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Epistemological Relativism (2016)
- smitty1e 3y agoI need a serious ontology ahead of these epistemological wranglings. How can I rate the app in the absence of an OS context?
- nathan_compton 3y agoHow you you ever come up with an ontology without an epistemology?
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoGut feel and entrails?
- pessimizer 3y agoYou're disrespecting the art of haruspicy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruspex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruspex
- mjburgess 3y agoHave you ever stated an epistemology without ontological commitments? How does one speak if not in terms of what exists?
- pilgrim0 3y agoSince a vocabulary already exists, then through bootstrapping.
- Der_Einzige 3y agoMore evidence for why I tell people that the Cogito was a massive mistake. You literally cannot even imagine ontology (being) without knowledge or "thought". The problem is that the appearance of thinking is not thinking. You don't actually know for sure that you are thinking. P-zombies will gladly tell you "they think therefor they are". My ontological foundation starts with my uniqueness, coming from the "creative nothing". Go read stirner or like dharmic philosophy for a non-cogitoist take on ontology.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pilgrim0 3y agoI feel the same every time someone starts using terms without defining them. For an analogy, it’s like a page o’ code minus its dependencies. One should define the dependent terms if didactics is a concern, which in my opinion should always be. I guess this article is relativist on relativism, then?
- chasil 3y agoWhile there are a bewildering number of types of relativism in the parent article, the most common by far is moral relativism, which is usually used as a slur against those who do not conform to general or specific ideologies. The wiki also mentions moral relativism in a pejorative context. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism
- alphazard 3y agoAgreed. The Wikipedia article and other summaries always present a strawman that I've never heard anyone accept as their own position. Except for maybe politicians. The steelman I would present: Moral Relativism is the belief that moral statements only make sense in the context of a "valuer" or thing that can perceive the goodness or badness of things. Absent a valuer, moral statements are under-specified or nonsensical. Humans, animals, and anything with a self preservation instinct, all clearly seem to be valuers. There does not seem to be any evidence for the universe itself being a valuer.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoI think that’s one of the best steel men I’ve seen for the idea of moral relativism.
- civilized 3y agoWhy talk of relativism at all? It's such a vague term. Does "relative" mean context dependent? Does it mean arbitrary? Something else? Nobody who uses this term seems to be in any hurry to clarify this. I suspect it's more of a marketing term, hitchhiking on the prestige of Einstein, than a concrete position worth arguing about.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoPeople talk about everything.
- r_hoods_ghost 3y agoGiven relativism is a term that started being used in English philosophy in the 1860s and in German philosophy prior to that you'd be dead wrong.
- mcpackieh 3y agoFWIW, Galilean relativity aka Galilean invariance, the idea that Newton's laws are true in all inertial reference frames, predates that by a few centuries. But I'm not sure when they started using the word relativity for this.
- mdp2021 3y agoThe term 'relative' is Latin, and it is used for "reference" (of course: fero and latus are in the same verb). Galieo uses the term 'relative', and to mean the judgement about magnitudes, but not for the invariance. The paragraph about the motion (the ships) does not contain it. The term 'relativity' in English was coined by Coleridge; in Physics, adopted by Maxwell - see https://www.etymonline.com/word/relativity https://www.etymonline.com/word/relativity In philosophy, as the parent mentioned, 'relativism' appears first in German in Wilhelm Traugott Krug (the successor of Kant), in 1838 - seemingly in a lexicographical work -, then in English in John Grote (1865) - see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism
- smif 3y ago
- slowhadoken 3y agoI’ve never cracked open a relativist or subjective philosophy text that was readable.
- dpierce9 3y agoIt is quite hard to write about. Suppose you are defending the claim. Your conclusion that ‘All knowledge is relative’ inherently seems like a non-relative assertion of knowledge. ‘All knowledge is relative except this statement’ seems like cheating (can you say why this one is special without absolutes?). So you have to approach the conclusion obliquely at best.
- jeremyt 3y agoYou're exactly right. Making an objective claim that everything is relative is a performative contradiction...which is why the relativists are wrong. The objectivists are also wrong. The truth is somewhere in the middle...which is why nobody has won the argument yet.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago> > So you have to approach the conclusion obliquely at best. > Making an objective claim that everything is relative is a performative contradiction...which is why the relativists are wrong. Which is maybe why they approach the conclusion obliquely at best. If you state the conclusion clearly, the contradiction is clearly apparent.
- GoblinSlayer 3y agoThe error there may be in extremism: relativism means that something is relative, not necessarily everything is relative.
- Der_Einzige 3y agoAgainst Method by Paul Feyerabend is extremely readable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method The Unique and Its Propery by Max Stirner is extremely readable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ego_and_Its_Own https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ego_and_Its_Own Particularly surprising in the case of Stirner because he was a friend of and contemporary of Marx (both Young Hegelians), who was writing extremely unreadable works at exactly the same time. Consider that they were all reacting to the least readable author in the modern cannon, Hegel
- swayvil 3y agoImplicit in the term "relativism" is the assertion that there is some kind of connection between the knowledge and what it renders. Of course there isn't. It might be useful, pretty, conventional, etc. But there's no actual connection. So let's just say All Form is Interpretation. Then the relativism is explicit.
- barrysteve 3y agoTradition tied to a consistent order is not relative. It is designed specifically to out-last relative approaches to deconstructing tradition.
- alphazard 3y agoThe issue with most explanations of relativsm/subjectivism is they don't tie it back to intuitions about scientific knowledge. And so the reader is left confused, and rejects relativism because they have stronger intuitions about an objective reality. Empiricism, taken most literally is, a relativist point of view. Your own consciousness is the only thing that must be real. If it appears that your percepts have predictable patterns, then so be it. Reliable prediction of future percepts is scientific knowledge to a relativist. You may notice that there are other things in the environment (people) who also make predictions. In so far as they make similar predictions to you, that is what the realists call objective reality. But to the relativist, it's just a pattern of objects in perception, making predictions about perception. The environment predicting itself, and agreeing with you, is realism to a relativist.
- downboots 3y agoDoes it have any utility?
- jfengel 3y agoIt's not about utility. It's about putting knowledge on an unshakeable foundation. You can live your life perfectly well without it. Most people do. But if you look too closely at how it actually works, you keep discovering unexpected inconsistencies. They don't actually matter until you try to definitively refute people saying dumb stuff and it turns out you actually can't. You can just ignore the people saying dumb stuff and you'll do just fine. But there will always be a nagging wonder if maybe somehow they were right.
- alphazard 3y agoRelativism? Yes I would say so. There are a lot of realists who spend some amount of their time arguing with other realists who believe contradictory things. Or doing mental gymnastics to convince themselves that their beliefs about morality are somehow objectively true, and other people's are objectively false. Moral relativists waste less time doing this. Your own percept of morality, better and worse, good and bad, is as real/true as any other percept. Morality isn't any more or less than that.
- ttonkytonk 3y agoThe article's reference to Plato's discussion concerning Protagoras' doctrine that "Man is the measure of all things" (expounded in Protagoras' lost book, Truth) can be found in Plato's Theaetetus, beginning at 152.