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Empirical Relativism
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In Defensive of Relativism
Relativism receives a rough time from the critics (such as Richard Dawkins and Joseph Ratzinger) who perceive it as a philosophy of 'anything goes' or as a claim that 'nobody really knows anything better than anyone else' or even as a failure to have faith. Consequently we can encounter hollow and emotive phrases such as 'the mire or relativism' or 'descent into relativism'. My favourite trophy phrase however is "charges of relativism", which implies that to engage in relativism is a kind of 'thought crime' punishable by philosophical alienation.
The articles on this site should be read in their totality as polemic in defense of a theory of knowledge that explicitly combines relativism, pragmatism, utilitarianism, and empiricism in a way which I think of as Empirical Relativism. It is not my aim to produce a historically balanced or encyclopaedic source on this matter or an attempt to teach anyone, it is merely an argument for thinking in a particular way.
Richard Dawkins and the Pope
I am amused that the 'new atheist' Richard Dawkins and his holiness Benedict XVI have such similarity in their views concerning the 'dangers' of relativism and both, in their own separate ways, have such a limited conception of the importance of faith in every day life and all our enterprises. Of course by claiming that scientists are motivated to act by a 'faith' in empirically based theories, I might even be accused of a "pernicious form of empirical relativism". For me such a stance would be a total misconstrual of the human condition. The practice of science has the advantage of being systematic, open to amendment and capable of almost boundless elaboration but that cannot mean that it has the sole prerogative to explain or regulate our actions in the world.
Relativism cannot be considered true
There are even people who ask, in more or less subtle ways "is relativism true?" Clearly they have missed the point. Truth, in the logical sense, of course has its addicts and has done so since Greek times. None more so than the purveyors of formal symbolic logic. If anyone can demonstrate how to acquire useful knowledge of the world in any non-empirical way I will willingly give up relativism. Until that time I will be happy to stick with empirically based value judgments on which I place different subjective degrees of belief rather than use the binary classification of truth and falsity. Of course if I am fortunate to have hard won scientific data in support of the description of particular repeatable phenomena then I may adopt a propensity theory of probability.
The empirical relativist would want to replace question about the truth of relativism with a string of questions about relativism such as, when are we so sure about of an outcome so that we can behave as if we are certain, when is relativism useful, to what extent can we be relativistic, in what domains of thinking could we be usefully relativistic? Similarly there are those who claim that "truth is a logical necessity", presumably in the sense that a combination of soundness and validity in argument leads to a 'truth value' or that axioms of belief systems are held to be 'true' within that system. The utilitarian empiricist can be legitimately more concerned with the utility of a system of beliefs and components of those systems than an arbitrary system-dependent truth value. People who should know better, including Allen Wood at Stanford University say "If their own assertions of relativism are to make sense, relativists must allow at least one proposition to be absolutely true, namely relativism itself" (my italics) . The simplest answer to that is simply; only if you hold absolutist notions in any particular domain of thinking. Of course he is not alone, when Jonathan Rée was asked to explain Plato's views, he made the following statement on the BBC radio 4 programme In Our Time', on 19 Jan 2006. "There could be no rationality to any discussion or rationality at all unless you presupposed that transcending that discussion there was some goal that everyone was aiming at which was the truth." This is a form of rationalism which has the axiom "absolute truth exists". This way of thinking then tempts us to believe that 'I know what absolute truth is when I encounter it'. Such views do little if anything to advance our understanding of complexity in the world.
If you cling to notions of absolute truth then you are likely abhor all forms of relativism. You will will instead be able to bathe in the comforting warm waters of your science, religion or political creed and ignore the fact that in a hundred years time science and technology will have moved on, theologists will have come up with new metaphors and new forms of political despotism will have been devised.
To what extent do we all live as relativists?
In practice many of us are relativists in the way we lead our lives, in the sense that we constantly weigh the relative value of one idea or action against another or identify some form of historical progression. If you assert that something is better than another thing (or probably so) you are undertaking a form of relativism. If you deny the concept that probably true has a meaning then you are being absolutist. Failure to be relativistic in that sense is then self-defeating. This is largely why the word progress is often absent from philosophical discourse and why the empiricist rather than the philosopher is left to make changes to the world. There are scholarly articles however on the subject of relativism, such as that in the stanford encyclopaedia of philosophy (click here), which suggest from the outset that we are bring 'seduced' by relativism and that relativism must have innate contradictions that are somehow absent from other philosophical approaches. Chris Swoyer in the encyclopaedia article referred to above even makes the brave but nevertheless bizarre attempt to define dependent and independent variables in relativism.
There are those who imply that relativism is inherently contradictory and then do their best to show it 'faults' rather than look for its advantages. These criticism are in essence centered around the thought that relativism has a problem of authority and self-reference. For me that is the equivalent of saying we should all give up arithmetic because of Goedel. We should instead look to see when relativism has utility. The most obvious case is the problem of religious diversity where only skepticism or a relativistic outlook makes any analytical sense. When some relativists do not behave like religious zealots and avoid making the self-contradictory claims that 'all is relative' then the charge is conveniently modified. We are then told that the whole concept begins to be diluted and so that eventually this way of thinking does not present a more than trivial challenge to absolutism and concepts of truth. For me that is merely a rhetorical word game that ignores the vacuousness of extreme positions within absolutism and relativism. If the anything goes form of relativism is self-defeating its converse absolutism must be equally self-defeating.
Clearly an anthropological approach to understanding our belief systems is life enriching and philosophically expansive and that is part of the relativist approach. It is more important however to envisage relativism as just one of many personalisable philosophical methods or tools that can be applied and not only as scheme for classifying truth values from different cultural frameworks. We must of course acknowledge the fallibility and constraining effects of all methods. In adopting this stance some might argue that I am creating a paradox of self reference. To them I say once you have chosen to learn about another person's frame of reference, or even tried to envisage the world from their perspective, you have immediately changed your own frame of reference. I also say to them consider to what extent you, as an individual, can only have at a given time one frame of reference. (If need be sort out your own personal set theory of ideas.) For the methodologically active relativist that frame of reference will also be very changeable.
The starting point must be to consider to what extent we can be relativistic within any given framework of ideas or particular set of cultural experiences at any particular time of our lives. For the empirical relativist the possibilities for change, empirically based elaboration and enrichment of personal outlook outweigh the notion of truth values. For some people this way of life would be discomforting and so perhaps is not for them. I personally am interested in a particular way to be without the Heideggerian obsession with the nature of being (ontology) or a personal need to understand truth in a very abstract fashion (such as Heidegger's altheia).
Angst and Change
The desire for fixed and immutable schemes of analysis might often lead to existential angst. It is therefore implicit in that statement that our very concept of relativism should change with time. As Richard Rorty says, a philosopher is only a person who reads a particular set of books. 'Read more and change', should be our motto. None of the above should be seen as dispiriting or nihilistic. Indeed the joy of empirical discovery and possibility of change should be valued above truth and the reason. It is however astounding how many inspired philosophers are able to divorce experience from abstract analysis and do not look to empirical investigation within a given framework for their inspiration.
My defense of relativism begins .............. If you disagree, please contact me. If you are more informed or more insightful than me please extend my horizons or try to correct what you see as my errors.
"Doubt everything or believe everything: these are two equally convenient strategies. With either we dispense with the need for reflection." - Henri Poincare
The Utility of Truth
I contend that the concept of 'truth' or 'truthfulness', or its converse falsity, has a more limited meaning and relevance in our lives than is commonly supposed. Truth or falsity is not irrelevant to our lives only weaker in impact than we might have been taught to imagine. We cannot therefore abandon the concept of truth altogether as that would be to our detriment.
Consider for a moment 'truth' in the sense of the opposite of deceitfulness. In this social and legal sense 'truth' is operationally important for us as individuals, families, communities and nations. It is however important for the pragmatist to consider where the concept of truth adds nothing to our understanding and where 'true enough' is pragmatically useful. Consider the following sentence for example with and without the word true. (It is true that) apples fall from trees. For the relativist the term 'more truthful' is also imbued with deep meaning.
It is very important not to become overly concerned with the notion that if the descriptors 'more truthful' and 'true enough' have meaning, there should be some ideal conjecture of truth against which we can compare these descriptors. Our perceptual world or 'lifeworld', as Habermas might call it, is too complex and too indeterminate for the world 'true' to always have a clearly definable meaning. In some circumstances it is even difficult to produce a satisfactory method by which me may be investigate what truth is. Obsession with idealist concepts of truth would be equivalent to mathematicians deciding that they could not do any mathematics until they had finally and definitively dealt with the notion of infinity.
Idealistic thinking about 'truth' however leads us into blind alleys and diverts our attention. We should instead pragmatically consider to what extent the following list of words have independent significance for our lives and to what extent they are inter-related: truth, is, fact, reality, meaning, objectivity, soundness, justification, verification, falsifiability, contingency, and entailment. If you were to place less significance on the concept of truth than your neighbour, might that make you less religious or more concerned about the actions of scientist than you would otherwise be?
Contradiction
Of course it is also important that we do not ignore the concept of dialetheism in which a language sentence or proposition is considered to be both true and false if we accept as useful some unusual form of (paraconsistent) logic. It is extremely easy to point to practices in medicine that are simultaneously good and bad for a patient. Chemotherapy for life threatening cancer is perhaps one of the most extreme and therefore one of the most striking examples, although these situations are to a lesser extent almost ubiquitous. Medicine aims at a favourable balance of good versus bad. When transliterated into the language of formal logic we have the concept of falsity and truth combined and ultimately transformed into a probabilistic assessment. Then with the assistance of Bayes theorem we can conceive of objective and subjective probabilities and come to a richer and much more rewarding view of the world in which we can value the concept of degrees of belief. Unsurprisingly we can then start to apply this way of thinking in many walks of life including the most practical of all subjects: engineering.
Absolutism
We are either absolutists, who want to think in terms of 'truth' and 'hard facts' even in very complex situations, or are to some degree relativists. As a pragmatist I see no need to develop universally applicable ways of thinking. I contend that we may be both analytical and critical in our approach while at the same time trying to maintain a relativistic openness of belief and a receptivity to others. We could for example be moral absolutists due to religious or cultural influences and be relativistic in our philosophy and practice of science. In addition the extent to which we are relativist in any domain of thinking might also vary so that we can pragmatically accept some propositions as being true enough while still considering ourselves to be relativists. A concept might be true enough for a scientist to justify further research.
I do not operate under the banner 'relativism of all'. That would be unacceptably absolutist. I see differences of creativity and analycity between the people who I have known for a very long time and even between my adult children. I see different motivations, dispositions and personal needs, which appropriately require different way of being in the world. I am content that some, due their individuality and life history, require the reassurance and social cohesion of religion, whilst others enjoy preoccupations with work, recreation, sport, art, music, creativity or material acquisition. I therefore contend that we need to examine 2 aspects of our beliefs. Instead of worrying whether or not our beliefs are absolutely true, we should be more concerned with the utility of our beliefs and the sense of satisfaction that they bring. For me these considerations are central to my personal philosophy.
The Importance of Action
If I had a mantra it would be: 'As you have the right to a non-interfering personal autonomy, I am not troubled by what analytical schemes you use, or claim to have elaborated. I do not even wish to dispute your claim that you know 'the truth' of any particular matter. In the end I am primarily interested in what your actions are given the data available to you and the standards of the culture in which you are embedded. (Of course I might also be indifferent to your actions.)
Defining Empirical Relativism
In practical terms, an empirical relativist would accept for example that the measured values for the speed of light are in one sense not culturally dependent. Light has properties that are in no way influenced by human culture in the sense that you could be a Jewish or Muslim experimenter, a transcendental realist, a liberal democrat or marxist and for you the act of measurement would give the same conceptual result as it would do for me.
The way in which the measurements are made and the accuracy and precision of the measurements are however very much dependent on our culture. In the example used here, culturally 'important' physicists 'need' socially respected and expensive equipment to make measurements with very high precision ( 4 parts per billion). This 'need' arises because the properties of light and the fact that our exploitation of those properties is seen at one level to be 'fundamental' to our society as a whole as well as our scientific culture. In that sense our personal biology and culture determines the nature of the act of measurement and at a very fundamental level has a role to play in what we actually think we know. There are of course important cultural consequences for those who make the measurements or go on to manufacture DVD players or armaments such as laser guided bombs etc.
In addition the empirical relativist might want to understand the way in which the properties of light very strongly influence human culture and the reasons why we make the measurement in the first place. In general the importance that we place on scientific activity is very dependent on our culture and our own biology. Some might say in making these statements that I adhere to a 'weak' rather than strong Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (Wiki, S.E.P.)
In the form of relativism that I propose we should also be suspicious of the difference between objectivity and subjectivity, especially in matters of aesthetic judgment. We should not abandon these concepts, merely find more productive ways of dealing with them.
The Practice of Science is a Social Construct with Implications for Freedom of Thought
Science as presently practiced is of course freer than the experience of political totalitarianism or existence under the dictate of religious authority. It would be foolhardy however to think of science as a practice that is somehow intrinsically free in a social or intellectual sense.
Up until very recently our science has 'dictated' that we adopt realist presumptions about the world. In addition the sheer momentum of scientific culture appears to dictate that we must incorporate material constructions of the world into every realm of thinking. We cannot expect to have a modern post-religious or post-mythological cosmology for example without having an understanding of the properties of light, matter and gravity. That would not be deemed rational. In so much as mythological cosmologies are 'ignorant' of the nature of light, gravity and the space-time continuum they are now regarded as conceptually and culturally inadequate by rationalists because of their lack of explanatory power. The social role with which these cosmologies have been associated are sometimes automatically deemed dysfunctional by those same people. This approach shows a lack of philosophical pragmatism, or as we commonly say 'why throw the baby out with the bath water'.
Ironically the cultural status of physical cosmology and quantum mechanics, is now such that we are 'allowed' to begin to envisage non-common sense notions of realism that are 'permitted' by the mathematical equations of present day physics. The principle of locality for example implies that than an object can only be in one place at a time and that objects which are far apart in space exist independently of one another, if no gauge fields appear to influence their observed behaviour. However the observable phenomena that support the "spooky" notion of long distance quantum entanglement questions the nature of locality and so brings into question what we consider to be real. Scientific culture now 'permits' us to have the notion of non-locality without being regarded as culturally eccentric or in need of philosophical therapy. The reductionist has, through experimentation (even with simple optical illusions), upset the debates about philosophical realism to make us question 'the reality' of our sense data, but has done so from the position of empiricism rather than abstract pragmatism.
Our present formulation of scientific practice has at least one of the features of organized religion. If a scientist violates a conceptual norm she risks loosing credibility. Just think what would happen to the academic reputation of a prominent evolutionary biologist if she were to 'deny' the Big Bang theory of cosmology, without what her peers would deem to be sufficient reason. She might, at least amongst physicists, become intellectually suspected of irrationality and be thought of as committing the philosophical crime of inconsistency with regard to the nature of empirical evidence.
The freedom that does exist within our practice of science is therefore primarily one that permits us to expand and revise our thinking but rarely permits us to think 'the unthinkable'. It is, in the academic sense, a discipline of mind that can also have a constraining effect as well as a liberating one. The transformative power of the social construct of science is due in part to the social and in part the intrinsic constraints of empirical investigation directing us towards the possible rather than what is imaginable. Ironically if we fail to imaginatively transcend the empirical and the socially acceptable we unnecessarily constrain ourselves. Eventually however science can, through long, difficult and tedious development, transform the mythological flight of Icarus into today's very athletic flight by pedal power. Empirically and socially constrained imagination is our ultimate tool rather than our ability to distinguish truth from falsity.
The Wider Application of Pragmatism
I see any form of empirically based pragmatism as necessarily involving a degree of relativism. I therefore include, science, medicine, law, politics, applied ethics, meta-ethics and religion as belief systems that equally merit our attention in this regard. Rather than be dismissive or relativism, scientists in particular should in my opinion consider the extend to which science is actually an expression of this way of thinking. There are of course those who who naively use relativism as a term of abuse. Ignore them for, in every day life, they to are relativists. When such people point to relativistic excesses however, pay close attention to them for they have understood the accompanying need for pragmatism.
What come next ?
This site consists of commentaries on the nature of belief, how belief is shaped, the utility of belief, the concept of degrees or strength of belief, testing of beliefs, the consequences of uncertainty, science as a belief system, touches on beliefs in the social domain. There is a developing argument about why we should be prepared to change our beliefs.
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List of Articles
Philosophical Stance Adopted Here Utility and the Experiment of Living Cognitive Illusion and Conditioned Probability Weak Comments on Logic in Relation to Belief Belief Testing
The Unknown in Real and Philosophical Gambling Requirement for a Philosophy and Science of Life in Matters of Belief Acquisition and Loss of Belief Definitions of Faith Respect and Disrespect Relevant Quotations Other Information
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On the Philosophy of Belief
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