>> Condemnation Without Absolutes
>> BY STANLEY FISH
>>
>> ... But if by relativism one means the practice of putting yourself in
>> your adversary's shoes, not in order to wear them as your own but in
>> order to have some understanding (far short of approval) of why
>> someone else might want to wear them, then relativism will not and
>> should not end, because it is simply another name for serious thought.
>
> Beautifully put.
There is a logically coherent version of this whose starting point is Kant's "sensus communis" - the capacity for "enlarged thought", for putting "ourselves in thought in the place of everyone else":
"under the sensus communis we must include the idea of a sense common to all, i.e. of a faculty of judgment which, in its reflection, takes account (a priori) of the mode of representation of all other men in thought, in order, as it were, to compare its judgment with the collective reason of humanity, and thus to escape the illusion arising from the private conditions that could be so easily taken for objective, which would injuriously affect the judgment. This is done by comparing our judgment with the possible rather than the actual judgments of others, and by putting ourselves in the place of any other man, by abstracting from the limitations which contingently attach to our own judgment." (Critique of Judgment, Bernard translation, p. 136)
This reappears in Marx's idea of "mutual recognition". It's also sublated in Husserl's idea of "transcendental intersubjectivity". In these forms, it is based on the premise that we do have direct experience of an external world and so avoids the "solipsism of the present moment" (Whitehead, Symbolism, pp. 33-4) that is the necessary skeptical reductio ad absurdum of any epistemological doctrine, e.g. Fish's, that denies this.
Both these ideas can also logically accommodate the possibility of real communication - where direct knowledge of an external world is denied the meaning of an Other is unknowable by me since it is part of the external world. All attempts to avoid the solipsism of the present moment result involve implicit contradiction of the premise that we have no direct knowledge of an external world. For instance, a consensus theory of truth requires that we be able to establish when consensus has been achieved. This can't be done if we have no direct knowledge of an external world.
Ted