33 Analysis of Relativism
http://www.scielo.org.co/pdf/eidos/n13/n13a09.pdf
The current debate on relativism
Today the theme of relativism is at the centre of attention not only in the philosophical sphere and more particularly, which most interests us here, in contemporary analytical philosophy but also in our public debate, in press organs, party offices, ecclesiastical hierarchies, etcetera.
In Italy (but the matter also concerns other western countries, as for instance the United States) for some time an intense press campaign has been going on within which the expression relativism, in its meta-ethical sense, has been used as a political weapon to discredit secular culture and the political forces that appeal to it -actually very weakly. Being relativists is in actual fact considered a sort of defamatory accusation, not only for those who make it but also for those who receive it and awkwardly endeavour to ward it off without ever entering into the content of the accusations.
The most serious thing, nevertheless, at least for those who ardently desire our public debate to move along tracks of correctness and transparency, is that in throwing out these attacks people entirely omit to specify the meaning attributed to the expression involved. The result of the ideological use made of it is to determine a more or less interested semantic overlap with other notions that are undoubtedly different (skepticism, nihilism, subjectivism, pluralism).
The discussion on relativism takes a rather different course if instead we look at philosophical culture in the English language, with reference above all to the area of analytical philosophy, which will be the privileged field of reference in this paper. What is certain is that the debate on relativism is receiving a great deal of attention today, while previously there was a long period, from the 1950s to the 1970s, in which it was taken for granted that relativism had been refuted once and for all. Caricature versions of relativistic positions were offered, presented in a totally pejorative and disparaging key, so much so that that few philosophers endeavoured to work out an explicit defence of relativism. Most of the people that expounded theses that might have had relativistic implications occupied a large part of their time in trying to avoid these consequences and defending themselves against this accusation1.
Until the 1960s, among scholars in the analytical area there was widespread awareness that cognitive relativism, at least in its most radical version, had been refuted once and for all by the most sophisticated versions of the traditional argument from self-refutation. I will return to this point subsequently. Here I am concerned with stressing that in the 1950s and 1960s the pathway of cognitive relativism having become an impossible one, it seemed to most people that the only acceptable version of relativism was the ethical one, specifically meaning meta-ethical relativism. From this point o