Relativism and Reality

A Contemporary Introduction

Robert Kirk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415208178
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134619887
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

Our thoughts about the world are clearly influenced by such things as point of view, temperament, past experience and culture. However, some thinkers go much further and argue that everything that exists depends on us, arguing that 'even reality is relative'. Can we accept such a claim in the face of events such as floods and other natural disasters or events seemingly beyond our control? 'Realists' argue that reality is independent of out thinking. 'Relativists' disagree, arguing that what there is depends on our point of view. Which is right? Robert Kirk provides a crystal clear account of this debate from the Greek philosophers to Wittgenstein and Rorty. Along the way, he unpacks some of the more complicated issues surrounding ideas of objectivity, subjectivity, pragmatism and realism essential for those beginning any study of philosphy.

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780203003794-1

1 Myths

In the Babylonian creation epic, the great god Marduk fights and kills a monstrous dragon. Having done so,

• He divided the monstrous shape and created marvels (from it).
• He sliced her in half like a fish for drying:
• Half of her he put up to roof the sky,
• Drew a bolt across and made a guard hold it….
• As for the stars, he set up constellations corresponding to them.

Later ‘He opened the Euphrates and the Tigris from her eyes’, and among other things created mankind from the blood of a slain warrior god.¹ That is one myth (in the original sense: not just any old falsehood, but a story significant for those who tell it). In another myth subordinate gods are made to dig out the channels for those two great rivers. Having worked at it for 3,600 years, ‘They groaned and blamed each other, Grumbled over the masses of excavated soil’, and withdrew their labour, complaining ‘The load is excessive, it is killing us, Our work is too hard, the trouble too much…’.² To provide workers who would relieve the gods of these burdens, the mother goddess created the human race from clay mixed with blood.³

¹ Myths from Mesopotamia, translated and introduced by Stephanie Dalley, pp.255–61. ² Website: Op. cit., pp.9–13. ³ Website: Op. cit., pp.1–16.

Stirring tales – but did anyone ever believe them? Well, why not? There are people today who claim to believe every word of the Bible. Little children seem to believe that Father Christmas delivers presents to each household. Perhaps, though, just asking whether or not the Babylonian myths were believed is too crude. What is it to believe a myth, or any other story? There is surely no straightforward answer. The fact is that those stories were told. In ancient Babylonia, if you wanted to know how things began, those stories were on offer – and, it seems, they had no rivals. In any case, they didn’t have to be taken literally, as we tend to put it. They gave satisfaction quite apart from possibly telling it like it was. They were entertaining. They contained sensible messages (for example, useful material for reflection on labour relations, regardless of whether the gods had really spent 3,600 years digging out channels for rivers). They gave the background against which religious rituals were intelligible.⁴ They provided a framework in terms of which people could think about themselves and their world.

⁴ See F. M. Cornford, Principium Sapientiae, pp.225–38.

Some themes recur in myths from many areas of the world. The theme of a god’s killing a great dragon is one. But, often, different stories are told about the same phenomenon, even in the same culture, as we have just noticed: was it Marduk or the goddess who made us? It hardly seems possible to believe that such stories all describe what happened in reality. You must either choose between rival accounts or find something better: incompatible stories can’t all be accepted as accounts of how things actually happened. (More on this later.⁵) Apart from incompatibility between different myths, it is hard to reconcile what the myths say happened long ago with the sort of things we see in everyday life.

⁵ See Chapter 2, section 4.

No doubt that is harder for us than it was for the people who originally enjoyed the myths. Today we are not often invited to take stories like the ancient myths seriously; and our thirst for explanations is typically satisfied by convincing non-mythical ones. True, there may be situations and people where the question of reconciling mythical accounts and the facts of everyday life just doesn’t arise. Angela Carter describes the state of mind of a tribe of Siberians, led by shamans, at the turn of the century:

And even when his eyes were open, you might have said the Shaman ‘lived in a dream’. But so did they all. They shared a common dream, which was their world, and it should rather be called an ‘idea’ than a ‘dream’, since it constituted their entire sense of lived reality, which impinged on real reality only inadvertently.⁶

⁶ Website: Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus, p. 253.

Still, even little children grow out of the Father Christmas myth. Why is that? It is not that the story ceases to be attractive. It remains attractive, which is perhaps why it keeps being passed on to new generations by unbelieving parents. Children certainly begin by taking it literally – to the extent that they can take any story literally at all. Nor does the story seem to be just some kind of decoration glued on to the surface of ordinary life. It seems to have explanatory power. It seems to explain at least two phenomena: the appearance of Christmas presents in the course of Christmas Eve, and the fact that Christmas brings numerous pictures of a man dressed in red winter clothes with white furry edging, distributing presents from a reindeer-drawn sleigh. However, when the story is regarded as an explanation of these phenomena, it comes under increasing strain as the child grows up. Some of the things Father Christmas is said to do are very peculiar. How can such a bulky man get down the chimney – even if there is a chimney in the house? How can he get through all the work in one night? How do reindeer fly? What about those characters in the shops, who all claim to be Father Christmas? Clinging to belief in the story gets harder and harder to reconcile with what the child knows about the way things are, and eventually belief falls away. The child has grown too sophisticated.

So, it seems, with myths generally. The process of abandoning them, at any rate as candidates for the literal truth, may be speeded up by special factors. The ancient Greeks not only had their own myths to reflect upon. Trading from their outposts on the coast of Asia Minor brought them into contact with the myths of other cultures. They were struck by the relativity of myths to cultures. As one of them remarked: ‘The Ethiopians say their gods are snub-nosed and black; the Thracians that theirs are blue-eyed and red-haired’. Again: ‘But if cattle and horses or lions had hands, or were able to draw with their hands and do the things people can do, horses would draw the shapes of their gods like horses and cattle ones like cattle.’⁷ Apart from being forced to notice a whole range of different myths, the Greeks had reasons for seeking good explanations of the sort of phenomena that the myths tended to treat as basic unexplained data. Trading by sea, they had a practical interest in navigation, the weather, astronomy, measurement, chronology. Whatever the exact reasons may have been, they originated ways of describing and explaining reality which differed remarkably from myths.

⁷ Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 570–475 BC), fragments 16 and 15 (in Barnes, Early Greek

2 Theories

Before about 500 BC the most important Greek city was Miletus, on what is now the coast of Turkey. Of the three main ‘Milesian’ thinkers – though we have only traces of their work – the most interesting is Anaximander, who died about 550 BC. The details of his theory of the world are uncertain, but the outlines seem to have been these. The ordered universe, or ‘cosmos’, with earth, sun, moon, planets, and stars, originated from what he called the ‘unbounded’. This was neither earth, air, fire, nor water. Apart from being unbounded in that way, it was unbounded in time, without beginning or end. And it was in ‘eternal motion’. At some time the continuous motion resulted in the formation of a kind of seed or nucleus. From this the ‘opposites’, notably the hot and the cold, were ‘separated out’. That process resulted in the formation of ‘a sort of sphere of flame’ surrounding the air which in turn surrounded the earth, ‘like bark on a tree’. The process continued with ‘the wet’ and ‘the dry’ becoming distinct. The hot outer sphere started to dry the earth. Then the sphere of flame was torn off and three vast rings of fire were formed around the earth. The fire was held within these rings by dense mist. Holes in these mist-rings enabled the fire within to be seen: a single hole in the case of two of the rings, and many holes for the third. The two single large fiery holes formed the sun and the moon; those in the third ring formed the stars. Eclipses occurred when the large holes were blocked; the waxing and waning of the moon were explained similarly. The earth is a cylindrical drum, a third as deep as it is wide. It stays where it is, at the centre, not because it is resting on anything or (as the Milesian Thales had suggested) because it is floating on water, but because there is nothing to make it go anywhere else: ‘because of its equal distance from everything’.⁸

⁸ For more on Anaximander, see, e.g., Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy. See also Karl R. Popper, ‘Back to the Presocratics’. The remarkable view that the earth stays where it is because there is nothing to make it go anywhere else is of course an ancestor of Newton’s principle of inertia: any particle remains in a state of rest or of motion with constant magnitude and direction unless compelled to change that state by the impact of a force upon it.

You could not have got Anaximander to believe in Father Christmas. There are no mysterious personalities in his story. No gods, no monstrous dragons, no processes unlike those we encounter in ordinary life. No manufacturing of human beings from clay or blood, for instance.⁹ True, some things in the story are still mysterious. The nature of ‘the unbounded’ remains unclear. We have only foggy ideas of how the original kernel of our world was ‘separated out’. But the processes involved would not have seemed more mysterious to Anaximander than those involved in cooking. We have no reason to suppose he thought he had explained everything. If it is uncertain whether those who devised and passed on the old myths thought they were describing what had really happened, it is certain that Anaximander was at least aiming to describe what had really happened, and how things really were in the world. We can say he was aiming at the literal truth about reality, and thought there was something to be right or wrong about.

⁹ He is said to have held that the first animals were produced in the moisture which resulted from the sun’s burning off the water on the surface of the earth.

The same goes for the other main Milesian thinkers and their successors. Their theories of the origin and present structure of the cosmos were all attempts at the literal, non-mythical truth.

Clearly there are many questions about Anaximander’s theory to which he could not have provided acceptable answers. He was in no position to claim, as he did, that the earth is three times wider than it is deep, or that the ring of the moon is eighteen times, and that of the sun twenty-seven times, the size of the earth. If it is unscientific to make claims without being able to substantiate them, Anaximander was in some respects unscientific. But what of it? He and those unrecorded thinkers whose ideas and criticisms contributed to his achievements were pioneers in the attempt to describe the history and nature of the world in terms which, unlike the myths, had some chance of being both true and acceptable to people from different cultures. There were no accurate means for measuring relatively large distances, and no accurate instruments: no telescopes, microscopes, or reliable clocks. Yet evidently these protoscientists were convinced the world had a history worth speculating about,¹⁰ that there were truths about reality to be discovered beyond what was immediate and obvious, and that it was possible to devise theories of the world that could be defended against criticisms.

¹⁰ Contrast, again, the Siberians imagined by Angela Carter: ‘they inhabited a temporal dimension which did not take history into account. They were a-historic. Time meant nothing to them’ (op. cit., p.265).

3 The First Atomic Theory

Those assumptions show up marvellously in the Greeks’ original version of the atomic theory. It will be a useful illustration of some of the main issues to be investigated in this book.

As a result of fierce debates on questions raised not only by the Milesians but by other early thinkers, certain issues were acknowledged to be crucial. One of these was the problem of change. When an athlete eats porridge, the porridge is apparently turned into flesh and blood. Something that wasn’t there before comes into existence; and something that was there before ceases to exist. How is that possible? If, like Anaximander, you say the cosmos came into existence at some time, why did that happen? More precisely, why did it happen at all? And why did it happen when it did, rather than at some other time? The conclusion seemed to be forced on them: whatever exists must always have existed. Hence an early ‘conservation principle’: nothing can come out of nothing. Any adequate explanation of change must satisfy that principle. To meet that and other challenges, two thinkers – Leucippus and Democritus – who flourished in the second half of the fifth century BC devised the following theory.

There are infinitely many indivisible things called atoms (‘uncuttables’). They have always existed and they will never cease to exist. They have different shapes and sizes; many are too small to be seen. The present cosmos results from the automatic swirling and colliding of atoms, and from processes of sifting out and compacting. Some atoms are relatively smooth, others have sharp angles, some have hooks. As a result of the combinations of atoms that have arisen over time, vast numbers of complex structures have been formed. These include the earth, the sun, the moon, the stars, other animals and ourselves. The different properties of things are explained by the fact that atoms of different shapes and sizes are combined in different arrangements. For example, water and other liquids consist of smooth atoms, which offer little resistance to one another. That explains why water flows and finds its...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Truth
• 3 Relative to Us?
• 4 Words and World: Wittgenstein
• 5 Words and World: Quine
• 6 Language-Games V. Realism
• 7 Foundations for Knowledge?
• 8 Dummett's Anti-Realism
• 9 Rorty's ‘Postmodern' Pragmatism
• 10 Science and the World of Everyday Life
• 11 A Strong Realism
• Glossary
• reference
• Index