Farmers want to release a non-native insect in the fields that feeds on weeds. Before they do this, they consult a team of scientists and ask them to conduct a study that will determine the insects' effects on the farm land. Which statement best describes why farmers need the information from this study? Farmers do not know much about insects; they would need to consult a team of scientists to answer questions such as where to get the insects, how to release them, and how to maintain control of the insect population after release. It is important to do this study so that farmers will understand all the positive and possible negative results of releasing this new insect into the area so that they can make a decision on whether or not the benefits are worth the risks. It is illegal to release new insects into an area. The farmers understand that if the study is conducted and the insects cause unexpected problems, the scientists would be held responsible for any resulting fines or fees. The scientists will be able to tell the farmers if the insects will eat the weeds. Before the farmers spend the money on this project, they want to be assured the results will meet their expectations.

relativism, roughly put, is the view that truth and falsity, right and wrong, standards of reasoning, and procedures of justification are products of differing conventions and frameworks of assessment and that their authority is confined to the context giving rise to them. more precisely, “relativism” covers views which maintain that—at a high level of abstraction—at least some class of things have the properties they have (e.g., beautiful, morally good, epistemically justified) not simpliciter, but only relative to a given framework of assessment (e.g., local cultural norms, individual standards), and correspondingly, that the truth of claims attributing these properties holds only once the relevant framework of assessment is specified or supplied. relativists characteristically insist, furthermore, that if something is only relatively so, then there can be no framework-independent vantage point from which the matter of whether the thing in question is so can be established.

relativism has been, in its various guises, both one of the most popular and most reviled philosophical doctrines of our time. defenders see it as a harbinger of tolerance and the only ethical and epistemic stance worthy of the open-minded and tolerant. detractors dismiss it for its alleged incoherence and uncritical intellectual permissiveness. debates about relativism permeate the whole spectrum of philosophical sub-disciplines. from ethics to epistemology, science to religion, political theory to ontology, theories of meaning and even logic, philosophy has felt the need to respond to this heady and seemingly subversive idea. discussions of relativism often also invoke considerations relevant to the very nature and methodology of philosophy and to the division between the so-called “analytic and continental” camps in philosophy. and yet, despite a long history of debate going back to plato and an increasingly large body of writing, it is still difficult to come to an agreed definition of what, at its core, relativism is, and what philosophical import it has. this entry attempts to provide a broad account of the many ways in which “relativism” has been defined, explained, defended and criticized.

explanation:

answer; equivalent to a one(1) horsepower motor;

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