In Defence of Conditional Truth

1. The False Choice

In his essay In Defence of Absolute Truth, Alan S. Rome argues that relativism corrodes rational discourse and morality, and that we must return to belief in absolutes to preserve social progress. He is correct to identify relativism as incoherent, but his solution—resurrecting absolutes—repeats the same mistake in reverse. Public debate often gets trapped between these two dead ends: absolutism and relativism. Absolutists claim truth is context-independent, universal, and eternal. Relativists claim truth is contingent on culture, perspective, or identity. Both positions collapse under their own weight. Absolutism denies the hidden assumptions it rests on. Relativism denies the very possibility of meaningful discourse across perspectives. The real escape is neither. Truth is always conditional.

2. What Conditionalism States

Every truth claim requires interpretation. Every interpretation requires background conditions. Therefore, only conditional statements can meaningfully possess truth values. Truth is not absolute ("X is true, full stop"). Nor is it purely relative ("X is only true for me or my group"). Truth is conditional validity relative to specified assumptions. For example:

• Incomplete: Water boils at 100°C.

• Conditional: Water boils at 100°C at sea level, under standard atmospheric pressure, assuming pure H₂O, calibrated instruments, and ignoring impurities, altitude, or experimental error.

The conditions extend much further than the casual claim suggests. The same applies across domains:

• Objects fall at 9.8 m/s² → really: only near Earth’s surface, ignoring air resistance, and neglecting relativistic curvature of spacetime.

• The sum of angles in a triangle is 180° → really: only within Euclidean geometry, which itself presupposes a flat metric space and the parallel postulate.

• The sun rises at 6 a.m. → really: only at a given location and date, assuming Gregorian calendar, conventional definition of sunrise, and ignoring atmospheric refraction.

Each “simple truth” is a compressed shorthand for an entire lattice of background assumptions. Conditionalism’s role is to surface those assumptions explicitly.

3. Why Relativism Fails

Relativism is incoherent because it makes an absolute claim: “It is universally true that all truth is relative.” It eats itself alive. Worse, it dissolves the possibility of critique: if morality is only context-bound, you can never condemn slavery or genocide beyond parochial tastes. You lose the ability to appeal across vantage points. Relativism is not humility—it is surrender.

4. Why Absolutism Fails

Absolutism is incoherent because it pretends to speak without conditions, while smuggling them in. “Murder is always wrong” sounds unconditional. But the implicit conditions are: definitions of murder, assumptions about agency, commitments to valuing life. Absolutism masks these dependencies, which makes its reasoning fragile and its disputes interminable. What one side treats as an absolute, another exposes as a contested assumption. Absolutism is not strength—it is blindness.

5. Conditionalism as the Middle Path

Conditionalism avoids the traps. It preserves objectivity without absolutism and contextual sensitivity without relativism. When we say “Slavery is wrong”, we mean: given the condition that we value agency, autonomy, and flourishing, slavery violates those values and is therefore wrong. That conditional form is stronger, not weaker, because it makes the grounding explicit and debatable. Shared conditions can be adopted and defended. They need not masquerade as eternal absolutes.

6. Society Requires Shared Conditions

A society cannot survive without common standards. But the foundation we need is not “absolute truth”—it is shared conditional frameworks. Logic, mathematics, empirical science, and human rights all function this way. They are not unconditional, but they are robust because their conditions are so widely adopted and indispensable. They act as if absolute within our vantage, but we remain aware they are conditional at a meta-level.

7. Humility and Ascent

Conditionalism retains the call for humility. We must climb toward better approximations of truth, recognizing bias and error. But instead of aiming for an impossible Absolute, we refine and expand our conditional frameworks. The climb is real, the progress measurable, and the grounding more honest.

8. Conclusion

The defence of truth requires rejecting both relativism and absolutism. Rome is right to resist the former, but wrong to fall back on the latter. The real alternative is Conditionalism: truth as conditional validity relative to explicit assumptions. This preserves rational discourse, grounds moral critique, and anchors social progress without resorting to incoherent metaphysics. In a world split between dogmatists and nihilists, conditional truth is the only solid ground.