The Strong Sociology of Knowledge Without Relativism

Abstract

Under the more or less established picture of the discipline, the sociology of knowledge — if you prefer, of received opinion — eschews any form of relativism. It distinguishes between knowledge proper and mere ideology and it seeks only to give a social explanation of the claims made by the latter. At the cost of having to deploy such a controversial distinction, it avoids any suggestion that serious cognitive claims — in particular, those of respectable science — are a function of local context. On the contrary, it suggests that certain claims may enjoy absolute merits, transcendent of their context of origin. [For a contemporary version see Laudan (1977).]