Just saying there is some correct answer or another is not dogmatic, when what that answer might be is completely open to question. Objectivism is not fideism; criticism is not nihilism.
You’re doing exactly the conflation of different things that I describing in the OP, so... thanks for the demonstration I guess. — Pfhorrest
I wasn't being wholly serious. It is certainly a
stricter position. "One of you is wrong, and that's that!" My beef with this is that, unless we have a means of evaluating the objective truth, there's nothing going on inconsistent with the view that there isn't one. Referencing our discussions elsewhere, belief in it appears unjustified to me.
Sure. That’s not relativism though. That’s “situationism”. Relativism would say something more like that whether abortion is right for Anna depends on whether we ask California or Alabama, because whether people think it’s morally okay varies between those places. — Pfhorrest
No, it's forwarded by some in relativism too (I'll dig a link out later). The idea being that what is good for Alice is objectively good for Alice, even if it is objectively bad for Barbara. I'm not arguing it's merit, just saying it's out there. As someone who believes that, even if there were an objective truth out there, we wouldn't know it, I think it's an exacerbation of a bad idea.
One could equally (wrongly) claim that truth in general (even about contingent things like the shape of the world) depends on belief systems, which was my point about the shape of the world changing when you enter or leave the Flat Earth Society HQ. The prevalent belief systems change between those places, so if one held truth relative to belief systems the way moral relativism holds goodness to be relative to moral systems, then the truth would change as you walked through the door. — Pfhorrest
Sure, and you'll find nihilism at an extreme end of relativism that not only acknowledges that facts determined scientifically, technologically or otherwise empirically are with respect to systems that
may contain biases, but that therefore all facts yielded by those systems are as dubious as any other. To say this is the position of relativists, though, would be like describing atheists as Stalinists. It's a weak pejorative, and leading proponents of relativism like Rorty thought it was as stupid a conclusion as you and I do. Relativism says little about the relative
merits of facts, but it is quite easy to see that a fundamentalist Christian's biases are more numerous, more impactful, and more wrongheaded than any odd slight bias in science. You're talking about a small number of idiots who made a big splash because their ideas were the right kind of controversial: clickbait before the click.
On which, and I've had this discussion with other anti-relativists in different fields, science is pretty friendly to relativism. While a lot of theist postmodernists during the science wars tried to use deconstruction to lower science's standing, it had the opposite effect. At university, I was taught to be mindful of unconscious biases in a way that previous generations of physics undergraduates were not. What doesn't kill us... Which is why I've always had a fondness for people like Latour, wrongheaded as his motivations were. We owe him a debt, as we have done to every philosopher who held a mirror to us. (I still say "us" like I'm still doing active research, what a pretentious bellend!)
Objectivism as I mean it is the opposite of that. About both reality and morality. What people think the correct opinion is doesn’t matter. (But what people experience does). The correct opinion, about reality or morality, is independent of what anyone thinks it is. — Pfhorrest
RE: emphasised point... not a little bit dogmatic? I, as I said, am a sceptical relativist, but that doesn't particularly define a solid position on either. I believe that there is some objective reality behind phenomena, and that scientific modelling is a way of gaining insights on the limitations of its behaviour. But I do not believe that science is revelation. We do not access objective reality; we see the results of interactions between its parts. I suspect objective reality is something quite fundamentally different from our state-of-the-art models and, while we will always improve the accuracy of those models, we might never have a faithful representation, or know it if we do have it.
Morality is a different matter. It is quite clear to me that human morality is defined by human biology, sociology, history, and moral philosophy. Being as it is comprised of individuals who generate that morality and who have very similar genetic heritage and, in the West at least, very similar socialisation, it is no surprise that there is usually consensus on moral matters, giving the illusion of objective moral truth. Applied scientifically, this would predict that cultures whose social structures are very different ought to have different moral structures too. This wins out. It would also predict that individuals from one social structure ought to be, given the opportunity, as amenable to the moralities of other social structures as their own. This wins out. The biological bases of morality point to fairness, empathy and altruism, suggesting that, over history, the trend ought to point in those directions as we consider more and more historic cases. This wins out. Moral objectivity simply fails to justify its existence.
However, getting back to the OP, there's not much pragmatic difference in believing in a right answer that we do not have access to and believing there is not always a right answer. I think we're aligned on everything else, and I notice we tend to agree on things (I'm glad we have something to disagree on, actually, other than the meaning of the QM wavefunction, as you're great to talk to), so hopefully that suggests the errors you see I have mostly escaped, by luck if not by design.