User:Peter Muckley

The main point of blocking the idea of relational relativism --"true in l" or "true for k"-- is that this form of relativism is so easy to defeat by crying out "self-contradiction" immediately it appears.

It is "relational" because it relates truth to some specific person or world. Margolis offsets this childish tactic by: 1) pointing out that the self-contradiction argument only applies to uninterpreted formulas i.e. "x is big" according to Joe, "x is small" according to Jim, therefore "x is both big and small", which is self-contradictory; 2) keeping the alethic use of "true" as meaning true, period; 3) retiring the application of "true" from the arena of truth value assignments, in certain contexts i.e. the arts or history; 4) applying a many valued logic by a system of grading to support relativistic claims. Here, while "true" means true, the value "true" does not obtain in relativistic contexts which are contexts involving meaningful sentences not uninterpreted formulas. Thus, we retain "false", but do not apply "true" to such statements as "Nixon knew about Watergate beforehand" and "Nixon did not know about Watergate beforehand". The interpretative is always open, in real life, to relativism, the world is like that. The most we can say, with lots of supporting evidence, is that "that tricky Dick knew about Watergate" is a pretty damn good proposition.

After all, in real life, not logic-chopping fantasy, something may indeed appear big to Joe and small to Jim, and appearance vs reality is a false dichotomy. It is only if this "x" had some kind of REAL ESSENCE", as Aristotle assumed, that we could say "x" is really big or small.