ABSTRACT
The debate on rationality and relativism seems set to become interminable and insoluble. ‘Debate’ is a misnomer; rather it is all too often a contest that takes place from fixed positions and in which both sides draw sustenance from the intellectual weaknesses of their opponents. The problem is: can this ‘debate’ ever get us anywhere? Relativism is pernicious if its most extreme consequences are enthusiastically embraced, but the effective antidote is neither to postulate a general human ‘rationality’ nor to suppose that we have independent means of demonstrating that the methods of modern science are of universal validity. Instead, we need strategies for coping with the consequences of relativism, accepting that our knowledges lack foundations in independent criteria of validity but without falling into a perspectivism that treats all views as equally valid. Such strategies need to be of another order from the meretricious demonstration of the logical inconsistency of systematic relativism or a pointing to the evident ‘success’ of Western science and technology. For all the critical scorn poured on them, relativist views have not gone away. They continue to be adopted and defended by able people in the social sciences.
