Epistemic Disagreement, Diversity and Relativism

Diversity abounds, and typically, disagreement is not far behind. Unsurprisingly, when initial starting points are far enough apart (take for example, the famous 17th century dispute between Galileo and Cardinal Bellarmine) the ensuing disagreements can appear rationally irreconcilable. Some philosophers such as Richard Rorty (1979) have taken the presence of such disagreements as evidence for epistemic relativism. The present aim will be to canvass this general argument strategy, which moves from diversity to disagreement to epistemic relativism. In the course of doing so, objections will be raised to various forms that this argument has taken, and, finally, I’ll contrast traditional forms of the diversity-disagreement-relativism sequence with a more contemporary, linguistically driven variant that has been defended in recent work by John MacFarlane (e.g., 2007; 2014). 1. From diversity to disagreement to relativism: ethics and epistemology Diversity often gives rise to disagreement. Consider a straightforward non-epistemic example, described byHerodotus in theHistories, concerning funerary customs1. The custom of the ancient Greeks was always to bury their dead; eating them would have been appalling. The Callatians on the other hand honoured the dead by eating them; burying themwould have been out of the question. AsHerodotus noted, each thought the other custom was not merely different, but obviously wrong. Their differing funerary codes accordingly led to a disagreement, overseen by King Darius of Persia, about the right way to honour the dead. And it’s unclear what, if anything, could have settled such a disagreement. Perhaps, in such circumstances, mutual tolerance is the way forward. Here’s a slogan that is often trotted out: burying the dead is right for the Greeks, eating them is right for Callatians. And there’s no ‘culture-independent’ sense in which either is 1This example, reported in the Histories (c. 440 BCE), is often used to introduce the idea of moral relativism. See, for example, Rachels (2003, Ch. 2), who takes this case as a starting point for discussion in the widely used textbook The Elements of Moral Philosophy.