The Case Against Epistemic Relativism

It is often said that truth is relative and not absolute. But does anyone still believe such seemingly persuasive sophistry?

Just because something appears persuasive doesn’t mean it is logical. This gap simultaneously massive and hidden is the hiding place where the components of misunderstanding lurk all around us.

Before we dive into the details, here are three quick examples to clarify the idea from the start:

The temperature of water at 20°C does not change but someone coming out of the desert finds it cold, while someone coming out of the snow finds it warm. The truth did not move the reference point moved.
Your weight on a scale is a single number, but people differ in describing you: fat, thin, or acceptable. The number did not change; the standards did.
Psychological pain, for example, has no unified unit of measurement, but it exists, it is real, and it is absolute in its existence, even if every human differs in defining it.

The Hidden Gap

This idea is often raised in arguments, like when someone says: “Truth is not absolute because we live in a moving world, not a static one.”

This sounds very beautiful and emotional, and it seems convincing because it contains a powerful statement: that the world is changing and not fixed.

However, even if this statement is true, it does not logically follow that the entire sentence is correct.

It is like someone saying: “The color of the sea is not real because it merely reflects the color of the sky.”

Okay, I don’t disagree with this statement, it is beautiful, powerful, and very persuasive. Anyone who disagrees with it seems to know nothing about natural sciences.

But it contains a logical gap.

Think about it: a liquid could be blue, we place it in a pool with blue tiles, or use water with blue dye, out in the open air and using literally the same way of thinking, according to the previous principle: its color is not blue, but rather it reflects the color of the sky.
Same principle, same result.
Do you see where the deception lies?

The principle stating “The sea reflects the sky, therefore its color is not real” is partially true in the case of the sea (though the sky itself appears blue due to the scattering of sunlight in the atmosphere;Rayleigh scattering);but it is not a universal law to be generalized to everything that is liquid and blue. When treated as an absolute truth, it collapses at the first real test.

I said at the beginning that it is a hidden gap. If you look closely, you will find it in many things that seem… seem or appear persuasive.
Even though it is by no means a requirement that everything persuasive is the absolute truth; Incompleteness Theorems demonstrate this as well.

The Number from Every Angle

For example: the number 7 in Hindi;as it is sometimes written in Arabic (V).

One person may see it from a certain angle as indeed being the number 7.
Another may see it from the opposite angle as its inverse;the number 8 (Λ).
A third person might see it from a middle angle;as the number 2.

They might argue that this is clear evidence that truth is relative depending on the angle from which you view the subject.

Okay, wait.

The abstract truth, and if we want to be precise, no one knows the “thing-in-itself” exactly;is that this is a numerical entity: with a certain number of sides, a certain structure, and a certain number of angles.

But things got mixed up, and the concept of truth became: “Since it depends on our understanding of it, it is relative.”

You see it this way but truth in itself is not forced to submit to the laws of your mind, which already submit to the laws of the senses, time, space, and the laws of your beliefs.

A fourth person might see it as nothing more than a boomerang, that wooden stick that flies and returns and they cannot be blamed, that is their angle.

But the truth as the mind sees it is not the truth itself. This is another very deep subject addressed by great philosophers, such as Kant.

Rather, it is a point of view, or in another term: an angle of vision. I do not know why the name “truth” became commonly attached to it.

In other words: it seems persuasive that truth is relative, but they forgot to add: “according to our point of view.”

The Rose

The sun, from the perspective of one person, is fire; from the perspective of a pagan, it is a god, and from the perspective of a physicist, it is a thermonuclear reaction. Will the sun be affected by our point of view of it?

And the rose;let’s take the Damask rose, famous for its dense petals and soft texture, the very one from which rose oil is extracted;this rose:

From a child’s perspective: a beautiful shape. This does not mean his words represent the absolute truth. He is talking about a property, not the essence.

From the perspective of lovers: a symbol of love. This does not mean it is an absolute truth in itself. They, too, are talking about a property, not the essence.

From a scientist’s perspective: it is a complex composition of organic acids, amine groups, and cellulose chains. Pigments like anthocyanins give it its color, and volatile oils give it its fragrance. But even this is an inventory of the characteristics of its interaction with our tools, not a grasp of the essence of the rose in itself.

This does not mean that the concept and essence of the rose… in the sense of being a rose, will submit to the concept of lovers or the scientist’s methodology.

Rather, in its essence, it is: “a certain being.” We are still discovering things in it; meaning we haven’t actually reached its true reality.

The rose, as it truly is, might be something else entirely that reflects all these “rosy” characteristics.
It might be a lower rank of another, higher model of a rose.
And it might be…
And it might be…

Let’s stay with the same example for a moment.

The Damask rose feels soft to you. But that does not mean it is an absolute truth that it is soft.

Does a hedgehog feel it the same way?

Or is there an external factor affecting your sensation this way;a factor that has nothing to do with the rose at all;such as the structure of your nerves that sense touch, or the hidden oils in the fingers that leave prints on surfaces? Do these interact with the property of friction to give the rose this tactile definition specific to us as humans: “its texture is soft”?

Is the rose, in its absolute truth, really like this?

Well, what about a blind person who has never seen a rose in their life;do they see it as the same thing?

What if we were all blind? Would our concept of the rose change?

What I want to propose regarding this example is: we do not know the absolute truth of the rose. That is, its pure secret;its essence as it is.

Someone might argue: “It’s a rose, man; surely scientists know its absolute truth.”

Okay;has research in this branch of botany stopped? Have they finished the curriculum? Of course not. At least during this period, I haven’t found any prudent researcher saying they know everything perfectly about the science of flowers. In fact, we enter another maze: what does “everything” mean?

But the bigger maze is: what is the absolute truth of the rose?

Since these are mazes, and the human brain loves shortcuts;they take a massive shortcut and say, “Truth is relative,” and they convince themselves of that. When they see a large number of people convinced of the same thing, they think it is reality and truth.

Have you ever asked in the world of bees about the nature of the rose to them? Should we take their definition, since they are more deeply immersed in the world of flowers than most humans? Even though their senses are different and their perception is different?

Forgive the maze and the great pressure in a massive field of epistemology.

What I want to say is: even the rose, we do not know its absolute truth. Rather, we see it through the lens of emotions if we are lovers, or through the lens of the senses if we are just passersby on the road, or from a purely material aspect if we see it from a scientist’s point of view.

This does not mean it is forced to submit to our sensory system and our mentality. Because if it were forced;quite simply;magic would be real, and we would change things just by looking at them or by our mere desire. But things do not work with such fantasy.

The Object in the Pocket

Imagine you are sitting at a lunch table, having just met your girlfriend and her friend. In your pocket: a small, red, rough-textured octagonal object.

Your girlfriend notices the strange bulge. Not knowing what it is, she decides you are simply eccentric — the kind of person who carries odd little things around for no good reason. And that, frankly, will not help your case.

Her friend, who has just been served a large burger, glances at the shape in your pocket mid-bite. Something about the size and the moment makes her wonder, absurdly, whether you are hiding food in there. That also will not help your case.

When lunch ends and you all stand to leave, you walk a little too quickly behind them. A security guard nearby — the type who has not yet proved himself and is quietly looking for the chance — notices your hurried step and the protrusion in your pocket. To him, it is neither a trinket nor a snack. It is something to be suspicious of.

Three people. Three entirely different stories. And yet the object did not move, did not change, did not consult anyone’s mood or hunger or suspicion before deciding what it was. It remained: a rough, red octagon.

This is where some draw the wrong conclusion: “Everyone saw it differently, therefore truth is relative.” But what actually shifted was not the truth. It was the lens. The plurality of perspectives only proves that perception is personal, not that the object bent itself to accommodate each viewer.

Mistaking the lens for the landscape is the oldest error in this argument.

Light;And What It Hides About Absolute Truth

Proponents of modern physics might not like what I’m saying. Some have become preoccupied with Schrödinger’s cat and wave theory, thinking that the strange behaviors of light in the double-slit experiment are the greatest evidence that truth is lost or relative;some even went so far as to say that observation itself intervenes in the formation of truth, and that truth does not exist independent of the observer.

But hold on.

When scientists say that light is a wave and a particle at the same time;they are not saying its truth is lost or fluctuating. They are saying exactly the opposite: the nature of this entity is like this, a constant law, encompassing both states together.

Let me bring the idea closer in a different way.

In logic, when we say: If such and such, then the result is such and such;we are not talking about the volatility of truth, but about the precision of its system. The function f that links the condition to the result is the absolute truth, not the result alone. If the observation is of a certain type, light behaves as a wave. If the observation is of another type, it behaves as a particle. The law governing this transformation does not change;it is rigorous, constant, and incredibly precise. What changes is x;the condition we input. And the condition itself is part of the equation, not outside of it.

This is regardless of the human emotional shock from the condition of changing states… as it appears that the photon has consciousness. This is what appears, and I will not delve here into the shock of state change and how it’s possible that a photon, when subjected to observation, knows it is being observed and changes its behavior… that is not our topic here. Also, this shock was a large cloud for them that made them hallucinate logic left and right and say truth is relative; some even went further and said there is no truth at all and everything we know is an illusion. Regardless, let’s return to the ground of our subject.

In other words:

In logic, there is a massive difference between “simple truth” and “the truth of condition and result” (If … Then). The absolute truth here is not the “particle” in isolation, nor is it the “wave” in isolation; rather, it is the universal law that governs the relationship between the observer and the observed. If the cosmic rule says: (If measurement context “A” exists, then light will behave with behavior “B”), then this rule itself is an absolute truth, constant, and not subject to human whims.

“Observation” does not create truth from nothing; it is an “input” in a mighty cosmic equation. Just as the boiling point of water is not a fixed number (100) in all conditions, but rather “a value that follows the state of pressure.” Does the boiling of water at 70 degrees atop Mount Everest mean that truth is relative? Absolutely not! It means that the absolute truth is the “fixed mathematical relationship between heat and pressure.”

We are the ones who fall into the trap of “relativity” when we fragment truth and try to cram the “whole” into the “part.” We are like someone looking at a cylinder from the side and seeing a rectangle, then looking at it from the base and seeing a circle; the rectangle is real, and the circle is real, but the transcendent absolute truth is the “cylinder” that combined the two opposites in its single essence, and remained as it is while our angles of vision danced around it.

What some call “relativity” is, in reality, a “deficiency in the tools of comprehension.” Existence does not change just by us looking at it; rather, our looking at it is what cannot capture more than one “frequency” from the absolute symphony of existence. The “state” is what changes, but the “logical law” that governs that state remains absolute, rigorous, and indifferent to our consciousness.

Conclusion

After all these mazes from the reflection of the sea to the puzzle of the number 7, and from the dissection of the rose to the complexities of quantum;we reach the final certainty: the error is not that our understanding is relative, for that is the tax of our existence within time and space; the fatal error is the “intellectual laziness” that deleted half the sentence and said “truth is relative,” forgetting to complete it: “according to the narrowness of our eyes.”

We have confused the “thing-in-itself” with “the interaction of our senses with the thing.” The rose does not turn to notice our aesthetic or chemical definitions, the number does not care who sees it as seven or eight or a wooden stick, and light does not ask permission from our consciousness before practicing its dual nature according to its absolute laws.

Truth is like the sun, shining in the heart of existence; it is not harmed that we see it sometimes behind a cloud, or feel it sometimes as heat and sometimes as light, or that the blind person sees it as nothingness.

For example: when I wake up and don’t drink coffee, I am in a bad mood. If I drink it, my mood is better. Someone might say: “Therefore, your mood is relative and changing.” But it is more accurate to say: “Therefore, there is a fixed law that governs your mood according to the condition.” The absolute truth here is not “irritability,” nor “cheerfulness”;it is the relationship between the coffee and the state.

We are the ones who fail to see the full picture all at once;so we see a shard and call it truth, we see a state and call it the whole truth, and we see that states multiply so we call truth relative. But the absolute truth is the law that unites all states, not any single state.

Absolute truth reminds me of Sir Isaac Newton’s saying at the end of his life when he said that all he discovered and all he did, he still felt like a small child gathering shells from the seashore… what then of the ocean itself?