Abstract
I noted in the previous chapter that the new image of science, especially as represented by Kuhn, shares certain characteristics with the sociology of knowledge. Most importantly, they both appear to lead to relativism. In this chapter, I will consider the relativism issue at greater length, and then will introduce some of Wittgenstein’s ideas which, I believe, are helpful in this regard.
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Notes
Karl Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952) p. 184.
Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972) p. 86.
Alexander von Schelting, ‘Review of Ideology and Utopia’, American Sociological Review 1 (1936) pp. 664–74
Howard Becker, ‘Review of Ideology and Utopia’, American Sociological Review 3 (1938) pp. 260–2.
Robert K. Merton, The Sociology of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973) p. 503.
Vergil G. Hinshaw, ‘Epistemological Relativism and the Sociology of Knowledge’, Philosophy of Science 15 (1948) p. 4.
C. Wright Mills, Power, Politics, and People (ed. Irving Louis Horowitz) (New York: Ballantine Books, 1963) p. 455.
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967) pp. 14–15.
Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2 (New York: Harper Torch-books, 1963) pp. 216–17.
Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970) (originally published in 1938).
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962) p. 108.
Israel Scheffler, Science and Subjectivity (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967) p. 17.
Roger Trigg, Reason and Commitment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
Alfred Schutz, Phenomenology of the Social World (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972) p. 32.
John Ziman, Public Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968) p. 9.
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© 1977 Derek L. Phillips
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Phillips, D.L. (1977). Relativism and Wittgenstein. In: Wittgenstein and Scientific Knowledge. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-03160-3_4
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