Under this interpretation, to ask if my culture is right is to ask if my fundamental way of understanding the world is right." Is my culture right?" is no more or less than the question with which Descartes started modern philosophy: "Are all my beliefs, especially my most fundamental beliefs, true? What if they are all wrong? How can I know they aren't?" The only difference is its intersubjective character: rather than a solitary Descartes doubting his beliefs in his study, it is now our shared beliefs that are sus pended in disbelief. We then become social Cartesians. Thus this third problem of cultural relativism is not merely a philosophical problem, it is the philosophical problem par excellence, the problem of knowledge, the problem of whether human judgment can be known to be valid or not, albeit here collectivized. The problem of cultural relativism is what the problem of knowledge sounds like once you accept that human cognition is social and historical. As such, "Is my culture right?" has no solution if the problem of knowledge has no solution.
Some antirealists, postmodernists, and evolutionary epistemologists, of course, think that there is no philosophical problem of knowledge at all, that to imagine such a problem is to assume foundationalism. Whether they are right or not is a story for another time, but certainly their rightness would only further undermine any epistemic problem posed by culture. The problem is the philosophical one of answering skepticism, a problem neither created nor exacerbated by embedding cognition in culture.
Even if the foregoing negative argument against relativism holds, without a positive account of knowledge that is both cultural and realist its claim may still seem dubious. Now, by no means can we afford a major foray into epistemology here. Time, energy, and wood pulp are limited. But a suggestion such as what follows does, I think, at least render plausible as an avenue for further inquiry the proposition that an epistemology which accepts the cultural embedded-ness of cognition need not break with a chastened, minimal realism.
Twentieth-century epistemology is a series of footnotes to Hume, in spirit even when the footnotes serve to correct Hume's letter. A long list of critiques from Wittgenstein to Derrida have wakened us from any dogmatic slumbering we might have hoped to do. With much of this revisionism we can agree. Yes, all judgments have mediated relations to their objects, hence cannot claim "privilege" or "immediacy" or a grasp of "presence"; are fallible and' open to revision, hence devoid of certainty; never cognize an objectivity devoid of traces of the cognizer, leaving no "immaculate perception"; are perspectival, linguistified, historicized products of particular cultures, not grasped in a "view from nowhere"; always presuppose unanalyzed conceptual and political commitments open to deconstruction and genealogical critique; and cannot hope to be given a noncircular philosophical justification, whether by foundationalism, coherentism, or as Susan Haack puts it, "foundherentism." All this is, if not true, at least presumptively valid. We must accept the burden that these critiques place squarely on the shoulders of any would-be realism.
But these shoulders, if not broad, are yet strong enough. Realism minimally requires that the validity of our judgments be constituted by their validity with respect to what they judge, that the truth of the assertion is decisively constituted by a relation to what is judged rather than to characteristics of the judge or the act of judgment. Such is unavoidably implicated by three homely facts that, I would argue, can hardly be dismissed. First, "true" implies true of something. That is, assertive judgment is intentional, and truth is an object-relational property of such judgment. Second, what is truly judged, as a what, cannot be truly judged by judgments that contradict each other. Something, call it A, cannot be q and -q at the same time in the same respect and remain A. This holds whether A is a physical object, a phenomenal quality, a process, a network of signs, or a thought. Last, the. relevant character of that what, of which the judgment is true, must obtain independently of our judgment of it. The judging cannot make it true. Saying shares with making and doing the status of being human judgments, but unlike making and doing, assertive judgment is in a crucial sense reactive or representative. That is inherent in the desire to be "true of." Whether we parse this through the metaphor of correspondence or fit or being "made true" by objects is an important but derivative question, as is the issue of what cognitive unit the realistically judged object must be independent (such as proposition, perspective, theory, or culture).
But we cannot make sense of any notion of "knowledge" or "truth," or of judgments being "true" that rejects these three homely parameters, nor can we identify a society whose repertoire of semiotic practices can consistently dispense with the quoted terms. Not that all judgments, or all uses of signs, are assertive hence normed by truth. They are not. But those that are are indispensable. The deflationary attempt to disavow truth always contradicts itself, as where postmodernists and antirealists claim to avoid truth as if their claim were true. Whether philosophy can prove my realist parameters, can justify realism, is another question. Failure to reach the bar does not by itself invalidate where the bar is set.
If this account seems anachronistic, well, things will now get far worse, for with minimal realism go two other doctrines.
First, we cannot give up the unity of truth. As said, the rules by which we methodically investigate truth cannot accept that contrary judgments be true of the same thing at the same time. But this only means that all truthclaims must be consistent. If that were false, then contradiction in truthgoverned inquiry should not motivate further inquiry, should not be a problem, any more than you and I singing different songs or marrying different persons is a problem. In inquiry, however, whether in a laboratory, a Senate subcommittee, or an Easter-egg hunt, contradictory truth-claims are a problem. Relativism, then, as a theory about what is true, cannot make sense of our actual behavior. We cannot give up the logic of realism and the unity of truth without, at the very least, giving up inquiry as we understand it.
Second, along with realism and the unity of truth goes the notion that cognitive advance implies a linear relation of objects-as-judged across differing or changed but intertranslatable semiotic nets, hence the rejection of incommensurability This rejection is justified every day by bilingual individuals, whether fluent in Armenian and Russian or Newtonian and Einsteinian. That is, if we accept a realist interpretation of inquiry, then we have no choice but to deny that incommensurability is ever more than an artifact of contingently chosen incompatible languages, to be resolved through translation via a more comprehensive or "neutral" language. "Neutral" here means, of course, locally neutral, neutral with respect to the languages in question. No language is neutral universally or per se. But none is needed.
Thus we are led to an admittedly Neanderthal epistemology. What lies behind my insouciance are two convictions. One is that many contemporary revisionists are in the habit of conflating a long series of alleged bugaboos-foundationalism, the "view from nowhere," essentialism, logocentrism, a "God's eye view," the imperialism of reason, and so on-which need a careful analysis.
For quite some time after September 11, 2001, many in the Arab world believed that the World Trade Center was bombed by Zionists-Jews having been warned, it was claimed, not to go to work in the towers on that day-in order to discredit Muslims. This belief is either true or false, not both. It is valid either everywhere or nowhere, not invalid in Manhattan but valid in Cairo. Without an at least minimal realism we are left in a moral, legal, and political never-never land of alternate universes, in some of which African slavery never happened, the Holocaust was a clerical error, and Stalin the Russian George Washington. Saying this does not justify realism's truth, of course. It merely indicates the price of rejecting it.
How then are we to understand a realist yet culturally embedded, mediated, historical, interested, fallible, decidedly nonimmaculate human knowing? Our cognition first has parameters dictated by the perceptual-affective-cognitive-motor capacities liberally distributed among modern Homo sapiens. Following Joseph Margolis we can accept that, contra Aristotle, these capacities evolved and are perhaps evolving, and that, contra Kant, no complete or a priori inventory of them is available.
An indeterminately large module of that cognitive medium is historical, cultural, linguistic, or most broadly, semiotic. Our perception, interpretation, and knowledge are thus biocultural. The experiences, or better, saliences that cognition must explain are. limited and structured, even if we cannot say completely what those limits are. Perception, as a biologically prepared receptive appropriation whose modality at some level is uncontrollable and unconscious, is both passive and mediated, intertwined with motor activity, affectivity, and semiosis.
Joseph Margolis is certainly right to summarize much epistemic revisionism with the claim that language and world are symbiotic (Margolis, Historied Thought, Constructed World: A Conceptual Primer for the Turn of the Millennium, University of California Press,2000). We never face an un-languaged world or an un-worlded language, never confront objectivity uncolored by our cognitive means nor a perfect synopsis of our cognitive means uncluttered by reference to bits of the world.
But symbiosis is graded, the adverbial means of judgment and what is judged are ultimately inseparable does not mean they are not incrementally separable. Experienced and judged objects are tied to background perspectives, methods, worldviews, and cultures, but are they all tied to all those media in the same way and to the same degree? It would be rather serendipitous if they were. On the contrary, not every fact or belief is as embedded as every other; degree of entanglement varies with degree of control of our own terms of judgment. That we can abstract from particulars of each makes cognitive advance and communication across nets of beliefs possible. It is not true, as some holists imply, that given disconfirmatory evidence any component of our worldview is equally up for rejection. Neither scientist nor cabbie behaves that way. The mind being at least as complex as sneakers, regarding theory- or culture- or perspectiveembeddedness there is no reason to assume that one size fits all. A minimally realist notion of truth, knowledge, and the world is entirely coherent with the adverbial nature of the "media" of knowing (judgments, concepts, worldviews, cultures, and so on), the denial of "presence" or "privilege" (the claim that we have cognitions that are immediate to their objects, hence irrefragable), and the assertion of objective indeterminacy (that not every possible proposition is or must be either true or false of real things, because the latter, like our propositions, vary in their determinateness, no object being either utterly determinate or utterly indeterminate).
None of this is tantamount to that view which is arguably the dominant theme of recent revisionist epistemology, namely constructivism. Constructivism is untenable. It is far too simplistic a metaphor. Constructing is building, which implies making and control. If it were true that we cognitively make the world, we would presumably have done a better job, for example, have left out pain, misery, and death. The idea of a self-creating human sphere, unconstrained by anything real outside its sculpturing, fails. For while it is plausible that our perceptual-affective-cognitive-motor apparatus, with its historico-cultural variants, shapes the world-as-we-know-it, it is equally true that such shaping, like all other processes, has constraints. If it did not, then it would be a creation ex nihilo; presumably not even constructivists wish to deify themselves. The world, even the world-for-us, is not simply the product of our construction; indeed, to claim that it is the product of a single process of any kind is a metaphysical assertion of a high order. Rather than constructed it is shaped, refracted, or selected, or any other of a host of less than Promethean figures. And it should be noted that constructivism's inadequacy does not hang on the now-anachronistic notion of an agent of construction, which has been discredited by post-Wittgensteinian and post-Heideggerian philosophy. Construction without an agent or subject doing the constructing is still construction, and still untenable.
In other words we can say that our networks of judgments overlap around portions of our perception that are least controllable, hence most thin and universal, albeit subject to diverse subsequent interpretation. That they overlap means that some portions of our world are minimally interpreted, least embedded, least open to cultural or other cognitive reformulation. The thicker and more particular, the more the judged or known object is colored by interconnections with diverse other judgments. The thinner and more universal, the more the judgment of the object abstracts from the particularities of other cultural judgments. For we can now see that "thinning" means first of all the abandonment of multifunctional judgment. In the case of assertive judgment or propositional knowledge, modern science is the thinnest form of cultural cognition yet created. It is not utterly thin; that would imply presuppositionless-ness or complete transparency, which is unattainable.
Realism and the unity of truth are indispensable but cannot be ultimately shown to be true. Once we have gone down the open-ended road of validating propositions via inquiry rather than faith, social and pragmatic demands, aesthetic appeal, or private intuition, we are stuck both with realism and with the search for realism's validation, knowledge's "foundations," a search that cannot be consummated. Inquiry has its own constitutive features which inevitably exclude other modes of handling the world. What lies within these borders cannot justify itself by its own rules, any more than it can lift itself by its own beard. We cannot maximize the methodological sophistication of our individual modes of appropriating the world-like inquiry-while at the same time integrating them.
So there is
then no specific epistemological problem attached to the recognition that
human cognition is cultural. That is, there is no philosophical problem
of cultural relativism. There might be if it made sense to say that human
belief occurs in systems, that all our beliefs are founded on identifiable
subsets of beliefs or enclosed in conceptual containers, and that cultures
are such containers. But it doesn't and they aren't. There might be, if
cultures did not overlap, exhibit commonalities, or have the resources
for comparison. But they do. There might be if there were no such thing
as the problem of knowledge, if the philosophical justification of human
knowing independent of culture were apparent. But it isn't. None of this
implies that culture is not a cognitive problem, that a culture's beliefs
or values can be definitively and noncircularly justified. It only means
that the fact of the location of beliefs and values in culture adds no
additional barrier that the subject must escape to contact objectivity.
The philosophical problem is the same, with or without culture.
