Abstract
This paper applies Edward Craig’s and Bernard Williams’ “genealogical” method to the debate between relativism and its opponents in epistemology and in the philosophy of language. We explain how the central function of knowledge attributions—to “flag good informants”—explains the intuitions behind five different positions (two forms of relativism, absolutism, contextualism, and invariantism). We also investigate the question whether genealogy is neutral in the controversy over relativism. We conclude that it is not: genealogy is most naturally taken to favour an anti-realism about epistemic norms. And anti-realism threatens absolutism.
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- 1.
We use italics for concepts throughout.
- 2.
Our work on this paper was assisted by funding from the ERC Advanced Grant Project “The Emergence of Relativism” (Grant No. 339382).
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Kusch, M., McKenna, R. (2018). The Genealogy of Relativism and Absolutism. In: Kyriacou, C., McKenna, R. (eds) Metaepistemology. Palgrave Innovations in Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93369-6_10
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