Jason Stanley @ ERC “Relativism”. -- Yesterday we had Prof. Stanley “all to ourselves”: for morning coffee, lunch, talk, Q&A, and dinner. He baffled us right from the word “go” by outing himself as an epistemic relativist about every epistemic category. And he revealed that his *Knowledge and Practical Interests* is relativist in all but name. I was curious to see how far he would go in the direction of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. One antirelativist friend had recently told me: “too far”. Alas, my friend need not worry: Jason is opposed to relativism about truth; he is a Platonist about logic and mathematics; and as far as the scope of the sociology of knowledge is concerned, he follows Mannheim and Laudan (only the SOCIAL sciences are principally ideological; and concerning the natural sciences, sociological analysis is needed only when things go wrong). -- But there is hope: given the speed with which Jason has moved from mainstream analytic philosophy to his current position, and given his brilliant proclivity for radical views, there is every chance that my friend might still, one day, have to worry big time. -- Jason’s talk was about “the political consequences of epistemic relativism”. The main idea was that material inequality leads to epistemic inequality: the poor need to have a stronger epistemic position for claiming knowledge than the rich, since “the stakes” for the poor are higher. I am not sure I have taken the full measure of this idea. I am convinced though that it is ONE element in the mixture of the poor’s many epistemic disadvantages. And yet, I am unsure how significant this element is, when compared with the many other factors that damage the poor’s epistemic standing: the costs of education, the brain-washing by mainstream media, testimonial injustice, and … and … and ... I also would like to see Jason’s thesis brought into contact with social history, for instance E. P. Thompson’s *The Making of the English Working Class*. Thompson shows that at times the working class has been pretty good at producing its own knowledge base. -- Be this as it may, this has been a wonderfully stimulating exchange and debate, hopefully the first of many.