Abstract

In his 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 (Physics World December 1997 pp 15–16). 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).

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