When I say thought is based in language, I think your definition of ‘language’ may be more restrictive than mine. Language here does not refer only to written and spoken communication, and I probably should have made that clearer. Language is any system of metaphors to represent reality. With that definition in mind, how can thought be anything but language? Even if it’s pictures, memories, etc. This is a very typical postmodern view of ‘language.’

I admit there are problems with moral relativism. I lean more toward the _social_ construction of rights and wrongs, social norms, and perceptions of reality. Individual societies construct their own morals and values which are commonly understood throughout their society. It creates an outlook where there are understood, common morals, but they are only applicable within your moral system/culture/society. I don’t think there is any single moral or value that has been shared by every society that has ever lived.

Also, I disbelieve that thoughts are based on language. In fact, I’ve heard of many stories where anthropologists or sociologists just made shit up to support this assertion (such as that the Hopi have a radically different sense of time because they have no past tense; if you wanted to be generous you could call this an exaggeration, but it’s simply not true). Rather, I think that certain forms of thought are common to all people, and that languages have to map on to these processes and concepts. Not that language isn’t important; it both reflects what people talk about and influences how easy it is for them to talk about it. But people who, due to brain damage or childhood neglect, do not have a native language learned during childhood (or in some cases, who have no language at all and never learn to understand speech), are generally still capable of solving many types of problems, as are animals, especially our primate cousins. And the fact that certain things are very hard to communicate in words I think is a testament to non-verbal processing. I especially see it in my work as a physicist.

Really, I don’t think that the Big Problem in establishing a Truth in society has much to do with language (realistically we don’t take the time to understand each other, but I think most things can be communicated quite well with enough time and effort from both ). I think it has much more to do with the problem of induction. We can all agree on whether huge classes of actions are right or wrong, but no matter how refined our principles we can’t cover every case. Getting every instance we can think of doesn’t mean we know all the principles. And principles don’t help if we don’t have strict logical definitions of all the words that comprise them.

I think it is interesting that your dichotomy is moral relativism vs. theism. My own belief is that there is some sort of objective morality embedded in the nature of things, in information theory if you like, having nothing to do with Dad-in-the-Sky. But that the application to human psychology is /hard/ (and our understanding of humanity itself limited), so you can’t figure out every case, even if theoretically there was some calculus that would solve it all. For practical purposes, it’s much the same as relativism, but I think the attitude that you are discovering something objectively real and not “just made up” can be crucial. Otherwise, the question of whether or not I should be moral seems to be contingent on what I think of all the people who tell me what’s moral. Or put another way, the good v. evil dichotomy gets tangled with the social v. antisocial dichotomy, which seems much more like practical legislation than good philosophy.