ABSTRACT
Ever since Socrates first confronted the Sophists, philosophers have tried to defeat relativism on conceptual grounds as “self-refuting.” However, most self-avowed relativists, from the ancient Greek Sophists to present-day sociologists of knowledge, advance their position on empirical grounds. Relativists, then, have not been moved by Socratic charges of conceptual incoherence. But this attitude makes their position more vulnerable, as well as more interesting, to the various empirical disciplines whose research can bear on the relativist’s claims. In what follows, I argue that relativism is, on empirical grounds, an obsolete position for studying science in society. Moreover, relativism is obsolete especially if one wishes to derive a point of normative intervention based on such research. In making this argument, I elucidate the sorts of sociology that social epistemology countenances, and also settle the score with the problem of “reflexivity” that has traditionally dogged both relativist and normative projects and that occupies the imagination of STS.
