Who's to Say? The Second Day Study Questions pp. 25-39

1. Who's to Say? The Second Day Study Questions pp. 25-39

2. 1. Fred begins the dialogue by shifting his position from one of individual relativism to one of cultural relativism. (a) What is the difference between these positions? (b) How is cultural relativism different from law? (a) In cultural relatvism, morality isn't so much up to the individual as it is completely dependent upon his or her culture. (b) Cultural relativism is different from law because morality is a broader concept than the concept of a law.

3. 2. Anita raises four questions to Fred’s new position. What are these questions? How does Fred attempt to answer them? Is he ultimately successful in salvaging his position? Q1: What is a culture? (p.27) Q2: If people belong to several cultures, then which one should they judge by? (p.27) Q3: Can cross-cultural judgments be made, e.g. of the Nazis, or do can we judge persons only by their own cultural norms? (p.28) Q4: Doesn't cultural relativism have the same problem of self-refutation as individual relativism? (p.28) Fred has no answer to any of these questions!

4. 3. How does Peter describe Fred’s new position? What does he see as right with it? What does he see as mistaken with it? Peter sees Fred's relativism as a dogmatic sort of anti-ethnocentrism. (p.29) He sees it as well-intentioned, but ultimately doomed. The principle problem is that Fred makes a doctrine out of his relativism.

5. 4. (a) Summarize Peter’s description of his own position on pp.30-32. (b) How does he intend the example of Sam’s and Michael’s differences over religion to illustrate his position with respect to standards of belief? (a) Peter's view might be summed up three propositions (p.31): 1) People are often dismissive of what they don't understand. 2) People benefit from "sympathetic identification" of different ways of life/ points of view. 3) Honest "sympathetic identification" shows that there is no objective reason to prefer any one world view over another. (b) Peter uses the example of Sam and Michael to show that very often the standards for what it is rational to believe are not objective, but are embedded within a worldview. (p.35) This entails that there is no objective way of arbitrating between these differing standards of belief since one cannot escape one's own worldview.

6. 5. (a) What first objection does Elizabeth raise to Peter’s view? (b) How does Peter answer her objection? Anita is also skeptical of Peter’s position. (c) How does he address her skepticism? (a) Elizabeth says the job of philosophy is to settle such differences. (b) Peter sees philosophy as having failed inasmuch as it has gone in the direction of empiricism--even the data given to us by our senses needs interpretation. And all interpretation is "theory-laden". (p.36) (c) Anita grants Peter his reply to Elizabeth but still wonders how he can say that no one worldview is rationally preferable to another. Peter's reply is that all worldviews stand as valid interpretations of human experience, and that any seeming rational preference for any one is really just failure to see past the preferences of one's own worldview. Note Anita's summary of Peter's view on page 37.

7. 6. Note the summary of Peter’s view that Anita gives on page 37. What does he mean when he says that all our theories and explanations about the world are “underdetermined” by the evidence? Peter means that science, working as it does on an inductive model, almost never gives the complete certainty that it is often interpreted as giving.

8. 7. Peter attempts to make his point about “underdetermination” clear through an example involving the conductivity of copper. How do Anita, Michael, and Elizabeth answer the example? Anita points out that the copper example only shows that a theory does not deductively follow from the evidence for it. Michael counters that the fact that the evidence does not determine the theory may well mean that a number of hypotheses are logically compatible with the evidence. This does not entail, as Peter seems to think, that all such compatible hypotheses are on an equal footing with the evidence at hand. Elizabeth's counter-example shows that compatibility between two propositions is a much weaker relationship than support. Compatibility holds anytime two statements do not contradict one another. Support exists only when there is a special evidential relationship.