Are All Theories Equally Good? A Dialogue

Abstract

This essay is written as a dialogue between a relativist and his critic. It does not focus on all species of relativism (e.g., I do not directly address here either ontological relativism, cultural relativism or moral relativism), but specifically on what might be called epistemic or cognitive relativism. I understand that view to amount to the claim that we are never warrantedly in a position to assert that any theory is objectively superior to another, or that the evidence and arguments in favor of one theory are stronger than those favoring any other. Although the form of relativism I am describing is perhaps most closely associated with Thomas Kuhn1 and Paul Feyerabend2 among philosophers of science, closely-related versions of it can be found in the writings of Mary Hesse,3 Willard Quine, Richard Rorty, Nelson Goodman,4 Gerald Doppelt,5 and sundry sociologists of knowledge.6 The dialogue takes literary license in imaginatively elaborating some of the argumentative details of the relativist’s position (in many cases, the relativists offer sloganistic hand-waving where argumentative fine-structure is called for). But I believe that all the major argument-types which I attribute to the relativist can be found in the writings of these authors.