What I mean by this term 'social or postmodernist relativism' is the unabashed recognition that all epistemology, ontology, and the ways of thinking that yield such categories as epistemology and ontology are socially conditioned and historically relative or contextual. I should perhaps mention in passing Habermas's famous attack on the conservatism of post-modernism. It does not accept, however, that such social and historical constraints cannot be questioned or altered. While the acceptance of such social and historical constraints may at first appear conservative, it is in fact the opposite. It specifically locates where the struggle for truth or knowledge occurs.
Truth is a social, historical, and, therefore, a political struggle.
In the sense that this social relativist epistemology uncovers the truth-power relationship, it is radical rather than conservative. It is doubtful, however, at least in the social sciences, that such a power-free truth game has ever existed. These are difficulties which are recognized in 'conventional' research. The survey or interview is unavoidably context-bounded. Both interviewer and respondent bring to it their conscious and unconscious assumptions and beliefs about the world, about each other, about themselves, about that moment in that place.