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Relatively Speaking: The Coherence of Anti-Realist Relativism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

James O. Young
James O. Young*
Affiliation:
The University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, CanadaT2N 1N4
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Extract

The current debate between realists and anti-realists has brought to the fore some ancient questions about the coherence of relativism. Realism is the doctrine according to which the truth of sentences is determined by the way things really are. Truth is thus the result of a relation between sentences and reality. One species of anti-realism holds, on the contrary, the truth results from a relation between sentences within a theory: a sentence is true if warranted by a correct theory.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , September 1986 , pp. 503 - 509
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1986

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References

1 A variety of writers have articulated something like such an anti-realism. See, in particular, Goodman, Nelson Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett 1978)Google Scholar and Rorty, Richard Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1979).Google Scholar

2 Putnam, Hilary Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981). 121CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Ibid. 123; Putnam has, of course, adopted a ‘non-realist’ position, but when he criticises relativism he still sounds very much like a realist.

4 Newton-Smith, William The Rationality of Science (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1981), 34ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the same argument is repeated in ‘Relativism and the Possibility of Interpretation,’ in Hollis, Martin and Lukes, Steven eds., Rationality and Relativism (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1982).Google Scholar

5 In the course of writing this essay I profited from discussion with Duncan Macintosh, William Abbott, David Davies and Mary Ellen Petrisko. An earlier version of this essay was read to the Canadian Philosophical Association Meetings, Guelph, 10 June 1984.