Page 199 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

cannot identify absolute and universal forms of truth, but rather knowledge is true
only within the domain of its formation and operation. Thus relativism involves
the rejection of overarching universal rules or procedures for deciding between
176 truth-claims. Cultural relativism is the extension of that argument to different
cultures leading to the suggestion that beliefs that appear to be invalid in the
context of one culture are not so in another. Thus, the claim that ‘X is an act of
witchcraft’ will not hold up within the confines of Western science but can be said
to be valid within a culture for which witchcraft is a truthful practice.
It is common to suggest that relativism is a self-defeating argument since the very
statement ‘all truths are relative’ must itself be held to be relative to the domain of
its utterance. Equally, to say that the statement ‘all truths are relative’ is universally
true is a contradiction in terms. Poststructuralism, postmodernism and
pragmatism, streams of philosophical thought that are strong within cultural
studies, have all been ‘accused’ of relativism. This is so because they all reject the
validity of universal truth-claims. They argue that no universalizing epistemology
is possible because all truth-claims are formed within discourse or language-games
so that all truth is culture-bound.
The postmodern philosopher Lyotard does seem to embrace relativism when he
argues that language is made up of islets each of which is governed by a system of
rules that is untranslatable into those of others. Here truth and meaning are
constituted by their place in specific local language-games and cannot be universal
in character. Some other postmodern writers also embrace relativism arguing that
truth is/should be an outcome of debates between competing claims. They suggest
that the consequence of saying that truths are only truths within specific language-
games is to accept the legitimacy of a range of truth-claims, discourses and
representations of reality.
Richard Rorty, the leading contemporary exponent of pragmatism, also rejects
the idea of universal truth since there can be no access to an independent object
world from an Archimedean vantage point from which one could neutrally evaluate
claims. For Rorty the notion of truth refers at best to a degree of social agreement
within a particular tradition. However, he rejects the idea that such an argument is
a form of relativism. This is because all knowledge is culture-bound and thus one
cannot see across different forms of knowledge in order to regard them as of equal
value. Rather, we are always positioned within acculturated knowledge so that the
true and the good are what ‘we’ believe. Judgements can only be made by reference
to ‘our’ values and not to a transcendental truth. Nevertheless, ‘our’ values can (and
for Rorty they should) accept the moral right of others to hold different points of
view. In other words, cultural pluralism is a value of ‘our’ tradition.
Critics of relativism argue that rejecting the possibility of a universal knowledge
in favour of accepting its culture-bound character leads to the problem of
incommensurability. That is, without a ‘meta’ or universal language one culture
cannot talk to or understand another because their foundations of knowledge are
radically divergent. However, Rorty argues that if we consider languages (and thus
culture) as constituted not by untranslatable and incompatible rules but as learnable
skills, then incommensurable languages could only be unlearnable languages,