Editing Relativism (section)

=====Joseph Margolis=====
[[Joseph Margolis]] advocates a view he calls "robust relativism" and defends it in his books ''Historied Thought, Constructed World'', Chapter 4 (California, 1995) and ''The Truth about Relativism'' (Blackwell, 1991). He opens his account by stating that our logics should depend on what we take to be the nature of the sphere to which we wish to apply our logics. Holding that there can be no distinctions which are not "privileged" between the [[alethic possibility|alethic]], the [[ontic]], and the [[epistemic]], he maintains that a [[many-valued logic]] just might be the most apt for [[aesthetics]] or [[history]] since, because in these practices, we are loath to hold to simple [[Principle of bivalence|binary logic]]; and he also holds that many-valued logic is relativistic. (This is perhaps an unusual definition of "relativistic". Compare with his comments on "relationism".) To say that "True" and "False" are mutually exclusive and exhaustive judgements on ''[[Hamlet]]'', for instance, really does seem absurd. A many-valued logic{{mdash}}with its values "apt", "reasonable", "likely", and so on{{mdash}}seems intuitively more applicable to interpreting ''Hamlet''. Where apparent contradictions arise between such interpretations, we might call the interpretations "incongruent", rather than dubbing either of them "false", because using many-valued logic implies that a measured value is a mixture of two extreme possibilities. Using the subset of many-valued logic, [[fuzzy logic]], it can be said that various interpretations can be represented by membership in more than one possible truth set simultaneously. Fuzzy logic is therefore probably the best mathematical structure for understanding "robust relativism" and has been interpreted by [[Bart Kosko]] as philosophically being related to Zen Buddhism.

It was [[Aristotle]] who held that relativism implies that we should, sticking with appearances only, end up contradicting ourselves somewhere if we could apply all attributes to all ''ousiai'' ([[being]]s). Aristotle, however, made non-contradiction dependent upon his [[essentialism]]. If his essentialism is false, then so too is his ground for disallowing relativism. (Subsequent philosophers have found other reasons for supporting the principle of non-contradiction.){{clarify|date=December 2012}}

Beginning with [[Protagoras]] and invoking [[Charles Sanders Peirce]], Margolis shows that the historic struggle to discredit relativism is an attempt to impose an unexamined belief in the world's essentially rigid rule-like nature. Plato and Aristotle merely attacked "relationalism"{{mdash}}the doctrine of true for l or true for k, and the like, where l and k are different speakers or different worlds{{mdash}}or something similar (most philosophers would call this position "relativism"). For Margolis, "true" means true; that is, the alethic use of "true" remains untouched. However, in real world contexts, and context is ubiquitous in the real world, we must apply truth values. Here, in epistemic terms, we might ''tout court'' retire "true" as an evaluation and keep "false". The rest of our value-judgements could be graded from "extremely plausible" down to "false". Judgements which on a bivalent logic would be incompatible or contradictory are further seen as "incongruent", although one may well have more weight than the other. In short, relativistic logic is not, or need not be, the bugbear it is often presented to be. It may simply be the best type of logic to apply to certain very uncertain spheres of real experiences in the world (although some sort of logic needs to be applied in order to make that judgement). Those who swear by [[bivalent logic]] might simply be the ultimate keepers of the great fear of the flux.{{Citation needed|date=July 2011}}