Relativism — What Now?

Abstract

Sociology is a latecomer to the relativist movement, as it has been late in growing sensitive to the need of 'decentring' sociological reasoning.' Anthropology, history, linguistics and philosophy, all appear to have encountered stages of relativism long before sociology. When a broadside of relativism finally hit sociology at the hands of Mannheim and Scheler, it stopped short of one of the most valued social phenomena of our civilization the natural sciences. To be sure, history, too, has been late in applying its otherwise longstanding relativist inclinations to the study of natural science. But it nevertheless preceded sociology by decades. Not only Kuhn and his followers (1962), but also much earlier authors such as Duhem (1914) and Bachelard (1934), have been undermining inductivist historiography of science for quite some time now.2 Philosophy, too, has long recognized the pro-relativist implications of the fact that empirical observations themselves cannot conclusively establish a theoretical interpretation, and thus cannot in and of themselves account for the acceptance or truth of a knowledge claim. At the turn of the century, Peirce discussed the problem that there are in principle always an infinite number of theoretical assumptions to which one can resort in order to account for a body of data, thus initiating the instrumentalist interpretation of science by the pragmatists.3 The problem has since received much attention by Duhem and Quine, and has come to be referred to as the underdetermination of theory by data. Feyerabend, Kuhn and Toulmin, among many other historians, have provided well-known illustrations of the oscillations of contextdependent criteria, and of the fluid negotiations, which result from underdetermination.4 It was nevertheless necessary and highly commendable for sociologists to begin to document the consequences of underdetermination in contemporary natural science that is, to study the formation of technical consensus among present natural scientists. First, and despite the existing historical illustrations, there is still a battle to be fought in sociology (and in other fields) against the standard empiricist account of science. Second, it was after all to be hoped that their privileged access to real life data would enable sociologists of science to arrive at (social) mechanisms of consensus formation which escape, or are of no concern to, the historiography of science. It is this, I suppose, which Harry Collins has in mind when he talks about the 'second stage' of the relativist programme as concerned with the description of the mechanisms which limit the infinite interpretative flexibility illustrated by the contributions to his Special Issue.5 But alas, have we really made any progress in this direction? Surely what we had in