Abstract
According to conceptual relativism, reality crucially depends on the mind and the language of a person. The world does not present itself as already made or arranged. People have different ways of categorising and conceptualising the world. Because according to conceptual relativism, what exists also depends on conceptual frameworks, it can also be called ontological relativism. We must note that ontological relativism does not mean that the mind creates or generates reality and its objects as a craftsman creates a ceramic object. That would be idealism. Relativism does not deny that the world exists and affects our senses, experiences and knowledge. But despite this, we cannot know how the world is in itself. We do not have an absolute point of view that would reveal reality to us as it is. We must always build our world from some chosen conceptual foundation. In this chapter, I will first define what conceptual relativism is. Then, I will discuss natural kinds and the problematics of structuring reality. I will then present and compare Putnam’s internal realism and Searle’s external realism. In the last section, I will present how we can analyse and specify the central questions of conceptual relativism about individuation and categorisation using the theory of conceptual spaces.
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Notes
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My impression is that social constructionism is mainly devoted to societies and cultures, not to nature.
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Hacking denies that Searle represents social constructionism. I consider Searle’s book The Construction of Social Reality to be the analysis of in what sense society is constructed, and in what sense it is not.
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It should be noted that although the fields of the philosophy of science and science studies have discussed the concept of social constructionism a lot (see Giere , 2006; Fuller, 2006), it is not widely used in epistemological discussions on relativism. For example, in her encompassing work, Relativism (2004), Baghramian does not mention social constructionism or refer to Berger and Luckmann’s classical work, The Social Construction of Reality (1967). O’Grady (2002) and Mosteller (2008) also do not refer to social constructionism.
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Putnam reiterates this critique in his last work; see Putnam (2015).
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Putnam avoids using the term “conceptual relativism” in the context of his own theory.
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Jaakko Hintikka offers an interesting differentiation between two kinds of identifications. A perspectival identification takes place from the perspective and context of the speaker. A public identification is perspective-free. In Hintikka’s semantics, these include the different identifications of the entities between possible worlds. See Hintikka (1998). I would like to thank Niiniluoto for this observation.
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The relationship between framework-reality has been described using the concepts of Kantian scheme and content, with the thought that the scheme provides a shape and structure to a material that is considered to be the content (Baghramian , 2004, pp. 214–218).
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However, because Putnam rejected the epistemic concept of truth in his later work and started supporting a “metaphysical” concept of truth (truth is not warranted assertability under ideal conditions, Putnam, 2015), even the last differences between internal realism and Searle’s external realism disappears.
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Gärdenfors (2000, p. 24) treats colour as a three-dimensional continuous domain, where the dimensions of hue, chromaticness, and brightness are integral in the sense that one cannot assign an object a value in one dimension without giving it a value in the other. In my presentation, I suppose that all domains are separate, like colour and shape are separate, and integral dimensions are integrated into one multi-dimensional domain.
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“Natural” does not mean naturalistic, but non-artificial.
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Decock and Douven (2015) defined relative identity by applying the metrics of domains. In their definition, identity means high-similarity in all relevant domains.
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This kind of ontology resembles the so-called cluster theory of individuals, according to which objects are a cluster or bundle of properties.
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Personally, I do not see that convexity should be a part of criterion C. There are so many useful concepts without convexity, especially in science, that the convexity requirement restricts the scope of applications of conceptual space theory too much.
- 22.
This refers to the semantic or structuralist concept of theories. I will say more about it in the next chapter.
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Hautamäki, A. (2020). The Relativity of Reality. In: Viewpoint Relativism. Synthese Library, vol 419. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34595-2_6
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