Is Truth Relative? | The MIT Press Reader
Relativism, almost more than any other philosophical topic, gets people riled up. Discussions of it pepper the internet, fill op-ed pages, and crop up in the Pope’s encyclicals. Opinions differ, to put it mildly, running from Stanley Fish’s declaration that relativism “is just another name for serious thought” to the conviction of conservative critics Allan Bloom and Robert Bork that relativism threatens to end Western civilization as we know it.
Relativism about truth is nonetheless an idea with a venerable history, whose original champion, at least in Western culture, is usually thought to be the Greek philosopher, Protagoras. According to Plato at least, Protagoras believed that man is the measure of all things — be they values or the more mundane objects of everyday life. Plato interpreted this as an endorsement of the view that truth in general is in the eye of the beholder, or is relative. Nowadays, it is more common to encounter endorsements of relativism outside of philosophy departments. Indeed, the idea, or at least what appears to be the idea, has taken root across the intellectual spectrum — in anthropology, sociology, the humanities, and religious studies.
By that standard, Protagoras’s idea is one of the most successful philosophical theories of all time. The “über thought” behind relativism is that different opinions can be equally true relative to different standards. Interestingly, relativism is often motivated by some of the same things that motivate skepticism. People disagree about almost everything. And about some things, like religion, or politics, or morality, their disagreements are so wide and deep it can be difficult to find any common ground. Add to this the fact that our thoughts and perceptions are likely to bear the imprint of our biases, background assumptions, and expectations, and we arrive at the following premises:
