Jenny asked:

Can knowledge be universal or is it possible that different cultures have different truths?

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Oh, dear, you had to use that word... "truths", didn't you. I'm going to skip that one, because when
one starts applying it to the beliefs and mores of different cultures it begins to lose whatever meaning
it had in philosophy, and become a sort of nice, fuzzy metaphor. I'll stick to the first part of the
question, "can knowledge be universal?". My answer to that is short and sweet. Consider the lowly
lightbulb. What happens to lightbulbs (hooked up to generators, of course), in cultures that do not
believe in science? Um... they still light up, don't they. You go over to the switch, flip it up and down,
and gee whiz, it just keeps going on and off... What happens to, say, atomic reactors in the same
cultures? Well, all the little thingies keep flying around and the reactor just keeps going. What about
vaccines, in cultures that believe in magic? Sorry, vaccines just keep working... Yes. Knowledge can
be universal.

Now, the more interesting question, perhaps, is whether knowledge isuniversal. And there you'd
have to be quite clear on just what you mean by "knowledge". I've glossed over that in the above
quite purposely, since there are literally libraries written on the latter question. And I'm going to keep
glossing over it, sorry... but if you want a rather long, complex, and superb (in my opinion) answer to
that take a look at: Kitcher, P. (1993). The advancement of science; science without legend,
objectivity without illusions.New York, NY, Oxford University Press.

Steven Ravett Brown

Let's adopt an uncomplicated definition of "knowledge": for a belief to attain the status of knowledge it
has to be both true and justified. What "true" and "justified" are taken to mean will depend on the
theory of truth we subscribe to. For example, if we subscribe to a correspondence theory of truth
statements or propositions are true when they point to a fact about the ways things are in the real
world, when they correspond with reality. If we subscribe to a coherence theory of truth, a belief is
true if it coheres with other beliefs within your network of beliefs, but there is no way of justifying a
claim that your network of beliefs is superior to mine or anyone else's.

So the underlying nature of justification differs in the two theories. In the case of the correspondence
theory, justification implies gathering evidence about reality, the way things really are. In the
coherence theory, justification may (or may not) depend on that kind of evidence, but now your beliefs
about justification, evidence, etc. are themselves part of your total network of beliefs. The most you
can say is that the network is internally coherent, consistent, reliable, effective for your purposes.

The coherence theory is obviously more sympathetic to the idea that truths are specific to different
cultures, because different cultures are different networks of belief. So relativism about truth and
reality tends to go together with a coherence theory of truth, whereas absolutism about truth and
reality tends to go together with the correspondence theory. Whichever we adopt there could still be a
class of beliefs that are, as it happens, universally held to be true.

Take the Buddhism's "Three Universal Truths" These are 1. Everything is changing and everything
depends on every other thing; 2. People are always changing, physically and mentally; there is no
such thing as a permanent self; 3. People always suffer because we cannot be satisfied but always
yearn for something more or better. There doesn't seem anything supernatural or unscientific in these
and Buddhism is a pretty cross-cultural religion, so perhaps there could be wide agreement on the
truth of these statements. (Actually, this wouldn't happen because anyone who believes in the
immaterial and immortal soul will not accept 2.) But even if there was worldwide agreement, this fact
alone would not make them true — for the correspondence theorist, they would have to be
well-founded and supported by powerful empirical evidence; for the coherence theorist, they would
have to fit into existing network of beliefs without dislodging other beliefs, and certainly without
dislodging the core beliefs.

Of course, we could take a position of realism about the physical world, and maintain that truths about
it are absolute and universal, but of relativism about, say, ethics and aesthetics, maintaining that
moral and aesthetics truths are of a different kind and can be relative to cultures.

Graham Nutbrown