Before looking into Plato’s own recoil argument a little more deeply, it will be useful to compare it with some recent followers. Hilary Putnam, one of America’s most distinguished contemporary philoso-phers, asks us to consider a formulation of relativism put in terms of
‘norms’. Since norms weave themselves into our story fairly perva-sively, it will be good to explain them a little. Norms are thought of as rules or principles governing our activities, and in particular our activities of thought and speech. Norms govern what it is permissible to say or think, or what it is obligatory to say or think. They are invoked when we allow that something was right, or insist that it was wrong. Speaking and thinking are norm-governed activities in the minimal sense that sometimes we get things right, speaking and think-ing correctly, and sometimes we get ththink-ings wrong, thinkthink-ing or speak-ing incorrectly. We can think or say that there is rain on the way when there is rain on the way, in which case we are right, or we can think or say that there is rain on the way when there is none, in which case we are wrong. Right and wrong here do not imply praise or blame, but they do imply success or failure, like the contrast between miss-ing a target and hittmiss-ing it.
As well as the norm of truth or hitting the target, there are norms of right procedure. These govern whether you have done your stuff properly: taken the right observations, made the right inferences,
hedged in the right places, weighed the evidence carefully and, in short, made yourself immune to procedural criticism. It may not follow that you arrive at the truth. The evidence may be poor, or mis-leading, or the interpretation which everyone supposes reasonable may be based on insufficient science or general misunderstanding. A trial may be fairly conducted, yet unhappily arrive at the wrong ver-dict. Still, there is nothing better that we can do. We act under the conviction that our best procedures, although they may let us down, markedly increase the chance that we get things right. Provided there was nothing better which we should have done then we may be immune from charges of irrationality, negligence or carelessness. Our procedures accord with reason, and it is only bad luck that might stop us hitting the truth.
The dispute between Socrates and Protagoras can then be put as one about the status of these norms, the source of their authority. Do they have more than a local or conventional standing? Is the rule of reason more than the rule of conventions, or even a mob rule, a ques-tion of might rather than right?
Here is Putnam’s argument that there is more to the authority of reason than just what we happen, at this place and time, to think. It is a pithy version of the judo-flip. The relativist Putnam imagines asserts:
A statement is true (rightly assertible) only if it is assertible according to the norms of modern European and American culture.
Putnam then neatly points out that this sentence is not itself assertible according to the norms of European and American culture. These norms do not demand that we make an equation between something being true and it being something we hold true or allow each other to hold as true. In fact our norms actually forbid the equation. For our standards allow that we are fallible. We may in principle sometimes all be wrong, and we may be disallowed from asserting things, although they are true. For example, perhaps it is not assertible according to our norms that there will still be a Gulf Stream in a thousand years’ time, for doubts about global warming are supposed to make that highly uncertain; but it may happily be true, for all that.
Even if we reason carefully, by contemporary historical, medical, scientific or political standards with which our culture is comfortable, we may get things wrong. Conversely, there may be truths so out-rageous and surprising that nobody would be able to assert them without causing dismay and ridicule. But truths, for all that.
So, the relativist’s doctrine is not assertible by the norms of modern European and American culture. But if the relativist’s sentence is not assertible by those norms, then by its own lights it is not true. Applying its own doctrine to itself, it comes out as untrue. Hence, if it is true, it is not true. But that means that it cannot be true, QED.
This is a nice knock-down argument, and it applies to other flam-boyant statements of a similar kind. The equally illustrious contem-porary philosopher Richard Rorty refuses to describe himself as a relativist, for reasons that we come to in chapter 6. But he is someone who has a robust debunking attitude to the norms of truth and reason. Indeed, he once wrote that ‘truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with’. That is a shocking thing to say, outlandish even by philosophers’ standards. In fact, it is shocking enough to be something Rorty’s contemporaries wouldn’t let him get away with (and unsurprisingly, they didn’t). So again, if it is true then it is false – by its own lights it is false.
This judo-flip is certainly neat, and it locates a trap that the rela-tivist must avoid. He had better not formulate his doctrine so that, applied to itself, it measures itself as being false. But does he have to do any such thing? Is it not a little hard to believe that this simple judo-flip settles the issue of relativism so decisively, so quickly?
Perhaps it depends what other formulations the relativist can find.
If we return to Plato’s text, we can see that Protagoras’s actual doc-trine is not really allowed to come very clearly into focus. Protagoras said that man is the measure of all things, the Measure Doctrine. As we go down the argument we see that this is taken to mean a number of things. First, that ‘truth and falsehood are dependent on individual impressions’. Second (in Socrates’s last speech), that ‘everyone believes what is the case’. There is also supposed to be the idea that things can be more or less true, according to some kind of democratic vote. These seem to be rather different. The idea that truth and
falsehood are dependent on individual impressions, for instance, may sound like a quite moderate kind of empiricism – the doctrine that the ultimate source of authority for any belief lies in sense experience. Far more lurid is the doctrine that ‘everyone believes what is the case’, that is, there is no such thing as false belief. For obviously according to common-sense ways of looking at things, there is plenty of false belief. Truth is a goal, and lies, mistakes, carelessness, muddled think-ing, plain bad luck or the thickness of the surrounding darkness all interfere with the achievement of hitting it.
Perhaps Protagoras did not even accept this much. Perhaps he did hold the lurid doctrine. But wouldn’t that be a lunatic position? How could anyone hold that ‘everyone believes what is the case’?