Take a piece of cardboard and make a thin cut in it with a sharp razor blade, a razor blade carpet knife will do. look at a light source through the slit. you should see a series of dark lines (called interference fringes) appearing through your slit. repeat this experiment with two very closely spaced slits. could these fringes appear if light had only a particle nature? explain in terms of the wave property of light. 1. while sound is not an electromagnetic wave it does have energy like electromagnetic waves. many of us have performed the experiment in which sunlight is focused onto a paper on fire illustrating the energy in light. to see the energy of sound waves, hold a tissue in front of the speaker of a stereo system. shut the doors and windows so the tissue remains still. switch on the stereo and turn up the volume. does the tissue remain still? explain the results. 2. piece of paper with a magnifying glass.

relativism, roughly put, is the view that truth and falsity, right and wrong, standards of reasoning, and procedures of justification are products of differing conventions and frameworks of assessment and that their authority is confined to the context giving rise to them. more precisely, “relativism” covers views which maintain that—at a high level of abstraction—at least some class of things have the properties they have (e.g., beautiful, morally good, epistemically justified) not simpliciter, but only relative to a given framework of assessment (e.g., local cultural norms, individual standards), and correspondingly, that the truth of claims attributing these properties holds only once the relevant framework of assessment is specified or supplied. relativists characteristically insist, furthermore, that if something is only relatively so, then there can be no framework-independent vantage point from which the matter of whether the thing in question is so can be established.

relativism has been, in its various guises, both one of the most popular and most reviled philosophical doctrines of our time. defenders see it as a harbinger of tolerance and the only ethical and epistemic stance worthy of the open-minded and tolerant. detractors dismiss it for its alleged incoherence and uncritical intellectual permissiveness. debates about relativism permeate the whole spectrum of philosophical sub-disciplines. from ethics to epistemology, science to religion, political theory to ontology, theories of meaning and even logic, philosophy has felt the need to respond to this heady and seemingly subversive idea. discussions of relativism often also invoke considerations relevant to the very nature and methodology of philosophy and to the division between the so-called “analytic and continental” camps in philosophy. and yet, despite a long history of debate going back to plato and an increasingly large body of writing, it is still difficult to come to an agreed definition of what, at its core, relativism is, and what philosophical import it has. this entry attempts to provide a broad account of the many ways in which “relativism” has been defined, explained, defended and criticized.

explanation:

there are no atoms