Abstract
In response to a recent argument by David Bloor, I argue that denying absolutes does not necessarily lead to relativism, that one can be a fallibilist without being a relativist. At issue are the empirical natural sciences and what might be called “framework relativism”, that is, the idea that there is always a conceptual scheme or set of practices in use, and all observations are theory-laden relative to the framework. My strategy is to look at the elements that define a relativist stance and show where the pragmatic fallibilist disagrees. Defending the pragmatic notion of experience will be central, given that relativists reject the idea that experience can play a role in objectively justifying belief. We can reject all absolutes and start from the premise that everything is historical, contingent, and situated. One of the lessons of pragmatism is that universal and fixed principles are not necessary for objective knowledge.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Markus Seidel (2014, 40) made the point that fallibilism is not relativism, yet that has stopped neither Bloor nor Kusch from continuing to claim that there is no middle ground between absolutism and relativism and I am responding to their claims. Seidel’s critique of the strong program is parallel to my own, but I make different arguments, focusing especially on the recently rehabilitated pragmatist notion of experience.
Given the contingency in the development of science, it is not clear that a full explanation of the development of science is possible at all. For more on this issue of the strong program and explanations of the development of science, see the debate between Bruno Latour (1999) and David Bloor (1999a, b).
References
Bloor, David. 1999a. Anti-Latour. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 30 (1): 81–112.
Bloor, David. 1999b. Reply to Bruno Latour. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 30 (1): 131–136.
Bloor, David. 2020. Relativism and Antinomianism. In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Relativism, ed. Martin Kusch, 388–397. London and New York: Routledge.
Boghossian, Paul. 2006. Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chang, Hasok. 1993. A Misunderstood Rebellion: The Twin-Paradox Controversy and Herbert Dingle’s Vision of Science. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 24: 741–790.
Chang, Hasok. 2012. Is Water H2O? Evidence, Realism and Pluralism. Dordrecht: Springer.
Chang, Hasok. 2015. The Chemical Revolution revisited. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 49: 91–98.
Collins, Harry. 1985. Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dupré, John. 1993. The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Frede, Michael. 1984. The Sceptic’s Two Kinds of Assent and the Question of the Possibility of Knowledge. In Philosophy in History, ed. R. Rorty, J.B. Schneewind, and Q. Skinner, 255–278. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Galison, Peter. 1987. How Experiments End. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Galison, Peter. 1988. History, Philosophy, and the Central Metaphor. Science in Context 2: 197–212.
Galison, Peter. 1989. Multiple Constraints, Simultaneous Solutions. In PSA 1988, vol. 2. East Lansing, MI: Philosophy of Science Association, 157–163.
Garrison, Jim. 2019. The Myth that Dewey Accepts “the Myth of the Given.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 55 (3): 304–325.
Hacking, Ian. 1983. Representing and Intervening. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hacking, Ian. 2000. How Inevitable Are the Results of Successful Science? Philosophy of Science 67: S58–S71.
James, William. 1907. Pragmatism, a new name for some old ways of thinking popular lectures on philosophy. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Koskinen, Inkeri. 2020. Defending a Risk Account of Scientific Objectivity. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71: 1187–1207.
Kosso, Peter. 1988. Dimensions of Observability. British Journal of Philosophy of Science 39: 449–467.
Kosso, Peter. 1989. Observability and Observation is Physical Science. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kuhn, Thomas S. 1977. Objectivity, Value Judgement, and Theory Choice. In The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change, 320–339. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kuhn, Thomas S. 2000. The Road Since Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kusch, Martin. 2010. Hacking’s Historical Epistemology: A Critique of Styles of Reasoning. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 41 (2): 158–173.
Kusch, Martin. 2015. Scientific Pluralism and the Chemical Revolution. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 49: 69–79.
Kusch, Martin. 2016. Relativism in Feyerabend’s later writings. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 57: 106–113.
Kusch, Martin. 2017. Epistemic relativism, scepticism, pluralism. Synthese 194 (12): 4687–4703. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1041-0.
Kusch, Martin. 2020. Stances, Voluntarism, Relativism. In Idealism, Relativism, and Realism, ed. Finkelde Dominik and Paul M. Livingston, 131–154. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Kusch, Martin. 2021. Relativism in the Philosophy of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Latour, Bruno. 1999. For David Bloor and Beyond: A Reply to David Bloor’s Anti-Latour. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 30 (1): 113–129.
Levine, Steven. 2019. Pragmatism, Objectivity, and Experience. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Nola, Robert. 2003. Rescuing Reason: A Critique of Anti-Rationalist Views of Science and Knowledge. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Padovani, Flavia, Alan Richardson, and Jonathan Y. Tsou, eds. 2015. Objectivity in Science. New York, Berlin: Springer International Publishing.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1960. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Volume I Principles of Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Sankey, Howard. 2012. Scepticism, Relativism and the Argument from the Criterion. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 43 (1): 182–190.
Seidel, Markus. 2014. Epistemic Relativism: A Constructive Critique. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan [citing Kindle edition].
Sellars, Wilfrid. 1956. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. In Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. I, ed. Herbert Feigl and Michael Scriven, 253–329. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
van Fraassen, Bas C. 2002. The Empirical Stance: The Terry Lectures. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Funding
None.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The author declares that he has no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary Information
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Stump, D.J. Fallibilism versus Relativism in the Philosophy of Science. J Gen Philos Sci 53, 187–199 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-021-09579-x
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-021-09579-x