Overton's and Palermo's Relativism: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter provides an overview of Overton and Palermo work related to relativism. Overton's principal objectives are to show that world views still provide the guidelines by which specific psychological theories are constructed, that such world views are essentially incompatible with one another, and that the organicist and mechanist distinction provides the most adequate integrative world views for developmental psychology. Overton claims, “as both Lakatos and Laudan argue, world views can and do form a necessary rational dimension to scientific research programmes and traditions.” Underlying Palermo's defense of the Kuhnian position is an unstated commitment to relativism, subjectivism, and the incommensurability and incompatibility of world views. Within this framework, Palermo takes as obvious that the history of science, like textual analysis, is open to the same kind of relativism. In the service of this view, he accuses people of a too easy dismissal of Kuhn and a focus on rationality as the sole basis of scientific decision making. The latter point is least important to his argument and is most easily dealt with.