Appealing to “Facts” or “the Truth” in Connection to the Study of Race, Gender, Violence, and Social Organization Is Just a Ruse, the Relativists Say, Because There Is No “Truth”

According to the relativistic wisdom prevailing in much of academia today, reality is socially constructed by the use of language, stereotypes, and media images. The idea that people have access to facts about the world is naive, say the proponents of social constructionism, science studies, cultural studies, critical theory, postmodernism, and deconstructionism. In their view, observations are always infected by theories, and theories are saturated with ideology and political doctrines, so anyone who claims to have the facts or know the truth is just trying to exert power over everyone else.

Relativism is entwined with the doctrine of the Blank Slate in two ways. One is that relativists have a penny-pinching theory of psychology in which the mind has no mechanisms designed to grasp reality; all it can do is passively download words, images, and stereotypes from the surrounding culture. The other is the relativists' attitude toward science. Most scientists regard their work as an extension of our everyday ability to figure out what is out there and how things work. Telescopes and microscopes amplify the visual system; theories formalize our hunches about cause and effect; experiments refine our drive to gather evidence about events we cannot witness directly. Relativist movements agree that science is perception and cognition writ large, but they draw the opposite conclusion: that scientists, like laypeople, are unequipped to grasp an objective reality. Instead, their advocates say,"Western science is only one way of describing reality, nature, and the way things work-a very effective way, certainly, for the production of goods and profits, but unsatisfactory in most other respects. It is an imperialist arrogance which ignores the sciences and insights of most other cultures and times,"! Nowhere is this more significant than in the scientific study of politically charged topics such as race, gender, violence, and social organization. Appealing to "facts" or "the truth" in connection with these topics is just a ruse, the relativists say, because there is no "truth" in the sense of an objective yardstick independent of cultural and political presuppositions.

--Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 198.