In the twentieth century, a variety of relativistic views have emerged in different fields. Anthropological and linguistic studies of some scientists such as Cyper and Whorf led to linguistic relativism. According to this view, not only languages have decisive roles in the formation of our thoughts and worldviews, but they are incommensurable and they cannot be translated to one another. In this paper, I seek to analyze relativism and its determinants in order to illustrate, first, that at what level, linguistic relativism enters, and what things are the ones that languages become their reference framework and relativity, and second, how strong and creidable this sort of relativism is-to see whether or not evidence and arguments for this view can drive home its claim. In this paper, I shall distinguish between linguistic relativism and linguistic determinism, showing that the weak thesis of linguistic determinism and the partial role of language in the facilitation of thought-and not in its determination and control-can be plausible.

Introduction: One of the most important issues in development of any scientific discipline including geomorphology is introduction of new viewpoints and special conceptualization. Introduction of relativism in philosophy, language and sociology has brought about deep evolutions in the epistemology of the research methodology in these sciences. Although this viewpoint was already introduced in geomorphology by the American scientist G. K. Gilbert one hundred and thirty years ago, temporal conditions did not let the development and understanding of the conceptions for others. Recognition of Gilbert’ s views and its comparison with relativism concepts in this age can familiarize us with Gilbert’ s thought and the evolutions it made in relativism concept. Besides, it can prevent us from considering Gilbert’ s relativism to be in parallel with many concepts introduced by others.....

Since the time of Plato, relativism has been attacked as a self-refuting theory. Today, there are two basic kinds of argument that are used to show that global relativism is logically incoherent: first, a direct descendent of the argument Plato uses against Protagoras, called the peritrope; and, second, a more recent argument that relativism leads to an infinite regress. Although some relativist theories may be formulated in such a way as to be susceptible to these arguments, there are other versions of relativism that are impervious to these charges of incoherence. First the arguments against relativism will be stated. Next, a radical form of global relativism with assessment sensitivity is introduced, RR. Finally, it is shown how RR can be defended against the challenges of the peritrope and the regress. No attempt is made to defend RR as a plausible theory; however, the usual attempts to show the logical incoherence of radical forms of global relativism fail.

By examining the different meanings of "essence" and "quiddity" in the thought of the Muslim philosophers, and by examining the important origins of Mula Sadra'a (transcendent) philosophy, this article will prove that the concepts of essence and quiddity are rejected in his philosophy and are considered as something conventional and as subjective constructs. So this line of thinking is nominalistic in this regard, and therefore is epistemologically a relativistic thought considering the knowledge of reality as something relative. In his philosophy, necessary and absolute knowledge of reality is impossible, and from the methodological viewpoint, this line of thought cannot be classified under rationalistic philosophy. Therefore, this kind of philosophy must rely on methods like intuition or experience.

One of the central notions in Thomas Kuhn’s thought is the notion of incommensurability. Generally, we can distinguish two kinds of incommensurability: methodological and semantic incommensurability. The methodological incommensurability is the thesis that the standards of theory appraisal are themselves theory-dependent. So, some kind of standard variance can be recognized at the level of theory appraisal. On the other hand, semantic incommensurability seems to imply semantic variation between theories or paradigms, regarding the terms occurring in them. These two kinds of dependencies have been employed in support of two forms of relativism: truth relativism and epistemic relativism. The main focus of this paper is on the possible relations that one can depict between incommensurability and these two kinds of relativism. First, I outline possible connections articulated by sufficient and necessary conditions. After that, I attempt to assess the viability of the resulting propositions.

The purpose of this study is to examine the possible impact of value systems on earnings management in France, Tunisia and Canada. Cultural values include power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism, masculinity and long-term orientation. The cross-cultural study uses the method of structural equations trough LISREL approach. The examination covers the period between 2003 and 2009. Findings show first of all, that ecological factors are able to determine cultural dimensions in the sample countries. Secondly, we found that all studied cultural dimensions are able to define national culture in the sample countries. Yet, results indicate that only three of cultural dimensions are significant in explaining differences in earnings management in the studied context. In fact earnings management seems to be positively related to uncertainty avoidance and negatively related to power distance and individualism.

Debate about moral relativism and moral absolutism is one of the most important and old subjects of philosophic deliberations in ethics; but the result of this discussion is not limited to ethics. The position a person takes on relativism or non-relativism of main values and criteria, affects his viewpoint, stance, social and legal position. In this article after articulating the related concepts, we revise each kind of moral relativism; and finally, we come up with the main reasons given for each one and evaluate them.

Discussion of the many faces of relativism occupies a highly prominent place in the epistemological literature. Protagoras in ancient Greece and Nelson Goodman in the modern period are two most notable proponent of relativism. In the present article, I discuss and explain relativistic approaches of this two important relativist. I will first briefly define and review some faces of relativism. Then I will discuss and elaborate Protagorean or true-for-me relativism and Goodman’s radical relativism in turn. I will argue that there are crucial difficulties in Protagorean and radical relativism, and that these difficulties, as the realist philosophers insist, make these two faces of relativism be undefensible. No doubt, these two shapes of relativism have paved the way for anti-realism. In the end, it will appear that Goodman’s radical relativism and so the theory of world making, like Protagorean relativism, suffers from a fatal flaw: the flaw of self-refuting.

An axiom of modern critical theories, relativism is the outcome of the intellectual developments which can be traced back to Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy and in critical theory has been particularly associated with the theorists of the Constance School in the second half of the twentieth century. Prior to the emergence of these theories, critical theory was principally oriented towards attempting to find a changeless meaning in a text. This absolutist approach considered the ultimate goal of literary criticism to be the “uncovering” of a meaning concealed in the text by the author as its Supreme Authority. The first part of this paper discusses the background to this absolutism in the nineteenth century and argues that even the New Criticism, which in the first few decades of the twentieth century purported to free the text from the boundaries of the author’s biography and such extrinsic considerations as history, failed ultimately to rid itself from anti-relativism in literary criticism. The next part argues that the phenomenological approach, by questioning the validity of the subject/object duality, paved the way for relativism as an influential view in literary criticism. Hans Robert Jauss and Volfgang Iser’s introducing of Reception Theory contributed greatly to advocating the idea that critical practice has an intersubjective nature and is therefore necessarily relative.