Whats wrong with relativism?
article last year, the Belgian physicist Jean Bricmont separated out some of the distinct strands in “science studies” and tried to provide a considered critique of sociology and history of scientific knowledge. He saw that there is a difference between “philosophical relativism” and “methodological relativism”. He grasped that the former view, which says that the truth of a proposition depends on who interprets it, is a perfectly tenable philosophical position, even though it has little leverage on the world. And he saw that methodological relativism – impartial assessment of how knowledge develops – is the key idea for sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). It was also good to see that Bricmont – unlike so many others – did not treat an accusation of “relativism” as an argument in itself. In contrast, he tried to explore what he sees as the faults of methodological relativism. In the context of the “science wars”, this is good progress, which makes it worthwhile to go over some of
