Relativist epistemology enables both discrediting good evidence and validating bad evidence

Evidence

According to some currently fashionable epistemological no­ tions, good evidence and bad evidence are meaningless terms. All evidence is, so to speak, born free and equal. And since there is no such thing as truth, there is no such thing as authenticity; these are irrelevant and meaningless, even mis­ leading, concepts. This approach serves a double purpose; it makes it possible both to discredit good evidence and to validate bad evidence, and this helps enormously in the process of falsification. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1826

There are others. According to some currently fashionable epistemological no­ tions, good evidence and bad evidence are meaningless terms. All evidence is, so to speak, born free and equal. And since there is no such thing as truth, there is no such thing as authenticity; these are irrelevant and meaningless, even mis­ leading, concepts. This approach serves a double purpose; it makes it possible both to discredit good evidence and to validate bad evidence, and this helps enormously in the process of falsification. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1826

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The double-purpose point is genuinely sharp: relativism functions not as neutrality but as a tool that symmetrically degrades evidentiary standards, aiding falsification.
• SEED: Angle: how post-truth rhetoric weaponizes the symmetry of ‘all evidence born free and equal’ — the philosophical roots of rival-narratives discourse.
• DEFINE: Defines what the author means by ideological fashion tsars’ weaponization of evidence-relativism.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting…, 1826
• XREF: connects to: Desired conclusions retroactively validate whatever evidence seems to support them