ABSTRACT
Kuhn’s doctrines have generally been interpreted so as to give rise to relativism – the theory that there are no truths, or at least nothing can be asserted to be true independent of some points of view, and that disagreements between points of view are irreconcilable. The result of course is to deprive science of a position of strength from which it can defend its findings as more well justified than those of pseudo-science; it also undermines the claims of the so-called “hard sciences” – physics and chemistry – to greater authority for their findings, methods, standards of argument and explanation, and strictures on theory-construction, than can be claimed by the “soft sciences” and the humanities. Post-modernists and deconstructionists took much support from a radical interpretation of Kuhn’s doctrines, and from other fashionable philosophies, for the relativism they embraced.
