ABSTRACT
Relativism about truth (alethic relativism) is the claim that views and standards of truth and falsity may vary across cultures, social groups, historical periods or even individuals, and every effort to adjudicate them is bound to be futile. The truth of beliefs, it is argued, is relative to a personal viewpoint, to the attitudes and other psychological idiosyncrasies of individuals, or more generally to the conceptual, historical or cultural background of the believers. Truth-claims are inexorably bound up with the personal, cultural and historical contexts which give rise to them and hence their assessments should also be context-dependent. Alethic relativism is at once the most radical and most general of all relativistic positions, for other varieties of cognitive relativism, and even moral relativism, are reducible to it. For instance, relativism about rationality can be restated as the claim that there are no true (universal) standards of rationality; relativism about logic as the contention that logical truths are relative to specific cultures or cognitive schemes and not universal in their scope and application; and moral relativism as the view that the truth of ethical judgements is relative to their context or the cultural background.
