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Relativity is more than a theory in Physics. It is a quite general position to which one feels constrained to adhere. In just the same way that a statement about the velocity of a physical body is meaningless without reference to the relative position and velocity of the observer, so also any general proposition (and perhaps also any particular one) about human affairs is meaningless, rather than true or false, without reference to the philosophical position from which the statement comes.
Human knowledge—and perhaps the external reality to which it is supposed in some sort to correspond—has often been thought to be hierarchichal in its “natural,” or most convenient, organization. On one, most common, variant of this view, Philosophy is the “Queen of the Sciences,” mandated to examine for validity the assumptions upon which the other sciences rest. Indeed, there is a tendency—I think Bertrand Russell represents it rather well—to define Philosophy as being distinguished by its capacity or duty to discharge this obligation.
It is a strange hierarchy, however, in which with no difficulty whatever, we can see any one of the general sciences as being super-ordinate to all the rest. From the viewpoint of sociology, to take an example, the behavior of philosophers, including most particularly their products, the contending philosophies, are social data to be explained in sociological terms. Karl Mannheim epitomizes this point of view, though he neither originated it, nor was able to accept or extricate himself from the position into which it placed him. The conclusion he should have drawn, as a sociologist, was and is that a philosophy is a social product, a function of a given society in a given time and place, an ideology whose warrantability or otherwise rests upon its relation to the society to which it appeals. Indeed, he went so far, but