Maniglier Others Truth

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Patrice Maniglier

(University of Essex)

The Others Truths: Logic of Comparative Knowledge

Departmental Seminar of the Department of Philosophy of the University of Essex

(17th December 2009)

Please be aware that this is only a draft which is not even fully referenced: it is not to

be quoted as such, but rather to be discussed and improved... Comments, corrections,

remarks and questions are more then welcome and can be addressed to me via email:

[email protected] . I want to thank Fabian Freyehagen and David McNeil for their

questions and suggestions in the course of many informal conversations we had on issues

related to this paper. However, since they didnt read any written version of this paper, and

certainly dont share the views presented here, they cant be held in any way responsible for

all the weaknesses of the following argument.

And what I dont for the life of me make out,

Chad pursued with resigned perplexity, is what yougain by it.Oh it would have taken his companion too long tosay! Thats because you have, I verily believe, no

imagination. Youve other qualities. But noimagination, dont you see? at all.I dare say. I do see. It was an idea in which Chadshowed interest. But havent you yourself rathertoo much?

Orrather ! So that after an instant, under thisreproach and as if it were at last a fact really toescape from, Strether made his move for departure.(Henry James, The Ambassadors. London: PenguinClassics, 2003: p. 437)

Nothing illustrates more nicely the view that the very notion of truth is incompatible

with the idea of its being relative, than this famous line by Pascal: Truth on this side of the

Pyrenees, error on the other side. That this line is ironical, and means exactly the contrary of

what is says, is even more apparent in its original context, which is actually plagiarized from

Montaigne or, to speak more politely, implicitly referring to a passage from the Essays:

We see neither justice nor injustice which does not change its nature with change in climate.

Three degrees of latitude reverse all jurisprudence; a meridian decides the truth. Fundamental laws

change after a few years of possession; right has its epochs; the entry of Saturn into the Lion marks to
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]


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us the origin of such and such a crime. A strange justice that is bounded by a river! Truth on this side of

the Pyrenees, error on the other side. Pascal, Penses, 294 (Edition Brunschvicg)1.

Quelle bont est-ce que je voyois hyer en credit, et demain plus, et que le traict dune riviere

faict crime ? Quelle verit que ces montaignes bornent, qui est mensonge au monde qui se tient au

del ? (Montaigne,Essais,Livre II, Apologie de Raymond Sebond , GF, p. 245).

The idea is that one and the same proposition cannot be true only in certain

circumstances, and become false in others, in other words, that truth cannot change. To say

that truth is relative in the sense that what is true is certain circumstances becomes false in

other seems simply to say that there is no truth, but only opinions. Of course, the fact that

people disagree about what is true or false is certainly not enough to make it so that there is

nothing which is true, but, if anything is to be true, it must be true in spite of the various

opinions that people have about what is true. What is true now will always be true (if it is true

indeed), and what is true here will be true everywhere (if it is true indeed).

My aim in this paper is to interrogate this very assumption that relativity undermines

the very idea of truth. But I am not so much interested in arguing in favour of what I will call

the relativist thesis, which can be loosely paraphrased as holding that there is no ultimate

criteria of what is right and wrong but only a plurality of assessments of the right and the

wrong depending on conditions which cannot be themselves assessed from an overlooking

impartial standpoint (external, as it were, to the arena of the dispute); I am more interested in

arguing that the relativist postulate, far from dismissing the very idea of knowledge, is, on the

contrary, an instrument for the production of a certain form of knowledge comparative

anthropological knowledge. Of course, I will have to justify the use of the word knowledge

in the previous sentence, and therefore to argue that it is possible to speak of truths based only

on, or resulting solely from, the very assumption that there are no absolute and eternal truths

and nothing beyond the variations of opinions or appearances. I suspect that you will be very

keen on pointing immediately at the usual paradox against scepticism and relativism: that this

is itself, by its own standard, only an opinion and cannot pretend to say the truth about

opinions I will try to explain why I dont find too much difficulty in this and happily

confess that relativism is indeed relative. But I will argue that relativism is not so much an

epistemological thesis, as a methodological postulate, and I must confess immediately that I

am more interested in the productivity of such a postulate in terms of its consequences than in

its intrinsic absolute validity or in the question whether the consequences themselves can be

1 On ne voit presque rien de juste ou d'injuste, qui ne change de qualit, en changeant de climat. Trois degrs

d'lvation du Ple renversent toute la Jurisprudence. Un Mridien dcide de la vrit, ou peu d'annes depossession. Les lois fondamentales changent. Le droit a ses poques. Plaisante justice qu'une rivire ou uneMontaigne borne ! Vrit au de des Pyrnes, erreur au del.


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proved to be absolutely valid. I will be happy if I find a standard of assessment of the right

and the wrong which results uniquely from the assumption that there is nothing but a variation

of assessments of the right and the wrong. But it must be said from the beginning that I will

argue that relativism is not the idea that truths are relative to different contexts which would

exist in themselves and be independent2, but rather the redefinition of everything that seems

to be, and in particular of these contexts, in terms of how they relate to one another and can be

seen as variants of one another.

I would like to call this form of relativism affirmative or active relativism, and oppose

it to what could be called negative or reactive relativism. Reactive relativism concludes that

we must suspend our judgement about everything and hold to the general view that what is

here is contingent in the sense that it could be entirely different (there is no necessary reason

for it to be and to be the way it is, to paraphrase Leibniz), and cannot be grounded on any

absolute necessity.Active relativism is not, or rather, not only, a negative statement about the

impossibility of anything (i.e. the absolute foundation of any sort of value), but rather a

positive method to generate new views on ourselves and things around us and to draw from

the relativist postulate itself a criterion to redefine what there is as a variant of other

possibilities of itself. The truth of what we are is to be found in the others truths.

1. Some arguments for the Relativistic Postulate.

Even though I could simply consider relativism as a postulate and go on to analyse

how it can operate as an instrument for a certain kind of knowledge, I thought it was at least

useful, and probably also quite fun, to try and give some of the reasons why I think the

relativist postulate is not such an unreasonable claim as it is often portrayed.

1.1. The Amazonian body and ours:

In order to make the discussion immediately more concrete or dramatic, I will start

with an example: in an article entitled The Gift and the Given, Three Nano-Essays on

Kinship and Magic, the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (to which the

ideas presented here are deeply indebted, though I will introduce them in a very different

2This definition of relativism is the only one which Chris Swoyer considers in his entry Relativism for the

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/, last accessed 16/12/09).
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/


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style), reports the following dialogue gathered on his fieldwork by his colleague Peter Gow

among the Piro, an Amazonian people:

A mission schoolteacher in [the village of] Santa Clara was trying to convince a Piro woman

to prepare food for her young child with boiled water. The woman replied, If we drink boiled water, we

get diarrhoea. The schoolteacher scoffed, and said that the common infantile diarrhoea was caused by

drinking unboiled water. Unmoved, the Piro woman replied, Perhaps for people from Lima this is true.

But for us native people from here, boiled water gives us diarrhoea. Our bodies are different from your

bodies.3

This reply echoes another infamous one, given by a Zande man to the British

anthropologist Evans-Pritchard, saying of Europeans: perhaps in their country people are not

murdered by witches, but here they are.4

Of course, these claims seem clearly wrong: the proposition the water should be

boiled in order to prolong the life of the child (or at least to avoid diarrhoea) may be true in

the world of the schoolteacher but not true in the world of this native Amazonian woman

seems to be demonstrably false. The schoolteacher may have replied: Just try, Maam! And

this would be a perfect illustration of the impossibility of holding that what is true here may

not be true there.

However, I suggest we should think of it in this way: what if it appeared that the kind

of life that people have to live in order to prolong their life through boiling water rather than

not was an altogether different life? What if, in order to accept the objective claim (which

experience substantiates), this woman had not only to drop this particular belief, but also a

huge set of beliefs, and, ultimately, to change the very sense it makes for her to live and to

die? Wouldnt it make sense to say, in this case, that you havent presented to the Piro woman

simply the truth about life in general, but rather a new definition of life, or, in the vocabulary I

will favour, that you have not said anything true about the world, but asked her to renounce

herworld? Therefore, my first argument to support the claim of the Piro woman against that

of the schoolteacher, that is, to support precisely her relativist claim but in terms

understandable by us, is that the words life and death dont mean the same thing for her,

so that to behave as scientific medicine says one should behave would imply not so much

improving your life or prolonging it, as rather living a different kind of life. 5 (One way of

3 Peter Gow, Personal Communication to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, quoted by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro,

The Gift and the Given, Three Nano-Essays on Kinship and Magic, in Kinship and beyond: the GenealogicalModel Reconsidered, Sandra Bamford and James Leach (eds.), Berghahan Books, 2009, p. 235.4 EVANS-PRITCHARD, E., 1937, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, Oxford : Oxford

University Press, p. 540.5Now, I would probably have to go further and say that my present argument is precisely notwhat the Piro

woman meant, the very idea of cultural relativity being itself a very cultural way of looking at the differences;


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understanding what I am saying here is to relate it to what Heidegger argues about the

ultimately hermeneutic constitution of the world: scientific knowledge itself is not just the

discovery of what there is, but is itself grounded on a specific constitution of the world, a

certain way of engaging with the world.)

Now, you could accept all this, and nonetheless reply that it doesnt make the

statement the water should be boiled in order to prolong the life of the child true in the

world of the schoolteacher and false in the world of the Indian woman: it is just that the

meanings of the words have changed. In other words, it is not the same truth, so that it makes

no sense to say that the truth varies or that it changes.

It is here that things become more complicated. I would argue that these two worlds do

in fact intersect: they are talking about water, about child, about diarrhoea, etc. and they do

understand one another to a certain extent. They can get along for a certain number of things

and can interact relatively smoothly on many other occasions. In other words, there are times

or rather circumstances when the semiotic identities in one world seem to be recognizable,

without difficulty, as the semiotic identities of the other world. We dont need to say that they

are talking of the same thing, in the sense of any independently observable reality; on the

contrary, we are just saying that they make sense of what the other one makes sense of, and

that there is no other way to judge the identities than how they construe them in their

reciprocal relations: in a way, it is the fact itself a child is drinking water, which is

equivocal, in the sense that it exists as a relevant possibility in both worlds, and this is the

reason why they disagree. In a way, it is continuously and smoothly that the statement

becomes false: we seem to be doing the same thing, bringing up children, avoiding sickness,

drinking water, and then at one particular point it appears that we may be doing rather

different things. The interesting point is that it is precisely thanks to (or because of) some

disagreements of a particular kind that we come to realize that we in fact dont mean quite the

same thing. But this disagreement is construed and measured in the very terms which come

into doubt. This is the reason why I think we cannot so easily say that they just mean different

but at least my argument suffices to make the point about the necessity of understanding what she means.Eduardo Viveiros de Castro makes a much stronger argument, but nonetheless similar, when he remarks that the

problem is not which theory about life and death, health and illness, that of the Piro woman or that of theschoolteacher, is true, but whether what the Piro woman propounds is indeed a theory on the same object, andeven whether it is meant to be a theory at all, that is whether we understand what she means by body when shesays: we have a different body: What the argument expresses is anotherobjective fact: the fact that the Piroand Western concepts of body are different, not their respective biologies. (241). He means here that it is not

two different theories on the same thing, but precisely two different ways of construing what it is that we have tomake theories about, and even what it is to think in general and to be in relation to something to be thoughtabout.


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things: what they mean cannot be construed but in their own reciprocal terms. They are

doomed to misunderstand their misunderstanding.

But I may leave this question of the relation between truth and equivocation aside for

the time being, since I will come back on it at length later, and just retain the idea that it is at

least not absurd to say that, if, in order to accept that boiling water will prolong the life of

your child, you may have to change the very definition you have of life, then you can

rightfully say that it does not prolong the life of your child, but redefines it.

1.2. Are the wood sellers indeed selling wood?

My second argument elaborates on the previous one at a more fundamental level, that

is, at the level not only of what we think we have discovered to be true as a matter of fact, but

rather of what we think cannot be disputed without the very possibility of establishing facts

being jeopardized. I will again use an anecdote, but this time fictitious, since it is the nice little

parable of the wood sellers imagined by Wittgenstein in theRemarks on the Foundations of

Mathematics and commented here by John Callanan a few weeks ago. I remind you of the

important passage:

149. Very well; but what if they piled the timber in heaps of arbitrary, varying height and then

sold it at a price proportionate to the area covered by the piles? And what if they even justified this with

the words: of course, if you buy more timber, you must pay more?

150. How could I show them thatas I should sayyou dont really buy more wood if you

buy a pile covering a bigger area? I should, for instance, take a pile which was small by their ideas

and, by laying the logs around, change it into a big one. This might convince them but perhaps they

would say: Yes, now its a lot of wood. And costs more and that would be the end of the matter.

We would presumably say in this case: they simply do not mean the same by a lot of wood and a

little wood as we do; and they have quite a different system of payment from us.

What interests me in this passage is the fact that Wittgenstein shows us that we may

come to realize that the very validity of our judgements about the right and the wrong is

conditioned by the fact our not misidentifying the practice, that which those we judge are

doing, in a way similar to our misidentification of what the Piro woman understands by

body when she says that we and the Piros have different bodies. If, after having tried my

little experiment to show them that they are wrong according to what I think to be their own

principles, they still dont accept what seems to me evidence for their incoherence, I have two

equally open possibilities: either I think they are just stupid and crazy, or I accept that more

important than the problem whether they are right and wrong is the problem of what they


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actually mean by a lot and a little. As we know, for Wittgenstein, this means how they

actually use these words, that is, ultimately, what they actually do when they seem to do what

I call selling woods, i.e. theirpractice.6

I want to emphasize the fact that Wittgenstein does not say that the conduct of the

wood sellers is simply incomprehensible and that this is the end of all matters, but, on the

contrary, that it may become comprehensible if we were able to reconstruct the nature of their

activity, their system of payment (and therefore that the very condition for anything to be

comprehensible at all depends on the activity it is embedded in).7 In other words, I dont think

that he simply wants to say that there may be people who think in a way completely different

from our own, but rather that the question is misplaced and has to be rephrased: not whether

the wood sellers are right or wrong, rational or irrational, but rather what it is that they are

doing and whether we have ways to redefine our practices in such a way that we can engage

into theirs and reciprocally. Wittgenstein remarks that up to this point we had supposed that

they were actually doing the same thing as we ourselves usually do: paying. But here, it

appears that this may have been an equivocation: what I took for a form of payment may be

something quite different, while having some relation to what we call paying. This is

exactly where the anthropological investigation begins. This remark, therefore, is not the end

of all matters, but the beginning of another matter, the anthropological matter. Wittgenstein

himself doesnt do much here to explain how we could reconstruct this alternative form of

payment which he presumes, but he nonetheless firmly leads us to the point where

anthropological questions arise, which is exactly the point where normative judgements fail.

The remark about the fact that they may have quite a different system of payment from us is

indeed typical of a good anthropological question: it suggests that this variation in the practice

of counting may be understandable if we resituate it in the context of variations of other

aspects of their practical life. It suggests that there is a point where we cannot severe our

arithmetical tools from the practices in which we use them, and that, if we had a completely

different system of payment, that is, ultimately, a different practice of justice, we may end up

with a different sort of arithmetic, that is, different intuitions about the more and the

less, the relations between our economic practices and our arithmetic practices becoming

6For further occurrences of this concept ofpractice in Wittgenstein, see among many other ones, the paragraphs

198, 199 and 202 of theLogical Investigations.7 Elaborating of what Callanan writes, we can remark that the presumption of comprehensibility, that is, of

meaningfulness, is not grounded on some sort of general charity, but that it is quite the opposite: we arecharitable just because they look like us, their activity resembles ours. We have no other reason to find what theydo meaningful, but because it has some family resemblance with what we do.


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more apparent if we could work about what it takes for the wood sellers to have different

intuitions about the more and the less.8

Consequently, what I take to be the important point here is not only the idea that

normative questions are merely dependent on matters of fact which cannot themselves be

assessed (Gosh! They areso different!), so that the only thing which could result from the

confrontation with ununderstably alternative normative judgements is simply the conviction

that our normative standards are ultimately contingent, but rather the idea that normative

questions about the right and the wrong stop at one point and give way to anthropological

questions which focus on the problem of the misidentification of practices and try to use what

we have in common with alternative forms of life in order to understand better what should be

modified in our practical life so that we understand better what at first seems un-

understandable. More important than understanding is the problem of even defining our

own practice in relation to the other ones: it is quite striking that, even in this very brief

passage, Wittgenstein does allude to the fact that we were not aware of the particular relations

between our arithmetic theories and our economic system until we were confronted to a

different understanding of a lot and a little: this is the critical part of cultural diversity:

it helps us to become more aware of relations between different levels of things which seemed

obvious for us. We discover first that evidences are not self-evident but rather co-evident; and

second that the very identity of what we do can be reached through the untranslatability of

our evidences In a way, Wittgenstein shows that there is no internal access to the identity of

what we our doing and even to the question of the nature of our own activity: we cannot

distance ourselves from the fact that we are counting, unless we discover that you can

understand the very notion of count in a different ways, meaning by this nothing but the fact

that something very similar to what we call counting can be in fact different given the

practical context in which it is performed. In short, normative judgements depend on practical

identities: I cannot judge somebody as doing wrong if I dont presume that we are engaged in

the same activity. Therefore my judgements are always threatened by the possibility that what

looks like what we usually do is in fact different from it, that is, by an equivocation similar to

the one I suggested there was between the schoolteacher and the Piro woman. In other words,

the real problem with human beings is not so much that they dont know what is ultimately

right and wrong and have various opinions about that, but rather that, as God Himself said

8

This remark suggests that mathematics is a form of hermeneutics of our practical life. This hermeneuticdefinition of mathematics has been defended, among others, by Jean-Michel Salanskis,Hermneutique Formelle(Paris: CNRS Editions, 1998).


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and these happen to be His last words: they know not what they do. Isnt that a good reason to

forgive them?

But do we know more what we are doing ourselves? Do we really understand what we

mean by counting? Do we know how to characterize the identity of this activity, the way it

relates to other aspects of our practical life? I doubt it, and the fact is that Wittgenstein agrees

that this practical equivocation begins at home: this is the sense of many remarks in the

Logical Investigations in which Wittgenstein argues that there is no way one can draw a rigid

line between making errors in the application of a particular rule or following another rule.

We find the same idea in this line from the Remarks on Colour: There is a continuum

between an error in calculation and a different mode of calculation (293). And this is an

immediate opportunity for me to say that anthropological problems are not only interesting

because they suddenly confront us to the contingency of the way we do things here, but also

because they may offer the only way we have to understand what it is that we are doing: the

variations between the assessments of the right and the wrong dont simply challenge our own

ones, but may also help us to characterize the identity of our practice. This is certainly the

main message I would like to convey in this talk: we can do something else with cultural

variety than try to overcome it in order to find universal standards of truths, or, on the

contrary, mourn over it and lament about the contingency of our standards: we can use it to

understand ourselves better, and to understand us only in relation to others, which we

discover through truth-variations. In other words, if you could be forgiven until now for not

knowing what you do, now that you have the opportunity to be confronted to your fellow

ignorant human beings in normative clashes, you may have the opportunity to define what it

is that you are doing by comparison or difference with the others.

Now, of course, many questions arise. The first one is whether I can indeed find what

in my practical form of life should be changed for this mode of calculation to make sense.

This implies that I am capable of using my own practical categories to operate with and

within them a variation which will modify them so that I will end up in another practical

world. The question is here whether it is possible to enter into another practical world only

using the resources of our given practical world. I will try to explain how this can be done

later on.

The second question is whether this remark by Wittgenstein supports any form of

relativism at all, in the sense that it would undermine the idea that I am absolutely right to use

the words a little and a lot in the way I normally do when I practice arithmetic. Indeed,

one could argue that it would still be true that, if you want to do what we do here when we


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sell and buy, you have to behave in this or that way, or mustnt do what the wood sellers do. It

is true in all possible worlds, that, in our world, you have to judge this proposition true and

this proposition wrong if this is what we call counting that you want to do. The fact that

propositions are true only under certain conditions doesnt make them false in the absolute,

but simply displaces the truth value onto the relations between the conditions and the

conditioned. It is just like in logic: you can indeed change your axioms, and you will then

have different theorems, but it is all the same true that this or that theorem necessarily follows

from this or that set of axioms. It is still universally true that this is relatively true, and,

therefore, truth itself remains absolute.

In answer to this, we first have to recall what we just said, that is, that there is no

guarantee that our practice is locked into itself in such a way that it cannot change and end up

being the one of the wood sellers (and, hopefully, we may find under what conditions this

may happen by trying to see what must be changed in our practical life for us to have these

new intuitions). But even if this what not the case, even if we could argue that the right and

the wrong are dependent on or relative to practical forms of life which cannot themselves

change, so that it makes no sense to say that what is true may become untrue in a continuous

way, it will still be very meaningless to say that what is right here is absolutely right.

First it must be remarked that the comparison with the axiomatic mode of reasoning is

odd here, since, if we are talking of logic, that is, of the theory of formally valid inference, we

are talking of that which enables us to go from the premises to the consequences: if we accept

that this can vary, as presumably Wittgenstein does, how can we argue that it is still true in all

particular worlds that the relation between the contextual premises and the theoretical

consequences are valid? True it may be in this particular world: if there is indeed no way my

world can change and become a different world (contrarily to what Wittgenstein argues), then

I can comfortably indulge in the local necessity I experiment here and not worry about its

possibility of becoming false in any possible state of my world. But even then I have no

reason to say it is absolutely true.

Secondly, I think there is a sleight of hand going on here, which consists in forgetting

what we have just said (that the concepts of right and wrong are only valid under the

condition of the identity of the practices), as soon as we say it. For, if the words right and

wrong only make sense in a particular practical context, how can we say immediately that

the relation to the context will still be right in all possible contexts: what is this context

from which we can judge the validity of the relation of a normative claim to its context?


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Wouldnt we need here something like a context of all contexts (a world of all the worlds)?

But how do we access the context of all contexts, if this ever makes sense?

This leads me to my third remark: if we dont have an a priori given global context,

the only way we can check that a contextual inference is true in another context, relies

entirely on our capacity to prove that we can pass from one context to the other, while

preserving the identity of what is being assessed, that is, showing what must be varied when

we pass across this threshold which separates the worlds: then indeed, it would be true to say

that the fact that it is true in world A would be itself true in world B, because we know

precisely how to reconstruct world A starting from world B, in the sense that we know the

practical conditions which must be modified for us to pass from one to the other, and thus can

locate unequivocally the proposition in this reconstructed world. In other words, nothing is

globally true unless we have the rules of passage or transformation between the contexts:

the global context is nothing but the set of these rules of conversion of one context into the

other one. If I dont have such rules, it makes no sense to say that the fact that it is true here is

itself true everywhere, quite simply because there is no stable relation between these worlds.

Again, this doesnt mean that I have to abandon my rules: it just explicates the conditions of

their validity.

Lets then accept at least for the sake of the argument that we have good reasons to

posit the relativist postulate and say that our assessments of the right and the wrong are

dependent on practical worlds which themselves cannot be assessed according to any

normative standards. Behind our standards of truth, we then find problems of meaning; and

behind problems of meaning, problem of identification of the practices. Now the question is:

can we use this variety of normative standards in order to understand better the identity of the

practices which underlie them? But before getting into this, I must probably answer to a

general worry, which is that the very postulation of the relativist postulate is itself self-

refuting.

1.3. The self-refutation objection: whose foot am I supposed to shoot in?

The idea that radical relativism is self-refuting is a very old one. It can be found in

Platos discussion of Protagoras claim that man is the measure of all things, in Thaetetus,

(171a-b).

Socrates: Well then, shall we say that in such a case, you opinion is true to you but false to themyriads?


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Theodorus: That seems to be the inevitable deducation.

Socrates: And what of Protagoras himself? If neither he himself thought, nor people in general

think, as indeed they do not, that man is the measure of all things, is it not inevitable that the truth

which he wrote is true to no one? But if he himself thought it was true, and people in genera do not

agree with him, in the first pace you know that it is just so much more false than true as the number ofthose who do not believe it is greater than the number of those who do.

Theodorus: Necessarily, if it is to be true or false according to each individual opinion.

Socrates: Secondly, it involves this, which is a very pretty result; he concedes about his own

opinion the truth of the opinion of those who disagree with him and think that his opinion is false, since

he grants that the opinions of all men are true.

Theodorus: Certainly.

Socrates: Then would he not be conceding that his own opinion is false, if he grants that the

opinion of those who think he is in error is true?

Theodorus: Necessarily.9

Well, granted: relativism would be self-refuting indeed, if it said that it is absolutely

true that truth is relative to practical contexts, that is, that it is true in all possible worlds, or,

rather, independently of any world and of any way of actually construing the passage from

one world to the other. For instance, that truth is relative for the Piro woman or the wood-

sellers just in the same sense as it is relative for me, without taking into consideration

precisely the relations between these worlds, as from an overlooking standpoint.

But we dont need to say that truth-value relativism is absolutely true: we can simply

say that it is relatively true, that is: given the context in which we live and think (given the

sort of experiences that I put forward above), it is more plausible to think that every truth is

relative, by which we ultimately mean that the identity of each truth is defined by the way it

could become false (the semantic contents of each truth are relative to one another). We dont

even need to say that there are contexts (or, as Chris Swoyer puts it, frameworks) to which

truths are relative, as if these were independent variables which we must simply discover as

they are, waiting for us on the other side of the curtain which separates us from the truth. Wecan simply say that such frameworks conditioning what we hold to be true appear in certain

circumstances, more specifically in circumstances of cultural encounter or historical change

when it seems that what seemed to be true become seemingly false, and that we have no

access to those conditions but through their reciprocal relations as we can reconstruct them

on the basis of our misunderstandings.

9

Plato, Theaetetus Sophist, trans. Loeb. Harvard/London: Harvard University Press, 1987: p.109-111. Thisargument is abundantly supported in the entry on Relativism written by Chris Swoyer for the StanfordEncyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/, last accessed 16/12/09).
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/


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The question is whether I am entitled to use the word truth to designate something

which is only relatively true. If by truth you mean something which is absolutely valid and

cannot be relativized out of principle, then, indeed, there is nothing like a relative truth. But

this is just a very poor tautology and you have put the answer in the question. Then indeed, it

is simply of question of word, and I can use another word if you want to reserve the notion of

truth for your cherished chimera: I can call mine item of scientific knowledge if you prefer.

But if you want the question to remain open, as to whether the truth can be said in an

interesting way relative or absolute, we have to ask ourselves whether what we expect from

the concept of truth can be obtained equally (and maybe even better) by construing it as

relative or as absolute. In other words, truth must be defined in continuity with what we

already do when we pretend to know things: knowledge is not defined by the notion of

truth, but it is quite the opposite: the notion of truth is defined by the standard practices of

knowledge. For this reason, comparative knowledge (anthropology) must look like (at least in

some respects) other scientific practices.

To cut very short what could be a very long argument, and speaking very loosely, I

would say that we expect from a truth procedure two things: that it enables us to create new

opinions (it changes the way we look at things, that is, the world in which we live), and

these new opinions appear to be more compelling than the previous ones. In other words, we

only need to preserve some sense of refutation on a local basis, meaning that, given the

evidence that we have here (how things look like from here), some new elements can be

created, which also become more apparent (more compelling) than other ones. Therefore, if

the statement truth is relative, understood as it seems that what seems to be true can

become untrue in certain circumstances, is itself said to be relative, it means that the

statement what seems to be more compelling may appear to be less compelling in certain

circumstances is itself more compelling than its opposite in the circumstance in which we

find ourselves, while we dont rule out a priori the possibility that there may be other

circumstances in which it will be found less compelling. I dont see what is self-contradictory

in this idea: we plainly agree that truth may appear to be absolute in certain contexts, while, in

the context in which we are, it appears to be relative, maybe for reasons which can become

clear if we understand better what should be changed in the way we think in order for us to

believe that truth is absolute... The real question is rather whether this very assumption, the

relativist assumption, is itself an endpoint in the search for truths, or if it provides methodical

procedures to create new truths. If it does, then relativism, far from being incompatible with

the idea of knowledge, opens up to a certain kind of knowledge.


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To the objection that, if the relativists claim that truth is relative is only true relative

to his framework and can be false in other, perhaps equally good, frameworks, then you

have no reason to even care about the relativists (perhaps rather idiosyncratic or parochial)

framework, as Chris Swoyer argues in his article from the Stanford Encyclopedia of

Philosophy, I have just one simple answer: because it may be yours too The question, in

front of any philosophical or even theoretical claim, is whether it operates strongly enough on

your way of thinking to tear you away from where you were and bring you to somewhere else

though as if from some sort of internal or immanent necessity. I must say I have some hard

times understanding what else is being asked here: are we supposed to care only about those

claims that would be true even if we had no access to the reasons why they may seem true?

Isnt it more reasonable to simply say that we have indeed nothing but appearances and

apparent standards for ranking these appearances, so that we will simply try to go for the most

compelling ones? You may object that, we shouldnt then bother about doubting at all in the

first place, since we want to go for the strongest argument anyway: but the problem is that we

dont have the choice to doubt or not to doubt, we are confronted to situations which make us

think that opinions are doubtful, situations of the kind I referred to above. Of course, if you

dont share this context, or just dont understand these arguments, you have absolutely no

reason to doubt about them, and I would even plainly agree that you are right in not doing so:

why would you do it indeed? I dont expect you to believe me just because you like me.

To this sort of objections to the relativist view, I am tempted to reply as Descartes did

when Father Mersenne, in the Second Objections, objected that indubitability may not be

enough to prove that something is true, precisely because it made truth dependent on the way

we think, by defining it as that which seems impossible to deny. He replied that this definition

of truth provided everything that we could reasonably want.

What is it to us that someone may make out that the perception whose truth we are so firmly

convinced of may appear false to God or an angel, so that it is, absolutely speaking, false? Why shouldthis alleged absolute falsity bother us, since we neither believe in it nor have even the smallest

suspicion of it? (Replies 2, AT 7:144-45)

I am no more relativist than Descartes when I say that the only thing which seem

certain to me is that my certitudes may change; I may even be more coherent than this

distinguished author and also more aware, because of the evolutions of the framework he

himself contributed to set up, that there is no single way to define this capacity of perceiving

immanent necessities which he called reason. But like him, I am speaking for myself


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indeed, and all I can do is to be as true as possible as to how things seem to me 10, and I will

be happy if I find some appearances (opinions, beliefs) which are more compelling than other

ones nonetheless: if this appearance is that appearances can change, I am not self-refuting

myself, but self confirming myself. When confronted to different views which seem to oppose

mine, the best I can do is to see whether I can change my framework so that what seems

evident for them may not also become evident for me, and grant that, first, it is possible that

this conversion may happen, and that, second, it is even possible that from another standpoint

I come to believe that our beliefs are not different, in other words that it doesnt seem that

what seems to you and what seems to me seem different. It seems to me that, given the kind of

examples that I have provided above, it should appear to everyone, making the same

assumptions as I am making and confronted to the same evidence, that this seems the right

conclusion to draw, but I happily confess that I will not try to convince anyone on any other

basis than how things seem to him or her, even if it is in the end to make him or her change

their mind, just as I changed mine I must confess that I think that ones own foot is the only

worth shooting in.

This whole discussion reminds me of the problem of scepticism, and whether

scepticism is or not self-refuting. The most violent affirmation of the self-refuting nature of

radical sceptical claims is to be found in Spinoza, in the Tractatus de Intellecti Emendatione.

If they affirm or doubt something, they do not know that they are doubting or affirming. They

say that they know nothing, and they say that they are ignorant of this very fact of knowing nothing.

And they do not even say this without qualification; for they are afraid that, in saying they know

nothing, they are declaring that they exist, so that in the end they have to maintain silence lest they

should perchance say something that has the savour of truth. () So they must be regarded as automata,

completely lacking in mind. (Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, 47-48, trans. S. Shirley

(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1992: p. 243-244)

I must say I disagree with the idea that radical doubt is itself impossible. For, I can

very easily say that I do have reasons to doubt, but that I also doubt of their validity, meaning

that I doubt whether I am right to doubt or not. In other words: I dont know whether I am

right in not finding anything absolutely right or wrong. What is wrong in that? Of course, if I

were to say that I doubt the very fact that I am doubting now, this would be more problematic.

10 It may be worth mentioning that this is also the same principle that Socrates invokes against Protagoras: Mostlikely, though, he, being older, is wiser than we, and if, for example, he should emerge from the ground, here at

our fee, if only as far as the neck, he would prove abundantly that I was making a fool of myself by my talk, inall probability, and you by agreeing with me; then he would sink down and be off at a run. But we, I suppose,must depend on ourselves, such as we are, and must say just what we think. (171D, p. 113).


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But I am simply saying that I consider my reasons for doubting themselves doubtful. If now

you want to do as Descartes, and shout that this confirms at least that, as a doubting activity,

you exist, I have no problem with this, as long as you dont separate yourself from the reasons

you have of doubting, that is of believing that you may become different from what you seem

to yourself, and that you ultimately realize that this commits you to accept that the verb to

exist doesnt mean anything else than to be able to become different

I hope this is enough to support the idea that the relativist postulate is not immediately

self-refuting. However, as I said in the introduction, I am not so much interested in the

question whether it is true that truth is relative or not, as in the question: what can we learn

from the postulation of this hypothesis? Is it possible to build up a form of knowledge on the

basis of the relativist postulate? (And again: by knowledge I dont understand more than a

symbolic mechanism which has the capacity of producing new appearances which seem more

compelling according to contextual falsifiability criteria.) I dont pretend that there is no other

way of trying to produce some knowledge about the world (something which is more worth

holding than other things), but only that it is possible to construct a kind of knowledge on the

very idea of relativity. In other words, I would like to take the relativist claim as a postulate.

My attitude is more similar to Descartes, assuming the most extreme doubt in order to

turn it against itself and base on it its first truth and then the entire system of knowledge, than

to a negative form of relativism: I want to use the most extreme doubt, which is the idea that

not only we cannot be sure that what seems true to us is indeed true or not, but also that what

seems to be true to us may happen to seem to be untrue, to see whether it is not possible to

build on its very basis another kind of knowledge. It actually seems to be a rather consistent

feature of Modernity (very apparent in mathematics) that, contrarily to the image we often

have of knowledge from outside, it advances by making less and less assumptions, by

increasing the number of things we can be called into doubt, by depriving itself of more and

more means and security, and trying to show that, even in these extreme conditions, we are

still capable of finding some things more worth thinking than others. I think the modern

subject of knowledge is very similar to Becketts characters: we have no leg, we have no

arms, we have no eyes, no ears, no mouth, we dont even whether we are anywhere and

maybe not even whether we are or not, and yet, with so little, we can still move We

shouldnt measure the quality of a thought by how good it is at not shooting in ones own

foot, but rather by how many bullets you can shoot in your own foot and still stand up and

even run faster.


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2. Consequences of the Relativistic Postulate: Epistemology of anthropological

knowledge:

For now on, I will then dismiss all the absolutist claims and stick to my relativist

postulate: I will accept nothing as true than the idea that what seems true here may become

false in circumstances which I dont even yet understand, or, in other words, that there is a

plurality of assessments about right and wrong which cannot themselves be assessed, so much

so that these different opinions are all that there is. And, rather than trying to escape from the

changing, movable quicksand of opinions, in search of something which would be altogether

different from an opinion, I will try to see whether it is not possible to build a kind of

knowledge on this diversity itself, emerging as it were from its own absence of foundation.

The advantage of such a decision is that it is minimal: it is nothing but what is actually given

to everyone I can think to be in relation with: there are different ways of assessing what is

right and what is wrong; any attempt at ranking them is itself an opinion and, practically, an

opinion is nothing but such a ranking. Now the question is whether this refusal of any

hierarchy, this position of a radical equality between the opinions, may not be itself enough to

produce, as it were from its own demands, a way ofcreating new opinions, new appearances

which will then appear to be more strongly motivated than others from the only perspective of

the relativist postulate.

2.1. Of the things of which we may doubt that we are even in doubt about:

It is likely that many will be tempted to refuse what I just said, that is, that the

relativity or, rather, the mutability of opinions, is indeed a given, and will accuse me of

introducing a strong supplementary claim when I claim that that the only thing I hold true is

that what is being held true can change. After all, it doesnt seem to everybody that all the

opinions are equal or that they could end up holding true what they held false.

I would like to argue first that my postulate is minimal, and that it is nothing but what

everybody must accept in order even to give sense to the very idea of truth. My postulate

simply says that the way we assess the right and the wrong can themselves change. My

argument for saying this is two-pronged: first I think that there is no reason to care about the

truth but because we are in doubt; second, I think that we have no reason to be in doubt but

because we have experienced that what we held true (our certitudes, our evidences) changed


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or that we were confronted to different and non-assessable assessments of the right and the

wrong. Even Descartes didnt doubt just because he was a particularly critical mind, but

because he was confronted to a diversity of opinions in the guise of the conflict of authorities

between his masters at school and between the different customs through which he travelled:

Considering how many opinions there can be about the very same matter that are held by

learned people without there being the possibility of more than one opinion being true, I deemed

everything that was merely probable to be well nigh false. () It is true that, so long as I merely

considered the customs of other men, I found hardly anything there about which to be confident, and

that I noticed there was about as much diversity as I had previously found among the opinions of

philosophers. Thus the greatest profit I derived from this was that, on seeing many things that, although

they seem to us very extravagant and ridiculous, do not cease to be commonly accepted and approved

among other great peoples, I learned not to believe anything too firmly of which I had been persuaded

only by example and custom. (Discourse on Method, Part One, AT, 9-10; op. cit., p. 50)

Reading and travelling, this is what put Descartes in doubt. Spinoza makes a similar

point when he remarks that a man who would have been confronted in his life only to one

image, the image of a winged horse, would then have no reason to doubt of its existence. In

sort, what makes our opinions doubtful is nothing but the experience we have of their

changeability, that is, of the possibility of thinking differently.

I deny that we have free power to suspend judgment. For when we say that someone suspends

judgment, we are saying only that he sees that he is not adequately perceiving the thing. So suspension

of judgment is really a perception, not free will. To understand this more clearly, let us conceive a boy

imagining a winged horse and having no other perception. Since this imagining involves the existence

of a horse (Cor. Pr. 17, II), and the boy perceives nothing to annul the existence of the horse, he will

necessarily regard the horse as present and he will not be able to doubt its existence, although he is not

certain of it. (II, 49, Scholium, p. 99)

However, while Descartes concluded from this the necessity of retreating within

himself and taking sides only for what seems indubitable to him, I would like to stick to this

simple given, the variability of opinions itself (or the awareness of the possibility that what

seems indubitable here and now may appear dubitable), and, instead of trying to overcome it

in order to find something which will be, ultimately, nothing but just another opinion (as

unshakable as it may be according to Descartes), I would like to see if I cannot find in it some

guidance for what should be preferred. I therefore firmly stick to this only belief: the only

thing I hold true is that it is possible to hold false what I hold true. I am like those wanderers

that Descartes pictures in theDiscourse on Method(Part III), lost in the forest and wondering

how they could get out of darkness, or this man, presented by Kant inHow to orient ourselves

in thinking, who has to go back to his house in a city where all the lights are switched off. I


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have nothing but the different claims made here and there or spurting from myself about the

path I should take. Many voices arise claiming: You could believe this, or you could

believe that, but I stick to my only reliable belief for now which is that there is nothing

decisively reliable. The question is: am I condemned either to choose one of these at random

and stick to it as Descartes suggested, or to die here in the middle of the dark night and in the

iridescent forest of opinions?

Some very good intentioned voices suggest that, given my personal obsession with

this relativist postulate, I may want to try to accept in this concert of opinions only the parts

which are recurrent in all of them: I will hold nothing true but what is identical in all the

beliefs, since I would then have no reason to call them in doubt.

There are two reasons why this suggestion is unacceptable. The first one is that my

postulate is precisely that any truth may be changed into an error: as long as I have no better

reasons to abandon it, I cannot avoid thinking that each claim about the right and the wrong is

contingent, and particularly in this case since the merefactthat I dont hear discordant voices

doesnt mean that there may not exist in other parts of the forest or of the city. I know that this

happened to me in the past, and now I suspect that all these voices may be as many evil

geniuses scattered all around to deceive me. Havent I heard that there have been also many

voices (i.e. cultures) in the past of which I know nothing since they have disappeared without

leaving any trace: how do I know whether they didnt have a different view on the matters I

ponder?

But there is a more fundamental reason. Even if I was sure that I had made an

exhaustive census of all the possible voices, it would still be possible that this lowest common

denominator is itself subjected to various interpretations. Lets imagine for instance that all

the voices seem to share something, which is the idea that certain sexual relations within the

family must be forbidden. Of course, they differ dramatically as to which family relations

must be banned (some tell me that it is my duty to marry my cousin, some on the contrary that

this is exactly what must be avoided), but they all have some interdiction. However, I mustnt

be too quick to rejoice and believe that I have hit a universal, which in this case would be

called the prohibition of incest. Not only because it wouldnt be properly speaking a

universal (as we know from Hume), but also because I have to be sure first that what all these

voices call sexual, family and ban is identical. A little attention will show me that this

is not the case. Here is a voice, for instance, which I will call the voice from the Trobriand

(filtered through Bronislaw Manilowski), who says that the father is not a member of the

family, but rather a foreigner who doesnt even take part in the conception of the children:


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as a matter of fact, the word being used to describe a sexual relation he may have with a

daughter is the same word as the one they use to describe a relation he would have with

somebody else than his wife, that is a word which should be translated as adultery rather

than incest. Similarly, I learn that some other voices understand by punishment not the fact

that some centralized authority imposes some harm to the offender, but rather the fact that

they immolate some other people which, according to them, are part of the general problem

revealed by the crime. As for sexuality, another voice, Michel Foucault, tells me that it is a

very recent concept and that even Rousseau wouldnt have understood what I meant by that.

This is a point actually very nicely made in various contributions by the late American

anthropologist Clifford Geertz, from which I will borrow this example which shows the

emptiness of such lowest common denominators:

Zuni culture prizes restraint, while Kwakiutl culture encourages exhibitionism on the part of

the individual. These are contrasting values, but in adhering to them the Zuni and Kwakiutl show their

allegiance to a universal value; the prizing of the distinctive norms of ones culture. (C. Kluckhon,

Culture and Behaviour, New York, 1962, p. 280, quoted in Clifford Geertz, The interpretation of

cultures, Hutchinson and Co, London, 1975, p. 41).

The problem with such claims is that the very meaning of this prizing in general

cannot be separated from its particular content: it is pointless to characterize something as

being one moral system in general for what it means to be moral is precisely part of what our

particular moral system tells us, or, to put it more concisely, what it is to relate to moral

values also depends on the moral values we relate to. Same for less obvious cases: to say that

all human beings use shelters or that they all have a certain relation to the dead, or that they

all have the capacity of speaking, is perfectly useless, not simply because they build different

sorts of shelter, mourn in different ways or speak different languages, but because the very

characterization of these as shelters, mourning or language, is precisely the point in

contention: it is impossible to separate the common characteristic from its particular forms.

We understand by mourning nothing other than: to do something similar to what we do when

we mourn: isnt the equivocation immediately obvious? Similarly, our very definition of

what it is to speak is not unrelated to the very way we use our language, etc. Even to say that

every human group has a culture or that all are differentiated from one another by their culture

is perfectly equivocal and is a way of projecting onto other forms of human life our

understanding of the way we relate to them, for which we use the concept culture, which is

in fact not adequate to the way they relate to themselves and others.11 The truth is that human

11 See Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture, The University of Chicago Press, 1981.


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beings differ precisely in the way they identify what they have in common! The common is

the point of division and misunderstanding. Therefore the more abstract I will be, the more

equivocal I will be.

This remark makes me realize that I dont even possess the good measure of the

differences and similarities between the various opinions I am considering, so that the

difference between the opinions is itself a matter of opinion. For instance, if I remark that the

claim no individual male must wear a skirt becomes untrue, say, in Scotland, I am already

using concepts that may not well characterize what I am talking about: is a kilt a skirt? To

take a more erudite example: if I want to compare the different forms of marriage existing

around the world, I have to presuppose that, even though the rules determining who can or

must marry who do vary considerably, the definition of marriage is stable; otherwise, my map

of the differences wouldnt make sense. But, as Edmund Leach convincingly argued, the

problem is that what is being understood and done under the heading of marriage around

the world, while it may look like what we do, designates social practices which dont have

much in common: here it only concerns the establishment of sexual rights, there it has

absolutely no sexual dimension but simply refers to property rights, and in yet another place it

is not marked by any sort of ceremony but very similar to what we call cohabitation, etc. 12

It then appears that it is not only the forms of marriage which vary but also the very definition

of what varies. Of course, this sort of remarks abounds in the anthropological literature, and I

will come back later on a more in-depth example. Suffices here to conclude that I have to

darken again my already dark night and grant that, if I really want to stick to the given, I

have to accept that the diversity of opinions is itself a diversity of the perception of the

differences and identities between opinions: is given a diversity a way of construing this very

diversity itself.

2.2. Of the Other and that it is better known than myself: the comparative intuition.

It now seems that I am utterly lost and that nothing will ever be able to take me out of

my deep night. However, the supplementary twist I have just given to the difficulty provides

me in fact with the insight of a solution. Instead of trying to find out claims which would be

universally valid, i.e. valid in all possible worlds, which seems impossible given the

intrinsically equivocal nature of every concept, why dont I try to recontexualize each claim

12 Edmund Leach,Rethinking Anthropology (London : Athlone, 1971).


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which pretend to universality, and more particularly those claims which pretend to give a

measure of the similarities and differences between opinions, i.e. the comparative concepts, in

order to show how they depend on and express the very differences that they obliterate or

conflate? Intuitively, this means that I may try to localize the categorical grid that I myself use

within the set of differences which it tends to obliterate. I thus propose to myself this new

task: I will try to contextualize the very comparative grid I use by realizing the equivocations

(the ambiguities, the misunderstandings) and having the meanings (or practices as a matter of

fact) progressively diverge from one another, thus attempting at characterizing more precisely

the differences by the way this seemingly common feature has in fact different senses when it

is taken in a field of other differences which are not immediately apparent. For instance,

instead of trying to use the concept of marriage (or, as a matter of fact, of truth, and even of

opinion, worldview, culture, etc.) in order to compare different forms of marriages, I will try

to redefine the very idea marriage by the relation between, on the one hand, the variations in

the concept of marriage which I can reconstruct on the basis of the variations of opinions, and,

on the other hand, other variations which situate, localize, or contextualize my concept

of marriage.

This means that, from now on, I will not accept anything unless it has been redefined

as a variant. Since I have no other certainty than certainties change, even in the

characterization of their very identities, I will now try to see whether it is possible to redefine

every certainty as a variant. The idea that truth is relative here is not that it depends on

something else, which one may call culture, practice, etc., which would be itself

invariant, but rather that this something else is defined by the differential relation with the

other truths.

What do I call a variant? A variant is an entity whose identity is entirely defined by

the way it could be different, which means that its identity is reducible to its position in a

group of transformations, that is, in a field of objects which are related to one another by

differential features only, and thus can be said to be alternative possibilities of one another. A

variant is not a variable: a variable is not a term defined by its relation of transformation with

other terms: it is the graphic substitute for a set of values which are in a determinate relation

to another set of values. For instance, the probability of lung cancer is a variable which

depends (among other things) on this other variable which is whether you smoke or not. The

probability of lung cancer is not here defined by its differential relation to other objects, say,

the other forms of cancers, no more than each value of this probability is defined by its

differential relation to all the other ones in a field of transformation. A phoneme, on the


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contrary, is a variant because it is only defined by the way it can be substituted by other

phonemes.

We usually use the term variant in a rather weak way: it consists in imagining that

we are given a set of objects characterized by a certain number of properties, and that we call

variants of the same type all the objects which share a certain number of properties but

differ on the basis of other properties. Thus, for example, a text will be said to have variants in

the sense that different texts are identical in most of their parts, but some sentences or

passages differ. But this definition of the variant is unpracticable for me since it would require

that I accept the identity of the types, and I have said that the types are precisely varying

through the equivocations. I thus must define a variant as that which is entirely defined by its

differential relations to other terms, and conversely, and must not accept any identity which is

not the position in a group of transformations. Far from defining a variant in relation to a type,

I will on the contrary redefine what I think of as types as determinate variants.

I therefore posit the first rule of my method, which is nothing but the comparative

method: never to accept any identity which cannot be redefined as a variant. Or, if I want to

reinforce the relation between this and the problem of truth with which I started: only accept

as true that which can be redefined as a determinate variant of that which could also be

accepted as true. We can also give an ontological form to my first rule, meaning by this that I

commit myself to a particular ontology: never to accept as existent anything which cannot be

redefined as a variant of other possibilities of itself. To put it more dramatically: the only truth

we can reach about what there is for us now (our situation, our world) is given by what there

could be instead; or, more precisely, the only truth of what we are is given by what we can

become (by how different we could be): the truth of what is actual is given by the alternative

possibilities of this particular world which is actual. The possible, or rather, the virtual, is the

real. Nothing truly exists but possibilities codetermined by the way they alternate to one

another.

Let me summarize what I just said: I held fast to the sole idea that there are different

assessments of the right and the wrong. But this postulate brought me to accept that there are

also different ways of perceiving the similarities and differences between these assessments. I

then decided that I will refuse all global identity and will try instead to redefine every identity

in terms of the differences it in fact mixed up (obliterated); I will then treat all types as

equivocal terms and redefine them as variants in relation to the alternative interpretations of

themselves which as types they obliterate. This process obviously implies that I relativize my

own categorical grid (my way of making identities and differences) in the sense that I redefine


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it by its position in the map of alternative ways of making identities and differences which it

itself construes in the process of its self-relativization. The comparing instance is not itself

outside of the field of what it compares, but the real upshot of comparison is precisely to

situate my kind of knowledge in other variants of itself. Comparative knowledge is situated

knowledge, but situated knowledge is a knowledge which redefines itself by its relation to

alternative forms of itself. To compare means: to try to experience how the differences

compared are themselves differently comparing and to try to redefine everything, and firstly

oneself, as a variant of one another.

This, from an anthropological point of view, means that what I have to compare are

different systems of comparison. As Lvi-Strauss nicely put it, anthropology is the social

science by the observed13. It is the knowledge of the others knowledge. This clearly implies

that it is not simply an objective knowledge having to produce accurate descriptions of what is

in front of us, but rather a critical knowledge which has to resituate the very subject of

knowledge in the field of what it knows.

Now, you will maybe impatiently say: how is that possible, since you just said that

you didnt want to exclude the possibility that, whatever identity or difference you make, it

can itself vary or be made differently? But there are two different questions here. The first

question is whether it is possible indeed to experience a variation of ones own comparative

grid on the basis of the differences which it makes locally perceptible, that is, whether it is

possible to go from one regime of identities and differences to another alternative one, and

therefore to the possibility of redefining each one by the variations which are necessary for

going from the former to the latter, in a controlled way (that using a locally efficient

refutability procedure). Here the question is whether it is indeed possible, simply thinkable, to

use the only tool which is given to us, i.e. our comparative grid, to reach as it were

continuously another, alternative, one, and therefore to relativize ourselves within the field of

their differences. To say it again differently: the question is whether it is possible to construct,

within my own thought, or my own language, an alternative system of thought, or an

alternative language, from which I could look at what I used to be as it were from the

standpoint of what I could become, so that I can redefine what I was as a variant of what I

have become. I will try to show that there is no impossibility in this and that it is perfectly

possible to use a system of differences and identities in order to experience within it a

13 Claude, Lvi-Strauss, The Scope of Anthropology.


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variation of itself which is itself in a methodical way (constrained by a locally operational

refutability procedure).

Another question is whether I can be sure that the differences I use to do this, and the

differences I end up with are indeed the right ones. But I dont have to answer to this question

since my postulate is precisely that this question doesnt make sense: this is again a way of

asking for absolute identities and absolute differences. I dont care too much whether the map

of variants I will end up with is indeed the unique right one in the absolute sense; my question

is rather whether the relativist postulate left me absolutely bereft of any criterion, so that, if

you are a relativist, then just anything goes. If I can prove that the process sketched above is

indeed possible, then it seems that not just anything goes: I have a criterion, never accept

anything as true what hasnt been redefined as a variant, and it will certainly change the way

I look and think one must look at the given (i.e. the variety of the ways of looking at one

another). I can build on the relativist postulate a certain kind of knowledge, and whether this

knowledge is absolutely true or not is not as important as the new descriptions which will be

produced by trying to stick to the first rule of the comparative method.

2.3. Of anthropology, that it exists and can be illustrated through the example of

kinship:

To show how it is possible that an extension of my own categorical grid can result in

an alternative one, I will analyse very sketchily an example taken from the anthropological

literature, and more precisely from this founding moment in modern anthropology which is

the work started by the American anthropologist Henry Lewis Morgan on kinship

terminologies in the mid nineteenth century and systematized through the British and French

schools of 20th Century anthropology. However, to be true to my little fable of the traveller

lost in the dark forest of the night, I will still proceed in my Cartesian style.

It makes no doubt that I must start with the differences which appear to me, within

what I hope to be able to redefine ultimately as a variant, that is, my categorical grid. If I want

to recharacterize (i.e. end up characterizing differently) the difference between my categorical

grid and alternative ones (my voice and other voices), I cannot do it otherwise than by using

my categorical grid. As Roy Wagner puts it: every understanding of another culture is an

experiment with our own, The Invention of Culture (p. 12), or, as he also says, an

extension (ibidem). I am thus given with resemblances and differences between the claims

made by the different voices as they appear to me. For instance, I recognize a family


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resemblance between those differences which characterize apparently for me and for other

voices too what I call, precisely, a family. I mean by this that I perceive a resemblance in the

ways by which these voices differentiate their behaviours in relation to the members of their

family and mine. I also perceive however that one of these voices, the Iroquois voice,

organizes these (differentiated) relations in a way quite different from mine: for instance, it

says that it is not the name of the father that must be inherited by the children, but rather the

name of the mother. I thus believe that the relevant differential feature between them and me

is the ascription of the rule of descent or filiation, either on the side of the mother or on the

side of the father. And since I happen to believe that this very idea of the name of the father is

nothing but the remnant of a patriarchal society, I am quite happy to say that patriarchy is

perfectly contingent and that there are voices which do not hold to this accursed view.

Alas, I quickly come to realize that I have misperceived the similarities and

dissimilarities (by which I just mean that the characterization of the differences between

appearances I have just given doesnt do justice to the variations I can indeed perceive).

Indeed, by listening to this voice more carefully or more at length, I understand that the word

mother doesnt only apply to the woman who gave birth to the child, but also to her sister,

the maternal aunt, and that grand-mother similarly designate the sister of the woman I

would call the grand-mother, so that the daughter of this woman is in fact a mother too, and

so on up in the genealogical tree, so much so that the Iroquois voice claim that each

individual, instead of having one mother, has a lot of mothers. In short, I realize that there is

here an equivocation.

Reflecting on how I could make sense of this equivocation in the field of my

appearances, that is what I would need to change in (my system of) beliefs so that it would

appear to me to that each individual has many mothers, etc., it seems to me that it has to do

with the fact that this voice doesnt in fact differentiate the family by the nuclear cell of the

parents and the children as I do: this cell is rather irrelevant to the constitution of the kin,

since the voice defines it by the group of individuals related to one another only by parents of

the same sex (for which I have no ready made terms, which means that I can use their own, as

some have done with mana or taboo, or find a word convey a meaning which seems very

similar in a voice closer to me, in this case the Latin voice: clan, or lineage). While I

thought the Iroquois voice was speaking of families, it was in truth speaking of clans. It thus

appears to me now that the best way to characterize the difference between them and me has

not so much to do with whether the rule of descent passes through the mother or the father, as,

rather, with whether the relation between the direct line (for instance father-son) and the


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lateral line (uncle-nephew) is treated differently (and then the uncle will not be a father) or

identically (and the mother will be an aunt). This introduces within my world a variation

which I had absolutely no idea was possible, and forces me to envisage a possibility which,

without being in principle unthinkable, was necessarily unthought given the nature of my way

of making differences and identities. Of course, I still express this differential parameter in

my own terms (direct line, lateral line), which are potentially equivocal, but it doesnt

change the fact that I have created a new differentiating feature out of my own categories, and

that I never thought I could characterize myself by such a difference. This difference didnt

appear in my world, and I now have to redefine myself as being characteristic because of this

differential property which had no sense for me.

Now, endowed with this new principle of differentiation and comparison, I will see

whether I can characterize my difference with other voices and the difference between one

another in the same terms, and whether it is possible to redefine each of the worlds which

equivocally appear in mine (as well as mine) as variants along the line of this differential

feature which maybe none of them recognized from inside as a relevant feature of their

identity. This is what is know as the theory of descent group particularly favoured by British

anthropology in the first half of the 20th century, establishing five types of kinship systems:

unilineal systems for which the belonging to one kin group depends either on one sex or on

the other (matrilineal and patrilineal) and which merges the direct and lateral lines but only on

the side of the mother or on the side of the father, bilineal systems where each individual

belongs to two kin groups defined by the merging of the direct and lateral lines on both sides,

undifferentiated systems where the two lines are distinguished on both sides, then

transforming radically the very concept of unit of kinship, since now it will not be definable

as a stable group but rather as a changeable and decreasing intensive one going from the close

relatives to the more distant ones. If I can relate these variations to other variations, for

instance changes in the way what I call political authority or economic relations are

organized, I will then redefine each group by a position in a system of transformations, that is,

of correlated variations. I will then come to accept that something else defines me that what I

used to think, and that something else is at stake in what I call family relations that relating

children to parents and creating nuclear units.

I took the example of Morgans anthropology of kinship terminologies and of its

elaboration by the British school in what is called theory of descent groups just because it has

the iconic aura of the beginnings. But it happens to be the case that this comparative analysis

has been challenged (one may say refuted) on the basis of the very principle of comparative


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knowledge (never accept as true but what can be constituted as a variant). This is what Lvi-

Strauss did in theElementary Systems of Kinship, when he tried to show that it was a different

parameter which was at stake here: not so much the way the belonging to one group is

defined, as the way the marriages are organized, the idea being that the groups are constituted

by the way they relate to one another through alliances, themselves being analyzed as

exchanges in women. He gave some convincing reasons to believe that the best way to undo

the equivocations and to redefine each term as a variant in a system of transformation which

none of them is conscious of, is to think of them as different ways of organizing reciprocal

gifts of women. If we follow Lvi-Strauss, we would then have to say that when we

differentiate our relations to our parents, children, siblings and the like, we take part in a

certain way of organizing a broader system of exchange. The convincing reasons are just the

fact that it can give an account of more correlated variations, and tighten the redefinition of

everything as a variant. But it is also clear that it has a more radical critical power (that is, it

relativizes more of what we thought was universal), since it compels us to think that what is at

stake for us in what we call family relations is something quite different from what we

thought, since it is an exchange of women considered as gifts, rather than the constitution of

kin groups. In other words, what it tells us about what kinship is is more different from what

we thought kinship was about than what the theory of descent group lead us to think. The only

reason I have to say that what kinship is in truth is nothing but a way of exchanging

women is that it sticks more tightly to the variations of the forms of kinship and enables me

to relativize my own categories in a more radical way. Therefore I have arrived, using an

equivocal concept of kinship, which I applied indiscriminately to all the behaviours which

looked like mine, to a redefinition of this very concept, to the effect of which I do not myself

look like what I thought I was. Here we can see, quite clearly, the relativization procedure at

work: a so-called universal is redefined by trying to reduce all the apparent identities to

variants.

Since Lvi-Strauss, other stronger versions have been proposed, in particular some

which concluded that what is at stake has not even anything to do with the organization of

what we call society or human relations, but rather with the metaphysical construction of

the relations between humans and non-humans. I will not enter into this. But I will simply say

that the fact that comparative knowledge advances by climbing over its own ruins is neither

tragic nor specific to it: it is on the contrary evidence that we can stick to the relativist

postulate and still be in possession of both refutability criteria and instruments of discovery

which define the dynamics of any kind of knowledge: comparative knowledge is a kin

Maniglier Others Truth

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