The "sin of relativism' is as old as western civilization, I state. In other words, one might claim that the "fear of relativism' has grown alongside it. As happens often with such grand and encompassing notions, I think we lost track of context completely in most of the debates on this issue, since we safely found ourselves in one of the two presumably exclusive trenches: one is either in favour of "real' knowledge and hence a universalist, or against it and hence one is a relativist. It might be healthy to consider that dichotomies and scientific seriousness never had a good and durable relationship. On the other hand, theology and ideology seem to embrace every dichotomy that comes along. That, at least, is my opinion after working in this field for a lifetime. My position is that dichotomizing thinking in its most absolute form can be found in the Christian tradition, feeding on the Greek philosophy to a large extent but unequalled in the later Christian European tradition. I cannot go into this here and can only refer the reader to specialists in that field like J.P. Vernant and C. Perelman.What is it all about? In a variety of studies cognitive relativism and cognitive universalism are pitched one against the other as the two exclusive positions. There is no other option, it appears, than either of these two positions. Of course, in the history of our western (or European) intellectual tradition this dichotomy was developed by scholars of a decidedly theological breed: truth was universal (and God-given) or it was not. Any room for alternative views tended to be considered either heathen or heretic in nature. In that sense, relativism has a bad omen since the beginning of our particular history of knowledge: the pragmatism of the sofists was contrasted with the search for "real' knowledge in Plato, and early science was seen to doubt or offer an alternative for the "real' knowledge of revelation. My claim is that scientists, as subjects in this culture, largely continued to reason in this way, certainly when invited to reconsider their views on a fundamental level. Substantial argumentation along these lines has been offered primarily by rhetoricians (e.g., Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca 1957 have attempted to demonstrate what "human' features scientists possess,–as opposed to the view of theologians–since they have to resort to persuasion and to use arguments with human beings for their theories and models to be heard and accepted). In the second place, historians of science (with prominently Koyré 1957; Kuhn 1962) have argued how much the historical and hence the cultural context mattered in the adoption or rejection of knowledge. And thirdly, social studies of science are documenting since the 1970s that scientific research is a unique mixture of context, human agency and "truth'. Fallibility remains a difficult discipline, and the appeal of dichotomic thinking stays with us, notwithstanding such important insights of recent decades.