Wie können wir von Geschichte lernen?

Bis in die Aufklärung hinein lautete die Antwort auf diese Frage für gewöhnlich: durch lehrreiche Beispiele. Unter dem Schlagwort >historia magistra vitae< - Geschichte ist die Lehrmeisterin des Lebens - wurde die Vergangenheit als eine Art Fundgrube von beispielhaften Konflikt- und Entscheidungssituationen behandelt, deren Lehren sich relativ unproblematisch auf vergleichbare Situationen in der Gegenwart übertragen ließen. Es galt, die erfolgreichen Handlungen und Strategien vergangener Akteure zu imitieren, und ihre Fehler zu vermeiden.

Mit der zunehmenden Professionalisierung der Geschichtswissenschaften im späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert geriet die Konzeption von Geschichte als einem Sammelsurium von Lehrbeispielen mehr und mehr in Zweifel. Dies schlug sich natürlich auch in der philosophischen Diskussion darüber, wie wir von Geschichte lernen können, nieder.

Wenn etwa Hegel lakonisch meint, dass die Geschichte lediglich lehre, dass "Völker und Regierungen niemals etwas aus der Geschichte gelernt" haben, dann spricht er damit nicht einfach eine pessimistische Einschätzung der menschlichen Lernfähigkeit aus. Hegel stellt vielmehr die Grundvoraussetzungen des Modells "exemplarischer Geschichte" in Frage: Wo wir die Vergangenheit als Vorbild oder abschreckendes Beispiel benutzen, gehen wir implizit davon aus, dass die Handlungsbedingungen in der Gegenwart jenen der Vergangenheit ausreichend ähnlich sind, um eine Übertragung von Gestern auf Heute zu ermöglichen. Geschichte bedeutet aber gerade einen umfassenden Veränderungsprozess, in der sich nicht nur einzelne Handlungsweisen, sondern die Handlungsbedingungen selbst verändern können.

Hegel selbst hat die Menschheitsgeschichte bekannterweise zu einem universalen Lern- und Fortschrittsprozess stilisiert, in dem sich die Vernunft und die Freiheit schrittweise selbst verwirklichen. Dieser umfassende Fortschrittsoptimismus wurde durch die Erfahrungen des ersten Weltkrieges und des Nationalsozialismus grundlegend in Frage gestellt. Aber auch die Tatsache, dass der europäische Kolonialismus stets unter Verweis auf "zivilisatorischen Fortschritt" legitimiert wurde, lässt den Fortschrittsbegriff problematisch erscheinen.

Aber welche Modelle des Lernens von Geschichte stehen uns zur Verfügung, wenn wir umfassenden Fortschrittsnarrativen kritisch gegenüberstehen, aber auch nicht in die naive Verwendung von Einzelbeispielen zurückfallen wollen?

Als Einstiegspunkt bietet sich die Frage an, wie Erinnerung, Erzählung, und Identität miteinander zusammenhängen. Schon für unsere ganz persönliche, individuelle Erinnerung gilt, dass sie nicht nur einzelne und voneinander isolierte Ereignisse aus der Vergangenheit festhält. In unseren Praxen und Ritualen der Erinnerung nutzen wir das Mittel der Erzählung, um die Ereignisse unseres Lebens in umfassende Zusammenhänge von Vorher und Nachher, Ursache und Wirkung, Bedingung und Bedingtes einzuordnen. Manche Ereignisse schätzen wir dabei als besonders bedeutend für unsere persönliche Entwicklung ein. Wir heben prägende Erfahrungen, Kumulations- und Wendepunkte heraus, und behandeln weniger wichtige Situationen als bloßen Hintergrund oder Ornament. Indem wir strukturierte Geschichten über unsere Vergangenheit erzählen, werden wir uns auch darüber klar, wer wir heute sind. Und mitunter geraten wir in Konflikte, wenn wir unliebsame Details, die mit unserem gegenwärtigen Selbstbild nicht zusammenpassen, lieber unterschlagen würden.

Auch wenn es um Erinnerung im kollektiven und gesellschaftlichen Sinn geht, ist die Erzählung von Geschichte stets mit einem Prozess der Erzeugung von Identität verbunden. In pluralistischen Gesellschaften begegnen wir dabei einem vielfältigen Angebot von Geschichtsdeutungen und -erzählungen. Unterschiedliche gesellschaftliche und politische Gruppen formieren sich unter anderem über die Erzählungen, mit denen sie sich und andere historisch verorten. Pluralität bedeutet dabei auch Konflikt: Unterschiedliche Erzählungen gehen mit unterschiedlichen Schlüsselerlebnissen und unterschiedlichen Urteilen darüber, was als relevant und was als irrelevant zu gelten hat, einher. Unterschiedliche Geschichten identifizieren unterschiedliche Traditionen, Kontinuitäten und Bruchlinien.

Zwar sind die Geschichtswissenschaften zu strengen Kriterien von Nachvollziehbarkeit und Überprüfbarkeit verpflichtet, sie bleiben von den politischen Konflikten um historische Erzählungen aber nicht völlig unberührt. Auch dort, wo es einen unleugbaren Bestand historischer Tatsachen gibt, die nicht in Frage gestellt werden können, bleibt doch die Deutung dieser Tatsachen in sinnvollen Erzählungen ein offener, gegenwartsbezogener und damit auch politischer Prozess. Gerade weil Erzählungen über Geschichte eine zentrale Rolle bei der Herstellung unserer persönlichen, gesellschaftlichen, politischen, und nationalen Identität spielen, bleiben sie umstritten.

Die Einsicht in den Zusammenhang von Erzählung, Identität und Geschichte, hilft uns, die Probleme von exemplarischer Geschichte und Fortschrittsgeschichte noch etwas genauer zu fassen, und dadurch alternative Konzepte des Lernens von Geschichte zu entwickeln.

Das Problem der "exemplarischen Geschichte" ist nicht nur die naive Vorstellung, dass sich Geschichte wiederholt. Ein grundlegenderer Fehler besteht darin, dass sie sich isolierter Einzelbeispiele aus der Vergangenheit bedient. Damit bleiben die Zusammenhänge, die historische Ereignisse miteinander verbinden, unsichtbar. Geschichte wird mit Vergangenheit gleichgesetzt, sodass die historischen Prozesse, die von der Vergangenheit in die Gegenwart führen, gar nicht zum Thema werden können.

Wenn wir aber Zusammenhänge und dynamische Entwicklungen in den Blick nehmen, statt uns auf isolierte Einzelereignisse zu beschränken, dann können wir die Gegenwart als ein Produkt der historischen Entwicklung verstehen. Und wenn wir Geschichte nicht als abgeschlossene, tote Vergangenheit betrachten, sondern als einen Prozess, an dessen Gestaltung wir in der Gegenwart aktiv Teil haben, dann ist es auch leichter, aus dieser Entwicklung gegenwartsrelevante Schlüsse zu ziehen. Eine Erzählung, die Vergangenheit und Gegenwart miteinander sinnvoll verbindet, ist eher dazu in der Lage, einen Orientierungsleitfaden für die Zukunft an die Hand zu geben, als ein isoliertes Beispiel.

Gleichzeitig kann die Auseinandersetzung um Vergangenheit aber nicht stillgestellt und auf eine letztgültige Erzählung festgelegt werden: Die Frage nach Kontinuitäten und Brüchen ist ebenso Gegenstand fortlaufender politischer Auseinandersetzungen, wie die Frage, was wir in unsere gegenwärtige Identität als positive und negative Bezugspunkte aufnehmen wollen und müssen.

Ein zentrales Problem des Fortschrittskonzeptes besteht darin, dass durch die Annahme einer vorgegebenen "Richtung" des historischen Prozesses die Gegenwart aus der politischen Verantwortung genommen wird. Einerseits wird unterschlagen, dass historische Errungenschaften umkämpft bleiben. Rechtsstaatlichkeit, Demokratie und Menschenrechte, aber auch Arbeitsrechte und die Rechte von Frauen können, einmal erreicht, auch wieder zurückgenommen werden. Andererseits lenkt die unreflektierte Rede vom Fortschritt davon ab, dass es eines normativen Standpunktes bedarf, um bestimmte Entwicklungen überhaupt als "Errungenschaften" und "Fortschritte" auszeichnen zu können. Gerade weil die Deutung von Geschichte immer umkämpft ist, kann von Geschichte zu lernen nicht bedeuten, die Verantwortung über gegenwärtige politisch-normative Entscheidungen auf die Vergangenheit abzuwälzen.

Dass sich das "Haus der Geschichte Österreich" als Diskussionsforum versteht, das sich nicht mit der toten Vergangenheit, sondern mit der lebendigen Geschichte befasst, ist folgerichtig. Das Haus stellt sich die Aufgabe "gegenwartsrelevante Fragen an die Vergangenheit" zu stellen, und zwar so, dass nicht nur die Ereignisse der jüngeren Vergangenheit Österreichs seit 1918, sondern auch Deutungskonflikte über die österreichische Geschichte selbst zum Thema gemacht werden.

Anlässe für "gegenwartsrelevante Fragen" an die Geschichte gibt es derzeit genug. Das Wiedererstarken von Nationalismus und Rechtsextremismus in Europa, der (scheinbare) Erfolg autoritärer Staatsprojekte, oder die zunehmende Verschärfung gesellschaftlicher und ökonomischer Konflikte sind allesamt Themen, die sich für die Befragung von historischen Kontinuitäten, Umbrüchen und Entwicklungslinien anbieten.

Ob es gelingt, österreichische Zeitgeschichte so zu erzählen, dass Zusammenhänge mit gegenwärtigen globalen politischen Entwicklungen sichtbar werden, hängt letztlich auch davon ab, wie gut der Balanceakt, den das "Haus für Geschichte" anstrebt, eingelöst werden kann: So muss eine Pluralität von Erzählungen und der gelebte Konflikt um Vergangenheit zugelassen, zugleich aber ein klarer demokratischer Standpunkt in der Gegenwart bezogen werden.

Moral relativism is the view that morality is relative to time, place, or culture.  What’s right for you may not be right for me.  Plenty of people self-identify as moral relativists, although it’s likely that many of these people are not being consistent or will change their minds over time (see Beebe & Sackris 2016).  Still, many people just think it’s obviously correct that there could be no universal morality and that whatever morals exist are a function of time, place, and culture.
 
Whether this is so depends on what we mean by ‘morals’.  The term is ambiguous.  Once made clear, it turns out that everyone is a moral relativist in some sense but only the most radical is a relativist in all senses.
 
Sometimes by ‘morals’ what we mean is ‘moral beliefs’.  In this sense, to say that morals are relative is to say that what one believes about morality is relative.  And that is surely correct.  What we believe about morality is affected by our time, place, and culture.  Three-hundred years ago, most people in Europe believed that slavery was morally permissible.  Now we do not.  Our moral beliefs are relative.  This view is not controversial.
 
Other times by ‘morals’ what we mean is ‘correct moral standards’ or ‘true moral principles’.  In this sense, to say that morals are relative is to say that the correct moral norms are relative to one’s time, place, and culture.  Take the slavery issue again.  If you think that people in Europe three-hundred years ago were mistaken about the moral permissibility of slavery, then you’re not a relativist in this sense.  You probably think that the correct moral standards show that slavery was always wrong but that it took humans a long time to realize this.  On the other hand, if you think that there was really nothing morally wrong with slavery then, but there is now, you are a relativist in this latter sense.
 
Does it make sense to be a relativist about the correct moral standards?  This view is controversial, but clarifying the dispute is tricky.  It depends on which sorts of moral standards are under discussion.  There are many “levels” of moral principles that we might discuss, and some may be relative while others are not.
 
Let me illustrate the dilemma with an example from science.  Physicists long to construct a “theory of everything.”  This theory would explain all physical phenomena by subsuming all physical events under a single set of ultimate principles.  However, we aren’t there yet.  The best we have are a series of principles that are true but fail to capture all physical phenomena.  Examples of mid-level principles are E=MC2 and Boyle’s law which says that pressure and volume are inversely proportional.  We use these mid-level principles to solve particular application problems like building a bridge or filling a scuba tank.  So in physics we can demarcate three levels of abstraction: an ultimate theory, mid-level principles, and lower-level applications. 
 
It’s the same in moral theory.  Philosophers have long argued over the correct “theory of everything.”  Candidates from utilitarianism to Kantianism to Aristotelianism claim to subsume all moral properties under a single set of ultimate principles.  As in physics, there’s no consensus on that front.  The best we have are a series of principles that most philosophers think are true but fail to capture all moral phenomena.  Examples of mid-level principles are “You ought to respect your friends” and “It is wrong to enslave people against their will.”  We use these mid-level principles to solve particular moral problems that we face in everyday life.
 
With these three levels distinguished, we can now return to the question of whether the moral standards are relative.  We have three levels to choose from: one may be a relativist about the application of principles to a given situation, about mid-level principles, or about ultimate moral principles.
 
At the level of application, it goes without saying that the application of moral principles to concrete situations will yield different moral standards of behavior at different times, places, and cultures.  What you must to respect a friend in 21st century Europe is far different from the behavior required to respect a friend in 9th century Japan.  In that sense, the correct standards for what you ought to do are relative to time and place.  And yet this doesn’t require us to say that the mid-level principle is relative: in both times and places there is a moral duty to respect one’s friend.
 
It is a far different matter to endorse a relativism about either mid-level or ultimate moral principles.  To endorse the idea that in some times and places it is morally wrong to enslave people against their will but in other times and places it is morally permissible is to be a relativist about a mid-level principle.  This sort of relativism provides no way of comparing the behaviors of people governed by different moral principles and no way to improve or regress by altering the moral principles at play.
 
In short, we should all be moral relativists of a certain sort.  We should agree that what we believe about morality is at least partly explained by our environment and that the principles of moral application will vary widely with local circumstances.  In some cultures it is a moral mistake to buy your in-laws a gift year and in others it is morally required to do so.  But this sort of innocuous relativism is consistent with the idea that there are universal moral standards at the mid-level, the ultimate level, or both. 
 
Moral relativism is not an all-or-nothing proposition.

We took a break for a while, but now we're back.

We'll have a looser schedule than before, but we will still be bringing you the latest about work on relativism, updates about the ERC Relativism project, and guest posts from scholars across the world.

For updates you can 'like' the project on facebook, or follow the project (@ERC_Relativism) or the blog editor (@natalan) on twitter.

by Delia Belleri

In your recent book Extended Rationality (Palgrave MacMillan 2015) you advocate a form of “Hinge Epistemology”. This view has something to say with respect epistemic relativism. How would you describe your stance in this regard?
 
I do not advocate a form of epistemic relativism. Hinge Epistemology can be developed in different ways and my own version differs from the versions that other fellow philosophers – for instance, Duncan Pritchard and Michael Williams – have put forward (but they are no relativists either!). There is a discussion among hinge epistemologists as to what we can count as “hinges”. My view is that hinge epistemology has the highest chances of success when it focusses on very general hinges, which are supposed to ground the acquisition of any type of knowledge in any area. So, the kinds of propositions that I consider to be hinges are, for example, “There is an external world”, “There are other minds”, or the principle of uniformity of nature. In my book, I also speak about “social hinges” or “testimonial hinges”: I maintain that the practice of testimony rests on the assumption that people do not generally provide misleading information. Now, if these are the hinges, I think it would be extremely difficult to come up with epistemic systems that feature radically different and opposed hinges which are nevertheless compatible with human experience, justification and knowledge. In this sense, I am not a relativist. If, by contrast, by “hinges” we understand more specific propositions, things change, and we can at least witness individual or group variability. Yet, mere variability is not enough to give rise to a relativist view. What is needed, on top of that, is some requirement of incompatibility – either in the form of disagreement or of distance – between these viewpoints and also an admission of their “parity”. Thus, the path from hinge epistemology to relativism is not at all obvious and I myself am not inclined to follow it.
 
It remains that the relationship between hinge epistemology and epistemic relativism may be further explored by those who believe in this program, in order to clarify what the available options are and where we want to position ourselves. A further, important element is this: my version of hinge epistemology could be read as a form of relativism because I am an anti-realist regarding hinges. That is, I do not believe they reflect facts that are given independently of us. They are background assumptions of our epistemic practices which cannot be established independently of the practices themselves. It would be epistemically arrogant to proclaim oneself a realist about their truth. So in this sense, my position could suggest, and be developed in the direction of, a form of relativism. Again, this is not my considered view on the matter, but others may be inclined to take hinge epistemology in this direction.
 
Do you think philosophical relativism – as stated and articulated by professional philosophers within academic institutions – could be responsible for other forms of relativism as expressed in certain public debates? I am thinking here of forms of opposition to what seems to be “established knowledge”, ranging from anti-vaxxers to climate change deniers.
 
I think that in this respect one should try more precisely to identify what the “public opinion” is. If we are talking about the public opinion of a specific country it is one thing, if we move to another national context, it is another. My impression is that in the United States there is not much contact between what academic philosophers do and public debates. Or at any rate, the contact is not as direct as it could be in other countries where, for sociological reasons, philosophy has a different role: for instance because it is taught in schools, or because it is constantly present in the op-ed sections of newspapers. I think in Italy there is much more continuity between academic philosophy and public opinion. Much of the philosophical debate that was “popular” between the seventies and the eighties in the last century, and whose echoes we can still hear today, was certainly informed by relativism. First of all, in the background there was the Kantian idea to the effect that reality is not immediately given, but it is rather at least partially constructed through our categories. This was often put in linguistic terms: the languages in which we phrase our experiences shape the experiences themselves. This was a theme running through academic philosophy at the time, as well as other disciplines like semiotics as it was developed by Umberto Eco. Once these assumptions are endorsed, the step towards relativism is almost inevitable: perhaps the initial position is a form of conceptual relativism, but it soon turns into an epistemic relativism. For employing certain concepts and certain words sooner or later affects the very conceptual resources we employ to express and transfer knowledge. Secondly, and again in the Italian context, Nietzsche is an unquestionable influence; journalists and public intellectuals are presumably all familiar with the Nietzschean idea that there are no facts, only interpretations. This may have epistemological repercussions, for the focus is shifted from the inquiry into facts to a hermeneutical task which implies that reality is approached from a certain “standpoint.” This can lead people to doubt that there are any absolute truths as to whether, e.g., vaccines cause autism or not. These observations seem to me to apply to the Italian context, or at least to some areas of Italian public opinion (generally the intellectual leftist), but, to repeat, we ought to distinguish which public opinion we are talking about. My impression is that in several contexts where we witness the rise of “alternative facts” there is very little philosophical motivation behind it. These opinions seem to stem more from ignorance and lack of trust in the experts, often motivated by feeling entirely at their mercy and thus diminished in one’s autonomy and in one’s relevance in a given society.
 
You have defended views in various sub-areas of epistemology. One of these concerns self-knowledge. In your recent book The Varieties of Self-Knowledge (Palgrave MacMillan 2016), you maintain a form of pluralism about how we acquire knowledge about ourselves. What is the impact of your position on the current debate on the topic?
 
This position leads to a reconfiguration of the debate and allows us to rehabilitate a number of positions that are considered antithetical as equally valid, to the extent that these capture only partial aspects of what self-knowledge is. By self-knowledge we mean knowledge of our mental states, which normally gives rise to self-ascriptions of psychological properties, like “I feel sick”, “I feel happy”, “I think that Vienna is pretty”, “I intend to take my son out for lunch”, “I am in love”, “I am brave”. The point is to understand how we come to know these mental states. I contend that these self-ascriptions of psychological properties are essentially divided into two classes: one of self-ascriptions of dispositional properties and the other of self-ascriptions of either current sensations/emotions or current non-dispositional propositional attitudes. Once this distinction is drawn, it is possible to see that a number of positions that seem in opposition are in fact compatible: for example, the inferentialist account of self-knowledge (whereby a self-attribution of knowledge is the result of an inference to the best explanation) and an anti-inferentialist account. The inferentialists are ultimately right with regard to our knowledge of dispositional states. How do I know I am brave? Not because I am currently experiencing a courage-like feeling, but because, at least in some cases, I consider my overt behavior to date and infer to its likely cause. The inferentialist is, however, wrong to extend her account to our knowledge of the pain we are currently experiencing in a certain situation. To make another example: Moran's deliberative theory is offered as a comprehensive account of self-knowledge, but this is clearly inaccurate, since this theory is best applied only to our self-attributions of beliefs and other propositional attitudes. In a pluralist setting, this theory need not be seen as in contrast with an expressivist option, which is best suited as an account of how we self-ascribe our ongoing sensations and emotions, like our ongoing pain or fear.
 
Now, my position is slightly more articulated than this and I myself take a critical stance towards some of these theories, so it is not the case that “anything goes”, by my pluralist lights. My general goal was, however, to show how a form of pluralism can help re-frame the debate. The view also gives rise to some interesting methodological results. When we think about how we arrive at a first person self-ascription, this is not exclusively the upshot of an inference to the best explanation (as urged by inferentialists like Ryle or, more recently, Quassam). There is a variety of other methods which have not been sufficiently studied: simulation, testimonial knowledge, or hermeneutics. In general, pluralism allows us to acknowledge and assess a cognitive and epistemic domain that is far more variegated than one may expect.
 
You wrote a book on Moore and Wittgenstein (Moore and Wittgenstein: Certainty and Common Sense, Palgrave MacMillan 2010) and generally give great importance to the historical aspects of analytic philosophy. How do you think analytic philosophers should approach their tradition?
 
First of all, they should pay more attention to the history of philosophy – and not simply to the history of analytic or Western philosophy, but also to that of, for instance, Eastern traditions. This is a burgeoning trend that we are witnessing in the United States. Building bridges between the past and the present and between different cultures allows more people to feel interested in philosophy and included in its practice. Secondly, and going back to analytic philosophy specifically, there is a number of authors whose influence is everlasting: I worked on Wittgenstein and Moore, but Frege and Russell are two undeniable pillars of the tradition. It would be impossible to understand what is going on in today's debates in the philosophy of mathematics, for instance, without having at least some basic acquaintance with Frege's logicist program. Analytic philosophy thinks of itself as theoretical philosophy, and hence as operating outside of time and history, but in fact it could only benefit from an increased awareness of its historical roots, or even of its possible connection with other traditions. These include, for instance, American pragmatism, phenomenology and perhaps also non-Western traditions. Conversely, it is somewhat curious to note that those who do confront their history, in the analytic camp, end up assuming the exclusive role of historians of philosophy. This is particularly evident in the Wittgensteinian tradition, where scholars of Wittgenstein also tend to think that nothing could be added to what he already said in his works. This is absolutely deleterious, if anything because it would entail the irrelevance of all that has been said since Wittgenstein's death – which happened around seventy years ago! Instead, I believe Wittgenstein's ideas could be a source of inspiration for new views, to be formulated and developed in the contemporary debate. I think this very clearly applies to hinge epistemology. Wittgenstein had a linguistic conception of hinges, but this feature need not be inherited by more modern versions of the theory. He believed that there is an incredibly high number of hinges, but this can be debated. So, if the history of our own philosophy is known to us but is not taken as the ultimate horizon of philosophical practice, it can provide us with valuable stimuli.
 
What about the relationship philosophers have with their present – and, perhaps, their future? Many interesting philosophical questions seem to emerge in connection with the digital world. What is the role of epistemology in this area?
 
I think applied social epistemology can lead to extremely interesting results here. We acquire a massive amount of information from the internet – not only about current topics, but also about history or science. How testimonial knowledge in digital environments is possible becomes a pressing question. Many philosophers have already produced highly interesting work on this topic, which illuminates problems that had never been experienced before the rise of digital media. Most of the times, in face-to-face communication we are acquainted with the person who is conveying their message to us. Hume was convinced that people do not regularly lie, not so much out of compliance with some abstract norm, but because, facing another human being, they would be embarrassed to be caught in a lie. Written testimony does not put the informant in a situation of potential embarrassment, but being the author of a text still implies “owning it” and being responsible for the truth of its contents. With the rise of digital media, authors can afford to disappear; embarrassments can be avoided completely. And yet, the information that goes online could never have been spread as widely as it can be spread today. We should therefore start to ask in which circumstances we can and cannot trust a digital source. Reflection on the notion of trust acquires a new significance when epistemology becomes involved with the internet. There is also a variety of other more technical and interesting questions connected with the algorithms used by search engines and social media to filter and display information. An interesting idea that has recently emerged in the epistemological debate is that the ranking of pages performed by search engines like Google is essentially link-based. So the page that is presented first is the page that is linked by the most epistemically “weighty”, or authoritative, websites. There have been attempts to model this phenomenon by means of, for instance, Condorcet's jury theorem: if more people link a certain page rather than another, they are linking the epistemically more reliable page. This might have interesting repercussions. Every time a new major technological resource appears on the scene, whose functioning we as laypeople do not master, this generates a sort of mistrust, the feeling that we might be deceived or manipulated by someone who is more expert than us. This risk is to an extent real, however, once we take a closer look at the way these systems work, our fears may be at least partially soothed. So it is important, also for social reasons, to clarify matters in this domain.
 
Apart from epistemology applied to the digital world, what would you say are the most exciting research trends in this field?
 
There is a growing interest in social epistemology, with topics like testimony, disagreement, reputation, trust and many others. All this is then applied to further areas of inquiry, such as medicine, legal issues, education, gender and racial issues. This is surely a trend for the years to come, and is also connected with the development of new technologies like the digital media. As far as “individual”, non-social epistemology is concerned, there was a moment when the field was dominated by, on the one hand, virtue epistemology theorists, and on the other, by the followers of Williamson's knowledge-first program. There was a lot of attention paid to the modal conditions of knowledge, as this was a heritage of the long-lasting discussion on Gettier cases. Today, thanks to the work of several people in between epistemology proper and the history of epistemology, “hinge” theories are emerging. These theories are promising in many ways: besides their stance on classical issues, such as the conditions of obtainment for justification and knowledge, the response to scepticism, and so on, these accounts offer interesting applications in social epistemology. One can talk about “testimonial hinges”, “moral hinges”, and ask if and how we know them and what their role is in our reasoning; one can talk about “religious hinges”, or even about “social hinges”, which encode the Weltbild of a given society or group with respect to gender and race, thus potentially reaching out to a different scholarly audience. And of course, the connections with relativism deserve to be explored.
 
You have recently taken up a full professorship at the University of California, Irvine, and you have an extensive international academic experience. What are your thoughts on the philosophy job market today?
 
I was recently shown by a colleague some interesting data related with the US job market, which is the larger market in terms of number of positions advertised. With regard to the last year, the results are quite impressive: approximately half of the positions are in value theory (ethics, metaethics, political philosophy); there are very few positions – approximately ten percent – available in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology and metaphysics. There is an increasing interest in the American market for “mixed” positions which combine different competences, especially as far as non-Western philosophies are concerned. The market seems nowadays open to research profiles that reconcile, for instance, analytic philosophy and Bhuddism; also, a significant number of jobs is devoted to feminist philosophies. This tells us that there is little interest for young academics researching the “big topics” in theoretical philosophy, and I cannot help but be worried by this. One's philosophical training needs to start from the foundations; lack of a solid knowledge of the fundamentals could lead to philosophically shallow outputs. This being said, that a reorientation is happening in philosophy is a fact that needs to be acknowledged. Turning to my area of expertise, epistemology, the emerging topics pertain mainly to social and applied epistemology (as already mentioned before). This is a sign that epistemologists wish to become more and more involved – and possibly make a difference – with respect of a variety of socially weighty issues. Medical epistemology, legal epistemology, epistemology of education, the epistemology of the internet are certainly branches that will be further explored in the years to come. For a young academic, working on these topics might be a good way of investing in their future career.
 
What's your view on the role of women in professional philosophy? Are we making any progress? Is there a long way to go?
 
I am not a pessimist at heart, or someone easily prone to giving in to victimism. These are complex sociological issues and phenomena. We should be looking at them in perspective and we should be asking ourselves: has the percentage of women (and other minorities) in philosophy increased over the last x-number of years? This is an entirely empirical question and deserves an empirical answer. I’m pretty sure there has been considerable improvement in terms of absolute values. In terms of percentage, I actually don’t know. But this is the question to ask. Another question to ask is: what areas of philosophy have witnessed the larger increase of female practitioners and why? I’m pretty confident that if we look at feminist philosophy, the ratio is actually in our favor. If we look at hard-core philosophy of logic, I would expect the opposite. My dream is to arrive at parity all across the board. I won’t see it in my life time, but that’s what I hope to see: more men working in areas of philosophy which seem traditionally just for women and more women working in traditional, core areas of philosophy.
 
How to get there? Well, like in all social phenomena, by creating a different culture – talking about all this does help – and by exercising power, whenever one can, to redress the balance, both individually and as a group. So I do urge women to seek and accept positions of leadership whenever they have an opportunity – without shying away or hiding behind one’s family obligations – and work for parity. It’s tough, it’s tiring, but, girls, it’s extremely rewarding! And I do urge women to get together and think of actions which can be carried out as a group. We are witnessing this already in certain professional organizations, like the APA. We need to do more on that front, though. I do have one piece of advice: use these opportunities to look forward and be pragmatic – that is, goal directed in your thinking. Ideals without action are empty, actions without ideals are blind!​

​The following is the first in a series of interviews with people who have written about relativism - whether for or against. While many of our interview subjects will be philosophers, we are also interested in what non-philosophers have to say about these topics.

David Bloor is a sociologist, and Emeritus Professor at the University of Edinburgh where he was one of the founders of the Science Studies Unit. ​While David has written about a variety of topics, he is best known for advocating the 'strong programme' in the sociology of scientific knowledge. The strong programme has frequently been associated with a form of relativism and a sceptical attitude towards science and its authority. As David tells us in the interview, while he is happy to be placed in the 'relativist camp', he is no critic of science as such. On the contrary. He sees the strong programme as part of an attempt to understand science - both its successes and its failures - scientifically.

David was interviewed by Robin McKenna, Anne-Kathrin Koch, and Natalie Ashton. You can listen to the audio embedded here, and/or read a transcript of the interview below.

​RM: David, you are perhaps best known as a proponent of the strong programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge. Can you tell us what the strong programme is, and what it tried to do?

DB: Let me start with what it was trying to do. My aim was to capture and codify what historians of science were doing already, and doing very successfully. I wasn't trying to tell people what they should do, I was trying to say what they already did.

Now, why was I trying to do that? It was because good historical practice was, as I saw it, actually under attack. Certain philosophers wanted to impose their own recommended method onto the practice of historians, and I thought that they were wanting to impose a bad method on the historians. I'm referring here to Popperians such as Imre Lakatos and others such as Larry Laudan.

What they said is that, first of all, philosophers should decide what counts as truly rational action. So philosophers defined rationality, and then those parts of scientific practice that could be described in a way that shows them exemplifying this idea of rationality, well those parts of science were explained simply by virtue of their alleged rationality. And that left causal explanation with two rather limited tasks to perform. According to the Lakatoses and the Laudans, socio-psychological causes might explain the general circumstances under which rationality would arise, or causes could explain why scientists deviated from rationality. In other words, they limited the role of causality very considerably and they partialled out the history of science into the rational and the non-rational (or the a-rational), and this seemed to me to run directly opposite to good historical practice.

Good historians, as I understood it, were offering, not a dualistic analysis of scientific knowledge, but a more monistic account. In other words, they were exercising causal curiosity and empirical curiosity just in a wholly general way. And this seemed to me to be correct and desirable so that, to me, the taken for granted empiricism and causal sensibility of historians of science, seemed to me itself to be a manifestation of the scientific attitude. So I saw the actual practice, or the best practice of historians of science, as exemplifying science-understanding-itself-scientifically, and I understood the recommendations - the historiographical recommendations and proposed legislation - by the Laudans and the Lakatoses, as itself in fact embodying an unscientific approach, because they were extracting rationality from the real world causal nexus. And that's what I was trying to embody in the strong programme, the sensibility, the codification of what I thought historians of science had already achieved, and that I believed was basically under attack. So that's as far as I can answer the first question, that’s a sketch of an answer to the first question.

RM: Thanks. That was quite high-level; could you perhaps tells us how this particular approach would work with a detailed case study? So what would differentiate a sociological or historical approach to a case study from, say, a philosophical approach to that case study?

DB: Well, take the example of a scientific controversy. It might be Priestley and Lavoisier over oxygen versus phlogiston, or it might be the theory of the electromagnetic ether versus an Einsteinian relativistic approach which discarded the appeal to the ether. You have a fundamental dispute, they can't both be right, and here the asymmetrical methodology of the Lakatoses and the Laudans and their rationalistic approach would tell the historian to make a prior assessment as to who was being rational. And then treat that as in some way unproblematic - simply the unfolding of rationality itself. And hence causal explanation would be, for example, confined to why Priestley did not respond rationality, allegedly, to the evidence, or why the defenders of the ether did not respond, allegedly, in a rational way - why they resisted Einsteinian rationality.

And this really does not make good sense, it doesn't make good historiographical sense, and the instinct of historians was very different: you looked at where this thinking came from, what interests it served, what were the causes of its credibility, or lack of credibility, of some given approach, to some given group. And just instinctively the historians dealt with both sides of the controversy in the same way. They didn’t at all engage themselves with some abstract notion of what was really rational. They assumed, I suppose, roughly speaking, that people on both sides of such scientific controversies were intelligent people, who were not thinking in any particularly corrupted way. They were both thinking, but with different assumptions, presuppositions, purposes, background resources, and so on.

So historians adopted a symmetrical attitude, whereas their philosophical critics trying to tell them how to do their history of science were recommending that they truncate their causal curiosity, and simply let somebody else define rationality, and then they would conveniently run round the edges of this account filling out a few of the details. And this struck me as a travesty, and my intention was really to codify the instincts of the historians here and expose the, well, let's be blunt about it: expose the extraordinary methodological arrogance that lay behind the rationalistic proposals.

AK: Ok, thank you David. Now this strong programme has often been associated with relativism. Could you please say a little about this association?

DB: Yes, but first I need to make clear what I understand by the word ‘relativism’ Philosophers typically use the word ‘relativist’ to describe all manner of irresponsible and rather stupid attitudes. If you look at what is alleged to be relativism, critics will tell you, in effect, that it is a form of irrationalism: that it indicates an indifference to questions of truth, falsity, rationality, accuracy; that the relativist adopts a ‘Who cares? Whatever’ attitude towards important disputes. That, I think, is nonsense. I don’t think that notion of relativism deserves to be taken seriously at all. So the definition of relativism that I use seems to me to be simple and intuitive, and it is that relativism is the rejection of any form of absolutism.

Now, this then raises the question: what is the link between that definition of relativism and the strong programme? And the short answer to that is that once one rejects any form of absolutism, then the only viable perspective on knowledge is to see it as a natural phenomenon. That's to say, to see it as something that is inseparable from the causal processes that take place in nature, and in space and time. It means that, inevitably, one must think of the process of gaining knowledge and constructing knowledge as itself causal and embedded in nature. In other words, relativism points to a form of naturalism, and naturalism is the basic perspective which is articulated by the strong programme.

NA: So you're understanding relativism as the counter to absolutism, so could you just say a couple of words about what you mean by absolutism there?

DB: What is meant by absolutism? Well it's got to be a certain sort of epistemological superlative, hasn't it. If one makes it anything other than something with a very strong, elevated, and superlative character to it, one is simply backsliding away from the connotations of the term, and the sort of contrasts that are implied by it. So, if we ask ourselves what the connotations of the word are, then we immediately have to produce qualities like: it’s something with a certain perfection to it; it is something with a certain eternal character to it; it is something which is not qualified or approximate, or sometimes true/sometimes false, effective here and not effective there. All of those qualifications, I think, have to be removed in order to do justice to something having, or deserving, the label of ‘absolute’.

Now, scientific knowledge itself, if you look at it historically, and just empirically, and ask yourself ‘How does it work? How do scientists behave?’, then, endlessly, there is provisionality, there is qualification, there is approximation. All of those things are just embedded in science, science is saturated with them. Therefore, science stands in fundamental opposition to any knowledge, or any knowledge producing process, that might deserve the word absolute. So I really see the choice between the absolute and the relative as the choice between something that is fundamentally non-scientific and something that is scientific, so it boils down once again to a dichotomy.

AK: So, unlike most people, you do in fact positively embrace the label ‘relativism’, is that right?

DB: Yes, I do positively embrace it. And you're wondering why I positively embrace it, I think? Well, this is a question that I have been asked before, and I ask it myself sometimes, because of course, as I indicated, most people, and that includes philosophers and non-philosophers, simply take the word to have wholly negative connotations, to refer to something really rather silly and objectionable, so why not just say the word has come to mean that, it’s come to have these connotations, why not just be smart and adopt another label?
Now there are two reasons why I don't want to do that. The first is that if I did try to present myself, or present the work that I think is relativist, by using another label, I don’t really think it would really alter the situation. I mean supposing that I started using a word like ‘naturalistic’ - I'm not putting forward a relativist view, I’m putting forward a ‘naturalist’ view of knowledge, or I’m putting forward not a relativist view but a ‘causalist’ view of knowledge - if I engaged in some verbal maneuver of that kind... immediately, if anybody bothered at all to respond to such a maneuver, they would start discovering that really naturalism is relativism or causalism is relativism, and they would slide back to the silly, trivialising definition of relativism, and claim that they’d detected it or could reveal its presence behind the charade that was now being perpetrated. So one would be trying to engage in a game that one couldn’t win, for a start.

The second reason is that I have a streak of stubbornness about this one. I’m not going to let other people dictate to me what words I use, or what words mean in my own mouth, so I refuse to let my language be corrupted by others, as I see it. I think there are very strong and clear intuitions behind the ‘absolute vs. relative, the choice is absolute or relative’ [talk]. I think there are strong intuitions there. I think a lot of philosophers lapse into that sort of talk when they're not on their guard for some reason, especially if they’re talking about moral relativism. You can find dictionaries of philosophical terminology that define moral relativism as the rejection of moral absolutism. As far as I can tell, most philosophers don’t jump up and down with anger on encountering that definition. For many purposes they actually use it. It’s just that they don’t have good control over their own terminology, because as soon as they start talking about epistemology they start denouncing relativism as the equal validity thesis or something like that. So the second thing is a streak of stubbornness; I think this is the correct way to use the language, and I’m jolly well going to stick with it.

RM: A more general question: you’ve set yourself up as someone who wants to, as it were, defend a scientific approach to science, against the anti-scientific, philosophical approach. So I think it’s fair to say that philosophers have not been on board with this more scientific approach towards science, but could you say something about whether scientists have been more receptive to this attempt to understand what they’re doing in a scientific manner? 

DB: It's difficult to generalise. In my own experience I've encountered radically different responses. There is of course the whole phenomenon of the Science Wars, as they're called, in which a number of scientists, particularly physicists, have denounced relativism and have denounced work in the strong programme as relativist in the negative, in my terms 'silly', sense of the word. Some scientists do seem to think that any careful empirical account must be read as a criticism. Why they think this, I don't know. I can see no adequate grounds for it, I don't believe any adequate grounds for this complaint have ever been produced, but there is a very strong tendency for critical empirical analysis of the activity to be read as criticism of that activity. In fact, this is possibly the most frequent, or at least the most vocal response - perhaps that’s a better word.

Though on some other occasions I have been extremely surprised and gratified when I have talked to some scientists who’ve read some of this material, and don't react in that way. Who do take it on the matter-of-fact, largely un-evaluative, level on which it’s offered. For example, I had the privilege when I was in Berlin to talk to an expert on hydrodynamics and hydraulics, who was engaged throughout his professional life in ship design, and he was a mathematically sophisticated engineer, and I was very worried, when he, very kindly, offered to read some drafts of my recent book on aerodynamics, as to whether he would very strongly react against the matter of fact relativist analysis that I gave, And I was grateful and gratified to find that he took it as all rather taken for granted and nothing to argue about. We discussed some technical issues as to how it’s best to deal with the relation between some different areas of aerodynamic theory, and I benefited from those discussions, but he did not have any wholesale methodological opposition to offer.

I also recently realised that there was a review of my book on aerodynamics in the American Journal of Physics, which is a journal that doesn't publish cutting edge research - its primary concern is with physics education and textbooks, particularly advanced textbooks, and often the contributions to this journal concern the clarity and accuracy of the presentation of the material of physics and so on. And so, as soon as I realised my book had been reviewed in the American Journal of Physics, I thought ‘uh-oh, what’s going to happen here? Will the person who is writing the review - an emeritus professor of fluid dynamics - will he find mistakes? For example, will he find mis-formulations of the technical content? Will he view the whole exercise as an attack on science?’. I’m glad to be able to report that I survivedthis review intact, and it was a generous and effective presentation of the case that I was trying to make. The reviewer did choose to confine the review to the technical chapters of the book, rather than some of the philosophical reflections at the end, but he didn't say this was because he thought they were wrong. He thought that those fell outside his own sphere of competence, so he was reluctant to talk about it. But to me that was an example of somebody who can read this sort of work and not automatically assume that it was a criticism of the scientific enterprise.

NA: Ok, so I'd like to ask you about public perceptions of relativism and its relationship to science. So relativism and other ‘ism’s like post-modernism are increasingly seen as in conflict with science and the common good, it seems. The recent March for Science, which aimed to celebrate non-partisan science and emphasise evidence-based policy as something in the public interest, saw some protesters carrying slogans such as “science has no agenda”, and it seems like the idea some of these people have is that political and other values would undermine science and make it less accurate and less beneficial. So I’m wondering what you think of this idea?

DB: Yes, this raises a lot of deep, and sometimes very complicated, issues. The first thing I want to say is that I certainly don't think relativism is a threat to science. I think that absolutism is a threat to science. Indeed, I think that relativism, as I understand it, and as I think it can and should be understood, embodies the general approach of science itself to knowledge. Of course, it’s easy to see what's happening here. If you define relativism as some sort of anti-scientific irrationalism, as many people do, then of course, by definition, relativism in that sense is a threat to science. But I think that one can state the whole matter much more clearly and effectively by focusing on exactly what it is one thinks is a threat to science - namely irrationalism - and denouncing irrationalism. And leaving the world relativism out of the discussion.

On this question of whether political values undermine science, or the objectivity of science, perhaps. I think the answer is: no, as such they don't, or they don't necessarily do so. It does of course depend on precisely which political values are in question. There will be those that do and, I’m fairly confident, those that don’t.

In general terms I would want to say that history makes it absolutely clear that the practice of science is saturated with political agendas. Think of the Manhattan Project building the atomic bomb; think of the development of radar as part of the defensive system in British strategic planning and the conduct of the second world war; think, going back a bit further, of electrical telegraphy and the work of Lord Kelvin, who had many commercial commitments; Kelvin’s work on underwater telephone cables. Historically and sociologically science has been inseparable from politics,war and economics. And I think it would be hopelessly unrealistic to draw the rigorous conclusion ‘oh, well, all of that science must be distorted science then’. Kelvin, Einstein, distorted science? No it really won’t work to talk like that. This is not bad science or polluted science, it’s just science. And if we admire science, and I admire science, or a lot of it, then we’ve got to learn to live with the fact that it is a complicated phenomenon - exactly as you'd expect it to be from a historical point of view - rooted in the complexity and contradictions and difficulties of social life and history. It’s a morally complicated thing. It’s a package deal.

AK: You just said that absolutism is a threat to science, or can be a threat to science. Many people might find that rather surprising. Can you maybe help us understand that by giving us an example of something of the practice of science that embodies absolutism?

DB: Yes it’s important to stress, or for me to stress, that I’m saying that absolutism can be a  threat to science. I wouldn’t want to commit myself to saying that absolutism is necessarily, always a threat to science, for the very good reason that there are determined absolutists who’ve been excellent scientists.

This is particularly the case if you go back into history. The classical example would obviously be Isaac Newton, who was an absolutist in the general sense that he was a religious person, believed in God, and attributed absolute powers and properties to God in a very orthodox, Christian way. And he developed absolutistic conceptions of space and time. This was one of those most successful technical achievements in science that there has ever been, and he was quite serious about using words like absolute here, and he also connected the technical meaning of the word to his theological thinking. And he said, for example, quite explicitly in his work that absolute space and time were the ‘sensorium of God’. So if Newton can be an absolutist and do the science that he did, clearly absolutism is not in any absolute sense antagonistic to scientific achievement.

When I say now that it’s the absolutists not the relativists who we should be worried about in the present day situation I am talking about absolutist religious thinkers who seek to undermine a naturalistic and biological conception of human beings and of human diseases; who use moral and theological categories for commenting on and seeking to understand, for example certain diseases, particularly sexually transmitted diseases - these things are seen as punishment from God. And the alleged sacredness of life is used as a way of inhibiting research in certain areas in the United States. These people are the enemies of science, these people are the absolutists. That’s why, at least in the present circumstances, and as far as I can see for the foreseeable future, it is absolutism that you should be worried about if you are pro -scientific. 

RM: Okay, just to finish, maybe you could recommend for our audience some readings on the topics we’ve discussed that could give them more of a background, some more information, on these topics.

DB: Yes. Two books spring to mind, and shamelessly one of them is my own. But there's a book published not very long ago whose title, if I remember it correctly, is What is a Genome? [Genomes and What to Make of Them] by Barry Barnes and John Dupré - Barnes, of course, was a colleague for many years in Edinburgh - and this is a look at some contemporary science. Science which has been discussed in the public realm rather a lot, and sometimes in an informed way and sometimes not in an informed way, and, for anyone who is interested in biological themes such as what exactly is a genome, this is a very readable and technically well-informed book, as I’m confident that it is.

And if one wants to follow up some of the particular themes that I’ve talked about here then let me shamelessly mention a book i published in 2011 called The Enigma of the Aerofoil - the aerofoil being, essentially, the wing of an aeroplane - and it’s about disputes over how a wing works, and why aeroplanes fly, treated historically, looking at conflicts. But one general feature of the book that might interest people who are not necessarily interested in the details of aerodynamics, is that, in the final chapter of the book, I broaden the discussion and ask where a science like aerodynamics fits into a relativist picture. Can you really be a relativist about aerodynamics?

And one of the vehicles for the discussion that I use is a claim made by Dawkins. Dawkins said - just in case the listener doesn’t know, Dawkins is famous for attacking religion, and he does so in the name of science, he also attacks relativism, allegedly in the name of science - and Dawkins has said, using the aeroplane as an example, he says: ‘show me a relativist at 30 000ft, and I shall show you a hypocrite. In other words he treats the relativist as someone who doesn’t pay attention to reality, doesn’t pay attention to technology, doesn't understand how technology or science works, yet can’t, of course, intelligently sustain such a view. And as soon as they’re confronted by the achievements of technology, such as being in an aircraft at 30 000 ft, then their silly ideas will be left behind and they will become more realistic. I directly address this challenge, and I show that if you're going to understand the science of aerodynamics, you must understand it as an achievement of relative knowledge. Now I could elaborate on that and go into details, but... that’s what you might find in that book, and that might be of some general interest.

NA: That’s great, thank you very much! Thank you for speaking to us.

by Thomas Raleigh

Here are 2 very natural ideas about conscious experiences:
(1) They are in some deep, interesting sense private.
(2) Nevertheless, different subjects can have qualitatively similar experiences.
 
I think that these 2 ideas are in tension. If we take seriously the idea that it is metaphysically impossible for any other subject to experience my phenomenal experiences, then the notion of phenomenal similarity across different subjects will not be well defined. And the reason for this is that the very idea of a phenomenal or appearance property – how something looks, feels or appears – is an inherently relativistic notion. That is: how something looks/feels/appears is always relative to some kind of subjective viewpoint or sense modality.
 
What is the relevant sense of ‘private’? Roughly: it is metaphysically impossible for anyone else to ‘directly’ experience my token phenomenal states/property instances. (Slightly less roughly: it is impossible for the token phenomenal features which constitutively form my stream of consciousness, to likewise constitutively figure in anyone else’s stream of consciousness.)
​
A traditional sort of scepticism raises the worry that we cannot ever know whether our respective private features are qualitatively the same – maybe your experience when looking at a ripe tomato is privately very different from mine; maybe your sensations when you bang your funny bone are quite different to how banging my funny bone feels to me; maybe, despite your fluent talk about experiences of various kinds, you actually have no inner conscious life whatsoever; and so on.
However, even allowing that this sort of sceptic may have a point, the following thought can seem very plausible: ok, perhaps I cannot be sure that your private stuff is the same as mine. But so long as it is in fact the same (and we both suppose or believe this to be so even if we may not be able to know it), then we can at least still successfully communicate and understand each other’s claims about our respective private stuff.

But notice that this line of thought relies on the second idea, above: that there can be facts, even if they may be unknowable, concerning inter-subjective phenomenal similarity. And this has been denied, at one time or other, by quite a few distinguished philosophers – including Frege, Schlick, Shoemaker and Stalnaker.
 
What is the problem then with the idea that 2 private phenomenal items, from 2 different subjects, could just naturally be similar – irrespective of what either subject can know or judge, or their dispositions to classify them and so on?

​Jennan Ismael makes a comparison with the notion of simultaneity in relativistic physics: there can be facts about temporal relations between 2 events within a spatial frame of reference. But when the 2 events are specified as belonging to different frames of reference, there is no fact as to one being earlier/later than the other. Likewise, given a model of experience which satisfies (MP), sameness or difference in the phenomenal appearance/feel of two private items/features may be well-defined relative to a particular subject’s private domain. But if the experiential elements in question belong to two different metaphysically private viewpoints, then any comparison of phenomenal appearance will not be well-defined. Just as there is no such thing as simultaneity simpliciter, but only relative to a specific frame of reference, there would be no such thing as phenomenal similarity simpliciter, but only within a specific private viewpoint.

One more comparison: John Divers has recently raised the following problem for Lewisian realism about possible worlds. If the truth of our modal claims is supposed to be explained by the existence of counterparts in distinct possible worlds, and those possible worlds are not spatio-temporally related to each other (i.e. spatio-temporal relations only obtain within individual possible worlds), then we face a problem with counter-factual claims like the following:
​
 ‘Usain might have been taller than he actually is.’

For the truth of such a claim is supposed to require the existence of a counterpart of Usain in some other possible world who is ‘taller than’ the actual Usain. But Usain in the actual world and Usain’s counterpart in some other possible world do not stand in any spatial relation; a fortiori they do not stand in the ‘taller than’ relation. In the absence of any possibility of actual-Usain and counterpart-Usain having their heights defined relative to a common spatio-temporal framework, we cannot make sense of claims that their respective heights are ‘the same’. Not only is it impossible for actual-Usain and counterpart-Usain to inhabit each other’s spatio-temporal domains, it is also impossible for any other item to function as a benchmark or ruler by which to meaningfully compare their heights – as it is metaphysically impossible for any item to figure in more than one Lewisian possible world.
​
Likewise, I am suggesting, assuming the metaphysical impossibility of my experiencing your private phenomenal items, or vice-versa, there is a lack of any common ‘appearance-space’ in which two items from distinct domains could have their subjective feels/appearances meaningfully compared as being phenomenally similar or different. Not only is it impossible for either of the two items in question to appear in the other’s private domain, it is also impossible for any other possible item/feature to serve as a phenomenal benchmark or standard in common to both private domains – as it is impossible for any item/feature to appear in more than one private phenomenal domain.

That is just the briefest sketch of the issue. But so what to do? I suggest that in order to hold onto the idea that we can have naturally similar phenomenal experiences, we should give up on the idea that they are metaphysically private – an idea that is in any case in tension with the physicalist idea that phenomenal experiences are ultimately just physical events/processes in the brain. There is nothing metaphysically private about the physical events and processes in a brain, which can be studied using 3rd-personal scientific methods just like other physical stuff. Indeed it seems plausible that it is precisely this supposedly special and unique conscious access we each have to our own sensations, mental imagery, innermost thoughts, etc. that provides one of the main motivations for dualism. As John Wisdom once remarked: “The peculiarity of the soul is not that it is visible to none but that it is visible to one”.

Taking seriously the idea that phenomenal similarity is always relative to a subjective viewpoint or appearance space – just as simultaneity and shape are relative to an observer’s frame of reference – thus gives us a reason to reject the perennially attractive idea that our conscious experiences are metaphysically private. But of course, others might want to jump the other way and hold onto phenomenal privacy at the expense of inter-subjective phenomenal similarity. The worry then is that this would make our privately defined phenomenal concepts incommunicable – but that will have to be a topic for another occasion.

If you are interested in the issues raised in this post, look out for Thomas' forthcoming article 'Phenomenal Privacy, Similarity and Communicability', which will be published soon in Ergo. ​

By Victoria Lavorerio

This summer term, Martin Kusch, philosophy professor and principal investigator of the “Emergence of Relativism” research project, held a Master-level research seminar (or "Forschungsseminar") in the University of Vienna devoted to epistemic relativism. The course explored recent proposals and criticisms of epistemic relativism, and it culminated on Monday, 27th of June in an all-day workshop in which the students presented their tentative results. The students’ presentations covered a range of issues and positions studied throughout the course, as well as some independent explorations of recent and not so recent relativistic proposals.

The day started off with presentations dedicated to Sankey’s reconstruction and critique of epistemic relativism. Olga Ring took issue with Sankey’s strategy to refute epistemic relativism; not only is his naturalistic stance (construed as an epistemic norm) also vulnerable to the problem of the criterion, but it is in tension with his brand of particularism. Relatedly, Richard Bärnthaler argued against Sankey’s claim that naturalism, but not relativism, can provide justification in an objective sense. Drawing from Galison’s work, he considered objectivity as a (historically-relative) epistemic norm, and argued that the empirical investigation behind the naturalistic approach uses the very epistemic norm it is supposed to evaluate. In his presentation, Jesse de Pagter turned to Evans-Pritchard’s study of the Azande to discuss the validity of the Equal Validity claim, which Boghossian and Sankey advance as an important feature of epistemic relativism.
 
Soheil Human’s talk was inter-disciplinary in nature, as he discussed how the predictive processing theory in neuroscience can contribute to MacFarlane’s criticism of Boghossian’s dismissal of “absolute relativism”. Also contra Boghossian, Tom Fery argued that there are ways to motivate relativism via the encounter of a different epistemic system, such as rejecting the claim that such system has to be impressive, or actual, or (which he deems more promising) by exploring the possibility that the two epistemic systems are on a par. Anne-Kathrin Koch’s talk asked the metaphilosophical question of what the disagreement between relativists (represented by Bloor) and absolutists (exemplified by Boghossian) is really about. After exploring the many facets of the contention, she advanced the hypothesis that what really is at stake is two different pictures of what epistemology is and should do.

The following panel explored the relations between relativism and disagreement. Lucas Smalldon discussed the famous disagreement between Bellarmine and Galileo, arguing that one shouldn’t ask who is more justified, but rather who is more rational. By using an error-correcting orientation, he argued that Galileo’s explanation fared better, and thus judging it to be a faultless disagreement is mistaken. In his presentation, Clemens Loidl presented Hazlett’s relativized entitlement to trust a source as a device to deliver mutually recognized reasonable disagreement; he then explored its potential to respond to Boghossian’s critique of faultless disagreement. I, Victoria Lavorerio, argued against Hales’s claim that relativism is a promising resolution strategy in cases of irresolvable disagreements, by analyzing the demands such strategy makes on the disputants, and why they cannot be met. Closing the panel, Christoph Lernpaß focused on the evolutionary debunking argument from disagreement and its connection to moral relativism. He argued that Mogensen’s distinction between “arbitrarily absent” and “merely possible” does not pick up only the epistemically relevant disagreements.

Opening the final panel of the day, Henriikka Hannula aimed to expand Sharon Street’s relativism about normative reasons to include the agent’s cultural and social context, as well as her practical reasons, which underpin normative reasons and are not necessarily about getting true beliefs. In his contribution, Jakob Schott compared Rorty’s and Boghossian’s interpretations of Kuhn, while claiming that the latter was the least comprehensive and charitable. Taking Hartsock’s Marxist standpoint theory as an example of feminist epistemology, Karoline Paier asked which kind of relativism would help the feminist’s advantage thesis the most. After reviewing some possibilities, she concludes that Stanley’s interest-relativism looks the most promising. Finally, Daniel Eduardo Marante Mendoza took Bloor's relativism of content and meaning and placed it against Boghossian’s taxonomy and subsequent critique of different kinds of relativism to see whether (and) they applied to Bloor’s theory.

I hope I have done justice to the enjoyable and busy day we had, exploring and discussing both classical and unexpected issues related to epistemic relativism.

The following is the first in a series of interviews exploring the connection between Relativism and Racism. Many philosophers disagree about this connection. Some argue that relativism is a prerequisite for open and multicultural societies as it enables their members to live on equal terms. Others argue that relativism gives rise to a problematic "anything goes" form of tolerance that is responsible for the flourishing of irrational and racist views. Moreover, these critics of relativism often claim that a universal concept of humanity and absolute values are necessary tools to resist racist ideologies. Some even argue that racism is itself a radical form of anthropological relativism, and use this as a basis from which to criticize relativistic views in general. This interview series will discuss the connection between relativism and racism from both a systematic and a historical point of view. We will take a closer look at our concepts of human nature and racist mechanisms such as dehumanization, and discuss why philosophers tend to demonize relativism.

Maria Kronfeldner was interviewed by Johannes Steizinger.

I am very happy to welcome Maria Kronfeldner for the first interview in our interview series on relativism and racism. Maria Kronfeldner is Associate Professor at CEU Budapest. She works in the Philosophy of the Life Sciences and the Philosophy of the Social Sciences and has published widely in this area. She currently works on a book with the working title: What’s Left of Human Nature: A Post-essentialist, Pluralist and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept. She organized an interdisciplinary and international conference on “Dehumanization: New Approaches to the Politics of Human Nature” in April 2016 and a smaller philosophical Workshop on dehumanization in January 2017. Today, we want to talk about the phenomenon of dehumanization, the concept of human nature and the significance of contexts for both.
 
JS: Dehumanization is studied especially in social psychology. There is a growing number of studies that examine the different forms of dehumanization and its psychological impact.  However, dehumanization is not an established philosophical term. Thus, I want to ask you: what is dehumanization and why should philosophers engage with it?
 
MK: In social psychology, dehumanization means something quite narrow, even though psychologists distinguish – as you mentioned – a couple of forms. The term also has a history in social psychology: it was introduced as a technical term in the study of extreme violence in the 1970s. Scholars claimed that in acts of extreme violence such as mass murder, the killing of other humans presupposes their dehumanization. Otherwise such atrocities would not be possible. Over time, the term acquired a less narrow meaning. Current psychologists assume that quite generally we perceive the Other in social interactions according to a concept of humanness, as part of which individuals are taken to be more or less human. If current social psychologists use the term dehumanization, they study such processes of social cognition as the basis of discrimination and similar social phenomena.

The usage in philosophy is different and quite problematic: in philosophy the word is mostly used for whatever an author regards as negative. The attribute “dehumanizing” then simply stresses the negativity of something. Take, for instance, discussions about rape: we all agree that rape is something negative. Philosophers that want to highlight the negativity of rape, often claim that rape involves the dehumanization of its victim. It is hard to find anything else than this very broad usage in philosophy since dehumanization does not have a precise meaning in philosophy.
 
 
JS: Do you think that any definition of humanness implies a certain kind of dehumanization?
 
MK: I think that dehumanization is something very abstract. It facilitates the creation of distance. If something comes too close to you – in multiple senses –, then you can use dehumanization to create a psychological distance. This is the general and abstract aspect of it. The concrete content of dehumanization, however, varies a lot. I cannot think of a definition of humanness, a concept of the human that does not allow for dehumanization. And I cannot think of a concept of being human that is exclusively or in a special sense dehumanizing. All properties that can be taken to define what is human (such as rationality or morality) can also be used to dehumanize others.
 
JS: On the one hand we seem to have a very broad and abstract concept of dehumanization. On the other hand, the dehumanization of others mostly takes place in rather concrete forms, such as in images of animal or monster comparisons. People call or depict, for instance, Donald Trump as a monster. Is this a form of dehumanization?   
 
MK: Comparisons with monsters, machines or animals can be used in a very specific metaphorical way that is not necessarily connected with dehumanization (i.e., believing that the depicted is in fact less human or treating the depicted as such). You can mean such comparisons satirically. Take, for instance, the images used in the magazine Charlie Hebdo, or in other satirical magazines. They use animal comparisons as part of an art form and want to communicate a certain message with it, which can but does not have to be dehumanizing. One needs a theory of the art of machine or animal comparisons to explain these usages.

But you also have other contexts in which it is harder to decide whether the case is a case of dehumanization and thus whether the respective image is ethically or politically legitimate. Take, for instance, advertisement, which often portrays women as sex objects. This objectification is a clear case of dehumanization. One cannot say that these sexist images are used in a metaphorical way. It is literally meant to be sexist.

Generally speaking, the use of seemingly dehumanizing images is a continuum and there are border line cases, which are hard to classify. You need a theory that gives you criteria to distinguish between the literal and the metaphorical use of an image.
 
JS: Where would you place the dehumanization of refugees in this continuum? Last year, there were articles in newspapers that depicted refugees as cockroaches or rats. Is this dehumanization? Is it problematic? And more generally, what distinguishes the metaphorical use of an image from the literal use?
 
MK: It is the form, function and the context that is crucial. If there is clearly a satirical context and the comparison has an artistic form and function, then the use, for instance, of an animal comparison might well be legitimate, i.e., not morally wrong. Those portrayals of refugees are, however, often used in a form and in a context in which people (hopefully at least) assume that the newspaper is telling them literally about matters of facts, i.e., that the function is literal reporting. You certainly also have sections in normal newspapers in which satirical usage is indicated, but often the dehumanization of refugees is part of the descriptive part of a newspaper. There it has no place and it is problematic. Thus, the context is decisive and it all depends on the concrete case.
 
JS: Your argument is interesting from the perspective of relativism: you seem to argue for a strict context-dependency of cases of dehumanization.
 
MK: Yes. It is the same as in the case of hate speech. A sentence in and of itself is not hate speech. It depends on the political context and I would add: the context of the media in which it is used. We have to understand the context of an utterance and then we can start to define whether an individual case is inciting hatred or is dehumanizing.

This all stems from a further complication in the background of understanding dehumanization: it is not clear that all cases of literal dehumanization are negative. Traditionally, dehumanization means, as indicated, something very negative, but one has to be careful with this claim. Moreover, we often assume that dehumanization is only used by the powerful against the oppressed. But dehumanization can also be a way of speaking back, a strategy of the oppressed. If you are dehumanized by someone else, you can use dehumanization in turn – in order to create distance to the offender. Here, dehumanization helps you against discrimination and thus is something positive. Dehumanization can be a strategy to answer dehumanization. There is a good example for this positive use of dehumanization that I use in my work: A black person tells us about her life in a segregated environment; she explains that when black people go to town, they try not to meet white people, in order to prevent hurtful interactions. For them, white people are ‘like the weather’, a mere object in the background of social interaction, an object to be ignored as much as possible. The identification of white people with the weather is a case of dehumanization as the sexist objectification of women in advertisement is a case of dehumanization. The person-as-weather is treated as an object and the black person creates distance with this. I think this is a legitimate psychological strategy. The problem is: how do you distinguish this strategy from the strategy of soldiers who dehumanize their enemy in order to be able to kill them. They seem to use the same strategy: soldiers regard their ‘targets’ as objects rather than as humans and thus create distance to them, in order to be able to harm or kill them. Thus, we have two examples of the same strategy: the dehumanization of white people by their victims and the dehumanization of victims by soldiers. Because of the different context and the different aims of dehumanization, I would evaluate the first case positively and the second case negatively.
 
JS: What about the concept of humanity? Do you think that there is something like human nature, i.e., universal features of humanity or a common core that connects all humans?
 
MK: You ask a descriptive question that only an empirical study can answer. But in any case, I would not use the term “universal” because it is often understood in a literal sense. “Universal” in a literal sense signifies properties which are shared by all humans and sometimes even by only humans. Such a claim goes clearly too far. I use the term “typical” instead of “universal”. If you ask for typical properties of humans, my answer is: there are plenty of them and empirically working scientists will tell you which. They can give you a quite long list of descriptive properties that characterize how humans are. However, the problem is most of these properties that are typical for us are not important. This is a paradox of thinking about human nature in such a descriptive sense. It is an important issue in particular if you extend the discussion to ethics and morality. The need for food is a typical property of humans. But if we discuss poverty, global justice or human rights, the need for food is not the point. When refugees come to us, the issue is not whether or not we give them food. It is rather about whether or not we give them food that is not disgusting. And what is disgusting is not typical: for some people certain kinds of meats are disgusting, for others it is other kinds of meat, or even meat in general that is disgusting. So, in reply to the paradox we abstract away from the differences in the need for food and create a new universal property: that people want non-disgusting food. But that abstract property, in order to be applicable to concrete situations, needs to be contextualized in practice since what is disgusting is not universal but relative to certain traditions of cooking etc. Thus, these local traditions are as morally important as the seeming ‘universal’. Thus, from a moral point of view it is not enough to know the typical trait, e.g., that humans need food. You have to upgrade this knowledge so that it becomes important: people want non-disgusting food and what that is depends on the context. The paradox is: if you concretize the typical trait, it is not typical anymore and if you keep it typical it is not what people care about. But, as indicated, there is a practical solution to that theoretical problem. Thus, let us assume that this problem can be practically solved.

Then another problem comes to the fore: there are too many properties that are typical for humans. It is also context-dependent which of these properties we regard as really important. It is a choice. For most typical properties we do not care. We possess, for instance, an opposable thumb. This property might be interesting for an anatomist. However, the opposable thumb was never (to the best of my knowledge) an issue in political or ethical debates. In the ethical or political context, other properties, such as rationality or morality, are regarded as essential for being human. There are then a lot of subsets of properties that can define human nature. Which subset one regards as significant depends on the context in which one uses the concept of human nature. There might be thousands of aspects of the respective context that determine which of the properties one regards as significant, for instance, the aims of ones theory, ones political views or ones social position, etc. I do not think that there is an objective, context-independent way to establish that certain typical properties of human life are more important, more at the core of what it means to be human than others.
 
JS: But could I not make the same argument on the descriptive level? I could, e.g., argue that there is something typical about humans, but this is only an abstract claim and it leaves plenty of room for concrete realizations of the typical feature.
 
MK: Yes, but then the first problem returns. The sentence “All people need food” is, as indicated, an abstraction from the concrete needs of individuals. No one wants food simpliciter. Everyone wants non-disgusting food that he or she can digest. Basically, all generalizations about living entities are abstractions from the pattern of similarities and differences that exist in the world.
 
JS: Do you think that we should always look at the evaluative level? Should we never talk descriptively about human nature?
 
MK: I think that the term ‘human nature’ should only be used in a descriptive sense. And we need the descriptive level in order to find an anchor in the world, an anchor for the normative reflections. But we should keep the normative questions (i.e., the normative choices about what is important) apart from the descriptive level. This is not completely possible, but we should try.
 
JS: What should the philosopher work on: abstract truths or the truths we care for?
 
MK: Both, but philosophers can’t make the normative choices. The descriptive accounts rely on the world that is out there. The normative level is dependent on the society we live in. It is not our right as philosophers to decide what is important or what is good since I do not think that one can objectively decide what is good. I am not a moral realist.
 
JS: Isn’t that a bad situation for the philosopher: either she speaks about something that is not important, or she does not have a say?
 
MK: Yes. But we should embrace humility in philosophy. We are servants; we speak for the people. I do not think that this is a loss; it’s an honour.
​

We have two exciting updates in this post. One is a summary of an event recently held by the project, and the second is the launch of a new initiative (and corresponding website) that resulted from this event.

1) Early Career Workshop
Vienna recently hosted the Early Career Workshop on Relativism, Pluralism and Contextualism (February 24-25, 2017), an event designed to bring together Ph.D students and early career researchers to present their current work and to discuss career planning, job prospects and funding opportunities in today's European academia. This was the second event of its kind, the first being hosted at CEU in Budapest.

This time around, the event was held under the auspices of the ERC-funded project “The Emergence of Relativism”, and featured talks on relativism, pluralism and contextualism in connection with a number of different areas of investigation: epistemology, philosophy of science, ethics and politics. A separate panel was devoted to career planning, comprising an open discussion on writing applications for philosophy positions and a talk by Professor Elisabeth Nemeth about the current state of European academia. Besides early career speakers from the university of Vienna, the workshop was organized so as to gather young researchers from central-eastern Europe, thus achieving a diverse representation of universities and of national backgrounds.
 
The first panel on February 24, dedicated to relativism, pluralism and contextualism in epistemology, was opened by Anne-Kathrin Koch (Vienna) speaking about the relationship between epistemic relativism and scepticism. She defended a view whereby the relativist is a sceptic after all - contrary to the standard representation of epistemic relativism as a “cure” to scepticism. Dirk Kindermann (Graz) took issue with invariantist theories about “know that” which explain the contextual variability of knowledge ascriptions through pragmatic mechanisms, arguing that they face a dilemma: either they are unable to explain phenomena like embedded implicatures, or they must opt for a pragmatic account that goes against their main invariantist tenet. Tom Fery (Vienna), closed the panel with a talk defending an optimistic view about philosophical knowledge: by adopting a form of contextualism about “know”, he argued against the sceptic that there is philosophical knowledge after all.
 
Relativism, pluralism and contextualism in the philosophy of science were the topics of the second panel, whose first speaker was Lisa Heller (Bielefeld). Heller's main thesis was that different conceptualizations of the context-notion are affecting the potential to enable relative stability - thus opposing allegations to the effect that relativism necessarily causes arbitrariness and breeds instability. Reflections about relativity in authors like Feyerabend and Fleck provided the inspiration for qualifying the view. Matthew Baxendale and Michele Luchetti (CEU Budapest) turned to the concept of levels of organization, pointing out that these can be recast as constitutive principles for scientific theories, playing a preconditional role in framing scientific inquiry. Finally, Raffael Krismer (Vienna) defended Pragmatism in the philosophy of science, with a special focus on the pragmatist interpretation of quantum mechanics and with a reflection on the pragmatist's stance towards the facts/values distinction.
 
The meeting started again on February 25 with an open session led by myself - Delia Belleri (Vienna/Hamburg) -  whose main aim was to report on recent studies tracking the careers of doctorate holders in the Euro area and to provide practical guidelines for application planning and application writing in the current European job market. Professor Elisabeth Nemeth's (Vienna) talk provided a sociological perspective on the changes undergone by European academia in the last twenty years, ranging from the prominence acquired by third-party funding to the internationalization of research programs and evaluation standards; these changes were interpreted in light of Bourdieu's theory to the effect that academic institutions live a constant tension between their educational role (adverse to change) and their scientific role (aimed at innovation).
 
The final panel explored relativism, pluralism and contextualism in ethics and politics. Mirela Fuš (Oslo/St. Andrews) focussed on generics associated with hate speech, shedding light on their semantic and ethical complexity and arguing that they suffer from a form of inscrutability which makes them recalcitrant to a systematic treatment. Ladislav Koreň (Hradec Králové) advocated a moderate version of moral relativism whereby differences in moral sensitivities are compatible with universal values, reviewing a number of recent experimental results which provide grist to the mill of the moderate relativist. Finally, Katharina Sodoma (Vienna) closed the event with a talk about relativism and moral progress, challenging traditional criticisms by maintaining that relativism is compatible with the improvement of our moral system.
 
2) New Early Career Network
The workshop was closed by a general discussion regarding future editions of the event. The idea on which all participants agreed is that there is a need for a network of early career philosophers where it is possible openly to share experiences and information about career opportunities and planning. Those present committed to the following measures to establish such a network:

(a) to organise further events in other European universities, where the presentation of ongoing research by early career scholars is combined with open sessions devoted to how to navigate the job market. This event-format is meant to fill a gap in the current training of European Ph.D students, resulting from the little importance their institutions attach to providing adequate information and advice concerning job prospects and methods of job search and application.

(b) to create a web-site where informative material can be uploaded, where young researchers can share their experiences and give tips about job application and where future events can be announced. The website is now live, so you can find out more about the network here.