Relativism Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Relativism refers to any doctrine holding that concepts and beliefs are relative to conditions and thus not universally valid. Relativists usually argue that because one’s cultural or historical context determines one’s core beliefs, universal knowledge is impossible to discover. This argument moves from descriptive relativism, or the factual account of different ethical, metaphysical, and epistemological claims held in the world, to normative relativism, the doctrine that such claims are correct only in relation to a given nonobjective conceptual framework. Absolute normative relativism is, however, difficult to defend, as it suffers from self-referential incoherence, for its claims are inherently relative. Accordingly, relativism’s proponents tend to allow for universal knowledge in some domains, such as in medicine, while denying it in others, such as in ethics. Although critics rightly charge that relativism renders any critical standpoint problematic, the fact of human difference allows for some degree of relativism. Most would accept, for example, that taste in cuisine is culturally relative, but the question is more fraught when it concerns morality. Alternative views of relativism are offered by historicists, pragmatists anthropologists, and sociological theorists. These perspectives, among others, form the foundation of contemporary methodological discussion, as does the stronger relativism of the postmodern scholars.

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