MEANING
Treating judgments of truth or value as dependent on a cultural, historical, or conceptual standpoint.
Use it for
describing claims that standards vary by standpoint; distinguishing contextual judgments from universal claims; examining the scope of a theory about relative valuesMakes the dependence of a judgment on a standpoint explicit, while requiring the writer to say which judgments are relative. Academic functions: Theory / Conceptual Language.
Words that belong together
- a relativist position
- a moral relativist
- a relativist account of truth
On the page
The essay adopts a relativist position about aesthetic value without extending it to every factual claim.
The criticism asks whether the author’s relativist account can explain disagreement within the same culture.
Nearby words
Word forms
- Base
- relativist
Usage notes
Adjective and countable noun: a relativist, plural relativists. Normally non-gradable as a theory label. Register: technical. Commonness: uncommon (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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