Question about the text

The way I read it, Fay is using the term "framework" to mean a the cultural and social units a person belongs to. As far as I can tell, he doesn't explicitly say why changing frameworks cannot be rationally justified. My guess is that scientists would consider changing the framework by which they looked at a problem would invalidate the data. To them, there is only one right answer and it doesn't make sense to look through a different multicultural prism. At least that is the way I understand that part of the reading. I could be wrong though.

I looked up hegemony and it essentially means the leadership. So I think he is saying that the leadership of the scientific community is not necessarily considered correct because they just so smart, but because they are good at dominating the intellectual conversation.

Josh- I think you've got it basically right. But it's important to notice that Fay is not giving us his own views in this paragraph. He's describing what relativists have said. He doesn't make this as clear as he might. But later in the chapter he does make it clear that he thinks relativism is wrong. And later in the book we will find out how he thinks that changes of framework can, in fact, be rationally justified.

"Hegemony" can mean "leadership", but it can also mean "domination" -- which has a more negative connotation. As Josh says, Fay is talking about the theory that dominant cultural groups tend to also dominate intellectually: they have the ability to ignore and sometimes even suppress other belief-systems and to make it seem (to themselves and to others) as if their ideas are the only reasonable ideas. Karl Marx put it this way: "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force in society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force."