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 Mason's
Meditations
If
you're looking for something to chew over, some thoughtful seeds
for mental cultivation, bookmark this page for Jeff Mason's monthly
meditations. To think in or take away...
Number
Twenty-Two: It's All Relative (Not)
When
the world was young and human beings dispersed in scattered tribes,
the chance of contacting alien peoples was faint. Language had a
sacred use in naming the gods and telling myths of origins and ends.
Once a tale was told and repeated, most everyone believed it, but
when human life expanded and moved beyond the tribe or clan, when
agriculture began, and with it the birth of trade, the growth of
cities, war and slavery, then questioning became unavoidable. Relativism
arose in an ancient Greek maritime world, where sailors brought
tales of far lands and peoples whose beliefs, customs and values
varied. One sage, Xenophanes, remarked that if horses drew gods,
they would draw them to look like horses.
One
response to a variety of conflicting beliefs is to tie the truth
down to what people believe. This, in brief, is the principle of
relativism. Truth is made to depend on the beliefs held by a person.
They may not be true for anyone else, but for each individual there
is no difference between believing something and its truth. So the
truth is whatever you believe to be true at the time that you believe
it, for as long as you believe it, and every time you change your
mind, the truth changes.
A
difficult question for the principle of relativism is whether the
principle, itself, is relative to a person’s belief in it.
If relativism makes all objective truth suspect, then it either
renders itself suspect or becomes an exception to its own rule?
Either way, the idea of an objective truth emerges that does resist
relativism. Such truths are essentially public. Perception statements,
for example, imply that the object seen can from more than one perspective.
This requirement for objectivity is explicit in science. Experiments
must be repeatable. If one scientist, alone, makes an observation,
but no one else can make it, then that does not count for much in
science. The public nature of knowledge guarantees the possibility
of objective truths, if not their actual possession. Not all truths
are relative, and the search for objective truth is legitimate,
even if the outcome of the search is always uncertain at the start.
.
Mason's
Meditations will next be updated early July 2002
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Previous
Meditations
21.
(25
April 2002)
20. (20 March 2002)
19. (20 February
2002)
18.
(15 January 2002)
17.
(15 November 2001)
16. (15th
October 2001)
15. (15th September
2001)
14.
(1st August 2001)
13.
(1st July 2001)
12. (1st
June 2001)
11.
(1st May 2001)
10.
(1st April 2001)
9. (16th March 2001)
8. (1st
March 2001)
7.
(15th February 2001)
6.
(1st February 2001)
5. (15th
January 2001)
4. (1st
January 2001)
3.
(15th December 2000)
2.
(1st December 2000)
1. (15th November
2000)
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