Maverick Philosopher

Assuming that God exists, could the atheist's denial of God be reasonable?

I say Yes to the title question; Greg Bahnsen, glossing Cornelius Van Til, says No. 

Yet it should be clear even to the atheist that if the Christian God exists, it is 'reasonable' to believe in him. (Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til's Apologetic: Readings and Analysis, P & R Publishing, 1998, p. 124, fn. 108, emphasis added.)

This is the exact opposite of clear. Atheists believe that there in no God, and thus that the Christian God does not exist, and the philosophically sophisticated among them have argued against the reasonableness of believing that the Christian God exists using both 'logical' and 'probabilistic' arguments.  So how could it be clear even to the atheist that if the Christian God exists, it is reasonable to believe that God exists?  Bahnsen's claim makes no sense.  It makes no sense to say to an atheist who sincerely thinks that he has either proven, or rendered probable, the nonexistence of  God that it is nonetheless reasonable for him to believe that God exists even if in fact, and unbeknownst to the atheist, God does exist.

Bahnsen is missing something very important: although truth is absolute, reasonableness is relative.  This is why an atheist can find it unreasonable to believe that the Christian God exists even if it is true that the Christian God exists.  Let me explain.

I do not need to spend many words on the absoluteness of truth. I've made the case numerous times.  Here for example. In any case, whatever  presuppositionalists  such as Bahnsen think of the details of my arguments, they will agree with my conclusion that truth is absolute. So that is no bone of contention between us.

Reasonableness or rational acceptability is something else again.  It is not absolute but can vary from person to person, generation to generation, social class to social class, historical epoch to historical epoch, and in other ways.  Let's quickly run through a few familiar examples.

1) Falling bodies. It 'stands to reason' that the heavier an object the faster it falls if dropped from a height. It's 'logical' using this word the way many ordinary folk often do.  Wasn't Aristotle, who maintained as much in his Physics, a reasonable man? But we now know that the rate of free fall (in a vacuum) is the same in a given gravitational field regardless of the weight of the object in that field.  So what was reasonable to Aristotle and his entire epoch was not reasonable to Galileo and later epochs. Rational acceptability is relative.

2) For the ancients, water was an element. For John Dalton (English chemist, early 19th cent.) it was a compound, HO. For us it is H₂O. Has water changed over the centuries? No. Truth is non-relative. What it is reasonable to believe has changed. Rational acceptability is relative.

3) Additivity of velocities. It 'stands to reason' that if I am on a train moving in a straight line with velocity v₁  and I throw a ball in the direction of the train's travel with velocity v₂, then the velocity of the ball will be v₁ + v₂. It also 'stands to reason' that this holds across the board no matter the speed of the objects in question. But this belief, although reasonable pre-Einstein, is not reasonable post-Einstein. Once again we see that rational acceptability is relative.

4) Sets and their members. Suppose S is a set and T is one of S's proper subsets. Then every member of T is a member of S, but not every member of S is a member of T. Now suppose someone comes along and asserts that there are sets such that one is a proper subset of another and yet both have the same number of members.  Many if not most  people would find this assertion a highly unreasonable thing to say.  They might exclaim that it makes no bloody sense at all. And yet those of us who have read Georg Cantor find it reasonable to maintain.  If N is the set of natural numbers, and E is the set of even numbers, and O is the set of odd numbers, then E and O are disjoint (have no members in common), and yet each is a proper subset of N which the same cardinality (number of members) as N.

5) When I was a very young boy I thought that, since I am right-handed, my right hand and arm had to be weaker than my left hand and arm because I use my right hand and arm more. Was that reasonable for me to believe way back then? Yes! I had a reason to hold the empirically false belief. Of course, my little-boy reasoning was based on a false analogy. If you flex a piece of metal back and forth you weaken it. If you a flex a muscle back and forth you strengthen it. Use it and use it up?  No, use it or lose it!

Examples are easily multiplied beyond all necessity. The point, I trust, is clear: while truth is absolute, rational acceptability is relative. What is true may or may not be reasonable, and what is reasonable may or not be true. 

What Bahnsen and the boys appear to be assuming is that both truth and reasonableness (rational acceptability) are absolute.   Well they are -- but only for God, only from God's point of view.  God is the IRS, the ideally rational subject. He knows every truth and he knows every truth without possibility of mistake. So for God every truth, being a known truth, is in accordance with divine reason, and everything in accordance with divine reason is true.  But we do not occupy the divine point of view. To put it sarcastically, only a 'presupper' does.

But of course neither we nor the presuppositionalists occupy the divine point of view. They only think they do.  But that conceit is the whole essence of presuppositionalism, is it not?  

Wokery and the Double Denial

Substack latest.

It is not unreasonable to maintain that there is no God and that nature alone exists. But suppose you take it a step further and deny nature as well. Then you are in the precincts of 'woke' lunacy.  Call it the Double Denial. On the Double Denial, everything is a social construct, including the social constructors. Could they too be social constructs? How?

Related: Gender Ideology and its Consequences

Einstein, Relativity, and Relativism

Substack latest.

Tulsi Gabbard Defends Objective Truth . . .

. . . at a rally to end child mutilation. Gabbard's  three-minute address begins at 19:30 and runs until 22:42. "Without recognition that there is such a thing as truth, there are no boundaries in our society, which why we are where we are."

That something so obvious needs to be stated explicitly shows how far we have fallen.  But precisely because we have fallen so far, Tulsi Gabbard is to be applauded for having courageously stated it. That it should take courage to state something so obvious is yet another index of our social decline.

And now, if you can spare ten minutes, listen to Chloe Cole's story at 47:15-57:50. 

True For and True

There are expressions that should be avoided by those who aim to think clearly and to promote clear thinking in others. Expressions of the form, ‘true for X’ are prime examples. In a logically sanitized world, the following would be verboten: ‘true for me,’ ‘true for you,’ ‘true for Jews,’ ‘true for Arabs,’ ‘true for the proletariat,’ ‘true for the bourgeoisie,’ ‘true for our historical epoch,’ and the like. Such semantic prophylaxis would disallow such sentences as ‘That may be true for you but it is not true for me.’

The trouble with expressions like these is that they blur the distinction between truth and belief. To say that a proposition p is true for S is just to say that S believes or accepts or affirms that p. This is because one cannot believe a proposition without believing it to be true. Of course, S’s believing that p, and thus S’s believing that p is true, does not entail that p is true. This is obvious if anything is. There are true beliefs and false beliefs, and a person’s holding a belief does not make it true. If you want to say that S believes that p, then say that. But don’t say that p is true for S unless you want to give aid and comfort to alethic relativism, the false and pernicious doctrine that truth (Gr. aletheia) is relative.  'Woke' folk love such obfuscatory expressions, but you don't want to give aid and comfort to them, do you?


A belief is always someone’s belief. This relativity of beliefs to believers explains why one person’s believing that p and another person’s believing that ~p is unproblematic. But truth is non-relative, or absolute. This is why it cannot be the case that both p and ~p. If you have truth, you have something absolute. There is no such thing as relative truth. Relative truth is not truth any more than negative growth is growth or a decoy duck is a duck or artificial leather is leather or faux marble is marble. In the expression, ‘relative truth,’ ‘relative’ functions as an alienans (as opposed to a specifying) adjective: it alienates or shifts the sense of ‘truth.’ Just as it makes no sense to say that there are two kinds of leather, real and artificial, it makes no sense to say that there are two kinds of truth, relative and absolute. Suppose someone sets out to list the kinds of leather. “Well, you got your horse leather, cow leather, alligator leather, artificial leather, real leather, artificially real leather, naugahyde, Barcalounger covering . . . .” One can see what is wrong with this.

The word ‘absolute’ scares some people. But the only reason I use it is to undo the semantic mischief caused by ‘relative truth’ and ‘true for X.’ In a logically perfect world, it would suffice to say ‘true’ or ‘leather.’ There would be no need to say ‘absolutely true’ or ‘real leather’ – “This here jacket a mahn is REAL leather, boy . . . .” If ‘relative’ and ‘artificial’ are (in the above examples) alienating adjectives, then ‘absolute’ and ‘real’ could be called de-alienating: they restore their rightful senses to words that semantic bandits divested them of.

One reason ‘absolute’ scares people is that it suggests dogmatism and infallibilism. Thus if I say that truth is absolute, some people think I am saying that the propositions I affirm as true I affirm as unquestionably or undeniably true. But that’s to confuse an ontological statement about the nature of truth with an epistemological statement about the way in which I accept the propositions I accept. It is consistent to maintain that truth is absolute while being a fallibilist, where a fallibilist holds that either no proposition held to be true, or no member of some restricted class of propositions held to be true, is known with certainty.

In sum, my point is that ‘true for X’ should be avoided since it gives aid and comfort to the illusion that truth is relative. But why exactly is that an illusion? I’ll leave that question for a separate post.

Student Relativism

From my first weblog, dated 28 September 2004:

Student relativism  is not so much a philosophical theory as a form of psychic insulation. An outgrowth of adolescent rebelliousness, it says: "You can't teach me anything because truth is relative; we all have our own truths."

Not being a philosophical theory, Student Relativism cannot be refuted in the usual ways. It is a pathology that must be outgrown. Unfortunately, we live in a society in which adolescence in many extends into the twenties, thirties, and beyond. Some remain life-long adolescents in their mentality. Many if not most of these characters are found on the Left.

A Relativist Cannot Rationally Object to the Imposition of One's Values on Others

Here, at MavPhil Strictly Philosophical

Narratives and the Left

Leftists love narratives because a narrative needn't be true to be a narrative. Their assessment criteria are identity-tribal rather than logical.  A good narrative is a coherent  story that enhances the tribe's power. Whether true or false is not to the point, the point being power. Truth is not a leftist value. It is not a norm that constrains their speaking and thinking.   That is not to say that leftists don't sometimes speak the truth; they do when it serves their purposes. They don't when it doesn't.  Truth for a leftist has a merely instrumental value, not an absolute value.  

Some have the chutzpah to deny that there is truth, which is different from admitting that there is and denying its value.  There is no truth, they hold, only power. If you ask them whether it is true that there is no truth, only power, they dismiss the very question with a power move.  They either have no intellectual conscience or they suppress it. They enforce the power-is-all doctrine which is not admitted to be a doctrine.  A doctrine is a teaching, and a teaching can be true or false; but then a transcendental norm comes back in, the norm of truth. So the 'consistent' leftist cannot allow himself to think; he must power his way through.

Denying truth and its value, they deny logical consistency and its value.  For consistency is defined in terms of truth. Propositions are collectively logically consistent just in case they can all be true.  So you can't get through to a leftist who maintains both that there is no truth, only power, but then complains that racist whites dominate blacks.  There is no objecting  to that if the world at bottom is just power centers battling it out.  There can't be anything wrong with whites dominating blacks if all is power in the end.  If all is power, and I have the power to enslave you, and the power to ward of any unpleasant (to me) consequences of my enslaving you, then why shouldn't I? If all is power, then there is nothing beyond power to which appeal can be made. If might makes right, then there is no right.  It is inconsistent to hold that all is power and that some of its deployments are evil.  If all is power, there is no good and evil. Any attempt to reduce good and evil to power terms results in the elimination of good and evil. But, as I said, you can't reach hard-core leftists  because they will just make another power move and dismiss the question of consistency as they dismissed the question of truth.

If there is right irreducible to might, that right is impotent here below if every broker in this broken world is a power broker. Only those spiritually sensitive to right and its claims can guide might in the ways of right, but such sensitive souls do not flourish in this mighty brutal world.

Truth, Fallibilism, Objectivism, and Dogmatism

It is important not to confuse the question of the fallibility of our cognitive faculties, including reason, with the question whether there is truth.  Truth is one thing, fallibility another. A fallibilist need not be a truth-denier.  One can be both a fallibilist and an upholder of truth.  What's more, one ought to be both a fallibilist about some, but not all, classes of propositions, and an upholder of the existence of  truth. Indeed, if one is a fallibilist, one who admits that we  sometimes go wrong in matters of knowledge and belief, then then one must also admit that we sometimes go right, which is to say that fallibilism presupposes the existence of truth. If we can be wrong about how Epstein met his end, then we can be right.

I spoke above of truth sans phrase, without qualification. There is no need to speak of objective or of absolute truth since truth by its very nature is objective and absolute.  Talk of relative truth is incoherent.  Of course, what I accept as true or believe to be true may well be different from what you accept as true or take to be true.  But that does not show that truth is relative; it shows that we differ in our beliefs. Suppose you believe that Hillary Clinton ran a child molestation ring out of a Washington, D. C pizza joint. I don't believe that.  You accept a proposition that I reject. But the proposition itself -- that Hillary ran a molestation ring, etc. -- is either true or false independently of anyone's belief state.

So don't confuse being true with being-believed-by-someone-or-other.

But what about an omnisicent being? Doesn't such a being believe all and only true propositions?  I should think so if the omniscient being has beliefs and has them  in the way we do. But does he believe the truths because they are true, or are they true because he believes them?  This is a nice little puzzle reminiscent of Plato's Euthryphro Paradox, to be found in the eponymous dialog.  (Indeed it has the same structure as that paradox.)  Note that the puzzle cannot get off the ground without the distinction between truth and belief -- which is my point, or one of them.

(Like I said, it's all footnotes to Plato, but it's not all from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains.)

Just as a fallibilist is not a truth-denier, a truth-affirmer is not an infallibilist or 'dogmatist' in one sense of this word.  To maintain that there is objective truth is not to maintain that one is in possession of it in particular cases.  The upholder of the existence of truth need not be a dogmatist. One of the sources of the view that truth is subjective or relative is aversion to dogmatic people and dogmatic claims.

But if you reject the existence of objective truth on the basis of an aversion to dogmatic people and claims, then you are not thinking clearly.

It is important not to confuse the question of the fallibility of our cognitive faculties, including reason, with the question whether there is truth.  Truth is one thing, fallibility another. A fallibilist need not be a truth-denier.  One can be both a fallibilist and an upholder of truth.  What's more, one ought to be both a fallibilist about some, but not all, classes of propositions, and an upholder of the existence of  truth. Indeed, if one is a fallibilist, one who admits that we  sometimes go wrong in matters of knowledge and belief, then then one must also admit that we sometimes go right, which is to say that fallibilism presupposes the existence of truth. If we can be wrong about how Epstein met his end, then we can be right.

I spoke above of truth sans phrase, without qualification. There is no need to speak of objective or of absolute truth since truth by its very nature is objective and absolute.  Talk of relative truth is incoherent.  Of course, what I accept as true or believe to be true may well be different from what you accept as true or take to be true.  But that does not show that truth is relative; it shows that we differ in our beliefs. Suppose you believe that Hillary Clinton ran a child molestation ring out of a Washington, D. C pizza joint. I don't believe that.  You accept a proposition that I reject. But the proposition itself -- that Hillary ran a molestation ring, etc. -- is either true or false independently of anyone's belief state.

So don't confuse being true with being-believed-by-someone-or-other.

But what about an omnisicent being? Doesn't such a being believe all and only true propositions?  I should think so if the omniscient being has beliefs and has them  in the way we do. But does he believe the truths because they are true, or are they true because he believes them?  This is a nice little puzzle reminiscent of Plato's Euthryphro Paradox, to be found in the eponymous dialog.  (Indeed it has the same structure as that paradox.)  Note that the puzzle cannot get off the ground without the distinction between truth and belief -- which is my point, or one of them.

(Like I said, it's all footnotes to Plato, but it's not all from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains.)

Just as a fallibilist is not a truth-denier, a truth-affirmer is not an infallibilist or 'dogmatist' in one sense of this word.  To maintain that there is objective truth is not to maintain that one is in possession of it in particular cases.  The upholder of the existence of truth need not be a dogmatist. One of the sources of the view that truth is subjective or relative is aversion to dogmatic people and dogmatic claims.

But if you reject the existence of objective truth on the basis of an aversion to dogmatic people and claims, then you are not thinking clearly.

One of the Ways Moral Relativism Defeats Itself

Bruce Bawer in Death by Entitlement quotes an NYT commenter:

One reader comment, a “Times Pick,” read, in part, as follows: “A great story and an admirable couple. But those who condemn their killers as evil probably fail to recognize that ISIS fighters see themselves as being on the side of good. For them, these young Americans were an embodiment of the Great Satan....Instead of bandying around moral absolutes, perhaps we should recognize that good and evil are relative categories, dependent on your culture and your values.”

Suppose that good and evil are not absolute  but are culturally relative. Why should we recognize this?  And why shouldn't we impose our Western values on benighted jihadis?

For the argument in full dress, see A Relativist Cannot Rationally Object to the Imposition of One's Values on Others.

Scott Adams' Starting Point

Here:

For new readers of this blog, my starting point is the understanding that human brains did not evolve to show us reality. We aren’t that smart. Instead, our brains create little movies in our heads, and yours can be completely different from mine. We see that situation now. Half the country thinks President Trump is well on his way to becoming a Hitler-like dictator. But many other Americans think Trump is an effective business person with good intentions. They can’t both be right.

"They can't both be right." True, but how could Adams possibly know this if the human brain does not "show us reality"?  According to the "little movie" in Adams' head, Trump cannot be both Hitlerian and non-Hitlerian. But there is this other guy, Shmadams, in whose head a "completely different little movie" plays according to which Trump can be both Hitlerian and non-Hitlerian.

So I tax Adams with the following dilemma. If he is justified in his claim that "They can't both be right," then our brains sometimes "show us reality" and Adams' theory refutes itself. If, on the other hand, Adams' theory is true, then he is not justified in his assertion that "They can't both be right."  Nor is he justified in believing that his theory is true.

But I hasten to add that Adams' silly speculation about the brain and reality in no way detracts from his insights into Trump's modus operandi.  

He understands that Trump is a negotiator who opens the bidding with an extreme offer so as to be in a position to dial it back to something reasonable.  In this way he manages to mollify, to some extent at least, the extremists on his Right and those on his Left.

Every reasonable person must grant that there must be some restrictions placed on whom to allow to immigrate. Trump will alienate Muslims and leftists but he will also insure that what has already happened in Europe won't happen here.

You lefties need to cool your jets, to use an old '70s expression, and give the man a chance. The stroke you prevent may be your own.  The more extreme and thuggish your protests, the more asinine your Hitler comparisons, the more you will discredit yourselves in the eyes of the sane.

Does Deflationism Rule Out Relativism?

This post floats the suggestion that deflationism about truth is inconsistent with relativism about truth.  Not that one should be a deflationist.  But it would be interesting if deflationism entailed the nonrelativity of truth.

There is a sense in which deflationary theories of truth deny the very existence of truth. For what these theories deny is that anything of a unitary and substantial nature corresponds to the predicate 'true' or 'is true.' To get a feel for the issue, start with the platitude that some of the things people say are true and some of the things people say are not true. People who say that Hitler died by his own hand in the Spring of 1945 say something true, while those who say that no Jews were gassed at Auschwitz say something that is not true. Given the platitude that there are truths and untruths, classically-inclined philosophers will inquire: What is it that all and only the truths have in common in virtue of which they are truths? What is truth? What is the property of being-true? 

A deflationist is one who denies that there is any property of truth, or at least, any property of truth robust enough to support a substantive traditional-type inquiry into its nature. Truth is either not a property, or it is a rather 'thin' property about which nothing very interesting can be said. An example of an interesting theory would be one that identifies truth with some epistemic/doxastic property such as warranted assertibility, or rational acceptability, or rational acceptability at the ideal limit of inquiry, or with a relation of coherence among beliefs, or with a relation of correspondence to facts, or with what is conducive to our flourishing (the Jamesian good by way of belief), or with that which enhances the feeling of power, or with what God decides, etc. For the classically-inclined, truth is a deep topic; for the deflationist it is very thin beer.

The deflationist, then, is denying that truth has a unitary and substantial nature into which it would make sense to inquire. There is no Truth with a capital 'T.' Does it follow that the deflationist is committed to relativism about truth? Must he say that there is no such thing as objective correctness?

It seems not. For although the deflationist denies Truth, he need not deny truths. There are truths galore on the views of prominent deflationists; it is just that they have nothing non-linguistic in common in virtue of which they are true. The deflationist tendency is to say that there is no more to Truth than is captured in such equivalences as:

Sentence 'S' (in language L) is true iff S

and

The proposition that p is true iff p.

One version of deflationism is Quine's disquotationalism according to which the function of the truth-predicate is to remove the quotation marks from a quoted sentence. Thus "'Snow is white' is true" says exactly what 'Snow is white' says, namely, that snow is white. And "'Grass is green' is true" says exactly what 'Grass is green' says, namely, that grass is green. And so on. There is nothing common to these sentences in virtue of which they are true. 'True' is just a device of disquotation; it does not pick out a genuine property.

It is easy to see that there is nothing here that is inconsistent with the absolutness of snow's being white or of grass's being green, etc. What's more interesting is that deflationary theories of truth would seem to rule out alethic relativism. Suppose a Nietzschean maintains that truth is the property of being power-enhancing, a property of those beliefs that enhance the power of the one who holds them. Deflationism rules out this substantive theory of truth along with every other substantive theory of truth. For if deflationism is true, then Truth has no nature; it is in a sense nothing at all. As such, it cannot be identified with the property of being power-enhancing. 

This looks to be a general result. For truth to be relative, it would have to be identified with some relative property such as acceptability or rational acceptability, or rational acceptability by some ideally situated cognizers, or whatever. But such an identification could be made only if truth has an analyzable nature. On deflationism, however, truth lacks a nature. So truth on deflationism is non-relative. Indeed, this seems to be a consequence of the above equivalence schemata. For the schemata imply that every proposition, if true, is true simpliciter, which rules out any proposition's being true-for-X, for some relativizing factor X.

To sum up.

No deflationary theory of truth is a substantive theory of truth.  All relativistic theories are substantive theories.  Ergo, no deflationary theory of truth is a relativistic theory of truth.

Related articles

Against Historical Relativism: Adorno on What is No Longer Believable After Auschwitz

Einstein, Relativity, and Relativism

Nietzsche, Truth, and Power

A Question About Alethic Relativism

This post floats the suggestion that deflationism about truth is inconsistent with relativism about truth.  Not that one should be a deflationist.  But it would be interesting if deflationism entailed the nonrelativity of truth.

There is a sense in which deflationary theories of truth deny the very existence of truth. For what these theories deny is that anything of a unitary and substantial nature corresponds to the predicate 'true' or 'is true.' To get a feel for the issue, start with the platitude that some of the things people say are true and some of the things people say are not true. People who say that Hitler died by his own hand in the Spring of 1945 say something true, while those who say that no Jews were gassed at Auschwitz say something that is not true. Given the platitude that there are truths and untruths, classically-inclined philosophers will inquire: What is it that all and only the truths have in common in virtue of which they are truths? What is truth? What is the property of being-true? 

A deflationist is one who denies that there is any property of truth, or at least, any property of truth robust enough to support a substantive traditional-type inquiry into its nature. Truth is either not a property, or it is a rather 'thin' property about which nothing very interesting can be said. An example of an interesting theory would be one that identifies truth with some epistemic/doxastic property such as warranted assertibility, or rational acceptability, or rational acceptability at the ideal limit of inquiry, or with a relation of coherence among beliefs, or with a relation of correspondence to facts, or with what is conducive to our flourishing (the Jamesian good by way of belief), or with that which enhances the feeling of power, or with what God decides, etc. For the classically-inclined, truth is a deep topic; for the deflationist it is very thin beer.

The deflationist, then, is denying that truth has a unitary and substantial nature into which it would make sense to inquire. There is no Truth with a capital 'T.' Does it follow that the deflationist is committed to relativism about truth? Must he say that there is no such thing as objective correctness?

It seems not. For although the deflationist denies Truth, he need not deny truths. There are truths galore on the views of prominent deflationists; it is just that they have nothing non-linguistic in common in virtue of which they are true. The deflationist tendency is to say that there is no more to Truth than is captured in such equivalences as:

Sentence 'S' (in language L) is true iff S

and

The proposition that p is true iff p.

One version of deflationism is Quine's disquotationalism according to which the function of the truth-predicate is to remove the quotation marks from a quoted sentence. Thus "'Snow is white' is true" says exactly what 'Snow is white' says, namely, that snow is white. And "'Grass is green' is true" says exactly what 'Grass is green' says, namely, that grass is green. And so on. There is nothing common to these sentences in virtue of which they are true. 'True' is just a device of disquotation; it does not pick out a genuine property.

It is easy to see that there is nothing here that is inconsistent with the absolutness of snow's being white or of grass's being green, etc. What's more interesting is that deflationary theories of truth would seem to rule out alethic relativism. Suppose a Nietzschean maintains that truth is the property of being power-enhancing, a property of those beliefs that enhance the power of the one who holds them. Deflationism rules out this substantive theory of truth along with every other substantive theory of truth. For if deflationism is true, then Truth has no nature; it is in a sense nothing at all. As such, it cannot be identified with the property of being power-enhancing. 

This looks to be a general result. For truth to be relative, it would have to be identified with some relative property such as acceptability or rational acceptability, or rational acceptability by some ideally situated cognizers, or whatever. But such an identification could be made only if truth has an analyzable nature. On deflationism, however, truth lacks a nature. So truth on deflationism is non-relative. Indeed, this seems to be a consequence of the above equivalence schemata. For the schemata imply that every proposition, if true, is true simpliciter, which rules out any proposition's being true-for-X, for some relativizing factor X.

To sum up.

No deflationary theory of truth is a substantive theory of truth.  All relativistic theories are substantive theories.  Ergo, no deflationary theory of truth is a relativistic theory of truth.

A Question About Alethic Relativism

Vlastimil V. inquires:

When someone says that (R) truth is relative,

a) ... what's the most clear way to understand R?

I suppose he means something else than that people disagree, also something else than that truth is seldom certain.

b) ... what's the most clear way to criticize R?

BV:  (R) is a substantive and highly controversial thesis about the nature of truth.  So it is not to be confused with the Moorean fact or datum that different people often have different beliefs about one and the same topic.  Nor is it to be confused with any epistemological thesis about the knowledge of truth such as the thesis that nothing is known with certainty.  For this latter thesis is consistent with truth being absolute.  Fallibilism and absolutism are consistent.  And of course, to hold as I do that truth is absolute (nonrelative) is not to hold that every truth is necessary.  If a proposition is true, then it is absolutely true whether it is contingent or necessary.  No matter how paltry the proposition -- I had gyro meat with my eggs this morning -- if true, then absolutely true.

Note that I would not speak, redundantly, of absolute truth were it not for the mischief caused by those who speak, incoherently, of relative truth.  I would simply speak of truth.  Truth is truth.  There is no such animal as relative truth.

VV: Suppose the alethic relativist is fine acknowledging that, given R, (R1) R itself is a relative truth -- as well as R1 (or any further meta-claim R2, R3, etc.). Once you provided an interesting retort: the alethic relativist "cannot say that ... nonrelativism is only relatively true. If he said that, he would be assuming that relativism is nonrelatively true ..." I don't follow this implication, so I would appreciate your further elaboration.

BV:  If (R) is true, then it is either absolutely true or relatively true.  If the former, then self-refererential inconsistency and self-refutation. So the relativist is forced to retreat, on pain of inconsistency, to (RR): It is relatively true that every truth is relative.  But then I object that this cannot have any general or global application or relevance.  "Fine, truth is relative for you and your pals, but this has nothing to do with me, and so I may reasonably ignore your quirky local view."  

The point here is that the relative relativist cannot exclude the nonrelativist view: he must admit that it is possible that nonrelativism (NR) be nonrelatively true.  But then the relative relativist seems to fall into contradiction inasmuch as he must embrace both limbs of the following inconsistent dyad:

It is possible that (NR) be true in every locality
It is impossible that (NR) be true in every locality.

Our relative relativist must embrace the first limb since he cannot logically exclude the possibility of the truth of (NR).  And he must embrace the second limb because (NR) and (RR) cannot both be true in the relative relativist's locality.

The relative relativist confuses truth with local understanding.  The relative relativist is a slippery fellow. It is not clear what he is up to, though one senses that he is up to no good.  Is he simply changing the subject by speaking of local understanding rather than truth? Is he making an eliminativist move by denying that there is truth?  Is he trying to reduce truth to local understanding?  These are all dead ends.

VV:  Also, once you wrote: "The aletheic relativist either asserts his thesis (R) as absolutely true or as relatively true. If the former, his thesis is self-refuting. If the latter, then his thesis avoids self-contradiction only to face a dilemma: either relative-truth is the same as the property of being-believed, or it is not. If the former, then the relativity of truth boils down to an uninteresting triviality. If the latter, then it remains wholly unclear what could be meant by the property of relative-truth, and the thesis (R) perishes of semantic indeterminacy."

What I'm wondering here about is whether the alethic relativist really cannot specify R non-trivially yet consistently.

BV: The following is an uninteresting triviality: one and the same proposition can be believed by one person but not believed by another. Let the proposition be: Hillary lied about Benghazi.  Speaking loosely, once could say that the proposition is true-for Tom but not true-for Chelsea.  This sloppy way of talking suggests that to be true = to be believed by someone.   Now if the property of being true = the property of being believed by someone, then alethic relativism becomes trivially true.  

But the thesis of althetic relativism is not trivially true.  So what is truth for the alethic relativist if it is not the property of being believed by someone?

My challenge to the relativist:  Tell us what you mean by 'truth' such that truth can be coherently conceived to be relative. If you cannot do this then you have no thesis. 

A Relativist Cannot Rationally Object to the Imposition of One's Values on Others

The following argument is sometimes heard. "Because values are relative, it is wrong to impose one's values on others."

But if values are relative, and among my values is the value of instructing others in the right way to live, then surely I am justified in imposing my values on others. What better justification could I have? If values are relative, then there is simply no objective basis for a critique or rejection of the values I happen to hold.  For it to be wrong for me to impose my values, value-imposition would have to be a nonrelative disvalue. But this is precisely what is ruled out by the premise 'values are relative.'

Either values are relative or they are not.  If they are relative then no one can be faulted for living in accordance with his values even if among his values is the value of  imposing one's values on others.  If, on the other hand, values are not relative, then one will be in a position to condemn some forms of value-imposition.  The second alternative, however, is not available to one who affirms the relativity of all values.

Persons who give the above argument are trying to have it both ways at once, and in so doing fall into self-contradiction.  They want the supposed benefits of believing that values are relative -- such supposed benefits as toleration -- while at the same time committing themselves to the contradictory proposition that some values are not relative by their condemnation of value-imposition.

One sees from this how difficult it is for relativists to be consistent. A consistent relativist cannot make any such pronouncement as that it is wrong to impose one's values on others; all he can say is that from within his value scheme it is wrong to impose one's values on others. But then he allows the possibility that there are others for whom value-imposition is the right thing to do.

Relativism, whether alethic or axiological, is curiously self-vitiating.  To be consistent, the relativist must acquiesce in the relativization of his own position.  For example, the value relativist must admit that is only from within his own value scheme that it is wrong to impose one's value on others.  To which my response will be:  That's nice; but what does that have to do with me?  The relativist can get my attention only if he appeals to nonrelative values, value binding on all of us; but if does so, then he contradicts himself.

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Lies, Truth, Narratives, and Hillary

Hillary Clinton we now know to be a liar beyond any shadow of a reasonable doubt.  A liar is one who habitually makes false statements with the intention of deceiving her audience.  This definition, however, presupposes the distinction between true and false statements.  Aphoristically:  no truth, no lies.  Hillary cannot be a liar unless there is truth.  But maybe there is no truth, only narratives.  Here, perhaps, is a way to defend Hillary.  Perhaps the outrageous things she says are merely parts of her narrative.  So consider:

N. There is no truth; there are only narratives.

It follows that (N) itself is only a narrative, or part of one.  For if there is no truth, then (N) cannot be true.  Is this a problem?  I should think so.  Suppose you want to persuade me to accept (N).  How will you proceed?  You can't say I ought to accept (N) because it is true.  Will you say that I ought to accept (N) because it is 'empowering'?   But it cannot BE empowering unless it is TRUE that it is empowering.  You cannot, however, invoke truth on pain of falling into inconsistency. No matter which predicate you substitute for 'empowering,' you will face the same difficulty.  If you recommend (N) on the ground that it is F, then you must say that (N) IS F, which leads right back to truth.

Being and truth are systematically connected.  The truth is the truth about what IS, and what IS is at least possibly such as to be the subject matter of truths. (A classical theist can go whole hog here and say:  necessarily, whatever IS is the subject matter of truths, and every truth is about something that IS.  But I am not assuming classical theism in this entry.)

So you can't say that (N) is empowering or conducive to winning the election or whatever; all you can say is that it is part of your narrative that (N) is empowering, or conducive . . . .  In this way you box yourself in: there is nothing you say that can BE the case; everything is a narrative or part of a narrative.  But you cannot even say that.  You cannot say that everything you say IS a narrative, only that it is part of your narrative that everything you say is a narrative.  You are sinking into some seriously deep crapola in your attempt to defend the indefensible, Hillary.

It follows from this that you cannot budge your sane opponent who holds that there is truth and that some narratives are true and others are false.  I am one of these sane people.  You cannot budge me because, according to MY narrative, there is truth and not all narratives are true.  According to my narrative, my narrative is not just a narrative.  It answers to a higher power, Truth. The only way you could budge me from my position is by appealing to truth transcendent of narrative. And that you cannot do.

So what is a poor leftist to do?  Fall into inconsistency, which is in fact what they do.  Everything is a mere narrative except when it suits them to appeal to what is the case.

It is of the essence of the contemporary Left to attempt the replacement of truth by narrative, a replacement they cannot pull off  without inconsistency.

What if the lefty embraces inconsistency?  Then, while resisting the temptation to release the safety on your 1911, you walk away, as from a block of wood.   You can't argue with a block of  wood or a shithead.  While shit has form, it lacks form supportive of rational discourse.

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Is Moral Relativism Dying?

In a recent Atlantic article we read:

. . . the prevailing thought of the second decade of the 21st century is not like the mid-to late-20th century. Law, virtue, and a shame culture have risen to prominence in recent years, signaling that moral relativism may be going the way of the buggy whip.

[. . .]

In The New York Times last week, David Brooks argued that while American college campuses were “awash in moral relativism” as late as the 1980s, a “shame culture” has now taken its place. The subjective morality of yesterday has been replaced by an ethical code that, if violated, results in unmerciful moral crusades on social media.

A culture of shame cannot be a culture of total relativism. One must have some moral criteria for which to decide if someone is worth shaming.

I find the article confused, but in an instructive way.  What is dying is not moral relativism but moral fallibilism.  And what is on the rise is not moral absolutism but  moral dogmatism.  People are becoming more dogmatic in their moral commitments.  But this is consistent with being a moral relativist.  Or so I shall argue.  There are two distinction-pairs in play and they 'cut perpendicular' to each other. Absolute-relative is one pair; dogmatic-fallible the other. This makes for four combinations.  

A. Dogmatic moral absolutism.  Moral values and disvalues and the truths that record them are absolute: not relative to individuals, cultures, historical epochs, social classes, racial or ethnic groups, or any other index.  So if slavery is morally wrong, it is wrong period, which implies that it is wrong always and everywhere and for everyone.  What makes one dogmatic in one's moral absolutism, however, is the further claim to know these values and truths with certainty, and/or the readiness to act upon them uncompromisingly, by say shouting down opponents.

B.  Fallibilistic moral absolutism.  Moral values  are absolute, but the fallibilist admits that moral judgments are fallible or subject to error. Consider the claim that a pre-natal human being is greater in value than a healthy adult dolphin.  An absolutist will hold that this claim, if true, is absolutely true.  But if the absolutist is a fallibilist he will admit that he could be wrong about whether it is true.  The fallibilist can be expected to tolerate those who disagree while the dogmatist can be expected to be intolerant.

C. Dogmatic moral relativism.  Presumably everyone reading this will agree that slavery is a great moral evil.  It is a fact, however, that it was not held to be a great evil at all times and in all places.  This fact inclines some  to maintain that moral values are relative, to historical epochs, say.  Suppose Tom is an historical relativist about moral values, but Tim is not any sort of moral relativist.  They can both be uncompromisingly committed to opposing slavery even unto shaming and shunning those who think otherwise.  This shows, I think, that a moral relativist can be just as dogmatic (non-fallibilist) as a moral absolutist.

I conclude from this that a rise in moral dogmatism should not be confused with a decline in moral relativism.  Moral relativism may be on the decline; but this cannot be shown by citing a rise in moral dogmatism.

D. Fallibilistic moral relativism.   This is a consistent position.  One might hold that that moral values are culturally relative  while also holding that one could be wrong about which putative values within one's culture are the binding values within one's culture, or without agreeing how to rank order competing values within one's culture.  For example, liberty and equality are both values. Suppose they are not absolute but relative to Western culture.  One can still have doubts about whether liberty trumps equality or vice versa.  If Tom says that liberty trumps equality, and Tom is a fallibilist, then Tom will be open to arguments to the contrary. 

Atlantic article here. 

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Fallibilism and Objectivism

It is important not to confuse the question of the fallibility of our cognitive faculties, including reason in us, with the question whether there is truth.  A fallibilist is not a truth-denier.  One can be -- it is logically consistent to be -- both a fallibilist and an upholder of (objective) truth.  What's more, one ought to be both a fallibilist about some (not all) classes of propositions, and an upholder of the existence of (objective) truth. Indeed, if one is a fallibilist, one who admits that we  sometimes go wrong in matters of knowledge and belief, then then one must also admit that we sometimes go right, which is to say that fallibilism presupposes the objectivity of truth.

Just as a fallibilist is not a truth-denier, a truth-affirmer is not an infallibilist or 'dogmatist' in one sense of this word.  To maintain that there is objective truth is not to maintain that one is in possession of it.  One of the sources of the view that truth is subjective or relative is aversion to dogmatic people and dogmatic claims.

But if you reject the objectivity of truth on the basis of an aversion to dogmatic people and claims, then you are not thinking clearly.

Objective Truth as a Condition of Intelligibility

John D. Caputo has recently made the fashionably outlandish claim that "what modern philosophers call 'pure' reason . . . is a white male Euro-Christian construction."  Making this claim, Caputo purports to be saying  something that is true.  Moreover, his making of the claim in public is presumably for the purpose of convincing us that it is true.  If so, he presupposes truth, in which case truth cannot be a social construct, as I said in my critique.  A commenter responded:

To say that Caputo "presupposes truth" is not to say that he presupposes some sort of absolutist notion of truth. Why is the latter a necessary condition for the activity of "trying to convince"?

The short answer is that there is no notion of truth other than the absolutist notion.  Truth is absolute by its very nature. The phrase 'relative truth' names a confusion.  I won't go over this ground again, having trod it before.  But there is a wrinkle, and that is what I want to explore in this entry.  Is absolute truth the same as objective truth?  Perhaps not.  It might be like this.  If there is truth, then it is the same for all cognizers: it is intersubjectively binding on all.   It is in this sense objective.  It does not vary from person to person, social class to social class, historical epoch to historical epoch, race to race, etc.   But how can we be sure that truth in this objective sense is not a mere transcendental presupposition of intelligible discourse and rational debate?  If truth is a mere transcendental presupposition, then it is not absolute.  For what 'absolute' means is: not relative to or dependent on anything at all.  Of course, if truth is absolute, it follows that it is objective in the sense of intersubjectively binding on all.  But there is a logical gap in the converse.  If truth is objective, it does not straightaway follow that it is absolute.  For it might be transcendentally relative: relative to beings like us who cannot think or judge or speak intelligibly without presupposing truth.  It might be transcendentally realtive while remaining the same for all in such a way as to exclude as meaningless such phrases as 'proletarian truth,' bourgeois truth,' 'Protestant truth,' 'Catholic truth,' 'White man's truth,' 'black female's truth,' and other similalry nonsensical constructions.

I will return to the objective-absolute distinction near the end of this entry. 

While there may be a problem in showing that truth is more than a transcendental presupposition, and thus absolute, it is fairly easy to show that truth is objective.  And so it is easy to show that Caputo presupposes objective truth when he makes his fashionably outlandish PoMo claims.

But what do I mean when I say that truth is objective?  I mean that there is a total way things are, and that this total way things are does not depend on the beliefs, desires, wishes, hopes, etc. of finite rational beings like ourselves, whether human or extraterrestrial or angelic.   So what I mean by 'Truth is objective' is close to what John Searle means by external realism.

According to John Searle, "external realism [ER] is the thesis that there is a way that things are that is independent of all representations of how things are." (The Construction of Social Reality, p. 182) Is it possible to prove this attractive thesis?  And how would the proof go?

We will recall G. E. Moore's attempt to prove the external world by waving his hands. His idea was that it is a plain fact, as anyone can see, that his hands exist, and so it straightaway follows that external objects in space exist. This sounds more like a joke than a philosophical argument. Or if not a joke, then clear proof, not of the external world, but that Moore did not understand the issue.  But let's leave Moore to one side for the space of this post. See my aptly entitled  Moore category for more on Moore.

The realism issue really has nothing to do with spatially external objects. There unproblematically are such objects whatever their ultimate ontological status. Note also that ER can be true even if there are no spatially external objects.  ER is simply the claim that there is a way things are independent of us: it says nothing specifically about spatial individuals.

As Searle interprets it, ER sets forth a condition on the intelligibility of discourse and thought rather than a truth condition of discourse and thought:

     There are conditions on the intelligibility of discourse . . . that
     are not like paradigmatic cases of truth conditions. In the normal
     understanding of discourse we take these conditions for granted;
     and unless we took them for granted, we could not understand
     utterances the way we do . . . . (181)

Among these conditions on intelligibility is ER. It is a necessary presupposition of a large chunk of thought and discourse. What Searle is doing is giving a transcendental argument for ER. He takes it as given that a sentence like 'Mt Everest has ice and snow near the summit' is intelligible. He then inquires into what must be presupposed for it to be intelligible. For the sentence to be true, Mt. Everest must exist, and it must have ice and snow near the summit. But for the sentence to be intelligible, it is not necessary that Mt. Everest exist, or if it does exist that it have ice and snow near the summit. What is necessary is that ER be true: that there be a way things are independent of human representations. If the mountain exists, then that is (part of) the way things are, and if it does not exist, that too is (part of) the way things are. The way things are, then, is not a truth condition of any such statement as 'Mt Everest has ice and snow near the summit.' It is a condition of the intelligibility of such statements and their negations. So even if every statement asserting or implying the existence of a physical object is false, and there is no spatially external world, it is still the case that ER is true. For it is still the case that there is a way things are independent of human representations.  The way things are would include the nonexistence of a spatially external world.

For Searle, then, external realism (ER) is a transcendental condition of the intelligibility of large portions of public discourse. He is aware that to have shown this is not to have shown that ER is true.   (194) Speaking as we do, we are committed to its being true, but that is not to say that it is true. That there is a way things are independent of human representations is presupposed by the intelligibility of much of what we think or say, but it doesn't follow that it is true.

Why not? Because its truth is conditional upon the fact that our thought and speech is intelligible. If ER is true, then it is true whether or not human representations and their intelligibility exist. But if ER is argued to transcendentally as a condition of intelligibility, then ER's truth is conditional upon the existence of  human beings and their representations. So we cannot say that ER is true, but only that we must presuppose it to be true. This is not to  say that without us it would be false, but what without us it would be neither true nor false.

Is Searle's position satisfactory? I'm not sure. I want to be able to say that ER is true simpliciter, or true unconditionally (i.e., not conditional upon the fact of the intelligibility of our discourse.)

But does my desire to be able to say that ER is true unconditionally make sense? Maybe not. We cannot not presuppose that there is a way things are assuming that we continue to think and talk as before. But is there a way things are? Yes, it might be said, in the only sense in which it would make sense to assert it, namely, as a presupposition of our thought and talk. That is, what we as rational beings must  presuppose as being the case IS the case. The 'possibility' that it  not be the case is unmeaning. No sort of wedge can be driven between the presupposing and the being. But this seems to land us in a form of transcendental idealism.

A fascinating labyrinth, this. Collateral reading: Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, section 44 (c), Die Seinsart der Wahrheit und die Wahrheitsvoraussetzung.

The main thing, however, is that Caputo  presupposes objective truth when he makes his ridiculous PeeCee assertions.

Against Historical Relativism: Adorno on What is No Longer Believable After Auschwitz

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno is exasperating but exciting. Although as sloppy as one expects Continental thinkers to be, he is nonetheless a force to be reckoned with, a serious man who is seriously grappling with ultimates at the outer limits of intelligibility. Derrida I dismiss as a bullshitter; indeed, to cop a line from John Searle, he is someone who "gives bullshit a bad name." But I can't dismiss Adorno. I confess to being partial to the Germans. They are nothing if not serious, and I'm a serious man. Among the French there is an excess of façade and frippery. But now let's get to work — like good Germans.

Suppose we focus on just part of one of Adorno's serpentine sentences. This is from Negative Dialektik (Suhrkamp, p. 354):

Dass das Unveraenderliche Wahrheit sei und das Bewegte, Vergaengliche Schein, die Gleichgueltigkeit von Zeitlichem und ewigen Ideen gegeneinander, ist nicht laenger zu behaupten . . . .

Adorno is telling us that

It can no longer be asserted that the true is the unchangeable while the mobile and mutable is mere appearance, or that eternal Ideas and the temporal realm are indifferent to each other . . . .

So what is our man saying? He is saying that after Auschwitz — where 'Auschwitz' collects all the genocidal and totalitarian horrors of the Third Reich — one can no longer take Platonism seriously, or the people's Platonism either, Christianity. And indeed most traditional philosophy, consisting as it does, in Whitehead's phrase, of a series of footnotes to Plato. The old metaphysics is dead, the metaphysics according to which Being itself has a positive and hence affirmable character.  An experience has refuted the old metaphysics, the experience of Auschwitz.

But if it can no longer be asserted that that the true is the immutable, then it once could be asserted. And indeed, by 'assert' is intended assert with truth or at least justification. Note the ambiguity of 'assertible' as between capable of being asserted and worth of being asserted. And make a meta-note of how a broadly analytic thinker like me pedantically points out something like this whereas your typical Continental head would find my procedure boorish or somehow gauche. "How low class of you to be so careful and precise!"

But I digress. My point, again, is that if a proposition can no longer be asserted and believed, then it once could be asserted and believed. But if a metaphysical proposition was once true or believed with justification, then it is now true or believable with justification. For a metaphysical assertion is necessarily true if true at all. The structure of being cannot be contingent upon our contingent experiences, even experiences as shattering as that of the Nazi horror. (It is telling of course that Adorno, good man of the Left that he is, does not mention the Stalinist horrors which were known since 1956 — but that is a separate post.)

What I am objecting to is Adorno's apparent historical relativism. By this I mean the view that truth itself is historically conditioned and thus capable of being different in different historical epochs. Metaphysical conceptions are of course historically variable, but not their objects, the structures of being. Adorno is doing the the Continental Shuffle, sliding from the epistemic/doxastic to the ontic and back again.  That views of truth are historically conditioned is trivial and scarcely in need of being pointed out; but that truth itself is historically conditioned is incoherent.

More fundamentally, what I am objecting to is Adorno's lack of any argument for his view that historical experience can refute a metaphysical thesis and his lack of consideration of the sort of (obvious) objection I am now raising.

The Continental 'trope' or 'move' — such-and-such can no longer be believed --ought to be defended or dropped. Why, for example, should it no longer be possible to believe in God after the horrendous events of the 20th century when people believed in God at the time of the Lisbon earthquake and the time of the Bubonic plague? What is so special about these 20th century horrors? The fact of evil may well rule out the existence of God, or more generally, the affirmability of Being. But if it does, this is surely no recent development.

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This from a reader:

I still read your blog conscientiously, but sometimes stare at your words in ignorant awe.

I have a question for you this morning which may be of interest. In a recent conversation with someone who described himself as a "gay" Christian (or is it a Christian "gay" ?), I gave reasons for observing that "gay Christian" is an oxymoron. My interlocutor said I must not be judgmental and justified his position by the saying, “You have your way, I have my way. As for the right way, it does not exist.” I made no headway with my argument that a belief in moral relativism is incompatible with a belief in God. If God is the incontestable ground of moral absolutes, it seems to me you can't have one without the other. Am I on the right track ?

Thank you for reading.  Several points in response.

1. Can one be a Christian and a homosexual?  I don't see why not, as long as one does not practice one's homosexuality.  So I don't see that 'gay Christian' is an oxymoron.  (AsI am using 'practice,' a homosexual man who succumbs to temptation and has sexual intercourse with a man on an occasion or two, while believing it to be immoral, is not practicing his homosexuality.  The occasional exercise of a disposition does not constitute a practice.)

2. To be judgmental is to be hypercritical, captious, cavilling, fault-finding, etc.  One ought to avoid being judgmental.  But it is a mistake to confuse making moral judgments with being judgmental. I condemn the behavior of Ponzi-schemers like Bernie Madoff.  That is a moral judgment.  (And if you refuse to condemn it, I condemn your refusal to condemn.)   But it would be an egregious misuse of language to say that I am being judgmental in issuing  either condemnation.  

3. If your friend thinks it is wrong to make moral judgments, ask him whether he thinks it is morally wrong.  If he says yes, then point out that he has just made a moral judgment; he has made the moral judgment that making moral judgments is morally wrong. 

4. Then ask him whether (a) he is OK with contradicting himself, or (b) makes an exception for the meta assertion that making moral judgments is morally wrong, or (c) thinks that both the meta judgment and first-order moral judgments (e.g., sodomy is morally wrong) are all morally wrong.  (C) is  a logically consistent position, although rejectable for other reasons.

5. He might of course say that 'must not' in 'must not be judgmental' is not to be construed morally, but in some other way.  Press him on how it is to be construed. 

6. Is moral relativism compatible with theism?  No.  If the God of the Christian faith exists, then there are absolute (objective) moral truths.  This is quite clear if you reflect on the nature of the Christian God.  It is not clear, however, that the arrow of entailment runs in the opposite direction.  A Christian could affirm that it does, but he needn't. Either way, moral relativism and theism are logically inconsistent.

7.  A further point.  When your friend 'went relativistic' on you, there was nothing unusual about that.  Alethic and moral relativism in most people are not  thought-through positions, but simply ways  of avoiding further discussion and the hard thinking necessary to get clear on these matters.  It is a form of 'psychic insulation':  "You can't teach me anything, because it's all relative."

8.  A final point.  That there are moral absolutes leaves open what they are.  While moral relativism is easily dismissed, especially if one is a theist, it is considerably less easy to say what the moral absolutes are, even if one is a theist.  So there is no call to be dogmatic.  One can, and I think ought to, combine anti-relativism with fallibilism.

Related: To Oppose Relativism is not to Embrace Dogmatism

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When Philosophical Questions Grow Up Do They Leave Home? Some Bad Arguments of Lawrence Krauss Exposed

Literarily Pleasing, but Incoherent

I found the folllowing quotation here:

But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. 

— Umberto Eco

The world is a play of phenomena, an enigmatic play of appearances beneath which there is no reality.  Harmless in itself, the world is made terrible by us when we make the mad attempt to lay bare an underlying truth it fails to possess.  Part of Eco's thought, I take it, is that those who seek the world's underlying truth fool themselves into thinking that they have found it, and having convinced themselves that they are now in possession of it, feel entitled and perhaps even obligated to impose it on others for their own good.  But these others, naturally, resist the imposition and react violently.  Hence the pursuit of the truth leads to contention and bloodshed. Better to live and let live and admit that there is a variety of perspectives, a diversity of interpretations, but no God's Eye perspective and no final interpretation, let alone an uninterpreted reality in itself, a true world hidden by the world of appearances.   The world is interpretation all the way down.  Being has no bottom.

 

The line of thought is seductive but incoherent.  If the world is an enigma, then it is true that it is an enigma.  If it is harmless, then it is true that it harmless.  If it is made terrible by our attempt to interpret it, then it is true that it is made terrible by our attempt to interpret it.  If our attempt is mad, then it is true that our attempt is mad.  And if it has no underlying truth, then it is true that it has no underlying truth.

 

If that is the truth, then there is after all an underlying truth and the world cannot be a play of relativities, of  shifting perspectives, of mere interpretations.  If the world is such-and-such, then it is, and doesn't merely seem.

A Failed Defense of Nietzsche's Perspectivism

Prowling the Web for material on Nietzsche and the genetic fallacy, I stumbled across this passage from Merold Westphal, "Nietzsche as a Theological Resource," Modern Theology 13:2 (April 1997), p. 218:
  
     Perspectivism need not be presented as an absolute truth; it can be
     presented as an account of how reality looks from where one is
     situated. It does not thereby cease to be of value. The account of
     the game given by the winning coach cannot claim to be THE truth
     about the game: other accounts must be taken into account,
     including those from the losing coach, the players, the
     referees,.... But that does not mean that we do not listen with
     attention to what the winning coach has to say about the game.
   
Perspectivism is the proposition P: All truths are perspectival.  Either (P) applies to itself or it does not. If the former, then one  must conclude that (P) is itself perspectivally true. Call this perspectivized perspectivism (PP). If the latter, if (P) is not taken to apply to itself, then (P) is nonperspectivally true. Westphal mentions, but does not take, this tack, so I shall ignore it here. His position appears to be perspectivized perspectivism. Unfortunately, his example shows that he does not understand it. He   confuses (PP) with a quite different doctrine that could be called alethic partialism.

What the latter says is that the whole truth about a subject cannot be captured from any one perspective. Take a quart of 10 W 30 motor oil. From the perspective of a salesman at an auto parts
store, it is a commodity from the sale of which he expects to make a profit. From the perspective of a motorist, it is a crankcase lubricant. From the perspective of a chemist, the oil's viscosity and other such attributes are salient. From the perspective of an eco-enthusiast, it is a potential pollutant of the ground water. And so  on. But note that these partial truths add up to the whole truth about the oil. (By a 'partial truth' I do not mean a truth that is only partially true, but a truth that is wholly true, but captures only a part of the reality of what it is about.)

Alethic partialism sounds reasonable. But that is not what the perspectivized perspectivist is saying. What he is saying is that  every truth is merely perspectivally true, and that this thesis itself is true only from his, and perhaps some (but not all) other, perspectives. Unfortunately, this allows a nonperspectivist such as  your humble correspondent to say: "Fine! Truth is perspectival for you, Fritz, but for me it is absolute, and one of my absolute truths  is that you are mistaken in your theory of truth." Clearly, the  perspectivized perspectivist is in an uncomfortable position here. He  wants to say something that is binding on all, but he cannot given the self-limiting nature of his position, a self-limitation demanded by  logical consistency.  

Pace Westphal, perspectivism is not "an account of how reality looks from where one is situated," but an account of the nature of truth, an  account that implies that there is no reality. For truth is the truth of reality. A truth-bearer (a belief, say) is true just in case it corresponds to what is the case independently of anyone's beliefs, desires, or interests. To speak of truth as perspectival is to dissolve reality along with truth. From this one can see how obtuse Westphal's account of perspectivism his. He fails to grasp its  radicality. And failing to grasp its radicality, he fails to appreciate its utter incoherence.

More on Alienans Adjectives: Relative Truth and Derived Intentionality

I am sitting by a pond with a child. The child says, "Look, there are  three ducks." I say, "No, there are two ducks, one female, the other  male, and a decoy."

The point is that a decoy duck is not a duck, but a piece of wood  shaped and painted to appear (to a duck) like a duck so as to entice  ducks into range of the hunters' shotguns. Since a decoy duck is not a duck, 'decoy' in 'decoy duck' does not function in the way 'male' and   'female' function in 'male duck' and 'female duck,' respectively. A   male duck is a duck and a female duck is a duck. But a decoy duck is not a duck.

'Decoy' is an alienans adjective unlike 'male' and 'female' which are specifying adjectives. 'Decoy' shifts or alienates the sense of 'duck' rather than adding a specification to it. The same goes for 'roasted' in 'We are having roasted duck for dinner.' A roasted duck is not a  duck but the cooked carcass of a duck. Getting hungry?

Adorno on the No Longer Believable

Theodor Adorno is exasperating but exciting. Although as sloppy as one expects Continental thinkers to be, he is nonetheless a force to be reckoned with, a serious man who is seriously grappling with ultimates at the outer limits of intelligibility. Derrida I dismiss as a bullshitter, indeed, to cop a line from John Searle, as someone who "gives bullshit a bad name." But I can't dismiss Adorno. I confess to being partial to the Germans. They are nothing if not serious, and I'm a serious man. Among the French there is an excess of facade and frippery. But now let's get to work — like good Germans.

Rorty's Definition of 'Relativism' and its Illiberal Consequences

Richard Rorty's writings put me off for several reasons, not the least of which is the way he distorts issues and definitions for his own benefit. The man is obviously a relativist as anyone can see, but he doesn't want to accept that label. So what does he do? He redefines the term so that it applies to no one:

"Relativism" is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps about any topic, is as good as every other. No one holds this view. Except for the occasional cooperative freshman, one cannot find anybody who says that two incompatible opinions on an important topic are equally good. The philosophers who get called "relativists" are those who say that the grounds for choosing between such opinions are less algorithmic than had been thought.

[. . .]

So the real issue is not between people who think that one view is as good as another and people who do not. It is between those think our culture, or purposes, or intuitions, cannot be supported except conversationally, and people who still hope for other sorts of support. (Consequences of Pragmatism, U. of Minnesota Press, 1982, pp. 166-167.)

Does Deflationism Rule Out Relativism?

This post floats the suggestion that deflationism about truth is inconsistent with relativism about truth.  Not that one should be a deflationist.  But it would be interesting if deflationism entailed the nonrelativity of truth.

There is a sense in which deflationary theories of truth deny the very existence of truth. For what these theories deny is that anything of a unitary and substantial nature corresponds to the predicate 'true' or 'is true.' To get a feel for the issue, start with the platitude that some of the things people say are true and some of the things people say are not true. People who say that Hitler died by his own hand in the Spring of 1945 say something true, while those who say that no Jews were gassed at Auschwitz say something that is not true. Given the platitude that there are truths and untruths, classically-inclined philosophers will inquire: What is it that all and only the truths have in common in virtue of which they are truths? What is truth? What is the property of being-true?

A Bad Reason for Not Imposing One's Values on Others

The following argument is sometimes heard. "Because values are relative, it is wrong to impose one's values on others."

But if values are relative, and among my values is the value of instructing others in the right way to live, then surely I am justified in imposing my values on others. What better justification could I have? If values are relative, then there is simply no objective basis for a critique or rejection of the values I happen to hold.  For it to be wrong for me to impose my values, value-imposition would have to be a nonrelative disvalue. But this is precisely what is ruled out by the premise 'values are relative.'

Either values are relative or they are not.  If they are relative then no one can be faulted for living in accordance with his values even if among his values is the value of  imposing one's values on others.  If, on the other hand, values are not relative, then one will be in a position to condemn some forms of value-imposition.  The second alternative, however, is not available to one who affirms the relativity of all values.

Persons who give the above argument are trying to have it both ways at once, and in so doing fall into self-contradiction.  They want the supposed benefits of believing that values are relative -- such benefits as toleration -- while at the same time committing themselves to the contradictory proposition that some values are not relative by their condemnation of value-imposition.

One sees from this how difficult it is for relativists to be consistent. A consistent relativist cannot make any such pronouncement as that it is wrong to impose one's values on others; all he can say is that from within his value-scheme it is wrong to impose one's values on others. But then he allows the possibility that there others for whom value-imposition is the right thing to do.

Truth Is Absolute! Part Two

Part One is here.

Michael Krausz, "Relativism and Beyond" in Relativism, Suffering and Beyond, eds. Bilimoria and Mohanty (Oxford, 1997), pp. 97-98:

The classical 'self-refuting' argument against relativism runs roughly along the following lines. If relativism is true then the thesis of relativism itself must be relatively true. It would be contradictory to affirm that relativism is true in an absolute sense. But while one could affirm that relativism is true in a relative sense, the counter-argument goes, to say that relativism is only relatively true has no general force. In order for the thesis to have general force it should include itself and should be presumed to be absolutely true. But that, again, would be contradictory.

In response . . . one might observe that there is no reason to rule out of court any non-general thesis of relativism. That is, the claim that the thesis of relativism is a thesis embraced locally does not itself show that it has no content or is not locally defensible. Local knowledge is knowledge nonetheless. Rather along lines suggested by Nelson Goodman, the aim of justifying local claims, including the thesis of relativism itself, need not be the establishment of of a general or a universal or an absolutist claim but may well be in the name of unpacking local understanding.

Truth is Absolute! Part One

In an earlier piece I argued that one can be both an absolutist about the nature of truth while being a fallibilist about the knowledge of truth. But a reader demands to know why we should accept that truth by its very nature is absolute. One reason is that the doctrine that truth is non-absolute (relative) is self-refuting. Herewith, a first installment.

The alethic relativist holds that truth (Gr. aletheia) is relative. Some call this cognitive relativism to distinguish it from ethical and other types of relativism. I prefer to avoid this terminology because it tends to conflate truth and knowledge, which are obviously distinct. (If S knows that p, then p is true; but a proposition can be true without being known by any (finite) mind.) To be relative, of course, is to be relative to something. Among candidate relata are individuals, social groups, cultures, conceptual frameworks, historical epochs, zoological species, and others besides. Thus there are different types of alethic relativism depending on the parameter or index to which truth is said to be relative. This being understood, there will be no harm in speaking simply of truth as relative.

To Oppose Relativism is not to Embrace Dogmatism

There is much popular confusion concerning the topic of relativism. One fallacy I exposed earlier, namely, the mistake of thinking that Einstein's Theory of Relativity implies either moral relativism or relativism about truth. Even more widespread, perhaps, is the notion that one who opposes relativism about truth must be a dogmatist. But there are two distinctions here and they must not be confused. One is the distinction between relativism and nonrelativism, and the other is the distinction between fallibilism and dogmatism. The first distinction has to do with the nature of truth, while the second pertains to the knowledge of truth.

Einstein, Relativity, and Relativism

A correspondent writes:

British (Catholic) historian Paul Johnson in his wonderful Modern Times attributes relativism's rise to Einstein! So does Einstein's latest biographer.

There are two questions that must be distinguished. The first is whether Einstein's Theory of Relativity entails either moral or cognitive (alethic) relativism. The second question is whether Einstein's revolutionary contributions to physics, via their misinterpretation by journalists and other shallow people (am I being unfair?), contributed to an atmosphere in which people would be more likely to embrace moral and cognitive relativism. The first question belongs to the philosophy of science, the second to the sociology of belief. The questions are plainly distinct.