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Epistemological Relativism and the Sociology of Knowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Virgil G. Hinshaw Jr.
Virgil G. Hinshaw Jr.*
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University, Columbus, O.
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Extract

Since Protagoras' classic “man is the measure of all things,” claims of relativism and counter-claims have been tendered. The nineteenth century saw Durkheim, Levy-Bruhl, Westermarck, Pareto, Marx, and others, suggesting that institutions, customs, moral codes, and the like, are “relative” both to the culture and to the time. At the crest of this wave of “relativism” surged a vicious claim: that truth and knowledge itself were merely functions of particular conditions. The “validity” of knowledge was said to be at the whim of historic, social factors. Not only is no theory really true; no particular statement is ever so. Not only is no theory or statement really true; no theory of knowledge has thus far ever been free from the bias of its genesis. There have been no absolute insights for epistemology. Or so, at least, it was claimed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , January 1948 , pp. 4 - 10
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1948

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Footnotes

1

Read before the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association at Iowa City, May 8, 1947. A portion of this paper appeared, in different form, in the Journal of Philosophy Volume XL (1943), pp. 57–72, under the title “The Epistemological Relevance of Mannheim's Sociology of Knowledge.”

References

2 Ideology and Utopia. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936, p. 69

3 Ibid.

4 Mannheim, op. cit., p. 270.

5 Ibid., p. 261.

6 Ibid., p. 262.

7 Ibid., p. 256.

8 Ibid., pp. 276–268.

9 Compare Ogden, C. K., and Richards, I. A., The Meaning of ‘Meaning’. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938 (Fifth Edition), p. 95.

10 Foundation of the Theory of Signs, International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol. I, No. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938, pp. 38–39.

11 Logic, The theory of Inquiry. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1938, p. 535.

12 “Naturalism and the Sociological Analysis of Knowledge,” Chapter 9 of Naturalism and the Human Spirit, (Edited by Y. H. Krikorian). New York: Columbia University Press, 1944, p. 184.

13 In a future paper, I hope to develop this last point in a systematic manner. I have made a more complete analysis of pragmatism in its relation to the concept of truth in my “The Pragmatist Theory of Truth,” this Journal, 11 (1944), pp. 82–92.