Relativism and Its Deniers

One of the most impressive aspects of Scott Davis's excellent new book is his blending of philosophy with anthropology. Philosophers tend to dismiss anthropologists because anthropologists, like historians, deal with particulars rather than with universals and, worse, stress the distinctiveness of each culture they scrutinize. Typically, only anthropologists who have garnered eminence because of their ethnography deem themselves entitled to universalize—as if ethnography had any connection to universalizing. The same is true of scientists who wax philosophical. The most ironic anthropological example is that of Bronislaw Malinowski, who made fieldwork in a specific culture de rigueur, yet who never hesitated to make pronouncements about “primitive man.” Because anthropology remains tethered to fieldwork, there is no equivalent of the specialization in theory found in sociology. Few anthropologists ever do fieldwork in more than two cultures, yet familiarity with even a single culture apparently provides the grounds for universal claims.There are various kinds of relativism. Conceptual, or cognitive, relativism denies the existence of objective criteria for assessing the diversity of beliefs about the world. Perceptual relativism, which is more radical, denies the possibility of evaluating objectively the diversity of experiences of the world. Conceptual relativism allows for common experiences that simply get interpreted differently. Perceptual relativism maintains that experiences themselves differ: people “occupy” different worlds altogether, with no way to judge the differences. Moral relativism denies that objective criteria exist for evaluating the undeniable diversity of values and practices.There are also different kinds of antirelativism. Universalism argues that there is uniformity rather than diversity in our conceptions, perceptions, or morals. For example, all cultures oppose murder, however differently they define it. In contrast to universalism lies absolutism, which grants the existence of diversity but argues that the conceptions, perceptions, or morals of one culture are right and those of all others wrong. If one can generalize, absolutism was far more common in the nineteenth century than in the twentieth, when relativism became dominant. In reaction to relativism, universalism emerged in the mid-twentieth century.The pioneering anthropologists E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer were classic conceptual absolutists. For both of them, our religious, which means pre-scientific, forebears explained and even outright perceived the world incorrectly. Yet Tylor and Frazer differed on the relationship between truth and rationality. For Tylor, religion is as rational as science, just false. For Frazer, religion is irrational as well as false. Most modern anthropologists are relativists of one variety or another. The staunchest ones have not been, as one might innocently assume, those smitten with postmodernism but rather those from decades earlier: Franz Boas and his students, especially Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, and Melville Herskovits. Writes Herskovits of perception, for example: “Even the facts of the physical world are discerned through the enculturative screen, so that the perception of time, distance, weight, size, and other ‘realities’ is mediated by the conventions of any given group” (1948, 64). Contemporary anthropological nonrelativists are invariably universalists rather than absolutists: they argue that cultures are the same, not that one is superior to the others. The classic demonstration by the anthropologist Brent Berlin and linguist Paul Kay (1969) that cultures the world over have the same color sequence seemingly refuted perceptual relativism, though their claims have been challenged.Davis (2012) focuses on the attack on relativism by Steven Lukes in Lukes's short book Moral Relativism (2008). Years ago, Lukes (1982) questioned the easy acceptance of cognitive relativism. In Moral Relativism he begins again with cognitive relativism but soon switches to moral relativism—a variety of relativism he considers far more pervasive and far more intractable. In chapter 6, on “relativism and fieldwork in contemporary anthropology,” Davis faults Lukes's characterization of Paul Feyerabend, Thomas Kuhn, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty, Clifford Geertz, and Mary Douglas as relativists of one kind or another. Davis argues that these figures are not relativists but pragmatists.Against cognitive, or conceptual, relativism, Davis enlists the American philosopher Donald Davidson's “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1984). A conceptual scheme is the equivalent of a paradigm for Kuhn. Davidson argues that the untranslatability of one scheme into another is an incoherent notion. Simply recognizing another scheme requires grasping it sufficiently to be able to translate it, even if less than totally. The relativity of a conceptual scheme is that of incommensurability and not that of incompatibility. Davidson takes both Feyerabend and Kuhn to be relativists of this extreme kind and rejects their views. In his 1982 essay on cognitive relativism, Lukes largely endorses Davidson's position. In Moral Relativism he never even mentions Davidson. On the one hand Lukes is, I think, wrong to characterize Feyerabend, Kuhn, Geertz, and maybe Douglas as relativists, in which case Davis need not worry about Lukes's characterization. On the other hand Davis does not explain how the historical approach that he deems pragmatic meets the challenge of relativism whenever relativism is at work.As cognitive relativists, take Feyerabend and Kuhn. Lukes quotes Feyerabend's Against Method (1975): Thus science is much closer to myth than a scientific philosophy is prepared to admit.... It is conspicuous, noisy, and impudent, but it is inherently superior only for those who have already decided in favour of a certain ideology, or who have accepted it without having ever examined its advantages and its limits. (Feyerabend 1975, Alphabetical Index 15, qtd. in Lukes 1982, 4) Feyerabend's linkage of science to myth echoes that of Karl Popper, one of his two targets in Against Method. But far from leveling science to the status of myth, Popper elevates myth to the source of cosmological conjectures then tested by science.1 Science derives from myth, though from the “criticism” of myth.Feyerabend's other target, to whom the book is dedicated and who was supposed to have composed a companion book as a cordial rejoinder, is the Hungarian philosopher of science Imre Lakatos. Lakatos (1970) was seeking to preserve Popper's falsificationism by loosening up the criteria for the retention of a theory, which Lakatos expands into a “research program.” Lakatos asserts that a program, to be retained, must offer new predictions, at least some of which must prove true. Since Lakatos, trying to preclude the premature rejection of a program, refuses to specify a period by the end of which a program must make true new predictions, Feyerabend concludes that it is therefore wholly rational to wait indefinitely. But in that case no program can be eliminated, so that, in Feyerabend's anarchistic phrase, “anything goes” (1975, 186).Feyerabend maintains that Lakatos's criteria, which are meant to evaluate less a single program than rival programs, do not even justify the most storied case in the history of science: the abandonment of the Ptolemaic program in favor of the Copernican one. Lakatos thus winds up, despite himself, just like Feyerabend: bereft of any objective criteria for evaluating scientific claims. But Feyerabend is not arguing merely that the Ptolemaic tradition, which goes back to Eudoxus, was as rational as the Copernican one. He is arguing that there are no criteria of rationality. There is no way of evaluating competing programs, but not because each has its own criteria of success. The result—“anarchism”—is not the same as relativism. Therefore Davis is right not to take Feyerabend as a relativist, but not because Feyerabend is a pragmatist. Moreover, Feyerabend himself continually denies that he is a relativist. I do not have at hand a copy of the fourth edition of Against Method, with the introduction by Ian Hacking that Davis recommends. But I do have the third edition (1993) of Feyerabend's repeatedly revamped work, and it contains a “Postscript on Relativism.” There Feyerabend rejects relativism because the immunization against challenge accorded relativists yields the same absolutism that they decry in their antirelativist nemeses. To be precise, Feyerabend's view of relativism fluctuates, so that it is inaccurate to pronounce him either always or never a relativist.2If one could take anarchism as a form of relativism, how would the “emphasis on ethnography and history” that Davis “attribute[s] to pragmatism” (2012, 126) help? Davis maintains that “the methods of real scientists, as opposed to the strictures of philosophers, are what are important in the pursuit of inquiry, and we discover what these are by the judicious exercise of our historical and ethnographic skills” (126). But Lakatos is no less historically minded than Feyerabend and indeed offers his methodology of research programs as a corrective to Popper's supposed indifference to scientific practice. Lakatos is seeking to explain why scientists actually tolerate falsification for a long time. The quick rejoinder would be that Lakatos is still prescribing, not merely describing, scientific practice and so is like, not unlike, Popper. But if Lakatos is leaping from “is” to “ought,” how does the pragmatic focus on actual practice escape the same predicament? And if Davis's pragmatism confines itself to practice, how is it defeating relativism, which is over prescription? The relativist's position is not just that practices differ but that there is no way of adjudicating the differences. When Feyerabend concludes that Lakatos is left unable to justify the abandonment of Ptolemaic astronomy for Copernican astronomy, how is Davis doing other than merely not trying to justify the abandonment?Davis gives far more attention to Feyerabend than to Kuhn, and properly so. Both Feyerabend and Kuhn are celebrated for their concurrent invention of the concept of incommensurability. Far more relativistic than incompatibility, incommensurability means that two scientific programs or paradigms use terms so differently that they cannot even understand each other. But Kuhn repudiates those who, especially in his name, characterize natural science as irrational, see science as no more objective than the humanities or the social sciences,3 and turn internalist disagreements among scientists into externalist, sociological ones. Kuhn elevates science over other disciplines. Kuhn is no relativist, as Davis (2012, 82–84) agrees. By contrast, Lukes grants only that Kuhn is not an extreme relativist.But Kuhn does more than disavow his more radical devotees. True, his comparison in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) of a paradigm shift both to political revolution and to a gestalt switch suggests relativism. But paradigms shift because the new paradigm can explain the anomaly that the prior one could not. There is, then, continuity across paradigms and even progress.Lukes sloppily reads many other figures as cognitive relativists—for example, the English philosopher Peter Winch (1964), whom Davis does not discuss. Lukes considers relativistic Winch's criticism of Evans-Pritchard's assessment of Azande witchcraft as irrational: The British philosopher of social science Peter Winch boldly contested Evans-Pritchard's assumption that in matters of witchcraft “the European is right and the Zande wrong”: the Zande were not seeking “a quasi-scientific understanding of the world”, and it was the European, “obsessed with pressing Zande thought where it would not naturally go—to a contradiction—who is guilty of misunderstanding, not the Zande.” (Lukes 2008, 7–8) But Lukes misconstrues Winch and indeed also Evans-Pritchard, who is at pains to argue that Azande witchcraft is wholly rational, given its premises. Winch argues that Evans-Pritchard commits a category mistake in taking Azande witchcraft as “primitive” science. Mary Douglas argues the same about magic in Purity and Danger. The corrective, then, is reclassification rather than relativism.Lukes takes Geertz as a moral relativist, and so does Davis. But surely Geertz (1973, 1983, 1984, 1995) is chiefly a cognitive and perceptual relativist, if a relativist he is. In stressing religion and other cultural systems as attempts to make experience meaningful, he is seemingly only a conceptual relativist: the cultural systems of each society are responses to the same kinds of inexplicable, unendurable, or unjustifiable experiences.The real issue is whether Geertz is a relativist at all. Lukes assumes that he is: From their observation of the fact of moral diversity and their view that this diversity is irreconcilable, moral relativists take the crucial step that defines full-fledged moral relativism. They hold ... that there is no point beyond a culture from which we can judge others in a way that is not relative to our own position. This was how the distinguished American anthropologist Clifford Geertz deviously defended relativism by criticizing “anti-relativism” for “placing morality beyond culture and knowledge beyond both.” (2008, 21–22) But Geertz is content with understanding, not evaluating, alien values. How, then, is he a moral relativist?Davis argues that Geertz is no relativist at all. Like Lukes, Davis focuses on Geertz's article “Anti Anti-Relativism” (1984). Davis quotes Geertz's contention that he and other mislabeled relativists are really concerned not with absolutism but with “provincialism”: “the danger that our perceptions will be dulled, our intellects constricted, and our sympathies narrowed by the overlearned and overvalued acceptance of our own society” (Geertz 1984, 46, qtd. in Davis 2012, 140). Consequently Geertz, according to Davis, is not interested in denying that slavery is unjust or that freedom for women, gays, and even Republicans is a good thing. So it turns out that so-called relativism is no more than a bogey, something to accuse your rivals of in one political argument or another.... Anthropology plays the important role of pointing out the temporal and geographical limits of the “certainties” and “absurdities” that politicians use with abandon. (2012, 140–41) Anthropology is like history: it puts differing positions in context.I agree wholly with Davis that Geertz is not a relativist, but for me it is for a different reason: because he is, rather, a particularist. Geertz opposes generalizations not because they are ethnocentric—the relativist's objection—but because they are sketchy. True, particulars by nature differ from culture to culture. But Geertz favors them because they are richer: Within the bloated categories of regime description, Feudalism or Colonialism, Late Capitalism or The World System, Neo-Monarchy or Parliamentary Militarism, there is a resident suchness, deep Moroccanicity, inner Indonesianness, struggling to get out. Such a conception of things is usually called nationalism. That is certainly not wrong, but, another bloated category, grouping the ungroupable and blurring distinctions internally felt, it is less definite than it seems. Every quiddity has its own form of suchness, and no one who comes to Morocco or Indonesia to find out what goes on there is likely to confuse them with each other or to be satisfied with elevated banalities about common humanity or a universal need for self-expression. (1995, 23) In the particular and not in the general lies the significance of any cultural phenomenon: Is it in grasping such general facts—that man has everywhere some sort of “religion”—or in grasping the richness of this religious phenomenon or that—Balinese trance or Indian ritualism, Aztec human sacrifice or Zuñi rain-dancing—that we grasp him? Is the fact that “marriage” is universal (if it is) as penetrating a comment on what we are as the facts concerning Himalayan polyandry, or those fantastic Australian marriage rules, or the elaborate bride price systems of Bantu Africa? (Geertz 1973, 43) The antirelativism denounced by Geertz is the quest for the same essence of human nature in all cultures rather than for the West as a superior culture.And for all Geertz's “anti anti-relativism,” he also opposes relativism itself, by which he means the view that the essence of human nature lies entirely in the distinctiveness of each culture. Typically, he opts for a middle ground: one in which culture, and the variability of culture, would be taken into account rather than written off as caprice and prejudice, and yet, at the same time, one in which the governing principle of the field, “the basic unity of mankind,” would not be turned into an empty phrase. (Geertz 1973, 36) What Aristotle says of history, Geertz says of anthropology: that “the road to the general ... lies through a concern with the particular” (Geertz 1973, 53).4In his chapter on relativism in anthropology, Davis cites Douglas as one of Lukes's nemeses. As Lukes notes, she refuses, for example, to accept the political philosopher Brian Barry's contention that discrimination and privilege based on birth are unjust, regardless of the teachings of the society in which this view is accepted. According to Douglas, Barry “is expressing the legitimating principles of the conventions created to maintain a particular set of institutions, to wit, those of Western industrial society” (qtd. in Lukes 2008, 23). What a textbook example of the genetic fallacy!Davis defends Douglas against Lukes not in his chapter on purported relativism in anthropology but in an earlier chapter. Davis is wholly “on target” in taking Douglas's lifelong task to be the one begun by Emile Durkheim: distinguishing sociology from psychology, which means individual psychology, which means psychological “innatism.” (That Douglas in turn faults sociology for sociological innatism and pits anthropology against it is another issue.) Davis is also on target in taking her key book to be not Purity and Danger (1966) but How Institutions Think (1986): Anthropology is the quintessential form of empirical inquiry in the study of human behavior. Its emphasis on what goes on in the communities under study helps to insulate it against economic “rationalism” and the game theoretic abstractions that often plague politics, economics, and sociology. But even in anthropology, it will be necessary to explain some aspects of communal practice in terms of the past, if only because the agents themselves do so. When the objects of our study are far removed from us in time, history is all we have and the ethnography must be reconstructed from what remains, both material and literary. Acknowledging this fact is the start of credible inquiry. (2012, 72)Davis's defense of Douglas against the charge of relativism is akin to his defense of Feyerabend and Geertz: that she insists on immersion in the context to work out the rationality of each culture. (In fact, this is what Evans-Pritchard, her mentor, was doing in Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande [1937], contrary to Lukes's relativistic reading of it.) But again, just how does what could be called historical reconstruction meet the relativist challenge?The conceptual forays of Douglas are far bolder than those of Geertz, whose own ultimate roots go back to Max Weber rather than to Durkheim. Take Douglas on science, about which she writes most fully in How Institutions Think. There she praises Robert Merton, Kuhn, and above all the figure Kuhn cites as the chief influence on him, Ludwik Fleck. Douglas celebrates Fleck for having done decades earlier what she herself does: venturing beyond Durkheim and even Kuhn to sociologize the content of modern science. By contrast, Merton and, before him, Karl explain not the content of science, which they to scientists to but only the of a culture in science. Like and Merton never the of science is really much closer to Barry and the of the as the who only a This maintains that the not merely the and of science is And yet the relativism of the much than that of Douglas at her most The never claims that scientific truth is itself as Douglas but only that the grounds for its truth It is the still more extreme and who go as far as Durkheim asserts that modern science takes the concept of time, and so “primitive” religion but that categories are and only scientific ones true. Durkheim asserts that modern like modern social But modern ones get tested and by by science, is or culture is Douglas argues that modern are no less than ones. In the to the edition of she argues that modern as well as not only and also true only a is thus an extreme relativist. Douglas's relativism is not only empirical but also For what is relative to a society is not only what is a true conception or a true perception but what is meant by truth or or or argument or rationality. of these terms can be By contrast, Durkheim never which means these terms even for In How Institutions Douglas from her extreme relativism, in reaction to the earlier of she only moral which she not in grants that at least they can be So Douglas to be an but then moral relativism all the way back to who for me is a Lukes roots modern moral relativism in and even more in the source of the relativism of the is also the source of the relativism of the Berlin who, as Lukes comes to universal with cultural differences. Lukes that moral relativism is to For example, an marriage to us individual but to it an as in The over morals actually be over Lukes cites philosopher Richard example of a society in which their when their or in to for them a at the practice would our in an to cultural relativism. One found above all in is that of our morality is right and that of all others is wrong. A is the rejection of the of cultures, which are as of for Lukes grants that there be for to and so he rejects But he asserts that there universal criteria, from and from the of human for that can still be to Lukes about the of moral relativism, to But surely in practice is a relativist. When the comes to we are not all

Epistemology · Relativism · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science · Philosophy, Science, and History · Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education

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