Are you a relativist?

If you ever hear yourself saying phrases like “Who’s to say” (meaning who is to say which opinion is better), or “That’s just your opinion” (meaning all opinions are equal), chances are you’ve absorbed the relativism so central to the postmodern zeitgeist (1). About five years ago, the Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn wrote a book called Truth: A Guide, in which he challenged the relativist position with some gusto. For Blackburn relativism is a serious and charged topic. Blackburn accuses postmodern relativism of being “something which corrupts and corrodes the universities and the public culture, that sweeps away moral standards, lays waste to young people’s minds, and rots our precious civilization from within” (2).

“In case you hadn’t realized, it has somehow become uncool to sound like you know what you’re talking about? Or believe strongly in what you’re, like, saying? Invisible question marks and parenthetical ‘you know’s and ‘you know what I’m saying’s have been attaching themselves to the ends of our sentences? Even when those sentences aren’t, like, questions? Declarative sentences, so called because they used to, you know, like, declare things to be true, as opposed to other things that are, like, totally... not?” -  Taylor Mali 

Why do some people end ordinary statements with question marks? 

Taylor Mali, who delivered the above quote on the HBO show Def Poetry in 2002, is best known as a comedian and slam poet. He was also a high school teacher (as he describes in another spoken word piece, which has racked up over a million youtube hits) and his website’s gig calendar lists more teaching work than anything else. It’s feasible to think he noticed the relentless rising inflection in his students’ voices - the “like”s and “y’know”s he sprinkles throughout the piece have a flavour of youth. Perpetual uncertainty doesn’t strike me as radically out of place in a group of youngsters facing a tall, muscular, slam poet champ of a teacher.