This article lacks nuance and the author seems entirely unread in the relevant philosophical literature. I don't say this in order to defend any kind of relativism, but simply to inform people...
Exemplary
This article lacks nuance and the author seems entirely unread in the relevant philosophical literature. I don't say this in order to defend any kind of relativism, but simply to inform people that this is not a good introduction to the topics at hand. The author conflates different kinds of relativism, as well as other concepts that are not even classified as relativism, then constructs a strawman that contains the worst features of all of them in order to knock it down.
I recommend the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) for a general introduction to, well, basically anything to do with modern philosophy, at least the analytic strain of it. The articles are written by actual philosophers and are generally way more nuanced and fair.
This article conflates moral skepticism or moral anti-realism with moral relativism, and conflates moral relativism with relativism in general. In fact, one may believe that there is no such thing as objective moral truth without being a moral relativist, and one may be a moral relativist without being a relativist about airplanes or physics. As the SEP article about moral relativism says:
First, [metaethical moral relativism, henceforth MMR] might be defended as a consequence of the general relativist thesis that the truth or justification of all judgments is not absolute or universal, but relative to some group of persons. For example, this general position might be maintained on the ground that each society has its own conceptual framework and that conceptual frameworks are incommensurable with one another. Hence, we can only speak of truth or justification in relative terms (see the discussion of incommensurability in the Summer 2015 archived version of the entry on relativism (section 4.2)). This position might be thought to have the disadvantage that it can only be put forward as true or justified relative to some conceptual framework (the suggestion is usually that this framework is our own), and many find it implausible with regard to common sense judgments and judgments in the natural sciences. However, this is one avenue to MMR. But most proponents of MMR focus on distinctive features of morality and reject general relativism. In fact, they often contrast morality and science with respect to issues of truth and justification. For example, Harman (2000b), Prinz (2007) and Wong (1996 and 2006) all associate moral relativism with naturalism, a position that usually presupposes the objectivity of the natural sciences.
So, in fact, most actual working philosophers who posit some kind of moral relativism do not subscribe to general relativism about things like the natural sciences. Instead, they argue that ethics is in some fundamental way different from the natural sciences.
Furthermore, there is a whole slew of other ideas about how ethics functions which contrast with realism (basically, the idea that there is a knowable, objective right and wrong, although there is a lot of nuance to what that actually means), but which do not equate to relativism. For instance, ethical noncognitivism proposes that when we say things like "slavery is wrong", we are not expressing a logical proposition, but rather expressing a special kind of negative emotional attitude towards slavery, akin to saying "boo! to slavery". Thus moral statements are not relative, or true, or false, they lack a truth value at all. Moral error theory posits that all moral judgments are wrong, either because the relevant properties (such as moral goodness or moral wrongess) do not exist, or because nothing in the world exists that instantiates such properties. And moral skepticism is the belief that we are not ever justified in believing any moral statement, regardless of whether or not there exists an objective truth about the matter.
I recommend the following articles to dig deeper into metaethics, the field of philosophy that has to do with questions like "is there such a thing as an objective right and wrong?" and "what does it even mean to say that something is wrong, or good, or evil?"
Yes, they are all from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, but they're written by different authors and include extensive bibliographies. They are much denser than the OP's article, but that's because they delve into the nuances that the author seems entirely unaware of. It's sad that a professor of freaking critical thinking did such a poor job of actually educating himself on the ideas that he's trying to critique. He may still have arrived at the same conclusion that relativism is a bunch of bunk (in fact that is my own opinion), but at least he'd do it in an intellectually honest way.
I mean, yes, of course, it lacks nuance, it's a 900 words highly informal blog post about the author's general sentiments towards the relativism umbrella. A typical SEP article, like the ones you...
I mean, yes, of course, it lacks nuance, it's a 900 words highly informal blog post about the author's general sentiments towards the relativism umbrella. A typical SEP article, like the ones you linked, is about 20+ pages long when printed as PDF[1]. It's an entirely different category from blog posts. So maybe there are some misplaced expectations here.
I found that sharing SEP articles (and others like them) is not very productive because nobody will read them, and I understand that. Who's got the time to read a very long, highly technical article just for the kicks? So, when it comes to philosophy, I decided to only share shorter stuff. These are obviously incomplete and generally contain just a taste of the subject, but people sometimes read them, react, etc. I'm not a philosopher or anything, but I find that the Blog of the American Philosophical Association (where this post comes from) is usually very good.
[1]I have the habit of sending SEP articles to my Kindle, and I can tell you that it takes me at least 1 hour to read a single entry. Not just because of the length, but also because of the difficulty in understanding it...
From the conclusion of your second source about moral anti-realism. It seems relevant to the linked article.
From the conclusion of your second source about moral anti-realism. It seems relevant to the linked article.
The embrace of moral anti-realism, it is assumed, will have an insidious influence. This concern presupposes that most of the folk are already pretheoretically inclined toward moral realism—an assumption that was queried earlier. But even if it is true that most people are naive moral realists, the question of what would happen if they ceased to be so is an empirical matter, concerning which neither optimism nor pessimism seems prima facie more warranted than the other. As with the opposition to moral non-objectivism, the more general opposition to moral anti-realism is frequently based on an under-estimation of the resources available to the anti-realist—on an unexamined assumption that the silliest, crudest, or most pernicious version will stand as a good representative of a whole range of extremely varied and often sophisticated theories.
Relativism cannot be a position one holds as a basis for actual belief, but what it does do is remind humanity that all we are is emergent intelligences that cannot see outside of our own...
Relativism cannot be a position one holds as a basis for actual belief, but what it does do is remind humanity that all we are is emergent intelligences that cannot see outside of our own perspectives. The idea that you are proving an ultimate truth by saying "ah, but you go to doctors!" is a shallow and disingenuous argument. One can accept the current context of life while epistemically acknowledging it as specific rather than universal.
Since I was just thinking about relativism, I have more thoughts on this subject than I normally would. I also want to clearly separate 'truth' and moral relativism. I'd like to start with truth...
Since I was just thinking about relativism, I have more thoughts on this subject than I normally would. I also want to clearly separate 'truth' and moral relativism.
I'd like to start with truth relativism, as it effects moral relativism a bit. The simplest way I can describe my relativistic views is that the problem is in the demarcation/proving of objective truth, not its existence or non-existence. My perspective does not view the world as it is, or if I do view the world as it is, how would I ever prove/know that? As an example, what can I say about my experience of sound as sound and the experience of sound in the world? I can't know how sound exists in the external world, because I only know my own experience. I usually try to get people to say out loud that they are the God who understands the world as it is, that they are the ultimate being whose perspective is CORRECT. Most people get uncomfortable saying something so arrogant out loud; it hasn't changed anyone's opinion yet, but it is fun for me. So, my truth relativism has nothing to do with reality, but with how anyone would differentiate between truth and falsity.
To go onto moral relativism, my opinion is that moral rules are at best pointless, and at worst, actively detrimental. I am only discussing morality from an individual context, mainly because getting into the social aspects of morality would make this post twice as long. Morality is pointless because you will make whatever decision you make in the moment regardless of whatever code you say you follow. It could be detrimental because it is an attempt to outsource your decisions to something else. At the end of the day, the people in the scenario will make whatever decision they do, with whatever knowledge and perspective they have.
When I was in college, a esteemed professor seemed to believe that everything was an attribute of language. I asked her if cancer and electricity existed in the time of Christ, since they were not...
When I was in college, a esteemed professor seemed to believe that everything was an attribute of language. I asked her if cancer and electricity existed in the time of Christ, since they were not part of the language back then. She said no. Then I asked her if her son broke his leg, she would either recite poetry or take him to the doctor. I was evidently not very nice, but I believe the contradiction I was attacking is well addressed by this article.
One thing that trips me up in philosophy is the use of common terms with technical meanings. In math, you see something termed homological theory, and the naming convention tells you that there's...
One thing that trips me up in philosophy is the use of common terms with technical meanings. In math, you see something termed homological theory, and the naming convention tells you that there's more going on. In philosophy, you see 'virtue' and it could be our normal idea of virtue or something completely different.
Philosophy has many paradigms. Other subject areas have very few. In physics, when talking about work in Newtonian physics, there's a paradigm shift. Holding a heavy weight does 0 work on the object. Most people don't find this intuitive given what they know about work. Happily, most science uses technical terms to help alert us understand that something different is happening.
Talking about existence is fraught with difficulty, as the term 'exists/existed' has a thousand technical interpretations. Maybe she believed the observables correlated with electricity existed, but not electricity itself. Maybe she was replying to the question: Did the words 'cancer' and 'electricity' exist in the time of Christ? Maybe she was using some modification of Kripke's attack on the descriptivist theory of naming. Maybe she believes that talking about existence in the past tense doesn't make sense. Maybe she was loopy.
Edit: in response to your other comment about article length. I agree shorter summaries are good, and this article does a good job of attacking a vagary of language that people commonly use when talking, but it doesn't attack the philosophy of relativism which is substantially different. This argument is admittedly good at tripping up people who claim to be relativists though :)
One way in which philosophy is very different from science, I think, is that science is not very concerned with the "ancient" history of the field. Historians and philosophers of science are more...
One way in which philosophy is very different from science, I think, is that science is not very concerned with the "ancient" history of the field. Historians and philosophers of science are more likely to occupy themselves with that. A scientist may have some historical knowledge of their chosen field, but that is often not a requirement at all. The current state of things (and some of the steps that led to it) is all that matters, why bother with hundreds of theories that did not stand the test of time? On the other hand, even in its most "technical" fields, the job of the philosopher is intertwined with history. You're not just making arguments, you're responding to them. So you gotta adapt your vocabulary according to whatever tradition you're addressing. And this lineage goes way back.
Regarding my professor, I was her student, and courses here are fairly intensive, so I was very acquainted with her way of thinking. There was not much space for misunderstanding, I believe. I only posed the question because I actually respected her very much -- she was very knowledgeable, passionate, and secure. I was confident that she would give me a better answer than other professors in the department.
Sure, for example, scientists don't know or care much about learning exactly how Newton thought about physics, including things like the awkwardness of his original mathematics and any mistakes he...
Sure, for example, scientists don't know or care much about learning exactly how Newton thought about physics, including things like the awkwardness of his original mathematics and any mistakes he might have made. The potted history we learn is very simplified, and we learn the modern version of the math, including all improvements made since then. Modern authors try to explain things as well as they can in modern language, using modern examples. But there is still something we call Newtonian physics that doesn't include relativity, because it's useful.
Historians of science would be more interested in the old stuff.
So I sometimes wonder why there aren't modernized versions of ancient philosophical arguments with the stuff that's obviously mistaken (we know now) removed, and rewritten in plain language. Why isn't there a modern version of Aristotelian thought, if it's still useful to know? The conversation should be about what philosophers believe now, not historical arguments.
I guess the Stanford encyclopedia would be the closest to that.
I think what you're saying kinda exists in the form of high-quality commentators that write introductions, companions, notes, etc. You don't need to read Aristotle to get the gist of it, you just...
So I sometimes wonder why there aren't modernized versions of ancient philosophical arguments with the stuff that's obviously mistaken (we know now) removed, and rewritten in plain language
I think what you're saying kinda exists in the form of high-quality commentators that write introductions, companions, notes, etc. You don't need to read Aristotle to get the gist of it, you just read a great commentator. Although Aristotle is kind of a bad example because I find him highly readable (as long as there are useful prefaces, notes, footnotes, etc).
It would be hard to present a "corrected" version of a certain philosophy, though, because one soon would ask: "correct according to whom?", and the debate would continue till the end of time.
But, in some way, current philosophy already is a correction to old/ancient philosophy. Many of the problems it addresses are historical developments of questions that started with people like Plato, Kant, or Confucius. One could make the argument that presenting corrected versions is all philosophers do -- you just need to follow the thread.
Yes, the SEP is really awesome, but do notice that every article has its own author, and no one makes the claim that their entries are final versions of anything. One should view the SEP as a source of high-quality summaries, but no one could ever claim that it is authoritative -- because nothing could.
Sounds good. Unless you get to know someone well, it's a balance. Is this person speaking from knowledge and assuming that things are understood, or are they speaking from ignorance and displaying...
Sounds good.
Unless you get to know someone well, it's a balance. Is this person speaking from knowledge and assuming that things are understood, or are they speaking from ignorance and displaying gaps? When talking about agriculture, I assume the first; when talking about philosophy I assume the second. This is based almost purely on my experience talking face-to-face with other people - online, it's hard.
That makes sense. Maybe some expect too much from philosophy. I don't know if that's your background, but STEM people often disregard philosophy when it cannot produce the kind of certain proof...
That makes sense.
Maybe some expect too much from philosophy. I don't know if that's your background, but STEM people often disregard philosophy when it cannot produce the kind of certain proof you might find in mathematics.
Philosophical logic can be pretty rigorous, though.
I once read a philosopher that worked with logic and went to mathematics, and, according to him, his philosophical logic training led him to be way more rigorous than even his professors required... they got impatient because he was too slow :P. That's just something I read on a forum, though...
This article lacks nuance and the author seems entirely unread in the relevant philosophical literature. I don't say this in order to defend any kind of relativism, but simply to inform people that this is not a good introduction to the topics at hand. The author conflates different kinds of relativism, as well as other concepts that are not even classified as relativism, then constructs a strawman that contains the worst features of all of them in order to knock it down.
I recommend the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) for a general introduction to, well, basically anything to do with modern philosophy, at least the analytic strain of it. The articles are written by actual philosophers and are generally way more nuanced and fair.
This article conflates moral skepticism or moral anti-realism with moral relativism, and conflates moral relativism with relativism in general. In fact, one may believe that there is no such thing as objective moral truth without being a moral relativist, and one may be a moral relativist without being a relativist about airplanes or physics. As the SEP article about moral relativism says:
So, in fact, most actual working philosophers who posit some kind of moral relativism do not subscribe to general relativism about things like the natural sciences. Instead, they argue that ethics is in some fundamental way different from the natural sciences.
Furthermore, there is a whole slew of other ideas about how ethics functions which contrast with realism (basically, the idea that there is a knowable, objective right and wrong, although there is a lot of nuance to what that actually means), but which do not equate to relativism. For instance, ethical noncognitivism proposes that when we say things like "slavery is wrong", we are not expressing a logical proposition, but rather expressing a special kind of negative emotional attitude towards slavery, akin to saying "boo! to slavery". Thus moral statements are not relative, or true, or false, they lack a truth value at all. Moral error theory posits that all moral judgments are wrong, either because the relevant properties (such as moral goodness or moral wrongess) do not exist, or because nothing in the world exists that instantiates such properties. And moral skepticism is the belief that we are not ever justified in believing any moral statement, regardless of whether or not there exists an objective truth about the matter.
I recommend the following articles to dig deeper into metaethics, the field of philosophy that has to do with questions like "is there such a thing as an objective right and wrong?" and "what does it even mean to say that something is wrong, or good, or evil?"
Yes, they are all from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, but they're written by different authors and include extensive bibliographies. They are much denser than the OP's article, but that's because they delve into the nuances that the author seems entirely unaware of. It's sad that a professor of freaking critical thinking did such a poor job of actually educating himself on the ideas that he's trying to critique. He may still have arrived at the same conclusion that relativism is a bunch of bunk (in fact that is my own opinion), but at least he'd do it in an intellectually honest way.
I mean, yes, of course, it lacks nuance, it's a 900 words highly informal blog post about the author's general sentiments towards the relativism umbrella. A typical SEP article, like the ones you linked, is about 20+ pages long when printed as PDF[1]. It's an entirely different category from blog posts. So maybe there are some misplaced expectations here.
I found that sharing SEP articles (and others like them) is not very productive because nobody will read them, and I understand that. Who's got the time to read a very long, highly technical article just for the kicks? So, when it comes to philosophy, I decided to only share shorter stuff. These are obviously incomplete and generally contain just a taste of the subject, but people sometimes read them, react, etc. I'm not a philosopher or anything, but I find that the Blog of the American Philosophical Association (where this post comes from) is usually very good.
[1] I have the habit of sending SEP articles to my Kindle, and I can tell you that it takes me at least 1 hour to read a single entry. Not just because of the length, but also because of the difficulty in understanding it...
From the conclusion of your second source about moral anti-realism. It seems relevant to the linked article.
Relativism cannot be a position one holds as a basis for actual belief, but what it does do is remind humanity that all we are is emergent intelligences that cannot see outside of our own perspectives. The idea that you are proving an ultimate truth by saying "ah, but you go to doctors!" is a shallow and disingenuous argument. One can accept the current context of life while epistemically acknowledging it as specific rather than universal.
Since I was just thinking about relativism, I have more thoughts on this subject than I normally would. I also want to clearly separate 'truth' and moral relativism.
I'd like to start with truth relativism, as it effects moral relativism a bit. The simplest way I can describe my relativistic views is that the problem is in the demarcation/proving of objective truth, not its existence or non-existence. My perspective does not view the world as it is, or if I do view the world as it is, how would I ever prove/know that? As an example, what can I say about my experience of sound as sound and the experience of sound in the world? I can't know how sound exists in the external world, because I only know my own experience. I usually try to get people to say out loud that they are the God who understands the world as it is, that they are the ultimate being whose perspective is CORRECT. Most people get uncomfortable saying something so arrogant out loud; it hasn't changed anyone's opinion yet, but it is fun for me. So, my truth relativism has nothing to do with reality, but with how anyone would differentiate between truth and falsity.
To go onto moral relativism, my opinion is that moral rules are at best pointless, and at worst, actively detrimental. I am only discussing morality from an individual context, mainly because getting into the social aspects of morality would make this post twice as long. Morality is pointless because you will make whatever decision you make in the moment regardless of whatever code you say you follow. It could be detrimental because it is an attempt to outsource your decisions to something else. At the end of the day, the people in the scenario will make whatever decision they do, with whatever knowledge and perspective they have.
When I was in college, a esteemed professor seemed to believe that everything was an attribute of language. I asked her if cancer and electricity existed in the time of Christ, since they were not part of the language back then. She said no. Then I asked her if her son broke his leg, she would either recite poetry or take him to the doctor. I was evidently not very nice, but I believe the contradiction I was attacking is well addressed by this article.
One thing that trips me up in philosophy is the use of common terms with technical meanings. In math, you see something termed homological theory, and the naming convention tells you that there's more going on. In philosophy, you see 'virtue' and it could be our normal idea of virtue or something completely different.
Philosophy has many paradigms. Other subject areas have very few. In physics, when talking about work in Newtonian physics, there's a paradigm shift. Holding a heavy weight does 0 work on the object. Most people don't find this intuitive given what they know about work. Happily, most science uses technical terms to help alert us understand that something different is happening.
Talking about existence is fraught with difficulty, as the term 'exists/existed' has a thousand technical interpretations. Maybe she believed the observables correlated with electricity existed, but not electricity itself. Maybe she was replying to the question: Did the words 'cancer' and 'electricity' exist in the time of Christ? Maybe she was using some modification of Kripke's attack on the descriptivist theory of naming. Maybe she believes that talking about existence in the past tense doesn't make sense. Maybe she was loopy.
Edit: in response to your other comment about article length. I agree shorter summaries are good, and this article does a good job of attacking a vagary of language that people commonly use when talking, but it doesn't attack the philosophy of relativism which is substantially different. This argument is admittedly good at tripping up people who claim to be relativists though :)
One way in which philosophy is very different from science, I think, is that science is not very concerned with the "ancient" history of the field. Historians and philosophers of science are more likely to occupy themselves with that. A scientist may have some historical knowledge of their chosen field, but that is often not a requirement at all. The current state of things (and some of the steps that led to it) is all that matters, why bother with hundreds of theories that did not stand the test of time? On the other hand, even in its most "technical" fields, the job of the philosopher is intertwined with history. You're not just making arguments, you're responding to them. So you gotta adapt your vocabulary according to whatever tradition you're addressing. And this lineage goes way back.
Regarding my professor, I was her student, and courses here are fairly intensive, so I was very acquainted with her way of thinking. There was not much space for misunderstanding, I believe. I only posed the question because I actually respected her very much -- she was very knowledgeable, passionate, and secure. I was confident that she would give me a better answer than other professors in the department.
Sure, for example, scientists don't know or care much about learning exactly how Newton thought about physics, including things like the awkwardness of his original mathematics and any mistakes he might have made. The potted history we learn is very simplified, and we learn the modern version of the math, including all improvements made since then. Modern authors try to explain things as well as they can in modern language, using modern examples. But there is still something we call Newtonian physics that doesn't include relativity, because it's useful.
Historians of science would be more interested in the old stuff.
So I sometimes wonder why there aren't modernized versions of ancient philosophical arguments with the stuff that's obviously mistaken (we know now) removed, and rewritten in plain language. Why isn't there a modern version of Aristotelian thought, if it's still useful to know? The conversation should be about what philosophers believe now, not historical arguments.
I guess the Stanford encyclopedia would be the closest to that.
I think what you're saying kinda exists in the form of high-quality commentators that write introductions, companions, notes, etc. You don't need to read Aristotle to get the gist of it, you just read a great commentator. Although Aristotle is kind of a bad example because I find him highly readable (as long as there are useful prefaces, notes, footnotes, etc).
It would be hard to present a "corrected" version of a certain philosophy, though, because one soon would ask: "correct according to whom?", and the debate would continue till the end of time.
But, in some way, current philosophy already is a correction to old/ancient philosophy. Many of the problems it addresses are historical developments of questions that started with people like Plato, Kant, or Confucius. One could make the argument that presenting corrected versions is all philosophers do -- you just need to follow the thread.
Yes, the SEP is really awesome, but do notice that every article has its own author, and no one makes the claim that their entries are final versions of anything. One should view the SEP as a source of high-quality summaries, but no one could ever claim that it is authoritative -- because nothing could.
Sounds good.
Unless you get to know someone well, it's a balance. Is this person speaking from knowledge and assuming that things are understood, or are they speaking from ignorance and displaying gaps? When talking about agriculture, I assume the first; when talking about philosophy I assume the second. This is based almost purely on my experience talking face-to-face with other people - online, it's hard.
That makes sense.
Maybe some expect too much from philosophy. I don't know if that's your background, but STEM people often disregard philosophy when it cannot produce the kind of certain proof you might find in mathematics.
Philosophical logic can be pretty rigorous, though.
I once read a philosopher that worked with logic and went to mathematics, and, according to him, his philosophical logic training led him to be way more rigorous than even his professors required... they got impatient because he was too slow :P. That's just something I read on a forum, though...