 Hello, everyone. My name is Martin Kusch. I'm professor for philosophy of science and the theory of knowledge at the University of Vienna in Austria. And over the next 45 minutes or so, I will tell you a bit about relativism, and particularly about relativism in the study of science. Now, we first need to get a rough idea of what we mean by relativism. And you might think that's easy enough to do, but like every ism in philosophy, so also relativism has many, many different meanings. Let me just give you a point of comparison. A famous American philosopher some 30 years ago also published a paper entitled Realism. And in this Realism paper, the author distinguished more than 80 different senses in which in the philosophy of morals and knowledge the term Realism is used. I would think that very much the same thing could be done for relativism as well. So even though I will give you now my definition, my shorthand definition of it, you should be aware of the fact that other philosophers might well not agree with that definition. So let me begin by giving you my definition, and rather than immediately jumping into the thorny issue of what relativism means in the study of science, let's first approach it through a case that perhaps it's more easy to appreciate. So let's take relativism in the domain of morals, of ethics. I think it's easier to see the structure of the relativist position there. So I think it's well documented that different cultures in different parts of the world have at least to some extent different moral principles that they seek to follow. So certain kinds of things might be allowed in one culture. We might go to such an extreme that in some cultures it's okay to kill your opponents and eat them. Something which in other cultures would be a port, the idea. So cultures differ to some extent in the kind of moral demands they put on their members. Let that be the first element of the relativist position. The next thing is to say that the moral demands that cultures put on their members, addressed to their members, are relative to something. They are relative to the overall conception of morality that people have in different cultures. Let that be the second principle. The first idea was moral ideas differ and the second moral judgments differ, moral beliefs differ. And the second idea is that they differ in a systematic form such that different cultures roughly come with different conceptions of morality. Let that be the second idea. The third idea now is the crunch of the matter. This idea is to say that when cultures differ in these ways and if cultures differ in these ways then there is no way of putting them into an order of who is right and who is wrong. It's impossible to rank cultures with respect to their moral conceptions. In some sense, all these different moral conceptions are equally justified or equally unjustified. That's roughly the structure of a relativist position. So let's step back from the case of morality and try to formulate the idea a bit more generally. Morality is one domain in which we judge but there are also other domains in which we judge. For example, about questions of tastes in aesthetics. We have the domain of knowledge. We have the domain of science and maybe we have other domains as well like the domain of religion. So the first element of relativist position is to say so there are these different domains but with respect to each domain we first of all find judgments people make in those domains. These judgments differ systematically with respect to different cultures, different background assumptions. And when we have those different background assumptions, these systems of rules by which we judge in those respective domains, then there is no way of, there's no neutral way of ordering these different conceptions as more or less correct. Let's work with that very rough idea of relativism to start with. Let's the first thing that we need to know that relativism is a general form of thinking about different domains. That also means incidentally that you can be a relativist in one domain and not be a relativist in another domain. So you might, for example, be a relativist about moral judgments but not be a relativist about epistemic judgments, judgments on whether someone knows or not, or whether someone is justified in what they say or not. So you can be a relativist in one domain, you may not be a relativist in another domain. We all are probably relativist in some domains. Probably most of us would intuitively think that when it comes to questions of taste, at least in some respects, different judgments are equally justified. When we say things like beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, that's clearly an expression of a relativist sentiment. The idea is then that different viewers of the same painting might have different standards of what constitutes a good painting or a bad painting. And when that is the case, if we do believe that, there is no way of telling which standard is absolutely right and which standard is absolutely wrong.