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Relativism, Cognitive
Relativism, Cognitive Diederick Raven, Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. This article is a revision of the previous edition article by M. Bunge, Volume 19, pp. 13009–13012, Ó 2001, Elsevier Ltd.
Abstract Cognitive relativism is the (philosophical) position that claims there are no absolute standards against which knowledge claims can be calibrated. Two key aspects of the relativist position are: (1) epistemological skepticism regarding a realist understanding of knowledge claims, and (2) acceptance that competing theories can be incommensurable. Linguistic monism, a position that holds that the world is constituted in and through discourse, is rejected. Instead a minimalist realist position is proposed that holds that the ‘world out there’ has independent causal effectiveness. Skepticism is maintained about our theories telling the truth about it. The caprice problem is tackled in terms of the political constitution of science. Relativism begs the question, relative to what? Are knowledge claims relative to a group of experts or civilization as a whole? Science as reason’s exemplar is a specifically Western institution. The hostility of Islamic traditionalists toward Western rational science is explained in terms of encroachment of the realm of divine authority and usurpation of Allah’s authority. In Islam, any legitimate knowledge endeavor must be premised upon and prefaced by transcendental truths. Hence, unlike the Western tradition, within Islam man’s inherent ratiocinating capacities can never be a legitimate source of knowledge.
Introduction Cognitive or epistemological relativism claims there are no absolute standards, criteria, practices etc. against which knowledge claims can be calibrated to assess their truth value. The only viable way to access knowledge claims is relative to a theoretical framework or practice. Apart from vague general statements such as ‘knowledge is whatever the norms of the local culture believe it to be,’ no agreement ever emerged as to what the unit of analysis should be to which knowledge claims are said to be relative. In part, this reflects the negative nature of the position itself: the rejection of the basic conviction that there is or must be some permanent, ahistorical matrix to which one can ultimately appeal in determining the nature of knowledge, truth, reality, or rationality – a position best christened absolutism. Because the dominant temperament of our age is fallibilistic, the position can also be referred as objectivism. Critics of cognitive relativism in general are philosophers of knowledge – philosophy of science is included here – who try to construe an ahistorical matrix from which all evaluation of knowledge can proceed and support this find with the strongest possible reasons. Their worry is that unless such a matrix is found to ground philosophy, knowledge, or language in a rigorous manner, radical skepticism cannot be avoided. Given the self-proclaimed job description of philosophers of knowledge as guardians of truth, rationality, and objectivity, it should not come as a surprise that much of their energy is spent on reigning in what is deemed the precarious nature of the cognitive relativist’s position. To its critics relativism seems to imply an ‘anything goes’ stance on knowledge – there are no defenders of relativism who ever claimed such a silly position – and hence is looked upon as a poor man’s epistemology. All they claim is that there is nothing to be said about either truth or rationality beyond descriptions of the legitimate procedures of justification a given society uses in an area of enquiry.
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 20
Proponents of relativism in general are empirical-minded students of knowledge practices who take as their starting point the anthropological truism ‘that elsewhere things are different’ and argue that knowledge practices are no exception. The unfortunate effect of this deep and long-running split is that the at times highly charged exchange between the two groups has generated more heat than light. The contours of some kind of understanding between the two have remained mainly in a zone of shade obscurity. Critique of absolutism normally takes either of two forms: 1. The criteria set to evaluate knowledge practices cannot be met – basically because they are set too high – which is the classical skeptical take on this issue. 2. There are culturally specific assumptions underpinning the idea of absolute criteria – originating within the Western intellectual tradition – implying that the position the philosophers defend is a culturally specific one. Prima facie, the latter kind of critique is the more fundamental because it is a direct challenge to the integrity of a transcendental realm of the philosophical a priori on which so much philosophical thinking depends.
Epistemological Skepticism as the Basis for Relativism Skepticism as a matter of course does not involve a substantive and constructive position of its own. It is parasitical on the opponent’s position. In the context of the cognitive relativist’s position, this raises the crucial question ‘Skepticism with regard to what?’ If knowledge practices differ across time, place, and culture, as clearly anthropological and historical studies suggest they do, the skepticism it yields seems to be directed toward a realistic understanding of knowledge claims. Realism understood here as the claim that our (scientific) theories are able to pick out the building blocks of the ‘world out there’ is
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made of. Beware, however, that (scientific) realism is a doublebarreled position and consists of two separate claims: (1) there is a world of objective reality that exists independently of us, and (2) this independently existing world has a determinate nature that is within reach of our cognizing powers. Central to this double-barreled or maximalist position is the correspondence theory of truth. The minimalist position preferred by relativists only acknowledges the existence of an independent ontological realm – a realm about nothing much substantive can be said except that it exists. Applying Ockham’s razor suggests this independent ontological realm is redundant. But is it? In its most extreme form relativism presents itself as linguistic monism: il n’y a pas de hors-texte. The reasoning behind the claim that ‘there is nothing outside the text’ is: the ‘objective world’ is constituted in and through discourse that there is no reality independent of the words (text, signs, documents, and so on); the organization of discourse is the object. If discourse and object are identical then it is tenable to say that the collection of words acquires a currency in discourse, which creates a referent in the real world. But is it tenable to say that real worldly objects are created by virtue of a discourse? After all, by drinking water there is a chance of satisfying thirst – with accounts of drinking water, there is not. Another way to see the implausibility of the linguistic monistic position is to ask the obvious question of why people go to such extraordinary lengths to find out how the ‘world out there’ reacts to all kinds of experimental interventions. The independent causal effectiveness of the ‘world out there’ seems a pretty good reason. Implied in this argument is that this independent ontological realm isn’t redundant after all. The causal effects of the whole in the ozone layer don’t disappear when we stop talking about it! Sure enough it is correct to say that people actively have to intervene in nature to come up with some kind of knowledge about it. However, it is quite another thing to say that all there is to the world is how it gets wrapped up in a web of significance spun by them. In short, it does not follow from this that the phenomena scientists investigate and attempt to manipulate and control are created by them. The entities manifest in those phenomena are not their creation. Never should we infer from the fact that our practices are necessary for access to scientific entities to the conclusion that those entities are constituted by our (linguistic) practices. What made cognitive relativism such a life issue in the debates from say the time of the 1960s is that there are wellfounded philosophical grounds to be skeptical about (scientific) realism. When it comes to realism, relativists are skeptics about the claim that our theories can tell the truth about this independent ontological realm. What they reject is the idea “that reality has an idiom in which it prefers to be described, that its very nature demands we talk about it without fuss – a spade is a spade, a rose is a rose – on pain of illusion, trumpery, and self-bewitchment” (Geertz). Our theories aren’t in any obvious way about the ontology of the world; at best we develop a discourse ontology to talk about it. The recalcitrance of the ‘world out there’ in no way explains why a particular theory is held at one time or another. At best it explains why the history of knowledge is a graveyard of rejected theories. Formulated in a more general way, the relativist claim that what philosophers take as explanatory notions for why
a specific theory is held at one time or another, such as logic, methodology, rationality, are taken on their own or taken collectively, is insufficient to explain the content of a (scientific) theory. Numerous case studies have made clear that there is no such thing as a single conceptualization of let’s say the idea of methodology that can account for the many uses that is being made of it over time. Feyerabend’s famous and notorious remark ‘anything goes’ needs to be read as a reductio ad absurdum of his opponents who put forward a view of science based on a restricted set of methodological rules and principles. His point is that if you want a general rule that is historically adequate, i.e., fits all instances of historical development, you should go for ‘anything goes.’ Please notice the conditional formulation here. He is not offering this as his own constructive position, although of course his diagnoses of the ills of his opponent’s views do influence his alternative of methodological pluralism: there is no single rationality, no unique way of attaining knowledge, and no single body of truth to be thereby attained.
Relativism and Its Key Concept: Incommensurability An obvious response to this line of argument is that scientific knowledge is generated by a combination of different kinds of rules, principles, or practices, be they methodological or epistemological as well as ontological assumptions. True as that may be, this doesn’t in any way reign in the room relativists claim for their own. Quite the opposite, it enhances their position. They claim that with the demise of the logical-empiricist view of knowledge, the idea that methodological rules are independent from say epistemological ones or ontological assumptions doesn’t hold any longer. Since this argument leads directly to what is the key central claim of relativism – different theories, paradigms, research programs, are incommensurable – it is best to explain what the idea behind incommensurability is before proceeding with my exposition. Suppose you’re living in England in 1845 and interested in ‘natives.’ What would you start reading? In all likelihood you would end up with a book called The Natural History of Man by J.C. Pritchard MD, FRS (1786–1848) and just on the market in an enlarged second edition. If lucky, you would be able to find his Researches into the Physical History of Man written in 1813 as well. In case you have never heard of Pritchard – founding father of ethnology and the notion of ‘diminished responsibility’ can be traced back to him – his ideas are used as the main conceptual tool to present the many different peoples that make up the empire to the visitors of that “realisation of the unity of mankind” (Albert, Prince Consort): the great exhibition of 1851 at Crystal Place. Fast forward to 1865. Which book would you pick up? Most likely Ancient Law, by H.J.S. Maine (1822–88). Significant about the change from Pritchard to Maine is that for Pritchard the central question is the challenge set by the emergence of comparative anatomy and its tendency toward a polygenist view of mankind. Dark-skinned people were taken as a separate species of mankind, and so were the Indians, etc. This runs counter to the monogenist view as presented in the bible and very well defended by the Society of Friends member Pritchard. Pritchard’s main research question is a physical one.
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But Maine’s research question is totally different. He is interested in the social organization of savages. Apart from how this change from physical anthropology to social anthropology came about, and why it happened at the time it did – in France the change only comes into full effect after World War I – the question does present itself how best to pinpoint in any reasonable detail what is going on in this change. We have two approaches: one physical and one social. Incommensurability is at play here and refers to specific types of difference between the two approaches. (Please note that incommensurability doesn’t mean two approaches can’t be compared; the point of its introduction is to clarify what is involved when we do compare alternative and rival approaches.) Prima facie each approach invokes different kind of properties and regularities, the notions of explanatory adequacy differ, and in a sense both approaches, because there doesn’t seem to be much common ground between them, are in a deep sense dealing with a different problem. That’s because the two approaches start from irreconcilable initial assumptions yielding irreconcilable practices of explanation. With this in hand it is easy to understand what incommensurability is about. Incommensurability points to differences in, among other things, standards of explanatory adequacy, object domain, etc. What makes rival paradigms incommensurable is not their mere difference but the fact that these differences are (1) irreconcilable and (2) incorporated into the practices each paradigm sets for itself. Incommensurability can exist between two successive paradigms as well as between two or more competing paradigms. For the latter, think about the disagreements between behaviorists, cognitive psychologists, and psycho-analyses. Let this suffice as an explanation of the concept of incommensurability. What are the implications of the fact that there are commensurable paradigms? Philosophically the most disturbing one is that no theory or paradigm can be privileged over another. If one wants to familiarize oneself with a paradigm one has to come to terms with an inextricable mixture of assumptions, notions, working practices, axiological orientations, etc. The implications of this are far reaching. Arguments to justify a paradigm tend to become close to circular arguments. There is no obvious way to deny that there is an element of self-vindication when a paradigm is justified in terms of its being able to account for empirical results. The key objection to relativism can now be formulated in a concise way: what to do with the Caprice problem? Suppose Caprice decides to form a community of selfappointed experts on say climate change. Suppose that having gone over all the evidence they reject the anthropogenic thesis of climate change. Is there any (independent) argument available to rule out the social monad created by Caprice as unscientific? Is there any argument to prevent science as being portrayed as any activity of a group of self-validating experts? The sting of the Caprice problem is that there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. If there is such an argument it in all likelihood is tied to the independent causal effectiveness of the ‘world out there,’ for example, ‘long term proven reliability.’ Take, for example, chicken sexing, a manual skill that involves a lot of tacit knowledge. A company that depends for
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its economic survival on this knowledge needs to get sex determination to be as close as possible to a 100% right. (As it turns out, 2 out of a 100 are wrong.) Clearly the long-term success of the business is an independent test of the chickensexing process. If there is a clear and independent pragmatic criterion available, then obviously the answer is affirmative and one could conclude the case. But does this apply to the case of the climate deniers? For sure, of all the scientific papers published on climate change less than a quarter of one percent challenge the anthropogenic thesis of climate change. Of course this fact need not have much impact on the Caprice group – nor that the scientific consensus on this research is that it is of dubious quality. What the Caprice example brings into to the fray is the thorny issue “What does it take to convince this group that climate change is indeed happening?” and “How long may it take to arrive at this conclusion?” The crux in this example is that if by 2050 all the evidence is finally deemed to be conclusive, it probably is too late to do anything about it. Acting now however involves making fundamental adjustments in our way of living and for that reason is politically a highly sensitive conclusion. One way of tackling the Caprice problem is in terms of the political constitution of science. Are there paramount values that make up the science game? Its silly to say there are none. A sensible approach seems to be (1) to allow for a certain amount of variation over time of these values and (2) to allow for some variance of emphasis between different domains of knowledge – experimentation is sensible for certain domains in psychology but not for anthropology. If this is done an affirmative answer is defensible. Traditionally, what is described as central to scientific endeavors is that researchers develop hypotheses, systematically test them through data collection and analysis, and produce publishable results while archiving the data for replication. Triangulation – the use of two or more different methodological approaches to study the same phenomenon; the aim is to make sure you get independent corroboration of the data and/or method you’re investigation – needs to be added here. Philosophers traditionally have talked about criteria a theory has to live up to in terms of values like accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, and fruitfulness. Given the impossibility to solve the Popperian demarcation problem, it is an illusion to think that however we made up this ‘political constitution of science,’ this will forever separate real science form the crypto- and proto-science. As case studies have shown, those trying to show that parapsychology is a truly scientific endeavor apply these paramount values much stricter than is being done in standard science. This is all to no avail; they are still not included in mainstream science. However, if we look at the sometimes-heated discussion about the scientific states of psychoanalysis, the striking point is not that those paramount values do not yield a unanimous outcome – that is more or less to be expected, experts have a habit of disagreeing among themselves over nearly everything – but the very limited number of values that are invoked at all. In short that it makes sense to take a restricted set of paramount values as the core of the political constitution science. The suggestion to be entertained here is that cognitive relativism is in the end a much less radical thesis than claimed
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by its critics. As with any social practice, the freedom there is a constrained one. People who are usually called ‘relativists’ are those who say that the grounds for choosing between incommensurable opinions are less algorithmic than had been thought, not that they are made in complete freedom nor that they are made without justifications. What relativists argue is that scientific rationality in action amounts to an informed opinion, derived from a particular point of view on the issue in question, a reasoned judgment. Judgment, here, is defined as a temporary and fallible verdict that articulates the assessment of the available and relevant information. A judgment is made and informed by the political constitution of science.
Relativists Are (Social) Constructivists Relativists are philosophically best classified as post-empiricist: they all claim the logical empiricist view is found to be wanting. It’s because of the flaws in the philosophical elucidation of knowledge practices that the proponents of cognitive relativism were able to claim the integrity of an intellectual space of their own. No longer did they have to labor under the assumption that a sociological understanding of knowledge was only possible if scientific knowledge was excluded. Even the founding fathers of the sociology of knowledge, such as Weber, Scheler, and Mannheim, at the beginning of twentieth century, subscribed to that view. For relativists the gaps in the philosophical understanding of knowledge had to be plucked by means of sociological mechanisms and principles like interest and/or tradition. One obvious drawback of this line of reasoning is that the sociological argument is a kind of ‘philosophy of gaps’ argument: only at those places where the traditional philosophy of science falls short of its explanatory power is there room for a sociological argument. Up to a point this criticism is correct. The sharper criticism is that the sociological theory that the relativists propose is very much of a short-range nature. It deals mainly with the local squabbles within a highly specialist community. The scientists themselves may feel they are contributing to the solution of the bigger problems in society but their wrangling over the correct interpretation of nature is with other specialist. It is this wrangling or negotiation that is at the core of the sociological analyses of science. Having arrived at this point, a distinction needs to be made between (social) constructionism and constructivism. (If everything is subject to a social process of negotiation, adding the word social in one’s description of the constructionism loses much of its edge, so the notion of ‘social’ might as well be left out of it altogether.) Constructionism aims at showing how and why particular concepts like, for example, ‘the noble savage,’ or ‘religion,’ came into being. The idea is to show how it is the outcome of a historical process and the stress is on the contingent social historical determinants of that process. Implication of that argument is that X need not have existed, or need not be at all like it is today. In a way constructionism is trivially true, but let no one lose sight of what the strength of the position is: it asks important questions such as who determines what the problem
is and who determines what the solution is? Is the current economic crisis like the one in the 1980s? In which case a monetarist stance is the solution, i.e., get the deficit under control by slashing government spending and deflating wages and house prices. Or is it a debt crisis? In which case classical austerity measures are only going to exacerbate the financial hole governments and the public are in, and more emphasis on short-term measures to stimulate the economy, via increasing the debt ratio, and getting it back on the path to growth seem to be preferable. Obviously the answer is hard fought over and is a highly charged political affair. Constructionism explores the essential contestability of any social ontology and as such needs to be sharply distinguished from constructivism, which holds that the only reality with which an inquirer can have any cognitive commerce is reality as he constructs it to be: we only know X when we can construct X. This is the tradition of the maker’s conception of knowledge that received its full philosophical articulation in Vico’s verum ipsum factum (the truth is what is made). The attractiveness of the constructivist position is that it in a direct manner gets rid of the evidence-transcendent meaning surplus of absolutist notions like truth, rationality, and reality. Constructivism sidesteps the skepticism by arguing that knowledge is not ‘grounded’ in experiences but in nonverbalized and hence noncognitive, routines, and actions. Practice of course directly brings with it the suggestion of routine and lack of questioning. Learning it requires a familiarization with the ways of manipulating the resources that are taken for granted. Again we arrive at the point that what is central to a relativistic understanding of knowledge is that the locus of knowledge is the community of expert practitioners.
The West versus the Rest ‘Relative to our culture’ is equivocal: culture can either refer to expert group or civilization. When you train as anthropologist you have to pass a series of the tests set by the community of experts in that field: write an ethnography based on your fieldwork experience among a particular group of people, say beekeepers, in which you provide thick description of closely studied phenomenon. You describe their way of living, their engagement with the bees, the skills required etc. If you train as a psychologist you learn to do experiments, how to assess the data and test different hypotheses via various complex statistical technics, etc. Relativism on the professional level means that every expert group sets its own requirements to become a qualified (licensed) member of it. In some cases, the medical profession for example, there is a legal framework in place for this. Relativism on civilizational level is different: it reflects the prestige science as a knowledge-generating activity has. Relative to ‘our culture’ in the West means relative to what ‘science’ – or given that it comprises of many different knowledge domains – relative to the ‘sciences’ may be the more appropriate way of putting it. This reflects that in the West science is the only legitimate knowledge-generating activity, that science is reason’s exemplar. Substitute Islam for the West and the picture radically emerges. Seyed Attas, in his book Islam and Secularism,
Relativism, Cognitive has a chapter called ‘Dewesternization of Knowledge,’ and the opening reads as follows:
Many challenges have arisen in the midst of man’s confusion throughout the ages, but none perhaps more serious and destructive to man than today’s challenge posed by western civilization. (.) the greatest challenge that has surreptitiously arisen in our age is the challenge of knowledge, indeed, not as against ignorance; but as knowledge as conceived and disseminated throughout the world by Western civilisation; knowledge whose nature has become problematic because it has lost its true purpose due to being unjust conceived, and has been brought about the chaos in man’s; life instead of, and rather than, peace and justice; knowledge which pretends to be real but which is productive of confusion and scepticism, which has elevated doubt and conjecture to the ‘scientific’ rank in methodology and which regards doubt as an eminently valid epistemological tool in the pursuit of truth; knowledge which has, for the first time in history, brought chaos to the Three Kingdoms of Nature, the animal, vegetable and mineral. (.) What is formulated and disseminated is knowledge infused with the character and personality of that civilisation – knowledge presented and conveyed as knowledge in that guise so subtly fused together with the real so that others take it unawares in toto to be the real knowledge per se. (Emphasis in the original.)
This is, indeed, a pronounced, elegant, and powerful critique of Western science. To understand the reasoning behind it, it needs to be contextualized. The hostility of an Islamic traditionalist like al-Ghazzali (1058–1111) or his modern-day equivalent Qutb (1906–66) against knowledge that is acquired through the application of reason and logic is easy to understand if we (Islam), which means (voluntary) start with the word submission to Allah. To be a follower of Allah implies (Qur’an) as Allah’s direct word, the willingness accepting to live in accordance with the Qur’anic law, and accepting the shari’ah as the sole source of regulating and legislating all aspects of human live. This obedience to Allah is embodied in the Qur’anic verse “I created jinn and mankind only that they might worship Me” (51:56). The education that the Prophet Mohamed received through the Qur’an is from an Islamic perspective the ideal model to emulate. The Prophet is the most perfect example of al-insan al kamil (The Perfect Man – perfect because of the near complete realization of the Divine in worldly realities) and the function of education is to strive to produce men and women resembling him (the Prophet) as nearly as possible. A comprehensive and integrated approach to education in Islam strives to produce a balanced growth of the total personality through training man’s spirit, intellect, rational self, feelings, and bodily senses such that faith is infused into the whole personality. The aim of Islamic educational theory is the actualization and perfection of all dimensions of the human being. But a balanced growth of the human character requires that both the heart (qalb) as the seat of the spirit and the intellect (cagl) should receive equal attention. The glorious Qur’an is the foundation of Islamic education; it is an immutable source of fundamental tenets of Islam, of its principles, ethics, and culture. The élan of the Islam is moral. The crucial point is that the idea of Islam, of submission, has quite radical implications for epistemology and rationality. Any source of authority is to be grounded in Allah.
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The implication of “Verily with God is full knowledge and He is acquainted (with all things)” (31:34) is that the Qur’an contains all of knowledge in principle and stands at the apex of modes and sources of knowledge. Because it provides the essential foundation for all forms of knowledge, revelatory knowledge is the most elevated form of knowledge. The insistence on this divine sovereignty implies a rebuttal of any rationalist theory in which reason alone becomes both method and justification of human knowledge. Such a rationalist theory of knowledge is objectionable because it represents human encroachment on the realm of divine authority and is usurpation of Allah’s rightful authority and yields a corrupted concept of the world:
To favour reason at the expense of spirituality hampers balanced growth. Exclusive training of the intellect, for example, is inadequate in developing and refraining elements of love kindness, compassion and selflessness, which have an altogether spiritual ambiance and can only be appealed to by processes of spiritual training. Separating the spiritual development of the human being from the ration, temporal aspects of the same person, (.) is the main cause for the disintegration of the human personality. (Cook, ‘Islamic versus Western Conceptions of Education’: p. 346.)
To ascertain truth by complete reliance on reason alone is restrictive since both spiritual and temporal reality are two sides of the same sphere. Indeed, the highest form of knowledge is the perception of God (idrak), which cannot be realized in any other way than through faith (iman). An important point here is that there is no room for legitimacy of whatever kind to knowledge claims based upon human reason alone. What is denied is that the world is ascertainable through purely rationalist method. This of course does not mean no knowledge could be produced that way, but only that it is without legitimacy. There is no room for an epistemology that assumes that truth about the world can be reached solely through the human faculties. For that to be the case any knowledge endeavor most be premised upon divine transcendental truths, most accept that knowledge starts by accepting the undiluted supremacy of divine authority and the eternal truths that are implied by this acceptance. The dominance of rote learning in the Islamic civilization signals the restricted source of the legitimacy that is allotted to human reasoning, and it reflects that legitimacy is not placed with man’s inherent ratiocinating capacities. (It is this line of thinking that is behind the naming of Boko Haram, a radical Islamist group in Nigeria. In Hausa ‘Boko Haram’ means ‘ Western education is sinful,’ from the Hausa word Boko, western education, and the Arabic word haram, sin, literally forbidden.) What this example shows is two things. Science as reason’s example is a culturally specific idea that presented itself in the West, but there is no reason to assume that it is a viable option elsewhere. Secondly, attempts to critique relativism because it naturalizes reason, i.e., all that is left of notions of truth, rationality, and knowledge is a nonnormative in situ description, begs the question. Of course any human being has the capacity to reason, and without a doubt in any kind of reasoning there is a critical or transcendent function that can be used to criticize existing norms and practices. The question at
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issue is what is the legitimacy of the intellectualistic knowledge produced in this way? The Islamic case makes clear that it is relative to the tradition one is part of.
See also: Phenomenology in Sociology; Rationality in Society; Sociology, Epistemology of; Values, Sociology of.
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Horton, R., Finnegan, R. (Eds.), 1973. Modes of Thought; Essays on Thinking in Western and Non-Western Societies. Faber, London. Jarvie, I.C., 1984. Rationality and Relativism: In Search of a Philosophy and History of Anthropology. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. Krausz, M., 1989. Relativism: Conflicts and Confrontations. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame. Krausz, M., Meiland, J.W. (Eds.), 1982. Relativism: Cognitive and Moral. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame. Kuhn, T.S., 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second ed. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Margolis, J., 1991. The Truth about Relativism. Blackwell, Oxford. Putnam, H., 1981. Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Putnam, H., 1987. The Many Faces of Realism. Open Court, La Salle, Illinois. Quine, W. Van Orman, 1969. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. Columbia University Press, New York. Raven, D., et al. (Eds.), 1992. Cognitive Relativism and Social Science. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ & London. Rorty, R., 1980. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Blackwell, Oxford. Rorty, R., 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Whorf, B.L., 1956. Language, Thought and Reality. M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, MA. Winch, P., 1958. The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. Wilson, B., 1970. Rationality. Blackwell, Oxford.
Abstract Cognitive relativism is the (philosophical) position that claims there are no absolute standards against which knowledge claims can be calibrated. Two key aspects of the relativist position are: (1) epistemological skepticism regarding a realist understanding of knowledge claims, and (2) acceptance that competing theories can be incommensurable. Linguistic monism, a position that holds that the world is constituted in and through discourse, is rejected. Instead a minimalist realist position is proposed that holds that the ‘world out there’ has independent causal effectiveness. Skepticism is maintained about our theories telling the truth about it. The caprice problem is tackled in terms of the political constitution of science. Relativism begs the question, relative to what? Are knowledge claims relative to a group of experts or civilization as a whole? Science as reason’s exemplar is a specifically Western institution. The hostility of Islamic traditionalists toward Western rational science is explained in terms of encroachment of the realm of divine authority and usurpation of Allah’s authority. In Islam, any legitimate knowledge endeavor must be premised upon and prefaced by transcendental truths. Hence, unlike the Western tradition, within Islam man’s inherent ratiocinating capacities can never be a legitimate source of knowledge.
Introduction Cognitive or epistemological relativism claims there are no absolute standards, criteria, practices etc. against which knowledge claims can be calibrated to assess their truth value. The only viable way to access knowledge claims is relative to a theoretical framework or practice. Apart from vague general statements such as ‘knowledge is whatever the norms of the local culture believe it to be,’ no agreement ever emerged as to what the unit of analysis should be to which knowledge claims are said to be relative. In part, this reflects the negative nature of the position itself: the rejection of the basic conviction that there is or must be some permanent, ahistorical matrix to which one can ultimately appeal in determining the nature of knowledge, truth, reality, or rationality – a position best christened absolutism. Because the dominant temperament of our age is fallibilistic, the position can also be referred as objectivism. Critics of cognitive relativism in general are philosophers of knowledge – philosophy of science is included here – who try to construe an ahistorical matrix from which all evaluation of knowledge can proceed and support this find with the strongest possible reasons. Their worry is that unless such a matrix is found to ground philosophy, knowledge, or language in a rigorous manner, radical skepticism cannot be avoided. Given the self-proclaimed job description of philosophers of knowledge as guardians of truth, rationality, and objectivity, it should not come as a surprise that much of their energy is spent on reigning in what is deemed the precarious nature of the cognitive relativist’s position. To its critics relativism seems to imply an ‘anything goes’ stance on knowledge – there are no defenders of relativism who ever claimed such a silly position – and hence is looked upon as a poor man’s epistemology. All they claim is that there is nothing to be said about either truth or rationality beyond descriptions of the legitimate procedures of justification a given society uses in an area of enquiry.
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Proponents of relativism in general are empirical-minded students of knowledge practices who take as their starting point the anthropological truism ‘that elsewhere things are different’ and argue that knowledge practices are no exception. The unfortunate effect of this deep and long-running split is that the at times highly charged exchange between the two groups has generated more heat than light. The contours of some kind of understanding between the two have remained mainly in a zone of shade obscurity. Critique of absolutism normally takes either of two forms: 1. The criteria set to evaluate knowledge practices cannot be met – basically because they are set too high – which is the classical skeptical take on this issue. 2. There are culturally specific assumptions underpinning the idea of absolute criteria – originating within the Western intellectual tradition – implying that the position the philosophers defend is a culturally specific one. Prima facie, the latter kind of critique is the more fundamental because it is a direct challenge to the integrity of a transcendental realm of the philosophical a priori on which so much philosophical thinking depends.
Epistemological Skepticism as the Basis for Relativism Skepticism as a matter of course does not involve a substantive and constructive position of its own. It is parasitical on the opponent’s position. In the context of the cognitive relativist’s position, this raises the crucial question ‘Skepticism with regard to what?’ If knowledge practices differ across time, place, and culture, as clearly anthropological and historical studies suggest they do, the skepticism it yields seems to be directed toward a realistic understanding of knowledge claims. Realism understood here as the claim that our (scientific) theories are able to pick out the building blocks of the ‘world out there’ is
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made of. Beware, however, that (scientific) realism is a doublebarreled position and consists of two separate claims: (1) there is a world of objective reality that exists independently of us, and (2) this independently existing world has a determinate nature that is within reach of our cognizing powers. Central to this double-barreled or maximalist position is the correspondence theory of truth. The minimalist position preferred by relativists only acknowledges the existence of an independent ontological realm – a realm about nothing much substantive can be said except that it exists. Applying Ockham’s razor suggests this independent ontological realm is redundant. But is it? In its most extreme form relativism presents itself as linguistic monism: il n’y a pas de hors-texte. The reasoning behind the claim that ‘there is nothing outside the text’ is: the ‘objective world’ is constituted in and through discourse that there is no reality independent of the words (text, signs, documents, and so on); the organization of discourse is the object. If discourse and object are identical then it is tenable to say that the collection of words acquires a currency in discourse, which creates a referent in the real world. But is it tenable to say that real worldly objects are created by virtue of a discourse? After all, by drinking water there is a chance of satisfying thirst – with accounts of drinking water, there is not. Another way to see the implausibility of the linguistic monistic position is to ask the obvious question of why people go to such extraordinary lengths to find out how the ‘world out there’ reacts to all kinds of experimental interventions. The independent causal effectiveness of the ‘world out there’ seems a pretty good reason. Implied in this argument is that this independent ontological realm isn’t redundant after all. The causal effects of the whole in the ozone layer don’t disappear when we stop talking about it! Sure enough it is correct to say that people actively have to intervene in nature to come up with some kind of knowledge about it. However, it is quite another thing to say that all there is to the world is how it gets wrapped up in a web of significance spun by them. In short, it does not follow from this that the phenomena scientists investigate and attempt to manipulate and control are created by them. The entities manifest in those phenomena are not their creation. Never should we infer from the fact that our practices are necessary for access to scientific entities to the conclusion that those entities are constituted by our (linguistic) practices. What made cognitive relativism such a life issue in the debates from say the time of the 1960s is that there are wellfounded philosophical grounds to be skeptical about (scientific) realism. When it comes to realism, relativists are skeptics about the claim that our theories can tell the truth about this independent ontological realm. What they reject is the idea “that reality has an idiom in which it prefers to be described, that its very nature demands we talk about it without fuss – a spade is a spade, a rose is a rose – on pain of illusion, trumpery, and self-bewitchment” (Geertz). Our theories aren’t in any obvious way about the ontology of the world; at best we develop a discourse ontology to talk about it. The recalcitrance of the ‘world out there’ in no way explains why a particular theory is held at one time or another. At best it explains why the history of knowledge is a graveyard of rejected theories. Formulated in a more general way, the relativist claim that what philosophers take as explanatory notions for why
a specific theory is held at one time or another, such as logic, methodology, rationality, are taken on their own or taken collectively, is insufficient to explain the content of a (scientific) theory. Numerous case studies have made clear that there is no such thing as a single conceptualization of let’s say the idea of methodology that can account for the many uses that is being made of it over time. Feyerabend’s famous and notorious remark ‘anything goes’ needs to be read as a reductio ad absurdum of his opponents who put forward a view of science based on a restricted set of methodological rules and principles. His point is that if you want a general rule that is historically adequate, i.e., fits all instances of historical development, you should go for ‘anything goes.’ Please notice the conditional formulation here. He is not offering this as his own constructive position, although of course his diagnoses of the ills of his opponent’s views do influence his alternative of methodological pluralism: there is no single rationality, no unique way of attaining knowledge, and no single body of truth to be thereby attained.
Relativism and Its Key Concept: Incommensurability An obvious response to this line of argument is that scientific knowledge is generated by a combination of different kinds of rules, principles, or practices, be they methodological or epistemological as well as ontological assumptions. True as that may be, this doesn’t in any way reign in the room relativists claim for their own. Quite the opposite, it enhances their position. They claim that with the demise of the logical-empiricist view of knowledge, the idea that methodological rules are independent from say epistemological ones or ontological assumptions doesn’t hold any longer. Since this argument leads directly to what is the key central claim of relativism – different theories, paradigms, research programs, are incommensurable – it is best to explain what the idea behind incommensurability is before proceeding with my exposition. Suppose you’re living in England in 1845 and interested in ‘natives.’ What would you start reading? In all likelihood you would end up with a book called The Natural History of Man by J.C. Pritchard MD, FRS (1786–1848) and just on the market in an enlarged second edition. If lucky, you would be able to find his Researches into the Physical History of Man written in 1813 as well. In case you have never heard of Pritchard – founding father of ethnology and the notion of ‘diminished responsibility’ can be traced back to him – his ideas are used as the main conceptual tool to present the many different peoples that make up the empire to the visitors of that “realisation of the unity of mankind” (Albert, Prince Consort): the great exhibition of 1851 at Crystal Place. Fast forward to 1865. Which book would you pick up? Most likely Ancient Law, by H.J.S. Maine (1822–88). Significant about the change from Pritchard to Maine is that for Pritchard the central question is the challenge set by the emergence of comparative anatomy and its tendency toward a polygenist view of mankind. Dark-skinned people were taken as a separate species of mankind, and so were the Indians, etc. This runs counter to the monogenist view as presented in the bible and very well defended by the Society of Friends member Pritchard. Pritchard’s main research question is a physical one.
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But Maine’s research question is totally different. He is interested in the social organization of savages. Apart from how this change from physical anthropology to social anthropology came about, and why it happened at the time it did – in France the change only comes into full effect after World War I – the question does present itself how best to pinpoint in any reasonable detail what is going on in this change. We have two approaches: one physical and one social. Incommensurability is at play here and refers to specific types of difference between the two approaches. (Please note that incommensurability doesn’t mean two approaches can’t be compared; the point of its introduction is to clarify what is involved when we do compare alternative and rival approaches.) Prima facie each approach invokes different kind of properties and regularities, the notions of explanatory adequacy differ, and in a sense both approaches, because there doesn’t seem to be much common ground between them, are in a deep sense dealing with a different problem. That’s because the two approaches start from irreconcilable initial assumptions yielding irreconcilable practices of explanation. With this in hand it is easy to understand what incommensurability is about. Incommensurability points to differences in, among other things, standards of explanatory adequacy, object domain, etc. What makes rival paradigms incommensurable is not their mere difference but the fact that these differences are (1) irreconcilable and (2) incorporated into the practices each paradigm sets for itself. Incommensurability can exist between two successive paradigms as well as between two or more competing paradigms. For the latter, think about the disagreements between behaviorists, cognitive psychologists, and psycho-analyses. Let this suffice as an explanation of the concept of incommensurability. What are the implications of the fact that there are commensurable paradigms? Philosophically the most disturbing one is that no theory or paradigm can be privileged over another. If one wants to familiarize oneself with a paradigm one has to come to terms with an inextricable mixture of assumptions, notions, working practices, axiological orientations, etc. The implications of this are far reaching. Arguments to justify a paradigm tend to become close to circular arguments. There is no obvious way to deny that there is an element of self-vindication when a paradigm is justified in terms of its being able to account for empirical results. The key objection to relativism can now be formulated in a concise way: what to do with the Caprice problem? Suppose Caprice decides to form a community of selfappointed experts on say climate change. Suppose that having gone over all the evidence they reject the anthropogenic thesis of climate change. Is there any (independent) argument available to rule out the social monad created by Caprice as unscientific? Is there any argument to prevent science as being portrayed as any activity of a group of self-validating experts? The sting of the Caprice problem is that there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. If there is such an argument it in all likelihood is tied to the independent causal effectiveness of the ‘world out there,’ for example, ‘long term proven reliability.’ Take, for example, chicken sexing, a manual skill that involves a lot of tacit knowledge. A company that depends for
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its economic survival on this knowledge needs to get sex determination to be as close as possible to a 100% right. (As it turns out, 2 out of a 100 are wrong.) Clearly the long-term success of the business is an independent test of the chickensexing process. If there is a clear and independent pragmatic criterion available, then obviously the answer is affirmative and one could conclude the case. But does this apply to the case of the climate deniers? For sure, of all the scientific papers published on climate change less than a quarter of one percent challenge the anthropogenic thesis of climate change. Of course this fact need not have much impact on the Caprice group – nor that the scientific consensus on this research is that it is of dubious quality. What the Caprice example brings into to the fray is the thorny issue “What does it take to convince this group that climate change is indeed happening?” and “How long may it take to arrive at this conclusion?” The crux in this example is that if by 2050 all the evidence is finally deemed to be conclusive, it probably is too late to do anything about it. Acting now however involves making fundamental adjustments in our way of living and for that reason is politically a highly sensitive conclusion. One way of tackling the Caprice problem is in terms of the political constitution of science. Are there paramount values that make up the science game? Its silly to say there are none. A sensible approach seems to be (1) to allow for a certain amount of variation over time of these values and (2) to allow for some variance of emphasis between different domains of knowledge – experimentation is sensible for certain domains in psychology but not for anthropology. If this is done an affirmative answer is defensible. Traditionally, what is described as central to scientific endeavors is that researchers develop hypotheses, systematically test them through data collection and analysis, and produce publishable results while archiving the data for replication. Triangulation – the use of two or more different methodological approaches to study the same phenomenon; the aim is to make sure you get independent corroboration of the data and/or method you’re investigation – needs to be added here. Philosophers traditionally have talked about criteria a theory has to live up to in terms of values like accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, and fruitfulness. Given the impossibility to solve the Popperian demarcation problem, it is an illusion to think that however we made up this ‘political constitution of science,’ this will forever separate real science form the crypto- and proto-science. As case studies have shown, those trying to show that parapsychology is a truly scientific endeavor apply these paramount values much stricter than is being done in standard science. This is all to no avail; they are still not included in mainstream science. However, if we look at the sometimes-heated discussion about the scientific states of psychoanalysis, the striking point is not that those paramount values do not yield a unanimous outcome – that is more or less to be expected, experts have a habit of disagreeing among themselves over nearly everything – but the very limited number of values that are invoked at all. In short that it makes sense to take a restricted set of paramount values as the core of the political constitution science. The suggestion to be entertained here is that cognitive relativism is in the end a much less radical thesis than claimed
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by its critics. As with any social practice, the freedom there is a constrained one. People who are usually called ‘relativists’ are those who say that the grounds for choosing between incommensurable opinions are less algorithmic than had been thought, not that they are made in complete freedom nor that they are made without justifications. What relativists argue is that scientific rationality in action amounts to an informed opinion, derived from a particular point of view on the issue in question, a reasoned judgment. Judgment, here, is defined as a temporary and fallible verdict that articulates the assessment of the available and relevant information. A judgment is made and informed by the political constitution of science.
Relativists Are (Social) Constructivists Relativists are philosophically best classified as post-empiricist: they all claim the logical empiricist view is found to be wanting. It’s because of the flaws in the philosophical elucidation of knowledge practices that the proponents of cognitive relativism were able to claim the integrity of an intellectual space of their own. No longer did they have to labor under the assumption that a sociological understanding of knowledge was only possible if scientific knowledge was excluded. Even the founding fathers of the sociology of knowledge, such as Weber, Scheler, and Mannheim, at the beginning of twentieth century, subscribed to that view. For relativists the gaps in the philosophical understanding of knowledge had to be plucked by means of sociological mechanisms and principles like interest and/or tradition. One obvious drawback of this line of reasoning is that the sociological argument is a kind of ‘philosophy of gaps’ argument: only at those places where the traditional philosophy of science falls short of its explanatory power is there room for a sociological argument. Up to a point this criticism is correct. The sharper criticism is that the sociological theory that the relativists propose is very much of a short-range nature. It deals mainly with the local squabbles within a highly specialist community. The scientists themselves may feel they are contributing to the solution of the bigger problems in society but their wrangling over the correct interpretation of nature is with other specialist. It is this wrangling or negotiation that is at the core of the sociological analyses of science. Having arrived at this point, a distinction needs to be made between (social) constructionism and constructivism. (If everything is subject to a social process of negotiation, adding the word social in one’s description of the constructionism loses much of its edge, so the notion of ‘social’ might as well be left out of it altogether.) Constructionism aims at showing how and why particular concepts like, for example, ‘the noble savage,’ or ‘religion,’ came into being. The idea is to show how it is the outcome of a historical process and the stress is on the contingent social historical determinants of that process. Implication of that argument is that X need not have existed, or need not be at all like it is today. In a way constructionism is trivially true, but let no one lose sight of what the strength of the position is: it asks important questions such as who determines what the problem
is and who determines what the solution is? Is the current economic crisis like the one in the 1980s? In which case a monetarist stance is the solution, i.e., get the deficit under control by slashing government spending and deflating wages and house prices. Or is it a debt crisis? In which case classical austerity measures are only going to exacerbate the financial hole governments and the public are in, and more emphasis on short-term measures to stimulate the economy, via increasing the debt ratio, and getting it back on the path to growth seem to be preferable. Obviously the answer is hard fought over and is a highly charged political affair. Constructionism explores the essential contestability of any social ontology and as such needs to be sharply distinguished from constructivism, which holds that the only reality with which an inquirer can have any cognitive commerce is reality as he constructs it to be: we only know X when we can construct X. This is the tradition of the maker’s conception of knowledge that received its full philosophical articulation in Vico’s verum ipsum factum (the truth is what is made). The attractiveness of the constructivist position is that it in a direct manner gets rid of the evidence-transcendent meaning surplus of absolutist notions like truth, rationality, and reality. Constructivism sidesteps the skepticism by arguing that knowledge is not ‘grounded’ in experiences but in nonverbalized and hence noncognitive, routines, and actions. Practice of course directly brings with it the suggestion of routine and lack of questioning. Learning it requires a familiarization with the ways of manipulating the resources that are taken for granted. Again we arrive at the point that what is central to a relativistic understanding of knowledge is that the locus of knowledge is the community of expert practitioners.
The West versus the Rest ‘Relative to our culture’ is equivocal: culture can either refer to expert group or civilization. When you train as anthropologist you have to pass a series of the tests set by the community of experts in that field: write an ethnography based on your fieldwork experience among a particular group of people, say beekeepers, in which you provide thick description of closely studied phenomenon. You describe their way of living, their engagement with the bees, the skills required etc. If you train as a psychologist you learn to do experiments, how to assess the data and test different hypotheses via various complex statistical technics, etc. Relativism on the professional level means that every expert group sets its own requirements to become a qualified (licensed) member of it. In some cases, the medical profession for example, there is a legal framework in place for this. Relativism on civilizational level is different: it reflects the prestige science as a knowledge-generating activity has. Relative to ‘our culture’ in the West means relative to what ‘science’ – or given that it comprises of many different knowledge domains – relative to the ‘sciences’ may be the more appropriate way of putting it. This reflects that in the West science is the only legitimate knowledge-generating activity, that science is reason’s exemplar. Substitute Islam for the West and the picture radically emerges. Seyed Attas, in his book Islam and Secularism,
Relativism, Cognitive has a chapter called ‘Dewesternization of Knowledge,’ and the opening reads as follows:
Many challenges have arisen in the midst of man’s confusion throughout the ages, but none perhaps more serious and destructive to man than today’s challenge posed by western civilization. (.) the greatest challenge that has surreptitiously arisen in our age is the challenge of knowledge, indeed, not as against ignorance; but as knowledge as conceived and disseminated throughout the world by Western civilisation; knowledge whose nature has become problematic because it has lost its true purpose due to being unjust conceived, and has been brought about the chaos in man’s; life instead of, and rather than, peace and justice; knowledge which pretends to be real but which is productive of confusion and scepticism, which has elevated doubt and conjecture to the ‘scientific’ rank in methodology and which regards doubt as an eminently valid epistemological tool in the pursuit of truth; knowledge which has, for the first time in history, brought chaos to the Three Kingdoms of Nature, the animal, vegetable and mineral. (.) What is formulated and disseminated is knowledge infused with the character and personality of that civilisation – knowledge presented and conveyed as knowledge in that guise so subtly fused together with the real so that others take it unawares in toto to be the real knowledge per se. (Emphasis in the original.)
This is, indeed, a pronounced, elegant, and powerful critique of Western science. To understand the reasoning behind it, it needs to be contextualized. The hostility of an Islamic traditionalist like al-Ghazzali (1058–1111) or his modern-day equivalent Qutb (1906–66) against knowledge that is acquired through the application of reason and logic is easy to understand if we (Islam), which means (voluntary) start with the word submission to Allah. To be a follower of Allah implies (Qur’an) as Allah’s direct word, the willingness accepting to live in accordance with the Qur’anic law, and accepting the shari’ah as the sole source of regulating and legislating all aspects of human live. This obedience to Allah is embodied in the Qur’anic verse “I created jinn and mankind only that they might worship Me” (51:56). The education that the Prophet Mohamed received through the Qur’an is from an Islamic perspective the ideal model to emulate. The Prophet is the most perfect example of al-insan al kamil (The Perfect Man – perfect because of the near complete realization of the Divine in worldly realities) and the function of education is to strive to produce men and women resembling him (the Prophet) as nearly as possible. A comprehensive and integrated approach to education in Islam strives to produce a balanced growth of the total personality through training man’s spirit, intellect, rational self, feelings, and bodily senses such that faith is infused into the whole personality. The aim of Islamic educational theory is the actualization and perfection of all dimensions of the human being. But a balanced growth of the human character requires that both the heart (qalb) as the seat of the spirit and the intellect (cagl) should receive equal attention. The glorious Qur’an is the foundation of Islamic education; it is an immutable source of fundamental tenets of Islam, of its principles, ethics, and culture. The élan of the Islam is moral. The crucial point is that the idea of Islam, of submission, has quite radical implications for epistemology and rationality. Any source of authority is to be grounded in Allah.
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The implication of “Verily with God is full knowledge and He is acquainted (with all things)” (31:34) is that the Qur’an contains all of knowledge in principle and stands at the apex of modes and sources of knowledge. Because it provides the essential foundation for all forms of knowledge, revelatory knowledge is the most elevated form of knowledge. The insistence on this divine sovereignty implies a rebuttal of any rationalist theory in which reason alone becomes both method and justification of human knowledge. Such a rationalist theory of knowledge is objectionable because it represents human encroachment on the realm of divine authority and is usurpation of Allah’s rightful authority and yields a corrupted concept of the world:
To favour reason at the expense of spirituality hampers balanced growth. Exclusive training of the intellect, for example, is inadequate in developing and refraining elements of love kindness, compassion and selflessness, which have an altogether spiritual ambiance and can only be appealed to by processes of spiritual training. Separating the spiritual development of the human being from the ration, temporal aspects of the same person, (.) is the main cause for the disintegration of the human personality. (Cook, ‘Islamic versus Western Conceptions of Education’: p. 346.)
To ascertain truth by complete reliance on reason alone is restrictive since both spiritual and temporal reality are two sides of the same sphere. Indeed, the highest form of knowledge is the perception of God (idrak), which cannot be realized in any other way than through faith (iman). An important point here is that there is no room for legitimacy of whatever kind to knowledge claims based upon human reason alone. What is denied is that the world is ascertainable through purely rationalist method. This of course does not mean no knowledge could be produced that way, but only that it is without legitimacy. There is no room for an epistemology that assumes that truth about the world can be reached solely through the human faculties. For that to be the case any knowledge endeavor most be premised upon divine transcendental truths, most accept that knowledge starts by accepting the undiluted supremacy of divine authority and the eternal truths that are implied by this acceptance. The dominance of rote learning in the Islamic civilization signals the restricted source of the legitimacy that is allotted to human reasoning, and it reflects that legitimacy is not placed with man’s inherent ratiocinating capacities. (It is this line of thinking that is behind the naming of Boko Haram, a radical Islamist group in Nigeria. In Hausa ‘Boko Haram’ means ‘ Western education is sinful,’ from the Hausa word Boko, western education, and the Arabic word haram, sin, literally forbidden.) What this example shows is two things. Science as reason’s example is a culturally specific idea that presented itself in the West, but there is no reason to assume that it is a viable option elsewhere. Secondly, attempts to critique relativism because it naturalizes reason, i.e., all that is left of notions of truth, rationality, and knowledge is a nonnormative in situ description, begs the question. Of course any human being has the capacity to reason, and without a doubt in any kind of reasoning there is a critical or transcendent function that can be used to criticize existing norms and practices. The question at
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issue is what is the legitimacy of the intellectualistic knowledge produced in this way? The Islamic case makes clear that it is relative to the tradition one is part of.
See also: Phenomenology in Sociology; Rationality in Society; Sociology, Epistemology of; Values, Sociology of.
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Horton, R., Finnegan, R. (Eds.), 1973. Modes of Thought; Essays on Thinking in Western and Non-Western Societies. Faber, London. Jarvie, I.C., 1984. Rationality and Relativism: In Search of a Philosophy and History of Anthropology. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. Krausz, M., 1989. Relativism: Conflicts and Confrontations. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame. Krausz, M., Meiland, J.W. (Eds.), 1982. Relativism: Cognitive and Moral. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame. Kuhn, T.S., 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second ed. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Margolis, J., 1991. The Truth about Relativism. Blackwell, Oxford. Putnam, H., 1981. Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Putnam, H., 1987. The Many Faces of Realism. Open Court, La Salle, Illinois. Quine, W. Van Orman, 1969. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. Columbia University Press, New York. Raven, D., et al. (Eds.), 1992. Cognitive Relativism and Social Science. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ & London. Rorty, R., 1980. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Blackwell, Oxford. Rorty, R., 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Whorf, B.L., 1956. Language, Thought and Reality. M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, MA. Winch, P., 1958. The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. Wilson, B., 1970. Rationality. Blackwell, Oxford.