Varieties of Realism: A Rationale for the Natural Sciences

This comprehensive account of the relativist debate is designed for students as an instructive introduction to the topic, while for professionals it should be a useful reference to the continuing discussion. The latest round in the age-old debate between relativists and their opponents has continued unresolved for the last 20 years. Relativism has increasingly become the unconscious theoretical underpinning for a host of theories of ideologies, and is beginning to be treated as a simplistic belief that truth is grounded in the value systems of a culture. This volume casts relativism as a sincere attempt to resolve sceptical conflicts beyond any reasonable doubt, and seeks to map the current landscape of arguments for the varieties of relativism and opposing varieties of absolutism by clarifying each of the main fields of the relativist/absolutist debate. It presents the whole subject as a complex pattern of inconclusive controversies, to be made sense of only by paying attention to the question of which species of absolutism each variety of relativism opposes.