Relativism and Its Deniers

One of the most impressive aspects of Scott Davis’s excellent new book is his blending of philosophy with anthropology. Philosophers tend to dismiss anthropologists because anthropologists, like historians, deal with particulars rather than with universals and, worse, stress the distinctiveness of each culture they scrutinize. Typically, only anthropologists who have garnered eminence because of their ethnography deem themselves entitled to universalize—as if ethnography had any connection to universalizing. The same is true of scientists who wax philosophical. The most ironic anthropological example is that of Bronislaw Malinowski, who made fieldwork in a specific culture de rigueur, yet who never hesitated to make pronouncements about “primitive man.” Because anthropology remains tethered to fieldwork, there is no equivalent of the specialization in theory found in sociology. Few anthropologists ever do fieldwork in more than two cultures, yet familiarity with even a single culture apparently provides the grounds for universal claims.

There are various kinds of relativism. Conceptual, or cognitive, relativism denies the existence of objective criteria for assessing the diversity of beliefs about the world. Perceptual relativism, which is more radical, denies the possibility of evaluating objectively the diversity of experiences of the world. Conceptual relativism allows for common experiences that simply get interpreted differently. Perceptual relativism maintains that experiences themselves differ: people “occupy” different worlds altogether, with no way to judge the differences. Moral relativism denies that objective criteria exist for evaluating the undeniable diversity of values and practices.

There are also different kinds of antirelativism. Universalism argues that there is uniformity rather than diversity in our conceptions, perceptions, or morals. For example, all cultures oppose murder, however differently they define it. In contrast to universalism lies absolutism, which grants the existence of diversity but argues that the conceptions, perceptions, or morals of one culture are right and those of all others wrong. If one can generalize, absolutism was far more common in the nineteenth century than in the twentieth, when relativism became dominant. In reaction to relativism, universalism emerged in the mid-twentieth century.

The pioneering anthropologists E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer were classic conceptual absolutists. For both of them, our religious, which means pre-scientific, forebears explained and even outright perceived the world incorrectly. Yet Tylor and Frazer differed on the relationship between truth and rationality. For Tylor, religion is as rational as science, just false. For Frazer, religion is irrational as well as false. Most modern anthropologists are relativists of one variety or another. The staunchest ones have not been, as one might innocently assume, those smitten with postmodernism but rather those from decades earlier: Franz Boas and his students, especially Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, and Melville Herskovits. Writes Herskovits of perception, for example: “Even the facts of the physical world are discerned through the enculturative screen, so that the perception of time, distance, weight, size, and other ‘realities’ is mediated by the conventions of any given group” (1948, 64). Contemporary anthropological nonrelativists are invariably universalists rather than absolutists: they argue that cultures are the same, not that one is superior to the others. The classic demonstration by the anthropologist Brent Berlin and linguist Paul Kay (1969) that cultures the world over have the same color sequence seemingly refuted perceptual relativism, though their claims have been challenged.

Davis (2012) focuses on the attack on relativism by Steven Lukes in Lukes’s short book Moral Relativism (2008). Years ago, Lukes (1982) questioned the easy acceptance of cognitive relativism. In Moral Relativism he begins again with cognitive relativism but soon switches to moral relativism—a variety of relativism he considers far more pervasive and far more intractable. In chapter 6, on “relativism and fieldwork in contemporary anthropology,” Davis faults Lukes’s characterization of Paul Feyerabend, Thomas Kuhn, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty, Clifford Geertz, and Mary Douglas as relativists of one kind or another. Davis argues that these figures are not relativists but pragmatists.

Against cognitive, or conceptual, relativism, Davis enlists the American philosopher Donald Davidson’s “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1984). A conceptual scheme is the equivalent of a paradigm for Kuhn. Davidson argues that the untranslatability of one scheme into...