Simon Blackburn 2
More Blackburn on truth. (Maybe in a few months I’ll give you a passage or two from Stangroom and Benson on truth. That will be fun for you!)
He points out that it is important to distinguish between relativism and toleration.
In the intellectual world, toleration is the disposition to fight opinion only with opinion; in other words, to protect freedom of speech, and to confront divergence of opinion with open critical reflection rather than suppression or force…Relativism, by contrast, chips away at our right to disapprove of what anybody says. Its central message is that there are no asymmetries of reason and knowledge, objectivity and truth…It is not only that we must try to understand them, but also that we must accept a complete symmetry of standing.
So, we have a Western view of the universe, they have theirs, we have Western science, they have theirs, and so on.
And then, once the symmetry of standing takes possession of the relativist, other things may come to fill his head, and they need not involve toleration at all. The dogmatic faith in homeopathy quickly leads to intolerant rejection of double-blind tests for the efficacy of treatments, or intolerant campaigns for the diversion of funds from medicine that works to medicine that does not…The faith that wisdom and the recipe for living are written in one text or another rapidly brings cries of death to the infidel.
Eloquent, isn’t he.
SB rules!
Heh. Simon Blackburn appears to be describing a Unitarian Universalist meeting, and puts his precise little finger on why I am a bit uneasy with the happy-clappy, wherever-you-are-on-your-spiritual-path, all-views-welcome, never-a-discouraging-word ‘toleration’ of the UU’s (who are, admittedly, a very nice bunch of people nonetheless…)
I think UU is perfect for well-meaning, comfortable, educated, often academic folks who are basically secure and don’t believe in much but still want “to go to church.” (Not being too harsh, if I was more sociable and less lazy, I would be a perfect UU member :) )
Is it true that Unitarians wear little question marks around their necks?
This describes the pop-relativism of sentimentalists. But it does not describe philosophical post-modernism, based on the perspectivism of Nietzsche.
Take the title of Rorty’s book: Contingency, Irony and Solidarity.
‘Contingency (1): the condition that something may or may not occur: the condition of being subject to chance (2): the happening of anything by chance: fortuitousness…..’
The book, if I recall correctly, uses contingecy to mean that there are indeed “asymmetries of reason and knowledge, objectivity and truth”.
The very word relativism suggests comparison, things are defined in relation to each other and not to some transcendent standard. Again asymmetry is directly implied.
I would descibe myself as a relativist, since the alternative is to be an absolutist, but I still believe in reason and (searching for) knowledge, objectivity and truth.
Relativism (Part 4)
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Either/or, eh?
Bruce, no, the quotation doesn’t claim to describe philosophical postmodernism. Blackburn makes all those distinctions in the book.
Your quotation is actually introduced like this: ‘with the relativist frame of mind can come a generally good thing, toleration. But it is important to distinguish them. In the intellectual world, toleration is the disposition to fight opinion only with opinion…’
More general thoughts here: : Relative truth.