Relativism
Relativism espouses the view that the meaning and value of human beliefs and behaviors have no absolute validity. Relativists claim that humans understand and evaluate beliefs and behaviors only in terms of, for example, their historical and cultural context. Philosophers identify many different kinds of relativism depending upon which classes of beliefs allegedly depend upon what.
The concept of relativism has importance both for philosophers and for anthropologists, although in different ways. Philosophers explore how beliefs might or might not in fact depend for their truth upon such items as language, conceptual scheme, culture, and so forth; with ethical relativism furnishing just one example. Anthropologists, on the other hand, occupy themselves with describing actual human behavior. For them, relativism refers to a methodological stance whereby the researcher suspends or brackets his or her own cultural biases while attempting to understand beliefs and behaviors in their local contexts. This has become known as methodological relativism.
Elements of relativism emerged at least as early as the Sophists.
One advocate of relativism, Bernard Crick, a British political scientist, wrote the book In Defence of Politics (first published in 1962), suggesting the inevitability of moral conflict between people. Crick stated that only ethics could resolve such conflict, and when that occurred in public it resulted in politics. Accordingly, Crick saw the process of dispute resolution, harms reduction, mediation or peacemaking as central to all of moral philosophy. He became an important influence on the feminists and later on the Greens.
An extremely common argument against relativism uses an inherently contradictory (self-stultifying) notion: The statement "all is relative" is either a relative statement or an absolute one. If it is relative, then there must be some absolutes in the world. If the statement is absolute, on the other hand, then it provides an example of an absolute statement, proving that not all truths are relative.
The latter argument forms one of the first in reply to relativism, and needs more explanation.
See also
External link
On refuting relativism: http://www.carm.org/relativism/relativism_refute.htm