Why should the attempt to draw that line convince anyone who doesn't care about the scientific project in the first place?
I think that most people have an intuitive understanding that there are some things that are objectively true and some things that are objectively false, at least in terms of the physical universe around us. Few people would disagree with a statement like that. If they don't agree with that right away, give them some concrete examples; is the statement "If I'm standing on Earth and I drop a rock, it generally falls" more or less true then the statement "If I'm standing on Earth and I drop a rock, it generally flies into the sky".
Most people will concede that the first statement is more true then the second statement, and you can work from there to a general principal.
Basically, you have to understand why people accept certain ideas. In the case of cultural relativism, the reason people accept it is because a lot of cultural and social behaviors and beliefs are in fact very relative, and have more to do with how someone was raised then with any sort of objective reality. If a person fails to understand that, then they're likely to end up like the characters in the Dr. Seuss book "The Butter Battle Book" who end up fighting a war over the question of which side of the bread you should butter.
Very often when a person has a general heuristic or way of thinking, there was originally a good reason for it; the person just made the mistake of applying that heuristic to situations where it doesn't work. The way to deal with that isn't to tell them the heuristic is wrong, because then they'll think of all the times when it seems right to use it and dismiss you; it's to try to draw a line to separate situations where the heuristic is useful and situations where it's not.
If you can give people a way clear idea that they can become more happy by getting rid of their irrational beliefs
Eh. Maybe. I tend to find that people are instinctively paranoid about that line of approach, though, since "you'll be happier if you believe X" is a line of attack usually taken by religions, cults, and other hostile memes. And, of course, most people don't think that their beliefs are irrational.
Most people will concede that the first statement is more true then the second statement, and you can work from there to a general principal.
That will only work if the person has no emotional attachments to his current beliefs.
Basically, you have to understand why people accept certain ideas. In the case of cultural relativism, the reason people accept it is because a lot of cultural and social behaviors and beliefs are in fact very relative, and have more to do with how someone was raised then with any sort of objective reality.
No. People might ac...
I'm afraid I haven't properly designed the Muggles Studies course I introduced at my local Harry Potter fan club. Last Sunday we finally had our second class (after wasted months of insistence and delays), and I introduced some very basic descriptions of common biases, while of course emphasizing the need to detect them in ourselves before trying to detect them in other people. At some point, which I didn't completely notice, the discussion changed from an explanation of the attribution bias into a series of multicultural examples in favor of moral relativity. I honestly don't know how that happened, but as more and more attendants voiced their comments, I started to fear someone would irreversibly damage the lessons I was trying to teach. They basically stopped short of calling the scientific method a cultural construct, at which point I'm sure I would have snapped. I don't know what to make of this. Some part of me tries to encourage me and make me put more effort into showing these people the need for more reductionism in their worldview, but another part of me just wants to give them up as hopeless postmodernists. What should I do?