Relativism is Safe

Professor Destroys Relativism in 4 Minutes!

This video is full of nonsense. I will have to pick it apart one piece at a time.

A direct way to expose nonsense is to provide a practical counterexample. Professor Fortin's views imply that a mathematician working on Euclidean geometry cannot communicate with a mathematician working on non-Euclidean geometry. This implication is wrong; the two mathematicians can easily communicate with each other. Truth can be relative without communication becoming impossible. Hence, Fortin is spewing nonsense.

If I'm a truth relativist speaking with another truth relativist, then I do not have to choose between yielding to their truth or forcing them to yield to my truth. Our truths are grounded in our axioms, and we can state our axioms and statements so they can be understood by us and understood by people in general without requiring acceptance of our views.

Joel Christensen said that the mark of an educated individual is the ability to entertain an idea without accepting it. Aristotle said something similar: "It is right that we ask [people] to accept each of the things which are said in the same way: for it is the mark of an educated person to search for the same kind of clarity in each topic to the extent that the nature of the matter accepts it." In no way does this create conflict in a conversation between two truth relativists working with different paradigms of truth. To be clear, there is a difference between truth relativism and truth subjectivism. Many of the YouTube comments on that video conflate relativism with subjectivism. Relativism means to work relative to a paradigm, and subjectivism means an appeal to personal preference.  

Fortin appears to be a truth objectivist. Objective just means stance-independent. Truth objectivism has the same problem that Fortin thinks truth relativism has. Namely, one's inquiry into objective truth will always put them in their own world anyway. One can interpret an interpretation, interpret an interpretation of an interpretation, and so on. This is one reason why I prefer religions like Mikraite and Neo-Ockhamist Protestantism (e.g., Lutheran, Mennonite) over Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Talmudic Judaism, Sunni/Shia Islam, etc. For example, the Orthodox say you need apostolic authority because you need an interpreter. I disagree with needing an interpreter because one has to interpret their interpretations anyway. Since I accept that all interpretations end with us at the end of the day, the simplest solution I see is just to be some kind of truth relativist (e.g., a nominalist like William of Ockham) and use that as a vehicle for interpreting the Old Testament.

Verdict: I am a truth relativist, and I will stay one.