Relativism

We’re both right.

Appearance vs. Reality

• Philosophy begins with the realisation that appearance is often different from reality, and it’s reality that counts. That’s what philosophy studies. (E.g. Plato’s cave.)

• Parmenides and others were maybe hyper-realists, denying any importance to appearance.

• Wood suggests that Protagoras’s relativism was a response to such hyper-realism.

“Protagoras wanted to extend his defense of appearance to the point of saying that appearances are completely real, as real as it gets. He also wanted to extend ‘appearances’ beyond perceptual feelings to other kinds of seemings, such as beliefs. If I believe that the world is a certain way, then that’s how the world seems to me, and so that’s how the world is (to me). If you have a different belief, then that's how the world appears, and therefore how it is, to you. From this Protagoras concluded that error and false belief are absolutely impossible.”

Wood, pp. 2-3

Alethic relativism:

“Here I want mainly to discuss (and to criticize) a view I have encountered among students in philosophy courses, who say things like this: “What anyone believes is true for that person. What you believe is true for you, what I believe is true for me.” We can call the view expressed in such statements ‘relativism’ because it denies that there is any such thing as “absolute” truth, holds that all truth is relative to the person who believes it.” (Wood)

• Are there such people? • Are there any grounds for such an attitude?

The world is a ‘social construct’? ‘Objects’ do not exist independently of conceptual

schemes. We cut up the world into objects when we introduce one or another scheme of description.

(Hilary Putnam’s “internal realism”, in Reason, Truth and History, 1981, p. 52).

“If, as I maintain, ‘objects’ themselves are as much made as

discovered, as much products of our conceptual invention as of the ‘objective’ factor in experience, the factor independent of our will, then of course objects intrinsically belong under certain labels because those labels are just the tools we use to construct a version of the world with such objects in the first place.

(Putnam, 1981, p. 54, italics his).

• Thus, Putnam denies that there are natural kinds, and even mind-independent objects.

• E.g. does the “Southern Ocean” really exist? Isn’t it just a human construct, pieced together from bits of 3 other oceans?

Classification changes with “paradigm”

Celestial bodies for Ptolemy

Copernican taxonomy

Putnam’s “internalism” • I shall refer to it as the internalist perspective, because it is

characteristic of this view to hold that what objects does the world consist of? is a question that it only makes sense to ask within a theory or description. Many ‘internalist’ philosophers, though not all, hold further that there is more than one ‘true’ theory or description of the world. ‘Truth’, in an internalist view, is some sort of (idealized) rational acceptability – some sort of ideal coherence of our beliefs with each other and with our experiences as those experiences are themselves represented in our belief system – and not correspondence with mind-independent or discourse-independent ‘states of affairs’. There is no God's Eye point of view that we can know or usefully imagine; there are only the various points of view of actual persons reflecting various interests and purposes that their descriptions and theories subserve. (49-50)

Internalism is not a facile relativism that says, ‘Anything goes’. Denying that it makes sense to ask whether our concepts ‘match’ something totally uncontaminated by conceptualization is one thing; but to hold that every conceptual system is therefore just as good as every other would be something else.

• If anyone really believed that, and if they were foolish enough to pick a conceptual system that told them they could fly and to act upon it by jumping out of a window, they would, if they were lucky enough to survive, see the weakness of the latter view at once. (p. 54) Can an ‘internalist’ explain why the data and epistemic norms priviledge some conceptual systems over others?

The “world” is conceptual?

“Quite literally, men of those days lived in a different world because their instruments of intellectual interpretation were so different”

[C. I. Lewis, 1929, p. 253].

“[the switch to a radically new scientific view]…produces disciples forming a school, the members of which are separated for the time being by a logical gap from those outside it. They think differently, speak a different language, live in a different world, …”

[Michael Polanyi, 1958, p 151].

Relativism is self-refuting?

“The problem arises as soon as Protagoras tries either to assert relativism or believe it. If Protagoras asserts relativism, then he asserts that relativism is true, and that those (such as Plato) who deny relativism say and believe something false. But relativism denies that anyone can say or believe anything false.”

• Is this too simple?

• Wood assumes that “it’s true for me” = “I believe it”, and “I believe it” = “I believe it’s true”. Is this fair?

Fundamental problems

• Does the concept of belief make any sense, except as an attempted representation of the truth?

• If we say, “p is true for Socrates”, aren’t we committed to the statement “Socrates believes p” being absolutely true?

Relativism and Scepticism

“… people are often attracted to relativism by the feeling that others are too confident in the absolute truth of what they believe …”

Wood says that relativism is perhaps attractive as an antidote

to dogmatism (p. 24). But scepticism shows that realism doesn’t entail dogmatism.

“… Skepticism does not deny that some beliefs are

(absolutely) true, it denies only that we can ever be sure which beliefs these are.”

Absolute truth and authority

“If a relativist catches you audaciously suggesting that there is such a thing as (absolute) truth, then you are bound to be asked the rhetorical question: “But who is to decide what the truth is?” Apparently the relativist thinks that if you hold that there is an absolute, objective truth, then you have to believe there is some authority whose word on that truth must not be questioned.”

Wood says that the possibility of scepticism shows this is all

wrong.

Relativism is a rejection of epistemic authority?

• I think Wood is perhaps a bit hasty here. • I wonder if, in these anti-authoritarian times, the

core of relativism is the rejection of epistemic authority?

• Recall that the truth (or the actual world) functions as the highest (non-defeasible) epistemic authority.

• Appeals to truth are deconstructed as appeals to the viewpoint of colonial powers, Western hegemony, ‘logocentrism’, etc.

• N.B. Wood repeatedly says things like, “For it is still true that to believe that p is to believe p is true (absolutely).” • But if the whole notion of absolute truth is unmasked

as a bogus appeal to epistemic authority, I don’t think a relativist is likely to agree with this.

• Surely I can believe p without (in so believing) see myself as being aligned with some oppressive metanarrative? It’s my belief, my truth, not that of colonial powers, science, God, etc.

Richard Rorty on truth Worries about “cognitive status” and “objectivity” are characteristic of a secularized culture in which the scientist replaces the priest. The scientist is now seen as the person who keeps humanity in touch with something beyond itself. [I.e. the objective truth – RJ] As the universe was depersonalized, beauty (and, in time, even moral goodness) came to be thought of as “subjective.” So truth is now thought of as the only point at which human beings are responsible to something nonhuman. A commitment to “rationality” and to “method” is thought to be a recognition of this responsibility. The scientist becomes a moral exemplar, one who selflessly expresses himself again and again to the hardness of fact.

• (Rorty, Science as Solidarity)

Back to Rorty

• Rorty seems to regard the notion of objective truth as inherently religious.

• He disparages the idea that: “…Truth is “out there” waiting for human beings to

arrive at it. This idea seems to us an unfortunate attempt to carry a religious conception over into a secular culture.”

• He thinks this desire for objectivity is: “the desire to be in touch with a reality which is more than some community with which we identify ourselves…”

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Relativism isn’t the claim that Different people can be justified in holding different beliefs?

• Thomas Kuhn has argued in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that during a scientific revolution (= ‘paradigm shift’) the available evidence + logic doesn’t unambiguously show the new theory to be better than the old.

• E.g. Priestly (phlogiston theory) and Lavoisier (oxygen theory) on the nature of combustion, etc. They had the same data! Lavoisier paid enormous attention to masses of reactants and products, Priestly focused on heat, colours, and volumes.

• Kuhn argues that one’s very standards of epistemic justification are part of one’s paradigm, so that competing paradigms are both justified by their own lights.

• “In the first place, the proponents of competing paradigms will often disagree about the list of problems that any candidate for paradigm must resolve. ... Lavoisier’s chemical theory inhibited chemists from asking why the metals were so much alike, a question that phlogistic chemistry had both asked and answered. The transition to Lavoisier’s paradigm had, like the transition to Newton’s, meant a loss not only of a permissible question but of an achieved solution.” (Kuhn, p. 148)

• Kuhn compares paradigm shifts to gestalt shifts, political revolutions, and religious conversions, presenting them as essentially non-rational.

• “the fact that a major paradigm revision was needed to see what Lavoisier saw must be the principal reason why Priestley was, to the end of his long life, unable to see it.” (Kuhn, p. 56)

• E.g. during a political revolution, the constitution of the old regime no longer applies, so no rules govern how the revolution itself is to be carried out.

• N.B. Allen Wood has this all wrong:

“… perhaps evidence for the phlogiston theory was so strong that they would have been unreasonable if they had not believed it. But Lavoisier acquired new evidence, which justifies rejecting the phlogiston theory and believing the oxidation theory instead.”

Kuhn on whether scientists think for themselves

“At least in the mature sciences, [the paradigm is]

firmly embedded in the educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice. Because that education is both rigorous and rigid, [the paradigm comes] to exert a deep hold on the scientific mind. … we shall want finally to describe that research as a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education”

(Kuhn, Structure, pp. 4-5)

“Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Much of the success of the enterprise derives from the community’s willingness to defend that assumption, if necessary at considerable cost. Normal science, for example, often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.”

(Kuhn, Structure, p. 5. Kuhn goes on to say that such

novelties cannot be suppressed for very long, and they can lead to a scientific revolution or paradigm shift.)

Remember Kuhn’s duck-rabbit metaphor?

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Should Alice Grant be allowed to investigate the PCI? Should ‘rabbitism’ be tolerated in the Faculty of Science?

Bruner and Postman’s Experiment

Kuhn illustrates how a paradigm exerts a strong influence on thought and perception by citing a psychological experiment.

“B+P asked experimental subjects to identify on short

and controlled exposure a series of playing cards. …

Bruner and Postman’s Experiment

“… Many of the cards were normal, but some were made anomalous, e.g. a red six of spades and a black four of hearts. … After each exposure the subject was asked what he had seen …

…the anomalous cards were almost always identified, without apparent hesitation or puzzlement, as normal. The black four of hearts, for example, might be identified as the four of either spades or hearts. …

… With a further increase of exposure to the anomalous cards, subjects did begin to hesitate and to display awareness of anomaly. … “That’s the six of spades, but there’s something wrong with it—the black has a red border”

Further exposure resulted in still more hesitation and confusion, until finally, and sometimes quite suddenly, most subjects would produce the correct identification without hesitation …

…Moreover, after doing this with two or three of the anomalous cards, they would have little further difficulty with the others. A few subjects, however, were never able to make the requisite adjustment of their categories … One of them exclaimed:

“I can’t make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn’t even look like a card that time. I don’t know what color it is now or whether it’s a spade or a heart. I’m not even sure now what a spade looks like. My God!” (p. 64)

Kuhn continues, “In the next section we shall

occasionally see scientists behaving this way too.”

• E.g. on pp. 83-84 Kuhn quotes Wolfgang Pauli, shortly before quantum mechanics emerged,

“At the moment physics is again terribly confused. In

any case, it is too difficult for me, and I wish I had been a movie comedian or something of the sort and had never heard of physics”

Kuhn is an anti-realist?

• Kuhn seems to espouse two forms of anti-realism (or relativism).

(A) Epistemic anti-realism: whether or not a view is rationally justified depends on your paradigm’s rules. There are no objective rules that transcend all paradigms.

(B) Alethic anti-realism: There is no objective truth, no world “out there” that is independent of theory. “Reality” is in fact a social construct. (Kuhn compared the ‘progress’ of science to biological evolution. Science changes, but doesn’t get better. It has no goal.)

Kuhn on scientific progress

“We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth”

(p. 170) (Note the weasel word ‘may’ here!)

“Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full,

objective, true account of nature and that the proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal?”

(Note the rhetorical question, rather than statement, here!)

• Kuhn claims that he can’t even make sense of talk about what is “really there” in the world itself, as opposed to what is there according to some theory.

• “There is, I think, no theory independent way to reconstruct

phrases like ‘really there’; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its ‘real’ counterpart in nature now seems to be illusive in principle” (p. 206).

Bayesian subjectivism

• According to Bayesian subjectivism, rationality is just a matter of one’s beliefs conforming to the probability calculus (and hence Bayes’ theorem). There are no rational constraints on priors.

• Two scientists with the same evidence, but different priors, can reach very different conclusions. And both be rational.

• So this view is relativist, up to a point.

Is morality a cultural construct?

• Wood acknowledges that (p. 17): – Ethics or morality itself can, in a certain sense, be seen as a

social or cultural phenomenon. – Ethical beliefs tend to come in systems that are conjoined

with cultural practices and acquired by individuals as part of their socialization.

– Systems of ethical belief differ from culture to culture in significant ways that anthropologists may study with profit.

– Moral decency requires that we consider cultural differences concerning morality with care and sensitivity.

• But don’t think that: “…those truths have the substantive normative implication that

whatever any culture believes is right is right for members of that culture.”

This absurd claim is sometimes conflated with the obvious

fact that: “the rightness or wrongness of an act is relative to the

circumstances in which it is performed”.

Cultural relativism and cultural tolerance

• Does relativism foster tolerance?

• Does realism (among Western thinkers) lead to [shudder] Western Supremacy?

“If the cultural relativists are right that Western Supremacy is a belief of Western culture, then what cultural relativism tells us as members of Western culture is that it is absolutely, objectively right for us to impose our ways on others and objectively right for us to blame and interfere with the actions of people in other cultures whenever our values condemn them.”

“It looks like those views really consist in holding to certain (absolute, objective, trans-cultural) ethical principles about how the members of different cultures should act toward each other, such as that people should be open-minded and tolerant to all human beings, always treating them with dignity and respect. Perhaps the anti-imperialists are embarrassed to avow such principles because they obviously come from the modern, Western Enlightenment tradition, and avowing them will immediately expose you to the dreaded charge of ethnocentrism.”

(Wood refers to slavery, human sacrifice, suttee, pogrom, genital

mutilation of children, etc.)

Relativism, humbug, hype and spin.

“Humbug is when I say something to you that isn’t true, where I know it isn’t true, I know you know it isn’t true, and I know you know I know it isn’t true, but I know that if you hear it enough, it will probably influence your behavior (typically, in my interests).”

E.g. advertising, public relations, political spin, etc. “Nobody believes them, or even takes them seriously. But the

politicians who spend their donors’ money are the ones who get elected and the products that are hyped on TV are the ones that sell.”

• Is advertising and political spin transparently false? • As Wood says, “Nobody believes them, or even takes

them seriously.”

• Humbug therefore works partly by dulling your appetite for truth, getting you used to filling your mind with what you know is less than truth, with what is self-consciously phony, a glitzy but of course unconvincing imitation of truth.

• Relativism might express the consciousness of someone whose whole cognitive environment, so to speak, has been taken over by humbug. Nothing anybody believes is really believed, nothing anybody asserts is meant seriously, so nobody would be so crude as to say that it was “true”. Nobody would care about the truth even if it came up and hit them in the face. Such a person would have come to regard being humbugged as the normal state. This person thinks of really believing something (holding it to be true, period) as abnormal, a relic of a more innocent age in which people didn’t yet realize that everything is humbug.

“Therefore, however prevalent hype and humbug may become in our cognitive environment, we can’t ultimately avoid challenging them directly and unsophisticatedly by just recognizing them for what they are and declaring bluntly that they are false. Admittedly, this is not “cool” …The only way really to oppose humbug is by being uncool, chopping logic and just insisting squarishly on the obvious if boring fact that there is after all a distinction between telling the truth and telling lies.”

• Relativism as an “intellectual defense mechanism”?

“When I begin the study of philosophy, I may suddenly discover powerful arguments and theories I never considered before which challenge the opinions I have always taken for granted. This can be very disturbing, and make me feel intimidated and insecure. Relativism comes to the rescue by protecting my opinions (making them all “true for me”).”