Oh, oh, oh, I love Bruno Latour. Have I explained this yet? Here's why I love Latour, as he speaks about relativism and the construction of reality:

Consider a sentence often cited by language philosophers: ' the present king of France is bald.' This sentence has launched endless discussion in the philosophy of language, because it is both grammatically correct and completely devoid of meaning, as it does not 'correspond' to any real state of affairs....

Historians know Charles the Bald, but not the present king of France. Hairdressers know a few bald people, but no kings, not to mention kings of France; they do, however, hold scalps, creams, and hair lotions close to their hearts. Much is presently happening in Berlin and Cambodia, but none of it has anything to do with the king of France. There are indeed people who run France, but they call themselves Presidents, and not kings. The only people who take this sentence into consideration are linguists and philosophers, who use it as a cliche!....

The judgement of [the] reality [of a statement] is immanent in, and not transcendant to, the path of a statement. To put this the other way around, forbidding oneself to exit a network [by which he basically means a network of meaning, the kind of thing we all mentally begin as children and add to and subtract from everyday] does not entail forbidding oneself to judge. In this example, we can correctly judge the degree of truth of the statement 'the present king of France is bald' without ever appealing to the notion of referent.... Indeed, all statements have a reality [a degree or measure of reality, he means], and this reality can be evaluated precisely by comparing, each time, what an actor [human, animal, object, idea, whatever] says about another actor with what this other actor says about itself. This comparison delineates a network which is both the existence and the essence of the statement. Unicorns, bald kings of France, black holes, flying saucers, appearances of the Virgin, chromosomes, atoms, Roger Rabbit, and utopian technological projects all possess, without excess or residue, the degree of realism delineated by their networks.

OK so it was really the bits about appearances of the Virgin and Roger Rabbit which I thought were hilarious, and which make reading Latour a total joy. But I copied down the rest because as I was going along I thought it might make for an interesting retort to people who sneer at "cultural relativists..." Many times the critique I hear of cultural relativism is that it has absolutely no sense of up or down, right or wrong, but of course what it means is situating the meaning of an event in an immediate network ("dead cow" in the context of "starving family/typhoid conditions" versus "militant veganism/easily upset stomach" versus "4H club project/college application" versus "Texas/steakhouse" is not a meaningless statement, it just means something else in each case). Of course, this works for objectivists who aren't slavering fundamentalists as well, because of course fundies want meaning to be transcendant. So this is just a shot across the bow of any atheist Randites out there: next time you try to tell me there's some universal truth out there I'm'a whip out the Latour and try to assure you haven't a leg to stand on.