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...

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’...

From Relative Truth to Finean Non-Factualism Alexander Jackson Abstract: This paper compares two ‘relativist’ theories about deliciousness: truth-relativism, and Kit Fine’s non-factualism about a subject-matter. Contemporary truth-relativism is presented as a linguistic thesis; its metaphysical underpinning is often neglected. I distinguish three views about the obtaining of worldly states of a...

The paper contrasts two domains of school education, natural science and citizenship education (as a paradigm of “hard” and “soft” subjects), with respect to their epistemological and ethical foundations. A sharp contrast between their associated world-views within the school community is accentuated at the outset. The epistemological shortcomings inherent in both are subsequently explored, and...

Social constructivists argue that what we call “nature” is far less universal and extrahuman than generally assumed. Yet this argument has been vigorously attacked by some natural scientists and other scholars due to what they perceive as its dangerous flirtation with relativism. I introduce this debate by reference to a recent controversy over the concept of wilderness, an important icon of na...

In “Epistemic Relativism,” Mark Kalderon defends a view that has become increasingly popular across various academic disciplines. He wrote his article in response to Paul Boghossian’s book Fear of Knowledge, in which epistemic relativism is criticized and dismissed as incoherent. Kalderon argues that Boghossian does not accurately characterize epistemic relativism resulting in a hasty dismissal...