Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

by Stephen R.C. Hicks

Logical relativism is the next consequence. Logical principles are constructs of concepts. What counts as a principle of logic, then, is not dictated by reality but is rather up to us: “the principles of logic and mathematics are true universally simply because we never allow them to be anything else.”[104] Logical principles become a matter of which formulations we are “willing” to accept, depending on whether or not we like the consequences of accepting any given principle.[105] Logical justification, Rorty wrote of Quine’s doctrine, “is not a matter of a special relation between ideas (or words) and objects, but of conversation, of social practice.”[106] But what if someone does not like the consequences of adopting a given logical principle? What if conversational or social practices change? If the rules of logic and language are conventional, what is to stop someone, for whatever reason, from adopting different conventions? Absolutely nothing. The rules of logic and grammar then can be as variable as other conventions, such as performing greeting rituals by shaking hands, hugging, or rubbing noses. No form of greeting or system of logic, then, is more objectively right than any other.