Over the last decades or so , objectivity and truth have fallen on hard times in late-modern societies. Instead, we have entered a kind of post-truth condition where skeptical, relativistic and truth-indifferent attitudes increasingly dominate intellectual, public and social life, a condition where “nothing is true and everything is possible”, as a recent volume on Vladimir Putin’s Russia puts it (Pomerantsev 2015). Or wait: maybe it is better to say, at this point, that it is often claimed that relativistic attitudes have taken a firm grip on the minds of people, and/or that we now (as opposed to before) live in a post-truth condition, as well as that these developments have completely changed the rules of interaction in politics and society at large. As almost always, when we encounter such drastic claims about what has become the “dominant” or “received” view, this is part of a very negative assessment of the development of late-modern Western thought and intellectual culture: things are in such a state of decay that people do not even care about truth anymore (e.g. Boghossian 2007; Ball 2017). Voices that claim there is not much new or much to get very worked up about receive less attention (cf., though , e.g. Fuller 2018). Of course, the picture is much more complex than any simple positive or negative characterizations indicate, and “relativism” and “post-truth” are concepts that can mean very different things depending on purpose and context.
This volume treats relativism and post-truth as related phenomena (and hence, as related concepts as well) in the following sense: both spring out of and feed off an increasing skepticism about human beings’ abilities and even preparedness to attempt to acquire knowledge that would be untainted by the local conditions, standpoints, ideologies, concepts, theories, power relations, and so on that they represent and that permeate any form of inquiry, be it individual or collective, undertaken by scientists or laymen, and so on. Once these influences are acknowledged, the very ideas of objective and disinterested knowledge-acquisition and expertise are in jeopardy. If everyone wittingly or unwittingly has an agenda, why should I treat differences in opinions or critique as anything more than illegitimate and ill-disguised attempts to force others’ agendas on me?
Although the debates over relativism and post-truth are lively both in society and the academy, it is still fair to say that, at least in its more sophisticated versions, this skepticism derives from certain well-known and widely accepted insights derived from a number of areas ranging from the hard sciences to everyday life—so the critical question for debate becomes not whether these phenomena exist but what implications they actually have. In what follows, I will speak about these insights as generating what I will call a dynamic of relativization. Among these insights, we find, for instance, a growing awareness of the formative role that language, concepts, theories and interests play in the seemingly innocent practices of experience, perception and knowledge-acquisition. Besides that, increased familiarity with other cultures, religions and languages through studies, travels and migration lead to an awareness of the degree to which norms that regulate social interaction and the judgments we make are typically context-dependent, and hence of limited validity. These assumptions may be unproblematic in one particular setting, and yet highly contestable or out of line in another. Finally, we have also come to appreciate the grave damage caused by reductionist and positivist science, Western parochialism, absolutism, intolerance and forms of cultural, moral, epistemological and economic imperialism, all the cases where claims to be enlightened and in possession of (universal) truth and knowledge have ultimately served oppressive and colonialist purposes.
The dynamic of relativization encourages us to move in an increasingly relativity-acknowledging, if not outright relativistic, direction; hence the term “dynamic”. However, it is quite possible to acknowledge that dynamic and yet refuse becoming a full-blown relativist, as many of the chapters in this volume testify (and I return to some possible strategies to halt the dynamic of relativization below). Questions about what to do regarding the dynamic of relativization are interesting in themselves, but it is also important to note that these debates involve many more than professional academics, and that they play out differently and have significantly different political repercussions in various areas, as we will see in the following chapters.
So, we seem, then, to lack even the possibility of convergence between views, and should convergence perchance occur, then suspicions will immediately arise that it results from oppression and silencing of important marginalized voices, rather than from rational deliberation or demonstration. The frustrating conclusion need not be the extremely skeptical view that there is no truth : we can just as well—and equally frustrating to many—say that there are actually (too) many truths , many different local perspectives and approaches that all can claim a limited validity, but as far as anyone can tell, there is no God’s eye point of view from which to adjudicate between them. A post-truth condition would then be one that has given up on the idea of “Truth” in the singular as the end-point of inquiry and instead has come to see politics, science, and so on, as continuous battles between different truth-regimes seeking to dominate the agenda.
This is certainly nothing new. Anyone familiar with the history of Western thought already knows that Socrates and Plato took themselves to be locked in battle with relativistic sophists comfortable with a cultural milieu where there is no clear distinction between persuasion and demonstration, and several movements and individual thinkers in, for instance, Western thought have striven to overturn established authorities that they considered illegitimate (Plato 2004; Descartes 2008). However, thinkers like Descartes and the Enlightenment thinkers who came after him, to take a couple of examples, were not prepared to give up the entire idea of legitimate context-transcendent authority; instead, they aimed to reestablish firm knowledge and indubitable truth and to replace false authorities with true ones. In a post-truth condition, this is an impossible enterprise.
This volume approaches relativity, post-truth and relativism in a multidisciplinary fashion. As editors, we have invited scholars from astrophysics, ethics, philosophy, psychology, media studies, religious studies, anthropology, social epistemology and sociology to discuss the impact of relativism and post-truth, both within the academy and in society at large. The motivation for this multidisciplinary approach is that relativism and post-truth are multifaceted phenomena with complex histories that have played out differently in different areas of society and different academic disciplines. There is hence a multitude of ways in which to use and understand the concepts and a multitude of critiques and defenses as well. No single volume can capture the ongoing discussions in different areas in all their complexity, but hopefully the different chapters can function as exemplifications of the ramifications these phenomena have had.
Relativity, Relativization and Post-Truth
The basic notion of relativity is simple enough: some properties we may ascribe to X are such that they are determined by X’s standing relative to Y. X can, for instance, be an object that is small relative to object Y (or a set of objects) and yet be big relative to Z (or another set of objects). This is trivial and unproblematic—if necessary, we can specify which objects/sets of specimens we compare with and then make the judgments more precise in ways that show that there is really no conflict between them. X can also be a judgment about proper conduct that has the property of “being right” relative to some standards Y, yet at the same time has the property of “being wrong” relative to some standards Z. Trivial examples are not hard to come by here either, for instance, judgments about good and bad table manners in different societies, and here, too, seemingly contradictory judgments can be handled in a manner similar to the example above.
To be able to accept and navigate such relativity in fruitful ways seems to be a crucial part of human practical wisdom, what Aristotle called phronesis. Such phronesis includes the ability to be able to make relevant judgments about relativity and to draw relevant conclusions from relativity. When we, for instance, come across the adult person Safia and learn that she is just four feet tall, there is nothing that, in principle, prohibits us from judging that “Safia is tall” (there are, after all, adults who are even shorter). Still, most of us would say that there is something wrong with this judgment. Although it is not false, it does seem to be misleading in relation to the kind of purposes we typically have when making judgments about a person’s length. For almost all such conceivable purposes, the judgment about Safia’s length is misleading, and this is what sets limits to which kind of judgments the persons of practical wisdom will make.
In a parallel fashion, when I ponder upon the question of whether I should tell the truth to a friend about her partner’s repeated infidelities, I will not, as a rule, be very impressed by the information that in certain époques, sincerity was not a highly valued property among friends: the fact that the norms of friendship are relative to a time and place does not change the fact that it is here and now, within a certain normative framework, that I have to make up my mind. In very many cases, then, the relative character of such factual and normative judgments cause no concern: relativity offers less leeway than it may seem to at a casual glance.
At the same time, examples like the above illustrate the extent to which human perspectives and purposes are integral components of our practices of making judgments, forming beliefs, creating plans of action and much else. This leads naturally to an increasing interest in the subjects passing judgment—be they individuals, researchers, groups, NGOs, lobbyists, political parties, and so on. Which purposes direct them, and what discourses and power hierarchies frame and underwrite their ways of thinking? Judgments are not made in a vacuum, but concern things that matter to us and our purposes and intentions, so normative questions about the adequacy of judgments inevitably involve questions of power.
Here, we can see that the recently much-used term post-truth is understood differently if you believe that this is a relatively new (and deplorable) phenomenon, or whether you see it more as the normal condition of human knowledge-acquisition and the creation of truth-regimes, that is, particular hegemonic conceptions of how to distinguish between true and false claims in a particular domain. In the former case, exemplified by Sawyer below, post-truth is an indifference toward truth paired with an increased emphasis on spin and appeal to emotions, prejudices, and other factors that are often seen as epistemically unreliable, whereas in the latter case, exemplified by Morteza/Bagherpoor below, the practice of establishing criteria for what we count as true and false is a kind of post-truth game where different players strive to take command of a domain such as s...