Stacy Transancos makes an important argument about limited knowledge, and how we shouldn't mistake it for a failure to know, pure and simple. She examines a re-upping of a tangled ontological problem, called Wigner's Friend, a riff on Schroedinger's Cat, and clarifies it admirably. (She also describes both logical problems, so be sure to read the article!)
I recommend reading it with your high school kids too. Relativism is all around us. The unsuspecting can be taken in by it, but it's a fallacy.
How so?
Well, it's quite simple. Is the statement "all truth is relative" a true statement? If so, then it contradicts itself. If not, then the opposite is true, that all truth is objective.
Stacy supplies this quote from the article she is refuting:
“So the next time your friends think something is or isn’t the case, consider interjecting with an argument from quantum physics: they’re both wrong, and so are you, because even the simple fact of the disagreement itself is just another illusion.”
So the author makes an assertion: what you are thinking is an illusion. Including thinking that "all thinking is an illusion"? If so, then that thought -- that all thinking is an illusion -- is an illusion, and thus, meaningless. Therefore, we can't really conclude anything, including whether it's true, by it; it's meaningless and defeats itself. If it's not an illusion, if it's true, then it asserts except this thought. If even one thought -- that one -- is objectively true, that is, true apart from the person saying it, then the statement is incorrect. So truth is objective after all!
It can never be the case that all truth is relative.
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