ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to address the difficulties in a preliminary fashion by outlining some core general features of relativism. It examines motivate relativism by outlining some of the reasons why, despite a long history of critical reactions, and indeed in the face of such criticisms, philosophers, and even non-philosophers, have found relativism an appealing option. The chapter discusses these motivating reasons to the discussions of the core features of relativism and discusses some varieties of and sub-categories of relativism. Relativism has been proposed as a reaction to the phenomenon of intractable disagreement. Relativism was generally assumed to involve some shared parameters, for example, paradigms, cultures, and frameworks, while subjectivism was seen as a claim about the relationship between assignments of truth-values to personal preferences. The purported fact of deep difference between cultures, styles of reasoning, world-views, and so forth is also frequently taken as a key motivation for relativism.
