The emergence of an information society, carried by information technologies such as the digital computer and the Internet, has lead to many questions in the West about the proper regulation of the production, use and transfer of information. In the West, a large part of this discussion has focused on individual rights: how to balance various rights of individuals against each other and against...

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. ...

Among naturalist philosophers, both defenders and opponents of moral relativism argue that prescriptive moral theories (or normative theories) should be constrained by empirical findings about human psychology. Empiricists have asked if people are or can be moral relativists, and what effect being a moral relativist can have on an individual’s moral functioning. This research is underutilized i...

Frege famously held that each act of utterance expresses a complete thought, and that each thought is true or false absolutely. Until a few years ago, analytical philosophers have sided with their most venerable ancestor: traditionally, relativism about truth has been dismissed as an extravagant and confused piece of semantic nonsense. But in recent times several writers have proposed relativis...

Moral relativism provides a compelling explanation of linguistic data involving ordinary moral expressions like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. But it is a very radical view. Because relativism relativizes sentence truth to contexts of assessment it forces us to revise standard linguistic theory. If, however, no competing theory explains all of the evidence, perhaps it is time for a paradigm shift. Howeve...

All over the world, work of some kind is (and has always been) part of most children’s lives, as may be seen from the Introduction and many articles in this special issue of Childhood. At certain times and places, and in certain forms and relations of work, the exploitation and abuse of children’s capacity for work becomes a serious social problem. It is in this sense – the abuse of children in...

An ethical ideologies model based on relativism and idealism was tested. Subjects judged the morality of an individual who produced a mildly or extremely positive or negative consequence by conforming to or violating a common moral norm. As predicted, an averaging model with differential weights accounted for situationists' (high relativism and idealism) and absolutists' (low relativism and hig...

Moral relativism is an attractive position, but also one that it is difficult to formulate. In this paper, we propose an alternative way of formulating moral relativism that locates the relativity of morality in the property that makes moral claims true. Such an approach, we believe, has significant advantages over other possible ways of formulating moral relativism. We conclude by considering ...

Relativism is one of the most tenacious theories about truth, with a pedigree as old as philosophy itself. Nearly as ancient is the chief criticism of relativism, namely the charge that the theory is self-refuting. This paper develops a logic of relativism that (1) illuminates the classic self-refutation charge and shows how to escape it; (2) makes rigorous the ideas of truth as relative and tr...

Epistemic relativism rejects the idea that claims can be assessed from a universally applicable, objective standpoint. It is greatly disdained because it suggests that the real ‘basis’ for our views is something fleeting, such as ‘‘the techniques of mass persuasion’’ (Thomas Kuhn 1970) or the determination of intellectuals to achieve ‘‘solidarity’’ (Rorty 1984) or ‘‘keep the conversation going’...