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<body> <script LANGUAGE="VBScript"> </script> <script language="VBScript" src="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Scripts/mysounds.js">  </script> <script language="VBScript" src="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Scripts/mycolors.js">  </script> <b><font FACE="Times" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">RELATIVITY and RELATIVISM</p> </font></b><font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">  </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">For the unspeakable difference of Rosie</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">And the late Dr. Wayne Untereiner</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">An unfathomable Mentor</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Of many Academic Relativisms</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">In humility, Greatness glows</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">In silence, Understanding speaks</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">In patience, Wisdom learns</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">In darkness, Truth seeks</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">In tolerance, Peace knows</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">In solitude, Courage keeps</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">In hope, Faith earns</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">In secrecy, Honesty sleeps</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">In love, Life grows</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">by</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Hugh M. Lewis</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">1994</p> </font> <p>  <hr> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua">This is another e-publication by Lewis Micro-Publishing.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Copyright 2000 by Hugh M. Lewis</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">(Copies of this text may be printed for personal, professional or classroom use only. Use of textual materials in this e-document are governed by fair-use policy)</p> </font> <p>  <hr> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> <b>CONTENTS</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </b></font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="#nineteen">Preface</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="#one">Introduction</a>: <a HREF="#one">Relativism Generally: The Paradoxes of Being Relative</a> <p ALIGN="CENTER">  </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="#two">Chapter One</a>: <a HREF="#two">Scientific Relativism and Relativities</a> <p ALIGN="CENTER">  </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="#three">Chapter Two</a>: <a HREF="#three">Historical Relativism</a> <p ALIGN="CENTER">  </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="#four">Chapter Three</a>: <a HREF="#four">Social Relativism</a> <p ALIGN="CENTER">  </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="#five">Chapter Four</a>: <a HREF="#five">Cultural Relativity and Relativism</a> <p ALIGN="CENTER">   </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="#six">Chapter Five</a>: <a HREF="#six">Linguistic Relativity and Relativism</a> <p ALIGN="CENTER">  </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Relativism.htm#seven">Chapter Six</a>: <a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Relativism.htm#seven">Hermeneutical Relativism</a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> <a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Relativism.htm#eight">Chapter Seven</a>: <a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Relativism.htm#eight">Dialogical Relativism</a> <p ALIGN="CENTER">  </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Relativism.htm#nine">Chapter Eight</a>: <a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Relativism.htm#nine">Textual Relativism</a> <p ALIGN="CENTER">  </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Relativism.htm#ten">Chapter Nine</a>: <a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Relativism.htm#ten">Literary Relativism</a> <p ALIGN="CENTER">  </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="#eleven">Chapter Ten</a>: <a HREF="#eleven">Exegetical Relativism</a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="#twelve">Chapter Eleven</a>: <a HREF="#twelve">Symbolic-Religious Relativism and Relativity</a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> <a HREF="#thirteen">Chapter Twelve</a>: <a HREF="#thirteen">Rational Relativity</a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">  <a HREF="#fourteen">Chapter Thirteen</a>: <a HREF="#fourteen">Psychological Relativity and Relativism</a> <p ALIGN="CENTER">  </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="#fifteen">Chapter Fourteen</a>: <a HREF="#fifteen">Western Philosophical Relativism</a> <p ALIGN="CENTER">  </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> <a HREF="#sixteen">Chapter Fifteen</a>: <a HREF="#sixteen">Nonwestern Relativisms</a> <p ALIGN="CENTER">  </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="#seventeen">Chapter Sixteen</a>: <a HREF="#seventeen">Paradigmatic Relativism</a> <p ALIGN="CENTER">  </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="#conclusion">Conclusion</a>: <a HREF="#conclusion">General Relativism: The Relativity of Being Paradoxical</a> <p ALIGN="CENTER">  </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="#twenty">Afterward: Anthropological Relativity and Relativism Reconsidered</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a href="#addendum">Addendum: Anthropological Relativity and Relativism Revisited</a></p> <p>  <hr> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="ninetee"></a><a NAME="nineteen">PREFACE</a></p> <p> </p> <p>By relativism we are referring simultaneously to many different forms taken by the relativity of human knowledge. There are different kinds of relativism in the world, and it makes an important difference to specify which kind we are referring to. It makes a critical difference whether we are talking about historical relativism or social relativism, or whether we are talking about epistemological relativism or philosophical relativism, or ethical relativism or cultural relativism, scientific relativism or religious relativism.</p> <p>To blithely dismiss all relativisms as the same without regard to which kind is to commit an error of prejudiced misunderstanding of the complexity and multidimensionality of the problem. As any good relativist would say, it would be a mistake of mixing apples and oranges, or at least, of mixing our metaphors.</p> <p>There are some "false" kinds of relativism which are the product of some common fallacies we are seem prone to; but to equate all of relativism with a few forms of "pseudo-relativism" is to merely compound further an already confused picture.</p> <p>As to the question of whether or not there really is "relativism" in the world, the answer is clearly and unequivocally that there are many different kinds, but may be no one general thing called "Relativism" of which each is a special sub-case.</p> <p>It is quite a case of misplaced concretization to spill so much precious ink over the possibility or ontological status of "Relativism" in some general or absolute (nonrelativistic) sense. To speak thus of a sense of "general relativism" amounts to a self-contradictory oxy-moron.</p> <p>It is more nontrivial to argue the finer points of precisely what kind of relativism we are referring to, its implications for our research and our theory, than to gloss or dismiss outright the entire "Problem" in a simplistic manner.</p> <p>The ontological reality of relativity (and the ontological relativity of reality) does not therefore spell death of God, the end of truth, the denial of a general theory or human progress in the world or the impossibility of getting good translations on foreign poems. There is nothing inimical between strict scientific practice and sound belief and "softer, looser" relativistic leanings in life. In fact, sound and sober science that is non-ideological in its commitments to some higher truth may in fact require methodologically a special form of empirical relativism.</p> <p>Relativism merely offers us the sobriety and humility of small, partial truths in the face of a grand Unknown. It remains our only antidote to the infection of ideological loops, deceitful viruses and unfalsifiable cases of "false consciousness."</p> <p>Relativism remains a problematic issue because for the most part its status has been presumed away in the research of other problems. It has rarely been the focus of much research in itself that does not reduce its status down to some prescriptive, didactic agenda for or against the dragon of relativity.</p> <p>Much that passes in the name of proving or disproving relativism is misguided by a confusion of the problems which relativism actually poses for our knowledge of the world. The universal order of the acquisition of color terms does not therefore disprove the possible relativity of color terminology and perception and neither does the mere enumeration of exceptional cases of belief or behavior demonstrate the status of an anything goes relativity. At most these kinds of attacks and defenses reveal the general and common lack of understanding of the often paradoxical problematic that Relativism poses for our human world.</p> <p>Relativism is a real and intrinsic facet, an undeniable quality inherent to our knowledge of the world. It characterizes all human knowledge in varying ways. The reality of relativism and the differences it makes in our knowledge of the world can be empirically demonstrated, and must inevitably be taken into account in all our scientific formulas aiming at universal principles.</p> <p>In spite of criticism, the doctrine of relativism remains a foundational cornerstone of both anthropological theory and method. It is not too much to claim that the most interesting and valuable aspects of relativism as a general doctrine about human reality have largely passed unnoticed in most of the literature.</p> <p>While a great deal of ink and ilk have been spent over its pros and cons, its virtue and its dangers, relativism as a general doctrine remains poorly understood, and from a theoretical point of view, less well elaborated than most would suppose. Relativism and relativity are more frequently used as glosses, or catchalls, for its great but mysterious implicitness or contextuality that it so implies.</p> <p>We must learn to be careful when speaking of things relativistically. We must be quite clear and specific about what we are talking about. There are many different, broadly generic kinds of relativism and relativity, forms that may be only remotely or indirectly related to one another. Though there may be some measure of overlap between some of the categories, such that none are mutually exclusive, each category stands alone by marking out a form of relativism in human reality that is separate and different than any of the others.</p> <p>There remains the very strong possibility that some more general, theoretical form of relativism and relativity may underlie each of the different kinds, which thus compose variations of a common theme. But it is also possible that understanding at this more general level of relativity may not be simply had or presupposed without a systematic inquiry into the differences and different forms that relativity may take, as well as the several bases for these differences and variations. We cannot also ignore the other possibility that the label of relativity may in fact be insubstantial and disguising the general lack of any common ground between the phenomena encompassed by a survey of its types. In other words, we may have long been taking for granted the ultimate and most basic significances of our concept of relativity, without seriously giving consideration to the full range of phenomena encompassed by the term.</p> <p>The question and controversy that the general issue of relativism has engendered, especially in anthropology, but also in philosophy, has always been striking as a demonstration of the critical and central importance that this set of notions plays in our understanding of the human world.</p> <p>Relativism is the source and consequence of some seemingly irresolvable dilemmas and paradoxes about our ability and capacity to know our world with any final certainty. Whatever kind of relativism we deal with, we are treating one dimension or another of the general epistemological problem of human knowledge, of how we know our world, of the limitations that our knowing imposes upon our knowledge of the world, and the way that these constraints shape, not only our experience of the world, but the world itself.</p> <p>The dilemmas inherent to relativism and sense of intrinsic inevitability about how we perceive and construct our world, makes relativism as a general theoretical problem very intractable. We can either presuppose its foundation in our experience, independent of our experience of it, or we can deny it arbitrarily in the absence of any disconfirming evidence.</p> <p>It is becoming increasingly unfashionable to become identified as a relativist. Anti-relativism has become the vogue since the tide has gone out on the American political economy. There is no money to be had in defending the cause of relativism and little more remaining with which to be anti-relativist either. The virtue of maintaining a relativist orientation in a world bent upon making us believe that "there is no other way," is that even if and when we get a one dimensional world order and even if we have hegemonic world culture, one person can still stand apart and claim "nothing is necessarily so," and that will be enough. In a relativist world, there are always alternatives, and this assures us that a great deal of hope remains for our world.</p> <p>It has been erroneous to equate relativism with determinism and the legitimization of every totalitarian empire or fascist culture that comes into being. Evil surely exists in the world, along with power and virtue, but in spite of and not because of relativist doctrine. Evil is not logically or necessarily or naturally forthcoming from a relativist standpoint. Evil proceeds as an indirect consequence of the general failure of relativism in the world.</p> <p>This can be claimed because the value of relativism comes from its intrinsic sense of realism. Human reality, multiply defined and determined, differentially experienced and expressed, is the anchor and hook of relativist doctrine. One cannot be dispensed with without the forfeiture of the other as well. Furthermore, a relativistic orientation in the world entails a naturally critical and skeptical response toward the world, one that mollifies its paradoxical appeal to universal tolerance and appreciation of difference regardless of the moral consequences. It also entails a certain basic humility and "equality in spirit" in our approach to humankind which is antidotal to prideful ethnocentrism and hierarchical authoritarianism. It allows us, in short, to walk in other peoples' moccasins before passing judgment upon them.</p> <p>Some claim relativist doctrine to be nothing but ideology inappropriate to genuine scientific discourse. But if relativism is indeed only ideology, so might science be as well, and we may ultimately lack any scientific means of proving the matter, one way or another, except unless we make blind leaps of faith fundamental criteria of scientific validity. Whether or not relativism or science are just ideologies remains really a moot point, for even if they were, both would nonetheless be ideologies well worth considering for their consequences in our world.</p> <p>The problem of relativism as ideology is just one of its many seemingly irreconcilable dilemmas. The general problem of relativism poses many impossible paradoxes for our understanding in the world, and this is both its main strength and its primary weakness, as these paradoxes both challenge the intellect and intimidate our common ignorance.</p> <p>If relativism promotes a version of the world not as hard and fast for some people's tastes, it also promises a vision of that world more realistic than those which unnecessarily reify and oversimplify it. Relativism is both much more and much less than either its proponents or opponents have made it out to be. It is less of a paradox and a moral double-entendre and more than "different strokes for different strokes," hermeneutic-psychedelic, anything goes, "going native" rape-proneness. It is for the most part just something different from what reactions, for or against, have made it out to be.</p> </font> <p>  <hr> <b><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> </font></b><font FACE="Times" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="one">INTRODUCTION</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">RELATIVISM GENERALLY</p> </a></font><font FACE="Times"><a NAME="one"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Paradoxes of Being Relative</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>General relativism amounts to a statement about the ontological status of knowledge in the world. There is no unconditional knowledge and all forms of knowledge are therefore bound to and limited by certain, if somewhat variable, kinds of constraints, both intrinsically in the design of information, and extrinsically in the epiphenomenal patterns which human meaning and its social communication take.</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p>"Relativism" as a doctrine does not exist "out there" in the world waiting to be discovered. It rather constitutes an inherent condition of our relationship to the world, an inextricable part of our knowing and relating to it. It exists between two senses of reality, the subjective and the objective, as part of our relationship between these sides of reality. Its dilemma is therefore the inevitable function of our habitual dichotomization of our knowledge of the world, and the resulting sense of "reification" of our constructions of reality that are the consequence of our dichotomization. Relativism is, in short, an inherent condition of our knowing reality.</p> <p>Relativism is therefore inherently reflexive and paradoxical in its own objective understanding. Our objectification of the relative quality of our knowledge entails that we apperceptively regard ourselves, how and what we know, as something separate, yet nevertheless, inseparable, from our own sense of being in the world.</p> <p>From an analytical and critical point of view, it makes sense to separate the two sides of the general problem of relativism, into what are the more subjective aspects of the "doctrine of relativism" and what amount to more objective facets of the "relativity of reality." Relativism comprises a kind of doctrine about the condition of the relativity of our knowledge about the world. It is one that we can accept or reject. Relativity involves a statement about the nature of reality itself, the inherent limits that nature places upon our knowledge about the world. This is a subtle but important distinction to make.</p> <p>Relativism lays the claim that whatever statements we make about reality, we cannot make them with absolute, final certainty. It entails that all our statements, to be accurate, must be conditional in specifying precisely the contexts within which an assertion is held to hold true. It is simply not enough in the relativistic comprehension of reality to claim that something is relative, but we must go one step further in specifying exactly what or how this is so in relation to a wider context of understanding. In this more rigorous claim, the relativist does not live so far afield from the scientist.</p> <p>The claim of relativism that there can be no preconceived, absolute or absolutely certain truths in the world does not necessarily preclude the possibility for such truth or certainty. Indeed it is a paradox of being relative that such possibilities cannot be "absolutely" discounted, no matter how unlikely. Neither does being relativistic preclude the possibility of one kind of truth being more "certain" than another, as long as the conditions for the specification of such decisions are made explicit. Relativism remains subject to empirical substantiation. Past experience would lead us to correctly conclude that all swans are white as long as we never witness a black swan.</p> <p>Relativism does not exist independently in the world, neither as an objective fact waiting to be discovered out there or as an arbitrary frame of mind, or even as an attitude which we invent for ourselves. Relativism occurs normally between two worlds, the subjective and the objective, and as a consequence dependent upon the relations between those worlds.</p> <p>It is never enough to just say that something is relative in the world, but we must always then qualify our statement by saying what it is relative to. If we fail to thus qualify our claim, we run the risk of implying that relativity is somehow a predetermined state or condition or quality of its own, as a thing, rather than as a general statement about a relationship in the world.</p> <p>We risk the reification of relativism, and with its reification, we turn it into something it is not--as something fixed, and, in essence, absolute. When we fail to qualify our statements about relativism, we create a spurious and false paradox that the doctrine can both be relative and determined, relational and absolute. It is a paradox exposing philosophically our whole claim to serious and skeptical doubt.</p> <p>When we do so qualify our claims, by saying that something is relative to something else, we then create the necessary closure which can be checked and validated by our experience or not. Specifying what and how something is relative to something else allows us to further refine and redefine our original claim in a way that renders it more realistic and representative of the world. If it seems somewhat paradoxical that this basic point about Relativism also lies at the heart of our scientific method, then we must come to understand that such empirical methodology may have always presupposed and necessarily implied a basically relativistic orientation toward reality.</p> <p>The relational logic of relativism provides us the calculus of uncertainty, more or less so, to which we can apply our statistical tests and question our positive statements of fact.</p> <p>Rather than incorporating doubt and uncertainty into its own definition and thereby protecting its status from our experience, our sense and our reason, relativism instead helps to precipitate, manage and eventually dispel our doubt and fundamental uncertainty about things in the world. It is the only way we have of qualifying and "conditioning" our knowledge claims we make about the world, such that we do not deceptively, unself-consciously deny our doubt, or its possibility and necessity in our world. We provide it form and substance by giving it something to be doubtful about, thereby converting it into a healthy form of critical skepticism which we then may mistake for "scientific objectivity." Relativism does not thereby undermine our ability to know, to reason about and come to terms with the world, but rather it reinforces our viewpoint in reality by the explicit standards of realism about the statements and conclusions we can make about our world.</p> <p>What it does cast doubt and uncertainty upon is our ability to ever conclusively know reality in any absolute or universal sense, or more precisely, to make statements about our world which do not need any further qualification. But this is a small price to pay for the partial truths and incomplete realism of the statements we must make about our world. It is better to stand upon shaky and soft ground than upon no ground at all.</p> <p>Relativism remains a notoriously difficult topic to talk about without its reification as a "thing in itself" that is detachable from the world of relationship upon which it depends. This has been an ancient "paradox of paradox" that, for instance, is contained in the Tao Te Ching. In order to talk about the worldless way of life, we must use words, and in order to "know" the unknowable we must eventually verbalize it. We can only know relativism indirectly by understanding how it actually works in relationship with our world. We can only indirectly outline what it may be as a "thing in itself" by systematically demonstrating all those things that it is not, and yet nevertheless surround and give it shape in the world.</p> <p>This has been the necessary dialectic of relativism, the movements of which we must come to understand as something "apart" and objectively separate from ourselves, yet nevertheless intrinsically related to ourselves, to our existential predicament and sense of basic reality in the world. We can only get at the general problem of relativism by stepping outside of its dialectic while at the same time remaining within its dialectical continuum.</p> <p>To step beyond the dialectic of relativity and relativism is no simple feat, especially for a Western intellect so steeped in a rationalistic tradition and "logo-centric" orientation toward the world of its collective experience. Stepping beyond the continuum entails a dialectical transcendence of the terms of the debate, in terms of the debate, which entails as well dealing with the "paradox of paradox" inherent to the reification of relativism and the relativity of reification.</p> <p>But by being difficult does not therefore make a reasonable and realistic discussion of relativism a logical impossibility. We must temporarily suspend our conventional frames of classical logic and the apparent-only common sense quality of our words and everyday language. We must momentarily suspend the trick of "concretizing credibility" that such logos plays upon our linguistic imagination of reality. We must engage instead in a kind of critical metalogue, both outside our normal bounds of truth and falseness and yet about that logic, both beyond the logos of our language and in terms and about that logos.</p> <p>Once we have become used to such a "suspension" of rational credibility in our "logodaedaly," we may then foster the capacity for entertaining critical doubt and sophistic skepticism, making room for the necessary uncertainty and the problematic of its inherent paradox for our knowledge. We may then better employ these in the service of our growing sense of reality and realism in our thought and speech.</p> <p>One claim of relativism is an assertion of the preeminent importance of a non-literal, or figurative, truth-value in both our language and logic, and for a basic<br> "non-literal" mode of thinking and talking about, inferring and referring to our shared reality. One aspect of non-relativistic approaches are the at least implicit claim to "literalness" and "literal" truth-value resulting in a common case of "literal-mindedness" and "logocentricity" that tends to flatten differential metaphoric signficance into a two-dimensional, classical evenness of "Truth" and "Falseness."</p> <p>Positivistic logic, which claims to replace the need for philosophic musing and conjecture with its mathematical rigor and empirical consistency, renders explicit and marked this otherwise implicit claim of literal logos. Besides lacking in the colorfulness of natural language, such restricted discourse also create a false and superficial sense of spurious equivalence or correspondence of value between the term and the thing, and between different terms and different things. These things are then construed as values that are either mutually inclusive, hence hierarchically arranged in levels of ascending generality and descending particularity, or are mutually exclusive, hence typologically distinct and bounded domains of experience.</p> <p>Such an orientation leads to a positing of equivalent, literal truth-value to facts as to "ideas" as well as to "things," as these are grounded and hence exist independently of the meaning of the words used to describe them. Such presumed and posited one-to-one correspondence between the term and the thing, and the essentialist equivalence or non-equivalence between different terms and different things, implicitly denies the statistical structure and conditionality of experience, the approximate, differential variation and gradient of meaning and significance that is inherent in such relations between worlds, and that result in the overall critical indeterminancy of our language to adequately, reasonably, sufficiently express the differences that make so much "Difference" in our world.</p> <p>Paradoxically, such literal-mindedness leads to an overemphasis of difference/sameness between two fundamentally separate and dichotomized worlds, of which one or the other must then be primary and the other merely a representation or reflection of the other, thus coming to focus upon the extremeness of duality between these worlds rather than upon the nature of the relationships that serve to integrate these worlds in our inherent experience. It leads to a kind of metaphorical blindness to deal with the figurative nature of the relationships of the world, as themselves something important making the world.</p> <p>Put another way, such literalness leads to a critical inability to see the natural and normal relativity of the relatedness of things and experience in the world, to the necessary conditionality of grounding statements in relations with the world. As a natural human response, those things about which one is basically blind and ignorant will tend to be the source of fear and uncertainty, as a source of insecurity and threat to one's sense of order, such things must be dealt with in a prejudicial and reactionary, if repressive and unconscious, fashion. It becomes a form of "epistemopathology."</p> <p>In the case of relativism this has meant the projection upon the world of one's repressions that must be cast out of one's rationalistic garden of Eden--determinism, ideology and sycophancy, tolerance of intolerance, nihilism, the pessimism of might makes right and the abyss of absolute, incurable doubt and solipsism. It has also led to a case of mistaken identity about what Relativism actually represents in the world, and to its resultant reification and misplaced concretization as something, as a condition, a state, a possibility, that is separable and independently distinguishable from the world, rather than as being simply the way of the world.</p> <p>Figurativeness, on the other hand, is the only means we have for accounting for the slop and lack of fit between our worlds of things and thoughts and words and deeds. It is a way of making up the difference, flexing the frames usually misconstrued as fixed, and challenging the status quo of the given and questioning the taken for granted. It is our way of dealing with the unexpected and the unusual, the exceptional, with alteration in our world and the implausible or supposedly "impossible possible." Such figurativeness allows us to stretch the limits of our perception and recognition, cognition and imagination of the world, in order to bridge the gulf that sometimes opens up between our worlds, rending the everyday experiential fabric of our existence.</p> <p>Figurativeness allows us to deal with inevitable and unexpected change in the world. Literalness is an attempt to establish through our language control over such variability and indeterminacy in our world, and as such constitutes a deliberate, and desperate, dialogue, however indirect or implicit, of power in the world. Relativism, the relational logos of change in the world, is dialectically contrapuntal to the propositions of Determinism that deals primarily with the problem of power, or control over change, in the world.</p> <p>Change always tends to relativize the world, while power always tries to control and determine such change. It follows that the kinds of understanding, the worldviews that come from each are very different from the other in premises, structure, implication and consequences in the world. These worldviews are not just different, but incommensurably so, such that the terms and meanings of one cannot be directly transcribed as opposite or negative values in terms of the other.</p> <p>Relativism and Determinism can be said to be dialectically non-complementary and therefore mutually non-contradictory points of view, except in terms of the fundamental problem of language, change and power in the world. The doctrines of relativism and determinism can be said to be mutually non-reciprocal in relation to one another except when it comes to the dialectics of power and change in the world, in which case the former seeks to understand the power of change in the world, whereas the later seeks to understand the power over change in the world. This is an important difference, because the former pathway leads to a natural science, the later to human ideology.</p> <p>It follows that the framework of one cannot be adequately understood or interpreted within the terminology of the other without distorting its understanding as to its actually significance and representativeness in the world. The literalness of Determinism thus fails to come to terms with the inherent figurativeness of relativism when it leads to a rationalistic interpretation of the later doctrine in a literal sense as but a weak form of itself, rather than as an altogether different doctrine with separate implications, premises and consequences. This also leads to a misconstruing of the contradictions of cognition and morality inherent to a strictly literal determinism as fitting a wider, broader relativism as well, rather than as a distinctive doctrine with its own sorts of dilemmas and contradictions.</p> <p>The doctrine of relativism has fallen victim to its mistaken identification with determinism, and in the process of its dysphemization it has been easy to blame the victim, especially when the victim is not allowed to speak for itself, or else becomes constructed as a convenient straw man by which to contrapose whatever anti-relativist doctrine one wishes to support. Because it has lacked any defensible framework of its own, it has even been denied or rejected as a central theoretical orientation, and it has been claimed to be but a set of half-baked, disparate and vacuous ideas or ideology.</p> <p>An opposite, but equally extreme version of what relativism amounts to in a deterministic world is its reification with a substantiality, concreteness, essentiality or independence in reality that it does not actually have. We search for its missing essence in the world, in the sexual practices of the Mundurucu or Samoans, or in the ethos and pathos of the plains Apache or the Pueblos or megalomaniac Kwakiutl, and we fail to find its source or foundation anywhere. We find only the indirect evidence of its critical absence and indeterminacy.</p> <p>This misplaced essence comes from a general failure to recognize, and to understand, the implications of the fact that relativity does not so much exist in the world as it is an inextricable part or condition or characteristic of the world. It is a relational quality which permeates the world and which colors it in many ways, but which we cannot capture in its essential form as a thing or entity or property in the world. As such it is amenable to propositional description and understanding, but it is not subject to direct empirical demonstration.</p> <p>We can progressively refine our relativistic statements about reality, but we can never finally prove or demonstrate unequivocally that our statements adequately, sufficiently or necessarily represent reality. This aspect of relativism, also, is a part of science as well.</p> <p>An inference can be made that relativism has some kind of privileged claim to the understanding of reality which other orientations lack. It does not so much preclude the possibility of our understanding of reality as it concludes in the correction and revision of our versions of reality. It does not presuppose multiple realities of which there might be a single integrated version of understanding (though this may be generally and unspecifically true) so much as it posits the mutual coexistence of multiple versions of the same general reality, none of which are complete or authoritatively final, but among which some are more consistently relativistic and realistic than others, and that can be judged in terms of the accuracy and number of conditional statements which can be made regarding relativistic assertions.</p> <p>Relativism makes a conditional claim to a privileged sense of realism in understanding and defining reality, which other orientations such as universality, rationalism, or positivism, cannot make because it always must render conditional its statements of rules in contingent relationships to all the exceptions which must follow.</p> <p>It is not necessarily tautological to assert that the doctrine of relativism is the principle means toward enhanced realism in our understanding of the world. An attitude promoting greater realism in regard to the world also promotes a relativistic version of that world, because it does not therefore follow that whatever is more realistic is by definition more relativistic, and whatever is relativistic is by definition more realistic. The reason for this is that the conditional statements made serve to ground and double-check both sets of claims--of relativism and greater realism--simultaneously.</p> <p>The way this works is that general propositions made must always be contingent upon some unknown but realistically available and conditional statements which serve to frame the proposition indirectly and a posteriori. It is the intrinsic property of these conditioning relational statements that they are always initially false, or at least untrue in an imprecise or only approximate sense. In order to continue to be held realistically, these conditional statements that frame the central proposition must be continually revised and amended in order to continue to fit and make sense of the proposition in the world, because the relations in the world from which these statements are derived will be continuously changing. Alterations of these statements must lead to modification or accommodation of the major proposition, which entails its dialectical transformation in order to fit the transformed, or derivative, frame.</p> <p>Transformation of the major proposition and of the conditional statements is an act of revisionism and of reinterpretation that entails a certain arbitrariness and deliberateness of intention over the entire process. We are attempting to exert control or influence over the directionality of change in alignment with our own intentionality structures. At this point the dialectic of relativism and determinism are mutually complementary, but the subsequent directionality of change or its control becomes a consequence of which doctrine is in place, the literal-mindedness of determinism or the figurativeness of relativism.</p> <p>In the case of determinism, propositions held to be true a priori or self-evident are not subject to reinterpretation--they remain fixed in their focus. Because change is inevitable, it is the intermediate conditional statement that must become either continuously amended and stretched beyond their practical limits of credibility, or otherwise suspended altogether as unnecessary to the validity of the propositions. In such a case it is better that basic propositions remain implicit only in order that they may not so directly challenge or become challenged by changes in the world. In such a case, it is enough to claim that such propositional truths are an inherent part of nature, insurmountable boundaries of absolute difference between realities is posited, and all changes must become reinterpreted as neutral or superficial to the pre-established order by whatever convenient circumlocution.</p> <p>With relativism, change in the world forces dialectical transformation of basic propositions and conditional statements that are construed as neither absolutely fixed nor nonrelative. Thus reinterpretation works to transform dialectically both propositions and conditional statements until closer fit with the world is achieved. The progress of these transformations is wholly achieved progress judged in relation to past propositions and statements that are shown in hindsight to be less real.</p> <p>While the doctrine of relativism seeks to transform itself in relation to changes in the world, the doctrine of determinism ultimately seeks to control changes in the world in relation to its basically unchanged propositions about the world. But there is a sense that the two doctrines overlap when it comes to relativism attempting to understand the reality of ideology in the world, and when determinism attempts to appropriate the realism and understanding of relativism to its own ideological intentions in the world. The convergence of these two doctrines comes into focus when it comes to the particularly human aspects of reality.</p> <p>The claim is made that relativism, but not determinism, is more realistically representative of reality as long as its conditional statements are in place and are revised in relation to changes happening in the world, than other possible frameworks for understanding reality.</p> <p>We may refer to the basic openness of such a system in which its conditional statements, hence its propositions, are always subject to dialectical revision, thence to the possibility of refinement through the progressive falsification or insufficiency of its statements. Though its statements are never complete, final and are always partial in relationship to a wider world.</p> <p>The openness of relativism is in part due to its own partiality and incompleteness. It is always an unfinished project entailing revision and reinterpretation. Reinterpretation makes possible multiple translations, which affords the greatest likelihood of its communicability across different contexts of meaning. It is because of its conditionality that its propositions must always be contextualized and hence reevaluated across contexts--hence the emergence of a more realistic version generalizable across a greater field of differences. This inherent incompleteness and openness is in part a function of the figurativeness that insures alternative and flexible translation of reality. The impossibility of translation is its possibility.</p> <p>The openness inherent to relativistic doctrine can be said to reflect the openness inherent in reality. Though both systems are constrained in certain definite and important ways, both systems are also infinite, unbounded and indefinite in other ways, and in these senses the realism of relativistic doctrine reflects and represents the relational structure of the world.</p> <p>Relativism is held to reflect in its representations of reality the condition of relativity inherent not just in reality itself, but in our knowledge of reality. The doctrine of relativism is an account of relativity, and the relativity of reality as a basic characteristic of its understanding is what relativism refers to. It is important to distinguish between relativism as a doctrine about human reality and the conception of relativity as an intrinsic dimension of this reality. When we mention relativism we are referring primarily to the doctrine itself and only indirectly to relativity, and when we refer to relativity we are not directly speaking of relativism, but through relativism, in relativistic terms. The former account of relativity is a non-reflexive one referring directly to its object of inquiry, while the latter account is reflexive, referring to how we know about what we know about relativity, and what consequences this knowledge has for our understanding of human reality.</p> <p>In a sense, this dichotomy between relativism as reflexive epistemological doctrine and relativity as a non-reflexive reference to reality is both a spurious and false one, and is also at the same time a necessary and important one. It is false in the sense that in the final analysis there really can be no precise distinction made between how we know, what we know and what the consequences of this knowledge are--relativism and relativity are two sides of the same coin of relating to reality. We might conflate the two meanings into a single quality we might call relativistic. But this dichotomy is also a necessary and important one to make because it forms the basis of the dialectical tension by which we frame our relativistic comprehension of reality--such dichotomization allows for both the sense of objectivity and reflexivity necessary to relativistic understanding.</p> <p>It can be supposed, given the terms of the dialectic, that relativity as an inherent dimension, quality or characteristic of human reality, is somehow complete in and of itself, a priori to our recognition and definition of it in the world, and therefore has some sense of objectiveness in the world. It can also be reasoned then that our doctrine of relativism, as the dialectical logos of relativity, is but an incomplete and a posteriori knowledge of the objective conditionality of reality, one that is always open to revision. Finally, it can also be concluded that if this dialectical dichotomy is paradoxically false and spurious, then what is actually relativistic about our knowledge and experience of reality is therefore neither a priori nor a posteriori, neither objectively complete nor subjectively incomplete. It is rather somehow intrinsic to the moment of the knowledge and experience itself, as standing between the before and after, the here and the there, and as something more than incomplete, but never quite complete enough, and as something not quite objective in the world, but more than merely subjective to the world. In other words, it is something inherent to both human experience and world reality (initially the same and undichotomized) which creates its own possibility for both being and nonbeing.</p> <p>Several other conclusions follow from this paradox. First, in terms of the dialectic of relativism and relativity, the former can be stipulated to be a dependent variable, conditional to the later independent variable, and this dichotomy fits the canons of causality in a strict scientific world view. Relativism is not inimical to such a strict version of science, but is actually an intrinsic component of its emphasis upon realism. Also, relativistic understanding admits of the ultimate subjectivity and partiality of all knowledge, and permits a reflexive awareness of this conditionality in its incompleteness, which informs a non-scientific vision of reality as received apperceptive consciousness. Finally, in its dismissal of the dialectics of Dialectic as fundamentally spurious to its own understanding, relativistic understanding allows for a phenomenological and temporally immediate status of its own knowledge as the on-going realissum of experience in the world.</p> <p>Thus broadly interpreted, relativism, relativity and relativistic understanding forms a dialectic which encompasses itself as dialectic and dialectics, as a single synthetic framework which creates its own paradoxicality and openness. It permits the hitherto separate and non-integrated visions of the world, namely the scientific, the humanistic and the phenomenological or experiential, to coexist as but alternative facets of the same general worldview.</p> <p>In this regard, it will be demonstrated that such a general relativistic framework provides a nontrivial, productive and interesting way of integrating previously irreconcilable versions of the world, for instance Universalism, Evolutionism, Relativism, Determinism, Positivism, Foundationalism, Empiricism, Rationalism, Mentalism (or Idealism), Materialism (or Realism), Phenomenologicalism, Existentialism, etc., as but multiple facets or alternative visions or different versions of the same basic relative human reality. This is both the virtue and necessity of such general relativisitic understanding in a world that has become so factionalized and fractionated between mutually exclusive, competing worldviews.</p> <p>While being primarily epistemological in orientation as the doctrine of relativism, general relativistic understanding also comprises its own complete philosophy, or philosophical orientation, combining both metaphysics, as being of first principles and seek (ing) to explain the nature of being or essential reality (ontology) and of the origin and structure of the world (cosmology). It is closely associated with a theory of knowledge (epistemology, as the theory or science which investigates the origin, nature, methods and limits of knowledge, and also a separate sense of ethics, aesthetics, as well as a metalogic or meta-logos as the metaphysics relating to logic and a philosophy of Logos.)</p> <p>As such, general relativism must be seen as something more than just another worldview or a theoretical orientation. It is a more inclusive and general way of understanding human reality which encompasses many other world views and theoretical orientations. It can be claimed that general relativism is meta-thematic in its basic scope, capable of combining elements and incorporating diverse frameworks of many alternative ways of looking at the world into a single, conceptually coherent system of understanding.</p> <p>It makes sense to refer then, to a relativistic philosophy of human reality which is a system of understanding complete in itself and which comprises a general orientation toward the understanding of human reality.</p> <p>The relativity of reality underlies the structure of its dialectical patterning, just as the relativism of our understanding of this reality constitutes the basis of our dialectics concerning this reality. In other words, there is something inherently dialectical about relativistic understanding, and, vice versa, something intrinsically relativistic about dialectical patterning. This aspect of both relativistic dialectics and dialectical relativism can be seen in how whatever the thematic thesis that becomes the focus of our attention.It identity is always configured by and conditioned in indirect relationship with antithetical anathema, which bounds and defines the shadow world of our ignorance, of Difference and of our emergent understanding.</p> <p>It is paramount to our relativistic perspective that we learn to focus critically upon the dynamic process of the interrelationships of the dialectic itself, rather than upon the contrapuntal elements or the sum of their contradictions. In this sense, relativistic philosophy aims to grasp the middle range of relatedness between the extremes rather than to focus upon the extremes themselves. Relativistic philosophy therefore steps outside of the dialectic through its own reflexivity, while still being expressed in terms of the dialectic, and while still remaining about the dialectic as a whole process rather than just about the developmental themes contained within its chain. Relativistic philosophy can be said to transcend the Difference while coming to rest upon the differences expressed within the whole relationship itself. This is an extremely crucial step in the relativistic project, because without its act of transcendence, it is bound to become irretrievably caught upon the horns of its own dilemma, and thus its relevance becomes lost within the difference manifest in the dialectic.</p> <p>This act of transcendence is necessary to capture synthetically or constructively the sense of undivided synergism and holism which is held to be inherent to our experience of reality before our attempts to dichotomize and analyze its parts. This transcendence is as much a matter of an attitude, of noninvolvement or lack of commitment to the terms of the dialectic, as it a basic skepticism and resistance to take the necessary leap of faith required to accept any one doctrine about human reality over all others. It is a learned, studied and sophisticated enactment, one which requires accurate understanding of the terms of analysis and of the alternatives which are available. It is not an enactment based upon simple rejection or refusal to engage in dialectics, but in the ability to bridge the world circumscribed by the terms of the dialectic, and to turn the dialectic upon itself in its own dilemma.</p> <p>Like the relativism of which it is its primary expression, dialectics are necessarily incomplete, partial and open-ended. Its value is its inherent capacity to deal with change in a systematic way, and its capacity to always leave change as a possibility of its patterning.</p> <p>The strong reaction to relativism must be understood as being composed of several interrelated but separable arguments. It is important to know these arguments, and to understand this outside dimensionality of the relativistic problem as something crucial, though peripheral, to relativistic understanding itself, because such critique brings into clear contrast some of the more significant implications which relativistic doctrine has in the world of humankind. Whatever its ontological status in the world, or its ethical ramifications in our lives, the issue and problematic of general relativism are rarely if ever dealt with in a neutral or unbiased way, whether for or against. It is this social salience, or loading, this capacity to arouse or potential for strong negative reaction, which marks relativism as an issue in the world which should not be dealt with in too trivial a manner, and as perhaps something more important than might meet the eye.</p> <p>It is the strength of the reaction against relativism which is the best measure of its power, potential or illusionary, which threatens to usurp and deny the legitimacy and established authority of many ideas, worldviews and belief systems in the world. For those who like to see science as something fixed, finite and solid to touch, relativism threatens with ultimate uncertainty. For those preoccupied with the enlightenment of humankind, who are concerned with establishing an absolute, prescriptive, metaethical code of conduct for human affairs in the world, relativism threatens with contradictory cultural values and the ultimate arbitrariness of power and evil in the world. For those who want to believe that all of humankind thinks alike, must talk alike, and behave themselves in the same basic ways, relativism threatens with numerous counterexamples that suggest that the ground of humankind may never be found, whether in spirit or in nature, and that its great range of continuous variation may well indeed be ultimately groundless, due to its natural "world openness" and instinctual or genetic underdetermination. For those who wish to see our sense of history as united and one and the same for all humankind, as synchronized and seriated by the same, universal atomic clock, relativism threatens with the relativity of space-time itself, and the possibility of infinite times and infinite histories.</p> <p>But the doctrine doesn't threaten to take away with one hand what it does not promise to give back in another shape with the other. If we cannot have definite certainty, we then can at least have approximate determinacy. If we cannot have the Good, the True, or the Right to reign in the world, we can at least have better than before. If we cannot have hard bedrock upon which to plant our feet, we can have at least firm soil, and if we cannot have a single sense of universal History, at least we can have a common stream into which many of our different histories can flow. What relativism really threatens is the illusion of our own ignorance and the delusions of our unquestioned ideologies, and what it really promises is the enhanced realism of seeing the world better for what it really is.</p> <p>One aspect of looking at dialectical relativity is to understand that whatever the truth or fiction of any particular system of understanding in the world, all such systems are carried and expressed by human bearers, and as such, are relative to their respective points of view. No one has a bottom line on truth in reality, however much many individuals may act like it or prefer that others to believe that they do, and if no one has a bottom line, but only just their own interpretation. If all truth is always and only embodied in the belief and behavior of human beings, then it follows that no system of truth can claim non-arbitrary ontological status in the world.</p> <p>Translating such systems of truth into written words or even numerical systems, like mathematics, still does not guarantee the non-arbitrary status for such systems, as all such words are still the products of human manufacture, whether they are spoken, written or abstracted into pure number signs. Mathematical systems can be construed as such pure and a priori systems. They are systems that seem to hold true regardless of the point of view of the observer, whether one chooses to accept or deny their ontological status in the world. These very systems have been raised as standards of such truth in the world, with which all other systems are to be compared. But such claims remain true only in a purely rational and non-empirical sense, to the extent that they are closed systems and to the extent that they are to be seen as operating at only one level in one way in the world. As such they are limited systems which are self-defining and therefore tautological in the world. As ideal systems they are non-historical and unreal--the necessary fictions of human consciousness. But even these systems lose their non-relative status upon the margins of their own understanding, and remain contestable by alternative theories.</p> <p>The understanding of anti-relativist reaction must take into account several interrelated issues.</p> <p>First, the dialectic of relativism is largely carried on outside of relativistic theory proper, in terms of an extraneous dialectic of relativism versus anti-relativism or some other kind of non-relativism. As such, the relativistic dialectic remains largely unelaborated, and therefore is easily misconstrued, mistaken or misrepresented for standing for things which it is not. This has led to a general sense of relativistic theory and thought as being somehow outside normal boundaries of conception, as being something alien mysterious and superfluous. Relativism becomes construed not as something in and of itself, but in terms of what it is not, as something contrary or antithetical, hence unmarked and devalued. In such a position, it is easy to turn relativism into whatever we want to make it, regardless of what it may actually represent. In such a vulnerable undefined position, relativism becomes difficult to defend and easy to attack. It becomes an object of contrapuntal convenience in other dialectics than its own.</p> <p>Secondly, its antithetical, outside status, renders its label and its categorical residual quality subject to projective prejudice by those who have truth to uphold at any cost. It is not a coincidence that what tends to become projected onto the label of relativism is all those repressed evils concomitant to any closed system of conception--namely ideological determinism, the dilemma of internal contradiction and external inconsistency, and the denial of the possibility of non-arbitrary but relative truth value. Relativistic understanding becomes inverted into something it is not. Relativism, in this inverted form, becomes then an extreme form of relativistic determinism, as a kind of absolute relativism that becomes its own contradiction, an oxy-moron of being both absolute and relative at the same time.</p> <p>Thirdly, when construed in this extreme form, false relativism becomes stereotyped as the label for all kinds of logical and empirical contradictions. All languages cannot be relative, otherwise any interpretation would be impossible. All cultures cannot be relative, otherwise no one would be able to cross cultural boundaries at all, and cultural anthropology, the guardian of cultural relativism, would be finally out of a job. If relativism means never being able to make the strange familiar, then any translation is impossible, but translation exists in however an imperfect and relative form, therefore the strange can be made at least partly familiar. If all cultures are historically relative, then the project of learning any lessons from history would be impossible, and history itself would make no sense as a human enterprise.</p> <p>Fourth, this line of argument against such false, extreme relativism leads to a most devastating critique. Relativism is necessarily value-tolerant rather than just value-free as any good objective science claims to be, and that it necessarily entails the ethical contradiction of raising a standard of absolute, universal tolerance while claiming at the same time that there can be no absolute, universal value. Such an extreme account entails the moral contradiction of justifying the tolerance of extremely immoral value systems, say Hitler's regime. Again, relativism does not take such an extreme stance that might necessarily makes right, though it might see this as an historical rule of thumb. But it does entail the understanding that different societies, whether Nazi, Hindi or Greek or Dani, may come up with relatively different, sometimes conflicting value orientations. Relativism does not claim there are no moral standards possible, but only makes possible the insight that some ideals may or may not be morally better than others.</p> <p>Fifth, and perhaps most subtle, such reaction against an extreme, false form of relativism makes the argument that relativism is merely spurious, trivial, nonsystematic and unintegrated as a theoretical perspective, lacking a focus or center of balance, and therefore it is at best a meretricious, nonessential romanticism, an old whore, a false-profound trick of the human imagination, misleading, hermeneutico-psychedelic and self-serving (Clifford Geertz, 1984:pg. 274) Relativism makes room for nihilism and makes all criticism an impossibility, hence all critical judgement becomes likewise self-defeating.</p> <p>Relativism is neither the last nor the only answer to the understanding of human reality. It is actually only a starting point, perhaps a prerequisite beginning to such understanding that cannot be denied without distorting or doing damage to whatever results. Relativism does not so much provide answers to the problematic of such understanding, but poses the problems and presents its paradoxes in clearer light. It is via its dialectic that these problems become elucidated as such, more definitively and realistically, than if relativism is purposefully omitted and the problem rendered whichever way is most fitting or convenient. It is perhaps because relativism promises not solutions to problems, but further paradox that so many find it antithetical and impossible to deal with. Our world has come to place a premium upon problem-solving and problem definition, and has come to look upon problem-posing as troublesome at best and downright anathema and inimical at worst. But the virtue of relativistic philosophy is precisely that it allows for a systematic and succinct way of posing problems and for separating out what are false problems from genuine ones.</p> <p>Consideration of anti-relativism leads to a distinction between a reaction against relativism and what amounts to a general form of non-relativism that tends to view the world in non-relative terms and that tends to construe relativism not so much as a threat but as something that is impossible, outside the realm of reason and therefore as inimical to truth. It is in this form that we can see the dialectic outside of relativistic understanding not so much as a reaction to it but as indirect critique of the relativist doctrine.</p> <p>Non-relativistic critique of relativism has had its basis in the predominant Western Tradition of Rationalism, which has had its beginning in platonic Idealism. The alleged logocentrism of western consciousness has its roots in Greek thought. Logos was the ordering principle of the cosmos as well as of humankind. Rationalism has been based upon the notion of the a priori existence of a noumenal world of pure essences or form that can only be discovered through the power of pure reason and rational process. In this philosophy, the real world of phenomena becomes but an imperfect reflection of the ideal world of the noumena, and truth is gained not so much through the senses as through the mind's eye as this becomes abstractly embodied in the world of words.</p> <p>Rationalism has been the predominant orientation of the Western tradition of philosophy and classical western worldview, from the time of the Ancient Greeks until the present day. The dialectic of its history has featured a movement about a central rationalistic axis in antithesisis to minor relativistic contrapuntal themes. Relativistic philosophies have been advanced from time to time in the Western philosophical dialectic, but never with the force or influence as it has in Eastern oriental religious-philosophies, and always in dependent counterpoint to the central dominant theme of rationalism. Rationalism has always been in a sense involved in a dialectical relationship with relativism, as these are necessarily contrapuntal themes that provide the dynamic tension for the entire dialectical process.</p> <p>A rationalistic, versus relativistic, orientation to the world has had several consequences for how we construe and relate to the world. First, it hypothesizes a basic objectivity and absoluteness of truth and a perfect world order that exists independently of our encounter with it, and which underlies its understanding. This Truth is susceptible to our attempts to comprehend it by our reason and through our language, but it remains unsusceptible to the influence of our actions and intentions. Our notion of progress entails an active, rationally objective movement towards the understanding of this truth and the incorporation of its principles into our lives such that we can attain a perfect world order--a utopia or paradise founded upon wisdom and the realization of Truth. It is not difficult to see the alleged role of Western Science, whether pure or applied, in conferring a sense of legitimacy to this long tradition of Rationalism.</p> <p>Relativism exists in an uneasy relationship with rationalism and rationalistic doctrine. Western Knowledge has for the most part remained bound to a strongly rationalistic tradition. It has been a kind of logo-centrism that tacitly holds to a priori, universal, monothetic "Truths." A strongly rationalistic orientation would find the inherent paradox, uncertainty and empirical character of a relativistic account of reality too threatening and uncongenial. It is too much of a contradiction to be tolerated within a system in which things are either true or false but not both simultaneously.</p> <p>Because of our premium on being strictly rational, we have tended to devalue the power and subtlety of a more relativistic orientation while holding up as the paragon of intellectual virtue the classically logical mind. In fields such as the social sciences where a statistical sort of relativism is prevails, this has led to a kind of schizophrenic identity as somewhere between the Sciences and the Humanities.</p> <p>Rationalism and relativism are in one sense antithetical extremes of a single dialectic. To hold too strongly to either position is counterproductive to the movements of this dialectic.</p> <p>A strict rationalism leads to an inevitable dichotomization of reality--a kind of duality of dimensionality that construes everything in terms of certain connective pairs. It comes from positing a kind of fixed sense of Identity and difference in the world, and from distinguishing strictly between an X and the value of X.</p> <p>Such strict rationalism not only leads to certain paradoxical contradictions of its own, but also to the misconstruing of the relativist problem as being one of a fallacy of absolute determinism or of absolutely chaotic indeterminacy. It leads to the misappropriation of relativism as if deterministic or non-deterministic, as if its extreme moral version amounted to the justification of genocide and power, or else to the impossibility of translation. An overly rigid adherence to a strong rationalistic orientation results in throwing the baby out with the bath water in regard to the interpretation of relativism.</p> <p>It is this fear of a misunderstood and misrepresented relativism that has engendered the straw dragon of relativity, and that has resulted in a kind of pseudo-intellectual "anti-relativistic" reaction. The Dragon of Relativity is made of rationalistic straw in the sense that anything contradictory to a strictly rationalistic interpretation of reality, anything soft, indeterminate, uncertain, vague, becomes labeled and libeled as so much anti-rationalistic slop in an otherwise absolutely strict system or ordered relations.</p> <p>It is but another paradox of relativism that there is even a form of relativism which can be aptly called "rational relativism" and that such rational relativism neither precludes the possibility of being rational nor its reasonableness or desirability.</p> <p>A rationalistic view of reality, in as much as it posits the existence of a True World which is held to be monothetic, also implies the existence of many false worlds which are typically polythetic. The ideals of truth and falseness are dialectically and dichotomously counterpoised to one another, such that whatever is not true is necessarily false, and whatever is not false must therefore be true. This in itself sets up a view of the world which tends to be dichotomized between what is real and what is not, between what is good or not. What is true, is, and what is not, is therefore untrue, or false. What is missing from such an either/or world is the possibility of something being relative, of being more-or-less true or not true, or the possibility that something may be either or neither true nor false.</p> <p>This dichotomous structure is applied to the dialectics of rationalism in virtually every facet, such that dialectical chains are set up in which one thetical value is emphasized as true or real over an antithetical value marked out as untrue or unreal. The dialectical structure of rationalism is fundamentally different from the dialectical structure which is possible from a relativistic orientation, one which is intrinsically more flexible with more give and take between the values, or with the possibility of alternative values.</p> <p>The differences between a rationalistic and a relativistic world view is that between a discontinuous vision of reality with discrete, ascertainable, therefore quantifiable, values and a continuous vision of reality with variable, indiscrete and therefore not quantifiable, or qualitative, values.</p> <p>Rationalism has led to an ideal notion of pure reason or of rationality which is stereotypically computer-like, objective (non-subjective), mathematical and quantitative, scientifically oriented, structured in terms of classical, two-value logic, causal versus analogical or magical, syllogistic abduction, and purposive, deliberate, planning, goal oriented. It is not fortuitous that this stereotype of pure reason or of the rational actor is held to be consummately represented by the modern, civilized capitalist, and that any other kind of reasoning or mode of thought is somehow less than adequate, non-rational, hence false. It would also not be surprising if such alternative primitive modes of thought also tend to be more relativistically oriented.</p> <p>There has been nothing intrinsically non-rationalistic or anti-rationalistic about a relativistic approach. Indeed, the very defense of relativism entails a resort to reason and rationality, albeit conditional and contextually constrained, in the name of its somewhat limited claims to truth and reality. Rationality is a necessary vehicle toward relativistic understanding, but it is not a strictly dichotomous or objective or monothetic rationality, and its dialectical structure does not follow the classic form of Dialectical Idealism.</p> <p>The philosophy of relativism exists as more than a possible system of ideas inter-relating relativism with the relativity of reality. It also is a potential paradigm or orienting model of praxis in the everyday world, in a way that is to some extent systematic and governed by rules that allow people to investigate and define the problems related to both relativism and encountered in the world. As a potential paradigm, it is something more than merely a philosophical orientation, but it provides a system of instruction for helping human beings to go about relating to reality and ordering their relationships in the world in a more realistic manner.</p> <p>It is in this regard that the relativistic paradigm defines a program for human action, relation and production in the world, and ceases being only a psychological orientation in life and becomes instead a possible social construction entailing its own problems of power and change in the world. As relativism thus becomes paradigmatic, it becomes potentially political and even possibly revolutionary. In this light, the anti-relativistic reaction against relativism may represent something more than a response to a threatened ideological status or symbolic order. It may be as well a deep-seated reaction to the possible threat to social order which relativistic doctrine may represent.</p> <p>Mentioning paradigmatic relativism implies a central theory of general relativism dealing with models and theories of relativity more focused than relativistic notions that are primarily philosophical. It entails being able to make certain kinds of claims which are explicit and which lead to certain specific consequences.</p> <p>Theoretical relativism is premised upon certain basic principles that have constraining implications for a relativistic orientation. It is necessary to define these principles and to render explicit their thematic implications in order to see how these principles are interrelated, theoretically with one another, and dialectically with the world.</p> <p>Principles of theoretical relativism include those of change, holism, universality, multidimensionality, critical indeterminacy, particularity or specificity, difference and identity, contextuality, relation, intentionality, reference and inference, interdependency, directionality and indirection, conditionality, duality, and dialectics.</p> <p>Change is universal, and is the paramount principle of relativistic doctrine. All non-change is relative to the inevitability of change. Entropy guarantees that everything will tend to change toward randomness. Change can be expected but not predicted. It is basically chaotic. Order, structure, system, and pattern, all these concepts entail the maintenance of a boundary, of redundancy, in contradistinction to wider change. Stability can only be understood in a relative dialectic with change, and identity can only be understood in a similar dialectic with difference. Perfect rational systems are held to be immune to change in the world, but even the atomic structure of the universe may be slowly changing. Natural systems are not necessarily rational systems--the difference being primarily the matter of change.</p> <p>Holism is a synergistic principle of the whole being something more than the sum of its parts. All the parts are interrelated in complex ways to compose the whole, and the processes of the whole cannot be simply reduced to the analysis of the functions of each of the parts. All complex dialectical systems are relativistic in the sense that they demonstrate this kind of holism, which renders them intractable to reductionist analysis. All holistic systems are relative in their effect and order and in their unfolding patternings. Holism implies a dialectical system that is anti-chaotic in its patterning, and that such complex systems have a natural history of changing patterning, or a kind of dynamic order, which is largely self-organizing in relation to the chaos of change. This sense of a natural history of a holistic system is another important principle of relativistic doctrine.</p> <p>Universality may be somewhat misleading as it may be misconstrued as a single universal structure that underlies all variation, and attempts to account for such difference. This is a non-relativistic principle, while universality refers to the notion that human reality, however it may be construed, always constitutes an a priori, undivided whole that is universal. We cannot go beyond it or step outside of its purview as it always encompasses all that we think and do. It is, at least in principle, infinite and eternal, and, furthermore, open-ended, and always subject to continuous change. Furthermore, this reality is initially experiential, phenomenological and non-dichotomized--it is naturally and intrinsically holistic. There are no boundaries to the universe, and there are no aspects of human reality that are not a part of the whole.</p> <p>Multidimensionality is the principle that even though reality is universal, it can nevertheless be construed and represented in multiple ways, and has therefore multiple dimensions to its experience. It can be said to be poly-semic and polythetic. It is this multidimensionality to the inherent experience of reality that confers upon our understanding of reality a relativistic orientation.</p> <p>Critical indeterminancy means that nothing may be known without a doubt, that nothing has an exact, permanent center or focal point to its understanding, and that nothing can be analyzed which is not subsequently reducible to smaller and smaller constituent parts and relations between parts. Critical indeterminacy precludes the possibility of absolute certainty, and creates the possibility for the progressive revision and refinement of our relative definition of reality. It is the principle of fuzzy focus that our basic units of understanding, even our purest ideas, are actually constituted by antinomies of other ideas.</p> <p>Particularity or specificity is the principle that everything that is known or knowable is capable of being rendered as related to a context or is reducible to constituent parts and relations between parts. Though this principle appears to contradict the principle of holism, it actually does not. Holism refers to the patterned effects of completely integrated systems and the relativistic understanding of these superorganic patternings while particularism refers to the relativistic imperative to specify precisely the configuration or pattern or the exact relations between the parts. It tends towards viewing any system or entity carrying meaning, however trivial or grand, in its particular historical arrangement. Particularity and specificity refers to yet another basic principle of relativism, that of immediacy, that relativistic knowledge tends to focus upon the most immediate or proximal pattern possible, rather than previous or prospective, remote or distant.</p> <p>The principle of particularity implies a corresponding principle of generality. It is possible to speak and know something not exactly, but only approximately and generally, and that general knowledge, though irreducible, retains some modicum of general validity and overall significance. Generality allows for the abstraction and distantiation of the holistic patterning from the particularity of the thing, and the immediacy of the moment. It is not universalistic or absolutistic, but is only generalist. Relativistic understanding is necessarily both particularistic and generalist in orientation, but not atomistic and universalistic.</p> <p>The principle of difference is implied in the principle of change, and implies in turn the corresponding principle of similarity, or identity. Relative difference/identity is not absolute Difference/Sameness--the dichotomous principle of identity. Change creates difference and system preserves similarity. Relativistic understanding implies understanding the differences, as well as the similarities, between different things, points of view, values, etc.</p> <p>Contextuality is the principle that all definitive, referential knowledge is always situated within some surrounding context, or connotative, inferential framework which configures and shapes such knowledge in important ways. Contexts constrain knowledge, and at the same time interrelate the object of knowledge, the thing known, with the rest of reality. Universality is the comprehensive context of reality. Everything is ultimately bound within a universal context of understanding.</p> <p>Contextuality implies a related principle of relation or relatedness that everything is somehow related to everything else, however indirectly or remotely. Universal relatedness helps to contextualize phenomena, and provides the necessary web of interconnections for the understanding of events. Nothing occurs which is not somehow context dependent within such a web of interrelationships.</p> <p>Interdependency, relatively direct or indirect, is another principle concomitant with those of contextuality and relatedness. Relations are based upon interdependencies between things, and it is the nexus of these interdependencies that create the context for the relativistic understanding of things in the world. In a sense, relative dependency is the measure of the directness or indirection of the contextual relatedness as it bears upon the understanding of something, whether implicit or explicit.</p> <p>Conditionality is another principle of relativistic understanding, entailing that understanding is always conditioned by and conditional to the dependency and relatedness with the contextuality that situates something. To a large extent the understanding of conditionality is indirect, an "if, then" kind of proposition which deals with counter-factual possibilities. The function of conditionality is the elaboration of every alternative possibility and all the exceptions to rules, as a measure of its limits and degree of fit.</p> <p>The basic principles can be seen to interrelate with a general framework of relativism, in emphasizing certain features and kinds of understanding. Each principle presents some of its own dilemmas and relativistic problematic. What is most important is the emphasis upon the interconnectedness of these principles within a relativistic framework, each leading by implicit entailments to the other principles. For instance, change can be seen to follow lines of interdependency, and it is by outlining such interdependency that the directionality of change can be determined. Similarly, the principle of contextuality implies and is implied by the principle of critical indeterminancy, or of how little or how much context is necessary, in the definition of something.</p> <p>Relativism can be distinguished between many different kinds. It is possible to speculate that there might be as many kinds of relativisms as there are ways of understanding the world, and that relativism in general may be applicable to almost anything and everything. But by so extending the definition of relativism, it must necessarily become a mile wide and an inch deep--applicable to virtually anything and relevant to almost nothing.</p> <p>There are several different kinds and many more sub-varieties of relativism than we are aware of. It makes an important, if usually overlooked, difference whether we are speaking of the relativity of the cosmos, of time and space, and the uncertainty of the place of the orbiting electron, or the relativity of different languages, cultures, cognitive orientations or the social relativity of class and status-identity or the rational relativity of reason, the religious relativity of belief, or the epistemological relativity of one's own phenomenological experience or culturally constrained, experientially defined point of view. But whatever the kind or the logical consequences of the relativism we choose to talk about, all kinds of relativism share a few basic things in common. Each kind is a version and an alternative way in which the knowledge of the human knower is critically limited, each kind tends to present to the viewpoint of the human knower a version of reality which seems in itself complete and holistically integrated, while at the same time contradictorily incomplete and partial. Thus, any and all relativisms are a fundamental source of irreconcilable paradox, a kind of paradox that is a basic condition of our knowledge and our ability to know. Finally, whatever the form which our relativism may take, each tends to condition and constrain our knowledge through grounding it within an open-ended relational context, one in which virtually everything is in some way connected to everything else. This inherent contextuality of human knowledge results in yet another ineffable quality--that of the inherent indirection of the many linkages and critical connections made between what it is that is in particular that is known and the rest of the world.</p> <p>The kinds of relativism dealt with in this work are those that either have general salience in the literature or else are forms which are evident or mentioned, or would probably have hypothetical significance for a general theory of relativity, if they can indeed be said to exist and whether or not they have been previously elaborated in the literature.</p> <p>This makes for a fairly wide and diverse range of relativistic arguments, some of which may be only superficially or remotely related to one another, even though they may be grouped under the same broad generic category. The order of grouping kinds of relativism in this work has been for general fit. Clusters of relativism that seem to go together may in actuality be wholly independent arguments that treat related problems. On the other hand, similar kinds of relativism may fall into several different categories, but may be more related to one another across categories than they are with other types of theories within the category. For instance, discussion of methodological relativism as a kind of scientific relativism may fit as well the class of historical relativism, while dimensions of linguistic or cultural relativism may come under the class of historical relativism or social relativism, or, likewise, aspects of phenomenological relativism may be better placed under philosophical than with psychological relativism.</p> <p>Though the general categories are by no means mutually exclusive or exhaustive, there is sound reason for ordering the presentation of the varieties of relativism and relativity into such a framework. Kinds of relativism are clustered together on the basis of the general domains of lived experience and formal problematic that they seem to most relate to, regardless of the origins or nature of the arguments that they may make. Kinds of relativism have been grouped by common association on the basis of the focal problem area in reality which they most centrally relate to.</p> <p>The most salient forms of relativism and relativity I have identified include the following categories: Scientific, Anthropological, Historical, Linguistic, Social, Cultural, Textual or Hermeneutic, Psychological, Experiential, Cognitive, Epistemological, Philosophical, Rational, Aesthetic, Nonwestern, Normative and Humanological (versus anthropological). These categories emerged during the writing of this work, when I discovered much to my chagrin that special problems found, for instance in social relativism, were separate and too weighty to mush together with cultural or historical relativism. I have included a miscellaneous category of residual relativisms that do not seem to fit any particular, broader category, and yet the exclusion of which would render the work incomplete. I am sure that other forms of relativism and relativity exist which I am currently unaware of. Discussions with acquaintances on related topics tend to suggest that other forms of relativism may indeed exist upon the boundaries of our awareness.</p> <p>It is possible that relativisms are lurking behind any and every boundary of understanding, and with each identifiable kind of relativism there is some associated form of centrism or tacit bias precluding more complete or inclusive understanding of reality. Such centrism is related to the notion of differentials inherent to the topography of understanding, such as the inherent unevenness of salience, of alternative orientations, unequal distribution, multifaceted and alternative in character.</p> <p>The doctrine of relativism may be summed up by the expression that whatever our statements about reality, it's just not necessarily so. But the reflexivity of relativism rebounds upon itself to say that it is not always necessarily so that it's just not necessarily so or else we would have the familiar and classical conundrum which any kind of false or extreme kind of absolute relativism is prone to. So relativism, in its paradoxical reflexivity, (which is itself not absolutely so) enters into a larger dialectic with science and rational ideology in admitting the opposite possibility that it may sometimes be necessarily so." though this is taken from a relative, non-absolute standpoint.</p> <p>Relativism is a necessary and indispensable component of science in the rational quest for truth in reality, in as much as science is a necessary complement and conclusion of a relativistic orientation to the world. In as much as relativism allows us to engage in such a dialectic while remaining able to temporarily and partially step outside of the dilemma such a dialectic imposes, it thus reassures us that both our science and our relativisms have the same basic aim of an enhanced realism of understanding at the expense of unquestioned, received versions of reality.</p> <p>Relativism may also be summarily described as an extremely complicated phenomenon of the reflexive human understanding of human reality. It is one that is itself multifaceted and entailing of many different and disparate aspects of reality. Its deeper, more complete appreciation stems from a natural delight in diversity and an intellectual and aesthetic celebration of difference that always makes muddles of our models and models of our muddles.</p> <p>Relativism is not well suited for many people who place a premium upon simplicity and clarity, to the expense sometimes of accuracy. Becoming a certifiable relativist entails learning to live and lead a complex life in a complex world in which there are few if any simple, straightforward solutions. More importantly, it entails an acquired tolerance and patience and appreciation of difference, and the ability to look aperceptively at the "Identity of Difference" and the "Difference of Identity." The impossibility of its translation is its possibility.</p> </font> <p>  <hr> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="two">CHAPTER ONE</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">SCIENTIFIC RELATIVISM AND RELATIVITIES</p> </a></font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"><a NAME="two"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">'There is no universe without its observer, nor any observer who is not part of the universe of description. (Paul Friedrich, pg. 98)</a></p> </font><b><font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p></font></b><font FACE="Times">Perhaps the most objective category of relativism, scientific relativism comprises those kinds of relativisms and relativities that center upon the problem of especially human objectivity in the world--objective knowledge dependent nonetheless upon the observer's point of view.</p> <p>Objectivity in and of the world entails certain implicit claims and presuppositions about the natural and innate status and positionality of human knowledge, that can be referred to as presentationalist, or that what we see and come to know scientifically about the world is in some pure, basic, essential and underived sense in and of the objectively real world itself, independent of how we come to know it.</p> <p>The claim of objectivity in the world is a powerful challenge to relativistic understanding, and is perhaps its most important obstacle and objective to surmount, and it is the relativist answer to this scientific objectivism which is perhaps the most interesting and nontrivial kind of relativism available. It is a relevant paradox that this relativistic response to the objectivist claims by scientists has come primarily from science itself, its practitioners, theorizers, historians and philosophers, and not from humanists or literary scholars.</p> <p>Scientific relativism answers the implicit presentationalism of the objectivist account of reality with a representationalist revision of reality. This reply is not a simple it all depends upon the point of view of the observer but rather that the point of view of the observer itself depends upon the relative position of the observer in a 'quasi-objective' reality. This reply does not contradict the fundamentalist presentationalism of ôhard scienceö so much as renders it somewhat less than intuitively obvious.</p> <p>Science, construed from a strictly ratonalist perspective, would seem to be inimical to a relativistic orientation. A rationalistic orientation in science has traditionally placed a premium upon certain values of logical coherence, empirical consistency, upon mathematical correctness and discreteness of finite values, which would seem to preclude the possibility of relativism within science.</p> <p>But the history and practice of science in many different fields of inquiry has demonstrated an entirely different perspective upon the problem. Science has yielded somewhat unwittingly the strongest proofs of the objective relativity of knowledge about the physical universe.</p> <p>What can be broadly termed "scientific relativism" constitutes a class of an odd assortment of relativisms that are grouped together by virtue of their direct relationship to one dimension or another of science. Together they constitute perhaps the most "objective" kinds of relativism, both in dealing with the problem of "objective" knowledge and objectivity, and in dealing with what amounts to more objective forms of relativity in the world, the critical influence of the observer upon the behavior of quantum energy-particles, the relativity of the observer's space-time, the non-euclidean space of hyperbolic human perception, the anthropocentric, and even "androcentric" bias of human perceptuality, conceptuality, and theoretical reconstructions of reality.</p> <p>Roy D'Andrade writes of three different scientific worldviews, which he distinguishes as the physical sciences, including of course physics, chemistry, astonomy and engineering; the natural sciences which include biology, geology, oceanography, meterology, and some dimensions of psychology, anthropology, sociology and economics; and the semiotic sciences, including linguistics, and subdisciplines of anthropology, sociology and psychology. The implication of these three fundamentally different World Views are that the participants in each talk differently from one another in relation to their own fields, and that a unifying covering law model does not apply equivalently in each of the three World Views.</p> <p>From the standpoint of science as natural systems theory, we can see that D'Andrade may have been treating the differences between distinctive levels of information contained in reality, levels that are not directly translatable or commensurable with one another.</p> <p>These three orders of scientific relativity--physical, biological and anthropological--constitute basic horizons of scientific understanding, and are premised upon a view of science as natural systems theory in which different orders of experience involve a hierarchy of determinations and different levels and kinds of relationsl principles, orders of experience and perception that defy a single scientific synthesis of reality without such a superimposed hierarchy and without a necessary over-reduction and over-emphasis.</p> <p>It is important to consider this aspect of science as a rather heterogeneous system of knowledge, and the implications that this heterogeneity may have for relativism, and how relativity may be found to cohere differently upon each of the three levels.</p> <p>It is for these reasons that I have identified three broad kinds of scientific relativity, which I have called respectively physical, biological and anthropological relativity. The first two kinds will be dealt with only in this chapter, while the rest of the book can be seen to be an elaboration of the third kind of anthropological relativity. It is not that the other two kinds are any less interesting than anthropological relativity, but it is that anthropological relativism treats a more highly elaborated, and perhaps a more intrinsically complicated order of reality, one that nevertheless has great and direct significance for humankind.</p> <p>But relativism of science does not end with the elucidation of these three classes, as there are also dimensions of methodological, theoretical, philosophical, historical and social relativism that directly pertain to the issue of the relativity of scientific knowledge.</p> <p>Physical relativity begins with the most basic building blocks of the universe, and extends to its furthest boundaries of space-time. The fact that quanta of energy may sometimes behave like particles and sometimes like waves depending upon the point of view of the observer, that electrons flying about their shells have at best a probabilistic determinancy, or that what appears absolute straight and linearly fixed in interval may actually be curved and expanding or contracting, or that the constancy of time of the observer depends upon the relative speed at which the observer is hurtling through the universe, that the fabric of space-time may fold upon itself and open onto a different universe in a black hole, or that before the big-bang there was no universe, or that beyond the margins of an expanding universe, if we can even imagine such a distance, there may be no space at all, nor time. All these are testaments to the "human scale" of normal phenomena.</p> <p>The concept of physical relativity can be extended to the transformational, floating geography of the earth's surface itself. Our experience of biographical time is calendrically recurrent and cyclical. We can predict the appearance of stars, moons, comets with extreme accuracy (predictions which were not the strict monopoly of modern science) We can hardly imagine the growth and leveling of mountains, the changing levels of oceans, the drifting of entire continents across the earths surface. But what can be called chaotic, cosmographical changes in the epiphenomenal patterning of the material universe are continuous and uninterrupted. Our brief, limited conceptions of constancy have no firm ground to rest upon.</p> <p>What physical relativity, once irrefutably demonstrated, has done for us has been to directly undermine our very premises about the physical constancy and continuity of ôthingnessö in the world. It becomes more difficult to unquestionly pont to things as the basis of scientific objectivity if the very substance of such thingness may actually be only an apparent by-product of processual duration or the probability of an electronic event subject to error and change. It has the consequence of rendering all our attempts at scientific reductionism and at a unified synthetic theory of reality suspect and ultimate groundless.</p> <p>In other words, it is difficult to make unequivocal and certain claims about the objectivity of our experience of the world when the very status of our objectivity is relative, ultimately indeterminant and nonabsolute. It forces us to amend our very conception of what is objective about the world. We can also base our claims of scientific objectivity upon the primacy of common sense, and many people do, but science does not progress in sophistication and refinement by basing its claims upon common sense.</p> <p>If physical relativity can be used to deconstruct our common sense notions of objectiveness in material reality, then it can also be used to help objectify our uncommon notions about relativism. Physical relativity provides a quasi-objective ground for the ontological status of a general doctrine of relativism in the world, a basis that renders relativism a difficult doctrine to deny or disprove as nonobjective.</p> <p>It is because relativism seems to so contradict the silent and unquestioned sycophancy of our common sense, even in terms of our very perceptuality, that relativism seems so threatening and inimical to our sense of stable order in the universe. The fact that atoms may not be the solid little entities the Greeks believed and imagined them to be, or that time and space may lack any fixed reference point for their absolute measurement, goes against the basic categories of our knowledge, perception and understanding of reality. Though there are good reasons for accepting the near universality of such natural basic categories of experience, based in common perception, and though these basic categories may remain the ground of our everyday experiences in our human-sized everyday world, they are also subject to a different kind of anthropological relativity, but not that same kind that has perplexed our understanding of the physical universe.</p> <p>Whom of the seventeenth century could have guessed that space-time itself twisted and curved, possibly involuting and imploding, or like a piece of Swiss cheese with many little holes, or that though time always appeared internally consistent, it actually varied quite substantially with the speed with which one was hurling through the universe. The round earth may have spun on its axis as it traveled around the sun, but the earth, for all intents and purposes remained quite solid beneath one's feet--or at least until the earth moved or opened into a chasm of energy. Bound as we have been to a human-scale of order, we could not have guessed that hypothetical little electrons we think we see through microscopes are only physical traces of differential potentialities, the veritible particles of time itself, or that protons may slowly decay or that light may even have gravitational mass or that there may be great seas of anti-matter floating somewhere out in space.</p> <p>Infinity is a humanly impossible thing to imagine or to deal with except as an abstraction. When it comes to trillions of light-years, the number of O's before or after one becomes less and less the same-- practically uncountable. If we look for an edge to the universe or a beginning of time, the margins of our field of vision are liable to just diminish to virtual impossibility. We really can have no realistic idea of what a billion years should feel like, or how far off the stars really are. And yet we have advanced a theory of the Big Bang, without much attention paid to what may have been before or beyond the cosmic egg, or where now may lie the center, much less the frontier, of the ever-exploding universe. We eventually reach some vague point in our calculations when our math begins playing tricks upon our imagination. We lack any nonrelative reference points.</p> <p>Physical realtivity is not the cause or explanation of all relativity in the world, but it is the beginning foundation for the understanding of many other kinds of relativities. If the physical foundations of our most objective knowledge is itself ultimately indeterminant, and universally differential, conditional and nonhomogeneous, then whatever objective framework we construct upon such foundations, however implicitly or reductionistically, must also be inherently unstable. If we can live with such critical indeterminancy and instability in our quasi-objective realities, whether we construe them presentationally or representationally, then we will be O.K. and we will have enough room remaining in our lives for a rather broad and flexible relativistic vision of the world.</p> <p>In other words, it is difficult to make unequivocal and certain claims about the objectivity of our experience of the world when the very status of our objectivity is relative, ultimately indeterminant and nonabsolute. It forces us to amend our very conception of what is objective about the world. We can also base our claims of scientific objectivity upon the primacy of common sense, and many people do, but science does not progress in sophistication and refinement by basing its claims upon common sense.</p> <p>  We can push this basic inconstancy and changefulness of nature to life itself. Evolution has been a profound and dramatic theory based upon the principle of random change itself. And yet the principle of biological relativity has not yet been elucidated though it remains very implicit in the patterning of life on earth.</p> <p>Biological relativity begins with our science fiction imagination of different forms of life in the universe. We can scarcely conceive of a whole evolutionary sequence of life based upon silicon in place of carbon, or composed of molecules of anti-matter--but these alternate forms of life remain a possibility to be considered.</p> <p>Biological or evolutionary relativity can be discovered at all levels of the web of life. Speciation as a continuous process of divergence of one group from another, in an unbroken chain from the first proto-organisms until the present, defies easy classification or explanation. Exclusive reliance on a fragmentary fossil record leaves too many gaps upon which to base such an explanation. The selective and environmental forces at play in one evolutionary epoch must have been unique, and different from factors prevalent in other ages. Life on earth, as an evolving, dynamic web of interacting species, creates its own unique situations and contexts for the emergence of new life forms. And the history of life on earth, as with all such history, has been essentially irreversible. Forms of life arising in one era were unique and essentially nonrepeatable instances of evolutionary expression, not to be recreated in another period. This renders the whole history of evolution, from its inception, without a non-relative baseline against which to measure and compare evolutionary changes or different pathways of development during any one epoch. The evolutionary aegis prevailing in the age of the early Dinosaurs cannot be directly compared to that prevailing in the age of hominid evolution.</p> <p>We must see life on earth evolving not as a single organism, or even as a single species, but as complexly interrelated sets of organisms and interacting species whose behavior, and net outcome, will have an influence upon the survival of other organisms. On an organic, behavioral level, life on earth diverged and emerged as a complex interacting and interwoven fabric. Where can we draw the line between the end of one species and the beginning of the next? Many limbs of the evolutionary tree of life have come to an end, their void filled in by the proliferation of yet other branches, and yet for the most part the tree of life remains the same elemental trunk that it has always been.</p> <p>This problem of understanding the evolutionary past is complicated by the fact that evolution seems totally blind--species cannot know if adaptations and genetic alterations are leading them down a pathway toward expansion and speciation or extinction. And yet there is a clear sense of progressive development of species, especially from one epoch to the next.</p> <p>Even more importantly, though, is the sense of uniqueness that we have as a unique species--the rise of human civilization has been an exceptional event in natural history. We have come to attach special significance to our own evolutionary origins and our preeminent evolutionary status. Our own biological relativity informs our experience and understanding of our place in the world, and constrains how we regard other forms of life on earth.</p> <p>With biological relativity, a clear sense of historical horizon or baseline is no longer readily available to our awareness, and the biological boundaries separating our selves from other forms of life on earth are no longer clearly demarcated in time. Separate species, bound within environmental contexts and evolutionary configurations, are no longer directly comparable to one another in any simple sense. Furthermore, biological relativity leaves us with a sense of ambivalence in regard to our own temporal, evolutionary status in the world, especially as the clouds of ecological disaster loom large upon our own horizon.</p> <p>Biological relativity might better be referred to as "evolutionary relativity." It is a kind of relativity resulting from the natural history of evolutionary processes on earth. It is interesting that the theory of evolution stands as a major orientation, a paradigm, the only non-"space-like" or "time-like" perspective that is available to science. As such it sees a heterogenous and particularistic view of the processes of life on earth, as non-uniform and subject to random and continuous variation. It treats time and change as the central metaphors to be explained.</p> <p>Biological evolution may have been a one-time event on earth, and may even be unique to the entire universe, though not likely. There is no governing principle that made such evolution of life an inevitable event--it was basically a chance occurrence, just as its continuation remains basically subject to the laws of chance.</p> <p>Biological relativity can be considered at a species level, in terms of the genetic isolation of each species and the impassable reproductive boundaries between every species. Such relativity may be better regarded on a macroscopic scale as a stochastic, linear series of epochal environmental events, complex and chaotic, over the entire earth, and that in seriation have been historically unique in their configurations. The kinds of selective forces and environmental factors impinging upon natural evolution in one epoch were unique to that era, and different from those synergistic patterns of other eras. Forms of life arising in one era were unique to that epoch, and essentially nonrepeatable instances of evolutionary expression, not to be recreated in another period. This renders the whole history of evolution, from its inception, without a non-relative baseline against which to measure and compare evolutionary changes or different pathways of development.</p> <p>We must see life on earth evolving not as a single organism, or even as a single species, but as complexly interrelated sets of organisms and interacting species whose behavior, and net outcome, will have an influence upon the survival of other organisms. On an organic, behavioral level, life on earth diverged and emerged as a complex interacting and interwoven fabric. On a genetic level, we may say that all life contains the same basic genetic codes and molecules for life, but each organism represents a unique combination--a natural experiment for survival--and each species represents a different trajectory for such pathways of variation of genetic codes.</p> <p>Genetic codes have long been exploring the natural, evolving, epigenetic landscape, and adopting successful strategies that led to their continued reproduction and expansion. We can speak of differential gradients of the epigenetic landscape, of species moving up to peaks of successful adaptation or stable plateaus of genetic development, or else falling off into troughs of extinction. But the landscape itself is always change, ever evolving, and the contexts for the successful adaptation and development of any one organism, or any single species, is always shifting.</p> <p>One general misconception about the fossil record is that we adopt each unique fossil specimen or related group of such specimens as prototypical of a step-wise stadial evolutionary tree on which each next specimen in line represent the branching and resultant plateau of an entire limb. What is lacking from such a partial and incomplete record is how each protoypical specimen may not actually be prototypically representative of an entire class, so much as it is but one found link in a long missing chain of many related but different lost links, and that each specimen may be more unique to its particular evolutionary context than it is generalizably similar or relatable to earlier or later specimens. This makes the interpretation of the fossil record, especially where and when it is rough and fragmentary, a very risky and problematic affair.</p> <p>About the only general rule of thumb that can be applied in this case is that the further back in time the separation, the greater the genetic difference, and hence the more distantly related. In this project the DNA clock has been calibrated to help determine such evolutionary distances in terms of the amount of genetic difference between related species. But the DNA clock is not an absolutely non-relative dating technique. It depends upon the accuracy and correctness of the calibration, which remains quite tenable, and upon the hypothetical presumptions of the historical constancy of rates of molecular change in evolutionary process, especially across epochal boundaries and across a wide range of dramatically different species.</p> <p>Evidence of punctuated equilibrium and of active versus "passive" evolutionary species defies the absolute character of any such clock, that may run reasonably accurately in the short span, but may well become increasingly variable or in error in the evolutionary structure of the long run. Even today the continued existence of species basically unchanged and millions of years old, little altered from their ancestral, fossilized forms, defies the determinancy implied by such a "clock".</p> <p>But even if the DNA clock proved to be correctly calibrated and its evolutionary constancy and accuracy resolved in a nonrelative way, it would still be little more than a dating technique to be applied taxonomically to the fossil record, to figure out the relative genetic distances of relatedness beween different species. By itself, it says little about how or why certain life forms arose during one period and passed away with another, to be replaced by radically different forms of life.</p> <p>We are yet left with a sense of fundamental relative difference between the evolution of plants versus the evolution of animals, or of prokaryotic bacteria versus complex multicellular organisms, or between selective factors impinging upon fish in the oceans versusthos impinging upon birds in the trees, or the different factors involved in the evolution of ants and other social insects versus the evolution of herding animals or of social behavior in humankind. The aegis of the evolutionary framework that was relevant when the Great Dinosaurs stalked the earth is not the same aegis that reins today when humankind paves the earth with asphalt and reinforced concrete.</p> <p>About the only way we have of approaching the problem is through hypothetical reconstructions which only approximte the complexities and intricacies of the past. We can imagine ourselves transported in a time machine to a period before human beings ruled the earth, stranded alone to confront the huge dinosaurs on their neverending quest for food. We are either soon reduced to dinosaur droppings, or else we introduce decisive permutations of extreme logic possible anytime we imaginative fold the future back upon the past. Perhaps the great extinctions were in fact initiated by our future time travelers, and perhaps the important of our own historical era were the indiret consequences of such temporal accidents.</p> <p>Somehow we know this to be a physical absurdity, because we can posit that time is unidirectional and historical change absolutely irreversible. But even the imaginative fiction of time travel gives us a good idea of the relativity inherent in natural history. Such relativity opens up the understanding of historical process and patterning to the possibility of paradox. If our pasts were influenced by our future, then either we have some measure of influence, not only upon our past, but upon our future as well. If this is so, thenour present is not as it is "presented" to us, but some alternative "yet-to-be" reality, or else nothing we do in the present will make any difference. Or else we are caught upon a gigantic historical loop which just repeats itself over and over again, with variations each time around. Or else there are multiple "parallel" simulataneous realities, each with different pasts and futures, and if we can travel backward or futureward through time, then we can also "jump" across time laterally to alternative possible presences.</p> <p>Once we admit an extreme form of historical relativity, then we open up a whole connundrum of paradoxical, illogical, possibilities. But evolutionary relativity does not entail or determine time travel. In its weak form it actually would entail the general irrelevance of the present upon either the past or the future, or of the temporally immediate upon the remote or distant. Surely evolutionary history is somehow interconnected, but more like a long chain made up of many smaller, interconnected chains, than like a single tree of phyletic growth and progressive development, in which the new always expands upon and encompasses the old.</p> <p>Biological relativity is demonstrated in the limits of our attempts to devise a taxonomic system that is free of contradiction. Sometimes our evolutionary record behaves in a way fitting a cladistic, or tree-like, organization, while at other times a phenetic, or trait-type approach, seems to work better. But there remain many anomalies in which species closely related phenetically are absurd from a cladistic standpoint, and vice versa. This kind of dilemma in biological relativity is analogous to the dilemma of quantum particles in physics which sometimes behave like little particles and at other times, under other conditions of observation, like waves.</p> <p>Biological relativity as expressed in natural history is largely a matter of relative distances, spatially, temporally and genetically, separating different species. In a sense, genetic separation and reproductive isolation is a function of relative distance, or proximity, between two populations. Furthermore, spatial, temporal and genetic distances are not clearly separable dimensions of the problem, nor are they at the same time equivalent to one another. In this case, the definition of species in terms of reproductive isolation becomes a more or less, and tautological matter, of too great a genetic difference, and distance, separating two individuals, to enable viable reproduction to occur.</p> <p>There is a need to view a synchronically or spatially defined species as always harboring the potential, or force, or direction, for the kind of reproductive divergence resulting in speciation. In a sense, divergence within a population is continuously occuring. A similar thing occurs in social history where there is always a splintering and divergence of small social movement from a host society. What makes the difference are extraneous, and largely chance, factors leading to the success or failure of such divergent sub-groups.</p> <p>In a biological sense, the new splinter group cannot become swamped by counterforces that tend to promote larger genetic convergence and a common pooling of genes. Some kind of boundary, whether behavioral or environmental or adaptive or competitive, between two groups which limits the crossing over between the groups and promotes the homogenization of traits within each group. The potential for speciation and divergence always existing in any and every biologically defined group, the successful occurrence of speciation must await a particular combination of factors, conditions or events, which facilitate or even accelerate its development. It may well be too that conditions within groups may become ripe for such divergence to occur.</p> <p>There is upon every level of evolutionary development, from the micro-biological to the organic level of the individual to the macrobiological level of entire species and ecosystems, a kind of weakly ordered chaos, anti-chaos and randomness of patterning that must be accounted for in our models of speciation and evolutionary change. This randomness cannot be explained exclusively in terms of the chance mutation of individual genes.</p> <p>Rather it is in the multi-leveled structure of organization of life, the patterned connections between strings of successive genes, switching over of whole genetic segments, the rapid reorganization of entire genetic structures, and upon higher levels, the social-behavioral patterns of interacting individuals of groups and species reaching a kind of super-critical mass in their environmental context which precipitates sudden, dramatic evolutionary events. It may well be that simple genetic mutations may, like a butterfly in Rio de Janeiro, trigger dramatic events. But it must also be that a complex multi-factorical "critical situation" must have developed to render this triggering of the event likely.</p> <p>We can see evolutionary relativity clearly in the orthogenetic evolution of a single phyletic species through time--in the "drift" which either eventuates in an evolutionary deadend or in an unending chain of variation. In such a direction of development, present species are by definition more closely related to past ancestral species than to contemporaneous speices of different phylogenetic liens. And yet the traditional definition of species in terms of genetic, reproductive isolation cannot apply directly or logically, because we cannot draw an absolute boundary separating when and where the parent species leaves of and offspring species take over, except in cases that there is clear evidence of a rather sudden speciation event.</p> <p>There must always have been relatively continuous and uninterrupted genetic transmission of a species throughout its history of development. The only way out of this connundrum is to skip several generations, a simple oversight in a spotty fossil record in which even a small gap may represent many generations, and then to hypothesize some point or degree of difference by which to infer a hypothetical genetic isolation or "species difference." But we know that this could not have been possible if we assume a direct line of descent or unless we hypothesize the divergence of an offshoot which eventually reached an evolutionary deadend.</p> <p>All speciation events, no matter how rapid or gradual, divergent or convergent, sympatric or allopatric, imply a direct ancestral line of genetic transmission and reproduction. All species that exist today are historically related within an unbroken chain to the first forms of life on earth, and the nature of this relatedness and the degree of genetic difference it implies, fits the classical definition of a "species" as a genetically isolated population.</p> <p>The basic components of the genome remain largely the same as the first eukaryotic bacteria that have evolved. And if we are, however remotely, directly related to the first, most primitive forms of life on earth, then, by extension, we are also indirectly related to every other form of life on earth by virtue of common ancestry. If it is obvious that we are not the same species of life as even our more proximate ancestors or cousins, much less the most distant life forms, it is still not quite so obvious where to draw the evolutionary boundaries in time when and where one species left off and a new one begins.</p> <p>About the clearest evidence of a natural historical base-line in evolution that we have is in a few relatively consistent fossil records which demonstrate "punctuated equilibrium"--a relatively long span of morphological constancy gives way to relatively brief "speciation episodes" which radically alters the configuration of the entire species. But even these interim episodes may in actuality be thousands or hundreds of thousands of years in duration, and what appears on the surface of an excavated site to be an abrupt boundary, may in fact have been a quite imperceptibly slow and unnoticeable process of gradual alteration.</p> <p>The next closest evidence of some kind of evolutionary boundary are the evidences of periodic mass extinction events in which entireflora and fauna suddenly disappear, to be replaced in the fossil record by entirely new forms. But even here we cannot be too sure how rapid these extinction events really were, or how complete and simultaneous. They may have actually been quite gradual, partial and successive, occuring in a lengthy chain reaction in which a few weak links eventual sever a long and large chain. But fine tunning of the fossil record reveals many holes in the evolutionary horizon throughwhich many species must have successfuly passed in order to further evolve into life as it later became.</p> <p>What biological relativity does for us is to reaffirm our privileged position at the apex of the Great Chain of Being. At one and the same time thoroughly undermining the whole progressive ideology underlying the notion of the Great Chain of Being, and reaffirming the uniqueness and relatedness of all life on earth. With biological relativity, a clear sense of historical horizon or baseline is no longer readily available to our awareness, and the biological boundaries separating our selves from other forms of life on earth are no longer clearly demarcated in time. Separate species, bound within environmental contexts and evolutionary configurations, are no longer directly comparable to one another in any simple sense.</p> <p>Furthermore, biological relativity leaves us with a sense of ambivalence in regard to our own temporal, evolutionary status in the world, especially as the clouds of ecological disaster loom large upon our own horizon.</p> <p>Anthropological relativity follows from a three tiered or tripartite conception of sicentific understanding as "natural systems theory". It concerns not the problematics of cultural or linguistic relativism so much as it is a matter of the relativity inherent in the reality of humankind and the basic condition of being human in the world. Though we share with many other animals an evolutionary status in the world, we have also created, by virtue of our historical civilization, another superorganic sense of organization in the world through our symbol systems, our language, our technology, our intelligence and our social organization. We have constructed another order of lived experience and relationship in the world that carries us far beyond our own biological being in the world.</p> <p>If our anthropological relativity has to some extent liberated us from many of the constraints of nature, it has also compounded many of our basic problems of human identity and relatedness with the world. We are defined by our "world-openness"</font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2">--</font><font FACE="Times">"The human organism is capable of applying its constiutionally given equipment to a very wide, and, in addition, constantly variable and varying range of activities...." We have tremendous plasticity that cannot be fully accounted for by arguments of genetic adaptation. Humanness is shaped by culture, and this is widely variable. Human nature is defined by traits of world openness and plasticity of instinctual character--the specific form in which it become molded is determined primarily by socio-cultural institutions and thus is relative to the many variations of such formations:</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>" While it is possible to say that man has a nature, it is more significant to say that man constructs his own nature, or more simply, that man produces himself." (Peter Berger & Thomas Luckman, <u>The Social Construction of Reality</u>, 1966:pg. 47-9)</p> <p> </p> <p></font><font FACE="Times">There may be such a thing as human nature, but it is no where clearly separable from the constructs of human culture. Humankind has created its own environmental context in the world, and has become subject to the vicissitudes of our own sense of human history as opposed to the natural history of evolutionary development.</p> <p>By our very being indefinite and indeterminant, our anthropological identity in the natural world has largely become influenced by our human activity. We make ourselves in relation to a larger world that is both social and natural, and the conditions of our own relativity remains anthropologically a by-product of our willpower and motivational determination.</p> <p>Just as biological relativity tends to undermine the"objectiveness" of our biological categories and classifications, anthropological relativity lies at the base of the problem of the lack of specifiable "objectness" about human being and humankind in the world. It is not simply sufficient to treat human reality as if it were something concrete and substantively fixed and immutable in the world. Like physical relativity, both biological and anthropological relativity are conditioned by the fundamental temporality of "objective reality." It is a temporaneousness that comes before and exists beyond, and thus underlies our own reflexive recognition of it in our world. It is a condition that threatens to undermine our own ground of being, our own sense of perception and the immediacy of our own "presence" in the world. What we perceive as relatively permanent, given and immutable in the world, much of which we leave as a taken for granted ground of our own being in the world, is largely the superficial residuum of our own "human-sized" sense of proportionality, or of our own momentariness and existential brevity in the world.</p> <p>If anthropological relativity threatens to undermine the objectiveness of human reality, it also, paradoxically enough, promises a relatively enhanced "objectivity" about our relativistic understanding of this reality. In an anthropological sense this enhanced objectivity is found in the basic traits and categories of human reality which provide a common perceptual ground of "world knowledge" and "common sense" underlying pan-human experience, which define the normal range and boundaries of human possibility in the world.</p> <p>If human reality remains upon its margins ultimately indeterminant and relatively unknowable in any absolute sense, these margins frame roughly and relatively an inner "core" of experience and reality which remains basically stable and predictable. If our science disintegrates upon the marginsof human reality, then it also converges upon its more solid middle ground, a common sensical, given, human-sized, basically proportionate world of experience. This confronts science itself with its own set of relativitistic problems that lie outside of but alongside of the scientific problematics of relativity.</p> <p>Anthropological relativity hooks scientific understanding upon the horns of its own dilemma, for there is no such thing as an objective reality that is not also necessarily a human reality. Objectiveness remains ultimately a human quality and construction in the world, whatever the separate ontological status of "things in the world" which are the construed "objects" of science. All reality, however relative or objective, or presentational or representational, remains ultimately, by definition, a humanly construed and constructed reality. Our scientific objectivity is ultimately a byproduct of our basic human sensibilities in the world that we cannot escape, even with all our science.</p> <p>However much we may deconstruct our scientific models of human reality as "nonobjective" constructions, we are always left with the very natural human need to reimpose some sense of order upon our experience of the world. We are left with the task of dialectically reconstructing a reality that may be no more objective than the constructions that replace it. One important aspect of anthropological relativity is that humankind is a "sense-making" and "order-imposing" creature in the world. If nature has left us bereft of a place in the natural scheme of things, then it has left us with the natural need, and means for making sense of the world. And in this task our science shares.</p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p></font><font FACE="Times">Anthropological relativity stems from the unfixedness of human nature. Rather than being an intrinsic part of our being like it is with most other forms of life, our "nature" exists mostly as an externalized form of human production and reproduction. There may be such a thing as human nature, but it is no where clearly separable from the constructs of human culture.</p> <p>If we are not predetermined by our nature in the world, humankind becomes constrained and subject by the historical forces of his social world. The world as a human construction takes the place of biolgoical instinct and selective constraint to condition and shape humankind in a wide variety of ways nature maynot have originally designed humankind for. If it opens up a world of possibility for becoming, it also creates the possibility of a world of illusion and delusion.</p> <p>In regard to this kind of relativity, the preeminent anthropological problematic becomes the theoretical dialectic between "Nature" and "Culture." Questions concerning the nature and nurture debate have been perennial and frequently troublesome issues both uniting and dividing the discipline of Anthropology as it attempts to come to terms with the object of its inquiry.</p> <p>We can make too much of this anthropological relativity in our deconstruction of both science and our common sense constructions of reality, by carrying it to its paradoxical extremes to deny any validity or "objectiveness" to our science, common sense or humanness whatsoever. But we more often proceed to the opposite extreme of our dialectic in the reactionary and ideological reaffirmation of the objectivity and "non-relativeness" of our science, our common sense and ourselves in the world. In either extreme lies the danger of non-relativistic determinism.</p> <p>Besides issues of physical, biological and anthropological relativity, science must also face issues of relativism in every aspect of its praxis--in its methodology, in theory, in meta-scientific philosophy, as well as in its social and historical dynamics, in its teleological applications. Science as well must deal with issues concerning perceptual and empirical relativity--perception may be constrained representationally in some ways that distort the actual field of view.</p> <p>The dominance of spatial perceptualization in science brings to question whether eyewitness or "seeing is believing" acounts of the public sharing of discovery are not somehow privileged modes of scientific empiricism. Spatial representations of knowledge have a valorizing sense of presence, and are one of the key distinguishing features of scientific publications. The issue of predominance of spatial metaphors in the perceptualization of science seems likely to be prone to a paradox of spatial relativity. Looks can sometimes be deceiving. It is no coincidence that physics is seens as the epitomy of the sciences and is also simultaneously the most 'space-like.' Such space-like sciences tend to be nomothetic and essentialist in framing general laws. They see an underlying, universal homogeneity. Quantity is a critical question, and entities are seen as finitely bounded. Such spatialization lends itself to an ahistorical science that attempts to step beyond the complications of the purview of historical change. The eidectic models of science become, by stepping forwever beyond the possibility of unpredetermined historical change, "rationalizations of the permanent present" and an "ideology of universal harmonies." (Amin, 1974;pg. 6) "One which finds distinctive expression in orthodox location theory where 'static equilibrium is the rule and the aim.'" (Massey 1973;pg. 34, in Derek Gregory, 1978;pg. 41-42.) Such a critique leads also to a privileging of a sense of universal, absolute, "atomic" time, and the problem of etic translation/transcriptions of different realities becomes one of fitting distant phenomena into the same universal framework.</p> <p>Science provides us with new ways of seeing the world. In our modern world we organize our perceptual reality in a Cartesian and Euclidean manner rather than in a way more in accord with science:</p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>The abstract form--idealized and therefore unrealizable--serves as a model/metaphor capable of ordering empirical instances, by suggesting an intelligible structure that individuals will "have," but from which they will diverge at the same time nonsystematically, when ordered according to the set of cultural interests guiding the choice of the model/metaphor... (Patrick Heelan, 1983:pg. 19-21)</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p>Methodological relativism has perhaps always guaranteed for our analysis and our theories a certain necessary amount of blind flying in the pursuit of scientific solutions and success. Although there ae a few widely shared and general principles, exactly how to conduct good science and how good science works are largely a matter of opinion depending upon the type of scientist one is refering to. The empirical emphasis of all sound science almost guarantees us that we can never prove our theories in any absolute sense of certainty. But it has also always guaranteed that scientific praxis would never finally fall victim to the ideological deceptions of reality that it has been prone to. It was the strict inductivism and empiricism that became the source of methodological relativism in science, for it guaranteed that all knowledge had to be directly observable, and that all experimentation had to be directly, causally relatable, that assured science of its resounding paradox that its most important observations would necessarily be indirect and remote and that its best experimental evidence would be at best circumstantial, and that science would come to deal normally upon a level of generality which is naturally imperceptible and inherently unobservable.</p> <p>The stricture of an extreme inductivism entails the necessary "openness" of science to the world, but at the cost of logical closure upon the world that is another tenet of a "naturwissenschaften" founded upon the idea of a dominant "logos." It entails that scientific reality would end up mostly and normally inferential regarding the directly unobservable and the unknowable rather than a deductively ordered, referential reality with knowledge firmly posited in the world by our senses and sensibilities.</p> <p>This relativistic conditionality of scientific methodology entails that science will be primarily a "simplifying" and "explanative" enterprise, based primarily upon the very human process of the interpretation of reality, which affects even our basic style of description, rather than just and only "observation" of the world. It is interpretation that is necessarily constrained by naturalistic observation and formalistic principles of logic, but it nevertheless remains interpretation subject to what can be referred to as "normative" and prescriptive constraints of the human translation of reality between the perceptual and the conceptual and the "significant" and the "symbolic" orders of experience.</p> <p>Every step of the methodological chain, from exploration and description to explanation and experimentation, to the alledged prediction and control, is marked by a "critical moment" of a fundamentally relative, nonobjective human judgement calls as to how to what to look for, how to define basic terms, research design, levels of significance and reliability, how to explain results, what to look for in pursuit of the unknown.</p> <p>Methodological relativism in science proceeds from some of the intrinsic characteristics of the much tauted "Scientific Method." From its inception this methodology has had basic relativistic problematics serving to constrain its applicabliity and teleological utility in the world. Though its touted practice has claimed much success for science, how it works and exactly why it has been so successful remains open to much speculation. Though many people adopt the common hard line of positivitistic scientific praxis in the purusit of such success, no one has yet a bottom line on the basic mechanics of scientific processes in the world. Methodological relativism must be construed as inherent to the problematic of science as everyday praxis, a dialectic of "construction/deconstruction/reconstruction" that is informed by both formals sets of operational rules, methodological criteria and routines, and by rather informal human predispositions, habits and tendecies. It is a rather ritualized ideological program of action that reproduces itself in the world according to a principle of progress.</p> <p>Methodological relativism is to be found in the classic dichotomies between the real and the ideal, the empirical and the rational, and the deductive and inductive as preferred approaches to a naturalistic science. It was the strict inductivism and empiricism that became the source of methodological relativism in science, for it guaranteed that all knowledge had to be directly observable, and that all experimentation had to be directly, causally relatable. It assured science of its resounding paradox that its most important observations would necessarily be indirect and remote and that its best experimetnal evidence would be at best circumstantial, that science would come to deal normally upon a level of generality which is naturally imperceptible and inherently unobservable.</p> <p>The problematics of this methodological relativism are most apparent in the so-called social sciences, where regular issues of "inter-coder reliability," comparative relevance, statistical significance and validity, problematics of establishing "control" and "interactor effects" all regularly limit the scope and validity of conclusions drawn hypothetically and experimentally from formal research designs.</p> <p>But methodological relativism is not exclusively the problem of social sciences. There is no less of a problem in the biological and physical sciences, but they are only less obvious and more amenable to "control." Methodological relativity never totally goes away. Thus in the physical sciences we are continuallystruckby the fundamental dilemma of really seeing what we think we see or want most to see, or of seeing something basically different from what we think we see. In the biological sciences we are typically confounded by problems of taxonomic classification and of the immense complexities and difficulties of extra-laboratory naturalistic observation--creatures in the wild behave differently than when in a cage or in a bottle of formalin. Though we have learned well how to exert a tremendous degree of human control over natural process of evolutionary selection, we still do not understand verywell the central dilemmas of evolution as a natural process. Methodological relativity has perhaps always guaranteed our analysis and our theories a certain modicum of blind flying in the pursuit of scientific solutions and success.</p> <p>This brings up the problem of meta-scientific relativism and the lack of agreement among the philosopher's of science as to what constitutes the canons of validity, method, and theory in the sciences. It has been pointed out that no one has a bottom-line of truth in science, about how or why it works or even from a metaphysical or epistemological standpoint, exactly what it is. But it has been the quest of the philosophers of science for such a bottom line that has best demonstrated "meta-scientific relativism." It is a relativism that is both about science and beyond science, involving the relativistic understanding of science itself, its praxis, theory, epistemology, metaphysics, etc., as something construed as "scientifically objective" and humanly constructed in the world.</p> <p>Meta-scientific relativism is in a sense a complement of methodological relativity, one which bridges between this and theoretical scientific relativity discussed in the next section. It concerns that relativity which does not come from scientific praxis, but from the practice of the philosohy of science</p> <p>Karl Popper proposed in his notion of falsifiability the philosophical notion of the basic relativism involved in scientific understanding. All scientific statements, if they are genuinely scientific, must be open to falsification, and therefore all scientific knowledge must therefore be by definition never absolutely true or methodologically "unfalsifiable." Science as an inductive enterprise can never make a final statement like "all swans are white" even if its first million observations of swans demonstrates the statistical likelihood of this proposition--the next swan may indeed prove to be black.</p> <p>Science has thus become opened upon its hermeneutical horizon of the known with its confrontation of the unknown. It is in its successful elucidation of the unknown, rather than the reaffirmation of the known, that "genuine science" stakes its claim upon the real world. Thus science is always, necessarily challenged by its own basic antinomality and fundamental "epistemo-pathic" uncertainty about its own truth-claims and knowledge of the world. Though statistics cannot ultimately solve this dilemma, it can help to mitigate and systematically reduce its consequences upon our view of the world by its systematic description and probabilistic determination.</p> <p>It is yet another paradox of contemporary science that scientific positivists, who in general hold to a strict "objective materialist" and nonrelativistic account of reality have unreservedly embraced the problematics of Popperian falsificationism as one of its central tenets of scientific praxis. It does so in a contradictory misconstrual of the implications of falsification for scientific methodology, as the affirmation of deterministic accounts of reality and as a disconfirmation of relativism rather than the other way around.</p> <p>Other philosophers of science also account for meta-scientific relativism in a number of alternative perspectives--some more radically relativistic than others--Hilary Putnam, Stephen Toulmin, Lakatos, W. Oupensky, Vigotsky, Wittgenstein, Abraham Maslow, all have a view of scientific praxis as a human activity and of theory as a human construction. All of these philosophers of science also deal with the implicit metaphysical and epistemological foundations of science, and with the underlying presuppositions of the explicitness of scientific understanding. Meta-scientific relativism must deal with the dilemma of the notion of objectivity, or whether knowlede and understanding can exist independently of our theoretical constructions, and whether "objectivity" can exist in our "subjective" based awareness of the world. " While, as Toulmin has put it, (side 1) facts are not self-describing, (side 2) neither are theories self-confirming..... The postulation of our own internal mental constructs as external forces lending intelligibility to the data of the senses seems to be a central and indispensable feture not only of imaginary, fanciful, hallucinatory, and delusional thinking, but of scientific thought as well."</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>Although reality is not something we can do without, neither can it be reached (for it is beyond experience and transcends appearances) except by an act of imaginative projection implicating the knower as well as the known...(Richard Shweder, <u>Thinking Through Cultures</u>, 1991:pg. 59-60)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>While the issues of methodological relativity and meta-scientific relativism will always remain open concerns haunting the philosophy of science, it is important to emphasize that the practice of the philosophy of science is not the practice of science itself. Though each may inform the other in critical ways, whether each needs the other remains a moot point. It is clear that scientists, whether positivistic or not in their philosophic orientations, are continuing to ply their trade in a tried and true, time tested way, regardless of what post-positivistic philosophers and post-modern critics may have to say about it. Whatever its relativistic limits and implications, scientific praxis continues to be a predominant and preminent orientation in modern life.</p> <p>Though "pure scientists" are the first to divorce their own interests and practices from those concerns of the "applied" people and engineers, it is becoming an increasingly legitimate question to inquire into whether the fundamental orientation of science is one that is as "anti-natural" and "death-oriented" as it is "anti-entropic" in the sense the Buckminster Fuller, the champion of scientific optimism in the modern world, has argued for. Science is itself running up against its own horizon of understanding and accomplisment in the world--its successful track-record of invention and discovery mayeventually reach a plateau or even a developmental deadend.</p> <p>Theoretical relativism begins on the other end of the hierarchy of abstraction as the empirical-inductivist paradoxes of methodological relativism. It concerns the question of nonarbitrary or nonconventional standards for establishing what is sound theory in science from what is not. It is not enough in this regard that a theory can be demonstrated experimentally to work. It must also have a certain elegance, parsimony and fit. A theory must have a certain "correctness" about it which is finite, ascertainable and as explicit as it is explanatory. But theory itself is the subject and product of much reinterpretation of phenomena, and in its reinterpretation, yields different points of view upon reality than is possible provided other theoretical frameworks. It does not seem enough to ground such theory ultimately in such nebulous human traits as creativity, intuition, elaborate, informed guesswork.</p> <p>Theory must also follow certain systematic inference structures. The basis for such inference rules may not be universally shared by all sciences. The kinds of inference prevailing in one field may not be the same as those of another, though the formal logic used to explain both appears to be the same. Part of the basic distinction between inductivist and deductivist approaches is that the kinds of inference used in the two are fundamentally different--nondemonstrative in the former case and demonstrative in the later. In hypothetical deductive approaches, so much a part of modern scientific theory, certain facts proceed logically and necessarily from the theory. Not so with inductivist theories--the certainty by which facts may accord with the theory is not as constraining.</p> <p>Furthermore, all theoretical construction faces its own horizon beyond which any single model must give way or eventually break down. The scope of any theory, no matter how "universal" its intentions or terminology, cannot be unlimited. Theoretical models are always by definition abstract simplifications of an infinitely more complex reality. Theory attempts to frame things ultimately infinite in finite terms. As such theory building soon approaches a point at which it must continue to compromise empirical consistency in order to maintain its own internal coherence.</p> <p>This leads to distinguishing between 'levels' of theoretical generalization--local, specific theories with finite, puzzle-solutions, "middle-range theories" that seek to generalize upon a circumscribe problem set, and general or universal theory which seeks comprehensive explanation to "how and why" kinds of questions. But this kind of hierarchy of theoretical generalization belies the fact that all theory implicitly tends towards increasing generality. General theory is not so much built up from lower level theories, stacked together like so many bricks in a wall, but rather it is the converse which generally holds--lower level theories are generated by, and at least tacitly justified within a general framework. Indeed, the test for the correctness of a theory is its capacity to yield such lower-level, special case theories that are directly amenable to scientific methods. On the other hand, if we keep solving so many smaller scientific puzzles, without reference to some general sense of the interlinkages between different problems, is like driving at night down a deserted highway without headlights--we would have no way of knowing if our solutions were generally correct or not.</p> <p>Different theories are holistically integrated in ways that make them incommensurable with one another, reflecting the incomparability of the areas of reality they treat. Theories have a kind of mental mass and occupy a definite area of mental landscape. Theories competing for the same terrain cannot simply be reorganized and welded back together to accommodate both--the underlying assumptions, premises or arguments of one may be essentially alien to others, or even contradictory. Different theories then differently formulated and leading to different conclusions, are often competing for the same region of mindscape, and one does not gain ground or win out without displacing others from its territory.</p> <p>Even today there are promulgators of revised creationism and of a neo-lamarkianism who compete for the minds of people. And it is the essential relativity of incomplete and imperfectly fit theory that assures us theory must be continually modified to embrace all the newly found exceptions or else eventually be replaced by a more consistent theory. It is the mark of a science come of age when one central theory finally gains relative ascendancy over the rest--it becomes the foundation of a central "paradigm" about which scientists can then organize their praxis and thought at the service of theory.</p> <p>While it can be claimed that in a limited sense all theories remain relatively valid, it is the very relativity of theory which assures that it will become changed in order to be more inclusive of the world and to better explain it. Previous theory must be either "displaced" completely, or encompassed or else substantively revised. Valid but limited or special case theories are never completely replaced, but only accrete new information as they become subsumed within a more complete theoretical framework. Such theory does not become so much more unifying as it becomes more organized into different components and specialized sub-areas. Such theory grows relativistically in its critical structure with or without general thematic unity.</p> <p>Roy D'Adrade wrote of the lack of fit of different sciences under the same implicit "Covering Law Model," a condition of theoretical indeterminancy upon a unifying level which reflects the differences between the orders of relation and complexity upon different levels of natural systems theory.</p> <p>The theoretical relativity of hypothetical deductivism gives way to the paradigmatic relativity that Thomas S. Kuhn has made so famous in his classic work. Scientific relativism at this level becomes a condition of the social praxis of a self-defining community of scientists. With a split and breakdown of communication within such a community, the competing paradigms emerge. These paradigms are to a large extent incommensurable, depending upon different rules of evidence, and to some extent, different forms of evidence itself. Argument about paradigmatic validity becomes necessarily circular, and cannot be made logically compelling to those who remain outside the circle. Kuhn's relativism was not an argument for the ascendency of propaganda in scientific theory, but for the necessarily relativistic integrity and holism of science, in experience, perception, language and conception, embraced by communities, paradigms and sciences, and the relativism of a science which is of necessarity a shared, social construction of reality.</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like 'really-there'; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its 'real' counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle. Besides, as an historian, I am impressed with the implausibility of the view....Though the temptation to describe that position as relativistic is understandable, the description seems to me wrong. Conversely, if the position be relativism, I cannot see that the relativist loses anything needed to account for nature and development of the sciences. (pg. 205-207)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>Theoretical relativism also comes into play in a sense that there may be essential distinctions of theoretical structure, understanding and activity between different kinds of theory. The clearest case of this is the general split between the Sciences and the Humanities, and the distinction between "Naturwissenschaften" and "Geisteswissenschaften." It may well be that methods and theoretical tools of inquiry appropriate to art or religion are inappropriate to science or philosophy, or that there are fundamental, irreconciable differences between how natural sciences construe the world and the way social science must see it.</p> <p>This is so much the case that we are left wondering if there really is such a thing as one general unifying kind of theory, even just for a single discipline or subdiscipline. We are left to ask "what is theory" if it is anything at all, or whether it may not be more of an organizational "metaphor," like Wittgenstein's "games" that we apply to a wide variety of unrelated phenomena upon the principle of family resemblances. Georg-Hans Gadamer writes of understanding as a "trans-subjective linguistic process"--an event of the fusion of horizons in the enactment of communication. Knowledge springs from the "linquisticality" and contemporaneousness of all human experience in the world. Non-demonstrable rhetorical claims to natural reason compete with the scientificity of knowledge. In this case we must wonder whether there can be any "prototypical" example of any kind of theory, or whether this might not be an inductive-deductive model that Rationalism likes to play with. There are many, relatively real "theories" in the world, but there may not be any such thing as nonrelative "Theory" in reality.</p> <p>Consideration of the philsophical relativism of science, we must question the social construction of the reality and ideology of science itself, versus its received ontological status in the world. The success and predominance of science in the modern era has led to a secular kind of ideology and religion of Science which has incorporated, paradoxically, as part of its own dogmas the rejection of the truth-claims of religion and ideology. And this is perhaps such ideologies ultimate leap of faith and blindness in its dissociation from other ways of knowing reality and other theories and philosophies about reality.</p> <p>Science itself has had not monopoly or bottom-line on the ultimate nature of reality. Its success has to some extent been fortuitous, and its long-term wisdom may be questioned if it continues to lead us down a deadend of technological disaster. In many cases, it has been seen as a legitimating device to adopt the label of science. We have the precarious paradox of often contraposed theories, classical versus marxist economics, for instance, which each promote themselves as the "genuine science" of economics. There is often, especially in the human sciences, a notable lack of unity, paradigmatic or otherwise, in fields that are broadly referred to as a science. And then we have some sciences that exist as spinoffs of technological developments--computer science. About the most that can be said of all of this is that science has created itself in its own image.</p> <p>The positivistic "ossification" of science, its intentional alienation and distance present, stems from its failure to reflect upon its own linguisticatity and hermeneutic foundations. The linguisticality of science as constituting its own hermeneutic horizon of meaning which, in its constructions of reality, it cannot escape. "Objectivism" amounts to a denial of the implicit linguisticality of our theory. Science raises the claim of transcending "prescientific" universality of the hermeneuical experience by "methodical and controlled alienation." Self-reflective consciousness of the hermeneutic problem seeks awareness of prejudices and preunderstandings that undermines scientific positivism. The role of the observer cannot be effectively separated from the on-going process of he event itself to allow 'objective'--non-hermeneutic appropriatin of the independent meaning of the event. The observer's own relationship with the event becomes denied.</p> <p>In this case we must wonder whether there can be any "prototypical" example of any kind of theory, or whether this might not be an inductive-deductive model that Rationalism likes to play with. There are many, relatively real "theories" in the world, but there may not be any such thing as nonrelative "Theory" in reality.</p> <p>Theoretical relativism involves the inherent constraints of theoretical construction in human reality, especially as this becomes a scientific problem of explaining and "modeling" reality. Scientific constraints upon theoretical model building involve criteria of rational and logical coherence, noncontradiction and external consistency, and parsimony, preserving the essential or important "structure" of a problem while systematically minimizing detail. It also involves issues of general validity, relevancy and descriptive faithfulness, of necessity and sufficiency for the understanding of phenomenal patterning, and also criteria of productivity, suggestiveness, exemplariness, and predictive accuracy. It goes without saying that, like methodological relativism, there is theoretical interpretation, but while the problem of methodological relativism begins and ends with inductivism and empirical experimentalism, the problem of theoretical relativism in science starts upon the other end of what has become known as "hypothetical-deductivism," or the "H-D model" that in its simplist form as promulgated by logical empiricists entails the formulation of hypothesis to fit observed phenomena, and then deducing consequences from the model that can be tested by further observation. The hypothesis are confirmed if the deductive consequences are confirmed, while it is rejected if subsequent observation fails to support it. It becomes thus "falsified" or verified. The essential condition of such theory is that they are testable, or "falsifiable."</p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>As might be expected from its brevity, the foregoing description of the H-D model is overly simple. Hypothesis are not tested in isolation but embedded in theories. Thus, if a deductive consequence of a theory turns out to be false, a single hypothesis is not falsified. Rather, any one of several hypotheses and observations may be at fault. Instead of abandoning a theory upon a negative deduction, the theory is usually modified, and considerable latitude is permitted in the degree of modification permissable while still terming the theory the "same" theory. (David Hull, <u>Darwin and His Critics</u>, 1973:pg. 30-1)</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p>Hypothetical-deductivism in science was introduced with the advent of the Darwinian revolution. Darwin, a time-tested inductivist in the strictest British tradition, gave the world a general theory of Evolution that defied the traditional canons of good science and yet which nevertheless worked well in fitting together the many facts he was able to muster in support of his theory. "To use an old figure, I look on the theory (Darwinian Evolution) as a vast pyramid resting on its ape, and that apex a mathematical point."(Adam Sedgwick, 1860) "you put very well and very fairly that I can in no one instance explain the course of modification in any particular instance....When we descend to details, we can prove that no one species has changed; nor can we prove that the supposed changes are beneficial, which is the groundwork of the theory. Nor can we explain why some species have changed and others have not." (Darwin, 1887:pg. 210) The Origin of Species was "a mass of facts crushed and pounded into shape, rather than held together by the ordinary medium of an obvious logical bond; due attention will, without doubt, discover this bond, but it is often hard to find."(Huxley, 1896:pg. 25)</p> <p>Beyond the Biological paradigm of evolutionary theory, what the Darwinian revolution accomplished was the awakening of science from its narrow inductivist slumber, by offering a productive alternative approach to scientific theory. The controversy between inductivism and deductivism, and the appropriate place to fit Darwinian theory within this dialectic, has been a long-standing one. The popular misconception of the difference between inductive and deductive approaches is that while the former proceeds from "the particular to the general" the later "descends from the general to the particular." Such theory is conceptualized as fitting thepyramidal hierarchy of the most generalat the apex and the base as the most particular. While the two approaches to science are mutually inclusive and syllogistically complementary, it makes an important difference within one's research strategy and selective attention which approach one adopts as primary. With deductivism valid conclusions must necessarily follow from the hypothesis and the premises.</p> <p>If the premises and arguments are valid, then the conclusion must "follow" as true. With inductivism, conclusions do not necessarily follow from premises with the same kind of certitude. "In an inductive argument there is always the possibility that true premises will lead to a false conclusion." The two approaches are characterized by different kinds of inference, demonstrative and nondemonstrative, respectively.</p> <p>The contrast between inductive and deductive approaches has been part of the rational dialectics of formal scientific teory, and the orientation that one adopts in relation to this dialectic, and how one goes about conceptualizing what is appropriate and acceptable theory, has a great deal to do with how one proceeds with scientific inquiry. It is also apparent that this dialectic is not yet finished. The precise status of anyparticular theoretical approach remains the subject of debate and interpretation. Theoretical construction thus lacks a definite base upon which to systematically build knowledge of the world. In the case of hypothetico-deductive models, theory is never finally verifiable in any ultimate sense.</p> <p>In the dialectic between inductive and deductive, a point is reached in theory development at which a trade-off must be made between increasing or maintaining internal rational coherence, but at the expense of "fitting the facts" in a satisfactory manner, or else internal coherence must be given up in order to achieve maximal external, empirical consistency. This trade-off becomes a matter of how tight or loose to make the proverbial belt until it fits comfortably both the facts and the ideas. If it is continually let out to account for all the exceptions to its rules, it soon no longer closes upon itself and ceases to perform its function of keeping together all the facts.</p> <p>Science and relativism can be seen to stand in a complementary, if uneasy, relationship. Relativism interprets paradox that is the by-product of our finite understandings, but which lacks finite solution. Paradox is the product of contradiction--the difference of Identity inherent to our experience of reality. It never really goes away except as it becomes reinterpreted as a kind of puzzlement possible of finite solution--the definition of identity. Science solves puzzles that are finite problem sets with correct solutions. Science needs relativism to derive paradox from the latent level of perception to the more conceptually available level of language. Science completes the interpretive process in a proximate, local and particular sense of reducing general paradox in favor of local puzzlement.</p> <p>Non-linear Chaos theory is founded upon the relativity of the epigenetic patterning of the natural order. It is an expression of the fundamental relativism of science itself. In such theory, precise prediction is replaced by a kind of statistical expectability of patterning, and the complex patternings of change are explained in terms of relational sets. Statistical relativism is the foundation of science.</p> <p>Statistics, the ultimate language of scientific quantification, remains ultimately a "probabilistic" versus an "exact" account of phenomena. Statistical description oversimplifies the realties it purports to represent, by conflating differences of detail under the rubric of a broadly interpreted, theoretical identity. We may be grouping together apples and oranges and excluding bananas if we base our descriptions upon the definition of fruits as objects that are round. We may include then in the category a round rubber ball but have difficulty with a pineapple. Our statistical decisions, perhaps perceptually obvious in a world where all frutits are round and lacking any bananas, may lead us on a quest to sort all round objects available on the basis of "fruitness" and "nonfruitness". If along the way we discover a peeled banana, then we must modify our definition of fruit to include an object that is like other fruits in some ways and yet which is not round, or else create an intermediate category of "part-fruits". This alternative may be acceptable as long as we discover only a few peeled bananas upon our path. But if our investigation leads us haphazardly into the middel of a banana plantation in which we find also papaya, rambutans, pears and durians, we might be convinced to rethink our original definitions conflating fruitiness with roundness.</p> <p>All statistical procedures depend upon the elicitation of some domain, in which there is no nonrelative guarantee that we have elicited an "object" of our perception rather than a "residuum" of our own definitions. Its principles of acceptance are fundamentally indeterminant and arbitrary. We must see in statistics not the last bastion of a positivist orientation, so much as the means which science is able to bring its own relativities and relativisms under some kind of theoretical, systematic control--a way of finitely precipitating the finite description of otherwise infinitely complicated realities.</p> <p>Chaotic relativity and statistical relativism are the ultimate forms of scientific relativism. If all reality is fundamentally statistical, hence probabilistically undetermined and fundamentally uncertain, then science is irretrievably relativisitic in its very description and definition of reality. Our science, though always partial and imperfect, is the best we can yet do. It is a paradox that those who are the most comfortable in dealing with the paradoxes of relativity and relativism may not necessarily be the best puzzlers or statisticians.</p> <p> </p> </font> <p>  <hr> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="three">CHAPTER TWO</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">HISTORICAL RELATIVISM</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>Historical relativism begins with the complex chaotic cosmographical patterns with which scientific relativism trails off. Science cannot predict the resulting erosional patterns caused by a stone tumbling down one side of a hill or another. Historical relativism can be said to treat the central problem and paradox of irreversible change. Historical relativism is complicated by the fact that it treats change in both natural systems as well as in systems which are to some extent humanly volitional and intentional.</p> <p>Historical reconstruction can attempt to side-step its own tendencies to reify the past and to project upon the past the representations of the present, in an attempt at a scientific objectification of history, but such accounts must at least implicitly deny the role in which reification and the externalization of human constructs must play in the process of reconstruction. Even the term "reconstruction" is biased by the implication that there is knowledge of some kind of historical baseline or "construction" which we can then reconstitute.</p> <p>Historical relativism demands a kind of reflexivity and "re-presentational" reordering of experience that is not normally required of scientific relativism. Whereas the paradoxicality found in scientific objectivity is primarily "presentational" in being rooted to experience, and is only representationally derivative of such experience, the kind of paradoxicality and relativism involved in the human understanding of history reverses this order, such that it is primarily representational and interpretive and only derivatively experiential and presentationalist in orientation.</p> <p>The principle concerns of the project of history in the recovery of the past center around the question of the validity of the documentary evidence or records, both internally and externally, upon which our historical constructions are based. Not only is the validity of these records always in question and suspect, but the records themselves are inadequate and incomplete to the task of full recovery of past events and life ways. Thus historical knowledge is always limited both intrinsically and extrinsically by the finite records upon which it is based.</p> <p>Historical relativism stems from the fact that the whole past, what actually happened, is mostly unrecoverable except in disparate bits and pieces of a larger jigsaw puzzle. Historians of every persuasion must therefore rely upon incomplete and fragmentary records which may themselves be subject to critical reappraisal, reinterpretation and revision. All history, in filling in the gaps of its knowledge with theories, becomes in effect a form of narrative, exegitical and expository story-telling which weaves a fiction, a mythopoetic recreation, which is of necessity revisionist and retrojective. History must first resolve the philological issues of the internal validity and genuineness of its records--perhaps the documents are in fact counterfeit or erroneous reproductions of the original records. Only then can the question of the external truth and plausibility of the records be taken into consideration.</p> <p>Our sense of History constitutes a hermeneutical horizon that surrounds completely our knowledge. Historical relativism can be said to be a matter of textual relativity if and when we are dealing with written history of literate civilizations. But human history must have a broader-based definition that implicates a wider span and range of human prehistory and natural history, including the oral and archaeological histories of preliterate societies. The issues and problems of one form of history are essentially the same as the other, except that in the paucity of written records there is a tendency to substitute "scientific method" and theory for lines of reasoning which are considered more humanistic in orientation.</p> <p>The problem of reading cultural materials and designs unearthed at a site as if these were historical texts is not as straight-forward or as unproblematically self-evident as is the problem of breaking the code of an ancient system of writing and deciphering its surviving records. The kinds of cultural constraints and patterns which underly the design of a pot or the pattern of an arrow-head are not as obvious as those which go into the construction of a system of writting.</p> <p>We must see the distinction between a scientific and a humanistic archaeology as an important contrast for the problematic of historical relativism. Science provides tools and techniques of analysis which assists the process of discovery and which digs inquisitively into the unknown, which primary reliance upon written records cannot often accomplish. Most history is in fact of the unwritten variety, and is therefore more the provenience of the scientific kind of history than of the humanistic variety. This would entail that most things historical are cast in terms which present to us a spurious kind of objectivity and "facticity" than may, if cast from the alternative point of view, prove to be much more conjectural and unfounded than we know.</p> <p>Not only is the past historically unrecoverable in any absolute sense, but all reconstruction is also to some extent unavoidably revisionist, involving a "retrojection" upon the past priorities and interests which are an immediate preoccupation of the present. This compromises history as inevitably relative to the point of view of the historian. In this matter it is necessary to separate the forward moving influences and factors that determine the unfolding sequences of historical action and reaction from backward looking influences of historical reinterpretation that determine how we will understand our past in terms of the present and understand the present in terms of the past. The understanding and reinterpretation of our own sense of history will also come to have an influence in our own forward-looking actions and intentions, just as the actors of the past had their own sense of history to constrain and guide their actions. Thus the dynamics and power of history have consequences which are more far-reaching than the immediate concerns of the actor or of the historian.</p> <p>Historicism replaces the "objectiveness" of science with the principle of "presence," thyat values as primary the immediate, most proximate moment as the archimedian fulcrum for all historical dynamics and its understanding. Presence posits as privileged the standpoint of the immediate, contemporary present--seeing the past as an ongoing series of such presences-- and implicitly regards as secondary and dependent alternative points of view which are remote, distant and "different" from the present. Such difference therefore has a special significance of "critical absence" which can be seen as the dialectically complementary, deemphasized counterpart of an implicitly infered relationship of "representational identity". From this point of view, all history becomes the history written from the point of view of the victor, and all other histories are "counterfactual" though perhaps just as possible at the time of their realization. Just as scientific relativism can be seen to have as part of its project the deconstruction of "objectivism," similarly historical relativism can be regarded as the effort to expose the principle of ongoing presence to its own contradictions, through historical falsification, while trying also to legitimate the critical difference, or "the presence of absence."</p> <p>The principle of presence assures us of a modus tollens type of historical fallacy, explaining the past in terms of its consequences for the present, and the tendency to review the past through the structured and transparent lense of the present and to rewrite the past in terms relevant only to the present in a kind of narrative order as if the present were a necessary outcome the past. The sense of "Past" as this is embodied in terms of its historical records, artifacts, myths, reconstructions and representations, are always a part of the present as functionally dependent upon the interpretive interests of the present in counterpoint to the embodiment of the principle of difference--the "presence of absence."</p> <p>Historical reconstruction and its relativistic dimensions can be thought of as being caught within an inescapable circle of dialectical dilemma. The present can never be wholly "presented" free of the "representations" of the past, and the past can never be wholly "represented" from the "presentations" of the present. There is thus no such thing as a pure past or present, either of which is unadulturated by elements of the other. The historical horizon is continuously receding just as the present conditions are continuously changing.</p> <p>Historical relativism can be regarded as the precursor of later forms of social, cultural and linguistic relativity that were to have such a strong influence upon the social sciences. Such historical relativism came to be regarded as "historicism," the dominant theme of which was "an overwhelming sense of the relativity of all perspectives on human events, that is, on the inevitable historicity of human thought."(Berger and Luckman, 1966:pg. 7) This orientation regarded all of human reality to be ideologically circumscribed by human historicity--what might be referred to as the facticity and factitiousness of our sense of history--and regarded as of central importance the received authenticity of our sense of history. This perspective sought to define the critical relationship between history and ideology in the definition of truth. Ideology subordinates history to its own purposes at the same time that it steps beyond the purview of historical verification.</p> <b> <p></b>Historical relativism has taken its most explicit form in what has been referred to as "Historical Particularism" that was championed by Franz Boas. Cultural traditions are situated within unique historical contexts that are the product of many different shaping influences. Aspects of such cultures must be studied in situ and in detail of their historical background before a sufficient explanation or reconstruction of their patterning can be faithfully accomplished.</p> <p>This extreme version of historical relativism came from Von Humboldt and the German idealist tradition of "culture history" that emphasized history as the expression or unfolding of ideas, or Geist, that was holistic in the many cultural manifestations of its spirit. Each cultural tradition had its own distinctively unique spirit which was qualitatively different from any other and which could only be understood in its own terms. History as subjective process and as difference was emphasized.</p> <p>Boas distinguished between the perspective and practice of physical sciences that were regarded as cumulative and law-like, and "cosmography" that "reached for the subjective and experiential truth of the indivudal phenomenon" apart from its place within a system. Boas came to emphasize the holism of cultural traditions that he later translated as "cultural determinism"--the historical force of a holistic patterning of custom, tradition and diffusion in the patternign of the cultural grouping and the individual personality. He believed that "each culture was a subjectively perceived whole." This superordinate sense of holism became implied in a research orientation which focused on a "thorough understanding of the phenomena themselves rather than toward the laws which they express," achieved by taking "all the features of the local area as a unit and seeking to understanding them as a unique constellation of traits." (Elvin Hatch, 1973;pg. 43)</p> <p>Boas came to emphasize detailed historical study of delimited regions in reconstructing the "actual" history of humankind from which general laws could be derived, and combined this historical approach with a principle of subjective interpretation. The subjectivity of culture, like the complexity of history, meant that each cultural grouping was unique in its own terms.</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>It appears that Boas did not regard these as clearly distinguishable aproaches, for he believed that when people offer an interpretation of their customs they provide an explanation for this historical development as well. By inquiring into a people's ideas, then, the investigator can understand the past, and vice verse....In his pursuit of history, Boas was led to explore the subjective side of culture, the domain of cultural ideas; and in studying cultural ideas he thought he was studying history." (Hatch, 1973: pg. 46).</p> <p> </p> <p></font><font FACE="Times">The complexities of history, the details of diffusion and the variability of integration of diffused traits, and the obscurity of cause and origin in historical explanation, led Boas to reject theories of cultural evolution and to believe that culture was primarily historically determined as an "emergent system." Cultural diffusion and integration was always incomplete, partial and historically haphazard. Historical processes are seen as continuous, differentially distributed, and contingent, consequential and inconclusive--cultural integration was seen as the working out of the historical inconsistencies of a cultural patterning. Neither process can ever be finished. Boas regarded the historical particularity and cultural uniqueness of people in different periods and places as problems of both science and humanism, both of the subjective and objective, the particular and the general. It is clear that Boas regarded anthropology and its central concept of culture as "cosmographical" in descriptive orientation of natural processes that have a complex and chaotic expression.</p> <p> <b> </b>The whole/part hyphenated identity of the individual actor in the dramas of history--her/his paradoxical indeterminancy or invisibility in the representations and reconstructions of history, reveals a different, often overlooked dimension of historical relativism. Psycho-historical studies have focused upon the retrospective analysis of the lives of great men, political leaders, revolutionaries, genius, and madmen in the attempt to explain their historical notability and the events that surrounded their lives, but the mixed motivations of the average actor in the larger productions of history remains mostly unaddressed and therefore historically anonymous. The individual occupies a central position in at least his own life history, if not in the participation and performance of grander History. But the decisions, actions and responses of the individual actor must serve as the pivot point upon which the wheels of change must turn in Human History. It may well be that the annonymity of history reinforces the stature of its representations, as if it might otherwise seem too common place and mundane to be a mover of the world.</p> <p>The dilemmas of locating individual biography in the cogs of the History Machine brings historical relativism to the very edge of its own horizon. The parallactic dissolution if great distance and depth by the human-sized, myopic lense of people time, and the ultimate irresolution of basic, context-bound, historically-situated human identity existentially and phenomenologically caught up in the daily business of living and dying.</p> <p>Temporal relativism is the term I have adopted to cover those dimensions of historical relativism which have usually been left out of historical reconstruction and representation. There are several dimensions of temporal relativism with different consequences for our understanding of historical relativity. Time is experienced as incrementally absolute, cyclical, irreversible, and as the embodiment of change. In its irreversibility it tends to be coercive. The stream of consciousness itself is experienced as temporally ordered.</p> <p>Consciousness itself is intrinsically structured by the sense of time. The sense of time occurs concurrently upon multiple levels of consciousness, and the structuring of life experience thus produced is extremely complex. Coordination of the different levels of the experience of time presents a fundamental existential dilemma to life."The temporal structure of life confronts me with a facticity with which I must reckon, that is, with which I must try to synchronize my own projects...".</p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>The same temporal structure....is coercive. I cannot reverse at will the sequences imposed by it....Also, the same temporal structure provides the historicity that determines my situation in the world of everyday life. (Berger & Luckman, 1966:pg. 26-8)</p> <p> </font><font FACE="Times"> The complex synchronicities of the historical moment create for us the subjective relativism of our own and other's temporality. It is everywhere variable within the day-to-day structure of experience, even within the biographical framework of a single individual. It is the structuration imposed by our temporaneousness and temporality which superimposes order upon our experience and which creates a factitiousness about the world, that things are as they have become, and the decisive moment to act is forever fleeting.</p> <p>The corporate extension of a group or thing beyond the biographical boundaries of its individual components is the reification of these things outside the structuration of temporality, as something enduring inspite of change, as essentially changeless.</p> <p>Temporality imposes constraints on a deeper sense of history as well, as it stretches the need for reconstruction beyond the boundaries of even our imagination. Delving deeply into history entails the limits of a human-scale parallax in increasing increments of time. What survives as surface pattern is increasingly remote and superficial, more subject to intermediate interferences. The moment of too deep a history does not effectively exist at all except as one long, endless day, an historical fiction, a figurative, reified "period" of time.</p> <p>In the subjective sense of our everyday lives, deep temporality becomes experienced as the fusion of the many myriad experiences of a distant past into a single background lacking relative depth or realistic proportionality--one single long memory with any necessary, rigid sense of order. In time all mountains become mole hills, and many caterpillars will metamorphize to butterflies.</p> <p>It is significant that the discourse on time should emerge in scholarship of the modern era as successively secularized, generalized, universal, naturalized and linear in its succession and in its influence upon our conceptualizatin of experience. It seems fitting that temporality itself should appear increasingly rational and absolutistic, and progressively "Detemporalized" as the "purpose of presence". Likewise, human history is seen as increasingly "decontextualized" from its temporal frames of reference. The detemporalization of experience just as objectification involves the detemporalization of the subjectiveness of experience. It is important, futhermore, to view how these processes have served political interets as theoretical machineries of ideological integration of reality and legitimation of the moral order of the status quo of power in the world.</p> <p>All theories are chronic in their necessary reference to time--in their temporality. The conception of formal models that transcend the problem of time result in distorted, meaningless representations of reality. Time can be used as a distancing mechanism in the denial of the contemporaneity and coevalness of those distant or different from our selves.</p> <p>The rehabilitation of history is in its revision of the idea of "totality." Hegel affirmed the totality of historical process and "the copresence of different 'moments' through which totality realizes itself." Culture is construed in this regard as a kind of totalizing concept which "commits anthropology forever to imputing (if not outright imposing) motives, beliefs, meanings and functions to the socieites it studies from a perspective outside and above. "(Johannes Fabian, pg. 157) and which fails to account for a theory of praxis, blocking the possibility for perceiving anthropology "as an activity which is part of what it studies". "The We of anthropology then remains an exclusive We, one that leaves its Other outside on all levels of theorizing except on the plane of ideological obfuscation, where everyone pays lip service to the "unity of mankind" (ibid., pg. 157).</p> <p>A theory of practice brings us back to a notion of "habitus" as advanced by Pierre Bourdieu, and of understanding the differential and subjective based temporalities of culture. Human-sized history then becomes an unfolding of interlocking networks that are the grinding wheel of social change. Individuals interact and realize and reproduce their daily praxis within a vast web of interrelations that serve to situate the individual's sense of temporality. Individuals navigate through such pathways, and learn to tactically, strategically negotiate their presence and positionality within many different frameworks. Hypernetworks, networks of networks, emerge with individuals as key nodal representatives in such patternings.</p> <p>Temporality leads to the notion of pathways of practice, what Sanjek referred to as "urban pathways" that were both "predictable and meaningful" involving the movement of people and resources through different pathways of varied interaction and activity. In the daily, interpersonal articulation of these pathways and the networks which they give rise to, we can see the articulation of history itself, of "history in the making" in the daily lives of its many actors and actresses. In this sense of the temporality of historical process, we can clearly identify the role of ideological representation and structuration.</p> <p>Within such a framework, we can also find the emergence of "intentionality structures" by which people daily make choices and decisions that have wide-reaching reverberations. The principle of intentionality refers to human enactment in relation to mental representations and objects, by whichcultural worlds and personal psyches make one another within an interdependent dialectic "perturbing and disturbing each other, interpenetrating each other's identity, reciprocally conditioning each other's existence."(Richard Shweder, 1991;pg. 102)</p> <p>We are led to a "production theory of knowledge and language" that cannot be based upon "abstraction, reflection, reification," "or another other conception that postulates fundamental acts of cognition to cnsist of the detachment of some kind of image or token from perceived objects," but on the temporality of human praxis. Language, consciousness, experience and culture embody one another in inseparable, temporally defined ways. "Language produces man as man produces language. <u>Production</u> is the pivotal concept." (Fabian, pg. 162)</p> </font> <p>  <hr> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="four">CHAPTER THREE</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">SOCIAL RELATIVISM</a></p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="4"> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p>Social relativism is the direct intellectual heir of historicism. Elements of social relativism have been expounded in the form of the social construction of reality, in reference theory, in the relativity of social values, expectations, opportunities, and positionality. It is also found as well as in social theory and methodology, but the concept of social relativism as embracing a broad category of relativities in the social world has never been explicitly or separately identified.</p> <p>Social relativism also contains an example of what might be referred to as a "pseudo-relativism"--a false sense of relativism derived from the deterministic misinterpretation of "structural-functionalism" that holds the basic noncomparability of differently structured social systems.</p> <p>Social relativism stems from the inherent, inescapable embeddedness of sociability and sociality in the life of a person. Human reality exists and perpetuates itself as an ongoing, transforming social phenomenon. The central meanings and awareness a person derives in the course of life will be fundamentally, irreducibly social in constitution.</p> <p>This socialness of human reality poses for our understanding of this reality certain kinds of problematic paradoxes. In spite of the many boundaries and separations which become imposed in our lives between the self and others, we exist in an unfolding continuum of social production and action, of social praxis and process which tends to statistically relativize all such boundaries and structures of our social awareness.</p> <p>The influence and incidences of social praxis are only ascertainable in an indirect, statistical sense. Though we struggle with the predicaments of social process on a daily basis, this struggle itself remains largely out of awareness as the substratum of our consciousness. Our own involvement in social life is as transparent to ourselves as the involvement of the social life of others seems opaque. This poses a dilemma for us in our understanding of the world because the chief problematic for such understanding is the relative relationship between the "self" and the so-called "other"--however these may be differentially construed in different social or cultural contexts.</p> <b> <p></b>What might be referred to as "structural-functional" relativism can be seen as an extreme deterministic version of social relativism, and is in this sense a kind of "false relativism" in that it is one that is based upon a non-relativistic and ahistorical conception of universal social structure and the functional integration of corporate groups based upon presupposed universal human "needs." In that it is one that appears fundamentally self-contradictory in that acceptance of its conclusions entails the rejection of its premises, while the acceptance of its premises logically depends upon the acceptance of its conclusions. In other words, in stepping outside of history, such analysis depends upon the ultimate modus tollens tautology of the acceptance of its consequences as proof of its premises. At some point or another, structuralist explanation becomes the substitute for historical explanation.</p> <p>Structural-functional relativism comes in two forms--one concerns social "structure" and the attempt to derive basic universal laws governing human society. The other concerns "functionalist" explanations which shifts the concern from the formalist presumptions of structuralist theories towards the problem of the functional integration of people into groups. Groups exist because they function to meet the needs of the group.</p> <p>The former approach, in its synchronic and ahistorical implications, attempted to generate spatial models of universal social order. These models were eidectic and which, by virtue of their abstraction, stood above and beyond the phenomenological realities they purported to "isomophically" represent.</p> <p>Structuralist theories hold that different social groupings are organized upon fundamentally different principles of social organization, and thus superficial comparison without accounting for these different principles would be like comparing materials of different molecular structure.</p> <p>Functionalism holds that different societies are functionally integrated in different ways to meet a similar set of universal human needs. Comparing different societies integrated functionally along different lines would be like comparing "apples and oranges." Included in this category of Structural-functional theory are the cultural materialists, the social ecologists, and the Marxists who seek a materialist explanation for social order.</p> <p>Structural-functional relativism has been advanced as an argument, and in its weak version it is worthy of consideration. Different social orders comprise fundamentally different forms of integration. The aegis of deterministic and functioning applicable within one social system may be fundamentally, structurally different from that applicable to another. Comparing two such systems, or similarly appearing traits derived from two such different systems, is tantamount to comparing the physiological anatomy of a dog with that of a cat without taking into account the different evolutionary histories of these two species.</p> <p>Part of this argument breaks down in its tacit denial of the history of the origins and divergence of different social groupings. Another part breaks down in the organic fallacy of imputing to social systems a kind of superorganic presence, or reification of "structures" as if there history were fundamentally independent from that of the people which compose them.</p> <p>The colonial-administrative context of British social anthropology, and the Eurocentric orientation of French sociology, must be taken into account in our understanding of the ramifications of "structural-funcational" relativism. The accommodation of native groupings, under a classical colonial strategy of "divide and conquer," necessitated the praxis of a kind of anthropology, as a "mode of information" which served to legitimate and direct colonial policy.</p> <p>From the standpoint of the sociology of knowledge, such social anthropology, including the "sociology of knowledge" can be seen to represent the theoretical and symbolic legitimation of the institutional foundations of a society. These represent "collectivizing strategies" of symbolic integration of foreign systems which otherwise tend to be relativizing of the received "universality" of the social order. "...The material out of which universe-maintaining legitimations are constructed is mostly a further elaboration, on a higher level of theoretical integration, of the legitimations of several institutions."(Berger and Luckman, 1966;109)</p> <p>These theoretical legitimations of social order serve the function of reinforcing social order by positive means of the "therapeutic rehabilitation" of deviance, alternative social universes which would threaten the received status quo of the system, and by means of "negative legitimation" involving the elimination of contradiction, inconsistency and heresy through theoretical "nihilation," that liquidates conceptuall allthatis outside of the same social universe. "Nihilation denies the reality of whatever phenomena or interpretations of phenomena do not fit into that universe. "(ibid.) Nihilation can be accomplished by assigning negative or inferior ontological status to alternative systems, or else it can be accomplished by attempting to translate "deviant" definitions into terminologies and epistemologies belonging to one's own universe.</p> <p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> "The final goal of this procedure is to incorporate the deviant conceptions within one's own universe, and thereby to liquidate them ultimately. The deviant conceptions must, therefore, be translated into concepts derived from one's own universe. In this manner, the negation of one's universe is subtly changed into an affirmation of it.....(ibid, pg. 115)</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p>Structural-functional interpretations were preeminently interested in isolating and determining "causes" of social performance and the consequences of social change. Cause was explained by function, and circular explanations explained one institution in terms of another. "When functionalists attempt to trace causal chains and nexes, we either get the reduction to individual psychology or pan-human predispositions...or we get the familiar tautologies--thefunction ofsoemthing is to do what it does."(James Faris, 1973:pg. 164)</p> <p>Hermetically sealed in an historical vacuum, change was explained in terms that were exclusively local and endogenous, as a consequence of relative systemic harmonies, dialectics and inexorable social evolution.</p> <p>Structural-functional relativism has come to focus upon the role of rationality within the social order, and therefore the logical locus and logos of the individual "actor" within the social drama. Such relativism leads to a kind of rational relativism, based on arguments of the social structural logic of witchcraft, magic, superstition and animistic religious beliefs and behaviors. But the exact status-role identity or rationality of any given actor within a social context breaks down upon closer scrutiny. Social structure becomes defined in its breach, and individuals compose their lives based on ad hoc contingency in response to unintended consequences of their own and other's actions. How a complete list of fundamental human needs become functionally integrated and served in any given society remains open to theoretical challenge. On the microscopic level of the individual, social structure breaks down into a nebulous, phenomenological stream of subjectively biased accounts. Structural-functional arguments thus break down upon the margins of its own relativistic horizons--personal idiosyncracies, biographies, and the vague indeterminacy of social constraints tends to defy all attempts at social explanation and rationalization.</p> <p>Nevertheless, the legacy of such thought remains strong, in World-Systems theory, in political economy, in cross-cultural research, in social science research, and in social ecological and sociobiological theory. Whatever its intrinsic weakness as human history or as human science, just as "functionalism has its functions," so also does "structuralism have its structures."</p> <p> </p> <p>Melville Herskovits elaborated a version of socio-cultural relativism related to this. Herskovits tried to reconcile the perspective that culture is an objective historical phenomena independent of the culture-bearer and that culture is nothing but the extension of the human psyche. Culture is so deeply rooted in human behavior, and articulates so evenly through the years of history, that it is easy to treat culture as something independent, or superorganic.</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>"Yet, as we have seen, when culture is closely analyzed, we find but a series of patterned reactions that characterize the behavior of <u>individuals</u> who constitute a given group. That is, we find <u>people</u> reacting, <u>people</u> behaving, <u>people</u> thinking, <u>people</u> rationalizing. Under these circumstances, it becomes clear tht what we do is to reify, that is objectify and make concrete, the discrete experiences of idnividuals in a group at a given time. These we gather into a totality we call their culture. And, <u>for purposes of study</u>, this is quite proper. The danger point is reached when we reify similarities of behavior that only result from the similar conditioning of a group of individuals to their common setting, into something that exists outside man, something that is <u>superorganic</u>." (Herskovits, 1947:pg. 47")</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>We are left to construe a "social horizon" of both objective and subjective knowledge of the world. This horizon presupposes a certain amount of integration of knowledge, social relation and praxis which effectively relativizes social knowledge and prevents the "migration" of whole systems from one universe to another. Elements of one system may be readily transmitted and translated into another, but the system as a whole cannot be readily comprehended from without or incorporated without certain critical transformations which alter its original integrity. The actual integrity of social systems must be open to question. Such integration is rarely if ever complete or "total". Thus, the social horizon itself is relative.</p> <p>Claims of scientific neutrality, objectivity and "disinterested inquiry" do not necessarily transcend the horizons of the actor's social positionality. In fact, it may often be the most "correct" and "objective" versions that are the most in doubt for their failure to transcend its own collectivizing horizon.</p> <p>We must reconsider the issue of social relativity in lieu of the dismissal of "structural-functional" relativism as a false, deterministic form of social relativism. The concept of social relativity addresses the socially relative point of view of a person, as member and actor within a society, or of the society itself, vis a'vis other people and other groups. The attitudes, beliefs, behavior, and experience of people are bound within a social horizon which socio-centrically constrains, biases and distorts their point of view in ways that are often explicitly marked as "natural," "normal," "morally correct" as well as in indirect ways that are ego centrically motivated, subconscious and out of awareness. Furthermore, one's relative status-positionality within a social hierarchy, or within the framework of multiple, overlapping hierarchies, constitutes a wide spectrum of attitudes and perspectives within a social continuum based upon the differentials of social status.</p> <p>Social relativity of one's worldview can be demonstrated by several common facets. Common sense and the scientific appeal to categories derived from consensus, is often socio-centrically biased and socio-cultural constrained in critical ways. Common sense as often as not has its foundations in socially shared, unmarked, and unquestioned categories and constructions that are socially relative to the group. We cannot clearly separate in our views of what is common sense our own socio-genic biases and the residuum of what might represent the "psychic unity of humankind."</p> <p>Such social relativity may be extended to normative versions of worldview such as the hypothesis of a "world of limited good" or a "just world hypothesis," as well as to cases of "relative social deprivation," cognitive dissonance, labeling theory, deviance, sociopathy, authoritariansim, social dependency, social expectation, psycho-social internalization, integration, and identification, or socialization and interpersonal or intergroup reference in which one's own or groups identity becomes nomothetically defined by comparison to another's or another group's. Relative deprivation is an interesting facet of such social relativity of knowledge because people almost universally judge the merits of their own social situation in comparison to the social situation of others, regardless of the superficiality of such comparisons or of the real history behind the apparent differences. One aspect of social relativity is the necessary impersonalness and denial of subjectivity of actors caught up in their socially defined roles. It does not pay an exploiter to become personally involved with those whom s/he must exploit.</p> <p>Social relativity stems from the critical indeterminancy of delimiting "causal influences of socialization and social process in the patterning of historical change. It involves the impossibility of trying to identify the exact, enduring location of the individual within the system as "actor," "by-product" and "producer." In the course of social transactions and relation, the precise lines between the self and other become blurred. Social relations frequently take on a trajectory and synergistic significance largely transcending the intentions and interests of the individuals involved.</p> <p>Social relativism can also be seen as a general failure to establish a nonrelative social "baseline" by which to measure change or determine the constant. Social relativism lays claim to the virtual impossibility of any such "baseline" that is not socially biased, no matter how statistically precipitated. It also represents a critique of sociological positivism, and by extension, becomes an intrinsic part of the "sociology of knowledge," as well as the "sociology of the sociology of knowledge." The devaluation of the psychological and psycho-genic as a derivative and secondary factor in sociological explanation points up the relativity of sociological knowledge, as does the possibility of alternative sociologies which come from different social traditions. The concept of social status itself, so fundamental in any sociological perspective, may in fact be differentially expressed or determined in different periods and places. The relative, "chameleon", dramaturgical status of a Southeast Asian actor may be at odds with the Aristotelian actor of the west. Socio-centrically defined identities may be in basic contrast to egocentrially defined identities. Achievement motivation, sociability or power may be differently defined or expressed in different cultures. Part of the difficulty of social relativism is encountered in the "operationalization" of basic concepts. If we define authoritarianism according to an "F-scale" or as J- and S-types respectively, we risk ignoring the real sociological possibility of alternative kinds of authoritarianism, including sociological authoritianism itself, involving authoritarian power structures or complexes of authoritarian actors or influences. Similarly, how do we define stress or dependency in a significant, nonrelative way?</p> <b> <p></b>The sociology of knowledge, or "Wissensoziologie" as coined by Max Scheller, is concerned with the relationship between human thought and the social context of its production. Whatever form that this general problem might be cast in, its central dilemma remained the "vertigo of relativity"--"of specific historically and socially located viewpoints" and it came to focus upon the historical, and in a narrow frame, the social, basis of knowledge. According to Scheller, "real factors" underly and regulate "ideal factors". "Society determines the presence but not the nature of ideas." Scheller referred to the social substrate as knowledge as the "relative-natural worldview" of a society, pointing out the tendency for the individual to view its a-priori social constructions as if a natural way of seeing the world.</p> <p>Karl Mannheim extended this thesis to cover almost all facets of human thought. He considered that society determined not only the form but the content of human thought.</p> <p>Marx conferred upon the sociology of knowledge its root premises that human consciousness was determined by society, it self determined by more basic materialist forces. He provided the field its key concepts of ideology, as ideas in service of social interests, and "false consciousness"--consciousness alienated from the social realities of the knower. Nietsche contributed to the formulation of false consciousness as the significance of deception, self-deception and illusion as the "necessary condition of life" and basis of social action. Mannheim considered "false consciousness" to be a near universal aspect of human thought. "No human thought....is immune to the ideologizing influences of its social context." He adopted a notion of "relationism" as "not a capitulation of thought before the socio-historical relativities, but a sober recognition that knowledge must always be knowledge from a certain position..." (Berger and Luckman, 1966:pg. 12)</p> <p>Alfred Schutz gave central emphasis to common sense in the everyday world as a mechanismof the social distribution of knowledge. The structure of common sense typifications "determines among other things the social distributionof knowledge and its relativity and relevance to the concrete social environment of a concrete group in a concrete historical situation."(Berger and Luckman, 1966:pg. 16)</p> <p>Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman gave wider scope to the definition of the sociology of knowledge to encompass all forms of knowledge and its totalizing process in the reproduction of everyday life. They propose the on-going dialectic of three overlapping "moments" in the social construction of reality--"<u>Society is a human product</u> <u>(</u>externalization<u>)</u>. <u>Society is an objective reality (</u>objectivation<u>). Man is a social product (</u>internalization)."</p> <b> <p></b>According to this perspective, society is the result of the institutionalization of reciprocal, shared patterns of human habituation in response to the natural "world-openness" of humankind unfettered by innate instinct. Institutionalization of social reality becomes experienced as if objective and natural. This objectivity requires legitimation and reinforcement, partially achieved through common sense structures posited in our "common stock of knowledge" via everyday language. Legitimation leads to their historical reification of its traditional form apprenhended as a 'non-human facticity.'</p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>"Reification is the apprehension of the products of human activity as if they were something else than human products--such as facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will. Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting his own authorship in the human world, and further, that the dialectic between man, the producer, and his products, is lost to consciousness...'(Berger and Luckman 1966:pg. 89)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p>Reification of the social order requires secondary symbolic legitimation serving to integrate the social order against "marginal episodes" which decollectivize or relativize the social order, and which 'make sense' of the order as a 'subjective plausibility', explaining and justifying it via symbolisms which confer onit cognitive and normative validity. Via socialization, and via the causal, interpersonal mechanism of the "conversational apparatus," this symbolic order becomes internalized into the personality of the individual as if "subjectively inevitable." Socialization depends upon identification of the individual with significant others, reinforced by the background "chorus of others" urging us into a comfortable conformity.</p> <p>The sociology of knowledge stands precariously upon the reflexive edge of its own social relativity, and easily becomes caught upon the horns of its own theoretical dilemma. "To include epistemological questions concerning the validity of sociological knowledge in the sociology of knowledge is somewhat like trying to push a bus in which one is riding....How can I be sure, say, of my sociological analysis of American middle-class mores in view of the fact that the categories I use for this analysis are conditioned by historically relative forms of thought, that I myself and everything I think is determined by my genes and by my ingrown hostility to my fellowmen, and that, to cap it all, I am myself a member of the American middle class?"(Berger and Luckman, 1966:pg. 13)</p> <p>The path out of the woods of social and historical relativism leads us into the forests of other relativities. Whatever the path we may take, we will always find our own relativism shadowing us closely behind.</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="five"></p> <p>  <hr> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"></font></a><font FACE="Times">CHAPTHER FOUR</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">CULTURAL RELATIVITY AND RELATIVISM</p> <p> </p> <p>Cultural relativism is a cousin of social relativism, and both share a common ancestor in German culture history, historical relativism and the concern with historicism, ideology and the embeddedness of knowledge in history and social practice. Whereas social relativism in its formal senses became part of the preoccupation of British and French social science scholarship, cultural relativism is the more American reformulation of the problem originally posed by German scholars.</p> <p>It was the same Franz Boas who espoused a strict historical particularism in regard to human groups that can be considered the father of both cultural and linguistic relativism that came to so characterize American anthropological scholarship. Cultural and linguistic relativism are closely associated in this research tradition, sometimes being used almost synonymously or as if they were refering to the same range of phenomena. But this relationship has served as much to confuse and obscure the issues and basic differences between the two doctrines as to clarify the problem of anthropological relativity.</p> <p>Cultural relativism concerns the embeddedness of human knowledge in human cultural traditions and practices, while linguistic relativism concerns the corresponding deposition of knowledge in human language. To the extent that language is at the center of culture, linguistic relativism can be considered as at the core of the problem of cultural relativism. But cultural relativism is a thesis that is broader in its concerns with human values, enculturation, the holistic integration of cultural practices, coherent cultural symbolisms that extend beyond the range of language, while in at least one way the hypothesis of linguistic relativism is at odds with an hypothesis of cultural relativism in positing language as more fundamental in influence than other aspects of culture.</p> <p>Like social relativism and linguistic relativism, cultural relativism comes in two forms, "soft" and "hard"-- in soft or "weak" relativism cultural relativity is to cultural anthropology as social relativity is to social anthropology. The "hard" or "strong" form of cultural relativism is a similar kind of spurious or false relativism as is "structural-functional" relativism. It is a kind of determinism which parades in the guise of relativism, that concerns the basic non-comparability of cultures, the non-relativisitic "culture-garden" approach to cultural determinism, and leads to a kind of easy reification and psychologization of culture as stereotypical, absolute character types. The linguistic correlate of this "hard" determinism concerns the problem of the basic "untranslatability" of languages--rendering intercultural communication impossible. It is important to recognize the difference between hard and soft versions, to dismiss outright the deterministic fallacy and the intrinsic sense of dilemma of the former, and to focus instead upon the more reasonable paradoxes of the later. Relativism is to be contrasted with determinism, not with universalism.</p> <p>Cultural relativity depends upon the notion of the relative psychological integration of cultural reality and the cultural integration of psychological reality, upon the critical influence of enculturative experiences in the shaping of personality, and in the influence of personality in the shaping of culture patterns. Different cultures, in different contexts, with different histories, have different patterns of integration.</p> <p>If this doctrine is pushed to its limit, the thesis of the basic incomparability of different cultural patterns is maintained, though with the paradox that these differences are only known through at least implicit cross-cultural comparison. If the doctrine of cultural relativity does not render the project of cross-cultural research impossible, it does render it problematic and intractable in very fundamental ways, always bringing into question and "relativizing" our pan-cultural understandings. It does allow always for the possibility of multiple alternative interpretations of the same patterns of phenomena.</p> <p>According to Franz Boas, the Father of American Cultural Anthropology, culture consists of a domain of ideas and unique feelings that was historically conditioned and subjectively constituted. The basic emotional subjectivity of culture, like the complexity of history, meant that each culture was a unique configuration of patternings, the result of a unique complex combination of historical influences. Culture became the patterned expression of acquired and ingrained habits of human belief and behavior. The fundamentally "irrational attachment" to custom and tradition precluded a universal sense of anthropological rationality. Like culture, the historical processes of diffusion and modification, occuring haphazardly and contingently, and affecting cultural patterning, were primarily ideational--cultural elements are modified thematically, according to a shared idea, attitude or normative orientation of a cultural tradition. Such subjectively constituted ideational integration was the basis for cultural dynamics and development. Cultural integration, though thoroughgoing, was never complete or finished business, as historical forces continuously created new conditions for reintegration. Custom was thus subjectively integrative, and the role of reason was primarily in terms of an "imaginativeness" which led to the elaboration and modification of cultural elements, as well as to "rationalization"--"according to which habitual patterns acquire secondary explanations." These were secondary processes subordinate to unconcious, emotional and habitual tendencies of the individual human mind. Consciousness was thus the psychological veneer, or "veil" of the subjective ground of culture. Because of the endless effects of historical processes, cultural patterning is unique. Cultures would never be completely integrated and will always manifest invariant patterns, and therefore universal laws of cultural integration or patterning would probably never be found.</p> <p>Cultural relativism received its most explicit and ardent version from a pupil of Boas, Ruth Benedict. It was in her "Anthropology and the Abnormal" (1932) and "The Patterns of Culture" (1934) that she formulated what have since been received as the basic statements of the cultural relativist position. Different cultural patterns or configurations were founded upon the reinforcing of particular personality types. Different cultures carve up the "arc of human possibility" differently, with the consequence that a culture will positively reinforce one personality predisposition, while at the same time negative sanctioning other types. Cultures vary quite widely in their integrated modes of behavior, and thus come to cultivate different kinds of personality orientations.</p> <p>Benedict stated unequivocally that "no form of behavior is abnormal in all cultures." Accordingly, "The concept of the normal is properly a variant of the concept of the good..." Normality and abnormality is a value-laden dichotomy, and only by explicating the inevitable intrusion of cultural values upon the definition of this dichotomy can "we ever hope to hypothesize a validly scientific and humanistic universal norm of human behavior." We must overcome the implicit ethnocentrism of our own cultural value orientations, and not make the mistake of deriving this from a reified sense of human nature. Our cultural value orientations are not to be raised to the order of a first principle. "We recognize that morality differs in every society, and is a convenient term for socially approved habits."</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>"...Just as we are handicapped with ethical problems so long as we hold to an absolute definition of morality, so too in dealing with the problems of abnormality, we are handicapped so long as we identify our local normalities with the universal sanities."</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>Benedict extended this thesis of the normative relativism of culture to the understanding of the psychological variability of personality types and how different cultural configurations reinforce personality differentially. People have sets towards universally recurring personality predispositions. The majority of individuals are shaped to the fashion of their culture--"most individuals are plastic to the moulding force of the society into which they are born." Abnormality becomes largely the illusion of our own cultural stereotypes and folk psychologies--the aberrant is one upon whom society has placed extraordinary strain. Different cultural orientations will be selective of different personality characteristics, and will intensify these in people who are more naturally predisposed to them. "The culture, according to its major preoccupations, will increase and intensify hysterical, epileptic, or paranoid symptoms, at the same time reling socially in a greater and greater degree upon these very individuals." In short, normality is culturally defined, a term applied to the socially elaborated segment of human behavior in any culture. In her psychologizing of culture, Benedict borrowed heavily from the very culture historical tradition from which her theory was derived--a tradition that tended to regard each culture in terms of its distinctive "Spirit" which was considered its basic orienting principle for all institutional forms. Melford Singer (1961) succinctly summarized Ruth Benedict's paradigm of cultural relativism as follows:</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>1. In every culture, there is a wide range of individual temperament types (genetically and constitutionally determined) which recur universally.</p> <p>2. Every culture, however, permits only a limited number of types to flourish andthey are those that fit its dominant orientation.</p> <p>3. The vast majority of individuals in any society will conform to the dominant types of that society, since their temperaments will be sufficiently plastic to the moulding force of the society. These will be the "normal" personality types.</p> <p>4. A minority of individuals in every society will not "fit" the dominant types, either because their temperament types are too deviant from the ruling types or because they are 'insufficiently endowed.' They will be the 'deviants' and 'abnormals'.</p> <p>5. The classification and distribution of 'normal' and 'abnormal' personality types is relative to the configuration of particular cultures which define the criteria of 'normality' and 'abnormality.'</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>It is this version of cultural relativism that has come to stand for relativism in general, and in many critiques, is held as synnonymous with value or ethical relativism. "Almost without exception, the philosophers are disapproving, for usually they mention ethical relativism only to criticize it while in the course of arguing some other theory."(Elvin Hatch, pg. 63) The similarity between this kind of cultural relativism and "structural-functional" relativism noted in the previous chapter should be noted. Hatch distinguishes what he refers to as a "functionalist" version of this relativism--"social institutions normally exist for good reason and "have unintended and beneficial effects", but this position "leads to the approval of practices that are patently inhumane." It is seen as a small step from the universal tolerance of cultural difference to the tolerance of a Nazi-type culture, and philosopher's regard as contradictory the claim of the cultural relativity of values and the call for universal tolerance. Hatch maintains that the call for universal tolerance inherently supports a conservative bias towards cultural traditions. It becomes, in its logical conclusion, the Machiavellian legitimation of power, that, historically at least, "Might makes Right."</p> <p>This "strong form" is distinguished from a more acceptable, "weaker" form which Hatch refers to as "methodological relativism" the temporary suspension of one's own ethnocentric biases and value orientation in order to study more objectively other cultures--"one's own perspective may get in the way of accuracy and should be held in abeyance until the research is finished." This corresponds to Melville Herskovits' distinction of "methodological relativism"--"One seeks to understand the sanctions of behavior in terms of the established relationships within the culture itself, and refrains from making interpretations that arise froma preconceived frame of reference...(Herskovits, 1964;3) This view is reiterated in Manner's and Kaplan's work on theoretical anthropology....</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>Clearly, relativism is a useful reminder that in studying culture's other than our own we must try not to be swayed by our cultural preconceptions. Looked at in this way, relativism is a methodological precept, not an ideological position. If there are differences among anthropologists with regard to the ideological version of relativity, all anthropologists accept the methodological version....</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>It is Melville Herskovits' version of cultural relativism that deserves more attention. Besides methodological relativism, he distinguished between philosophical and "practical" forms of the doctrine, all three of which were programmatically interrelated in anthropological research, and which in logical sequence trace the pattern of the conceptual development of the idea.</p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>"This is, the methodological aspect, whereby the data from which the epistemological propositions flow are gathered, ordered, and assessed, came first. For it is difficult to conceive of a systematic theory of cultural relativism--as against a generalized idea of live-and-let-live--without the pre-existence of the massive ethnographic documentation gathered by anthropologists concerning the similarities and differences between cultures the world over. Out of these data came the philosophical position, and with the philosophical position came speculation as to its implications for conduct." (1964, pg. 63)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>Herskovits interpreted cultural relativism as "an approach to the question of the nature and role of values in culture." Values are derived from experience shaped by enculturation. Cultural relativism challenges the notion of "fixed" or absolute values by demonstrating the culture historical relativity of values. "We even approach the problem of the ultimate nature of reality itself. Cassirer holds that reality can only be experienced through the symbolisms of language. Is reality, then, not defined and redefined by the ever-varied symbolisms of the innumerable languages of mankind?" Hatch accuses Herskovits of deriving an "ought from an is"--because there are no absolute values does not mean that no universal norms can apply to all cultures. It is Herskovits himself who provided a way out of this dilemma, by distinguishing between "absolute" and "universal"--absolute admits of no variation. Universals are "those least common denominators to be extracted from the range of variation of all phenomena of the natural and cultural world manifest. "There is no absolute criterion of values or morals, or even, psychologically, of time or space, does not mean that such criteria, in different forms, do not comprise universals of human culture.</p> <p>Richard Shweder, the most recent advocate of a version of cultural relativism, maintains a view of "cultural psychology" which sees cultural patterning as occupying a distinctive landscape or region, and that different cultures, from a subjective, normative and cognitive standpoint, occupy different regions.</p> <p>Cultural relativism has been based upon an "integrationist principle" that culture exhibits an inherent pattern or order of integration that has a shaping influence upon its dynamics. Behind this principle of integration is a presumption of the necessary holism of cultural life. This necessary presumption is critical to the relativist argument, and has been explicitly elaborated by Richard Shweder especially in relation to the contextuality of worldviews and values. "For a holist, 'unit' parts are necessarily altered by the relations into which they enter." (Phillips, 1976)</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>From a holistic perspective unit parts (for example, an elbow) change their essential properties when isolated from the unit wholes (for example, an arm) of which they are a part. Thus, the holist concludes, it is not possible to understand or appraise an entity in isolation, in the abstract. The holist is prone to seek contextual clarification before making a judgment; the holist is disinclined to examine or judge things in vacuo. (Shweder, <u>Thinking Through Cultures,</u> 1991:pg. 148)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>Holism makes a presumption of the necessary integration of significant parts that may or may not be the case. It defines as necessary the context in which phenomena occurs, and sees as reductionistic a science that tends to tear phenomena from their contexts of natural occurrence. In understanding the complexities of context, it is not always straightforward and self-evident to separate out factors that are relevant from irrelevant. Such selection entails some kind of criteria of evaluation. The problem of holism in such representations of complexity is that they are necessary models when broadly defined, but they tend to inexorably breakdown under the weight of numerous details. If we push the particularism of the emphasis of the different, the detailed and the distinct to any great extent, we cannot but end up with a definition of broad patterning in terms of a basically hyphenated identity of people as "part-whole" and a "whole-part." If we carry our relativistic holism to an extreme, we end up deriving an "ought from an is" by the reification of the whole at the expense of its many parts.</p> <p>The paradox of relativism is that it demands a "base-line" from which to infer difference, difference which in the long run renders any such base-line relative. This is a basic dilemma of cultural understanding, one that Herskovits believed to be "the essential nature of culture must resolve a series of seeming paradoxes that are not to be ignored...stated here as follows....</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>1. Culture is universal in man's experience, yet each local or regional manifestation of it is unique.</p> <p>2. Culture is stable, yet culture is also dynamic, and manifests continuous and constant change.</p> <p> 3. Culture fills and largely determines the course of our lives, yet rarely intrudes into conscious thought. (Herskovits, 1947: pg. 17-18)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>Holism is as much a necessary presumption of relativist doctrine as reification is a logical outcome of rationalistic determinism. We need models by which to organize our multiplicities of experience, by which to maintain a sense of enduring order amidst a reality of continuous change. But such models cannot become too inflexible, absolute, or unchanging unless they become senseless anachronisms of the environment in which they are situated. Though we are left without any absolute, fixed, Archimedian reference point by which to weigh and balance the complex dynamics of human reality, we are allowed relative reference points, approximate coordinates by which we can map our trails through the wilderness of consciousness.</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>Culture is both stable and ever changing. Culture change can be studied only as a part of the problem of cultural stability; cultural stability can be understood only when change is measured against conservatism...perhaps the most basic difficulty arises from the fact that there are no objective criteria of permanence and change...." (pg. 20)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>The strongest criticism of relativism has come from attacks by anthropologists, philosophers and others upon the dragon of cultural relativism. The beginning of the paradox of cultural relativism is in the lack of the clarity and substantiality of "Culture" itself. It remains an elusive "meta-thing" with many definitions and yet without central, exact form. As a consequence, cultural anthropology is represented by host of competing theoretical constructions, all of which seem equally plausible and yet incomplete. Cultural anthropology has sought to define itself about a center that is real and yet is not real enough, thus suffering a relativistic "schizophrenia" of identity reflecting the cultural multiplicities of the world.</p> <p>Cultural anthropology stands somewhat ambivalently upon the horns of its own relativistic dilemma. It is composed of contradictory forces, relativizing and collectivizing, as Roy Wagner calls them, or of the strange and the familiar or of difference and identity. This dilemma is reflected not only in the weak and strong versions of relativism, but in the relativist doctrine versus the central "comparativist" critique of relativism, that the science of anthropology is built from cross-cultural contact and comparison, and the logical absurdity of the untranslatability of relativistic languages and cultures makes the anthropological enterprise a self-contradictory impossibility. As Eric Wolf pointed out, anthropology exists with its foot in both camps, the sciences and the humanities.</p> <p>There has been a rationalist "anti-relativist" attack upon the doctrine of relativism, as pointed out by Clifford Geertz. It is important to reiterate that this kind of attack, whether made from a position of the biological unity of humankind or the psychic unity of humankind, is based upon a rationalistic misconstrual of the relativist doctrine as if the strong form of cultural determinism.</p> <p>The critique that relativism precludes comparison, translation or objectivity in anthropology is ill founded. Relativism is not diametrically opposed to cross-cultural theory, as is determinism. Relativism is not exclusively preoccupied with only the differences, but with the similarities between cultures as well. From a relativist standpoint, comparison, whether explicit or implicit, is an automatic part of cultural interaction. The relativist doctrine states that cultural patterns and differences are not absolutely different, but only relatively so, and are therefore comparable in an inexact way. If they were absolutely different, as a deterministic position would entail, then cultures would be basically incomparable. Relativism only renders the task of such comparison less straightforward, more problematic, and less self-evident than otherwise would be the case if we did not attempt to shed or bring to light our own ethnocentric biases. Relativism prevents us from presuming the universal validity of our own received "Truths" about reality. "In a culture where absolute values are stressed, the relativism of a world that encompasses many ways of living will be difficult to comprehend. Rather, it will offer a field day for value judgements basedon the degree to which a given body of customs resembles or differs from those of EuroAmerican culture." (M. Herskovits, 1964:pg. 64)</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>To hold that values do not exist because they are relative to time and place is to fall prey to a fallacy that results from a failure to take into account the positive contribution of the relativistic position...</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>It is possible to empirically demonstrate significant and consistent psychological and sociological form of cross-cultural differences across a suite of patterns at different levels. This I have done in my own anthropological research--clear, significant, and unequivocal empirical and ethnographic evidence exists that demonstrates important differences of patterning in a variety of ways. The empirical reality of the importance and relativity of culture should go without question. The real question is not whether cultural relativities exist, as they most definitely do, but rather in precisely what way and what are their implications and consequences in the patternings of human behavior and interaction across cultural boundaries.</p> <p>The holism and integration of cultural patterning, and its psychological internalization, are also empirically undeniable facts of culture. But again, what is not clearly understood is the extent or the exact nature of this integrative synergism of cultural patterning, so complex and multivariate its causes, nor its implications or consequences for understanding human behavior--though these are also undoubtably important.</p> <p>Clearly cultural is not a hermetic culture garden, a straight-jacket or an inescapable black hole. Cultural boundaries exist, but nowhere are they absolute but that we make them so. Many patterns of culture that are different across cultures may occur at only superficial levels that serve to obfuscate more fundamental and basic human universalities and similarities. Different forms may serve similar functions, and different functions may be served by similar forms.</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>This is the kind of patterning of institutions which we find in all their many different phases....Patterning, however, is not a straight-jacket; it is not even a high wall that bars wandering in adjacent cultural fields. It is, as we have noted, a model. It constitutes a pattern in the technical sense of the term, but with its outlines and contours flexible and alterable, permitting experience to fall into meaningful forms despite the changes that continuously mark its expression....(Herskovits, 1947:pg. 207)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p> <a NAME="six"></p> </a></font><a NAME="six"> <p>  <hr> </a><font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">CHAPTER FIVE</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY AND RELATIVISM</p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="4"> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>Language is primarily a pre-rational function. It humbly works up to the thought that is latent in, that may eventually be read into, its classifications and its forms; it is not, as is generally but naively assumed, the final label put upon the finished thought. (Louanna Furbee, 1991:pg. 15)</p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="4"> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p>To the extent that language is somewhere between objective and subjective worlds, and serves to mediate between them, we can speak of the possibility of linguistic relativity that constrains in critical ways our relationship with the world. The central role which language plays in culture cannot be ignored, nor can the central place which language seems to play in human cognition and cerebral function. Indeed, language gives form to thought, conceptually condensing meaning and experience in accessible ways. The relationship between language, culture and cognition is an important one, and without language it would be difficult, if not impossible to have culture or cognition as we know it. It is apparent that the recognition and naming of colors depends to some extent upon the acquisition of an appropriate color terminology that encodes the central, basic distinctions of the color continuum.<br> Differences in basic colors may be available to experience and perception without conceptual labeling, but not quite in the same way that they are with naming, as a conceptual component of the construction of reality. Naming, the function of language thus precipitates experience conceptually in a way as to render it more available to human manipulation and intention.</p> <p>The question of the relationship between culture, cognition and language has been termed the "Worldview Problem" and centrally concerns the general issue of relativism in the three domains. Different formulations of this problem exist, and there seems to be little straightforward solution. From a deterministic standpoint, of which is causally primary and which consequential, it is largely a hen and egg dilemma, because in fact it represents a complex dialectical feedback system. Acquistion of language made culture and cognition possible, just as cultural acquisition probably made language and cognition more likely, and similarly, cognitive development of the brain probably stimulated to some degree further linguistic and cultural development. From the standpoint of anthropogenesis, we must see this problem as a critical and unique trait complex. What came first or which is more primary will probably always remain a matter of informed conjecture and "guesstimation."</p> <p>How language, culture and cognition are interrelated is likely to remain an open empirical question. The virtue of linguistic relativism is that is has given the problem of relativism, via the role of linguistics, an empirically approachable form, one open to systematic investigation.</p> <p>The theory of linguistic relativism has the same origins as does cultural relativism, and these sister concepts developed in parallel ways, both coming to reflect the "weak" and "strong" dichotomy which reflects the confusion of the question of relativism with determinism. The question arises in this doctrine is how does language influence either thought or cultural patterning, or both, and vice versa, how might language be influenced by either or both.</p> <p>Wilhelm Von Humboldt was the first to introduce the notion of linguistic relativity. He believed that language and the psychological personality of the individual were inseparably bound together, and that language shaped thought, and that each language had its "own inner form." "He thought that the word structure (morphology) of each language held the key to the knowledge of its speaker's world view."(Furbee, pg. 7)</p> <p>Boas picked up and elaborated this theme as part of his research interest in the documentation of the indigenous languages of North America. His research led him to adopt the notion of "linguistic particularism"--each language is unique in its structure. Though some general linguistic concepts were found in any language, certain others were area-specific or even unique to a certain language. Linguistic structure was held to reflect and embody psychological reality, and he therefore sought the precise description of underlying psychological principles of a language revealed by its grammatical analysis. The unconscious foundations of language made it an especially appropriate means for getting behind the veil of cultural consciousness. Boas disclaimed a "prescriptivist" translation of indigenous languages into a EuroAmerican grammatical structure. Because each language encodes otherwise complex reality in apparently arbitrary ways, cariving up the continuum of experience in different ways, and because linguistic encoding is always open and productive, particularistic analysis came to focus upon the "core grammar" and "basic terms" of a language.</p> <p>Edward Sapir, another student of Boas, came to elaborate upon Boas' thesis of linguistic particularism, and has since become most associated with the weak version of the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis". Sapir developed the notion of "native speaker intuition" and of "pseudo-sounds" (the phonemic aspects of the hearer). He came to place the locus of a language's grammar upon the individual speaker as a psychological reality--a divergence from Boas' view of the individual's grammar as a distortion of the common cultural grammar of the language group. Sapir believed language and thought to be inseparable, and, though well within the "cosmographical and historical paradigm" of Boas, came to focus upon and emphasize the "psychological reality" of the role and structure of language and culture.</p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>It was the work of both Boas and Sapir, in emphasizing the psychological aspects of language, which gave a focal place to the doctrine of linguistic relativity--the doctrine that different languages, structured differently, have different psychological consequences, and that the native speaker's language influences to some extent that person's thought."(Furbee, 1991:pg. 3, 42)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p>Though Sapir did not see any direct connection between language patterning and cultural patterning, he did believe there was such an indirect relationship via the influence of both upon the psychological experience of the individual. For Sapir, therefore, the important relationships were not language and culture, but language and cognition and, alternatively, culture and cognition. Speakers of different languages parse the worlds of their experience in different ways. 'The "real world" is to a large extent built upon the language habits of the group.' (Sapir, 1921:pg. 218) Put another way, a language makes it easier for its native speaker's to think in some ways than in others, and thus different languages "habituate" thought in different ways. Language "defines experience for us by reason of its formal completeness and because of our unconscious projection of its implicit expectations into experience."(Sapir, 1931:pg. 578) Every language is a formally complete and unique pattern system by which culturally sanctioned forms and categories are used by the individual to communicate, analyze, notice, select or ignore, direct reason and "build his house of consciousness." (Carroll, 1956: pg. 252) This "weak" version does not put forward the argument that ideas expressed in terms of one languge are impossible of translation or expression in any other, only that ways of thinking conveniently expressed by one language may only be expressed with more difficulty in a differently structured language. It assumes that the formal completeness of language covers almost the entire range of human cognition--"that nearly all human thought is done by means of the habitual and unconscious use of the basic categories provided by the language...." (Furbee, 1991:pg. 11)</p> <p>Benjamin Lee Whorf, a student of Edward Sapirs, contributed what has become known as the "strong form" of the Whorf Hypothesis, or also the "theory of linguistic determinism"--the theory giving language causal primacy in the World-View problem. Language constituted not only categories of cognition, but the basic ideational template of culture as well--language shapes both culture and cognition. The investigation of the grammars and lexicons of different peoples reveal not only significant aspects of behavior, but their patterns of thought as well. "We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it this way--an agreement that will hold throughout a speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory: we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees." (Whorf, 1956, (1940): pg. 213-214)</p> <dir> <dir> <p>This theory has been succinctly summarized by Carol Eastman as:</p> </dir> </dir> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>1. Each language embodies and perpetuates a particular world-view. The speakers of a language agree to perceive and think of the world in a certain way--but not in the only possible way.</p> <p>2. The same reality-both physical and social--can be variously structured; different languages operate with different structures.</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>The strong version of linguistic determinism holds that habitual thought will automatically be cast in terms of linguistic categories--languge even determines a speaker's perception. The weaker version, more supported by empirical evidence, claims only that language has some influence over habitual thought, and that there is some association between habitual behavior, experience, language, culture and thought. While linguistic relativity holds that language and thought tend to covary, determinism requires the preexistence of a language pattern for the production of its derivative thought pattern. (Brown, 1958:pg. 260)</p> <p>Linguistics has moved away from a strictly particularistic view of language implied by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and instead came to predominantly endorse a notion of universal structure underlying all language. The revised and better received version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis holds that "a perceptual category more frequently employed is more linguistically available to its speakers." This implies not that one's worldview is predetermined by language, but that "one categorizes his world by using his language according to his need."(Eastman; pg. 77) The "codability of perceptual categories" is held to follow the "principle of least effort". In other words, the length of a word will tend to be negative correlated with its frequency of usage. When a phrase is required to encode a category, it has low codability, while when only a word is need, it is said to have high codability. A more frequently used category will be more available to consciousness because of its higher codability. Such differences have been found to occur in grammar, phonology, morphology and lexicon, and this principle has been found to hold in terms of "marked versus unmarked", "overt" or named versus "covert" or uncoded, in areas of color, gender, age, mass, count, time, animacy etc. These dimensions "underlay cognition as an integrated means of coding cognitive categories and analyzing experience."(Furbee, pg. 19)</p> <p>There is a conceptual correspondence of differences between cultural and structural-functional theories of anthropology, on the one hand, and varieties of linguistic relativism that may be called "structural" versus "functional". Cultural patterning is to structural-functional integration as "symbolic linguistics" is to more "scientific" studies of syntax. Robert Benfer (1988) has pointed out the structuralist orientation of ethnographic semantics in its taxonomic approaches versus the more functionalist studies of cognitive anthropology aiming at understanding the use of knowledge in different contexts in terms of ecology, social interaction and ritual process.</p> <p>Del Hymes (1966) distinguishes two kinds of linguistic relativity. The Whorfian version comes from an appreciation of the differences of linguistic structure. The other type Hymes identifies as "that related to the use of language"--calling "attention to differences in cultural pattern, and to their importance for linguistic experience and behavior." (pg. 114)</p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>The classical Whorfian conception depended upon a notion of an underlying "structure" of language, a notion that did not contradict the idea of the "universality" of such a structure. Whorf in fact believed in universals of thought, and that people could transcend the patterns of their own language. His assertion was mainly that "people in communication will have problems unless they can calibrate linguistic backgrounds....the role of linguistics is to call attention to these differences in structure, so that people will be able to transcend limitations tht these prticular patterns may place upon their behavior in ordinary daily life." (Hymes 1966: 114()</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p>Hymes maintains that Worfian structural linguistic relativism is based upon inference from linguistic data to cultural data, while functional linguistic relativism is derived from inference going from ethnographic evidence towards the functions of language. Both are but two general versions of from sixteen emergent possibilities of linguistic patterning derived from a matrix based upon the differential emphasis of the "uniformity of both structure and use," the "diversity of both" the uniformity of one and the diversity of the other," as well as to whether primary reference is to intra-cultural systems or cross-cultural systems.</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>It is a matter of emphasis always, not of exclusive prerogative for either uniformity or diversity, invariance or variation. Universals and concrete differences especially are interrelated, and the value of one does not cancel the value of existence of the other. It maybe necessary sometimes to correct an emphasis, or to expose the ideological role it plays. Thus, too ready an emphasis upon structural universals may reflect a wish for oneness and simplification in the world, and a tendency to overlook the level at which differences help or hinder individuals to conduct their lives. (ibid.: pg. 116)</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p>Distinguishing the significance of the functional type of linguistic relativism, Hymes contests the presumptions that languages in different contexts must play an equivalent role--the relativist presumption that a diversity of structure is accompanied by an surface equivalence of function irrespective of culture. "The inference of differential effect on world-view assumped equivalent roles in shaping world view."(pg. 116) He posites, therefore, that the cognitive significance of a language is as dependent upon its functional use as upon its structure.</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>.....Linguistic habits are in part constitutive of cultural reality. My contention is that people who enact different cultures do to some extent experience distinct communicative systems, not merely the same natural communicative condition with different customs affixed. Cultural values and beliefs are in part constitutive of linguistic reality....(ibid.: pg. 116)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>The difference between structural and functional forms of linguistic relativity are in prt a matter of the difference in the infered "direction of dependence" between the determination of language on one hand, and of culture and cognition on the other hand. In the former case, language becomes the matrix of culture, and in the latter, culture becomes the matrix of language.</p> <p>But this distinction belies the actual theoretical complexity of the problem, which has three levels--surface patterning, the functional roles, and the nature and direction of dependency between language, culture and cognition. The first level focuses upon the distinctive significances of particular historical patternings and their relationship to manifest cognitive orientations. The demonstration of pattern makes no claim about the significance of culture except the assumption that such significance exists. To infer the role of language in the shaping of world-view carries the analysis to the second level, which analyzes the specific role of language to culture and cognition. "The place assigned may be among any and all aspects of cultural and social life: conscious or unconscious metaphysics, values, aesthetics, enculturation, productive activities, type or stage of culture, thought, behavior; or, the place may be one of effective autonomy."(Hymes, 1966:pg. 118) The third level of analysis concerns the degree of fit of the various cultural aspects:</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>....The 'language and culture' problem par excellence has been the connection between language and thought (nowadays, cognition); and social anthropology has its counterpart in the 'language and society' problem of the connection between kinship terms, social structure, and interpersonal behavior. The analytical distinction, however, still finds applications; the two types of problem just cited provide an instance. Whorf ('language and culture') and Radcliffe-Brown ('language and society') may be said to have agreed at the second step, in that each maintained that there was a close fit between linguistic pattern and non-linguistic behavior. With regard to kinship terminology, however, Radcliffe-Brown argued for a close determination of the linguistic by the non-linguistic, whereas at the beginning of his 1941 essay Whorf seems to argue for the reverse, and at the end of the essay, for neither. (ibid.: pg. 120)</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p>Hymes recognizes sixteen possible positions for the determination of the relationship between langauge and culture within a four-by-four matrix whose dimensions are both phylogenetic (culture historical) and ontogenetic (individual life-histories) sets of variables with four major standpoints for each: 1) language as primary, 2) the rest of culture as primary, 3) neither as primary, but mutually interdependent, 4) neither as primary, but determined by some third, underlying set of variables.</p> <p>Some of these possible positions are more likely than others, but even Whorf expressed several different viewpoints for the relationship between language and culture within different contexts. Such a matrix does not account for all the variability of the relationships among the different aspects of language and culture. Such analysis is necessary "as a means of getting beyond global arguments as to THE relation between language and the rest of culture. Most or all the systematically possible positions may have to be coordinated as partial vantage points within an adequate theory." (ibid.: pg. 121)</p> <p>Hymes notes the logical distinction between linguistic determinism and relativism. Whatever kind of determinism is posited, the possibility of a linguistic relativity based upon language use is still unanswered. The three levels from description to explanation are equally possible whether the emphasis is one of uniformity or difference. Whorfian relativity has been construed as a sort of "wave on the surface of general commonality...." "Given a view of language that recognizes that it serves a number of functions, whose hierarchy may vary from case to case, it is not surprising to find one language serving predominantly aesthetic roles, and another language serving predominantly cognitive needs, or to find different aspects of the same language serving each." (ibid.: pg. 122)</p> <p>Language may only be one semiotic system among others, and what may be a matter of structure in one language may be one of "lexicography" in another. Linguistic models and modes of implementation vary cross-culturally, as does primary acquisition, socialization and developmental "scheduling." All the empirical conditions which govern whatever opportunity language has to play a role with regard to an aspect of culture may be found to vary cross-culturally. Explanation of the connection between linguistic pattern and the rest of culture cannot be abstracted from its ethnographic, sociolinguistic base.'(ibid.: pg. 123). The apparent complexity of language use suggests that language is largely structured by its cultural background, but, in the final analysis, there is no single direction of determination in such use. 'In sum, with use, as with structure, a monolithic position is not tenable; an adequate theory must coordinate several standpoints.'</p> <p>Accounting for diversity at one level, whether the deep structural or the surface functional, requires controlling diversity, or presuming uniformity, at the other level. The notion of creative productivity of generative grammar, for instance, presumes a universal structure to account for virtually infinite surface representations.</p> <p>Del Hymes raises the spectre of the paradox of a groundless relativity when he points out that the differences of perspective are more a matter of critical emphasis by different linguists, than it is anything necessarily significant about language except in a very partial sense. To explicitly emphasize either surface or structure, is to implicitly deemphasize the significance of the other. What remains critically important is to account for Language, as the sum of many different languages situated in diverse contexts, is an extremely complicated phenomena requiring a relativistic, rather than deterministic, accounting of the many its many aspects upon its several levels in different dimensions.</p> <p>Somewhere between the word and the thing, lies the "no-human's-land"of linguisticality and voice. Language is not only a culturally and cognitive construction of reality, but it is an ongoing, negotiated social reality, fraught with all the relativities this might imply. Because it negotiated, it is partially a dialectically "synthetic" construction. Such constructions must be found somewhere along a continuum between the Structure of language and the "critical indeterminancy" of its functional interpretation. This "critical indeterminancy" refers to what Paul Friedrich has called the "language parallax". In locating any meaning-word within a Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic matrix of signs, we are bound to become confounded by a kind of "principle of Saussurian 'uncertainty' and 'complementarity'" that goes something like this: to the extent to which we focus upon relations of identity, we tend to ignore relations of difference, or to the extent that we may locate any particular linguistic event in space (mind-space, levels of generality, dialogical space, or regions of social space) then we tend to blur or obscure its inherent relational temporality.</p> <p>This has led Paul Friedrich to define as an extension of his thesis of thepoetic and connotative relativities of language, the "order-to-chaos" continuum characterizing linguistic complexities. This continuum covers general and paradoxical dimensions of the cumulative complexity of language that renders "any one language unique and poorly transformable into another."</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>The paradox of continuity and discontinuity is peculiarly basic to language, and it is the governing principle for all of language's other dimensions as these intersect with each other. The interworkings of continuity and discontinuity increase the complexity, and therefore, the uniqueness and non-translatability of any one language. (and of the other cultural codes and communication processes). They also decrease the theoretical value of any formal determinism, or of the sort of general linguistic relativism that argues that languages are largely intelligible and translatable in terms of a "universal calculus." '(1980, pg. 94)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>He identifies a number of relative order-to-disorder dimensions in language--"language behavior" versus "underlying meaning", increasing orders of generality versus decreasing orders of contextual determinancy, manifest versus latent, spurious versus genuine, parole versus langue. "The greater proportion, if not all, of language and culture is played out in the middle zones that simultaneously comprise large measures of behavior and of deeper levels of structured meaning. Transformation between mixed systems is much more difficult than between 'either two descriptions of behavior, or two simple algorithms (which latter could conceivably be treated as literal functions of each other).</p> <p>This increases complexity, hence relativity as well, and relates to another paradox of the continuum ranging between polar extremes of "communal-cultural to the particular, unique, individual, extending through the middle range of the "ideal generic 'speaker-hearer.'"</p> <p>This overlaps with dimensions between objective and subjective, bringing into play the physical relativity of the influence of the observer's presence upon observations made. The observer is always a participant, and that becomes reflexively doubled when considering the relation between "linguist-analyst" and the native "speaker-hearer," and as evidenced by the difficulty of translating poetry which is simultaneously objective and externally referential as well as highly subjective. "When we translate such poetry our equation must include not only the source and target languages, and the two poems, but four participant-observers--and, indeed, a half-dozen or more other major variables."</p> <p>Another dimension of language occurs between "logico-referential" or deductive meanings of language and "associative" or connotatie/suggestive uses. Language is never wholly the one or the other. The simultaneous double function of language is its "duality of patterning", between syntatic/semantic and metalinguistic codings, between emotive and poetic and cognitive and informative functions. "In sum, the pervasive duality of reference and association states yet another level of richness and flexibility of language and hence its relative uniqueness and nontranslatability.'(ibid.: pg. 101)</p> <p>Other dimensions include "Linearity/instantaneity," "diachronic/synchronic," and the "orientation" of language change between "goal oriented" and random "drift"--the languate contains its past and future as its present, and contains its time and its processes within itself. This increases the complexityof the present, hence the individuality and nontranslatability of language."(ibid.: pg. 109)</p> <p>There is the dimension of destruction/construction of language, the contraposed tendencies of randomizing erosion in language versus synthetic integration. This leads to the "Order-to-Chaos Continuum" or the movement from "order, regularity, determinancy, predictability, to randomness, freedom, choice, chaos." The ordering principles and patterns integrating language are continuously crosscut by the 'disordering' dimensionalities of language. Order and chaos are dialectical and one imposes limits upon the other. The structurality of language consists of an "anti-chaotic" system that exists upon the edge of chaos. "The fact of linguistic pluralism is just one of the more systematic arguments that order is limited. One of the other arguments is that the metalinguistic and language-using capacities of anyone imagination or culture are disturbed by the fact that language itself is constantly changing, and that both its growth and its decay are significantly beyond full, rational, mechanistic control or even understanding, both at the peripheries and through the central areas. Constant flux implies some chaos. 'The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind.'" (Paul Friedrich, 1980:pg. 120)</p> <p>The "rage for order" has led to the fallacies of denying or ignoring disorder on the one hand, and to assuming too much order on the other. To ignore the centrality of the lack of order in language is absurd, as is the possibility of specifying the precise measures of the "critical indeterminancy of language." Variation and diversity is great without hindering the great generative, creative, informative, productive, and communicative power of language. "This ability to function with poorly ordered systems seems analogous to the fact....that individuals can cooperate and communicate in groups without much shared understanding or cultural background."(ibid.: pg. 127) "....The paradox of order and lack of order is the most profound and interesting in language..."(ibid.: pg. 129)</p> <p>All of the dimensions identified by Friedrich are complex and paradoxical, but they also all contriubte to a more sufficient "definition of the uniqueness of any one language-culture." Of all the dimensions that are mentioned, it is the order-to-chaos continuum that is the greatest basis of linguistic relativity:</p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>the less ordered a language, the less transformable and translatable. In these terms, any translation is an unavoidable fiction. The astronomical complexity of language from this point of view adds an abstract argument to the Humboldt-Boas-Sapir-Whorf et. al. hypothesis. The hypothesis, as we have seen, is deeply reticulated with the problem of freedom. (pg. 130-1)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> <a NAME="seven"></p> </a></font><a NAME="seven"> <p>  <hr> </a><font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">CHAPTER SIX</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">HERMENEUTICAL RELATIVISM</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">...Zeus understood when Hermes promised to tell no lies but did not promise to tell the whole truth.(Vincent Crapanzano, Hermes Dilemma, 1986:pg. 76)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>As much as language is at the center between objective and subjective worlds, and serves to mediate between these worlds, and to the extent that linguisticality underlies human knowledge, relativism must come to focus upon the dilemmas of its mediating function. Hermeneutical relativism concerns centrally the problems and paradoxes of interpretation, or the linguistic translation of reality from one mode of experience into another, or from one semiotic or symbolic system into another, or from one cultural orientation to another, and is thus closely related to linguistic relativism. It concerns the many ways language becomes involved in the interpretation and representation of reality.</p> <p>In a sense, linguistic and hermeneutical relativism are logical extensions of one another, as each implies the other. Whereas linguistic relativism is concerned primarily with the active production, expression, transmission and communication of information via language, Hermeneutical relativism is more concerned with the subsequent interpretation, appropriation and rehabilitation or recovery of meaning from "texts" which have already been produced. While oral discourse can be treated as a text, written texts can be treated as valid sources for linguistic analysis. Linguistic relativism concerns the immediate production and integrative consequences of meaning in language. Hermeneutic relativism attempts to recover the approximate, past meanings as these have been originally embodied and subsequently modified in the "texts," principally by spanning the distance between the received version and the original which augments the original with greater "iconographic significance"--what is known as the problem of the "distanciation of surplus meaning" that accumulates around and in texts.</p> <p>While the interpretive paradox of linguistic relativism can be said to be primarily concerned with the variable significance of communications of languages as "sign systems," hermeneutical relativism is concerned with the extended problem of the "differential saliency of meaning" or the "epigenetic topographies of meaning" that are historically patterned and situated in social space. Surplus value accretes to "unpetrified" texts as vital emblems and symbols during their transmission, reiteration and translation through time and across space. Language as discourse is an on-going, interactive phenomenon--it is characterized by its ephemeralness, its fleeting "momentariness." Once set down in relatively fixed form, "texts" (language as artifact, "resultant used language") acquire a "life of their own" and a sense of reality of their own which is separate and independent of its origination. Thus hermeneutic relativism can be considered as the attempt to recover the orginal value of the text, to trace its history of changed and augmentation of meanings.</p> <p>Translation is always partial and never perfect or complete. All systems of human linguisticality and interpretation are insufficient systems of pattern representation. Interpretation involves not perception or conception, but description, evaluation and transcription, and inevitably entails error, over-simplification or reduction, and exclusions, and it is necessarily a normative, because selective and evaluative, decision-making process. The thesis of hermeneutical relativism arises from this imperfectness of fit and the normative partiality of all systems of interpretation and translation, and hence it comes from the possibility of alternative interpretations of the same reality. The hermeneutic paradox of identity and difference becomes evident in these alternative possibilities.</p> <p>Hermeneutical relativism covers the paradox of making the strange familiar, a process that renders the familiar strange. Hermeneutical distances have a special quality in that they cannot be easily or simply bridged by the hermeneut, without some consequence for the positionality of the observer. The more we embrace the different, the distant, the alien, the more "relativized" and estranged our own original reality becomes--we suffer a loss of ignorance, a fall from grace with the world--and our own truths become open to the possibility of disillusionment.</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>The essence of hermeneia consists of that which the Romans called elucotia: the expression of thought--not the understanding, but the rendering intelligible. Consequently, Hermeneia has long signified the rendering of one person's language intelligible to another, the work of the interpreter. As such it is not esssentially different from exegsis, and the two words may be used as synonyms. They are concerned not so much with interpreting as with actually understanding, which becomes possible only through interpretation. This understanding is the re-forming process of hermeneia as elucution. (Boeckh, pg. 47-8)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>Hermeneutical reality is not only fundamentally linguistical and textual, but it is also basically a problem of the construction and representation of meaning in human reality, both psychological and social as an intersubjective, transpersonal process. It is therefore essentially dialectical, dyadic and dualistic, an extension of the subjective sense of self into the world of the other. It defines the fabric of human meaning in the world, both subjectively and objectively constituted. It represents the extension of the human organism into its cultural environment.</p> <p>Hermeneutic relativism arises from the duality of patterning found in human language. The ultimate source of this duality remains uncertain, but it has several important implications for hermeneutical relativism--it tends to always produce a dichotomization of reality that leads to dilemma, dialectic and the permanent dualities of identity and difference. The duality of patterning inherent in human linguisticality is the chronic source of the relativization of hermeneutic interpretation. The paradox of hermeneutical relativity is that the thing may never be just one thing, but also its opposite as well as something else, and if it is something more than what it is, then it cannot simply be the thing that it is represented to be. Even more, this hermeneutical paradoxicality of meaning turns upon itself as its dialectic becomes elaborted--its things can be twisted from one way into many others.</p> <p>Because human beings are symbolic creatures, we cannot escape from the hermeneutical and relativistic consequences of our symbolisms. Symbolism provides a comprehensive, hermeneutical horizon for our collective representations and shared understandings.</p> <p>The hermeneutics of meaning is largely an effort in symbolization and symbolic interpretation. Because meaning is constituted principally through our symbolisms and because this meaning is also inherently "meta-logical" and metaphorical, which can speak of the reflexive and apperceptive sense of paradox which is intrinsic to meaning. This metalogicality of meaning is evident in what Richard Shweder designates as "unpetrified texts" that are open to reinterpretation and fold back upon themselves in growing convolutions of complexity, that he distinguishes from "petrified texts" whose meaning is closed, finite, and unproductive.</p> <p>It is not enough to explicate human language as a sign system that is holistically integraed at a second, symbolic order. Thought it is this, it is also something more. It is also a complex series of patterns of human presentation, ordering and organic expression within the world. It depends upon its constrain upon the first level to generate freedom and unlimited productivity at the second level. These second-level qualities of human language can be summarized as the "world-openness" of human symbolization. It comes to represent more than just a single sign system, but also a number of overlapping and interrelated symbolisms. This is a direct expression of our anthropological being in the world, both a consequence and an account of its cause.</p> <p>It is this "world-openness" that renders our language and meaning systems hermeneutically relative and unresolvedly problematic. Not only does world-openness allow us to escape the determinations of our nature, to become something more, but also it allows us to incorporate into ourselves "difference," alternative possibility, as well as for the extension, elaboration and intervention of our beingness in the world.</p> <p>It provides the basis not only for human truth, willpower, intention, purpose, and rationality, but at the same time, also the contradiction of falseness, deceit, corruption, dependence and the servitude of power, anomie and irrationality. We become the embodiment of both Appolonian and Dionysian tendencies. It becomes constituted in our imagination and our intuition of possible worlds.</p> <p>Another aspect of hermeneutical relativism is the degree of misfit and error between parties in communicationm, or the degree to which the sender is actually sending the message intended and to which the receiver is receiving the same or some other message. Complete certainty and correctness can never reign over human communication--noise, bias, distortion, misinterpretation, are all-present in this process. The text that is part and parcel of the transmission acquires a life of its own independent of the original intentions of its transmitter, entering into a wider stream of interpretation.</p> <p>The wider process of reinterpretation embeds a text in a growing context of historicity and facticity. The distortion of distortion permeates the meaning of a text during its reinterpretation. It tends to be mythologizing of reality, transforming it into something larger than life. It is also therefore necessarily totalizing of the reality of the text. It takes in everything and comes to encompass the entire text. Symbolically, it mediates boundaries and resolves all contradiction, discontinuity and marginality.</p> <p>The hermeneutical dialectic always presents to us its text with the possibility of two simultaneous, complementary and contradictory readings. According to Ernest Becker, texts speak either of the past or the present. Repetition is past oriented, though in the act of repeating there remains something of the present "be it only the voice quality of the speaker, the variations of tempo and speech and resonance that express the repeater's attitude about what he is repeating." Each new repetition is accomplished in a new context and derives some significance from this context. Thus one can never really completely speak of the past without also communicating something of the present.</p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>Likewise, one can neer wholly speak of the present. Even everyday language is highly conventional, far more constrained than we normally recognize...(Ernest Becker, Javanese Shadow Theatre, 1979:pg. 213)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p>  Communication, and the meaning it carries, always occurs simultaneously upon two levels--the surface, or "lexical" level of the sign, and the "metacommunicative" or "relational" level of the symbol. Speaking of the present entails increasing spontaneity upon either of these levels, and therefore decreasing redundancy. Speaking spontaneously involves the active imagination. Speaking of the past involves increasing redundancy, and decreasing spontaneity, upon either or both of these levels. It involves memory.</p> <p>The duality of patterning of meaning and its communication also involves the intertranslation of time and space, transforming space into temporal metaphors and time into spatial metaphors, or the spatialization of time and the temporalization of space. We might extend this thesis to the basic "verbality" versus "nominality" of language, and distinguish between analogical and homological, synchronic and diachronic, the syntagmatic and paradigmatic, the referential and contextual, and the inferential and intentional, the "langue" and the "parole."</p> <p>Hermeneutical relativism deals with the problematics of Difference, rendering them recognizable as part of one's sense of identity such that they no longer constitute a critical difference.</p> <p>Just as we speak of a basic linguisticality, we can also refer to a basic "inter-textuality" of meaning, one which is primarily reprensentational rather than presentational, metaphorical rather than metanymical. Textuality is paradoxical and problematic because, thought it necessarily stands between two worlds, as an intermediation of those worlds, it also serves to highlight and stand for the differences between those worlds. It is like a thick cloud in the distance which appears opaque, but which dissipates to invisibility the closer we come to it--though we can always sense it in the larger world around us, we can never touch or grasp it. It comes, therefore, to create its own meaning between two worlds. And the more fixed and solid it becomes, the more relative and insubstantial it must really be. A text is something that is separate from its context of origination. It stands apart as something inherently "decontextualized" and thus "disembodied" from the important moment of meaning. As something separate, a text is neither here nor there, neither wholly a part of the past or the present. It exists in a limbo of critical indeterminancy.</p> <p>The critique of a text involves its "recontextualization" and restoration of original and derivative identities through the "depetrification" of difference. In this regard, hermeneutical relativism becomes something of a misnomer, as it would be more appropriate to refer to "philological relativism" as combining to distinct enterprises, interpretation or translation, and criticism or evaluation. Interpretation leads to a theory of criticism by the systematic excoriation and resolution of "differences" embodied within the text. Both interpretation and criticism are interdependent, and both levels of analysis address issues of both internal and external validity of its view of the text.</p> <p>Logos was in the Greek order the ordering principle of the Cosmos. It regulated relations in nature and between people. It was also the "sense of order" as expressed by the "word", or, more generally, by language. There was in this scheme of things a profound and sublime sense of isomorphic identity between the Logos of the cosmos and the Logos as discovered by and expressed through language. The rational relation between all things became the "general sense of order or measure." It made possible understanding of the relations between humans and nature and between other humans. The paradox of logos is the presumption of a universal sense of identity underlying and accounting for all differences in the world. It demands explanation of things infinite in finite terms. Part of this paradox stems from the consequence of the ordering principle of the universe being not one of permanence and constancy, but rather one of change and continuous flux. Difference renders our sense of identity always partial, imperfect and incomplete.</p> <p>Equating logos as a rational principle underlying both language and the natural and social order demands that our texts be internally coherent and noncontradictory--exorcized of any and all sense of difference. There is no room in this formulation for a kind of poetics that delights in diversity, contradiction and the "celebration of difference." Logos unites language and reality as if a single "objective reality," and therefore constitutes the basic rationale of all kinds of "Structuralisms" which hold a hidden, underlying, universal order above the surface differences.</p> <p>The relativism of interpretation brings to focus what has been called the "project of interpretivism," that encompasses a wide variety of perspectives that share as their common point of departure the critical deconstruction of reality as if a text, as the shared construct of meaning, and as the interpretive problematics of this meaning. It is a form of "philological relativism" as this is both linguistical and textual. Meaning is made and shared, the product or default of interpretation--it is nowhere critically determined or absolute, but is always subject to reinterpretation. Because meaning is symbolic, constructed of signs within a contextual field of relations, it is always relative.</p> <p>Interpretativism has its basis in Jacque Derrida's critical deconstruction of Ferdinand de Saussure's structural theory of language. In a sense, post-structuralist theory is the logical extension of Structural theory to its own destructive conclusions. The deposition of structure breaks the traditional referential/inferential relationship of language with the world--instead language refers to itself, and significance is constituted internally by the binary opposition between the signified and the signifier.</p> <p>Meaning becomes the acoustic and psychological image we receive as the result of this inner tension in linguistic structure. Cultural reality is constituted by language, and its structure is a system of rules governing other rules and individual speakers. It is self-enclosed, abrogating the politics of the System versus the actor. The moment language imposes itself upon reality, it looks at all things relationally, syntactically and figuratively. Nothing is fully present in itslef, as words and meaning derive value from its relational positioning with the system. It is language, not the thing represented by language, but its conception that is important. It is impossible to get beyond the metaphysicality of the entity. The system is self-stabilizing, self-constituting.</p> <p>The problem with structuralism is that it breaks down under the possibility of self-contradiction--of alternative structural interpretations for the same system of signs. We then get an intellectual "stuttering" of a dialectical regress ad infinitum. Then why stop at signifier/signified, but why not signifiers of signifiers of signifiers.</p> <p>Derrida levels structuralist models against themselves by seeking free play within its system of signs, by finding contradiction behind any "coherence." Identity and difference are not completely symmetrical. Identity is composed of difference by its relational positionality, or relative distance, within the sign system. "Identity is constantly being deferred." Derrida offers in place of the structure of language the "language of rupture"--redoubling and fragmentation in the process of deliberate, self-conscious detotalization. It becomes "repetition compulsion with a difference." Structure, as relativised by power, incorporates the principle of "presence" as something "that finally presents itself, as arriving at the ultimate "signifier". This is in contradistinction to a principle of "absence"--the loss of control, or "power without a source."</p> <p>If there is no such thing as perfect translation, then there must always be competing versions, though some versions may be judged better than others, there may be no one best translation. The "impossibility of translation is its possibility." Secondly, the sign, the word as symbol and metaphor, and by extension, the text and the "trope," once created and enacted, gains irreversibly its own ontological status in the world, accreting meaning and precipitating its own sense of reality in the world as something reified, humanly produced but outside of human production. Such signs and constructions then come to have an ideational and ideological history of signification that further conditions their status in the world. They become bound by the circle of their own historical and hermeneutical horizon in the world--a relative horizon that always vanishes upon the margins of one's world. All interpretive meanings, therefore, are contextually bound within the horizon of the words used to express it, and thus all reality is ultimately "interpreted reality," and therefore relative to the horizon of interpretation.</p> <p>Ours is an age of interpretation. Interpretation is an inescapably political act. Translation is the central problem for all people in the world, an interpersonal and intercultural problem. "Structure" in the Saussurean sense is the comprehensive solution to the problem of diversity and heterogeneity in the world, as a system of rules incorporated into language governing the relations with the world. The search for the universality of structure has been hermeneutically, ideologically synnonymous with the quest for the totality of power over the natural chaos of divesity and change. Universal categories of "Structure," as transcendental essences, are political, and are therefore subject to interpretation and change.</p> <p>Knowledge as "Power" is premised upon the privileging of certain positions within sign systems while suppressing others. For Derrida, associations between referent and sign are mostly by chance, with only a few becoming conventionalized into categories.</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>Those chance associations among referents and signs that have become conventionalized as categories in a cultural or linguistic system are a microcosm of the power inherent in the institutions of human groups. Where there is a named concept, it gives a particular referent-sign relationship a favored (conventionalized) status, thereby suppressing opposite meaning(s)...(Furbee, pg. 50)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>Language is not necessarily the mirror of the mind and received knowledge or established meanings are suspect of their historicity and facticity, of their hermeneutical relativity within the context of their construction and interpretation. "Meaning depends upon context; contexts are dialogic and fleeting; the fact that a written text is its own context in which author(s) and reader(s) cannot negotiate and provide feedback points up the hopelessness of arriving at objective truth." (Derrida, 1976, in Furbee, 1991) Deconstruction is a "celebration of the arbitrariness of the sign" freed from larger structure (s). Deconstruction therefore constitutes the basis for a kind of contextually dependent hermeneutical relativism that is different from a linguistic relativity based upon structuralism. Natural language has an infinite capacity for creating new categories and finding newuses for old categories (Friedrich, 1986) While there may be an infinite number of possible contexts for the use of a single word, and while lingusitic norms governing selection exist (otherwise making translation impossible), the use of these norms is also inherently variable. Such linguistic free-play can nevertheless be exploited to create normative behavior.</p> <p>Post-structuralism begs the question of the interpretive relativity of meaning in language. The paradox of meaning is that it is always situated, arbitrary and contextually dependent. Again, the impossibility of interpretation is its possibility, and this is the crux of its interpretive paradox.</p> <p> <a NAME="eight"></p> </a></font><a NAME="eight"> <p>  <hr> </a><font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">CHAPTER SEVEN</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">DIALOGICAL RELATIVISM</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The man from Crete said "all Cretans are liars."</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>Dialogical relativism can be considered as an intermediate form of relativism between linguistic and hermeneutical relativities. Briefly, it is the relativism that concerns the inherent indeterminancy of meaning in the act of its verbal production. Communication is to be seen as a dyadic process that continually builds structure in meaning, structure that is always relative. It is a form of relativism derived from socio-linguistic perspective, from a functional approach to the patterning of language, and from the "ethnography of speaking." The dialogical construction of meaning as a negotiated ongoing "con-text." Casual conversation can be construed as the principal mechanism for the "intersubjective" reinforcement of reality. In this sense, all of human reality is dialogically constructed. It is shared, expressed and contradicted in the course of on-going verbal exchanges. The power of language becomes the rhetorical and propagandistic power to convince, persuade, manipulate, and deceive within the immediate dialogical context. Reference to distant meanings plays a vital part in this "power game." Public knowledge, therefore, tends to have greater power than private knowledge.</p> <p>Dialogical relativism is rooted in the basic inescapable sense of orality underlying meaning in human reality. The speech act is the decisive, critical moment of meaning. The spoken word, and the "word heard" or the "received word," precipitates meaning, however ephemeral, in an embodied sense--giving substance to the form, function and fiction of meaning as if it were vital. Because it is based upon "broadcast transmission," because it is ever fleeting, such meaning is always relative. It depends upon its resonance and reiteration over other possible words for its vitality, its power.</p> <p>Everyday discursive activity, causal conversation or formal speech, is considered the "most important vehicle of reality-maintenance. One may view the individual's everyday life in terms of the working away of a conversational apparatus that ongoingly maintains, modifies and reconstructs his subjective experience." (Berger and Luckman, 1966:pg. 152) This reality maintaining function of common language activity is not necessarily explicit, but mostly implicit. "Most conversaton does not in so many words define the nature of the world. Rather, it takes palce against the background of a world tht is silently taken for granted." (pg. 152) Discourse maintains and modifies the plausibility structures that integrate the socially sanctioned world. In its objectification of the world, language realizes it, reproduces it, and actualizes it. "In conversation the objectifications of language become objects of individual consciousness. Using a common language maintains the consistency of the shared reality of a collectivity--those employing the language are mutually reinforcing one another's versions of reality." "Items are dropped and added, weakening some sectors of what is still being taken for granted and reinforcing others. Thus, the subjective reality of something that is neer talked about comes to be shaky...Conversely, convesation gives firm contours to items previously apprehended in a fleeting or unclear manner....Generally speaking, the conversational apparatus maintains reality by 'talking through' various elements of experience and allocating them a definite place in the real world."(Berger and Luckman, 1966:pg. 153)</p> <p>From this standpoint, "structures" are nothing more than the "received truth" of the predominant "voice" in command of the current moment. The sense of holistic integrity that congeals about such truth is a function of our shared need for the interpretive coherence of reality. Our habitual need to impose order and make sense of the world--and such integration of reality is never final or complete, because it is always disrupted by the challenges of continuous change.</p> <p>Whereas structuralist theories emphasis the "langue" of the ideal speaker-hearer. The internal relationships of the sign system that underly the "mental knowledge" necessary for the speaker to reproduce language in a coherent manner, to the exclusive deemphasis of "parole" or the actual, idiosyncratic patterns which speech actually takes, dialogical theory reverses this emphasis as a corrective to the bias of the structuralist presumption, by emphasizing "parole" over "langue." Structuralist theory "decontextualizes" meaning. Dialogical theory seeks to referentially "recontextualize" meaning. Thus such theory shares a little bit of both linguistical relativism and hermeneutical relativism, for on one hand it deals with primacy of the phenomenal presentation of speech production. On the other it can only do this through the "reconstruction" of the verbal construction of meaning. They bring back to context significances that must first be alienated from their contexts of origination. The dialogical analyst must therefore recall what was said and infer its meaning by a similar sleight of hand that the hermeneut must ultimately rely upon. In this sense, all texts are spoken and all speech becomes text. We cannot clearly separate the overlapping domains of linguistics, the hermeneutic enterprise or dialogical analysis.</p> <p>The distinction between emphasis on langue and parole also disappears when we consider that discursive analysis at least implicitly attempts to elicit general patterns and explain surface variation in terms of structural rules derived from these patterns, while structural analysis must anchor its presumptions and attempt to account for the possible variation in terms of hypothetical structures. The two approaches can therefore be considered to be dialectically complementary, each necessitating the other.</p> <p>Dialogical relativism is to be seen as attempting to steer a middle course between the two extremes of theory, in its attempt to structurally account for meaning as embodied, contextualized, situated discursive events. It confronts the "metalogical" paradox of the meaning of meaning that is stuck on the horns of the dilemma between "Langue" and "Parole." Though there is no such thing as nonrelative, context-free meaning, there are possible meanings that are more general, if not universal, than others.</p> <p>Discursive analysis has largely been an atheoretical approach based upon the explicit rejection of the structuralist presumption and of structuralist primacy in theory. It has been concerned with "dyadic" everyday speech events as "situated discourse practices." It brings back into central focus the problems of history, the relativities of a subject-dependent intentionality, of contexts and practices without the implicit determinism of Structuralism. Such events incorporate in an on-going way the complexities of conflict, contradiction, consonance, and conformity. They continually rend open and demand resolution and repatching the unfolding, manifold, woven fabric of meaning.</p> <p>From this perspective, there occurs a critical conjunction of "structuration" in which on-going practices and enduring structures are conflated and self-generating. The context of meaning is the network and pathways along which such structuration unfolds. "structures," rather than "Structure," are continually 'con-structed' and 're-constructed' from the elements and "schemas" of the "con-text." Structure collapses into structure that collapses into the structure of the context.</p> <p>What is sought in such analysis are the relationships and ways that language, and via language, meaning becomes daily shaped and reshaped. In this sense we can speak of the discursive articulation of meaning which creates its own context within a larger, relative historical context.</p> <p>Because meaning is inherently referential and relational, its dialogical excoriation must eventually run up against the dilemma of context--how much or how little context is enough to "explain" or interpret an "event." The arbitrary delimitation of context often requires the spurious reification and superimposition of schemas that become structures in place of "Structure."</p> <p>This dilemma of context becomes intrinsic to the dilemma of interpretation as the issues of who's translation, of the differential saliency of metaphorical meanings and categories (Roger Keesing, 1985) Are inferences and implications about the "invisible" or "entangled" or "hidden" realities the "speaker/actor's" own or may they in fact be the "observing/interpreting" participant's transparent constructions? One must only consider the possiblity of multiple translations to reveal the hidden ambiguity of determining the "correct" translation. Rendering "visible" apparent "invisible" significances, revealing "hidden" thoughts and feelings (like enlightening "back regions" or "deep structures") and the transparency of our own encodings of reality, presents an antinomial paradox shared by both participants and observers. This invisibility of shared context and connotations, of the shared "identity of difference" undermines the whole agenda of presupposing order in apparent disorder. It is a dilemma far more confused and pronounced for the observer than the participant, because the former must successfully disentangle at least two or more different, equally invisible, encodings of experience, entailing a deliberate and forced estrangement divorcing "dialogical betweenness" and the critical "con-textuality" of the conjunction. In allusion to Sigmund Koch's term, I will will refer to the result as a kind of "epistemo-pathology" that underlies the anti-antinomial "rage for order", and the inherent cross-linguistic phenomenological predicament of the interpreter as "anthropo-pathology."</p> <p>We may, in such analysis, be smuggling back "Structure" into our substitutions of "structures" for "Struktur." Analytical deconstruction of everyday discourse and the common senseness such discursive practices are held to produce begs the question of "whose analysis" and "whose common sense." In the process of disentangling our shared realities, might not the native's own contradictions and hidden inconsistencies become our own transparent sense of order. Human reality is always entangled, meanings and motives always invisible, intention always transparent.</p> <p>The relational relativity of meaning puts us upon the horns of another dilemma. Meaning as metaphor, the meaning of meaning, entails not only that we are reflexively, appreceptive aware of our own meanings, but that our meanings, and our dialogues about meaning, always also constitute a "metalogical metalogue" that invariably point to things beyond the "con-text" of our constructions of reality while simultaneously pointing back to themselves. We constitute not only interactive dialogues on a daily basis, but we strive to turn these dialogues into "metalogues" which make more sense than they them selves otherwise embody. We seek the novel juxataposition of elements and relations, of "structures" which will accomplish this kind of metalogue. By such a feat, by such a hermeneutic trick, we extend our own sense of being into the world, our own power over the world, and we embody more of the world into our being.</p> <p>Plato was infinitely wise to have cast the poets from his Repulican garden. Politics has been time immemorial blessed and cursed with poetics. Ceasars and careers are regularly made and broken on poetic skill or blunder; Empires rise and fall upon the shaky ground of poetic legends. Hitler managed to mesmerize the German masses and mobilize a world into a frenzied holocuast on the oratorical power of his words. Language is power. It is the power to do many things. This power renders language relative to the human purposes and designs to which it is put. It is mostly within the pragmatic contexts of power that language is usually articulated. Poetics is more than just logodaedaly--the free play of words--but it becomes also logomachy, the war of words. Logomachy stands for the everyday contest and battle over and about words and with words and their meanings, which are never set in stone. Words thus come to symbolize power as much as they may embody it. The battle of interpretation is just the battle over whose poetics will be received as truth.</p> <p>The poetic power of language rests in its metaphorical capacity to foster an illusion of reality which, without such sophistry, would vanish into thin air. It the spell-casting power of the racanteur, the blind bard, the singer of tales and spinner of yarns. In the poetic illusion is the power, for as Nietsche so aptly noted--"Understanding kills action, for in order to act we require the veil of illusion." Words can be twisted and turned at will to obfuscate or clarify reality, to deceive or reveal deception, to trick the imagination or induce a mood. The power of words is emblematic in the same way that a flag waved or a banner flown above the heads of a zealous crowd is emblematic.</p> <p>The poetic play of language allows it to be recast into so many different figures and so many alternate roles. It confers upon language the possibility for its phenomenological "realissum of consciousness." Language, in its pliant expressivity, allows the easy integration of many different realms of knowledge in the world. It has the capacity both for transcending the immediate present and for rendering "present" a wide range of things otherwise remote and "different". It thus fosters the "poetic identity of difference." It precipitates into the everyday world of phenomenological experience the "relevance structures", "semantic fields" and "makes relativity available different zones of the linguistically encoded, "social stock of knowledge" "Put simply, through language an entire world can be actualized at any moment....</p> <p>  According to Berger and Luckman, language use buildsup semantic fields or "zones of meaning" that are "linguistically circumscribed. Language patterning is oriented by the organizationof these semantic fields. Experience on both biographical and historical levels can be built up, objectified and retained, which is always selective.</p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>By virtue of this accumulation a social stock of knowledge is constituted, which is transmitted from generation to generation and which is available to the individual in everyday life....My interaction with others in everyday life is, therefore, constantly affected by our common participation in the available social stock of knowledge. (Berger and Luckman, 1966:pg. 41)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p>  We live in a world immersed by words. We walk in a word forest whose topography of value and use has different, changing dimensionalities--different depths, densities, distributions of knowledge and tonality. As we move through this linguistic forest, we encounter entanglements in which our vision and voice become confused and transformed. "Everybody is filled with words in eery state of his life--conscious, sub-conscious and unconscious, waking and sleep. Mind is an accumulation of words and it is due to its obsession that we usually fail to have the clear glimpse of self. Self cannot be known through words, for it may be beyond them, behind them, above them, below them, may be anywhere, but never in them...." (D. N. Thakur, pg. 24) Thus, the ultimate power of words is to foster the illusion of a world without words--the illusion of the word itself.</p> <p>Immersed in our poetic world of words, we confront its surface relativities in the many differences of its use and relevance, in its many dimensions and densities of meaning. The landscape of language is mapped by the topography of the Mind. We cannot escape from the woods of words, though we might imagine a way. But we cannot speak of such a way without using words.</p> <p>The topography of word-use, of word-work and word play, occurs simultaneous upon two parallel levels of experience, the literal and the figurative, the concrete and abstract, the noumenal and phenomenal, the denotative and the connotative, the significative and the symbolic.</p> <p>The poetic relativities of word-use is clearly evident in a paradigmatic way in the logodaedaly of Lewis Carroll's <u>Alice in Wonderland</u> and <u>Through the Looking Glass.</u> "....the question of meaning and the question of value are the very crux of the dealings with language in Through the Looking-Glass."(Spacks, 1961:pg. 274) In these works, Carroll (a pseudonym) cleverly reverses the normal ordering of the sense-making apparatus of language, allowing the figurative to become the literal, and the literal to become strictly, unfiguratively fastened to reality. It is a world in which logic is more true to its language than our own world, and this is precise the inversion of logic and language which causes little Alice so much confusion. It is a world of language in which "the symbolic representation of experience has power of its own. Thus anthropologists find that primitive magic depends upon an equation between the names of things and their souls, and semanticists learn that a shift of words in a crucial context equals a shift in emotion." What this kind of pragmatic reversal of the function of language brings into clear contrast is the extent to which the pattern, structure and order of our own language depends upon the looseness of our ordinary, common sensical talk. Semantics lacks anything more than an informal, tacit, shared ground--"no principle goerns its usage, nor does any technique exist whereby confusion may be avoided." (Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning) The ambiguity of structure is the possibility of poetic power.</p> <p>The word world of the Looking Glass one which is overdetermined by its anti-chaotic language. Its nonsense is too tightly bound to sense. Its extraordinarily logical sanity reveals our own ordinary sanity. In this inverted world, the power of language is real, literal, not just figurative and metaphorical. "The existence of the rhymes themselves seems to determine the course of the action related to them: again, a dictum of Ogden and Richards is supported--that "the power of words is the most conservative force in our life." It is the power of words that eliminates the possibility of change from the Looking-Glass world: actions are by words eternally fixed, and no deviation from them is conceivable."(Patricia Meyer Spacks, 1961:pg. 272) Throughout her many travails and trials, it is Alice's naive but firm faith in the common sense categories of her own language which guides her successfully through wonderland. ""No important question of verbal usage can be considered without raising some questions as to the rank or level and the truth or falsity of the actual references which may employ them." (Ogden and Richards)</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>"....The play with words, playful though it is, depends for its satiric effect on the assumed existence of some realm of absolutes, in which there is a real equation between a truth and its symbolic expression."(Spacks, 1961:pg. 275)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>When we consider the inanities of our own "real" world where one dictator can declare war by uttering a few words in "the name of God," we are left to soberly reexamine our own naive faith in the common sense foundations of our language, and in the received "truths" upon which our language and common sense are built. We are left to see, without an illusion of a fulcrum or an anchor, the semantic and pragmatic relativism of our word world--the essential groundlessness of its many meanings and values.</p> <p> </p> <p>In the course of considering its many possible relativities, language becomes must less determinant and much more indeterminant than we might have otherwise presumed it to be. We have unmasked the idea of "Language" as a unitary, univocal phenomenon, to reveal a teething tower of Babel, of many tongues and many voices, of many codes and contexts which to some ineffable extent overlap and interpenetrate one another. We are left to consider our thesis of the central position of "Language" as the mediator between our two worlds. We are left to reconsider a conception of a universal "linguistic continuum" with fewer nonarbitrary boundaries that we would suppose.</p> <p>Humankind speaks with many tongues, in many different styles, codes, terms. Simply substituting the problem of language for the question of "reality" does not seem to solve our problem of the relativity of human reality--of "What actually is reality." It only seems to further compound our problem with the question of "what are the relativistic realities of languages."</p> <p>The relativisms of language can be expressed in terms of heteroglossia, polyphony and multivocality. Language has presumed a tacit univocality, a singularity of voice, purpose, word, meaning, and structure. Rather we can speak of a coeval, heterogeneous "multilinguisticality" of the human world. The Struktur and structures of language become then primarily those functional patterns superimposed from above in service of some political agenda. The promotion of any standard form entails the demotion of any and all nonstandard varieties. Languages, rather than Language, are continuously evolving in certain, anti-chaotic ways. This process of language change is largely taken for granted and transparent, though it informs in fundamental ways our experience and expectations of experience in the world--both our world and our worldviews.</p> <p> The work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) derived from the role of the novel in Western culture, in which a patchwork of voices is created from different characters each having their say or part to play, and overlaid with the narrator's or author's voice. This patchwork is more multifaceted by the possibility of each voice representing multiple or alternative points of view.</p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>This approach is technically known as heteroglossia ("diverse tongues") or polyphony ("many voices")....Culture is not only a text, but a texture of differing voices, each trying to get its own way....In the final instance....the choice of which voice and how much of each to includeis the author's....This role of orchestrator or conductor (authorial voice) is Bakhtin's analogue of the institutionalized power of Derrida, Bourdieu and Foucault." (Louanna Furbee, pg. 64)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>The question of authorial voice resonates with the problem of the "voice of authority"--the machinery of language to legitimate the structures of power, influence and their status quo in the world. "Voices of authority" demands the question "whose voice?" and "whose authority?" and brings clearly into focuse the issue of multivocality inherent in everyday discourse and everyday language. The emphasis of one voice entails the muting of another. If voice is constrained to speak through an alien idiom, its possibilities and power becomes limited in certain decisive ways--rendering problematic the alternate codification of relative realities. Granting a privileged "voicefulness" to some entails the relative "voicelessness" of others. This critic is extended to also relations of power in the world, as well as to biographic and intrapsychic aspects of subjective reality--in terms of the pluralities and heterogeneity of self. The dialectical, relative silence of the voiceless is the equivalent of the "presence of absence". One must only consider the effects and distortions inherent to gossip to consider the consequences of polyphony.</p> <p>These considerations bring into relief related issues of evidentiary "witnessing," illocutionary "eloquence," "vocalization," and "detotalization," and of linguistic "tonality." In these strategies, the "articulation" of realities becomes a strategic negotion of power in the world, the "disarticulation" the sign of rupture and conflict. If similar words lead in different directions, different words may lead to the same place.</p> <p> <a NAME="nine"></p> </a></font><a NAME="nine"> <p>  <hr> </a><font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">CHAPTER EIGHT</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">TEXTUAL RELATIVISM</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The poet, the artist, the sleuth--whoever sharpens our perception, tends to be antisocial....A strange bond often exists between antisocial types to see environments as they really are....(Marshal McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, pg. 87)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <b> <p></b>Discourse analysis accepts actual speech events as if these were the primary texts of culture. Such discourse is held to be intermediate between culture and society. This results in a different kind of relativity centered upon the way texts may constrain reality. When seen in isolation they constitute their own entire context and reality, depending upon the interactions of "topic, speaker/author, hearer/reader with reference to appropriated shared cultural conventions that are symbolic." At the intersection between culture and society, texts are the ideographic and relativistic by products of language in context.</p> <p>Textual relativism is an extension of hermeneutic relativism. It is an accounting of the ways in which texts tend to incorporate and precipitate realities as if objective, though these realities remain exclusively textual. Textuality is concerned with the context and "intertextuality" which is built up within texts and between texts for the interpretation of texts. Texts constitute complex multidimensional symbolic realities. In a sense, textual relativism is an account of the reification of reality to the extent that such reification tends to be precipitated and reinforced by the presence of texts.</p> <p>To the extent that textual relativism deals focally with the problems of texts, it is also primarily a paradox inherent to the facticity of writing. It becomes the study of the effects that literacy is held to have over language, culture and cognition, as well as what becomes of language when it becomes not only textual, but literal as well. When language is written down, it undergoes a dramatic transformation, and results in the transormations of both the world and world-view as well. Language as written artifact becomes the object upon which legitimacy, authority and truth can become permanently affixed. Written words then come to have a symbolic value which stand for and demonstrate the verities and ideals that are associated with them. Love, God, the Good, stand by themselves a something more than the letters or sounds which produce them. They acquire a metanymical weight and massivity that cannot be easily undone or discredited in the world.</p> <p>But language as written text also becomes open to the possibilities of deceit and delusion in a way not possible with verbal lies. Written words may acquire multiple, contradictory significances that can be the source of much sophisticated manipulation. With the possibility of Truth, comes also the likelihood of Untruth, along with problems of the "Totalization" of reality. Reality as text is no longer as presentationally immediate or embodied as is reality as discursive text. It cannot be negotiated in any direct, democratic sense. It becomes the fully representational distortion, the unnegotiated fiction posed as fact, the "possibility of impossibility."</p> <b> <p> </b> The significance of the distinction between the written and the oral rests upon a basic premises of the influence of language upon culture and cognition, in which basic changes in the extension of our uses of langauge through the use of textual technologies and of widespread literacy, has led to dramatic transformations of human civilization and collective consciousness. Evidence suggests that oral or semi-oral languages may in be inherently more "context-bound" and functionally oriented to the pragmatics of effective communication in dialogical situ, compared to fully literate languages that allow a greater expressive function, access to more innuendos and nuances of subtle and sophisticated meanings, and permit greater abstraction independent of the speech context. We can speak of the emergence and development of a written contextuality of meanings in written, printed texts which is to some extent separate from the behavioral speech settings in which normal oral discourse occurs.</p> <p>It is of some debate whether these transformations have been abrupt and decisive, as in the "great divide theory" or whether they have actually been gradual and cumulative, yet massive in their consequences. The hypothetical history of the decisive noetic transformation of human consciousness, as a social construction, from a predominantly "oral" mode to a preeminently "literate" mode, is based upon the presumed analytical differences of a strictly dichotomized reality between "oral noetic economy" and a "literate noetic economy" that are fundamentally different, though in some ways complementary.</p> <p>According to Jack Goody, culture is a series of communicative acts, and differences in modes of communication are as important as differences in modes of production. According to this "orality-literacy" argument, is that writing technology fundamentally altered the noetic consciousness of literate societies compared to oral-based societies. This had dramatic effects on encouraging rationalism, criticism, and logic. "By making it possible to scan the communication of mankind over a much wider time span, literacy encouraged, at the very same time, criticism and commentary on the one hand and the orthodoxy of the book on the other." (Jack Goody <u>The Domestication of the Savage Mind</u> 1977:pg. 37)</p> <p> </p> <p>This shift, I believe, has certain, hitherto unmentioned implications. First, the spread of writing and writing technologies has expanded the collective memory and the base for the storage, ordering and retrieval of knowledge, and it has extended the informed "voice". There arises in the spread of these technologies a textuality that offers a degree and level of social integration and information coordination and conservation on a scale not possible in only oral-based societies. An almost unlimited, relatively permanent body of information can be reproduced and maintained and transmitted over great spaces and spans of time in a way not possible for a society dependent only upon oral transmission of culture. The expansion and development of modern civilization has been a direct consequence of this increased capacity for information storage and processing. Such information has provided the necessary instructional templates for the design of this development.</p> <p>The rise of literacy and of the written word, of printing and electronic technologies, has been held to account for basic transformations of human consciousness, for a new sense of "objective, reflective self" and for the rise in importance of rational ideas and ideals and of logical rationality in general, and especially for the process of "reification" of the social construction of reality which is held to attend its ideological legitimation. Logic, in this sense, is held to be prestructured by sentential, syntactic structure of langauge ('hypertaxis/parataxis")--embedded in the coherence patterning of language are the reasons of the rational mind. Levi-Bruhl did not discount the role of language in his formulation of the unfortunate concept of the "primitive mentality." He noted a correspondence of language with mentality, that he identified descriptively as "oral" in pattern, compared to the "logical" pattern of literate society. In oral societies, language itself has the function of containing and transmitting knowledge, without the retention or development of logical conceptual systems that characterize literate societies and that permit progressive development of ideas.</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>"The image-concepts which are a kind of delineation allowing of a limited generality and elementary abstraction only, yet involve remarkable development of memory, and thus give rise to the wealth of form and vocabulary. In the peoples whom we are considering, on the contrary, this treasure is still entire, or almost entirely, explicit in language itself. It cannot fail to be transmitted, because the children try to imitate their parents' speech, without any teaching, properly so called, without any intellectual effort, simply by memory." (Lucien Levy-Bruhl, 1926:pg. 174-5)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>This sort of analogy is exemplified by Eric Havelock's <u>Preface to Plato</u> (1963) in which he locates the transition from the mythopoeic age of Homer to the beginning of the formal philosophical rationality as epitomized by Plato, and thus the dawn of Western Civilization. This argument addresses the "Homeric Question" of who was Homer and how were the Homeric epics composed? Albert Lord's answer to this question in <u>The Singer of Tales</u> is complementary to Havelock's theory. There is a fairly abrupt transition from a primarily oral, mimetic, and poetic mode to one that is primarily literate and philosophical. Oral discourse inherently constrains the minds of an oral cultures members by limiting the ways of expression and degree of sophistication of ideas. Knowledge in an oral-based society is temporally condition, "which is another way of saying that in such a culture 'knowledge' in our sense cannot exist."</p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>To this fundamental trait of the Homeric mind Plato and also the pre-Platonic philosophers address themselves, demanding that a discourse of 'becoming,' that is of endless doings and of events, be replaced by a disourse of 'being', that is of statements which are in modern jargon 'analytic', are free from time-conditioning.... It was simply a crystallization of the demand that the Greek language and the Greek mind break with the poetic inheritance, the rythmically memorized flow of imagery, and substitute the syntax of scientific discourse,whether the science be moral or physical. (Havelock, 1963:pg. 182)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>Here is the origin of the basic rift between our "two cultures" of science as spatializing and history as temporalizing, between langue and parole, and between two basic kinds of relativities, spatial and temporal. Here we find the classical distinctions between logic and rhetoric and mathematics and poetics. Relating textual relativism with this argument of the effects of the rise of Greek Civilization and the literacy based upon the Greek Alphabet relates to another kind of argument centering upon social traditions and institutions for the transmission and perpetuation of cultural forms and their associated "collective representations." This relates directly to the notion of culture historical "archetypes." Frederich Nietzsche, who also addressed the Homeric Question, distinguishes in <u>The Birth of Tragedy</u> between Dionysian and Appollonian archetypes relating to this early transition period of Greek civilization.</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>It is at this point that philosophical ideas begin to entwine themselves about art, forcing the latter to cling closely to the trunk of dialectic. The Apollonian tendency now appears disguised as logical schematism, just as we found in the case of Euripides a corresponding translation of the Dionysiac affect into a naturalistic one. Socrates, the dialectical hero of the Platonic Drama, shows a close affinity to the Euripidean hero, who is compelled to justify his actions by proof and counter proof, and for that reason is often in danger of forfeiting our tragic compassion. (Frederick Nietzsche, 1956:pg. 88-9)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>This "great divide" between oral and literate may underly the distinctions that have been variously made between "primitive mentality" and Civilized, or variously the concrete and abstract, the prelogical and the rational, the magical and the scientific, the analogical and the causal. These were distinctions that have been mostly brought out in the discourse upon collective representations. It is not irrelevant that the theme of Dionysian and Apollonian archetypes underscored by Nietzsche would be reiterated in Ruth Benedict's classical statement on cultural relativism. These may also be part of the basis for the distinctions brought up by anthropologists in studying cognitive differences between "traditional" and modern societies.</p> <p>Another implication of this transition is the rise of so-called "secondary orality," and a distinction between "basic" and derivative forms of oral discourse. "Secondary Orality" involves the privileging of a certain "literate-style" of discourse amounting to a literal register, over fundamentally "oral" styles of discourse. These involve important functional differences. Literate register is educated speech--standardized, formalized, "grammatically appropriate and corrected," tending to be orally restrictive, shying away from or down-playing or marking vernacular idiomatic expression as unrefined or vulgar, tendign toward the monopolization and mastery of jargon over slang. It commands deliberative, transactive and formal, oratorical registers of speech practice. It also tends to be seen as abstract versus concrete, general versus specific, "nominal" versus "verbal," temporally ordered versus spatially relational, overtly analytical versus analogical, informationally loaded versus evocative. Particular sets of behavioral and emotional repertoires and discourse practices tend to be associated with this speech style; conventionally inscribed paralinguistic phenomena lends "command presence" to its performance and perfection. It is associated with the repression of emotion, with coolness, calculated response that is rationally purposive.</p> <p>More importantly, vitally connected to its proficiency and discursive performance is the marking of authority--of authoritativeness of form and content, voice, intention and effect. The written word is associated with authority--its command entails the command of the knowledge, the information, the understanding writing subsumes. The written word becomes the embodiment of authority--its discourse is the exercise of social power that valorizes authority. Speech is organized as if on paper, argument is laid out in a well-planned pattern of topical hierarchicalization and abstract rationalization.</p> <p>Underlying the authority of the written word, and one of the primary differences between fundamental and refined orality associated with literate register, is the process of the objectification of knowledge, or the subjective/objective dichotomization of experiential human reality. Truth, as something independent of or separable from human experience, takes on a life of its own as it is textually embedded and embodied. It becomes so reified as an objective phenomenon preexisting before its phenomenological experience. Subjective experience becomes secondary, subordinated to the literal and literate objectification of experience. It is taken as the circumstantial evidence of objective truth. But with the social construction of an objective form of reality, there occurs simultaneously the increased potential for the prevarication of reality, the social construction of falsehood and deception. With the objective reifiecation of truth comes the equal but opposite possibility of the hypostatization of experience. Oral discourse does notlack the possibility for deception, the potential for telling a lie, exaggeration, persuasion or delusion. It is just that subjective experience and "objective truth" are less distinctly differentiated. Human reality is less overtly dichotomized, hence discursive validity is tied more immediately to the verification of personal experience, and paradoxically, tot he veridical experience of the imagination. There is not the alienation of truth/falseness fromt he substantion of subjective experience.</p> <p>If oral consciousness manifests in its expressions no strongly marked subject/object relation, then in a very real sense it is improper to speak of oral consciousness as somehow comparable to literate consciousness--literate consciusness is self-consciousness itself. What passes in the name of oral consciousness is the direct mediation between the phsychological unconscious and social consciousness without an intermediary "self-conscious" or "ego", and with a strongly marked sense of difference between subjective self and objective self. The self becomes embodied in the society and society becomes embodied in the self. This is not the same thing as saying that the oral personality or character lacks any strong sense of self from the other, of clear-cut dichotomization between id and superego. Hence there is no sense of the need for ego-developemtn to inter-mediate between id and social conscience. Psychotherapy as a form of verbal discourse would make no sense in oral society--unconscousness is not so strongly repressed but is socially embodied. To heal the self is to heal the social body, and to heal the social body is concomittantly to heal the self.</p> <p>There is then to be no strong, overt marking between irrational and rational behavior. All behavior is equally socially construed in a "non-rational" way. It is a sociall embedded rationality, not individuated by literate, privatized modes of consciousness. There are of course schizophrenia and mental disorder, whatever these phenomena are, but they are not marked in a literate fashion as "irrational" behavior. It is also not to say that the oral individual is incapable of acting or behaving or thinking rationally or independently, but in an oral society such personal rationality would probably not make the same kind of sense as in a highly literate society.</p> <p>We may, in concluding, refer to a kind of "veneer" of a privatized, literate consciousness which overlays and constrains in important ways a basic oral functioning of the mind. A sense of "primitive mentality" in a highly impersonal way, still motivates the most "civilized of mind" to frequently behave in basically non-rational ways. The gulf of mind between the civilized and the native is not as great as we have wanted to believe. Both operate upon the principles of symbolic projection, collective representation, and in-group/out-group consciousness.</p> <p>  Texts bridge the past and the present. Textual "schemata" are patterned elements that, by constraint, carry information of the past in the present. Contextual relations are the meta-logical functions which provide the raison d'etre and sense of purpose to the text. Texts may be part of the context, and texts may present part of their own context. In this way we can speak also of an "intertextuality" of meaning which may be embodied within a text or surround it with signification. Such intertextuality suffers a critical indeterminancy, an "as if-ness" or "suchness." Reinterpreting and reconstructing texts from schemata taken from the past for present purposes always involves us in a reflexive, inescapable mise en abyme of meaning. Representation and presentation become fused together at the same time that they cancel each other out in value. As soon as a text is "collectivized" or achieves "identity" with the present, it no sooner becomes "relativized" by its "difference" from the past.</p> <p>We continuously construct and reconstruct texts as coherence systems by which to mediate and navigate our reality. They are externalized embodiments or maps of the mind which allow us to inter-integrate reality upon many levels. A. F. C. Wallace referred to "mazeway reformulation" as part of our need to reconstruct our schemata to fit the present purposes of our existence. Failure or dysfunction of this process of representation results in maladaptive and schizophrenic pathology, both psychologically and sociologically. Texts then no longer bridge the past and present, no longer mediate our conflicts or serve our needs. According to Ernest Becker, texts are aesthetic in the kind of responses they can engender if they are coherent to the context in which they are culturally and linguistically embedded. "Even the more basic assumptions about how words relate to thoughts and the things of the world need to be more or less shared."</p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>Never fully to understand and constantly to misunderstand are linguistic pathologies that characterize a wide range of phenomena from the strategic understanding of the schizophrenic to the persistent confusion and uneasiness of one who is learning to use a foreign language; all these pathologies subject one to a world in which language and metalanguage are incoherent, where, to take and extreme case, people say 'I love you' and at the same time reveal contradictory messages, even 'I hate you,' in a look or a slap.</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p>Becker sees the aesthetic attributes and responses possible in art as the opposite of the pathology of language--" that is opposites are things which are in the same class but differ in one feature (Hale, 1974). Schizophrenia, foreign language learning, and artistic expression all operate under the same set of linguistic variables, constraints on coherence, invention, intentionality and reference. The difference is that in madness (and in temporary madness of learning a new language or a new text) these constraints are misunderstood and often appear contradictory; whereas in an aesthetic response they are understood as a coherent, integrated whole." (Ernest Becker, "Javanese Shadow Theatre" 1979:pg. 240-1)</p> <p>  The mind carries a repository of textually iconic schemas that are collectively shared. These schemata contain bits and pieces of value and meaning recursively recombinable into an infinite number ofways. Even the semantic atoms of language may be infinitely polysemous--"for each use of a given morpheme, there are a potentially endless array of occasions and contexts in which it could be used. Thus, a definitive account of its absolute meaning is impossible, particularily if one admits poetic, extend or other novel uses." (L. Furbee, 1991:pg. 51) The infinite and relative polysemy of meaning entails that the ground of understanding in our world is ultimately, paradoxically groundless--the possibility of its creation creates both the possibility of its destruction and the possibility of its own impossibility.</p> <p>Socialization tends to ossify, constrain, and make conventional meaning into a finite "state" or set of possibilities. Greater degrees of socialization carry us further away from our own essential beingness in the world, embedding our basic oral consciousness within an ever-growing hierarchy of relational schemata. Just as our nakedness becomes ever more interiorized beneath our clothes, so does our basic orality become ever more interiorized beneath our texts.</p> <p>According to Amin Sweeey in reference to storytelling, textual schemata are to be referred to as "minimal stereotypes" that compose our imagination. They become important upon multiple levels of discourse and are embedded in a cultural tradition consisting of a symbolic repository and reservoir of collective representations. Schemata are symbolic texts that are recalled and refashioned to fit present contexts. Schemata thus are continuously reworked, and become the basis of new schemata</font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2">. </font><font FACE="Times">(Amin Sweeney, <u>A Full Hearing,</u> 1987:pg. 8-9) Storytellers and writers both use a broad range of different kinds of schemata to handle various aspects of composition, and many features of schematic composition may be intrinsic to discourse as a whole. In oral societies these features may be critical to the preservation and transmission of knowledge. According to Sweeney, though the basics of composition are essentially the same in both literate and oral societies, in the print culture schema tend to be more numerous and more "fragmented" and thus there is a greater perception of a need to adjust continuously adjust such schemata to deal with particular contexts. In an oral culture, schematic "chunking" occurs in larger pieces, and their form may be more formulaic and stereotypical to facilitate memorization. Thus the writer and story teller are products of their socity, bound by norms and values, as well as by their own artistic medium and technique.</p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>"He composes in terms of all the other compositions he has read or heard, for art owes more to art than to direct observation of 'nature.' Otherwise, as Gombrich (1969) repeatedly emphasizes, there could be no history of art: the artist has a stock of mental stereotypes, which he adapts to suit his needs. The artist does not actively seek to overcome the natural pull toward the schematic by correcting his schema, his art will tend to return to the minimum stereotype of the conceptual image. He must be able to construct a schema before he can adjust and correct it to fulfill a specific purpose, and he will naturally see the unfamiliar in terms of familiar schemata. (Amin Sweeney, pg. 17-18)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> Sweeney extends this same argument to embrace the scholar who studies the artist or story teller as well--the scholar's own cultural embeddedness contextually defines the limits of his work.</p> <p>If the Great Divide hypothesis is correct, then how can the literate mind ever grasp the naive difference of the non-literate, in terms of the latter not translatable into the rational sanities of the former? We must seek a relativistic, or "weak", rather than a deterministic, version of this difference, allowing us a measure of intertextual free play between the two contraposed realities--to walk and talk simultaneously, antinomiously, in both worlds. Unlike Plato, we cannot simply cast the poet from our rational paradise. </p> </font> <p>  <hr> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">CHAPTER NINE</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">LITERARY RELATIVISM</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">"... Jay Gatsby, Godzilla, Agammenon, John Wayne, and Charlie Chaplin do not and may not appear in the same plot. (Ernest Becker)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>Literary relativism can be seen as an extension, or special case of textual relativism. Whereas textual relativism embraces both oral and written texts, literary relativism focuses upon the problematics of written texts alone, especially how these tend to precipitate an objectified, reified "text-bound" reality. It is an account of the material reification of reality, to the extent that such reification is reproduced by the presence of written texts, and it is an account of the multi-dimensionality of the "text-bound" reality which the writing and reading of texts opens up. The manifold meanings thus created by and within texts, remain bound to the texts. There is fostered over time a "distanciation of surplus meaning" around and about a text, which accretes to a text and which becomes detached from the original significations of the text. Literary relativism becomes apparent in the critical "inter-textuality" which thus builds up around the interpretation of a text. The concretized reification of such surplus meaning tends to relativize the original significance of the text, and to bury it within multiple layers of revisions, translations, and critical interpretations. The original value of the text becomes lost, and replaced by the total value of the reconstructive field built around the text.</p> <p>The history of any text becomes inscribed by its stratigrapy from the moment of its internment within a larger framework of "inter-textuality." It is a gradual burial process in which secondary meanings cover over and obscure primary meanings. Invisible beneath the surface of the present, meanings fuse into a single totality the value of which transcends and comprehends the values of its many elements. The kind of literary context which then comes to surround, relativize and determine the many meanings of a written text is different from the kind of context possible with oral texts. The surplus of meaning is materially embodied within a library. Written texts accrete other written texts, and the value of the central topic of the text becomes encompassed by an entire library of texts, rather than by a single text alone.</p> <p>Each new era witnesses the addition and reinterpretation of new meanings of a text, obscuring and diminishing the original significances even more, while simultaneously creating new meanings and possibilities of textual extension and comprehension. Van Gogh during his lifetime was a poor, starving painter. He may have been a kind of "oral text" which had little social value. Yet he left behind an entire oeuvre of material texts, written and graphic, which came to acrete surplus value in the world. Today, within four generations of his death, we can speak of a multi-million dollar "Van Gogh Industry" built around the surplus value of his orginal texts, as well as thousands of books which purport to explain the "Real Van Gogh" --each additional one adding further insight and more meaning to the total product of his value. Van Gogh, the virtually annonymous suicide, has become now resurrected and apotheosized as a saint of modern expressionist art.</p> <p>We can see a similar process of textual build-up and accretion of value around Karl Marx's original texts. Much more has now been written about Marx and his texts, than by the actual Marx. Sigmund Freud is a similar, striking example, as is perhaps Herman Melville or Charles Darwin.</p> <p>In this regard we can refer to the original literary production of inscribed, graphic texts, and the potential "productivity" of texts thus produced. Literary relativism concerns what happens when text is produced and its productiveness "proven". Not all texts produced prove to be productive--if not they eventually die. We can distinguish in this regard to the difference between "petrified" and "unpetrified" texts. The productive value of a petrified text is more-or-less frozen--it is sterile, it's value fixed, finite in meaning. An unpetrfied text achieves a multiplicity of meanings, and any attempt to render its meaning only yields a greater number of meanings. The distinction between petrified and unpetrified texts is, according to Richard Shweder, a difference in their "Homonymic" value. Petrified texts are homonymic, unpetrified texts are not. Petrified texts are treated as multiple, rather than the meaning which they carry. Each version of a petrified text carries its own, self-contained value that does not affect the values of the other versions. With an unpetrified text, there is only one version, but many values that are interrelated. The values of an unpetrified text are singular but dynamic, those of a petrified one are multiple but static. "There is probably no general standard for judging the relative worth of petrified versus unpetrified texts; both types of texts exist and play their different parts in our way of life. It was once commonplace to argue that for a text to be properly scientific its meaning must be petrified (fixed and unitary), although that view is no longer so commn or well placed...." (Richard Shweder, pg. 350) According to Shweder, an unpetrified "classic" text may become part of a canon of "genius" at the center of a new movement, school or discipline in a field, as these texts "center" themselves within "the global relational structures of meaning." They embody this sense of being centered within themselves that render them relatively productive and unpetrified in the first place.</p> <p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> Nevertheless, up until the event which I wish to mark out and define, structure--or rather the structurality of structure--although it has always been involved, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or referring it to a point of presence, or fixed origin. The function of this center was not only to orient, balance and organize the structure--but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the free-play of the structure. No doubt that by orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of the structure permits the freeplay of its elements inside the total form.'(Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play," pg. 247)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>Productive texts, then, are holistically and synergistically integrated--they are "hypercoherent" and are therefore generative of new meanings. The difference between petrified and unpetrified texts are the difference between, say, a system of ideograms and an alphabet. They are thus partly unpetrified because the relevance of the text has not been cut-off from the present--but their relevance produces itself in the present, thus increasing in total value. Once such a text becomes cut off from the present, it becomes then petrified and its total value lost to the past.</p> <p>Thus, a Marx, Van Gogh or a Freud are more than a textual center, but come to represent a totality of "textual structures" which serve to demarcate the historical horizon of its own "event." Literary relativism results when the extension and reinterpretation of the text is held up as a mirror for its structure and value. With the compilation and reinterpretation of many such texts, a labyrinth of mirrors results which create not only multiple, but infinite meanings of its realities.</p> <p>In a broad, figurative sense, the worldview problem can be regarded as the resulting paradox of a materially inscribed textuality that creates its own meaning, context and structure. Culture can be construed as such a materialized text, coming to represent both language and cognition. In this sense, a world-view creates its own meaning in the world, which, once posited, becomes elaborated and extended through many domains of reality. A world-view is unpetrified in that it comprehends all of reality.</p> <p>Written discourse stands on its own. Unlike conversation, it is neither directly dialogic nor as potentially self-clarifying. A written word thus constitutes its own context. Writing is a way of freezing the moment, and offers a model for the study of culture. Culture exists in context, and contexts may be videotaped or otherwise "written," thus making it possible to study a cultural context like a text.</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>My claim is that action itself, action as meaningful, may become an object of science, without losing its character of meaningfulness, through a kind of objectification similar to the fixation which occurs in writing. By this objectification, action is no longer a transaction to which the discourse of action would still belong. It constitutes a delineated pattern which has to be interpreted according to its inner connections. (Ricoeur, 1975:81, In Furbee, pg. 58-9)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>Paul Ricoeur identifies several paradoxes involved in literary relativism. An interpretation of an inscribed text is not strictly bound by the intentionality of the author. The text creates its own internal meanings, and yet the text cannot therefore be treated as "semantically autonomous," which treatment would lead to the "fallacy of the absolute text" as opposed to the treatment of the author's intentionality as the restrictive and exclusive criteria of the interpretation of the text, referred to as the "fallacy of intentionality."</p> <p>Literary inscription leads not only to the ossification and embedding of texts but to the conventionalization and institutionalization of standard forms of meaning. Within the western tradition of rationalism, these processes are tied to the "Logo-centricity," or the treatment of inscribed texts and the rational ideals they represent, as if absolute and nonrelative reference points in the interpretation of reality. It leads to a predominant "literal-minded" orientation as opposed to a "figurative" or metaphorical orientation. Written words posit a tacit "givenness" of their substantiality. This is a fallacy of "misplaced concretization" obscuring the actual textuality, facticity and historicity of such meanings. When bound to conventionalized forms of inscription, the meaning of texts then become restricted in terms of their polythesis and meanings. Thus the petrification of texts has broader implications in the understanding of the ideology and rational ethics of our own civilization.</p> <p>Literary relativism treates inscribed texts holistically. Such texts tend to create their own center, context and structure, by which the organization of its many parts achieves meaning. It follows that such texts are relative in meaning to and within themselves--they are a system of mirrors turned inwardly, reflecting and resonating images and meanings back upon themselves in constructive interference and amplification. But we should not see the boundaries of texts as fixed and absolute. Texts are often composed of other texts, not only are they normally polysemous, but polythematic as well. Texts therefore also share meanings, overlap and merge with other texts upon their horizon.</p> <p>  The consideration of literary relativism brings to view the problem of the influence of "narrative structure" upon the value of an inscribed text, and upon the "world-view" which such a text constitues. Narrative structure is the conventionalized expectation of the ordering of elements within a text, in a way that leads to the expected outcome of the text, informing its value in a vital, nontrivial way. Narrative structure is also informed by the relative "authoriality" of the text--the relative presence or absence of the authorial voice in its structure and expressive style. It is no coincidence that the casting out of the Poets from the Platonic Paradise, is linked to a Rational, Aristotelian conception of normal narrative structure as a temporally unitary and linearly causal chain of events, constrained by principles of unity of action and character, and leading to some kind of climactic outcome. Events unfold in a single train within a single frame of time and space. It is also linked to the absence of the authorial presence in the expression of reality. Such constraints are held to be rooted in the "intersentential coherence in Indo-European languages (that) is achieved primarily by tense."</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>"Clarity and coherence means to speakers of these languages linear temporal/causal sequencing. Tense is seen as iconic: that is, past, present and future are taken as facts about the world, rather than facts about the language. Tense is not iconic at all--cultures and languages and hence temporal-causal linearity is not the major constraint of textual coherence in all languages. (Ernest Becker, 'Javanese Shadow Theatre" 1976:pg. 218-9)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>In this received model of narrative structure, authorial voice is, like the voice of God, normally hidden from view. It is an impartial voice that does not seem to play favorites in the telling of the story (though such partiality may be incorporated into the structure of the story itself) In this model, we have formal constraints placed upon the relatively unconstrained, "dialectical/analogical" structure of mythology, and we can see in this constraints a remarkable resemblance to the structure of scientific discourse. It is itself a kind of narrative.</p> <p>But logocentricity and the formal constraints of narrative and authoriality are countered by a "theory of iconicity" or the iconic augmentation of ordinary reality, of which textual inscriptions are but partial and imperfect representations that nevertheless "yield more by handling less." These constraints resist the "entropic erosion of normal, presentational experience and "increase the meaning of the universe by capturing it in the network of its abbreviated signs. This effect of saturation and culmination, within the tiny space of the name....is what is meant by iconic augmentation.' (Ricouer, pg. 41) Literary representation of reality is served by the "radical denial of the immediate."</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>"....Constructivism is only the boundary case of a process of augmentation where the apparent denial of reality is the condition for the glorification of the non-figurative essence of things. Iconicity, then, means the revelation of a real more real than ordinary reality."(Ricouer, pg. 42)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>This theory of iconicity--an aesthetic augmentation of reality--gives us the key to a decisive answer to Plato's critique of writing. Inconicity is the re-writing of reality. Writing, in the limited sense of the word, is a particular case of inconicity. The inscription of discourse is the transcription of the world, and transcription is not reduplication, but metamorphoses. Paul Ricouer recognizes the positive aspects of the material mediation of writing "presenting analytical properties: discreteness, finite number, combinatory power."</p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>This generalization of language is complete with the appearance of printing. The visualization of culture begins with the dispossession of the power of the voice in the proximity of mutual presence. Printed texts reach man in solitude, far from the ceremonies that gather the community. Abstract relations, telecommunications in the proper sense of the word, connect the scattered members of an invisible public. Such are the material instruments of the inconicity of writing and the transcription of reality through the external inscription of discourse. (Paul Ricoeur, pg. 42-3)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p>  With the rise of formal constraints in narrative structure, the subjectiveness of authorial voice and vision tends to become lost between the lines. As inscribed texts become buried beneath a context of extended transcription, all such voice tends to become "leveled" to the point that they effectively cancel one another out. When authorial voice is absent from a text, a void is created which is left to be filled in, wittingly or unwittingly, by the voice of the reader, bringing the text back into the subjective, immediate presence of the reader.</p> <p>We are faced with a groundlessness of authoriality when the voice of the author has been absolutely lost to the past. When we have an annonymous artifact, we cannot reconstitute the intentionality of its creator. Such texts speak to us within a strange and eerie silence, in a totally alien voice that we cannot decipher.</p> <p>When we seek to inscribe the reality of others who are alien to us, or even of ourselves as if we we alien, we run up against problematics of a fundamental, insuperable form of anthropological relativity. The shock of the new, of the different, always occassions a threatening sense of disorientation, especially if we must to some extent, in some way, come to terms with such difference, or learn to incorporate it into our own sense of the world. Different people, different cultures, different periods of time, present us with the paradox of having to mix our characters, and our time zones, our John Waynes, Charlie Chaplins, Godzillas, into the same narrative framework. The dilemma of inscribing otherness is especially acute if we have a pretense of being scientific about such inscription, and also a pretense about the exclusive, categorical difference between transcribing facts and inscribing fiction. If even in the physical world it is true that "an observer is always a participant," then how much more true it must be in a world of humanity that is interpenetrated by words. The world of words can no longer be completely disentangled from the words of the world. Not only must we adequately translate between different languages, but we must, in ethnographic predicaments, "describe" complex situations, events and significances, and evaluate our descriptions. In this way, the world of words comes to embody and stand for the words of the world. We must struggle to constrain within the received narrative structure a variety of subjective, phenomenological experiences that may not actually fit such an order. Constraints of normal time and space may have been violated in our experiences, as if in a dream, resulting in our need to superimpose some kind of order upon such experience to "make sense" of it.</p> <p>Authorial voice in such ethnographic inscription suffers from a funny kind of self-alienating ambivalence and critical indeterminacy. It must be subjective absent yet objectively present. The observer must subject her/himself to participation, yet without the subjectivity that would normally be involved. The participant must distantiate her/himself in an objective manner from the locus of action, yet without losing the sense of participatory involvement. The eye of the action must be the panoptic eye, yet at the same time refracted through the native lense.</p> <p>And yet this kind of ethnographic dilemma is an exaggerated form of the kind of dilemma we face in our everyday world in our inscription of texts, through our acts, our words, our deeds, which will become part of a larger historical record. It is an existential dilemma of a sense of grand purpose and design we all must face in our own way. We seek to inscribe daily life in a way that will have a center of balance, a sense of enduring productivity that will only enhance our meaning in life.</p> <p>In a sense, we are always caught between two worlds, as a partial observer and participant in both worlds and yet fully a part of neither. We all suffer a fundamental, existential "liminality" of being between both worlds--the subjective and the objective, the real and the ideal, the private world of the self and the social world of the other. It is a dilemma of a fundamentally dichotomized reality that has perhaps become more acute with the rise of literacy and of print civilization--a gulf that seems only to be mediated through the process of textual inscription.</p> <p>The tension which results from such existential betweenness can either destructively interfere with our lives, or else become the source of the creative construction of meaning in life. Perhaps, from an anthropological standpoint, its source is our own anthropological "world-openness" which has long made humankind an unfinished creature of its own creation, always just on the verge of completion. The recognition of death, suffering, difference, and the sense of becoming that accompanies a prescience or expectation of the future, as well as a sense of the past, are the unavoidable consequences of such "world-openness." Human identity in the world is born of the recognition of such differences in the world.</p> <p>The tragedy of our humanness is that we often forget, and even forget that we have forgotten, our own partiality in the world. We forget the arbitrariness of our meanings, the fact of our own authorship in the reified world of inscription. Sometimes social forces compel us into our forgetfulness, making it even pleasurable and profitable to forget and painful to remember. And in our forgetfulness, we ignore our own ignorance.</p> <p> </p> </font> <p><a NAME="ten"></p> <p>  <hr> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"></font></a><font FACE="Times">CHAPTER TEN</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">EXEGITICAL RELATIVISM</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">"The right of the reader and the right of the text converge in an important struggle that generates the whole dynamic of interpretation. Hermeneutics begins where dialogue ends." (Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, pg. 32)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>The relativity of reading begins where the relativity of writing ends. A text is no sooner inscribed and finished by its author, than it is "reopened" by some reader, whether the author or some other person. "Exegesis" is formally "the exposition, critical analysis, or inerpretation of a word, literary passage, etc., especially of the Bible." (Webster's Dictionary) It is an extension of textual relativism, hence of hermeneutical relativism, to the exegesis of entire textually derived traditions, hence of culture-historical traditions themselves. It may be referred to as "philological relativism". Theoretically, it can be a "principled" form of the application of interpretive theory to the "reading" of entire cultural traditions, involving the critical reading of ethnographic, historiographic, iconographic and epigraphic texts and translations of texts and archival records. Used in the sense of "exegetical relativism" it is the process and problematics presented by the "reading" of any kind of inscribed text.</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>Traditional exegesis followed the framework of interpreting the New Testament as a narrative that paralleled in certain ways the plot of the Old Testament. Exegitical interpretation, as "Kulture geshichte" and as "Kulturewissenschaft" came to assume a formal methodology and style of interpretation, in which cultures were seen as if a wheel with each of its many aspects a spoke radiating from a common, unchanging center, and leading, necessarily by exegesis, back to the center. All manifestations of a cultural tradition, especially its major markings as a distinctive civilization, were regarded as the expression of its central ordering principle. This theory entailed relativistic implications of holism and particularism, unless united within a grand theoretical framework such as the unfolding of the Hegelian "Spirit." Each epoch presents itself as a complete and articulate whole, not only in all its aspects, but in terms of each of its participants and their social life. (Burckhardt, pg. 257)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>The dilemma of this strict exegetical approach in Culture History has been the presumption of a central ordering principle necessary to the writting of a coherent sense of history. "The history of culture as such, the history of all the aspects of life as it was lived in the past, could never be undertaken without some ordering principle, some centre from which the panorama can be surveyed, some hub on which the wheel of Hegel's diagram can be pivoted. Thus the subsequent history of historiography of culture can perhaps best be interpreted as a succession of attempts to salvage the Hegelian assumption without accepting Hegelian metaphysics." (Gombrich, "In Search of Culture History": pg. 25-6)</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>The study of such derivations, metaphors and symbols in language, literature and art provides no doubt convenient points of entry into the study of cultural interactions. But I do not think more should be claimed for this approach than it is likely to yield. By itself, it cannot offer an escape from the basic dilemma caused by the breakdown of the Hegelian tradition, which stems from the chastening insight thAt no culture can be mapped out in its entirety, but no element of this culture can be understood in isolation. It appears as if the cultural historian were thus left without a viable programme... (Gombrich, 1969:pg. 41)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>Formal exegesis was based upon the principle of the "demonstrability of parallels" which were determined by the criteria of proximity, similarity and of inheritance. This method depends upon the critical use of analogy in the interpretation of texts--"like instances demonstrate like underlying principles." "If in this co-operation of the different kinds of interpretation the hermeneutic circle is to be avoided, the restriction of the general sense of the word must not be conjectured from such instances of its use, whose actual connection can be learned only on the basis of correct grammatical interpretation. One must rather seek to establish the usage of every case through analogous cases; the interpretation of every passage of a literary work must be based as much as possible upon parallel passage. (August Boeckh, pg. 66)</p> <p>In this sense, exegitical relativism, as the philology of the word, is equivalent to history itself--"Philology coincides with history in the widest sense of that word; whatever is known is philological. The philologist does not indeed engage in historical research to uncover new materials; he uses what the historian has already discovered..."(John Pritchard, pg. xii, in Boeckh) Culture History, based upon the methodology of philological exegesis, can be thought of as the "etymology of the ideas of History," or the attempt to excoriate the stratigraphic layers of inscription and to trace the historical chains and seriation of signficances which lie buried in texts. If the exeget adds new meaning to old texts, this is considered only incidental to the purported intention of uncovering lost and perhaps original meanings, though the contribution of new or recovered meaning to a text, wittingly or not, results in the iconic augmentation of the reality of the text.</p> <p>It was Hegel who played a central role in the development of Culture History. Hegel posited the "Dialectic" of the unfolding of divine reason--infusing history with the principle of "progress" along the "Great Chain of Being". "Hegel translated this ascent into the terms of logical categories and thus turned the cosmic process into the progression of the divine spirit thinking itself, impelled by the need for resolving contradictions to move to a higher and higher plane of articulation."(Gombrich, 1969: pg. 7)</p> <p>Thus culture history, and exegetical philology upon which it depended, as 'history in the broadest sense,' became nothing more than a form of 'historical descriptivism' parading around as exegitical explanation in the form of Dialectics (Marxism and Materialism included). The dialectics of culture history can be seen as the "working up" and "working out" in an objectivated, reified, textually inscribed form the internal "principles" of the central Dialectic which underlies the presentation and representation of history in the first place, as well as the interpretation of reality. It represents the "formalization" (Hence "institutionalization" in the form of "modes of information") of thediscursive dialectics of the everyday politics and practices into an historical Structure informed by the principles of progress and presence. The relativities of everyday life become progressively transformed through the systematic dialectical resolution of contradiction into a nonrelative Grand Dialectic, which then becomes relativistically contradicted. In such a model, difference ultimately makes no difference, because all difference is but the imperfect expression of identity. Differences everywhere cancel themselves out, in a grand, chaotic self-resolution, leaving only the One and the Same. "Human history, the rise of civlization, is part of this progress, indeed it repeats its essential and inevitable dialectical steps as an assent through the logical categories till the divine at last comes to self-awareness in the mind of Herr Professor Hegel."(Gombrich, pg. 7)</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>And yet, I want to maintain, this rather blasphemous and heretical interpretation is an extension, or possibly a perversion, of the Christian interpretation of providential history. But in the Judaic and in the Christian tradition history was seen as part of the divine plan in which the actions of people and of nations were conceived as manifestations of divine will. (Gombrich, pg. 8)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>We must extend our thesis of exegitical relativism beyond the interpretation of the Bible or of European Culture History, to embrace not only the history of our modern global era, but the spirit of capitalism, the Marxist "mode", and many other orientations which remain rooted, one way or another, to the same Judeo-Chistian/Graeco-Romanic tradition. Furthermore, we must understand the exegitical relativism intrinsic to the contact of different peoples and their cultural orientations, whether it is "Hermes dilemma" of the ethnographer who "renders the foreign familiar, and gives meaning to the meaningless."(Vincent Crapanzano, pg. 51)</p> <p>In this regard, we must not confuse the writing of critical texts with the reading of original texts, a mistake with which Vincent Crapanzano takes Clifford Geertz to task in his "Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight," in which, "despite his phenomenological-hermeneutical pretensions" there is in fact "no understanding of the native from the native's point of view. There is only the constructed understanding of the constructed native's constructed point of view...'(pg. 74) Similar to the authorial voice, we must consider the paradoxes of the privileged point of view of the "reader's eye" in the "reconstruction" of constructed texts--even when a culture is regarded as "an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulder of those to whom they properly belong."(pg. 452-3)</p> <p>There is no exegesis that is not accomplished from some point of view, from some orienting perspective, however implicit. The hypothesis of an ordering principle is the point of entry into textual exegesis, whatever the ontological status of the purported "text." The events of provisional, presented descriptions are subverted and covered over by the "transcending stories in which they are cast. They are sacrificed to their rhetorical function in the literary discourse that is far removed from the indigenous discourse of their occurrence. In the excoriation of the Dialectic, we must come to final terms with the Imperial Gaze in the final delimitation of the reconstruction of constructions of texts of other texts. "All too often, the ethnographer forgets that the native, like Edward in Goethe's Elective Affinities, cannot abide someone reading over his shoulder. If he does not close his book, he will cast his shadow over it. Of course, the ethnographer will also cast his shadow over it...."(Vincent Crapanzano, 1986:pg. 76)</p> <p>In this regard, Roy Wagner refers to the exegitical 'invention of culture' as a process entailing the concommitant 'masking' or obviation of both the original creativity of the people who are the objects of our understanding and of our own dialectic as "'invention' placed 'out of awareness'"; it is dialectic experienced as event, as nature. Reification collectivizes, creates objective identity--difference relativizes, creating subjective awareness. By such dialectics we turn alien culture into 'something arbitrary and questionable, a mere symbolic word play." As such, our reconstructions of others culture historical realities enters into our own "collectivizing/relativizing" dialectic:</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>But since the whole force of human creativity lies in the ability to objectify, to identify symbolic effects as reality (to confuse them with reality, we might say) and "mask" their effects, what we "extend"to these subject cultures along with our conception of reality is our own "masking" of cultural creativity. Culture is recognized, indeed, but at the expense of its creativity. (Roy Wagner, 1981:pg. 144)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>It is to Pierre Foucoult that we must turn to find the best example of exegetical relativism that turns the eye of History upon itself to reveal its own historicity of ideological construction. Foucoult reveals the dialectics underlying the Dialectic, and exposes the nakedness of ideological revision and reconstruction. But even his "modes of information" as the institutionalization of ideas in service of power becomes hooked somewhat upon the horns of exegitical dilemma--the Dialectic of dialectics, so to speak.</p> <p> </p> <p>Reading imposes its own relativistic concerns upon the text. Multiple possible readings open up the paradoxical possibility of the appropriation of meaning of the text for different purposes. The point of view of the reader critically constrains and conditions the meaning of what is read, in such a way that the structure of the inscribed text itself becomes temporally transformed in the mind's eye of the reader. For every reader, there is a different version of the text. And, in this matter, we get the dilemma of the Rashoman effect, of which testimony to accept before any other, however contradictory, if the differences between versions are evidently unmotivated by human interest (if indeed they ever can be) Behind the Rashoman effect lies the power of human motivation to preferentially choose and select from a field of possibilities only those elements which may serve best one's interests.</p> <p>It can be said that the relativity of reading stems from the selectivity of our own perception, as well as from the alteration of the meaning of the words of the text. We not only read texts, but we evaluate and edit texts at the same time that we read them, always within the light (or the shadow) cast by our own interests. In other words, there is no final, or "correct" reading of a text, only many competing versions.</p> <p>But the relativity of reading brings up another set of dilemmas that are not just subsumed by a broader interpretive relativism. Reading is more than interpretation, but it also involves the simultaneous appropriation of meaning, and the "recovery" of meaning from the distanciation which its inscription inevitably involves.</p> <p>Paul Ricouer writes of the hermeneutic dialectic beween writing and reading texts as a problem of distanciation and appropriation. Appropriation is the detachment of the text from its writer, the counterpart of semantic autonomy--it is "to make 'one's own' what is 'alien'." Distanciation arises from the need to make the foreign familiar, and distance becomes a dialectical trait signifying the "struggle between the otherness that transforms all spatial and temporal distance into cultural estrangement."</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>"Distanciation is not a quantitative phenomenon; it is the dynamic counterpart of our need, our interest, and our effort to overcome cultural estrangement. Writing and reading take place in this cultural struggle. Reading is the pharmakon, the "remedy," by which the meaning of the text is "rescued" from the estrangement of distanciation and put in a new proximity, a proximity which suppresses and preserves the cultural distance and includes the otherness within the ownness.</p> <p>This general problematic is deeply rooted both in the history of thought and in our ontological situation. (Paul Ricoeur, 43-4)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>The rise of literacy poses a problematic of an imperative of both writing and reading which is greater than in an oral tradition. Writing and print brings with it both the problematics of textual distanciation of surplus value, but the necessity of overcoming the gulf thus created. Reading is the therapeutic counterpart of the disruption of dialogu that is created by inscription--it restores, or "recuperates," however superficially or falsely, the subject sense of immediacy to the meaning which is otherwise lost between the lines. But even oral cultures, to the extent that they inscribe their tradition in the form of ritual or material artifices, present the dilemmas of the relativity of reading and of the need for the recovery of meaning. Unless a text can be read, it will be lost, remaining only as a silent testament to our own dumb ignorance.</p> <p>It can be said that the relativity of reading tests our "plausibility structures" and undermines the received legitimacy, credibility and authority of our texts. Because reading can transform the relationship between the reader and the read, and thus reorient the relationship between the person, the text and the world, and create new possibilities for being andmeaning, reading can be a political act as much as interpretation, and it can be an act of rebellion as much as an act of conformity. The ability, or inability, to read our texts, is an index of the coherence or lack of coherence that such texts play in our lives. If the reading of a text becomes irrelevant, then the text may be construed as an anachronism of a bygone era.</p> <p>But reading also tends to relativize at the very moment that it recovers meaning, for in the act of appropriation it not only makes familiar what was previously estranged, but it estranges what was previously familiar. Reading ruptures the very fabric it restores, and puts the reader further from the original text, and more inbetween both worlds, than before the reading.</p> <p>It has long been a fallacy to treat the "Western Tradition" as if this were a single, homogeneous, monolithic phenomenon. This, of course, is one of the fundamental presumptions of our critical theory.</p> <p>Similarly, we run a risk of the "fallacy of otherness" and a "aallacy of selfness" in presuming a monolithic character of either the "other" or the "self." Likewise, we we say "The West and the Rest" then we have somewhat conveniently dichotomized all of human history into two separate streams or camps, implicitly deny a tremendous amount of diversity, heterogeneity, plurality and complexity on either side. In our lumping, we might also neglect our treatment of "Hindu Civilization" or "Chinese Civilizaton" or "Aztec Civilization" as if this were a singular kind of phenomenon.</p> <p>The internal and external differences that become somewhat retrojectively and introjectively or projectively obfuscated when we seek to dichotomize the world in such terms, and reify our dichotomies, point up an aspect of our exegitical relativism that deserves attention, especially when we deal with "inscribed traditions" such as Romanticism or Enlightenment, as well as other, more alien genres of literature. Such traditions are not unifocal or monothematic, but a complex and twisted bundle of many threads. It is not so much that different texts on the same subject may produce any number of multiple readings, all equally plausible but that different 'genres" of literature may create different domains of understanding or perspective that constitute fundamentally different and incommensurable ways of seeing and relating to the same thing. They end up carving along fundamentally different, but equivalently plausible, dimensions, the same domains of reality, leading to alternative versions of that reality. Just as we can speak of a broad archipelago of speech, of argots, jargons, dialects, and languages that follow other structural-functional boundaries, we can also speak of a similar island world of literature.</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>The dialectic may also be expressed as that of the tradition as such, understood as the reception of historically transmitted cultural heritages. A tradition raises no philosophical problem as long as we live and dwell within it in the naivete' of the first certainty. Tradition only becomes problematic when this first naivete' is lost. then we hae to retrieve its meaning through and beyond estrangement. Henceforth, the appropriation of the past proceeds along and endless struggle with distanciation. (Paul Ricouer, pg. 43-4)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>Sometimes differently inscribed traditions of literature or art can become the focal meta-themes that serve to define or express the collective identity of a group or a culture, or even of an entire civilization. They may present a particular constellation or configuration of symbolisms which serve to orient, and separate, a people around resonances and reverberations of meaning which are available only to insider's but relatively opaque to its outsiders. The strong emphasis on "ego" and "self" within the American tradition must be set into the background tradition of "rugged Individualism" and the dialectic between the frontier and civilization, between cowboy and indian, between pioneer and "businessman," superman and Tom Sawyer, and between fathers and sons.</p> <p>Such relativism of a traditional form of literature is very evident in Vietnamese civilization. The structure of Vietnamese language lends itself well to word play, double-punning, sexual innuendo, and a sing-song tonality with which speech can pass easily into song and back into poetry. The authocthonous origins of the Vietnamese finds strong and sublime expression in the love of nature and the erotic nature symbolism of its literature and art. The translation of its poetry is thus inherently problematic, with three or four very different versions not uncommon, while the precise meaning even for a native speaker often remain quite elusive. The linguistic facility and virtuosity of Vietnamese language mixes with a kind of romantic/naturalistic value orientation, and a kind of "logic of love" which finds reiteration in folk poetry and songs, in mythology and folklore, as well as in the "higher" traditions of written literature.</p> <p>The Tale of Kieu, or Kim Van Kieu, is a classic statement of the Vietnamese orientation towards life--of romantic devotion and desperation. It was unfortunate that Americans, caught in "saving their freedom" in the recent war, failed to come to terms with either its literature or its sense of cultural life, which is quite unlike any other on earth.</p> <p>From this standpoint we can consider "our" own traditions of Romanticism and Enlightenment, which emerged from the renaissance and reformation periods, as intrinsic to our age of discovery and the dawn of "modern" civilization. Enlightenment depreciated difference in its principle of progressive fulfillment, by the embracing of difference. Romanticism, a reaction to enlightenment idealism, became our first anthropological "celebration of difference" in the glorification of the "noble savage" and the pure, pristine way of life of the "primitive." We can see the winding of twin themes in our own conceptualization and symbolization of our civilization and our tradition. We find the familiar Nietzschian distinction between the Appollonian and the Dionysian, as well as in the affirmation of the Superman. Rational enlightenment was a secularization of Salvation and Christian dogma, while the romantic reaction was an "anthropomophization of natural tendencies"--the celebrated "return to nature."</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>Historically speaking, the problem which I am elaborating is the reformulation of a problem to which the eighteenth century Enlightenment gave its first modern formulation for the sake of classical philology: how to make once more present the culture of antiquity in spite of the intervening cultural distance? German Romanticism gave a dramatic turn to this problem by asking how we can become contemporaneous with past geniuses? More generally, how is one to use the expression of life fixed by writing in order to transfer oneself into a foreign psychic life.... If there is no recapitulation of past cultural heritages in an all encompassing whole delivered from the onesidedness of its partial components, then the historicity of the transmission and reception of these heritages cannot be overcome. Then the dialectic of distanciation and appropriation is the last word in the absence of absolute knowledge. (Paul Ricoeur, pg. 43-44)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>Where romanticism appropriated, enlightenment estranged, and vice versa. But this familiar theme of rationalism versus relativism, of collectivizing versus relativising, of a delight in disorder versus a rage for order, of making the strange familiar and the familiar strange, are not new in our Western dominated world. "Interpretation, philosophically understood, is nothing else than an attempt to make estrangement and distanciation productive. (ibid: pg. 43-44)"</p> <p> <a NAME="eleven"></a></p> </font> <p>  <hr> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">CHAPTER ELEVEN</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">SYMBOLIC-RELIGIOUS RELATIVISM AND RELATIVITY</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>There are other kinds of textualities than those of language and the written word. There are iconographic texts, ideograms and mytho-ritual symbolisms which have a structural ordering and a sense of unspoken, unwritten textuality of cultural life, which is embodied in definite artifacts and in the cultural ordering of values, experience, things, and behavior. Ritual texts that collectively order and orient belief and behavior in the ceremonial reticulation of religious traditions and cultural customs have an ordering and directing force upon human reality and worldview that is largely unconscious and transparent in its effect, appeal and influence, and which if left without, would create a condition of hopeless anomie and irreconcialable sense of suffering and loss in individual's well situated within such symbolic textualities.</p> <p>It is the persuasive and pervasive power of ritual and myth to render "as if normal" any event, experience, feeling or expectation which might otherwise be threatening, harmful, upsetting or "unusual." The critical presence of myth and ritual can bring into the center of the normal range of human experience virtually any kind or quality of phenomena, including such practices as cannibalism, human sacrifice, witch-hunting, community anti-structure, however strange. The critical absense of symbolisms can casue anything however previously familar to become unfamiliar and "estranged" from the "normal" field of human sensitivity and possibility.</p> <p>The presence of myth and ritual helps to frame our everday experiences, providing them with contexts of understanding, interpretation, emotional expression and social response and relationship. Its absence may result in anomie, meaning-loss, disorientation, disordered behavior, and even death. Religion, whether "primitive" or "civilized," provides a great organizing, totalizing force in the daily lives of many people, confering a sense of purpose and a reason for being in the face of uncontrollable events. The lack of any such guiding principle can be the source of much anomie, discomfort and confusion. This is true of any kind of religious orientation, whatever its basic differences and local details.</p> <p>Different people of different culture historical backgrounds, situated within and oriented around different kinds of religious textualities, will perceive, construe and interpret the same kinds of ambiguity of events in daily life in quite different ways. Richard Shweder highlights some of the basic textual contrasts between American and Hindu moral universes of meaning, between context-bound thinking and context-independent thinking, between "right's -based" codes and "duty-based' codes or "role-based" and "individual-based" codes of behavior. "What one culture views as reasonable is not always the same as what is viewed as reasonable in another culture. What is thought to be natural on one side of the Indian Ocean is not always thought to be natural on the other..." (1991:166) Shweder notes that in social construction theory of the analysis of cross-cultural variation, people's perception and description of other's behavior is critically influenced by received preconceptions of the person in relation to social-moral and natural order.</p> <p></font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2">We have assumed that even though each society viewed its own moral code--whether duty-based and role-based or rights-based and individual-based--as 'natural,' there is no logical, prudential or evidential grounds for selecting one type of moral order over the other. Societies, we have implied, are "free" to construct themselves in one way or the other, history being the only constraint. We have also implied that we conceptualize the person the way we do, not because that is the way we intrinsically are, but because that is the kind of conceptualization of the person that is presupposed by our social order and a requisite for its functioning..."(Shweder, 1991:174)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>Such traditional textualities communicate upon two levels; the lexically explicit, conscious and surface level, and the meta-communicative level of the implicit, the contextual and the unconscious. The textualities of such "cultural communications" and historical transmissions effectively intermediate reality upon these levels, bringing them into alignment in a way which renders the world integrated, coherent and consistent in both belief and behavior. To enter into different cultural realities is to enter into a strange mazeway of meaning and value in which one's own language, textualities and coordinates are no longer of much assistance.</p> <p>Emblems, icons and ritual-symbolic practices form a richly textured background against which people configure their cultural significances and daily meanings in ways which come to acquire the efficacy and force of natural feeling and reflex.</p> <p>There is a sense that worldview itself, as it is embodied in symbolic representations and transmitted from generation to generation, forms the defining basis for the expression and determinations of language, culture and cognition. It is the cultural historical ground that comes always before and after the critical moment of communicative consciousness. It has its own symbolic language.</p> <p>The language of religion that expresses and motivates the unconscious is necessarily a language of symbolism--"...for only symbols can express the unconscious. The real of unconscious is inexpressible and only a symbol tries to express what is inexpressible." (S.K. Singh, 69). Symbolism is the medium of direct expression of religion.</p> <p>Religious symbolism has several general characteristics and, as the language of religions, performs several basic functions. Symbols point to something beyond themselves that can only be indrectly grasped via symbolisms. Symbolisms participate in the reality that they represent. Symbols are conventional and are a social production of history and culture. They are in this sense relatively non-arbitrary. They simple cannot be produced by will, though they ultimately are a consequence of arbitary human production. Thus as individually nonarbitary, their origin can be easily reified and disguised "as if natural." As such symbolisms tend to be historically particular to the partical context of their provenience. They cannot be substituted ad hoc by alternate symbolisms without some sense of disruption or displacement occuring.</p> <p>Symbols are born of the social unconscious, and their principle function is in the expressive service of the unconscious--"This implies that in the moment in which this inner situation of the human group to a symbol has ceased to exist, the symbol dies..."(Singh, pg. 73)</p> <p>Symbols open up different dimensions of reality as well as within ourselves--as we open up within ourelves, we become more open to reality. "Every symbol opens up a level of reality for which non-symbolic speaking is inadequate." Each symbolism in this regard is unique, creating dimensions of reality that are available to our experience in no other way. Symbols have a tremendous integrating and distintegrating power. They can be used therapeutically and nihilistically. Symbols function to call up a whole cultural complex of beliefs, feelings, attitudes and orientations--in short to express worldview and to reveal what remains otherwise hidden. "Symbols unveil the depth dimension of reality. This dimension of reality is the ground of every other dimension and every other depth. This is the fundamental level, the level below all other levels, the level of being itself, or the ultimate power of being." (Singh, 75).</p> <p>The destructive aspect of symbolism is found in their reification, when they come to replace the thing that they stand for as the sacred reality unto itself. "The moment they do not negate themselves in their tendency to usurp the ultimate, they become idols, and this is the destructive aspect of religious symbols." Symbols link the worshipper and the worshipped into a single symbolic unity. Symbols have an evocative and expressive function--they carry and produce emotive meaning as well as cognitive orientation. Symbols are loaded with faith-value, with meanings which language alone cannot adequately express and which nonetheless are pregnant with significance and value. As such they may be shorthand for complex notions and world-views. The uniqueness of symbols suggests their special significance--they are unique because they represent a unique reality, "and there lies their power and truth."</p> <p>Virtually everything that is humanly meaningful can be considered as endowed with a symbolic structure. Symbols are the characteristic way by which we comprehend and understand meaning. They are "things" that shape our feelings, our sensibilities, and our beliefs and views of the world. Symbolic relativity is a function of the capacity of symbols to cohere into larger symbol systems, and for these symbol systems to create the illusion of a collectivizing, comprehensive unity of experience of the world. It is a function of a unitary "worldview" that defines and orders all relations within the world, including the place of the self and society within it, and for alternate symbol systems to compete and displace one another, to relativize and disrupt this sense of order.</p> <p>Symbols and the meaning systems they form perform the functions of both mediating reality and of integrating the disparate parts of reality in order that it may have a sense of overall coherence and order. The theory of the social construction of reality posits a "secondary" functional role for symbol systems in the secondary reinforcement and legitimation of the primary constructions of humankind, with the consequence of "reifying" these constructions that they seem as if natural rather than artificial. The mediative/integrative function of symbol systems has specifically the role of resolving "marginal episodes"--the occurrence of death which relativizes the symbolic universality of the normal order and threatens it with otherwise unresolvable questions. The power of symbol systems is in the capacity for the symbolic unification of experience, rendering meaning of universal significance that is transcendent of all differences. Symbol systems are also regularly employed in the function of disambiguating reality when alternative, relativizing symbol systems interfere in normal social process--nihilation or rehabilitation, assimilation or acculturation of alternative symbol systems helps smooth the wrinkles of the social fabric in the creation of unity.</p> <p>Symbols deal with the infinite and the ultimate, and as such transcend the finite and the everyday--no part of the finite universe can be a referent of a religious symbol. Symbols are therefore both metanymical and metaphorical--their paradox is that though they are finite and limited, they are a part of the infinite and are the media standing for the ultimate. Symbols resolve their own paradox through their transparency, which allow us to see through them to the infinity beyond, and their self-negation--in their finiteness they deconstruct their own metanymical function, making it impossible for them to usurp what they stand for. The symbol thus mediates two levels of reality--that of the ultimate and the everyday, or what are called the transcendent and the immanent, respectively.</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>"...In reality the transcendent and the immanent are not that far apart, as polytheistic relativists (and mystics, I am told) come to know...the fact that there is no one uniform reality (God, foundation, truth) does not mean that there are no realities (gods, foundations, truths) at all. (Shweder)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>The consequence of this function of symbol systems is to both reify the fact of the constructive process, and to render "transparent" or invisible the fact of the symbolic mediation process itself, such that people who believe and are caught up within such systems are objectively unaware of its "facticity."</p> <p>A symbol is characterized by its authenticity--of both its transparency and mediating function and its self-negation and metanymical aspect. A symbol becomes inauthentic and destructive when it ceases to stand for what lies beyond it--when it becomes opaque and self-affirming and its metanymical function takes over. This is the point at which symbols cease their religous function and take on an intentional and ideological role in reference to and reinforcement of realities upon which they are based.</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>If we are not inside the religious situation, the language used in reference to it will be certainly very puzzling. Unless we are involved in the religious situation and are in know of the referent to it, the religious language will hardly be understandable to us....(Singh, 72-3)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>From a social constructivist standpoint, symbolic processes signify reality other than those of everyday experience. They serve a legitimating function of social order, integrating all regions of meaning and encompassing the social order in its totality. This removes symbolic experience from the experiential, pragmatic sphere of everyday life as something transcendent. The symbolic universe becomes the matrix of all socially objectivated and subjective realities of the individual. It allows the integration of the individual biography, of marginal situations of death and separation and of the whole social order and its history within a single integrative framework.</p> <p>It not only orders individual biography, finding a place for marginal realities, everyday discrepancies, and even death, it also orders all of social history as well into a collective series of events in terms of past, present and future."Thus the symbolic universe links men with their predecessors and their successors in a meaningful totality, bestowing meaning upon the individual's death. All the members of a society can now conceive of themselves as belonging to a meaningful universe, which was there before they were born and will be there after they die. The empirical community is transposed onto a cosmic plane and made majestically independent of the vicissitudes of individual existence." (Berger and Luckman, 1967:103). This ordering function of symbolic universes is "nomic."</p> <p>If symbolic universes order all of history and social reality, they also have their own social history. "If one is to understand their meaning, one has to understand the history of their production. This is all the more important because these products of human consciousness, by their very nature, present themselves as full-blown and inevitable totalities." (ibid, 103)</p> <p>Symbolic universes become, in the process of their historical, self-fulfilling legitimation, "naturalized" as if inevitable aspects of reality. Alternative symbolic universes pose a threat to the naturalized order--they pose a problem of power--because they present the possibility of the symbolic universe as something less than inevitable and naturally necessary. They become "collectivized." Symbolic universes entail conceptual machineries of their maintenance that systematize cognitive and normative legitimations. "Thus, there is usually a continuity between the explanatory and exhortatory schemes...The relationship between the cognitive and normative conceptualization...is empirically fluid; normative conceptualizations always imply certain cognitive presuppositions." (ibid; 109)</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>The origins of the symbolic universe have their roots in the constitution of man--Human existence is, <u>ab initio</u>, an ongoing externalization. As man externalizes himself, he constructs the world into which he externalizes himself. In the process of externalization, he projects his own meanings into reality. Symbolic universes, which proclaim that all reality is humanly meaningful and call upon the entire cosmos to signify the validity of human existence, constitute the farthest reaches of his projection. (ibid.; 104)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>The cultural function of symbol systems is referred to as "collectivization" of reality as a unified, shared, monolithic and universal experience. The presence or interference of alternative symbolic systems from different cultural realities has the effect of relativizing the symbolic reality and undermining its principle function of relativization. Relativization and collectivization of symbolic systems assures that two or more symbol systems cannot occupy the same place unless one displaces the other, or unless one or both undergo a radical tranformation, a "mazeway reformulation," that entails the acculturative assimilation of the two systems into a new synthesis. What occurs with this relativization and collectivization function is a symbolic dialectic which is very fundamental to many symbolic religious movements, and which can be considered to be the functional process underlying and forming the foundation of the Hegelian dialectic that was central to culture historical studies.</p> <p>Collectivization of symbol systems and the relativization concomittant with contact with other, alternate symbolic realities, constitutes a process of making the strange familiar and the familiar strange which underlies the dialectic of cultural anthropology and becomes the crux of the problem of intercultural translation and interpretation. It constitutes the basis for a form of cultural relativism that is rooted in the integrative holism of cultural unities that are defined principally in terms of their symbol systems.</p> <p>All textualities of human reality become posited int he symbolic relativity of worldview as the basis from which language, culture and cognition is activated, produced and actualized. In a sense, all textualities become symbolic components of worldview. If texts, whatever their form, do not enter into and function in this symbolic manner, then they become discarded. They cease to exist as significant devices of cultural transmission.</p> <p>The earth is littered with such dead, meaningless texts whose job it has been the archaeologist's and culture historian's to recover lost meanings and values and reconstruct the lost order of previous or other worlds. It is not enough that we must understand the history of textual realities and the social context of their meaning and function. We must participate in that history in some way, becoming a part of it such that our experience of its symbolic totalization is a possibility. To the extent that we participate in that history, we reproduce it and contribute to its culture historical reconstruction.</p> <p>There is a sense that where linguistic relativism begins with the worldview problem as its point of departure, in dealing with language as a presentational, on-going phenomena, there is a corresponding sense that hermeneutical relativism in general ends with the World-View problem as the basis of its own textual relativisms.</p> <p>Again it is worth speculating that there are two levels, or two "worlds." The linguistic and the meta-communicative, or "textual," and that relativism and its paradoxes arise from the problematics of integrating these into a single coherent unity. There are possibly two different, contraposed "modalities of being' from different "modes of consciousness" and ways of relating to reality. There is a significant distinction made between the shaman and the priest in their different approaches to sacredness--the former embodies the sacre, the latter represents it in disembodied, textual forms. "Individual's may acquire shamanistic or priestly sacred selves in terms of how they use the symbols of the sacred other. " (Pandian, 1991: 90).</p> <p> </p> <p>The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis centers arund what has been referred to as the "World view Problem." Linguistic relativity and determinism are alternative ways of formulating this problem. The Worldview Problem is, briefly, "the whole question of the relationship of language to culture and to thought." (Eastman, p.76). The Worldview problem, most generally, concerns the precise nature of the interrelationships between three analytically distinctive aspects of human reality--language, culture and cognition. We may model this as the vertices of an equilateral triangle, and address the question of the nature of the interrelationships between each of the three variables--are they strongly interdependent, causally determinative and if so, then is the determination one way or multiple. If they are not strongly determinative relationships, then are they possibly "correlated" and weakly conditioned by one another, perhaps indirectly through intervening but unknown variables.</p> <p>A strongly deterministic relationship between the three key variables would represent a tight "center" or focus of realty for a cultural grouping. A set of weaker relationships would make for a wider, looser boundary. The implications are that in a stronger interrelationship, cultural boundaries are essentially unpasable, and each cultural grouping would have its own unique focal point or orientation that functions like a cultural blackhole. On the other hand, if there is a weak interrelationship, the boundary would be more open, possibly overlapping with other boundaries, and would become more of a matter of relative distance and difference from the center than of "inside/outside." The closer to the cultural center one goes the stronger the interrelationships and the more well-defined and stable its distinctive elements. Other possibilities include the lack of any clear cut relationship between these variables, or alternatively, the functional intermediation of indirect, unknown variables (symbolisms) between them, in which case only indirect correlation can be empirically demonstrated, and symbol systems, as functional mediators between linguistic, cultural and cognitive systems, then come to play a central part in the articulation of cultural reality.</p> <p>There is much to offer in the form of empirical circumstantial evidence for this final case as the most plausible. If this is the case, we can see the basic dependency of the integration of human reality upon the symbol, and how the disorientation and dysfunction of the symbol as a mediative device will lead to different cognitive, linguistic and cultural consequences.</p> <p>The paradox of the inherent holistic untranslatability of one symbol system in terms of another and the possibility of intertranslation by the substitution or displacement of symbols in the functional mediation of worldview, a process that occurs in acculturative assimilation of such systems, can be seen in terms of the central importance that the symbol plays as an integrative device of worldview.</p> <p>In any case, the connections between language, culture and cognition in the formulation of the worldview problem may be from a relativistic standpoint, complex and multiply determined. There may be in fact no straightforward causal relationship between any of the three sets of variables, and the exact nature of these interrelationships may ultimately be undeterminable except in terms of symbol systems. It also suggests that there may occur a symbolic dialectic between language, culture and cognition such that the relationships between any two sets of variables may be indirectly expressed in terms of the third set of variables. There may in fact few if any sharp boundaries between one kind of variable and another.</p> <p>The symbolic duality of patterning which may underlie and complicate the world-view problem. Meaning may cohere at multiple levels in world-view, expressible in alternative forms. To understand what language, culture and cognition may represent as a holistic patterning cannot be had by simple analytical reduction into its separate variables.</p> <p>From this standpoint, what language is for one person or culture or frame of mind might be something quite different from what it is for another. The Worldview Problem as a definitive problem with a single correct solution evaporates, but becomes instead a kind of relativistic paradox that constitutes the horizon of our cultural preunderstandings and definitions of knowledge and view of the world.</p> <p>An alternative way of modeling these interrelationships between culture, cognition and language might be in terms of a more complex dialectic in which the value of any one set of variables becomes expressible or reducible in terms of the relationship of symbolic intermediation of the dialectics occuring between the other two sets of variables. A center exists, no so much as something in and of itself, but as a relative center defined by its position between the three different sets of variables. It can be said to be a coincidental or relational center.</p> <p>In this model, each set of variables retains its own respective analytical "center" of origin around which its "sphere of influence" emanates, thus each set of variables represents its own system as something separate but interrelated with the others, as well as with the rest of the world. But each defines its relation to the whole, to the particular worldview and the Worldview problem in general, primarily i terms of its dialectic with the other set of variables.</p> <p>What is suggested in this model is that the worldview problem does not exist a priori as such until and unless the three sets of variables, culture, cognition and language, enter into some kind of dialectical interrelationship with one another and create a common symbolic "center" about which a "worldview" can be thus articulated, organized and made coherent and functionally available to human awareness. To define this problem in another way, we may say that symbolisms minimally contain cultural, cognitive and linguistic elements in order to be functionally effective in the contruction of worldview--that symbolisms are not any specific "thing" so much as they are a process of the dialectic between these variables.</p> <p>The worldview problem does not therefore exist in the world in its own right, except as a synergistic, epiphenomenal synthesis of its primary variables within a complex symbolic dialectic, and that any worldview problem must always have cognitive, cultural and linguistic aspects, but possesses no single set of variables exclusively of the others.</p> <p>What may also be suggested in such a model is that the degree of variation tolerable in terms of the dialectic is relatively wide without requiring much of a focal shift of the "core" set of symbolic interrelationships between the variables. This also suggests a rather complex relationship between surface structure that is dialectical and deeper structure, and between what becomes explicit and manifest and what remains latent and implicit. What may be directly inferred or implied in the dialectic in terms of its antithesis, may indirectly imply a second level of "meta-significances" about the set of variables which contrapose the particular dialectic in the larger worldview framework.</p> <p>A three dimensional matrix describing all the possiblities between culture, cognition and language as either completely determinative or as only relative is an alternative form of relationship. The existence and alternative direction of determination of the linkages between each of the cells of the matrix would express the causal and correlational structure of the worldview problem.</p> <p>The hypothesis of cultural cognition is that different cultural orientations may produce different cognitive orientations, regardless of the function of language, and that cognitive differences may become reflected in different cultural patternings between people. Culture may predetermine some of our categories, cognitively and even perceptually, and the way we go about experientially segmenting the world in significant ways may become represented and predeterminative of the way we go about constructing cultural realities. Cultural cognition is summarized in Richard Shweder's elaboration of the notion of cultural psychology. "The basic idea of cultural psychology is that, on the one hand, no sociocultural environment exists or has identity independently of the way human beings seize meanings and resources from it, while, on the other hand, every human being's subjectivity and mentallife are altered through the process of seizing meanings and resources from some sociocultural environment and using them. (Shweder, 74-5)</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>Cultural psychology is the study of the way cultural traditions and social practices regulate, express and transform the human psyche, resulting less in psychic unity for humankind than in ethnic divergences in mind, self and emotion. Cultural psychology is the study of the ways subject and object, self and other, psyche and culture, person and context, figure and ground, practitioner and practice, live together, require each other, and dynamically, dialectically, and jointly make each other up.</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>The value of a cultural cognition persepctive is that it gives a sense of depth and dimensionality to the problems of linguistical and symbolic relativism, allowing us to frame our understanding of the worldview problem in another way than an "either/or" hypothesis, and to understand the complex patterning of the symbolic dialectics that may be involved in worldview.</p> <p>By controlling for, hypothetically omitting or accounting for the role of language in the cultural mediation of experience, it is possible to reformulate the problem of linguistic relativism in alternate ways than that provided in the straightforward linguistic relativity hypothesis. We can see that both culture and cognition are as much paralinguistic and "extra-linguistic" phenomena as they are linguistically encoded and interpreted, and this allows us to redefine what we mean by "language" in a more inclusive and general sense to account for important nonlinguistic and symbolic phenomena.</p> <p>The study of cultural cognition has borrowed heavily from formal linguistic and structural analysis, tending to treat culturally circumscribed domains of knowledge as if these are coherent sign systems. It led to the study of the concept of "cultural grammars." Culture in this regard is treated as "systems of knowledge"--sets of components based upon internalized knowledge and united thematically. This ethno-methodological approach, known as "ethnoscience," "ethnographic semantics" or as the "New Ethnography," borrowed the ideational and mentalistic conceptioning of sign systems and the "ideal of generative models of language" from linguistics.</p> <p>Overt, culture-specific categories were to be modeled semiotically in a way similar to t he structural analysis of languages, in terms of distinctive componential features, to yeild a common grammar, a "structural model of a domain" that would "generatively" predict native behavior. This accepted a degree of linguistic/structural relativism as sign systems internally, holistically coherent, and as culturally distinctive.</p> <p>Semiotics, as the study of "language-as-culture" and linguistic relativism, as the study of "language-is-culture" merged into what has become known as "cognitive anthropology" which focused upon the ideational construction of culture in terms of "basic terms" and various alternative cognitive models, or "templates" for symbolic cultural construction, analysis and understanding, and as an introduction to the importance of context and "con-text" as well as the resulting pragmatics of sign-systems in situ. Non-taxonomic, typological models, prototypes, fuzzy-sets, frames, schemas and semantic nets were devised to help model the variability between different cultural texts.</p> <p>The model of ethno-semantic approaches to cultural cognition were based upon the following four relativistic premises (Keesing: 1972)</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>1. Culture is a conceptual code (like language).</p> <p>2. Every cultural code has it's own distinctive, idiosyncratic and emic categorizations. (Boas' particularism).</p> <p>3. The emic categories of each cultural code are discoverable by algorithm. (structuralism)</p> <p>4. The discovered categories correspond to native (deep) knowledge.</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>These premises were confounded by the paradoxes of accounting for the context of the speech event. Context constrains cultural knowledge in certain ways that make problematic the preceding premises:</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>1. The individual is the locus of linguistic and cultural knowledge.</p> <p>2. Culturally appropriate behavior can be accounted for solely by use of a set of finite rules.</p> <p>3. Meaning is the sume of the constiuent parts that make up the message.</p> <p>  4. The context of linguistic and cultural elicitation is equivalent to naturally occuring linguistic and cultural usage. (Furbee.)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>The former lexical, semiotic approaches and contextual approaches accounting for the nature of context in cognitive anthropology have been united by relativistic formulations of metaphor and metonymic (Friedrich, 1986) and the distinction between referential/indexical forms in language in accounting for individually relative variation in "consciousness of linguistic categories and linguistic forms" and which can be used to account "formally for the interrelationship of language structure, function and ideology. (Silverstein, 1981). In this, the study of linguistic contextuality (language in context) merges with the study of "language-as-culture." "Since language is uniquely reflexive in that it is used to speak about itself; that characteristic is seen to have great potential for studying and understanding how speech functions as a social action, how meaning (and potentially reality) is created in social interaction."</p> <p>These perspectives have come to be formulated in the notion of "cultural models" at the bottom of the Worldview problem and interconnecting the variables between language and cognition. Cultural models provide an understanding of how cultural knowledge, seemingly both natural and socially constructed, is organized and shared. "Cultural models are presupposed, taken-for-granted models of the world that are widely shared (although not necessarily to the exclusion of other, alternative models) by the members of a society and that play an enormous role in their understanding of that world and their behavior in it. (Quinn and Holland, Culture and Cognition, 1987: 4)</p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>The prototypical scenarios unfolded in the simplified worlds of cultural models, the nestedness of these presupposed models one within another, and the applicability of certain of these models to multiple domains all go far to explain how individuals can learn culture and communicate it to others, so that many come to share the same understandings (Quinn & Holland, <u>Cultural Models in Language & Thought</u>, 1987: 34-5)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>Textuality in particular, and the interpretation of the word in general, is determinative or bound up with the variables of cognition, culture and language with the worldview problem. A relativistic orientation subscribes to some degree of correlational interdependency between texts, words and thoughts and cultural patternings of behavior, but not necessarily an overdetermined or completely underdetermined set of interrelationships.</p> <p>Just as the problem of linguistic relativity is dichotomized between strong and weak forms, and is reflective of a parallel dichotomy of the cultural relativity thesis between a wealkly relativistic anda stronger version of cultural determinism, so too does the notion of interpretive/textual relativism fall along a "chaos-to order" continuum of linguistical relativity which is reflective of a similar dichotomy found in structural functional versions of social relativism. This continuum of structural relativity of meaning and texts can be set up along the lines of "arbitrary-conventiaonal" polarities of the symbol as text, and of "context -bound" to "context-independence" (abstract) meanings, or a continuum of "relativity and determinancy":</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>If one accepts that one can study a single cultural tradition carefully by examining texts in which language and culture merge, it remains to be seen if science can be rehabilitated as a method for linguistic anthropology, or if universals of human language and culture are attainable. Just as there are stronger and weaker versions of the Whorfian hypothesis that drive various approaches in scientifically oriented semiotic studies, there are corresponding strong and weak versions of indeterminancy that motivate different interpretivist approaches....(Furbee: 64-5)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>Analysis of social structure has tended to deemphasize or claim as secondary the dialectical role of religion and religious ideology in the articulation and patterning of human history, in part because of the attempt to dissociate such analysis from any implicit ideological importation of religious beliefs and values into the analysis. The claim to scientificity is made at the sacrifice of the nonsecular, sacred and the spiritual. The problematics and paradox of religion is that it puts us upon the horns of a dilemma of belief and behavior that makes it difficult to treat its intrinsic form of understanding in any objective or open manner. We are led either to its denial or to its own ideological self-fulfillment, yet we cannot ever escape its existential and ideological influence, and the understanding of this influence, in either our worldview or in our understanding of worldview in general or of different people's alternate worldviews. This influence of religion upon our collective representations and ideological systems of belief and value constitute the basis for a kind of pervasive, paradoxical "religious relativism."</p> <p>It goes without saying that Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Jains, and Animists construe a world fundamental different in orientation from one another, and these differences of religious orientation are fundamental and irreconciable in many ways. Spirits are as real to animists of Southeaast Asia as Allah is to any devote Muslim. Love that guides the Christian to holly war is not the same as the pervasive and central sense of duty or "dharma" that led Krishna to battle.</p> <p>A case in point of religious relativism is demonstrated by religious "revitalization" and millenarian movements in general, religious syncretisms and the fundamental doctrinal clash of alien religious worldviews. Of orthodoxies, heterodoxies, heresies and paganisms, as religion as a general, undifferential and unspecialized "universalizing symbolic system of legitimation" of the prevailing social and normative order, compared to more highly differentiated and specialized systems of knowledge and belief which tend to be nonreligious and secular in orientation, n terms of the resolution of difference and contradiction within religious frameworks, the religious amelioration of states of marginality, rehabilitation and nihilation, etc.</p> <p>From the viewpoint of religious relativism, it is difficult to view any recent religious movment as wholly separate from the larger exogenous influence of Western religioius values, eschatologies and theodices, or as emergent heterodoxies or antithesis in relation to some predominant orthodoxy. It is without doubt that where ever the major world religious traditions firmly established themselves, whether Buddhism or Islam or Judaism, such doctrines had similar consequences and reverberations upon local world views and traditions, tending towards internal sectarianism and division and external reaction in the form of millenarian or revitalization movements. Very few millenarian movements can be traced which do not have some symbolic influence from the chiliastic eschatology of Christianity.</p> <p>What is apparent in the study of such religious movements is that their symbolisms do not exist in a symbolic vacuum, arising spontaneously from nothing, but were enmeshed in a larger context of alternate religious symbol systems. Religious systems exist in a dynamic state. Comaratively minor influences can lead to cataclysmic and dramatic reverberations and changes in a religious system. Such movements are not only religious, but more generally ideological in foundation. Ideologies can be considered as any "closed, self-contained symbolic systems of conceptioning and belief" which have a cybernetic function of mediating reality in a universalizing symbolic manner. Changing historical contexts and the clash of different ideas may lead to the "mazeway reformulation" when previous schemata and codification of reality are no longer adaptive to changing circumstances, and alternative symbolisms emerge upon the edges of the order. This form of process is regarded as basic to scientific, political, social and religious revolutions, and will be considered in greater detail for its implications in the penultimate chapter.</p> <p>In such instances, which have been historically numerous and quite variable, general religious codifications of reality can be seen as enduring symbolic structures fundamental to the worldview of a group, a culture or a civilization. Such basic codifications symbolically incorporate both cognitive, linguistic and cultural value elements, and tend to be pervasive and long lasting. They tend to be inherently conservative, though they can also be quite centripedal in accreting and assimilating alien symbolisms. Though they may undergo numerous modifications, additions, and transformations, many of the mythical elements and meta-themes remain unaltered or recurrent--tying the remote past together to the immediate present.</p> <p>In one sense, such codifications function symbolically to provide the necessary collective illusions for ideological unity, consensus and concerted enactment. These basic mythical-religious codifications of reality have a powerful influence in the "self-fulfilling" prophecy of ideological hsitory as being "history in the making," whether it is in terms of the transmission of values, worldview and beliefs, as well as inherent problems and paradoxes from one generation to the next, or whether it becomes a kind of "butterfly effect" in which relatively minor beliefs or doctrines can eventuate in major climactic episodes in the formation of new sects or religions. We acquire through ritual behavior and mythical belief the potentiality for turning ourselves into what we believe ourselves to be, whether negatively or positively, and for making the world into the way we believe it ought to be, whether intentionally or otherwise.</p> <p>In a sense, the religious circle of a basic worldview constitutes the ultimate historical horizon of our understanding of reality, and always encompasses and orients in critical ways our more immediate and local "hermeneutic circles"and "ideological illusions" in the production and enactment of cultural meanings in the world.</p> <p>It is a circle from which we cannot fundamentally escape, but which we can only enlarge or render more open and inclusive. In this sense the issue of "nativism" and the pristine, relatively unadulterated "naivete'" of native identity is critical to the understanding of the encompassin symbolic influence of religion in our lives. By means of the particular history of our place of birth, our ethnic identity and natural citizenship, through the primary acquisition of our basic langauge and encultration of basic values and beliefs, we gain our unique and distinctive identity in the world which constitutes the hermeneutic base-line of our awareness and development in relation to the world.</p> <p>We then come to encounter difference and the possibilities of otherness int he world which we must symbolically resolve on a religious level--in the process of meeting the world we become estranged from our starting point, "alienated" from our original symbolic "center." The greater this effect of fundamental religious alienation and estrangement of our being, the greateris the consequent need to overcome and render productive this estrangement int he "refamiliarization" of our worldview. We acquire more complexly differentiated secondary identity as we become part of a larger and more diverse world. But always this secondary identification, internaliztion, and conversion, is never complete or as "natural" as our primary orientation. It is always secondary, derivative and partially dependent upon our native primary orientations and values that were rooted in the contexts of our birth and early development.</p> <p>According to A. F. C. Wallace, nativism is technically speaking not a social movement but a widespread and deeply embedded attitude of rejection of foreign people and beliefs. "All of these beliefs are pervasive "myth-dreams" (Burridge 1960), which suffuse a society or culture area over considerable periods of time; but although the code of a movement may incorporate such a myth-dream, the myth-dream, as well as the general social policy, of nativism, millenial expectation, revivalistic nostalgia, etc., does not in itself constitute a movement." (Anthony F. C. Wallace, 1972:75)</p> <p>  From the standpoint of religious relativism, it is never possible to clearly separate the problematics of "Worldview" from the problems of the world. The two are fused together both in the reproduction, creation and practices that make and transform our world. From both a philosophical and a practical standpoint, this fusion of world with worldview that is accomplished symbolically and ideologically, and the paradox of religious relativism that such fusion entails, always consists of a complex dialectic that has inextricable cognitive, linguistic and cultural components, and that always becomes an ideological and political problem of power in the world. The power of correct "truth," to render the world in the perspective of a single worldview, is always fundamentally a problem of promotion of its orientation by means of conversion, persuasion or annihilation of alternate realities--the "righteous" conquest of the world.</p> <p>Religious relativism, cast in a linguistic framework, must be seen in the many entanglements of langauge and power, in the capacity for distortion, propagandistic persuasion, illusion, delusion and deliberate deceit, and in the many functional uses of language. Whatever its design and purpose, language has the power to convince and therefore to control those who believe in the reality of its constructions. "To control truth is to control reality, and to control language is to control truth...And how many souls be swayed except through thought that seeks the shape of language?" (John S. Nelson, 1989:25)</p> <p>The problem of nativism in the paradox of religious relativities and ideological realities becomes the dilemma and danger of nihilism in the appropriation and alienation of truth in the distortion of realities. Nativism carries at its heart the vital lie of all mythos of symbolic understanding that requires a blind leap of faith in its existential affirmation. The resolution of contradiction inherent in such dilemmas of deception are inherent to dialectical mechanics of nihilation of difference, whether it involves redefining a problem so that it theoretically no longer exists except in name only or by rationalizing it away as a non-problem. To the extent that such nativism and "vitalism" of our symbolic world underlies problems of ethnocentric prejudice, attachments and chauvinistic closed-mindedness and intolerance, it affects us as a basic part of our everyday experience. We cannot easily escape its hold upon our experience, its rootedness in our common sense, or its influence upon our constructions of realities. Religious biases and commitments remain implicit to the background of all our thoughts, words and actions. To this end, there is even the paradoxical "illusion of Illusion' and the "fallacy of false consciousness" that really places the understanding of religious relativism upon the horns of its own dilemma:</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>. This perspective identifies Nietsche as twentieth-century nihilism's most immediate precursor, and what is more, a harbinger of vulgar sociologism at its most brutal and virulently iconoclastic, which re-confirms...the genetic bond between contemporary nihilism and the entire gamut of vulgar reductionism, from vulgar-sociological to Neo-Freudian, structuralist and that advocated by Foucault. (Yuri Davidov, Myth, Philosophy, Avant-Gardism, 1983:7)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="twelve"></p> <p>  <hr> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"></font></a><font FACE="Times">CHAPTER TWELVE</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">RATIONAL RELATIVITY</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>Rational relativity is a special form of relativism that demands separate attention because it is so pivotal in the understanding of the processes of reification of our belief and symbol systems, and its deconstruction turns the table on the rationalistic anti-relativistic critique. In consideration of rational relativity it is a propos to distinguish between rational systems of conceptioning which are more formally ordered, and less formal systems of rationalization which underlie a great deal of every day human thought processes and "common sense." Ultimately this analytical distinction is surmounted when we consider that rational systems and systems of rationalization are similar and of the same kind of general processes of conceptual organization of ideas.</p> <p>Rational relativity has many sources of inherent ambiguity, in the critical historical and conceptual indeterminancy of the concepts and ideas of any system, of the lack of referential one-to-one consistency, either internally within the system or externally in relation to a wider world, between the denotative definitions of ideas and the contexts in which these ideas occur. It occurs in the possibility of both non-standard logics that connect these ideas, as well as in the possibility of symbolically coherent non-logical systems. It occurs in the lack of necessary connection between the internal coherence of the system and its external coherence or consistency in the world. A rational system may be entirely true in a strict sense and yet based upon false presuppositions that render its conclusions entirely fictitious in the real world.</p> <p>Rational relativity can be considered to be a form of "meta-philosophical" as well as "meta-philological" relativism. It accounts for the profusion of alternate philosophical systems in the world, each with entire separate and unique ideas, each professing truth-value, and yet most remaining mutually incompatible and irreconcialable. At the same time, the ideas and connections within thought systems which originated in one time and place may lose relevance or suffer a loss of value or validity in its transference to another era--ideas and knowledge have a silent background of their production against which their meaning and truth value is configured--alter this background, and the matrix of meaning of such systems is also altered. It is for this reason that it is so important to consider rational relativity as a separate and distinct form of relativism.</p> <p>There are in the emergence of different philosophical systems larger dialectics of implicit presuppositions and ideas that occur and give thematic unity and dynamic tension between these different systems. This larger dialectic revolves around axis of basic presuppositions that remain for the most part tacit and unaddressed within such systems, but which serve to frame the system in a larger field of knowledge and thought. The precise positioning of any such rational system within such a larger field of relations remains problematic--ultimately adding to the relativistic nature of such systems.</p> <p>Understanding of rational relativity begins with the problematic of defining in some panhuman sense what "rationality" really is. To merely leave the matter at "reason" begs the question in the first place "then what is reason." Underlying this question is an implicit argument that there is a single valid system of reasoning, (based on classical logic) which is true for one and all time, and which necessarily underlies the structure of all correct argumentation and possibly the rational structure of the human mind itself. That there is some panhuman, "psychic unity of humankind" that is expressible in some ultimate metaphysical "logos" remains to be proven. What is evident anthropologically is that there is relatively wide variety of alternate systems of conceptioning, not all of which can be easily reducible two-value logic. Early anthropologists sought explanation of some necessary "primitive mentality" that was explained as being somehow prelogical in structure--until it became quite evident that not all "primitives" necessarily think alike, and not all primitive thought was necessarily prelogical, illogical or even just logical. (on the other hand it is not too difficult to demonstrate basic contradictions in thought processes of supposedly "rational" and highly educated Western minds). While this issue touches on psychological relativity to be explored in greater depth and detail in the following chapter, it does address certain issues concerning the apparent lack of a substantive, empirical foundation for a single, monothetic pan-human form of "rationality" or of any necessary organic linkages between Rational systems and the ordering of the brain itself.</p> <p>Numerous ethnographic studies have documented the widespread occurrence of nonstandard alternative logics, of magical or concrete religious thinking in place of logic, of common formal fallacies of standard logic (abduction, affirming the consequent), of linguistic and cultural linkages to directions of inference that are other than the left to right and top to bottom (general proposition to specific case), or the coexistence of completely rational systems attributing efficient causes within larger magical-symbolic universes attributing ultimate causes. Differing systems of classification and categorization have also been document which demonstrate a non-classical taxonomy.</p> <p>This variability of rationality lead to a special form of the argument of rational relativism especially among British social anthropologists which focused upon the question the formal question of rationality in relation to especially magical thinking. Put briefly, it is possible for a system of magical thinking which is apparently consistent with empirical events to be completely internally coherent and logically impeccable from an internal standpoint, though in a more general sense remaining "a scientific" and nonrational.</p> <p>It is not necessary to revive the question of the ethnographic occurrence of three-value logics or basic (non-classical) categories to understand the potential cultural variability that may occur in the thought processes of humans, nor is it necessary to invoke the intermediation of special processes or sophisticated arguments in understanding the many differences in how people think.</p> <p>It can be said at the outset that behind all the diversity of human reasoning, there appears to be an underlying unity. It is a unity rooted in part in the tacit structure of human systems of rationalization, whatever their content or presuppositions, knowledge framework or mode of logical inference, as well as in the deeper linguistic and symbolic structure of all such argumentation and reasoning.</p> <p>The critique of rational relativity is in part a critique of the inherent limits of the capacity of our language for expression of ideas, truths and for logical precision which approximates that of a computer or has some kind of one to one correspondence with a mathematical form of reasoning. Implicit in the classical model of logical reasoning is its approximation of an a priori, pure mathematical system of reasoning in which postulates and corrollaries can be proven deductively without need to go outside of the system for facts or information from a wider and more chaotically impure world.</p> <p>It is this inherent "weakness" and impurity of natural language which in part renders it so problematic and difficult to program effectively into a computer, to model language structure in terms of pure mathematical models, and that also, paradoxically, is the principle source of strength, power, poetic beauty and relativity in such linguistic systems. Arbitrary denotative meanings are always situated within larger, implicit semantic fields of meaning which can be considered connotative in significance and relatively non-arbitrary in the sense that these connotations cannot be simply or independently defined by the individual, but are constrained by unspoken conventions of meaning existing in the background of all dialogue--conventions of meaning underlying such loosely interpretive phenomena as native speaker intuition, the accretion of surplus meaning to texts by a wider readership, the cross-translation of texts, etc..</p> <p>Such a "con-text" of largely implicit "preunderstandings" surround the definition of any single term or set of terms is a necessary prerequisite to the communicative efficacy of meaning in systems of rationalization. We may manipulate this context of wider meaning surrounding our communications and systems of meaning, but we cannot break from its indirect constraint, nor operate completely independently or in a totally arbitrary manner within it. In this sense cultural backgrounds influence both linguistic systems and systems of conceptioning in very similar ways.</p> <p>It is this wider, looser context of connotative and largely implicit semantic meaning which virtually guarantees the impossibility of a neat, mathematically analogous, one-to-one correspondence of meaning between the term and the definition such that a system of meaning can be constructed that operates independently of the wider universe of meanings.</p> <p>This implicit semantic ground of our meaning is itself "groundless" in the sense that there are few concrete or final nonrelative meanings or associations to be found within it--there is no bedrock of final meaning upon which we can anchor our conceptual systems. This semantic background is also tied to the critical indeterminancy of our presuppositions, whether these are tacit or explicit, initial, corrollary or final, in the construction of our rational systems. All rational systems depend upon basic statements of truth which are linked by logic to cases and other statements. These statements of truth are in language-based systems themselves open to equivocation and qualification, unlike parallel forms in mathematical systems, such as "two plus two equals four" which in a sense is a priori and nonarbitrary. What holds true for the counting of objects does not hold true for other descriptions of objects. The more metaphoric description enters into the definition of the terms, the less precise and a priori we can hope our rational systems to be.</p> <p>It is possible to undermine refute any rational system by bringing into explicit focus the otherwise tacit presuppositions upon which it is based, and deconstructing these by bringing their implications and truth value into direct question. Practically any conclusion can be rationally reached, as long as we accept the premises upon which that conclusion was based. Another manner of systematically deconstructing rational systems is to bring out in an explicit way the possible contradictions of the implications of both the presuppositions and the conclusions--often by carrying the conlusions to their logical extreme such that they become self-contradictory of the initial premises. What ever method of undermining the otherwise tautological foundations of systems of conceptioning, it is the general vulnerability of all such systems to such critical deconstruction which renders their ultimate, universal value suspect and which helps to make their relativity of connection to a wider world more apparent.</p> <p>The underlying structure that all such systems share is the tautological character of the presuppositions which prove and are simultaneously proven by the conclusions, and the necessary "leap of faith" in the acceptance of the truth-value of the premises that must be made in order for the tautological deception to be complete. As long as we accept the terms of the agreement, no matter how implicitly, we must obligatorily follow its logic to its perfunctory conclusions. Having made such a leap of faith, allows us to hermenutically embrace and fully comprehend and appreciate the meanings, value and implications of profound systems of conceptualization.</p> <p>It is this common structure that underlies and unites both formal rational systems and less formal systems of rationalization, in which category we may include systems of folk belief, certain vulgar or basic ideologies, such as the belief in the innate superiority of the White Man, blah, blah, blah, a great deal of what passes for "common sense," popular arguments or explanations, and, finally, highly personalized or collective systems of rationalization and "representation," great many of which are psychologically interpreted to have an "ego-defensive" function. Both formal and less formal systems of rationalization rely upon the foundation of faith in the acceptance of the initial premises, inferential logic, and common preunderstandings of the terms employed with in the system. This foundation of faith in the acceptance of the truth-value of basic terms and rules of the game is reinforced by a certain degree of commitment that comes with the elaboration, reinforcement and involvement with such systems, especially if an attempt has been made to teleologically translate these systems through action into behavioral practices.</p> <p>In otherwords, we may say that all systems of human rationalization are ultimately belief systems that are founded upon a subjective ground of an implicit willingness, or arbitrary desire to accept the credibility and basic truth value of the arguments or tenents of the system. What supposedly distinguishes a scientific system from a rational system is that the former does not necessarily depend upon such subjective grounds of belief, but upon intersubjective replicability, though a great deal of what passes as genuine science is in fact a form of such systems of rationalization, as for instance classical economic theory or Marxist economic theory, or other cultural materialist arguments, etc.</p> <p>As such, all systems of rationalization share certain other facets of their "structure" which mark them our as separate and distinguishable forms of conceptioning. First, these systems are to be considered not just systems of belief, but ideological systems in the sense that such belief demands a fundamental closure of the system from critical questioning of its foundations. Such closure to criticism precludes the possibility of refutation of the system, and at the same time renders its conclusions tautological and inevitable. It shuts the system of truth into a separate world of its own which is quite independent of the real world of relations. Within such systems other things then take place, and the fact of this basic separation from external validity takes the form of the language of the system no longer directly refering to the world, but to the terms and terminology of the system itself, such that its truths are self contained and become productive of an endless plethora of meanings which may or may not have any direct bearing in the world.</p> <p>At this point we must consider the important processes of reification and the resulting transparency of systems of rationalization in the ideological reinforcement of their truth value. Reification of the system as if a natural part of the world, disguising the facticity of its construction, and transparency, or the inherent invisibility of the system as such, or as a rational construction, are the consequences of the blind leap of faith in the belief criterion of such systems, as well as the processes of reinforcement and production of such systems in our everyday world. Their behavioral enactment in the world comes to stand for their reality independent of our original construction of their meanings. Reification then is a case of the misplaced concretization of otherwise abstract meanings and signification. The facticity of reification makes the arbitrary, constructive nature of such systems invisible and unsusceptible to criticism, while the general invisibility or transparency of such systems in their behavioral enactment renders their facticity of reification closed to criticism.</p> <p>Refering to such reification attendant to the acceptance and enactment of such belief systems as "misplaced concretization" leads us to a deeper understanding of the structure of systems of rationalization in the perpetration, whether deliberate or unconscious, of certain dynamic processes, and that in normal parlance are referred to as "informal fallacies of pragmatic logic." Processes such as anthropomorphization or zoomorphization, over-emphasis, reductionisms, objectification, that characterize systems of belief as of a mythological character. Such processes reinforce the sense of belief and credibility of idea systems, and can be considered to be fundamental to the basic symbolic and psychological structure of all human idea systems, especially as these come to constitute systems of projection, repression, identification and collective representation of meanings.</p> <p>These processes show us the underlying psychological character of all human rationalization, as systems of cognitive symbolization. These processes become more apparent when otherwise tight systems of rationalization are elaborated, or have their belt's loosened, to account for a wider range of diverse phenomena in the world. At some point, the problem of establishing external consistency comes to take precedence over the problem of maintaining a tight, restrictive internal coherence. After a finite set of rules have been defined, a host of exceptions occurring in the translation of a variety of phenomena in the real world entails that the rules become buttressed with other rules, a process which at somepoint entails the committment of more obvious process of fallacious leaps of faith, such as anthropomorphization, etc, that represent distortions or exagerations of both reality and the "truths" of the system itself. The metaphorical function of the symbols of the system take over from the previous denotative function upon which they were originally defined. Reification is also attendent upon this liberal application of basic concepts to encompass a broader, otherwise unrelated range of diverse phenomena. A case in point is the identification in Marxist theory of "Modes of Production." A blanket ascription that originally had quite specific meanings, but when pushed ethnographically to encompass a wide range of historical and cultural phenomena, demands a metaphorical interpretativeness and lack of specificity which belies the apparent exclusiveness of the concept's categorical imperative.</p> <p>Any system of ideas, even supposedly scientific theories, are prone to the same problems as ideologies of meaning when and if they becoming accepted as truth in some nonarbitrary, absolute or final sense, and when the possibility for their refutation or criticism becomes fundamentally precluded by their belief and practice. Therein lies the value of both the relativism of rationality and of relativism in general. Holding to a relativistic orientation prevents us from adopting a chauvinistic or inherently biased frame of mind, such that we end up accepting as ultimately or finally true one system of conceptioning or rationalization over any other. Therein also lies the inherent paradox of the anti-relativistic rationalist challenge. We must define some system as true in an absolute, nonarbitrary sense, to the exclusion of alternate systems, and such definition entails that we reject the possibility of the basic relativism and relativity of our ideas and thought systems.</p> <p>It is the rejection of the tacit categorical imperative of systems of rationalization, of their monothetic, exclusive truth-value, in recognition of their arbtrary, symbolic and tautological structure, which is the foundation of a more relativistic understanding, and relativistic form of rationalization, about the world.</p> <p>That relativistic rationalization has not been well elaborated or systematically explored is a consequence of our anti-relativistic, rationalistic bias about the world--a fundamental bias of our conceptioning and worldview that is probably rooted to a predominant Western tradition of platonic rational idealism. Such a relativistic rationalization begins, as with cross-cultural studies, with the acceptance, tolerance and appreciation of the truth value of alternate, mutually contradictory systems of rationalization, with the multifaceted, polythetic nature of truth in reality, and an understanding of the underlying symbolic dynamics of such systems of rationalization. Such recognition allows us the possibility of hermeneutically taking part in an objective not commital fashion with the internal meanings of different systems of rationalization, while simultaneously remaining outside of the tautological circle of their horizons of belief. In such a manner, we may step outside such systems while simultaneously taking part within them, while at the same time we can then transcend and consider the dynamics of the larger dialectic in which such alternative systems of conceptioning are situated. Richard Shweder writes of the possibility for the "rationalization of custom and tradition" within a broadened post-positivist anthropology as a legitimate objective with the emergeence of a new type of relativism called "ontological polytheism" in which realism and rationality are "compatible withthe idea of multiple worlds."</p> <p> </p> </font><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>For if there is no reality without metaphysics, and if each reality-testing metaphysics (that is, each culture or tradition) is but a partial representation of the multiplicity of the objective world, it becomes possible to transcend tradition by showing how each tradition lights some plane of reality but not all of it. Since each is but a partial representation, it must be transcended. Since each is a representation of reality, it lends itself to a process of rational reconstruction through which it may become an object of respect. (Shweder, 1969)</p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>Systems of rationaliztion are rooted in the tendency of humans to seek greater coherence, or to prefer coherence within their system. It is a coherence that is more often than not maintained at the cost of both diversity and reality. The case of a criminal's self-justification of the means and ends in a life dedicated to crime, a justfication that may be every bit as logical and complete, and that allows that individual to continue to commit crimes without a sense of remorse or guilt or injustice, stands as a testament to the hypnotic power of such systems of rationalization in our lives. The case of death by suggestion or voodoo death which is well documented ethnographically is another clear case of the power of suggestion which systems of rationalization hold over people. The case of a cult-movements rationalizations and collective representations which lead such groups to await the end of the world, to amass weapons or usher in the end of the world, or to commit mass suicide, is another testament to the social psychological power of such systems of rationalization. The case of an entire nation systematically imprisoning, burning and gassing racially "inferior" minorities in a very impersonal bureaucratic manner is another testament to the social archotic power of such systems of rationalization.</p> <p>It is interesting to consider systems of rationalization as special forms of human symbolic representation--forms which involve systematic cognitive expressions of thought and belief, of imagination of experience and conceptual understanding. As cognitive systems of symbolic representation, they come to have a special force and power in our world when they become attached to external symbolic cultural forms, and when their meanings and truths become psychologically internalized through processes of identification such that we are led to an enactment of their meanings in a neurotic, compulsive manner, whether they are ultimately true or realistic or not.</p> <p>If we consider systems of rationalization as cognitive forms of symbolic representations, then we are led to the question of what kinds of meanings they actually represent. We can understand that the things that these kinds of cognitive symbols stand for may come from a variety of sources and occur at a number of levels of meaning in the stratification of consciousness. What matters is that they come to represent and stand in place of a diversity of meanings in a system of thought seemingly rational and coherent in its order. It is a coherence that can become coercive in terms of the mandate of its logic and power of its reason in our lives. Thoughts thus may embody a great deal of experience and meaning that is otherwise not directly or easily available to our awareness. Furthermore, their ordering serves to "explain" in a clear manner the antinomies and uncertainties of such diversity of meaning. Such symbolic explanations justify our beliefs, values and actions. As long as we hold firmly to these thoughts and ideas, we solve the problem of the potential confusion and contradiction that such diversity might otherwise entail. The fact that these are but representations of reality--that they are finite, delimited "things" that stand in place of reality--are the foundation of their relative limits in standing in place of that reality.</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="thirteen"></p> <p>  <hr> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"></font></a></p> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">CHAPTER THIRTEEN</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">PSYCHOLOGICAL RELATIVITY AND RELATIVISM</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>The consideration of rational relativity lead directly to the related problem of psychological relativity and the all important question of the psychic unity of humankind. The critique of psychological relativity actually encompasses several distinct forms and several different thesis--thus the problem is actually of broader and more general significance than the term itself might imply with the associations of what goes on inside of a single individual's head. Part of the problem of psychological knowledge is that the head is largely a "black box" which we cannot see directly inside of to figure out what's going on. We must distinguish between the issue of psychological understanding as a formal science or theory of how people think, feel and behave in motivated ways--as a theory of mind and brain, from psychological or meta-psychological theories themselves which purport to understand or explain this psychological functioning. But understanding psychological relativity and relativism does not require a detail analysis or understanding of every facet of psychology--common relativistic themes underlie the diversities of psychological systems of theoretization.</p> <p>Psychological relativism takes issue with the presumption of the "psychic unity of humankind" which claims without solid empirical verification that all humans at some level or in some basic sense share a similar psychological reality, or at least potentially so. Connected with this notion is the related notion of a "deep structure" of mind which is and innately universal characteristic of the human species--a structure which may be represented algorithimically in fairly precise mathematical language and rationalization, and which is manifest especially in certain cognitive representations of knowledge.</p> <p>This presupposition of psychic unity has been common in the field of anthropology and remains largely uncontested, though a variety of evidence supports a critical doctrine of cognitive diversity and therefore, by implication, of "cognitive relativity" of alternative structures of mind. Basic differences occur between field-dependents and field independents, between men and women, between people of different cultural backgrounds, between normal and abnormal individuals. How the mind organizes itself or becomes ordered in a coherent manner in relation to the organic organization of the brain remains an unanswered and therefore open question. It concerns philosophical the ontological status of knowledge and "mind" and generally broaches what is referred to as the "Mind/Brain" dichotomy. Cognitive sciences are based upon the search for an ultimate "solution" to this kind of dichotomy. Cognitive relativism attempts to demonstrate the inherently problematical nature of any such "solution" by the demonstration of exceptions to rules, of inherent ambiguities of meaning, and the evidence of cognitive diversity. It appears that any cognitive claim to structure is in one form or another and "overdetermined" and that real cognition is in some basic ways only partially determined and therefore inherently underdetermined. In this way rules and logics can only partially solve the problem of human cognition. It can be said that what remains undeterminable is the inherent symbolic structures of human mind and mental organization--symbolisms which lead us again back to the problem of symbolic relativity of meaning.</p> <p>To a large extent, our understanding of the human mind and of intellect has largely been "anthropocentric" and this anthropocentricity has lately itself become relativized as animal, cognitive and behavioral sciences are turning up mounting sound evidence of advance thought and cognitive processes in a number of different species of animals. We are coming to understand that mind now encompasses a much broader range of possibilities and that human intellect, and especially rationality, may only occupy an incomplete portion of the entire spectrum.</p> <p>Psychological relativity may be expressed in many forms. We can refer to the relativity of feelings and emotions, to the relativity of personality and sense of individuality, the relativity of biography and personal experiences, of sense experience and perception, of alternate or drug-induced states of awareness or consciousness, the occurrence of state-dependent behavior, of "mind" itself, of ideas and thoughts, of status and identity, the relativity of neurotic states and states of mental disorder, of psychological "reference" and relationship with others. This form of psychological relativity looks to distinct patterns of individual differences that may occur. We can say that the psychological states and sense of reality of a schizophrenic street person is fundamentally different than that of a more normal participant in a society--hence we can claim that the street person lives psychologically in a very different world than that of the normal person.</p> <p>Another form of psychological relativity would claim that our subjective psychological states are the product of our social and cultural contexts of reinforcement and learning and that variability of these states is due to variability in these larger exogenous social processes and practices. We can look at labeling theory, theory of the social and cultural construction of emotions, of definitions of states of behavior and feelings, at psychological and folk psychological ascriptions of characteristics and traits that are linked to social positionality, reference and status-identity and "discrepancies" of primary and secondary patterns of socialization, at social practices and situations which are chronically identified with certain distinctive psychological attitudes.</p> <p>The two forms of psychological relativity can be brought together when we refer to the objective/subjective aspects of a theory of the psychological construction of reality that can be considered to be complementary to the theory of the social construction of reality. This theory inverts the social construction process and places the subjective and symbolic process as primary to the construction of reality, upon which objectivated social constructions become extended, and in the process, reified by social praxis.</p> <p>The theory of the psychological construction of reality may be summarized in the following form: humans internally subjectivize identities that are emotionally tied to relationships of critical reference others and objects. Psychologically these internalizations are configured into some form of coherent order that constitutes the basis of individual identity. This process of construction of identity from internalized, subjectivized constructs becomes projected onto the environment in the process of reinforcement of identity. Projection onto world of social relations, knowledge and things leads to an "objectification" of subject attitudes and psychological states, and to their secondary social reinforcement or extinguishment. The indirect constraint of the social environment upon which these internalizations were built in the first place entails that the psychological construction of identity must be consistent and consonant with the intersubjective attitudes and received constructions of the normal social order. These attitudes and states then become "socially reified" as if socially real and natural to the human being, and not as the products of psychological construction. Symbolic systems of rationalization psychologically and socially reinforce the normal order of these psychological constructions.</p> <p>Within this theory, the relativity of psychological identity, attitudes and states lies in the possibility of alternate psychological realities that occurs with individual and group variation, and in the possibility of alternation and conversion of identity from one state to another. We can refer to an intersubjective social psychological landscape in which there is an uneven distribution of feelings, moods and identities. When we refer to the uneven saliences of an emotional landscape and to the cultural construction of emotions, we are pointing to the relativity of the distribution of psychological attitudes within the social world, and to the possibility of the coexistence of alternate psychological states both nomothetically and idiographically.</p> <p>Various social patterns that appear psychologically motivated recur frequently enough to suggest that psychological relativity may be extended to encompass a relativism of group psychology. Besides cases of mass hysteria, possession and rioting, there are numerous clear cases authoritarian social organizations which reinforce authoritarian ethos and personality, and of social movements and "social archosis" which may lead entire nations into self-destructive patterns of scape-goating, witch-hunting, persecution of minorities, etc. Social archosis refers to the possibility that certain psychological predispositions or characteristics may come to control larger social patterning, role-playing and the "organization of diversity."</p> <p>The psychological construction of reality addresses centrally the construction, maintenance and social objectivation of identity in the world, or the question of the reality of the self in the world and apart from the world--is the self subjective, or objective? Is it constructed? Is it innate? Is it the product of nature or nurture? Is it monothetically real or is it just an illusion--a concatenation of many discrete and independent momentary states of being? This form of psychological relativism takes serious the paradox that though the self must somehow exist in relation to social reality and the world, the exact or absolute nature of this relationship, and of the "self" in general is both logically and metaphorically impossible to pinpoint in any demonstrable, deterministic manner. The reality of the self must exist somewhere in the act and fact of the relationship with the world, and not as some a priori or quinessential "spirit" or "soul" or "thing" which precedes and predetermines its relatedness to the world.</p> <p>We cannot analytically isolate or separate the sense of "selfness" from its ontological, experiential with a wider, fundamentally "non-self" world, or adequately dichotomize its relationship into "subjective/objective" and "self/other" components, without the process of analysis, destroy what is more real about it.</p> <p>Psychological relativism must take a stand against what can be referred to as both psychological rationalism and psychological determinism. Psychological determinism rests upon the analytic logic of the strict dichotomization of the "Self" between subject and object, Identity and Difference, Ideal and Real, etc. It posits an independent ontological reality of the "Self" which is a priori to and apart from our representational conceptions of its reality. Determinism necessarily leads to the logical extremes of either total self-determination--of absolutely arbitrary "will-power" in the soplipsistic black-hole of the Ego, or else of "other-determination" by which the self is purely the behavioristic a posteriori by-product, tabula rasa, the epi-phenomenal expression of the wider, mostly social order. The self is then either a complex machine, a sophisticated fact of nature ultimately reducible to bio-chemical processes and matter, or else the self is the ultimately irreducible Geist, Noumena, Mind or Soul which by its actions transcends biological facts. The self is either an endogenous creation or an exogenous invention.</p> <p>Either way, the "Self" must be something that is somehow fixed and absolute, universal and therefore normative--gradations of "otherness" are so many deviations of "non-Self". The self is thus discontinuous with the world. Individual differences are merely superficial and spurious diversity obscuring the psychological depth that is collective, universal, and therefore totalistic in its structure and consequences. The hidden, more real "self" or rather the Structure of the many different selves in the world, is the ultimate repository of all that is "true," "ideal," "rational" and therefore "objective" about reality. It is the throne of "reason," just as the ego is the first and last bastion of a presentationally absolute reality.</p> <p>Psychological relativism is a doctrine that intersects with, but is not to be conflated or confused with, the doctrine of epistemological relativism. The latter begins where the former leaves off. Whereas psychological relativism takes as centrally problematic the question of "Self" in reality, epistemological relativism asks the question of "how do we know (the world, ourselves, one another, knowledge, etc.) or more fundamentally "what do we know, what is knowledge, and why?"</p> <p>A strict stance in a deterministic position of psychological relativism must necessarily conflate the two doctrines of relativism as reciprocal and complementary to one another--self is knowledge of and in the world, and knowing is the awareness of the self in relation to the world. But such a position must disregard aspects of the question of "Selfness" which are separate from questions of "knowledge"of the self is situated and constrained socially in relation or independently of knowledge, how self is reified as something irreducible, unanalyzable, synergistic, as a thing beyond knowledge, which in turn reproduces itself in the world? But the region of overlap between psychological relativism and epistemological relativism is occupied by a doctrine of "cognitive relativism" which is shared by both--its psychological dimensions connect it with the former, its philosophical questions with the latter.</p> <p>It is evident that we cannot clearly separate the question of psychological knowledge from the obverse case of a common, shared social stock of knowledge. The formation of attitudes and self-identity that is coherent never occurs completely outside of cultural contexts, or "in situ" of a social framework of understanding and information. We cannot draw a clear boundary separating where one begins and the other form leaves off. But it is evident that the question of knowledge itself is to some extent independent of the problem of the formation of the sense of self and identity in the world. The possibility of this independence gives rise to the basic discrepancies between subjective and socially objective realities that are in theory the source of psychological dilemmas and neurosis. This independence of sense of self from the contexts of knowledge may account for our apparent capacity to carry ourself separate and independent of the alternative behavioral settings in which we find ourselves with a sense of psychological continuity in the stream of events from one situation to the next. In this sense, then, we might say that the self is symbolically constructed.</p> <p>The difference between psychological and epistemological relativism recapitulates in a very local way a more general and vague distinction between the "Two Cultures" of the Sciences and the Humanities, and between "naturwissenschaften" and "geisteswissenschaften" as alternate and separate forms of knowledge about the world. This basic "mind/body" dichotomy should therefore come into clear focus in the consideration of "cognitive relativism." The differences between the three might be stated something like this, whereas psychological relativism concerns "on the ground" understanding of the self in the world as an organism, an actor, a thinker, an affective, willful respondent with the world, epistemological relativism is primarily preoccupied with the "meta-theoretical" and "general-level" theory that asks ultimate kinds of "why" questions and seeks primary kinds of "why" answers. Cognitive relativsm exists somewhere between these in "middle-level" theory and higher order "instances" and "units of analysis". Psychological relativism askes who, when and where type questions, epistemological relativism asks first what and then finally why kinds of questions, while cognitive relativism asks intermediate "how" questions.</p> <p>There is a sense of a continuum of "subjectiveness" between the specificity/generality of the self and the generality/specifity of "knowledge" and ranging somewhere inbetween these is the intermediate sense of "structured" or determined cognition. It follows that in the hierarchy of determinations, psychological relativism is more inductively and empirically oriented, while epistemological relativism is more deductively and rationally oriented, while cognitive relativism hovers somewhere in hypothetical "fuzzy" middle ground. This hierarchy goes up the spectrum of contextuality and determinancy from "this is a rose" through "roses are red and smell sweet" to a "rose by any other name."</p> <p>The three dimensions are but aspects of the same kind of phenomena in reality, alternatives in a dialectical word play upon worlds and worldviews. It is somewhat specious to separate relativistic paradoxes about reality into questions "psychological," "cognitive" and "epistemological", rather than to consier the relativistic continuum of "psycho-cognitive-epistemological" relations and phenomena, but it is perhaps a conve