Equal Validity and Disagreement: Comments on Baghramian and Coliva’s Relativism

Extract

I applaud Maria Baghramian and Annalisa Coliva (henceforth B&C) for writing this book. Like Baghramian’s earlier book of the same title (Baghramian 2004), it aims to be a comprehensive critical survey, but unlike the earlier book it engages extensively with the large literature on relativism that emerged in the first two decades of this century. This is, to my knowledge, the first survey of relativism that covers this recent literature, in dialogue with earlier relativist traditions.

The book’s scope is enormous. ‘Relativism’, as B&C think of it, is a tent big enough to hold Protagoras, Nietzsche, William Hamilton, David Bloor, Nelson Goodman, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bruno Latour, Thomas Kuhn, Lorraine Code, Gilbert Harman, Carol Rovane and Peter Lasersohn. I think it is an interesting exercise to look at these thinkers’ very different views as instances of a single kind, relativism. But I am sceptical of the effort, in Ch. 1, to delineate the kind with a set of necessary conditions or essential features (Non-absolutism, Dependence, Multiplicity, Incompatibility and Equal Validity). If these features are to apply throughout the big tent, they must be formulated extremely vaguely. ‘Relativism’ in its broadest sense might better be thought of as a family resemblance term.