Knowledge is the product of material conditions

The argument

The claim here is that knowledge is not something discovered independently of the knower but something produced, and that what produces it is the material conditions the knower happens to occupy. Relativism, on this account, treats every body of knowledge as relative to the environment that generated it. Social, cultural and political factors do not merely colour the answers people arrive at; they shape the prior question of what gets asked in the first place, which possibilities are considered worth investigating, and which kinds of answer will count as satisfactory when they arrive. The underlying picture generalises the point beyond enquiry. Things are said to have the properties they have - big, small, beautiful, right, wrong - not intrinsically but relationally, by standing in some relation to other things and above all to people's experience of life. Size is size compared with something; beauty and rightness are beauty and rightness to someone. Since life experience is itself diverse, because people come from different backgrounds and hold different beliefs, the relations that fix these properties differ from person to person and from community to community. Proponents draw the sceptical conclusion directly from this. If properties are relative in this way, no claim can be false outright and none can be the single true one; there is no position standing outside every background from which competing claims could be adjudicated. What presents itself as objectivity is only the perspective of one set of material conditions mistaken for a view from no particular standpoint. And if objective, purely true information cannot in principle be obtained, then what has traditionally been meant by knowledge - belief that is true independently of who holds it - has no possible object. On this view knowledge is impossible, not because people are careless or under-informed, but because the conditions that would make knowledge possible are never available.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Despite the various cultural beliefs and diverse social environments people live in, there are some universal things to all social systems. An example would be the seven universal facial expressions: happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, contempt and surprise. If every argument is true and faultless, disagreements defy the purpose of having arguments. Disagreement means that one side finds the other incorrect or is offering a less likely explanation of the phenomenon discussed. People disagree because some knowledge or arguments are more accurate or correct than others. Such disagreements are valid, which shows that evidence and knowledge are not impossible.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That the questions people ask are shaped by their circumstances does not entail that the answers are. The origin of an inquiry and the truth of its conclusion are separate matters, and a claim reached for parochial reasons can still be checked against evidence that observers from any background can inspect. [Rejecting P2] The claim that there is no single true argument is self-undermining, since it is itself offered as a true argument that the opposing view is mistaken. If it holds only relatively, it gives no reason to abandon the view that knowledge is possible; if it holds absolutely, relativism is false by its own example. The counter makes the same point from practice: disagreement only has a purpose if some accounts are more accurate than others. [Rejecting P3] The step from "properties are relative" to "objective information cannot be obtained" conflates two things. Relational facts — that one object is larger than another, or that a practice is disapproved of in a given society — are perfectly objective facts about a relation. Relativity of a property to a frame of reference is a feature of many well-established sciences rather than a barrier to knowledge.