This article offers a meta-analysis of contemporary approaches aimed at resolving the internal, relativistic-non-relativistic tension within the text of the Chuang-Tzu. In the first section, the four most commonly applied approaches are unpacked and evaluated, ranging from relativistic approaches such as hard relativism and soft relativism, to approaches that acknowledge both relativism and non-relativism, as well as others which acknowledge neither of the two perspectives (relativism and non-relativism). After demonstrating the immanent difficulties these (...) four types of approaches encounter, the latter section of this paper puts forward a different philosophical solution known as asymmetrical relativism. This novel approach preserves textual evidence for both relativistic and non-relativistic attitudes within the Chuang-Tzu by proposing that the mind engages in relativism insofar as it is in a state of ignorance; en route to enlightenment, however, value-laden discourse and pedagogical heuristics are nonetheless still employed as instruments for the mind to transcend its own ignorance. (shrink)

Chapter 2 primarily discusses Bernstein’s account and its differences both from Nagle’s metaphysical realism and Rorty’s postmodern pragmatism. Trying to diagnose assumptions that polarize thinkers to become objectivists and relativists, Bernstein articulates a Cartesian Anxiety he thinks they ironically both share. Descartes’ anti-skeptical wave of rigor was presented as a rationalistic project of rebuilding an unstable and dilapidated ‘house of knowledge’ on secure philosophical and scientific foundations. His overtly foundationalist metaphor of rebuilding from timbers set “in rock or hard (...) clay” shapes Descartes’ attempt to refute the skeptic and to secure the objectivity of knowledge as pursued by a more rigorous and analytical method of knowing. (shrink)

THIS PAPER IS THE CO-WINNER OF THE FRED BERGER PRIZE IN PHILOSOPHY OF LAW FOR THE 1999 AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE BEST PUBLISHED PAPER IN THE PREVIOUS TWO YEARS. -/- The conflict between liberal legal theory and critical legal studies (CLS) is often framed as a matter of whether there is a theory of justice that the law should embody which all rational people could or must accept. In a divided society, the CLS critique of this view is overwhelming: (...) there is no such justice that can command universal assent. But the liberal critique of CLS, that it degenerates into an unpalatable moral relativism on which there is no non-arbitrary basis between a justice that underwrites forms of domination such as slavery and a justice that condemns such forms of domination is equally powerful and compelling. I show that there is a way to harmonize both views that is subject to empirical test. -/- First I show that the most widely accepted and influential formulation of liberal justice, John Rawls' Justice as Fairness, in. e.g, A Theory of Justice, cannot avoid the relativistic challenge because it would not be accepted, as a matter of sociological fact, by real people in a divided society once the "veil of Ignorance" is removed and real people step out from the Original Position. To put it differently, different reflective equilibria are inevitable in a divided society. Given the weight that Rawls properly puts on the realizability of a conception of justice and its stability in practice, this is a fatal objection. There can be no divided society that is "well ordered" in Rawls' sense, governed by a shared conception of justice and known to be so governed. -/- I then turn to the most powerful statement of the CLS view, Milton's Fisk's relativistic account in The State and Justice. For Fisk, justice is a compromise between what the dominant groups can compel and what the the subordinate groups will acquiesce to., There is no one such compromise in any given situation, so the account is in that sense relativistic, but more deeply, it is relativistic in that it offers no non-arbitrary, non-question begging way to choose between the official justice of, e.g., a slaveholding society and and the radical justice of the slaves, which has no place for slaveholders as a group or slavery as an institution.All that Fisk can offer is an arbitrary existential choice: I'm with the slaves. (Or the slaveowners.) Most of us would find this disconcerting or even unacceptable. -/- I show that Fisk's general sort of account can be modified to allow for an non-arbitrary choice. Given general facts about human nature, societies based on domination will produce resistance that over the long run will diminish or eliminate various forms of domination. Through a sort of ratchet effect, rights won will be hard if not impossible to reverse. Societies embodying forms of domination can therefore be compared on dimensions of stability: the more domination, the more resistance, and the less stability. Such societies are inferior on the dimension of justice to more emancipatory society on the terms of both kinds of justice, official and radical. -/- This is not question begging because regimes of domination incorporate stability no less than more emancipatory social orders. The choice between official justice embodying domination and radical justice that does not is not arbitrary because it is based on a shared commitment to long term stability. This offers an empirical test of which social orders are more justice, and a prediction that over time, domination will tend to decrease. (shrink)

This paper argues that Sextus Empiricus’s Pyrrhonism is a form of relativism markedly different from the positions typically referred to by this term. The scholars who have explored the relativistic elements found in Sextus’s texts have claimed that his outlook is not actually a form of relativism, or that those elements are inconsistent with his account of Pyrrhonism, or that he is confusing skepticism with relativism. The reason for these views is twofold: first, when employing the term (...) ‘relativism’ one hardly has in mind the sort of relativist stance adopted by the Pyrrhonist; and second, those scholars have misinterpreted Sextus’s relativistic remarks. The purpose of this paper is to show that he adopts a ‘phenomenological’ kind of relativism that is compatible with his account of Pyrrhonism. (shrink)

The suggestion of something akin to a ‘relativist solution to the Mind-Body problem’ has recently been held by some scientists and philosophers; either explicitly (Galadí, 2023; Lahav & Neemeh, 2022; Ludwig, 2015) or in more implicit terms (Solms, 2018; Velmans, 2002, 2008). In this paper I provide an argument in favor of a relativist approach to the Mind-Body problem, more specifically, an argument for ‘1st/3rd person relativism’, the claim that ‘The truth value of some sentences or propositions is relative (...) to 1st and 3rd person perspectives’. The argument for 1st/3rd person relativism is close to a forma proof. It is shown that, just by assuming the 1st/3rd person distinction itself and using first order logic and set theory, ‘1st/3rd person relativism’ follows as a theorem. Some consequences of ‘1st/3rd person relativism’ to the Mind-Body Problem are evaluated. It is shown that ‘1st/3rd person relativism’ predicts the existence of an (apparent) Explanatory Gap; explains why the Explanatory Gap is just apparent (and the origins of such illusion); dissolves the Hard-Problem; provides a possible solution the problem of Mental Causation; explains why Mental Causation looks like a problem in the first place and accurately predicts the actual empirically found correlation and covariation between conscious experiences and brain states. This explanatory power of ‘1st/3rd person relativism’ is particularly impressive since it was not designed as a possible solution to the Mind-Body problem in the first place. (shrink)

Mentalities like scientism and relativism idealise or belittle science respectively, and thus hurt science education and our literacy. However, it seems very hard to avoid the former mentality without sliding to the latter, and vise versa. I will suggest that part of what makes balancing between the two so difficult, is a representational account of meaning that science educators, like most of us really, usually endorse. Scientism then, arises from the assumption that ​there is such a thing called (...) science​. Relativism, on the other hand, assumes that ​there is no such thing called science,t​hereisnorealmeaningattachedtotheterm​.Wittgenstein'sremarksonrule-following then, could help us escape this twofold danger. Addressing scientism, Wittgensteinian writings remind us that, in order to understand the sciences, we do not need to point to some mental referendum of what science is. We rather need to grasp a matrix of overlapping, often implicit, always evolving rules that govern scientific practices. Addressing relativism, Wittgenstein's comments help us realise that there are always certain criteria about what kinds of things we call by a name; there are rules governing scientific practices, rules that even though they may be context dependent or evolving, are always in play. (shrink)

The Discourse of Universalism , Moral Relativism & Utilitarianism Table of Contents: Chapter 1. Moral relativism: history and theory of moral relativism: Ancient Greece and Early Modern Era Chapter 2. Universalism and Relativism Chapter 3. Hume's Universalism Chapter 4. Plato's Universalism Chapter 5. Problems with Rawls Theory Chapter 6. Aristotle's Relativism Chapter 7. Is Aristotle an ethical relativist? Chapter 8. John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism Chapter 9. Mill and Principle of Utility Chapter 10. Kant and Moral (...) Theory The historian Herodotus gives the anecdote of Darius, King of Persia, who summoned the Greeks and asked them if they would be willing to eat the bodies of their dead fathers. They replied they would not for any money in the world. Later, Darius asked some Indians of the tribe called Callatiae, who do eat their dead parents’ bodies, if they would ever consider burning the bodies, as was the custom among Greeks. “One can see by this what custom can do” writes Herodotus. He draws the conclusion that this story vindicates the view some acts may be right for some and wrong for others, depending on their individual conceptions of morality. The Sophists were also associated with relativistic thinking, notably Protagoras who asserts that “man is the measure of all things”. However, this view was quite uncommon and moral relativism hardly flourished, as Plato and Aristotle both defended forms of moral absolutism. Ancient Greek philosophers acknowledged moral diversity, but more often under the form of moral scepticism, which states that there is no moral knowledge (rather than moral truth is relative to a culture). (shrink)

Despite its centrality in the philosophy of cognitive science, there has been little prior philosophical work engaging with the notion of representation in contemporary NLP practice. This paper attempts to fill that lacuna: drawing on ideas from cognitive science, I introduce a framework for evaluating the representational claims made about components of neural NLP models, proposing three criteria with which to evaluate whether a component of a model represents a property and operationalising these criteria using probing classifiers, a popular analysis (...) technique in NLP (and deep learning more broadly). The project of operationalising a philosophically-informed notion of representation should be of interest to both philosophers of science and NLP practitioners. It affords philosophers a novel testing-ground for claims about the nature of representation, and helps NLPers organise the large literature on probing experiments, suggesting novel avenues for empirical research. (shrink)

In a recent letter, Dillion et. al (2023) make various suggestions regarding the idea of artificially intelligent systems, such as large language models, replacing human subjects in empirical moral psychology. We argue that human subjects are in various ways indispensable.

This book begins with the question 'Who am I?' and immediately sets off in an astonishingly original direction. Why didn't anyone before Harding think of responding to this question like this? It's so obvious, once you see it. Harding presents a new vision of our place in the universe that uses the scientific method of looking to see what is true. It turns out that the truth about ourselves is not only true but also very good, and breathtakingly beautiful. We (...) live in a sacred, many-layered, living universe - or rather it lives in us. Though it was completed in 1950, this book is still ahead of its time. One day it will surely be widely recognised for its greatness: its all-encompassing vision, its originality and freshness, its depth of insight, its wide-ranging knowledge, the clarity and poetry of its language, its humanity. It is a world-view not dependent on local culture or religion, but on universally verifiable facts. It is also a world-view that respects our manifest differences whilst celebrating our underlying unity - the unity not just of oneself with other people but with all of life, indeed with the whole universe. Harding died in 2007 aged 97, leaving behind him an impressive body of work. He was a highly creative person who was passionate about - he was in love with - this living universe and the immortal treasure that abides at its centre - at our centre. "A work of the highest genius." C. S. Lewis. (shrink)

Throughout the bulk of the Reformed Tradition’s history within both Europe and the United States, most scholars have dismissed pastor and theologian Moïse Amyraut as a seventeenth century French heretic whose actions and theology led to the demise of the Huguenots in France. However, upon further introspection into Amyraut’s claims as being closer to Calvin (soteriologically) than his Genevan successors, one finds uncanny parallels in the scriptural commentaries and biblical insight into the expiation of Christ between Calvin and Amyraut. By (...) comparing key scriptural passages concerning the atonement, this article demonstrates that Reformed theologian Moïse Amyraut in fact propagated a universal atonement theory which parallels Calvin’s, both men ascribing to biblical faithfulness, a (humanistic) theological method, and similar hermeneutic. As such, both Calvin and Amyraut scripturally contend that God desires and provided the means for the salvation of the whole world. Further, the article demonstrates that Calvin’s successor, Theodore de Beza, could not in fact make the same claims as Amyraut, this article demonstrating that Beza went beyond Calvin’s scriptural approach to Christ’s expiation. Therefore, this article supports a more centrist approach from within and outside the Reformed tradition by demonstrating that Calvin and Amyraut concentrically held to God’s gracious provision in Christ for the saving of the whole world, for those who would believe in Christ for salvation. (shrink)

Recent advances in stem cell research suggest that in the future it may be possible to create eggs and sperm from human stem cells through a process that we term in vitro gametogenesis (IVG). IVG would allow treatment of some currently untreatable forms of infertility. It may also allow same-sex couples to have genetically-related children. For example, cells taken from one man could potentially be used to create an egg, which could then be fertilised using naturally produced sperm from another (...) man to create a genetically-related child with half of its DNA from each of the men. In this chapter, we consider whether this technology could justifiably be denied to same-sex couples if it were made available as a fertility treatment to different-sex couples. We argue that it could not. (shrink)

This study advances a refutation of Physicalism. It demonstrates that it cannot, coherently, be maintained. An alternative approach based on Husserl’s ‘transcendental ego’ is developed. This is an account where the physical world is constituted by a freely acting self from a phenomenology that is ontologically neutral. By doing so, the, so-called, ‘hard problem’ of consciousness is dissolved. It will be shown that the self is compelled to attribute moral and aesthetic value to the world that it has constituted. (...) The determinism that Physicalism engenders is shown to lead to a nihilism that makes all knowledge impossible. Genuine personal responsibility for action, is asserted within strict limits. A position is outlined that gives a role to the self in causation and one that entails the possibility of panpsychism. (shrink)

Background: There are many reports in the mass media and scientific literature about child abuse caused by parents. Medical practitioners also are concerned about child abuse and need to grapple with the prevention and early detection of child abuse when working in medical facilities. Aim: The aim of this descriptive study was to explore the relationship between maternal and child factors contributing to child abuse. Methods: A sample of 50 multiparas (mothers with more than 1 child) in a 48-bed postpartum (...) hospital unit in Okinawa prefecture were asked to fill out an anonymous questionnaire regarding the relationship between mothers and their first child in September, 2007. The questionnaire contained 30 items of physical punishment that are quoted from “The Handbook of Correspondence to Child Abuse” (Ministry of Health, Labor and welfare in Japan), 24 items relating to maternal factors and 22 items to child factors, plus items related to mothers’ satisfaction with the health guidance given in the hospital. Data were analyzed using JMP (ver. 14.2; SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC, U.S.). The significance level was set at 0.05. Results: Forty-one (82%) questionnaires were analyzed. Of the 41 valid responses, 19 mothers reported abusing their children. Child factors contributing to the abuse included the first child’s regression to infantile behavior, bullying younger brothers or sisters and being rough and violent to their friends. The significant maternal factor leading to abuse was the belief that mothers were irritated by their child. Conclusion: A first child’s developmental difficulties had a significant relationship with the harsh punishment by their mothers. The mothers need to understand their child’s developmental behavior and provide a favorable environment for nurturing young children. (shrink)

I intend to: a) clarify the origins and de facto meanings of the term relativism; b) reconstruct the reasons for the birth of the thesis named “cultural relativism”; d) reconstruct ethical implications of the above thesis; c) revisit the recent discussion between universalists and particularists in the light of the idea of cultural relativism.. -/- 1.Prescriptive Moral Relativism: “everybody is justified in acting in the way imposed by criteria accepted by the group he belongs to”. Universalism: (...) there are at least some judgments which are valid inter-culturally Absolutism: there are at least some particular prescriptions which are valid without exception everywhere and always -/- 2. The traditional proof of prescriptive moral relativism: the argument from variability: Judgments, rules, and shared values are de facto variable in time and space. The traditional counter-proof: examples of variability do not prove what skeptics contend. -/- 3. Pre-history of the doctrine -Ancient sophists: either immoralist or contractualist -Modern moral scepticism (xvii c.): variability as an historical and ethnographic fact supports a sceptical conclusion more moderate than sheer immoralism. - Voltaire, Kant, Reid counter-attack pointing at a universally shared moral sense - Romantics and idealists stage an even more moderate reformulation: instead of universally shared moral sense they point at the Spirit of a People which is: a)alternative to abstract and universal philosophical systems as far as it is lived ‘culture’; b) indivisible unity with an inner harmony and a source of normative standards; c) dynamic, in so far as it is a manifestation of the Spirit through the becoming of National cultures. -/- 4. The birth of Cultural Relativism and its ethical implications 4.1. The 18th c. doctrine was the noble savage (a non-historical doctrine: state of nature vs. social state) 4.2 Edward Tylor (1832-1817) and ethnocentric historicism Savage moral standards are real enough, but they are far and weaker than ours. 4.3 Boas and Malinowski and an holistic reaction to ethnocentric historicism -/- Franz Boas (1858-1942): a) Development of civilizations is not ruled by technical progress nor does it follow a one-way path; instead there are parallel developments (for ex. Agriculture does not follow stock-raising); b) racial characters have no relevance in development of civilization; c) we are not yet in a position to compare externally identical kinds of behaviour till we have not yet understood beliefs and intentions laying at their roots (for ex.: “From an ethnological point of view murder cannot be considered as a single phenomenon”; d) we should distinguish among different practices which are only superficially similar (fro ex. practices traditionally classified under the label “tabù”); e) there is as a fact just one normative ethic, constant in its contents but varying in its extension; f) the implication is not that we cannot judge behavior by members of other groups; it is only a recommendation of caution. -/- Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942): a) against Tylor’s and Frazer’s “magpie” methodology, field-work is required, a culture as a whole should be observed from inside; individual elements are incomprehensible; b) a culture is an organic whole; c) its elements are accounted for by their function (economy), avoiding non-observables (empio-criticism). -/- Ruth Benedict and Melville Herskovitz identify Boas’s approach with “cultural relativism”. Benedict: what is normal and abnormal is to be judged on a culture’s own standards, not on our own (“Anthropology and the Abnormal”). Herskovits: “Boas adumbrates what we have come to call cultural relativism” (The Mind, p. 10); “Judgements are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation” (Man and his Works). -/- 4. How analytic philosophy understood and misunderstood the discussion 4.1. At the beginning of the 20th c., the new view in ethics was non-cognitivism (emotivist and subjectivist). Eric Westermark combines this view with an old-style ethnographic approach in support of relativity of moralities. Moralities are codes, or systems of emotive ‘disinterested’ reactions selected by evolution on their usefulness in terms of survival value for the society that is the carrier of such systems or codes. The moral relativity thesis: there are cases of disagreement that cannot be settled even after agreement about facts. 4.2 Anti-realists Brandt, Mackie, Gilbert, Harman adopt Westermark’s approach in a more sophisticated version: a) moralities are codes with an overall function and may be appraised only as wholes; b) variability is an argument for moral subjectivism; c) apparent legitimacy of deriving shift from ought is legitimized only within one institution d) morality should not be described but instead made, and existing moralities may be improved. Is it ‘real’ relativism? It is clearly subjectivism (a metaethical thesis). The normative thesis is that there better and worse codes, and survival values is the normative standard. -/- 4.3 Particularists MacIntyre, Sandel, Taylor, Wiggins, McDowell ‘Wittgensteinian’ prospectivist arguments bent to support weak-relativist claims MacIntyre: there is ‘incommensurability’ between different theoretical systems in both science and ethics. No argument is possible through different systems Different traditions may coexist for a long time without being able to bring their conflicts to a rational solution. -/- 4.4 Kantian universalists Baier, Gewirth, Rawls, Apel, Habermas Shared claim: justice concerns the right and is universal in so far as it may be based on minimal assumptions Other virtues are relative to context in so far as they are related to comprehensive views of the good - O’Neill criticism: a) it is an assumption shared by both alignments; b) after an alleged crisis brought about by alleged loss of metaphysical certainties, theories of justice have dropped demanding assumptions and kept universalism, virtue theories have kept demanding assumptions and dropped universalism; c) the opposition of virtue and justice has arisen in an unjustified way. O’Neill’s positive proposal: ‘constructive’ procedures may be adopted both (i) concerning all the range of virtues and (ii) across cultures once we abandon idealization and confine ourselves to abstraction from real-world cases. -/- 4.5 A metaethical relativist and anti-relativist normative ethicists: Bernard Williams Williams: vulgar relativism may be assumed to claim that: a) 'just' means 'just in a given society'; b) 'just in a given society' is to be understood in functionalist sense; c) it is wrong for one society’s members to condemn another society’s values. It is inconsistent since in (c) uses ‘just’ in a non-relative way that has been excluded in (a). William’s positive proposal: i) keep a number of substantive or thick ethical concepts that will be different in space and time; ii) admit that public choices are to be legitimized through recourse to more abstract procedures and relying on more thin ethical concepts. -/- 5. Critical remarks 5.1 The only real relativism available is ‘vulgar’ relativism (Westermark?) 5.2. Descriptive universalism (or absolutism) has a long pedigree, from Cicero on, reaching Boas himself but it is useless as an answer to normative questions 5.3. Twentieth-century philosophical discussion seems to discuss an ad hoc doctrine reconstructed by assembling obsolete philosophical ideas but ignoring the real theory of cultural relativism as formulated by anthropologists. -/- 6. A distinction between ethoi and ethical theories as a way out of confusions a)There are systems of conventions de facto existing. These may be studies from outside as phenomena or facts. b)There is moral argument and this, when studies from outside, is a fact, but this does not influence in any degree the possible validity of claims advanced. c) the difference between the above claims and Mackie’s criticism to Searle’s argument of the promising game is that promises, arguments etc. are also phenomena, but they are also communicative phenomena with a logical and pragmatic structure. -/- 7.Conclusions: a) cultural relativism, as a name for Boas’s methodology is a valuable discovery, and in this sense we are all relativists; b) ethical relativism, as an alleged implication of cultural relativism, has been argued in a philosophically quite unsophisticated way by Benedict and Herskovits; philosophers apparently discussed ethical relativism in the basis of a rather faint impression of what cultural relativism had been. c) a full-fledged ethical relativism has hardly been defended by anybody among philosophers; virtually no modern philosopher really argued a prescriptive version of the thesis; d) we may accept the grain of truth in ethical relativism by including relativist critique to ethical absolutism into a universalist normative doctrine that be careful in separating open-textured formulations of universal claims from culturally conditioned particular prescriptions. -/- . 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Our investigation on Hilary Putnam’s internal realist perspective(internalism) traces parallels and identifies differences between Putnam’s ideasand their antipodes: metaphysical realist (externalism) and radical relativist. Ourresearch has focused upon the contemporary debate in which it is inserted, par-ticularly, upon the challenge that radical relativism to impose on contemporaryepistemology. Such challenge will not be surmounted through classical project tofind absolute certainties. The history of science to point out that theories are notnets that to catch the reality as it is in itself. (...) But this do not to imply that our viewof knowledge are only determined for contingent aspects. In this scenery are hard enterprise but it is worthy-while to take into account efforts of philosophersas Putnam to propose a via media. (shrink)

Some have claimed that people with very different beliefs literally see the world differently. Thus Thomas Kuhn: ‘what a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual—conceptual experience has taught him to see’ (Kuhn 1970, p. ll3). This view — call it ‘Perceptual Relativism’ — entails that a scientist and a child may look at a cathode ray tube and, in a sense, the first will see it while the second won’t. (...) The claim is not, of course, that the child’s experience is ‘empty’; but that, unlike the scientist, it does not see the tube as a cathode ray tube. One way of supporting this claim is to say that one cannot see something as an F unless one has the concept F. Since the child plainly lacks the concept of a cathode ray tube, it cannot see it as a cathode ray tube. Although Perceptual Relativism is hard to believe, this supporting suggestion is not so implausible. After all, when we see (and more generally, perceive) the world, the world is presented to us in a particular way; so how can we see it as being that way unless we have some idea or conception of the way it is presented? We need not be committed to a representative theory of perception to think that perceptions in some sense represent the world. We can express this by saying that perceptions have content. Now it is a commonplace that the contents of beliefs and the other propositional attitudes involve concepts. The belief that this thing is a cathode ray tube involves, in some sense, the concept cathode ray tube. So the line of thought behind Perceptual Relativism may be expressed thus: seeing an F as an F is a state with content. (shrink)

This thesis engages with three topics and the relationships between them: (i) the phenomenon of disagreement (paradigmatically, where one person makes a claim and another denies it); (ii) the normative character of disagreements (the issue of whether, and in what sense, one of the parties is “at fault” for believing something that’s untrue); (iii) the issue of which theory of what truth is can best accommodate the norms relating belief and truth. People disagree about all sorts of things: about whether (...) climate is changing, death penalty is wrong, sushi is delicious, or Louis C.K. is funny. However, even focusing on disagreements in the evaluative domain (e.g., taste, moral and comedic), where people have the intuition that there is ‘no fact of the matter’ about who is right, there are significant differences that require explanation. For instance, disagreement about taste is generally perceived as shallow. People accept to disagree and live comfortably with that fact. By contrast, moral disagreement is perceived as deep and sometimes hard to tolerate. Comedic disagreement is similar to taste. However, it may involve an element of ‘intellectual snobbery’ that is absent in taste disagreement. The immediate questions are whether these contrasts allow of precise characterization and what is responsible for them. I argue that, once a case is made for the truth-aptness of judgments in these areas, the contrast can be explained in terms of variable normative function of truth – as exerting a lightweight normative constraint in the domain of taste and a stricter constraint in the moral domain. In particular I claim that while truth in the moral domain exerts a sui generis deontic control, this normative feature of truth is silent in both the taste and the comedic domains. This leads me to investigate how to conceive of truth in the light of normative variability. I argue that an amended version of deflationism – minimally inflated deflationism – can account for the normative variability of truth. (shrink)

In humans, knowing the world occurs through spatial-temporal experiences and interpretations. Conscious experience is the direct observation of conscious events. It makes up the content of consciousness. Conscious experience is organized in four dimensions. It is an orientation in space and time, an understanding of the position of the observer in space and time. A neural correlate for four-dimensional conscious experience has been found in the human brain which is modeled by Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. Spacetime intervals are fundamentally (...) involved in the organization of coherent conscious experiences. They account for why conscious experience appears to us the way it does. They also account for assessment of causality and past-future relationships, the integration of higher cognitive functions, and the implementation of goal-directed behaviors. Spacetime intervals in effect compose and direct our conscious life. The relativistic concept closes the explanatory gap and solves the hard problem of consciousness (how something subjective like conscious experience can arise in something physical like the brain). There is a place in physics for consciousness. We describe all physical phenomena through conscious experience, whether they be described at the quantum level or classical level. Since spacetime intervals direct the formation of all conscious experiences and all physical phenomena are described through conscious experience, the equation formulating spacetime intervals contains the information from which all observable phenomena may be deduced. It might therefore be considered expression of a theory of everything. (shrink)

Relativism and expressivism offer two different semantic frameworks for grappling with a similar cluster of issues. What is the difference between these two frameworks? Should they be viewed as rivals? If so, how should we choose between them? This chapter sheds light on these questions. After providing an overview of relativism and expressivism, I discuss three potential choice points: their relation to truth conditional semantics, their pictures of belief and communication, and their explanations of disagreement.

This paper is about two topics: metaepistemological absolutism and the epistemic principles governing perceptual warrant. Our aim is to highlight—by taking the debate between dogmatists and conservativists about perceptual warrant as a case study—a surprising and hitherto unnoticed problem with metaepistemological absolutism, at least as it has been influentially defended by Paul Boghossian as the principal metaepistemological contrast point to relativism. What we find is that the metaepistemological commitments at play on both sides of this dogmatism/conservativism debate do not (...) line up with epistemic relativism nor do they line up with absolutism, at least as Boghossian articulates this position. What this case study reveals is the need in metaepistemological option space for the recognition of a weaker and less tendentious form of absolutism, what we call “environment relativism”. On this view, epistemic principles are knowable, objective, and they can serve as the basis of particular epistemic evaluations, but their validity is relative to the wider global environment in which they are applied. (shrink)

This paper reviews arguments concerning the relation between relativism and tolerance, both whether tolerance entails relativism, and whether relativism entails tolerance. Two new arguments are offered to support the contention that there is no necessary relation between relativism and tolerance. In particular, building on the classic argument by Geoffrey Harrison, this paper argues that even if there is no strict dichotomy between facts and values, as Harrison had assumed, relativism still does not entail tolerance for (...) every relativized perspective. (shrink)

I investigate the implication of the truth-relativist’s alleged ‘ faultless disagreements’ for issues in the epistemology of disagreement. A conclusion I draw is that the type of disagreement the truth-relativist claims to preserve fails in principle to be epistemically significant in the way we should expect disagreements to be in social-epistemic practice. In particular, the fact of faultless disagreement fails to ever play the epistemically significant role of making doxastic revision rationally required for either party in a disagreement. That the (...) truth-relativists’ disagreements over centred content fail to play this epistemically significant role that disagreements characteristically play in social epistemology should leave us sceptical that disagreement is what the truth-relativist has actually preserved. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Contemporary relativists often see their view as contributing to a semantic/post-semantic account of linguistic data about disagreement and retraction. I offer an independently motivated metasemantic account of the same data, that also handles a number of cases and empirical results that are problematic for the relativist. The key idea is that the content of assertions and beliefs is determined in part by facts about other times, including times after the assertion is made or the belief is formed. On this (...) temporal externalist view, speaker behaviours such as retraction of previous assertions play a role in making it the case that a past utterance has a given meaning. (shrink)

Many times, what we say proves to be wrong. It might turn out that what we took to be a comforting remark was, in fact, making things worse. Or that a joke was inappropriate. Or that yelling out loud was rude. More importantly for this paper, there are plenty of cases in which what we said turns out to be false: we spoke without paying attention, we were misinformed or tricked, or we made a reasoning mistake. -/- A particular instance (...) of this latter phenomenon is when someone changes their perspective and doesn't find their previous assertions true anymore. For example, imagine that you used to like licorice as a child, and that you went around saying things like "Licorice is tasty." But, growing up, you find licorice too strong and quite boring; your tastes have changed. While the taste of licorice itself has not changed, you are not going around anymore uttering "Licorice is tasty." In fact, in certain cases, you might even think that what you said in your childhood was wrong - at least in light of your present preferences. -/- Sometimes we "take back" the assertions we made when we realize they are no longer true. Such speech acts of taking back can be performed in various ways: more formally, as effected in a court of law or when an official speaks to the press, or more informally in our day-by-day interactions. These acts of taking back are known as retraction. Retraction is usually achieved by employing certain linguistic markers ('I was wrong', 'I was mistaken', 'I retract', "Scratch that' etc.) that signal that the retractor takes their previous speech act to be faulty in a certain way. -/- This phenomenon has formed the basis for a popular argument used by relativists about a variety of natural language expressions (predicates of taste, epistemic modals, moral and aesthetic claims etc.) in support of their view. Recently, several considerations (mostly from contextualists about the same expressions), both from the armchair and based on empirical studies, have been offered to undercut the support retraction was thought to provide for relativism. In this paper, I consider and re-evaluate that support in light of both types of considerations, showing that neither of them decisively undermines it. However, to survive the contextualist counterattack, the relativist needs to pay a price: that is, she will be forced to make some concessions or rethink certain claims. I show what I think those concessions should be and what needs to be rethought (and how). The upshot is that, while the support retraction offers relativism is not as strong as initially believed, appeal to retraction remains a legitimate move in the debate. In section 1, I introduce the views in the debate and clarify the phenomenon of retraction and its dialectical role. Armchair data are investigated in section 2, proper experimental studies in section 3, while section 4 summarizes and concludes. (shrink)

There is a family of metaethical views according to which (i) there are no objectively correct moral standards and (ii) whether a given moral claim is true depends in some way on moral standards accepted by either an individual (forms of subjectivism) or a community (forms of relativism). This chapter outlines the three most important versions of this type of theories: old-fashioned subjectivism and relativism, contextualism and new wave subjectivism and relativism. It also explores the main advantages (...) of these views and the key objections to them. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss three problems of consciousness. The first two have been dubbed the “Hard Problem” and the “Harder Problem”. The third problem has received less attention and I will call it the “Hardest Problem”. The Hard Problem is a metaphysical and explanatory problem concerning the nature of conscious states. The Harder Problem is epistemological, and it concerns whether we can know, given physicalism, whether some creature physically different from us is conscious. The Hardest Problem is (...) a problem about reference. Recently some philosophers – among them David Papineau – who advocate a physicalist approach to both the Hard and the Harder problem have called into question the common sense assumption that phenomenal concepts – subjective concepts that we apply directly to experience – refer determinately (modulo vagueness) to real properties that can be instantiated in minds other than my own. The Hardest Problem is the problem of explaining how, given physicalism, this assumption could be true. In this paper I explore how these three problems appear from the perspective of a physicalist approach to consciousness based on Brian Loar’s account of phenomenal concepts, recently dubbed the “phenomenal concept strategy”. My contention is that this approach can go quite far in handling not just the first two problems but the Hardest Problem as well. (shrink)

When we look back upon people in past societies, such as slaveholders and colonialists, we judge their actions to have been morally atrocious. Yet we should give some thought to how the future will judge us. Here I argue that future people are likely to regard our behavior as no better than that of the past. If these future people are to be believed, then we are morally hopeless; we have little chance of working out the moral truth for ourselves. (...) I argue that we ought to resist this conclusion, and that our best means for doing so it to reject moral objectivity and accept instead a form of time-linked moral relativism. (shrink)

Contemporary issues involving knowledge and science examined from a constructivist-pragmatist perspective often labeled "relativism." Individual chapters include a review of the difference between constructivist-pragmatist epistemology and "social constructivism;" an examination of recent writings by Bruno Latour; a critique of computational methods in literary studies; a skeptical look at current efforts to "integrate" the humanities and the natural sciences; and reflections on the social dynamics of belief in relation to denials of climate change and to hopes expressed by environmentalists.

What makes a choice hard? I discuss and criticize three common answers and then make a proposal of my own. Paradigmatic hard choices are not hard because of our ignorance, the incommensurability of values, or the incomparability of the alternatives. They are hard because the alternatives are on a par; they are comparable, but one is not better than the other, and yet nor are they equally good. So understood, hard choices open up a new (...) way of thinking about what it is to be a rational agent. (shrink)

In her book Extended Rationality: A Hinge Epistemology (2015), Annalisa Coliva puts forward an anti-sceptical proposal based on the idea that the notion of rationality extends to the unwarrantable presuppositions “that make the acquisition of perceptual warrants possible” (2015: 150). These presuppositions are commonly the target of sceptical arguments, and by showing that they are on the one hand unwarrantable, but on the other are constitutive components of rationality itself, she reveals that they are beyond rational doubt and thus avoids (...) scepticism. Part of Coliva’s defence of using extended rationality in this way involves distancing it from relativist interpretations, which she describes as “devastating” (2015: 120). She proposes two ways that someone might attempt to formulate epistemic relativism from her extended rationality view, and argues that both would be unsuccessful because they require describing alternative conceptions of rationality which are “unintelligible” (in the first case), or “inconceivable” (in the second). The superficial claim of this chapter is that Coliva’s arguments, as they stand, are insufficient to dismiss relativism. She fails to show that the conception of rationality needed for the first formulation of relativism is unintelligible, and overestimates the significance of the second formulation’s conception turning out to be inconceivable. But I also highlight a deeper problem: neither formulation follows a realistic blueprint for relativism, and so these were the wrong possibilities to consider in the first place. To address this issue, I propose a third, more plausible, way in which someone might attempt to formulate relativism on the basis of Coliva’s account. I leave open whether this strategy is successful, or whether a version of Coliva’s criticisms apply to it too. (shrink)

Relativists make room for the possibility of “faultless disagreement” by positing the existence of subjective propositions, i.e. propositions true from some points of view and not others. We discuss whether the adoption of this position with respect to a certain domain of discourse is compatible with a realist attitude towards the matters arising in that domain. At first glance, the combination of relativism and realism leads to an unattractive metaphysical picture on which reality comprises incoherent facts. We will sketch (...) the contours of a realist-relativist position called “subjectivism”, which avoids this result by giving up the assumption that the points of view of different subjects are all metaphysically “on a par”. (shrink)

Moral relativism provides a compelling explanation of linguistic data involving ordinary moral expressions like 'right' and 'wrong'. But it is a very radical view. Because relativism relativizes sentence truth to contexts of assessment it forces us to revise standard linguistic theory. If, however, no competing theory explains all of the evidence, perhaps it is time for a paradigm shift. However, I argue that a version of moral contextualism can account for the same data as relativism without relativizing (...) sentence truth to contexts of assessment. This version of moral contextualism is thus preferable to relativism on methodological grounds. (shrink)

Although moral relativists often appeal to cases of apparent moral disagreement between members of different communities to motivate their view, accounting for these exchanges as evincing genuine disagreements constitutes a challenge to the coherence of moral relativism. While many moral relativists acknowledge this problem, attempts to solve it so far have been wanting. In response, moral relativists either give up the claim that there can be moral disagreement between members of different communities or end up with a view on (...) which these disagreements have no “epistemic significance” because they are always faultless. This paper introduces an alternative strategy: accounting for disagreement in terms of “metalinguistic negotiation”. It argues that this strategy constitutes a better solution to the challenge disagreement poses for moral relativists because it leads to a nuanced understanding of the epistemic significance of moral disagreement between members of different communities. The upshot is a novel account of disagreement for moral relativists that has consequences for how moral relativism should be understood. (shrink)

The chapter tackles the complex, tension-ridden, and often paradoxical relationship between relativism and conservatism. We focus particularly on radical conservatism, an early twentieth-century German movement that arguably constitutes the climax of conservatism’s problematic relationship with relativism. We trace the shared genealogy of conservatism and historicism in nineteenth-century Counter-Enlightenment thought and interpret radical conservatism’s ambivalent relation to relativism as reflecting this heritage. Emphasizing national particularity, historical uniqueness, and global political plurality, Carl Schmitt and Hans Freyer moved in the (...) tradition of historicism, stopping short of full relativism. Yet they utilized relativistic elements – such as seeing irrational decisions or the demands of “life” as the basis of politics – to discredit notions of universal political morality and law, thereby underpinning their authoritarian agendas. Oswald Spengler, by contrast, took the relativistic impulses to the extreme, interweaving his conservative authoritarianism and nationalism with full-fledged epistemic, moral, and political relativism. Martin Heidegger has recently been perceived as the key philosopher of radical conservatism, and his thought arguably channeled antimodern aspects of historicism into contemporary political thought. We conclude by analyzing how some radical conservative arguments involving cultural relativism and plurality still reverberate in contemporary theorists such as Samuel Huntington, Aleksandr Dugin, and Alain de Benoist. (shrink)

I argue that relativists about aesthetic and other evaluative language face some of the same objections as non-naturalists in ethics. These objections concern the metaphysics required to make it work. Unlike contextualists, relativists believe that evaluative propositions are not about the relation in which things stand to certain standards. Nevertheless, the truth of such propositions would depend on variable standards. I argue that relativism requires the existence of states of affairs very different from other things known to exist. Furthermore, (...) there seems to be no convincing reason to postulate such entities. However, if they do not exist, then relativism leads to an error theory. That is unattractive, as relativism was meant to preserve the truth of many evaluative claims. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the connection between moral disagreement and moral relativism. Moral relativists, generally speaking, think both (i) that there is no unique objectively correct moral standard and (ii) that the rightness and wrongness of an action depends in some way on a moral standard accepted by some group or an individual. This chapter will first consider the metaphysical and epistemic arguments for moral relativism that begin from the premise that there is considerable amount of moral disagreement (...) both within individual societies and between them. The second half of the chapter, by contrast, focuses on the objection that moral relativism threatens to make us unable to have moral disagreements because it seems to make us speak past one another. This part of the chapter also evaluates relativist responses to this disagreement problem that rely on semantic opacity, disagreement in attitude, metalinguistic negotiations, and truth relativism. The chapter finally concludes by considering future directions of research in this area. (shrink)

Chalmers’ meta-problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining “problem reports”; i.e. reports to the effect that phenomenal consciousness has the various features that give rise to the hard problem. Chalmers suggests that solving the meta-problem will likely “shed significant light on the hard problem.” Against this, I argue that work on the meta-problem will likely fail to make the hard problem any easier. For each of the main stances on the hard problem can provide an (...) account of problem reports, and we have no way of deciding which of these accounts gives the correct explanation of an individual’s problem reports without presupposing a stance on the hard problem. We thus cannot determine which of the available solutions to the meta-problem is correct without having already solved the hard problem. (shrink)

There are a number of debates that are relevant to questions concerning objectivity in science. One of the eldest, and still one of the most intensely fought, is the debate over epistemic relativism. —All forms of epistemic relativism commit themselves to the view that it is impossible to show in a neutral, non-question-begging, way that one “epistemic system”, that is, one interconnected set of epistemic standards, is epistemically superior to others. I shall call this view “No-metajustification”. No-metajustification is (...) commonly taken to deny the objectivity of standards. In this paper I shall discuss two currently popular attempts to attack “No-metajustification”. The first attempt attacks no-metajustification by challenging a particular strategy of arguing in its defence: this strategy involves the ancient Pyrrhonian “Problem of the Criterion”. The second attempt to refute No-metajustification targets its metaphysical underpinning: to wit, the claim that there are, or could be, several fundamentally different and irreconcilable epistemic systems. I shall call this assumption “Pluralism”. I shall address three questions with respect to these attempts to refute epistemic relativism by attacking no-metajustification: Can the epistemic relativist rely on the Problem of the Criterion in support of No-metajustification? Is a combination of Chisholmian “particularism” and epistemic naturalism an effective weapon against No-metajustification? And is Pluralism a defensible assumption? (shrink)

I argue that relativists about evaluative language face some of the same objections as non-naturalists in ethics. If these objections are powerful, there is reason to doubt the existence of relative evaluative states of affairs. In they do not exist, then relativism leads to an error theory. This is unattractive, as the position was specifically designed to preserve the truth of many evaluative claims.

Assessment relativism, as developed by John MacFarlane, is the view that the truth of our claims involving a variety of English expressions—‘tasty’, ‘knows’, ‘tomorrow’, ‘might’, and ‘ought’—is relative not only to aspects of the context of their production but also to aspects of the context in which they are assessed. Assessment relativism is thus a form of truth relativism which is offered as a new way of understanding perspectival thought and talk. In this article, I present the (...) main theses of assessment relativism, focusing in particular on highlighting the points of commonality and contrast with other forms of truth relativism. I then offer some critical remarks concerning the motivation of assessment relativism in relation to matters of taste. (shrink)

Different views on the connection between relativism and feminist epistemologies are often asserted but rarely are these views clearly argued for. This has resulted in a confusingly polarised debate, with some people convinced that feminist epistemologies are committed to relativism (and that this is a reason so be suspicious of them) whilst others make similar criticisms of anti-feminist views and argue that relativism has no place in feminist epistemologies. This chapter is an attempt to clarify this debate. (...) I begin by asking the question “are feminist projects and goals best served by relativism, or by absolutism?” I then sketch out four broad positions one could take on the answer to this question, and evaluate arguments for each one. In the end I conclude that feminist projects can, at least sometimes, be served by relativism, and that the claim they can be served by anti-relativism is under-supported. (shrink)

Relativism is a theory about how people organize their beliefs. We construct mental representations of the world—particular configurations of our internal brain stuff—to guide our actions. But our brains contain only a minuscule part of the world’s stuff. Given the limited brain stuff available, we can have detailed representations of some features of the world only if we simplify our representations of other parts. Our internal representational means are thus too meager to accurately represent reality in full. Which representations (...) we adopt will therefore depend upon our purposes: different purposes, different representations, different beliefs. Such a relativism does not deny the reality of the outside world, is not self-contradictory, and allows for progress, moral persuasion, and cross-cultural criticism. (shrink)

This paper presents a naturalistic response to the challenge of epistemic relativism. The case of the Azande poison oracle is employed as an example of an alternative epistemic norm which may be used to justify beliefs about everyday occurrences. While a distinction is made between scepticism and relativism, an argument in support of epistemic relativism is presented that is based on the sceptical problem of the criterion. A response to the resulting relativistic position is then provided on (...) the basis of a particularist response to scepticism combined with a naturalistic approach to the warrant of epistemic norms. It is argued that it is possible to comparatively assess the ability of epistemic norms to lead to epistemic aims. As against the epistemic relativist, it is possible to provide an objective basis for the choice between alternative epistemic norms. (shrink)

In the pair of articles of which this is the second, I present a set of problems and philosophical proposals that have in recent years been associated with the term “relativism”. These problems are related to the question of how we should represent thought and speech about certain topics. The main issue is whether we should model such mental states or linguistic acts as involving representational contents that are absolutely correct or incorrect, or whether, alternatively, their correctness should be (...) thought of as varying with some (more or less surprising) factor. In the first article, “Relativism 1: Representational Content”, I discussed the general issue of relativism about representational content. I argued for the conciliatory view that both relativist and absoutist conceptions of representational content can be legitimate. In the present continuation, I look in more detail at a special case of the general issue, namely the question of whether semantic contents, i.e. the contents assigned to linguistic utterances in the semantics of natural language, should be construed in an absolutist or in a relativist way. (shrink)

A RELATIVISTIC THEORY OF PHENOMENOLOCICAL CONSTITUTION: A SELF-REFERENTIAL, TRANSCENDENTAL APPROACH TO CONCEPTUAL PATHOLOGY. (Vol. I: French; Vol. II: English) -/- Steven James Bartlett -/- Doctoral dissertation director: Paul Ricoeur, Université de Paris Other doctoral committee members: Jean Ladrière and Alphonse de Waehlens, Université Catholique de Louvain Defended publically at the Université Catholique de Louvain, January, 1971. -/- Universite de Paris X (France), 1971. 797pp. -/- The principal objective of the work is to construct an analytically precise methodology which can serve (...) to identify, eliminate, and avoid a certain widespread _conceptual fault_ or _misconstruction_, called a "projective misconstruction" or "projection" by the author. It is argued that this variety of error in our thinking (i) infects a great number of our everyday, scientific, and philosophical concepts, claims, and theories, (ii) has largely been undetected, and (iii), when remedied, leads to a less controversial and more rigorous elucidation of the transcendental preconditions of human knowledge than has traditionally been possible. The dissertation identifies, perhaps for the first time, a _projective_ variety of self-referential inconsistency, and proposes an innovative, self-reflexive approach to transcendental argument in a logical and phenomenological context. The strength of the approach lies, it is claimed, in the fact that a rejection of the approach is possible only on pain of self-referential inconsistency. The argument is developed in the following stages: A general introduction identifies the central theme of the work, defines the scope of applicability of the results reached, and sketches the direction of the studies that follow. The preliminary discussion culminates in a recognition of the need for a _critique of impure reason_. The body of the work is divided into two parts: Section I seeks to develop a methodology, on a purely formal basis, which is, on the one hand, capable of being used to study the transcendental foundations of the special sciences, including its own proper transcendental foundation. On the other hand, the methodology proposed is intended as a diagnostic and therapeutic tool for dealing with _projective_ uses of concepts. The approach initiates an analysis of concepts from a perspective which views _knowledge as coordination_. Section I describes formal structures that possess the status of preconditions in such a coordinative account of knowledge. Special attention is given to the preconditions of _identifying reference_ to logical particulars. The first section attempts, then, to provide a self-referential, transcendental methodology which is essentially revisionary in that it is motivated by a concern for conceptual error-elimination. Phenomenology, considered in its unique capacity as a self-referential, transcendental discipline, is of special relevance to the study. Section II accordingly examines a group of concepts which come into question in connection with the central theme of _phenomenological constitution_. The "_de-projective methodology_" developed in Section I is applied to these concepts that have a foundational importance in transcendental phenomenology. A translation is, in effect, proposed from the language of consciousness to a language in which preconditions of referring are investigated. The result achieved is the elimination of self-defeating, projective concepts from a rigorous, phenomenological study of the constitutive foundations of science. The dissertation was presented in a two volume, double-language format for the convenience of French and English researchers. Each volume contains an analytical index. (shrink)

The hard problem of consciousness is explicating how moving matter becomes thinking matter. Harder yet is the problem of spelling out the mutual determinations of individual experiences and the experiencing self. Determining how the collective social consciousness influences and is influenced by the individual selves constituting the society is the hardest problem. Drawing parallels between individual cognition and the collective knowing of mathematical science, here we present a conceptualization of the cognitive dimension of the self. Our abstraction of the (...) relations between the physical world, biological brain, mind, intuition, consciousness, cognitive self, and the society can facilitate the construction of the conceptual repertoire required for an explicit science of the self within human society. (shrink)

In this paper I refute the chief arguments for cultural relativism, meaning the moral (not the descriptive) theory that goes by that name. In doing this I walk some oft-trodden paths, but I also break new ones. For instance, I take unusual pains to produce an adequate formulation of cultural relativism, and I distinguish that thesis from the relativism of present-day anthropologists, with which it is often conflated. In addition, I address not one or two, but eleven (...) arguments for cultural relativism, many of which contribute to its popularity but receive scant attention from its critics. To elicit the failings of these arguments I deploy a host of pertinent but often neglected distinctions. (shrink)