Relativism is the view that the meaning and value of Human beliefs and behaviors have no absolute reference. 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 what allegedly depends on something and what something depends on.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson define relativism in their book Metaphors We Live By as the rejection of both subjectivism and objectivism in order to focus on the relationship between them, i.e. the metaphor by which we relate our current experience to our previous experience. In particular, they characterize "objectivism" as a "Straw man", and, to a lesser degree, criticize the views of Karl Popper, Kant and Aristotle.
The combination of both approaches results in what is known as descriptive relativism, which claims that different cultures have different views of morality, which cannot be unified under one general conception of morality. Thus, one might want to claim that all cultures, for example, prohibit the killing of innocents. The descriptive relativist reply to this is that while this might be true at a general level, different cultures have different understandings of what "innocent" means, and so are still culturally relative.
Elements of relativism emerged at least as early as the Sophists.
One argument for relativism is that our own Cognitive bias prevents us from observing something objectively with our own senses, and Notational bias will apply to whatever allegedly can be measured without using our senses. In addition, we have a culture bias shared with other trusted observers, which cannot be eliminated. A counterargument to this is that subjective certainty and concrete objects and causes are part of our everyday life, and that there is no great value in discarding such useful ideas as Isomorphism, objectivity and a final Truth.
Another important 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.
Another counter-argument uses Bertrand Russell's Paradox, which refers to the "List of all lists that do not contain themselves". This paradox has been famously debated by Kurt Gödel, Jorge Luis Borges, and Jean Baudrillard.
A very different approach is to explicate the rhetorical production of supposedly 'bottom line' arguments against relativism. Edwards et al’s influential and controversial Death and Furniture paper takes this line in its staunch defence of relativism.
According to the Church and some philosophers, relativism, as a denial of absolute truth, leads to moral license and a denial of the possibility of sin and of God.
Relativism, they say, is a denial of the capacity of our mind and reason to arrive at truth. Truth, according to Catholic theologians and philosophers, following Aristotle and Plato, is adequatio rei et intellectus, the correspondence of the mind and reality. Another way of putting it is: the mind having the same form as reality. This means when the form of the computer in front of me (the type, color, shape, capacity, etc.) is also the form that is in my mind, then what I know is true because my mind corresponds to objective reality.
Relativism, according to the Catholic and Aristotelian viewpoint, violates the philosophical Principle of non-contradiction, a most fundamental principle of all thinking without which there is no way to understand each other nor any possibility of science.
The denial of an absolute reference is a denial of God, who is Absolute Truth, according to these Christian philosophers. Thus, they say, relativism is linked to secularism, an obstruction of God in human life.
In the Gospel of Life, he says:
On June 6, 2005, he told educators:
Then during the World Youth Day, he also traced to relativism the problems produced by the communist and sexual revolutions, and provides a counter-counter argument.
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