The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 83. The book is alphabetized by the whole headings of entries, as distinct from the first word of a heading. Hence, for example, abandonment comes before a priori and a posteriori. It is wise to look elsewhere if something seems to be missing. At the end of the book there is also a useful appendix on Logical Symbols as well as the appendices A Chronological Table of Philosophy and Maps of Philosophy. | 800 relations the nature of William James A Pluralistic Universe New York 1909 . B. Russell The Principles ofMathematics 1903 2nd edn. London 1937 ch. 26. ----Philosophical Essays London 1910 ch. 6. T. L. S. Sprigge The Vindication of Absolute Idealism Edinburgh 1983 ch. 5. relativism epistemological. Relativist theories of knowledge are as old as Methuselah or at least Protagoras and as fashionable as Foucault or Rorty but their exact import remains elusive. Protagoras put it pithily and provoked Socrates to question what he meant and how it could possibly be true by saying Man is the measure of all things of what is that it is and of what is not that it is not. This bon mot is striking but susceptible of many interpretations. Protagoras was principally concerned with perceptual knowledge and individual human variations. He seems to have thought that whatever any given individual believed was true for him or her . Socrates has little trouble showing the absurdities of this since the individual has to understand what it is to make perceptual mistakes whether detected by himself or others. Indeed global relativism at the level of true for me has so little to recommend it that its popularity with ordinary people is truly astonishing. We need only ask whether the claim that X is true for me is itself merely true for me and so on to realize that what merit there may have been in the original relativization attached not to the truth-predicate but to something in the content of the belief. One can indeed make a case for certain local relativisms such as the relativities supposed to be involved in judgements of taste. But if such judgements do amount to no more than affirmations ofpersonal or group likings then these affirmations themselves seem to stand beyond relativization. Sometimes the rhetoric of relativism merely draws our attention to the need for a conceptual framework to interpret reality without denying that there is a reality to be thus understood but .
