Relativism — A position holding that truth, knowledge, and moral values are not absolute and universal but always depend on a frame of reference: the individual who judges, the culture in which one lives, or the historical period in which one thinks. The word derives from the Latin relativus (“having reference to something”), and its central thesis is that claims of truth or value make sense only relative to such a frame, never in themselves. The oldest formulation is the sophistical relativism of Protagoras, captured in the famous dictum “man is the measure of all things,” reported by Plato in the dialogue Theaetetus: each thing is, for each person, as it appears to them. Both Socrates and Plato opposed this view, arguing that it is self-contradictory, since it asserts as universally true the thesis that there are no universal truths. It is worth distinguishing the main variants. Moral relativism holds that no ethical standards are valid for all cultures, so that practices such as certain rites or taboos can be judged only from within each community — a position often nourished by anthropology and close to cultural relativism. Cognitive or epistemological relativism, in turn, claims that the very criteria of knowledge and rationality vary with context; it gained force in post-structuralism and the philosophy of science, especially in Paul Feyerabend, who in Against Method (1975) argued that there is no single, universally valid scientific method. The classic problem of relativism remains that of self-refutation: in denying all absolute truth, it seems committed to at least one.
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