Relativism
There is no truth, there are only versions
Related: meaning - truth - philosophy
Definition
Relativism espouses the view that the meaning and value of human beliefs and behaviors have no absolute validity. Relativists claim that humans understand and evaluate beliefs and behaviors only in terms of, for example, their historical and cultural context. Philosophers identify many different kinds of relativism depending upon which classes of beliefs allegedly depend upon what.
George Lakoff defines relativism in his book Metaphors We Live By, as the rejection of subjectivism and objectivism both, to focus on the relationship between, i.e. the metaphor by which we relate our current experience to our previous experience.
The concept of relativism has importance both for philosophers and for anthropologists, although in different ways. Philosophers explore how beliefs might or might not in fact depend for their truth upon such items as language, conceptual scheme, culture, and so forth; with ethical relativism furnishing just one example. Anthropologists, on the other hand, occupy themselves with describing actual human behavior. For them, relativism refers to a methodological stance whereby the researcher suspends (or brackets) his or her own cultural biases while attempting to understand beliefs and behaviors in their local contexts. This has become known as methodological relativism. --http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativism, [Jun 2004]