The argument against strong relativism

It is essential to the form of relativism that I have been discussing that different theories that are true with respect to different con­ceptual schemes can nevertheless be incompatible with one another.

One way of seeing what is involved here is to recognize that if two theories are incompatible, then they make competing claims about the universe. But there is only one universe—and all of us inhabit it. It follows that at most one of us is right. Strong cognitive relativists seem to want to deny this. They seem to think that two people in the same universe could both rightly make opposing claims about the truth. This view is apparently absurd; can we offer an argument that makes it clear why?

Consider two conceptual schemes, ENGLISH and AZANDE, associated with two languages, say English and Zande. The strong relativist says that there could be a sentence, S_ENGLISH, which was true relative to ENGLISH and whose translation, S_azande, into Zande, was false relative to AZANDE. Now, as we saw in the chap­ter on language, Frege argued that the meaning of a sentence in effect determined what the universe would have to be like if it were true.

On one of them, we would say that in order for S_azande to be a translation of S_english, it would have to be a sentence that would be true relative to AZANDE in the same circumstances that S_english would be true relative to ENGLISH. But that would make strong relativism impossible. For there could be no sentence that was both true relative to AZANDE—and thus a translation of S_english, which is true relative to ENGLISH; and false relative to AZANDE—and thus evidence of strong cognitive relativism. There could be no such sentence, that is, unless Zande contains sentences that are both true and false at once!

The other way to apply Frege's theory would be to say that, in order for S_azande to be a translation of S_english, it would have to be a sentence that would be true relative to AZANDE in the same cir­cumstances that S_english would be true relative to AZANDE. But until we know how to translate S_ENGLISH into Azande, how are we supposed to be able to tell whether it is true or false with respect to the Zande conceptual scheme? If Frege's theory of meaning is right, the Azande could only decide what S_english meant if they knew what it would be for it to be true for them. But there seems to be no way that we can explain this to them. In particular, because strong rela­tivists believe truth is always relative to a conceptual scheme, they cannot, at this point, try to explain what it would be for S_english to be not true-relative-to-ENGLISH or true-relative-to-AZANDE, but, simply, true. For if truth is not always relative to a conceptual scheme, then strong relativism is just false.

The general point is this. For two sentences, S and S', to be incompatible, it must be possible for us to recognize that S says what S' denies. But the only way of translating a sentence, T, in one lan­guage into a sentence, T', in another, so as to be in a position to con­firm this incompatibility, is to suppose—as a minimum—that T and T' would be true in the same circumstances. Any reason for suppos­ing that S is a translation of S' will be grounds for doubting that S denies what S' says. It follows that strong relativism—the claim that we have reason to suppose that there are different conceptual schemes in one of which some sentence, S, is true and in another relative to which its translation, S', is false—is incoherent. For there could be no evidence that this was so.

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