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Relativity, Realism and Consensus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

John Skorupski
John Skorupski
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
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Extract

1. Relativism has always seemed in some way to flow from, and yet in some way to undermine, a naturalistic attitude towards mind and society. That is true whether one goes back to the modern roots of relativism, in the historical and anthropological perspectives which began to flourish in the eighteenth century; or even further back, to the rather similar development from prehypenSocratic anthropological speculation to the Sophistic discussions which took place in fifthhypencentury Athens. Neither implication—from a purely naturalistic conception to relativism, or from relativism to the rejection of a purely naturalistic conception—is indisputable. I shall argue that neither holds. But each of them can be made to look quite plausible—and in fact both of them simultaneously; amounting in that case to an apparent reductio of naturalism.

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Articles
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Philosophy , Volume 60 , Issue 233 , July 1985 , pp. 341 - 358
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1985

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References

1 Mackie, J. L., The Cement of the Universe (Oxford University Press, 1979), 73.Google Scholar

2 Barry, Barnes and David, Bloor, ‘Relativism, Rationalism and the Sociology of Knowledg’, in Martin, Hollis and Steven, Lukes (eds), Rationality and Relativism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), 25.Google Scholar

3 The locus classicus for this view is Ramsey's, F. P. note, Knowledge, in Mellor, D. H. (ed.), Foundations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 126–127. Ramsey says that knowledge is belief ‘obtained by a reliable process’. This seems exactly right: causation comes in, not directly in virtue of the meaning of ‘know’, but because on a naturalistic view there can be no process other than a causal process.Google Scholar

4 It appeared (posthumously) in threehypenpart form in Mind VII (1882), and was then incorporated in his Prolegomena to Ethics, sections 3–99 and a part of 100Google Scholar

5 Aspects of this development from the time of Herder and Kant are described by Gardiner, P., ‘German Philosophy and the Rise of Relativism’, The Monist 64 (1981), 138–154Google Scholar

6 Mill tended to use psychological associationism as a kind of blunderbuss against the ‘apriori school’. But he was clear that the point would hold whether all beliefs were products of association, or some were inherited: ‘a conviction might be really innate, i.e. prior to individual experience, and yet not be true,since the inherited tendency to accept it may have been originally the result of other causes than its truth’ (System of Logic, Collected Works, VII, 276). Mill is discussing Spencer, who must, I imagine, have been the first ‘evolutionary epistemologist’.Google Scholar

7 See the essays collected in Michael, Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas (London: Duckworth, 1978).Google Scholar

8 The most familiar source for this type of argument is the later philosophy of Wittgenstein. But it can also be traced, I believe, in the American pragmatists and in Frank Ramsey's later papers.

9 See Jurgen, Habermas, ‘A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 3 (1973), 157–183. I am not at all sure whether Habermas would agree or disagree with what I say here; see e.g. his ‘Reply to My Critics‘, in John B., Thompson and David, Held (eds), Habermas: Critical Debates (London: Macmillan, 1982).Google Scholar

10 Quine, W. V., Theories and Things (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 181.Google Scholar

11 Martin, Hollis has put forward an argument of this kind—most recently in The Social Destruction of Reality, Hollis, and Lukes, (eds), op. cit. Similar arguments and others are put forward by Donald, Davidson, ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1973–1974).Google Scholar

12 Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, the discussion leading up to para. 242.

12 See Ernest, Gellner, Spectacles and Predicaments(Cambridge University Press, 1980). Robin, Horton's most recent statement is in Hollis, and Lukes, (eds), op. cit., Tradition and Modernity Revisited. In a fuller account it would be necessary to bring out explicitly that there are cognitive interests other than those of a specifically ‘theoretical’ understanding, and of technical control. On this, Charles, Taylor's ‘Rationality’, in Hollis, and Lukes, (eds), is perceptive.Google Scholar