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Against Relativism - A Philosophical Defense of Method (Hardcover)
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Against Relativism - A Philosophical Defense of Method (Hardcover)
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When the Catholic Inquisitors persecuted Galileo for teaching that
the Earth moves through space, they did so because Galileo insisted
that this was the truth. The Church was quite prepared to tolerate
the notion of a moving Earth, so long as it was regarded as an
instrument useful for calculation, as true merely within a
particular framework which might be adopted or discarded for
reasons of convenience. For centuries Galilieo has been seen as a
heroic fighter for enlightenment against benighted tyranny, but
strangely enough, recent years have seen the rise, within Western
philosophy, of a wave of relativism, according to which Galileo was
wrong and his persecutors were correct. In the view of this new
relativism, which has roots in both the continental and analytic
traditions, there are no universal or trans-cultural standards of
rationality. Among the sources of the new relativism are the
failure of logical positivism and the shift within anthropology
from a single evolutionary model to several models for
understanding human culture. In this critique of relativism,
Professor Harris turns the techniques of relativism against
relativism, showing that it is ultimately self-refuting or
ineffectual. A number of methodological points are stressed in the
book. Quine's rejection of the anaytic-synthetic distinction
appeals to the very analytic truths Quine hopes to dispel. The
relativism arising from Goodman's "grue paradox" is innocuous,
since the paradox is not really concerned with induction. Kuhn's
theory of paradigms must be either self-refuting or
incomprehensible. Winch grossly distorts Wittgenstein's theory and
fails to show that basic notions of rationality are culturally
relative. Rorty cannot avoid presupposing the epistemological
principles he is attacking. Finally, feminist criticism of science
can exert a welcome corrective, but the notion of a distinctive
"feminist science" is indefensible (and counter-productive for
feminism).
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