Relativism and Hypocrisy

The conclusion that an understanding of aerodynamics supports, rather than undermines, a relativist analysis of knowledge will sound strange to ears ac­customed to the incessant academic rhetoric directed against relativism.104 Antirelativists confidently use aerodynamics in their attacks on what they see as the debilitating evil of relativism. Airplanes have become a veritable symbol of the absurdity of the relativist position. Consider the following challenge issued by the well-known scientist Richard Dawkins.105 Dawkins who, after his scientific career, went on to occupy a chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, has said, “Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thou­sand feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite. Airplanes built according to scientific principles work. They stay aloft, and they get you to a chosen destination. Airplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications, such as the dummy planes of the cargo cults in jungle clearings or the beeswaxed wings of Icarus, don’t” (32). Dawkins calls this a “knock-down argument,” and I suspect that most philosophers agree with him.106 In reality it is nothing of the kind. Who are the targets to be knocked down? They are identified as “cultural relativ­ists” and then defined as people who believe that “science has no more claim to truth than tribal myth” (31). There may be persons who cannot distinguish science from myth, but no relativist is committed to such a position simply by virtue of being a relativist. Dawkins has simply chosen an easy target, namely, a foolish version of relativism, and omits to mention that a foolish absolutist might also believe that science has no more truth than a tribal myth. But to reject foolish versions of relativism is not to refute relativism.

Dawkins acknowledges that there are “sensible” people “who, confus­ingly, also call themselves cultural relativists.” The reader is told that these “sensible” relativists believe that “you cannot understand a culture if you try to interpret its beliefs in terms of your own culture” (32). This is indeed a reasonable position, but notice that, on this definition, the sensible relativist stance puts no critical pressure on Dawkins’ position. “Sensible” relativism, so defined, can be conceded by an absolutist (as it is conceded by Dawkins) without any inconvenience. An absolutist can allow that some things are rela­tive as long as not everything is relative. Thus the claim that the meanings of concepts are relative to culture can be accepted because (the antirelativist will say) it is the truth-status of the propositions conveyed by those meanings that really counts, and this, it will be claimed, is not relative. The real argument is therefore not about meaning, it is about truth—as Frank saw clearly.

Dawkins says that airplanes built according to scientific principles work and stay aloft, while those built according to mythological principles don’t. This assertion makes no allowance for the fact that flying machines were mostly developed on a trial-and-error basis by practical men whose stance was often unscientific. Nor does Dawkins allow for cases like the Davis wing. The Davis wing was used on thousands of Consolidated B-24 bombers dur­ing World War II. The aerofoil was produced by the inventor David R. Davis according to a procedure he kept secret. The wing section went into produc­tion because, to everyone’s surprise, it outperformed rivals when tested in the wind tunnel at the California Institute of Technology—von Karman’s home base. When, later, the secret of its design was revealed, it turned out to have no intelligible relation to the laws of fluid dynamics. The procedure was pseu­doscientific hocus-pocus.107

Nor does Dawkins say which scientific principles are supposed to be play­ing the star role in his version of the history of aviation. The discontinuity theory of lift was based on scientific principles and, at one stage, was sup­ported by no less a figure than Rayleigh, but that wasn’t much help. Einstein may have regretted his involvement in aviation, but he was deploying the same formidable scientific intellect that had proven so successful in other areas. On the one side, then, there is the Davis wing, which was unscientific but worked, while on the other side there is the Einstein wing, which was sci­entific but didn’t work. The procedures of science are neither necessary nor sufficient for success.

Dawkins makes mock of what he calls “tribal” science and paints a picture of pathetic, nonflying, cargo-cult replicas of aircraft to drive home the point. He assumes that “tribes” do not have real science, and real science does not have “tribes.” The historical episode that I have studied could be read as a counterexample to this questionable assumption. In a nontechnical sense of “tribe,” I have examined the different practices and rituals of two, scientific tribes. One of these tribes lived on the banks of the river Cam and was called the Cambridge school; the other lived on the banks of the river Leine and was called the Gottingen school.108

At no point does Dawkins grasp the nettle. Relativists deny that humans are in possession of any absolute truths. If Dawkins rejects relativism and uses aerodynamics as his leading example, he must think aerodynamics is a case of absolute truth. Can he really think this? If not, he had better find another example or become a relativist. There is no middle way— other than obscu­rantism and evasion.109 Where does this leave Dawkins’ challenge? Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite. Dawkins is committed to a proposition of the form “All As are Bs,” hence “Show me an A and I’ll show you a B.” A necessary and sufficient condition for refuting a claim of this form is to produce an A that is not a B. A sufficient reply would therefore be to introduce Dawkins to Dietrich Kuchemann. Here is someone who knows all about the reality of flying and yet is a relativist about the very science that it involves. Of course, Kuchemann would not normally be called a “cultural relativist,” but I have explained why he must be counted as a bold and unequivocal relativist—and that is what the argument is all about.

The authority behind Kuchemann’s observations about the methods of aerodynamics will be evident. As an aerodynamicist he had the reputation of being one of the best of his generation. His work at Farnborough was de­voted to the aerodynamics of transonic and supersonic flight. Would Daw­kins really dare to impute intellectual hypocrisy to the man who discovered the novel aerodynamic principles embodied in the remarkable wing of the supersonic Concorde?110 Of course, while Concorde was an aerodynamic tri­umph, everyone knows that it was also an economic disaster.111 This makes it a resonant symbol for many things—but the weakness of relativism certainly isn’t one of them. The rise and fall of the Concorde project demands a rela­tivist analysis. It was cases of this kind that Frank had in mind when he said that strengths and weaknesses trade off against one another. This was why he cited the design of airplanes to remind his readers that even the best piece of technology cannot simultaneously meet all human demands at once—and why he then used an airplane as a metaphor for the relativity of scientific knowledge in general.