Relativism - What Is Relativism?, Issues And Arguments Relating To Relativism, Shared Motivational Attitudes, Real And Notional Confrontations
ethics
Although relativism is most often associated with ethics, one can find defenses of relativism in virtually any area of philosophy. The following article first discusses the general structure of relativist positions and arguments. It then examines several influential ideas concerning relativism in the late twentieth century. Finally, it ends by considering the rise of relativism in one area outside of ethics: epistemology.
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Relativism about some property F can be divided into a number of different theses. One relativist view is that there exists a plurality of standards of Fness associated with different places, people, cultures, or times. Call this descriptive relativism. A different relativist thesis is that there is no single universally valid standard of Fness for all places, people, cultures, or times. Call this…
As obvious as it may seem that we ought to be relativists about some things, late-twentieth-century philosophical discussions of relativism spent a surprising amount of time simply trying to state the view coherently. The ethical relativist familiar to most of us, for instance, combines all three above relativist theses in a way that best illustrates the problem. He will begin with the innocent ob…
Gilbert Harman has argued for philosophical relativism about what he calls "inner" moral judgments. These are moral judgments that imply that the agent has certain motivating reasons to do something, and the person making the judgment and his audience endorse those reasons. For instance, the claim that S ought to do some action is an inner moral judgment. Harman claimed that relativi…
Bernard Williams was concerned to come up with some way of stating normative relativism such that it is coherent and does not fall victim to self-contradiction. Recall that the self-contradictory ethical relativist view is the claim that since there are no universal moral standards, no one ever ought to condemn the practices of other cultures. The main issue is whether philosophical relativism can…
With respect to some areas of thought and discourse, unbridled relativism will be less attractive than a relativism that requires certain boundaries be respected. As we have seen, it is difficult to see how tolerance about alternative standards of Fness can be maintained unless we suppose there is some viewpoint independent of these alternative standards from which to evaluate them. Many philosoph…
By far the most discussed form of relativism is ethical relativism. However, relativist issues arise quite frequently in almost every area of philosophical research. One of the most significant trends in late-twentieth-century epistemology has been the rise of views that are broadly either relativist or pluralist and are loosely collected under the banner "contextualism." Contextuali…
Normative relativism in a given area counsels tolerance of practices that conform to alternative standards prevailing in the area. The paradigm of acceptable tolerance is clearly the case of etiquette. Here we have grounds for a defensible and thoroughgoing relativism. And here the relativist doctrines we have discussed fit: Clear-eyed judgments that the practices in a different culture conforming…
Cohen, Stewart. "How To Be a Fallibilist." Philosophical Perspectives 2 (1988): 91–123. ———. "Knowledge and Context." Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986): 575–583. DeRose, Keith. "Solving the Skeptical Problem." Philosophical Review 104 (1995): 1–52. Feldman, Richard. Epistemology. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Ha…
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