Paper short abstract:

In the Plato-Kant-Russell line, the philosophy of science advanced in the cult of the formal disciplines: logic and mathematics. Consequently, an inferior status was attributed to the socio-human disciplines. The ethnographies of knowledge challenged this absolutist view and revealed cultural relativism as a criterion for the rationality of science.

Paper long abstract:

Long Abstract:

In the long line Plato-Kant-Frege-Russell, philosophy of science advanced having as background the cult of the formal disciplines - logic and mathematics -, the principles of which were extended to the whole scientific knowledge. In so far as the socio-human disciplines encountered difficulties in adopting a prescribed formalized language, they were considered inferior to the natural sciences and even as not being constituted yet. The ethnographies of knowledge challenged this absolutist view. An analysis of some less traditional conceptions (Thomas Kuhn's and Stephen Toulmin's especially, as undertaken in the present paper) shows that, in its endeavour to define the essence and rationality of the scientific knowledge, the epistemology of the last decades has borrowed some of its basic concepts and orientations from the socio-human sciences, particularly from anthropology. This entails the placement of the rationality of science under the mark of the cultural relativism as this was imposed by the ethnographic variability of knowledge.