How Both 'Facts Don't Care About Your Feelings' And 'Everything Is Relative' Get It Wrong
To thread the complexity of our world, we'll need to go beyond rigid Absolutism and inconsistent Relativism
(NOTE: This piece is a follow-up to a previous article, ‘Constructed But Not Imaginary’, which delves into an epistemic ‘middle way’ called Enactivism, whose central premise is that minds ‘enact’ a meaningful reality).
In contrast to Enactive epistemology, which finds its bearings amidst our lived perspective within Reality, Absolutism ascends the masthead in search of an elusive ‘view from nowhere’ - yearning for a set of absolute foundations upon which our knowledge about Reality can safely rest. Just as Ahab became consumed by his obsessive hunt for Moby Dick, philosophers, scientists, and theologians have long pursued their own white whale: absolute certainty that can serve as a stable bedrock for sensemaking. Speculation on the basis for this certainty has included an all-knowing and all-powerful God, the surety of our own conscious experience, and a self-contained material reality governed by physical laws, to list just a few of the more prominent contenders.
Uniting these varied approaches is an unquestioned faith that all knowledge must spring from some fixed ground. What a ‘ground’ refers to is a foundational assumption that’s not contingent upon anything else. For instance, scientific materialists plant their flag in self-contained physical Reality that’s not dependent upon any divine tinkering. Monotheists make a parallel move, casting God as the eternal wellspring for life, the universe, and everything. And then there’s the consciousness-first folks, who insist that the physical world is a parlor trick of our minds.
What binds all of these diverse perspectives together is a shared presupposition that there’s a monolithic something (such as matter and energy, a divine creator, or consciousness) that serves as the Source, or ultimate ground, for all that exists. Just as the ground beneath a building determines the shape of structure above, the ground of an epistemology shapes the metaphysical tales we spin about Reality. And just as surely as buildings arise from a foundation, our convictions about what counts as valid knowledge arise from our intuitions about what’s ultimately ‘real’.
When we encounter claims that violate these intuitions, we’re generally very quick to dismiss them out-of-hand - we chalk it off as fantasy or delusion, and that’s where the consideration ends. It’s why we don’t get alarmed when a small child tells us that there’s a monster under their bed, yet we react with an appropriate level of concern if they report a stranger lurking in our yard at night.
The basic takeaway is that we all use Absolutism in our lives. The ‘sniff test’ it facilitates serves a very important purpose, providing us with an accessible waste bin for discarding nonsense. Consider just how much useless, nonsensical information you come across in a typical day - and how much worse this problem has gotten in the digital era. Much like Borges' Library of Babel - that short story of the impossible library containing every possible text, most of which is nonsensical gibberish - we wade amidst an unending stream of misinformation, conspiracism, and bullshit that’s gunking up our sensemaking machinery faster than we can clean it. Without Absolutism, finding any semblance of coherence in this sea of noise would be a herculean task.
So that’s the everyday necessity of Absolutism, but what of its limitations? Like a finicky shower knob that’s maddeningly inconsistent as to whether the water it releases is ice-cold or scaldingly hot, Absolutism is notoriously difficult to fine tune. If the miscalibration gets bad enough, the consequences can be catastrophic - the historical record is rife with examples, from the belief in a quick victory and subsequent sunk-cost fallacy that led millions to their deaths in World War 1 to the blind faith in markets that created the Great Depression. So how do we check if what we’re certain about, and what we dismiss out-of-hand, is reasonably well calibrated? For that, we turn to Absolutism’s antithesis: Relativism.
Where Absolutism hitches its epistemology to bedrock certainties, Relativism reveals how knowledge rests upon the shifting sands of perspective. Those fixed and enduring truths that Absolutism pines for are for Relativism hunks of fool’s gold, carved out from a labyrinth of competing stories. Instead of casting its anchor to the seabed of surety, Relativism recognizes that truth is murky, and our choice of lens determines what’s revealed to us. For Relativist epistemology, knowledge takes different shapes from different vantage points. Moreover, knowledge isn’t a fixed feature of the world that’s waiting to be discovered like buried treasure - it’s something we actively craft through our individual, social, and cultural lenses. These then are Relativism’s navigational tools: the lens of perspective and the map of context.
Developing alongside advances within other academic disciplines, such as linguistics and sociology, Relativism reveals a crucial insight: every piece of knowledge comes to us through an interpretative lens. When presented with the assertion that ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’, Relativism reminds us that ‘there’s no such thing as an uninterpreted fact’. Which is to say, facts always mean something to someone. Moreover, the lenses we look at the world through pre-determine which types of facts are available to us - and what stories those facts tell. While a racist won’t have any difficulty in dredging up facts for why an out-group deserves their hatred, a humanist will see the same data as evidence of systemic inequalities. With such radically different readings of the same ‘facts’, Relativism shatters the comforting myth of ‘neutral’ knowledge.
Beyond coming to different interpretations over what facts mean, there’s an additional question for us to consider: which facts are relevant for a given situation? Here’s where Relativism delivers a gut punch: ‘just the facts, please’ is a convenient story divorced from the messy epistemological reality. And here’s the real kicker: there’s no objective formula that can tell us which facts are relevant for any given situation. In practice, individuals and groups will choose to emphasize certain facts over others based on their motivations, life experiences, and cultural background. Moreover, determinations of relevance are coupled to what we care about within a given situation - our values decide which facts are given a seat at the table. Crucially, this isn’t a ‘flaw’ of our reasoning that can be excised through a strict adherence to ‘objectivity’. It’s an inescapable feature of our existential situation, as finite beings that experience Reality from ‘somewhere’ rather than ‘everywhere’.
Armed with insights of perspective and context, Relativism revealed an uncomfortable truth about the role of coercive power structures in dictating what counts as ‘knowledge’. This led the way for new forms of social critique, exposing the incestuous relationship between ‘knowledge’ and Grand Narratives. While narratives are a sensemaking tool that’s as old as human culture, Grand Narratives differ from our everyday yarns due to their relationship with power. A Grand Narrative is a story big enough to swallow the world, offering a broad and encompassing explanation for an observed state of affairs. Tellingly, it’s no accident that these tales usually justify the existing social order - or pitch its replacement.
For a textbook case of how Grand Narratives serve power hierarchies, consider the ‘white man’s burden’ narrative used to prop up European colonialism. Its thrust was that white Europeans had a right and duty to ‘civilize’ (i.e., colonize) other regions of the world, due to Europe’s self-appointed role as stewards of civilization against ‘barbarian’ cultures. Far from backwater bigotry that was eschewed by respectable people, this narrative found eager champions among Europe’s most well educated and esteemed individuals. Moreover, it’s a notion that found support within scientific discourse of the time, bolstering its credibility among those who preferred their bigotry to be peer-reviewed.
And while it’s easy for us to ridicule these outdated narratives, their lessons echo uncomfortably into the present. The cautionary tale they tell is that present-day sensemaking inevitably reflects our own social, cultural, and personal circumstances. It can be sobering to confront the fact that this process is largely invisible to us, due to our enmeshment in the cultural waters that inform our beliefs. So when we pass judgment on the Grand Narratives of the past, it would be well to remember that we’re doing so with the benefit of hindsight. That said, the point of this wake-up call isn’t to whitewash these narratives - it’s a call to approach the self-evident truths of our own era with a healthy informed skepticism (a topic we’ll return to in our final chapter: Beliefs Serve Us Best When Held Lightly).
So that’s the ‘prudence’ of Relativist epistemology. Where do its ‘pitfalls’ lie? As we explore these pitfalls, we’ll begin to get a better sense of where Relativism meets - and parts ways - with our Enactivist framework. The task before us is to distinguish and bridge: this involves identifying Relativism’s partial truths, while being mindful of its inherent limitations. Phrased differently, we’re attempting to ‘transcend and include’ the partial truths of Relativism, just as we did for Absolutism (tip of the hat to the philosopher Ken Wilber for this useful framing).
An attentive reader may have noticed some common ground between Relativism and Enactivism - particularly their shared focus on how knowledge is constructed, and on the impracticality of absolute truth. That said, the overlap between these two epistemologies shouldn’t be overstated. As we’ll see, Relativism stumbles when it’s pushed beyond its useful insights towards a complete theory of knowledge.
Relativism’s fatal flaw? Like a defense attorney who unintentionally incriminates their client, Relativism is inherently self-undermining. And how does Relativism stumble into this trap? It does so through one of two paths, which ultimately lead to the same destination. Down the first path, Relativism takes a page from Absolutism’s own playbook, crowning itself the final arbiter of knowledge. Thus does Relativism become wedded to the very thing it sets out to dethrone - absolute certainty. Down the second path, Relativism refuses the crown and becomes merely one valid perspective among others. Thus, the trap snaps shut: if Relativism is correct, then it’s no more or less valid than the Absolutism that it critiques.
While this might look like humility, in actuality no one adheres to an epistemology without an implicit belief that it’s more valid than what it’s critiquing (otherwise, why embrace Relativism over some other viewpoint)? Another term for this is a Performative Contradiction. It’s an inconsistency that’s unaddressed because it’s fundamentally unanswerable - and thus inconvenient to advocates for that viewpoint.
Beyond this Performative Contradiction, Relativism’s second major stumbling block arises from its impracticality for real-world decision making. Relativism leaves us stranded on which perspectives should guide our decisions and behavior. Providing actionable guidance on how to discern what’s likely to be true is where the rubber hits the road for epistemology. Precisely because any attempt to assess the comparative value of different societal and cultural viewpoints is anathema to Relativism, this severely limits its usefulness for guiding our decisions in the real world. An important aspect of living in the real world means being confronted by decisions that are informed by incommensurable viewpoints. As such, we can’t always reach a compromise that ‘splits the difference’, nor should we work from the assumption that every perspective should be given a seat at the table - inviting Nazis to participate in public discourse is to miss that their entire agenda operates in bad faith. In short, there’s no shortage of bad actors ready to gleefully weaponize Relativism’s naivety that ‘all views are valid’; when the ability to call out lies is kneecapped, demagogues flourish.
Enter Relativism’s final stumbling block: misapplications of it poison the well of productive discourse. The problem is simple: Relativist epistemology is inherently deconstructive. Its modus operandi is to ‘debunk’ existing attitudes and beliefs; brilliant at demolishing existing beliefs but useless at building bridges. While taking a sledgehammer to harmful ideas is crucial, Relativism leaves us bereft of the scaffolding to rebuild after. Demolition without reconstruction leaves us stranded in the rubble.
When left unchecked, Relativism can toxify into narcissistic echo chambers, where individuals and groups insist upon their own ‘truths’ that are completely detached from Reality. Social media has only amplified this poison into a plague, corroding the shared reality that sustains our democratic institutions.
So where does this leave us? While destruction and creation are on some level two sides of the same coin, tearing down ideas and beliefs that aren’t working anymore on its own isn’t enough. Nature abhors a vacuum, and in the absence of better alternatives, darker forces await their chance to fill the void. We needn’t look far to find a host of candidates circling overhead, eager to feed on alienation and despair. Conspiracism is one prominent example that positively thrives in this wasteland, ready to seduce the lost with its poisonous certainties.
Warding off these circling specters requires more than Relativism's sledgehammers - we require tools for rebuilding meaning. Enter Enactivism: a reconstructive epistemology that meets this urgent need in Western thought.