Paper on Cognitive Relativism

Imagine that in 2008, a group of UFO enthusiasts comes to your attention, perhaps because some of your aquaintances are involved. They believe in many things relating to flying saucers and space aliens, but also the following distinctive claims:

• They say a special spaceship has recently appeared just behind a comet approaching the inner solar system. In fact, the UFO is visible in some NASA photos of the comet.
• The leader/prophet of the UFO group is in telepathic contact with the aliens aboard this spaceship. He has learned that the spaceship is the one the group has long awaited, coming to collect those humans who are ready to transition to a higer spiritual level.
• In three days time, the UFO will be within range. At that point, the believers will abandon their physical vehicles (their bodies). To those who remain behind, it will appear as if the believers have committed suicide, but they really will have joined the aliens.
• The UFO will then make a close approach to Earth and become visible to all. This will be a final warning to humans to stop destroying the environment.

You have two options in writing your paper. The first is to argue that the UFO cult's expectations are very likely mistaken: they are almost certainly objectively wrong about what is happening and what will happen. However, you also have to assume that you only disgree on what is unknown to you all:

• When you discuss the "hard facts" available, you find no points of disagreement. For example, you all agree that the first NASA photos of the comet show a faint accompanying object, but more recent photos do not. NASA's story is that the object in the first images is an artifact – an optical mistake that often happens with the sort of cameras it uses. This being a well-understood matter, they easily corrected the mistake, removing the artifact from further published photos. The UFO people disagree; the image was real. NASA erased it with software to "correctly" process the image in the later photos, but that was a case of encoding the anti-UFO theoretical prejudices of mainstream science into the data collection process. It may even be an example of the UFO cover-up engaged in by government institutions.
• The UFO believers seem reasonable people except when it comes to unconventional beliefs about UFOs. It seems you could easily come to an agreement about further investigations which would settle the question of the NASA photographs one way or the other. In fact, you find their leader/prophet has publicly stated that he will admit he was wrong if a certain independent analysis of the photos was performed and showed the NASA image-processing was innocuous. But now you find, with three days to go, that you have neither the time nor the resources to be able to do that analysis.

If you decide to argue that the UFO people are wrong, I want to you to explore the possibility of finding an argument which can show they are objectively wrong. The UFO cult's claims can seem arbitrary, even crazy, from your point of view. But they seem very reasonable from within that community of belief. Can you make an argument that your point of view is somehow better, that your views are not just a reflection of the arbitrary beliefs important to your particular community?

I want you to examine your own arguments, asking whether the UFO believers could find the same faults with your position. Watch out for:

• Appeals to faith. If, for example, you argue that according to your religious tradition suicide is a terrible sin, and no true belief could encourage suicide, that leaves you open to the objection that the UFO people simply have a different faith – plus they're not interpreting their proposed actions as suicide but as leaving their physical prison. If you appeal to faith, you invite the question of why your faith is objectively better (in the sense of giving you a more accurate handle on reality) than the UFO faith.
• Listing principles of good reasoning out of a textbook like Schick and Vaughn. Again, this invites the question of justifying your basic principles. Why, for example, should simplicity or continuity with mainstream science be a good guide here, rather than a principle of trust in the charismatic leader/prophet who personally assures his followers that he psychically converses with the aliens?

By the way, I don't expect you to find an airtight solution. I just want to see you arguing a case while trying to be aware that you might encounter objections with a cognitive relativist flavor.

Your second option for your writing is to take a cognitive relativist position, arguing that there is no reason to think that either the mainstream scientific view or the UFO cult view is more likely to be correct. Perhaps each subculture has its own views about reality, its own standards of evidence, and there is no way of legitimately criticizing such sets of cultural standards from the outside.

If you do so, I want you to examine your own position, asking if you're inviting objections like the following:

• That your relativism goes too far – it applies to any and all theories about the world, and any expectations about the future. Are you saying it's no less rational for you to step into the path of an oncoming bus expecting it to vanish as to be careful in crossing the street?
• That your views are self-refuting in the way described by Schick and Vaughn. If there's no way to choose between the rival claims of different cultures, isn't that claim itself part of a particular culture as well, and hence vulnerable to the same sort of problem?

Again, I don't expect anything airtight – I'm trying to get you to construct an argument while anticipating some objections to it at the same time. I want to see if you can take a moderate relativist position that doesn't go to an absurd self-refuting extreme.

Also, no matter what point of view you decide to argue, please remember that your focus should be on cognitive claims, and whether they're objectively better or worse. For example, questions about people having a right to believe anything they want to can be interesting, but they have no connection to our interests here.