Many philosophically inspired approaches to knowledge attempt to show that certain claims to knowledge are true regardless of time and place. They are true or false everywhere and always. This position is universalism. In contrast, there are broadly sociological approaches, which argue that the validity of a knowledge claim is specific to time and place. What passes as knowledge in one culture may not pass in another. This position is relativism. The import of relativism is best understood if one thinks of cultures as well-defined spatiotemporal units that are the subjects of national histories or tribal lore. Without these clear boundaries, it is difficult to specify the extent of a knowledge claim's validity. In that sense, relativism loses its meaning if one cannot specify relative to what exactly. But do claims to knowledge naturally carry such clearly marked jurisdictions (a.k.a. validity conditions), or must these be actively constructed and maintained? If these jurisdictions are indeed constructed, can they not also be constructed to constitute a universe, a single polity that at least potentially includes everyone? This is the constructivist universalism common to the idea of the university, logical positivism and Fuller's social epistemology. (See relativism versus constructivism.)

A well-defined sense of culture – and the epistemological relativism it breeds – is itself relative to a certain period in the history of Western culture, one that roughly began in the late-eighteenth century, and is unravelling today in the midst of postmodern (see postmodernism) patterns of communication and migration (a.k.a. globalization).