But since you're ending it without addressing practically anything I've said, I can't help but read this as a concession from you. Very well, I accept your surrender.
The people for whom you plan to intercede with the gospel of relativism don't want it. They aren't satisfied saying that they believe in gods and that's as good as a fact is going to get for them. They don't believe you, Tommy, and neither they nor we are going to fall down and worship at the feet of your dizzying intellect.
Now first off, only Rorty is a relativist, they others describe relativism.
- "Reason is whatever the norms of the local culture believe it to be". (Hilary Putnam, Realism and Reason: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (Cambridge, 1983), p. 235.)
- "The choice between competing theories is arbitrary, since there is no such thing as objective truth." (Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol. II (London, 1963), p. 369f.)
- "There is no unique truth, no unique objective reality" (Ernest Gellner, Relativism and the Social Sciences (Cambridge, 1985), p. 84.)
- "There is no substantive overarching framework in which radically different and alternative schemes are commensurable" (Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia, 1985), pp. 11-12.)
- "There is nothing to be said about either truth or rationality apart from descriptions of the familiar procedures of justification which a given society—ours—uses in one area of enquiry" (Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 23.)[
https://www.iep.utm.edu/cog-rel/#H3
That is it. That is cognitive relativism.
And now I will answer you about standards. There is no standard unless it is believed in. That also goes for philosophy. There is a practical proficiency - can you use logic and analyze different POV and compare them, but that is only the current standard in this culture.
Standard understanding of facts.
A reductive physicalist believes that the mental is nothing both the physical and calls that a fact. To her, her belief is a fact and other beliefs are beliefs.
A non-reductive physicalist believes that the mental is caused by the physical, but can't be reduced to the physical and calls that a fact. To her, her belief is a fact and other beliefs are beliefs.
An religious idealist could say and believe that reality is from God and there is nothing physical and call that a fact. To her, her belief is a fact and other beliefs are beliefs.
That has nothing to do with the word "fact" in particular, it could be "proof" or "truth" versus "false" or "wrong".
(1) The truth-value of any statement is always relative to some particular standpoint;
(2) No standpoint is metaphysically privileged over all others.
The problem that we all face, is how to explain differences. How come that you and I can in effect claim something different about reality, which when compared amounts to a contradiction.
That is not unique to religious people. That same happens in the case of a strong and weak atheist as with us two. One of the beliefs is false as per the second classical law of logic/thought. Non(P AND non-P) or what ever notation you prefer. But the law of non-contradiction doesn't state that the other position is true. In fact both can be false.
So how come that for all different worldviews for what science, religion, philosophy, ethics, politics, woo, CT and so on can do and which are in effect contradictions, that you should be special or that I should be that?
In effect the vast majority if indeed not all humans hold claims about facts, which can't be facts.
How do you explain how that is possible? How come a given human can be born, grown up, get children and die of old age and hold one or more claim about facts, which aren't facts?
That is the challenge we both face, when we try to explain the universe.
The problem with being wrong, is that in some cases it doesn't matter, because the person claimed to be wrong, has a different worldview.
So here is a series of versions of wrong or false, which are common.
The physical ones, that if I am wrong, I will die as a candidate to a Darwin Award.
The real ones, that if I am wrong, I am not in reality.
The moral ones, that I am amoral in a sense, because I have a different understanding of morality.
Wrong comes in 3 versions. Wrong per observation, wrong per reason and wrong per morality.
And now since I am a philosopher I have checked these 3 versions, but just for myself, but in general. And none of them hold in a strong sense for all humans and that includes you and I.
So here it is for "right" and "wrong". No human is neither the one or other in any physical sense. A human can be treated as "right" or "wrong" or feel "right" or "wrong", but it is cognitive, mental, non-physical, relative to a given belief about "right" and "wrong".
Take 2 other humans than you and I. Are there other humans than us? Yes, could we find e.g. a communist and a libertarian? Yes. Could we find two where the each claim that the other is wrong? Yes.
So how do we explain that in a general sense using reason, logic and evidence? What makes me a philosopher is that I can do that in a general sense.
- Observation: You can't observe wrong, you can't see it nor does it have any other sensory properties. It has no length, volume or any other measurable property. You don't have any international scientific measurement standard for it and you have no scientific instrument to calibrate and measure with.
- General causality: If one person by saying it can cause another person to become wrong, then how come it only works in one direction and not the other?
- Logic: As a contradiction one of the claims are false(logic), but that doesn't mean that the other is true.
- Special pleading: If someone doesn't have justification for a special claim, we don't accept it. So if you don't accept that some person is wrong simply by it being claimed by someone else, how come you accept that when you are involved. What makes you that special and not others? That is the special pleading involved in being wrong.
- Culture: We know of words, which are folk-beliefs. The word “god” is such a word. “Wrong” is no different. We all learn it growing up and incorporate into our thinking, just as some with “god”.
- A property of a process and not a thing: All cases of “wrong” have in common that they are a result of cognition; i.e. a mental process. A belief itself is neither right or wrong. It becomes right or wrong as a result of cognition.
So in practice I don't believe in right or wrong as some people do. And I am not dead, I am still a part of reality and I have morality and ethics. I am just different than you and so are you in reverse. All of this I have learned by reading about it by other humans. No of this is homegrown.
As for metaphysics, if your metaphysics was a strong brute physical fact for all of the universe, then individual differences would not be possible. The laws of the universe are fix for both regularities and variations. So we share some regularities and are variations in other senses.
The idea that there is one methodology which can account for all processes to be point of being the same with reason, logic and evidence “died” in philosophy after Descartes. We then got skepticism and moral and cognitive relativism back over time.
So all of the cognitive words including facts, real, wrong and what not have no universal standard like psychics.
There is no one standard in philosophy, there are 3:
“The rational, abstract, and methodical consideration of reality as a whole
or of fundamental dimensions of human existence and experience.” That is 2.
Then there is “The rational, abstract, and methodical consideration of reality as a whole
and of fundamental dimensions of human existence and experience.” That is 3.
The 2 first ones are excluding dualism, reality is one or the other. The last one in inclusive dualism, but not holism. Reality is the set of different necessary, but not sufficient parts and the is no one universal standard for all. You can either treat reality as real or unreal; or similar and different.
To some I am unreal, to others I am real. You are real to me, yet different for our worldviews and I accept that.
And no, I don't concede, I will accept a truce, but if you want to win, I fight with words.
I am so special according to some, than I am not even a part of reality. But I don't get, how come that they keep pointing that out, because that presumes that I am a part of reality.
He is arguing for no standards to be applied to himself but he gets to set the standards for everyone else...
