Editing Relativism (section)

===Philosophical===
====Ancient====

=====Sophism=====
[[Sophists]] are considered the founding fathers of relativism in [[Western philosophy]]. Elements of relativism emerged among the [[Sophist]]s in the 5th century [[Before Christ|BC]]. Notably, it was [[Protagoras]] who coined the phrase, "Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not." The thinking of the Sophists is mainly known through their opponent, [[Plato]]. In a paraphrase from Plato's dialogue ''[[Theaetetus (dialogue)|Theaetetus]]'', Protagoras said: "What is true for you is true for you, and what is true for me is true for me."<ref name=socratesdialogue>
{{cite book | title=Scientific Inquiry: Applied to the Doctrine of Jesus Christ | author=Richard Austin Gudmundsen | page = 50 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3C-ZdOSwRJcC&q=Protagoras+%22what+is+true+for+you%22&pg=PA50
|year=2000 |publisher=Cedar Fort | access-date=2011-01-24 |isbn=978-1-55517-497-2}}
</ref><ref>
{{Cite book
| publisher = Barnes & Noble Publishing
| isbn = 978-1-56619-271-2
| last = Sahakian
| first = William S.
|author2=Mabel Lewis Sahakian
 | title = Ideas of the great philosophers
| page = 28
| year = 1993
| url = https://books.google.com/books?id=Vi7cQMw8SwYC&q=Protagoras+Plato+%22what+is+true+for+you%22&pg=PA28
| quote = What is true for you is true for you.
}}</ref><ref>
{{Cite book
| publisher = Schenkman Pub. Co.
| last = Sahakian
| first = W. S.
|author2=M. L. Sahakian
 | title = Realms of philosophy
| year = 1965
|page = 40
| url = https://books.google.com/books?id=6FEYAAAAIAAJ
| access-date = 2011-01-24
}}</ref>

====Modern====
=====Bernard Crick=====
[[Bernard Crick]], a British political scientist and advocate of relativism, suggested in ''In Defence of Politics'' (1962) that moral conflict between people is inevitable. He thought that only [[ethics]] can resolve such conflict, and when that occurs in public it results in [[politics]]. Accordingly, Crick saw the process of [[dispute resolution]], [[harms reduction]], [[mediation]] or [[peacemaking]] as central to all of moral philosophy. He became an important influence on [[feminists]] and later on the [[Green movement|Greens]].

=====Paul Feyerabend=====
Philosopher of science [[Paul Feyerabend]] is often considered to be a relativist, although he denied being one.<ref>{{cite web| url = http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=156973&sectioncode=39| title = Cooper, David E., "Voodoo and the monster of science", ''Times Higher Education'', 17 March 2000| date = 17 March 2000}}</ref>

Feyerabend argued that modern science suffers from being methodologically monistic (the belief that only a single methodology can produce [[scientific progress]]).<ref>Lloyd, Elisabeth. "Feyerabend, Mill, and Pluralism", ''Philosophy of Science'' 64, p. S397.</ref> Feyerabend summarises his case in ''[[Against Method]]'' with the phrase "anything goes".<ref>Feyerabend, ''Against Method'', 3rd ed., p. vii</ref>

:In an aphorism [Feyerabend] often repeated, "potentially every culture is all cultures". This is intended to convey that world views are not hermetically closed, since their leading concepts have an "ambiguity" - better, an open-endedness - which enables people from other cultures to engage with them. [...] It follows that relativism, understood as the doctrine that truth is relative to closed systems, can get no purchase. [...] For Feyerabend, both hermetic relativism and its absolutist rival [realism] serve, in their different ways, to "devalue human existence". The former encourages that unsavoury brand of political correctness which takes the refusal to criticise "other cultures" to the extreme of condoning murderous dictatorship and barbaric practices. The latter, especially in its favoured contemporary form of "scientific realism", with the excessive prestige it affords to the abstractions of "the monster 'science'", is in bed with a politics which likewise disdains variety, richness and everyday individuality - a politics which likewise "hides" its norms behind allegedly neutral facts, "blunts choices and imposes laws".<ref>{{cite web| url = http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=156973&sectioncode=39| title = Cooper, David E., "Voodoo and the monster of science," ''Times Higher Education'', 17 March 2000| date = 17 March 2000}}</ref>

=====Thomas Kuhn=====
[[Thomas Samuel Kuhn|Thomas Kuhn]]'s philosophy of science, as expressed in ''[[The Structure of Scientific Revolutions]]'', is often interpreted as relativistic. He claimed that, as well as progressing steadily and incrementally ("[[normal science]]"), science undergoes periodic revolutions or "[[paradigm shift]]s", leaving scientists working in different paradigms with difficulty in even communicating. Thus the truth of a claim, or the existence of a posited entity, is relative to the paradigm employed. However, it is not necessary for him to embrace relativism because every paradigm presupposes the prior, building upon itself through history and so on. This leads to there being a fundamental, incremental, and referential structure of development which is not relative but again, fundamental.

:From these remarks, one thing is however certain: Kuhn is not saying that incommensurable theories cannot be compared - what they can't be is compared in terms of a system of common measure. He very plainly says that they can be compared, and he reiterates this repeatedly in later work, in a (mostly in vain) effort to avert the crude and sometimes catastrophic misinterpretations he suffered from mainstream philosophers and post-modern relativists alike.<ref>{{cite web| url = http://www.uea.ac.uk/~j339/Kuhntogo.htm| title = Sharrock. W., Read R. ''Kuhn: Philosopher of Scientific Revolutions''}}</ref>

But Kuhn rejected the accusation of being a relativist later in his postscript:

:scientific development is ... a unidirectional and irreversible process. Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles ... That is not a relativist's position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress.<ref>Kuhn (1962), ''[[The Structure of Scientific Revolutions]]'', p. 206.</ref>

Some have argued that one can also read Kuhn's work as essentially positivist in its ontology: the revolutions he posits are epistemological, lurching toward a presumably 'better' understanding of an objective reality through the lens presented by the new paradigm. However, a number of passages in ''Structure'' do indeed appear to be distinctly relativist, and to directly challenge the notion of an objective reality and the ability of science to progress towards an ever-greater grasp of it, particularly through the process of paradigm change.

:In the sciences there need not be progress of another sort. We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth.<ref>Kuhn, ''[[The Structure of Scientific Revolutions]]'', p. 170.</ref>

:We are all deeply accustomed to seeing science as the one enterprise that draws constantly nearer to some goal set by nature in advance. But need there be any such goal? Can we not account for both science's existence and its success in terms of evolution from the community's state of knowledge at any given time? Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal?<ref>Kuhn, ''[[The Structure of Scientific Revolutions]]'', p. 171.</ref>

=====George Lakoff and Mark Johnson=====
[[George Lakoff]] and [[Mark Johnson (professor)|Mark Johnson]] define relativism in ''[[Metaphors We Live By]]'' as the rejection of both [[subjectivism]] and [[Metaphysical realism|metaphysical objectivism]] in order to focus on the relationship between them, i.e. the [[metaphors|metaphor]] by which we relate our current experience to our previous experience. In particular, Lakoff and Johnson characterize "objectivism" as a "[[straw man]]", and, to a lesser degree, criticize the views of [[Karl Popper]], [[Immanuel Kant|Kant]] and [[Aristotle]].{{Page needed|date=September 2010}}

===== Robert Nozick =====
In his book ''[[Invariances]]'', [[Robert Nozick]] expresses a complex set of theories about the absolute and the relative. He thinks the absolute/relative distinction should be recast in terms of an invariant/variant distinction, where there are many things a proposition can be invariant with regard to or vary with. He thinks it is coherent for truth to be relative, and speculates that it might vary with time. He thinks necessity is an unobtainable notion, but can be approximated by robust invariance across a variety of conditions—although we can never identify a proposition that is invariant with regard to everything. Finally, he is not particularly warm to one of the most famous forms of relativism, [[moral relativism]], preferring an evolutionary account.

=====Joseph Margolis=====
[[Joseph Margolis]] advocates a view he calls "robust relativism" and defends it in his books ''Historied Thought, Constructed World'', Chapter 4 (California, 1995) and ''The Truth about Relativism'' (Blackwell, 1991). He opens his account by stating that our logics should depend on what we take to be the nature of the sphere to which we wish to apply our logics. Holding that there can be no distinctions which are not "privileged" between the [[alethic possibility|alethic]], the [[ontic]], and the [[epistemic]], he maintains that a [[many-valued logic]] just might be the most apt for [[aesthetics]] or [[history]] since, because in these practices, we are loath to hold to simple [[Principle of bivalence|binary logic]]; and he also holds that many-valued logic is relativistic. (This is perhaps an unusual definition of "relativistic". Compare with his comments on "relationism".) To say that "True" and "False" are mutually exclusive and exhaustive judgements on ''[[Hamlet]]'', for instance, really does seem absurd. A many-valued logic{{mdash}}with its values "apt", "reasonable", "likely", and so on{{mdash}}seems intuitively more applicable to interpreting ''Hamlet''. Where apparent contradictions arise between such interpretations, we might call the interpretations "incongruent", rather than dubbing either of them "false", because using many-valued logic implies that a measured value is a mixture of two extreme possibilities. Using the subset of many-valued logic, [[fuzzy logic]], it can be said that various interpretations can be represented by membership in more than one possible truth set simultaneously. Fuzzy logic is therefore probably the best mathematical structure for understanding "robust relativism" and has been interpreted by [[Bart Kosko]] as philosophically being related to Zen Buddhism.

It was [[Aristotle]] who held that relativism implies that we should, sticking with appearances only, end up contradicting ourselves somewhere if we could apply all attributes to all ''ousiai'' ([[being]]s). Aristotle, however, made non-contradiction dependent upon his [[essentialism]]. If his essentialism is false, then so too is his ground for disallowing relativism. (Subsequent philosophers have found other reasons for supporting the principle of non-contradiction.){{clarify|date=December 2012}}

Beginning with [[Protagoras]] and invoking [[Charles Sanders Peirce]], Margolis shows that the historic struggle to discredit relativism is an attempt to impose an unexamined belief in the world's essentially rigid rule-like nature. Plato and Aristotle merely attacked "relationalism"{{mdash}}the doctrine of true for l or true for k, and the like, where l and k are different speakers or different worlds{{mdash}}or something similar (most philosophers would call this position "relativism"). For Margolis, "true" means true; that is, the alethic use of "true" remains untouched. However, in real world contexts, and context is ubiquitous in the real world, we must apply truth values. Here, in epistemic terms, we might ''tout court'' retire "true" as an evaluation and keep "false". The rest of our value-judgements could be graded from "extremely plausible" down to "false". Judgements which on a bivalent logic would be incompatible or contradictory are further seen as "incongruent", although one may well have more weight than the other. In short, relativistic logic is not, or need not be, the bugbear it is often presented to be. It may simply be the best type of logic to apply to certain very uncertain spheres of real experiences in the world (although some sort of logic needs to be applied in order to make that judgement). Those who swear by [[bivalent logic]] might simply be the ultimate keepers of the great fear of the flux.{{Citation needed|date=July 2011}}

=====Richard Rorty=====
Philosopher [[Richard Rorty]] has a somewhat [[paradox]]ical role in the debate over relativism: he is criticized for his relativistic views by many commentators, but has always denied that relativism applies to much anybody, being nothing more than a Platonic scarecrow. Rorty claims, rather, that he is a [[pragmatism|pragmatist]], and that to construe pragmatism as relativism is to [[beg the question]].

:'"Relativism" is the traditional epithet applied to pragmatism by realists'<ref>Rorty, R. ''Consequences of Pragmatism''</ref>

:'"Relativism" is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps about any topic, is as good as every other. No one holds this view. Except for the occasional cooperative freshman, one cannot find anybody who says that two incompatible opinions on an important topic are equally good. The philosophers who get called 'relativists' are those who say that the grounds for choosing between such opinions are less algorithmic than had been thought.'<ref>Richard Rorty, ''Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism''</ref>

:'In short, my strategy for escaping the self-referential difficulties into which "the Relativist" keeps getting himself is to move everything over from epistemology and metaphysics into cultural politics, from claims to knowledge and appeals to self-evidence to suggestions about what we should try.'<ref>Rorty, R. ''Hilary Putnam and the Relativist Menace''</ref>

Rorty takes a [[Deflationary theory of truth|deflationary]] attitude to [[truth]], believing there is nothing of interest to be said about truth in general, including the contention that it is generally subjective. He also argues that the notion of [[Theory of justification|warrant]] or justification can do most of the work traditionally assigned to the concept of truth, and that justification ''is'' relative; justification is justification to an audience, for Rorty.

In ''[[Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity]]'' he argues that the debate between so-called relativists and so-called objectivists is beside the point because they do not have enough premises in common for either side to prove anything to the other.

===== Nalin de Silva =====
In his book ''Mage Lokaya'' (My World), 1986, [[Nalin de Silva]] criticized the basis of the established western system of knowledge, and its propagation, which he refers as "domination throughout the world".He explained in this book that mind independent reality is impossible and knowledge is not found but constructed. Further he has introduced and developed the concept of "Constructive Relativism" as the basis on which knowledge is constructed relative to the sense organs, culture and the mind completely based on [[Avidyā (Buddhism)|Avidya]].<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://repository.kln.ac.lk/jspui/bitstream/123456789/5923/1/109.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200129072609/http://repository.kln.ac.lk/jspui/bitstream/123456789/5923/1/109.pdf |archive-date=2020-01-29 |url-status=live|title=Constructive Relativism}}</ref>

====Postmodernism<!--'Postmodern relativism' redirects here-->====
The term "relativism" often comes up in debates over [[postmodernism]], [[poststructuralism]] and [[Phenomenology (philosophy)|phenomenology]]. Critics of these perspectives often identify advocates with the label "relativism". For example, the [[Sapir–Whorf hypothesis]] is often considered a relativist view because it posits that linguistic categories and structures shape the way people view the world. [[Stanley Fish]] has defended postmodernism and relativism.<ref>[http://www.gwu.edu/~ccps/rcq/Fish.pdf ''Don't Blame Relativism''] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130521230254/http://www.gwu.edu/~ccps/rcq/Fish.pdf |date=2013-05-21 }} as "serious thought"</ref>

These perspectives do not strictly count as relativist in the philosophical sense, because they express agnosticism on the nature of reality and make [[epistemological]] rather than [[ontological]] claims. Nevertheless, the term is useful to differentiate them from [[Philosophical realism|realists]] who believe that the purpose of philosophy, science, or literary critique is to locate externally true meanings. Important philosophers and theorists such as [[Michel Foucault]], [[Max Stirner]], political movements such as [[post-anarchism]] or [[post-Marxism]] can also be considered as relativist in this sense - though a better term might be [[social constructivist]].

The spread and popularity of this kind of "soft" relativism varies between academic disciplines. It has wide support in [[anthropology]] and has a majority following in cultural studies. It also has advocates in political theory and political science, sociology, and [[continental philosophy]] (as distinct from Anglo-American analytical philosophy). It has inspired empirical studies of the social construction of meaning such as those associated with labelling theory, which defenders can point to as evidence of the validity of their theories (albeit risking accusations of [[performative contradiction]] in the process). Advocates of this kind of relativism often also claim that recent developments in the natural sciences, such as Heisenberg's [[uncertainty principle]], [[quantum mechanics]], [[chaos theory]] and [[Complex systems|complexity theory]] show that science is now becoming relativistic. However, many scientists who use these methods continue to identify as realist or [[post-positivist]], and some sharply criticize the association.<ref>{{cite web| url = http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/| title = Sokal and the Science Wars}}</ref><ref>{{cite web| url = http://www.csicop.org/si/show/quantum_quackery/| title = Quantum quackery| date = January 1997}}</ref>