.Analytical philosophers, such as Peter Singer and John Searle, interpret relativism as relativism turned into scepticism. The error is spread universally. So, common teachers of philosophy consider that "relativists can not say, consistently, that the agnostic European culture is superior to Islamic culture or any other or vice versa." And the exam papers to students in the 11th grade reproduce this paralogism.
This is the paradox: analytical philosophy does not analyze clearly. It confuses relativism, the doctrine that ethical aesthetic, scientific, political, religious, values, vary from society to society or social class to social class, with scepticism, the doctrine that states nothing, that doubts about everyting or about almost everything. There are two different positions. One does not necessarily lead to the other. There are relativistic not skeptical , vehicles of a differentiator dogmatism. For example: "The ethical, political and religious values vary from society to society, I believe that my European political values of liberal democracy, secularism, are superior to non-European political values of religious fundamentalism, I am a relativistic- or differentiator dogmatic- most part of the truth is with me, and only a small part of the truth settles in fundamentalism, for example, assistance to the poor and the sick. "
We think dialectically. There are three genera - relativism, scepticism and dogmatism - and they intersect mutually as follows: the middle one, i.e. relativism, encompasses a part of skepticism and a part of differentiator dogmatism. Analytical philosophers reduce relativism to scepticism: they confuse the trunk of the animal with its tail. They see only one side.
© (Direitos de autor para Francisco Limpo de Faria Queiroz)
Eliminativism is the contrary of additivism (this term is created by us, supposedly).
What is eliminativism? It is the group of theories and the philosophical attitude that suppress any part of reality or any knowledge structure.
Simon Blackburn dissociates wrongly scepticism from eliminativism:
«This is in fact Hume´s characteristic position. There is no prospect of us doing any better than thinking, for example, in terms of a spatially external world of independent objects. Nature forces us to think, and it would be absurd to recommend otherwise. Yet we may have no reason whatsoever for supposing that the thoughts we then have are true: indeed we may have good reasons to suppose them false. Scepticism does not imply eliminativism, although as the example of Hume shows, the cost of holding one and not the other is a pessimistic view of the place of knowledge and reason in human life.» (Simon Blackburn, Truth, A Guide for the Perplexed, pag. 115).
On truth, eliminativism is a genus and scepticism is a specie of it: this means that scepticism, on the measure that eliminates the certainties, is a form of eliminativism.
© (Direitos de autor para Francisco Limpo de Faria Queiroz)
The definition of irrealism in Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy is :
«Irrealism Coinage from the late 1980s for positions either that believe that traditional realism versus anti-realism debates are not well formed, or that sympathize with opposition to realism without wanting to commit themselves to idealism, relativism, reductionism or other anti-realist options » (Simon Blackburn, Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2005, pag 191).
Is relativism an anti-realist option?
Simon Blackburn believes it is. That is an error. Much of relativism is compatible with realism and not with anti realism. Let´s consider the case of Hegel: he is a realist philosopher - in the sense that causality, determinism an other categories and biocosmic nature in general are not inside but outside human minds - and is also a relativist - as he says that the truth is variable, things are and are not, change continually in a dialectic flux.
Relativism, in Hegel´s theory, is not scepticism but a flexible dogmatism. Example: Hegel sustains that the truth of God is spread by all religions but not with the same grade in each one. Protestantism is truer than catholicism and this one is truer than budism and this is truer than animist religions.
Thus, hegelian´s relativism is tied to realism, not to anti realism.
© (Direitos de autor para Francisco Limpo de Faria Queiroz)
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