Relativism and Mechanism

Abstract

Now that we have classified relativism insofar as it can claim to be considered as a philosophical system and have seen it to be a mathematicism, we would at the same time seem to have determined its place as a scientific theory. However, we have yet to discuss its relationship to mechanism, a question that has been much debated since the appearance of Einstein’s theory. This discussion seems all the more useful since it has been suggested that there is a complete opposition between the two conceptions of reality we have juxtaposed in the title of this chapter. Such an opposition would corroborate the belief that relativism is entirely different from anything theoretical science had previously imagined, that it perhaps even constitutes a sort of extravagance, a monstrous and no doubt ephemeral excrescence. Our analysis, however, as the reader has seen, tends rather to reintegrate relativism into the framework of scientific thought, to show that relativism conforms to the canons science has followed at all times and in all places, or at least during the periods when it was dominated by the concerns that seem to us to characterize the modern concept of science.