Truth

Can you disprove the statement, 'Truth is relative'?

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The most familiar challenge to relativism is straightforward and, to my mind, has never been adequately answered. It is that the truth of "Truth is relative" had better not be relative. But we can spell the argument out a little more.

Question: Relative to what? Now, whatever you tell me, I will introduce an explicit statement of the alleged condition. So, if it's "relative to cultural standards", I'll ask you to consider something like: Lying is impermissible, according to the predominant standards of culture X. I can't even make sense of the claim that that is true only relative to cultural standards. It's like trying to make sense of "It's warm in Texas in Oklahoma". (Afficionados will note the similarity of this argument to Quine's criticism of conventionalism. That's non-accidental.)

Note that no such argument could show that truth was not in some interesting sense relative in some particular area. The foregoing does not show, for example, that moral claims are not true only relative to cultural standards, since "Lying is impermissible, according to the predominant standards of culture X" is not an ethical claim. What the argument does purport to show is that there must be a level at which the truth is not relative to anything.

That said, I should probably mention that certain positions people have taken to calling forms of relativism are enjoying a bit of a resurgence nowadays. See, for example, some of the work of John MacFarlane, who is at Berkeley. For what it's worth, though, my own view is that such positions are not plausibly regarded as relativistic, in any interesting sense.

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