Meditation 21: 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.