 8. Historical skepticism, incommensurability, and relativism. One role of historiography is to debunk myths. As such, it can be liberating, as when we see that institutions and conceptual frameworks are, to a large degree, human constructions with a historical origin, not things irremediably fixed in the foundation of the universe. For that very reason it produces a degree of skepticism toward all human things. Although the natural world shapes human cultures, including scientific ones, it far from dictates a single, fixed culture. Historiography discloses that human enterprises, including the sciences, are imbedded in deep cultures with their distinctive norms. There is no “God’s-eye”, history-neutral set of meta-norms, no “Archimedean point” from which these cultures can be objectively compared. Thus it is difficult or impossible to evaluate all science with a single standard. Here lurks the problems of cultural incommensurability and relativism.