The Postmodern Attack on Science: Irrationality in the Name of Relativism
The Postmodern Attack on Science: Irrationality in the Name of Relativism

Summary/Abstract: This article addresses the postmodern attack on science. On the basis of relativism, postmodernism posits that science should not have a more privileged status than pseudoscientific or plainly anti-scientific disciplines. Some 20th-century philosophers have unfortunately provided intellectual ammunition for this attack. Levi-Strauss’s approach to rationality, Peter Winch’s criticisms of Evans-Pritchard, Wittgenstein’s notion of “language games”, Kuhn’s approach to the incommensurability of paradigms, and Feyerabend’s epistemological anarchism, are duly addressed and criticized in the article. Likewise, Popper’s philosophy of science has been erroneously used by postmodernists to attack science. This article clarifies some of these misconceptions

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