Talk:Cognitive relativism

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[edit] anti-realism vs. cognitive relativism

Should this article be redirected to anti-realism? It seems to me that cognitive relativism as it is described is a philosophical layman's take on the realism/anti-realism debate within philosophy and as such should be discussed there?

Anti-realism is an ontological thesis (i.e. a thesis about the existence or non-existence of certain classes of entities or phenomena: there is anti-realism about abstract objects, anti-realism about proposiional attidtudes, anti-realism about numbers, about concrete particualres, etc.) Episetmologocal relativism is the view that "there are no truths only interpreations"; so chiromancy, the hollow earth hypothesis and the theory that my penis controls the universe are equally as valid as the best-confirmed facts that you can look up in your basic chemistry or physics textbooks and test in the lab. Please DO NOT confuse the two. --Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 08:30, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

Nothing to do with antirealism. I must say, though, it's a pretty poor article all the same. No mention of the "proper" philosophical groundings of cognitive relativism (Hume's "radical scepticism" is a definite precursor) nor the writings of those like Richard Rorty who ground truth and falsehood in language, therefore a contingency of that language and not direct epistemic access to "the world out there" ... Happy to add this in, unless someone thinks it isn't quite on point (I'm hopeless at labels, and i know a lot of folks get worked up about them). Also, the dismissive quote at the end is (a) from someone unnotable (in the sense that they don't have a Wikipedia article about them) and (b) is basically bullshit POV anyway and should be removed. In fact, I think i'll do that now. ElectricRay 23:02, 11 September 2006 (UTC)