The position I have outlined is fairly standard and commonplace; that it is different from the view you call ‘relativism’ does not mean that I have misrepresented you, since I did not in fact intend to characterise your specific view.
It’s not that there are no facts to discover, but that whatever you discover is a mental construct that is mediated by how you think about it.
If the ‘mediation’ in question is sufficiently strong, whatever is discovered is not, on the usual reading of ‘fact’, really going to consist in facts.
This ‘nihilism’
is not standardly called nihilism. Those standardly called metaphysical nihilists in the literature tend not to be relativists; in insisting on their position in the debate, they usually think that the debate is meaningful.
In the later section of your comment, the sort of mind-dependence to which you advert is unclear. One reading is that you think that the process of intellectual enquiry as we perform it is mind-dependent because it takes place in our minds; this much I think is quite plausible. Another reading is that you think that any criteria of success (e.g., correctness) will also be mind-dependent, which is fairly close to Berkeley’s idealism, in that, if Berkeleyan idealism is denied, there will presumably be mind-independent facts (up to translation schemata) that we can get right or wrong. I do not intend to debate whether Berkeleyan idealism is true, but it is certainly different from what is typically taken to be metaphysical relativism in the metametaphysical literature.
Comments
The position I have outlined is fairly standard and commonplace; that it is different from the view you call ‘relativism’ does not mean that I have misrepresented you, since I did not in fact intend to characterise your specific view.
If the ‘mediation’ in question is sufficiently strong, whatever is discovered is not, on the usual reading of ‘fact’, really going to consist in facts.
is not standardly called nihilism. Those standardly called metaphysical nihilists in the literature tend not to be relativists; in insisting on their position in the debate, they usually think that the debate is meaningful.
In the later section of your comment, the sort of mind-dependence to which you advert is unclear. One reading is that you think that the process of intellectual enquiry as we perform it is mind-dependent because it takes place in our minds; this much I think is quite plausible. Another reading is that you think that any criteria of success (e.g., correctness) will also be mind-dependent, which is fairly close to Berkeley’s idealism, in that, if Berkeleyan idealism is denied, there will presumably be mind-independent facts (up to translation schemata) that we can get right or wrong. I do not intend to debate whether Berkeleyan idealism is true, but it is certainly different from what is typically taken to be metaphysical relativism in the metametaphysical literature.