What good is it calling a person an idiot in regards to this statement? Wouldn't it be more constructive to offer a criticism of the silly idea that people can have two different truths? A critique will follow shortly, but it is important to recognize when dealing with someone who has a pathology (idiocy) so that you can be better prepared to talk to them. You would want to know if you were talking to someone with autism because you may choose to communicate differently. You would want to know if you were entering into a relationship with a sociopath because you would try and keep them at a distance. You would want to be aware of someone's addictions, or co-dependency issues or whatever may ail them before getting too far into a relationship with them. Being aware of what affects a person helps you build strategies to have a healthier relationship with them and increases the chances of having a positive affect on them. (Also, as a disclaimer, I am not saying that having autism or another disability is the same thing as being a sociopath or an idiot. The common thing between them all is that knowing what the disability is helps in future interactions.)
The same goes for the person who says "that may be true for you". They are an idiot. They can't be properly reasoned with because they have isolated their mind from the truth. A mind isolated from the truth is a sick thing. They suffer from a mental, or rather, an intellectually illness. If truth-replacements (lies) are then fed to the mind, the mind becomes delusional and ill. Now, if a person who is starved and then fed poison, you wouldn't expect them to be able to play hockey or rugby well. You also wouldn't enter into a rational debate with a mentally ill person without addressing the mental illness first. An intellectually ill person is much the same, yet we must remember that an intellectual illness isn't physical in the same way as a bodily illness or a mental illness caused from an imbalance in brain chemistry. An intellectual illness is due to an insane belief, that is, a belief that doesn't correspond to reality. We can get by with some false beliefs, for to some degree or other the vast majority of people suffer from human weakness of intellect due to sin, but there are some that are so fundamental that they must be correct for us to be correct about anything. The intellectual illness that I have in mind attacks such a belief.
What illness do these idiots suffer from? In a word, relativism. It is a philosophy in which there is no preferred direction, orientation, or truth yet that is the preferred direction, orientation, or truth. In other words, the central claim of relativism is that it is true that there is no truth. There are those, and I would include most in this category, who naively and rather innocently believe this statement. However, you sometimes get very sophisticated versions of this idiocy. After all, you have to be really smart to rationalize the most stupid things and absolutely overflowing with pride to believe them. Just like successful con artists are incredibly intelligent in manufacturing their lies, so too is the relativist philosopher who comes up with a complex belief system that hides a simple and obvious contradiction. A complex belief system that is in itself a self-inflicted con. You have to be very smart, albeit completely bereft of wisdom.
Think of an alcoholic. As they begin to drink it is often fun for them, they may drink more than others, but it isn't ruining their life outright. As time goes on however, and people start pointing out the problems with their drinking, the alcoholic has to come up with more and more sophisticated lies and manipulations to believe that they don't have a problem with drinking and that the problem lies elsewhere. Much like an addict is able to rationalize and justify their poor behaviour by blaming everyone and everything else for their condition, so too does the relativist find every reason under the sun to hold to their relativity.
When backed into a corner to say whether or not something is true, the relativist needs to become a very flexible intellectual acrobat to be able to make claims about reality while claiming that there is no way to make accurate claims about reality. If a person claims that there is no way to say that there is a superior culture, and you ask them about cannibalistic cultures, they have to go through a long winded discussion about values and socially constructed rights to avoid saying that some things are morally reprehensible regardless of your culture while also saying that they don't support cannibalism. If a person says that they themselves would never get an abortion while they wouldn't stop someone else from getting one, they have to find all sorts of ways to avoid the science that proves that a baby is a baby even in the womb while trying to claim they support medical science and talk about women's rights while avoiding talking about the baby's rights even if they are female.
It truly is a sickness and people are dying because of it! So when you are talking to a relativist you can not talk about anything until you have helped them find a cure to their idiocy. What is the cure? A healthy dose of humility followed by a heaping serving of truth. If they can keep that down, they may still have a chance to enter into a healthy discussion.
After all, what is the point of saying anything if it isn't to make some sort of truth claim?
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