 Okay, so I've given you a general characterization of relativism in science, and I've put much emphasis on the methodological side to that relativism in the study of science. I've explained to you why some scientists, for example, Popper would oppose this view of science, and I've also explained to you two relativistic directions that emerged within the philosophy of science itself. So I've told you quite a bit about the past. You know, Kuhn wrote this book in the early 1960s. Many of Faier-Arm's writings were of most influential writings of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. The sociology of scientific knowledge keeps going to this day. But you might wonder, so where does the future lie? What are the new challenges for relativism? Does relativism have a future in the study of science? And what are its opponents? Well, let's start with the last question. What are the opponents of relativism? Well, if you look at the literature in philosophy, you might think that there are very many opponents. Sometimes the central opponent of relativism is described as realism. Sometimes the central opponent of relativism is called rationalism. And sometimes the general opponent of relativism is called absolutism. I think we need to understand a little bit the meaning of those terms that relativism is opposed to, allegedly, to also get a clearer handle on the debates around relativism. Let's start with absolutism. Absolutism seems the most at least terminologically the most important opponent of relativism. Something is either relative or absolute. If it's absolute, it isn't relative. That seems to mark a very clear opposition. But there are many philosophers who don't want to be characterized as absolutists. Because to be characterized as an absolutist seems like as if you had somehow captured the absolute truth about something. Or as if you thought the absolute truth about something even could be captured. So relativists like to characterize their opponents as absolutists very often. And this, of course, is done with the rhetorical effects of putting their opponents in a position that they don't really want to take in the first place. So it may be a little artificial to oppose them in this way. People who oppose relativism don't tend to call themselves absolutists. But more tend to call themselves either rationalists or realists. When they call themselves rationalists, they want to put the relativists on the side of something which is not rational. It then becomes you are either a rationalist or you are a relativist. And since the opposite of rationalism is irrationalism, by definition, if you're a relativist, you're also an irrationalist. That kind of fits with the way in which Popper thought. Popper thought he's a rationalist. He called himself a critical rationalist. And so the sociology of knowledge in so far as it refused to do what Popper was doing in Popper's eyes was irrational. Now, obviously, that's not a characterization that the relativists find very appealing. So they reject that characterization. So again, we feel like it seems like the two sides don't really meet. Each side uses for the other side a term that the other side doesn't really want to accept. We have the same problem with respect to realism. I mentioned when I started that there is this famous paper by Susan Hark. Now remember her name, I didn't remember that at the beginning. Susan Hark's paper distinguishing these 80-something meanings of realism. So if we now oppose realism to relativism, the question becomes, what do we mean by realism? And even the realists in philosophy of science are not agreed what they agree on. So let's make a very simple characterization. Let's distinguish between two characterizations of realism. Let's call the one characterization, let's call it basic realism. That basic realism be the view that there is a world independent of us. There's a world outside my mind that has the structure it has independently of my mind. Even if I had never existed, indeed even if no human had ever existed, many central features of the world would be what they are independently of us. Call that basic realism. Let's distinguish from that a second form of realism. Let's call that ambitious realism. Let's ambitious realism be the view that there is a world independently of our thinking. And that that world has a specific structure. And that scientific progress consists in getting ever closer to that structure. This view is also sometimes called scientific realism. Let's just call it ambitious realism to have the contrast between basic and ambitious. Now how does the relativist stand with respect to those characterizations? I have yet to encounter a relativist who is not a basic realist. Relativists don't say there is no mind independent world. That would be a view that in philosophy sometimes is called idealism. The world is just our projection of some sort. There is no mind independent world. The world is just as we or God's mind projected. Relativists in this day and age and in particular relativists with respect to science don't hold such kind of view. So in that sense there are realists. Most of them though are not realists in the second in the ambitious realist sense. Strictly speaking you could be a relativist and even be a scientific realist. You could accept that in some way or form reality has a structure independent of us and that in some sense we get a better handle on some aspects of that structure while still accepting the kind of studies that the sociology of scientific knowledge does. Kuhn for example to take another case does think that there is progress in science. He just doesn't speak of it as us coming ever closer to the ultimate structure of reality. He rather prefers to turn it around and say well there is some progress in that we eradicate more and more of our mistakes. But of course if we eradicate more and more of our mistakes about nature there is some sense in which we make more contact with nature. So realism if we want to contrast it with relativism is a complicated issue. We need to be very clear on what we mean by realism in order to actually even achieve a contrast with relativism. I'm not going to here try to tell you now how should we really think about the contrast. I think what I most want to sensitize you for that it's difficult with this ism as with many other isms in philosophy to even state clearly and to work out for oneself just how it is to be distinguished from other from other positions. What are the other positions that it is intention with and what are the other positions it can be combined with. But the thing that I want you to take away from this from these comparisons that relativism is not the same as irrationalism. The relativists that we saw in the study of science does not say that the phrenologists were irrational. The relativist is trying to understand why was it rational for people of the bourgeoisie in Edinburgh to find phrenology so convincing. So it's not opposed to rationalism. It's opposed to Popperian style rationalism where it means we have clear rules of science that are true everywhere. But it's not irrational in the sense that scientific choices are completely arbitrary. Anything goes, you know, you can go any way you like. It doesn't matter. Relativism allows for everything. That's not the view. Nor is the view that relativism equals I realism or anti realism. It doesn't need to be that way. It need not be opposed to basic realism. And it may not even be fully incompatible with stronger forms of realism. That's very much an open debate here and now. OK, so where do we go from here? What are the next important philosophical issues concerning relativism and the philosophy of science? This, of course, will be very much a statement of my own view because philosophy is an area of disagreement and contestation. And so just like as there are as many relativists or realists almost as there are philosophers advocating those positions, there also, of course, are as many different views of where we go from here. So let me just say where I think interesting challenges for the future lie. First of all, it's important to emphasize that philosophy of science has developed hugely from the days of Popper. I've used Popper here as an easy foil to set up the contrast between sociology of science and philosophy of science. But of course, today's philosophy of science is in many ways much more sophisticated than Popper's views were or even Kuhn views were. And that in several ways. The first way in which philosophy of science has changed tremendously over the last 20, 30 years is that it has learned a few lessons from its opponents. It has learned, for example, from the sociologists and the historians that to do good philosophy of science, you have to engage with the details of scientific work. You cannot write the philosophy of science by at most looking at science textbooks, to understand the dynamic and theory choice in science. You have to do case studies, detailed observation. You have to look at the letters you have to interview. You have to look at the emergence of a scientific theory in order to understand the dynamics of the development of science. So philosophy of science has become considerably more empirical. That's the first thing. The second thing is that philosophy of science has become less insulated. It used to be the case that philosophers of science had relatively little interaction with other areas of philosophy. So for example, for decades, philosophy of science and epistemology, the study of knowledge, have surprisingly enough lived pretty separate lives. Philosophers of science have ignored what the epistemologists did. Bad, bad, bad. But epistemologists have just as much ignored what philosophers of science was doing. I recall, for example, the statement of a very influential contemporary epistemologist, Kvanvik, who says in one of his books that when we say that there is scientific knowledge, we mean knowledge only by courtesy. Strictly speaking, by the epistemologist standards, science has no knowledge. This is a peculiar statement in the ears of most philosophers of science. They would think that some of our best examples of what knowledge is, is from the sciences. So if an epistemologist says to call scientific knowledge, it's only by vague analogy with real knowledge, knowledge like he has a hand or I know I'm currently in Edinburgh, then this is a very peculiar statement and is an expression of the distance between epistemology and philosophy of science. But it is my distinct impression that this gap between these two fields is becoming smaller, that there's more interest on both sides in the work of the other side. Specifically for the topic of relativism, I think this will be a good thing because within epistemology a number of approaches, new ideas have emerged on how to think about relativism, how to best formulate it, how to formulate the arguments for and against it more rigorously and so on. Epistemologists have also become more interested in comparing relativism with respect to knowledge with other forms of relativism. In particular relativism in the domain of morality, where perhaps the philosophical sophistication with respect to relativism has been the greatest. So new ways of thinking, new models on how to think about relativism begin to move from these fields into the philosophy of science. That's one important development. Another important development is that philosophy of science has opened up more itself to politics and political questions. For example, thinking about science policy for a long time was not done by philosophers, but was done primarily by sociologists. Sociologists like Brian Nguyen or political scientists like Shila Jasanov or Kassanstein were the people who thought long and hard about science policy. What kind of decision procedures do we want for deciding what kind of science do we get? Incidentally, Footnote firearms was extremely interested in those kind of questions, but they were largely ignored because he was voicing those concerns at a time when philosophers of science weren't quite ready yet for this kind of opening. But that is happening before our eyes today. Philosophy of science and political philosophy have moved considerably closer and it's no longer weird to have whole conferences or whole sections of international conferences devoted to the political philosophy of science. This has also meant that questions about relativism have received a new urgency and a new interest because now political questions, the differences between societies and how do we adjudicate between different value systems or how do we treat them in a tolerant or maybe even relativistic fashion. Reflection on those kinds of issues has become much more prevalent than it used to be. So the hope I have is that this exchange between philosophy of science and those other domains of philosophy will give us a better understanding of how to formulate maybe different forms of relativism, a variety of forms of relativism that might have a place in the study of science and maybe also find new ways of adjudicating between them.