چکیده:
Discussion of the many faces of relativism occupies a highly prominent place in the epistemological literature. Protagoras in ancient Greece and Nelson Goodman in the modern period are two most notable proponent of relativism. In the present article, I discuss and explain relativistic approaches of this two important relativist. I will first briefly define and review some faces of relativism. Then I will discuss and elaborate Protagorean or true-for-me relativism and Goodman’s radical relativism in turn. I will argue that there are crucial difficulties in Protagorean and radical relativism, and that these difficulties, as the realist philosophers insist, make these two faces of relativism be undefensible. No doubt, these two shapes of relativism have paved the way for anti-realism. In the end, it will appear that Goodman’s radical relativism and so the theory of worldmaking, like Protagorean relativism, suffers from a fatal flaw: the flaw of self-refuting.
خلاصه ماشینی:
com Introduction Some thinkers maintain that our thoughts about the world are influenced by such things as point of view, temperament, capacities, language, conceptual schemes, scientific paradigm, historical periods, and culture.
Relativists, on the contrary, hold that what there is, and what is true, depends on many things such as point of view and conceptual schemes, and consequently a neutral standpoint for evaluating the cognitive norms and moral values in not available to us.
Ontological categories include objects, facts, world and reality; semantical include truth, reference and meaning; epistemological categories include perception, belief, justification and knowledge; methodological categories include inference, rationality and progress; and moral categories may include at least customs, values, ethics, law, politics and religion.
The ontological dimension of Protagoras’ relativism commits him to the view that ‘what appears to each individual in the only reality and therefore the real world differs for each’ (Guthrie, 1971:171).
As Harris properly says, the title, ways of worldmaking, is appropriately chosen because Goodman really means that we actually make different worlds by creating different theories or systems.
Also, since according to Goodman individual statements have truth-values only relative to some theory of description or some frame of reference, he also aligns himself very closely with Quin’s holism.
Objections to worldmaking theory Goodman’s radical relativism faces several difficulties.
It is important to emphasize that, as Harvey siegel has argued, Goodman’s relativism, like all other relativistic claims, is self-refuting because Goodman believes his ‘restrains on radical relativism, his criteria of rightness to be version- neutral, and to pick out his version as right.