Monday, April 4, 2011
The Trouble with Relativism (with a historical aside about believing contradictions) - Anonymous
In thinking about what Nagel was trying to communicate with regard to subjectivism, he raises a familiar issue. It is often the case that subjectivists, no matter the subject, will dogmatically say that there is no objective way the world is. Yet, in defending the view of subjectivism, they take a very objective stance. This seems similar to the problem relativists have in their commitment to the idea that there is no true or false, no right or wrong. Obviously, the statement that "everything is relative" is itself proclaiming an unrelativistic "truth." This is why Nagel is trying to drive home the point that people who hold radically subjectivist views do not really understand what they are doing -- because holding those views is a kind of acknowledgement of the objective way the world is. Again, similarly, holding views of relativism, which are assertions of truth, is completely contradictory to the spirit of relativism. It seems to me, then, impossible to make any claims or assertions at all about the world being either subjective or relative. And perhaps if it is sort of logically impossible to assert a certain point of view, that might help guide us in considering the strength of that view. By "logically impossible" I mean the kind of fallacy like "p and not p." The conclusion "p and not p" can never be true. (By the way, I just googled whether the words "logical impossibility" can ever be used together and I see that this idea is actually controversial. Apparently, David Hume held that the impossible simply cannot be believed or conceived, but Moritz Schlick claimed that "while the merely practically impossible is still conceivable, the logically impossible, such as an explicit inconsistency, is simply unthinkable." Moreover "an opposite philosophical tradition, however, maintains that inconsistencies and logical impossibilities are thinkable, and sometimes believable too." Apparently, Hegel holds this view. Interesting.)
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I tend to agree with most of the body of this post, so I'm going to comment on the interesting historical note about whether contradictions are thinkable. This is indeed an interesting issue, though I fear it is difficult to tell when two thinkers really disagree on this issue, due to the difficulty in knowing what they mean when they say that something is, or isn't, thinkable. In one sense, I suppose that anything that is meaningful is thinkable. If that is what one means by "thinkable", then I am inclined to say that contradictions are thinkable. The reason is this: if sentence "p" is meaningful (or thinkable), then so is "not-p" (or, "it is not the case that p"). Moreover, given any two sentences p and q, each of which is meaningful, the conjunction of those sentence, namely: p and q, is also meaningful. The general principle here is that proper use of the truth functional connectives never takes meaningful (thinkable) sentences and turns them into non-meaningful things. But if that is true, then contradictions are meaningful. For, if p is, then so is not-p. But if those are both (independently) meaningful, so is p and not-p, which is, of course, a contradiction.
ReplyDeleteGranted, merely being meaningful might not be a very rich (or interesting) notion of thinkability. But my hope is that this spurs some more concrete thinking about thinkability. If it isn't mere meaningfulness, what is it?
What do you think?
Hmm, I wonder about logical impossibility. In some ways it seems to me as if one could logically think through and believe that something 'impossible' is possible, although, I guess that that would mean that whatever was thought actually was logically possible (excluding the possibility of logical fallacies, of course), just not something that had been experienced as being actual. That's not quite the same interpretation that was presented here, just something I thought I would add since I was thinking about it. =)
ReplyDeleteThanks, Naomi! I think there certainly is a sense in which one can think through an issue--even quite carefully--and end up believing something that is impossible, even in the logical sense. One way this can happen is that one can simply fail to perceive that a contradiction is implied by what one believes. I'm not sure this counts as "logically thinking through" something in your sense, but I think it satisfies many uses of that phrase.
ReplyDeleteA reply from Anonymous;
ReplyDeleteRegardless of "thinkability," "believability," or "meaningfulness," I wonder if there is any way to discern truth from logic. In other words, subjectivism and relativism are both obviously "believable" or there would not be so many who advocate for those views. So how to get at truth? Perhaps the fact that subjectivism and relativism are logically weak, if not outright unsound, might lend some help in considering the truth of those ideas. Again, any claim about the truth of subjectivism and relativism becomes an objective claim about the way the world is, which is the opposite of being subjective or relative. That fact might point the way that such a claim cannot be true. It is often very difficult to get to truth, or to discern untruth, so it would be interesting to imagine that one clue/tool may be logic.