ABSTRACT
Anti-realism is currently the prevalent trend across many schools of thought in epistemology and philosophy of science. There are, to be sure, some strong countervailing voices and some well-developed arguments in support of an alternative (ontological-realist or causal-explanatory) approach (see especially Bhaskar 1986, 1989; Harré and Madden 1975; Salmon 1984; Smart 1963; also from a range of philosophical standpoints Devitt 1986; Leplin 1984; Psillos 1999; Rescher 1987; Smith 1981). However, these have enjoyed nothing like the same degree of favour with workers in other disciplines – among them the sociology of knowledge, cultural theory, and science studies – where anti-realism is nowadays the orthodox line. Nor is it hard to understand why this should be the case. For those disciplines clearly have a large investment in the idea of scientific ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ as relative to – or constructed within – some culture-specific discourse, framework of enquiry, historical paradigm, conceptual scheme, or whatever (see for instance Barnes 1985; Fuller 1989; Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay 1983; Latour 1987; Latour and Woolgar 1979; Rouse 1987; Woolgar 1988a, 1988b). Hence the rapid diffusion of arguments from recent (post-Kuhnian) philosophy of science which are taken as lending powerful support to the anti-realist case. Other sources include W.V. Quine (on ontological relativity, meaning-variance, and the underdetermination of theories by evidence); late Wittgenstein (on language-games and cultural ‘forms of life’); Heidegger, Gadamer, and other proponents of a depthhermeneutical approach; Foucault’s relentlessly sceptical ‘genealogies’ of power/knowledge; postmodernists such as Lyotard with their talk of paralogism, narrative pragmatics, and ‘performativity’ as the sole criterion of scientific truth; and the ‘strong programme’ in sociology of knowledge with its declared principle of according equal treatment to all scientific theories, whether true or false as judged by our present-day cultural lights.1
