Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

attribute that movement, that progress or that evolution, from
the first to the ninth? Why did these students change the way
they thought? It would seem that, because of the exposure,
again and again, to thoughts and beliefs and concepts – to
“truths” - that do not fit the earlier perspectives, there is an
utter need for relativism. As Perry contends, “It is not for
nothing that the undergraduate turns metaphysician” (33). From
his description, this “need” brings about the “drastic
revolution” that defines his fifth position because of “the
failure of a dualistic framework to assimilate the expanding
generalization of Relativism” (110). As Perry writes, the
students now experience “the radical reperception of all
knowledge as contextual and relativistic” (109). Simply put,
whereas, before, relativistic thinking had been the exception,
it now becomes the rule – it becomes “habitual.” “Relativism is
perceived as the common characteristic of all thought, all
knowing, all of man’s relation to his world” (111). But with
the “drastic evolution” born out of that “need” for comes a new
urge for what Perry called “individual personal commitment”:
“personal commitment in a relative world.” Of this, he writes:
If all I have been taught up to now is open to
question, especially to my question, then my sense of
who is responsible shifts radically from outside to
me. But I see too that my questions and my answers
are likewise open to question. Yet if I am not to
spend my life in questions about questions and am to
act, choose, decide and live, on what basis am I to
do it? (34)
151