Relativism

Mark Linville's article in the September 2006 issue of Touchstone argues that relativism
means believing that "all truth claims are relative to the perspective from which they are made."
Therefore, a fact is true only for those who believe it.
Linville shows that, because a relativist must accept this view as true for everyone, he is not relativist.
Therefore, relativism is impossible.

Now, however, consider a much more limited relativism relevant to systems research.
As we try to understand the truth, especially about a complex system like an organization, each individual has their own perspective on the system.
They have their own, limited, understanding of the system.
No one person can have a complete understanding of the true system.
Note that this applies to researchers who try to study the system as well.

It is not my intent to deny that the system exists and certain things about it are true (while others are false).
But we have a multitude of incomplete perspectives that I call approximations.
The challenge, when studying a system, is to synthesize these approximations into a coherent picture of the system.
Meredith's article in Operations Research describes a research approach that takes these approximations into account.
This article uses the term "relativism" to describe this approach.

Unfortunately, it might be possible to confuse this research approach with the more general philosophy of relativism and, moreover, use the merits of this research approach to defend relativism.

For me, the use of different perspectives is a reasonable way to understand a complex system, but there remains only one reality.