A standard reply to relativism the claim that truths depend on a point of view is that this claim itself is either absolute (and so self-refuting) or relative (and therefore of no general import).
Scholars disagree on whether Sextus in some sense admits that these statements are self-refuting (McPherran 1987), or whether he defuses their self-refutational structure (Castagnoli 2010, III.14).
J.L. Mackie, for instance, has argued that alethic absolutism is a requisite of a coherent notion of truth and that a claim to the effect that "There are no absolute truths" is absolutely self-refuting (Mackie 1964: 200).
This way, Rey and Devitt argue, insofar as dispositional replacements of "claims" and deflationary accounts of "true" are coherent, eliminativism is not self-refuting.
How? Putnam's claim is that we can rule it out because on a plausible theory of reference, it is self-refuting: that is, 'I am a brain-in-a-vat [or BIV, for short]' cannot be truly affirmed by anyone.
He's pushy, impulsive, impetuous, self-refuting, sort of causelessly rebellious and irreverent.
In her victory statement last night, after beating a casino owner whose health-care program was having patients trade chickens for doctors' services, Angle came up with the best self-refuting statement of the evening: "We have the opportunity to send a very positive message, and that message is dump Harry Reid".
(He sensibly ignores the self-refuting ones, such as the Heritage guy's proposals for scrapping popular election of senators, going back to the sixty-seven-vote cloture requirement, and mandating an entire day of debate for each million dollars Congress spends).
Our disagreement is rather with the dissent's bland and self-refuting assumption that there will not be fine lines to be drawn in Fourth Amendment cases as in other areas of the law, and that its rubric, rather than a meaningful exegesis of Fourth Amendment doctrine, is more desirable or more easily resolves Fourth Amendment cases.
The substance of the article consists of an explanation of these requirements, along with a brief discussion of some of the objections that have been advanced against them, for example, the false accusation that the program makes out knowledge to be 'purely' social, implying that the material world plays no role, or the objection that because the program is relativist it is self-refuting.
Is the tradition, then, self-inconsistent, and so self-refuting?
