forum for week of 21 Nov: the appeal of truth relativism

The reason I lean towards relativist ideas of truth is that there seems to be something intrinsically wrong with the notion of absolute truth. However it is difficult to articulate precisely what is wrong. The main problem I have is the way in which absolutists deal with the future. The example in class that was used is the flipping of a coin. It is either true or false in the present that the coin will land heads in the future, if it’s true then the coin will, in fact, land heads. But this argument seems to assert that the event is true before it even happens, without regard for other possibilities. I view this argument to be extremely close to determinism, and I don’t wish to conceptualize truth in this way. I want to be able to have the free will to influence which events will become truths in my life. Furthermore, I find relativism appealing because, as human’s we have defined the concept of truth. For instance, the universe would exist without us, but it would not be “true” in relation to us. There is an inability to get outside of our human experience, and therefore I think that truth is relative to humans.