Comment by sigbottle

Well, you can technically scurry around this by saying, "Okay, there are a class of situations, and we just need to figure out the cases because yes we acknowledge that morality is tricky". Of course, take this to the limit and this is starting to sound like pragmatism - what you call as "well, we're making a more and more accurate absolute model, we just need to get there" versus "revising is always okay, we just need to get to a better one" blurs together more and more.

IMO, the 20th century has proven that demarcation is very, very, very hard. You can take either interpretation - that we just need to "get to the right model at the end", or "there is no right end, all we can do is try to do 'better', whatever that means"

And to be clear, I genuinely don't know what's right. Carnap had a very intricate philosophy that sometimes seemed like a sort of relativism, but it was more of a linguistic pluralism - I think it's clear he still believed in firm demarcations, essences, and capital T Truth even if they moved over time. On the complete other side, you have someone like Feyerabend, who believed that we should be cunning and willing to adopt models if they could help us. Neither of these guys are idiots, and they're explicitly not saying the same thing (a related paper can be found here https://philarchive.org/archive/TSORTC), but honestly, they do sort of converge at a high level.

The main difference in interpretation is "we're getting to a complicated, complicated truth, but there is a capital T Truth" versus "we can clearly compare, contrast, and judge different alternatives, but to prioritize one as capital T Truth is a mistake; there isn't even a capital T Truth".

(technically they're arguing different axes, but I think 20th century philosophy of science & logical positivsm are closely related)

(disclaimer: am a layman in philosophy, so please correct me if I'm wrong)

I think it's very easy to just look at relativsm vs absolute truth and just conclude strawmen arguments about both sides.

And to be clear, it's not even like drawing more and more intricate distinctions is good, either! Sometimes the best arguments from both sides are an appeal back to "simple" arguments.

I don't know. Philosophy is really interesting. Funnily enough, I only started reading about it more because I joined a lab full of physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists. No one discusses "philosophy proper", as in following the historical philosophical tradition (no one has read Kant here), but a lot of the topics we talk about are very philosophy adjacent, beyond very simple arguments