Best known for his pioneering study Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, in which the aesthetic attitude of disinterestedness is accounted for as the expression of a class ethos, Bourdieu has become something of an icon of relativism. In thus effecting a Bakhtinian 'discrowning' of official hierarchies of the arts, he is often celebrated for his concern to place all tastes,...

Raanan Gillon is a noted defender of the four principles approach to healthcare ethics. His general position has always been that these principles are to be considered to be both universal and prima facie in nature. In recent work, however, he has made two claims that seem to present difficulties for this view. His first claim is that one of these four principles, respect for autonomy, has a sp...

In the established political system of liberal nation-states built up on a principle of coherence between culture and nation as territorially defined groups, the occurrence of cultural differences has brought to the dissolution of this formula crucial for a unity of a nation-state. Nationalism holds that cultural differences are results of a hierarchy between “us” and “them” and consequently th...

This study is going to investigate the problem of relativism in the writings of Karl Mannheim and David Bloor. These two scholars are important confessors of the sociology of knowledge. Mannheim began to apply the notion of relationism instead of relativism. Some critics believed to understand this object, others talked about the lack of real differences. My first aim is to differentiate these ...

Diversity is an asset, as long as it allows cooperation. In the case of information systems and databases, the data model used is a help or a hindrance for this cooperation of diverse views; this is characterized by the semantic relativism of the model. We first analyze diversity within an information system, where cooperation is made possible by the use of external schemata; semantic relativis...

Relativism is usually a derogatory word in philosophical bioethics in the West. If people make the mistake of trying to understand radically “different” points of view, an accusation of relativism is quickly forthcoming.1 But why should this be an accusation? My aim in this paper is to demonstrate that it should not. My demonstration is simple, and it consists of filling in the empty boxes of T...

Since its inception in the work of the classical social theorists, the sociology of knowledge—or as some would prefer, of belief—has generated an extensive array of debates about relativism. A central question has been whether the very existence of social determinants for beliefs makes it impossible to regard them as true or rational in any absolute sense, and this has proved especially content...

There are five basic ways to resolve disagreements: keep arguing until capitulation, compromise, locate an ambiguity or contextual factors, accept Pyrrhonian skepticism, and adopt relativism. Relativism is perhaps the most radical and least popular solution to a disagreement, and its defenders generally think the best motivator for relativism is to be found in disputes over predicates of person...