The Reasonableness of Relativism

Abstract

I have for some time defended a form of relativism which, though formulated explicitly in the context of certain aesthetic concerns (chiefly, regarding the interpretation and appreciation of artworks), I suggested could be applied without much adjustment to a wide variety of judgments and conceptual schemes for instance, moral judgments, ontological analyses of what there is, characterizations and interpretations of human history and human action, and explanatory theories of intentionally specified phenomena. There are ways of applying relativism promisingly even to those domains that have been most stubbornly extensional or have claimed apodictic certainty and universal scope for instance, regarding the phenomena and causal laws of the physical sciences, and transcendental arguments. These and other applications appear reasonable at least to the extent that we cannot provide a compelling basis for demarcating realist and idealist accounts of the sciencesI or for proposing a criterion of the analytic/synthetic distinction among natural languages or for eliminating historicist constraints on theory and inquiry. Now, Michael Wreen has charged' that my theory, a moderate or robust relativism': (A) is not consistent, (B) is not moderate, and (C) entails skepticism. I am grateful to Wreen for an occasion to clarify the sense in which none of these charges may be made to stick hence, that relativism is a conceptually respectable option that fits our intuitions rather neatly in a variety of contexts