Introducing the Radical Relativism Blog

So begins what I hope will be an entertaining and educational experience for me and hopefully some others as I explore the details and boundaries of a philosophical outlook that I term "radical relativsm." The concept is pretty simple to explain but hard for most people to get their heads around. The essential idea is that there are no absolute truths in the world. It is not just that beauty is in the eye of the beholder or that favorite colors are personal choices or that a taste for liver has to be aqcuired. Nothing in life is certain. There are no religious truths, no scientific truths, no mathematical truths, no logical truths. Everything is a point of view.

I remember, as a kid in the fifth grade being taught what seems pretty obvious to most people, that there is a difference between fact and opinion. It seemed like a clever distinction to me. I adopted the idea as my own and spent most of my life trying to straighten people out when they got their facts and their opinions confused. (Of course, in what can only be described as a preview of what was to come, I got frequently frustrated at the number of people who seemed unable to tell the difference, at least in my view.)

In college, I became fascinated by logic. And I was a master of it, actually. I could prove difficult theorems in multivariable predicate logic more easily than anyone I knew. I was enamored with the idea that there was a system of thought that one could use to take a set of facts and absolutely know, based on that set of facts that another set of facts was true. Imagine the possibilities. Surely this is the closest mankind can come to omniscience.

As I set about trying to apply this newly found wisdom to the real world, I started to have problems. The usefulness of logic as applied to real world thought required certainty in the facts you assume. A syllogism is only as good as its inputs. (I remember a clever play on words that, while not exactly illustrating the point, at least hints at the difficulties: Nothing is better than eternal happiness. A ham sandwich is better than nothing. Therefore, a ham sandwich is better than eternal happiness.)

Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher, having seen my problem a couple hundred years before I did, coined the phrase "Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy" to point out the difference between propositions that you know because you can prove them (the analytic propositions) and those that you know because you discover them (the synthetic ones). In my earlier, fifth-grade view of the world, facts were facts, whether it was "ducks have wings" or "1+1=2," they were both facts, obviously true, and there was no need for a difference between them. But knowing that ducks have wings is one thing (even if you stipulate that it's true...has there never once, in the history of the world, been a duck that lost its wings?) but not all facts are that easy to discern. Science is chock full of questions still waiting to be answered, about the origins of life, the nature of matter, even the birth of the universe itself.

So, one might say, there are things that we do not yet know, but that doesn't mean that there are not facts about those things. We simply haven't found them. That is the empiricist's argument. And, fair enough. The problem is, that that observation is, itself, just an opinion. There is no proof that there are objective answers to the questions of science. Moreover, there is no proof that there are objective answers to any questions about the nature of the real world. All so-called facts about the world are based upon observation, analysis and categorization. We know that ducks have wings because every duck we've ever seen has had wings. Notwithstanding congenital defects or accident, we conclude that is the nature of ducks to have wings. We define having wings as an intrinsic feature of duckness. But, what if, on some expedition to some newly discovered island in the south Pacific, we suddenly find a species of duck that has no wings? They are like ducks in every other biological sense. What once was an established certain fact is no longer true.

The empiricists, bent on objective reality will repeat that the fact that we did not know that there were wingless ducks does not change the fact that there objectively were. We now simply adjust our knowledge to reflect the new known facts and move on.

But this misses the point that these synthetic facts are never certain. We can always find a counter example to any fact we believe we know about the world and without this certainty, there is no reason to believe that the facts objectively exist. It is fine to believe that they do, but that does not make it so.

In fact, the argument is reminiscent of the feud between Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr over the validity of Quantum Theory in the early part of the 20th century. An important element of Quantum Theory was the Heisenberg Uncertainty Prinicple which said that it was impossible to simultaneously know the precise location and velocity of an object. The quick and dirty explanation of this is that the process of measuring its location will change its velocity and vice versa. (This only really applies to particles at the atomic level and below. The uncertainty in question is immeasurably small when dealing with larger things like people, because photons just don't have that much impact on those things.)

Einstein, while unable to argue against uncertainty, felt that it was merely a limitation of tools. The fact that we could not know the location and velocity of a particle does not mean that it does not have one. Bohr, and other quantum scientists argued that it was arrogant to assume that an objective reality existed that could not be even theoretically observed. The implications of Quantum Theory included the fact that there were certain things about the world that were nondeterministic, impossible to predict, and caused by things not describable about the universe. Randomness, it seemed, was a built-in feature of the universe. Einstein's famous lament, "God does not play dice," was based on his discomfort with this idea. (Bohr, when even Einstein finally admitted he could not refute Quantum Theory, reportedly told Einstein to stop telling God what to do.)

It was arrogant to assume that an electron, say, has an objective physical state that it was theoretically impossible to determine. I argue that it is just as arrogant to claim that anything has a physical state that it is theoretically impossible to be intellectually certain about. "Ducks have wings" is a statement about the current universe those of us who have observed this tendency occupy. But our lack of certainty that this is true means that it is not an objective fact. It is a belief. The same is true of such statements as "the sky is blue" and "gravity attracts." Our level of certainty may differ for different beliefs, but they are all still beliefs. So, if our so-called knowledge of the universe is uncertain, why do we cling to the insistence that the universe exists, in any objective sense, at all?

Prejudice. Pure and simple. We have lived with these beliefs our whole life (indeed, our whole civilization) and are simply unable to step out of them to see them for what they are. Those who will argue against me (and there will be many, and I will post the most thoughtful of them) will turn themselves blue in anger at my heresy. They will say things like, "Jump off a cliff if you don't believe the world exists. Those rocks your body will crash on aren't really there after all."

So if there are no real facts (I have only talked about the synthetic facts...I will talk about why I think the analytic facts are just beliefs, too, on another occassion), then everything is belief. All we know is just opinion. It is pointless for me to try and convince you that the sky is blue if you see it as red. It is ridiculous for me to tell you that brocolli is delicious if you dislike it. It is utter folly to try and talk you out of your religious beliefs. It is silly to try and change your worldview, not just because you are unwilling to change it but because your worldview is your world. Your beliefs are not wrong if there is no standard truth against which to measure it.

Does this mean that I advocate for chaos and anarchy? That I think everyone should do whatever they want without fear of consequence because, after all, there are not true values? Of course not. After I get done tearing down everything we think we know about the real world, I will put it back together and, when I'm done, it will look largely like it does today. Most of the same things that are wrong today will be wrong then (though, I would argue, not all). Most of the facts we rely on daily will still be facts. But our approach to understanding them, incorporating them into our lives and, most importantly, getting along with others of different point of view will be much expanded and our capacity to tolerate those of a different worldview will hopefully be enhanced.

There is one more thing worth pointing out, before I close my introduction. It is also pointless to try and convince you that even this thesis I am espousing is true. If there are no absolute truths, how can I claim, absolutely, that this is the case? This paradox is, actually, the key to how I build my universe back up after I tear it down.

I will, in my next article, talk a little about myself and then use some "facts" about the universe to turn our understanding of it on its head.

Thanks for reading.

Lane