ABSTRACT
Relativism is often portrayed as a last resort: something we retreat from rather than aspire to. This is partly due to the perception that realism best captures our ordinary, common sense commitments, whereas relativism is a revisionary account of ordinary practice and therefore bears a higher burden of proof. In fact, I suggest that relativism can capture a feature of ordinary normative discourse - its supposed commitment to objectivity - as well as, if not better than, realism, by accommodating the existence of both objective and relative facts. This claim has both methodological and theoretical implications, and in defending it I look at past work in philosophical ethnography investigating cross-cultural normative diversity in both moral and epistemological discourses. This work has important lessons for current empirically informed philosophy, insofar as it offers an alternative to survey-based research for investigating moral and epistemic concepts.
