The paper contrasts two domains of school education, natural science and citizenship education (as a paradigm of “hard” and “soft” subjects), with respect to their epistemological and ethical foundations. A sharp contrast between their associated world-views within the school community is accentuated at the outset. The epistemological shortcomings inherent in both are subsequently explored, and...

Social constructivists argue that what we call “nature” is far less universal and extrahuman than generally assumed. Yet this argument has been vigorously attacked by some natural scientists and other scholars due to what they perceive as its dangerous flirtation with relativism. I introduce this debate by reference to a recent controversy over the concept of wilderness, an important icon of na...

In “Epistemic Relativism,” Mark Kalderon defends a view that has become increasingly popular across various academic disciplines. He wrote his article in response to Paul Boghossian’s book Fear of Knowledge, in which epistemic relativism is criticized and dismissed as incoherent. Kalderon argues that Boghossian does not accurately characterize epistemic relativism resulting in a hasty dismissal...

This paper explores the question of whether there is an interesting form of specifically epistemic relativism available, a position which can lend support to claims of a broadly relativistic nature but which is not committed to relativism about truth. It is argued that the most plausible rendering of such a view turns out not to be the radical thesis that it is often represented as being. 0. On...

The purpose of this paper is to show that, pace (Field, 2009), MacFarlane's assessment relativism and expressivism should be sharply distinguished. We do so by arguing that relativism and expressivism exemplify two very different approaches to context-dependence. Relativism, on the one hand, shares with other contemporary approaches a bottom-up, building block, model, while expressivism is part...

This study is going to investigate the problem of relativism in the writings of Karl Mannheim and David Bloor. These two scholars are important confessors of the sociology of knowledge. Mannheim began to apply the notion of relationism instead of relativism. Some critics believed to understand this object, others talked about the lack of real differences. My first aim is to differentiate these ...

Diversity is an asset, as long as it allows cooperation. In the case of information systems and databases, the data model used is a help or a hindrance for this cooperation of diverse views; this is characterized by the semantic relativism of the model. We first analyze diversity within an information system, where cooperation is made possible by the use of external schemata; semantic relativis...