1. Relativism, Truth, and Reality

2. Wood combines with phlogiston, of negative weight, when it burns, to leave ash; the ash weighs less that the wood; thus phlogiston is of negative weight.

3.  If you believe burning wood combines with phlogiston, that’s fine. It’s true for you, but not for me, for I don’t believe it.

4.  In your society burning wood combines with phlogiston, but not in my society. Truth is relative to societies.

5.  According to your conceptual scheme, burning wood combines with phlogiston, but in my conceptual scheme this doesn’t hold; truth is relative to conceptual schemes.

6.  Burning wood combines with phlogiston if I believe it does, for we create our own reality.

7.  If enough of us believe burning wood combines with phlogiston, it will become the truth.

8.  It doesn’t matter whether burning wood combines with phlogiston or not; the very idea is metaphorical, like all language use, and as metaphorical, it’s all relative.

9.  1.If after weighing the wood and the ash remaining after the wood has burned (objectivism), we might imagine, and venture the conjecture (idealism), that phlogiston is of negative weight. But the very idea of negative weight, however faithful it coincides with experience, is counterintuitive. So we should continue our search for a better answer. C. S. Peirce

10.  2.The premises behind this posture are: –No contradiction, conundrum, or paradox, no new knowledge. –Just because an idea hasn’t been refuted doesn’t mean it’s true. –Just because an idea hasn’t been proven doesn’t mean it’s false. –When evaluating an idea look for disconfirming as well as confirming evidence.  In other words, look for the unexpected, the bizarre, the weird. –In other words, if you’re more wrong that right, your probably on the right track. In other words, make mistakes (‘catch yourselv in your own lies’) as quickly as possible.

11.  But a great truth is such that its complement—its complementary other—is also true (Niels Bohr).  So take truth and ‘lie’ into equal consideration.

12.  Relativism all this? Yes, and no. Yes, because there are many possible truths (‘world versions’ [Nelson Goodman]). No, because all possible truths are ONE; but we’ll never have the ONE, so we’ll continue imagining new possible ‘truths’ (idealism  ) and discarding them in favor of other possibilities that emerge and promise more success (  objectivism).

13. Creativity: mistakes with survival value? Quite likely, for there is more in human life and in the physical world than our theories of them allow.