Subject: PKF: Re: Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock PKF self-defeating?
Date: Sat, 5 Dec 1998 17:52:35 +0100


Sorry to jump into this discussion like this, but I have simply been
too busy with other things to read the mails on the Feyerabend list.

> This
>involves the idea that a principle that holds that all is relative must
>either include itself in that principle or somehow objectify itself from
>it. The latter is self-contradictory but defendable, the latter is
>self-contradictory if the statement Relativism is only relative is made
>- Feyerabend doesn't do this, he cleverly skates his way around the
>situation.
>
Does relativism refute itself? First of all, I'd like to add a few comments
of
my own. When you ask whether something is "real" or "moral" or not, it
seems to entail some sort of absolutism: that you speak in a context of
something
"really real" or some "absolute good". You may, however, also examine the
*meaning* of the words "real" or "good", and find that they are defined in a
given
*context*. This line of reasoning - examination of words like "real" or
"good" and
their definition - invariably leads to some sort of epistemological, ethical
or
cultural relativism. Relativism not only does not refute itself, it is
natural as soon as
you try to analyze what you mean by the affirmation that something *is*
real.
    Secondly, the question is treated at length in an article concerning a
certain
Danish philosopher which may be found at
    http://www.faklen.dk/en/en/the_torch/enw.shtml

I shal repeat one of the arguments here:
    "Another objection to relativism goes that relativism is invalidated by
its own paradoxical absolutism and thus must itself become absolute, or that
it fails to relativate itself and so becomes absolute. But this is only a
conceptual exercise like we know it from the paradox of Achilles, who cannot
overtake the turtle, that is slower than himself, because every time he
advances to its immediate position it will have advanced ever so little, and
even though this lead must ever be reduced, it will always persist.

Nevertheless, the turtle does not stand a chance outside the narrow
conceptual framework of the Gedankenexperiment; Achilles *does* win in spite
of the race's apparently paradoxical turtle - and reality *is* relative in
spite of the apparently paradoxical absolutism of relativism. "

    I would subscribe to the "anything goes" view, but with a criterion:
    anything goes of it helps us make better predictions, if it helps us,
anyway. Some things (like physics or the religions of "primitive" peoples)
are empirically verified - verified by very direct experience - whereas
other
disciplines - astrology, say - seem more "reassuring" but less falsifiable
(thus
violating Popper's demand for falsifiable theries, which I still support to
some
extent).

    regards,
    Carsten
--
http://www.faklen.dk/en





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