Relativism, in the sense at issue here, is a view about the meaning of knowledge attributions—statements of the form “S knows that p.” Like contextualism, it holds that the truth of knowledge claims is sensitive to contextual factors, such as which alternatives are relevant at the context, or how high the stakes are. For the relativist, however, the relevant context is the context from which th...

Fodor (1983) claims that the modularity of mind (the relatively encapsulated, insulated, special-purpose nature of the psychological mechanisms of perception) helps undermine relativism in various forms. I shall show first, that the modular vision of mind provides insufficient support for the rejection of (most forms of) relativism, and second, that an alternative (‘neural constructivist’) mode...

An enquiry is made about the nature of the soul at the dawn of premodernism, at the dawn of modernism and in the era of postmodernism. The enquiry is used to support the view that, even in today’s politically correct and morally relativist world, science (and by default science education) should continue to predicate its activity on, and judge its success by, a commonsense appeal to experience,...

A classic nature-versus-nurture debate in cognitive science concerns the relation between language and perception. The universalist view holds that language is shaped by universals of perception, while the opposing relativist view holds instead that language shapes perception, in a manner that varies with little constraint across languages. Over the years, consensus has oscillated between these...

The aim of this paper is to examine the kind of evidence that might be adduced in support of relativist semantics of a kind that have recently been proposed for predicates of personal taste, for epistemic modals, for knowledge attributions and for other cases. I shall concentrate on the case of taste predicates, but what I have to say is easily transposed to the other cases just mentioned. I sh...

In this paper we argue that the so-called 'positivism'-versus-'interpretivism' conflict raised by some constructivist, postmodernist, relativist philosophers and methodologists in information systems research is merely a pseudo problem which has no basis in reality. This pseudo problem of so-called 'positivism' versus 'interpretivism' only distracts from the genuine problem of the information s...

(1) Johnny played a silly prank and had a lot of tasty licorice. phenomenon of perspectival plurality has been shown to pose a serious problem for at least some versions of relativism about predicates of taste (the view that postulates a parameter for perspectives in the circumstances of evaluation with respect to which utterances of sentences are evaluated). Perspectival plurality is the pheno...

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 ...

Psychologists' appropriation of language and ideas from Thomas Kuhn's (1962, 1970b) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions reveals deep and contradictory concerns about truth, science, and the progress of the field. The author argues that psychologists, uncomfortably straddling natural and social science traditions, reference Structure for 2 reasons largely overlooked: first, because it presen...