Cultural Pluralism

Cultural pluralism in epistemology is the extension of epistemological anarchism into the political domain: the claim that a democratic society should not grant any single knowledge tradition — including modern science — a monopoly on legitimate belief. Paul Feyerabend argued for this position in Science in a Free Society (1978), contending that the separation of church and state should be matched by a separation of science and state. The argument is not that traditional medicine or folk astronomy are as accurate as their scientific competitors. It is that accuracy is not the only criterion by which knowledge traditions should be evaluated, and that the suppression of alternative traditions by institutional power prevents the kind of cross-fertilization that has historically produced the most radical innovations. A pluralist society treats knowledge traditions as coevolving populations rather than competitors in a zero-sum race for a single truth.