Moral and Epistemic Relativism

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Kobi

As Jane Wagner once said....reality is nothing more than a collective hunch.....to which I would add......at a certain time, in a certain place by a certain group of people.


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I'm curious, do you think this applies to the physical world? In other words do you believe that there are any places, any people on this Earth for whom water did *not* freeze at 32 degrees F (0 C)? Do you think that there are any people or any place or any time at which a rock of some throwable weight wasn't subject to force which is equal to its mass multiplied by its acceleration? Now, I will admit that F=ma (Newton's second law) is an approximation but it is a close *enough* approximation that for most applications we can use it (for example, all space shots are calculated using Newton instead of Einstein because the math is more tractable). However, that equation describes an approximation of a physical reality that was true before Newton came along to explain it. All Newton did was quantify what is happening.

This is the problem I have with statements along the lines of the Wagner quote: it ignores the physical world. There have been cultures (including Western) that *believed* that the Sun orbited the Earth but every single one of them (including this one) was absolutely and completely wrong about that. The belief that the Sun orbited the Earth didn't change the physical reality. The same can be said about, for instance, the cause of thunder and lightning--people have, until fairly recently, believed that this was caused by the thunder god, or the sky god, or what-have-you but at no point was any of that *true* and to say it was 'true for them' really misses the point. Would one accept that the paramedic who is about to give you CPR believes that your heart is in your feet? Would one accept that this is 'true for them' while you die because they are giving you a foot massage? Should one accept that?

The other thing, the contradictory thing, is that the idea that reality is just a hunch is, itself, an epistemic statement. I'm only being half-cheeky here when I say that if the strong epistemic relativists are correct then their argument negates itself. If all of reality is just a collective hunch and not based upon some objective, empirical reality that would hold true even if this universe never contained a single sentient being, then that statement itself is the baseline reality and thus it negates the idea that there is no truth 'outside' our ability to construct it socially.