From relativism through scepticism to a modest realism

At the end of the last chapter, some of the ideas that pull us towards relativism were discussed. Perhaps we are locked in the world of ideas, from which we can never escape, because whatever we claim wider reality to be, we can never get beyond the web of symbolic representations to that which our language seeks to represent. Relativism is a kind of scepticism about what we can know of objective reality. In its extreme form, ontological relativism, the claim is that reality is nothing but our shared social construction. In this chapter, a correction to this view is proposed. It is argued that there is a route from relativism to realism. By concentrating on active rather than passive experience of the world, the reader will be led to a minimal realism that is very hard even for sceptics and cynics to dismiss persuasively. On this basis, bolder realist positions may be constructed, even while conceding the argument that what is conventionally called knowledge is the outcome of construction processes that are social as well as individual.

The core of the argument of this chapter is that the inclusion of a minimal conception of reality (linked to experience of our own actions and interactions) makes a great deal of difference to the normal kinds of analysis in science studies. Most such studies, and especially those after Kuhn (1970a, originally 1962) clearly separate reality as constructed by the scientific practitioners under study from reality as constructed by the commentator.