Is the relativist justified in challenging the value of knowledge ?

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Relativism is a term that covers a whole family of doctrines, depending on the field to which it applies (ontological, linguistic, moral, aesthetic, cultural, social relativism, etc.) and the degree to which we are prepared to accept it (relativism of facts, of the justification of our beliefs, of our epistemic, moral or aesthetic reasons, etc.), or whether or not we believe that the introduction of a relativity parameter, whatever it may be, commits us to a relativist position. Depending on the case, relativism will be seen as either incoherent or inevitable, without necessarily being hostile to the idea of knowledge, or even to that of the value of knowledge. In fact, it's enough to admit that aesthetic, moral or epistemic values can vary according to cultures and communities, and only have meaning in relation to them. This is not the same as endorsing Rorty's integral epistemic contextualism, still less radical forms of social constructivism. We can still share the Quinian theses (relativity of ontology, inscrutability of reference, indeterminacy of translation), Whorf's linguistic relativity, or Putnam's conceptual relativity argument (there can be no metaphysical commitments that are not relative to language, or meaning and reference are relative to certain conceptual or linguistic schemes), or Kuhn's thesis of the incommensurability of paradigms, without being obliged to admit that the only possible option is then to defend a form of pluralist unrealism in the style proposed by Goodman. The difficulty lies in navigating these precipices without necessarily throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

1. We began by analyzing the links between three major concepts: relativity, relativism and skepticism, with a lengthy presentation of Sextus Empiricus' ten modes or tropes, and the meaning of the mode of the relative. We have noted, in particular, that we must not be too quick to conclude that the "ten modes" lead to relativism. When Sextus asserts (eighth mode) that everything is relative, he means that everything is apparently relative, that "here, as elsewhere, we use 'is' loosely instead of 'seems', meaning: 'everything seems relative'". It's also important to realize that the relativist is not the skeptic's ally. The (more radical) skeptic suspends his judgment (there's a fact to be known, but he can't know it), while the relativist maintains that he knows, but relative to X, to an individual, a standard, a criterion, that there is a truth, but for X; that (relative) judgments can be affirmed, i.e., within a framework, a culture, and so on. What skeptics and relativists have in common, however, is their rejection of the idea of an objective reality, a truth to be known.

Let's be clear about what we're denying and not denying here, when we oppose relativism according to the classical model of knowledge. We don't deny "that the quest for knowledge may manifest a strong social dimension, and this in several ways: we cannot deny, for example, that knowledge is often produced collectively by members of the same social group, and that certain contingent facts relating to this group may explain why its members have turned to certain problems in preference to others" (Boghossian, 2009, 25). Similarly, "the classical model does not deny that the members of a group of researchers may have certain political or social values, or that these values may influence the way they conduct their work, the observations they make or the way they interpret the data collected". In contrast, the model insists on the independence of knowledge from contingent social circumstances, and asserts the following three things: 1) Many facts about the world are independent of us, and therefore independent of our social values and interests. The fact, for example, that dinosaurs once inhabited the earth is not dependent on us: it's a natural fact that didn't need us to exist. 2) What we're aiming for is not so much the truth as the justifications we have for believing something to be true. That we have discovered evidence for the existence of dinosaurs may not be independent of our social environment, but that it is evidence in favor of this hypothesis is(Ibid., 26). 3) The classical conception also has some idea of the role played by our epistemic reasons for believing what we believe. Thus, being confronted with empirical evidence that justifies the belief that there were dinosaurs can, in some cases, explain in itself why we believe there were. It is not always necessary to invoke other factors, and in particular, to invoke our contingent social values and interests. We could therefore characterize the classical model according to this triple objectivism: that of facts first, then of justification, and finally of rational explanation. Yet relativism attacks one or other of these characterizations, and sometimes all three. For the purposes of this lesson, we have confined ourselves to the first two, to show that they are not all of the same tenor, nor of the same gravity.

2. We began by showing how the very idea of a complete relativism of facts is incoherent: not everything is constructed. This is the most radical and counter-intuitive thesis, and yet, in many ways, the most influential (Boghossian, 33 sq.), but it is incoherent. The world didn't wait for us to exist, and many facts existed before us. But in some of these versions, it is more subtly said that we construct a fact because we accept a way of speaking or thinking that describes that fact (cf. Goodman, Ways ofWorldmaking). "There is no way in which the world is that is independent of description, no way in which it is beyond description" (Rorty). Doubtless some facts depend on their description or on the mind: there could be no money, no bathtub, no priest or homosexual if no one was or had been willing at any time to describe them in this way. But on the one hand, this is not necessarily true of all facts (mountains, dinosaurs, electrons). On the other hand, the social relativity of descriptions is one thing, the constructivism of facts another. Even in Putnam's subtle version of the relativity of conceptual analysis, which has him saying that there is no one way in which things are in themselves, independently of the choice of a conceptual schema, and that there can be several equally true descriptions of the world or a certain part of it : as long as they are coherent, even if they in fact imply distinct notions of object, no objectivist, according to Putnam, will object (we can talk about eight people or four couples). But for this to happen, we have to admit that there are "basic facts", a kind of "primitivedough" of the world, so that we can operate on it (Boghossian, 47). Whether for reasons of causality (nobackward causation), conceptual competence (it's part of the dinosaur concept that it wasn't constructed by us), or violation of the principle of non-contradiction (since it is asserted that, necessarily, it is not both the case that p and thatno; or, since constructions are held to be contingent, how can it be understood that logically or metaphysically incompatible facts can be constructed simultaneously?), factual relativism is impossible to sustain.

3. Relativizing facts to a theory undoubtedly avoids certain problems. Thus, we'll say that there are no absolute facts of form p and that if our factual judgments are to have any chance of being true, we must not interpret statements of the form " p" as expressing the assertion p, but rather as asserting the following: "according to a theory T, which we accept, p ", thus relying on the pluralism of the following facts: "There are many alternative theories to describe the world, but there are no facts in virtue of which one would be more faithful than another to the way things are in themselves". But while a formulation may seem coherent when applied to this or that local relativism (moral, aesthetic, cultural), it becomes absurd as soon as it is generalized. Indeed, every relativist needs to presuppose the existence of at least some absolute truths; yet he asserts that there are none. He therefore faces an insurmountable dilemma: either he ceases to be a relativist, or he loses all intelligibility. We have no choice but to recognize that there must be objective facts, independent of the mind. No doubt this tells us nothing about what they are, or which of the facts that exist are mind-independent and which are not. But the essential point has been made. Nor has the relativist given us any serious reason to think that we are wrong to consider that there are certain facts (dinosaurs, giraffes or mountains) around us. "The world is simply the world", Putnam eventually admits, as his realism evolves. To a very large extent, the outside world is what it is, independently of us and what we believe about it.

4. We have shown, by taking up much of the detailed analysis carried out by P. Boghossian, that only the question of epistemic relativism arises, touching on the question of the criteria we have or don't have to justify our beliefs, and that the relativist argument here has some force (notably in the form of the so-called "reinforced" argument) in favor of "pluralism", or in the form of the argument that epistemic systems are neither true nor false, but rather imperatives - even if, in the end, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny, and is based in particular on ambiguities, some of whose effects can be measured in the question of disagreement.

5. Finally, we assessed the exact scope of the critique of relativism in its mainly epistemic version, and proposed a few ways of avoiding relativist dead-ends in the form of a realism that we presented at some length and that should be able to find its place halfway between a metaphysical realism advocating total independence of reality from the mind and a culturalist or historicist relativism in which the classical notions of truth, justification or knowledge would have lost all reason to exist, without really offering us a satisfactory alternative. If this realism is correct, perhaps it is also an indication that if we are to go all the way in examining what the value of knowledge consists in, it is essential, at some point or other, to answer the metaphysical side of the question, so true is it, as we showed in our opening lecture, it is only by elucidating this link between the epistemological and the metaphysical that we can give substance to our ideal of presenting ourselves as rational thinkers.