Relativism: What Is this Nonsense?
When I was in college, relativism was all the rage. People were going around saying “truth is relative”, “reality is subjective”, etc. I haven’t heard so much of that lately, but that may be because I’m just better at avoiding people who say that sort of thing.
Anyway, truth relativism (relativism about truth) is closely related to but not identical with subjectivism, which I went after earlier (https://fakenous.net/?p=2697). So an attack on relativism is due.
What Is Truth Relativism?
Truth relativists think that “truth is relative”, meaning that a proposition can be true for one person or group and not true for another.
And what does that mean? It’s practically impossible to get a relativist to say anything about that. In fact, I don’t believe I’ve ever gotten a relativist to try to say what “true for so-and-so” means (where “so-and-so” is replaced with a phrase denoting a person or group).
The dumbest theory of truth
Here’s a stab: “x is true for Joe” means “Joe believes that x is true”. This fits with a common usage in which we say things like, “For Catholics, the Pope is infallible” (which just means that Catholics believe that the Pope is infallible), “To Sally, this idea was intolerable”, etc. Of course, if this is what the relativists mean, then
a) Their actual thesis is just that someone can believe a proposition that someone else doesn’t believe. I.e., disagreements are possible. This is trivial and does not contrast with any position that anyone has ever held. No one in the history of philosophy ever thought that it was impossible for people to disagree. Yet relativists appear to be trying to advance a position that is in contrast with absolutism, which is supposed to be a widely held view (especially historically).
b) Their chosen expression of the thesis would be a simple and obvious abuse of language – inviting confusion between truth and belief, or between P's being the case and someone’s believing P.
- Or maybe the thesis would be the trivially false claim that “x is true”, in English, actually just means “x is believed (by some person or group that is salient in the context)”.
Other theories of truth
There are other theories of truth that are less dumb than the “truth=belief” theory. Some philosophers have said things like: the true is that which it is useful to believe; the true is that which would be believed at the conclusion of ideally conducted inquiry; the true is that which belongs to the most coherent overall belief system. These theories enable you to make sense of relativism: a proposition might be useful for one person to believe but not useful for another; ideal inquiries conducted by different people might lead to different beliefs in the end (perhaps due to differing prior probabilities); or there might be multiple equally coherent belief systems. Hence, there could be different truths for different people. So yay, we found a way to at least understand what the relativists might be saying.
What’s Wrong with Relativism?
False theories of truth
Here’s what is wrong with those theories of truth. If there is anything we know about the concept of truth, it is this:
i) P entails that it is true that P.
ii) Its being true that P entails that P.
For example, it’s true that sloths are lazy if and only if sloths are lazy. I assume this is a non-negotiable fixed point. If you combine this with the above theories of truth, you get implications like: Sloths are lazy if and only if it is useful to believe that sloths are lazy; sloths are lazy if and only if we would believe that sloths are lazy at the end of ideal inquiry; etc. These would have to be analytic truths (since principles (i) and (ii) above are analytic, and the theory of truth is, I assume, supposed to be an analysis of the concept of truth). (Also, btw, we’d have to say that it’s useful to believe P iff it’s useful to believe that it’s useful to believe P; etc.)
But these implications are not only not analytic; they are obviously false on their face. It’s easy to think of situations in which it would not be useful for some person to believe something that is the case. E.g., imagine a case in which the number of atoms in the universe is even, but anyone who believes that gets tortured and killed. That scenario isn’t a contradiction, and in that case, it wouldn’t be useful to believe that the number of atoms was even. Or imagine a case in which there are an even number of atoms but we have no way of verifying this. Etc.
The correct theory
The correct theory of truth is the correspondence theory: truth is correspondence with reality. I.e., if a sentence or belief represents the world to be a certain way, and the world is actually that way, then the sentence/belief is true. If the world isn’t that way, the sentence/belief is false.
I think this is trivial, but somehow people have managed to have big debates about it.
Is relativism self-defeating?
The undergraduate refutation of relativism goes like this: if there is no absolute truth, then relativism itself could not be absolutely true. Ha!
The relativist would probably accept this, claiming that relativism is true for him (the relativist himself), but perhaps absolutism might be true for other people. Is this a viable position to take, or is it self-refuting? I don’t know, because I don’t know what “true for me” means.
The Motivation of Relativism
If you’re reading Fake Nous, you probably already knew that relativism is nonsensical. But you may still wonder, what the heck is going on? Why would people say this obvious nonsense? Especially without being able to explain what it means?
The most popular argument
The most popular argument for relativism goes something like this:
There are many different cultures/individuals with different beliefs.
Therefore, there are many different truths.
This is obviously invalid. To make it valid, we have to add a premise something like this:
1a. All beliefs are true.
The only problem is that 1a is trivially false. 1a is not explicitly stated by relativists; it’s just a required presupposition of their argument. So what it looks like is that the relativists have simply confused truth with belief. This is a variant of the Fallacy of Subjectivism, in which one confuses representations with their objects (https://fakenous.net/?p=2697).
The emotional motivation
The underlying, emotional motivation, I believe, is a desire to avoid saying that anyone is wrong, especially about things that are important to people’s culture or religion. The way we’re going to avoid anyone being wrong is the most flat-footed ploy possible: we’ll just declare that all of these beliefs are true. But since they conflict with each other, they can’t really, actually be true (in the real sense of the word “true”), so we’ll just say “well, these beliefs are each true for the people who hold them,” and pretend that that means something. There, problem solved.
The reason why relativists never tell you what “true for so-and-so” means is that they don’t care about that and have never thought about it, because they were never trying to describe any aspect of reality to begin with. (These are people who usually say “reality is subjective” too.) They aren’t using sentences in the same way that you and I use them, i.e., cognitively. They’re using philosophical sentences for non-cognitive purposes – expressing an emotional attitude, declaring loyalty to a faction in the culture wars, trying to be nice to people from different cultures, etc.
Of course, the literal meaning of the statement of truth relativism is a proposition. It’s just that the relativists don’t really care about whether that proposition is true or false. They really just care about the non-cognitive stuff.
You may think I am being unfair and that I should just confront the relativists’ actual arguments instead of doing armchair psychologizing of them. But there really is not much in the way of arguments to talk about. There is no argument that it’s impossible for cultural beliefs to be wrong. And I really don’t think that you need me to argue that this is possible. That’s why I’m left speculating about the psychological causes of relativism.
How to Be Nice Without Being Irrational
Here’s the good news: You can be nice and tolerant without sacrificing rationality, objectivity, the concept of truth, etc. You can admit that two or more conflicting beliefs can’t all be true (that is what “conflicting” means), and yet still not be committed to bashing anyone who disagrees with you over the head.
How so? Two important points:
You could recognize that you are a fallible human being. Thus, when other people disagree with you, that usually provides at least some reason to think you might be mistaken. This doesn’t mean you immediately give up any belief that other people disagree with; it just means that you should normally lower your credence (your degree of confidence) when you learn that many other people disagree with you. You should then try to find out what their reasons are for holding a different belief, because you may be able to learn something from them. This is known as open-mindedness, and it is actually an implication of the fact that reality is objective (if reality is subjective and truth relative, then you have no reason to try to learn from other people, since whatever you believe is already “true for you” and there is no objective truth to try to get at).
You could also recognize that other individuals have rights, including a right to lead their own lives in the way that they choose, as long as they do not violate the equal rights of others. Thus, even if you know that someone is worshipping a non-existent god, it is still their right to do so (provided that their method of worship doesn’t violate anyone else’s rights).
It remains the case that some people might have their feelings hurt, or feel offended, when they contemplate the fact that not all beliefs can be correct. Frankly, I think that is a super-duper philosophically childish reaction. Obviously some people are wrong. Trivially. You might be one of them. No, in fact you’re definitely wrong about some things. Every human being in history has been wrong about some stuff, so if you don’t think you’re wrong about some stuff, you’re delusional. So just grow the fuck up and accept that.
And if you meet someone else who seems to have some false beliefs, you should talk to that person like an intellectual adult and assume that they can handle the fact that other people think they’re mistaken.