[Inquiry] Re: Question On Realism

[Jon Awbrey]

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QOR.  Note 3

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Naive relativism is the attitude that says:
"If the world is the way it is relative to
the experiencer thereof, then the world is
whatever I say it is so long as I persist
in saying so."  Of course, this is simply
solipsism or "tenasticism", the singular
form of coherentism.

Nuanced relativism is the recognition that additional variables,
very often parameters of subjectivity or the frame of reference,
may have to be taken into account in order to uncover realistic
invariants of real phenomena.  These more sophisticated forms
of relativism were naturally forced on us by the realities
of relativity and quantum mechanics, where one is obliged
to count the experiencer/experimenter as a participant
observer of the "hard" physical universe, and where
nothing about the relativity of phenomena to the
experiencer makes their reality go away.

Now, the Peircean pragmatist will have a difficult time
arguing from the opposite extremisms of anti-relativism,
absolutism, essentialism, and so on, since the addition
of interpretive parameters like the interpretant leaves
pragmatism guilty as charged to a variety of relativism,
at least in the eyes of a dyed in the wool reductionist.

So the answer here has to turn on a non-knee-jerk consideration
of the conditions for the raising of dimensions in our theories.

Jon Awbrey

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inquiry e-lab: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
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