The past few years have witnessed some heated debate about various forms of cultural-relativist (or social-constructivist) thinking that would appear to undermine all accepted standards of truth, objectivity and reputable method in the natural sciences. On one side are ranged those defenders of truth – scientists mostly – who reject such ideas as merely a species of irrational mystery-mongering. (Thus Richard Dawkins: 'show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I will show you a hypocrite. Airplanes built according to scientific principles work.') Alongside them are realist philosophers of science who insist that what makes our theories and beliefs true or false is the way things stand in reality and not just the way reality is 'constructed' in accordance with this or that cultural world-view, descriptive scheme, communal belief-system or whatever. On the other side are ranged the anti-realists and cultural relativists for whom such an argument is both nonsensical – involving as it does the appeal to truths outside or beyond our best current knowledge – and also (most often) an instrument of power for silencing dissident views. [from the Preface]

I shall here contend that the cultural-relativist approach to philosophy of science is misguided both in theory and in the kinds of ethical or sociopolitical judgement to which it very often gives rise. By equating 'science' with its own worst abuses – i.e., with its exploitative, its purely instrumental or technocratic forms – this approach fails to recognize that the quest for truth carries its own ethical imperative, that is to say, an obligation (on the part of scientists and philosophers or sociologists of science) to get things right so far as possible and not to be swayed by the pressures of conformist ideology or consensus belief. For, as William Empson remarks, the human mind very often has to labour against unknown odds or prejudice, unreason and deep-laid resistance to heterodox ideas. From which it follows that any new discovery – any 'paradigm shift' or challenge to established (consensus-based) norms – will encounter such resistance not only in the wider institutional context but also from those forces that are ranged against it in the scientist's own pre-existent habits of thought. Where science breaks new ground it is most often through what Empson describes as a 'complicated churning' of facts and theories, a process which may look decidedly messy (mixed up with all sorts of extraneous private or social motivation) if treated from a viewpoint primarily focused on the original context of discovery. But whatever the historical or psychobiographical interest of such enquiries, it is in the scientific context of justification that any truth-claims must finally be assessed. And this applies equally to the ethical issue of how far a scientist may be justified in proposing theories at variance with the ideological self-images of the age. For such conflicts could simply not arise if 'truth' were indeed – as the cultural relativists would have it – just a product of short-term localized consensus belief. And conversely, the moral argument would lack all force if the thinker's heterodox view of things were shown to rest on nothing more substantial than an attachment to some idiosyncratic quirk of method or technique, whatever its long-run pragmatic or instrumental yield. [from chapter 1, "Metaphor, Concept and Theory Change: Deconstruction as Critical Ontology"]