless I'm wrong.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

No, you're almost certainly right - that was my comparison with Newton. I rarely have to take Einstein's relativity equations into account when playing pool, for instance. (Unless I hit the ball at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light, when its mass and therefore momentum increase more than Newton would predict. At that speed it's quite hard to control the final position anyway, I find.)

[koganbot]

Interestingly enough, I also read recently that in Newton's laws time doesn't have an arrow either: if you play the videotape forwards or backwards, the balls still recoil with the same equal and opposite reactions.