Abstract

RELATIVISM AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES by Ernest Gellner Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 200 pp., £25, £8.50 (paper) Gellner assails Wittgenstein's putative legitimation of the relativistic assumption that ?forms of life?; are autonomous and ultimate, mutually incommunicable, and immune to external criticism. Gellner's view is used here to defend a reconstructed Popperian position against all comers, including Gellner. The tactic is to attack the Cartesian presuppositions Popper implicitly shares with the whole Logical Positivist tradition, arguing that these cannot even be coherently expressed without presupposing the possession of knowledge of the various kinds thereby denied.