Editing Relativism (section)

=====Paul Feyerabend=====
Philosopher of science [[Paul Feyerabend]] is often considered to be a relativist, although he denied being one.<ref>{{cite web| url = http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=156973&sectioncode=39| title = Cooper, David E., "Voodoo and the monster of science", ''Times Higher Education'', 17 March 2000| date = 17 March 2000}}</ref>

Feyerabend argued that modern science suffers from being methodologically monistic (the belief that only a single methodology can produce [[scientific progress]]).<ref>Lloyd, Elisabeth. "Feyerabend, Mill, and Pluralism", ''Philosophy of Science'' 64, p. S397.</ref> Feyerabend summarises his case in ''[[Against Method]]'' with the phrase "anything goes".<ref>Feyerabend, ''Against Method'', 3rd ed., p. vii</ref>

:In an aphorism [Feyerabend] often repeated, "potentially every culture is all cultures". This is intended to convey that world views are not hermetically closed, since their leading concepts have an "ambiguity" - better, an open-endedness - which enables people from other cultures to engage with them. [...] It follows that relativism, understood as the doctrine that truth is relative to closed systems, can get no purchase. [...] For Feyerabend, both hermetic relativism and its absolutist rival [realism] serve, in their different ways, to "devalue human existence". The former encourages that unsavoury brand of political correctness which takes the refusal to criticise "other cultures" to the extreme of condoning murderous dictatorship and barbaric practices. The latter, especially in its favoured contemporary form of "scientific realism", with the excessive prestige it affords to the abstractions of "the monster 'science'", is in bed with a politics which likewise disdains variety, richness and everyday individuality - a politics which likewise "hides" its norms behind allegedly neutral facts, "blunts choices and imposes laws".<ref>{{cite web| url = http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=156973&sectioncode=39| title = Cooper, David E., "Voodoo and the monster of science," ''Times Higher Education'', 17 March 2000| date = 17 March 2000}}</ref>