ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses primarily on the “problem of relativism” in social science and especially in the classical sociology of knowledge. It also addresses the more wide-ranging problem of the relations between various historically grown discourse traditions and scientific communities. The chapter discusses that the all too frequent dogmatic separation between epistemological and social scientific discourse contributes little to a solution of the relativism problem, and that this separation must therefore be overcome. The prevailing interpretation of the nature of relativism tends to attribute to relativism the assertion that all knowledge claims and intellectual conceptions are equivalent, if only in their inability to ascribe special status to a single claim. The relativism debate demonstrates that an adequate epistemology must not be separated from the social sciences and from ethics. In the debates about relativism, a distinction is frequently made between cognitive and moral relativism.
