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The 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 confus

The 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 ago
Does it have any utility?
- jfengel 3y ago
  It'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 ago
  Relativism? 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.
  - downboots 3y ago
    So iiutc, it has utility if you value not having to resolve contradictions over being correct in a realist sense?
    - GoblinSlayer 3y ago
      It's recognition of the structure of judgement: if judgement is correct relative to its reference frame, then it's a relative judgement. Example: person A stealing from person B is good for person A and bad for person B - these two judgements specify their reference frames and their relative structure is fairly obvious.
jfengel 3y ago
Well... they make utterances that you interpret as predictions, and do so more often than random chance would imply. You can impute prediction-making capabilities based on that, but hold out the possibility that the inference is incorrect.
brutusborn 3y ago
I agree most philosophy would benefit from being tied back to human experience in the material world, ‘touching grass’ so to speak. I think Lakatos’ Research Programmes give a good structure for demarcating scientific knowledge from pseudoscience. And precisely because he provides a pragmatic method for how this should inform low level decisions about scientific funding bodies and what scientists choose to work on. I think most people would reject his ideas because of the intuition you describe: scientists ‘feel’ like they ‘know’ their expert subject and so epistemological relativism feels dirty because they lose their delusion of objectivity. “I use fancy methods so I’m a ‘real’ scientist and my conclusions are scientific!” I believe the issues in nutritional science, psychiatry and psychology (to name a few) are fundamentally because these sciences are hard to study, so researchers use sophisticated statistical methods to hide their lack of ‘true knowledge’ or epistemological uncertainty. It’s why Lobotomies won a Nobel prize and all the major classes of psychiatric medication were discovered accidentally. It is a discipline made up of mostly degenerate research programmes but too much inertia to change track.

downboots 3y ago

Does it have any utility?

jfengel 3y ago
It'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 ago
Relativism? 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.
- downboots 3y ago
  So iiutc, it has utility if you value not having to resolve contradictions over being correct in a realist sense?
  - GoblinSlayer 3y ago
    It's recognition of the structure of judgement: if judgement is correct relative to its reference frame, then it's a relative judgement. Example: person A stealing from person B is good for person A and bad for person B - these two judgements specify their reference frames and their relative structure is fairly obvious.

jfengel 3y ago

Well... they make utterances that you interpret as predictions, and do so more often than random chance would imply. You can impute prediction-making capabilities based on that, but hold out the possibility that the inference is incorrect.

brutusborn 3y ago

I agree most philosophy would benefit from being tied back to human experience in the material world, ‘touching grass’ so to speak. I think Lakatos’ Research Programmes give a good structure for demarcating scientific knowledge from pseudoscience. And precisely because he provides a pragmatic method for how this should inform low level decisions about scientific funding bodies and what scientists choose to work on. I think most people would reject his ideas because of the intuition you describe: scientists ‘feel’ like they ‘know’ their expert subject and so epistemological relativism feels dirty because they lose their delusion of objectivity. “I use fancy methods so I’m a ‘real’ scientist and my conclusions are scientific!” I believe the issues in nutritional science, psychiatry and psychology (to name a few) are fundamentally because these sciences are hard to study, so researchers use sophisticated statistical methods to hide their lack of ‘true knowledge’ or epistemological uncertainty. It’s why Lobotomies won a Nobel prize and all the major classes of psychiatric medication were discovered accidentally. It is a discipline made up of mostly degenerate research programmes but too much inertia to change track.