So, we have different domains. You might be a relativist in some, you might not be relativist in others. So, that's an important distinction. In which respect are you relativist? But there's also another dimension in which different forms of relativism can differ and that will be important when we think about relativism in science. And this is now the idea that you can be a relativist in a methodological sense. And, you can be a relativist in a substantive sense. Let me explain. When you are a relativist in a substantive sense, then you are relativist in the sense in which I've talked about it up to this stage. When you think certain judgements in certain domains systematically differ and they differ with respect to background assumptions or cultures, and there's no way of ranking those in a neutral way. So that's what we've talked about thus far, substantive relativism. But you may also be just a relativist in a methodological sense. Which means that when you study a certain area, then you study this area with a methodology that is relativistic. So, for example, if you are a relativist in anthropology. Then you might approach this study of other cultures on the assumption that there is no way to tell, in a systematic way whether the culture's judgements, say about oracles, or about witches, then you approach that discourse in this culture, the talk, the practices in this culture, without an evaluative stance. You approach the culture as if you were a relativist, as if there was no way of saying what they're doing is right or wrong. Even if though, actually, you do think they're wrong, you still approach them in your investigation without using the assumption that they are wrong. So let's just repeat this point once more just to make sure that you have fully grasped the difference. So let's say that we have an anthropologist who goes into a culture in which they have witchcraft, or belief in witchcraft, and they have certain practices around it. Say that they are trying to find out who are the witches amongst us. They are trying to persuade the witches to stop doing their witch work, witchcraft work, or in this way, trying to neutralize the witches. Now, if you are relativist and you study this witchcraft culture, how will you do it? Well the most important thing about the relativist methodology will be, is that you are trying to understand the coherence, the way which the different assumptions of witchcraft fit together to form a harmonious whole without being contradictory in itself. We are trying to make sense of why do people think in this culture that witchcraft is a plausible way to think about the world or some aspect of their social world. That's the 'methodological relativism'. You study witchcraft without actually evaluating it, and you actually think that the evaluative stance might be standing between you and a proper understanding of the witchcraft in that culture. The relativist investigator will think that your best chance of understanding what these people actually think is not to immediately turn on your evaluative instincts when you investigate the culture. Someone who thinks that a relativist methodology is a bad idea, will say, well, we need to understand why these people can have such false beliefs. How is it possible for people to believe such nonsense? Or, what ideology or what deception makes it so that people believe these things? That's precisely the kind of approach that the relativist anthropologist will not want. Okay, so we've talked a lot about relativism, in general. Not we've talked, I've talked, about relativism in general. And then about the different forms it can take, but we haven't yet mentioned science very much. So, let me now try to apply what we have gone over in very general terms to the case of science. Now, the kind of relativism that has been most controversial in the study of science over the last 30 years or so has been methodological relativism. And it has come not so much from philosophy of science - the relativistic methodology - as it has come from the sociology of science. But both philosophy of science and sociology of science are part of what in general one calls 'science studies' or 'history and philosophy of sciences' - (history, philosophy and sociology of science). So philosophers of science constantly negotiate and argue and debate with the sociologists and with the historians. So let me say a few words of what the sociologists of science have done. And is actually very fitting for me to be talking here in Edinburgh about the sociology of science, the relativistic sociology of science. Since that school was founded, started in Edinburgh in the 1960s and then flourished in the 70s and 80s. Key figures in this movement were and are people like David Bloor, Barry Barnes, Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer in Cambridge and Harry Collins and many others. Okay, so what did they do? I can make a direct link with what I've said about anthropology and whatever I will say about the sociological study of science. Because the idea of the early work in the sociology of science was to say, we should do with respect to science what the anthropologists are doing with respect to witchcraft. We should study the history of science not by asking, how come those scientists in the past went so wrong in holding false beliefs that we no longer hold in science today. But we should rather try to understand scientific beliefs of the past against the background of the culture and the social arrangements prevalent in the cultures in which those scientific theories were developed. So the idea was, let's take what we've learned from the anthropologists, and turn the anthropological gaze on science. This meant that sociology of science was not declaring winners and losers. It meant that when the sociology of science looked at episodes in the past, the aim was not to say "Look! Great! The correct view has won - and let's celebrate this!" As so much of traditional history of science, and indeed much of philosophy of science did do, and still does today. But the aim was let's try to understand why certain scientific views come to become prevalent in a given time period, and let's try to understand that against the background of what everything else people believed at the time. Let me give you a simple example that brings this home, again it's an example that links in two ways to Edinburgh. It links to Edinburgh because the historical case study I shall briefly summarize comes from a Sociologist who was then based in Edinburgh, namely Steve Shapin. But the historical case that Shapen studied is Edinburgh in the early 19th century. In the early 19th century, there was a particular form of physiology/psychology popular in many places in Europe, but particularly in Edinburgh and that was phrenology. Let me briefly explain the key assumptions of phrenology. Phrenologists want to explain differences between people. They wanted to explain why people differ in talents, and they wanted to explain why different societies are organized in different ways. And to explain this, they stipulated a number of distinct faculties in the human mind. And what was new there is that they were happy to stipulate a large number of such faculties. The traditional school of philosophy that derived ultimately from Aristotle, from ancient philosophy, and was then further developed in medieval times, thought that there are about four to five faculties in the minds. There's judgement, there's the ability to form language, there's emotion, and some other faculties that were distinguished, but a very small number. What was strikingly new about phrenology is that it stipulated, or assumed, postulated, a large number of such distinct faculties of the mind, between 25 and 35. For example, a phrenologist had faculties for competitiveness, a special faculty they assumed essential in the human mind and was responsible for our ability to judge our own standing in society - how we stand relative to other people. Like the ability to scan whether one's social position is good or bad. That was an altogether new faculty in the mind that the phrenologist assumed. Then they also have faculties for music abilities, they had faculties for different crafts that people might be able to do. They had faculties for different kinds of reasoning and much else besides. Additionally, the phrenologist linked the mind to the brain. The phrenologist thought that the human - that these different faculties that are distinguished - each had their distinct organ in the brain. So they thought the brain wasn't just one thing, one organ, the brain they thought was a combination of many different organs, and each such organ housed one of those faculties. And then they took a further step. They assumed that the size of the respective faculty or the degree to which one has one of the faculties is explained by the size of the organ. So if you are very musical, they assumed, then this organ that is responsible for music at the back of the head would be bigger than in people who only have slight musical faculties. And then comes the last step. They thought that the different development of the organs would reflect itself in different bumps on the human skull. They thought that the shape of the brain influences the shape of the skull. And thus, the trained phrenologist can read off the skull what someone's talents are. Now that sounds a quite bizarre theory to us today. Though bear in mind that quite some influential contemporary forms of psychology also tend to think that the brain, not as in the brain, but that the human mind has what is nowadays called a modular structure, a structure of parts that can operate to some extent separate from the others. Okay, but let's leave aside for the moment the parallels to today's views, at first sight it strikes us as a courageous theory, a bold theory and one might think, so what explains that people believed that? And who was it who believed it, and who were the people who didn't believe it? Now comes the sociological analysis. So when Shapin analyzes this phenomenon of the popularity of phrenology in Edinburgh, he does not take the line of, "How can we explain that someone believed something so obscure?". But he rather wants to explain "Why was it rational, perfectly rational, for people to be inclined to accept different or logical views?" Now, the first thing that Shapin draws attention to is that phrenology actually very closely engaged with the human brain. Phrenologists were the first people to actually cut up the brain in very, very fine slices and produced big atlases. in which they drew these details of the brain that they discovered by cutting the brain in very fine slices. So they engaged very closely with the empirical material. That's one thing that impressed a lot of people. But there were also other factors involved that pushed or pulled certain people in the direction of phrenology. And very important in Shapin's explanation here is the class conflict in Edinburgh at the time. Edinburgh at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century experienced a great social change and upheaval. The traditional landed aristocracy was becoming more impoverished and there was a new class of people, tradesmen from the middle class or the bourgeoisie, that were on the rise. The big social change was that many traditional divisions in society, like you had peasants, and you had the landed aristocracy and you had a few guilds, became increasingly more diverse. You had many, many new professions. You had a whole new division of labour in society. Whole new lines of trade and production suddenly sprung up. The response of the traditionalists. The response of the aristocrats was to say "This new division of labor is unnatural - that's not how God has meant the world to be!" The phrenologists said "No, no, that is exactly how God has wanted it to be, and that God has wanted it to be this way you can see from the fact that if a human brain is such that it supports a high degree of division of labor. The structure of the brain supports the idea of specialization that we see in the society that is emerging in front of our eyes. Why is that? Well, God has made it so that there are many different faculties in the human brain and in the human minds, and each of the faculties deserves its own specialized form of profession. That's the natural way to do it." The traditionalists said, "No, that's not the natural way to do it. There are just four or five faculties in the mind. and it wasn't meant to be that way, that we have all that specialization and division of labour." But the bourgeoisie thought that's what phrenology shows - phrenology shows us that division of labour to the degree that we see in front of our eyes is natural. So let's step back from this and ask ourselves what does that have to do with relativism and just repeat the central message. Shapin is saying, when we study science and when we try to understand why certain scientific theories become accepted - it's not enough to look at the theories in isolation. It's not enough to just look at the evidence (what does the brain look like?) - and the theoretical beliefs in this case the brain has this structure of a combination of many organs). That's not enough. To understand why a theory is developed in a certain way and to understand why a theory is accepted, we need to understand the whole scientific community in its social context. The social context of 19th century Edinburgh needs to be taken into account when we want to explain why phrenology became an important influential theory. So Shapin says, "Let's not evaluate phrenology, let's try to explain why it became the dominant theory." So this is a methodological relativism. It's a relativism which says, in order to understand how science works you had best not try to evaluate it at the same time. Of course, you can have your evaluations. But, keep your evaluations away from trying to explain why scientific theories become accepted.
