科学知识社会学相对主义知识观批判

“The Strong Programme” is put forward as a metaphysical theory of sociology by the Edinburgh School (SSK) to study the social causes of knowledge. Barry Barnes and David Bloor are the proponents of the School. They call their programme “the Relativist View of Knowledge” and argue against rationalism in the philosophy of science. Does their relativist account of knowledge present a serious challenge to rationalism, which has dominated 20th century philosophy of science? I attempt to answer this question by criticizing the main ideas of SSK and defending rationalism theories in modern philosophy of science.     

The evidence for relativism

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 shall begin by considering in general the question of what kind of evidence can be offered in favour of some semantic theory or framework of semantic theorizing. In other words, I shall begin with the difficult question of the empirical significance of semantic theorizing. In Sect. 2, I outline a relativist semantic theory, and in Sect. 3, I review four types of evidence that might be offered in favour of a relativistic framework. I show that the evidence is not conclusive because a sophisticated form of contextualism (or indexical relativism) can stand up to the evidence. However, the evidence can be taken to support the view that either relativism or the sophisticated form of contextualism is correct.     

Bloor's bluff: Behaviourism and the strong programme

The accumulated case studies in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge have been taken to establish the Strong Programme's thesis that beliefs have social causes in contradistinction to psychological ones. This externalism is essentially a commitment to the stimulus control of behaviour which was the principal tenet of orthodox Skinnerian Behaviorism. Offered as ‘straight forward scientific hypotheses’ these claims of social determination are asserted to be ‘beyond dispute’.

However, the causes of beliefs and especially their contents has also been the subject of intense study in the quite different domain of cognitive science where internal states, images, rules, representations and schemas are postulated as explanatory constructs. Such explanations which postulate mental states are described by Bloor as infected by the ‘disease’ of ‘psychologism’ and Bloor has defined his Strong Programme in terms of its diametrical opposition to mentalistic theories. For example, Bloor has explicitly endorsed the Behaviourist rejection of mental representations such as images. Accordingly, a direct comparison of these radically divergent approaches to a common subject matter is of considerable interest.

The paper attempts to reveal the unnoticed enormity and recidivism of the sociological programme, and how its vulnerability is betrayed in Bloor's response to criticism on central issues.     

Realism,relativism, and constructivism

This paper gives a critical evaluation of the philosophical presuppositions and implications of two current schools in the sociology of knowledge: the Strong Programme of Bloor and Barnes; and the Constructivism of Latour and Knorr-Cetina. Bloor's arguments for his externalist symmetry thesis (i.e., scientific beliefs must always be explained by social factors) are found to be incoherent or inconclusive. At best, they suggest a Weak Programme of the sociology of science: when theoretical preferences in a scientific community, SC, are first internally explained by appealing to the evidence, e, and the standards or values, V, accepted in SC, then a sociologist may sometimes step in to explain why e and V were accepted in SC. Latour's story about the social construction of facts in scientific laboratories is found to be misleading or incredible. The idea that scientific reality is an artifact turns out to have some interesting affinities with classical pragmatism, instrumentalism, phenomenology, and internal realism. However, the constructivist account of theoretical entities in terms of negotiation and social consensus is less plausible than the alternative realist story which explains consensus by the preexistence of mind-independent real entities. The author concludes that critical scientific realism, developed with the concept of truthlikeness, is compatible with the thesis that scientific beliefs or knowledge claims may be relative to various types of cognitive and practical interests. However, the realist denies, with good reasons, the stronger type of relativism which takes reality and truth to be relative to persons, groups, or social interests.This paper was presented at the 8th Inter-Nordic Philosophical Symposium, Oslo, 18–20 May 1989. Some ideas from this paper were first expressed in a lecture in Professor Aant Elzinga's seminar in Gothenburg, 22 April 1988.     

Context,content, and relativism

This paper argues against relativism, focusing on relativism based on the semantics of predicates of personal taste. It presents and defends a contextualist semantics for these predicates, derived from current work on gradable adjectives. It then considers metasemantic questions about the kinds of contextual parameters this semantics requires. It argues they are not metasemantically different from those in other gradable adjectives, and that contextual parameters of this sort are widespread in natural language. Furthermore, this paper shows that if such parameters are rejected, it leads to an unacceptably rampant form of relativism, that relativizes truth to an open-ended list of parameters.

The methods of reflexivity

Abstract

This paper will explore different uses of the term reflexivity in qualitative research. After discussing the foundational role of phenomenology and hermeneutics in the practices of reflexivity, this paper will present four methodological approaches to reflexivity. Distinctions will be made between personal reflexivity, interpersonal reflexivity, methodological reflexivity, and contextual reflexivity, and examples of research from each perspective will be presented. It will be argued that integration of these perspectives is possible thanks to their common foundation in phenomenology and henneneutics, and an example of such integration in practice will be provided.     

Epistemic modals, relativism and assertion

I think that there are good reasons to adopt a relativist semantics for epistemic modal claims such as ``the treasure might be under the palm tree', according to which such utterances determine a truth value relative to something finer-grained than just a world (or a <world, time> pair). Anyone who is inclined to relativise truth to more than just worlds and times faces a problem about assertion. It's easy to be puzzled about just what purpose would be served by assertions of this kind, and how to understand what we'd be up to in our use of sentences like ``the treasure might be under the palm tree', if they have such peculiar truth conditions. After providing a very quick argument to motivate a relativist view of epistemic modals, I bring out and attempt to resolve this problem in making sense of the role of assertions with relativist truth conditions. Solving this problem should be helpful in two ways: first, it eliminates an apparently forceful objection to relativism, and second, spelling out the relativist account of assertion and communication will help to make clear just what the relativist position is, exactly, and why it's interesting. Thanks to Brian Weatherson, John Hawthorne, Daniel Stoljar, Frank Jackson, Ben Blumson, Seth Yalcin, Karen Bennett, Kent Bach, Matthew Weiner, Jonathan Kvanvig, Eric Swanson, David Chalmers, Agustin Rayo, Dustin Locke, Aaron Bronfman, Michael Allers, Ivan Mayerhofer, and to the participants at the BSPC 2005 for helpful discussion.     

Alternative mathematics and the strong programme: Reply to Triplett

Timm Triplett argues (Inquiry 29 [1986], no. 4) that David Bloor does not succeed in justifying a relativistic interpretation of mathematics. It is objected that Triplett has focused his attention on the wrong chapter of Bloor's Knowledge and Social Imagery, and that the examples which Triplett demands Bloor provide to make the case do appear in the subsequent chapter. Moreover, Bloor has anticipated and refuted Triplett's brief criticism of the examples that make Bloor's case for the relativism of mathematics. Finally, Triplett's own example of a basic mathematical truth can be shown to be socially relative.