Fear of Relativism?

AbstractThe chapter was originally published as a contribution to a Philosophical Studies book symposium on Paul Boghossian’s Fear of Knowledge (Clarendon Press, 2006). In his short book, Boghossian aims to expose as bankrupt the idea that there is even a coherent, let alone defensible, philosophical stance about truth and knowledge that can underwrite contemporary ‘pluralist’, or ‘postmodernist’ ideas about reality and objectivity. But since it was crucial to his project that his discussion remain available to non-specialists, much of the recent more technical debate within analytical philosophy about relativism’s renaissance as a particular form of semantic theory is passed over unmentioned. The chapter aims to show how Boghossian’s discussion nevertheless connects quite straightforwardly with relativism in its contemporary analytical philosophical livery—what I have elsewhere called ‘New Age Relativism’—and how some of his critical arguments may proceed in that setting. The principal contentions are, first, that when relativism about epistemic justification, and about morals, are couched in the currently canonical sort of form, they still remain in range of artillery that Boghossian positions in chapter 6 of his book; second, that there is evasive action that they can take; but, third, that when they take it, they effectively have nothing to offer over other well-established forms of—broadly speaking—anti-realism, and that the play with specifically relativist ideas becomes nugatory. New Age Relativism, about morals and epistemic justification at least, is nothing distinctively to be anxious about. If anxiety is fitting, it should concern whether our aspirations to epistemic and moral objectivity can withstand attacks that neither need nor prosper under the flag of relativism but are best articulated differently.