Relativism

Relativism

Introduction

Relativism believes that truth depends on or is related to the subject, person or group who experiences it. Relativism accepts that there are many opinions about the same things, this is obvious and no one has denied. Relativism appears when it is said that these opinions are true if people who advocate them seem real. Relativism holds that there are many truths about things, at least as many as people think they have knowledge of them.

Relativism is a doctrine or movement of thought that says that there is no absolute truth. It comes in various fields of human knowledge: philosophy, epistemology, knowledge, logic, sociology, cultural, moral. For relativism, values, morality or aesthetics are variable and depend on the socio-historical circumstances. The meaning and value beliefs, customs and human behaviors have no absolute reference (www.jeramyt.org). The search for truth and the notions of good and evil are related to the circumstances and are therefore not absolute.

Kant and Relativism

For Kant, knowledge is the combination of what brings reality can be perceived by our senses, and the categories of our understanding, so we grasp things conditioned by our senses and intelligence, knowing what is real for us, thus, our knowledge is still true, but it only goes as far as allowing our limitations. What is not captured by our senses is not really know anything, even though the reason, we try to speculate.

He says that our knowledge begins with experience does not mean that all of it comes from her. Understanding concepts thought by forming judgments. There are two kinds of concepts: the empirical that is our sense data synthesis and pure concepts, which Kant called categories of knowledge that comes from experience and through which is thought about the concepts intuited that are possible thanks to categories (www.ucd.ie).

Kant made what he called metaphysical deduction of the categories, which consisted of the deduction and explanation of the categories of twelve kinds of judgments, which were classified into four groups: quantity, quality, relation and morality. Kant called this transcendental deduction of the categories. Without them one cannot synthesize and not reach objective knowledge, because it is objective, precisely because the categories are and can only make objective realities. In these ideas underpinning our mind, are a priori conditions for the universal and necessary knowledge, innate. The sensitivity also suggests ways the object and thinks as pure concepts. Kant also argues that something is ...