Relativism problem

Laudan, L. (1996) The pseudo-science of science The demise of the demarcation problem. In Laudan, L. (ed.) Beyond Positivism and Relativism. Theory, Method and Evidence. Westview Press, Boulder, pp 166-192. 

Quantum Monte Carlo techniques have considerable potential for application to problems involving open d or f shells where the treatment of electron correlation has proven particularly difficult. However if is to be a viable alternative one must be able to limit the simulations to small numbers of electrons and in addition relativeity must be included. Relativistic effective potentials offer one avenue (at the present time the only avenue) for achieving these conditions. However, as we have indicated, REPs do introduce carpi icat ions. 

Then came the historical turn in philosophy of science due to Kuhn, Lakatos, Toulmin, Feyerabend, and Laudan among others. These authors have done much to show the importance of the history of science to the study of scientific methodology. In addition, for better or for worse, the writings of Kuhn, in particular, have spawned the sociology of science and science studies industries which claim to study science as it is actually practiced and stress the need to go beyond an analysis of theories. I say for better or for worse because, as I see it, the problem with sociology of science has been an obsession with the context of scientific developments and the demotion of the actual science involved.3 What many of these authors have done is to take naturalism a tittle too far such that they end up with relativism. This is of course one of the well-known dangers of naturalism in general. 

The application of BWS to conceptual profiling and the associated data analysis procedures are described in detail by Thomson et al. (2010) and by Thomson and Crocker (2014). Subsequent to this, we have developed a variant of BWS where the best-worst exercise described above is augmented by a calibration best-worst exercise in which the roles of the conceptual terms and objects are reversed. Referred to as 2-way best-worst scaling, this procedure represents a major methodological advancement because it overcomes the problem of relativism in BWS, thereby faciUtating... 

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