ABSTRACT
Widespread puzzlement and fearful anxieties have been voiced in recent decades in response to the threat of relativism that appears to be raised by several kinds of new knowledge projects. These are poststructuralist criticisms of Enlightenment assumptions, post-positivist philosophy and social studies of science, and feminist, multicultural, and postcolonial science studies and social sciences. All of these knowledge projects seem to many observers to abandon or even reject the hope that a single transcultural standard to use in evaluating competing beliefs – ontological or epistemic facts, rules, or principles – can be identified. Without one such standard we have no rationally justifiable standards, no rationally defensible grounds for our knowledge claims, according to this line of thought.
