Relativism, Objectivity, and Law

Objectivity , Relativism and Context Dependence

Risk relativism and physical law.

In two 1959 papers, one coauthored, Jerome Cornfield asserts that 'relative' measures are more useful for causal inference while 'absolute' measures are more useful for public health purposes. In one of these papers (the single-authored one), he asks how epidemiology should respond to the fact that its domain is not a highly 'articulated' one-it is not susceptible to being subsumed under genera...

Paradox and Relativism

Since the time of Plato, relativism has been attacked as a self-refuting theory. Today, there are two basic kinds of argument that are used to show that global relativism is logically incoherent: first, a direct descendent of the argument Plato uses against Protagoras, called the peritrope; and, second, a more recent argument that relativism leads to an infinite regress. Although some relativis...

Indexical Relativism versus Genuine Relativism

The main purpose of this paper is to characterize and compare two forms any relativist thesis can take: indexical relativism and genuine relativism. Indexical relativists claim that the implicit indexicality of certain sentences is the only source of relativity. Genuine relativists, by contrast, claim that there is relativity not just at the level of sentences, but also at propositional level. ...

Relativism: Protagoras and Nelson Goodman

پروتاگوراس در یونان باستان و نلسون گودمن در دورۀ جدید دو تن از برجسته­ترین مدافعان نسبی­گرایی به شمار می­روند. گاه ممکن است نثر آن دو فریبنده بنماید، و چه بسا این امر شرح و تفسیر منظور و مراد حقیقی آنها را دشوار سازد. پروتاگوراس و گودمن، با وجود برخی تفاوتها، به دفاع از این دیدگاه به ظاهر افراطی می­پردازند که همه وقایع، به معنای حقیقی کلمه، وابسته به دیدگاه انسان است. هدف این مقاله شرح و بررسی ...