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Relativism is a family of philosophical views which deny claims to objectivity within a particular domain and assert that valuations in that domain are relative to the perspective of an observer or the context in which they are assessed. [1]
Epistemic relativism. Our knowledge of reality is limited and fallible. Judgmental rationality. It is possible to judge that some accounts of social reality are better than others. Cautious ethical naturalism. Although the is-ought fallacy ought to be avoided, ethical values can be empirically studied.
Factual relativism (also called epistemic relativism, epistemological relativism, alethic relativism, and cognitive relativism) argues that truth is relative. According to factual relativism, facts used to justify claims are understood to be relative and subjective to the perspective of those proving or falsifying the proposition.
Meta-ethical moral relativism holds that moral judgments contain an (implicit or explicit) indexical such that, to the extent they are truth-apt, their truth-value changes with context of use. [1] [2] Normative moral relativism holds that everyone ought to tolerate the behavior of others even when large disagreements about morality exist. [3]
Cultural relativism involves specific epistemological and methodological claims. Whether or not these claims necessitate a specific ethical stance is a matter of debate. Cultural relativism became popularized after World War II in reaction to historical events such as "Nazism, and to colonialism, ethnocentrism and racism more generally." [7]
Other philosophers [2] contend that context-dependence leads to complete relativism. [3] In ethics, "contextualist" views are often closely associated with situational ethics, or with moral relativism. [4] Contextualism in architecture is a theory of design where modern building types are harmonized with urban forms usual to a traditional city. [5]
In metaphilosophy and ethics, metaethics is the study of the nature, scope, ground, and meaning of moral judgment, ethical belief, or values.It is one of the three branches of ethics generally studied by philosophers, the others being normative ethics (questions of how one ought to be and act) and applied ethics (practical questions of right behavior in given, usually contentious, situations).
On the one hand, discussions of the relativist fallacy that portray it as identical to relativism (e.g., linguistic relativism or cultural relativism) are themselves committing a commonly identified fallacy of informal logic—namely, begging the question against an earnest, intelligent, logically competent relativist. It is itself a fallacy to ...