The fake cheese fallacy: Pragmatics and the exploitation of deceptive modifiers

A sort of rhetorical grab bag has accrued over the years: an assortment of tropes, turns of phrase, misrepresentations, allusions, and implications that are recycled and uttered like a ritual whenever the topic of various antirealist positions comes up; typically moral relativism, but on occasion you’ll see references to nihilism or antirealism (though you’ll be unlikely to see direct references to error theory or noncognitivism unless you’re dealing with someone with an academic background or who is pitching their objections in a moral academic context). For instance, here’s one trope about relativism:

“Nobody can live like a relativist.”

The idea seems to be that if you were genuinely acting on a commitment to relativism, this would require certain sorts of behaviors that nobody actually acts on, e.g., not objecting when others harm you, or being completely indifferent to the welfare of anyone who isn’t yourself or a member of your culture. This is, in a word, nonsense. Moral relativi…