On 'Male Chauvinist' and 'Relative Truth'

A reader comments:

I'm confused about a claim you make. You say: "Take 'male chauvinist.' As standardly used nowadays, this refers to a male who places an excessively high valuation on his sex vis-a-vis the opposite sex. So a male chauvinist is not a chauvinist, and 'male' functions as as an alienans adjective: it does not specify, but shifts, the sense of 'chauvinist.'"

I did a quick check at Merriam-Webster Online. It seems to me that when someone is called a male chauvinist, the second of the three senses of 'chauvinism' given by Webster's is meant, viz. 'undue partiality or attachment to a group or place to which one belongs or has belonged.' But if so, it seems that a male chauvinist is a chauvinist. Male chauvinism is one type of chauvinism. It is that type of 'undue partiality' shown to members of one's own sex.

Dictionaries record facts of actual usage even when this usage is a misusage. Their enterprise is descriptive rather than normative. The second sense you cite has arisen from a misuse of the term 'chauvinism' which had the original meaning of excessive attachment to one's country. Educated people know what the word means and people who misuse it display ignorance. It is telling that the sense you mention is not to be found in the OED.

As I pointed out, 'male chauvinist' is ambiguous as between i) male who is a chauvinist as Chauvin himself was, and ii) male who is inordinately partial to his sex in the way in which a chauvinist is inordinately partial to his country. In meaning (ii), a male chauvinist is not a chauvinist, and 'male' is an alienans adjective.

Will you grant me that words can be misused, and that even if a word is misused by the majority it is still a misuse? Consider 'millivolt.' There are people who think that a millivolt is a million volts. Not so: a millivolt is a thousandth of a volt. I say that no matter how many scientifically uneducated people misuse 'millivolt,' it is still a misuse. Same with 'light-year' which is a measure of distance, not of time. And so on.

I'm still unconvinced that the 'relative' of 'relative truth' functions as does 'artificial' in 'artificial leather'. You have said so a number of times but I have not found an argument for this.

I take it then that you grant me that 'artificial' shifts the sense of 'leather' and that there are not two kinds of leather, artificial and real. Artificial leather is not leather any more than faux marble is marble.

There are truths that are analytic and truths that are synthetic. There are truths that are a priori and truths that are a posteriori. There are truths that are contingent and truths that are necessary. All of that makes prima facie sense despite certain questions once can raise (e.g. Quine's cavils about the analytic/synthetic distinction.) But I claim that it makes no sense to speak of absolute truths and relative truths.

For what would a relative truth be? It would be a proposition that could be true for X but not true for Y (X being distinct from Y). Let the proposition be: Water is HO. The alethic relativist is prepared to say that this proposition is relatively true since it is true for Dalton, though not true for us. But now isn't it clear that relative truth is not a kind of truth but rather the property of being believed?

To put it another way, 'true' and 'true for' pick out distinct properties. For 'true' the following equivalence holds:

p is true iff p.

But one cannot say:

p is true-for-X iff p.

Here is another way to see the absurdity of relativism. If it was true in Dalton's day that water is HO but not true now, then water has changed its chemical composition — which is absurd.