Realism and Relativism: Truth and Objectivity

Abstract

Although the doctrine of relativism has a lengthy pedigree in philosophy – conventionally traced to the fifth‐century bce sophist Protagoras and his “man is the measure of all things” – it was only in the twentieth century that its full force was unleashed. The “linguistic turn,” the “cultural turn,” and the “postmodern turn” all brought with them profoundly relativistic claims. Late twentieth‐century thought sought to relativize aesthetics, ethics, and even that last bastion of Enlightenment certainty, natural science. But relativism takes many forms, and relativists do not speak with one voice. This is especially apparent where conceptions of science are concerned, for a very wide variety of relativistic arguments have been marshaled against the conviction that science provides privileged access to the independent, objective, external reality of nature. These range from the various perspectival relativisms that increasingly undermined philosophy of science orthodoxy from within, right through to the far‐reaching social constructionist relativism of the sociology of scientific knowledge and the so‐called science wars to which it gave rise.